White Plains
Page 5
He lifted his head at the sound of a creaky car door slamming shut, then footsteps on his front stoop. Flynn. It was Flynn, coming to pay his condolences, or to apologize for not visiting when Joanna was in the hospital. Faustino went up on his elbows—yes, it might help him to see the youngster—but then realized what he must look like. He could never answer the door in this condition.
*
Flynn Hawkins stood on his professor’s porch, his hand below the doorbell, his finger poised. A light rain was falling. The bells of Devlin campus were chiming. The 1996 Spring Commencement had begun.
Two hours earlier, he had been lying in bed with a headache, listening to Briggs getting ready. Flynn and the other graduate assistants had gone out the night before to celebrate, and toward the end Amita had offered to come home with him, but Flynn had slipped out when her back was turned and walked all the way home. Amita was smart and kind and beautiful, sure, but how was he supposed to compete with a soldier?
Briggs knocked on Flynn’s bedroom door, but Flynn said nothing. The door was locked. He lay on his back, the covers under his chin.
It was Saturday, June 1. Their lease was up, but their landlord had given them the weekend to move out, since there was nobody else renting the place until September. Briggs had already packed his things and would be heading to Buffalo after graduation and the wake for Mrs. Faustino, which would take place at the Williams and Gardner Funeral Home at two o’clock. Flynn had planned on leaving the following morning. He would drive to White Plains and stay with his mother while looking for a cheap place to live in lower Manhattan. Neither his mother (who rarely drove farther than Macy’s or the DMV and was certainly not going to risk the six-hour trek to Madisonville, “wherever on God’s green earth that is”) nor his sister (who was six months pregnant) would be coming to his graduation ceremony.
Briggs clapped up the stairs with his dress shoes and rapped on his door again. “Hawkins!” A pause, then a jiggling of the door handle. “Flynn, we gotta go, for fuck’s sake! What’s going on, is Amita in there?” He banged on the door. “Amita! Flynnie! Wake up!”
Flynn held his breath until Briggs gave up and tramped down the stairs.
Once he heard the front door slam and Briggs’s car pull away, Flynn got up and rubbed his face. He would pack up and leave. Now, not tomorrow. He would get on Route 17 and head east. He’d skip graduation. Most of his professors would be there, along with his fellow graduate assistants and their families, including Briggs’s infamous mother and Amita’s macho soldier-boy, probably in full military garb. But no one for him.
And he would miss the wake. But Faustino wouldn’t want him there anyway. The man would surely prefer to be left alone. Can you imagine? That beautiful woman. The love of his life. It wouldn’t even register if Flynn was there. Besides, he knew how Flynn felt about him. Flynn didn’t need to line up at some ritualistic service, paying respects and whatnot, to show his professor how much he cared. He didn’t need to see Mrs. Faustino in the coffin, her lips sewn up into a clownish smile, her middle collapsed from the removal of her organs, her overbrushed hair arranged strangely with chemicals. He didn’t need to touch her skin to know how cold and taut it would feel. He didn’t need anyone grabbing him around his waist again, pulling him away from the coffin.
He washed himself, packed his car, cleaned his bedroom, put his house key on the kitchen table, and left 17 Younger Drive for good. As he pulled away, he saw the flinching child on his neighbors’ porch and realized it was a boy.
But as he headed through town on 394, a soft rain began to fall, and just before driving past the Devlin campus, he impulsively turned right onto St. Anne Street.
When Faustino had talked about Ernest Hemingway’s death, he had put down his book (The Old Man and the Sea), set his huge paws on the armchair, and described the famous writer going up to the roof of his Idaho home and blowing his brains out, just as his father had done. “He couldn’t stand things, I guess,” Faustino had said, putting on a downcast face.
