by Pamela Erens
“Jack? Is that you?”
“Yes,” I answered. Mrs. Fiore had many times urged me to call her Frances, but that felt uncomfortably familiar in my mouth. When I called her Mrs. Fiore, however, I got a lecture, and so, on the occasions when we spoke, I avoided using any name at all.
She came down the steps as quickly as her legs allowed. First I glimpsed her slippers cut open at the front to give air to her swollen toes, then her quilted housecoat, and finally her long reddish braid. Sometimes, when she was not well, she would let her hair go loose, and then it fell past her hips: astonishingly thick, strong, rust-colored hair that forced me to imagine younger years and children begging for the privilege of braiding it. She’d been a mother of seven, and in the tales she told me (buttonholing me on the stairs when I wanted to go inside and read, until I shook with impatience) she was forever a woman stirring a pot with a baby draped over her shoulder and another child tugging on her skirt. In the corners of this picture little boys wrestled, girls smeared lipstick on their dolls, puppies yipped and peed on the carpets. Being with Mrs. Fiore was enough to make me feel crowded, that I had not enough room on the stair.
Today she was agitated, breathing rapidly. “Thank God,” she panted, one hand on the quilted spot over her heart. “I heard the door downstairs and I came out, thinking it was you. But it wasn’t. So I screamed, but he kept coming up the stairs, talking and coming.”
“It was just the architect,” I told her. I showed her the card he had given me.
She frowned, bit her lip. “Yes, but—,” she said, and with a bent finger she tapped on my door.
Thumbtacked over the peephole was a sheet of paper with the words NOTICE OF TERMINATION typed at the top. I had expected a seal, fancy script, a bit of pomp. I took down the paper and read it through quickly. It stated that I, John Frederick Ronan Gorse, was illegally occupying premises rented to John Frederick Ronan, and that I was expected to remove myself within ten days.
“What are you going to do?” Mrs. Fiore asked. Mrs. Fiore always had questions. Usually they were the same ones, over and over. You used to be a lawyer, didn’t you? Could Mr. Giglio evict me? Could he raise my rent? I always told her that the matter was out of our hands, that we would just have to wait and see what Giglio would do. I’d remind her that she’d been a legal tenant for more than thirty years. I’d stress the word legal so that she would get the point: I was the one who had something to worry about.
Yes, but, she would say, always, Yes, but, and finally it had dawned on me: as afraid as she was of being thrown out, she was even more afraid of being left alone. Alone in the building with all the worries a seventy-eight-year-old woman can conjure up: thieves, rapists, murderers. She paid only three hundred dollars a month in rent; how could she leave? But if I were evicted, how could she stay? When she asked, What are you going to do? what she really wanted to know was, What will I do if you leave?
“I don’t know,” I said.
She clutched her robe at the neck and said she didn’t want the architect coming into her place.
I took out my keys.
Her hand reached out and grabbed my arm. I flinched. Although she often stood too close to me, she had never touched me before. I could smell her smell, a mixture of soap and something deeper, unwashable.
“My son-in-law is worse,” she said.
I grunted to make her think I was listening. But really I was paying attention to my breathing, in and out, so as to be less aware of her fingers like bands around my arm.
“One-bedroom apartment,” I heard her say. “Sharon can’t possibly take me in.” I had heard this story many times before: the daughter in Neptune, New Jersey, the son-in-law with multiple sclerosis, the tiny apartment, the impossibility of going to live with them. The other children lived much farther away, in Texas, Arizona, Germany.
“Yes,” I muttered.
“I know you’ll know just what to do.”
She released her grip and I escaped into my apartment.
I threw my coat onto the sofa and the notice on top of it, then flipped through my mail. There were three solicitations and one bill, all addressed to Mr. Ronan. I tossed the solicitations unopened into the wastepaper basket. The bill was from the electric company, and the figure seemed high. I squinted at the small print and saw that the rates had gone up. One envelope remained, this one addressed to John F.R. Gorse. I opened it to find the check for five hundred dollars that always arrived around this time of the month. In the lower right-hand corner was the spidery signature of my parents’ executor. Always that handwriting conjured up for me the visit to his office after my parents’ death so many years ago, the pad he pushed across the table after scribbling some figures on it, too embarrassed, apparently, to say the numbers aloud.
