And without handing Harry anything for the three months of back rent she owed, she turned around and stamped her way down four flights of stairs, leaving the rhythmic echo of her slapping shoes.
Underneath was a more gentle sound, the soft rhythms of a drum. Harry and Ruth continued down to the fifth floor, where they found Cristofina widi a large green-and-black silk scarf extravagantly wrapped around her head. Next to her, seated on the floor, was Panista from the casita, playing a small drum he held sideways, tapping it in such intricate and lovely patterns that at last his restless fingertips seemed satiated.
In Cristofina's hand was a headless, milk-chocolate-colored pigeon out of which she was pouring blood in the doorway, humming like a nimble and contented seamstress fast at work. Puddles and splatters of dark, wine-colored blood filled the doorway like an abstract expressionist painting in progress. Like stoppers and empty bottles cast aside in a bout of drinking, bird heads and drained carcasses with crumpled feathers were scattered in the hallway Nathan was seated on the floor dressed in white, strands of green and black beads around his neck, a grayish feather resting on the side of his head, a bashful smile on his face as he looked up and saw his parents.
Cristofina poured honey over the blood and then sprinkled feathers on the sticky, bleeding pools while singing in a gentle, happy voice in Yoruba.
Chow Mein Vega was hunched over the table in the dark, cool corner of the casita, tapping out page 611 of his autobiography, in which he was performing in the Catskills. On the porch, the other cool part of the house, Panista was leaning back on a metal folding chair, balancing himself against a post, his fingers tapping out a plena beat against a book called A Taste of Japan.
"Did you know that kamaboko was first made in the fourteenth century?"
"What do you mean, made?" said Palo, who, too tall for the casita, was seated in the garden on a wooden stool. "I thought kamaboko was a vegetable."
"No," scoffed Panista, "that's takenoko."
"Bamboo shoots," said Panista, still tapping.
"Okay, pendejito, what is kamabokoT Palo challenged.
"It's fish puree, asshole," said Panista. "They mold it so it is shaped like your head."
"Hello, Mr. Seltzer," said Palo, suddenly seeing Harry coming through the front gate.
"Hey, Mr. Seltzer," said Panista. "Know of any openings in Japanese restaurants? We can wait tables, cook, whatever. Ask me something, Seltzer-san."
"Well, Palo-san, I have no sushi work, but I do have a boogaloo gig."
"Sí señor!"
"One night. A wedding."
"A wedding. Old people?"
"Afraid so. People in their fifties. Third marriage, no white dress, but they wanted boogaloo. Latin boogaloo. Where's Chow Mein?"
The three simultaneously pointed inside the house, where the typewriter could be heard. Felix had said that Chow Mein was the last person in New York to use a typewriter.
As Harry walked into the casita, Chow Mein looked up from his work, saved by an interruption. "Man, writing is hard. Who was it talked about the blank page, Hemingway or someone. I got too many pages."
"Anybody can write," Harry said. "A pencil or pen, some paper, and then you just sit down and write."
"Hemingway said that?"
"No. Irving Berlin."
Mrs. Kleinman kissed the mezuzah on her doorpost softly as she left for the third floor to Birdie Nagel's, where the door was open and Birdie really was packing. "You're getting out? Good for you! Good-bye to all the goddamn cockroaches and the stolen mail and the guy who pisses in the doorway every night. Where you going? Boca? God bless. You'll probably get an eat-in kitchen and a living room and closets big enough to dance in."
The seersucker fardarter leaving his apartment a floor below heard her and, for the first time, noticed the building's tile floors had dirt caked in the edges and the paint was peeling in large curls off the wall.
When Nathan asked Ruth where Harry was, she had said pointedly, "At the casita—eating lechón!" Nathan was not sure what significance Ruth was attaching to this, but he left to look for his father. Today was the day he would straighten out his life, and he was anxious to talk to Harry before settling things with Ira Katz.
On his brisk walk to the casita, it struck Nathan that Arnie was missing. He did not see him or his pallet, blanket, or books.
