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part 1 of the story
Crashing Down

Edna C. Horning

    The smartly dressed real estate agent directed her eyes upward, her expression approaching that of a Sistine cherub.
    “As you can see,” she continued, “its ceilings are a good nine and a half feet.” The couple followed her lead and also looked up.
    “Ten, actually,” Snapper corrected.
    “Wow!” the agent said with fabricated admiration. “You’re good at this.”
    Asshole, she added silently while keeping her facial expression pleasant. Now more than ever, she couldn’t afford to alienate any potential customers. To maintain a stylish appearance, a must in her line of work, she was going to have to boost her sales because until recently both she and the mayor’s wife had bought their upmarket clothes at down market prices from the same fence, a man with exquisite taste in women’s fashions.
    Unfortunately for him and his customers, his body had been found in a dumpster behind Toys ‘R’ Us on Christmas Eve, nine bullet holes forming the shape of a cross in his chest.
    Experience had taught the agent to ostensibly give the expressed preferences of house hunting couples equal weight at the outset and then, over time, subtly and adroitly shift deference to the wives as the primum movens of the enterprise.
    Not the case here. She perceived instantly that this particular husband was the more highbrow of the two. He snobbishly showed off a wealth of information about houses and had sniffed at nearly everything she had shown them in the beginning while casually tossing off phrases like ‘vernacular gothic’ and ‘midcentury modern’ and holding forth on picayune differences between, for example, mansard and gambrel roofs. Most maddeningly, he was usually correct.
    The reason came out when Olivia, embarrassed by her husband’s pretentiousness, explained privately that, as a professional construction engineer, he was interested in architectural history. He had been quite insistent about wanting a house with high ceilings more typical of older, Victorian structures. Those under nine feet he dismissed as déclassé, and thereafter the agent had tracked down every high-ceilinged domicile in local listings.
    As events played out, it was Snapper who found the grand finalist. On his way to work one morning, he wended along a different route to bypass a traffic snarl, and there it sat, a For Sale sign staked in the newly sodded yard. He phoned the agent from his office and set up a showing for the next day, and before the sun went down earnest money had changed hands. Snapper insisted on it to keep others at bay.
    The house was perfect in all respects save one. It was more than a little out of their price range, as Olivia nervously pointed out, but Snapper was determined, and what Snapper wanted he generally got.
    That night he was on the phone to his parents rhapsodizing about their marvelous find and how they couldn’t allow it to get away. It certainly didn’t hurt the cause that Olivia was four months pregnant with her in-laws’ first grandchild, and within twenty-four hours they transferred a sum sufficiently generous to cut the mortgage down to size.
    Five weeks and a ream of paperwork later, they were given the keys. Pregnancy notwithstanding, Olivia didn’t find the move especially arduous as the two-bedroom apartment they had occupied since their marriage contained a minimum of furniture, and the transition had played out smooth as silk.
    While Olivia genuinely liked the house and readily acknowledged its multiple virtues – curb appeal outside, comfort inside, reasonable closeness to Snapper’s work – she couldn’t help but remember Valerie’s contemptuous view of neighborhoods such as this.
    Valerie was Olivia’s best friend, formerly her college roommate, and a staunch civil rights and environmental advocate and committed vegan (“I dare any meat eater to remain conscious in a slaughterhouse more than five minutes. I dare them”) who had once spent a night in jail for heaving bricks through a furrier’s store window. It had been Olivia who drove to county lockup at 5:00 AM, her nightgown peeping from beneath her trench coat, and shelled out Valerie’s bail.
    Valerie had returned the favor by helping Olivia stop smoking for good. Her method consisted of transcendental meditation followed by a generous chunk of chocolate marshmallow pecan fudge.
    “It won’t work without the fudge,” she had cautioned.
    According to her, gentrification was hypocritical pussyfoot for “shameless predators who invade older neighborhoods like the Army Corps of Engineers, renovating and upgrading so that the hiked rents and property taxes drive poorer families from homes they’ve lived in for decades.”
    And as the agent herself had allowed, the neighborhood was, truly, undergoing gentrification, and exactly as Valerie had lamented, buzzards were perched on every branch.
    When Val and Snapper first met, the two didn’t exactly circle each other like wolves in a standoff, but Olivia sensed immediately that no love would ever be lost between them and that Val disapproved of the match.
    She also took a jaundiced view of Topper’s employer, a too-big-to-fail architectural and construction firm that regularly hosted large fetes for politicians, clients, competitors, and business associates, current and potential, as standard practice, and employees were expected to attend and hold up their end of the schmooze fest.
    However, Topper made it plain to Olivia from the onset that her primary role was to look pretty and say little except to wives and other plus-ones, and while she complied for the most part, she still had privately complained once or twice to Valerie about what she regarded as a slight.
    But if Olivia had borne some residual embarrassment about her gentrified address, Val had vaporized it once with yet another of her grapes plucked from the wrathful vine.
