Their chickens were fed on rosemary and table scraps and top-notch grains. The eggs’ yolks were so orange that the coconut cakes Paul baked weren’t white. Half-wild cats chased baby bunnies through the gardens, and citronella candles burned yellow in buckets on the edges of the patio. The bed was a box spring and mattress on cinder blocks shrouded in mosquito netting. They had a piano someone had painted red, its ivory keys dark as bad teeth.
We’d sit in lawn chairs and laugh in the quiet way required of easy, supernatural evenings. The lake wasn’t far, but it wasn’t visible except as a shimmer through dense trees. They were both in their late thirties. Paul had worked as an accountant in Boston for years and had saved enough that neither of them had to work anymore. They weren’t artists, and they weren’t bitter recluses. They were simply deliberate. Nothing they did required more than a bike ride. Two bikes slanted against the house in all weather, one pink, the other white, rust stains dripping like blood down their parts.
Paul and Frank communicated without words. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then one announced their decision. They never preached about how to live, but I knew they could instruct me if I asked. I thought about asking once. In a blue woody light, we sipped homemade sangria full of jewel-sized homegrown strawberries. I knew they were waiting for me to speak my mind. But I wasn’t ready then to hear what they would say.
SEVEN
I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life
my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over
the roulette table, I recoup what I can
nothing else to shove under the nose of the maitre de jeu
—DIANE DI PRIMA, from Revolutionary Letters
Lunch at the restaurant a couple days later was winter weekend madness. Mirrors sparkled, gold stools winked. Kelly’s black necktie was stitched with a stranger’s cursive white monogram. We passed looks with straight expressions because we didn’t know what the other was thinking. Myself, I swung between two pinnacles every twenty seconds. First I was ready to take a tire iron to the windows, mirrors, glasses, bottles. Then I’d find myself high on sobriety, smiling dazedly at everyone with clarity and nebulous gratitude. My headache, I’d later learn, was because of withdrawal from, of all things, caffeine.
None of the staff knew what I was doing. They were suspicious of the jasmine teas and club sodas with bitters I asked them to make me, but no one said anything. Each time I passed Kelly, I smiled professionally, didn’t allow the moment to linger long enough for him to ask or me to confess.
One table knocked back Absolut Peppar bloody Marys. Glassy-eyed in the daytime. I tried to look down on them with all my heart. Here they were, throwing this day away, tossing it to the gods as if it were a virgin. They giggled. They ordered a banana split to share. They showed no sign of leaving. I believed they were my enemies.
At four o’clock, I had a minute alone as I was clocking out, and I folded. I had been putting on my coat in the office, pulling the gloves out of pockets, and I just stopped what I was doing. Stood still as a statue.
“Cold turkey,” Kelly said behind me, and I jumped.
“I am pathetically obvious,” I answered, unable to look at him.
“Damn, girl,” he drawled. “That’s excellent.”
I sat heavily on the chair, one glove on, one off. “Yeah, but I wasn’t going to tell you because I’m not even going to make it through the day.” I shot him a lopsided grin. “I mean, what’s TV without smokes? What’s sushi without beer? What’s the movies without a joint?”
“So you can’t go to the movies and get popcorn.”
“No. I can get high and go to the movies and get popcorn. It’s the difference between being in love or not.” Suddenly I looked at him in fear. “I’m not asking you for help, by the way. That’s not what I’m doing.”
He laughed, pulled a pom-pom hat over his head. “I know. It’s okay.”
“Oh, hell.” I gazed at my boots. “There’s just nothing as tacky as being on the wagon.”
Kelly suggested he walk me home.
“I walk over to Seventh,” I said. “I get the One-Nine.”
“No, I mean, walk you home.”
“Kelly Bradley.” I grabbed him by the biceps and spoke clearly. “I live in Brooklyn. Home is in Brooklyn.”
“I know. Let’s walk. It will give you something to do.”
* * *
—
The river’s motion was invisible, but water rushed barges under the bridge.
We stepped over graffiti written on the asphalt path. A long poem in German. A portrait of a schoolboy with his cock out, pissing, cigarette between lips. Scrawled: Criminalize Wealth. Landlords evict spies. And Good night Juanita. On the edge of the walkway: junkie vomit, pigeon feathers. The smell of almost-burned sugar in the sky.
Matte-gray girders divided pearly clouds. On the Brooklyn side, what was closest to us was lucid, like the red neon Domino sugar factory sign, but beyond was veiled by a layer of plum silk.
When I took the train, I never acknowledged this passage. I went underground, I came up later, like a prairie dog. But crossing the water, with pale-blue Manhattan behind us, and maroon-and-mustard Brooklyn ahead, I understood that I lived in a town, firmly planted on land. Before this, Brooklyn had seemed a figment of many imaginations, a place solely made from the words and deeds of many generations.
Even when Kelly hunched into his jacket against the wind, his face was turned to the sun. Just a California boy on a New York winter day, walking a girl home. The blond fur tufts from his hood, framing his face, reminded me of sunflower petals.
