Any of the painters they’d bought pictures from who started to get known and whose work started to be worth real money, Burke sold the work, sowed the money back into the café.
I don’t want to pay the insurance, Burke said.
All this art, both classical and political, was tinged with an irony that showed in the crudeness and comic book character of the figuration. The irony of skinny-legged suburban children who had populated the neighborhood and adjoining ones, people brought up in a world that could commodify any conviction or idea or style. Some of the work had rage but most of it worked best without rage: these artists were largely refugees, white suburban kids or no longer kids but still in Converse and 501 black jeans; their rage tended to look childish and calculated and was infuriating to some people in the way calculating, badly behaved children always were infuriating. Caustic skepticism worked. It was how they felt about their parents, and it ended up being the attitude they brought to the rest of the world, including, quite often, what they painted, or filmed, or depicted in their writing. One local woman painter did nineteenth-century landscapes with modern military scenes at the center, government commandos killing peasants being the subject of the painting Burke bought from her. Her name was Tess. Her boyfriend they called Dr. Bedhead.
Running a café: you knew all these people. Eventually, some of them—apologetic at first, then not—ended up back in the suburbs raising their own children. But plenty of others stayed, toughed it out, had families and did the city grind with the public schools and bad services and the double strollers on the subway stairs. The café hours were insane. Six a.m. bakery deliveries or earlier, other suppliers, someone had to be there from five thirty on, to accept. They opened at seven thirty—it could have been later, in that neighborhood there was little point, no one much rose until ten, but Burke was loyal to the working guys and the white girls with jobs in Midtown who came in on their way to the subway for coffee with skim milk to go. Latecomers among the plumber and carpenter crowd. For that group you’d have to open at six thirty and there wasn’t that much profit in the coffee alone. The café closed at one in the morning. Burke hired good people. Musicians, painters, actors but with practical intelligence, something he could pick out with the accuracy of a shaman. But either Burke or George had to be there at opening and the other at closing because this was retail and you could not trust anyone with the money. Every night it was seven times what any of them made in a week. Sometimes if for one reason or another the same one had to do a night followed by a morning they came in and closed out the day’s sales at eleven or midnight and carried the rest over to the next morning. Soon they were doing three thousand a day in business, more on the weekends. Thick leather and canvas pouches with padlocks. A device for sorting and rolling change. A tiny back office with file cabinet, small desk, and two squeaky chairs found on the street, just like the old desk chairs at Spectator, gray aluminum frames, green vinyl leatherette seat back and covers, each with a dooming tear in it someplace, there must be an army of those motherfuckers spread across the land.
I grew up with no money. Did you grow up with no money? Burke said.
Money was an issue, George said. We always had less of it than we were supposed to have, but that’s not the same.
I cannot tell you the satisfaction—it’s like a deep physical well-being I feel, like I’m settled down into my own self, my own body, it’s really physical—when I have a lot of money. When I’m carrying a few hundred bucks and I have like ten thousand in the bank. It’s like a drug.
How much would be enough? George said.
That’s an interesting question, Burke said.
Made particularly interesting in that he never answered it. To George, after a time, this lack of an answer was the answer: the figure was literally unknowable and would always be unknowable because no known figure, put in front of the man, could ever be declared enough. Money was like Circe’s potion, like the Sirens’ song, like Calypso’s magic: take a taste, just the smallest bit, and it owned you. In college once, he was flirting with a girl on his floor, he was a sophomore, it was spring, they were in the lounge, a larger discussion got going on the topic of money. High ’70s. Emphasis on high. Whether money had real value. George ended up taking what money he had, around twenty dollars, collecting from some other people, sitting down on the metal plate outside the service elevator, and setting a hundred and six dollars on fire. People went batshit crazy. People were nuts about money. They associated the actual paper currency with some kind of morality—this was the American lesson. Money was morality. It was a core meaning. The scene changed them physically, their bodies became frantic. The ones who went most nuts were of course from the most well-off families. Prelaw assholes. Utterly predictable. One of them said, We could give that money to the poor!
George pulled a bunch of bills out of the flames. Here, he said. You want to give it to the poor? Let’s go out and give it to them right now. I’ll go with you.
The guy turned and walked away.
