Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  There is great clarity and great opacity in remembering this now—clarity in the way I can still see it in my head, opacity in what I thought it all meant. For us in those days everything was extreme, nothing fair or middling. Somehow the stakes of us loving each other were so high that the smallest thing could become impossibly fraught. It was as if we immediately meshed together and became a third entity that actually represented neither of us. Or I went over to how he was, loving him as I did—but not knowing how little, ultimately, it reflected who I was.

  But never mind that for now. Never mind that. I just want to see these two people together in their moment, as if they are people in fiction, in a story that speaks to my own. I see the young couple in L’Atalante, on the prow of the barge, so unlikely, so raw and so beautiful. I see the barge passing so silently up the waters of the canal, so dreamlike and quickening, and so quickly gone.

  22

  I guess I hadn’t ever known anyone who’d reached the age of twenty-four and never had a job.

  In a way, it was part of the strangeness and specialness of him, something beyond the realm of questioning. The joke was, when Jerry busked, he averaged about $20 an hour, while my temp-worker hourly rate at that time was just about $12. So Jerry could actually pull in much more in a week than I could. Problem was, there was only so much flute-playing a person could do.

  The world came intruding on us all too soon. Some days I would come home and Jerry was already there, waiting for me, drumming his fingers on the table as if I were late. Or I’d find him lying flat on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, staring up at the ceiling. What was the matter? He tried to explain, but his frustration made him inarticulate. It was something like this: I had helped to free him, and, now free, he had no idea what to do.

  He had an at-large disgust for many things of the world: bourgeois behavior, hypocrisy, conformity, capitalism. But these were all abstractions, and his feelings needed to find an object. What was he doing, anyway? What was he doing with his life? He shouted this aloud to himself, looking at me as if I knew the answer. I had met friends of his by now, and just about all of them were involved in some kind of activism: the War Resisters League, homesteading, writing for one of the anarchist papers, making chili at a Catholic Worker house, protesting the gentrification of the East Village. But it was as if his own precociousness in things like this had worn him out. He was done with the squatter scene, and he had a rap sheet from being twice arrested, once in the Tompkins Square Park riot of 1988, which kept him quiet on that front. He’d been going to protests since he was twelve. He had an enormous weariness, something he shared with Kendra.

  They had seen and done too much, gone from child professionals to child dropouts. At his most desolate, this was what Jerry always returned to. He’d been a prodigy, a star, at the expense of having a childhood, and then when he walked away from that he was left with what? He and Kendra, they were left with what? Their mother had not protected them. She had given them nothing. At some point when Jerry would be talking like this, hopped up and pacing the apartment, he’d slump against the wall, exhausted from the effort of trying to represent what he was feeling. He angled his body away from me as if he were separating himself, as if he were not in the room or in the building or on the planet with anyone else.

  “And what are you doing, anyway, always going to work?” he spat at me one day.

  I stared back at him.

  “My God, don’t you think there’s other things I want to be doing besides making spreadsheets for some gross CEO? Don’t you think I want to be writing?”

  “Then why don’t you just do it then?” he shouted.

  “How are we going to live?” I said. “What are we supposed to live on, Jerry?”

  And it was as if some elusive idea of causality hooked itself up in his mind, some abstraction was finally brought home to him.

  He had never been poor.

  “We’re stuck in this cycle and I hate it,” he said.

  “It won’t always be like this,” I said.

  And it wasn’t, it wasn’t really. I was disciplined; I put myself in a chair most every night and weekend morning and wrote reams of stuff. Most of it was terrible, but I didn’t realize this because I was young and on fire. I knew I could write my way out of this cage of working for a living; I was special and talented. We were special, talented, and our life was a shimmer. We were potentialities waiting to be realized. We would turn a corner; it would happen any moment now…

  But sometimes I’d sit at my makeshift desk, pick up my pen to write, and just stare at the Brooklyn sky outside the window. I was embarrassed at having to do something as mundane as work for a living. I felt shame over this, as if by doing so I’d dragged Jerry, the rare moonchild, sadly down to earth. I felt like I was not ready for this life together with him. I knew I was a fraud—I needed more preparing, more experience in order to match his knowledge of the world. I was gauche, I said embarrassing and foolish things, I did not speak French. I did not understand how to live. How do people live? I sought the answer everywhere.

  I would close my eyes and think, We can get there, I know we can get there.

  I remember the early heat wave of that first summer together, an incredible scorcher that killed old people on their couches and made children pass out in the street. At night we’d sit on the fire escape, legs dangling, to catch a phantom breeze. The backyard down below was invisible with tree cover, a canopy of green, and we’d be smoking cigarettes despite the filthy heat, tapping ash away from ourselves and watching it fall in nearly intact cylinders onto the treetops, the air so humid it acted as a kind of cushion. We tried not to lean against the wall, because even at night the asphalt still retained all the heat of the day.

