* * *
—
Got off the subway later that afternoon. Black clouds veined the gold sky, like marble. A threat glowed, one that was not as immediate as a storm warning, but rather a vague promise of hardship. The premonition of New York winter.
Litter in the gutter of North Seventh Street. An elderly Italian man loitered on the corner, radio to ear, square black shades obscuring three quarters of his face, wisps of white hair blown straight up by wind. It was too cold to stand outside: he was pretending to enjoy a summer day. I moved through the peach air as if it were the breath of roses. A dramatic silence in Brooklyn.
* * *
—
At work that night, I picked petals from the crease of the reservation book. Angel paced in my imagination, savage and divine as a snow leopard. I bragged about her until Chico made fun of me.
“You’re going to start lactating, Lee.”
“Who are you? You’re about to be a dad!” I protested.
Shannon smirked behind the bar, wiping hands on rag tucked into waist. “Don’t become one of those New York women, Lee. Don’t get all book club and Pilates and soy milk. You’re my favorite fucked-up party girl.”
“Gee, thanks.”
During the next few hours, in the anxiety of sweet-potato soufflés, on the trays of Cosmopolitans, among the hands and faces of strangers, Angel’s image became less distinct.
I got off the subway a bit after 2:00 AM. Ambled down my blue street, mumbling under my breath, still high on work. Opened my door with a hopeful smile.
“I’m home, sugar,” I said. “Angel. I’m home.”
Left bag and keys on floor, and walked from room to room. When I didn’t see her anywhere, I pulled down the comforter, turned over piles of clothes, lifted towels from floor. Don’t panic, I told myself. I looked in the toilet. I looked in the refrigerator. I checked the hollows of shoes and boots.
“Fuck!” I said, wringing hands. “I knew it.”
I was checking cabinets when I noticed. I’d opened the window to dump an ashtray onto the street and hadn’t closed it. The gap was four inches. I put my hand over my mouth.
* * *
—
Outside, I hunted through shadows. Moved blue recycling bags on the curb. Oh my God, I saw her.
Rushed to the other side of the street. But it was a white napkin caught in wild grass.
Two guys rolled down the sidewalk in Adidas sneakers and hooded sweatshirts. I asked if they’d seen a kitten, held my hands apart to demonstrate size.
“We don’t live here,” one said.
“Just passing through,” said the other. “Sorry.”
After circling the block, and the surrounding blocks, I stood in the moonlight and tried to gather my thoughts. I need to make a sign, I decided.
Upstairs in my kitchen, I sat at the table with paper and a marker. I couldn’t write, though; my fingers were shaking.
Then I heard a scuffle.
Found her behind the stove, caught between pipes.
“Oh my little biscuit,” I said, squatting. “My sugarplum, my babycakes.”
What is this saccharine nonsense coming out of my mouth?
Stayed up for a while. Angel was like a baby, sleepy in my arms one minute, eyes literally closing as she tried to keep them open, then jumping down and running wild. At one point, she sat in the dark, staring up into the garment rack. Every other minute, she’d rear up and swat at white sequins, miss, wobble, and sit again.
Outside my window, truckers trucked, hookers fucked, cops cruised, kids smoked, elders yelled, invalids slept, spouses fought, lovers kissed, while I watched a pussycat playing with stars in a black room.
* * *
—
Kelly knocked on my door Thursday, hands stuffed in pockets. Beige vest over white hooded sweatshirt. Wet hair combed down but tucked behind ears. We both had the day off. I told him I felt as if we were going on an undercover assignment, and he laughed. He drove us to Queens in Guy’s truck, stealing looks at me as often as he could take his eyes from the road. Angel slept, tucked into my coat.
Outside, the cold, sunny street glittered with cars and strollers and bikes. We stopped at a grocer and bought a baguette, pasta, sauce. Inside the store, an elderly man with a black eye patch leaned on his cane, a Daily Racing Form in his hand, talking odds to no one in particular. The guy behind the register apparently recognized Kelly.
