The Understory

by Pamela Erens

  My first stop this morning was to check on a witch-hazel bush that had been vandalized earlier in the fall. I’d found the crime weapon, a broken Bass Ale bottle, lying next to a heap of sawed-off branches. The dismembering had taken some work, given the crudeness of the tool: someone had been very angry, very persistent. A spurned lover? Someone just fired from a job? One of the mentally ill men who circled the park in their baggy pants and unlaced sneakers?

  The branches had scarred over nicely, but it was impossible to be sure of this plant until the spring. Soon it would be dormant, healing itself, and if all went well new growth would push forth come April and the spidery yellow blossoms would appear again when the weather cooled. I put my hand to the ground. It was still moist, but the soil was hardening and becoming denser in preparation for the winter. I stroked the trunk of a spindly sassafras, its smooth green pith showing through in places where the wind had scoured off the fragile bark. I cradled one of its last leaves in the palm of my hand. If you blindfolded me I could tell you the name of almost any plant, some by touch, some by smell, different in each season. In the spring and summer I watched my plants flower, but it was, perhaps, in winter that I loved them best, when their skeletons were exposed. Then I felt they had more to say to me, were not simply dressing themselves for the crowds. Stripped of their leaves, their identities showed forth stark, essential.

  After a while I made my way to a boulder with a smooth flat top and sat looking out over the cloudy greenish water of a small pond. I drew out the eviction notice and flattened it over my knee. One thing was clear: I was not going to pack up and leave because of a notice on a letterhead. Removing me from the apartment ought to require more of Giglio’s time and energy than that. I enjoyed thinking of the trouble my changing the locks would put him to. As for the eviction notice, this evening I would do some research at my old law school library. I very much disliked altering my schedule but the reason was pressing enough.

  Once again I pulled out the architect’s card. Patrick Allegra. His name was appealingly musical. Wasn’t alegre the Spanish word for merry? A sympathetic face, too. I wished that a man employed by Giglio would be easier to despise. I stood up and began to make my way out of the park toward the Upper West Side. I reached the locksmith’s shortly after it opened and spoke to the owner, who was the only person there, telling him I needed my lock changed as soon as possible. He said that his associate would be in at any moment and he would meet me at the apartment then; what was the address? That had not been my plan; I had meant to leave a copy of the key to the downstairs door and be on my way. But the man refused to take the key and insisted that he would be over directly. I set off for the apartment.

  My block looked odd at this unfamiliar hour, lit by a different angle of light, full of unfamiliar inhabitants. A teenaged boy and girl who ought to have been in school walked toward me, arm in arm. I was impatient for the locksmith to arrive so that I could take my leave. As I entered the building I heard footsteps heading down the stairs, and I swore silently.

  As on the previous night, the architect noticed me only at the last minute. We came face-to-face on my landing. He was humming to himself, something melancholy and a bit off-key, and he stopped, embarrassed. In the daylight I could see the blond hair, straight and lank, that fell to his shoulders. Today he wore jeans and a dark collarless shirt. Around one wrist was a bracelet of brown beads. He smiled and said he had been to the apartments upstairs and was just now about to stop in mine; he was sorry for the imposition. I found myself unlocking my door and letting him in.

  He entered, swiveling his head this way and that. I saw him take in the worn tan carpet, the sagging toffee-colored sofa, the antiquated stereo with its outsized speakers. The architect removed his bag—a knapsack, not a briefcase—and leaned it with excessive care against the sofa. Then, excusing himself once again for disturbing me, he walked about the room with his notebook. I retreated to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, and as I brought it into the living room the buzzer rang. I walked downstairs and told the puzzled locksmith that I had changed my mind, my lock did not need changing after all. I pressed a ten-dollar bill into his hand and went back to the apartment.

  With my coffee I sat in the living room, pretending to read but really spying on my visitor, keeping track of anything he might displace. At first he turned toward me every couple of minutes in the hope, apparently, that my attention had wandered. But gradually he began to forget me. He took some pictures, measured the window sashes, the radiator covers. Every time he measured something he would place his hand on it briefly, as if taking its temperature. At first I flinched; then I began to grow used to it. His tape measure made a sound like shaken foil. The more oblivious he became, the more he touched things. He lifted the window drapes, ran his hand slowly over the chairs and along the walls. He began to hum sadly again. I grew uneasy watching him, half expecting that soon he would crouch down and caress the dirty carpet. When he moved in the direction of my bedroom I leaped up in alarm. He noticed me then and spread his palm against the wall.

  “This building has lovely bones,” he said softly. Again I noticed his pale eyes and almost invisible lashes. “It’s a nice old building,” he continued. “Sometimes, when you do the demolition, you find real beauties inside. Antique tile. Marble fireplaces.” He knocked on the boards sealing up my own fireplace. “It’s a scandal that these brownstones were ever allowed to deteriorate like this.”

  Suddenly he flushed and began to put his camera back into its case. “I didn’t mean to say that this apartment is slated for demolition,” he said.

  “Didn’t you?” I asked.

  He looped the camera strap over his shoulder and looked at me. “Mr. Giglio told me you’ve been living here illegally. Is it true?”