  Strange thing, one evening after days of this, so much intense heat had put us both in an almost giddy mood, and we phased in and out of this, joking in a way that was unusual for us. Because Jerry was always so deadly literal. We sat there, swinging our legs and goofing around. We had been together about three months.

  “Clarice found us,” he told me.

  Neither of us had been in contact with her since the last days on Eleventh Street.

  “What? How?”

  “I’m sure through Cornelia. I suppose, I mean.”

  “But—what does she want?”

  He looked out across the treetops.

  “She says she wants to have me back in her life.”

  “Do you want this?”

  I knew he’d say, Of course not.

  “I hate her,” he said instead.

  We sat looking out over the treetops.

  “I’m going to see her tomorrow,” he told me at last.

  I turned to him, questioning.

  “Alone,” he said.

  He lifted my hand, and kissed it.

  *

  Almost as soon as Jerry left the next day, I stood at our front window in the heat-stilled afternoon, willing him to come back. I had a terrible feeling.

  But Clarice was his mother, after all. They had their own relationship. I rolled this around in my head, trying to talk myself out of feeling anger, then out of feeling abandoned, and then giving in to all those feelings. Why didn’t she want to see me? Didn’t she care about me? It was almost a hundred degrees and the heat made me drowsy, so at some point I dragged a chair to the window and propped up my head in my hands.

  It was Sunday. The crackhead couple who’d been arguing in front of our building the night before, yelling so loudly they’d entered my dreams, were long gone, and the block took on a melancholy aspect, silent but for the hum and drip of air conditioners and the whispering of a hundred oscillating fans. When would Jerry come back? Nothing changed for what felt like hours, and I was alone in the stillness of my thoughts. Sometimes I’d hear the sudden slap of a door slamming shut, and out in front of a building a figure would appear, always alone, pausing to blink at the sun. Sometimes it would be an old-timer and sometimes a new-school person, an
invader from Manhattan. Once a small family walked the length of the block, eating huge lollipops that were actually mangoes cut like flowers, their voices soft and skittering at four stories up.

  At some point I must have fallen asleep in the hot afternoon air, because the next thing I heard was the sharp clap of a car door. I lifted my head to see a cab idling below our apartment, its trunk open. In a moment the trunk closed with a slam, and I saw Jerry with a huge box in his arms.

  I ran down the stairs to meet him, and he looked up, unsmiling over the box.

  “It’s an air conditioner,” he said.

  “What?”

  “She wanted us to have it,” he said.

  “We’ll give it back,” I said.

  “I don’t want it anyway.”

  “Then why did you take it?”

  “Fuck if I know,” he said.

  I pressed myself against the wall and he pushed by me and climbed the stairs. He put the huge box in the middle of the kitchen floor and turned to me.

  “We took that money before,” he said.

  “And we said it’d be the last time we would,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I can’t think when I’m around her.”

  “Let’s take it back.”

  “But that would mean seeing her again.”

  He sank to the floor. It was insanely hot inside our apartment, but he wore his jacket, a narrow black chauffeur’s thing from the Paris flea market. He reached inside his breast pocket, pulled out an envelope, and threw it down between us.

  “A thousand dollars,” he said.

  I sank to the floor beside him.

  “What do we do?” he said.

  He stared at the envelope, and so did I. Of course we had to give everything back. But why did he even accept these things, bring them here? I listened to the buzz of the old clock on the wall and it was as if I could feel the motion of its second hand spinning. I looked at Jerry, and I saw that the thing had overtaken him again, the uncanny thing where tears were running down his face but he remained as impassive as a stone.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said.

  “What? We just moved in.”

  “We have to get out of New York. Out of the country. We have to get away from her.”

  I took his hands in mine.

  “Jerry, we are away from her. We don’t have to see her! We’re grown-ups and we can determine what we do.”

  “No, I can’t. I’ve never been able to. I’ve always had to get well the fuck away from her to live. When I came back I thought I crushed it out of her, I thought I won. I’m so fucking stupid—you never win with her. I lost.”

  “How did you lose?” I said. “We are away from her and we’re together and why isn’t that enough?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said miserably.

  “What did she do to you? Please tell me. What did she do?”

  “It’s just nothing I can ever explain,” he whispered.

  “My God, did she…?”

  He pulled his hands away.

  “Everyone goes to that and it’s nothing I can explain. Look, she was there and then she wasn’t, not at all, and I hate her so much. I hate her so much. You come in and then you go out again and I want to know, why can’t you always just be here? Why can’t you always just be here?”

  “Jerry,” I said to him, “I’m here. I’m here! I don’t understand.”

  “But you have to understand,” he said, his eyes burning. “You have to.”

  He slumped forward and I pulled him to me, gathered him together, collected him in my arms. He let himself collapse against me and I petted his head, wanting so badly to soothe him. I was looking up from there, up into the blank ceiling, up into the hot world above us.

  And I understood our future then, as clearly as if it were written across the sky.

