Caveat Emptor by Ken Perenyi Page A

and the two of them accompanied me to an elevator so small that I could feel their breath on my neck. We got out on the third floor and I marched with the pair to a door near the end of the hall. The boy with the earring made a grand display of producing a jangle of keys from the end of a long chain attached to his skintight jeans.
    When he opened the door, I was confronted with a tiny, windowless room that resembled a prison cell. Dumbfounded, I wondered if this wasn’t a joke they were having on me. Smiling, they demanded fifty bucks a week. I thanked them and said, “I’ll have to think about it.” Back in the lobby I noticed a guy in a biker jacket and a shaved head staring at me on the way out. I returned to the Fergusen Club and told Mrs. Parker that all they had was a small room and I doubted I wanted it. Jim tried to keep a straight face as Mrs. Parker politely said she understood perfectly. She took my name and phone number and said she’d see what she could do.
    Several days later, as I sat biting my fingernails in the loft, the phone rang. Mrs. Parker informed me that she had a room on the top floor, plus storage space in the basement if I could commit to stay for any length of time. Without hesitation, I told Mrs. Parker I’d take the room. I loaded up a rented truck with my artwork, told Tony to go fuck himself, and split.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Fergusen Club
    M y artwork went into the town house basement, and I stored my Jeep in a garage on West Fifty-Seventh Street. I was pale, run-down, and depressed. I holed up in my small room on the fourth floor. The weather outside was horrific. Sleet storms raged day and night. I ran to Third Avenue for groceries and returned to my room. It had been a long time since I could take a bath, eat in peace, and sleep in a warm bed. I bought a copy of Dickens’s Hard Times and read it over the next week in bed. I knew that once I felt better and could think straight again, I’d have to plan where to go from here.
    After I convalesced and began to explore my new surroundings, I discovered that every evening, a group of residents gathered in the basement kitchen to prepare dinner for themselves. Like everything else, the kitchen was original to the house and, with the exception of two refrigerators, it retained all of its antique charm.
    I began to frequent the kitchen with the others, but, still in shock over the downtown debacle, I skulked around like a zombie and kept to myself. The first person to approach me was Ann. A tall, well-preserved, gregarious woman of forty, she wore her blonde hair in a ponytail and sported horn-rimmed glasses. Articulate and highly intelligent, Ann had an authoritarian air about her. I felt like I was in the presence of one of my grammar-school teachers again. It was Ann’s allotted duty to make preliminary overtures to any new and potentially interesting member.
    We quickly became friends, and I discovered that Ann was the intellectual and social backbone of the club. She could be found almost any night in one or another tenant’s room holding stimulating conversations on most any subject. I learned from Ann that the Fergusen was home to an interesting and somewhat eccentric assortment of people. Many of the long-term tenants liked to swap stories about how they’d found their way to the club, the way religious people like to recount how they’ve been led to Christ.
    Ann herself had once led an exciting life in society when she was married to a young composer. It all came to a sudden end when he died of a heart attack, leaving her almost destitute. Ann’s problems might have been solved had she somehow been able to obtain what she claimed was a fortune in royalties due her. She believed that her husband’s works were in the possession of scheming lawyers who were in cahoots with everyone from the Bilderberg Group to the Trilateral Commission. She claimed that they had conspired to keep her from