Through the Window

Paradise

David M. Simon (@writesdraws)

I found myself on the Deuce that night through a combination of loneliness, self pity, and drunkenness. I was nineteen, and Trina, the first, hell—the only— love of my life had dumped me that morning after yet another fight because I had lost my shitty bodega job. Dumped me? She had thrown me out of the Alphabet City walkup we shared, her right I guess, since her Wall Street father was paying for it. He hated me, which in retrospect I don’t blame him for one bit, so I’m sure the tearful phone call he probably got after I left pleased him.

I was actually jealous of him and her if you want to know the truth, even if he was an asshole. I had grown up in foster care, where love was measured by how big the check from Family Services was. Apparently, the checks weren’t very big. Trina’s dad loved his little girl, despite her choosing to live with a lowlife like me in a tiny flat. I couldn’t imagine someone caring about me that much. And yes, I know how pathetic that sounds.

Anyway, there I was walking down Forty-Second Street, the Deuce, with the clothes on my back and maybe two hundred bucks, my life savings, wadded up in my pocket. This was in the late seventies, before they cleaned up Times Square. ‘Cleaned up’ makes it sound like a good thing, but not to me, not at all. Back then, Times Square, and especially the Deuce, was a wonderland of grind houses, strip joints, peep shows, and dive bars, with a dozen hookers on every corner, drug dealers openly offering their wares, and three card monte shysters fleecing the rubes from Kansas who had just arrived in the big city. Yes, it was dirty and dangerous, but it was so fucking alive. When they sanitized Times Square, turned it into Disneyland, they sucked the soul clean out of it.

I spent hours making my way from the lower east side to midtown, pausing here and there to sip Mad Dog from a cliched paper bag and feel sorry for myself. I had no real destination in mind, except that I needed a place to sleep that night, and had heard there were hot-sheet flop houses on the Deuce where a bed could be had for a few bucks. Hey, it sounded better than a bench at the Port Authority.

When I reached Times Square, I let myself get swept away in the sea of humanity, tossed and turned past one decaying XXX movie palace after another. Hookers and dealers both vied for my attention, but my mood was too black for either to sound enticing. I usually found the energy there exhilarating, but that day it did little to lighten my mood.

“Smile, kid.Why the scowl? You’re at the center of the world!” These words, delivered in a voice that was somehow both high pitched and gravelly, were accompanied by a slap on the back. I had been lost in my own misery, not paying attention, but the combination of voice and back slap pulled me out.

I was standing in front of a gaudy establishment called Stairway to Paradise. It was a storefront painted Pepto Bismol pink, decorated with life size silhouettes of naked women. Neon arrows pointed to an open doorway that led to, you guessed it, a stairway leading to the second floor. The man who had stopped me dead in my tracks stood in front of that doorway. He was dressed in full pimp finery, from wide-brimmed, feathered hat, to full-length leopard print coat, to the jewel-capped cane he was now waving in the direction of the doorway.

“I got nothing to smile about,” I said, with as much belligerence as I could muster.

“Then take the Stairway to Paradise, my friend. At the top of those stairs are a dozen doors, and inside each one is a window that offers a different glimpse of paradise. Whether you like girls, or boys, or something in between, for the price of a few dollars, enlightenment awaits. Take a chance, and turn that frown upside down.”

“I don’t think it’ll help,” I said, and turned to leave.

The man barred my way with his cane. “Kid, believe me, you need this. I can always tell, and you need this bad.”

I was feeling a little dizzy, and needed to sit down anyway. “Okay, fine.” I headed for the doorway.

“Excellent choice, my boy. See the lady at the top of the stairs, she’ll get you squared away. And take my advice…don’t choose a door, let the door choose you. The doors always know what you need.”

A middle-aged woman sat behind a counter at the top of the stairs. When I approached her, she immediately went into her spiel, one she had clearly recited a thousand times. “Welcome to paradise. Choose a door, if it’s locked that means there’s someone in there, pick another. Behind each door is a little room with a chair in front of a covered window. Put a token in the slot on the little metal box, and the window opens. Ten tokens for ten dollars, each one opens the window for one minute.”

“I got it,” I said, handing her a ten.

She gave me a stack of tarnished gold tokens. “One more thing. There’s a roll of paper towels in every room. Please clean up after yourself. Thank you, and enjoy your time in paradise.”

Past her was a hallway lined with closed doors, none of them labeled with who might be behind them. I decided to take the man with the cane’s advice. I meandered down the hallway, waiting for a doorway to call to me. Shockingly, one did.

