When Rose thinks back to that afternoon now she can see them both at a distance, her blue parka coat done up to the throat, her father’s hair swept back, black and inky and looking as though the colour might run down his face in the drizzle. In the fuzzy tableau she’s crying, her father looks enraged and ashamed. Then it’s quiet and her father thrusts the gun towards her and she shakes her head and turns and walks away down the hill, becoming a speck as her father looks on after her and gently bites his bottom lip. He places the gun back in its case, his gaze unwavering, but knowing that something in the ever-expanding space between them is now twisted and wrong, and though he sets off briskly after her he’s merely making up the yards that separate them. He can do nothing to ever eliminate the distance between them.
Years later, in the hospital where Rose was born, her father died, and as life left him with a gasp her father reached for her, one hand outstretched as he said one final, softly spoken thank-you. The nurse who has just walked in to check on him heard only those final words and wondered what had passed between them. She stepped forward and gently helped Rose unclench her fingers from around the bed cover and check her father’s vital signs where there were now none. The nurse was always surprised to touch the neck and embrace the thin wrists and sallow skin and find nothing there, as if life was hiding from her like guests crouched in the darkness at a surprise party. Sometimes the nurse would hold on a second too long, expecting the beat to return, only to become aware of the curious eyes of a family member or friend already clinging to a shard of hope who mistook her lingering grip as a sign that their loved one was coming back, that life would suddenly flood through their veins and they’d sit up with a smile, full of longing and ready for the embrace.
January 1980
In Washington Square there was a man who preached to the indifferent New Yorkers that passed him by. He stood on a piece of turf just where two paths intersected and sometimes he’d throw back his head and call to his God; other times he sounded humbled, his voice low, and he’d speak of the sins once clogging his arteries and heart; he made sinning sound like a burger, like he’d once gorged on evil and mankind would too, but then, Rose did concede, gluttony was one of the seven sins. He spoke of fires rising up and consuming the city, making everything clean. At his loudest and most pronounced he put her in mind of her father, though her father’s voice had diminished as the years wore on and even though he insisted – usually at dinner as he waved his knife and fork and impaled food around – that the evils of the world still scratched at their window, he’d lost his lustre and volume when it came to condemning the wrongdoers that he insisted still sat mere feet from their front step.
Rose would sometimes take her lunch to the park, sweeping crumbs from her lap as she studied the towers of New York through the sparse boughs of the park’s spindly trees. She’d tried to embrace the city, but its indifference was robust and some days she dreamt about travelling home and fixing up her father’s old house in the shadow of those troubled hills. But that home had been sold long ago, and she’d bundled up the bad memories with the pale bedding and the curtains and burnt them in the back yard and wished the pain away with the dwindling smoke.
One evening, much to her surprise, Rose found herself in a brown and yellow church basement, partitioned off by a white folding wall that ran on castors and squeaked each time it closed in on itself to reveal another room beyond. The preacher in the park, as she’d begun to think of him, had sat down next to her one day while she ate her lunch and almost without her knowing had laid his hand gently on her wrist. She remembered a blackbird on the branch overhead turn his head and regard her with a rolling eye and then fly off with an abrupt snapping of his wings. The preacher spoke softly in a voice she wished she’d heard more of in her life. His silver cross hung on a long chain and swung towards her as he sat forward, her eyes drawn to it as she took his voice in. She blushed, suddenly pink with longing and if not for this man then for something long missing in her life, her loneliness prompting memories of calamitous dates and odious men who she thought of as the personification of New York’s crumbling streets, like something the city might have made.
One was called Reese, he had eyebrows that knitted together to form a line of dismay across his forehead; he was already drunk when she arrived at the restaurant, and was waving a piece of asparagus around. With mounting dread she realised that he’d taken it from an abandoned plate on the table next to theirs. He’d referred to the waitress as another cheap slut before they’d even emptied the bread basket and had broken off their conversation mid-sentence to head to the restroom, glancing back over his shoulder to inform her and a startled woman at the salad bar that the asparagus was sure to make his piss stink. She’d grabbed her bag and was up and away from the table before the bathroom door had stopped swinging. Rose made a blind left out of the restaurant and walked purposefully away, her heels a quickening clatter on the street, and wondered when the promise of another life that had once filled her as she pulled into the city had gone. She felt colourless and found an empty bench on which she sat and thought about Jack Lemmon ousted from his home by amorous workmates in the movie The Apartment, shivering in the cold, defences down.
