by Pamela Erens
More Praise for The Understory
“This is a strange, haunting meditation on aloneness and the melancholy of frustrated love, written knowingly about a character bereft of self-knowledge. The language is precise and considered, the mood sustained, the effect at once narrative and poetic. A lovely, elegant debut novel.”
—ANDREW SOLOMON, author of The Noonday Demon,
winner of the National Book Award, and Far From the Tree,
winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
“A wonderfully controlled portrait of a contemporary Underground Man—a man who buries his life beneath the normal social interactions of modern-day Manhattan, so that what is inside of him might stay buried too.”
—JONATHAN DEE, author of The Privileges,
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“Pamela Erens’s The Understory is at once an exquisite portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control, an homage to Manhattan’s secret places, and a deftly braided narrative that keeps the reader hungry to find out what happens next.”
—RILLA ASKEW, author of Fire in Beulah,
winner of the American Book Award
“Mesmerizing . . . a universal human cry for love.”
—ForeWord Magazine
“An elegant, understated study of physical and psychic dislocations . . . artfully detailed and beautifully rendered.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The Understory comes to a gripping finale. Erens . . . is a very talented writer, and this slender volume is a welcome addition to contemporary fiction.”
—Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
“Pamela Erens’s novel is a letter bomb of a book, pulsing with savage potency.”
—The Elegant Variation
“We have such a deep understanding of and sympathy for the engaging but troubled Jack that we willingly follow him into the dark corners of his wounded psyche.”
—Rain Taxi
“In a book that begs for stellar acting in a cinematic treatment, the fascinated reader bears witness as events follow a collision course.”
—Booklist
“Not your typical debut . . . The soul of this novel is its meditative lyricism, rendered in language that is as exquisite as it is penetrating.”
—Small Spiral Notebook
“This novel derives its power from Erens’s ability to create a character who is simultaneously repulsive and sympathetic . . . [She has] given us insight into the very human desire to make this world—and our lives—matter.”
—El Paso Times
the Understory
Copyright © 2007 Pamela Erens
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West,
1700 Fourth St.,
Berkeley, CA 94710,
www.pgw.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Second U.S. edition, 2014
Interior design by Diane Chonette
www.tinhouse.com
for JDR, AER, and HER
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Acknowledgements
Character is habit long continued.
—Plutarch
One
Many years ago, in a deli, I found flaky white bits floating in my self-serve coffee; the milk, sitting all day in a bucket of cold water, had turned sour. Since that day I have never drunk my coffee anything but black. Yet I look for those tainted curls every time: I pour, peer inside to reassure myself, then top it off.
Even here I am bound to my habits. I pour, pause, bend to my mug. All at once Joku is standing next to me at the end of the buffet table. He looks down, as if he too suspects that something is wrong with my drink. I move the mug away, toward me, and by the time I have accomplished this I’ve forgotten my most recent action. Did I already look inside? I think so, but it nags at me that I don’t know for sure. The glass coffeepot, suspended above the mug, is beginning to hurt my wrist. Joku is watching me now, and I become even more flustered and uncomfortable. To look twice is not good, not the way things should be, but I decide it is better than failing to look at all. So I glance in, confirm that the surface of the coffee is black and pure, then finish filling the mug and replace the pot on the electric hot plate. Joku moves off, toward the metal trays of kidney beans and homemade bread and peanut butter.
Normally his staring wouldn’t rattle me so much. I have grown used to it. He watches me in the dining hall, during chores, as we file into the meditation hall for zazen. He is so open about it, does not spy or hide. His head turns as we pass in the hallways. Without a doubt the abbot has asked him to keep tabs on me. For what if I am mentally unbalanced, a troublemaker? But today was different. Today Joku came so close that he nearly touched me.
He was the first person I met here, with the exception of the secretary. I was dirty from the night in the park and the day on the bus, and the red itchy blossoms on my neck and arms tormented me. Warily the secretary invited me in out of the snow, but I stayed under the eaves next to the large oak door with its brass doorknob while she ran to see what was to be done about me. It was only on the last leg of the trip that the snow had begun. When I’d left Manhattan it had been spring, but now, three hundred miles north, it was winter again, the land knocked back into dormancy. The sun was setting and I watched the spruce and firs below the hill sink into darkness. Then a small man in a dark robe came to the entrance. He had a broad, intelligent face and wire-rimmed glasses. I guessed him to be ten years older than I was, around fifty. “Mr. Ronan?” he asked. “My name is Joku.” He flung his hand toward the open door, indicating that I had been received, admitted. His gesture was too big; the back of his hand hit the door, made a leaden thud.
He led me through the simple corridors—unsanded beams, white plaster, flowers set in a wall alcove. I pictured Patrick passing through these hallways and wanted to reach out to touch the walls that he might have touched, but we were moving quickly and I did not want to call attention to myself. We arrived at a small office and the monk introduced me to the abbot, a tall man with a long, elegant head who sat at a desk bare of papers. The monk withdrew to the side of the room but could not seem to make himself unobtrusive. He shuffled, coughed, knocked over something on a table.