* * *
—
On Bedford, we came upon a church sale. A garment rack was being pulled inside by a huge woman in a baby-blue coat. Her hat with black poppies was one degree of purple less black than her skin. Left on the sidewalk: record albums. A small library of songs no one wanted to hear anymore.
As Kelly squatted, the woman came back outside, and I pointed out to him that she was closing up.
“No,” the woman said with an island accent, smiling but looking down the street, pulling her coat’s lapels, kind and dissociated at the same time. “Lookit ’um. Go head.”
He scanned titles quickly, flipping through jackets. I saw the boy he might have been, standing in a stationery store reading BMX magazines, comic books, tattoo trades.
* * *
—
My apartment smelled as if an invalid had been sleeping there. Drawings in a pile on the kitchen table were paperweighted by a sticky jar of honey.
“How’s my girl.” He scratched Angel’s head.
She mewed as I collected lingerie and junk mail.
We’d bought books from the one-dollar shelves of a bookstore. Then he’d gotten the makings of Mexican hot chocolate at a deli. He managed to use three pots, a couple knives, and a few spoons. Left chocolate shavings on the counter, cinnamon and burned milk on the stove. The sun had vanished, and he cooked in the dark. The only light was the violet blossom of gas flame.
Settled into my stereo room on big pillows. The chocolate tasted like a lullaby. When I asked how he knew the recipe, Kelly said his mother was Mexican. Why had he never told me? He rolled his eyes. I’d never asked.
The ten-record set was called Background Moods. Each side, a different mood. The green box featured a kohl-eyed woman with pale pink lips, a sweep of dark hair across her forehead, and a rainy window in between us and her.
“Oh, this is brilliant,” I said, pulling out one record. “I have to hear In an Exotic Mood. I want to hear song number five, ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon.’ ”
It started with small plucks of music and crept into something vaguely Hawaiian. I grinned, sipping my chocolate.
“I think I hear some harp,” Kelly said doubtfully.
* * *
—
Standing at th
e door in his parka, paperback in his pocket, he seemed uncertain. I asked if he wanted his records. He said he guessed he’d leave them.
“Is that a gift?” I asked. “Are you giving me a present?”
He shrugged, and by the flavor of the movement, I realized in a flash what had been evident all along.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-nine.”
“You’ve never been in love,” I said softly.
He started to protest.
“You’ve never had a girlfriend.”
“I’ve had many girlfriends.”
“I mean, you’ve never had a proper girlfriend.”
Once more, he shrugged. Pecked me on the cheek and jumped down the stairs two steps at a time like a teenager.
* * *
—
It was eleven that night by the time I got over there. I’d been avoiding Yves with dubious excuses, and he’d become guarded, even cold. He hadn’t let the tension come to a head, so I would have to do the dirty work. I woke Yves out of bed. The loft was dark, and I asked him to leave it dark.
He hugged me, past the right moment for letting go. And my skeleton started to melt, like it did that first time, releasing fears and shames, giving itself away.
But I didn’t want that, and struggled. He gave a last squeeze, the way parents do when they don’t want you to disappoint them.
We sat in his living room, in a darkness that betrayed forms but not colors. The gloom sealed the room, its furniture, its corners, its windows, and its owner, bonded them so I would remember the space as one piece.
He started talking, running his sentences together so there was no place for me to break into the discussion. He kept repeating that there were a lot of things for us to hash out, to get through. He spoke with hands on arms of chair like Lincoln.
I went deaf looking at his silhouette, topped by the shimmer of his hair, still but for a flash of tooth. I no longer saw a king presiding over possibilities, but an ordinary man working his fingers to the bone to maintain the idea of possibilities.
After a while, I went over and pressed the ring into his hand. He stopped talking.
Rain struck the window. I walked to the door.
“I’m going to pay you back,” I said, turning around, my hand on the doorknob.
“Pay me back what?” he asked, incredulous.
“The money. All the money.”
“That is an insult, Lee,” he said evenly and urgently.
My face wanted to crumble, and I fought to keep it straight. “I have to. I’m so sorry—”
“An insult.”
“I don’t want to owe you,” I said, tears welling, aware I was saying the wrong things. “I mean—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, hands on hips, turning away.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Just go home, Lee,” he said, sounding so tired, still looking away.
As he heard me turn the knob, he looked at me. “Wait,” he said, and picked an umbrella from the stand. Black silk, ivory handle.
“No, Yves. I don’t want it.”
“It’s raining,” he said.
“I don’t want it,” I said in a shrill voice.
His face crimson, eyes absurdly wide. He spit when he yelled. “You don’t want my umbrella?” His accent swelled, voice thick and dense. “You don’t want it?”
He hurled it into the living room; it smashed the white lamp, which fell to the floor in sparks that died quickly.
* * *
—
I stood, shaking, on the other side of the door.
I pictured him wandering his loft tomorrow, dressed properly, picking up and putting down the odds and ends of existence—a half-melted drink, the newspaper, his reading glasses—aimlessly pursuing or evading something he couldn’t see.
Was I so vain to think I’d done him in? Wrecked him? Did I think that Yves was even damaged? Was he anything besides pissed, disgruntled, disconcerted, his tie askew, cufflink lost on floor, glasses bent? All he had to do was brush himself off, clear his throat, and comb his hair.
