by David Hicks
Flynn acted out the story to Peter as other diners glanced over. But he left out what happened in his bedroom afterwards. What happened in his bedroom afterwards was that he stood before the full-length mirror and stared at his eyes, dark and angry. At the scabs on his chin. Then he tiptoed to the bathroom, spread some of his mother’s cover stick on the scabs, then spent the next ten minutes trying to wash it off.
“You do your father so well,” Peter said, “it’s as if you were born for the role.”
*
Thursday morning, a week after his soup at the Kiev, Rachel called to propose moving in with him, even though her parents were going to hate her for it. She was willing to do it, for him. For the relationship. “It’s been hard for all of us,” she said, “even upstate. We can’t keep putzing around like this, Hawk. Life’s too short. Like shit or get off the pot, right?”
“Right,” Flynn said. If there was one thing he really needed to do, it was to shit or get off the pot. And that’s what he loved about Rachel: she never stayed on the pot. She got things done. She made decisions. She took charge. She spoke with authority. She lit up the room with her smile, and Flynn never had to guess what she was thinking. He could certainly stand to be a little more like Rachel.
He looked around his tiny apartment. He didn’t have a picture of her anywhere. There was one in his desk drawer, one he had taken of her at Jones beach: she had spontaneously joined a soccer game with a bunch of kids, and she was kicking the ball while laughing, three children at her heels, the ocean in the background.
Flynn heard her say that her parents might not be too upset, so long as marriage was in the long-term plan. He thought, I didn’t even realize we were a couple.
“Hey, are you there?” she said.
“No, it’ll be great,” he said. He pictured her bright green eyes, her tousled red hair. Energy is what she had. The woman had energy. That, and she loved him. She adored him. He was the man of her dreams. He had never been the man of anyone’s dreams—at least not that he knew of.
Outside his window, a flake of ash hovered in the air.
“Whew,” she said, pronouncing her exhale. “Okay, I’ll tell them. Mom will be furious.”
“Oh well,” Flynn said.
“Easy for you to say,” she said. “You’re not the one taking a risk here.”
“Are you kidding?” Flynn said. “Everything’s a risk.”
*
On lunch break with Peter, on their way towards Washington Square Park, they saw the black-haired girl. She was walking toward the NYU classroom building, her red skirt flouncing about her strong legs.
“Rosa Flores,” Peter said. “Now there’s an allegory you can hide behind.” He dropped into his personal-ad voice: “Early twenties. Grad student in Comparative Lit. Likes Garcia Lorca, Chilean wine, and long walks under la luce de la luna.”
“It’s as if I’m destined for her,” Flynn said.
“Destined,” Peter said. “Active verb, or passive adjective?”
“I’m picking up Rachel on Saturday,” Flynn said. “She’s moving in with me.”
“From Penn Station?” Peter asked.
“From Binghamton,” Flynn said. “Oh, can I borrow your car?”
Across the street, Rosa saw them, stopped, and waved. Peter pointed with his cigarette. “Trust your instincts,” he said.
What Flynn’s instincts told him was to dash madly across the street, embrace Rosa Flores, and twirl her around so that her skirt lifted and her enormous eyes opened wide with delight.
When he did nothing of the kind, she shrugged, turned, and entered the building.
Hours later, she walked into the bookstore, strode past New Arrivals, found Flynn in Self-Help, and stood with her arms crossed. Flynn was squatting by the Deepak Chopra shelf. When he looked up, she raised an eyebrow.
*
Friday night in SoHo. Rosa wore a dress that was all white. White like a high-school prom queen. White like a sixteen-year-old at a town-hall wedding. It had lace. But she wore it with no bra, no stockings, nothing. The curves of her flesh were shameless and alluring. Flynn wore a gray linen jacket with black chinos and a gray shirt, and he reminded himself not to slouch.
In line at the ticket booth for the tiny Off-off theatre, Rosa took his arm and said that in her opinion, a little realismo mágico would be most beneficial to him. She said he had sad eyes that made her want to take care of him, and when she said take care of it sounded like fuck.