When I reached the last door on the left, I felt…something. A vibration, a shift in atmosphere, I don’t know, but I felt something. Good enough, I thought. I entered the dark, tiny room and closed the door behind me. True to the front-desk woman’s word, a folding chair faced a large window covered with shutters. On the wall next to the chair was the metal box with a slot for tokens, and above that a nearly empty paper towel roll on a dowel rod. Not surprisingly, the floor was sticky.

I took a deep breath, not sure what to expect. I’m straight, but if there was a naked guy on the other side of the window, what the hell. I decided to be open minded, and let whatever was going to happen, happen. I settled in the wobbly chair and dropped a token in the slot.

The shutters rumbled open. No naked woman. No naked man, for that matter. Through the window I saw what appeared to be a 1950s era kitchen, complete with avocado colored appliances and a yellow formica dinette. A plump, elderly woman wearing an apron was in the process of removing a pan of chocolate chip cookies from the oven. She was wearing oven mitts decorated with roosters in overalls.

At the sound of the shutters rising she looked over at me and smiled. “There you are, dear. I thought I heard you come in. I’m just taking out some cookies, would you like one? What am I saying, of course you’d like one.”

She removed the oven mitts and brought me a cookie, then took a seat across from me. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to say. I took the cookie. It was soft and warm and wonderful.

“What do you say, dear?”

A red light blinked on the metal box, warning me that the minute was almost up, and I hurriedly dropped in another token.

“Thank you,” I mumbled around a mouthful of cookie. “Thank you—”

“Nana. You can call me Nana. Now why don’t you tell me why you look so sad today?”

And…and I did. I told Nana about Trina breaking up with me, about how much her father hated me. I told her about my life, how empty it felt, that it had felt empty and pointless even before Trina kicked me out. I spilled my guts, pausing only to stuff tokens into the box.

As the last token dropped, Nana stood up, dusted off her hands. “Well, dear, I think you know what you have to do.”

“I do?”

“Yes, you do. You’re a good boy, you’ve always been a good boy. You just need to get out there and find your passion, get your life on the right track. Go on now, make your Nana proud.” She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, and then the shutters rolled down tight.

I left Stairway to Paradise in an absolute daze, not sure what exactly I’d experienced. The man out front took one look at my face and laughed, slapped me on the back with even more gusto than the first time. “I told you, my man, I told you. The doors always know what you need. I’ll see you again. Soon.”

I slept that night on a bench in Central Park. Let me rephrase. I slept damn good that night on a bench in Central Park. It was as if a weight had been lifted. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, and maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t an oncoming train.

I returned to Stairway to Paradise bright and early the next morning. The man didn’t say a word, just shook his head and smiled, waving me in. I bought my tokens and approached the door slowly. What if Nana wasn’t there? What if it had all been a dream courtesy of depression and Mad Dog?

Nana was there, this time with a loaf of banana bread. She hurried over to the window with a slice of the bread, butter oozing down the sides, and a copy of the Village Voice in her hand. “I’m so glad to see you, dear. Not to be a busybody, but I saw this in the classifieds, and thought you might be interested.”

She had circled an ad in the help wanted section. A local theater company was looking for help refurbishing an abandoned performance space. Enthusiasm was more important than experience, and better yet, the job came with a small apartment, so the space would be occupied at night. It wasn’t fancy, but it was warm and dry. I thanked Nana, and we talked while I ate the banana bread. When the last token had dropped, she kissed me on the forehead again and said, “Let me know how the interview goes. I’m so proud of you, Gregory.”

I left Stairway to Paradise and walked straight to the address listed in the ad. A crew of people around my age were busy cleaning up a building that had clearly seen better days. The woman in charge, who turned out to be the director of the theater company, looked me up and down, shook my hand, and asked me if I was a hard worker. I answered yes, and was surprised to find that I meant it. I didn’t want to disappoint Nana.

It was later that night, as I lay in the bed of the small apartment at the back of the theater building, that I realized I had never told Nana my name.

The next morning, on the way to tell Nana the good news, I stopped at Junior’s for some cheesecake to surprise her with. Except, in the spot where Stairway to Paradise had been just the day before, there was a vacant lot. The lot was overgrown with weeds, filled with garbage, as if the building had never been there at all.

Image by Rahul Pandit from Pixabay

The third of my introductory stories, creating characters and background to the work-in-planning. The narrator here is Kirt, whom we met in January’s The Onion Tart.

For all I have become extraordinarily fond of Cenric, he is appallingly slow at preparing to go out. At a guess, the hour bell will have rung before he makes an appearance. Every hair will be in place, every button shining, the seams of his garments straight. ‘A bé Casille,’ he has said, when I have expressed impatience, ‘must always look his best.’