“Are you interested in our practice?” asked the abbot, resting his arms upon his desk. I had not expected him to look and sound so perfectly American. His voice had a Yankee timbre, the elegant head a Yankee frigidity. I answered that I didn’t know. I repeated what I had said to the secretary, that I had no home, no place to stay. I waited to be asked for more details. But the abbot only handed me a folded piece of paper and told the monk to find me a bed. And so I was taken to a room with four bunk beds and given a pillow and a small rough towel. Looking at the beds, I could already feel the nearness of the bodies that would lie in them tonight. Snow drizzled steadily outside the window. The fire under my skin brought water to my eyes and I slapped heavily at my
arms, then pushed up my sleeve to show the monk that there was a reason, that it wasn’t craziness. His eyes widened. “What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing contagious,” I assured him. “An allergic reaction.”
“I will find something for you,” he told me.
The room was empty and quiet; the whole building was quiet. I looked at the paper the abbot had given me. It spelled out the abbey’s policy on nonpaying visitors. Short-term residencies would be permitted in exchange for twenty hours of labor a week. A list followed; I was to check off any areas in which I had special skill. Cooking. Computers. Communications. Gardening. And so on. Across the list I scrawled the word none. Then I erased that—better to appear useful—and put a check mark next to Gardening.
The monk came back with a crumpled tube. “Tch, tch,” he clucked as I patted the ointment on. A strange, sorrowful little noise. I sighed as the cool salve penetrated the skin.
“We rise at four,” said the monk. “Just follow the others.”
“My name is Gorse, actually.”
“Pardon me?” He stopped at the door.
“I said Ronan but that’s not correct. My name is Gorse, Jack Gorse.”
“Mr. Gorse, then. Pleased to meet you.”
I was afraid he would hold out his hand. The fleshiness of a handshake has always repelled me, hands slickly moist or hot like a furnace. But he only bowed, Buddhist-style, his thick palms pressed together. He told me to make myself comfortable, and added that the others would be back in half an hour. The lights would be turned out at nine.
It felt good to have a bed. I fell asleep before the others returned.
Two
In Chinatown the late-November air smelled of raw fish, and the sidewalk was full of orange rinds and trampled paper. I’d entered the neighborhood via the Bowery, right on schedule. Night was falling and men and women hurried by on their way home, carrying bulging scarlet plastic bags filled with fruit and fish and vegetables. As I passed yet another greengrocer’s I caught sight of two stout men rooting through a sidewalk bin stacked high with yellow squash, and so I stopped a few feet away. I always stop if I think I see a pair of twins, even if it risks disrupting my schedule. Usually, of course, it’s a false alarm. The light over the bins was dim, so I could not see the men’s features clearly. I moved to a different part of the sidewalk, but it was even harder to see from there. Still, I had a feeling I was right. The men’s broad foreheads and wide noses, moving in and out of the shadows, seemed cut from the same mold. I rummaged around in a bin of garlic, pretending to pick out the best specimens. After a few minutes one of the men made an impatient comment and the other man followed him out.
I watched them for as long as I could, until they disappeared, two shrinking forms, around a corner. Now I would never know for sure. Let me explain. I hunt for twins. Not your run-of-the-mill fraternals, your IVF side effects, but identicals only, life’s natural aberrations. Nothing so far but Nature can make these mirror images, her rare gift of likeness in a world of infinite variety. Successful sightings are very unusual, but I wake up each morning with a sense of expectation, knowing that unusual does not mean impossible, armed with the statistic that the incidence of natural-born identicals is roughly three in a thousand. In a city like Manhattan, where a man with a habit of walking may pass thousands of people each day, the unusual must occasionally come to pass. And so it does. In the summer I came across two sisters leaving the main post office on Eighth Avenue wearing identical faces and identical postal uniforms. A few months before that it was two brothers with identical toupees feeding the pigeons in Union Square. During the long stretches between sightings I kept my spirits up by convincing myself I saw twins separated from their doubles. There, I would tell myself, spotting a man listing slightly to one side, as if leaning his weight on another person, or a woman constantly glancing next to her, perhaps checking for her invisible other: a shard, a half.