The play was a campy gay version of Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play Flynn had once taught. In the second scene, when the drunken father sang a song called “I Coulda Been a Contendah,” Rosa put her hand on his leg, threw back her head, and laughed.
At Veselka’s afterwards, where he had the Ukrainian stew with a side of mashed potatoes and beet salad for only $8.95, he couldn’t stop smiling. At what? Hard to say. Possibility? Potential? Finding such a readily available solution to his ambivalence? His surprising capacity for whimsy in the midst of such a stench?
When he finished, Rosa suggested taking a cab to her apartment in Queens, and he felt his neck heat up. The fare would cost more than dinner. But what the hell, right? You only live once.
Inside the taxi, Rosa slid away from him, lifted her leg over his, and pressed her calf into his groin. As the taxi burrowed into the Midtown Tunnel, she was illumined in pulses: a sliding hem and bend of knee; lips, full and open; shadowy tresses fanning the window. In the dusked throbs between punctuated light, only the white dress, the white gleam of teeth, the white turban on the cabdriver’s head.
On Borden Avenue Flynn kissed her, keeping his eyes open as the street lamps tolled, but her eyes swallowed his, he could see only one at a time, so he leaned back and tugged down the top of her dress. In half-notes of lamplight her breasts arched up toward him. In quarter-notes of asphalt bumps her bared thigh throbbed against him. He saw, or thought he saw, his father’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
Vernon Boulevard: $12.90.
Hunters Point: $14.35.
*
The following Monday, he walked with Peter over to Pane e Cioccolato for a bowl of spaghetti: $6.95 with a big basket of bread. A sepulchral waitress, her eyelids drooping from the weight of her mascara, took their orders with a look of blank resignation. Restaurants had been empty for two weeks. The whole world loved New York, but nobody was willing to say so in person.
“So she’s all moved in?” Peter said.
“Already got a job,” Flynn said, curling spaghetti around his fork, then sliding it into his mouth. “Teaching a Pilates class even as we speak.”
Peter put down his fork. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say ‘Pilates’.”
“When I was loading her stuff into the car, her mother sat by the window like Mrs. Bates. When I kissed her cheek, it felt like ice.”
“You kissed her mother?”
Flynn poured some beer into his glass and took a careful sip. He checked his watch. He took another forkful of pasta, only as much as his mouth could manage. He wiped his lips with the corner of his napkin. Students at a nearby table burst into laughter.
“We got into a big fight,” he said. “On Saturday, our first night together.”
“Over what?”
He shrugged. He couldn’t remember.
When Peter asked about his date with Rosa, he focused on evenly distributing the butter on his bread.
He had taken the subway home from Queens, rehearsing the call to Rachel he knew he wasn’t going to make. She was taking a big risk. It would be terrible to cancel everything, the day of. She would be furious. By the time he got back to his apartment, the sun was coming up, and he had to shower quickly, get Peter’s car, and head north. During the drive to Binghamton he kept himself awake by fantasizing about Rosa, but by the time he exited I-81, he had calculated the cost of be
ing with a woman like her and concluded that he couldn’t afford it.
As he bit into the slice of bread, his eyes clouding, Peter bent his head and said something to his bowl of spaghetti, like the downbeat of a prayer.
*
Sunday morning in the Fiction section: the squared-shouldered back of her. Black hair caressing the back of her black leather jacket. Reading, but shifting her weight. As Flynn approached, she held up the book, a Borges paperback. “Such a sad man,” she said to the air in front of her.
“Dead now,” Flynn said.
She turned to face him. “Fiction is truth,” she said. “I need you to understand that.”
Flynn nodded, considering it.
“Nonfiction?” she said. “Pack of lies.”
She put her hand on Flynn’s arm. “You said you’d call. I thought it was good.” Her enormous eyes welled and opened in wonder, as if revealing to Flynn the vastness of all he was denying himself. “I thought it was magical.”
“I’m sorry,” Flynn said. “My mother.” It’s the first thing he thought to say. “I had to go to White Plains.”
“Your mother what?”
