Billy quickly puts his socks and shoes back on and guides me away from the pond, with a firm hand on my arm. We have gone only a few steps when he halts and lets go of me. He is staring at a bundle of shadows beneath a tree.
“It’s a body,” I cry. “Don’t look. Don’t touch it.”
Ignoring my pleading, he bends and pokes at whatever it is.
“It’s men’s clothes,” he says. “Good clothes. Everything. A ski jacket, shirt, pants, underwear, socks and shoes—very good shoes.”
He lifts each item one by one and sets it aside.
“Whoever put them here did it in midwinter,” he murmurs, as if to himself. “Why?”
I am shivering uncontrollably now.
Billy checks the pockets of the trousers and the ski jacket. The clothes are wet, beginning to grow mold.
“Nothing,” he says. Thinking again, he turns the jacket inside out and unzips an inner pocket. He extracts a man’s wallet from it, opens it, and drops the jacket to the ground.
Back in the van, Roberta gets the engine running and the heater blowing.
“We can return to New York now,” Billy tells her in a subdued voice.
“Okay, homeward bound it is. Is your friend all right?”
“He will be.”
We retrace our route back through Tadd’s Ford, up the hill and over the ridge to higher roads leading south. My shivering declines and then stops. The fear is receding.
“Did someone drown in that pond?” I ask Billy.
“No. No one drowned,” he says.
He opens the damp wallet and shows me a driver’s license. The photograph is my face. Beneath it is a name.
It is not Francisco de Goya.
7
East side, west side
It is close to midnight when Roberta drops us in front of an older five-story apartment building on Twelfth Street, in the East Village neighborhood of lower Manhattan. It is not unlike Billy’s building, though better maintained. It is red brick with black trim and wide fire escapes. The front entrance is engraved glass panels in a brass frame. Inside the foyer, Billy bypasses the apartment buzzers. He finds a single key in the wallet’s coin purse, and sure enough it opens the door to the lobby, which is brightly lit, floored with maroon carpet. A potted fern adds a dash of green. On the left wall is a bank of mailboxes.
“Do you remember it?” Billy asks.
I shake my head. If I once lived here, all traces are gone.
The building is a walk-up, no elevator, so Billy heads for the wide staircase and begins to climb, his thumping steps softened by runners. I follow with some trepidation, fearing unknown revelations that may soon be made manifest. Lacking a key to the residence of the man on the driver’s license, we might learn nothing. I feel certain it would be better to remain ignorant. Nevertheless, in fairness to Billy’s determination, I let him lead me from floor to floor. Arriving at the top, we find ourselves in a corridor with four numbered doors. Billy checks the license again, and then strides to the end of the corridor, halting before 5-D.
He knocks.
I wait nervously a few steps back, ready to make a bolt for the staircase if need be.
He knocks again, then puts his ear to the door.
“Not a sound,” he says.
Without knowing why I’m doing it, I step along the corridor to a wall-mounted fire extinguisher. Tucked behind its hose, invisible to the eye, sits a key. I retrieve it and hand it to Billy. He inserts it into the lock and turns it. A click, and the handle revolves. A push, and the door opens.
Ducking his head, Billy enters first. It is dark inside, though city lights are visible through curtainless windows on a far wall. They provide just enough illumination for me to grope along the entranceway to a switch. A single overhead light pops on above me. I close the door. Flicking another switch makes a lamp turn on in the room ahead of us.
“Hello,” calls Billy. “Anyone home?”
Proceeding farther into the apartment we enter a living room, and stand there gazing about. Clearly, this is the residence of a moderately well-off person. The floors are shining hardwood, the furniture is avant-garde design but looks comfortable with thick cream-colored cushions. The lamps in the room are oval unglazed clay with golden shades. A single floor lamp is a metal rod with a white shade, embroidered with flower motifs. The rug looks hand-woven, Scandinavian, warm hues of russet and rose.