“Your parents lived a little too well,” he’d said with an uneasy smile. “And they had their pet charities.” I stared at the pad: a five followed by two zeros. That was what my inheritance came to, five hundred dollars a month. And the principal? I asked him. The executor fidgeted. “After your death,” he said, “it will go to Actors’ Equity. I’m afraid that you won’t be able to touch it.”
I put the check aside and thought of the young man with the long face and pale eyes who wanted to take some pictures. I tried to remember the last time that anyone other than me had stood in these rooms. It must have been two years ago in the spring, when a plumber replaced a corroded faucet. Morris Skill never fixed anything; that was understood. I accepted that without protest, since at one time or another Skill must have figured out that I was illegal and yet he’d always left me alone. I’d stood next to the plumber and noted the things he touched, and after he left I wiped off everything with a damp rag.
My book was lying on the table next to the sofa. All day I had looked forward to returning to it, but it no longer held any interest for me. Instead I did what I always did when I was troubled or distracted: I stood at my bookshelves and waited for the right book to reveal itself. The shelves, of thick oak, took up an entire wall and had been installed by my uncle. The bottom shelves were filled with the books he himself had left behind: accounts of military campaigns, political theory going back to Plato, and a generous collection of anarchist writings. On the shelves above were books I’d taken from my parents’ townhouse when I sold it to pay off their debts: scripts of the plays my mother had appeared in; biographies and memoirs of famous stage actors and actresses, many of whom had worked with her and had visited our cavernous apartment on East Sixty-Third. At the very top were the books I’d bought when I still had money to buy books, a mishmash of philosophy, law, ancient literature, history, chemistry, and botany. At the end of one row was a scrapbook that I had put together when I was thirteen years old and that contained only three items—an enormous maple leaf, a slip of paper with the words jewel beetle written on it, and the soaked-off label of a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.
I could hear Mrs. Fiore shuffling about upstairs, a clatter of dishes in her kitchen, the television going on. Either she did not sleep well or she had a tendency to doze off while watching, because I sometimes woke in the middle of the night to hear the grumble of TV laughter. The air in the apartment smelled metallic tonight, a sign of the first deepening of fall into winter. I put on a sweater and looked through the open cabinet of LPs next to the stereo. My uncle had collected hundreds of recordings: a bit of jazz, some classical, lots of opera. Studying them one by one soothed me. I put on Tchaikovsky’s Trio in A Minor and waited for the throat-clearing static of the needle finding its groove. Then came the low notes of the piano, followed immediately by the entrance of the melancholy cello and the echo of the violin. I listened with my eyes closed, my feet up on the coffee table, to the fluid but insistent repetitions. I thought of my uncle, home at night after work, reclining very likely in this same position on this same sofa, listening to this same trio, twenty or thirty or forty years ago. I could even picture my mother beside him, in those early days when she’d first com
e to New York to live with him, following the trail he’d blazed. They were Quakers, fallen away. Plain people, attracted by the big city. I could see her twisting her handkerchief, confessing, I don’t love God as much as I love Portia or Viola or Blanche DuBois. I don’t love God as much as I love makeup and costumes. God wants me to be plain and I can’t be plain. And my uncle would have answered, That’s all right, Grace. God gave up on me a long time ago.
I rose to make myself a sandwich. My book from the night before still waited: Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. I picked it up and put it down again. I returned to the bookcase and pulled down one book after another. Some nights it took me an hour or more before I could find the right book, the one that would make me forget anything I might be feeling, the day’s complications and demands. This would be one of those evenings. My mind kept straying to Mrs. Fiore’s crooked finger tapping my door, the architect’s long face. I walked to the window to watch the hurrying bodies below. I did not want the architect to come into my rooms. Those rooms were arranged in a very particular way and had been for a long time. When I’d moved in I had taken care not to change by even a few inches the position of my uncle’s sofa and chairs, or of any of his other things. Perhaps this was a way to complete my impersonation of him. But in any case, that arrangement felt at first familiar and comforting, and then necessary. This Patrick Allegra would surely move something, alter something, and I would be able to feel the difference. Even if I were to put things back in order later on, it would not be the same: the vibration of change would remain. I remained at the window thinking thoughts like these until it occurred to me that the radiator against my knees was completely cold. I reached down and touched it, just to be sure. It was something I ought to have anticipated.
