We wouldn’t get married this year either, but I had begun to think about it in my last year of college, the year we spent apart, he in Florida, I in Vermont. Walking around town, I eyed the bed-and-breakfasts, the village green with the gazebo where Aaron and I had spent so many hours, now covered in snow. I imagined it come to life with wildflowers, saw a ceremony there, the eaves strung with tiny lights. At work, as I stood at the back table folding bakery boxes, I daydreamed of the dress I might wear, a sunshiny yellow, I thought, because it was the middle of winter and I was hungry for spring. I missed my boyfriend.
So we would be reunited, not in Vermont or in Florida but in New York. It had once been his home, the place he knew best. His mother was there. His memories were there. It would be a return for him; he could be more himself. And it would be a new start for me; I could be the self I wanted to be—more fashionable, funnier, with more friends. I would have material. I would have experience. I could see the two of us walking arm in arm down the street, Aaron’s step both more relaxed and more alive, mine a little taller in my platform shoes.
Over spring break, Aaron and I met in the city to try to find an apartment. We hadn’t heard of Craigslist; we were looking in The Village Voice. It seemed an impossible task. His mother urged us to call her cousin, a real estate agent in the city, but Aaron said we could find something ourselves. He didn’t like relying on family. We couldn’t find anything ourselves. On the last day of our visit, I broke down and cried at the Astor Place Starbucks. The idea of returning to Florida put me in a soul-panic.
Aaron broke down and called his cousin. We went to her office and immediately she found us a one-bedroom sublet in an elevator building for $1,200 a month, for a fee of $1,200. She took down our information on the application form—rental history, previous addresses, income. I told her what I’d be making at the magazine. Then she looked to Aaron. “About two thousand dollars,” he said.
His cousin paused her pen. “Two thousand a month?” she asked.
“No. For the year.”
“Wow,” his cousin said.
His cousin owned two apartments in Greenwich Village—one for herself and one for her dogs.
* * *
While I started my new job and pretended I lived on the Upper East Side, Aaron tied up loose ends in Florida. He was needed to take care of one problem at one property, then another. A hurricane rolled through and took part of a roof off one of the houses. There were bills to pay, cats to feed, repairs to oversee. He’d picked up some shifts at CD Warehouse. Might as well. This pleased me, his return to the job he’d had when we met. We might go on indefinitely like this, us being the people we’d been before we’d complicated each other’s lives.
It was a strange period of inheritance. His father wasn’t dead yet. But there was little Aaron could do for him by that point. After a second stroke, he was an empty shell. Slowly it became clear he would be a resident at the VA hospital for the rest of his life, however long that would be.
Meanwhile, there was stuff. A lot of it.
His father had once been a rich man. Now Aaron had to rummage through a lot of bizarre crap to find the equally bizarre riches. Jewels. Some gold pieces. Tiny jagged pieces of meteorite, encased in beds of cotton. Mayan artifacts that belonged in a museum. The speakers his father had manufactured in his factory in the Bronx. Aaron would call me and report on the day’s findings. What to save? What to trash? What to sell? His attitude about his father’s stuff ranged from annoyance to disgust to nostalgia to reverence. Other days he just wanted to burn it all. “I’m afraid I’m going to find something scary,” he said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
He had already found his father’s guns. They were one of the first things Aaron sold. They went to Morris’s friend from the VA. Aaron didn’t want them around, and I was glad to see them go.
In other boxes, he found pictures. Pictures of his grandfather, his namesake, Aaron David. Pictures of his father’s first wife, the woman he had married shortly after returning from the war. Aaron knew of her, growing up, had seen the pictures of the young wife and their baby son, who was born with his umbilical cord wound around his neck. His brain suffered such loss of oxygen that it never developed beyond his birth. He learned to walk but not to speak. As though knowing what fate lay beyond, Morris had reversed the order of the names he’d intended to give his first son: David Aaron.