    According to her, not all the slender, attractive young ladies deftly but discreetly circulating in clingy chiffon cocktail dresses and expensive-looking jewelry at these soirees were dates brought by the single men. Along with free (for the guests) and fully deductible (for the company) flowers, food, liquor and live music, the firm also discreetly covered the cost of charming female companions for any man desirous of charming female companionship at a more convenient time and place. Gratuities optional but strongly advised.
    “But how do you know this?” Olivia had asked, frowning.
    No sooner was the query out of her mouth than Olivia realized she probably didn’t need to ask. Valerie and her network of superannuated tree-huggers (as Topper deemed them) beamed watchdog eyes on anyone and anything they considered despoilers of nature, and that included developers who had ever plowed so much as a wood sorrel into oblivion.
    “Because I have friends in low places. Really low places,” Valerie replied. “I do confess considerable curiosity, though, when April rolls around each spring, as to exactly which itemized expenses those bow-tied, corporate tax accountants claim on Schedule A for hookers. Entertainment? Charitable Contributions? Professional Services? Independent Contractors? Inquiring minds want to know.”
    In a spirit of appreciation for Val’s witty if slightly disturbing sense of humor, Olivia had also laughed, but privately she considered it worrisome. Was this Valerie’s sly, sidelong way of hinting that Topper might – just might – not be immune to these and additional unclean shenanigans at work? Was she putting Olivia on alert?
    In any case, this revelation served to heighten Olivia’s awareness of Topper’s past exchanges with slender, attractive young women in clingy chiffon cocktail dresses and expensive-looking jewelry, exchanges which, now that she thought about it due to Val’s disclosure, did seem to be on the increase.
    But what if Valerie was correct? What if her comments were veiled references to financial monkey business in the stratospheric echelons? Look at Enron and Lehman Brothers. Trash to the toes. And what if some hot-eyed reporter itching to make a name for him/herself started poking around and decided it was high time to publish? Topper had made plain, in word and deed, his sincere ambition to eventually be one of those higher-ups. What if he got snared in the same net?
    Olivia, with considerable trepidation, repeated Valerie’s comments to Topper that very night, except she omitted the bit about unattached ladies. Better perhaps to leave that for later. Sufficient to the day, etc.
    “That ninny?” he snorted. “Listen to me, Livy, not her. Various forms of baksheesh probably do swap hands along the way, but it’s nothing to get bent out of shape over. Try to keep perspective.”
    Barely a year into the marriage Olivia began to share Valerie’s perspective. She was mature enough to realize every honeymoon must come to an end, but she had not been expecting le rot quite so soon.
    During their courtship and engagement, Snapper had been all charm and charisma. On the anniversary of their meeting, he sent her two dozen roses, deep passion pink, and beribboned around each stem was a decorated strip of paper containing a line of love poetry.
    But once they were married and settled into the apartment, the first cloud dimming the sun appeared when Snapper set up the extra bedroom as an office and disappeared into it every evening after supper until bedtime, no exceptions. Same on weekends unless he was at the gym with male friends or the golf course with clients. If Olivia interrupted him when so ensconced, regardless of the reason, she got a frosty reception.
    Olivia tried to find the silver lining. Immuring himself at home was, she told herself, better than heading straight for the nearest watering hole immediately following work with a flock of likeminded colleagues and then coming home drunk as a lizard. This way he was, at least, physically present, and she opted to be grateful for small mercies. If it was a mercy.
    Then there was the time Snapper called her father a tosspot, certainly an exaggeration for an amiable, basically upright man who had been observed to get a little too merry at holiday and birthday celebrations but rarely elsewhere.
    He told Olivia’s older sister that she needed to put her daughter on a diet (“I’ll wager the last time Chubs saw her feet was in a mirror”) and send her admittedly rowdy son to boot camp (“There’s a nice little reformatory upstate where they’ll chain him to his desk during the day and to his bed at night”). And when Olivia’s younger brother graduated from college early and with honors, no less, Snapper snorted he must have cheated his way through.
    As for Olivia herself, she evidently hadn’t put a foot right since the wedding. Her clothes, hairdo, makeup, cooking, housekeeping, and friends – Valerie especially – had all come under his scrutiny and been faulted in one way or another.
    Olivia’s objections to his disregard, however tactfully she phrased them, never accomplished much. Snapper might tweak his behavior for a few days, but it was quickly followed by a slide back to business as usual.
    One determined day she got as far as packing while he was at work. Her parents were vacationing in Mexico, but she was prepared to depart upon their return and kept the suitcase hidden.
    And on the same day they got back, a home pregnancy test came up positive. Slowly, very slowly, Olivia unpacked while telling herself that maybe a child, a house, and the passage of time might mellow Snapper’s behavior, if not dramatically, perhaps to a tolerable level.

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