You don’t even want to talk to the poor, never mind give them money, George said.
Oh, his pride. Oh, the power. This was power—to show you were above even this, which gave meaning to American life. His wounded glee, burning the money. Like take that motherfuckers.
And there was in the 1980s in New York a lot of tasting going on. Not in smallest bits either. Burke’s name for the café, long established in his imagination, was Brown & Co. Some questioned the wisdom of it—Marina said brown was the color of death, rotting in the soil—but George sensed what Burke was after. This would be his skill. What Burke really wanted, despite the Loisaida feeling of the place now, with the overstated art and hacked-up brick, the unmatched, used-furniture-shop tables and chairs, what Burke was after really was the comforting elegance of Edwardian club rooms. Brown & Co. sounded like the rest of the sign could read Importers of Fine Comestibles. Estb’d 1783. Inside this idea resided the chain’s true identity: a place for educated white people. They were twenty years in before anything felt wrong to them about this situation. More immediate and practical was the problem of how to make this kind of thing modern, fast, diverse, and adaptable.
There was a bookshop east of Avenue B called Neither/Nor. With a large performance space. A lot of space all over because even the bookshop portion wasn’t filled up, featuring exclusively self-published and hand-made booklets and comics sold on consignment. At night it was very dark—you could hardly see the texts—and various volunteers, many with no talent whatsoever, played music to no one in particular in the back room. George had gotten to know the couple that had opened it. Eager and skinny. The woman was from France and wore fishnets and electric-purple high heels. George brought Burke to see the place. As it happened, no bad music: instead a poet was reading, who was very good—George had seen him before, at ABC No Rio. For his last poem, a sonnet, he lighted a book of matches, the whole book—held it aloft, and let it fall to the floor and die with the dying words of the verse. The floor, George couldn’t help noting, was wood, beaten, broken through in places, chairs arranged around the holes, frightening openings into a black void, the suggestion that at any moment one could fall through to a kingdom of darkness and rats.
I think we should open a café in back, George said. This place is cool.
This place is deadly, Burke said. What has it got that we don’t have on Avenue A except a lot less traffic? And less light?
George looked around. Fishnets? he said.
Core mission, Burke said. Core mission. Plus we got some fishnets going on. We are not absent fishnets.
They’re not part of the genetics of the place, George said. What George wanted, he realized, was for the enterprise, their café business, to be avant-garde. Burke said, This bookstore is avant-garde because it has no books in it. Hard to make a café truly avant-garde, Georgie. You’d have to refuse to serve coffee. Georgie was the cheerful Burke. It raised his spirits to say no to things.
* * *<
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MARINA AND GEORGE’S baby was due soon. They had found a place uptown, Upper West Side, 105th Street—I want some space, and high ceilings, Marina had said—and they would deliver at St. Luke’s eight blocks north. Marina was not a tall woman, she was most compact through the middle, and her pregnancy saw her grow to a prodigious size. In the final weeks, middle and late December, she was showing signs of toxemia, preeclampsia, high blood sugar. It was coming on Christmas they were cutting down trees… Marina’s ob-gyn was heading to the Caribbean for two weeks; therefore, she had Marina in to the delivery room a week before the holiday, on a Saturday, and the residents and nurses spent Saturday and Sunday trying to induce labor; just the days, Saturday night they were sent home, but for nine hours both days Marina lay in bed hooked up to a Pitocin drip. Nurses came and went every half hour or so, adjusting the flow of the bag. Every couple of hours they changed the catheter bag.
This is how the Mossad tortures PLO guys, Marina said, halfway into the first day of brutal, unproductive cramps.
You wouldn’t say that in DC with your state security colleagues, George said.
Discretion is part of any foreign-service career, she said.
They were released at six, with Marina’s cervix still shut tight as an uptown jewelry shop at midnight, and tramped back again the next morning, volunteers in their own beheading. George was taking time from the café to sit in a dark-beige room with her. It was that color of beige available only to institutions in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, a hue that had some red in it and some yellow in it but somehow everything combined to dinge. The room was run-down. At one point he decided to open the blinds: he thought he’d let in some milky winter light. One pull and the entire enormous blind structure—the upper portion behind a false wall at the top of the six-foot window—came tumbling down in a cloud of black soot accumulated over the previous several decades from the truck exhaust on Amsterdam Avenue. It crashed, things on the windowsill went flying, broke, it was an explosive event. The soot mushroomed up into his face, into his mouth, then settled again everywhere on him, in his hair and on his clothes, across his brow like Al Jolson halfway ready for his set. The crash brought them all running from the four corners of the obstetrics ward.
