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Marion appeared over my shoulder and I closed the paper, embarrassed. I set the eviction notice on the table next to my coffee. Paul X. Giglio Associates, petitioner to the Civil Court of the City of New York. It had yesterday’s date on it, the twenty-ninth of November, and it occurred to me that my birthday had been on the twenty-seventh. It was the first time I had thought of it, and I had to stop and ask myself just how old I was. Forty—I had turned forty. I touched the hot rim of my coffee cup. I had entered a new decade of life without even noticing. I tried to remember my thirty-ninth birthday, or my thirty-eighth. Nothing came to mind.
When I was done reading and rereading the court notice I took out my book. It was a medium-sized paperback, priced at three ninety-five, that I bought at the old Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue during my second year of law school. I could remember the exact provenance of almost every one of my books, and the cost, too. I turned to the first page.
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations.
I read Descartes’s Meditations, one of my favorite books, at least once a year. Each time, I liked to follow Descartes in his project of beginning with one absolutely indisputable truth and rebuilding the universe from it: the natural world, the life of the mind, even God. Every time, I found that I snagged on one link of the argument or another, and I was never sure if Descartes had failed to make his reasoning airtight or if I had failed to understand something. But each year I liked to try again, because I too wanted to be able to take one true thing and from it construct a system that would allow me to understand everything. I had a fantasy of finding the perfect book, the one that would illuminate absolutely all, draw every single fact into a coherent design. My mother’s family would have said that that book was the Bible, but she had dismissed that answer and I dismissed it too. Although the Meditations failed, like all the others, to be my perfect book, I had a special fondness for it. Its clear, confident prose always gave me the illusion, for a time, of things being in their proper place at their proper time.
The sky had deepened to the color of slate and Marion had long ago taken my empty rice pudding glass away. A burst of wind rattled my window. It was late; the daylight would not linger much longer. Going back to the apartment this morning had put me hours behind schedule. Departing from my routine made me unhappy, as if my own skin did not fit quite right. I paid for my meal, leaving a large tip as always; Marion’s tips were one of my few indulgences. As I walked out of the coffee shop I saw, ahead of me, a man with a shaved head nibbling on another man’s ear. The shaved man’s hand was thrust in the back pocket of the other man’s jeans. I watched his brownish tongue emerge, the wet, pointed tip. I thought of the quick rustlings and low moans I sometimes heard in the Ramble. The nibbler, feeling my stare, turned his handsome skull and stuck the tongue out at me. I dropped back, surprised.
By the time I reached the law library it was already dark. Office workers were beginning to move in slack waves toward the buses and subways. At the front desk of the library my old ID card, sixteen years expired, was accepted with a quick nod. I was twenty-two years old when I first walked as a student into these somber rooms with their rows of identical-looking volumes, and now, taking in all of those hundreds of books at one glance, I again experienced the sense of possibility that once made me foolishly decide to become a lawyer. I had loved the study of law, and when graduation had neared and we were pressed to choose a specialty, a professional niche, I settled on trusts and estates. Was it any accident that I was drawn to this? My own challenge to my parents’ will languished in the courts as I made my way through school. After graduation I was offered a position at the firm of Watteau & Charles, and at first all went smoothly. Wealthy and important men called Mr. Watteau to praise the smart young lawyer he’d recently hired. More than once I was asked to share Mr. Watteau’s table for lunch. But in fact, I was a failure at the job—that is, at doing the work I was asked to do, when I was asked to do it. If a topic interested me I would pursue it tirelessly; I would jump through hoops to solve problems for a client. But anything that seemed routine or uninspiring—and as the months went by more and more did—I would put off until repeated calls sent Mr. Watteau down to my office, where he might find me with a book in hand, my feet up on my desk. Law firms are generous places in their way, and Mr. Watteau really wanted me to succeed. He kept me on for more than a year before firing me for tardiness, unexplained absences, failure to complete assigned projects, and unauthorized reading of Aeschylus and Aristotle.
At the computer terminal I searched for books on New York City rental codes. I’d had to learn to use a computer after my branch library uptown replaced its card catalogue a few years before. For a while the oak drawers sat in crooked heaps by the circulation desk, waiting to be discarded. I thought about asking whether I could bring a couple of them home, but one day all the cards in the drawers were removed and stacked blank side up near the new computers for people to use as scrap. Without the cards the drawers were just furniture to me, devoid of mystique. Sometimes I thumbed through the scrap-paper piles and read the old typed entries. Heyerdahl, Thor. Early Man and the Ocean. Cox, Claire. The Fourth R: What Can Be Taught about Religion in the Public Schools.
I sat in a carrel away from a group of chatting students and took notes until the hour to return home drew near. Coming out of the library into the sharp wind, I saw two figures seated on the stone steps below and knew instantly from the matching shapes of the heads that they were twins. My pulse quickened, my fingertips tingled; the universe had again chosen to affirm to me that it dealt in affinities. In an attempt to prolong the moment I walked past the two figures and turned on the half-lit steps. What I saw startled me. They were two boys, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with the wide soft faces and sloe eyes that signal Down syndrome. They held hands. Their dark blazers and white button-down shirts had the look of a school uniform. They seemed to be waiting for someone; their postures were patient, trusting. I wondered if their caretaker was coming for them soon. It seemed impossible to me that the boys did not have someone to look after them, but the minutes passed and no one arrived.
