by Pamela Erens
Peterson’s, the bookstore I now stood before was called, a good plain name. I went inside. Yes, I remembered it: the owner took an interest in regional literature, the history of New York State and of Manhattan, the area’s flora and fauna and waterways. There were old maps on the wall, time-darkened paintings of Colonial figures. Near the front door two men were bent over an enormous map dotted with what looked like checkers. One set of checkers bore the American flag, the other a swastika. I gravitated toward a shelf filled with books on native plants. I had been reading only a short while when a man emerged from the rear of the store and asked me to leave. I looked at him in surprise, my mind still full of the characteristics of E. americanus, the strawberry bush. “What for?” I asked. He was tall and thin-cheeked and wore a faded plaid shirt. Mr. Peterson, presumably.
“I don’t need to tell you what for,” he said. “This is my store and I don’t want you here.”
I glanced at myself to see if what I was wearing was torn or stained, if anything about me was offensive. Maybe he was joking with me. I smiled nervously and reached for another book.
“Did you hear him or what?”
One of the war-gamers stood up, his belly spilling over his belt. He shook out his long coarse hair.
“I haven’t done anything,” I murmured. The room had developed a sinister aspect: the low ceiling, the dim lights, the big-bellied man in front of me and the wraith like Mr. Peterson behind.
“Haven’t done anything?” jeered the big-bellied man. He stepped toward me, his heavy boots thudding against the floor.
When I saw that he did not mean to stop, my stomach lurched and I sprinted around him, the book tumbling from my fingers. I careered onto the first side street I saw, turned and turned again, jogging crazily until I spotted the lighted globes of a subway. There must be some mistake, I thought. They have me confused with somebody else. Just before reaching the subway entrance I caught sight of my reflection in a lighted window filled with medical supplies: prosthetics, elastic bandages, bedpans. The bizarre display stopped me and I paused, panting, resting my forehead against the glass. When I raised my head again, still breathing heavily, I did look, reflected to myself, like someone criminal, or at least disorderly and subnormal. I leaned in, trying to see deeper into my reflection, but my image dissolved as I grew closer. I bared my teeth, caught the flash of white. Then I hobbled down into the subway and rode home with my eyes closed.
The weather grew bitter. For several days in mid-January I cut short my visits to the park and on one of these days I took shelter in a small art gallery on the Upper West Side so that I could thaw my numbed fingers. A sleepy-looking woman asked if I would like a mug of hot tea while I looked around. I very rarely went to museums or galleries, but I found myself drawn to some paintings done in broad washes of reds and yellows on large irregular ovals of paper. It occurred to me that these were paintings my mother might have liked. “Please sign our guest book,” the woman said, handing me the tea. At the top of the page for that day I wrote: John Frederick Ronan. In another corner of the room a different artist had filled an entire canvas with black dots. I looked more closely. Some of the dots were a bit larger and some were smaller, but they all marched in long, closely spaced lines that looped and crossed and sometimes sent off shoots in new directions. There must have been tens of thousands of these little dots; the canvas looked like a hiking map with trails running wild. I thought of the artist bending over his brush, patiently dabbing in circle after circle, repetition after repetition, his back aching, his eyes beginning to swim. The image oppressed me. I turned away from the canvas and asked where I should put my mug. “Come again, Mr. Ronan,” the woman called after me.
Where was Patrick? The weeks passed. Why had he not returned? “Please forgive,” said the note on my mantelpiece. “I’d hoped to find you in.” The pressure of his pen on the flimsy paper, the childish uncontrol of the handwriting, the torn bit at the top where he had removed the paper from the pad: these were all so physical to me, so palpable. It was as if he were there in the room with me. Yet he did not come. I tried to picture what parts of the city he was working in each day, calculated the possibility of running into him on the street. Less likely, I thought, than the possibility of spotting a set of identical twins. Gradually I came to berate myself for having looked for hints and invitations in a tossed-off note. More than once I determined to throw the note away, but it would have felt like disposing of a living thing.
