Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  The police didn’t make their way there until late the next afternoon. For Talmadge and Micah, Matty’s disappearance had not been cause for distress. The opposite, really: In their unfamiliar twosomeness they stretched and yawned like purring cats, grateful for the unexplained reprieve though not precisely reveling in it. For most of Saturday Micah was desultory and subdued as she struggled with telling Talmadge she’d lost the baby. Fearing the arid delicateness of his reaction, the sudden telltale glow in his eyes exposing his secret relief, she opted to wait; until when, however, she wasn’t sure. They’d nestled themselves into a night so soft and languorous as to verge on the narcotic, taking their letters of Leo and Doris early to bed where Talmadge’s voice wilted away in the midst of a drowsy reading. When Micah raised her head to urge him onward she found him asleep, Leo’s letter beside his head on the pillow like a nerveless lover’s farewell. For her, the day and night felt like old age, or what she thought old age might feel like: the mindlessly fixed routine (scavenge, nap, scavenge again, eat dinner, bathe, Leo and Doris, sleep), the sedate and measured pacing, the long and tender silences that passed between them, but also, perhaps most essentially, a bittersweet impermanence shading every moment with its bluesy pall, a sense of sadness on its way. It might’ve just been Leo and Doris’s letters inspiring these elderly connections, Micah didn’t know. The letters were so brittle in her hand that by merely blowing a stream of air at one she thought she could blast a tear in the paper. Yet the passion they contained was so impregnable, or seemed to be. (They had only made it halfway through the correspondence.) When she finally fell asleep, hours after Talmadge had, she felt more like the paper than what was written upon it: tenuous, fragile, splotched with whorls of dried tears.

  Then Sunday. Indian summer in the city: every window ajar to beckon inside those last warm gusts, the retreating summer breezes which the previous night’s chill suggested had already been vanquished. People fled onto the sidewalks in a confusion of garments, some decked in sweaters and others wearing shorts, and the trees reflected this confusion, some having yellowed their leaves for the approach of autumn, others squeezing a final and vivid spurt of green down their branches, loath to surrender. The sky had a music to it, as if in longing to stay current it had expanded into multimedia. Mere color insufficient, it had to sing. And it was singing, or at least it seemed that way to Talmadge and Micah: a song of New York City you can hear only once, and only as young lovers, an evanescent, intoxicating music—parts Gershwin, Charlie Parker, the Ramones, and coffeehouse Dylan, and overlaid with a symphonic veneer of streetsounds: jackhammers and carhorns and keening sirens and the subway’s dragon-grumble and the polyglot chaos of a hundred different languages dispersed into eight million conversations plus the lonesome elegant sawing of that wizened Chinese violinist down below the Times Square station—that causes some people to spend the rest of their lives there, cemented to the city for the chance of hearing it again. It played all through that Sunday morning, as Talmadge and Micah made their regular rounds, roaming the streets the way foragers roam woods. Discovering a sack of bruised apples and half a dozen containers of just-expired Greek yogurt outside the Gourmet Garage on Seventh Avenue, they hauled their find to the river and sat beside the water’s edge, Talmadge slicing the apples with his pocketknife for Micah to dip into the yogurt. They tossed the bruised wedges into the Hudson, wondering if fish would rise to them, and what those fish might look like. The apples lay motionless on the surface, as if thrown into wet concrete, and noting this Micah raised her eyes to survey the whole river, which showed no signs of movement at all, looking as stilled and molten in its passage as Micah felt she was. For this one morning they seemed exempt, the river and her, from the obligations of flow, from the gravitational laws of life. She smiled at Talmadge, and fed him a yogurt-smeared apple.

