“Walrus Dodgeball,” he shouts.
I move to the other side of the courtyard and sit cross-legged under a tree, lolling my head back to watch the gray clouds spreading across the sky. A leaf drifts into my lap. It is broad and smooth as candle wax or maybe dough, and I roll it like I would roll a croissant and hold it under my nose to breathe in the buttery morning quiet, and I close my eyes and imagine the shop now—a beehive of activity, Lucy managing the lunch rush and José sprinkling chili sugar onto hazelnut chocolate pizzas slated for delivery and Flora holding her breath and inverting a tarte tatin and Milton inhaling the pear slices that slide off.
Some of the kids move to share my tree and I drop the leaf and it uncurls. They stand in a circle linked by their upturned palms to start an old clapping game and I think about leaving because I do not belong here, an intruder in their world.
“Down by the banks of the hanky-panky . . .” Slap, slap, one palm rising and slapping the next palm. “Where the bullfrogs jump from bank to banky . . .” Rising and slap slap slap, faster and faster the palms go, and the sky is gray and close and strange and I am peering up and watching until it all becomes a ripple and a blur.
4
After school, I clatter off the bus and jump-land on the sidewalk and head to the hardware store for wicks, down a street jammed with traffic and people and two policemen on horses and across an intersection with traffic lights arranged in six different directions. I pass a cheese shop that sells wheels the size of hubcaps and a seafood bar with oyster happy hours, and there is Mrs. Witherby’s stationery store with its Gutenberg-style press in the back and a tattoo parlor with grinning skulls emblazoned on the window and a staircase that leads to a basement thrift store with five-dollar pants.
I turn onto a street that is leafy and forgotten like a garden maze and the hardware store is sandwiched between a corner apothecary that hosts poetry slams and vegan chili nights and a shoe repair place that is small enough to warrant one half of a street number.
The hardware store has been owned by the Dickson brothers since 1981 and its aisles are cluttered and filled to the tin ceiling with paints and nails and tapes and bulbs, and the fiberglass wicks are on the bottom shelf of the candles section. I buy one pack and Roy Dickson zips it into my backpack so that I do not have to shrug in and out of the straps again.
I am running late for my interview with the musician—case number 84, which means that while I have not found what I am really looking for, I have found a lot of lost things and have spent a lot of time looking, and I am eager to get back to work. I hurry toward the shop, pushing through a line of people waiting outside a pizzeria with patched booths and the same menu they’ve had since the 1920s.
On the next block a cook pops out of the sidewalk like a groundhog and I steer around his head and the smell of dishwater and fried shallots wafts out as he props open the cellar doors. I walk faster and my backpack bounces and then I am one block away and then I take the turn onto Carmine Street, and I see the oil lamp in the window.
At the sight of it, the bleak fog of the day burns away. I push the door open and step inside and my eyes sweep across the row of round brass chandeliers hanging over the front counter. Lucy is working the register and the tables are full of friends and couples and the kitchen door swings open and I catch a glimpse of Milton pulling his nose out of a mixing bowl and rushing toward the door, and in the moment before he crashes into me I think, Here at last.
I look around and know that I am home, and the numbing chill of being alone fades. I can look into the faces of those I know and even those I don’t and figure out if they are in the mood for a plum-butter Berliner, a pillow of homespun comfort, or if they would prefer refinement, a green matcha croissant. When they bite down and smile behind their hands with powdered sugar mustaches, I can smile too, because I was a part of it.
Milton’s fur slides between my fingers and he wriggles in my arms and breathes loudly into my ear. He takes a seat facing me and I search for the musician and see him standing near the displays, holding a stack of flyers and looking lost with his sloped shoulders bunched up around his ears.
I wave at Lucy and tap the musician’s elbow as I pass. He startles upright and Milton sniffs his flyers and he startles again. To cheer him up, I step behind the counter and search for the squeaking mice, nudging away a ring of passion fruit marshmallows engaged in a sumo match. I wait, looking into the display case as a jelly frog studded with chopped dates and hazelnuts hops across the second level. My reflection rises up from the glass and I search for traces of Walter Lavender Sr.—those eyes like two moons, that inquisitive turn about the mouth.
I wait a moment longer for the mice but none come sniffing forward to investigate. I select a stack of yogurt pretzels instead and shrug in apology when I give them to the musician. He watches them spin in his palm, throwing off sprinkles like fireworks.
“I say, they’re exploding,” he says, rubbing the rainbow dust from his eyelashes.
We leave the shop and Milton follows, nipping at the flyers. We find an empty bench in the little park on the next block because more people use it as a shortcut than a place to sit and think and be outside.
Milton trots away to see where everyone else is and what they are eating and I start as I always do by asking the musician about the lost bassoon. Gathering the backstory helps me set up the possibilities, and it usually contains information that directs my search.