David was twenty-five years older than Aaron. He might have been his father, if he had ever had a life of his own. When he was a child, too much of a burden on his young parents, his mother made the decision to commit him to an institution upstate. Morris didn’t want to. At least that’s what he told Aaron. That was the end of their marriage.
Still David lived in a home in Rome, New York. As a child, Aaron had never been taken to see his brother, and now he was an adult and didn’t know how to start, whether he should, what it would do for him or David.
But now these were among the calls and letters Aaron managed. He was still in his twenties and the power of attorney for a seventy-six-year-old man in one home and a fifty-four-year-old man in another, both of whom were spoon-fed their breakfasts by a state-paid nurse. Insurance, social workers, medical updates. Morris had a stomach virus. David had eaten a razor blade. Morris would be moved to a room down the hall. David had eaten a comb.
There were the pictures. Then there were all the contents of his father’s walk-in closet, and a storage unit across the street: cases and cases of collectibles from failed businesses. Baseball cards, coins. His father had written them off. They weren’t worth much, but they weren’t worthless. Aaron got to know the baseball card dealers in town, the coin dealers. He’d meet them in the parking lot of the storage unit and make a deal. And he started selling stuff on eBay. Slowly, he learned the way it all worked. How to time an auction for the best bids. How to deal with buyers. How to insure a package. He became a regular at the post office on US-1. He started researching his items on eBay, finding poorly listed auctions—inaccurate descriptions, or misspellings—then buying those items and relisting them at a profit. He hadn’t signed up for it, but he was good at it. That year, for Christmas, I had business cards designed for him, which he tucked into every package.
I don’t remember having a conversation about it. It was predetermined. That was what he would do in New York. He would sell stuff on eBay.
After sixteen months sleeping in his old bed, he called his father’s social worker and his brother’s social worker and gave them his new address. He found homes for his father’s cats and he drove to New York. He would go back to visit his father every month. The condo sat, shuttered, empty of people, full of junk.
* * *
Every Sunday afternoon, we took three trains to visit Aaron’s mother on St. Marks Place. In some ways we considered it our neighborhood, more than Manhattan Avenue. It was Aaron’s home. We walked the block he’d walked as a kid, a whole universe between Second and Third avenues, drank egg creams at the Gem Spa, browsed music at Kim’s, comics at St. Mark’s Comics. That was where he’d played arcade games; that was where he’d played violin in front of his mom’s restaurant; that was where he’d bought liquor for his mom’s restaurant; that was the dumpster where she’d found a dead body; that was where he and his best friend, Ashmat, used to sell the Star Wars action figures they’d stolen from K-mart. In some ways, it felt like the reason we were here in New York: so we could walk up and down this block, reconstructing Aaron’s childhood.
Aaron’s mom had grown up in Manhattan. Her parents hadn’t married; she had more half-siblings than Aaron could count. When she was a child, she had been subjected to abuses acknowledged but not detailed by the family. Her father had sent her to a boarding school in Belgium, where she was taught by nuns. Like Aaron’s father, she did not go to college.
But she learned French and Spanish and Italian. She learned to cook from her mother, a Sicilian immigrant with a restaurant in Mi
dtown. She was married young, to a man who abused her and her two children, and divorced young. She was married again, to a millionaire and World War II vet who had struck it big with a speaker company he’d founded. She told me later he was the love of her life. He bought her a big Gatsby mansion in Manhasset (built by Raoul Fleischmann, cofounder of The New Yorker and heir to the Fleischmann baking company) with twenty-three rooms, chauffeur’s quarters, a tennis court, and a swimming pool on Oyster Bay. In pictures from that time, family lounged around the pool, smoking, laughing, doting on her baby son, Aaron. Aaron’s older half-sister and half-brother, who lived there with them, aunts, uncles, cousins. There were nanny’s quarters too. It was his Dominican nanny, Eni, who really raised him, he said. His first language was Spanish. Lost now.