  “Yes,” I answered. I looked around, as if the old stereo and age-worn sofa might speak for me, offer defenses. It seemed to me as if I had only just moved in, as if just the other day an aunt I’d never met had phoned me from Fishertown, Pennsylvania, to tell me that my uncle had passed away. “I was afraid you wouldn’t know,” she’d said. And I hadn’t known; there had been no one to tell me. I hadn’t been in touch with my uncle for some years. My aunt began to sob: first it was my mother, she said, now Fred; she was the only one left.

  That was when I’d come up with my plan. I’d told my aunt that it was a long trip for her, especially in the state she was in, and that I would be glad to go to the apartment and pack up her brother’s things for her. She thanked me, over and over, said I was a good nephew, a fine son; she wished my mother had not been such a stranger. When I got to my uncle’s place, carrying one large suitcase, there was little work for me to do. The apartment had all the dusty asceticism I remembered from my childhood. There seemed to be only one of everything: one overcoat, one pot, one wooden spoon. I spent an afternoon boxing up the clothing—too small for me—and taking it to the post office. Everything else I kept, including the bedding and the kitchen items. I wrote my aunt that I had donated these to Goodwill. I slept that night on the sheets my uncle had spent his last night on and felt that in this rather ghoulish way I was earning my right to be there, to inhabit his place.

  “I’ve lived here for fifteen years,” I told the architect.

  He nodded, dropping his gaze. He seemed easily embarrassed, alternately assertive and retreating. Then, abruptly, he looked up and thrust out his hand, saying he would be out of my way now.

  I took a step back. The architect dropped his arm, as if he had expected no better. “Where will you go?” he asked.

  My heart skipped a beat. Where would I go? Yes, where? He was looking down at me, still close enough to resume that aborted handshake, with what looked like genuine concern. Had he pegged me right off as someone who might, in fact, have no place to go? I struggled to think of a dignified answer. But just then I recognized Mrs. Fiore’s clumsy footsteps in the stairwell, and we both heard her sharp, annoyed “Oh!” and the sound of something hitting t
he floor. We hurried out to the landing. A torn bag of groceries lay on the floor; Mrs. Fiore bent over it, trying to right a half gallon of milk. When she saw us she raised herself stiffly. “Don’t worry, Frances,” said the architect, coming to her. “Just take it easy.”

  Frances, I thought. I seem to have missed something. As the architect helped Mrs. Fiore to her feet I began to retrieve the cans that had rolled into the corner, setting them in an orderly row. Then I rearranged the row, placing the small cans at one end and the larger ones at the other. Gradually I became aware that the others were waiting for something else from me. Finally the architect asked me if I had another shopping bag. I said I did and went to my kitchen to get it.

  When I returned he was telling Mrs. Fiore about an herb treatment that might relieve the pains in her legs. She nodded eagerly. They seemed to be continuing a conversation they’d started earlier. “The ingredients are a little hard to find,” he said. “I’ll bring them over for you. Try it for a few days and then let me know.” The architect and I loaded the fallen groceries into the fresh bag.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Fiore—to the architect, not to me. I was surprised to hear her voice quaver. “You’re a good man,” she said. She shot a look at me, as if to underscore my shortcomings by comparison. The architect took the bag in one hand and gently cupped Mrs. Fiore’s shoulder with the other, waiting for her to start up the steps. He walked at a creeping pace, never getting ahead of her. Yes, where will I go? I wondered.

  It was nearly noon by the time I arrived at Egret Books, a used bookstore on Columbus Avenue in the upper Sixties. Egret had a punched-tin ceiling and a string of bells looped over the door to alert Carl when a customer came in, although he was almost always at the large desk at the front, going through paperwork. Egret was small and much of its stock consisted of predictable secondhand leftovers: novels by Howard Fast and James Gould Cozzens, “treasuries” of humor from the 1940s, books about fishing and dogs. There were other, better-stocked stores I sometimes visited, but Egret was the only one at which I was a regular. I felt comfortable there. White-haired, hunching Carl never bothered me with conversation or seemed to mind that I did not buy anything. He hardly seemed to register that I was there.

  Carl held up his palm in greeting, without lifting his eyes from his papers. “Hello, Ronan,” he said. I moved past him into the mouth of the store. For some reason I always thought of Carl as Charon, the silent old man who ferried souls into the Land of the Dead. Perhaps it was the dim lighting and labyrinth-like layout of Egret. Or perhaps it was the way my mind circled deeper and deeper the longer I spent at the shelves, until it reached an almost still point: not the frozenness of eternal torment but the stasis of perfect absorption.

