Invasion of Privacy

license, but she still compared what was written on it with my face, saying, “You were in The Tides today, right?”
    “Right.”
    Kira handed my holder back to me, with a little flourish I took to be her idea of coy. “So how come you’re following me?”
    “I’m not. I represent another condominium association that’s thinking of hiring the Hendrix company to run their complex, and I’m just checking on how well people who live here think Hendrix performs for them.”
    “Well, I don’t know much about it, but come in anyway.”
    I’m not sure what I expected after the Stepanians’ place. In terms of structural layout, the Elmendorf unit had exactly the same design, but mirror-imaged, so the kitchen was on the left and the staircase to the catwalk on the right. While the Stepanians had overstuffed furniture and carefully selected knickknacks, this place seemed more cluttered than decorated. Magazines covered all the horizontal planes. Teen, Outdoor Life, Elle, Popular Mechanics. Some technical photographic journals were sprinkled into the general mess. The couch, chairs, and table in the living room looked twenty years old, used pizza boxes and Chinese food cartons stacked on the counter separating kitchen from dining area. No sign of Norman Elmendorf. But some sound of him.
    A gravelly male voice called out from the upstairs. “Kira, who is it?”
    “No problem, Dad. Just a man wanting to know about the condo management.”
    Kira said the words sweetly, no condescension toward him or me in her manner.
    “Well, send him up.”
    She looked at me, spoke very quietly. “If you don’t go up to see him I’ll, like, hear about it for a week. Do me a favor, though?”
    “What?”
    Kira bit her lip once and let out a breath. “Be gentle and patient with him, okay?”
    Watching her, I said, “Okay.”
    She sat down on the old print couch, putting the headpiece to the Walkman back on and picking up a magazine.
    Climbing the stairs, I noticed only two chairs at the dining room table. Looking down at the staircase itself, I saw a number of indentations on the wooden steps. The marks were round and roughly the circumference of a half-dollar. As though somebody on crutches had been making this journey for a while.
    When I arrived at the threshold to what I predicted would be the master bedroom, the door was half open, but I knocked anyway. The gravelly voice said, “Come on in.” Entering the room, I saw a man of six feet or so lying in bed, propped up by two pillows behind him, a pair of metal braces like polio victims might use leaning against the night table next to him. The bedclothes covered his body up to the waist, but on top he wore a hooded, navy-blue sweatshirt which I would have thought too warm for the mild temperature on the second floor. Elmendorf’s smiling face was cheery, but the rosy cheeks, bulbous nose, and crooked teeth caricatured him like an engraved portrait out of Dickens. He was about my age with homecut hair, the rosy color of his cheeks extending in blotches down his neck and onto his chest along the zipper of the sweatshirt. I could see why Kira had asked me to be gentle with him.
    A liter bottle of Jim Beam was nearly dead on the night table, two fingers of the bourbon in a glass next to the bottle. Probably why his daughter had asked me to be patient as well.
    “Pull up that chair. Kira uses it to watch over me when I have nightmares, but they’re hours away yet.”
    I tugged over a wooden armchair that might once have stood at the head of the dining table downstairs. A print on its seat cushion matched the one on the living room couch. “Nightmares from what?” I said.
    A tolerant laugh, though it came out more a grunt, like he had phlegm in his throat. “The war, what else? Desert Storm.” Taking a swig of his booze, Elmendorf squinted at me. “You?”
    “ Vietnam .”
    “Army?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where?”
    “I was MP, so mostly Saigon , occasionally the bush.”
    “The ‘bush.’ God, what we would have given for some ‘bush’ where old Bushie sent us. Even a branch or a twig, anything to throw a little shade.”
    “How did you get sent over?”
    “My own stupid fault.” Another gulp of bourbon. “I went into the Reserves after college. Make a little extra money, you know? Then I got married and Kira came along, and the extra money looked even better, so I re-upped each time. Never thought I’d ever go anywhere, just weekends at Fort Devens or wherever