I checked my watch; there was still time to catch my usual train. One of the boys said something to the other in a high-pitched voice and his brother laughed like someone who doesn’t understand a joke but pretends he has. I wondered if I should call the police. I thought of being home with a book in my hand and the sharp aroma of my coffee at my side. The more I thought of the train and the book and the coffee, the more certain I became that the police would take a long while to come, and when they finally did come they would ask suspicious questions. And how did I know that the mother or teacher wasn’t right around the corner, rushing back from some errand, all apologies? The police officers would stand around me as I explained with rising urgency that I needed to go, that I had the 6:27 train to catch. That I had nothing to do with the boys, could do nothing about them. Somehow I would have become responsible for them, and it would be my fault if they came to grief. Or the mother would arrive and begin to shout at me, to accuse me of having embarrassed her, of poking my nose into business not my own.
The wind tore loose with an audible howl, and one of the boys whimpered. My heart jumped and I knew that things were not all right, that the mother was not just around the corner, that the police, if they came, would never find her. At the same time I thought of the train, my train, racing past the station. I hurried toward the subway and made it onto the platform just as my train pu
lled in. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the sign posted near the turnstile: STARTING 12:00 AM ON JANUARY 1, THIS STATION WILL NO LONGER ACCEPT TOKENS. It was the same sign that had gone up earlier in the month at the Broadway-Nassau station. PLEASE USE ONLY METROCARD AFTER THIS DATE. Another unnecessary, incomprehensible change! Across from me the woman with the beige purse turned her face away.
Five
This afternoon my “work practice,” or chore, is to rake the dry garden. Although at other times I have been sent to wash pots in the kitchen or tear boards from a dilapidated garage, increasingly I am given what gardening work becomes available. For two days I turned up the cold earth in the vegetable garden and last week I was sent in a taxi to purchase seeds and dirt from the nursery in nearby Conklin. Afterward a woman monk and I started some basil and squash and put them in a sunny room off the kitchen. When I have a rare moment to myself I slip inside and mark their progress.
The dry garden is a large bed of gravel, bordered by shrubs and dead grass, into which irregular clusters of large stones have been set. There is a stone bridge and a stone lantern. We are supposed to clear away branches and other debris that the winter has deposited and then rake the gravel into wavelike patterns meant to represent water. The illusion, murmured the monk who walked us over, should be of a gently rippling pond. He told us that the dry garden is among the spots the abbot favors for meditation.
The moment my rake cuts three parallel lines into the stone I recognize where I am: inside the picture I saw the day I waited for Patrick outside the Chelsea Zen Center, the picture in the brochure. The photograph had been taken at such close range that all I had been able to make out then was a swirl, a grainy abstract pattern. But now the code is broken; the image was not abstract after all but a part of something real: rocks, gravel, grass. This unveiling, this new piece of meaning, makes me for a moment inordinately happy.
Another man has been sent to work with me, a tall man with scarred skin who introduces himself as Roger. I have never seen him before; he does not share my room. I nod and manage to spit out my own name, glad for the work-practice rule that prohibits any further conversation between us. We are supposed to concentrate only on the motion of raking, on the scratchy sound the gravel makes as it is loosened, the vibrations that travel through the metal teeth up through the wooden pole and into the arm. I fall into a pleasant rhythm of stroke and pause, stroke and pause. At one point, absorbed in our work, Roger and I back into each other and twist away in a shimmy of mutual embarrassment. After this my raking is jerky and self-conscious. I catch one foot under the teeth of my rake and stumble. When a dark shape approaches I am glad for an excuse to stop a moment and see who it is.
It is Joku, toiling up the hill. When he reaches the garden bed he tells me he wants me to come with him to the bonsai shed. I lay my rake in the grass and follow, my eyes trailing his feet. He is wearing the kind of shoes one would expect a monk to wear: dark, thick-soled leather sandals, humble, earth-hugging shoes. I notice that the backs are worn down much farther on one side than on the other. His gait must be lopsided. I am surprised that in this weather he does not wear socks. His heels are calloused, flaky, gray. I look away.
We walk for several minutes, until Joku ducks his head to enter a windowed shed not far from the abbey. My nostrils take in a smell of dust and clay. The room is filled with bonsai plants—on shelves, on the floor, crowded on large tables. There are more of them, and they look even worse, more dried out and scraggly, than Joku had led me to expect.
Since our conversation in the dining hall I have tried to remember anything I can about bonsai. They are most commonly conifers or evergreens, at times quince, crab apple, maple, or dog rose. The art of bonsai originated in China around the twelfth century. But little of practical use has come to me. I mumble something to Joku about how the plants need to be bare-rooted and repotted. The word bare-rooted sounds esoteric to my ears, persuasive. I open drawers, looking for tools. I find some chopsticks, shears in different sizes, a kitchen knife, a kind of claw with two metal prongs. I hold up the claw, say that it can be used to pull the dirt off the root-ball. “Ah, I see,” says Joku, and asks whether I have everything that I need.
