by Pamela Erens
Two nights before Christmas I was awakened by a banging at my door, repeated, urgent. “Coming!” I called. “All right, coming!” Then it struck me that a visitor at this hour could mean nothing good, and I shoved my feet into a pair of shoes and searched for something large and menacing to hold in my hands. Giglio—it had to be Giglio. No, not him but two men he had hired who would grab me and knock me down to teach me a lesson. Helplessly I ran from sofa to bookcase and finally seized the fireplace poker. The pounding continued, and beneath it I heard Mrs. Fiore’s pleading voice. I opened the door. In the brightness of the hallway her back receded down the stairs, and I followed her. I had a vague impression of heat above my head, an extra density in the atmosphere, but I saw nothing, smelled nothing, not then. Mrs. Fiore moved so quickly that before I knew it I was out on the street, looking up at my darkened balcony, which held my uncle’s clay planters that I had never removed nor tended to but that every spring miraculously flowered with weeds. The cold cut my face. Above my balcony were the lit windows of Mrs. Fiore’s front room, and, above that, a murky glow in Mr. Flax’s old apartment. I had always thought that fire meant bright tongues of flame, smoke billowing from windows. This was mute, subdued.
Mrs. Fiore stood with pursed lips. When she spoke, her voice trembled.
“Arson,” she said. “Giglio got tired of waiting.”
“No, Frances,” I said—the name just slipped out. “Why would you think that?”
Mrs. Fiore turned to me and I was frightened by her face, which looked bloodless and defeated in the half darkness. Her hair, tangled from sleep, looked like the hair of a crazy woman. Her eyes were so dark I couldn’t find the irises. “Your uncle never lifted a finger for anyone,” she said.
I stuttered out some baffled reply—what did she mean?—but she turned away to the glowing windows and said no more.
I have trouble remembering exactly what happened after that. The firemen came; they threw blankets over us, dingy quilted cloths of the kind that movers throw over bureaus and sideboards. I was still clutching the fireplace poker. I remember a fireman asking us to go to the nearest doorman building to warm ourselves, but neither Mrs. Fiore nor I abandoned our watch. We stood side by side waiting for any sign that the flames were creeping down to the lower floors. At some point windows had to be smashed, and the water from the hoses froze when it hit the stone, leaving a moss of rime. Still, in less than half an hour the fire was out, and when the men returned to tell us the news their impassive faces seemed to express contempt for the flames for putting up such a poor fight. They suspected some bad wiring on the fourth floor, they said; who was our landlord? Did we have friends or relatives we could stay with for the night? Mrs. Fiore called her daughter on one of the truck phones. “Two days before Christmas!” she shrieked. One of the men turned to me. “And you, sir? Do you have some place to stay?” I had no place, of course, but I only told him that I didn’t mind returning to my apartment. The men conferred. The smell was strong, they said, and there were broken windows. They wouldn’t advise it.
I meant to stay, I repeated. The one who had just spoken raised his eyebrows. All right, he told me. If that was what I wanted.
At some point a fireman offered to go upstairs and get clothing for Mrs. Fiore to take to her daughter’s, but she waved him off, muttering. When her taxi arrived she got into it, a small, nightgown-clad figure, and she did not bid me goodbye. But as the cab pulled away she stopped the driver and called after me to ask if I would shut the door to her apartment. Her daughter, she said, would come after the holiday to get her things. I nodded.
The fire trucks drove off and I went inside. Immediately I was assaulted by a smoky, chemical stench. It settled into my lungs and scraped at the back of my throat, left a taste of plastic in my mouth. I grew winded as I climbed the stairs, and my eyes watered. When I reached Mrs. Fiore’s door I hesitated, my hand on the knob, wondering how to delay the finality of shutting the place up forever. I nudged the door open a bit farther and peered inside.