To our right is a kitchen with a humming refrigerator and an electric range, its digital clock marking time in small glowing numerals. A teak table and four matching chairs are in the open dining area to the left. A green glass vase in the table’s center contains wilted flowers, their black petals scattered about. One chair appears to have been used recently, then pushed back against the wall. A drift of letters, bills, flyers, is spread on the table before it. A ballpoint pen lies on top of an open bill.
The air is stale. Unlike the cabin at Tadd’s Ford, there is no smell of decay, though the background odor is that of a place hastily vacated with chores left undone. There are unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. Among the plates and cutlery are the shattered remnants of a drinking glass. An ice cube tray lies upside down on the floor, with faint water stains around it. A cardboard box beside the refrigerator is full of empty wine and liquor bottles. I open the fridge, releasing the smell of vegetable rot. I close it quickly.
Returning to the living room, I see that Billy has turned on all the lights. The teal-blue walls are hung with a few paintings and photographs, placed here and there, not crowding each other. Billy is standing between the two picture windows, gazing out at the apartments across the street. There is no balcony. He presses a button in the central frame, and wood-louvered shades descend slowly on tracks.
Covering one of the walls is a set of shelves, half of which hold books and the other half a music console, compact discs, freestanding photographs, and an amethyst bowl. In the bowl I find a set of keys.
Watching me, Billy asks, “Do you remember it now?”
“No, nothing,” I whisper. “Whoever lives here is a stranger.”
“He hasn’t been here for some time. . . maybe three or four months.”
“It’s not me, Billy. I don’t know this person.”
He says nothing, regarding me thoughtfully for a few moments. Looking up at the ceiling, he whistles.
“More than twelve feet high. Higher even than my place.”
Two doors lead into rooms we have not yet explored. The first is a bedroom. Rumpled clothing is scattered about; dresser drawers yawn open. The double bed is a tangle of musty sheets, with blankets and pillows tossed to the floor. An empty liquor bottle lies there too. On the bedside table sits another. Jumbled around the bottle are a wristwatch with a metal-link band, an empty plastic pill container, an empty bullet box, and a cell phone. From out of nowhere, I recall how to turn it on. I press a button, and a screen glows, informing me that 138 new voice mail messages are waiting. A larger number of text messages remain unread. I turn off the device and drop it, filled with inexplicable loathing.
Now we enter the last room. It is as spacious as the living room, though not a square. It is a long rectangle with a wide window on the end wall, reaching nearly as high as the ceiling. An artist’s easel sits in the center of the room, beside a table heaped with tubes of oil paint. Stretched canvases lean against the wall, unframed. The flooring is paint-spattered tiles. The atmosphere is pungent with evaporated turpentine and a lidless jar of linseed oil.
A canvas sits on the easel. The work is unfinished. It portrays a screeching human face in lurid colors; in the background are two narrow vertical boxes, like apartment buildings. Smoke is pouring from one of them; a small aircraft shape is heading at an angle toward the other. My stomach cramps painfully and I turn away from the image, only to see a large poster taped to a wall. It is a print of one of the frightening paintings we saw in the Metropolitan Museum of Misplaced Memories: a crazed monster with wide-open jaws devouring a naked, dec
apitated man.
Billy is observing me.
“Come on,” he says, taking my arm, “Let’s see if we can find out more.”
Back in the living room I sit down on the couch and hold my head in my hands. It’s too much. Submerged in this tsunami of things that are supposed to have meaning for me, I feel more than ever my dislocation. My life was a current in the continuous flow of time. I drowned in it, and now that I have risen to the surface I still do not know where I have come from or where I am going.
“It’s not me, it’s not me,” I groan.
“Look at this,” says Billy, kneeling beside me. He hands me a framed photo of a man seated at the stern of a sailboat. A triangle of white sail is visible in the foreground. In the background the blue horizon tilts at a wild angle. The man’s hair is whipped by high winds, his head lifted high, his hand firm on the tiller. He is grinning, proud and in love, his eyes fixed on whoever held the camera.
“Written on the back is Chesapeake Bay, 1988,” says Billy. “So it’s not you, Francisco, but he sure looks like you.”
