“Kendra’s joined the Krishnas!” Bertrand cried out.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“Clarice was thrilled about it, to tell you the truth. Kendra was living like a slug in the rumpus room, all pizza and Seconal and Dumas novels. Now at least she has a hobby.”
“God,” I said. “God.”
“Yes, dear, it is very funny, isn’t it? You know what old Mr. Marx said about history playing out the first time as tragedy, the second as farce? She’ll always be Kendra, I’ll give her that.
“Cornelia’s not done very well for herself either,” he went on. “None of us has the faintest knack for making what you’d call money. She was canvassing for—who was that man, ran for president? The one who screamed like a queen on television and so of course they had to tear him down?”
“Howard Dean,” Fitz said.
“That’s the one!” Bertrand said. “Poor little Nelly. Cornelia’s back in her adopted state, doing public relations for some artisanal sausage concern. She doesn’t have two sous to rub together, but she goes with a man who wears a beard and Eddie Bauer, and I suppose she’s happy.”
“Wow,” I said.
“You’re both looking so well,” he added.
He himself was not looking remotely well, but he was so friendly and soft that I was quick to lie. Fitz was looking at me, urging me to ask what he knew I wanted to ask.
“How is Jerry?” I said at last.
“How is Jerry?” he said. “Well, I suppose Gerhardt’s fine. He was in France for some time, you did know that? And then he landed back home again. I suppose that’s the curse of us all, the silver cord. He’s had another of his breaks, but you know he’ll be fine.” He smiled at me, but I couldn’t take it in.
We said good-bye, Fitz speaking for me because I was plunged in my own thoughts. As we turned, Bertrand gave me a parody of a funny uncle’s wink, this rotund man who had nothing for himself but a few lovely things under glass.
But you know he’ll be fine.
*
One day not long after, Fitz and I were hustling across town when we ran smack into a parade going down Fifth Avenue. We were late for some theater event on the West Side and annoyed by this loud festival clogging the street—I had my New York Get There face on, deaf to interruptions. But then something made me see what was in front of me.
It was a Hare Krishna festival, the Ratha Yatra, huge and colorful, when the believers pull an enormous chariot down the street. Everyone was dancing to a loud, clanging beat, all of them chanting together in a multitude of ecstatic voices:
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare
All of them moved as one mass, up and down to one beat, caught in a single moment. I was hypnotized, and Fitz caught the moment of it too. And instead of darting through, we stood there.
I was fascinated to see believers of all kinds, people who looked Indian or Bangladeshi but also all types of others, the East Village temple-goers and guys who looked like Jewish doctors and blond women so totally Upper East Side but for their saris and wide-open faces and the fact of them dancing down the middle of the street. It struck me how happy they all looked, how genuinely and deeply adoring they seemed. Oh, what is this bliss, I thought, what is this bliss?
The chariot, canopied in red, came toward us, surrounded by believers. Some were pulling it, some holding loosely on to its yellow rope. A beautiful girl with paint on her face passed in front of me and pressed something into my hand. I didn’t know what it was and I wanted to give it back, but she kept going and I called out a thank-you. I looked at it, expecting some magical relic.
It was a tiny plastic zip-lock bag, with a label that read: COCONUT BUNS PRASADAM.
“Damn, it’s a cookie,” I said to Fitz.
“Promise me you won’t eat that,” he said.
When I looked up again the chariot had passed. I saw a woman from behind, pulling the rope that dragged the chariot down the street. And I knew it was her. It was Kendra. And I knew I had to run down the street and get in front of her so that I could see her face, see her face so that I could finally see her happy. See her blissed out, thrilled to be a part of this thing—finally content.
I started to move through the crowd, Fitz calling my name. The parade suddenly sped up and I did too, manic with the idea of catching up to Kendra.
And then I stopped.
The parade was beautiful and alive, but the people pulling the chariot suddenly seemed corralled. They were self-tethered, but still they were tethered like cattle, like beasts of burden.
Not free at all.
Fitz was at my side again. He took my hand and we silently decided together to ditch the event across town. I needed to stand there and watch this thing to the end somehow. And we stood on the curb, unspeaking, amid the clanging and the chanting. We watched as the heart of the parade passed and then it thinned out into stragglers. I looked at them all. There, that woman—actually, was that Kendra? Or that woman—that was Kendra, of course! It had been years since I had actually seen her.
All of them were Kendra, and none of them was Kendra.
At the end of the parade, a vehicle rolled into view. It was an enormous Humvee, a war machine, but it was bedecked with flowers and carrying a group of Krishna men and women. All of them looked old and exhausted, and as they passed they turned their unsmiling faces to gaze at Fitz and me.
*
So what’s fascinating, in an anthropological sort of way, is that I stayed at Acme long enough to see just about everyone else go down around me.
