The Understory

by Pamela Erens

  In the evenings I went to the library. I would have liked instead to walk to the water as I used to, to climb the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun set. But I knew I did not have the strength.

  Ambrose, Saint (340?–397), bishop of Milan, one of the great doctors of the Western church, born in Trier of a Roman senatorial family.

  Every day or two the librarian came by with a new book for me. She had grown more talkative and sometimes told me why she was recommending it. She had seen a glowing review of this one in the librarians’ journal, or she had read the book and couldn’t put it down. She loved murder mysteries. I took whatever she gave me, but the murder tales I didn’t read. I needed no more nightmares. The other books I did plow through, even when they didn’t interest me. The librarian looked at me so eagerly when she came bearing her gifts that I felt obliged to try. So I dutifully read a collection of humor pieces by a television comedian and a first novel by a young immigrant writer, and forgot them as soon as I was done.

  On Thursday evening I arrived at my old building long before it was necessary. I had thought of a thousand different ways our meeting might go, had daydreamed of conversations that ended with a smile or a touch, with our walking away from the building together or going our separate ways. For the first time it occurred to me that Patrick might not come at all. Perhaps he would forget, perhaps he had never intended to come. From a dozen yards away I could see the scaffolding and orange plastic netting that covered the brownstone from top to bottom. Wooden boards covered the windows. I ducked under a platform and stood at the top of my old stoop, rubbing the soot-streaked stone.

  When Patrick arrived, at ten after six, I hoped I looked presentable. I emerged from my little alcove, waving, slapping grime off my coat and hands. Patrick slouched, gestured upward at the damaged building with his chin. “There it is,” he said. “The shell of a beautiful place.” The sight clearly depressed him. Then, unexpectedly, he threw his arms around me and hugged me. He pounded me gently on the back. “How are you getting along?” he asked.

  My head was jammed against his shoulder and I did not know what to do with my arms, which were pinned against my sides. All I could sense was the sharpness of Patrick’s collarbone and the vaguely musty scent of his neck and the thick sausage feel of my trapped arms.

  He let go, waited for an answer.

  “Let’s go in,” I said. I felt as if I were about to weep. I blinked, trying to keep hold of myself.

  “I hope you’re prepared. Nothing has been cleaned up yet.” He took a key from his pocket and unlocked a large padlock securing the outer door.

  It was dim inside; the overhead light had been smashed. The walls were pocked and smeared with ashy streaks, the stairs were filthy. I stepped around broken glass, bits of metal. Patrick urged me to walk slowly, pointed out areas on the landing where the floor was spongy or the support beams showed through. “Careful, careful,” he repeated. I could feel him behind me, very close, his solicitousness, his anxious hovering. For a moment I saw myself as Mrs. Fiore, an old woman helped up the stairs by a kind young man. The door to my apartment stood open, partially off its hinges. The first thing I realized was that part of the floor inside had fallen into the apartment below, and part of Mrs. Fiore’s floor had fallen into mine. The resulting chaos made it hard to tell what anything was. There were odd bits of fabric, hunks of metal and glass, broken Sheetrock, burnt pieces of wood, gray ash, black ash, twisted pieces of what looked like plastic. Close to the center of the room squatted a monstrous blackened conch—the coffee table, I eventually determined, buckled inward by the heat. A scrap of drapery drooped from a boarded window like a flag of surrender.

  Patrick remained silent as I checked my bedroom, where a burned mattress lay with exposed springs. It gave off such a powerful stench that I gagged. A piece of paper blew back and forth in the draft from a broken window. I picked it up, thinking it might be a page from a book, something I might recognize, but it was a fragment of a restaurant delivery menu.

  “Why don’t we go around the corner for a cup of coffee,” Patrick suggested. “We’ll sit a minute.”

  “No, I want to stay here.”

  I tried to take in all that I was seeing. I had thought that I would be moved, maybe that I would cry, but I could not seem to wring anything out of myself. I scooped up a handful of ashes, let it trickle from my fingers. Irritably, I asked: “Do you have the photograph?”

  Patrick took off his knapsack and handed the envelope to me. I opened it and was again caught off guard by that bewildered, unready expression, that look of bracing against a possible blow. Over the weeks I had touched up the image in memory, smoothed the hair, put light and focus into the eyes. Now I was again disheartened by the portrait, vaguely insulted even.

  “Why did you take my picture?” I asked.

  Patrick took the photograph from my hands, studied it. “You didn’t have a social face,” he said. “Often when I’m taking pictures I get impatient at the social faces. People want to look sexy or smart or strong or whatever. They want to be in control of the look. I’m always trying to get underneath that. But you just stood there as if no one had taken your photograph before. You had no look, but I couldn’t decide what you had.”

  The ash in my hands was oily, left a coating even when I scuffed my palms against each other. “You take people’s pictures all the time,” I said. The thought struck me unpleasantly.

  He heard the complaint in my voice and looked at me in surprise. “I’ve been working on this project,” he said. “I document people like you, people who are getting pushed out of their apartments. Mostly in Manhattan, sometimes in other places.”

