by Lise Haines
She wasn’t sleeping much anymore. I knew this because I was up most nights listening to her not sleep. She would get so worn during the day she wouldn’t bother to put on makeup, and her hair was a mess where once it had been washed and neatly brushed each day. I saw that it had come undone from the rubber band that she had taken off the morning paper. I was tempted to reach over and pull that band out the rest of the way and hand her a comb, but it was hard to know what was holding her together at that point. I didn’t want to pull out a lynchpin.
Looking at the wooden sticks on Lola’s plate, I saw that she was on her third corn dog. She squatted in her chair instead of sitting, the way she did sometimes when she had growing pains. That winter the pain moved up and down her legs, and she often asked me to rub it away. I thought at first this was about sadness, about not being with friends enough, and maybe it was in part, but then I saw that her appetite had become ceaseless. And when I measured her against a doorframe, she was taller.
Leaning over the open page of a library book, she was so intent on finding one little man among thousands that she hadn’t stopped to eat the French fry she held, coated thick with ketchup. I was about to caution her when hundreds of Roman warriors were suddenly buried alive. I grabbed my napkin, but she pushed my hand back. “I almost have him,” she said without taking her eyes from the page. Later I would rub the ketchup in to make it look like blood spilled in all that Roman chaos. Mom didn’t need the cost of replacing a library book.
“Found him!” she said, beaming her flashlight into my eyes. I guided it out of range, having lost track of the number of times she had looked all the way into the back of my brain with that thing. Lola had developed some of Mom’s impulse for worry by then, and I know she looked with that flashlight for signs of imminent departure.
“They all have striped hats,” I said, studying the illustration, trying to imagine if he was even there. She pulled her wool scarf up to her nose to indicate that I was out of it. I wondered if this was how, in her mind, she looked for our father. Keenly, precisely, without rest.
Waiting until the elevated train passed and the cups hanging from hooks stopped swaying, Mom said, “That’s definitely a compacted fracture.” She shot me a look of satisfaction. And then she returned to us and said, “No dinner tonight?”
“I had a late lunch,” I said.
“Be a love and get the mail, would you?” Mom touched my hand.
I don’t know what it was about that building and its capacity to take on discarded things. When I got down to the entryway I found a large planter with a dead rubber tree and a stack of old Spy magazines—stuff no one had the inclination to move in or out. No bikes, though. Bikes were stolen quickly. That happened to Lola the first week we moved in, though Mom had a solid cable fixed around the frame and a floor-to-ceiling pipe in one corner. She promised to replace it as soon as the spring hit, but Lola told me in confidence that all the money would be gone by then. She must have heard us say too many times that we couldn’t afford something she wanted. I explained that I would give her my birthday money when I got it from our grandparents and uncle. But Lola was a girl of unshakable beliefs. A thousand ways to break a heart.
Ajay was still out in the cold, sometimes stretching his arms out as if he were limbering up for an athletic event. I watched him for a moment through the glass door, and then I jammed my hands into my coat pockets. I’d forgotten my keys. Before I could buzz upstairs, he spotted me. My body locked as he came inside and the cold air swept the entry. Bits of paper danced around his boots and came to a stop when the outer door finally shut.
“Any good mail?” he asked, rubbing his hands together, finally showing he had to warm up. I dreaded that someone might see the envelopes printed with Second Notice, Third Notice, Delinquent. I pulled my gloves from my pockets as if I needed them.
“We didn’t get our mail today,” I said. But when I followed the direction of his gaze I was reminded that our mailbox had diamond-shaped cutouts in the little door, allowing anyone to see when it was crammed full, as it was now. I honestly didn’t know why he cared.
I considered the smallest tattoo on his chest. A goddess of some sort, she had four arms, two hands raised holding flowers and two with coins raining from her palms. A couple of weeks earlier I’d had a dream about her, though she had only two arms. She stood in my room in her sari and gave me a long look and then she started to talk, but too low for me to catch the words, like a movie with bad sound. I had the sense that she was trying to warn me about something. As I began to wake I realized her voice was the voice of someone on the television in the dining room selling fall blouses or false houses. It was three a.m., and my mother had dropped off. They were always trying to sell her things she couldn’t afford while she was unconscious.
“Why does she have four arms?” I asked, nodding toward his chest.
He laughed and said, “The better to hold you with, my dear?”
“That work on your girlfriend?”
I’ve had my share of lucid dreams, and often in that state I can manipulate how I move, what I decide to do. I can drop into water and start swimming, turn a car around and drive off in the opposite direction. More often I take to the air. Yet for all this fluid motion, I know we are as earthbound as rocks. We are self-contained and tough as hard apples.
An odd thing occurred, however, standing there with Ajay in that freezing hallway. Something I hadn’t experienced before. I felt somehow tugged from myself, drawn out little by little, as if I possessed a lighter body inside my solid one. And that lighter body eased into him the way two chemicals mix in a darkroom tray. I found myself breathing with him as if I were held for a second or two in his ribs. I stood inside him, following the stream of thoughts soaking his brain. A lot of those thoughts were about trying to keep me from leaving and going upstairs.
