She asked for a tour and Berliner led her through the maze of middle rooms—“Thank god I was drunk the first time,” Davis said, “or else I would’ve probably freaked out”—into the back bedroom. They immediately went to the bed. Experiencing a transferred reverence for the space, Davis tried to be quiet as she and Berliner copulated. From the scrubbed walls and waxed floors she thought Berliner wanted quiet awe. She kept her eyes closed and her hands to herself. According to Berliner, the sex that day was mediocre. In fact, Berliner’s fantasy was the opposite of Davis’s assumption. His sexual excitement didn’t come from the pure space, but the violation of it — specifically Davis’s (or any female visitor’s) violation of it.
Once he explained what he wanted, Davis was more than happy to oblige. “He liked things like cracked tile, broken light fixtures, all kinds of stuff,” Davis said. “Sometimes he’d tell me what to break. Once, while he was asleep, I cut up all the curtains with a knife, then woke him up to show him what I’d done. He really liked that.”
Once, in a fit of anger and sexual excitement, she used a chair to punch a hole in the wall, then threw the chair at the bedroom window where it broke the glass, then hung in the frame for a few seconds before tumbling to the sidewalk. That night, she and Berliner had their most passionate sexual experience and most emotionally revealing post-coital conversation. They talked about music, and Davis told Berliner about her childhood in rural Ohio, where her parents kept bees.
The downside of Berliner’s unusual predilection was that it required costly upkeep. Berliner had the walls repainted monthly and a cleaning crew came to wash the floors and windows every week. He had a close relationship with his contractor, who often repaired dented walls, chipped plaster, or scratched molding. When Davis realized how intensely Berliner kept up his apartment, she had to confront the fact that she probably hadn’t been the first lover to visit. She was right; Berliner also occasionally brought home a librarian who worked at the Chicago city archives, but their encounters were sporadic.
In the early days of their relationship, Davis couldn’t find her way around the apartment to save her life; Berliner had to walk her everywhere, to the fridge to get water, to the front door to go home in the morning, even to the bathroom. By the time their relationship was deteriorating, Davis could move from the front of the apartment to the back with her eyes closed. She had found the secret second bedroom buried in a dead-end, and she slept there when she was angry with Berliner.
Davis spoke to Taer and Nix about these patterns of their relationship disdainfully, regretfully, but like Berliner, without shame. Despite their odd sex life, Davis never felt shy about the details. For her, it didn’t even feel transgressive. “In a certain sense, I never really could ‘get it up’ for him, you know? I mean, it just felt like normal sex in a strange place, to me. But it wasn’t supposed to feel like normal sex, it was supposed to be some new merging of person and architecture in a way that was supposed to open up the world. That’s how he told me I should feel about it, but I never did. Not really.”
Berliner was also shameless but for a different reason; he doesn’t mind, even likes, even revels in, being abnormal.
Davis talked and smoked for close to three hours with very few interruptions from Nix and Taer. They polished off two more bottles of wine in the last hour and although they were all drunk, Davis’s hands remained steady and her footsteps straight and even.
When Davis finished explaining her breakup with Berliner, no one said anything for almost twenty seconds, until Taer broke the silence.
“Well,” Taer lisped drunkenly, “I feel like I’m not going to be able to digest all this until tomorrow morning.”
“For sure,” Davis replied.
“But it’s like — I still don’t know what to do next.”
“Maybe we should avoid him,” Nix said.
“He’s not dangerous,” Davis said. “Just weird and sort of amoral. Just find him and talk to him.”
“He broke into our apartment,” Nix said.
“My apartment,” Taer said.
“And he hurt Cait’s forehead,” Nix said.
“The break-in, that’s something he would do. But he doesn’t hurt people,” Davis said.
“I hit his head with a dictionary,” Taer said. “He hit me back in self-defense.”
“Don’t defend him,” Nix said.
“But this argument doesn’t matter because I don’t know where to find him,” Taer said. “Where’s his apartment?”
“I can’t tell you,” Davis said.
“You can’t or you won’t?” Nix asked.
“I won’t,” Davis said, giving Nix a taste of the medicine Berliner would later feed me. “He won’t be there anyway. He doesn’t live there.”
“Where does he live?”
“I don’t know.”
“We could go ask Marie-Hélène,” Taer said.
“She won’t see you,” Davis said.
“Well, then, what are we supposed to do?” Nix asked.
“Look, I’ll give it to you that something is going on here, with Molly’s disappearance and Nick,” Davis said. “But I don’t know why you two in particular feel like you have to take it on.”
“It’s her,” Nix said, meaning Taer.
“Molly,” Taer said, thinking she was agreeing with Nix.
“Okay, then. My guess is that hunting down Nick is the right thing for you to do,” Davis said. “He knows way more than I do. He’ll be able to help you out. I’m just not sure how to find him.”
Taer pulled Berliner’s sketchpad out of her bag. She held it out of Davis’s reach. “We have this,” she said.
Davis held out her hand. “Give it to me.”
Taer didn’t want to, but handed it over anyway. Davis flipped through the sketchpad, stopping at some pages, running her fingers along the middle binding.
“I can’t decipher it fully. But I know what it is. He’d draw a map of wherever he went during the day. You see these arrows here? That’s his path.”
Davis flipped to the last map in the sketchpad. In the margins, she wrote a key to the map. She defined some of Berliner’s personal annotations, like the arrows she had mentioned, labeled a prominent diagonal street “North Clybourn Avenue,” and made a few guesses of the names of some smaller streets branching off North Clybourn. She pointed out all the maps that were a similar shape to the last map, as if Nick was revisiting the same places.
“What does this mean? This name here?” Taer asked.
“Antoine Monson?” Davis asked. “It was Nick’s assumed name, I think, kind of a code name. I don’t know where it came from, but some of the screen prints in Nick’s apartment were signed Antoine Monson.”
“Molly sometimes had me sign her into hotels as Antoinette Monson,” Nix said. “I didn’t think it was that weird, just some fake name to hide her.”
“Huh,” Taer said. “Maybe it was some way they communicated with each other.”
“Whatever,” Davis said. “I’m glad to be done with the stress of dealing with both of them, to be honest.”
Nix and Taer left Davis cigaretteless, drunk, and wallowing in her own emotional filth. Davis gave the distinct impression that she wouldn’t be seeing or speaking to them again. The way she closed the door seemed aggressively final. They went back to the Ramada Romulus; the lobby bar was still open. They installed themselves in a booth, ordered two Martinis, and gossiped about Berliner and Davis’s sex life. After the bar closed, Nix and Taer went up to their room. They danced together to music from Nix’s favorite band at the time, Sleigh Bells.