by Dale Peck
© 2012 Dale Peck.
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First printing 2012.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Front cover painting by Hayley McCulloch.
Printed by BookMobile, USA, and CPI, UK.
The US printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship Council-certified, 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100% wind-powered.
paperback ISBN: 978-1-935928-59-1
ebook ISBN: 978-1-935928-60-7
It is my great pleasure to offer this book,
more than twenty years after the fact,
to La Tasha Harris.
•
N.B.: the watch is Brian Pera’s
but everything else belongs to Paul.
Except the key. The key was mine first.
Story Problems
The man with the van was called Kevin From Heaven, and he charged extra for driving all the way up to Harlem. He was stocky and hirsute, a ruff of fine gray hair sticking out of his T-shirt and cowling his bald head. He said he lived in Jersey himself, yup, heaven was just the other side of the Hudson River, he couldn’t see how anyone besides day traders and dot-commers could afford to live in the city anymore—which showed, more than anything else, how out of touch with New York he really was. The back of his van, where Claudia and I rode, was dry and hot and empty save for several blankets and nested boxes and a few dented beer cans, and whenever the van went over a bump the cans would bounce and rattle and one or the other of us would jump a little, nervously, then try to laugh it off. There were a lot of bumps between Dutch Street and 137th.
As soon as we entered her father’s house Claudia set off down the hall, but Kevin From Heaven lingered in the foyer doorway. “Shee-it,” he drawled theatrically, and a long low wolf whistle gamboled down the hall like a lapdog chasing its mistress. But Kevin From Heaven surprised me with what came out of his mouth next:
“Now this is old New York.”
At any other time, in any other place, Kevin From Heaven would have been whistling at the jiggle of Claudia’s ass beneath the clinging silver fabric of her dress, but faced with a thirty-foot corridor off which opened “two, three, four, five, six doors” (Kevin From Heaven ticked them off on his fingers, although on the last digit he just grabbed his crotch), square footage beat round flesh hands down. The hallway’s baseboard was so scuffed it was practically black and one of the panels in the fanlight between the living and dining rooms was filled with plywood and a leak had puffed out the ceiling in Claudia’s bedroom so that it resembled an oppressively low thundercloud, but nevertheless this was the real deal. This was old New York.
I pretended to help for a few minutes, but Claudia’s method was so haphazard there wasn’t much I could do. She ran from bedroom to closet to bathroom then back to the bedroom, high heels thumping like hammerblows in her haste to beat her father back from his bridge game. Even so, her efforts couldn’t have been more inefficient. She carried one thing at a time to eleven boxes lined up in the hallway, and with each object there was a moment of contemplation as she decided which box to put it in, what belonged with what—as if, like a hostess seating a dinner party, she didn’t want to place two guests together who might not get along.
When, every once in a while, she actually filled a box, Kevin From Heaven or I would carry it down to the van, but this happened so irregularly that soon I ceded the task to him and just wandered from one seventeenth-story window to the next. You could see all the way down to the World Trade Center from the south exposure, all the way across to the Jersey Palisades from the west, while from the east the planes taking off from La Guardia aimed straight for the ten-foot wide oriel in the living room before arcing north or south or simply higher into the sky. The chair from which Claudia’s father took in one or another of these views had a shot cushion augmented with a rump-flat stack of pillows, and beside the chair a copper washtub, green as moss, held a mixed stack of New York Posts and Amsterdam Newses. In the dining room a brownish bit of cutwork sat in the center of a warped round table, in the foyer a Thonet coat tree had been pushed into a corner, as naked and lonely as a hanging skeleton in an anatomy lab. And I mean, sure, it was all a little Miss Havisham, but it was hardly tragic. The person who lived in the midst of this sprawling decay had obviously checked out a long time ago, so it was hard to feel sorry for him. But I could see why Claudia wanted to get the hell out of there.
At some point I found myself loitering in the hallway next to a short bookcase, its white paint tinged yellow like urine left standing in a toilet, its four shelves lined with a couple dozen books. Two of them were Bibles: a decorative volume as big as an unabridged dictionary, a smaller edition bound in zippered red vinyl. The second Bible wasn’t actually shelved in the case but laid atop it, and it was easy to imagine Claudia’s father picking it up on his way to church every Sunday morning and returning it, unopened, to the same spot every Sunday afternoon. There were three or four children’s books, as many cookbooks. An Agatha Christie mystery whose title I didn’t recognize stood next to Martin Luther King’s Why We Can’t Wait and the same Reader’s Digest condensed edition of Nicholas and Alexandra that I read when I was sixteen and living with Aunt Clara in North Dakota. At least half the books had no name on their jacketless spines, and the entire collection was scattered in random groups of twos and threes bookended by memento boxes of plastic or inlaid wood, river stones, paperweights and other relics of an indiscriminately acquisitive life that had petered out twenty or thirty years earlier. Claudia had told me her mother left when she was twelve, a few years before her brothers died; she was thirty-two or thirty-three now, maybe thirty-four. The math didn’t add up perfectly but it didn’t have to: one box, Valentine-shaped, plastic and candy-apple red, declared “You stole the key to my heart!” but when I picked up the container (although I knew it was silly, I wanted to see if my mother's key would fit in the hole drilled through the box's plump center) I could feel that it was in fact empty—that it wasn't just the key to Joseph MacTeer's heart gone missing, but the organ itself. At any rate, my mother's key didn't fit.
