She nodded toward the other boys. “They listen to you.”
“It’s funny,” he said. “I quit drugs a while back, but once you realize that sometimes people actually listen, and you have this power to be heard and all—I can’t get enough of it. So, if I’m going to be addicted to something?” He shrugged. “You hear me?”
Claire raised the unlit cigarette to her lips and pretended to inhale. “I hear you.” She handed it back to him. “How long have you been in here?”
He looked at his watch very seriously. “Five hours, twenty-three minutes, seventeen seconds.” He grinned. He had nice teeth.
“How long have I been in here?” she asked quietly.
A faint V of veins rose from his forehead. He stopped grinning, stood up and announced, “It’s time for sleep.” His boys mumbled consent. The others in the cell seemed to agree, too.
But there weren’t enough mats for everyone. The boys rested their heads on each other’s shoulders or legs, and immediately started horsing around again.
“Don’t act stupid,” their leader said. “We have to speak up for ourselves and protest this bullshit, excuse my language. Are you going make sense at the arraignment if you don’t sleep? Are you going to convince anyone you don’t belong here?” No one answered. It was like he’d flicked out the lights, and everyone settled in, making a bed of the cement floor. He motioned for Claire to take the one bed. Stepping over the legs of children, she shook her head. “I don’t need it.”
He smiled so warmly she thought she could kiss him. He sat down and patted the ground for Claire to sit. They leaned their backs against the metal frame of the bed and their heads on the edge of the thin mattress. She watched the boys resting on top of one another. An unsaid trust. Somewhere, someone was screaming. But when she shut her eyes, it was a whisper.
The cement dawn smashed Claire in the side of the head. Dug its nails into her back and kicked her hips in. She was too old to sleep on the ground.
The leader was up, standing over her as if he’d been watching her sleep, waiting for her eyes to open. He reached his hand down. She took it, he pulled her up. She was taller than him.
Her throat was so dry no sound came when she opened her mouth. Her voice pulled out of her like knotted rope. “I still don’t know your name.”
He grinned. “Jill,” he said. “What’s yours?”
What an odd name; she felt the urge to tease him. She thought of asking how old he was, but she didn’t really want to know. She didn’t want to know anything more. She wanted to go home. She wanted to fall on her bed with all her clothes on despite their filth, kick off her shoes and not care where they landed. Leave the door open, let anyone see her sprawled across her big mattress, her down quilt. But who would come to find her?
Later they brought bologna sandwiches. Breakfast. One boy threw a piece of bread at the wall and it didn’t bend or crumble; it made a hard sound like a pebble.
The strung-out boy threw up in the corner and the teenage girl called out for help. The guards said they’d call someone, but no one came. An hour later? Was it more? The boy put his head on her lap and she moved her fingers through his hair and whispered to him. Finally a man in a different uniform entered. They had to wake him; he’d fallen asleep near his mess.
“Let me stay with him,” the girl moaned after them. No one answered.
At some early hour, an officer came and called Claire’s name. She was first, though she’d been there the shortest time. She was moved to a different cell, then there was paperwork. Carbon copies of everything.
This is my street and this is my door. She clutched the painting at her side as she dug through her bag for her keys and came up empty. Her keys were lying in the middle of Fifth Avenue, crushed by feet and wheels. Maybe her keys were in the gutter. Maybe they’d reached the Hudson. And no one was home, waiting. No one was ever expecting her. Perhaps that was why she’d left her address and number for Jill and his boys. She’d asked the lawyer to give it to them, ignoring his raised eyebrows.
The public defender still had acne on his face, but he’d held her painting like an apostle. He’d told her not to say anything, that she could trust him. Samantha hadn’t bothered to show and it was easy for the young lawyer to prove it was a property dispute to be dealt with in the divorce proceedings, that the theft charges shouldn’t stand. “As you can see plainly,” he’d said, pointing at each falling face in the painting, “it’s her likeness. There’s no question here.” The painting was restored to her. She was let off without so much as a reprimand. But, somehow, Claire felt she’d failed.