At the casita, Nathan was stopped by Palo. "Here's the man que corta el bacalao. Nathan, how do you make miso?"
"I don't have any idea. But it seems to me that miso is one of those things, like pizza and hot dogs, that you don't try to make. You just buy it. Ask José Fishman. He's Japanese now."
After Nathan walked into the casita, Palo whispered to Panista, "That's bullshit, man. He better get with the program or he's not going to make it in the neighborhood."
"Got that," said Panista. "Things are changing."
Harry was seated next to Chow Mein Vega but was not eating lechón. Chow Mein was hunched over his typewriter, stroking his stumpy ponytail, while Harry was explaining their strategy for the future of boogaloo. Nathan knew he would have to be patient, that Chow Mein would want to go to the cuchtfrito. It seemed probable that the only meals Chow Mein ever had were when he could get someone to take him to lunch. That and the food available at weddings and receptions at which he performed. For a while he did well with bar mitzvahs. Chow Mein believed that more food was available at bar mitzvahs than any other type of event. He even wrote a "Bar Mitzvah Boogaloo." But it was the parents who wanted him, not the bar mitzvah boys. Besides, there were fewer and fewer bar mitzvahs in the neighborhood. Still, mysteriously, Chow Mein grew ever larger.
Just as the conversation seemed to be wearing down, Chow Mein clapped his hands together with sudden enthusiasm and said, "How about some cuchifrito?"
At the cuchifrito, which posted a "Free Ruben Garcia" sign, Nathan noticed that as his mother had predicted, Harry ordered kchón, the suckling pig. But since almost everything at a cuchifrito is cooked in pork fat, Nathan could not see anything particularly galling in Harry's choice of lechón.
Finally, after Harry paid the inexpensive bill and Chow Mein left them, Nathan had a chance, as they walked home, to talk to his father.
"You don't sound very happy about this."
"I can get five hundred thousand dollars. Maybe more."
Harry did not react, so Nathan tried a different way of expressing it. "It's for the money." He wanted to say, "It's for the money, stupid." But money meant nothing to Harry. He wouldn't understand. "We have to send Sarah to school. Preschool, then school. And swimming lessons. There are a lot of things kids need now. The shop doesn't make money, Dad. It never did."
Nor was Harry moved by this revelation.
"Sometimes it broke even. Right now it is not even doing that."
"This company seems anxious to get it."
"They just want to put it out of business."
"Look, Nathan, I have to tell you something. We are rich. The family is rich." Nathan was either not understanding him or not believing him. "We're rich people. You don't have to sell your business. Mordy doesn't have to run off to Cape Cod with a shiksa. We have money.... Okay, we don't have any money. But we have property. Do you know how much property we have? It's better than money. I get offered millions all the time. They keep offering more and more. The more you say no, the more they offer. It makes me wonder why anyone would ever say yes."
"Because if you don't, you never have any money."
Harry stared at him with a look that was not approval, a look Nathan knew well.
"What would be wrong with taking the money?"
"It always means throwing somebody out of their home. Besides, I never like the people making the offer. A bunch of anti-Semites. I don't need to do business with them. Say, where's Arnie?"
It was true there was no trace of him on Avenue A.
"People get older. They die or go to Boca Raton, which is probably the same thing. Fly away, like Birdie
Nagel. Someday we will sell something. Or maybe we will just let the properties earn money Give Mordy a building to manage. We could make him a landlord."
"Free him from Priscilla."
"Who knows. I'll tell you a secret. When I was sixteen years old I met a woman—a woman, she was maybe eighteen—on a train to Warsaw. I can still remember her. Or maybe it is all wrong, but the way I remember her she had straight blond hair, real yellow stuff, like yellow silk. And that white skin that you can almost see through. And eyes so blue, they had no color at all. A real Pole. And she didn't see that I was Jewish."
Harry stopped walking.