The lights were blazing and on the television a set of kitchen knives silently rotated on a dais, the asking price flashing underneath. I stepped over the threshold, blinking. A large wall mirror caught my approach and I drew back as if I’d been captured on a surveillance camera. Turning away from the glass, I saw that Mrs. Fiore’s living room was furnished not so much with chairs and tables as with photographs: photographs propped or mounted on every conceivable surface, on the walls, even hanging by wire from the necks of lamps. I stepped closer. There were pictures of children, teenagers, adults, and old people. The walls held large formal shots, the tables and sideboards smaller and more informal ones. There were pictures taken on beaches, at picnics, in front of houses, in restaurants, at weddings and graduations. There was a series of photographs of young men in military uniform, some in black and white, others, more recent, in color. A young woman with long hair and a wide smile waved from the driver’s seat of a 1950s-style Buick. It was Mrs. Fiore, I was suddenly sure. I felt as if I had stumbled into an enormous family reunion. Exactly how many grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, did Mrs. Fiore have? There seemed to be several dozen. I stood clutching the ridiculous poker, wondering which of the hundreds of faces might be that of the daughter in Neptune, New Jersey. The images seemed to shimmer and blur. Beneath the pervasive burnt-chemical odor the apartment smelled, I realized, of soup. There was a small Christmas tree in the corner, plastic by the look of it—I could not bring myself to walk in any farther. My feet were sunk into a shag rug whose faded rust color made me think of Mrs. Fiore’s hair. I could see through a half wall the cooking range in the kitchen, each burner covered with a saucepan as if at the ready for company. Something on the floor above fell with a loud bang, a delayed casualty of the fire. The feeling of being watched returned to me. I backed out of the apartment and shut the door.
In my dream I saw the car accident that killed my mother and father, saw the dark-blue sedan come out of nowhere and fling their car into a ditch off the highway, where it turned over and burst into flames. In real life there had been no fire. My parents had died from the impact, the coroner had said, my mother instantly, my father more slowly. They had been traveling home on the Henry Hudson Parkway after a dinner party when a darting car sideswiped them. In the dream I left the car where it was, belly-up and burning, and walked a long way, back to our apartment. I crawled into my boyhood bed and, exhausted, went to sleep. But a knocking at the door kept awakening me. Finally I got up to answer it. It was my mother, warning me that there was a fire. Because I had not come in time her dress had burst into flames. I saw her spinning and twirling down the staircase, bits of blackened cloth rising from her body, and I knew it would be dangerous to follow.
“That’s all right,” she said, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I didn’t die after all. I’ll read to you.” Then I was awake, and I lay shivering, my lungs and nostrils thick with a noxious coating. For a moment I really had been a child again and my mother was putting me to bed before she went out for the evening. The dress in the dream was one I remembered, a sheath of shimmery emerald green, off the shoulder, that made her appear to be some sort of mermaid. Every now and then she would read to me from her grandmother’s Bible: Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan, all those stories of matched sets. Whenever she readied herself for an evening out, her eyes were bright and she looked beautiful, not at all the way she appeared during the day. After kissing me with her cool lips she would sweep out to join my father and begin their evening, which might start at 10:00 PM at an actor’s or producer’s home and end with the maid waking them for a noon breakfast.
I threw a bathrobe over my sleep-damp clothing and went into the kitchen to rinse the ashen coating from my mouth. It was past eight o’clock and I would have to move quickly to make up for lost time. It felt strange to be indoors when the sun was so far up in the sky. I drank a glass of water, then another, and was about to brew some coffee when I
heard a sound in the stairwell. Patrick’s step was already familiar to me and I came out onto the landing. As soon as he caught sight of me I remembered that I was not yet dressed.
“Hello, Mr. Gorse,” he said. “Are you all right?”
I nodded. His head was dusted with snow and, feeling giddy, I pointed at it. He reached up, checking, and brought his hand down wet.
“Yes,” he said, breaking into a smile. “I guess we’re going to have a white Christmas.”
