He’d worn a herringbone cap, softened but still in good form. He had looked up into the sky, and then at me. He was smiling at the snowflakes, articles of innocence, that fell from a dark sky.
* * *
—
Hours passed. The canvas on the easel was alive, breathing, blood running through its veins. The sky and the snowflakes and the man’s freckled face were primitively rendered, and joined like the broken pieces of a teacup. In the looming dimensions and shadows resided the darkness of adult truths as well as the candy of children’s dreams. The yellow beam from the streetlamp, the gleam of his cane were leaden as Freudian symbols, but the snow was spun sugar. Much work remained for tomorrow, and the next day, but so far the painting was greater than what I’d imagined. And that was the hallmark of a breakthrough. That’s what I’d been awaiting.
“Motherfucking hell,” I said loudly.
I strutted around. Picked up my hairbrush, combed once, threw it on the bed. Sat in the unlit room. A safety pin glittered on the bedside table. A chipped glass with an inch of milk glowed. Even in the darkness, everything burned with light. My fingernails, Angel’s eyes.
Walked through dawn streets, hands in pockets. Nowhere to go. No one out here, no one at all, no wind, even. Just a still, dark mist enclosing railings, stoops, trees, garbage cans, broken toys on the curb, cars parked bumper to bumper, a shopping cart.
My God, charging up the middle of the street: a pit bull, his hide the color of vanilla ice cream, his face grotesque. But I wasn’t scared. I stopped as he got closer. He slowed to sniff my pockets. And he wasn’t lost. He ran down the street, right to a first-floor apartment, and in he jumped. From my angle, it seemed he leaped through the wall of the building. But there was a screech as the sleepy master pulled down the window.
* * *
—
Thanksgiving afternoon: the sky as blue as Caribbean water, but cold as ice.
I ran my hands over the dried paint, but it didn’t make me as giddy. The design and the potential still thrilled me, but not as much. I didn’t even want to go anywhere; I just wanted to work. That’s when I realized that I could never stop. Because each little bit only kicks your heart like a can down one measure of the road. I remembered this passion as though the last time I’d felt it had been a thousand years ago: art begets art.
Overheated subway station, a sense of sparseness and irregularity due to the holiday. A man stood against a wall as if thrown there by an explosion; his feet were bare, scarred, one covering the other like feet nailed to a cross.
On the bench, a teenaged boy peeled a banana. I looked at the white spear, the petals of yellow. Its perfume was staggering, and flooded the whole station.
I jotted words on my hand.
Coming up from the subway in Manhattan, I thought it was raining on the steps above me. But no, it was a man pissing down the stairs. His penis and hands silver in lamplight.
“Happy Thanksgiving, motherfucker,” I shouted up to him.
* * *
—
Instead of using the front door, I sneaked in Yves’s kitchen door like a thief. The Raoul’s boys were cooking dinner. Hand-rolled cigarettes burning on the sill.
Gifts out on the foyer table: red wine, plum lilies, soap in wax paper, a tin of foie gras. Everyone but me had brought something. I’d brought the black hole of my misfit personality: light fell into me. I spent much of the time bent over the cheese plate, hands clasped behind me, avoiding conversation.
His guests moved around like characters in the opening scene of a play.
“Muscadet?” Anson asked, handing me a glass of green wine, his thumb firmly grasping the base. His eyes twinkled when I smiled my thanks. A mustard cashmere sweater tied around his shoulders.
And I thought, these people would have a better time without me. I’d come late, as usual. Sashayed around in my black pencil skirt like a drunk starlet. Remembered almost no one’s name, although they all knew mine. And up till now, I’d always thought they were pretty lucky to have me around. But I brought nothing but conspicuous silence.
* * *
—
Cranberry sauce crumbled in wet chunks as I spooned it to my plate.
Yves sat at the other head of the table and tried to catch my eye. When he did, I smiled wanly at him. Everyone was pink-cheeked, even the men, competing to put two cents into the conversation and trying to include me.