Trash-mouthed Nikki got the ax, Vinny the lecher got sacked, poor agreeable salesman Walt got the boot—and walked out whistling “Hey, Look Me Over,” so relieved was he to finally get the bad news he’d been so long dreading—and the curly-haired dispatchers each got a visit from the Turk in rolling succession. The young IT kid Jacob, impeccable Françoise, the acid-casualty speaker of Modern Standard Arabic, and money guy Will were all fired together one sunny morning. Somehow even Cissy—porco Dio!—got chopped down like a stout tree for firewood. She particularly did not go gentle into that good night, and strange to say, when she got the news, she grabbed me in a hug and wailed into my bosom, her highlighter eyebrows bleeding orange all over my shirt. Poor Mr. Shah from security attempted to pry her free as she clung to me, he and I looking into each other’s eyes like people in a horror movie trapped together in a broom closet.
I had somehow become the office agony aunt.
Each day I yearned to be fired, but somehow I remained bulletproof. New people came and went, and one day I realized that besides sinister Petey and Dee-Dee himself, I was the person with the longest tenure there. How had this come to pass?
On that day of revelation, late on a midsummer Friday, I came to remember something a boss had told me back in the day.
It had been during the clueless era after the winding-down of the “arrogant years” of my twenties and the beginning of the slow-dawning clarity of my thirties. I’d had a gig writing a brief history of a cast-iron building in SoHo for its owner, a motherless, overfed millionaire who was at once ragingly suspicious and as tight as new shoes. I must have done something above the call of duty for him, however, because one day he asked me to come into the office, promising me a “surprise.” There he offered me a chair, leaned across his broad Chippendale desk while yanking at the neck of his Phish T-shirt, and said to me with a smile, “Frances, I’ve always found that Catholics make the best workers.”
His smile was almost salacious. And right then I understood that what he was telling me was no kind of compliment, but actually this: Frances, I’ve always found that Catholics know how to eat shit.
In thanks, he gave me a $10 gift certificate for Bath & Body Works, which I swiftly regifted to a homeless woman on the corner of East Seventy-Second Street.
I remember I was aware of many things in that mo
ment. I was aware that I did not want to become my mother. I did not want to forgive, I did not want to be kind, I did not want to consider other people’s limitations and adjust my own expectations accordingly. I simply wanted the millionaire dude to stand still so that I could scream in his face.
That had been, what, ten years before Acme, and I knew myself to be not nearly the angry woman I’d been. I’d mellowed. “Mellowed,” what the heck? Who was I kidding? I didn’t even like the word! I had no business “mellowing.” Why was I always the good girl tiptoeing around people, the hard worker, the sport, the nicener? The caregiver, the “understanding” one? Why was I always in the role of the person reacting, why was I never doing?
Of course these thoughts cast me back to Kendra. I mean, here was a woman who took up as much space as she wanted. She was a slob and a jumble sale and she dazzled and made big, big mistakes, she stole and connived and she was always looking for transcendence and she manipulated and charmed you and ate up the oxygen in any given room. But through it all, Kendra was always herself. She never gave in.
Suddenly it seemed imperative that I get some news of her. Where was she? What had happened to her? It’d been ages since I’d looked up anything after Clarice’s passing, but now I turned to my computer and typed in Kendra’s name.
And, how crazy…
Kendra had been appointed executrix of her mother’s estate. Of all the siblings. Not only that, but she was calling herself not a former dancer, not a survivor, not a “denizen of the downtown scene,” but a writer, having published something I’d totally missed: a weight-loss/self-help/mystical hybrid how-to manual that, from what I could see, had sold stunningly well. Maybe I’d missed it because she was married now and had used the man’s name: Weatherhill. She had married Broyer. She had married her mother’s old lover.
I found their wedding picture in the New York Times. I stared at them, Broyer looking out-of-his-mind happy at his good luck while a poised woman stood beside him. Kendra. How could this be Kendra? She was coiffed and thinned and deflavorized into pretty blandness, smiling a greet-this-beautiful-morning smile and wearing a good Chanel suit. I stared and stared at her, not believing this could possibly be the real Kendra, my Kendra, the Kendra of my past.
And so she had turned herself into a successful parasite.
I leapt from my chair and went to the window. I looked out over the sooty Garment District at the wig store, Rock the Fashion Hut, trimming shop, decaying deli, what the hell, because in reality I was seeing nothing. All I saw was her, the new and final Kendra. The image spread in my mind like ink in water. Maybe the past was the true misunderstanding. Maybe Kendra always knew she would end up like this, claim her inheritance, move into her entitlement. My image of Kendra with her blue hair and damaged eyes standing on the corner of 116th and Broadway melted into air. And with it, I felt something else leave me that I hadn’t even understood had any power over me still, some part of my heart or my body that, if pressed, would be found to yield no pain anymore.
I would be who I was.
I shut down my computer, picked up my bag, and looked around me. No one was paying any attention to me at all. I put my set of office keys on the desk. I was done there.