“That girl, she eats only spaghetti,” he said in a thick Greek accent, relishing the absurdity.
Kelly nodded. “She does; it’s crazy.”
The guy put an apple into the bag as an afterthought. “Tell her she better take vitamins or something.”
The basement apartment was carpeted in white. Single bed, neatly made with a white afghan pulled up to one white pillow. A cheap brass chandelier, the fourth flame-shaped bulb dark. A hot plate, a yellow sponge. Pressed-wood cabinets with white knobs.
We sat on a white pleather couch, facing a window of dead leaves. The only valuable item was the stereo system: Bang & Olufsen speakers, a turntable, big leather earphones on the carpet. Milk crates of records.
Nick’s elegant cheekbones were chipped like aged stone. Brown hair parted to the side, with a nimbus of split ends. She wore a black Fugazi T-shirt and black jeans. Bare feet. No makeup. A white strip of leather tied in a knot around her wrist.
Kelly pointed to the bag beside him on the couch. “You want me to cook for you, Nick?”
“What do you mean,” she said. “You think I forgot how to cook or something.”
“No, I didn’t,” Kelly said earnestly. “I like cooking for you.”
“One day I’ll call you and say, ‘Get your ass over here and cook me some spaghetti, Kelly Bradley.’ ”
“All right.” He shrugged. “Deal.”
It took her one second too long to process anything, and I had a hard time talking because of the false importance her hesitations gave to everything. It always seemed she was giving my words too much consideration, when actually she was giving them none. I told her how I got the kitten, and she beamed, but when I got to the part about losing her in the apartment, she forgot to stop smiling. Then, when she remembered, her frown was exaggerated.
She was tall and held herself like a retired dancer. If she couldn’t finish a sentence, she’d stare at the ceiling, then laugh.
“Oh, shit,” she said, looking at me steadily. “Forget it.”
For a while, Nick dragged a sock around the carpet for Angel.
“C’mon,” she said. “C’mon, little girl.”
The kitten would pounce, and Nick would pull the sock farther, taunting. A name was tattooed in turquoise script on the sole of her foot. I was going to ask, but when I opened my mouth, Kelly shook his head.
* * *
—
Chinatown’s storefronts bloomed with topaz ducks and were crowned with red neon characters. An unlikely address, but the loft had been available and cheap fifteen years ago when Guy renovated it. Kelly unlocked a sparse lobby, led us up two flights.
We stood in a studio that was not uncluttered but still clean as a military station. Black material hanging from industrial clippers pooled like lava on the floor. A black toy pistol positioned on a light box. “Ain’t Skeered” bumper sticker peeling off filing cabinet. Utility kitchen along one wall.
Prints and contact sheets tacked along the walls. Transformations were conducted here. On a few occasions before tonight, I myself had passed under this window and seen lightning flash through black curtains.
Guy emerged, shirtless, from the bathroom with a newspaper. His white arms so sinewy and muscular, they were grotesque. Shiny black hair to jaw. Jagged brows, and lips like an Italian movie star.
“How’s it hanging, Kelly,” he said.
Scraggly black hairs between nipples. Black slacks and bare feet. No jewels, no tattoos. But his body was so volatile; his hand reaching out to shake mine was frightening.
I winced like a working-class girl introduced to upper-class parents. After meeting Nick earlier that day, I’d asked to see where Kelly stayed. I knew he lived in Guy’s studio, but I’d hoped Guy would have left work and gone back to his own home. He didn’t look like the photographs in magazines. He was much uglier or more beautiful, I couldn’t decide.
* * *
—
Kelly slept on a single mattress covered with a Mexican blanket in what used to be a supply room. The illicit pleasure I remembered from boarding school of being in a boy’s room washed through me for the first time in years. A surfboard leaned in the corner. Blue jeans, a parka with fur hood, and Hawaiian shirts on hangers swayed from white pipe. A copper saucer of patchouli dust on the floor, sticks charred and crossed, next to a cardboard box of clothes.