“You’ve been to Venice, haven’t you, Lee?” someone asked.
“It’s a knitwear boutique in Stockholm,” someone else said. “Lee, you must know her stuff.”
“Which is not the same as what happened in the beginning in Bosnia, don’t you agree, Lee?”
I answered yes to everything. Sure, I’d been to Venice. Why not? I could feel Yves, at the opposite end of the table, trying hard not to hear my lies, but becoming concerned.
“Excuse me, Delphine,” I said, patting my mouth with my napkin. I turned to Anson, on my other side. “Excuse me.” Yves’s eyes followed me to the kitchen, but he didn’t get up.
The boys stared at a travel backgammon set between them. So engrossed in their game, they didn’t look when I whispered good-bye.
* * *
—
My cheeks flamed when I walked into the warm studio. Kelly, in jeans and shetland sweater, wore five-o’clock shadow. Football played on a black-and-white TV, a Guinness on the floor next to a folding chair.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“For what,” he whispered back, making fun of me.
I tried to make a joke, but blundered. We both realized I was extraordinarily drunk.
I tried to explain the foie gras and the lilies, my empty hands, the back door. As I spoke, his eyes deepened, his mouth grew wary.
“So you didn’t tell anyone you were leaving?” he said. “You didn’t tell Yves?”
“Well,” I said, gesturing. “No.”
“So you just left him to explain your disappearance to a table of his close friends. On Thanksgiving.”
I looked steadily at him, but he looked steadily at me. So I started crying. I expected Kelly to grab a tissue, but he didn’t.
“Fuck,” I wailed. “I just want it to be over.”
“And?” he said, on the brink of disgust.
“Christ,” I said raspily, “I don’t want to think about any of this.”
He seemed to be framing a thought the way he pursed his lips, clasped his hands. Instead, he repeated what I’d said: “You don’t want to think about any of this.”
“You have a problem with that.”
He nodded. “I do.”
“I thought you liked ladies in distress.”
Looking at the floor, he paused before he said quietly: “Come on, Lee. Nick cleans houses for a living, pays her bills, and listens to records. She never asked for help. If anything, she could do without my help and humors me because that’s who she is.”
He glared at me with disappointment. I saw, then, in his eyes, some hopeful vision turn to a lifetime of nights like this one, but with sun blazing outside, or a different cityscape blinking, or us wearing different clothes, using different words. Shattered nights, scattered talks—but nothing that would amount to more than a wet sleeve, midnight prayers and contracts and resolutions, morning-time disenchantment, empty bottles, sticky glasses, stinking ashtrays.
He stood up, with effort.
“Lee,” he said finally, “I am just not interested in taking care of you. I am very sorry if I gave you the impression that I was.”
And he walked into the hallway. Held the door open for me, his head bowed as I exited.
* * *
—
When I got home, I dialed half his number. Maybe he regretted what he’d said and would apologize. No, you bimbo, I thought to myself. The kid wasn’t sorry. And he wasn’t going to come out here, no matter how much I begged. He probably wouldn’t even answer my call.
So I took off my clothes. Scru
bbed my body in a hot shower for a long time. Stared into the mirror at the pale face, red eyes, stringy hair until I was able to operate my features. In a kimono, hair dripping, I brewed coffee. I couldn’t think right, my thoughts lurching from one place to another.
Swallowed the coffee black. In the sink, I ran cold water on face, wrists. Slapped my cheek.
“Okay, sweet thing,” I said. “Focus, for fuck’s sake.”
Turning on all overhead lights was spooky, as if a tunnel of caves was illuminated for the first time. My nerves were electric. A hangover was coming on in degrees.
I moved from kitchen to bedroom, from cupboard to drawer, from Levi’s pockets to leopard clutch. I tore things up. Angel loved it, chasing after my silk belt.
Opera on the radio. Incense.
In between, I bent to the sink and gulped water from my hands.
