“I want to understand,” he said. “I want to.”
“If you are serious,” I said, “it will take time.”
“I think I can do this,” he said. “I think we can.”
He came to me. He smelled like sharp citrus and the wind off the Hudson but with the stench of sickness still rising from his chest…and then his mouth was on mine in a kiss so awkward, so maladroit, so lipless and ravening that I can feel it on my lips even now. Even now, so many years later, the sadness of that time pulling me back into the past.
“Things will happen, but tell me you might wait,” he said.
“I might,” I said. “I might.”
*
The next day I was not surprised that he was gone, but I was surprised by the enormity of my grief over his leaving.
I woke up to find a note right on the pillow beside me. He had come into my room at night, and I’d heard nothing at all.
The note read:
FRANCESCA,
I AM SOREY. I AM ANGREY WITH HER AND I HAVE TO LIEVE LEAVE. SAY NOTING. TO HER OR TO SIDNEY. PLESE WAIT I WILL BE BACK. PLESE BELIEVE ME. SHE IS SPITEFULL.
I L— YOU.
GERHARDT
I sat on the bed and read this over and over for a long time.
At last I folded it up and slid it between the mattress and box spring. In a moment I took it out again, unfolded it, smoothed it flat, and closed it in a book. I cleaned myself up and went downstairs, heavy with dread.
Clarice was already in her office, seated at her desk. Sidney stood beside her, one hand in the pocket of his trousers, the other around a cigar cocked at an awkward angle, as if he were holding it for someone else. He looked pale and worried, and said good morning to me in an artificially loud voice. Clarice studied me long and hard, saying nothing at all.
“Of course he’s gone,” she said at last.
“Jerry,” I said.
“How did you know?”
“Who else would you mean?” I said.
Clarice gave Sidney a look, and he left the room.
“Did he leave you a note?” she asked me.
“Why would he do that?” I said.
She cut her eyes away, looked back at me.
She has no idea I know about her, I thought, none at all.
“Well, he left me a note,” she said. She held it in her hand.
“May I see it?” I said.
“I’ll read it to you,” she said. “ ‘Clarice. I am going now. Don’t look for me. I suppose I should thank you but I will not. Tell Dad I love him. Be nice to Francesca. Watch yourself. Gerhardt.’ Now. Why would he write such a strange collection of words?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
She looked so mean and so angry with me that I stared at her in order to burn her image into my mind. Lest I ever made the mistake of feeling sorry for her again.
“ ‘Watch yourself,’ what could that mean?” she said.
“I really have no idea. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“My guess would be back to the squat.”
“Well, he can rot there with those animals. I don’t miss him at all! But who told you, I want to know, who told you to make him fall in love with you?”
“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” I said.
With this there was a change in her face. Oh, I had studied this woman for what felt like years. Some certainty fell away. And then I saw her rooting around in her mind for clues—what is counterfactual, what is known? What was she to do with me? Was I an impediment to getting Jerry back, or once again the bait? Why did he leave, what did he know? I had shown myself to be a deeply un-Catholic game-player, a figure of suspicion. Maybe she had suspected me all along? But if so, she was mistaken. Because I’d come in like a good little dog and only learned my duplicitous behavior so recently, and from the best: her.
*
Strange to say, in no time at all the routine at the house on Eleventh Street went back to something like normal.
At least on the surface. Clarice and I both knew we were only waiting for Jerry to return. And then what would happen?
I had to get out of there, but I had developed an almost crippling phobia about the outside world. I read the want ads on the sly, but where in the past I’d see anything from baby wrangler to genome researcher and think, Sure, I can do that, now even the most basic office jobs made me shudder with the knowledge of my incompetence. Must type fifty words a minute—what? Of course, I typed sixty-five words a minute. But somehow I called into question everything I thought I knew. It was as if so much deep interaction with the Marr-Löwensteins had changed the shape of my brain, distorted it and devalued it.
I just had to do something—find any job, find any apartment, and get out of there.