That wooden bench, the one in Washington Square, and now these old rows of seats in a church basement in SoHo: here Rose was again, feeling that she was watching the world from outside in. There was a man, the Reverend James Bulley, standing up in front of a group of thirty or so people, some holding hands, others with heads bowed and eyes closed, and he was asking them to testify, to reach out and open up. It all sounded like instructions, but she wanted to be led, she was still in her twenties and she’d already had enough of fumbling her way through life. Rose missed her father’s commands, the domineering tone of his voice; she’d forgiven him his lack of love a long time ago and settled into a kind of compliance that she found comfort in. She hadn’t been the son he longed for and his wife had been dragged almost in two halves into the sky: her father had endured his share of pain and loss, no wonder he railed against the world. At least, she thought, he felt strongly about something.
The SoHo basement became her refuge three, sometimes four times a week. She met recovering alcoholics, drug addicts, the lost, the hopeless, others like her crushed by a city that lived remotely behind closed doors and sealed windows. Rose talked to her God and he listened. The room in her minute apartment slowly filled with crucifixes and iconography and she learned to love each tiny Jesus, the welcoming, open arms and the soft curve of her saviour’s nose. She lit candles and enjoyed the glow of his beatific face. Rose slept beneath a picture of him that she’d found downtown; she kept a small figure pressed against her chest, her fingers in a tight embrace around her saviour. She tripped to work, and grinning in her cubicle she found herself gently fingering the small cross around her neck. Someone told her she looked like she was blooming and she did feel like a flower craning towards the sun, feeling the warmth and being filled up with life. His love was all-encompassing; it made her complete.
‘They’ll tell you this is unconstitutional,’ said the Reverend James Bulley with the gentle hands and a rod in his voice. ‘Tell you that it’s wrong, tell you that it can’t be taught in our schools.’ His voice was low and invited the listener in. The basement was busier than usual tonight; she stood near the back and poured hot water from an urn onto the granules of coffee bunched up at the bottom of her plastic cup. She felt the heat fill the cup and ran her fingers over its side as if she were practising piano scales. The murmur of approving voices brought her head around. Then the preacher was speaking to her, to the thickening air around her. The thought pierced her heart – that not all men embraced the Lord like she did, that some even doubted his veracity. Satan sat in the towers and alleyways of this city, that much she knew; her father had always said as much, had warned her to stay away. She knew that his horned shadow sat across her heart some nights as she looked out of her window and so she pulled her coat
close and trembled at the thought of the evil below, the dark stain of sin running in the streets. Sometimes she’d rush home, her short heels a rapid tattoo on the sidewalk as her pulse flared and the blood rushed through her veins and she felt him at her shoulder inviting her to stay, to slow and to succumb. She’d slam her apartment door behind her, the air caught at her throat, the sound of her heart filling her head and she’d say a silent prayer until the pulsing stopped and then she’d walk quickly to her room and fall into her saviour’s loving arms until the panic ran from her. Some mornings she’d wake there, the beautiful features of her Lord smiling up at her like she once imagined a lover might.
She took to standing on street corners in the evening with the rest of her new friends from the basement, directed by Bulley; they took turns staring the Devil down. She could see him in the eyes of the passers-by, the scorn with which they surveyed her as she proffered a leaflet, implored them to open their hearts to God, to be saved on these streets, could they not see the bile rising around them, the tide readying to carry them away? She imagined Gomorrah before the city fell, before the sin was cut from its heart, her God and his angels falling from the sky as a rain of cleansing fire.
