“All of which he tells me about the next time we’re alone! The man was not well. It was clear he hadn’t slept in days. He hadn’t called me back. The thing about him turning himself in, I don’t know that I was totally serious about it. I mean, what did I want? I didn’t know that either. Lying, sneaking. That was all I was opposed to. I hate secrets. They make me ill. I was sure he’d call me back later that night, try to convince me of some plan or other. But he didn’t call. A week I didn’t hear from him. I was getting concerned. I thought maybe he’d actually done it, gone to the police, because I didn’t see him around. Then I thought maybe the lab results came back, and the mouse was still alive! Maybe I wasn’t pregnant after all.
“Sarah had been keeping her distance, but I still spent time at the house, out of habit, I suppose. I should have had it out with her. Well, we would have it out soon enough. Instead, we said awful things about other people who thought they were our friends. I think it made Sarah feel better about hating me, and it made me feel better about not opening up about this whole affair with her father.
“We heard the car in the driveway, and then he was in the room with us. ‘Out,’ he said to Sarah, and she obeyed. He closed the door. He told me he’d been contemplating murder, he’d been contemplating suicide.”
He tells her these are not good options. But neither is going to the police. Has she really thought this through? (She hasn’t.) Has she considered that it will involve a trial, in which she will have to testify? (She hasn’t, no.) That it could drag on for months? Longer, with appeals? That she won’t be free to go to New York to become a Superstar until this is all over? He won’t give in, he tells her. It’ll be his word against hers. What evidence does she have, besides her word? He will fight it every step of the way. And whom will people believe? He is a respected member of the community, the friendly neighborhood dentist—and what is she? A promiscuous young girl who dresses like a hooker. It will be months before she can get the abortion—if she somehow manages to win, and by then it will be too late. The rape clause pertains only to first-trimester abortions. She will be forced to keep the baby and now be center stage in a messy trial. She will be famous—people will talk—but is this how she wants to spend her fifteen minutes?
No, she says meekly.
He feels sick. This is not how he meant for this to go. He botched a routine filling that morning, badly, and, after canceling the rest of his appointments for the day, had been driving around aimlessly. He pulled into the driveway expecting to throw himself on her mercy, to beg her not to make him turn himself in. He was on the verge of tears when he burst into Sarah’s room. He watches himself talk. He hardly knows the man who is saying these words, the man who is standing over this poor girl and browbeating her half to death.
So what do we do, she says.
He doesn’t know. He has to think. He will call her later.
When he leaves, Sarah returns, “And we finally had the fight that had been brewing for weeks. By the end of it, we were no longer friends, at least as far as Sarah was concerned. She called Lou Reed a fag and snapped my Velvet Underground album in half. She kicked me out of her house before I had developed a full-enough head of steam to storm out on my own. I went across the street, back home, slammed the door, stomped upstairs, and proceeded to trash my room.
“If I wasn’t quite ready to call this town quits, after that afternoon I certainly was. There was nothing left for me here.”
“What about your parents?”
“You mean my mother and her string of boyfriends? I would have moved out of her house at the age of twelve if I had the means—or knew where my father had run off to.
“I packed a duffel. If I hadn’t gotten the call from Doc that night, I would have left on my own. He asked me how long it might take me to be ready to leave and not come back. I said, ‘I’m already packed.’ He said to meet him out front at midnight.
“I left out the front door. I got into Doc’s car, which was idling in his driveway with the lights off. Anybody could have seen us leave, but I didn’t see any lights come on—in either of our houses—as he pulled away, and I watched out the back window. Where were we going?”
Delaware, he says.
What’s in Delaware, I ask.
A bus to New York.
“Like James Bond, this guy! His plan was to ditch the car outside of Wilmington. And once at the bus station, pay some wino to buy us two tickets to the city. Why all the secrecy?”
“People didn’t need to know our whereabouts.”
“I said, ‘I can’t get an abortion in New York,’ and he said, ‘You’re not getting an abortion. You’re keeping this baby.’ ”
It’s the first time he has referred to the thing growing inside of Cynthia as a “baby.” And doing so is like casting a spell. They both can feel it. After he utters the word, it’s no longer something to be gotten rid of, to be dealt with. It’s a life—to make room for, to figure out.
Okay, Cynthia says. But you’re not leaving your wife for me. That’s not what this is—you’re not ending one family just to start another. I’m not going to be your wife. And this is not going to be your son.
Fine, he says. But I’m coming with you, wherever you go.
Fine, she says. You can be a Superstar, too.
12
COLLECTIVE
THEY ARRIVE AT PORT AUTHORITY a little after six in the morning on Tuesday, May 31. They find a motel room on Forty-Ninth Street and Tenth Avenue. The rates are designed for use by the hour, more time than most customers seem to require, from all the coming and going. They sleep in a windowless room that smells like a urinal and bad breath. The bed is narrow and surprisingly clean for what this place is—the sheets bleach white and fresh. They sleep next to each other but do not touch.
When they wake, it’s night. The place has suddenly become very active.
