by Tom Molloy
He raised his head, the tiny blade pinched between his thumb and forefinger, somehow menacing as his voice began to rise.
“Ya know how he got half this town? He got half of this fucken town by starting with a vacant lot and selling that for a shipment of wool waste, and then sold that for scrap metal. He bought a house, then another house, then another house, and anybody didn’t pay their rent, my grandfather, that great man, threw them right the fuck out onto the fucken street, the colder the better, that’s what a great man my grandfather was.”
Trapped between his fingers and the hard wood of the table, the blue razor blade bent so that the reflections of the light bulb, and our faces, were stretched thin along the length of the blue polished steel.
“And at 83, just one day short of 84, that sainted man wandered down an alley in dear Chelsea and fell between a dumpster and one of his own buildings, and proceeded to rot right alongside the garbage of his Spanish tenants, although as he himself liked to say, ‘What part of Spain they are from we do not know.’ He lay there for two days and two nights until two little boys, two little uncircumcised Roman Catholic pricks named Morrisey and Angelino, found the body.”
Deftly he plowed the powder into a triangle, then a long pleasant curving line.
“And do you know what those little Catholic cherubs said to officer Peter Nolan, Chelsea P.D. as that great man was being loaded into the wagon?”
“What did they say?”
He laid the razor down and whispered.
“‘Mister policeman, do we get a reward?’”
Above, the ceiling creaked beneath the shifting weight of the crowd. David sat, his head bowed, the sweat on his flesh seeming to evaporate as I watched, his hand absently tracing a cross in the white powder. “You understand these things. But of course you are descended from a noble race. The Celts. Loyal, fierce, despairing, and absolutely unforgiving; the latter a trait, I fear, God Himself is rather long on.”
Lifting his gaze, he blinked at the room, and continued in a gentle voice.
“Come along, lad, let us see the sights that must be seen.”
I went first up the stairs, ascending into the smoke and noise and the inquisitive looks of some of the patrons. We left the bar through the back door. David’s mood suddenly lifted as he skipped down the wooden stairs and onto the cobblestoned street.
The cold seized me, so that my breath came shallow and rapid, but David strode forward. We entered a darkened warehouse that was mercifully warmer, and in the dizzying blue-black darkness I followed his booming voice.
“Step lively, lad, step lively.”
We went upstairs. I stumbled several times, leaning heavily against the wall, for there was no railing. We went on in darkness to a second level of the warehouse. He stopped, and as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see his right arm raised, calling for me to be still.
Softly he said, “One of my buildings. I have 51, thanks to my sainted grandfather. I buy and sell them as you once played Monopoly. The difference being, I always win the game.”
We went across the dry expanse of the room, to a narrow corridor that turned into an enclosed catwalk connecting to the next building. We crossed, David pushing hard against a metal bar that opened the kelly green door of the new building.
Now we were in an empty wood-scented room, as dim as, but even larger than, the one we had just left. I could see large canvasses on the wall, and abstract sculptures were stationed in the open space like the tiny, desperate trees that clutch the inlets of Maine.
The only light came from two night-lights plugged into the wall at ankle height. As I followed David past them, I saw that the plastic cover of each had been molded into the face of a woman, her finger raised to her lips, calling for silence.
Suddenly David disappeared into a side hallway, and as I caught up to him, I could see at the end of the hall a thin bar of light clearly defining the borders of a closed door. As we drew closer, the heavy fragrance of scented candles and incense clung to the wooden walls.
Drawing staccato bursts of air into both nostrils, David advanced upon the door. Halting before it, he again sniffed at the darkness; then rapped twice on the door with his knuckles.
“Are we decent? Are we being good girls?”
A woman’s voice answered, deep and sure.
“Fuck you, David. Fuck you and the horse you came in on!”
Deftly, with one hand, like a detective in the movies, David snapped a credit card from his back pocket, and sliding it into the door jamb, snapped open the interior lock. He opened it with a gentle nudge of his foot.
From the bed, two naked women stared at him, the brunette on the right furious, the smaller auburn-haired woman on the left, seemingly thrilled. As he spoke, I stepped into the room to the left and slightly behind him.
“Horse? Dear woman, the stork brought me. Or did you think our being here was accomplished by something as vulgar as a man fucking a woman?”
Two plumes of smoke whooshed from the brunette’s nostrils, expanding and rolling the length of the sheet.
“Fuck you, David.”
He puts both hands to his ears.
“Oh, there’s that awful F word again! You know how it upsets me!”
He made a slight turn in my direction. “Now ladies, may I introduce …”
Snapping back the covers, the brunette cut him short as she came out of the bed, her back to us, and stood. She walked slowly, deliberately, to where her bathrobe was draped over a radiator. As she moved with controlled fury, I noticed her body, at least the back of it, was without a single imperfection.
With the robe on she turned to face us, the cigarette clinging to her lower lip. She seemed about to speak, but then shrank back against the metal radiator, glaring at David. In the bed, the face of the other woman was brimming with delight. Shorter, fuller, sexier than the brunette, she was riding her sexuality with the careless aplomb of a skilled surfer on a growing wave. She caught David’s gaze and held it, making the other angrier, and David spoke only to the woman in the bed.