I noticed then that the heart-shaped box pinned a single thin volume against the edge of the bookcase: The Complete Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks. When I was in high school—North Dakota, I think, Aunt Clara, or maybe I’d moved on to Lily Windglass by then—I’d read “Boy Breaking Glass.” There was one line I always remembered: If not a…something. If not a note, that was it. If not a note, a hole. I reached for the book then, to read the whole poem, but as I cracked the cover the words surprised me.
They fell off the pages to the floor.
At first I thought it was the dust that furzed the book. But no, there they were on the split grain of the parquet: a little pile of thes and bricks and freedoms and a thousand other words I couldn’t make out. The only writing left in the book was block-printed in faint, fading pencil:
PARKER MacTEER
JULY 31, 1979
The rest of the pages were as bare and white as a new diary’s—or yellow, really, like all the other things that had once been white in this house. A little piddle of urine sunk to the bottom of the bowl, the issue of an old man’
s weakened bladder and his age-old habit of not flushing in the middle of the night so as not to wake the members of a household that had long since moved on.
Just then Claudia came out of her bedroom, fanning her face with a well-worn sheaf of papers folded tightly and giving off the air of a love letter saved and reread many times. I smiled brightly, guiltily, shielding the pile of words with one foot. Claudia smiled blankly at me, thumped down the hall.
In the living room, Kevin From Heaven read a newspaper by the light of a window whose curtain was equal parts lace and dust. A door closed at the end of the hall: Claudia, going into the bathroom. I glanced back at Kevin From Heaven, saw that he was reading The Amsterdam News, his brows knitted together as he looked at his already estranged city through an African-American lens. I knelt down as if to retie my shoelace—never mind that I was wearing sandals. The words hadn’t scattered far, and I was able to gather them up with a few swipes of my hands. How small the stack was: a book’s worth of language fit in one palm like a few dark kernels of rice. I creased the blank book open and poured the words in and slammed the cover, stood it back on the shelf, used the heartless box to prop it closed. I wiped a couple of stray adverbs and articles off my pants, a lone magic, the suffix ible. There, I thought, no one’ll ever open this book again. And if they do, they’ll never connect its incomprehensible jumble of language with me. They’ll just blame Parker, which is apparently what they always did.
A rustle brought my attention back to the apartment. Kevin From Heaven had folded his paper and was looking at me with a slightly nervous, slightly curious expression. I tried to imagine what I looked like to him. My eyes dropped to my hands, but they were their own indictment, each finger thin as a chicken claw, the edges smudged black from scraping dirt off the floor. Kevin From Heaven’s face settled into an expression of unfixed but palpable discomfort, and I was trying to think of something to say when Claudia emerged from the bathroom with a milk crate in her hands.
“That’s it.” She wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead. “We’re done.”
In the time it took me to stand Kevin From Heaven had dropped the newspaper and jumped from his chair as if he too had been caught out. He wiped his own forehead as he took the crate from Claudia but was still looking at me out of the corner of his eye, as if I might try to dump a pile of dust down his shirt if he turned away. “Easiest job I’ve had all week,” he said, hefting the crate in one hand as if to show how light it was, or perhaps just demonstrate the strength of his arm.
We were in the foyer when Claudia suddenly pivoted and clumped back down the hall. Kevin From Heaven frowned as he stared after her retreating form, then looked cautiously at me.
“Women,” he said, in the way that men say “women” to other men.
A wry smile followed this word, half request, half challenge. We'd failed to bond through the medium of “old New York” but perhaps could still find common ground on more straightforwardly masculine turf. I glanced down the hall at Claudia’s ample curves moving up and down in her shiny dress, then down at the stingy flesh that stretched like papier-mâché over my own spindly limbs. A trace of flowery perfume hung in the foyer, under which swirled the rank odor emanating from my own body. I envied Kevin From Heaven then: envied him a view of the world that could envision a union between my flesh and Claudia’s, despite all the obvious arguments against it.
“Women,” I said. And I shook my head.
There was a beat then, then Kevin From Heaven set the milk crate on the floor and we set off after Claudia. Apparently I’d passed his test. But as we passed the bookcase I resisted the urge to look at the thin white volume propped up by the plastic heart, lest its words jump from closed covers and stencil a more explicit accusation across my forehead.
“—my mother’s sewing room,” Claudia was saying when we caught her up. “It’s mostly storage now.” The little room was piled high with boxes, the detritus of her father’s lives as a married and a widowed man. Everywhere dust could settle or seep in it had, and it took us several sneezing minutes before she found what she was looking for: a crib.
Kevin From Heaven looked at me and looked at Claudia then looked more sharply at me, as if shocked to find his earlier assumption confirmed. “Well I’ll be goddamned.”