Oh my god, you’re covered in soot, Marina said. Her hand was over her mouth like a nineteenth-century etching of a woman saying eek.
Now I know how to get the nurses, George said. He had a wad of tissues from the bedside table and was spitting black stuff into it.
They tsk-tsked him but really couldn’t quite blame him—why shouldn’t he open the goddamned blinds? Well, because the shit of the ages falls out of the walls if you do that. No risk of infection though: she hadn’t opened even half a centimeter.
The end of the second day they walked home again with their pillow and paint roller (for back labor) and focus object, a small painting by their neighbor, a gift. Paris, the Seine, in ink and watercolor. The blue-gray river led a pathway between the stone gray-brown walls.
Marina gave birth finally in early January ’87. It required more than thirty hours of labor and concluded with an emergency cesarean section. At some point in there, during a slow period, Marina’s mother, having flown in to be on hand, spelled him in the birthing room and George went out and got a hero sandwich and two bottles of beer. He downed them on a cold bench in the middle of Broadway. That was his sustenance over forty-two hours or so. Later, rolling the paint roller down her lower spine and across her coccyx—they were fifteen or twenty hours in at that point—he concluded that no physical feat he’d ever seen accomplished by a man matched this. He couldn’t fully grasp it. Twenty-five hours, twenty-eight. Somewhere in the thirtieth hour and Marina’s cervix just reaching the tenth centimeter, the baby’s heartbeat had started to slow, his oxygen levels were going down, and off they sped on a gurney to the OB-GYN operating room. One of the nurses helped George wash and suit up and brought him into the room, which was not, given the rush, properly set up for an observer: they sat him in a simple chair like from a kitchen, at the end of Marina’s arm, and he held her hand, which grew frigid because of the epidural, like a refrigerated hand. Early on he made the mistake of turning his head toward where the business was being done and he saw far too much of the inside of his wife’s body, red pink yellow layers of skin and fat, clamped as if in a sandwich, elevated to allow the obstetrician’s hands to explore the womb and extricate the baby, and she was in there up to her forearms. This was his next revelation then: you do not want, ever, to see the inside of a loved one’s body.
Out he came, then, Nathaniel they’d decided to call him: first Apgar score of nine. Valiant fellow. Once the baby had been cleaned and wrapped George looked over the nurse’s shoulder as she was suctioning his lungs, a tube up his nose, down his throat, pulling out the amniotic fluid that the vaginal walls had not had the chance to squeeze out of him, as a thousand moms over a thousand sinks squeezed clean a thousand sponges on a thousand quiet evenings. The baby was remarkably awake, clear-eyed: there was a nobility and endurance in his face that George could see already, not the kind of strength that changed the world but the deeper kind of strength that refused to allow the world to change it. He was moved by the endurance he saw in that face.