I thought of mobster movies, but there was no policeman at my door. Just the past, with his own nightstick. My reflection swept by in the mirror, red hair flying, black sleeves flapping, but I couldn’t stop to think what I was doing. I’d compulsively hoarded, as if sandbagging a foxhole. Newport Kings in the freezer. A bag of coke in my underwear drawer. The drugs went in the toilet, the liquor down the sink. Took the garbage bag of bottles and cans to the curb, pulling kimono lapels tight.
I never went to bed sober, but here I was. The energy used up, the liquor passed through the body, the desires exhausted. Sleep had always been my way station, a hiding place where the night’s events could fade without contemplation. Not that I was sure now for whom I’d done this, or how I would deal with the morning. But I was spent, and conscious. I’d gone past the place where I usually surrendered and had traveled into unknown territory.
Lying in the sheets, Angel curled against my stomach, I said: “It’s just you and me, babydoll.”
My apartment is bare, I thought dreamily as we drifted.
My mother and I skinny-dipped when the Blackmans were out of town. Standing in the shallow end, our torsos wet with moonlight, legs shining underwater. I bounced on tiptoes, too ecstatic to be still. Skin ablaze with night. Unable to contain joy, we pushed forward, like geese landing. Sent up wakes of sparks and feathers. Oh, the glamour of nothing. Bare skin and flat hair and dark faces and our own rain.
Afterward, we ran screeching home in towels as if fleeing a crime. We squealed past rhododendrons, our pink-gowned chaperones, that trembled in midnight heat. The whole scene was preserved, like a snow globe. I could still shake it, watch stars collide.
* * *
—
A few days later, after Kelly and I worked an excruciatingly awkward brunch together, I lured him into talking to me. I had a theory. I had a strategy. I’d suggested we go somewhere, offered to take him to dinner that night. Used the fact that we’d have to work together too often to be at odds.
“Naw,” he’d said, not looking at me. “Let’s just go sit outside somewhere.”
We walked without talking across the West Side Highway and down along the Hudson to a bench that faced the river. When he finally turned to me, his face showed a combination of exasperation and pity. I almost gave up before I began.
“I’m not going to ask you for help,” I said quickly, voice small.
I cleared my throat, knowing nothing was as damaging as uncertainty.
“I was hoping I could ask you a few questions,” I continued. “That’s all.”
He rolled his eyes. “Lee, it’s not even that I don’t want to help you. I can’t. I cannot give you what you need.”
“What if,” I rushed on, “you just let me ask about the way you live. I won’t ask for advice. And this will be a better end to things than what happened.”
He said he just didn’t want to get into anything more, but almost had to suppress a smile, as if intrigued by being interviewed.
This made me sure enough to say: “Come on, Kelly. It won’t hurt. Deal?”
Even though he shook his head, he said: “Deal.”
The day’s cold was heavy and humid, and the water gray. But the sun flickered now to make a white sparkle on the waves and then turned the expanse to pounded gold. He took off his sweater, then had to pull down the black long-john shirt he wore over his button-down.
“So, what are your questions,” he said.
“So,” I started, clearing my throat again, “what do you really want?”
“We went over this already,” he said blandly.
“Well, you told me you wanted to restructure your life, that you wanted to start over and all that. You found Nick—” I barely spoke her name, so embarrassed about the way I’d brought her up before. “And all that, but I still don’t know exactly what you want.”
“To make every hour matter.”
“And you think you can do that?”
“I know I can do that.”
I looked at the lipstick marks on my coffee lid. “How are you going to do that?” I whispered.
“We’re not in church, Lee,” he said sardonically.
Then he looked at the sky, and back at me. “I’m dismantling my life. It’s in pieces as we speak.” His hands were laced around one knee, pulling up the leg so the foot didn’t touch the ground.
“And you do that how, exactly?”