“He’s my oldest friend,” the musician whispers. “For years and years. It’s been so long that he’s having some problems now, like his whisper key gets sticky all the time. My instructors, my roommate—they all say, time for a replacement. I say, so what?” His voice reaches a crescendo, his soul ablaze so that his eyes crackle with passion. “I say, he stuck with me through the beginning when I didn’t know what I was doing. He warmed my fingers when they froze, opened up doors, led me to my best friends in the reed quintet, so how could I even think about abandoning—”
He burns out and sighs. “I’ve been meaning to get him fixed up at Giuliano’s for my first master’s recital on Thursday. It’ll decide whether or not my scholarship is renewed. This school was my grandmother’s dream, too. She took the last of what she’d saved and put it into my plane ticket. We’ve put everything into this program—I’m doing Jolivet, for God’s sake. I can’t lose it all, let her down after she believed in me. . . .”
I ask him when he last remembered having the bassoon. If he is able to remember and retrace his steps, we will be able to focus the search early on and cut down the overall search time. If he does not remember, it gets a little trickier and it takes more creativity and time to systematically search the immediate area and then the natural places and the accidental places.
The musician purses his lips and furrows his brows. “I—I was practicing. In my apartment. The whisper key had been stuck in a worse way lately—every time I played in the upper register the notes would crreeeeak! Creeeeeak!”
Milton races around the fountain and plows into the musician, a rope of spittle draped over his nose, digging wildly for the source of the screeching sound. The musician flings a pretzel and Milton does an arching half-twist and catches it with atypical grace.
The musician relaxes and continues. “The first time it stuck my roommate came running to see what was dying. Now he bangs from the other side of the wall and yells, Shut up. Shut up! He even took off last week, road-tripping to California—for the music festivals, he said, but I think he’d had enough of my practicing.”
Milton tries to crawl under the bench to help the musician carry his sadness and the musician tries to scoot the bench away except it is screwed into the ground.
“So I stopped for the night, cleaned up, put him to rest in his case, and left him by my bed as usual. When I woke up the next morning, he was . . . gone.” The musician puts his head in his hands; crouched under the bench, Milton
drops his head between his paws.
“Search the case again?” It sounds unnecessary but in many cases people are overwhelmed and they conduct a brief and frantic search and miss the obvious.
“He’s not in the case. Or in the department practice rooms. Or in my room—I triple-checked under the laundry and in the drawers and beneath the bed. I cleaned out the apartment and organized my closets.”
He hasn’t been haphazard at all. It sounds like he has thoroughly checked the ZOLA, the Zone of the Lost Article, which is the surrounding area where many lost things end up being found—a pair of reading glasses knocked behind the desk, a set of keys hiding under the mail catalogs. He has also checked the obvious place and the natural place and even the accidental places, by cleaning the apartment. Which leaves . . . “Stolen?”
“What would a thief do with a broken bassoon that’s falling apart?” the musician says, confused. That is a good point. Not stolen, then, and I scratch a finger across the black cover of my notebook. The musician puts his head between his knees and contracts like a pill bug.
“The concert is on Thursday,” he moans through his nose. “There goes my scholarship—ugh,” he squawks when Milton licks his face sympathetically.
The musician’s future will change because of the lost bassoon. If he does not find it, he will not be able to use it to deliver his performance and as a result his scholarship will not be renewed. His dream will be over and his grandmother will be disappointed and I am the only one who has answered his call for help. The weight and responsibility of it keeps my mind open, gives me purpose—connects me to him.
I draw a diagram of the musician’s room in my notebook, starting with four walls and then the door, bed, desk, window, bassoon-in-a-case, and music stand. I write KITCHEN along one side of the bedroom’s outer wall, and on the other side, I write ROOMMATE. Underneath the diagram, I make a list.
Frame of the Lost Article (FOLA): Before Sleep, in Case by Bed. By Morning Lost.
Not in the obvious place: the case
Not in the ZOLA: the bedroom
Not in the accidental places: anywhere in the apartment
Not in the natural place: the practice rooms
Other: Too big to fall somewhere and hide, or to be carried out the window in the arms of a gusty wind. Not stolen.
Someone must have carried it out.
Hypothesis: The musician. Does the musician sleepwalk? Did he carry the bassoon somewhere?
The musician says no and he does not think so, and we lapse into silence and he stands and paces clockwise around the fountain. On his third revolution a businessman catches him with his square shoulder and the flyers spray into the air, and passersby in collared shirts scatter like pigeons as the musician scrambles.
I help him gather the flyers and Milton helps by sitting on them to keep them from running away, and when we return to the bench I pass the flyers back and study the picture of the bassoon. I think over the story the musician told me, and I return to my list and pause at the fourth point—the natural place. It made sense for an instrument to be in the practice rooms, but this particular bassoon was broken and the natural place for a broken bassoon would be a repair shop.