I was disappointed that the two men had walked off before I had been able to get a really good look. I never follow people. It would embarrass me, and besides, it would throw off my schedule. I brushed some papery garlic skin from my jacket sleeve and went on my way, completing my daily walk from the Upper West Side to the Brooklyn Bridge. The last stretch of streets before the bridge always made me gloomy. After Canal Street Chinatown dissolves into the municipal district, with its ugly horizontal architecture, its clouds of dirty pigeons, its stream of distressed visitors. Lawyers leap out of taxis, thousands of lawyers on their way to family court, divorce court, housing court, criminal court. The buildings bear big block letters: POLICE, PROBATION, DETENTION. I always felt uneasy passing through. But soon, blessedly, I would be at the bridge, where my evening ended with a climb to the top of the wooden pedestrian walkway. There, a hundred feet above the water, neither in Manhattan nor in Brooklyn but somewhere between, I would glimpse on my right the Statue of Liberty, on my left the echo of the Manhattan Bridge. Ahead of me was the Brooklyn tower, with its caisson sunk deep into Brooklyn bedrock and its cables that seemed to invite you to pull yourself hand over hand along them until you got across. But I never did go across. I had lived my entire life in Manhattan and had never been to Brooklyn. There had never been any reason to go. Suspended between the two banks, I would breathe in the night air and watch the boats with their night lights move past the harbor. Then I would go back down the way I had come and head toward the subway. I had done this nearly every evening for more than fourteen years.
My subway was the C train stopping at 6:27 at the Broadway-Nassau station. Most New Yorkers do not realize that the subways run on a precise schedule. They might not care about catching a 5:13 or a 6:27; they come to their station and wait and before long a train arrives. But I liked, whenever possible, to be on one particular train. I got onto the third car, as usual. The man with the square glasses and very flat briefcase was sitting in his favorite seat under the subway map opposite the doors. The short-haired woman with the frown was at the other end of the same row of seats. Long ago I had decided that this woman made this trip uptown every few nights to see a lover, a man who met with her before going home to his family for the evening. The man meant more to her than she meant to him. The pinched and anxious lines between the woman’s eyes were what made me think so; also, she carried nothing with her except a small beige purse with a twisted silk rope for a strap. A small paperback always peeked out of the top of the purse. Sometimes the man under the map caught my eye and nodded. The woman always behaved as if she had never seen me before.
The train rocked, warm and not too crowded as yet. There were twenty-one minutes, assuming no unexpected delays, before I would arrive at my stop. I began to wonder whether Mrs. Fiore would be waiting for me on the landing, insisting on a talk. We had been neighbors for nearly fifteen years, and she had known my uncle before me, but we had hardly exchanged a word until the previous winter, when Paul Giglio had purchased our Upper West Side brownstone from Morris Skill, our longtime landlord. Skill lived in El Paso, Texas, and never set foot in the place: the perfect landlord, as far as I was concerned. The first thing Giglio had done was to offer Mrs. Fiore and me and Mr. Flax on the fourth floor and the Porters in the garden duplex ten thousand dollars each to move. He made no secret of his plans to renovate the four existing floor-throughs and bring them up to market rate. When none of us agreed to the ten thousand dollars, Giglio shut off the heat. That took care of Mr. Flax, who contracted pneumonia, and the Porters, who were expecting a baby. Mrs. Fiore began to wait for me in the hallways. She had no one else to pester; even the super was gone, fired by Giglio some months before. What would it be this time? A request to borrow some butter? A demand that I recalculate her grocery bill? Mrs. Fiore suspected cheating among the cashiers at Key Food. As I approached my building, gauging how quickly I might be able to get past her, I saw the outer door swing open and a tall man rush out, his head down. I steeled myself to stop him and demand what his business was, but when I stepped into h
is path his head snapped up and I saw his frightened face. We were both startled at having nearly knocked into each other. He searched my own face for a moment, then seemed to recover himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you live here?”
I nodded.
“Tell your neighbor that I’m just the architect,” he said. “Mr. Giglio sent me.” He dipped a hand into his pocket and drew out a card. I had a moment to look at him now. He had a long face, high cheekbones, pale eyes, and a long, shapeless coat. He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, perhaps. Something else struck me about him, and in a moment I knew what it was: he had that odd, unverifiable aura of being a twin. There seemed to be someone absent standing next to him, a kink of loneliness in his posture. I took the card from him. It bore a name, Patrick Allegra, along with the name of an architectural firm in the West Twenties.
“I need to take some pictures,” he said. He raised a camera hanging by a strap over his shoulder, by way of proof. “I think I alarmed your neighbor, Mrs., um . . .”
“Fiore,” I said. “You’re here to look at the vacated apartments?”
It had been hours since I had spoken to anyone, and my voice was raspy. I cleared my throat.
His eyes slid away. “I’m here to look at all of the apartments,” he said.
“I still happen to live in mine,” I told him.
“Yes, I know. It’s what Mr. Giglio has asked me to do.”
I wondered how much Giglio had told him about me. Illegal tenant, pays only two hundred and ten dollars a month, unemployed, bit of a crank. The architect picked at his collar with palpable unease. “I would be happy to work around your schedule,” he said. “Just let me know a time that’s convenient for you.”
In my schedule there is no time for interruptions, deviations. But I did not want to get into this with him. “Come back another time,” I told him, pushing open the door. I kicked some delivery menus and a crumpled paper bag out of my way and opened my mailbox, drew out a thin pile of mail. As I walked up the steps I could feel Mrs. Fiore’s presence above me, hovering.