PAY THIS AMOUNT Excerpt

“And here we come to the Episcopalian seminary where Clement Clarke Moore wrote his timeless classic, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.’ It is a little-known truth that in the line ‘Not a creature was stirring/ Not even a mouse,’ he is referring not to a rodent but to his tiny niece Millicent, who went by the nickname ‘Mousy.’”

A murmur arose from the cluster of tourists. A portly woman wearing her pocketbook across her front turned to Gary and without minding that he was a total stranger said, “I didn’t know that, did you?”

“No I didn’t,” he said, cocking his head her way.

“He’s fascinating, isn’t he?” she said.

Gary smiled and nodded. It was a testament to the tour-giver’s skill that Gary was paying attention at all. This was the twelfth such tour he’d been on in six months -- at considerable expense to himself -- and every next trifling anecdote about some person he never heard of pushed him closer to the limits of hope. If only he knew what else to do, he’d do it.

“Now this is the Chelsea Hotel, which has served as a sanctuary for many literary lights over the years. Arthur Miller wrote some of his most famous plays here. Thomas Wolfe also lived here for a time. And if you look up to the fifth floor, second from the left, you’ll see the window from which Dylan Thomas looked down on the world, sometimes wearing only a robe that he had forgotten to close in front. Would that he were with us here now so that he might act out for us one of his more memorable lines, ‘I am to the window drawn.’”

“This man just knows so much!” the portly woman said.

He did have a way, Gary thought, of making what was essentially boring and useless information sound like something you were dying to know. Part of it was the man himself, introduced as a Mr. Howard Teel, not quite elderly and still quite dapper in a crisp blue suit and a perfectly trimmed snow-white moustache; he gave a good performance of a person with only interesting things to say. He blinked his eyes forthrightly when someone asked a question. He clasped his hands together under his chin as he answered it. He hopped up on the balls of his feet when he arrived at the next landmark. He also had a way of stopping at every set of his eyes in the group as he spoke, yet each time he rested on Gary’s he seemed to impart something unspoken which had no bearing on the haunts of famous authors or the other tour-takers. Just now, in fact, the old man appeared to lick his lips at him, in front of everyone, though it happened so fast that Gary couldn’t be sure, and it so confused the younger man that he was completely unprepared for the tour’s next stop, which was his pay dirt.
He stood motionless, absorbing it helplessly, like the time he watched from the curb as the pickup struck his mother and dragged her fifty feet to her death.

“And this townhouse belongs to Eldra Twitchell, the famous children’s story writer. Madame Twitchell is ninety-five years old now, and has become well-known around the neighborhood for her special brand of cranky reclusiveness. She has been known to call the police on anyone who so much as stops at her steps to tie his jogging shoes. I know this from personal experience. Once in awhile, though, she deigns to show herself in that third-floor window there.”

Gary looked with everyone else up to the window. Eldra Twitchell was not there, but he knew now that she sometimes was. The tourists were led onward, but Gary did not go with them. Finally he found what he’d been looking for.

“Aren’t you coming with us?” called Howard Teel, on tiptoes, over the crowd. “There’s much more to see...”

The eyes of the group turned to Gary. He looked up at Eldra Twitchell’s window again, then back at Howard Teel. He discovered a difficulty in voicing a topic he had never been allowed to openly discuss, but he stammered out, “She’s ninety-two.”

“What?”

“She’s ninety-two. Not ninety-five.”

“Really?”

Gary nodded. The crowd looked at him, expecting more. All he could think to say was, “She’s from West Virginia.”

“Why, yes she is!” said Howard Teel. “It appears to be our lucky day, everybody! We have an Eldra fan with us.”

“In a way. Um. Does reclusive mean she hates people?”

“Well, I suppose it could,” Howard said. “Now, just three doors down -- Yes?”

“Does she -- Eldra Twitchell -- like cats?” Gary said.

“Why, I’m not sure.”

“It’s just that there’s a cat in that window you pointed out. See that white one?”

“So there is! It’s settled then. Eldra Twitchell is a cat lover, if not a people lover. Now we mustn’t dawdle. We’ve much more to see!”

