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The walk home took me past featureless block buildings, warehouses that lined up in formation, once waiting by the river for some cargo to be unloaded. Now they waited for something like the Factory to come in and inhabit them again, to give them new life. Eventually I came to a space where the buildings had been demolished before they had reached their turn in that unemployment line. It left a huge flat space populated only with tarmac and the tall poles of parking lot lights. In the center rose the beginnings of a stadium, men already arriving at work to complete a modern Coliseum. I wondered for a time what it would be like to have a simple occupation like that for a living. I couldn’t really get my head around it.
It was too far to walk home but the trams were running again. After staring at the construction workers I felt more like the company of strangers than the close, enclosed silence of a taxi so I found a stop and hopped on the tram. I shouldn’t have bothered thinking about unknowns – it was still early enough that not most commuters were still at home with their breakfasts. I sat in the quiet emptiness of the tram, watching its rounded, polished plastic nose cut through town, moving from the abandoned warehouses to the medieval architecture of Old Town, like a spaceship traveling through time. I changed stations once to head north to Triaite, taking me forward in time again, away from the cobblestone streets and terracotta roofs to hard, flat pavement and high-rise tenements.
The elevator in the lobby remained unlit, the sandwich board still in front of it. I headed up the stairs. The walls were thin and the fellow tenants mostly quiet, but there was still the occasional family scuffle or love-making couple that produced enough muffled noise to fill the halls with something other than regret and poor choices. At this hour, though, the only sound was children up in the early morning playing and horsing around while their parents tried to get them ready for school. It was mostly happy sounds, because the children hadn’t known anything better than living here, I figured.
Letting myself into the apartment I was surprised to hear voices. I paused with the front door barely cracked, listening. Sophie spoke, clear and bright, without anything in her tone to indicate there might be trouble. To my surprise several voices followed hers, one sounding almost giddy another low and husky. They all were women.
I walked in, making enough noise that I wouldn’t take anyone by surprise. Down the short entry hall I passed the kitchen to find Sophie sitting on a chair she had placed catercorner to the sofa. She had pulled up another one in a similar position on the other end of the coffee table. There was another woman sitting in it and three more on the couch.
All attention was on the woman in the center on the couch. Bunched up with her legs tucked underneath her, she was shoeless and wearing a puffer jacket so big I couldn’t tell if he was wearing a skirt or just knickers underneath it. She appeared a little older than Sophie, perhaps in her mid-thirties, but dark haired. Her cheeks were stained as though she had cried through mascara or taken a beating. Possibly both.
The women next to her were obviously friends, leaning in for close support. The woman closest to me was a dirty blonde, wearing equally stained white jacket and skirt, her tan shoes promising to add several inches to her height when she rose from the couch. The woman on the far side of the couch wore a similar outfit of short skirt and jacket, these of mismatched color, her haired pulled back to emphasize the peculiarly angular and French beauty of her face. Her sympathy for the woman in the middle couldn’t hide her anger.
The last one I barely glanced at as I swept my eyes to Sophie. She was younger than everyone else in the room, too young for what I was beginning to suspect was everyone’s profession, which made me more uncomfortable than I already was. Someone had done a bad job of dyeing her hair red, staining her scalp. A cheap black vinyl skirt was stretched across her thighs.
I stepped into the doorway, feeling more like a roadblock than a man in his own home. All eyes turned to me. I nodded and said hello.
Sitting there Sophie smiled at me with a, “Buon giorno.” She gestured to the other women, hand held upright as if she were offering each of them a plate of hors d’oeuvre, saying their names as she went by each of them. I didn’t catch much of that but the bruised one in the middle whose name was Jardin. Eyes back on Sophie I noted she had been out, jeans and blouse slightly damp around their cuffs, a short rain slicker hanging next to the door.
I nodded and awkwardly said hello again. None of them said much or offered to shake my hand. The youngest waved and seemed very small and a little embarrassed. Jardin tucked her bare legs further underneath her and roller her shoulders in the puffer jacket trying her best to disappear into it.
Feeling weirdly parental I asked Sophie, “Could I speak to you in the kitchen for a moment?”
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