  On their way back home, on a side street near the river, they passed the open door of a restaurant or bar in the early stages of a gutting. Permit notices were splashed across the windows. Micah swiveled back, her intrusive gaze having latched onto a face—in a photograph or painting hanging on a far wall—whose resemblance didn’t fully strike her until she’d already taken several steps past the door into the crosswalk. It was her father. “What are you doing?” Talmadge asked, as she went right inside the restaurant, her footsteps crinkling on the brown paper taped to the floor. The room was barren save for a massive and ornately carved mahogany bar to her left where in the blotched mirror behind it she caught sight of herself passing, momentarily startled. An open bottle was on the bar beside a paper-stuffed clipboard. When Talmadge caught up to her Micah was standing beneath the picture—a lithograph portrait she could tell was ancient, from the subject’s high unfurling collar and wide waistcoat lapels, but whose likeness to her father stopped her breath just the same. “What is it?” Talmadge asked.

  Before she could answer him, another question rang out: “Can we, uh, help you?” They looked to the kitchen door, where a thirtyish couple was standing. They were both exquisitely tattooed, the woman’s arms ink-sleeved like Micah’s left arm, purplish foliage overflowing from beneath the man’s shirt. His beard was braided, and his head was capped by a porkpie hat. “We’re not quite open,” the woman said, tittering at the obviousness of this.

  Talmadge apologized, and tried pulling Micah by the arm. She asked, “Who is this?”

  “Him?” The woman stepped forward, joining Micah beneath the portrait. “We don’t know!” she said, tittering again. “He came with the place. Do you know who he is? He looks so—so mean or something, we thought it’d be bad luck to take him down. At least for now . . .”

  Without looking from the portrait Micah said, “I thought I might know him.” Mean wasn’t the word she would’ve used, though she groped through her mind for a replacement. Possessed, maybe. “He looks like—my daddy.”

  “Wow,” the woman said, with a black note of sympathy.

  “You guys from the neighborhood?” the man asked Talmadge, who with slight exaggeration said yes. “Then welcome to day one. Or I guess it’s day two—right, baby? You’d think I could keep track. We just got the permits Friday. You guys ever come here when it was the Austrian place? No? I guess they just couldn’t keep it together. Not really the right neighborhood for it.”

  “We’re hoping to do a little better,” the woman said, establishing her titter as a constant tic.

  Micah remained beneath the portrait as Talmadge and the couple talked their way over to the bar. She half listened as the couple (“I’m Joe, this is my wife Donna”) explained their concept—haute Jewish cuisine (“like Mario Batali cooking a Seder dinner”)—and recounted all the toils of acquiring the place. “I mean, you know what a bitch this neighborhood can be,” Joe said to Talmadge. “We’re still fighting the liquor permit process. Twenty-seven seats with just beer and wine is a tough road. We thought about knocking back into the kitchen, for more front-of-the-house space, but the kitchen’s tiny already. I’ve been in walk-ins bigger than that kitchen.”

  “Plus he’d have to come down,” Donna said, pointing to the portrait.

  “And the curse would befall us,” Joe added, mock-ominously. Jutting his chin toward the bottle on the bar, he asked, “You want some champagne? We just opened it. A neighborly taste of what’s to come.”

  “Sure thing,” said Talmadge. Joe fetched two plastic cups from behind the bar, wiggling one toward Micah who with a faint smile declined.

  “She’s pregnant,” Talmadge said, and the couple, already in celebratory mode, let out congratulatory whoops.

  The whooping forced Micah to join them at the bar, though blankly and off to the side, where with a sulky fingertip she drew squiggles on the bar. The couple had a two-year-old girl, who was back home in Brooklyn with Donna’s mother, and Micah nodded gamely as Donna pelted her with breezy childbirthing advice (“Don’t resist the epidural, seriously”). The men discussed the restaurant business, Talmadge bubbling out a story about a
restaurant—“a James Beard Award place,” he noted, piquing the couple’s attention—where he’d briefly worked during college, about the temperamental chef who’d fired him after Talmadge had mistakenly topped a crème brûlée with salt instead of sugar. “No matter how long I torched that thing, it wouldn’t caramelize,” he said. “But you didn’t send it out?” Joe asked. “I sent it out!” Talmadge exclaimed, and everyone screeched in high laughter save for Micah, who wanted to ask what a crème brûlée was. Joe’s confession that he’d once been a temperamental chef drew a smiling rebuke from Donna, who said she’d missed the memo that he’d gone into rehab. (Titter.) Talmadge hooted, tipping his plastic cup toward Joe to accept the offer of a refill.