Birth and death, there was always a story. All this would become the folklore that so many birth stories became; she was overhydrated and her hands in the recovery room were blown up like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man’s. He thought they would have to saw off her wedding ring but the anesthesiologist said no, the swelling would go down shortly, and so it did. Finally it was over and she was asleep and the baby was where the baby was and he left, thrust out of the hospital doors into a dim dawn in which snow had begun to fall: gray-white world of an empty Amsterdam Avenue, sky swirling. He went back to their apartment on 105th Street where his mother-in-law was asleep in the spare room, and opened the fridge and emptied into a tall water glass the white wine that had been residing there; he drank it down. It wasn’t nearly enough. There was an alky bar on Broadway that opened at seven as the law permitted (of course noon on Sundays), didn’t close till four a.m. when the law required, and by 7:15 that morning he was sitting in it with a Jameson and a small glass of beer. He’d never drunk in the morning and never would again but this was an exceptional day and, besides, when you’d been up for close to forty-eight hours, what was morning anyway? It was all night as far as his body and his psyche could measure. The pre-workday business in such a place was an education: men—family men, hello—came in on their way to their jobs, jobs clearly hated, downed a drink and left. The champ was a red-faced guy in his thirties, already shot-looking, face raw from a bad shave, collar too tight, bad tie, JC Penney–type imitation British trenchcoat—a lifetime of middle management awaited the men in those coats—and when Joseph, the bald and potbellied day shift bartender, saw the guy come from southward past the windows and toward the door, he pulled out the house scotch from the well and poured two doubles, to the brim. Fellow came through the swinging door, placed a ten on the bar—probably four apiece for the doubles and two for Joe, for being daily and quick about it. He put the drinks down like two small sips of cool water. Out the door again. Forty seconds in all, certainly not a full minute, and then, only then, was he ready for the first few hours of his day. Barely. He likely would need a booster by eleven and the evenings at home must be an unending bad dream, filled with dreary meanness or worse. In George’s inner dictionary, where the mind catalogues its words and phrases, this guy’s red face would for years thereafter pop up under fucking miserable life. It made George a little sad, in the midst of this grinding melancholy, to be in his exhausted way so happy. Oh, the feel of a baby in your arms.
When the baby—Nate—was six months old they took him out to Seattle to be baptized and to see her people. In church on Sunday: the foreign land, slightly ominous, of the Roman religionists. The smoke of incense and a touch here and there, still, of Latin. Ten words of Latin left in th
e Mass, perhaps. It was like a vestigial tail. The old priest who gave the sermon had a thick accent. He was, George found out later, a Basque; his mouth looked like it had been pushed around in a bad fight and the English words came out of it pre-mangled. His bald head, with chin and ears and cheeks and forehead, looked like a series of lumps he’d taken in that same bad fight. He said, in his sermon, George remembered only the one line: that if we wish to lead satisfactory lives, we would be required to conduct ourselves with dedication, joy, and tenacity. Three words, he remembered them ever after: dedication, joy, and tenacity. Afterward Marina’s mother introduced Marina and George and the baby to the old priest and he touched and smiled at and blessed the baby, who was fussing, needing to nurse. There was a rustic beauty to this face, ardent and authentic, brown-eyed. He went by the name Father San Sebastian, having taken his religious name from the largest city in the Basque region of Spain.
He said to them, while the baby fussed, Little children’s lives are very hard. At night the dark comes and they do not want to go to sleep. They are afraid they are going to die. You have to help them. Not now, he sleeps and eats, but later, later he will be afraid.
* * *
THAT FIRST YEAR George was still working seventy hours a week in the café, which was hard on Marina, but she had friends and her mother stayed for two months. Burke was preparing to expand the business. Late 1987 they had four or five good managers to work with. To keep them in it Burke set them up to make a piece of the business over time. George and Burke went and bought themselves good suits at Barneys to wear to the bank. George wore his tie that afternoon, Burke went with open collar and his Ray-Bans. He brought a neat portfolio of bank statements and press reviews of the café. They got the big loan, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all they owned on collateral, plus two co-signers, and aside from weddings and funerals George never wore a tie again. They opened the first of the chain versions of Brown & Co. coffee shop on Fifth Avenue and 22nd Street, across from the Flatiron. One of the design elements George, whose official title was Executive VP, Management and Marketing, insisted on: large bathrooms. Two of them. In every store. Soon they had four shops and an office (an office, for chrissakes, George had said) so that neither he nor Burke would see the inside of a store for a week or more at a time, which meant he could control his hours better, even stay home some days. When Nate was three Marina decided to finish her foreign affairs degree in Washington. It meant she was down there three or four days a week for three and a half months in the fall and three and a half again in the spring. They had enough money to hire someone to live in—they moved into a three-bedroom with maid’s room on Riverside Drive; this was the building in which George would eventually buy a co-op, a larger five-bedroom on the seventh floor, and where he’d stay. The nanny’s name was Lourdes. Nanny and housekeeper. A three-times-weekly cleaning service as well. Lourdes ran it all. When, one day a few years later, he and Marina decided to split, she would stay in DC, he in New York, Nate would split the time, each parent would visit the other city, it wasn’t that much of a change. For middle school, when Nate was eleven, he moved back to New York. Washington’s a drag, he said.
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