Claire would have to find a payphone and call Tomasz after all, or a locksmith. She leaned her painting against the railing and sat down. She hugged her legs and rested her chin on her knees, making herself small. In the cold, on her stoop, her whole body was finished. It was used, unfed, every morsel of skin and muscles exhausted.
During the three-minute arraignment, Claire had wanted to jump up, to cover what felt like a great exposure, something very private revealed to all these public people. The judge had leaned forward, sleep still in his eyes, and looked at the painting. The officer had looked at the painting. The court bailiff had stopped shuffling papers to look at the painting. The lawyer, he’d looked and looked at the painting. Everyone stared at her torn body falling through the air—but no one said anything to indicate that this was strange. That it was bad. That it was a bad painting, an evil painting, that it should be found guilty.
3.
Claire balanced a tray with four glasses of Tang and four Wonder Bread sandwiches as she walked into the den. If she didn’t feed Jill and the boys they’d eat nothing but potato chips.
“Tonight’s about draft demographics,” Jill was saying to the other three—Lawrence, Carlos, and Bird—who were sprawled on the floor and couch. They’d been arguing over whose speech to use at their rally that night.
Lawrence plopped himself dramatically on the couch. “I worked hard on that speech.”
“Me too,” Bird said, pulling his long hair down so it shielded his eyes.
Then Carlos started dancing in the corner of the room. He did the Twist and the Jerk and the Mashed Potato. Often, when tensions rose, he would lie on the floor and wriggle.
Jill ignored him and said to Lawrence, “We’ll use your speech at the next rally. All right?”
They would go on like this until everyone conceded to Jill. But they were content in their roles: Carlos designed flyers and banners and called himself art director. He’d even created a logo for their collective: an outline of Cassius Clay’s head that he stitched onto each of their black masks. Bird was responsible for direct action, calling government officials at dinnertime, posting Carlos’s flyers. And Lawrence was on media, clacking away at his op-eds on a typewriter set up on the den floor.
Carlos was Puerto Rican. Bird was Jewish. Jill was Italian. Lawrence was a Negro. These boys could not have been more different from one another, but even now Claire had a hard time telling them apart. They were inseparable. She called them the Lost Boys in front of Mary. But they weren’t lost.
Her Village apartment had been transformed into the temporary headquarters of their small, rogue collective. She’d stressed “temporary” and had agreed to let them stay until the divorce hearing two months away, no longer.
Claire set the tray on the coffee table and the four said thank you in unison.
It looked as if a bomb had gone off in the den—clothes strewn over the couch, sleeping bags piled in corners. Large strips of fabric with black paint cloaked the backs of chairs. They slept through the afternoon, drank enough beer to sustain an army, and smoked marijuana and cigarettes all day, the windows shut against the cold—all paid for by Bird, unbeknownst to whomever sent him his allowance. But Claire imposed no rules. She wasn’t their mother; she wasn’t anything to them.
Freddie would have hated their cheap beer and smoke, draped as thickly as their rubbish over all the furniture. B
ut she no longer linked the apartment to Freddie. She had re-associated every corner of it; her memories of him, even in their bed, had been overwritten. Claire could just imagine Mary stumbling in and thinking she’d mistaken the address, but Claire hadn’t had Mary over in many months. Her home may have been unrecognizable, but it felt more like home with the boys. There was movement; there was purpose in the air.
“Hey, Claire—you like Elvis?” Carlos asked between sticky bites.
“Yes,” she said, leaning in the doorway. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
All four burst out laughing. “Hey,” Bird said, “Claire likes Bubblegum!”
“It’s not Bubblegum. I like nice music. Like Joni Mitchell. And the Beatles. Not whatever you had on yesterday. The Jugs.”
“The Fugs,” said Lawrence.
They laughed again and she couldn’t keep from smiling. “I’m going to the library for a few hours. Don’t set the couch on fire.” She was a regular at the Sixth Avenue library, where she was attempting and failing to teach herself family law.