  People like you. I took this in for a moment. Then I asked, “Whatever for?”

  Well, Patrick explained, he loved what he did. He loved building things, creating spaces for people to live and work in. But after a while it had become hard to look away from the human cost, from the people who were being forced to leave and change their lives because a building was being renovated or torn down. When the economy started to boom it was even worse. “There were all these people that the boom had passed by and who knew where they were going to go? When I was meditating I would have flashes of the tenants I had met, even of people’s stuff—this one’s coatrack, that one’s kitchen linoleum. I was bothered by it all.”

  I sensed that he had told this story before, that it was something he used to explain to other people who he was.

  He’d spoken to the abbot about it, he said. The abbot had asked him if he was prepared to give up his work. He said no, he thought there was more good than bad in it. The abbot told him that then he must find a way to bear witness.

  “Did you take Mrs. Fiore’s picture?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “She is very beautiful, did you ever notice?”

  I asked him what he did with all these pictures.

  He smiled. “Actually, I hope one day I’ll have a book, or a show, or something. I’d like to think they’re good work.”

  Good work? I turned away, busied myself pushing the photograph back into its envelope. It would not enter easily and I shoved it harder, crushing the edges. Instantly I felt a prick of remorse.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Patrick said. “Hurting you is the last thing I want to do. I should have said something, maybe. Look, if you dislike the photo I’ll destroy it.”

  “Yes, destroy it,” I told him.

  He looked unhappy at that. “Do me one favor,” he said. “Don’t decide that just now, when you’re upset. Think about it and get back to me, and I promise to do whatever you want. But I feel like I need to tell you it’s the best portrait I’ve ever done. I find it impossible to take a good picture of someone unless I care about them in some way.”

  I clutched the envelope in both hands and forced myself to meet his eyes. It seemed to me that meeting his eyes was the important thing, that it would tell me the truth of what he felt and maybe even of what I felt. I looked in his eyes
and he held my gaze. My heart rose up in my chest and knocked wildly. The pause lengthened, became awkward. I must say something, do something. The moment was slipping away.

  “I love you,” I said.

  Patrick’s eyes widened and in the flicker of embarrassment that ran through them I read everything I needed to know. Apparently I care about you did not mean the same thing as I love you. I stared at my feet, mortified.

  “Jack—”

  The note of compassion in his voice was unbearable. I could see the photograph before me, painfully vivid, on a book page with a caption running beneath: Jack Gorse, 40, Upper West Side. Evicted from his one-bedroom apartment after fifteen years. When his funds ran out after a stint in a transient hotel . . .

  I put my hand on the mantelpiece to steady myself, felt the powdery grit beneath it. I lifted it and stared at my sooty palm.

  “Listen, Jack.”

  I picked up the poker leaning against the fireplace. It felt pliable in my hands, as if still soft from the heat that had ignited the room. I held it up as I walked toward him.

  “Tell me that you love me,” I said.

  He looked at me in disbelief, took a step backward.

  “I don’t even care if it’s not true. Just tell me that you love me,” I insisted.

  “Jack, I . . .”

  “Tell me!”

  I moved toward him, wagging the poker slowly to and fro. All the time I was thinking, You can’t hit him. You won’t. You wouldn’t do such a thing.

  His mouth was working, and he said, in a thin, rushed voice, “I love you.”

  “No, you don’t mean it,” I told him. “I want you to really mean it. Please try to mean it.”

  I told myself I would not hurt him if he would just try, that I would not hurt him in any event, but that for just a few more moments I needed to keep him here and force him to talk to me, force him to consider the idea—just consider it—of loving me.

  Then he did something I did not expect. He stopped backing up and his face cleared. He looked at me with great sadness and said, softly but very distinctly, “I hardly know you.”

  Then I hit him. I raised my arm and swung the poker against the side of his head. Later I told myself that I had checked myself at the last moment, that I had not hit him with all my might. Was that true? His knees bent and he fell hard to one side, and I thought of the sack of groceries that Mrs. Fiore had dropped on the landing, the way the cans of vegetables had rumbled into the corner. I still half believed, as I put my hand to Patrick’s cheek, that I had not hit him, that I would never actually hit another human being. He was breathing, his cheek moved shallowly under my palm, but his eyes were closed, his mouth gently parted like a child’s. Blood was trickling out of his ear. I dropped the poker and ran through the open door, down the stairs. I stood in front of the blighted building turning this way and that, not knowing where to go. For a moment I thought of going back upstairs to tend to him but if I went back I would have to ask him again if he loved me, and I could not bear to think of that. In the end, habit served me. I crossed the avenue and fled through Mariners’ Gate, toward the Ramble.

  Fifteen

  Somehow I thought not to run. There was no reason to run. What I had done had been justified, unavoidable. I moved past the bench sitters and nuzzling couples into the more thinly populated interior of the park, and when I found myself in a stretch of the Ramble with no one in sight I walked into a stand of Japanese knotweed until I reached a spot where the plants grew higher than my head. Then I curled into the cold earth. I touched my hands in the waning light, feeling for the telltale wetness of blood, and thought of prison, of being led out of a courtroom with my hands shackled, in leg irons. I thought of lights blazing at all hours in a concrete cell, of being forced to march in a line, of guards who took pleasure in making me uncomfortable and afraid. I told myself quite reasonably that I could never survive in such a place, that I would have to find a way to kill myself first.