When Aaron was six, his mother moved out. His half-siblings, now grown, had left, too. Aaron lived in that big house with his father. Morris told him his mother didn’t want to be a mother anymore. Sandra told him his father had cut her off, used his money and power to muscle her out of Aaron’s life. “I couldn’t fight him,” she told me. After a while she moved to St. Marks Place, where she had been living now in a rent-controlled apartment for more than twenty years, half of them with a boyfriend who was thirty years her junior. As a kid, Aaron had visited on the weekends, in the summers, whenever he could, even after his father moved him to Florida. His dad kept a tight leash on him, but on his days in the city, he was free. Once, at sixteen, he skipped school, pawned his amp, got a ride to the airport, and bought a ticket to LaGuardia. He called his father that afternoon from his mom’s living room. “I’m in New York,” he told him. He expected his dad to be furious, but Morris laughed and laughed.
From the sidewalk, I could see a slice of that living room: the cherry cabinet lined with vases, the crystal chandelier. The apartment had once been the second-story entrance to the building; now the ornate white French doors opened on to a tiny balcony. The next building over, the Search & Destroy vintage clothing store blasted punk, but as I approached I could hear the competing notes of a symphony. I’d duck under the Sock Man’s awning and Aaron would ring the buzzer. “Hey, Ma,” he’d say.
“Come on up, sweeties.”
I could smell the onions sizzling as I came up the stairs. Sandra would be hustling around the kitchen when we came through the propped-open door; she stopped to air kiss each of our cheeks. “I’m making pulao,” she’d say. Or dumplings, or soup—vegan, she’d promise.
“Smells so good,” I’d say. She smelled good, too, floral and sharp. She was sweating over the stove, but she did so with the slightly intimidating poise of a woman who had once employed a chef herself, and often said so. She was a large woman, and the tiny kitchen she filled was a kind of extension of her body. Everything in the apartment was tiny: tiny stove, tiny refrigerator, tiny countertop that swung open to pass through to the tiny living room, and closed to double as the tiny dining table. I could reach out and touch the mirrored door to the bathroom, which was so tiny I could sit on the tiny toilet while washing my hands in the tiny sink. But the whole apartment was tall; all the tiny things were stacked neatly in long, white cupboards that stretched to the eleven-foot ceilings. A loft bed hovered overhead.
“Can I help?” I’d think to ask. I was a little scared of her, the same way I was still a little scared of New York. I was worried that I’d burn or bungle something, that I’d reveal myself to be the inept girl who could never get my MetroCard to swipe on the first try.
Sandra would wave a hand. She cooked; it was second nature; it was like asking her if I could help her walk. “It’s easy. You could make it. I’ll give you the recipe. Oh! I have something for you.” Rarely did we come over without her pressing some cast-offs into our hands. She’d open one of the tall cabinets and pull out a handful of slightly bowed wooden spoons. “They were just going to throw them away.” She cooked for a family uptown. She used to cook for George Soros and would bring home his discarded pots and pans.
At dinner, Sandra told stories about a bright and colorful ensemble cast, friends and lovers and cousins who were dancers and psychics and entrepreneurs, Bob Dylan singing on the sidewalk, Madonna eating in her restaurant, beautiful people (his sister, his niece)—they could have been models! Sandra, too, had been beautiful—“I used to be beautiful, you know,” she would say, with pain. She told only a handful of stories about Aaron. “I took you to Radio City. You must have been seven or eight. You loved those Rockettes!” It was a shallow field, I realized, Sunday after Sunday, her memories of Aaron as a child.
But she was fairly absent in Aaron’s stories of New York, too, a figure glimpsed from under a table at her restaurant, where he played. “She fed me well,” he allowed. There was that.
She fed us well still, these Sundays, and I felt strangely full and empty, leaving the apartment, as she pressed a bag of goodies into my arms—leftovers and the wooden spoons, a silk jacket she didn’t wear anymore. We walked in silent exhaustion to the subway station. I didn’t tell Aaron that, after dinner, when he was in the bathroom, Sandra had leaned over to me and whispered, “You know, he could get his chin done, easy.” She held her glass of sparkling water steadily in one hand, and with the other, scissored the skin under her own chin.