Jill raised his sandwich in cheers and grinned at her. “We’ll get to that legal stuff later this week, you bet,” he said, then turned back to the Lost Boys. “Make the poster say two a.m. in the park under the hanging tree.”
Claire left them then. The less she knew, the less Freddie and his legion of lawyers could hold against her if she was found out. And she didn’t want to hear the rest, who they were meeting, what plans. Other young men in black masks, illicit but harmless enough, draping peace flags from the rooftops of office buildings or rallying in front of a politician’s apartment. They always came home smelling of sweat and spray paint.
Jill was the oldest of their gang at twenty-four. He told her he’d flunked out of law school while he was getting high. “Harvard Law,” he’d said with what Claire swore was a touch of pride, despite his disdain toward that lifestyle. He’d offered to help with Claire’s divorce settlement but hadn’t yet found the time. He’d never taken the bar but advertised himself quietly in Village coffee shops as unofficial counsel for draft deferments. There was something thrilling about his confidence and the moodiness that seemed to accompany it. After yelling himself hoarse at a rally, or giving the boys one lecture or another, he would sometimes lock himself in the bathroom, first making sure the others didn’t need it. Claire tried not to imagine what he did in there. Perhaps he only needed the quiet.
The fact of his youth alone reminded her of the older man she’d met at the Goethe Institute: at forty-two, she was nearly right in the middle of both their ages, as old to Jill as the man was to her. Jill, a quarter the man’s age, had the same passion for dissent as the gray-haired man had for Wagner and Bordeaux. “You know nothing about your wine, do you?” the well-traveled gentleman had said at a reception. Claire pretended to be offended, then went home with him that afternoon, rubbed against him while it was still light out. Then he took her to the movies: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth Taylor was fat for it, and on her fifth husband. Claire said so and the man laughed. But with his hand on her thigh illuminated by the screen, nothing much was funny. She could see more clearly in that dark theater than she could in his uptown apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and all the sunlight money could buy. She could see so clearly in the dark: this is my life. She wanted to leave, but it was the middle of the movie.
He called her a thinner, better Elizabeth Taylor. She pouted and said most people thought she was a rather plain Lauren Bacall, which was partly true—though Freddie was the only one who’d ever said so, and only once. Claire lay naked on his sofa under a thin quilt not meant to be used. He cooked her dinner, which no man had ever done for her, borscht and brisket. And the next morning he woke her up with Wagner and danced her around the living room and said she made him feel young again. To which she laughed and said, “I’m not young.” And he said to her, “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know anything. Not even wine.”
She stayed with him for three days. He fed her well, as if he knew—a stray, a temporary home. Then he flew to Europe on business and the next time they saw each other nearly a year had passed, too much time, and they smiled across the room and that was all. A silent pact to erase a week. To disengage a memory, to unknow it.
The painting was under the bed. Most nights she would peek at it before going to sleep, a new ritual. It lay on its back, facing her back, and she could swear she felt it like a body, with arms and other parts breathing underneath her.
A week or so into their stay, Claire was walking past the bathroom door when Jill flung it open, startling her. She was terribly afraid he’d think she was spying on him, hovering there in the hall.
“Can I run something past you?” he asked, as if they were in school together, not the door to the toilet.
Claire cleared her throat. “Yes, of course.”
Jill glanced quickly up and down the hall, then grabbed her arm. “Come in here.” Before she could object, Jill pulled her inside and closed the door.
“Read this.” He shoved a copy of The Sad Gay Life into her hand, a paperback novel he must have taken from her bookshelf. His face was inches from hers. She could smell something like clove in his hair. She glanced from the cover, to him, back again. “No,” he said. “Not the book. This.” He flipped to a blank page in the front, now veiled in penciled script. She squinted at it, but could hardly begin to mobilize that portion of her brain. “I know, my handwriting. But I’ve been hammering out this idea,” he said.
“I don’t think I’m the right—” Claire tried.