I shake my head, at a loss for words. “We’ve found out that your name isn’t really Francisco, but we could still use it for a while, if you like.”
“But I am Francisco. I know I’m Francisco.”
In his kindliest tone, he lowers his voice and says, “Your real name is Paul Maximilian Davies. That’s the name on the driver’s license.”
“No! It’s a mistake.”
“You were born in August—same as me—but the year is 1990.”
“No, no, no! It’s a big mistake!”
He hands me a postcard. It’s an art reproduction, the red-suited boy with the jackdaw.
“My self-portrait,” I say.
“It was painted by Francisco de Goya, all right,” says Billy, “but it’s a portrait of somebody else.”
My mind swirls.
“Let’s look at some other things I’ve found,” he says. He helps me to my feet and takes me over to the bookshelves. There on a shelf stands a photo of a boy wearing a blue hockey sweater emblazoned with a white maple leaf. He is holding a hockey stick.
“This isn’t me,” I protest.
“No, it isn’t, Francisco. Written on the back, it says he’s a boy named James Davies. It’s dated forty years ago. I’ll bet he was your father.”
He points to another photo, lying face down on the shelf. I pick it up:
A young man who looks like me is standing beside a very beautiful young woman, their arms around each other, their cheeks pressed together. The Eiffel Tower rises behind them. The woman is not floating sideways in the air. The frame’s corner joints are broken; the glass is fractured. I slam it back down on the shelf.
Billy takes me next to the dining room table.
“Most of this mail is addressed to Paul Davies,” he says. “Or to P. M. Davies. A couple of envelopes are addressed to ‘Max’.”
He points to the bill lying open on the table.
“It’s a bank statement,” says Billy. “Looks like your rent is deducted automatically every month, the utilities too.”
I return to the couch and sit down. I hold my head in my hands. I rock my body forward and backward. I hit the sides of my skull with my fists.
“Don’t do that,” Billy pleads, kneeling and grabbing my wrists. “Stop hurting yourself, buddy. You gotta stop hurting yourself.”
Eyes closed, heart racing, I fall back and rest my head on the cushions. He lets go of me. For a time we say nothing.
“I want to go home,” I groan.
“This is your home,” he replies.
“I want to go home,” I insist.
Neither of us wears a wristwatch. The stove clock tells us it is nearly two in the morning. Billy goes about the room with a gold shopping bag in hand—Hugo Boss—filling it with small items. Still rocking, holding my head, I pay little attention to what he is taking. Finally, he appropriates the keys from the glass bowl and tells me it’s time to go.
After locking up the apartment, we head down to the street in search of a taxi. Eventually, we hail one on First Avenue—that is, one that will stop for someone of Billy’s stature. The sleepy-eyed cabbie hardly glances at him as he folds and squeezes his body into the backseat. I take the front. The taxi brings us across town to the west side and then north to Hell’s Kitchen. The streets are relatively deserted, and we arrive home within half an hour.
It has been twenty hours since we embarked on our journey to Vermont. I crash onto my mattress and fall instantly asleep.
Later—I’m not sure how much later—I awake with a start. The room is still dark, so I must have slept only a few hours. I can hear Billy’s breathing nearby. Restless, I get up and pad to the bathroom. Then I drink a glass of water at the kitchen sink. I cannot fall back to sleep, so I go out into the corridor and feel my way in the gloom toward my hidden room of the mind. I open the door and flick on the light switch. The chandelier ignites, blinding me. When I can see again, I notice the gold bag by the doorframe, empty. I throw it out into the hallway and close the door. The horse painting hangs where I last saw it. There are now two yellow racing cars side-by-side in the middle of the floor. Spread around the room, propped against the walls, are photographs, which Billy must have taken from P. M. Davies’ apartment.
I turn off the light and sit down with my back against a wall. The window is a pale rectangle of night glow from the city. I close my eyes.