“She tattooed the name of the guy who did it on the bottom of her foot,” he said, lying on his bed, arms crossed behind his head as a pillow.
“If she knew who did it, why didn’t she get him arrested?”
“Doesn’t work like that there. Not for my crew, at least. We were such assholes, and the Jamaicans hated us.”
“Nick was an asshole?”
“No, but she was connected to us, poor thing.”
Kelly’s vest zipper riding his chin. Tiny dots where mustache and beard would have grown in. That dazed look boys get when they’re reclining.
“When my buddy died, you know, in the motel room, I just decided I had to find her. Someone heard she was in New York.”
“What did you plan on doing once you found her?” I asked, with a degree of disbelief.
He shrugged, nylon zithered against stubble. “Nothing. I just wanted her to see I hadn’t forgotten her. To know that she was important enough to be followed, checked on, consoled. I mean, I’m sure part of my motivation was just guilt. We shouldn’t have let her go alone. You know?”
“But you weren’t responsible for what happened.”
He looked at me quickly. “Not directly. But any one of us could have walked her back that night. And we knew that we should because we were in a weird part of town. But we were stoned and lazy, and she was a tough girl. She took care of herself.”
“She was tough?”
“Super tough. She was with this guy Jack for as long as anyone could remember. They were the king and queen. They were so strong. He let her down the worst. He was scared of what had been done, of what he hadn’t done, and all that. Basically he didn’t understand, and he didn’t try. He became a cliché, chasing storms and surfing hurricanes.”
I shook my head. “Why couldn’t you tell me before?”
“Because it’s a private story, Lee. And because it’s shameful. To me.”
“And it’s the most fucking depressing story I ever heard in my life,” I said. “No offense.”
He smiled. “No offense taken. It is depressing.”
“So she just totally lost her shit after,” I prodded.
“Well, she’d been depressed, I guess, her whole life. The surfing and hiking and all that were her way of medicating. With endorphins and whatever. Then the incident and the hospital interrupted all that, and, yeah. She lost her shit.”
“Same deal with your friend in the motel?”
“Similar. But he’d been on regular medication. He was bipolar. And he ran out of pills while we were in Costa Rica and had no easy way of getting more. Or he didn’t try.” Kelly talked slowly but lucidly. “I only found out afterward, although he was doing such totally weird stuff, I should have known.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, Christ. Like he stopped brushing his teeth. Got into bar fights. Almost beat up a woman. Wore sunglasses at night and talked like he was a movie producer or something. I think it was an experiment. He wanted to see what would happen.”
“Jesus. Why does this shit happen to you?”
“It doesn’t. It happened to people I loved. I’ve always been drawn to big personalities, big appetites. The flip side of those things is sometimes tragic.”
“You got it all figured out, kid.”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m broke, driving a borrowed car, and living in a closet.”
I leaned against the wall, afraid to lie next to him. I scanned the cinder blocks. Shelves had been removed, leaving outlines of rust. Above us, one long industrial fluorescent light.
Library books on the floor: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Walden, The Ginger Man. Neither of us spoke for a while.
“What’s the best thing you’ve ever done?” I asked finally.
“I haven’t done it yet,” he answered.
“That’s cheating.”
“It won’t be big or dramatic,” he hurried to add. “I don’t mean to say that. But it’s on the horizon. I look forward to it.”
“How can you live in here?”
“Oh, man,” he said, sitting up. “I shower at the Y.”
“But, I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “To be honest, this is about all I can handle right now.”
* * *
—
A blond beehived woman with ample bosom glared through bifocals. “Where you been, Lee.”
“Hey, Doris.”
We were back in Brooklyn. As a coda to our long and serpentine day, we’d decided after dropping off Angel to bring burritos from the taqueria over to Rosemary’s Tavern. Androgynous kids shuffled by the jukebox, skunk stripes bleached down their heads, sheer vintage blouses showing nipples, tattoos. Polish men hunkered in booths, dressed in midnight-blue work clothes, grease under fingernails. The place was yellow with smoke.