  First, however, there was some ritual business to dispose of. Each morning, before I settled in, I checked each shelf to see if anything had been sold since the day before. Carl’s business was not brisk, and there were days when he did not appear to have sold a single book. This comforted me. I took an almost proprietary interest in his stock, and it pained me to find anything missing. So I would go down each row, scanning the familiar spines, stopping if I spied a gap. There, in U.S. History, a book called The Indian Wars had vanished. It was always possible that a careless customer had put it back in the wrong place, or that Carl had sent it out for rebinding. But more likely it was gone for good. I ran my finger over the row, wincing as I passed the closed-up spot. It was like feeling a phantom limb. Once or twice I had tried to make conversation with Carl about these disappearances, thinking he might share my odd sense of loss. But he merely scowled and turned back to his papers. Yet I’d noticed how he behaved whenever he rang up a sale. He would lick his finger and turn the pages of the book very slowly, refusing to give it up until he had sampled it one last time. The customer would begin to shift his feet impatiently, wondering if Carl was going to sell the book after all. And when the transaction was finally complete and the customer had gone out the door Carl would shake his head after him, as if he’d just allowed one of his children to run out to play in traffic.

  As always, the last section I checked for changes was Poetry, for one book in particular there meant a great deal to me. It was old and fragile and bound in blue cloth, and I’d first spotted it about ten years earlier. I had never heard of the writer, whose name was Frederick Goddard Tuckerman; the book, dated 1930, was a collection of nature sonnets originally published in the 1860s. I’d pulled out the book and jiggled it gently in my palm, testing it, just as I might test a leaf in Central Park. Its pages were brownish and soft with age, but the binding was still stiff and the book had the feeling of never having been read. I turned to the first sonnet and began. “Sometimes, when winding slow by brook and bower . . .” I almost ended there, before I began; bower promised nineteenth-century tedium. I ran my eyes over what was to follow. The style of the sonnets was unabashedly archaic, full of o’ers and thous and syntactic tangles. There were stagy references to mythological figures. But I continued all the same, because something in the poems unsettled me.

  On from day to day I coldly creep

  By summer farms and fields, by stream and steep,

  Dull, and like one exhausted with deep sleep.

  I had closed the book and stopped reading. Gloom, sterility, dread. I ought to have returned the book to its place and never looked at it again. Yet the next day I went straight to it and, stomach knotted, read some more. Before long it became a compulsion, each day, to read a poem or two from The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman before I could start my morning browse. “My proudest thoughts do seem / Bald at the best and dim: a barren gleam.” The book did not give me pleasure. I knew that I would never buy it, never want to own it. But each morning I would approach the shelf with a tightness in my chest, afraid that I would find it gone.

  I put the book of sonnets back in its place and walked again through all the rows I had just passed through. I kept my eye out for new arrivals, pulled out old favorites, read a paragraph here and another there, fussed with loose bindings, perused the marginal graffiti scrawled by eager readers of the past. Was it history I wanted today, or philosophy? Drama or science? Would my afternoon be spent with one of those fat, flexible Penguin paperbacks that bent double in one’s hand, or a library edition, with its ugly but reassuringly authoritative plastic jacket? When I reached Classics I stopped to turn to the famous passage in Plato’s Symposium in which Aristophanes claims that human beings were once creatures with two sets of arms and legs and genitals but were later punished by the gods by being sliced in two. Ever since, Aristophanes says, we have been seeking our lost other halves, the beings or bodies that would complete us. I read this story often, and there were moments when, half believing it, I longed to go back in time and see such a race of people. Would they move with an infinite flowing grace, like those Indian gods with extra heads and arms?

  A customer entered, setting off the bells and causing Carl to make a dry creak in his chair. I glanced at my watch. Marion would soon go off her shift, and I needed a meal. I replaced my book and nodded to Carl’s bent head as I went out.

  The Stardust Diner, where I ate lunch each day, was in the West Fifties. I liked it for its torn banquettes, the stale mints at the cash register, and Marion. Normally I arrived before noon, when it was not busy, but if the place was more crowded than usual I waited for one of Marion’s tables so as not to be served by anyone else. Marion offered no unnecessary chat, no false service smile. Her face was unnaturally tanned and heavily lined, as if she spent long summers in the sun, but never in fifteen years had I known her to take more than a few days’ vacation. When she had a minute off her feet, she sat at the counter next to the doughnut stand and drew fiercely on her cigarette. The other waitresses chatted with one another, traded stories about manicures or difficult children. Marion never joined in. Once, when she had been gone for a couple of days, I made the mistake of asking her where she had been. “My daughter had a breast removed,” she
said, slapping the flatware on the table the same as always, and turned away. A different waitress, ugly Connie with the mole at the corner of her mouth, came to take my order. After that I was more careful of our deal: ask nothing, tell nothing. As long as I obeyed that law, I knew that Marion would appear at my side just when my coffee cup needed a refill, that my one-egg order would arrive with an extra egg at no charge, that my dessert of rice pudding would be heaped high and generously coated with cinnamon.

  Today I was so late that the lunch crowd was already gone. I slid into one of Marion’s booths and pushed aside a tattered cardboard turkey meant for a centerpiece. Someone in the booth in front of mine, a woman, was crying quietly. Another woman murmured consoling phrases. I stood up to move to a different table, and as I did so my eyes locked with those of the consoling woman. She frowned and I turned away, annoyed that she thought I was eavesdropping. I slid up against the window in the next booth and grabbed a Village Voice that someone had left facedown on the table, flipped backward through the classifieds: