‘Hey!’ she said, ‘awesome news about your plums…’
‘Sure is a relief about my old marbles…’ he said, ‘the family jewels, the gems…’
‘Your kintama…’ she said, with a strong Japanese accent.
He thought a moment. ‘Hanging brains…’
She screamed at that one. They came to a halt. Ahead of them, a grey heron stood perfectly motionless on the sidewalk, on one leg, looking into the 6th Street and Avenue B Community Garden. The heron was familiar to Finn, from the dykes and rivers of the Sussex Levels he would disappear to alone in his early years, and the presence here in the East Village of something from home made him feel that he’d been caught fleeing the crime scene that was his upbringing.
A man’s denim-clad backside emerged from a van on 6th Street. It belonged to a well-built guy in his sixties with a flamboyant moustache and long, lanky hair. His rolled-up, studded black shirt exposed tattooed, oil-stained forearms. He cradled a lifesize wooden statue of a cormorant which he placed next to the heron. He clambered back into the van and dragged out a large potted tree, scraping the tub across the sidewalk to the entrance of the garden.
‘Pin oak…’ Finn said, under his breath.
‘What?’ Amy asked.
‘It’s a pin oak tree,’ Finn told her, shyly.
She studied him as he watched the moustached man lift the carved wooden birds back into his van. The man sized Finn up. ‘Could you lend a hand?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ Finn said, and liked the sound of the word in his mouth, the same way he liked the idea of being a New Yorker.
They carried the tree into the garden along a gravel pathway to the man’s twelve-foot-by-six-foot plot. The man straightened up, ran both soil-flecked hands through his hair, then shook Finn’s hand.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Sure.’ Finn recycled the word. If it ain’t broke…
‘Good autumn colour, pin oak,’ Finn said to Amy, as they walked away, and he smiled the same apology that followed anything he said with authority. In direct contrast to most men she knew, he suggested to the world that he knew less than he did.
They walked the community garden in silence, avoiding obvious platitudes about the place that could add nothing to their happiness. Bamboo stood high against the windowless wall of the first building on 6th Street. Hydrangeas spilled through the mesh fencing on to Avenue B. A tool shed bore the haphazard marks of reparatory bitumen patches and non-matching wood-stain. Around it, small blossoming magnolia and cherry trees were unkempt and expressive, caught in mid-conversation. Blotches of pale lichen had stepped across from them on to the shed. The other trees in the garden were neater. Finn saw plum, pear, mountain ash, willow, maple and elm.
Amy pointed to a large blue flowering tree in the centre of the garden. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘Chinese empress tree,’ he said. ‘The people I work for won’t sell them. Call them weeds.’
‘Big, pretty weed,’ she said, putting her hands on her hips and taking a good look at it.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What’s your job?’
‘I drive a truck full of trees.’
She smiled at the minimalism of his chat. He smiled back, curiously, at her expression.
‘You deliver them?’
‘Yes. And we plant them up.’
‘You like that?’
‘I did.’
‘Don’t like it any more?’
‘I’m not there any more.’
A noticeboard had a potted history, photographs of the garden when it was an empty, disused lot in 1981, photos that already looked dated of the residents who created the garden, and a history of the Barusch Housing Complex which told them that the buildings stood on what was once the East River, and that the 6th Street Community Garden had been salt marsh. A wooden sculpture, like a huge bonfire stack made of old timber, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the five-storey building next to it. Tucked in among the timbers were rocking horses (or were they carousel rides?), wooden geese and toy cars.
They stood over goldfish in a pond and Finn could see Amy’s toes wiggle through the canvas of her shoes. They passed the man planting his pin oak tree and the man said, ‘Thanks again,’ to Finn and Finn hesitated and said, ‘Can I…? That’s not right.’
‘How so?’ the man said.
‘You’re telling it life’s going to be easy, with all that compost. Just a little compost mixed into the soil, that way the roots get a leg-up, but not too much and they know soon as possible what they’re in for.’
‘Massively cool,’ the big guy said, and Amy decided she would kiss Finn this day.
On the street corner, Finn turned to her and explained that he had to go away for the weekend. He asked if he could see her when he got back. She said that, yes, he could. They wandered on and she told him they could walk to Tompkins Square Park together and then she’d have to go to work and he felt her hook her little finger around his little finger but when he looked down he saw that it was her index finger. He had never seen hands so small.
They agreed to meet at Leo’s gallery the following Monday, at one o’clock, when Finn was back from Long Beach. They held hands and, momentarily, her lips touched his lips, then she left. From a distance of thirty yards, she shouted out across the elm trees and the people,
‘Your gonads!’
‘My man tonsils!’ he called.
She backed away, shouting louder every time. ‘Your pelotas!’
‘My knackers!’
‘Your nuggets!’
‘My love spuds!’
‘Your golden pillows.’
And she danced away.
21
From what William could work out, his body was a hard shell. Beneath its surface, his organs functioned, more or less, and his mind turned. He looked out through glassy morphine eyes at Sidney White and the other elders of the Fountains board as words tumbled out of their mouths, unfathomable to him, while they explained to Leo why the store could no longer employ William, as if Leo would translate it into whatever language this stupefied version of William Fairman could understand.
William peered out from his body as if a vast space lay between him and the elders, pipe-cleaner figures at the foot of his bed, in suits half a century old, on plastic chairs that bent to the curves of their spines. He didn’t know what time or day it was. His world was a blur of ungraspable monochrome and a fluid, humming sound that cruised around his head with no edges. Joy was not in the room and William sensed a shift in the world that left him neither shocked nor bereft by her absence. Something had lifted itself out of him and taken flight the previous day as the hours passed without her and he felt himself begin to die in tiny increments. All he wanted now was the peace to acclimatise to the emptiness.
He slept. When he woke the elders were gone. Leo crinkled his eyes affectionately. William raised his head an inch off the pillows, a Herculean task, looked at that part of the mattress he would once have expected Joy to be seated on, then closed his eyes again. Inside the newly fortified castle of his mind, William had a visitor: a vivid picture of the street in Lincoln, Illinois, where he grew up, and of the lakes outside of town and the soft, grassy sea of fields stretching out to the state park. He hadn’t thought about the place for many years. He saw the house on South Hamilton Street. At first he could not see his parents but if he looked past the house, across the plains, his mother and father appeared on the front porch, in his peripheral vision. For as long as he didn’t look directly at them, they remained there.
Feeling no deficit of love, nor any frustration with his parents, William had left them nevertheless, first for Chicago and then for New York City. He’d returned home often, with no appetite for Illinois, but a yearning for the man and woman who had raised him. He remembered his childhood in Lincoln with affection, grew to like Chicago, and quickly loved his life in New York City and fell under its spell. He took with him to that great metro
polis his parents’ unspoken belief in the futility of going abroad when America offered more than one lifetime could accommodate. The more he met them, the more unnerved William was by people who travelled, and he could not believe his luck when the wanderlust in Joy began to drain out of her through the open wound of her vertigo and her dislike of flying, to a degree he could not have dreamed of when he first encountered the tornado of self-belief and physical exuberance that came packaged with Joy Emerson’s fiery eyes and mane of walnut hair.
She appeared to him now, in colour. Only this image of her, walking towards him on Ninth Avenue, could maintain its crisp, defined edges and stand out against the dense, pinhole-camera world into which he had been deposited by a bucketload of morphine and the underside of a seven-ton truck. He saw her in high definition, at the anti-drugs forum when they first met. Her passion for the cause had swept them out of the Wednesday night meetings and into bed, where he had discovered that lust could be shared with the same woman he prayed with, did charitable acts with. Until then, he had seen a future in which prior to a dull marriage he paid good money for the experience of a certain sort of practical sexual education and momentary hedonism that a man like him (by which he meant a man not abundantly fascinating to women) would not find in the fabric of his everyday life.
