Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by B. G. Firmani

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Cover photograph © Eli Fendelman / 500px

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Firmani, B. G., author.

  Title: Time’s a thief / by B. G. Firmani.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016021705 (print) | LCCN 2016029862 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385541862 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385541879 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women college students—Fiction. | Female friendship—Fiction. | Dysfunctional families—Fiction. | Life change events—Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. | Psychological fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3606.I736 T56 2017 (print) | LCC PS3606.I736 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016021705

  Ebook ISBN 9780385541879

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part III

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This is for Damian

  What will remain of us is cities and songs.

  —Jane Jacobs, in conversation

  Part I

  1

  Kendrick Löwenstein.

  I’d heard her name for almost a whole semester before I ever saw her. I was taking a philosophy class, a terrible class actually, with a student-hating, prehistoric professor who never gave lectures or “unpacked” anything but instead read aloud to us for the entire hour, as if we’d gathered there for a bedtime story. To eat up some time before turning to his disintegrating notebook and intoning his notes on Epictetus—notes unchanged, was the word on the street, since the time of the ’68 student protests, when a few subversive asides crept in, among them an oblique reference to the world actually having ended in 1908 due to the Tunguska Meteor Event—he would call the roll. There were certain people who never showed up, and on these he would hang, repeating their names over and over again, a dull needle stuck in a bad groove.

  Kendrick Löwenstein, he would read. Getting no response, he would repeat: Kendrick Löwenstein. He’d look up, squinting his eyes under caterpillar eyebrows. Kendrick Löwenstein! he would demand, warning her that she risked giving offense and commanding her to appear. Kendrick Löwenstein? he would say finally, wistfully, lingering over the name as if he were a lover and she the one who got away.

  I remember very clearly the first time I finally saw her.

  It was about four in the morning, just after bar time, and I was trucking up Broadway with my motorcycle jacket stuffed with packs of Marlboros and a six of $2.99 Knickerbocker beer under my arm. I’m not even sure where I was going. Probably I’d been hanging out with Trina, Audrey, and Fang-Hua and I’d volunteered to do the beer-and-cigarette run, or I’d been at a bar and I was out looking to prolong the mischief, but who can remember so many years down the line? Anyway, right there on the corner of Broadway and 116th was this girl. And she looked so dramatic, so absurdly exaggerated, that I almost laughed out loud. It was freezing cold, but the top of her coat was pulled down, swathed around her freakishly pale, almost alien-white shoulders, and held closed over her breastbone with one long-fingered hand. Worn like this it took on the aspect of an opera cape, or some last shred of grandeur clung to, literally, by deposed royalty. With her other hand she held by the corner an enormous clutch purse, which was covered in some kind of ancient linsey-woolsey needlepoint fabric and which sagged with (I’d learn only later) masses and masses of stolen dexies. I remember thinking she had a kind of arrogant, indolent lower lip, and I got the feeling she had just left some louche company. She was like a tragic heroine, worse for the wear—glamorous, haggard, in extremis—and she was made up like a silent movie star. Except that she had electric-blue hair.

  There was something to this. The thing of it was, she was a mess, standing there with her lips parted, smudge-lidded and surprised at herself, with her sulky and offended face. But I knew from experience how much discipline it took to have blue hair. Green hair, we all knew, was easy. It was what you got when you tried to dye your hair blue. You’d bleach and bleach your brains out, but it was never enough, so your hair would go a crazy straw yellow. Then you’d slather on the Manic Panic blue dye and get…green hair. You had to have real patience, real technique, to have blue hair.

  And so, looking at this girl standing on the corner of 116th and Broadway at 4:12 a.m. on a cold winter night in the late 1980s, I thought, Here’s a girl who, all evidence to the contrary, has a backup plan.

  “Got a light?” was the first thing she said to me.

  Of course I had a light. I was born with a Zippo in my hand.

  I lit her cigarette for her—it was almost the same blue as her hair, with a long gold filter, a Nat Sherman Fantasia, I would learn—and when it was clear she was going nowhere, I put down the six-pack, took out my own cigarettes, and lit one. It felt wrong to leave her standing there on the corner. I was still holding the lighter when she took it out of my hand.

  “Cool,” she said, turning it over and over and looking at it. “Why’d you paint it black?”

  “They made them like that during World War Two. To save the brass. And you could light up in the trenches and the metal wouldn’t reflect the light.”

  She flicked it open, lit the flame, snapped it shut.

  “Can I have it?” she said.

  I laughed.

  “Um, no?” I said.

  “Oh, come on, can’t I have it?” she said. She was holding it up in front of her face, clicking it open, flicking the flame, snapping it shut again and again. I realized with this that she was a rich kid. Because middle-class people, let alone working-class, don’t go around expecting stuff for free. I grabbed the lighter back on the last snap.