He was taller than I remembered, more angular and awkward-looking than the man who in my imagination reached out to brace my fall and ran his hands again over the chairs and curtains in my apartment. I looked at the glittering crystals in his hair and thought about how children were always being told that no two snowflakes are alike. Somewhere, I was sure, I had read otherwise. I believed otherwise. Trillions upon trillions of flakes fall to earth in a single snowfall, and there are tens of thousands of snowfalls each year around the globe. How could one of any kind of snowflake be anything but an accident, a deviation?
Patrick gestured up the stairs apologetically, explaining that Mr. Giglio had sent him to take a look at the damage. He started up and I followed. In the night I had not noticed the dirt and debris the firemen had left behind. We stepped carefully, made our way slowly. “Good Lord,” Patrick said. At the top landing, one long wall had been disemboweled. Spongy blackened material spilled out of it, some of it fused to the floor. There were patterns on the walls where the smoke had licked upward, leaving the impression of tall stenciled leaves. Broken glass powdered under our feet. Patrick took out his camera and snapped pictures, then entered Mr. Flax’s vacated apartment, from which a frigid draft blew. I waited outside, peeking in at the blackened carpet and shattered windows. Patrick was shaking his head as he came out. “Thank God it wasn’t your place,” he said, and just then I noticed something odd about the way he was dressed. One untucked tail of his shirt rode above the other; the right and left sides of his collar were out of joint. Patrick noticed me staring and gazed down at himself. “Oh,” he said.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I blurted out. It was the shirt that made me say it; the clumsiness of it emboldened me. Patrick started to work on the buttons. I wondered if I’d been too abrupt, spoken too loudly. But Patrick raised his head gratefully and said that he would. Mr. Giglio had called him first thing that morning, and he hadn’t even taken the time for breakfast.
He nodded as he entered my apartment, as if reminding himself that he had already been here. In the kitchen he was too polite to take the one chair for himself. He leaned against the counter and I had to brush against him to get the coffee filter and the tin of grounds from the cupboard. Delicately he raised one shoe and pried an inch-and-a-half-long shard of glass from a tread. I pressed myself into a corner, holding the filter and the tin. Through the kitchen window I saw the snow falling softly on the cars and the sidewalks. I turned on the oven, hoping that it would quickly warm the room. After filling the filter with grounds, I realized that I was not sure how to make the second cup of coffee. Should I tip more grounds into the filter and pour in twice as much water? But then the mug would overflow. I couldn’t use two separate filters, because I had only one filter holder. I stood for a moment in some confusion. Then I gave the coffee canister a hard rap, filling the filter to the brim, and poured the boiling water over the grounds. When it was done dripping I poured half the coffee into a separate mug and added water to fill it to the top. Handing it to him, I again became aware of my bathrobe, the stubble on my cheeks, the fact that I had not bathed.
A musical jingling erupted from somewhere and Patrick rummaged in his pocket. I had grown used to phones ringing on the street, to people passing by with hidden earpieces talking as if to themselves, but I was startled by the sudden appearance in my kitchen of a third party. “Hello?” he asked softly. “No, I’m on a project visit. That’s all right. No, it’s really all right. I can be there in an hour.”
He closed the phone with a click. “I’m sorry, where were we?”
But we hadn’t been speaking. I ducked my head and busied myself dumping the used filter into the garbage can. From his manner it was unclear whether he’d been speaking to a client or a boss or a wife. I moved jerkily from garbage to sink, avoiding Patrick’s eyes.
I heard him put down his mug. “May I ask you something?” he said. “Please don’t feel you have to say yes.” I turned. “Would it be all right,” he asked, “if I took your picture?”
Before I could even answer he raised his palms as if to ward off any negative reaction. His fingers were slender, naked—no wedding ring. Only if I felt comfortable, he insisted, only if I wanted to. It was just that I had an interesting face.
But already I was stammering my agreement. “I’d better go change,” I said.
“No, stay as you are.”