I made plenty of noise as I took the stairs into the basement, in order to scare off the rats. There were no lights down here—Giglio kept removing the bulbs and I had grown tired of replacing them—but with my flashlight I found the furnace. I ducked down next to it, looking for the dial. The previous winter, Giglio and I had engaged for several months in an elaborate game of cat and mouse. He turned off the heat; I turned it back on. No sooner had the rooms warmed up than Giglio would return, often late at night, so that I would awaken the next morning huddled against the cold.
The dial, I saw, had been padlocked. It sat in a small cage with narrow openings too small to poke a finger through. Momentarily I was impressed with Giglio’s foresight. I worked at the lock with a paper clip I found in my pocket, then searched around for something more effective. In a corner full of dirt and laundry lint I found a hammer with a metal head. I hit the lock repeatedly, to no effect. Then I hit the cage. I hit it until pain pulsed in my wrist and shoulder. The bars bent but would not break. I threw the hammer to the floor, panting, and stared at the furnace, wishing for another idea. The basement smelled of rat droppings and damp Sheetrock and dust.
It’s all right, I thought, as I returned to my apartment. I know what to do. From a drawer I removed last winter’s sleeping outfit: an old pair of corduroys, a turtleneck, and a wool sweater. I remembered the other things that would follow now: the painful morning hopping and stamping to get the blood flowing back into my feet, the cups of scalding coffee, the evenings pressed up against the kitchen oven. I told myself, as I’d told myself the previous year, that my will was stronger than Giglio’s, that I would outlast him.
Three
Night is the worst time. After the long regimentation of the day, the enforced silences, the men want to talk. At first it doesn’t matter what about: TV, movies, travel, jobs. I lie on my side on my mattress as the words pool around me, reciting to myself the botanical classifications for peach, cherry, apple. Magnoliophyta, Magnoliopsida, Rosales, Rosaceae . . . I smell the smell of other bodies: stale skin, flatulence, cologne. I long to open the windows and let the fresh air sweep the smells away, sweep the bodies away, too. Gradually one man drops out of the conversation, then another. Soon there will be only two men left speaking. And now these two—they are not the same two every night—will drop their voices, speak in an intimate murmur. Perhaps they are only gossiping about one of the monks. Perhaps they are complaining about the food. But no, there is a reticence that lets me know that they are trying, clumsily, to reach each other. I crush my pillow against my ears and think of an article I once read in a science magazine. Ultrasound, the author wrote, shows that many pregnancies start out as twin pregnancies. Long before quickening, either the twins merge or one is absorbed by the placenta. Up to fifteen percent of us might actually be the surviving half of a twin pair. I imagine that I am a conjoined creature, two souls wrapped into one, and after a while this thought lulls me to sleep.
We wake at four to the sound of a stick being struck against the door and shuffle to the meditation hall for an hour of morning zazen. The abbot sits on a small platform in front of the altar. Behind him narrow windows with iron grillwork show pictures of darkness. I fold my legs, imagining that Patrick once sat on this very buckwheat cushion, once bowed his head and tried like me to bear the loneliness of wakefulness before sunrise. I am sure that I feel his presence here, sure that he preceded me.
Follow your breath, they instruct us, hear and feel yourself breathe in and breathe out, count these breaths from one to ten and then begin again. Clear your mind of all thought; if any thought arises let it drop like a pebble down a well. But when the thoughts come I find myself unwilling to shed them so easily. I have no family, no home, no friend, no books. Surely they can leave me my thoughts. Surreptitiously I turn my head to look at the still, obedient bodies around me. Out of the corner of my vision I perceive the monitor with his big stick walking my way and I shrink back into myself, glue my gaze to the floor. I hold my breath. He passes and I am free. I go back to my thinking. I trace the structure of a sugar molecule, recall passages in favorite books. I walk through the rooms and hallways of my childhood home, touching the expensive wallpaper, the Chinese porcelains, the Rothkos and de Koonings. How much longer will I be allowed to stay at the abbey? I have a bank account in Manhattan that holds nearly two thousand dollars. But it is much too risky to write for the money. My stomach growls.