‘You really believe this?’ asked the man, though not unkindly. His question turned heads among her group who, until then, had been working their corner as assiduously and protectively as a drug dealer might theirs. The man was tall, his face set hard as if he always had somewhere to be, but it was difficult to tell what he might be thinking as he pored over the words on the leaflet she’d handed him; she could only stand and stare and didn’t dare stop him to eulogise as it was the first flyer she’d passed out that day that hadn’t been discarded moments later. He looked up and smiled at her and she saw the brief tenderness in his eyes before he glanced at his watch, nodded a brief goodbye and was gone. She wanted to tell him that yes, she really did believe all of this – to the outsider it might have looked like she lacked conviction, but with each flyer she gave out she felt a surge of pride and faith as if she were lit up from the inside like a lantern. She nodded emphatically to herself and stepped forward once again from their corner, the spirit of her father spurring her on; the conviction that she could help to make her flock multiply made her feel giddy.
Rose had been smitten before, had what felt like a schoolgirl crush. But that was before Jesus had entered her life and let her glimpse his eternal love. Apart from the occasional, fumbling nights spent as a jumble of limbs and a tangle of sheets with men who came and went leaving her feeling only rueful and incomplete, she only shared God’s true love with one other thing: an abandoned warehouse set just outside the city, a hollow promise with cracked windows. Even writing about it in her diary had made Rose laugh, but it was a girlish laugh, a soft laugh; it made her blush to think of it. She’d first seen the building, looking abandoned and forlorn, set back from the concrete rise of the highway heading towards New Jersey, as she passed by in a friend’s car, her jabbering companion failing to see the magic rising up from the bricks and tiles like glassy waves of undulating heat coming up from the surface of a freshly tarred road. She’d craned her neck until her companion had asked her who the hot guy she’d spotted in another car was, and then honked her horn with an emphatic finger.
‘Did he see you staring, did he wave back?’ her new workmate asked. And Rose found herself recalling the dark windows and wondered if she’d been seen, if its empty spaces were in some way reaching out to her. She passed her days on that idling commute to a temporary job and would feel her heart race a little as they came to the curve that led to the straight, speeding pass where the building would reveal itself to her. It had been empty for months as far as she could tell – a sign offering excellent rates and the first three months free looked tattered and abashed. Its corner curled down as if it couldn’t or wouldn’t meet her gaze. The building had already been painted three times in as many months, first a shimmering blue gloss that made it look like a giant wrapper for a discontinued chocolate bar. Then it was suddenly red, a lofty exclamation point that stood out against the horizon like a welt or a warning. Then it was dirty white again, an indifferent totem, still a bargain at half the price. In her dreams she stalked its rooms, never scared, always at home in its lofty space. Its wall were lit, there was a welcoming fire, the gentle murmur of a radio played the same country shows that her father liked to listen to in their kitchen. He’d stand staring out of the window and sing the words he knew, hum the rest, his fingers tapping a restless yet happy beat. Rose would wake in her apartment to low light and the sound of the street, her alarm insistent and harsh, and think back to the cool solitude of the building and see herself looking out of its windows and then spot herself in one of the cars gliding past on the busy highway in the distance. She’d feel safe there, she thought, at a distance.
Rose had finally taken a cab down to the warehouse late one night, hailing the car on a whim from a bar she’d just walked out of, the driver asking her if she wanted him to wait, but she waved him away, craving the solitude and her mood buoyed by a bottle of wine and some beers a stranger had bought. The building stood impassively still as the cab’s lights retreated and she reapplied her lipstick and brushed her hair among the shadows. She felt afraid but then reassured as she laid both hands against the cold stone of the warehouse wall. The giant door was ajar and she ran her finger against the frame as she slipped inside; it was darker than she’d imagined, there was no fire, no music playing, no radio, her footsteps echoed, in the distance the road sang with stray cars rushing to find home. She wished she were among them, suddenly longing for the steep stairs of her apartment block. She found a grid of light switches and ran her hand against it, elated and surprised to find that at least some of the neon bars overhead came to life to form a broken grid of white across the high ceiling as a glowing, fractured cross. She climbed the long, steep, steel stairs set against one wall and pulled herself up to one of the high windows, craning her head upwards as if her nose were trying to break the surface of a swimming pool. She clung to the serrated bricks with the side of her foot and looked out; the view to the road was just as she imagined it might be, though no faces looked up to discover hers and no matter how hard she stared she couldn’t find herself out there among the concrete pillars and painted white lines, cocooned behind a car door and making up the miles.