I make a show of looking for more supplies, and then tell him that I do. But Joku has not come empty-handed. He offers me a book, saying that he got it out of the abbey library, in case I should need something for reference. The Art of Bonsai, it is called, and I begin to page through it, my spirits rising. There are long columns of print on types of soils and methods of pruning, with big glossy pictures for illustration. I read eagerly, then recall Joku’s presence and riffle through the rest of the pages as if the information is familiar to me. Joku walks about the room inspecting the plants, making concerned noises. I find myself afraid that he will topple a pot, trample on a trailing branch. I am glad when he goes out.
But as soon as he is gone I again see clearly what is around me. The plants really have been badly handled. Some pots are cracked where roots have struggled their way out, and the crowns of the trees are leggy, shaggy, drooping with their own weight. I page through the book again, disheartened.
Six
The deadline passed for me to remove myself from my apartment, but there were no more notices. I did not know whether the reprieve would be short or long; in the meantime I kept to my usual activities, enjoying the pretense that all was as it had been before. I let my visits to the law library taper off. The most pressing of my concerns, for many days, was the transition from tokens to electronic cards at the Broadway-Nassau station. I spent some precious time checking other stations in the neighborhood and eventually found that Cortlandt Street would continue to accept tokens. I thought about changing my route so that I could return home each evening from there. But that would mean having to switch trains at Herald Square. I tried to imagine the unfamiliar train, possibly with a different kind of hand bar or seat configuration, the unfamiliar route, the absence for-evermore of the briefcase man and the purse lady. I thought of the transfer at Herald Square, of having to push against the late-rush-hour crowds, and I gave up on the idea. One morning, therefore, I bought one of the new cards, to give myself time to get used to it. It was yellow and had a thick black magnetic stripe at the bottom. At the top, blue letters rising as if heading off into the distance read MetroCard.
I watched other commuters, to see what they did at the new turnstiles, and after a while I too went to swipe the card through the narrow slot. The turnstile gave a little jolt and refused to let me pass. I ran the card through again, and again I was jolted back. Perhaps, I thought, my card didn’t work. A middle-aged man, seeing my perplexity, stopped and showed me that I was holding the card backward, that the magnetic stripe had to face left and not right. I thanked him and this time successfully pushed the card through, but all the same I felt that there could only be trouble ahead, that I would never grow comfortable with this new system. I turned and exited back through the turnstile, and the man who had helped me looked at me with surprise. But I had only been making a trial run. I put the card in my wallet and hoped that I would remember how much it was worth: three more rides. It bothered me that there was nothing on the card itself to indicate this. I climbed back up to street level, fingering the tokens, still usable for now, in my pocket. The round perimeters felt reassuringly thick under my thumb.
As the days went by I tried to decide whether or not Giglio was moving ahead with his renovation plans. The signs weren’t clear. One evening I returned home to find the vacated ground-floor apartment open, its living room lined with plastic sheets. Opposite my own front door a large and seemingly purposeless hole had been punched into the wall, and plaster dust had been swept into a tall pyramid beside it. Was it a warning, an attempt at harassment? I waited to see. Day after day the pyramid sat there, growing neither larger nor smaller, until Mrs. Fiore came to sweep it up. After their single day of activity, she told me, the workmen had not returned. But the architect—Patrick, she called
him—had stopped by and dropped off some herbs for her. She had wrapped them in cheesecloth and steeped them in boiling water—he’d given her directions half a mile long, she said, so serious about it all—but she was damned if it had done anything for her pain. I could see, though, that she’d been flattered by his attention. I changed the subject, annoyed that I’d missed him, and did not admit that I too had begun to call him Patrick in my thoughts. In imagination I saw him again at dusk at the entranceway, and he told me he had forgotten to take certain measurements, certain photographs. He needed, he said, to see my apartment again. On the way up the stairs, leading him, I would stumble and his hand would fly out to brace my side, but I would right myself before he reached me. Anxiously he would ask if I was all right. Yes, I would assure him. I’m all right.
Midmonth we had a few balmy days that seemed to wilt the paper Santas pasted to the storefront windows and take the shine off the Christmas baubles hanging from the lampposts, but afterward it turned sharply cold again, and when I emerged in the mornings for my walk to the park, Mrs. Fiore was sometimes waiting on the stairs for me, bundled up in an ankle-length down coat with an old scarf wound around her head. Her face expressed reproach, as much of me as of our landlord. Deep in the bowels of city government lay powers of law that could put things to right—if only I would set them in motion. We could beat him, she was saying with her long-suffering face, but you must help. I’m just a woman; I can’t do it myself. Each time I greeted her politely and walked on, pretending that I did not see her silent demand. Had I ever led her to believe I was a man of action, a fixer? Had I ever misled her?