He pushed the crib toward the foyer like a gurney, and I followed until again Claudia stopped abruptly, this time at a pair of paneled doors. Like the crib, they were mounted on casters, and they creaked angrily when she slid them open, releasing a hot dry smell I was beginning to realize belonged not just to Dutch Street but to all places where pointless memories molder, where nostalgia and self-pity mix to form a gruel as tasteless as overcooked oatmeal. Directly opposite the doorway a wall of shelves was lined with hundreds of vinyl records, 33s and 45s and 78s too, their spines so worn the labels were no longer legible, and on the sagging mantle two urns canted toward each other like medieval towers built on swampy soil, one thick and dull and heavy, lead it looked like, the other light shiny brass.
Halfway to the urns Claudia stopped, turned back to me; hesitated, then reached out, gave the key hanging from my neck a little pull, as though I were a talking doll from whom she was soliciting benediction. You are the prettiest girl in the whole wide world!
“You’re sure this is okay?”
Her words appeared from thin air, as immaterial—unreal—as the ones that had fallen from Parker’s book a few minutes before. I looked down at her hand but saw only my own, still black with dirt from the hallway. I scratched at something I thought was the letter I and it turned out to be a tiny splinter, scratched again and it relinquished its berth like a starship embarking from its hangar into the vastness of space.
“Jamie? Still with me?”
The weight of Claudia's hand on my neck was barely noticeable, yet I felt that with the tiniest of tugs she could jerk me to the floor or, who knows, pull the thin chain right through my neck like piano wire. I loosened her fingers then, lifted the key free, wrapped my fingers around its sharp teeth as if it were Claudia I was shielding, not myself, not my mother's key. Deep breath. Big smile. Then:
“Come on. We've got a treasure hunt—”
“Oh my God.”
The panic and wonder in Claudia's voice: it was my hand that nearly snapped the key from my neck, even as Claudia’s right palm slapped her forehead and her left went, more tenderly, to her stomach, and then she lifted her left hand and looked at the splayed fingers wondrously, as if they were responsible for the miracle of life.
“It just hits me sometimes. I’m going to have a baby.”
An old riddle popped into my head: a train leaves Selden, Kansas traveling east at fifty miles an hour… Claudia's face shone as brightly as a convert’s but her eyes were grim, a mixture of fear and determination. They defied me to say anything—as if there were nothing to say to this most basic of facts. She was going to have a baby. End of story.
“You are,” I affirmed tentatively. Then, more confidently: “You’re going to have a baby.”
Without another word Claudia turned to the urns on the mantle. In front of each was propped an old snapshot, both as curled as the board they sat on, a bitter widower’s spine or his pregnant daughter’s belly, and the hand that had touched that belly and touched my mother's key now touched her lips and reached for the mantle, and with one fingertip she transferred the tiniest of kisses to the premature deaths memorialized there.
“Momma,” she said to the bridal-veiled woman in front of the brass container, “Ellis” to the bright hopeful young face in front of the leaden. Her damp finger removed the film of dust that had covered the faces in the pictures and they stared down at Claudia, heads ringed by tiny shiny penumbras, as if haloed by her touch.
I BLANKED OUT THEN, or blacked out—is it a blackout if you haven’t had anything to drink (or eat for that matter) or taken any drugs? At any rate I was at Dutch Street when I came back to myself. I was sitting in the chair in my bedroom, my fing
ers clutching the key around my neck. But even as I tried to remember how I got there I felt a thump under my feet and immediately knew it was Claudia on the floor beneath me, swabbing a decade’s worth of cobwebs from the ceiling of my mother’s old apartment with a stringheaded mop. Another thump and everything fell into place—the ride downtown, unloading the van, walking to the hardware store to pick up a fresh mophead. The events were vivid in my memory, save for the fact that I saw myself as you do in a dream: from the outside, as a stranger, with no idea what thoughts had passed through my doppelganger’s head.
I glanced at my wrist: Trucker's watch said that it was 4:05. It had just passed noon when we left Claudia’s father’s apartment. I splashed some water on my face, then, like Claudia, spent the rest of the day cleaning, or at least stuffing dirty clothes and books and food tins into closets, shelves, trash bags. More than once I felt Claudia bang the ceiling below me as if we followed a parallel track, one atop the other, an iron filing tugged by an invisible magnet through a sheet of paper. But which of us was the magnet, which the unwitting sliver of metal?
Before I went out for groceries I ran an extension cord down the dumbwaiter to see if the dining room chandelier still worked. Waves of heat floated up the dumbwaiter's shaft but when I tried to wipe the sweat from my eyes it felt as if the air itself held my hand back, and I jerked my arm free. Even as I did so, however, I realized all that had happened was that Trucker's watch had caught on the chain around my neck. I felt the thin links strain against my skin, heard a snp!, saw a metallic flash as my mother's key flew past the glowstick I’d tied to the bottom of the extension cord, and when it hit bottom a thin sound, the sound a mouse might make jumping from one place to another, floated back up at me. Damn thing, I thought. I should let it stay lost.