“Sick,” he said, looking at the floor. “Terribly sick. She may be dying.”
He kept his head down as Rosa Flores walked out of the store, the book still in her hand, the alarm going off.
*
On Wednesday morning, Flynn and Rachel walked past Lil’s Diner on their way to the new café on Waverly, where a fresh-baked bagel with cream cheese and a bottomless cup of coffee cost $2.49. When the waitress refilled Flynn’s cup, she put her hand on his back and brushed her breast against his shoulder. Rachel’s eyes turned to ice.
*
On Thursday, he received the forty-eighth rejection of his poem, “A Terrible Beauty is Born.” The editor had scribbled, While beautifully written, this is a terrible poem.
“Missed you again last weekend,” his mother said on the phone. “Your sister’s worried about you.” Flynn knew this already, because his sister had left eleven messages on his voicemail. When he promised to come not this weekend but the following, she said, “Next weekend? I could be dead by then.”
So he took the train to White Plains, walked into the house, and kicked Fungus out of his way. A migraine had seized the back of his neck. The house smelled like an old man’s t-shirt. He could hear the faint strains of the Barney theme song from the other side of the wall.
Flynn’s mother wore her gray bathrobe. She didn’t get up from her gray seat at the gray kitchen table.
“So Rachel moved in,” Flynn told her by way of news. And I rejected a Puerto Rican girl you would have hated, he almost added. Also, you’ll be pleased to hear I have abandoned poetry altogether.
She leaned over to flick ash into the saucer, stopped midway, and attempted to hook a stray hair behind her ear. “The gray ones grow straight out,” she said, holding the strand between her fingers. “They’re dead, so there’s no curl. And they keep growing after you’re dead,” she added, as if to herself. Flynn calculated her age: fifty-nine. “You’ve got a few yourself now,” she said, pointing to his temple. “Startin’ to look like your old man.”
On the floor were gray strands of hair, flecks of cigarette ash, and the gray fur of Fungus. From behind the wall Flynn could hear his sister yelling at her husband Mitch, and Mitch responding with a roar.
His mother sighed. “They’re always at it, those two.”
“I’m going to ask her to marry me,” Flynn said, surprising himself.
She looked up, her painted eyebrows arched. “The Protestant?” she said. “Looks like a matchstick?” She leaned back, her wrist drooped over the arm of the chair, her cigarette dangling, the cylinder of ash about to cascade to the floor. Flynn had forgotten that his mother had met Rachel at his college graduation.
“Come on, Ma,” he said.
In the baby picture hanging on the wall behind her, Flynn’s face seemed no longer cute or innocent, but doughy, pliant. He imagined removing the photo from its frame and taping it to the Union Square fence:
Missing.
Zits on chin
Early-onset OCD
Below-average penis
If found, call Peter.
If found, call my mother.
If found, call my sister.
His mother waved her cigarette like a wand, arching disdain. “Best you could do,” she said, and for a moment, Flynn considered tackling her to the floor, clutching her by the throat, and banging her head against the linoleum until she cried out for mercy. But she probably wouldn’t have cried out. She probably would have stared at Flynn as if she had known all along he would do this. She probably would have smiled, happy she finally got to him. She probably would have seen it as proof that he cared.
A wisp of smoke wafted across the table. Flynn inhaled it into his lungs.
*
The next morning, before work, Flynn walked over to Lil’s. The acrid smell on the streets seemed to be dissipating; he was surprised to realize he would miss it when it was gone. Peter was at the counter, reading the Op-Ed page of the Times, wiping egg yolk from his plate with his rye toast, extra butter. He didn’t look up as Flynn sat down.
“Good morning sir,” is how Lil greeted Flynn. She waited, holding her pad, until finally he ordered. “Whole wheat or white?” she asked.
“You know,” Flynn said.
“White,” Lil said, tearing off the order and slapping it on the shelf by the kitchen. She picked up a pot of coffee but then turned, wagging her long finger. “What’s wrong with you? You found some other breakfast place?”
The other customers looked up with accusatory stares.