Thinking back, it was like those light-headed moments brought on by skipped meals or too much sugar and coffee that became a habit in those days. Maybe the sensation lasted longer than I imagined. I’m not sure. Time had a way of distorting when I was around him.
The next thing I knew he was shaking my hand and introducing himself again, as if I hadn’t heard him that day in the basement. I did the same.
Despite our clumsiness, I began to see how my head might rest in the crook of his shoulder, what he would say to me the first time he cut himself open to reveal something he tended not to talk about. He looked at me as if we were working off something inevitable. I drew my hand away.
“What makes you think I have a girlfriend?” he asked. “Because I don’t … have a girlfriend.”
“How about keys? I left mine upstairs.”
He seemed relieved that I had a mission for him. Unlocking the door, he tried to hold it open for me, but I’m used to making my own way through doors, so we had a funny exchange. “We called the super, by the way. About the hot water,” I said, starting up the stairs.
“We did too. Then my grandfather pushed me out of the door half dressed to keep an eye out for the guy so I could help him find a parking space. I tried to tell him he’s been working here for years. But you can’t tell my grandfather anything until he calms down. I moved home to help out for a while. He’s gotten too forgetful.”
“I hope he’s okay.”
“You know.” He shrugged. “You planning to be around for a while? I mean, living here?”
“Probably ’til the start of summer.”
“All right,” he said. We were almost in front of his apartment door. Here he moved ahead of me. Taking hold of the banister with one hand, he braced his other hand against the wall, gently blocking my way. “Listen, I was going to ask …” but he stopped and seemed to change course, “if you keep your sister away from the park down the street.”
“We go to other parks,” I said.
“Good, that’s good. Look, if there’s anything I can ever do. You know, change a light bulb …”
“I think we’ve got it down wit
h light bulbs,” I said, finding it tough not to laugh.
Days later I found the woman his grandfather couldn’t stand waiting in the entryway to our building. She wore that same thin jacket, as if she was confused about the season. Her hair was up in a topknot. She pulled the door open for me.
“Do you live here?” she asked before I was halfway in.
I nodded and went over and got the mail out.
“I’m looking for Ajay?” It was odd that she stated this as a question.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“I’m Constantina and …”
“You’re his tattoo,” I said, locking the box again.
She took off her jacket and pulled her right sleeve up to show me a bird in flight in blue ink. “It’s a jay,” she said, as if I might not get it. She asked for something to write on. I guess we should have supplied a dry-erase board for his callers. I watched as she rummaged in her purse. On the floor was a flyer for a new pizza place. I picked this up and handed it to her.
“So you know him,” she said and got out a pen.
I began to understand Mr. Kapur’s troubles here. “You’re his girlfriend?” I said. She looked away. When she didn’t answer, I said, “You all set?”
I’m not sure what I had expected Constantina to be like. Anna Karenina with piercings had gone through my mind. In any case, I thought she would be older. But she was just this woman, probably in her early twenties, not very lean or wan or Olympic or hard-looking. Just a woman willing to trust anyone to get a letter through to a guy—as if he were a soldier at the front. I couldn’t say I understood the war at the time, what was at stake. I told her my first name when she asked and said I had to get upstairs.
“If I write a note to him will you give it to him?” On one edge of the flyer she started to compose her thoughts. “If I leave it in the mailbox or under the door, his grandfather will get it.”
I wondered how long she had been waiting for someone to come by, if she had asked anyone else. She reached out and took my arm now. “For love’s sake?” she said.
“Have you tried calling him?”
“I think his phone is dead. I’ll write quick.”
She went back to composing. I would not have trusted me with her love. But then there’s a name for a condition where you’re unaware that you’re unaware. Cynthia liked to use words like that now and then, but she did crosswords. Anyway, I think Constantina had that. Everyone does, I guess, about certain matters.
I noticed the cheap jewelry around her neck, the battered character shoes. It was this lack of anything else, the fact that she was just a woman sick with love, that made me feel sorry for her. I waited while she scratched something out and then while she started over. Once she was done she folded it into a funny shape, as if she was doing origami for the first time, maybe so I wouldn’t open it. As soon as she handed it to me, I unlocked the inside door.
“Can you put it in your pocket so no one sees?” she asked.
This seemed extreme, but I stuffed it in a jacket pocket and said, “Good luck. I mean, with everything.”
She left quickly, and I assumed this would be the last of her. As I passed Ajay’s apartment on my way upstairs, I put my ear to his door. I didn’t hear anything except water running in the pipes, a sound that could have come from any of the units. It was hard to say if he was home. On the next landing I pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket, unfolded it, and read.
Ajay~ I have to see you. At my aunt’s for a few days. Call me. Forgive me. Call even if you can’t forgive. I’m cut to shreds over you. ~Constantina
I tore off the thin strip that contained the message. What was left—the greasy-looking pizza slices photographed in full color and all those great deals—I let drop to the landing.
Then I ate her note. Slowly. While I trudged upstairs.