They go out to a nearby diner. We need a plan, he says, and outlines his idea for how to proceed. The day before they left, he withdrew half the family savings—he slides the cashier’s check across the counter to her now. And I have enough cash in my wallet for us to get by for a couple of weeks without making use of this, he says.
Will he start up a practice here in the city?
No, he is through with that life. It’s time for something new. He wants to make something, to use his hands, tools on a large scale—use picks and drills that aren’t all designed to fit in a person’s mouth. He has heard of a man who went into business for himself restoring rundown properties and then reselling them at enormous profit. He can buy a place with the money, and they can live in it while he fixes it up—then they could sell it, which would net them enough for another place and enough left over to live on while they fix the new one up. And so on. It would be a self-sustaining way of life. There is something graceful about its logic—from the micro to the macro—restoring cavities in the face of a block. He’ll learn as he goes. He already knows quite a bit from being a homeowner—it’s surprising what you pick up intuitively about structural engineering from managing your own home repairs. And when the baby is born, he—or she—will have a roof over his head. Cynthia meanwhile can do whatever she wants—sing, dance, act—anything her little heart desires.
See, she says, I knew this is what you would do.
Do what?
You’re making a family. You are not my husband. And you are not going to be a father.
Honey, in seven months I am, like it or not. Fine. So let’s hear your plan.
You do what you want. My plan is simple and hasn’t changed since tenth grade.
Do you even know where this place is? (She doesn’t.)
And what do you imagine will happen once you get there? He waves his fairy magic wand—presto, you’re a superstar! You still don’t have a place to live. (She’ll figure something out.)
You’re still going to need to eat. (She’ll manage.)
They walk along Forty-Second Street, among a rough crowd of transients an
d prostitutes. They lug their belongings with them because they don’t trust them in the motel. Cynthia insists on stopping every vagrant with a cup of change to ask where she can find Andy Warhol’s factory. She has heard somewhere that Ultra Violet and Candy Darling—and most of the other superstars—were, at the time of their discovery, bohemian eccentrics with no fixed address.
Why don’t you just look it up in a phone book?
Don’t be stupid—he’s not going to put his phone number and address out there for just any person to see. The place is underground, man! (In fact, she has no idea whether or not it would be listed in the phone book. Thinking about it now, she imagines that it probably was.)
One man Cynthia asks leads them to a place several blocks away. The Factory? Sure, I know it, he says. But it turns out to be a jazz club called the Factory. Inside, it reeks of sweat and furniture polish. The three of them slide into a booth and listen—Cynthia enthralled, Doc skeptical—to the man’s life story over the cacophonous quintet of musicians onstage.
When the man gets up to go to the bathroom, Doc says, He’s just milking us for free whiskey.
Cynthia looks at him blankly. So? He’s broke. What else is he going to do?
They stay until the place closes at two and then wander, drunk, back to their motel, which, when they arrive, is being raided by the police. An officer at the entry tells them to move along, and they happily comply.
They book a room at the motel next door, which isn’t being raided. (“A stupid, stupid thing to do,” Doc said. “It was just dumb luck the cops didn’t—when they were done with the one place—move on and raid this place, too. I would have been toast. Cynthia would have gotten what she asked for—cops find a forty-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl in a motel room? They would have driven Cynthia back and locked me up and thrown away the key.”)
This place isn’t as well maintained. The carpet is stained; the sheets are not clean; a haze of cigarette smoke hangs in the air from the previous occupant, who seems to have vacated only minutes before their arrival—the cigarette butt stubbed out on the windowsill is still damp with saliva.
They sleep in their clothes, on top of the covers.
The sounds of a violent argument shake the walls. Stomping, screaming (a woman), bellowing (a man), splintering furniture (a bed?), glass shattering (a mirror? an ashtray?), outside the wail of sirens. When he wakes that morning, Cynthia—as well as all the cash in his wallet—is gone.
He waits in the hotel for three whole days, not daring to leave lest she return and not find him there. But she does not return.
He walks the Forty-Second Street corridor, from river to river, but she does not turn up. He begins to recognize the faces of the permanent vagrants, to learn names. Popcorn Jack. The Cardboard Preacher. Josephina Billingham III. Haunted faces, faces worn hard by vices, by insanity. Scars, open sores, hard callous feet.
When he reads a couple of days later that Andy Warhol has been shot by a woman, he thinks, My God, Cynthia—what have you done? He starts at every police siren, sure they are looking for him, sure he will be arrested as her unwitting accomplice. It turns out, though, not to have been Cynthia but rather a radical feminist by the name of Valerie Solanas, who had been in one of his movies. According to the papers, there had been some dispute about a screenplay.
He goes to the Factory, which turns out to be in a building down in Union Square, but he is stopped by a drag queen on his way off the elevator.
Your business?
I’m looking for a girl. He describes Cynthia, but it’s clear she isn’t here—clear, too, that this place it not what she had supposed. There are no vagrants here, no Cynthias. Everyone here is, in spite of some costumes, normal, adult. It is a place of commerce—a messenger handing over a package, someone signing for it, a man in a suit and bow tie sorting through artwork on a large table. Business as usual, even though their fearless leader lies recuperating in a hospital from a bullet in the ass.