At breakfast Joku tries to get my attention. I bend over my scrambled eggs, pretending I don’t see, but he puts his tray next to mine and begins a conversation. He reminds me of the form I filled out, the one where I claimed to be some sort of gardener. He is asking me if I know anything about bonsai. I say, yes, I do, though I don’t think it wise to add that what I know comes only from books. Joku explains, at some length, that the monastery has a large collection of bonsai and that they have been doing poorly ever since the monk who used to take care of them left. No one since then seems to have the knack. I keep nodding intelligently as he speaks, to imply that I feel that this is a great shame and that I have just the sort of expertise that will save the day. And although I’ve said almost nothing during our conversation, Joku seems pleased and tells me that he will bring me over to the bonsai shed as soon as possible.
Four
I woke on the living room couch with my book in my hand, the architect’s business card stuck in the back pages. The sun was just rising and my toes and fingers were numb. I removed the card from the book and read the words on it again. In the night I had had an idea. If Giglio could play games with locks, so could I. There was a locksmith’s a couple of blocks away, on Columbus, but of course it would not be open at this hour. I would go to the park as usual, only cutting my visit a bit short, and in that way could make a brief stop at the locksmith’s on my way to Carl’s. It would be an expense, to be sure, but it would hardly disrupt my schedule at all. I rubbed the blood back into my hands and splashed water on my face, pushed a book into my overcoat pocket. Then I walked to the corner and crossed the street into Central Park.
In the early morning the park is a great canvas speckled with dog walkers and briefcased workers crossing over to Midtown. As always, I watched these
with the relieved sense that we would soon be parting ways. Walking warmed me, and the farther I got from the city streets, the freer I felt. The day was overcast and windy and I lifted my collar as I moved briskly in the direction of the lake, watching the tops of the buildings slowly disappear behind the screen of trees. By the time I reached the Ramble, nearly the exact center of the park, I was aware only of my breathing and of the wind against my face.
The Ramble is the jewel of the park, its secret heart. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park’s designers, created it, I like to think, as a reward for those of us who have the cunning and patience to uncover it. There are people who bike in the park, picnic here, walk daily to work, and yet never find the Ramble. You have to know where to turn off the main path, and you have to be willing to lose your sense of direction in this landscape where no exit can be seen on any side. The paths turn, and every few steps a new arrangement of stone and brush appears and makes you forget the one you have just passed through and might not easily find again. The birdwatchers know the Ramble—the birding is excellent here—and so do the homosexuals. They come here to meet those they might not meet anywhere else, to tryst in a place that is somehow both private and exposed.
Entering the Ramble each morning I entered, you might say, my variety. My daily schedule was fixed: I rose at daybreak, walked to the park, spent some hours at Carl’s bookstore, had my lunch, walked downtown, climbed the bridge. It was the park that put the day into a living balance. I knew each turn of the paths and each significant feature, yet never knew exactly what I would find here. The plants blossomed, got uprooted or trampled, reseeded themselves, swiveled toward the sun, bent with the wind. Insects and small animals left their marks. Each day I noticed some living thing or living trace I had missed all the many days before. I liked to imagine what the Ramble looked like when Olmsted and Vaux first created the park: a wild garden of daffodils, tulips, French roses, rhododendrons, Solomon’s seal, fox grape, hazelnut, Carolina allspice, and more, a landscape of hills and valleys in which native and exotic trees grew side by side. Since then billions of footfalls had flattened the land and stripped it of some of its most precious features. But I like bare as well as lush, probably better. What speaks to me most is close to the ground: the shrubs and vines, rather than the great elms, oaks, and maples. The understory, as botanists call it. In the decades after the war, when the city turned its back on the park—firing the groundskeepers, ceding greater and greater swaths of land to the muggers and drug dealers—it was not the big trees that began to disappear; it was the shrubs: the witch hazel and jetbead, black haw and sweet pepperbush. The park became like the city: skyscrapers, no texture. And that meant it was dying. The things that live at ground level are what hold the earth fast, buffering the grander plants from flooding, salt, and erosion. Central Park was built on rocky, inhospitable land, and its secret is the shallowness of its soil, its only tenuous ability to sustain life. It is the shrubs that allow the park to survive.