In the middle of one night I woke to hear the hiss of steam in the radiators. I sighed and turned over in bed, kicking off layers. In the morning I learned why the heat had returned. As I was shaving, I heard the slam of the downstairs door, followed by the sound of footsteps and of men coughing. Soon a radio was turned on. Spanish lyrics floated toward me as I opened my front door. A latecomer passed, dressed in workman’s whites, and looked at me with surprise.
“You live here?” he asked.
I said that I did. He scratched his nose. “Mr. Giglio said nobody is living in the building. There was a fire, no?”
“Yes, a fire,” I agreed. “But I still live here.”
I walked through my rooms touching the mantelpiece, the counters, the tables: surfaces that had been cave-cold for weeks and now were warm again. The oily, unfamiliar scent of the heat made me sleepy and lazy. I could not seem to get myself out of doors. I made myself some toast and delighted in the way the air-softened butter spread creamily over my toast instead of lying in stubborn hard slivers. I scrambled an egg just to prolong the meal. Then I drew a hot bath and lay in it, listening to the scraping and talking of the workers upstairs.
When the buzzer rang I was frightened for a moment; I had forgotten what the sound meant. But immediately afterward I conjured up Patrick’s face. I stepped out of the bath and dried myself quickly, threw on pants and a shirt. As I hurried down the stairs I told myself to be reasonable: it was just one of the workers, someone had gotten locked out. At the bottom of the staircase I made out a short man composed of blurred shifting shapes behind the smoked glass of the vestibule door. Raising his voice to be heard he told me that he needed my signature. I unlocked the door and the man handed me some papers: CIVIL COURT OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. I read them quickly, hoping to spy some technical error that would allow me to hand them back and tell the man to come back another time. Perhaps my name would be misspelled, or the wrong apartment number listed. “PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that a hearing at which you must appear will be held at the Civil Court of the City of New York. . . . PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that if you fail to establish any defense to the allegations of this petition. . . . PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that in the event of your failure to answer and appear . . .”
I held the papers in one hand, the pen the man had given me in the other. “If you would please,” urged the man. I signed the papers, and he disappeared. It struck me that I had no one to tell the news. I gazed at the dirty snow banked motionless across the street. In front of one of the brownstones sat a man shrouded in a garbage bag, another scrap of bag tied like a kerchief around his head. Impossible that I’d never noticed him before. I stepped onto the street to take a walk, clear my head, but before I had been gone a few minutes I realized that I had no coat on. I circled back, banging on the front door until one of the workmen let me in.
That day and the next and the next I spent extra time at the law library filling my head with facts, precedents, obscure lines of reasoning. I read case after case, scribbled notes and arguments until my eyes burned. I walked up and down the library stacks on the off chance that the right book, the book that would save me, would jump out and announce the perfect answer. Did fifteen years’ residence entitle me to any kind of rights? Would anybody say in hard print that it was so?
On the fourth evening, my energies flagging, I returned home before dusk to hear women’s voices and the sound of vacuuming. An astringent odor met me in the vestibule, a mixture of lemon and ammonia. I went up the newly swept stairs. A woman outside
the Porters’ door held a mop in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Smoke curled around me as I continued up to the second landing.
“Mr. Gorse?” I knew the voice instantly, though it took me a moment to realize that it was speaking to me. Gorse was the name I used at the bank, a name linked in my mind with my monthly stipend, with paperwork. I wondered if Patrick thought it as ugly a name as I did. Gorse: a bush with thorns. Even my mother had refused it, keeping her maiden name for the stage. Grace Gorse for an actress? An abomination.
He called down from Mrs. Fiore’s floor, saying that he’d brought me something. He asked me to wait, he would be right down. I stood where I was, a patient child, straining to hear what he was saying to one of the workmen. In a moment the man came clomping down the stairs, his tool belt rattling, and passed on. Patrick followed, shrugging off his knapsack. He tugged at some cords and pulled out of the knapsack’s mouth a flat gray envelope.
“Please,” I said. “Call me Jack.”