Gary decided to go with the group. He knew now where Eldra lived and he could come back, and he thought he might be able to learn more about her from the old man. As it turned out, there were only two more stops on the tour -- a pub Eugene O’Neill was carried out of several times and the building where William Styron lived -- before Howard Teel was thanking his clientèle and letting them know his “Society Tour” left from the same corner Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at one o’clock, rain or shine.

The portly woman gasped. “And how much is that, Mr. Teel?”

“Same price.” He had collected fifteen dollars from each of them, cash only, at the start of the tour.

The woman twisted her mouth and looked to the side a minute. “Are there any discounts for, you know, seniors or students?” she said, though it was clear that she was neither of those.

“I’m afraid not,” Howard said.

She turned and looked at Gary. “Can you believe how expensive this city is?” She waddled off.

That left Gary facing both Howard and his chance to step forward. When he did, though, that same ordinance against speaking of Eldra Twitchell seized him. He faltered. He stuck out his hand. “I want to thank you,” he said. “I really learned a lot.”
“I’m so glad.” The old man held his grip, Gary thought, longer than he needed to. At the same time his eyes looked into Gary with a lurid frankness.

For several minutes Gary was trapped in a volley of niceties, all the while taking small half-steps backward to make up for the ones the old man was taking forward. When finally it seemed as if the subject of Eldra could not be broached, Howard leaned forward and put his hand on Gary’s forearm. “Listen,” he said. “I was wondering -- Gary, isn’t it? -- well, I was wondering, Gary, if you’d be interested in coming up to my apartment for a little brandy and a little pot?” He gestured toward the high-rise they were standing in front of.

Gary was a little taken aback by the bluntness of the offer, especially from a man as seemingly distinguished as Howard Teel. But he was in New York now and had observed that the people of New York took pride in never flinching at anything. “You mean you live here?” he said. “The same place as William Stryon?”

“That’s Styron,” said Howard. “And yes, I always end my tours at my own building.”

Gary accepted. He knew very well what the old man was after. But he seemed harmless enough and Gary was still hoping the tour-giver might be able to tell him more Eldra Twitchell.

They took the elevator to the seventeenth floor and Gary was let into a cramped apartment made to seem larger by bright shadeless windows and blank white walls. In every corner was the kind of stacked-up clutter that could only be acquired from years of being in the same place. Still, it was more spacious than the one-room basement studio Gary lived in. A small orange cat woke up on the sofa and stretched. Gary sat down and started petting it, his mind aswarm with Eldra.

He said, “Do you do this a lot?”

“What?”

“Bring people up here from your tours?”

“Oh, no!” Howard said. “In fact, I’ve never done it before.”

Gary wondered if the old man was telling him the truth. It was very hard to tell with people. They were not like the cat he was caressing, whose simple actions bespoke its simple desires. At thirty-one years old, Gary had only recently become aware of the extent of his unworldliness. He still never would have guessed that a person like Howard Teel would smoke pot, never mind roll a joint as nimbly as he just did. Gary declined the smoldering cigarette when it was offered, but he did accept a small amount of brandy.

“There was just something about you,” Howard went on, “something that made me want to get to know you. -- Are you sure you won’t have a hit of this? -- Maybe it was your delightful accent. I’ve never heard anything quite like it.”

“I just moved here from Tumley, West Virginia,” Gary said, scratching the head of the cat, which had by now slipped into his lap.
“Yes of course,” Howard said. “That’s how you know about Eldra Twitchell. I suppose little children in West Virginia are taught Eldra Twitchell’s stories from the time they’re old enough to read.”

As before he was grateful for Howard’s having brought up the subject. He knew he had to get past that impediment to speaking about her, that near-instinctual hush that came over him, instilled by his mother, who would seethe at the even the remotest allusion to her. But his mother, poor Lenora, was dead now and he was nowhere near the whispering wooden two-stories of Tumley. He understood that he was rapidly approaching the point at which he could open his mouth and say with impunity, “Eldra Twitchell is my grandmother.”
Howard had just started a new draw on the joint but halted, the crackling red end fading quickly. He looked at Gary.
“No she’s not,” he said.