What’s so special about this place? Nothing, as far as he can tell. Cynthia will be disappointed when she finds it—if she hasn’t found it already—just to be turned away by a man in a pink beehive wig.
He leaves and spends the rest of the day searching the meadows of the city. This seems to be where all the young people congregate when the weather is nice. In Union Square Park, Madison Square Park, Tompkins Square Park. He spends an entire day getting lost along the cloistered footpaths of Central Park. He buys a hot dog from a vending cart, and then another, then an ice-cream sandwich. He sits down in an enormous grassy field, among a ring of young people. Several have musical instruments. He is welcomed in warmly and—after being encouraged several times—joins in the singing, even though he doesn’t know the words or the tune, and eventually finds himself beckoning with the others for passing strangers to join them, making room, expanding the circle.
This was the day Robert Kennedy was killed.
It grew dark, and the circle broke up. He left the park and found his way back to the room he was renting. It was time to move on. Cynthia was gone, subsumed into the great anonymous swirl.
He would occasionally wake, panic-stricken that Dolores had killed herself and still, half dreaming, imagine that Benji was calling to give him the news. He would grope for the phone in the dark and be woken by the sound of the dial tone droning in his ear. He’d hang up and go back to sleep, and by morning the dread would have passed. No news was good news, he figured. They were all getting along fine without him, he was sure. He had certainly left them all enough money to, anyway.
So however impossible it might have been to utter the word no and dissolve his family, it was remarkable just how easy it had been for him to forget about them entirely. That he had left them forever never to see them again was already, in his mind, a fact. In these first weeks of his arrival in the city he thought about one or another of them only in the context of how distant, how unreal, they seemed to be. He could conjure his wife’s face only vaguely and Benji’s not at all. The most vivid was Sarah’s, but sometimes he caught himself confusing her face with Cynthia’s.
He himself hardly remembered who he was anymore. Who had he been all these years? And who was he now?
It was too soon to know.
The death of Robert Kennedy turns out to be an occasion of national teeth gnashing and breast-beating; it’s an event for which he himself has no particular feeling. The only politician he ever liked was Barry Goldwater, but this was only because Goldwater talked sensibly about taxes and government spending. The Kennedys are a phenomenon he doesn’t get. What that family of New England socialites had to do with poor black people in the south he just could not figure out.
He is alone in this, he can see. Everywhere he goes the conversation is about the assassination—how nothing will ever be the same, how they are living in dangerous times now, how this will define the era. And coinciding as it does with an occasion of personal upheaval, Doc begins to hear the disembodied phrases of national mourning uttered by people—at a newsstand, in an elevator, on a bus—as advice. Start from scratch. Do what needs to be done. Move on.
He starts seeing a sculptor who rents an old carriage house on Grand Street. The neighborhood—if it can really be called that—south of Houston Street, had been a major base for manufacturing at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, but most of the businesses moved away, the rest forced out through the threat of eminent domain. Early in the sixties, many of the buildings had been slated for demolition to clear the way for an eight-lane expressway that would connect the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges with the Holland Tunnel. Apartments could be gotten cheaply, and artists took advantage of these raw spaces—some former printing houses, others former textile factories, grand old buildings with cast-iron façades, expansive views, and enormous windows—expecting that when the city got its act together, they’d all be kicked out.
In fact, this never happened. The expressway plan fell apart due to a change
in political winds, and by the time Doc arrives, it has become a thriving creative hub. It’s not zoned to be lived in, but most landlords look the other way. Neither is it a neighborhood convenient for its residents. There are no groceries, few restaurants—the delis keep bankers’ hours. The nearest Laundromat is on Sullivan Street, many blocks away. The buildings are not equipped for tenants—bathrooms are multistall affairs in the hallway, without showers, no kitchens, no bedrooms or closets or proper ventilation. When he stays over—which is most nights—he is reduced to sponge bathing in the large slop sink in her studio.
The woman claims to be a lesbian, but this does not stop them from sleeping together. So far as he can tell, lesbian just means that she enjoys being pleasured orally—fine by him—and occasionally catcalls women on the street. She also claims to be an anarchist. They initially bonded over their mutual indifference to Robert Kennedy’s death. She likes to host parties, which he pays for. The parties last all night and into the next morning, and if one falls on a Friday, it lasts the entire weekend. He is free to sleep with whoever is willing, though he is often at odds with his desire to follow through with this invitation and his desire to get high, which precludes his doing anything sexually productive.
It’s at one of these parties that Doc meets the lesbian’s landlord, a tall man in his fifties who she says used to be an actor. Doc doesn’t recognize him, but the man does use old-fashioned turns of phrase, words enunciated to the verge of British. Doc tells the man that he’s interested in buying the carriage house. A month later, Doc finds himself in possession of the deed to the property and shockingly less money in his new bank account. He buys a sledgehammer and begins knocking down walls.
Don’t I get a say, his lesbian asks.
If you don’t like it, talk to your landlord!
He tries hiring an architect to build a kitchen and proper bathrooms, but he is told it’s against zoning law—so he goes out on his own. He finds a plumber and a general contractor. He pays them in cash.
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