And then I would start to imagine Jerry coming back and finding me gone. Clarice would say, Oh, I don’t know what became of that girl. She was so unreliable. She would speak these words after burning in her ashtray a note from me she’d promised to give her prodigal son.
And then we would be lost to each other.
I had become an island. It was impossible to leave the house now—Clarice was on me for typing, for dictation, for cooking and even cleaning at every turn. My workday swelled to fourteen hours but I put my shoulder to the wheel, thinking of these as my labors of Psyche, that I would prove my worth by separating out the heap of wheat and barley and millet, but Venus remained unmoved. I needed to check in with my friends for sanity, check in with Trina, but I couldn’t even get ten minutes on the phone. Clarice in her new mania watched me at every turn.
And Sidney was home all the time now, conducting his fur business by telephone and fax. Had he understood Jerry’s words to Clarice, Watch yourself? He was there at every moment. We three ate every meal together. It was as if I were the mouse being watched by the cat being watched by the dog. No one could make a move.
Sometimes the whole thing made me giddy in a just-this-side-of-crazy way, but more often I just felt wretched.
But most of all what I wanted was to drop the game-playing and say to Clarice, What did you mean by throwing us together if not to have us fall in love? What is all your playacting and pretense? Why not end your marriage? Because it was clear to me, if not to Sidney, that she was miserable. Her mouth grew harder by the day.
Maybe what I really wanted to ask her was this: Why don’t you love me? Love me like a daughter, and that would fix everything.
17
One day late in that endless winter I was alone in the backyard of the house on Eleventh Street, wrapped in my heavy coat, smoking a cigarette and listening to music. It was early evening, the sky slowly going pink. The yard was covered in that weary snow, sooty on top, demoralized…but as my mind roved around, I looked at the ground and my eyes seized on something unlikely: peeking up through the snow was a purple crocus.
So spring would come after all.
Though the harshness of that autumn had relaxed, somehow, even when I was alone in that house, I clung to my self-policing ways. The one thing I’d allow myself was to play music. Down by the kitchen was Kendra’s old rumpus room, with its ’60s hi-fi and hundreds of record albums in old wooden soda crates, their spines scratched to a soft fringe by the long-passed Agnes Smedley. I’d go through them until I found something I’d never heard of, put it on, and listen. Sometimes I’d crack the window so I could hear the music outside and then go to the garden and smoke a cigarette. This was the closest I’d get to a holiday.
Earlier, months before all the surveillance had slackened, I’d managed to sneak off at the first opportunity and make my way over to the squat on East Fifth. I didn’t know the actual name of Hard Bettie Page, and I knew Jerry wasn’t there. But something told me she was still around and would know something about his vanishing.
Well, I was a fool. I stood on the sidewalk for an hour staring up at the dark windows before I finally dragged myself back down the street. What’d I been exp
ecting? I happened to look into Sophie’s and there, on a payphone in the window, was Hard Bettie Page herself. Our eyes met and I stopped abruptly, almost making a cartoon skid sound with my boots. She kept talking on the phone while looking at me, and since I couldn’t hear her through the glass I imagined all sorts of unsavory exchanges. She made movements like she was about to hang up and then she half turned away, but I distinctly saw her red lips mouth the words Love you too, Mom.
She spilled out of the bar and sort of clicked her heels together, half Dorothy from Kansas, half Stasi hatchet girl. We were wearing identical motorcycle jackets.
“Hey,” we said at the same time.
“Nice jacket,” she said, after a beat.
“Good taste,” I said, gesturing back at her with my chin.
I took out my cigarettes, offered them to her. She took one, put it behind her ear, took another, and I lit us both up.
We stood smoking and looking at each other.
“I’m Chess,” I said at last, sticking out my hand.
“Chrissy,” she said, shaking my hand.
“You keeping warm?” I asked.
“Why, do you have a generator in your pocket?”
I cocked my head at her, having grown deaf to sarcasm.
