by Dale Peck
“Sonny don’t like it. People on his blind side.”
He reached up and, in a practiced gesture, adjusted the rearview mirror so Sonny could see my face without crimping his neck.
“I been watching you,” Sonny said now, his voice not threatening, but ruminative, contrite even. “I’ve had a lotta time on my hands these past few months and I seen you come and go a hundred times. You keep weird hours, you know that. You wear weird clothes and you keep weird hours. Your ma used to keep weird hours too. Used to go for a walk in the middle of the night, this before the mayor cleaned up the city, made it okay for a woman to do that. She used to say she could hear the empty buildings talking in their sleep. ‘Talking their dreams.’ She was crazy, your ma, but, you know, I think I understand what she meant. Took me twenty years, but I finally know what the hell she was talking about.”
I had to swallow before I could speak.
“What were they—what did she say they were dreaming?”
“She said they was dreaming us.”
“Dreaming about—”
Sonny found my eye in the rearview mirror. “Not dreaming about us. Dreaming us. Dreaming us up.” He stopped then. His eye had relaxed as he’d spoken, but now it focused again. “I want you to listen to me, James. Listen to what your ma told me. Your ma told me it was only when she was walking around the city late at night that she understood it was the people who did what the city wanted. You see what I’m saying, James? What she was saying? She said the people didn’t build the city, the city built the people. For a long time I used to think that was just another one-a Ginny’s peculiarities but after everything that’s gone down I think I understand what she was talking about. New York ain’t about you and me, James. It ain’t about these buildings, or all the money that’s made inside them. New York is about itself. You get my drift, James? You understand what I’m saying? James,” Sonny said, “if I don’t get No. 1 someone else will. Either the government or some developer, but the city will not be ignored.”
As if on cue, a horn broke the silence—the city’s silence, I mean. A car had turned the corner behind us and even as the potatoey man said, “Yeah, yeah, buddy, hold your fucking horses,” he dropped the van in gear and we lurched up the street. Not fast enough apparently: the car squealed past us and the potatoey man—Joey, I reminded myself—flipped the driver off as it went by. “Fuck you too, sweetheart.”
But I was still looking at Sonny in the mirror, and as soon as it was quiet I said, “Is that why she left?”
In the mirror Sonny smiled, as if I’d made his point for him. “She said she’d stopped sharing in the dream. Said once you did that there wasn’t no point in hanging out in something that was basically just a sculpture.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant, is that why she left me?”
“You mean—”
“Did the city call her? Is that why she abandoned me?”
“Did the city call her?” Sonny cleared his throat. “Huh.” He thought about it, shrugged. “Truth be told, she didn’t talk about you very much. But she did say this one thing. She said—”
“It would have been worse if I stayed.”
Sonny’s eyes met mine—both of them, I mean, both of his. You could see from the way his eyebrows and cheek muscles moved that whatever was left under the patch still turned in sync with his uncovered right eye.
“If she stayed,” he clarified, and I nodded at him in the mirror and he nodded back. Before either of us could say anything more I felt the van stop, and both Sonny and I turned to look at Joey as he dropped it out of gear. We were back on Dutch Street.
On my right The Garden’s ochre lights emanated weakly through the windows, on my left was the building across from No. 1, as faceless then as it is in my memory now. Was New York really that small, I asked myself, just five or six pages long?
The van idled in front of No. 1, and I idled too, but neither Sonny Dinadio nor Joey said anything, and I understood it was my turn to speak. It took me a long time to decide what to say.
“I need money.”
Sonny and Joey remained silent for a long time.
“I got money,” Sonny said finally. “Joey, give the man some money.”
In an action that seemed to defy the laws of physics, Joey extracted a wallet from the front pocket of his pants and pulled several bills from it. I took them from him, put them in the pocket of the pirate suit, but still, I didn’t think I could just get out without saying something, so I said,
“Can I go now?”