I have my own opinions on when Cenric bé Casille looks his best, and they have nothing to do with groomed hair or shining buttons. But his pride amuses me, and perhaps he is right. He is—by twenty minutes or so—the head of the family, barring his uncle, who now lives the ascetic life of the Leordh of Wintredene, concerning himself largely with books and translations and the running of the school, not the business of commerce. At the guild meetings, while Cenric is not physically the most striking of its members, his arguments are reasoned and rational and he commands respect. To be richly but soberly dressed adds to his gravitas, I can see.

Still, we are going out to dine, not to discuss wool prices around the guildhall table.  And I have been ready for a quarter of an hour, and I am bored with waiting. I want a distraction. In one corner of the room Luce’s cittara leans against the wall. She is not at home; whether attending a patient or pursuing her own amusements I have no idea. But I doubt she would mind; we have discussed music, a little, over suppers or of an evening. Just a little. And there is something I want to know.

The cittara is almost in tune. I tighten one string, run my fingers over the four together. The sound is pleasing. I play a few notes, and then, purposely, a snatch of melody. One I have known since I was a boy: an unusual, haunting rise and fall. It takes me out of this room, out of my impatience, back to Leste. To a house standing high over the harbor, wide windows thrown open in all but the worst weather, and the music that drifted down to the street. Music that sometimes included this run of notes, played by my grandmother Radné.

Radné il’Ikorsa, merchant, ship’s captain, scion of a powerful Ikorsan trading family. That my father, a de Guerdián, tracing his descent from an ancient Casilani governor of Leste—for whom I was named— had chosen her daughter as his wife spoke to their importance. And ours: an il’Ikorsa marriage was rarely for love. Nor was a de Guerdián one, come to that. A link between two merchant families was far more valuable. Still, my parents appeared happy enough. I had a brother, and two sisters, and that went far beyond the usual expectations of a transactional marriage.

That my mother’s mother had chosen to accompany her to Leste also was not expected, but then Radné was not a woman who did the expected. I had known that, somehow, from earliest childhood. Her tales of her voyages no doubt sowed the seed of my own desire to travel, even knowing the dangers. She’d survived—and most of her crew with her—uncharted waters, pirates, even encroaching ice once on a northern voyage. Her career as a captain had been ended, capriciously, by a sudden squall, the wind rising from nowhere like the feared xubae of the desert, a rope lashing like a serpent, catching and coiling around her leg, wrenching her hip from its socket.  She’d endured days of agony before a competent doctor could be found, but her life as a ship’s captain was over.

She’d told me all this when I was seven or eight, sitting at her feet at the open window overlooking the harbour. Without regret, or self-pity, at least not that my child’s mind comprehended. What I’d heard instead was that adventure shouldn’t be put off. Bad things could happen to anyone, so I should grab at life with both hands before fate found me.

I’d learned to play a cittara from her, too. She had, it seemed to me, an endless repertoire of songs. She began to play in the morning as soon as she was dressed and seated in her wheeled chair—either near the open windows or out on the balcony when the weather permitted—and continued late into the evening. People stopped in the street below to listen on their way to the wells or to the market, to the harbour or to workshops. Children gathered to play games or to dance with unselfconscious abandon. Usually, Radné’s tunes were either peaceful or playful. Sometimes they were complex and difficult. The run of notes I was playing now came from one of those songs.

The door behind me—the one that leads to the entrance hall—opens. Lost in memory and music, I had not heard the outer door, or any murmur of voices. “If you are attempting to alert Cenric, he won’t understand,” Luce says.

My fingers still. “But you do,” I say. I look at Cenric’s twin. Like him, she is square, dark haired, blue eyed. Unlike him, she gives little thought to her appearance, preferring to dress simply. Appropriate for a physician whose garments must be washed daily, in truth.

“Yes.” She watches me, her gaze level. Says, in the language of my mother and grandmother, “If you have seduced him to gain access to Ésparias’s secrets, you have made a mistake.”

She spent several years in Ikorsa and Cyrenne, learning from their superb physicians. I should not be surprised she mastered the language. I should not be surprised by anything Luce bé Casille does, I suspect.

“That was not my intent,” I say. It is almost the truth. Or has grown into the truth, with every night I spend with Cenric.

Luce holds her hand out for the cittara. I hand it to her. She plays another run of notes, a sombre, sad motif. They tell me, not of danger or treachery as might be expected, but of a successful transaction made. What transaction depends on the rest of the tune. I tilt my head in unspoken query.

She plucks the strings, an almost jaunty melody now. I translate the notes silently. “You were to make this contact?”

“In such a way as to encourage friendship, or more,” she says. “So I could judge you for myself. But as our tastes in bed partners do not align—”

“You suggested to my brother that I might find Cenric…interesting.”