“As I was saying, this man is an artist, of exactly what art form I am unsure, but as someone, no doubt a hebe, once said, ‘I know one when I see one.’”
I introduced myself to the woman in the bed who beckoned me close and clasped my hand with a cool, firm grip. David introduced the brunette to me, and she didn’t so much as nod. I told her I thought the room was lovely, which added a tinge of moroseness to her rage. I looked again about the room and thought that it really was quite pleasant.
Drifting in and out of focus with the waxy ebb and flow of the candles, the paintings were truly beautiful. They lined the walls, wide and sure, barely a foot from the floor, all of them depicting the same woman in nude repose, the same auburn-haired woman I had just introduced myself to.
Like mirrors, the paintings reflected her, each canvas a frozen moment of her, as she rolled over in the bed, the last canvas beside the first, nearly identical but for the locks of hair let loose by the movements of the painted figure.
David struck the match that lit the marijuana cigarette on his lips. He took a luxuriant drag of smoke, and with the cigarette behind his back, walked the wide wooden floor planks like an old sea captain as he spoke.
“An artist was giving an exhibition of his paintings in Boston, and a lady from Beacon Hill said to him, ‘I like your work, but what are you trying to say?’ And he said, ‘Lady, if I could say it do you think I’d bother painting it?’”
At that, even the brunette smiled, the expression testing and fleeing her face like a nervous sparrow from a branch. But then she looked closely at David and her features froze.
“Don’t you ever take off that beanie?”
He touched the yarmulke lightly with one hand.
“I wear it in God’s presence. And what gives greater glory to God than the body of a beautiful woman?”
The auburn-haired girl stood up, holding the sheets over herself so that only a small bit
of her shoulders was exposed.
“Oh, do you really think so?”
He proffered the marijuana to her.
“Most assuredly, my little Episcopalian flower. Most assuredly.”
She turned to me. “Do you agree?”
I glanced at the others, then at the long, low row of paintings. Looking back at her I could not form any words, and I nodded without speaking.
With one hand she pulled on the sheet so that it slid lower around her shoulders. Grasping it tight like an evening gown, she looked at the brunette and then let the sheet fall in a pile of shrinking white silence around her feet. We all stared.
“Then it’s unanimous,” she said, “and that makes me happy.” She looked at all of us.
“’Cause I’m a Libra, and Libras like harmony and having everyone get along.”
Both women regarded him with curiosity as David moved toward the woman on the bed, the marijuana smoke twisting in his wake, like the incense of ancient ceremony. She seemed to stop breathing as he stood before her.
Slowly his hand reached out for her and their eyes locked, then he lifted her hand and gently kissed it, letting it fall back against her thigh. Then he turned to me.
“Come, lad.”
That was all he said and I followed him from the room. Walking faster, we passed through the dim expanse of the building, down a flight of old, dry, complaining stairs, and down to the street. He walked rapidly right to the water’s edge before speaking.
“I was afraid of her.”
He turned to test my expression before continuing.
“They have such power.”
“I know.”
He nodded once, his eyes on the water, its ebony surface still, its anticipatory grip making me step back just as he spoke again.
“Truly they do. Truly they do.”
Like some sort of child’s toy, the air horn of a truck sounded on the distant bridge, but the fog hid the vehicle.
David went on, “It takes a man …” He corrected himself and continued. “It should take a man years to appreciate their power, their world, their great, oh my dear friend, the great depth of their sexuality. Far greater than our own, far, far greater, and ever so complex. I do truly, truly I say, believe they wander in that sexual world, that deep sexual world, and we can only sit and imagine.”
I heard the screech of rubber on asphalt as somewhere beyond the buildings an automobile roared in acceleration, and I heard the banging gears fade in the ever growing distance. David was looking at me as he spoke.
“So tell me,” he gestured with one hand turning full to face me, “do you think I’m queer?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
At his feet the water lapped the stones in a nervous, uncertain manner, and we both stared at the sound. No other noise came from the harbor, no machine moved. It was as though we were inside a vast, foggy hall while the drizzle began to cling and make itself felt, but then it may have been clinging to us all along.
The drizzle was on everything, it was a thin sheen even on the fog itself when he spoke.
“Why did you come here?” I simply said, “I’m here.”
Silent, frantic, permeating, the drizzle moved within the fog and he stared at me for long seconds, before glancing again at the water that flowed between us and Boston.
As we walked back toward the bar I hummed a sea chanty about a young boy on his first fishing trip along the shoals of the Irish Coast.
Again we went through the bar, and David checked the register and locked the door of the basement. He picked up a motorcycle helmet and we went outside again. David carried the black helmet as though it were a great weight, and as he slid onto his motorcycle he held the glistening helmet up with both hands and said no Jew should be without one.
With a phlegmatic mutter, the machine came to life and its amber lights were beautiful in the fog. He didn’t wave and the street held the machine’s sounds long after he had vanished.