Downstairs in the lobby, I said good-bye to Mr. Shah.
It was a day of almost insane sun outside, and I found myself wanting to walk east. I realized that I wanted to go to the water, to the East River, I wanted to walk the hot day of Manhattan and mark the clarity of this moment.
Because this was the day when youth finally died for me.
Going east, I felt a criminal lightness, I felt myself a wisp of flame. And as I walked, this walk became a thousand, a thousand walks across the city, a thousand trips and wanderings and dérives.
Some years later I would get out of the train at the new and nearly empty Hudson Yards station and amaze myself to be completely disoriented at the street level, just me and some tourists looking for the there there and a few affectless skater kids riding fakie on a dead-end street. I would find my bearings and head east, walk into the morning sun and in those blocks way west see the dark old Hell’s Kitchen aspect still somehow preserved, that real meagerness of resources, that desperate outsider savvy. I’d see a textbook energetic crazy man in inexplicable headgear walking around hollering and waving his arms, and once I’d crossed the feeder roads to the Lincoln Tunnel, I’d see a dozen no-frills chain hotels and a shiny-sad Irish pub where a bored girl in a smock top stands smoking outside. And then the tourist glut picks up, everyone spilling north from Penn Station, and at the corner of Eighth Avenue by the T-Mobile store the most violently delicious onion-ring smell fills the air. There’s a storefront with headless mannequins, their hips out with cheap-chic attitude, there’s the headphones-wallets-watches-pashmina-perfume store, there’s the dollar-slice pizza place and the soot of a hundred years, and as I go by I’m thinking about how all this fabulous old sleaze soon will pass into nothingness. New York—you shoulda seen it in the old days. I’m on the Acme block when I realize I can’t even recall which building it was; the memory has left me, it’s somehow faded into the anonymity of lost time.
A boy in front of me throws his losing Take 5 ticket into the air—Aww, man!—and whirls around, and when he sees me starts singing that song about not being able to feel his face when he’s with me. But then he sees me better, sees that I’m old enough to be his mother, and politely trails off his song to a hum. I smile at him.
Age has taught me patience.
I’ve crossed over to the East Side, I’m all the way to First Avenue, and I realize that what I want to do more than anything is go up to the UN. I’m not even sure why. I love the feeling of mystery here, something left, the empty, pitched landscape of weedy lots just south with their smell like an endless childhood afternoon, chickweed and crabgrass, something slightly rasping and forlorn. The strange lonely wealth of this city. But then it’s perfect when you clear the curve of the library and the tall, slender Secretariat springs into view. I run across the street, run against the light. I want to read the words on the Isaiah wall, read how we will beat our swords into plowshares, I want to be there at what’s maybe my favorite moment in all of New York City. Because despite a hundred stupid realities, the city still feels to me like hope.
I climb the stairs and look out over the edge of Manhattan.
And then, I keep walking.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to everyone who inspired me, helped me, and kept the faith along the way:
Kim Sullivan, Thomas Glave, Sarah Hill, my hero Gerry Howard, Colette McDonald, Sharon Corso, Carole Maso, Ann Reinhard and Ken Koton, the inimitable Nancy Frick Battaglia, Ken Gangemi, Caroline Stern, Kathy Hipple and Alberto Zayden, Lisette Wesseling, Wing-Sze Ho, Phil Graziano and Michael Spirito, Claire Chafee, Patti Kelly, Erik Ryding, Adrienne Fitzgerald, F. S. Rosa, Neill McKenna, Barry Allen, Erika Rosenfeld, Clara Arthur, Steve Bleiweiss, il miglior fabbro Michael Daddino, and the wonderful Susan Golomb. Shout-outs to Marian, Cecily Joyce, Jen Fuqua, Alarice Joyce, Lily Wang, Pato Fernandez, Kathleen Hill, Sandy Opatow, William Chapman Sharpe, Ira Silverberg, Linda Yablonsky, Joan Acocella, Ela Basak, Jacob Forman, Cole Heinowitz, Daniel Rios, David Hess, Charis Conn, Lydia Salzman, Vicki Gestwicki Murphy, Devin Fitzgerald, and my friends at work, especially Carol Giffen, Cami Lee, David Florio, Howard Allen, Aris Carlot, Hilary Whittier, and the endlessly inspiring Lynn McClouchic, who may never know how much I’ve learned from her. Shout-outs as well to Mike Cohn, Anthony Delmar, and my other friends met through the late, great Manhattan Stuttering Support Group. My gratitude to the New York Public Library system and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony for early support. All props and respect to Malka Burton and Smadar Yaish. To Glen, to my dear Mr. Brent, to my mother, Colette, I wish you were here.
About the Author
B. G. Firmani is a graduate of Barnard and Brown. Her short fiction has been published in Bomb, T
he Kenyon Review, and the Bellevue Literary Review. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. She lives in New York City, has a day job, and writes on the weekends.
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Time's a Thief Page 33