Had he loved me, or did I just keep him from feeling old, or lonely, or mortal? The only thing I knew for sure as I pulled my jacket around my face to brave that rain was that now he hated me.
* * *
—
A few nights after, Kelly wanted me to have dinner with him and Guy, but I’d have been bad company. Sherry called about a party for a guy named Jesse. It seemed like a good idea: I’d get out of the house but wouldn’t see many people I knew. I went alone, scuffing through icy litter on the Southside. The foyer was propped open, and the bulb illuminated crooked stairs.
I could test myself. Already my days had doubled in length, my strength had tripled, but sobriety was excruciating every minute. My instinct was to stay home forever, but that was a cop-out. It hadn’t been a substance problem; the substances were symptoms of a bigger failing. Vodka and cigarettes had become shortcuts, and the muscles I’d used as a child atrophied. The defect was a laziness, an unwillingness to do the hard labor of living.
One repercussion was the appetites I’d created, empty places that could only be filled in particular ways. Nothing warms the torso exactly like brandy. Nothing swells the lungs like smoke. I wasn’t born wanting cocaine’s numb front teeth, but I’d built that fetish from experience. I imagined my heart as a chunk of coral: tunneled, calcified.
What can I say? It was like most parties. Boys and girls. Cake. A kid in the corner wearing a leather beret, playing synthesizer. Christmas lights rocked back and forth, casting shadows as people stomped on the floor.
Jesse was stunning. Jug-eared and bowlegged in a black denim jacket, with a birthday high that made me jealous. In one hand, whiskey in a plastic cup, in the other, a beer bottle, a joint hanging from his lips, eyes slit.
The bad feeling escalated when girls broke out bottles of cheap champagne.
“No, thanks,” I said, shielding my mouth.
“C’mon,” one said.
“No, no,” I said, thinking that I was in a bad after-school special.
“A li’l can’t hurt,” she slurred, and in the end, spilled it down my shirt.
“Sorry.” She hiccuped.
In the kitchen, I dabbed at the wetness. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t stand to be here. I didn’t know who I was. But I refused to leave, to solidify my defeat. I stood guard in the living room, sipping orange juice, like a cop.
Early in the morning, with only a small crew left, Sherry came out of the bedroom in her own birthday suit. Standing like a queen, eating cake from a plate she held aloft, she was met first by silence, then applause. White sandals glowed on her black feet. Her long limbs gleamed under the strings of lights. A violet thatch between her thighs.
Praise the lord. I would always love the beautiful things that happen at night.
* * *
—
Walked home, hands crammed into pockets, breath rolling out.
A birdcage on the curb with bundled newspapers, its bars shiny with ice. With wheelchairs, too, it was possible to imagine two scenarios. I hoped the bird got a better cage.
* * *
—
Me, lying in sheets, morning snowflakes turning like wagon wheels in the Brooklyn sky, Angel purring, phone pressed to my cheek. Art, in his green parlor out east, bifocals pushed up, slippers, Stanley Turrentine on the record player, Becca alighting on one arm of his chair then the other like a moth. She must have been concerned that he tell me in the kindest way, and probably mouthed words to him, maybe reached for the phone. I think he expected me to cry. And I should have cried.
I’d called to tell him to put the house on the market, but he had news of his own. My mother hadn’t owned the house. She hadn’t even paid rent. After living there for years, my mother gave Art my college money when it became obvious I wouldn’t need it. It was a vague down payment, as if she could ever afford the balance.
&
nbsp; “But that’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. “She must have known I had to find out one day.”
“Yes,” Art said slowly, still waiting for me to break down.
“That’s just crazy,” I said, laughing. “That’s totally insane.”
Silence on the other end. I imagined Art shrugging at his wife, trying to indicate that I was fine. I thought of the looks they’d exchanged when I had lunch with them. I told Art he could have told me earlier.
“I wanted you to feel the house was yours.”
“Now you sound as crazy as my mother,” I scolded.
He sighed. “Ginger had a way of, how should I say, drawing a person in. It never seemed crazy the way she explained it. Part of why we loved her.”
Maybe I wasn’t surprised because I’d known all along. This strange inheritance of good intentions and nothing else was in much better keeping with my mother’s spirit. Art wasn’t the enemy. He didn’t care about property value more than he cared about me; in fact, it was the other way around. We talked over the options, until I convinced him I had only one option, meaning there actually weren’t options at all. I was grateful for what he offered as a return of my mother’s “original investment,” knowing it was more than I was owed.
I accepted, knowing it was less than I owed Yves.
“Tell her to come out for eggnog and gingersnaps, Art,” I heard Becca say. “Tell her.”
* * *
—
During our life together, my mom and I were each other’s houseguest. That’s not to say we were always standoffish and too polite: there were pillow fights and duels of silence and decadent rainy-day sessions of dress-up. But it means we always gave each other room. We had to because it was only the two of us, and if we hadn’t, we would have become one person. It means we kept secrets from each other. She didn’t tell me how to live, and I didn’t tell her how to die. We let sleeping dogs lie.
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