I walked on, making sure my instruments were properly protected and dry before stopping in the pale light of an all night coffee shop. Inside was a man with Tourette’s Syndrome, gyrating within his baggy clothes, his coffee placid and cooling before him. On the wooden façade that would track the path of tomorrow’s sun, I carefully traced the message I had left in Maine.
BEWARE LOVE
12
The previous night we had carried the tree lengthwise between us, she clutching the tip, my bare hands around the base with its sticky sap and fresh wound. Its fragrance was from childhood when the nights were longer, colder, and ever so much darker.
The crowds, the uneven sidewalks, and the pockets of hardened snow made our movements awkward, and we stumbled like soldiers with a wounded comrade; but she was laughing with each step. She said that because we had waited until the last minute and got the tree so cheap the guy probably thought we were Jews.
Near the apartment the crowds thinned, and she held the tree with one hand behind her back and she spoke looking straight ahead.
“My Old Man used to get nice at Christmas. He’d drink like always, but he didn’t hit nobody an’ he used to sing all them old time Christmas songs. The Old Man, he had a great voice, he really did, even Ma used to say that, she’d say ‘He’s got the pipes, ol’ John Thomas does, he’s got the pipes.’”
She switched the tree to her other hand.
“God, did I ever believe in Santa Claus; jeez I guess I was a fanatic or somethin’.”
With one hand in her pocket she continued.
“I got one brother still alive, that’s all the family I got left. But me an’ him was never close. I had another brother, Bobby, but he got killed in a car crash, him an’ his dog together. He loved that old dog, can ya imagine? The brother I got left, he’s way out to the west coast. I don’t know how they can be happy at Christmas if it ain’t even cold or snowin’ or nothin’.”
We raised the tree and adorned it with ornaments and a single strand of green and red lights she kept stored wrapped in white paper inside a long wooden box. Afterwards, we sat on the floor with the lights dimmed and drank a single glass of wine each.
Framed by the glass window, the new snow took on a bluish hue. We had agreed there would not be an exchange of gifts between us, but instead, we would try to be thoughtful, one of the other, for as long as we knew each other. She had insisted that we shake hands and cross our hearts to seal the agreement.
Christmas Day arrived within a metallic gray sky that deepened to pale blue as it embraced the frozen ground and the ice-covered river that ran through the city.
When my eyes opened she was sitting on the floor beside me, a red Christmas hat with a white tassel on her head.
“What am I?”
“An elf.”
“Who do I work for?”
“Santa.” She smiled and pulled a candy cane from the pocket of her housecoat and stuck it in my mouth.
“Give the man a Kewpie doll.”
I fell back into the sleeping bag.
“Time?”
“Five-thirty.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Watch your language, it’s Christmas.”
I lay for about a minute sliding back into sleep when she pulled my left eyelid open with the edge of her thumb.
“Gonna call your wife today?”
“No.”
“Just checkin’.”
As sleep came I could hear her singing Christmas carols in a beautiful voice. She sang Silent Night in flawless German and Adeste Fidelis in Latin, using the pronunciation of the Roman Church.
When I awoke, the sunlight was a cold yellow smudge on the glass of the window as the heat in the pipes and hollows of the house rose from below, passed upward and vanished.
The woman had left and I went out onto the back porch where the snow had worked into the porch screen so that the thin metal seemed as if it would break if a single finger touched it.
The day had too many me
mories that were an effort to keep at bay, and I decided on a run around the frozen Charles River. The distance was five miles with not another soul present, and that seemed to please the ghosts, who stopped their whispers. I prayed as I ran for my parents, for my wife and little boy, and for the young men dead in battle with the second hands of their expensive watches sweeping on and on. I prayed my country would find its way.
Afterward I bought a bar of chocolate at a little store that was open despite the day. Breaking the candy into pieces I placed them on a metal tray in Frances’ parlor.
I was lost in a book when she came through the door, cheeks flushed, a wide smile on her face. The cold wafted around her as she pulled a light blue hat off her head.
“I woke the turkey up!”
“What turkey?”
“My brother out on the Coast. It was even earlier out there than here; it’s the time in the mountains or somethin’. Anyway, I woke him up an’ told him I loved him, an’ guess what?”
“What?”
“He said he loved me too and then we both cried!”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah, ’cept it cost me about a million bucks in quarters, but what the hell, next time I’ll call collect, but what the hell.”
She stiffened as though someone had poked her.
“Hey, ya know I could go out there sometime.”
“Sure could.”
“Or he could come back here.”
“Another solid option.”
“I could even like fly out for a couple of days.”
“Why not?” She broke into another wide grin.
“This is a nice Christmas.”
While she hung up her coat I started to make coffee and told her about the chocolates. When she spoke again her words were muffled by the handful of candy in her mouth.
“He said he never thought I liked him! Can ya imagine? The turkey. I always thought he didn’t like me. ’Course that’s different, I’m a girl, anyway we got that straightened out.”
One by one she touched the tips of five fingers to her lips.
“Jeez I ain’t had chocolate in a dog’s age.”
Lifting another handful of candy she spoke, her words again struggling through the sweets.