But Flynn had read a more recent biography than the one written by Faustino’s mentor, and it painted a more complicated picture of the author’s final years: plane crashes that left him with cracked discs, a broken skull, a ruptured kidney and liver; second-degree burns sustained in a fire; treatment for arteriosclerosis and hypertension; paranoia (justified, as it turns out) about being tracked by the FBI; heavy drinking; electroconvulsive therapy at the Mayo Clinic; a deep and abiding depression; and very likely hemochromatosis, a genetic disease he had inherited from his father. It wasn’t simply that he couldn’t stand things. The man had been destroyed. And then he had been defeated.
Flynn flicked two fingers away from the doorbell, pulled up his collar, ducked his head, ran through what was fast becoming a downpour, and got back into his car. He U-turned on St. Anne Street (sensing his professor watching from the front window) and drove back toward 394, where he would head east on the slick road, past the Devlin campus, past the police station, past the hospital, and past the Williams and Gardner Funeral Home, before following the ramp onto Route 17 East.
But somewhere between Jamestown and Elmira, unable to see clearly, Flynn would pull over onto the shoulder of the highway. He would grip the steering wheel with both hands. He would drop his head, listening to the rain thunder onto the hood and roof of his dead father’s car. He would sit there, in the heavy rain, for quite some time.
ONCE UPON A TIME AT THE KIEV
Once upon a time at the Kiev, on the corner of East 7th and 2nd, a bowl of soup with two slices of challah bread and a glass of water was $2.99, and the waitresses left him alone. One day potato pickle, another day matzoh, another day pea. He could never remember which soup was which day, but it was all on a schedule by the front door.
That day, beef barley. There were only two other regulars in the place: the mopey Hasidic guy and the magenta-haired artiste. He couldn’t bear to look at the front pages, so he flipped over the Post and News and read the sport sections, then the Times’s Arts & Leisure. Outside, floating flakes of ash, sheets and sheets of paper on the street.
Flynn never ate at the Kiev with anyone besides his friend Peter, except once when Rachel visited. She had taken in the chain-smoking Ukrainian waitress, the toothless homeless guy gnawing on a knish, the girl with eleven eyebrow rings. “You eat here?” she said.
After the soup and buttered challah, he went back across the street to his apartment, covering his nose and mouth. Inside, he lay on the couch, surrounded by Wyeth prints: weathered women, all of them Helga. New England wind, wailing and grating.
He kept the windows shut.
*
He had the world at his fingertips, although he didn’t know it. He was twenty-eight years old. He was getting his PhD in English Literature at NYU, full scholarship plus a stipend. He worked at the St. Mark’s Bookstore. He was living in the greatest city in the world. He was tall, wavy-haired, and charming, and he was meeting smart, attractive women, and sometimes he had sex with them. Rachel was someone he had dated once in college, lost touch with, and recently reconnected with. She lived in Binghamton, almost four hours away, so they saw each other every other month. It wasn’t exactly a relationship, but it was fine. She was feisty, bighearted, and cute, and she thought Flynn was the bee’s knees.
That Friday, the bookstore opened back up for business, even though lower Manhattan was a ghost town, even though the stench was everywhere. They had only one customer: a girl with jet-black hair, enormous eyes, and a red leather jacket. She gave Flynn a sad smile as she headed towards Fiction.
To pass the time, he bet Peter he could find a grammatical error in any book within two minutes. And he did, in one Nonfiction book after another, until Peter grabbed one by William Safire.
The black-haired girl came to the counter. “At a time like this,” she said, “you’re arguing about grammar?” She handed Peter La Muerte de Artemio
Cruz. Peter nodded in Flynn’s direction.
“Flynn might look like an L.L. Bean model,” he said, “but in real life he’s a dangling modifier.”
When the girl smiled at this, her cheekbones jutted out.
“At a time like this,” Flynn said, leaning his elbow on the counter and pointing to her book, “you’re reading realismo mágico?” She put her hands on her hips and sized him up. “What we need now,” Flynn said, sounding like a former roommate of his, “is not escapism; what we need now is good grammar and rhetoric. Precise language. Carefully selected nouns, well-placed adjectives, active and appropriate verbs. The fate of the free world hinges on what we say next.”
