At dinner the previous Friday, Isaac, oddly, seemed ready for a commitment.
“Seriously,” he’d said, “I know Irina would kill me, but would it really be so hard to get the permission and variances to build a small house in the yard, one that would still leave some greenery and trees?”
“I told you already, Isaac,” Christy replied, “it’s not a big deal. You own that lot. There are no covenants or restrictions on it. Your neighbors and Irina might go apeshit, but it’s a pretty clear path.”
“I’m more afraid of Irina than Derek,” Isaac said. “I’m beginning to think real-estate women have a harder time pulling away from houses they sell than from men they, so to speak, handle-”
“Nice try,” Christy cut it. “But I hear a new form of whining just around the corner. Let’s not go there.”
“The last time she dropped by,” Isaac said, taking Christy’s cue and dropping the “Poor me” tone, “I was watching Larry King do his latest Michael Jackson show, about the endless wait for the funeral. At first Irina was funny. She listened to it for about a minute, then uttered one of those Irina-isms I love.” Isaac shifted into his heavily Russian Irina impersonation and accent. Poor Michael Jackson! Cannot easy normal die!
“So I was feeling obnoxious,” Isaac continued, dropping the accent, “and said, ‘Right, Irina, you can only easy normal die in Russia. You just sit in your car after offending someone powerful, or write the wrong story, and pow-you’re gone.’”
“That was nasty!” Christy said. “You know she loves that whole Russian tough-guy thing, and Putin. Plus she really doesn’t like anyone even noticing her accent, let alone making fun of it.”
“I know, I know,” Isaac said, a little too knowingly for Christy’s taste, “and, yeah, she did act strange, weird, after that. She just looked at me in a way she never has before. Really cold, as if she didn’t recognize me.”
“Have you slept with her?” Christy asked with a chirp in her voice.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Isaac shot back. “I’ve told you before-no.”
“Yes, but you’ve also told me ‘No’ about other women in real estate, then changed it to ‘Yes.’”
“What’s the point?” Isaac asked.
“The point is,” Christy said, her sarcasm getting the best of her, “if she wants to share that unique feeling of being with you, and you haven’t gotten there yet, don’t jerk her chain.”
“I guess I can’t say I’ve never slept with my realtor,” Isaac offered, hoping for a smile.
“No, you can’t,” Christy replied, not granting one.
A week later, Isaac made clear to Christy that he wasn’t kidding about the side yard. His 401K had dropped 40 percent in the recession. His bridge loan on 401 would come due in two more years. Isaac wanted to know if, at least, the second-house idea was feasible.
In the eleven years since they’d stopped sleeping together, Christy had never made a dime off Isaac. Now, she thought, she should.
“Look, Isaac, if you’re really serious about this,” she told him on the phone, “let’s deal. The first thing you have to do is to see if it’s even possible to lay a foundation and build there. If you’re serious, for a $5,000 retainer, with you bearing the costs, I’ll arrange for the initial testing.”
“Five thousand is pretty steep,” said Isaac. “How much would the testing cost?”
“Probably a couple of thousand.”
“Five thousand is too high,” Isaac said. “What would you think of doing it as a team, with you taking a commission if I build the little house? You said all along that this was a unique property and situation-sort of ‘Own your own block right smack in University City.’ You could sell both together for over a million. I’d give you 10 percent on the whole thing.”
Christy liked the idea. She’d never seen a Philadelphia city block with only one house. A wild notion that she’d had before about 401 came back. It could be her signature project. She could explore that craziest of all inner-city ideas: trying to turn the 400 block of St. Irenaeus Square into a private street. Or a gated area like one of those suburban enclaves she’d long admired. Isaac’s prominence as an Inky writer might get her coverage as an innovator.
“Okay, let’s do it,” Christy replied after a long pause. “I mean, the project-the house!”
“You can’t tell Irina,” Isaac said.
“Of course not,” agreed Christy.
Isaac gave Christy a set of keys-he traveled half the time anyway, and trusted her. Christy arranged for Eric Busby, who’d worked on some of the town houses that replaced the imploded Southwark Towers, to do the initial research, checking city records on underground lines and obstacles, checking out the yard. Isaac would be off in Europe for three weeks right after the semester ended in May. She might get things off the ground by then. She told Isaac as much.
It didn’t turn out as Christy planned. Most of the time, when she thinks of Isaac and 401-and, occasionally, when she sleeps there (deals often leading to other deals)-she’s glad about that. The sixteen trees make it feel like someplace else, not Philadelphia. Isaac’s sudden avaricious side-the instant developer eager to make a profit and let nature be damned-didn’t become him. When they both realized they had to stop cold on the second-house idea, Isaac seemed vulnerable again, even sexy, as he had when they first met. Just a writer, and a dreamer, in a house full of books.
Christy broke it to him pretty quickly after he came back from Europe in June. They were sitting in Isaac’s living room, on the old Imperial couch.
“There’s not going to be a second house,” she began. “It can’t happen.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Eric dug down into the yard about forty feet back from the sidewalk.”
“So?”
“So, he hit something. An obstruction.”
“An obstruction?”
Christy got up, walked over to her travel bag, and took out something wrapped in old pages of the Daily News.
It was a matryoshka doll.
“That’s what Eric hit in the yard?” Isaac asked, his eyes riveted on it.
“That’s not all he hit,” Christy answered, with an efficient air that suggested-this thing is over: game, set, match.
“Try part of a rib cage next to it, not quite separated from its accessories.”
Isaac looked at Christy as if she’d just told him that she’d gotten pregnant by him years ago, given birth, and now it was time for Isaac to meet his daughter. Christy looked at Isaac with an expression that said: You owe me for the rest of your life.
“Don’t worry,” Christy said quickly, “Eric was just as scared and worried and in shock as I was. He’s totally trustworthy on this-he’s fine. He filled up the hole again, and spread the weeds and leaves over it. You’d have to look really close at it, standing right there, to even know it’s been disturbed.”
“I want to show you something,” Isaac said. He got up and went to the attic, where he kept the papers and souvenirs of his three years reporting and teaching in Russia. When he returned, he showed Christy the larger matryoshka doll he’d brought back from Russia-a gift from one of his students there, the daughter of a prominent St. Petersburg businessman.
“Doesn’t the whole doll-inside-a-doll thing stand for the, uh, endless similarity of the human spirit?” asked Christy, repeating something she thought she’d once heard.
“It does,” Isaac replied. “Katya, my student, told me all about them when she gave it to me. Apparently, Russian mafia sometimes bury one of them with a body.”
“What does it mean?”