  A thousand mental miles down the bar, Micah flashed back to a family dinner she and Leah attended in India, and the way she’d felt when the hosts kept dipping into Hindi: the smile she’d manufactured in response to the incomprehensible words swirling ’round the table, the discomfort of her exclusion. She felt the same discomfort now, positioned outside this warm and spontaneous circle. Talmadge’s salt story was new to her—he’d mentioned the restaurant once, but only to cite the unconscionable food waste he’d witnessed—and watching him now, as he leaned knowingly into Joe’s stories about working the line at a restaurant whose name seemed familiar and impressive to him, she found herself marveling at Talmadge’s fluidity, the way he could slip in and out of the World with such smooth and mellow dexterity. She’d seen this before, of course, though not with such starkness; it had always struck her as more of a skill than a trait. But then how could it not be? He was an auto dealer’s son, with a genetic knack for small talk, armed from birth with social faculties Micah couldn’t imagine herself possessing. Her eyes were drawn back to the portrait on the wall, to the glowering gray face of the restaurant-to-be’s patron saint or demon. Her own inheritance had been a vision. A mutated certitude. An idyll.

  When the champagne bottle was empty they waved goodbye to their new friends, who invited them to come back when the restaurant opened for a “Manischewitz cocktail,” the bird-chirps of Donna’s laughter trailing them down the block. Talmadge’s hand found Micah’s, but she struggled to keep up with his rhythm and pace, which were lighter and faster than usual, big moonwalk steps that left her straggling behind. When she stopped to investigate some trash bags outside a Sixth Avenue deli, he tugged her forward, saying, “Not now.” She obliged, and let him lead her. On his face was the softest imprint of a smile, and she kept glancing at it as they walked in clasped silence, simultaneously troubled and reassured, as though the contentment she saw had once belonged to her, and her loving satisfaction at seeing him smile was offset by the emotional and physical hollow scoured from her insides. The sense of motionlessness returned, despite the city blocks clicking by, the preppy cobblestones of the far West Village giving way to the grittier mishmash of the East—a treadmill sensation, with the mileage of their walk as distorted and elongated as their own two-headed shadow in front of them was. She clasped his hand tighter, and he replied with a lingering squeeze. The moment was like that dessert Talmadge had described botching: creamy and sugary but crusted with charred salt. A sweetness contaminated.

  They saw it together, from all the way down the block: their steel cellar doors splayed open to the street, with a police cruiser parked beside. The champagne fizz vanished instantly from Talmadge’s eyes. “Oh God,” he said, breaking into a rash and wild sprint. Micah stuck to the corner, watching. Arriving at the doors he peered down inside, and then looking back at Micah he threw up his hands in panicky indecision. The best course of action, she knew, was to stay put. Lola, who’d been through squat raids in Oakland and Vancouver, would’ve called their situation ideal: Wait out the cops, she’d advise, then gather your shit and vamoose. The best police contact is no police contact. But Talmadge was already going in. At the top of the door she saw him waving a desperate hand for her to follow. Micah found him at the bottom of the basement steps, buckling with fear. “What do we do?” he begged. She felt a small kernel of disgust pop inside her: That same debilitating timidity that’d kept Matty glued to them for all these months was now smeared across Talmadge’s face. She shook her head as she passed by him into the basement, hearing his high-pitched cursing as he fumbled for his penlight.