He put his palm on my back to encourage me to stand up straighter. I grew dizzy, closed my eyes, opened them again. He pushed a spoon and a salt shaker to the end of the counter, out of the frame, and adjusted my shoulders. “Relax,” he said. He stood back and drew close again. The room was growing very warm and I would have liked to turn off the oven. When Patrick finally raised the camera I involuntarily stiffened. He frowned. “Take a breath and let it out,” he said. “Good, now again.” But still he did not look pleased. He rotated me into a slightly different position. I had the feeling that something had gone wrong, that I was somehow ruining the photograph. I did my best to smile, but Patrick gently told me to drop any attempt at an expression. Finally he seemed satisfied and I held my face still for the camera. Patrick took one photograph, then several more in rapid succession.
Afterward we stood awkwardly. It seemed I had surrendered something to him, and I was startled by my impulsiveness. I turned and flicked off the oven. Then, light-headed, I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my robe. Patrick had again picked up his coffee mug and was blowing on it, though surely it was cold by now. That bracelet of his dangled from his wrist, a primitive thing, brown beads on a rough leather thong, tied with a simple knot. And before I could stop myself I had asked him what it was. I was sure he would say that his girlfriend had made it, his fiancée.
Patrick raised his arm, and the sparse blond hairs on it caught the light. “They’re Buddhist beads,” he said. “We use them in prayer.”
“You’re a Buddhist?” I mumbled. The girlfriend, the fiancée, disappeared.
He laughed. “I never feel able to say that,” he told me. “It’s like saying you’re an artist, or a saint. You aim at it; you don’t ever manage to be it.”
He fingered the beads as if for reassurance, and in that moment I saw in him someone I’d once known, a childhood friend named Henry. I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it before. The blond hair, the awkward, eager gestures, the bracelet: they were all reminiscent of Henry.
“I meditate at this place near my office,” Patrick said. “I try to go nearly every day.”
He turned and put his coffee mug into the sink. It clinked against the porcelain. The warmth was quickly fading from the room. Patrick rubbed his arms vigorously and thanked me. It was, he said, getting to be time for him to go.
Seven
Each day I return to the shed with the bonsai and the smell of dust and pine. My new responsibilities are a gift, allowing me an hour or two of solitude and some exemption from the daily routine. Sometimes I overstay my allotted time and do not appear for the afternoon meditation. To my surprise, no one takes me to task for my absence or even questions it. I used to wake in the night wondering whether my residency was running out, whether I would soon be asked to leave the monastery. No one ever said anything about it. But when I began to work with the bonsai I worried a little less. I felt that if I could succeed with the plants I might be seen as useful, at least for a while.
Today I am working on a spruce tree growing in a rectangular container. Its trunk has a deep curve that was trained into it long ago.
I wonder who the monk who took care of these plants was, and when and why he left. The spruce has a spiky, disorderly crown and dense growth beneath the branches, in violation of the principle that bonsai growth should be above the branches only, in the direction of heaven. I press back some branches to see how the tree will look if I open up more space at the top. Then I stand at a distance and look at the tree from different angles. I begin to see how this plant might grow, the shapes it might assume. The trunk wants, I think, to bend back against itself, to make an S. Wants? I ask myself. When did a plant ever choose to grow in a particular shape?
With each specimen I have gotten better at my work. I loosen the sides of the plant with a flat tool and remove the impacted rectangle. Thick white roots like veins bulge beneath the surface. I slice off the bottom and sides of the rectangle with a long knife and then scrape away at the soil between the roots until only a small ball of root and dirt is left. With scissors I cut back the longer, dangling roots.
Now I place the plant back into its container. The plant will grow but it will never have more room to spread than this. I am reminded of the Chinese custom of binding little girls’ feet to make them fit the same size shoes year after year. I shift the plant this way and that, deciding where to position the root-ball in the pot. Bonsai are never supposed to be perfectly centered. I fill the pot with soil and gravel, using a chopstick to push the dirt down into the spaces between the remaining roots. Now it is time to clean up the plant itself. I pinch a few new buds with my fingers, toss them into the bucket near my feet. I lop off branches that interfere with the shape I have determined upon. Some of them have grown thick and tough and I have to saw at them with a kitchen knife.