I thought of going down to Cynthia’s that night to tell her what I’d done. That I had consumed another woman’s love, that I had eaten her sorrow and maybe her best effort to patch things up. She might be able to tell me why. But I didn’t go. Lola had dropped off, and Mom stirred for a moment when I snapped the lock open but went right back to sleep. A train went by and I went into my room and put Coltrane on low, Constantina’s love still swimming in my belly.
I made a couple of prints from one of Anna Lily’s racetrack images. She had spent time at Arlington. I was intrigued to see how she ignored the rule of three. There was a feeling of movement in many of her images, though the people tended to be still. Whether she shot a simple ticket window or a hot-dog concession, a man’s hat pulled down or a woman looking up at the board to see what she would bet on, everything she shot felt essential and a little mysterious, as if she was giving you the start of a long story. She photographed the privileged in their smart outfits and reserved boxes. Their faces nicely shaded, money in good supply. Her lens had a way of respecting them while exposing them, as if she had pulled down their pants in public while highlighting the beautiful fabric and stitching. But the depictions of the desperate characters captured me the most. Here were the gambling addicts, the people out on the hard benches in the sun tearing up tickets, the ones who stayed at the bar too long. One man looked like my father. But he was in the background, turned away.
I had Lily’s printed versions for comparison. She had a particular way of burning and dodging that I was trying to understand. I took them over to Nitro’s to get some technical advice. As soon as I pulled them from the box, he wouldn’t stop talking about them. Finally, after asking me when I had taken these shots and talking about a couple of ways I might reprint them, he took my hand and we went over to the long, flat drawers where he had shown me the work of the woman he went to Paris with. He opened the third drawer from the top—the one above hers—and removed whatever was there and placed Anna Lily’s work inside. He assumed they were a present. I removed them just as carefully and put them back in the photo box I had brought them in.
He gave me a funny look and suggested I soak while he finished something up. His tub, sitting out in the middle of his loft, accommodated two. The word MARAT was painted in dashed black letters along one side. Here I soaked and watched him through a pair of binoculars as he worked. He put down his mat knife and came over to where I bathed and slipped the strap of the binoculars over my head. He placed them on a table, undressed, and got into the other end of the tub. I watched his penis bob in the water.
“You look sad today,” he said. “How can anyone look sad who’s just shot the best photographs of her life?”
“They aren’t mine. I was just printing something, playing around.”
“Who’s the photographer?”
“Never mind.”
“Okay.”
He lay back and cradled me in his arms so I’d open up a little. He had a boyish, lean body and it was a little difficult to get comfortable against his ribs, even in the water. But I imagine some of Freud’s patients complained about the scratchiness of the rugs on his couch.
“I had a dream I keep thinking about.”
“Tell me,” he said.
“When we lived in Evanston my mother’s sculptures used to spook me at night, the way they mirrored the house and the workshop and anything that moved across the lawn. We had a lot of rabbits in our neighborhood, and their reflections would suddenly loom up in the metal like a funhouse mirror. Now I just miss them, the sculptures. In the dream I was standing in the yard again, surrounded by her towering work. Our lawn was covered with seedpods, outdoor furniture, and bicycles left out. I could feel the wet grass soaking my feet and the bottom edges of my pajamas. Then all at once I took off into the air. Moving above our house, arms outstretched, my clothes fluttering against my body. I was far above the sculptures, above the troubles.”
He asked me to turn around so he could wash my back. I did this and crossed my arms and put them along the edge of the tub, resting my forehead there.
“I felt … lighthearted.”
; “Headed?”
“Yes, light-headed, lighthearted—flying dreams are like that for me.”
He kissed the back of my soapy neck and slid his hands around and cupped my breasts. But I wasn’t feeling that way and turned, nudging him off, rinsing his soap away.
He lay back again at the other end of the tub.
“Ajay was in the dream.”
“Who?”
“This guy who lives in my building.”
“You haven’t mentioned an Ajay before,” he said, looking concerned.
“He’s on the first floor. I hardly know him. But in the dream I felt as drawn to him as I do to gravity.”
“You should probably stay away from this guy,” Nitro said.
“But it wasn’t even about him, really.”
“Then why was he in it?” he asked.
I didn’t know why I played these games with Nitro, but I did.
“I’ve been sending my father postcards. Did I say?”
“I thought you weren’t talking to him.”
“Each one is a tragic accident. Some are quite bloody.”
My head began to feel too light, the water too hot. Maybe I should have eaten lunch. “If I saw him tomorrow,” I said, mumbling to myself, “I might turn him in.”
“For what?”
I thought over the possibilities. “For each time Lola goes without.”
“Do you think you’re his tragic accident?”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. Just fuck me so I can go home. I’m going to be late for dinner.”
He held on to both sides of the tub and pulled toward me. “You said they were pretty young when they had you.”
“You’re driving me crazy,” I said and pushed him away.
“I’m sorry. Wait, stay.”
“Call your girlfriend up. Ask her to stay.” I got out of the tub, water sheeting off my body onto the floor.