“Yes she is,” said Gary. He took a sip of brandy from the absurdly oversized snifter in which it had been given him. “I should really thank you for helping me find her.”

“Did I do that?”

Gary nodded. “I’ve been looking for her for months,” he said. The cat purred madly under his magic fingers. “In a way,” he said, “I’ve been looking for her my entire life.”

“Haven’t you ever met her?” Howard said.

“No, sir,” Gary said. “I’ve never met or spoken to the woman in my life. She left Tumley to come to New York long before I was born, when my mother was still a little kid. She never came back.”

“Really? I didn’t know that about her. I’ll have to use that on tomorrow’s tour, if you don’t mind. I could say it’s a little-known truth that this woman famous for her children’s stories had abandoned her own child.”

Gary stopped in mid-scratch behind the cat’s ears. He wasn’t sure he liked having his family lore announced every afternoon on the streets of New York. Even more, he didn’t like how it made Eldra look bad. All his life he had been steeped in how bad she was. As a child he dutifully shared his mother’s hatred for her, when he was allowed to think of her at all. But even then -- long before he had become an adult and done exactly the same as Eldra did, abandoning a family back in West Virginia to come to New York and pursue a life that did not make him unhappy -- he thought that she must have had a good reason for what she did. Gary was old enough now to see how life trapped people unawares. He had seen how good-faith decisions turned to shackles. Squirreled away in the bottom drawer of a bedroom bureau, underneath a very old comforter that was never used, his mother had kept a birth certificate and a photo of Eldra she thought no one else knew about. The photo showed Eldra at about the age Gary was now, on some porch steps somewhere, one child on her lap and two more at her feet. (Gary never understood who the other two children were, since his mother was Eldra’s first and last child.) Even sitting as she was, and corralled by tots, it was easy to tell that Eldra was abnormally tall. She also looked severely unhappy, as if she resented the camera for gawking at her circumstances.

After his mother’s death, Gary took the photo and carried it with him as he searched these past six months. He had been starting to give up hope, doubting she was even still alive. She was not in the Manhattan phone book. He went to the public library thinking he would find clues in her books, which he had never seen before. They were fascinating artifacts typically about little girls who wandered from their parents to have adventures both glorious and terrifying. But they didn’t tell him anything about Eldra other than that she lived in New York City. Then one Saturday at the laundromat in his neighborhood, he saw a flyer advertising walking tours of New York. One of the tours claimed to show the residences of well-known writers. He went, but there was no mention of Eldra Twitchell. He searched out other tours. Howard Teel had been the last on the list.

Howard laid the joint down in a crystal ashtray and said, “Would you mind terribly if I took off my pants? I like to relax after work.”
Gary could hardly object. It was his house after all.

“So now that you’ve found her,” said Howard, looking more amused than someone with stained underwear should, “I suppose you’ll go to see her.”

That of course had been the plan. Gary had visions of Eldra welcoming him, reluctantly at first, into her apartment. She warms up though, once she hears what he has to say, that he was so much like her, that her only daughter had been killed. But now that he had actually found her, he was not at all sure that it would happen that way.

“You know, Gary. I don’t mean to call you a liar, but if I looked at your driver’s license, would it say Gary Twitchell?”

“No,” Gary calmly replied. “It says Gary Boone. Twitchell is my mother’s maiden name.” He realized he should have said was. “Why would I lie?”

“I’m not saying you would. It’s just that Eldra Twitchell must be worth quite a lot of money. And she is ninety-five.”
“She’s ninety-two. And I don’t care a whit about the money.”

“I’m sure you don’t.” Howard moved closer on the sofa. The cat let out a cry when he tried to pluck it from Gary’s lap. Gary tensed as she dug her claws into his pants. “My but she just loves you,” Howard said. “I’ve never seen her take to someone this way.”
It had always been that way for Gary. Animals were drawn to him, he believed, by what they perceived as a gentle openness to their simple concerns. Somehow he could never get humans to trust him as completely. His ex-wife, Rachel, toward the end when she would stop at nothing to hurt him, said the reason he loved animals so much was because they were too stupid to see right through him.
“Let’s go, Hairball,” said Howard. “That’s enough now.”