As soon as I said it I realized I wasn’t sure if it was the van I wanted to get out of, or No. 1, or the city itself. I’d spent five months in a basement, after all, waiting for Claudia to reveal herself. I was angry and wracked by guilt and so fucking hungry I wanted to eat myself, and whatever time I had left was wasting away, literally. Why shouldn’t I take the money and run? But nobody answered me, and I slid the door open, climbed out, slid it closed. As it rattled into place the 9/11 decal quivered, and I realized Sonny hadn’t actually stuck it to his window, only taped it in place.
In the time it had taken me to get out of the van Sonny had rolled down his window, and his left hand, his blind hand, held a thick envelope through the open portal. He held it without looking at me, and in the mixture of arrogance and shame in his gesture I saw two things. I saw first the way he’d pressed Nellydean’s hand to the counter the day I met Claudia, and then, just as clearly, I saw the way my mother had left him. The why: why she might’ve been attracted to such strength, and why that attraction, like Sonny’s strength, would have failed. In the time it took me to think these thoughts I’d taken the envelope and Sonny had rolled up his window, and by the time I made it upstairs and looked outside the van was gone. I stared at Dutch Street, half expecting to see him reappear and demand an answer. Or maybe I was looking for Justine. It felt as though those were the fates I was being asked to choose between: an opportunistic self-justifying thug on the one hand or, on the other, a crazy drag queen who ran away from the world by making one up inside her head. But for the moment they were both absent, and that night all I did was put the envelope Sonny had given me on my dresser and, fully clothed, climb into bed. At twenty-two I still hadn’t mastered eating, but sleeping I could do like nobody’s business.
THE NEXT MORNING I waited for claudia to knock on my door as she had every morning for the past five months, but she never came. Sonny’s envelope sat on my dresser, a white rectangle that seemed to stare at me even when I left the room to take a bath. It was still staring at me when I walked back into the room, naked and shivering, carrying the clean dry bundle of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothes. By then it was pretty clear Claudia wasn’t coming and, still conscious of the envelope and everything that might be contained within it, I tossed the clean laundry on the bed, threw on yesterday’s dirty clothes instead, snuck out of the building.
The sun was bright but the streets were cold, and I walked as quickly as I could in a vain effort to stay warm. That was the day I came across the plaque at 35 W. 9th Street (Marianne Moore lived here) and when, a little while later, I came to a used bookstore, I went inside. They had a Complete Poems, and I took it to a leather chair whose cushion squeaked like a murdered mouse when I sat down. As I cracked the cover I froze, remembering what had happened the last time I’d opened a book of poetry, but Moore’s words were more stable than Brooks’. I was just scanning the table of contents when the clerk tapped a round wooden table on which sat a tent-folded card: you don’t have to buy anything but you don’t have to sit here either! The little prick turned around after he was sure I’d read the sign, and behind his back I slipped the book into the hollow flounce of my shirt and walked out of the store.
By the time I got home I was so numb I’d forgotten the book clamped beneath my arm, and when I dug in my pocket for my key it fell to the sidewalk beside me. I stared at it the way the first chicken must have looked at the first egg, wondering where in the hell i
t had come from, then picked it up and made my way upstairs. I’d forgotten the envelope Sonny Dinadio had given me last night, but there it was when I walked in my bedroom, the envelope and five wadded hundred-dollar bills scattered around it. Again I thought of chickens, eggs. An idea came to me, and I turned around and headed back down to the shop. After an hour of searching I found the sword I’d used to hack away the vines from the table where Claudia used to have tea with her brothers—the vines that hadn’t been itch ivy, and hadn’t been HIV, but had made me break out in a rash nonetheless, a rash that only K.’s soothing touch had been able to cool. It was awkward work, trying not to slice my fingers open as I cut the meat from the Complete Poems, but in the end I rendered my stolen book a hollow paper shell. I had to fold the envelope in half to make it fit in the place I’d carved for it, and then I slotted the book in with all those other books I’d stolen from all those other bookstores and libraries over the years. When I turned from the shelf, though, I saw the shorn pages scattered over the floor. My first impulse was to eat them as I’d once eaten grass, but like any good pirate I felt I had to leave a clue behind. Because it’s not buried treasure, after all, unless someone’s looking for it. It’s just buried.