Joy interrupted his memories of her by arriving, with Pastor Edwin in her wake. Leo welcomed them and he and the priest watched on as Joy took hold of William’s hands, and they interlaced their fingers. Leo rolled up his copy of the New Yorker into a tight cylinder and drummed it against his thigh as he went to the door. The priest drew a chair away to the furthest corner of the room and placed it against the wall, where he sat with his hands in prayer, head bowed, oblivious to the way Leo’s body language had beckoned him out of the room so as to allow some privacy. William and Joy sat before each other, the formula for their equilibrium mislaid. William broke the silence, with his ashen voice.
‘What can we do with our life? What are we good at?’
‘We’re good at being together.’ Her voice was clipped. ‘I’ve worked in the same store for twenty-five years and you index old stuff in an attic. We are not world-changers and you wouldn’t be sure to survive without me. Let’s just get back on track.’
‘I feel different.’
‘Of course.’
‘About what we believe.’
‘Please don’t say that. I don’t think I’m up for that as well as all this.’ She said it softly.
She tightened the grip on his hand. He smiled. She leaned forward and kissed his lips and then she rested her cheek against his. They held each other tight and after she had sat back on her chair they sat in silence and her eyes settled distantly on the bedding and she tried to keep her thoughts in the room and hoped that he would not ask what she knew he was going to ask. But he asked it.
‘Did you talk to them about it being a local anaesthetic?’
She looked helpless. ‘It has to be a general, Will. You’re beaten up and need repairing.’
He placed the palms of his hands over his face, dragging the tubes and wires up off the sheets.
‘And, William, there are going to be one or two more generals after today, more than likely. It’s a rebuilding process.’
‘Jesus!’
‘William!’
‘Sorry.’
A little time passed and he felt his voice wouldn’t reach her but he gave it a try. ‘I’m scared of not waking up.’
‘I know that, honey. I understand.’ She was weary, and in the silence she had enjoyed the excessive heat in the room and the way her head was balanced perfectly, weightlessly, on her neck, allowing her something very close to sleep. ‘You will wake up, of course you will.’
‘But what if I don’t?’
‘Well, of course you will, what does that even mean?’
‘It means not wake up.’
‘It’s impossible not to wake up, you can’t sleep forever.’
‘Die. Obviously, I mean die.’
‘Well, you know…’ she stuttered ‘… we have our faith.’
‘I have my fear…’ he said.
‘Let’s not change everything,’ she said, irritably. He was off script with all this.
‘Be nice,’ he whispered.
‘I’m trying.’
‘You shouldn’t need to try.’
‘I need a coffee to be nice.’ She turned around, as if expecting to see a decent coffee stop in the corridor. Pastor Edwin was gazing at her. His smile was like a blanket waiting to catch her and it irritated the sweat out of her. ‘I don’t think you’re allowed coffee yet, but I might go get one. Let’s not argue, it’s silly. It’s not my fault you need surgery and it’s not your fault you got run over.’
‘It is, actually.’
‘And remember, if something happens to you under anaesthetic it’s me that’d be left here with no one and nothing; you’d be in heaven. Unless you’ve not been good.’
‘Exactly! If something happens to you under anaesthetic.’
‘Nothing bad is going to happen. But have you been good, William? Is there anything you want to tell me?’
I don’t believe any of it any more, was what he wanted to tell her. But he didn’t want to hurt or anger her, so he smiled and shook his head.
She went to get coffee. William shut his eyes. He heard his own breathing and it seemed to come from elsewhere in the room. He contemplated the truth, the one which his yet again absent wife and the priest pressed against the far wall would not want to hear, of how improbable it had seemed, as he felt himself swallowed up by the truck, that beneath this vehicle lay paradise. An ending had seemed more likely, and more deserving of his faith. And he was left with a feeling similar to dreams of being stranded on a cliff-edge or a rooftop where the fear of falling abated only when he gave up hope and jumped. It was the hope of survival that caused him terror.