“We’re fine,” she said. “We’re dealing.”
I nodded, kept nodding, nodded too long.
“You know he’s gone,” she said at last.
“Gone?”
“He came back to get some of his shit. Then he took off. Said he’s going to see his sister.”
“Kendra? Cornelia? Not Cornelia.”
“The spacey chick with the habit and the Manic Panic hair,” she said.
“Kendra,” I said.
Kendra. Morocco? I hated that this girl knew more about Jerry than I did.
“Did he say where?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said.
“Did he say when he’d be back?”
“Nope.”
We both sucked on our cigarettes, coolly studied the pavement.
“But he told me to tell you something,” she said.
“He did? What was it?”
She looked up the street, down the street, and then at me.
“I forget,” she said, smiling.
I’d packed a bag of groceries for this stupid chick and her stupid friends, and for a moment I thought I’d just take it down the corner and give it to the crackhead couple by the Con Ed station. They could go up to that special place past the park, jam it through a hole in the wall, and trade it for some rock to smoke. Instead I flicked my cigarette into the street and handed her the bag.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Food from where I work. Stuff they won’t miss.” And then I was walking away.
“Hey!” she called out.
I stopped and turned, wondering what her final insult would be.
“What he said was, have faith. He said to tell you to have faith.”
She stood in the middle of the street, probably freezing in her unzipped MC jacket and leather mini and fishnets, and held her look on me. None of this made any kind of sense. And then she turned on the heel of her Trash and Vaudeville thigh-high boots and vamped down the street, crossing her feet one in front of the other in an exaggerated runway walk. I watched her big ass rolling back and forth and I thought, What? I’d never heard Jerry use the word “faith.”
Months had passed since he’d left, and there had been nothing: no letter, no phone call. Nothing. The memory of my weeks with Jerry spun and turned and mutated, and in time they acquired an impossible, roseate glow about them. The words we spoke to each other sounded in my head in stark, formal cadences, something like the way I remembered sentences from The Princess of Cleves. This was just nothing I could explain to anyone.
When Christmas came, Clarice and Sidney flew to London to see Bertrand, leaving me to watch the house. Cornelia was working out her own issues, and called me from Vermont on Christmas Eve to complain about what selfish bourgeois her parents were and to ask me to make a donation to her local chapter of Food Not Bombs. And then she got on a plane for London.
Of course I’d shown Jerry’s note to Trina at the first opportunity. She’d taken it in her hands, read it carefully, and then looked up at me and said, “Are we on Candid Camera?”
“Seriously,” I said, “he has a learning disability.”
“Seriously,” she said, “that family has a freak-show disability.”
She was all over me to get out of there and get back to who I was again. I loved her and I knew she was right, but it was as if I were magnetized to the house on Eleventh Street. I was deep into magical thinking and was constantly buying Jerry gifts, fancy chocolates and Caran d’Ache colored pencils and a beautiful cashmere scarf that took away most of my paycheck, as if these things would make him come back to me.
I was smoking my cigarette in the backyard thinking about all this, looking at the purple crocus in the snow and listening to the record playing. It was a piece for solo piano, some orientalist thing, a Frenchman imagining the Middle East, and on the album cover was a drawing of buildings with Moroccan arches—a watercolor, a fantasy, something indistinct, pale and shimmering in the distance.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” a voice behind me said. “I thought you heard me.”
I turned to see a young man standing at the iron gate that led out to Eleventh Street.
The first thing I noticed was his kind, wide-open face. He was tall and long-limbed, with unruly hair, and had on big schoolboy glasses that appeared to be held together with tape. He might have been twenty-nine, thirty, and he wore a dark coat and a rag-wool scarf that looked eaten up by moths. I had no idea who he was, and yet he struck me as instantly familiar.
“I work with Freddie,” he said when I hadn’t responded.
“Who’s Freddie?”