I opened the window, looked up to Fulton, down toward John. When I was convinced Dutch Street was empty I hurled the 152 sheets of paper in the air, and even as I watched them flutter down to the Belgian blocks I thought of the last time paper had showered down on these streets, a true library of the dead. I heard a throat clear behind me then, followed by a quiet knock.
I whirled around. Claudia stood in my bedroom doorway. I noticed two things: first, that she was carrying a large suitcase, and second, that she had somehow managed to squeeze herself into the silver dress she’d been wearing the day I met her. At first I thought she was moving out, and a bolt of fear shook me so hard I almost fell out of the window with the pages I’d just dumped onto Dutch Street.
Claudia must have seen some sign on my face, because she smiled suddenly and, straining mightily, hoisted the suitcase over my threshold.
“Oof,” she said as it stirred up a cloud of dust from the floor. “Room 42.”
I swallowed my heart out of my throat. “Or forty-one,” I said. “Or forty.”
Claudia puzzled through the arithmetic as I walked over to her, tested the suitcase’s weight, set it down again.
“Recovered from The Garden of Lost and Found?”
Claudia laughed. “In a manner of speaking. Endean gave it to me.” She let her voice trail off. Then: “I hope I’m not being presumptuous.”
I looked at the suitcase, then back at Claudia. Suddenly it hit me. “Oh my God! Do you need me to take you to the hospital?”
Claudia jumped back at the force of my tone. Inside the straining confines of her dress, everything shook and shivered, and I thought it might rip open at the seams. “Yes! I mean, no. I mean, not right now. I’ve got another month or so. I just meant, when the time comes.”
“Oh. Oh, of course.” I picked up the suitcase. Room 42, or 41, or 40: it was every bit as heavy as Claudia’s strained face had made it out to be, and I almost had to drag it to the corner by the bookcase with its recent, hollow addition.
“It’s just that, I mean, there’s Nellydean, and…” I broke off. Then, perhaps because there were no more walls to tap, I decided to poke at Claudia instead. “And Reggie. And your father.”
“Oh please, cease with the roll call of ignominy. When I’m screaming for the epidural I want someone there who gets me.” She waved a hand. “I thought yesterday was laundry day, right? Isn’t it time you got out of the pirate suit?”
I just stared at her until I realized she was actually asking me to change. I remembered how she’d dropped her dress in front of me that first day and, shrugging, started to undress. The pirate suit, never washed, was scratchy, stiff; even after I stepped out of the pants they stood at half mast for a moment before falling to the floor.
“So what’s with the dress?” I said as I reached for Johnson Montgomery Croft’s pants. “Going out?”
I could feel her eyes boring into me as I stepped into the pants. Both of my legs would have fit into one of the pant legs with room to spare, and in my haste to cover myself I tripped, nearly fell. But all Claudia said was,
“There’s more to this city than a cold and moldy basement, you know.”
I reached for the shirt. “I get out plenty often.”
Claudia snorted. “The apartment of someone who calls himself ClobberU isn’t the kind of culturally edifying experience I had in mind. Don’t play dumb, you left his address on your desktop.”
“Claudia—”
“Jamie, please. This is going to be hard enough. And besides, you’ve never heard Reggie sing.”
Suddenly I understood: she was going to tell him.
I reached for the vest, stepped into the sandals. “I heard him hum once.”
Claudia stared at my feet. “Don’t you have any other shoes?”
I looked at hers. Divine’s old shoes had to stretch to contain her swollen feet almost as much as the dress had to stretch to contain the new Divine growing in her stomach.
“Don’t you?”
Claudia looked down. “I haven’t been able to see my feet for the past six weeks.” She laughed slightly. “He goes on in an hour. At least put on a pair of goddamn socks.”
By the time we got out of the Number 9 at 116th and Broadway she was practically giddy. The club was just a few blocks east, but we took a cab rather than walk. “Girl may be knocked-up but she got to arrive in style. Can’t be looking like no subway-taking-too-poor-for-a-cab-ride street trash.”