* * *
One night, leaving his mom’s, he pointed out the building to me. A regular building on St. Marks Place he had passed a thousand times as a kid. It was the building where his mom and Ashmat’s dad had owned a restaurant while they were carrying on an affair. It had happened shortly after Aaron had moved from New York to Florida. He hadn’t wanted to leave his best friend. Ashmat was about twelve. When he and his siblings had come over from Afghanistan—his father, a judge back home, had sent for them—they hadn’t brought birth certificates. The family wasn’t sure of his exact age.
One day, one of the waitresses found herself locked out of her apartment in the building. It was her idea to tie a rope around Ashmat’s waist and lower him from the roof down to the third-floor window. But she hadn’t been able to hold on, and Ashmat fell to the ground. He died in the hospital.
Aaron learned the news from his father, in their condo in Florida.
Ashmat was the one in Aaron’s stories of New York. Selling fireworks with Ashmat. Going to see E.T. in the theater with Ashmat. He still had a Snoopy Valentine’s Day card from Ashmat. “He was like a brother to me,” Aaron said.
* * *
Phillip had lined up another job for me. It was with another friend of his, a woman who worked as a private art dealer and bookseller and needed an assistant. This meant I went to her Tribeca studio and ordered old books and prints on eBay and put new dust jackets and frames on them so that my boss could sell them for ridiculous amounts of money. It also meant I helped her out of bed and fetched her coffee and ciabatta rolls and listened to her gossip about rich people in New York. I felt poor and dull in her presence, but never bored; feeling poor and dull was a small price to pay for proximity to a dark and dysfunctional opulence. She once bought me a $300 dress from Bergdorf Goodman, black and silky and, I realized too late, entirely see-through in the flash of a camera.
Meanwhile Aaron was at home in our apartment, selling things on eBay. He too was calculating markup and postage and insurance, timing auctions and waiting in line at the post office in our neighborhood, leaving with receipts long enough to touch the ground. He’d already gone home to Florida once to visit his dad at the VA nursing home and to pick up more inventory: baseball cards, coins, figures, his own versions of weird collectibles. I knew he was also picking up pot.
We were in New York City. There were drugs everywhere. It was the place Aaron had first tried pot, first tried everything. His mother had kept it in the refrigerator. But he was too shy, or paranoid, or isolated, to ask for connections. He thought about having his dealer in Florida mail him some. But we had a friend in Vermont who’d been arrested for receiving pot through the mail. Aaron didn’t want to risk it. Instead, he flew do
wn to Florida, rented a car, and drove back with a trunk full of collectibles, a big bag of pot hidden in an emptied-out Nintendo console. The uglier the car, he thought, the better. No cop was going to pull over a white guy driving a Pontiac Aztec.
I took in this information with some amusement and some worry. I still felt like a square myself, didn’t really like to smoke and never smoked with him. But I’d accepted that it was a part of Aaron’s life, accepted that he needed it, even if I didn’t totally understand why. When I’d feel the worry nagging me, I’d tell myself, Everyone smokes pot! It’s a harmless hippie drug!
Mostly, I was worried about money. The money came in, a little here, a little more there. Aaron had access to his dad’s accounts, but there was less and less money in them, mortgages to cover, insurance, repairs. I was starting to feel the weight of it, money, the gravity it had in New York.
Phillip’s MCAT class was coming to a close. Soon he would take back the afternoon shift at the magazine and I would be done.
Then one morning I received a phone call on my giant clamshell cell phone. It was from an editor at Poets & Writers. They had received my letter and résumé. As it happened, they were looking for a part-time person to edit a couple of sections of the magazine. Would I like to come in for an interview?
A few mornings later I took the 6-train downtown past St. Marks, and got off at Spring, wearing the suit and the silver sweater shell my mother had bought me at the Gardens Mall. The editors were kind and did not seem to notice how very badly I wanted the job.
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