Peter gave the woman her change. “This” she told Flynn, jabbing the book out like a weapon, “is not ‘escapism.’ This is reality.” She twisted her lips. “You need to change the way you think, guero.” But she said guero the way someone would say guapo. Then she left, her boot heels thudding on the hardwood.
*
On Monday, Flynn visited his mother in White Plains. She was in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and watching the President on TV.
. . . hide and burrow in.
“Are you a professor yet?” she asked. It was the same question, every time he went there. He had finished his course work, had recently passed the grueling three-day written exam, and was about to take the oral exam, but he was dreading the dissertation. Once he completed it, he’d have to look for a teaching job, and he wasn’t sure that talking about books was what he wanted to do for a living. He was thinking he might want to do something bigger, something good for the world, something that would help it to heal.
He was thinking he might want to change the way he thinks.
From next door, he heard his sister shouting or laughing at her kids—it sounded the same—and something thumped against the wall. His mother shook her head while taking a drag. “Every day is a wrestling match,” she said. She looked nothing like the mother of his youth.
The enemy knows no borders.
“A professor,” she said. “Now that would have made your father proud.”
Flynn’s father had died when he was a junior in high school from a heart attack brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. Apparently no one had known his liver was rotting. Nobody had even known he’d been drinking—or not that much, anyway. Coors Light while watching Jets games, martinis at restaurants and weddings, but nothing that seemed imminently fatal—at least not to Flynn. And he had steadfastly refused to go to the doctor.
“How could you not know?” Flynn asked, after his mother told him about the cancerous condition of Fungus, her cat, whose actual name was Fergus.
His mother sucked in her cheeks. The ash of her cigarette crisped.
When I was a kid . . .
She exhaled a locomotive breath. “These things don’t conveniently announce themselves,” she said.
Flynn sat in silence.
. . . dead or alive.
*
Flynn wrote poetry. He fancied himself a poet. Tuesday morning at Lil’s Diner he handed Peter his latest, titled “Coffee Spoons.” The diner wasn’t called Lil’s—for a long time it was the West Fourth Street Diner, and then it changed to the Violet Café—but Lil had been there forever (Morning, sweetheart) and she always knew what Flynn wanted. She had charcoal fingers, skeletal wrists, Japanese palms. Sometimes while sipping his coffee Flynn drew a sketch on his pad, or wrote a poem, and showed it to her.
Amid the clatter of dishes and silverware Lil came to Flynn’s place at the counter and asked if she could read what he had written. When she finished, she put down the coffee pot and tapped the back of Flynn’s hand. Her long fingernails scraped his knuckles. “This is nice,” she said, as Peter reached for it. “But if you ask me, poetry should be more . . . direct. Not so many metaphors and such.”
Flynn started to laugh, but then he saw Peter nodding in agreement.
“Where were you last week, sweetheart?” Lil asked. She shook her head, her voice clouding. “Saw a white man covered in ash, looked just like you. Like the livin’ dead.”
Two eggs over easy, wheat toast, home fries: $2.99, $3.33 with tax.
“You were open?” Flynn asked, but then the cook slapped the bell and she left to pick up an order.
Peter handed Flynn’s poem back to him. “You’re hiding behind allegory,” he said. “And Prufrock? Enough already. This is no time for Prufrock.”
*
Flynn used to make chili. An art form, he called it. Multeity in unity—that’s what Briggs, his former roommate, used to call it. All those ingredients at a low boil, congealing so slowly you didn’t even notice. When ground beef went on sale at D’Agostino’s—really on sale, like ninety-nine cents a pound—he’d buy a family-sized pack, fry it up with onions and garlic, and dump it into a spaghetti pot with kidney beans, peppers, tomatoes, the works—the way Briggs used to do it. All those things cost money, but in the long run it was a good investment. Because he cooked that chili all night long, sometimes waking up to stir it, then had it for lunch and dinner all week.