  Two uniformed patrol officers were in the apartment. One was a pink-faced guy with a linebacker’s neck and tiny but predatory eyes; the other, who emerged from the kitchen just as Micah stepped through the apartment’s open doorway, was a short black woman with a dense, squat figure whose bewildered, congested expression was either a permanent facial condition or her reaction to the squat and its residents. “What’s going on here?” Micah asked her.

  She didn’t answer, deferring to her partner. “That’s a good question,” he said, sly and challenging. “You the ones live here?”

  Talmadge was in the apartment now, flush-faced, and mouth agape. “Yessir,” he said.

  “You and who else?”

  “We’ve had a friend, uh, staying with us—”

  “Matthew Boone.”

  “Yessir,” Talmadge said, his eyes ticking from the cop’s face to Micah’s.

  “What’s he done?” Micah asked, the unspoken word now dangling at the question’s end.

  “Done?” The cop was enjoying this, amusing himself further by imitating Micah’s drawl. “Who said he done anything?”

  Talmadge asked, “Is he okay?”

  “Manner of speaking. He’s in custody.” The cop was staring hard at Talmadge now, sizing him up. “He took a swing or two at a security guard down at the Best Buy on Broadway. Was doing some shopping on a fraudulent credit card.” His tiny eyes narrowed into blackened slits. “That sound about right to you?”

  Talmadge shook his head, anxiety seeping into his face.

  “Anyone else living here?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Just you and Boone and the lady.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Let’s pull out some IDs.”

  The cops were divvying them up: Talmadge to the male cop, Micah to the female. Micah’s followed her into the bedroom so that Micah could fetch her passport. Noting it was expired, she asked if Micah had any other ID. When Micah said no the cop sighed and after an allergic survey of the bedroom wagged her head and sighed again, Micah stiffening against the scorn.

  Back in the living room they found the male cop holding Talmadge’s satchel in his hands. “Whose bag is this?”

  “Why?” Talmadge asked.

  “That’s not an answer. Is it the lady’s? This your purse, miss?”

  “My name is Micah,” she said.

  “Okay, Myyyy-kah.” He repeated her name like that, with even more relish. “This your purse?”

  “It’s mine,” Talmadge said.

  “It’s your purse?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Mind if I look inside?”

  Talmadge shook his head no, his eyes beginning to puff. The cop gave it a brief and theatrical look-see; he had clearly ransacked it earlier.

  “That’s not a good bag to be claiming, is it?” he said.

  “Nossir.”

  “Why?” Micah broke in.

  “Whose bank statements are those? Whose credit card statements?”

  Talmadge shrugged, looking pulverized.

  “But they’re not yours, right?”

  “Nossir.”

  “But that’s your weed in there, is that right?”

  Talmadge shut his eyes, as if reeling from intestinal pain. “Yessir,” he whispered.

  “Where’d the bank statements come from?”

  “They’re just trash,” he answered, his voice quivering.

  “Say again?”

  “They’re just trash.”

  “Trash. Right.” The cop straightened his back and nodded to himself, the button of his chin pulsing in and out of that thick neck. “You been working with Mr. Boone?”

  “I’m not emp
loyed, sir,” Talmadge said, and the cop let out a harsh booming laugh, its peals bringing stuttered flinches to Talmadge’s face.

  “Yeah, we can see that.” The cop did a fresh study of the living room, reading or rereading the line from Matthew 8:20 painted on the wall. Foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. “You paint that?”

  Talmadge said no.

  “Who did?”

  “Someone before us.”

  “Someone before you.” The cop chewed on this for a moment. “How long you been squatting here?”

  “Almost a year and half,” Micah said confidently. She glanced at Talmadge, who stood hunched in defeat. Matty on a shopping spree with a stolen credit card, financial garbage stuffed in Talmadge’s satchel: these revelations had yet to congeal in her head.

  “A year and a half?” The cop scanned the room again, re-coloring it with this fact. “Damn.” He threw a look of repulsed disbelief to his partner. “Kept it pretty quiet, didn’t you?”