She nods. “You will never tell him that.”

“No,” I agree. In tacit agreement we sit, facing each other. Her face tells me nothing. Physicians, like successful merchants, learn to hide their thoughts. “Where did you learn the codes?”

“Did you think them known only to the de Guerdián family?”

“Of course not. I would not have been playing the piece I was, in that case.”

She inclines her head in acknowledgement. “Where I learned them is of little importance. Suffice it to say a physician in any land may see even the highest amongst us in complete privacy, if needed.”

“Whereas a merchant cannot, but has friends and connections in the ports of many lands.”

“Indeed. And has the opportunity to make more, in an exploration of trading opportunities in new cities and lands. Especially an exploration led by Kirthan de Guerdián of legend and fame.”

Or by Radné il’Ikorsa, in past years. Footsteps sound overhead. For once, I hope Cenric is still dithering between tunics or shoes.

“Would Ésparias be asking more of you than you have done for Leste, and, I believe, Ikorsa, in these past twenty years?” Luce murmurs.

Grab at life with both hands. The lesson—one lesson— my grandmother had taught me, along with the codes hidden in the music she played sitting by her open window, to the entertainment of children and passers-by. And to pass on messages or give commands to men and women who would never be seen to enter her house, or even look up to the source of the music.

The creak of the stairs announces Cenric. His hair is brushed back, every strand in place. His tunic is the blue he favours, matching his eyes. “I’m ready,” he says. “Hello, Luce. Were you playing for Kirt? I heard music.”

“A complex passage from an Ésparian song,” I say. “One that I believe I will attempt to learn. I like a challenge.”

“Then we must find the time to work together,” Luce says, rising. “But now I wish a bath and a quiet evening. Where are you going?”

“To dine on the first of the season’s lamb at Ferrand’s inn,” Cenric tells her. “He has also had a new shipment of wine from Cyrenne. Shall we go, Kirt?”

“We shall,” I say, smiling. “I asked for a table by the windows. I like to look out on the city, to watch the people passing by, and listen, perhaps, to a strolling musician. Come, amané. Let’s enjoy the night.”

Illustration credit:  Scene from a Novella

Artist: Liberale da Verona (Italian, Verona ca. 1445–1527/29), Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436885

Finding Love and Acceptance

Joseph P. Garland (@JPGarlandAuthor

These lyrics  grew into the novella Finding Love and Acceptance. You can listen to a rough sample here.

Image by Anja from Pixabay

March Team Showcase

Marian L Thorpe‘s eighth and final book in her historically inspired speculative fiction series Empire’s Legacy, Empire’s Passing, is out in paperback and as an ebook. (Empire’s Daughter is the first part.) She has numerous titles available; they can be found at her aptly-named website, MarianLThorpe.com  or at Books2Read. Marian’s short story On Shining Wings is included in the anthology Historical Stories of Exile, published by Taw River Press.

Renée Gendron‘s A Gift of Stars: Book 1 The Nearer Realm Tales is available for pre-order on Amazon. Her Golden Hearts: Book 2 of Frontier Hearts and Two Hearts on the Backspin, Novella 2 of her Heartened series, are also available there. The second book in her Outdoorsmen series, The Officer’s Gamble, was published on October 18. Book 1 of the Outdoorsman Series is available as is her Ninth Star, Jaded Hearts, and Seven Points of Contact, Heads and Tales, a supernatural/mythological anthology. to which Renée contributed a historical, supernatural, romance. Shopkeeper & Spoon, Beneath The Twin Suns: An Anthology, Heartened by Crime, and In The Red Room: A crime anthology with heart, all edited by Renée Gendron, are also available now.

David M. Simon has published The Wild Hunt: Novella 2 of The Wild Hearts and Hunts Duology (Part 1 is Renée Gedron’s Ninth Star) as well as Trapped in Lunch Lady Land, a middle-grade fantasy adventure.

Louise Sorensen has contributed to numerous anthologies that are available on Amazon, and is the co-author, with Misha Burnett, of Duel Visions.

Joseph P. Garland‘s The Diary of Elizabeth Elliot has just been published; it is on Kindle Unlimited. Becoming Catherine Bennet is available on KU and also on Audible.com.  (First Chapters.) He has also adapted his AMBR submission of a few months back involving Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy entitled “Mr. Darcy’s Regrets” from June 2023 into a novella entitled The Omen at Rosings Park, also available on Kindle Unlimited and as an Audiobook on Audible.com. He has also started a newsletter and those interested in getting on the mailing list can contact him at JPGarlandAuthor@DermodyHouse.com.

Heather Wickers has published Just One Night, a novel (as Heather Melo), and Tiny Little Wishes, a collection of poetry.