“Freddie Knives, the arrotino. I guess you’re new. Is Bert or Dolly here? Dolores, I mean? Or Mrs. Marr?”
“Bertrand’s been gone since last summer. How is it I don’t know you?” I said, studying him.
“You tell me—how is it? Bad, good?” he said, instantly absurd.
“I mean, I’ve seen Freddie lots of times,” I explained.
“Well, I work with him off and on. Whenever his sciatica is acting up. He learns me stuff,” he said, talking in quotes and touching his hair as if to flatten it down.
“You’re a knife grinder?”
“Oh, I do all kinds of things. In the high season I work in animation, but the season’s been low for some time now. I paint houses. I hang art in grim corporate hallways. I milk the cow, shave the pig. Slap the creep. Not really. But. I do the Police in different voices.”
I stood looking at him, and I felt a strange sensation overtaking me. I realized what it was: I was smiling.
All these months I had made my face a mask.
“I know that line, it’s from a Dickens novel,” I said. “The dust-heap one. Our Mutual Friend, what a hodgepodge! The ‘Veneerings,’ not so subtle. I remember our prof glossing that line, the Police Gazette he meant, the kid did funny voices when he was reading it aloud.”
“That was the working title for ‘The Waste Land,’ if you can believe it. I was just reading that. Terrible idea, right? Not as bad as Trimalchio in West Egg, though.”
“Oh, that was going to be the name for The Great Gatsby!” Somehow it felt wonderful to talk about things that I knew.
By now I had slid the lock from the gate and let him in.
“Are you a writer?” I asked him.
“Geez, do I look that bad? Kidding, sorry. I, um, I’m actually an artist, a printmaker. I do some cut-up poetry, but people generally hate it. You can’t really perform it or folks throw shit at you. I have this friend Ricardo, he read some tricky Brion Gysin kind of stuff at Nuyorican, and someone clocked him in the head with a Nerf football. But then he wrote a poem about it.”
He was holding something bundled in tea t
owels, and this he presented to me in mock solemnity.
“Madam,” he said, bowing.
I took the bundle in my arms.
“Heavens, Rhett, there must be some mistake,” I said in a silly voice.
“It’s actually Bert’s pruning shears. Freddie forgot all about them—he’s sort of phasing out, the poor old sock, welling up to ‘Una furtiva lagrima.’ I found these under a crate of Moxie empties.”
I wound up.
“I guess he, uh, used to have a lot of moxie, right?”
“Oh, groan! Fair play to you, kiddo. Wow—I have no idea why I just called you ‘kiddo,’ I’m so sorry! Too much time alone in the truck and I turn into Uncle Fergus from County Cork.”
And then he just stood there, looking at me, until he tilted his head to the side.
“Persian Hours,” he said.
“Persian…?” I said.
“Persian Hours,” he said. “Charles Koechlin, I think, is the composer. Is that what you’re listening to?”
“Oh! It is. Yes. Such a strange thing,” I said.
We stood looking at each other.
“I should get back,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. His gaze was so open. I wasn’t used to this sort of thing at all.
He wanted to know what my name was, and I told him. Then he put out his hand and I took it. His eyes were blue: gentle, intelligent.
“I’m Fitz,” he said, smiling.
The phone was ringing. I gestured at it, and he shooed me forth with a mock-professor face.
“See you again!” he said as I darted inside. I ran down the hall and grabbed the phone.
It was Sidney’s sister, Anne. I couldn’t tell what she was saying.
“Anne, I’m sorry—what happened?”
It was as if she couldn’t catch her breath.
“He’s gone. My father. He’s gone. I just never thought it would come to this.” And she was off in a rush of tears as Mitchell took the phone.
Yes, old Zeyde. I’m so sorry, I said. How did he…? Gently, in his sleep. Oh, yes, how old was he? Ninety-one almost to the day. He had a long life, I said. Yes, Mitchell said, yes. He’d been born at the dawn of a new century, Mitchell said, as if to indicate that such an era of discovery was gone.
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