  “It was my dad’s,” I said, putting it in my pocket.

  “Your dad was in World War Two?” she said.

  I said yeah.

  “My dad’s way old too,” she said. “How old’s your dad?”

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  “I wish my dad were dead,” she said. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, threw her head back, and exhaled. She tilted her head down and looked at me fiercely. “Actually, I wish my fucking mother were dead. I could
chuck her down a well.”

  She was…theatrical. But there was also something strangely languid about her, distracted. She threw me off. I would later learn that her parted-lip, surprised look was what her face settled into at rest. I would go on to wonder if this might have had something to do with her having done lots of drugs since the age of eleven.

  She took her hand from her coat and one side slipped down her shoulder, revealing a thin dress, cut ’40s style, rhinestone clips pulling its neckline square. With her heavy-lidded, rounded eyes, her pouting mouth and long neck, she reminded me of a Pontormo Madonna. But without any calm, without any quiet.

  “Aren’t you fucking freezing?” is what I said to her.

  She smiled.

  “Don’t you know,” she said to me, “that crazy people don’t feel the cold?”

  She made no move to pull her coat back up again. She seemed rooted to the spot, smoking her blue cigarette there on the corner by the Chock Full o’Nuts with its perpetually sweating windows. I really was freezing and I had to pee, but I couldn’t leave her there.

  “You just hanging around out here?” I said to her.

  “Yeah, whatever,” she said.

  Then she sang a line from “I’m Waiting for My Man.”

  It seemed like a weirdly public place to be meeting a drug dealer. Then I wondered if she meant something else and she was actually, what, a prostitute? But you really didn’t see a lot of punk-rock prostitutes on the Upper West Side in the 1980s.

  “You live here?” I gestured down 116th Street.

  “Sort of,” she said. “Do you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and pointed. Then I abruptly retracted my hand, because the building I’d pointed to was a dorm.

  She cocked an amused eyebrow at me.

  “You go to Barnard?” she asked.

  I cleared my throat, feeling deeply uncool.

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  She rolled her eyes in a complete 360-degree lunatic circle.

  “So do I,” she said.

  And with this, our pretensions that we were as bad as all that melted into air.

  “I’m Chess,” I said, putting out my hand. “My name is Frances—Francesca Varani, actually. But everyone calls me Chess.”

  “Kendra,” she said, “Kendra Löwenstein.”

  “Damn, girl—you’re Kendrick Löwenstein?” I said. “You better get that shit to class!”

  *

  I should probably back up a moment and talk about what got me thinking of her.

  It was another cold winter, some twenty years later, when I got a piece of news that sent me right back to Kendra and her family. It was a pretty dire time jobwise, and I’d just stumbled into a new gig as a bid writer in a loony little office in the Garment District. The whole sick crew there sort of bears some words, as does where my head was at just about then, age thirty-nine and feeling blindsided by how quickly time was passing.

  The Acme Corporation, as it was called, was a “language services” company that specialized in plucking consecutive interpreters out of the ether and dropping them into grim situations such as family court appearances, determinations of Medicaid fraud, and deportation hearings. As far as I could tell, though, no one in the Acme office did a lick of work. There was a sales guy, Walter, a friendly, mildly defeated fellow who dealt in uncontrollable sighs and who spent most of his days eating sad, crunchy snacks behind the privacy of his workstation divider. There was the team that dispatched the interpreters: a creepy manager (male) and four young and good-looking women, all with long and lustrous hair, as if they’d been hired because they fulfilled a type. The three who did any kind of actual work were constantly quivering with disgust or terror, while the fourth, Nikki, an elaborately lazy yet hot-tempered twentysomething from Staten Island, had the worst trash mouth I’d ever encountered at a job. She had near-screaming conversations with the lecher of a dispatch manager where she’d yell across the office, You answer the fuckin’ phone—my nails are wet!

  I could not believe I had to work in this place. This is no mere flimsy figure of speech: I just could not believe I had to work there. I kept waiting for Allen Funt to pop down through the acoustic tile and say, Just kidding, hon! You can go now! But this was right when the first shocks of the recession were rippling through Manhattan, and no one in the industry I typically freelanced for—architecture—had a crumb to spare. Everywhere around us industries were tanking, and just a month before, my best friend, Trina, had been laid off from a media company where she’d been a photo editor for sixteen years as print media seemed to go the way of the eight-track tape. And my own guy, Fitz, an artist who earned his bread in animation, had been thoroughly unemployed for months, as “outsourcing” and new technology killed off nearly every studio on the East Coast.

  So the prevailing notion was that one was lucky to have a job at all. However, “lucky to have a job” was an idea that, dating back to my first reading of Bartleby the Scrivener as a cringing, glasses-wearing preteen, could only make me want to vomit.