If that weren’t enough for his battered mind to contemplate, there was also the prospect of finding something meaningful to do with the time between now and the second truck, a task that now felt as complicated as life had once been simple. His head turned slowly, painfully on the pillow, until he was looking at Pastor Edwin. ‘I know something you don’t know,’ he whispered.
‘What was that, William?’ Edwin asked, brightly. He dragged his chair to the side of the bed.
‘Faith…’ William said.
‘Yes, William, faith…’
‘You need a licence to sell guns, but faith…’
Edwin smiled helplessly and averted his eyes (always good practice for the day one went under one’s truck). He bowed his head in renewed prayer. Joy returned and kissed William on the lips. She tasted of coffee.
‘Better?’ he asked.
She nodded and sat on the side of the bed and crossed her legs, leaving her bare knees close to Pastor Edwin’s face as she took the lid off her coffee and laid it on the bedside table. She took a sip and smiled at William.
‘The beauty,’ William whispered, ‘is you’ll never really know there’s nothing. So, that’s kind of okay.’
‘Not as okay as the eternal paradise thing I thought we had agreed on,’ Joy said.
‘What’s happening here with you, William?’ Edwin said, softly. He looked up and was met by a vision of the intersection of Joy Fairman’s thighs that he would need time and effort to shake off.
‘I was run over by a truck,’ William replied, his voice weak and slow.
‘I mean, what else?’ Edwin said.
‘It’s not enough? Ever been run over by a truck?’
‘Use the toolbox of faith that the Church has given you,’ the priest said, as he noticed on the bridge of Joy’s nose a dab of coffee foam which required licking off. He swallowed. ‘I should be going,’ he said. He put his coat on (Pastor Edwin lived by two seasons, the ten months of the year he wore his coat, and the two, July and August, when he carried it) and suggested to Joy that he and she have a quiet word in the corridor.
‘Now she’s here, you’re not taking her,’ William muttered, returning his wife’s backside to the spot she had already started to vacate. The priest left. William shut his eyes and spoke faintly. ‘Some of the things that man expects us to believe are clearly ridiculous. What do we think about that?’
‘We’ve always kept a sense of humour about it.’
‘It all seems less funny now, more hilarious.’
‘And don’t personalise it. It’s not him, it’s all of us. You’re stressed.’
‘Yes. I don’t want to be put under.’
‘Gee, thanks, by the way, for reducing our entire life to rubble. I can look forward to no afterlife now, thanks to you.’
William laughed under his breath. ‘It’s really not my fault. The mustard-coloured paint in the bathroom was my fault, but I’m not to blame if there’s no afterlife.’
‘Everything’s your fault,’ she said, and laughed petulantly, after which her face settled into her handsome smile and they held hands. She sensed that the moment to ask about Susan French had just escaped her and she was appalled at herself for wanting to have it out with him before his surgery, with him so terrified. She squeezed his hand. ‘I love you,’ she said.
‘We could have done all the good things we do just for the sake of goodness,’ he replied.
‘Stop talking in the past tense,’ she said curtly, but soon, as the fear in him rose, she lay with him and stroked his forehead and whispered how she loved him and that she would not allow any harm to come to him and that he needn’t be afraid. She soothed him until the time came and in the sunset glow, as the hospital fell quiet, the nurse brought the pre-med, rattling like dice in a cup, and Joy fed the tablets into his mouth and handed him the water to wash them down, and she shook with fear as they wheeled him away, by which time William was altogether unaware of his lifelong phobia of anaesthetic and enchanted, rather, by the strip-lights on the corridor ceilings.
22
The mist rising off the East River was the lazy sigh of a city hauling itself to its feet. The vibration of the traffic from Delancey Street was the slow drag on a cigarette by the grocery porter sitting on the tailgate of his truck at the intersection of East Broadway and Grand. The porter wore a brown lab coat and pointed to something on the sidewalk with his cigarette hand, making two men outside Ryan’s Grocery Store laugh. The men arched their bodies backwards to counterbalance their pot bellies and one removed his cap and scratched his head as his laughter subsided into a whimper.
Men Like Air Page 25