"For some reason, I have never wanted anything in my life more than I wanted to sleep with this girl. And she wouldn't. Maybe she knew I was Jewish. If she had slept with me, she would have seen I was Jewish. Maybe I was afraid because of that. But I lied. Pretended I was a Pole. Even tried to sound a little anti-Semitic. I couldn't do it very well. But I could see that she didn't like it when I talked like that. Then I really had to have her. No excuse. She wasn't even an anti-Semite. Well, she was a Pole. Klara. And I couldn't have her. I still remember her. I still remember wanting her. Disgracing myself, pretending to be a goy. I always remember it—her and how I acted and how I wanted her. I think I would have done or said anything. So if Mordy wants to spend the summer on Cape Cod, I wish him God bless. If I could have had a summer on Cape Cod with Klara, I would have forgotten her by now. That would have been better."
They walked in silence. In his entire life, Nathan had never felt so close to his father. He thought that for the first time he might be able to understand who Harry was. He had to ask. "Why is Nusan angry with you?"
"Nusan is angry."
"There is more, though, isn't there?"
Harry shrugged. "He thinks I should have saved him. Saved the whole family."
"Why didn't you?"
"I didn't know that they needed saving. They never said anything. When I went to America, none of them wanted to come. None of them ever said they wanted to come. Then suddenly they were all gone."
"This woman, this Pole, you wanted her so much that you didn't care about anything...."
"Nothing else. It wasn't love. I didn't even love her. I just craved her. A kind of sickness."
"You know..." Nathan began.
Suddenly the street was filled with a throbbing, pounding noise. It was Dolby and his speakers, pedaling his bicycle past. And on the back of the huge, throbbing boxes, almost obscured by the silver and blue duct tape that secured the speakers to the bicycle, was a bumper sticker—BUSH FOR PRESIDENT. There, at last, the neighborhood Republican had been identified. By the time Dolby was far enough away so that they could talk again, Harry had dressed himself in the kind of silence that meant he did not want to talk anymore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fresh Kills
DAYS PASSED in the cleansing but unexciting spirit of reform, yet Nathan had not taken the last critical step in his program—the visit to Karoline. As he said to his orisha, the Vocero-shrouded Oggún, he should have never started with her. He loved his wife and his daughter. Why did he have to get involved with this other person—this other who was so much other? He knew why, but sex was not something he wanted to discuss with an orisha.
By the time he went to Karoline's to tell her all this, Joey Parma had a bruise on his right cheek. This showed a number of things about Mrs. Parma, including the fact that she was left-handed, or else, like a professional, led with her left and had not delivered the finishing blow.
She did not hit him when he came home that night. She was too hurt. But then he infuriated her. He denied the entire affair. When asked to explain why the woman had confessed the whole thing, he did not have an answer. All he could say was, "Who knows why women do things?" That was when she started getting angry. Then he made it worse by telling a preposterous and elaborate story about storing wine at the woman's apartment.
"Don't lie to me, Joey I could see this was a lot more than trading Zinfandellis."
"Zinfandels."
"What?"
Joey walked out and drove to the East Village, attaching the red dome light to his roof and turning on his siren to force his way through traffic jams. In Karoline's apartment, he grabbed the first three cases of his wine that he found, refused to talk to Karoline, who was trying to explain, and drove back to Queens.
He showed his wife the bottles, lovingly extracting a 1981 Chassagne-Montrachet, and read from the label the words "Morgeot premier cru." Then, seeing that she was unmoved, he tried to impress her with a 1982 Bordeaux. "It was a big year for Médoc," he argued as he presented a bottle of Chateau d'Agassac, pointing to the lemon-colored label with the engraving of the castle. She simply turned away in disgust. So he made her go with him to a local wine merchant, who appraised the wines at over $3,000. She glared at him as he drove them home. "What did you think?" said Joey. "Remember that wine when we had the Feguccis over last weekend? You thought that was good, didn't you?" He mimicked her voice in falsetto Queens: " 'Vewy noice, Jowey' Yeah, nice. Chassagne-Montrachet for seventy dollars a bottle!"
She said nothing, but when they got home she asked him how many more cases he had. Joey said, "Six."
"Six! So this is about ten thousand dollars you spent on wine!" She was a grocer's daughter and tabulated quickly.