“Wheat,” Flynn said. “It’s always been wheat.”
She set down the pot, laid her hands flat on the counter, and sighed, her face softening. She looked at Flynn as if he were in a hospital bed. “Listen, sweetheart,” she said. “You’re smart, creative . . .” She clicked her long nails on the Formica. “Why aren’t you doing something?”
When Flynn didn’t answer, she stood taller and straightened her shoulders. “That day?” she said. “The cook, he went home. Right away. But me and the girls, know what we did?” She knocked on the counter. “We stayed right here and we gave those poor people some coffee.”
“Coffee?” Flynn pictured it: thousands of people coated in ash, pouring cream and sugar in their Styrofoam cups.
“That’s right,” she said, lifting her chin. “Coffee. We had them masks on.” She put a hand over her mouth, her long fingernails stretching to her ear, and motioned with the other toward Flynn, as if handing a cup to a ghost. Then she put her hands on her hips. “And what did you do, Mister Artist? Mister Poet?”
*
He watched television.
He had just come out of the shower when he felt an odd movement, as if the air had changed. In the sky over the building across the street, he saw only a piercing blue. But then: a line of smoke, the color of pencil lead, being pulled up to the heavens.
People gathered on the street—his neighbors, apparently. An elderly woman came out on the roof of the building across from his, looked southwest and cried out, “My god!”
Flynn leaned out the window. He had a towel around his waist. “Hey!” he called out and she turned to him, her eyes wide. In that moment he felt closer to her than he’d ever felt to anyone.
He ducked inside and turned on the television.
Later, sheets of paper billowed by, chunks of ash. A page stuck to his window screen—an invoice, unpaid and overdue. He shut the window, tied a rag over his mouth, and dropped to the floor.
He should have gone to White Plains.
He should have headed to the towers to see if his cousin Jessica, who worked there, had made it out.
He should have called Rachel.
He should have gone to Peter’s, to see if he was okay.
He should have dashed across the street, run up the stairs to the roof, and hugged the old woman.
Instead, he stayed in his apartment. He stayed there for two days, trying to keep out the smell, until he ran out of food. And that’s when he went to the Kiev for beef barley soup.
*
Friday night. He lay in bed with Rachel, flat on their backs, side-by-side. He had banged his head into the headboard when she told him to Fuck off, when she screamed You need help! and refused to speak for a half-hour as he tried to get her to take fifty percent responsibility for the argument. Mice scratched at the box of old newspapers in the broom closet. Asthmatic air drifted in through the window. A spider web in the corner of the ceiling shimmered red from the fluorescent bar sign across the street. Music and voices burst out as somebody opened the door to the bar, then muffled again as it closed. Two women clacked their shoes as they walked past. It was the fourth argument they’d had that week. He was starting to lose his voice.
He wondered what would happen if he called Rosa Flores.
Rachel sighed. “Maybe we should call it quits,” she said. Her words floated to the ceiling and hovered above them.
Flynn closed his eyes and felt the scrape of Lil’s fingernails on his knuckles.
You’re gone, is what Peter had said over his bowl of spaghetti at the Pane e Cioccolato. Goodbye.
“No,” Flynn said. “Let’s work at it. We’ll be okay.”
The little finger of Rachel’s right hand, and that of his left, were almost touching.
THE LONELY COOL BEFORE DAWN
I met Flynn Hawkins in 1997, in a Chaucer class at NYU. I was getting my third master’s, he was getting his PhD. We were in the NYU Classroom Building: nothing on the walls, windows sealed shut . . . a nondescript room to say the least. But Professor Reynard spoke Middle English so beautifully, so perfectly . . . we were all entranced. Although Flynn, typical Americanist, democratic to the core, didn’t show him much deference. At the end of our final class of the semester, we all paused at Reynard’s desk to hand in our final essays, and when it was Flynn’s turn, he shook our professor’s hand and said, “Sire clerk, wiltou drynketh with us a pitaunce of ale?” Which stopped the rest of us in our tracks. We waited to see if Reynard would correct Flynn’s grammar, but he just grinned.