  But! We had rent to pay.

  Fitz and I did have a little bit of savings, and he was getting $342 a week in unemployment, but the idea of blowing through this and having to tap a relative for a loan filled us with deep Catholic shame. Fitz ate himself alive trying to come up with something he could do to earn money, and went around the neighborhood picking up applications at every last Ukrainian grocer and taco shack until we did some basic math and realized that, going by the minimum wage of $7.15, after taxes he’d actually make more on unemployment. Plus, I reminded him—all the while feeling huge discomfort over having become a “reminding” type of woman—the most important thing for him was to get his degree. He’d reenrolled at CUNY, and ditching college again just to fry up buffalo wings on Avenue D seemed criminal. Besides, truth be told, with my many years of schooling and “wide breadth of work experience”—porca miseria!—I was the employable one.

  Anyway, to get back to the story here, I’d got a random call from Acme telling me they’d just lost their bid writer and had something big in the pipeline. Could I come in for an interview?

  I hadn’t spent any real time in the Garment District for years, and getting out of the subway at Penn Station and walking west, I was surprised to pass into the ominous cloud of dinge that hung over the streets, something to do with decades of underpaid labor and the still-lingering scent of Gambino crime family stogies. I passed shops with names like Spandex House, Stretch World, Textile Kingdom, places that sold to the trade, al por mayor, their windows showing endless evidence of the strange trickle-down from haute couture to discount-bin schmatte. I was running early, and I stopped to look at a polka-dot catsuit trimmed with military insignia and then, farther west, a beautifully made portrait of Barack Obama rendered entirely in sequins. More than anything, the vibe of the sweatshop still hung heavy over the terrain, and I got to thinking of my various great-aunts who spent thirty, forty, fifty years hunched over sewing machines on these very streets, trying to sew their way up the fabric of the American Dream.

  I found myself in front of the building, a sooty old workhorse of a place with a retrofitted black-marble lobby dating from the 1980s. The security fellow, a melancholy Gujarati whose strange habits I would come to know well, immediately guessed where I was going, which somehow surprised me.

  Upstairs on Acme’s floor, I picked up the phone, and the man I’d spoken with, Mr. Walker—Acme’s president—said he’d be right out. He’d sounded erratic earlier, voluble and strange, but I had no idea of the real degree of this until I saw the person who greeted me now.

  The first thing I noticed about Mr. Walker was his hair. It was copious, sculptural, and uncommonly blond. The second thing was that his glasses were on upside down. When I looked closer, however, I realized the problem was that they were actually women’s glasses, of the gold-braid-trimmed, peekaboo-stem variety. This idea was confirmed later, when I met his wife, Tootsie, who had exactly the same pair.
>
  Besides the glasses, Mr. Walker wore a wrinkled dress shirt, buttoned crookedly in sight-gag fashion, and, one could not help but notice, overly tight trousers. He was lean and fit, with oddly bright eyes—cokehead, I thought—and he told me to call him, in all seriousness, Dee-Dee. He talked a mile a minute in a constant yammer, asking and answering his own questions: So did you get here all right, of course you got here all right, you’re here aren’t you, you want a coffee, sure you want a coffee, it’s free, I mean—who doesn’t like something free?

  By now he’d taken me into his office and closed the door.

  He told me they’d just got in a big Request for Proposal and unfortunately their bid writer, Mrs. Churtie-Matz, had been afflicted with a persecutory delusional disorder and split the scene. Bad news for them, because this proposal was due right after the holidays and there was plenty to be done on it. All this time as I listened to him yammer I was trying not to react to his oddly filthy play-grown-up office (cracked vinyl Chesterfield sofa, Wayne Gretzky inspirational poster, orange carpeting covered in violent burn marks) or to his ludicrous hair and overall hophead manner. But I guess I passed some test, because in a moment he asked me to meet his second-in-command, Petey, as well as Cissy, the ops manager, and Will, the “money guy.”

  All three spilled into his office immediately, as if they’d had their ears pressed to the door. Petey appeared at once paranoid and anesthetized and had the staring-into-the-abyss look of a late-career Francis Bacon, while Will seemed like some worried bear with a WTF look on his face (later I’d learn that he was amazed that anyone who had gone to “fancy schools” would want to work “in a dump like this”—even though, not to put too fine a point on it, I did not want to work there). Cissy freaked me out because of the mean, witchy cast she had to her face, not to mention her totally crazy-looking, seemingly Halloween-themed dye job. I thought maybe her scowl signified that she was always shunted aside as an older woman in this world of men, so I was careful to acknowledge her and greet her especially, at which point she smiled, and the witchy aspect disappeared entirely.