886

Hope

“Who is it?” David bellows into the intercom. He stresses the who instead of the is, making the statement more like a warning or a scolding than an inquiry—an oral BEWARE OF DOG sign in all caps with triple exclamation points.

“It’s Vincent,” Vincent responds coolly, attempting to deflect this unanticipated animosity with contrapuntal amiability. “I’m here about the fountain pens?”

Vincent waits in the rain for what seems like forever, and is about to press 4A again when David ends his signature pregnant pause with something unintelligible and buzzes Vincent in.

The vestibule smells like a mixture of damp dog and cooked cabbage, and the stairway’s right there, as impatient and in-your-face as the bellicose voice on the intercom. Vincent hears a salvo of deadbolts unlatching in the vertical distance and starts taking the steps two at a time. It’s like him to meet every challenge with a headlong rush, but in this instance it’s more like getting the blood flowing to offset the chill. By the fourth floor he’s winded and trudging, and has to lean over the railing with his forehead on his forearm while his heart-rate reluctantly stabilizes.

David’s left the door ajar, but Vincent knocks just the same. Lightly. The door swings a few more degrees and Vincent can see David slouching on the sofa, staring at the TV with his open pie-hole verging on drool.

Vincent steps in and stands there, waiting for David to acknowledge his presence or at least exhibit one or more signs of life. He’s like Silas Marner in full-on catatonia, Vincent thinks, David’s Kim Jong-il sweatshirt notwithstanding.

“It’s lucky for you I’m no ‘Dunstan Cass,’” Vincent jests in a bid to break David’s trance. “Otherwise, I’d’ve grabbed your sack of gold and been long gone by now.”

David languorously turns his pallid, doughy face in Vincent’s direction and begins boring a hole through Vincent’s forehead with his eyes. He lets ten or fifteen seconds elapse before uttering, “Huh?”

It comes as no surprise to Vincent that yet another obscure literary allusion—in this case to George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, in which magnum plot twists occur during the eponymous protagonist’s random cataleptic seizures—has shot wide of the mark. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last, and Vincent has long since stopped giving a shit. And so, with neither amplification nor apology, he begins recapping his reason for being there.

“Okay ... well ... I’m the one Marjorie from the resale shop called you about—about your late mother’s fountain pens. You told her I could come by any time as long as I brought plenty of cash, and ... well ... here I am.” Vincent downplays the cash stipulation by chuckling as he says this, but David’s deadpan expression does not change. Nor do David’s eyes stray from Vincent’s forehead, which Vincent endures without discomfiture, having been forewarned of the young man’s idiosyncratic forehead-gazing by Marjorie when he was purchasing Hope’s dishcloths.

At length, which is to say absurd length, David lowers his eyes and says, “You’re the guy who bought Hope’s dishcloths, yeah?”

“Right. Yes. That’s me,” Vincent replies, nodding.

“Why?”

“Why? Oh ... well ... I do some photography and I found them at the resale shop and I thought they might make a charming still-life arrangement.”

“Charming?” David repeats, finding Vincent’s forehead again. “Yeah, I guess Hope had a knack for ‘charming.’ You could even say ‘charming’ was Hope’s métier.”

Vincent isn’t sure if David is being sarcastic with this reference. Moreover, he wonders if it’s a subtle payback in kind for his errant invocation of a George Eliot novel. He hasn’t heard or seen the word “métier” since Jack Nicholson, as sardonic gumshoe Jake Gittes, used it in the 1974 motion picture Chinatown. He dismisses this conclusion out of hand, however, as giving a douchebag too much credit. “Métier,” he says, smiling crisply. “Haven’t heard that word since Jack Nicholson used it in Chinatown.”

“Bingo,” David answers. He counts to twelve in his head, rises, and says, “Okay, let’s do this.”

Vincent follows David into the kitchen, where David motions for him to take a seat at the table—at the table, Vincent realizes: the round, chrome-trimmed, 1950s-era Formica table where poor Hope had keeled over into a plate of chicken-fried steak.

The table has what’s called a boomerang pattern, featuring overlapping stylized boomerang outlines in light, medium, dark, and bluish gray tones against a soft gray background. Stimulated by the acuteness of this detail, Vincent’s imagination goes hyperactive and his skin into gooseflesh-mode as he envisions Hope slumping there so pitiably. An undignified, unworthy way for someone so sweet and gentle to leave this world he thinks, and the thought pierces his heart like a poison dart.

Because, Vincent just knows Hope had to have been sweet and gentle; because only a sweet and gentle soul could have knit exquisite dishcloth after exquisite dishcloth. And pondering her breathtaking handiwork and undeserved tragicomic demise has imbued Hope in Vincent’s mind with an almost unbearable poignancy. He has become as obsessed with her as Dana Andrews was with the presumably murdered Gene Tierney in the quintessential film noir Laura. Only in this film there’s no hope of Hope coming back from the dead to find true love.

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