The next time Rose returned to the warehouse, she borrowed her friend’s car and took Christmas lights and balloons and cushions and made what she considered looked most like a nest. She tried to herd the errant balloons, racing after them with a giggling gallop, as they caught on an untraceable current and bobbed gently away into the building’s corners, drifting upwards and just out of reach. She knotted the lines of fairy lights and made them into a long, glimmering lasso and couldn’t help but gasp when they softly glowed into life. Lying among the cushions she breathed in deeply and then exhaled just as hard, trying to make the building’s air mingle in with hers. So its timber and brick, corners and joists would be on her breath and then in her lungs and ultimately inside of her. Rose lay there panting like a racehorse that finished third and watched the light die in the arches above her. Like stars blinking out in space, she thought. She spoke to the walls and believed that they listened, she talked of her father and her mother and the burgeoning faith kicking into life inside her and thought of the place as her sanctuary. She brought more cushions and lights the next time she came and then one night found herself startled by the morning as it stole through the high windows, her hair matted and her mouth dry, the irregular balls of light twinkling at the periphery of her vision. She imagined taking a lover there, dragging him down among the cushions, embracing him tightly as the darkness hemmed them in. There was no lover now though, no one she cared enough about to share her space with; she was here alone with only the sound of speeding cars for company.
*
They saw the smoke hanging in the air before they reached the familiar rise of the h
ighway. The road was backed up as the traffic slowed and stilled to take in the spectacle blooming in black plumes somewhere past the next turn-off. By the time they rolled slowly past, the warehouse was host to spires of orange, yellow and red, defiantly spitting its last. The cheap rates sign hung down like an unknotted tie, pale wisps of smoke gathering at its corners, the vinyl beginning to curl. Fire trucks directed jets of water upwards that hissed and steamed on impact, their revolving lights playing dully against what was left of the building’s frame. Her friend turned in her seat and was surprised to see Rose pressed up against the window, tears dashing her crumpled features, fingers bent up against the glass. This one thing that had given her hope and a sense of belonging when she had none was now drifting in dirty plumes and into the sky forever.
In retrospect, the gutted building felt like a schoolgirl crush, the three-month fling before the first love proper once she’d found her Lord and been saved. Rose still felt pangs when she passed that way (though her new and more permanent post had saved her the long commute out to the suburbs), or thought about the dreamless sleep she’d enjoyed among the cushions on that vacant concrete floor. It was improbable and never likely to last, but the memory left her feeling happily flushed. She’d tried to tell her new friends about it, but had been shushed into silence by those who thought her kind of low-key madness might spread like the fire that had once engulfed her building.
*
Weeks later, after her dreams had been filled again and again with the shattering glass of the burning warehouse’s windows, flaming beams crashing to the floor where she had once slept, Rose found herself once again back at the warehouse; forever changed, she stood within the building’s husk; she’d lost her Christmas lights and cushions to the fire, but still half-expected to see the remnants of her belongings among the black dust that littered the warehouse floor. Rose tried the useless light switches; their sharp edges seared to a blunt point, shrivelled memories forged in the heat. She kicked at the pieces of wood scattered around her and stared up at the suddenly fleeting clouds moving through the sparse rafters above her head. She touched the walls, but the life had gone out of the building; she shouted into the darkness, but her questions were swallowed up and unanswered; she pressed both palms against the brickwork, willing her life to pulse through the rotten wood and black glass and into the soulless edifice and make it live again like her Lord had once commanded Lazarus to rise from his bed. She imagined her fairy lights radiant, the sound of the radio, her father nearby and her mother alive as a silhouette in the hallway before their God had taken her away. A footfall broke her reverie.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 2