"You miss the point. It's an investment. The value goes up. I probably only spent eight thousand." And that was when she hit him. He, holding the stinging side of his face, argued, "Ten years from now, you know what it'll be worth? You're looking at maybe twenty thousand in wine."
"Twenty thousand dollars. In wine! And you drink it! And with the Feguccis!" He was lucky she didn't hit him again. She wanted him to sell it. She wanted to see the money in a bank account or in "low-risk, medium-term Treasury bonds."
What kind of bond? Where had she learned to talk like that? Joey wondered. But he went to Karoline's to gather the rest of the wine. He asked her why she had told his wife they were having an affair.
"I didn't know who she was."
"So that's why you said you slept with her husband. When in doubt, confess adultery?"
"I thought she was somebody else."
"Somebody else?"
"Somebody else's wife."
"Ahh, so you're allowed to have secrets."
A loud buzzer intruded. She pushed the button. "Karoline," came Nathan's muffled voice from the white plastic box on the wall.
Joey and Karoline examined each other. "No, I don't get to have them either," said Karoline with a sad smile as she pushed the buzzer button. Then she opened the door wide and stepped back so that Nathan would see Joey.
"I think you know each other."
"Yes, how are you?"
"How you doin'?"
Nathan could not dismiss the impression that Joey Parma was— was leering at him. "You look like someone smacked you," Nathan observed.
"Naw. It was a door. A swinging door."
"They always say that," said Nathan, but he saw that no one was amused, so maybe he was right.
"Well," said Joey. "The last of it. Thanks, Karoline."
"Sure, Joey Sorry it—"
"Forget about it," he said, picking up two cases of wine with surprising ease and walking out. "See ya, Nathan."
Nathan and Karoline did not move as they listened to Joey's footsteps, almost counting them. They both had the same thought: I am not going to start this speech I have been practicing until Joey is gone. Once the door downstairs was heard closing, Nathan began first.
"I have to talk to—"
"Don't you ever call first?"
"I'm sorry. Listen, I have to—" But the next words out of his mouth were not the ones he had been planning. "We were using his handcuffs, weren't we."
"What?"
"The handcuffs. They were Joey Parma's handcuffs. You had used them with him."
Karoline took her hand with the strong, skilled fingers and covered her mouth, a
ttempting to conceal the fact that she was laughing.
"It's funny? It's funny? Why is it funny? Why do you always laugh at me? Am I that comic?" But it was a rhetorical question. Nathan knew the answer.
"There are three things you need to know here," said Karoline, extending three fine fingers in front of her face. "The first is for general release. Please tell the world. I am not now, nor have I ever been, involved with Joey Parma." Then she muttered, "Not my type. You're my type. I'm sick of my type." Then she resumed in full voice, "Number two: The handcuffs were given to me years ago as a joke, and you are the only one I ever used them with. And number three"—she walked over and opened the door—"number three is I'm getting married. I'm marrying Dickie, and I want you to go away and stop ruining my life. Good-bye, good luck, regards to the wife and kid."
Nathan looked at her in disbelief. How had she turned this around? Now she was sending him away? Why did she always have an advantage over him? He imagined the voice of Ira Katz: "Because you're married, stupid."
He walked to the door. Should he kiss her? Shake her hand? He could not look at her without aching to touch her. His nose filled his head with her buttery scent. Their noses filled with each other's scents. If they had been alone in a room with no God watching, they could have spent an hour just sniffing each other like dogs.
"Just one last time for good-bye?" Nathan suggested. With no more spoken, they were in her wide bed, the lumpy mattress on the wooden base of drawers full of pastry equipment.
He walked home hours later, still having said nothing but knowing that they had said good-bye. He told himself that he felt relieved and ignored the dryness in his throat, the aching in his face, the uneasy feeling in his stomach.
When he got back to the building, a new tenant was moving in. Birdie Nagel had left and Harry had run an ad in the Voice, and it was answered so quickly that he barely had time to clean and paint the apartment, which had been neither cleaned nor painted in decades, and Birdie had left behind stacks of twenty-pound bags of birdseed that had to be disposed of.
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