Accounting - Part II

What I and his ex-wife imagine about John is out of date. She called him for days without his picking up. Worried his longing for her had overwhelmed him, she grew concerned and called the front desk. She called the front desk on every shift hoping to reach an elevator guy who had seen him. The elevator guys remember the man lost to the bathtub a couple years ago, and the woman to her carpet before that, and started to get concerned. They checked his apartment. Everything was pristine, but he was not there. I don't know if they checked to see if any clothes or a passport were missing. I know they concluded he had vanished in the night.

Feb, our building manager, was forced to call John's ex-wife and tell her if he'd hung himself it wasn't at the Castle. His ex-wife made plans to come out. She was by her own doing separated from him, but acknowledged he still was her responsibility, especially since she had driven him to this presumed loneliness. Note this all happened over the holidays, where family or romance challenged souls feel like losers and take their lives, and not long after a young man had gunned down several in a schoolyard.

It was her fault. John had to be found.

John was seen next at a New Years party. The exclusive one for which a Castle resident had reserved all of downstairs for her and her friends, the Grand Salon, its attached rooms, everything. Causing others in the building to resent her, since no one was invited and everybody had to wander from little apartment party to little apartment party upstairs.

In fact, one new renter was confused by the open parties and thought Karen's was another. She wandered down in to the reserved rooms and had a drink with a friend from her own bottle. Karen was incensed and demanded she leave the party, famously declaring, "Just because you're pretty doesn't mean you can crash my party". These words echo in my head if not hers, they are more openly insecure than a woman should ever be. If one doubts one’s attractiveness one should not share it, it eats away at other people's attraction to one. In Karen's stress, she must have forgotten this.

Leif, who had passed a safe distance from the exclusive party, while going through the lobby to walk Spike (a little dog, one of the prides of our life), tells me it was not a large gathering. It was nothing to book the Salon for, but I guess Karen thought by securing the lobby (referred to as “booking a resident event") she could keep out the Castle riffraff, especially the prettier riffraff.

None of her neighbors were invited to her party, not a single resident of the Castle, save one. John and his date were invited. She was a woman about his age, said in retrospect to have been seen on and off with him in the past month.  She wasn't his daughter, she wasn't his wife, she was very clearly his date.

Madame X by John Singer Sargent

John hasn't retired yet; perhaps he met a woman at work. Perhaps she’s a woman he’s known all along but hadn’t had the opportunity to consider before. Perhaps the woman’s a widowed friend of his wife, who became his friend rather than hers when he and his wife separated.  He might even have met her in the grocery store, or getting morning coffee at Starbucks, a luxury he's figured into his days. Perhaps there he'd seen a woman he found attractive, about his age and seemingly available. Then, employing the game he hadn't used in 40 years, if ever in his life, he asked her out. He was smooth enough that she accepted and now he has a girlfriend. It is with her we now presume he spent his days away from the castle.

The elevator guys called his ex-wife back and told her he'd been seen, that he was accounted for and safe. Both relieved and disappointed, she then cancelled her flight. No one dared tell her John appeared to have a girlfriend. We his neighbors could only wonder how he'd scored an invitation to Karen's party. There’s a rumor it happened in the laundry room. We now assume Karen considers John and his girlfriend not pretty or riffraff. We've observed John seems more confident this week in his pleasantries in a shared elevator ride.