As our cab moved slowly up Broadway Claudia peered out the window at the people on the sidewalk, students mostly, the stiff, square buildings of their schools ascending both sides of the street: Manhattan School of Music, Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia, Barnard, Horace Mann.
“Here’s something,” she said. “Consider it my burnt offering for the evening. A little story, like the ones you told me in the basement when I wasn’t feeling so hot.”
She paused, then began. “I used to come here, not so long ago. Oh well, maybe it was so long ago. Before Reggie at any rate, which means at least seven years. Eight? Jesus, I don’t even know anymore. I used to wander over here and hang out for a few hours, check out the bookstores and those guys on the sidewalk pushing their used magazines and the one dumb-ass hippie chick who’d always be hanging out in front of Tom’s Diner wearing her fake sixties-like-ish-esque print skirt and singing that song. Okay, okay,” she said as if I’d protested, “why dress it up? I came here to troll for college boys. Eighteen-year-old white kids from Minnesota or Massa-two-shits who thought fucking a real live black girl in her Harlem apartment—cause I’ll tell you one thing, Jamie, I refused to have sex in a dorm room—was like something outta Spike Lee. Jungle fever, baby. Put your lips on mama right here and don’t be telling me Susie and Janie back home have titties like these.” She grabbed them through her dress, and even she seemed surprised at their milk-filled heft. “Oh, Jamie,” she went on, “those were the days! Not once but twice did I make a poor boy come in his pants. The first was this kid in a pair of Umbros, I called him the Soccer Player. He had seven zits on his forehead like the Big Dipper, and he ended up slinking off with his tail between his legs and a wet spot on the front of those shiny blue shorts. But the second kid was this freckle-faced redhead who practically fell on his knees in his eagerness to make up for his little accident. I was worried about his braces at first, but they added an entirely new and pleasurable sensation, and as it turned out his recovery time was amazing. He certainly earned his gold star. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,” Claudia wound up as we stopped in front of a line of well-dressed people shivering on the wrong side of a velvet rope. “What were we looking for in that basement, when there are so many miracles in the real world?” She laughed, and without giving me a chance to answer
she pushed open the door of the cab and said, “Now pay the man, would you?”
Claudia’s generosity was catching: I gave the driver one of Sonny Dinadio’s hundred-dollar bills. “Keep the change.”
Kisses awaited her at the bottom of a long narrow flight of stairs: the cashier, who took them instead of money, a couple of waitresses, the bartender. Claudia made a show of introducing me to her friends. “This is James,” she said, then “This is Jamie,” then just “This is J.” Music was playing over the speakers, something female and just a little bit down and dirty, and Claudia had to raise her voice to pierce the noise.
“This is J.! He a friend-a mine!”
The bartender took the time to wink at me, then spoke to Claudia in a voice so quiet she had to turn her ear toward his mouth to hear. As he spoke he mixed a cocktail, and after a few seconds of conversation Claudia burst into giggles, at which point the bartender handed her the glass and turned my way.
“What can I get you, my man?”
“Um, a beer?”
He reached beneath the bar and pulled out a green bottle.
“On the house.”
I nodded, turned to follow Claudia, but she stopped me.
“You tip the man?”
“He said it was on the house.”
Claudia rolled her eyes. “A word of advice. Unless you’re fucking the bartender, always leave him a tip.”
“But you—”
“J.,” Claudia cut me off with a smile. She grabbed one of her breasts through her dress as she had in the cab. “Collateral. Remember?”
I just nodded, turned, put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar, then Claudia took my hand and led us toward the front of the small room. I let myself be led, conscious of more than a few looks from the people we passed, although I wasn’t sure if they were looking at Claudia, or Claudia’s belly, or me, or me and Claudia’s belly. She stopped at a small circular table up close to the stage. There was a Reserved sign on the table, a small drum kit and battered upright piano on the stage. Claudia sat me down and set her glass on the table.