  I dozed off. I woke to complete darkness and the sound of rain. After a moment I discovered it was not rain but someone relieving himself in the knotweed. I wanted to tell him to go home, that it was not safe here at this hour. After the man passed into the distance, I fell asleep once more. In the morning there was the hollow rattling of a woodpecker, the sound of mockingbirds. Instinctively I patted my pocket; my wallet was still there but the book for Patrick was not. I scrabbled about with my hands but could not find it anywhere.

  I stood up, my clothing damp from the morning mist, raked my hair back from my head, rubbed my face with the heel of my hand. It was very early and I saw no one about. I walked through the park toward my hotel, stopping at the coffee shop where a few weeks earlier the waitress had offered to give me a meal. I sat again at the counter, trying to catch her eye, and when she came to take my order I ostentatiously laid my wallet next to my napkin and ordered what I had ordered that first time: sausage and eggs, French toast and home fries and coffee. I could tell that the waitress did not remember me, but that did not matter. I had successfully passed for someone unexceptional, someone who simply needed to eat breakfast before going on with his day. I ate slowly, for I still had time to waste, and I left a sizable tip, thinking of Marion. When I reached the Calliope it was only seven-thirty. I asked the desk guard if anyone had been to see me since the previous evening. He checked the overnight guard’s report sheet and my pigeonhole and said, “Sorry, no.” I went upstairs and walked directly down the hall to the pay phone.

  A voice answered, thick and disoriented, with sleep or perhaps something else. “Hello?” Patrick said. “Who is this?”

  I hung up quietly and then put my clothes and some food into a shopping bag. I wrote a letter to the management company for the Calliope Hotel, explaining that I would be vacating my room as of the end of the week. Then I began to walk toward the Port Authority. On the way I returned the book the librarian had given me the day before; I did not like to let books go overdue. At the station I figured out which bus I needed and boarded it around ten. As I sat watching Westchester and then Danbury and Hartford pass by the window a prickly itch began in my chest and spread up my neck and down my arms until I had to sit on my hands to keep from clawing at myself. Just before dusk I knocked on the great oak door of Infinite Light Abbey and as in a dream or fairy tale I was given entry.

  Now the first hints of summer have arrived. I saw forsythia along the West Drive of the park during the last days I spent in Manhattan, and weeks later I saw it again in sprays about the abbey, a second coming. The forsythia is spent now, but there are lilacs, azaleas, geraniums, Japanese wisteria. The beans in the garden begin their long climb. Today it is sunny and I move the remaining bonsai, eleven of them, against the shed windows where they can soak up the warm rays. These are the survivors, the ones that may live fifty, a hundred, two hundred more years.

  Joku enters and at first I think he is coming to chat with me and check on the plants. I reflexively tense against the certainty of his loose sleeve catching a branch, his sandals tracking dirt along the floor. He always brings with him a certain amount of disorder. But as soon as I see his face I have a premonition of something different. He looks stricken and anxious, and he hovers near the door as if to make sure he can leave quickly if necessary. After him enters another man, then two at once, standing close to each other. One of the pair is short and has a mustache. The other is a little taller. The man in front is large and thick, with sand-colored hair that creeps down past his ears.

  “These men are from the county sheriff’s department,” says Joku. “They’ve asked to speak with you.”

  The sandy-haired man steps toward me. He says his name, but I don’t hear it, a whirring noise comes up in my head and drowns it out. I want to tell them that I will come with them, I will cooperate, but that they must not touch me. I smell the man’s odor—sweat, cigarettes—as he comes close. He puts his hand on my shoulder. It is not a grip, nothing with force in it, but I have to clench mysel
f all over to keep from pulling away. I do not want to upset anyone. I put down the ball of twine I am holding and let the man lead me through the door.

  Joku walks alongside us. “When will he be back? Will we be able to contact him by phone?”

  “This may only take a couple of hours,” says the man noncommittally. The two other men follow a few steps behind. We have moved down the hill, toward the parking lot. A few startled residents who have noticed the police car are standing around watching our progress. I spread my free hand uselessly over my face. One of the men behind me steps forward now to open the rear door of the car and the sandy-haired man guides me in and seats himself to my right. The door closes. The sandy-haired man turns toward me. “You have the right to legal counsel. We’ll go over all that when we get to the station.” We have pulled out of the driveway now, are navigating the winding roads that lead down from the hill the abbey perches upon into the valley below.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

  The man to the left of me turns his head and shoots a look across at his partner. The sandy-haired man remains impassive. “You waive the right to an attorney?” he asks evenly.

  “Will I get to see him?” I ask.

  The man’s eyes narrow. “See who?”

  “Patrick. Will he be brought in to see me, to identify me? If I’m charged with anything, will he appear in the courtroom?”