Free Loss by Tom Piccirilli

Loss
     
    The last time I saw the great, secret, unrequited love of my life, Gabriella Corben, was the day the talking monkey moved into Stark House and the guy who lied about inventing aluminum foil took an ice pick though the frontal lobe.
    I was in the lobby doing Sunday cleaning, polishing the mahogany banister and dusting the ten Dutch Master prints on the walls. At least one of them appeared authentic to me–I’d studied it for many hours over the last two years. I thought it would be just like Corben to stick a million dollar painting in among the fakes, just to show he could get away with it. I imagined him silently laughing every time he saw me walking up from my basement apartment with my little rag and spritz bottle of cleaner, ready to wash a masterpiece that could set me up in luxury for the rest of my life.
    And it was just like me to keep wiping it down and chewing back my petty pride week after week, determined to drop into my grave before I’d pull it from the wall and have it appraised. The chance to retire to Aruba wasn’t worth knowing he’d be snickering about it for the rest of his life.
    I stared at myself in the buffed mahogany and listened to Corben and Gabriella arguing upstairs. I couldn’t make out their words from four flights away. He played the tortured artist well, though, and could really bellow like a wounded water buffalo. He roared and moaned and kicked shit all around. He used to do the same thing in college. I heard a couple of bottles shatter. Probably bourbon or single malt scotch. They were props he occasionally used in order to pretend he was a hard drinker. The journalists and television crews always made a point of saying there was plenty of booze around. I had no doubt he emptied half the bottles down the sink. I knew his act. I’d helped him develop it. For a while, it had been mine as well.
    Now Gabriella spoke in a low, loud, stern voice, firm but loving. It hurt me to hear her tone because I knew that no matter how bad it got with Corben, she would always stand by him and find a way to make their marriage work.
    I kept waiting for the day when his hubris and self-indulgence finally pushed him into seeking out even more dramatic flair and he actually struck her. I wondered if even that would be enough to drive her away. I wondered if I would kick in his door and beat the hell out of him for it, and in a noble show of compassion I would let his unconscious body drop from my bloody hand before breaking his neck. I wondered if she would gaze on me with a new understanding then and fall into my arms and realize we were meant to be together. I often wondered why I wasn’t already in long-term therapy.
    They owned the top floor of the five-story building. They’d had a fleet of architects and construction crews come in and bang down walls and shore up doorways and put in flamboyant filigreed arches. In the end they were left with sixteen rooms. I’d been inside their place but never gotten a grand tour. I’d mostly stuck to the bathrooms and fixed the toilet when it broke. I imagined the library, the den, the sun room, the bedroom. I didn’t know of sixteen different types of rooms. Was there a ballroom?...a music room?...a solarium? I had a passkey to all the apartments in Stark House, even theirs, but I’d somehow managed to resist the temptation to comb through their home.
    The other four stories were inhabited by elderly, faded film and television stars, one-hit pop song wonders, and other forgotten former celebrities who’d become short-lived cultural icons for reasons ranging from the noble to the ludicrous. They were mostly shut-ins who every so often would skulk about the halls for reasons unknown or appear, momentarily, in their darkened doorways, maybe give a wave before retreating.
    We had the guy who’d invented aluminum foil. We had a lady who’d given mouth-to-mouth to a former president’s son after a pile-up on I-95 and saved his life. We had a