“Guy scares me. I didn’t like him.”
“He intimidates you. He’s obsessed with what he does. He does exactly what he loves, he works like an animal, and he’s earned his independence. Everyone is jealous of him, don’t worry.”
“His independence from what?”
Kelly shrugged. “From everything.”
I asked Kelly to tell me stories. He told me about bribing policemen in Costa Rican woods after getting caught buying cocaine. Skateboarding in an abandoned hotel pool in Jamaica, breaking his arm. Windsurfing on ice, on a board with steel runners. Untangling a dying hawk from a fence.
“I don’t know,” he said, suddenly shy. “All those places seem faraway now. Those stories sound like…I don’t know. That’s the kind of stuff you write on postcards.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, sipping my Styrofoam cup of Bud.
He shrugged, smiled. “The stuff that changes your life is never very dramatic. You know? Not to other people.”
“Yeah, I hear you. So tell me one of those stories.”
“I don’t know if I can. They’re not really stories. They’re just moments.”
“Try.”
“Okay,” he said, licking beer foam from his lip. “One day, a couple years ago, before anything bad had happened, I was surfing. And I scraped my hand on coral. It slit me like a knife, but not deep. It was a bright day, the sun was blinding. It made the blood this fierce red against the blue water. I stood in the shallows and watched my hand bleed. I must have looked like a madman, you know, staring. But I couldn’t stop.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It wasn’t an omen,” he added.
I looked at him.
“But it was something close to an omen,” he said.
* * *
—
We parted after last call. I stopped into a deli, watched him through the window. He walked down the street, easy as a beachcomber, keys glittering from his dark hand.
It wasn’t a swagger or a skulk. He had a slow way of moving forward that paid homage to what was left behind, and to what was immediately around him, as well as to his destination.
He paused to read a wall of flyers.
He resumed walking. Fading into the ratty shearlings and moonlit faces and iron railings. He brought so much with him to this Brooklyn avenue, he kept so many things alive, but
they didn’t weigh him down. They didn’t make him struggle. In fact, he wore them like a halo, a crown of phantom coconuts, conch shells, hibiscus blossoms.
* * *
—
A few nights later, I sat at my kitchen table, sketched in a book while coffee brewed.
“What do you think, Angel?” I said every once in a while, chewing my pencil.
I’d talked with an elderly man that day. He’d been walking with a cane, a ruby signet ring glinting on his finger. In the summer, he perused the sidewalks with shirtsleeves rolled, and I’d seen concentration-camp numbers on his arm. Big orange freckles covered his face. He had a sensual, rolling walk, even though he limped.
I put down the graphite pencil, closed my eyes. Soon I was on hands and knees, yanking fishnets across the dirty floor. Angel pounced. My Chanel N° 5 had rubbed onto her fur, and I scooped her up and pressed my cheek against hers. Maybe I would put on a record and lie in bed with Angel to think.
A cold and quick fever pricked my skin: a sensation explained to me when I was little as someone walking over my grave. Oh, I knew this country. It was a bad place. This was where I went to let an endeavor subside. It was the halfway zone. I sat back on my heels, let Angel have the stockings. Lying on her side, she curled around them like a potato bug, biting the thread, clawing them with back paws.
I sat down at the table, chewed the pencil. The man. What did I know about him? I didn’t know his name. Both his face and his gait reminded me of a younger man. Mainly his walk, slack with a bounce, studly. What had he said to me?
He’d raised his cane, gazed at it theatrically: “This here’s my girlfriend.”
I’d laughed for him.
“Don’t get old,” he said in an accent, tough and gentlemanly. “Getting old is the pits. I wouldn’t wish it on a dog.”
But the big grin contradicted what he told me. Contradicted it sternly enough to alert me to some other truth he was trying to tell me. It was late afternoon when we met. Snowflakes fell, early, errant ones that melted before they hit the sidewalk. Practice snowflakes. They were almost imaginary.
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