  He would be ill, ill in his special way, for the rest of his life. I would care for him. Time would wash over us, years would wash over us. We would try, but we would never get away. She would always be there, the ruiner. Clarice in the flesh right up in his face or Clarice the idea always in his mind. The devil on her boy’s shoulder, criticizing him, mocking him, steering his thoughts. Every choice he made, even counter to what she wanted, would be in response to the fact of her. I would take on this self-policing too—I would stand with him in everything, thinking it would make him feel less alone. When he railed against something she did, I would be right there with him. When he caved in, I would too. We would stand united in the face of this thing, letting it distract us from our real life. She would be the limousine idling outside our window, the imprint across every word her son could not read. I would be her son’s lover, but I would also be his caregiver and sometimes his warden. We would always be together, in the way that always can be meant so ardently when a young woman is twenty-three and so in love with a young man, but also maybe so in love with saving, with rescuing, with redemption. Because through this you prove your worth on this planet, a need that might never go away.

  Or maybe it was just about loving him, even past the moment when there is nothing left to prove.

  Sometimes he would just disappear. He would leave for days, the only explanation one of his charged, illiterate notes left on the table. I AM FRIGHTED BY MY REALIENCE ON YOU. I may have been the cure, but sometimes I was a shape that was too much like the shape of his mother. In times like these the world was too much with him, reality was something imposed upon him, and he resented the notion that he had to abide by it. I was part of that imposition, with my “practicality” and my “kindness,” something that in his worst moods he ascribed to my upbringing, as if I were an acted-upon soft machine with no ability to form my own beliefs. Le christianisme est par excellence la religion des esclaves. Yes, I was one of these slaves. He needed to make up his own world, not live in this cave of received ideas.

  And then, after he had disappeared for two or three or four days, he would come home, dirty, exhausted, guttered. I would have spent those days sick with worry, but when I’d see him again all I felt was gratefulness. His attitude would be one of depressing penitence. It was as if he wanted me to punish him. Sometimes he told me that I was the only one tethering him to this earth. I watched him melt before my eyes.

  “What is it like to have faith?” he would ask me.

  What is it like to have faith?

  Sometimes he would say this with such sadness, as if I were a holy object to him, as if my belief somehow ennobled me. But sometimes it was as if he were spitting it at me, as if he needed to communicate to me that he missed nothing by not having this and in fact it disgusted him. Both attitudes were baffling to me. I could only tell him that it was not a choice I had made; and then, of course, I became to him once more the acted-upon peasant. I would try to tell him that faith was beyond words, and this, coming from me, seemed to him the worst insult of all. Because the space he lived in was the space beyond words.

  If he pursued these black moods of his too long, inertia overtook him and he collapsed. It was as if it became a kind of pose, an enactment of his moods. In his worst posing he would say things like of course he was not supposed to live in the world; the world could only taint you; he was a kind of poète maudit, forever at odds with the world. The money he took, and still took and took, from his mother was the tithe she paid to him for ruining him. It was owed to him. It was a tax on her normalcy. That he was always funded by his mother and did not know how to walk away from it squelched his self-esteem, and he threw it back in the world’s face, painting himself as all the more wretched and accursed.

  And then sometimes Jerry could be the happiest man on earth. Expansive with joy, thrilled to be alive. It was as if two lenses came briefly together to produce an amazing focus. Times like this I didn’t question; I was happy to see him happy, and happy to stay up all night and drink champagne on the roof, to ride the train with him the breadth of Brooklyn to Far Rockaway to smoke hashish and watch the sun rise. This
would go into the next day, and his elation would only increase until the lenses crossed and moved apart again and it became mania, superhuman, unstoppable.

  I was a dumb kid, loving and believing. I grew up surrounded by so many not quite sane people that I never believed in what was called normalcy. I took this other way of how it was to be in the world as the only way. If you are true of heart, you will suffer. And mostly I still feel this is true. But this also meant that despite my love and my care, I didn’t know how to help this boy. And so the strongest memory I have of this early era of ours is the close of that chapter, when someone not me knew enough to get a doctor for Jerry, when I am walking him up Central Park West, my arms wrapped tightly around him because I know that if I let go of him, if I let go, the weary life force will spill out of him and he will be lost forever.

  23

  So one morning these many years later, I’m walking down the street to work, down that dingy Garment District street, and I see this guy across the way stretched out against the side of a double-parked delivery truck, his arms stuck out like Christ on the cross and his head hanging down at a crazy angle like something out of Matthias Grünewald. It’s so striking that I stop in my tracks. And then an SUV goes by him—Be-beep! the driver nicks his horn at him—and I realize that the guy is just getting out of the way, mugging for the driver. In a moment another car passes, but now the guy’s already blended into the crowd, the mass of humanity trundling swaying racks of garment bags down the street, lining up at the food cart for their bad coffee and worse doughnuts, or hustling down the sidewalk along with me to get to our chump-change jobs on time.