“It’s like this. So what if I’m not an artist? I know art. At least, I know what I like. And you know how I feel about the war. And these rallies. We can really do something here.” He stopped talking and waited as if he’d asked her a question.
“Yes, I agree. But I don’t understand what…”
“Right. Sorry. I forget sometimes that you can’t read my mind. Feels like you could.” He smiled sheepishly at her. Claire hung her head over the book, shielding her red cheeks with her hair. “It’s like this,” he went on. “I think the real success of this movement has to come from art. That’s how we’re going to reach people. But not cheesy, obvious art like you see at marches. It has to be bigger than that. Like the Surrealists in France. A whole political movement that started with art. We’ve got nothing like that here. Just a bunch of freaks on the street. That’s how they see us, even the middle-class pacifists. They won’t join. They’re too scared. They think it’s just some drugged-out youth movement. It’s not. It’s a people movement.” Jill let out a breath, like he’d been holding onto those words for ages.
“So art could bridge that gap,” Claire said. “But I still don’t see how I would be much use. Have you talked to Carlos?”
Jill’s face sunk. Claire wanted desperately to say something smart and useful and unique. Something to meet the expectations that she didn’t know he had of her until now. He looked proud, and spent. She had to say something.
“I might know someone,” Claire said before she could stop herself. “An artist. She used to live in the neighborhood. Very influential. I heard she was a Freedom Rider.” Jill perked up a little. “But I don’t know that we’ll unearth her. It was a long time ago.”
Now when Claire sat with the painting each night, she dared herself not to think of Nicolette. Running her hand along the canvas, perhaps ruining the painting with the oils of her fingers, but she didn’t care. She laughed at her own strangeness. But she felt comforted by the painting, its new proximity. Like an old lover she didn’t know she missed until they were near once again.
Of course, as soon as she tried not to think of Nicolette, there was no stopping it. Claire often wondered where she was, what adventure. She seemed only to imagine Nicolette in exotic landscapes—beaches, old fortresses—never close by. Perhaps this kept Claire from looking her up, imagining she was unlocatable.
But as soon as Claire became aware of her own daydr
eam, she would cover it with the drop cloth of a more immediate worry: whether she’d be able to pay the electric bill this month.
Bird was on the phone in the kitchen and his back was rocking. Claire paused in the doorway.
“I’m fine. Yes, I’m eating. Is Dad going to get the operation?” he said forcefully, as if he might lift off the ground had he spoke with less weight. There was a pause and then, “If you don’t tell me I’ll kill you.”
Claire had never heard Bird speak like this. He was always the playful follower. Being the youngest seemed to make him feel special.
“I won’t kill you,” he said, softer now. “I’m just mad. I want to know. Call me if Mom says anything. Promise…cross your heart…I don’t hear you crossing your heart.” A leaden sigh. “Yeah, yeah, I love you, too.” Bird set down the receiver, breathing shallowly.
So they had worlds outside of this apartment, this movement. They had problems and people and anger and other injustices to contend with.
Claire stood where she was, couldn’t make herself move toward him. She could so easily lie and say, “Little Bird, it will be all right. Nothing is so bad in the end.” But there seemed to be an invisible shield around the room. She couldn’t go forward. She couldn’t be good. Her bag slipped from her shoulder with a thud.
As Bird turned toward the noise, Claire slipped down the hall to her bedroom, away from him. She heard him call after her, “Who’s there? Carlos? Don’t be a jerk.”
Why couldn’t she be good?
Taking a cue from Jill, Claire found respite in the quiet of her bathroom. She needed to better herself, she felt desperate in that. Perhaps if she looked happier. In the mirror, she made a face like Julie Andrews dancing in the Alps, that doltish, open-toothed smile, those dewy eyes. But it wasn’t her face. Claire put on her rarely worn eyeglasses and studied herself. She’d always been told her eyes were beautiful, cat-like, until she was forced to hide them behind frames. When she noticed the lack of compliments, she’d stopped wearing them, only to get lost in her own neighborhood.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 11