Tuesday night in the meat section, holding the 89%-lean package and gazing longingly at the rib-eyes, Flynn pictured the second airplane, heard the endless keening of sirens, felt the quake of his apartment floor. He saw the faces plastered on the arch at Washington Square, flapping on the fences at Union Square:
Nicknamed “TJ”
JESSICA, TURQUOISE DRESS
Gray suit pink tie
And two days later:
Chain tattoo on left arm
BLACK PUMPS WITH HOLES ON BOTTOM
Perry Ellis glasses
And after four days:
Gold tooth
SEASHELL EARRINGS
Wedding ring inscribed “B♥K”
And on the bottom:
If found, call Janna: 212-538-9971
ANYTHING AT ALL, CALL US: (914) 677-0082
Call please please please 7182483872.
He put the beef into his basket and headed towards check-out, but in the middle of Aisle 4 he doubled over, he dropped the basket, he fell to his knees.
*
The next morning he lay in bed, thinking about the black-haired girl. Eyes so big she had taken in all of him at once. Eyes like a Klaus von Döngen painting. Eyes like white serving trays carrying giant black pearls. And hair the black of her leather jacket. Lips, blood-red, that wanted to swallow him. Skin like coffee with an exact measure of cream. But her eyes, her eyes were bottomless wells of sorrow. He could lower himself in and drown.
*
“I’m lonely,” his mother said to his answering machine. On his dresser was a picture of her, one his father used to have on his desk. In it she wore a V-necked sweater, her hair so blonde it shimmered even in black-and-white.
“Don’t hate me,” she said. “I did my best with you.” A muffled croak, then a few hacking coughs. In the background, a Tums commercial. “I think I’m dying,” she said. “I think we’re all dying.”
*
He painted, too. One of his paintings was of a field of sunflowers blooming under an oyster sky near Silver Lake. In it, a Ryder truck idled on a hill between Saint Anthony’s Church and the deli where he used to ride his bike to get bread for his mother. Most of the flowers yearned toward the sun, but one was turned away, arching its blossom—the brightest yellow, the blackest core. He called it “Defiance.”
*
Back then, Christine’s on 1st Avenue had an all-you-can-eat special: kielbasa, pierogies, red cabbage—anything and everything for $9.95. The fat Polish waitresses wore miniskirts. On Wednesday night, after finishing his third plate, Flynn sat back, patted his belly, and told Peter a story.
One evening, when Flynn was a sophomore in high school, his mother had baked a chicken and fried some potatoes, but gave Flynn boiled broccoli instead of
fries. She brought the plates into the living room so they could all watch Channel 4 News with Chuck Scarborough and the new co-anchor Flynn’s father called “the Token”.
“You need to avoid oily foods,” his mother said, pointing to his chin, which hosted a colony of scabs that, before he shaved them with his father’s razor and dabbed them with his father’s Brut, had been a tiny colony of pimples.
“Oil!” his father said, still concentrating on the Post crossword puzzle and ignoring both the news and the plate of food in front of him. He found the word he had skipped. “Three-letter word for slick.” He lifted the paper close to his face, scratched the word in with a pencil, and looked over at Flynn. “You got a lot of three-letter problems, champ,” he said. “Oil. Zit.” He pointed at Flynn’s chin, and Flynn quickly covered it with his hand. “And cat!” he barked, plucking Fungus off the footstool and tossing him onto the floor. He laughed and slapped Flynn’s knee. “I’m just giving you the business,” he said. He rustled the newspaper and leaned over. “You mustn’t take life so seriously.”
Flynn pushed away his dish and stood up. He wanted to ask his father something. He wanted to ask him when he had decided that selling cabinet parts all week and sitting on the couch all weekend would be his life.
“What is it,” his father said, leaning back in his armchair. “You need more money? Don’t bother asking, you just piss it away.” He pointed. “You have to learn to be frugal!” As Flynn turned away, his father lurched up and tried to grab his arm. “Come on,” he called out as Flynn vaulted up the stairs. “Don’t be so morose!” He lumbered over to the landing, rustling his newspaper. “Sad!” he yelled up. “There’s another one!”