“Well. I don’t know how to explain this. Let’s see. I was reading about this guy who saved an organ from a church that was being torn down. He didn’t know shit about organs, really, or any instrument, but he flatbedded it to his garage. Where there was a screw, he unscrewed. He put numbers on everything—every pipe, every pedal. Found someone to make new reeds. Then he reassembled it in his barn, and when it was done, he somehow could play songs.
“I didn’t used to work. I thought I lived the life. Made money in surf contests. We knew all the judges; they knew us. Me and my friends buddied up to rich tourists. I drank on other people’s tabs. I’d get in on the occasional drug deal. I don’t know. My friends and I even ripped each other off. I was in jail once—”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Nothing big, a fight. I told Greg where to find my cash to bail me out; he took it and went on a three-day binge with two other guys. Kind of funny. I always told it like it was a funny story.”
“It is kind of funny,” I said.
“Enough out of you,” he said. Then he sighed. “So. For a while, I knew it wasn’t right—”
“What?”
“My life.”
“Don’t tell me you found Jesus.”
“No.” He snorted. “No. But I knew, even before that happened to Nick, I had to get it together. But I didn’t know how to fix it because I didn’t know how it was made. So I decided to break down my time by year, by week, by hour. Figure out how I was spending my life. What I ate, drank, loved, made, hurt, saw, learned. Bought. Stole. Gave.”
“That sounds impossible.”
“It’s the easiest thing in the world.” He pointed to the notebook on the bench beside him, tattered pages bulging.
I asked to see it.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
We were quiet for a moment. On the other benches, suits sat in winter reveries.
I thought of something. “But you did work. You were a bartender,” I said.
“I never bartended. I just memorized a cocktail book.”
“You can’t learn bartending from a book.”
“Yes, you can,” he said simply, without argument. “I never knew how to first mate either, but I knew how to fish, and I needed a ride.”
“What else have you been up to?”
He scanned the opposite shore, then reddened. He grinned, the first time all afternoon he’d shown his teeth. The wind was light, made his hair tremble. He admitted that the night before he’d made cookies. From scratch, he said twice, as if I’d argued.
“I can’t believe you baked cookies, Kelly. I mean that,” I said, “in the best possible way.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s fucked-up. But now I
want to bake a cake. I’m hooked. I even wear an apron, you know. The whole nine yards, Lee.”
“Is it coming together then?” I asked after a while.
“Hell no,” he said emphatically, knowing what I meant. Then yawned, making his face pink, eyes watery. “Hell no,” he said quietly, but not sadly. “Still mainly coming apart, I guess.”
The picture of Kelly in an apron, powder on his cheek, sifter in hand, almost broke my heart. He was like an alien enchanted by life on Earth, so enamored he was willing to try.
For a moment I was tempted to tell him about what I’d done, what I was trying to do. But my whole life I’d been working from the template of love being sloppy. A big martini sloshing over the sides of the glass. Maybe strength and reserve would serve us better. Kelly had proved during the conversation by the choice of a word here and an intonation there that he’d love me if I didn’t make it impossible. Which is what I’d been doing. He reminded me of a deer: powerful, lightning fast, and autonomous, but delicate and curious. In a way, stillness was my best chance.
“Thanks,” I said, and although he looked surprised that the interview was over, we stood.
In the distance, violet clouds weighed heavily on the Jersey skyline. We left behind a man who’d been standing at the rail when we sat down, and was still doing so, and looked as if he might forever. A messenger bag strapped across his back, the wires of earphones attached to the Discman in his hand. His raven-black hair ruffled like feathers by the breeze. He was a figurehead at the bow of Manhattan.
* * *
—
Jeremy took me to dinner at Paul and Frank’s house a few times during my first year on the Cape. They lived at the end of a long dirt road so overgrown that branches snapped against Jeremy’s ancient Datsun as we crawled over the ruts. Their home was like a huge shed, with arbitrary porches and crazy angles, vines of blue clematis blazing up the wood shingles in the dusk.
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