Patrick handed the envelope to me. I lifted the flap and drew out a large photograph of a man standing in my kitchen. Was this me? The man’s eyes were unfocused, his face slack. There was stubble on his chin; his bathrobe was lumpy and shabby. For a moment I was too surprised to speak.
Patrick bent over the photograph and began to use a vocabulary I couldn’t follow: depth of field, cropping, burning-in. He seemed to be very interested in this technical conversation, or, more accurately, lecture, but I was preoccupied with the age of the man in the picture. His forehead was high and bald and his hair stood up in thinning tufts at the crown. The lower half of the face was not as square and firm as I was sure it ought to be. The shoulders slumped and the bathrobe looked old-fashioned in some way I could not have defined.
“It’s for you,” Patrick told me. Was he really not aware of how pathetic the man in the picture looked? Patrick’s eyes urged the gift on me; he clearly wished me to be pleased. I studied the photograph again, searching for whatever it was that had caused Patrick to feel I looked “interesting.” Failing to find it, I pasted a smile onto my face and tried to appear flattered. I think I thanked him. All of a sudden I had an overwhelming desire to tell him about the eviction papers. I reached out to steady myself on the banister, to fend off my shyness while I gathered the right words in my mouth.
Patrick’s cell phone rang. He apologized and turned away as people do when they speak into a phone. My throat was dry and I stared yet again at the photograph. Horrible, I thought. Patrick was saying something about crown molding. I realized that when he turned back to me there would be no graceful way to begin, no way to speak of the eviction papers or the photograph or even the weather. I simply did not have the words. The vacuuming started up again on the floor below, filling the stairwell with white noise. I did not want Patrick to turn, pushing the phone into his pocket, and see my speechlessness and trembling. While the roar of cleaning covered the sound of my steps, I slipped away.
Eleven
Some nights I dream about the Down twins. They sit on the library steps in their ironed white shirts, their neat school blazers, shivering anxiously in the wind, yet never doubting that someone is coming to take them home. I see their almond eyes, their broad faces. The wind blows their hair into strange and wild shapes. Or I dream I walk out of my apartment, away from the boarded-up fireplace, the couch, all my books, and follow Patrick down long dark Manhattan streets terrifying in their unfamiliarity. When I wake I catch my breath, remembering where I am, that I do not own my bed, my room, the hours of my day. I remember that in the night one of my roommates shouted out. What was his dream? In a moment I will have to get up, wash my face, and walk into the darkness of the abbey. But for a few seconds longer I can pretend that I am still sovereign and free. I think of Central Park and what is blooming there now: columbine and Solomon’s seal, Photinia, buttercup. Soon there will also be roses, mountain laurel, catalpa.
I wait while the other men use the bathroom, and turn my back to the room to dress. I brush my teeth and glance at myself in the mirror, always surprised to find myself really here, in these rooms, this place. The last out the door, I provoke scowls as I rush moments late into the meditation hall. I avoid looking at the abbot, who has told Joku that I cannot stay on as a gardener and must make other arrangements within the month.
During zazen I think about something I read in the library the other day, that the Sanskrit word for monk comes from another word that means to beg. I picture the monks of tradition walking the countryside with their begging bowls in hand, peasants beckoning them in to feed them meat and fish and tea. There were strict rules against monks’ keeping any food from one day to the next; each day they were required to start again with nothing. How good, I thought, to know that one’s bowl would be filled over and over. How good that its emptiness would be prescribed, a thing without shame.
After zazen the abbot always gives a brief lecture. Today it is about remorse. Suppose you have injured somebody, he says. You have lied or cheated, abused someone emotionally or physically. Afterward you feel guilty, or would like to. But Buddhism prescribes action, not feeling. For the Buddhist, the abbot reminds us, feeling is merely an indulgence. We should not waste time feeling guilty. Rather, we should make amends to those we have injured.
We rise and crowd into the dining hall for breakfast. I can’t help thinking what I always think: It is I who am due amends. I catch Joku watching me as, heads bowed, we repeat the chant before consuming a meal. Seventy-two labors brought us this food; we should know how it comes to us. I have never been able to shake the feeling that he can read my thoughts. I stop him as he passes with his tray, and tell him that I have news.