I see golden rings, pulled from fingers in anger, hurled through cold air, descending in an arc, hitting the ice as chariot wheels, rolling, zinging, spinning out of orbit, and wobbling into immobility with one last echoing zing. The rings splinter the ice, collapse the hard surface of the pond, and then pull down the water itself as the weight of a star sinks the invisible graph of time.
Into the great sea are hurled signs that contain unbearable memories. The sea takes them all and returns only a few of them, altered in shape and hue. There are currents and tides and storms in the sea, and because of this, one may find washed up on shores the half-forgotten words of love and hate.
When I was very young, the pond behind Grandma and Grandpa’s house was my ocean. Mom and Dad brought me and Puck there for two weeks every summer. When our family of four drove up the lane, we erupted into our annual cheering at the first sight of our old friend, the big painted horse on the wall of the brewery. Then Grandma came out onto the porch, waving, her hands sometimes colored by the dyes she used to stain her weaving wool. Then Grandpa came out of the brewery doors wiping his hands on a cloth, ambling toward us with a grin and a Santa swagger and hands contorted into claws on his huge belly, ho-ho-ho, an old joke between us, bending over to embrace us, his shoulder-length gray hair tickling us, his beard long and scraggly, with two chin braids that he called “fairy twine”.
When we could get away with it, Puck and I swam in the reservoir above the waterwheel, chilled and exhilarated by our first plunge, and slid down the old stone race onto the motionless wheel, which was locked against such forbidden mischief. We clambered down its slippery steps like monkeys, dropping into the creek below. Sputtering, shivering, happy, and a little scared, we scaled the mossy creek bank, our skin alabaster white with blue veins, as Grandma came out of the house with warm towels and hot muffins and scolding and nervousness about little boys drowning. Then we danced around in the hot sunlight with the crickets and grasshoppers, got dressed, and went into the brewery to watch Grandpa filling the Benny horse bottles, while Dad stretched out on a deck chair on the porch, reading his reports from the city, and Mom picked wildflowers for the supper table. There were woodpiles to topple too, and the pond, the pond, the great sea to wade across, up to our necks in the middle, feeling the warm muddy leaves on our toes, catching frogs in the shallows, skipping flat shale stones.
Every second year we came for a week at Christmastime. The brewery was shut down then, the hired men gone for the holiday, though the ales and lagers never ceased working on their
own. The woods were white, the reservoir frozen over, all sounds hushed in the still air. The parlor was merry with the Christmas tree that Grandpa and Puck and I cut down in the woods and brought in on his ten-foot toboggan.
Grandpa and Dad would drink whiskey, and talk, and tell stories. Dad was different when he was here with Mom’s family, more careful with his words. He laughed less, and sometimes stared off into space over the white-powdered mountains toward the south, where our city and our most-of-the-time home was.
“I can tell you about those days,” Grandpa once said from his armchair by the woodstove, stroking his long gray beard, snapping his suspenders, patting his belly, while Puck climbed up his legs and draped himself over the huge chest and arms. “The Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead.”
I listened with one ear as I scooted my new racing car, a Christmas gift, around the ornate patterns on the threadbare rug. Mine was yellow; Puck’s was blue.
“Not in front of the lads, please,” said Dad with a short laugh, and Grandma looked worried.
“I was at Woodstock,” Grandpa said, refilling their glasses. “Same beard, another body. Like a young god, I was. Girls going crazy over me, half of us naked, or all of us half-naked, I can’t remember which. You should take notes. I’m a walking heritage site.”
“It was pandemonium, Ben,” said Grandma with a look.
“With an emphasis on demonium,” said Mom with a sideways smile.
“You weren’t even born, Sarah,” Grandpa snapped at her.
“Let’s change the subject,” said Dad.
“Can’t stand conflict, can you,” Grandpa snarled.
“If you want conflict, I’ll be happy to supply you some.”
“Supply and demand, that’s you all over.”
“Jamie, Dad, take a break, will you,” said Mom.
“No, no,” said Grandpa. “It’s time we had it out.”
“Ben, you’ve had far too much to drink,” Grandma interjected.
The Fool of New York City Page 11