“What did you call her? -- Ouch!”

“I’m sorry, Gary! Come on, Hairball, be good...”

The cat yelped as Howard succeeded in extracting her. He dropped her to the floor in a careless way that made Gary concerned. “Are you sure you won’t have some pot?” he said.

“No -- thank you -- what kind of a name is that...?”

“Oh, I call her that sometimes. The day I brought her home as a kitten the first thing she did was cough up a hairball. Don’t get upset, Gary. It’s not her real name. That’s Millicent.”

“Oh.” Gary tried to lighten up. “I’m sorry.” The notion that this beautiful creature could be named something so vile had disturbed him. “That’s a nice name,” he said. “Sort of like that guy’s niece.”

“Exactly. In fact, that’s who I named her after. Here.” He had the joint lit again. “Have just one hit.”

“Well. Okay.”

It wasn’t long before Howard’s hand was running up Gary’s thigh. Gary allowed it. Perhaps it was because for the first time he felt the effects of pot (the few times he tried it before it did nothing) and that, combined with the brandy, helped produce a permissive feeling in him. But it was also because it had been such a long time since he had felt the touch of another person. It had been so long -- before the closed-casket wake for his luckless mother, before he tossed his suitcase into the bed of his pickup, before Rachel had accused him (more directly than Howard had) of only going after Eldra’s money -- when he thought about it, almost a year had gone by without him ever letting himself go.

So Gary welcomed the release, even if sex with Howard was something less than transcendent. The handsome elegance Howard emanated in public all but deserted him in an undressed state. His limbs were bony. His skin was pale and flaky. Sparse colorless hairs protruded from his shoulders like frazzled filaments of tungsten. His teeth appeared as white and well-manicured as his moustache, yet his breath stank like his insides were rotting. But Gary didn’t have to do much. And afterward, as he sat on the bedroom floor and played with Millicent, he felt contented for the first time since coming to New York. At least for the moment, he was not consumed by his quest for Eldra. He and Howard talked awhile. Howard stayed in bed, wrapped in the flowered sheet, smoking yet another joint he produced from the night stand drawer. He made an eager, hospitable listener, and Gary heard himself saying things, simple unextraordinary things, that he nevertheless hadn’t told a soul before.

“I’m a pet groomer,” he said when he was asked what he did.

“Really? What a fascinating job.”

Gary shrugged. “It’s alright,” he said. Back in Tumley he had worked at the animal hospital, doing whatever the local vet needed done at the moment. It was a good job that allowed him to be around animals all day. He had hoped to find something similar in New York, but the “veterinary clinics” (as they were called here) sought more certification than just a love of animals. Then he saw an ad in the paper for a grooming shop, Purrs and Grrrs on Third and 59th, and its promise of “training provided.” He went in. His natural and instantaneous rapport with an Irish terrier that was waiting for his owner to pick him up was what got Gary hired. The lady who ran the shop, Leila Reddy, a plump pink-faced woman of about fifty with tightly curled hair, watched in amazement as Gary had the sullen dog wagging his tail just as the owner walked in. “A big part of this job,” Leila told him later, “is making the animals appear happy when the owners come to pick them up and pay the bill.”

Only later would Gary realize what a tacit admission that had been on Leila’s part, an acknowledgment that the profession of pet groomer was largely a scam. Leila had jargon she used -- “basic brushdown,” “twenty-toe manicure,” “whisker trim” -- but they were just words designed to disguise what was clear to Gary: animals did not need grooming. What they needed from people was food, protection and love. Grooming, except in rare cases, they did quite alright by themselves. But this glaringly obvious fact seemed lost on the silly people who were the shop’s customers. They’d come in, their eyes spinning in an almost otherworldly way, have serious conversations about dog perfume, then lay out obscene sums. At first, it was hard for Gary not to feel like a fraud, taking money for a service that was so inessential, so unlike the work he did at the animal hospital. But then, as Leila said, he wasn’t exactly mugging these people in Central Park.