On my last visit to the nursery in Conklin, I explain, I noticed a Help Wanted sign; the owner, Mr. Endicott, was looking for someone to work Saturdays loading customers’ cars with heavy bags of peat and dirt. I told him that I was interested in the job. As I recount the incident to Joku, I remember the way that Mr. Endicott looked me up and down, replying with New England terseness that he hoped I was strong enough. I was, I promised. I did not bother to think about how I would get to work, or whether the abbot would give me permission to go.
“Whatever I earn I’ll give back to the abbey,” I tell Joku. I point out that with the employee discount I’ll get, the abbey’s supplies will cost less. I insist that this is a start.
Joku looks embarrassed. Panicked, I start to make predictions: Mr. Endicott will give me another day of work before long; by fall I could be with him full-time. I just need a little more time to get on my feet. And the bonsai—what will happen to the bonsai if I leave? Finally I find myself blurting out that I have some money in a bank account in Manhattan, it’s been tied up with red tape, but within days I should have access to it. I can make up the difference between my pay at Endicott’s and the monthly resident’s fee. A bit of paperwork and it will be taken care of.
Joku takes a gulp of coffee. Meals are quick here; no sooner do we sit down than it is time to clear the tables for morning chores. Conversations have to be quick, too. “It’s not just about the money,” he says. He says that I’ve shown no evidence of interest in Buddhism as a way of life. The abbey is not a boardinghouse. He will speak to the abbot, but he warns me not to be optimistic. He suggests that I contact one of the social service groups in Burlington.
People are getting up and busing their trays. Joku slides a brochure from a rubber-banded stack and hands it to me. “Open it,” he says. I do and on the second panel I see the two of us, a monk with wire-rimmed glasses and a man with thinning hair and a sweatshirt, caught in the middle of a conversation. The man holds a book—you can just make out the title, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. A ripple of fear goes through me. “May I keep this?” I ask. “Certainly,” Joku says, standing up. “I’ve got hundreds more.”
When I return to my room later I surprise one of my roommates by speaking to him and asking for an envelope and a stamp. I carefully tear out the picture
of Joku and me and put it into the envelope. On the front of the envelope I write out the address of Patrick’s office in New York City. My heart races, filled with a strange excitement. Then I walk the letter down to the secretary’s desk and place it in the tray for outgoing mail.
Twelve
I propped the photograph Patrick had given me on the mantelpiece next to his business card and his note and the broken glass, and over the days it ceased to disturb me so much. The homeliness of the man in the picture became unsurprising, like the homeliness of a familiar piece of furniture. I got used to this face, its paralyzed uncertainty, the bewildered mouth. I saved the gray envelope the photo had come in and put it on the mantelpiece as well. It had once been addressed to someone else, a Mr. Michael Taylor on West Forty-Second Street, but a thick black line had been drawn through the typed name and above it was scrawled “Jack Gorse.” Seeing the name in Patrick’s handwriting, I could almost develop an affection for it. I traced the letters with my finger, feeling my hand merged with Patrick’s as we made the long slash of the J, the swollen loop of the G. I wondered when Patrick would next descend like the intermittent angel he was, bearing a gift or leaving some sign of himself behind. Each evening on my return home I listened in the hopes of hearing his voice calling down to me from above, and when I didn’t hear it I was sure that at another time, and soon, I would.
In the mornings I combed my hair carefully and touched my neck and wrists with some drugstore cologne. On impulse I visited a large, fluorescent-lit discount clothing store near Union Square. I became anxious when I saw all the circular racks topped by big signs marked with prices and exclamation points, but before I could retreat a salesman seized my shoulders and asked me my size. He pulled a shirt with blue stripes from a rack and held it up to me. I imagined wearing the fresh new shirt the next time Patrick saw me, and I let the salesman lead me over to the register. There I handed over more bills than I had paid at once for anything in a very long time.