“Giuliano’s? I would remember if I had taken it there,” he protests.
I shrug; it is a place that makes sense whether he remembers taking it there or not, and I rise and wait for him to follow.
5
We swing by the shop so I can tell Lucy where I am going and that I will do homework later, and I reassure Milton that I will be right back, and then the musician and I are ready to go to Giuliano’s. We move like pinballs through the neighborhood, swinging right and swerving left and detouring around construction sites, and I almost walk past Giuliano’s because the sign is cracked and faded and hung in the corner of the dusty window.
Inside, a man surrounded by a sea of instruments and cases is tinkering with a saxophone. He adjusts the height of his worktable and glances up at us and says, “Ciao!”
When he comes over I unfold the musician’s flyer. “Have you seen this?”
“Bassoon,” he booms, and the musician becomes an attentive statue, still and intense. “Ready tomorrow. Am-a still a-fixing.” He disappears into the back room and reappears with a bassoon and it is beautiful and maple, exactly as described and pictured.
Giuliano depresses the sticky key a few times to indicate its continued stickiness and the musician throws his head back and bays with joy and relief, and then he laughs and laughs and up and down his arm sparks of happiness swim under his skin like tadpoles.
“You crazy, weird, genius kid—” He squeezes me so hard that I creak like his broken bassoon, and then he is skipping, pulling me along, flinging us around the shop and singing, “You found it, you found it—I can’t believe you found it,” and we are both laughing and dancing in a world bursting with living color now that his heart is whole.
Giuliano clears his throat. “Chop, chop,” he says, flicking his eyes at the instruments piled on his worktable. He hands the bassoon over to me and I cradle it gingerly because it is a little prickly to the touch, bristling with irritation. I look more closely at the wood and the musician runs his hands down the keys and says proudly, “Pure maple.”
For him the case is closed, the missing bassoon found, but I have more to think about later. I am not sure what the prickliness means and how the missing bassoon got here in the first place. Maybe the musician did sleepwalk after all?
I hand the bassoon back and Giuliano holds up a hand and says, “Ciao.” I mirror his gesture and he sinks back into the watery light of his shop.
The musician shuts the door behind us and says, “You’re my favorite person ever. Besides my bassoon.” He turns to me, his eyes still glossy. “Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you for saving us. Come to my concert on Thursday? In fact, free tickets to any of my concerts.”
I accept, pretending I do not know that he will move forward and I will move forward, separately. For now, though, we walk together in the direction of the shop and he chatters away, telling me story after story that make up his life—about feeling heartbeats in the bottom of his feet right before he walks out onto the stage and about his favorite place in the city for looking at lights, which is not at a rooftop bar but through the curtain of water erupting from the fountain in front of Lincoln Center, glittering and liquid gold like dreams; and about waiting for the C train, which shrieks in C-sharp, and the satisfaction of finding a spot in Washington Square Park and unwrapping his Sunday-morning everything bagel.
I listen and he talks, eager and easy and free, and it is just like we are long-lost friends until we reach the subway entrance and he hesitates and says, “This is me.”
I say good-bye and he says, “See you later.” He starts down the stairs and I think that maybe I will, one of these days—we could run into each other in a subway station, or I could walk past a coffee shop and see him taped to the window in a Carnegie Hall poster and know that his first master’s recital went just fine after all.
The neighborhood unfurls as evening falls, people coming and going and on their way, picking up dinner and sipping wine and looking for a friend and buying a bouquet and hailing a taxi and unlocking a bicycle and anything except standing still—looking around. So when I stop in front of the Second Chance House, someone trips over me and says, “Fucking tourist,” and I am confused by what I am seeing, which is this: a mix of people gathering on the sidewalk, and some of them are waving picket signs and a girl in a stroller has two. The poster in her hands says, Compassion Not Condos, and the poster tied to her stroller says, A Second Chance for Second Chance. Sisters in gray habits stand in a semicircle around one Sister who is gripping a yipping Yorkshire terrier. Their faces are all turned uptown, and I follow their gazes up the street to where a big man with flinty little eyes is barreling toward them with a crowbar in his han
ds and a crew of men with sledgehammers in his wake.
I stop and reach into my pocket for my notebook as the man slows to a halt and announces, “We gave you the terms, we’ve sent you numerous notices—you’re aware of our tight timeline for construction—” and someone says, “Fuck your timeline,” and the crowd cheers and the Sister pleads for silence.
The man raises his chin although he is already tall and bulky as a high-rise building. “If you don’t vacate within the hour, you’ll be trespassing on private property.”
“These people have nowhere to vacate to,” the Sister implores, bouncing the Yorkshire terrier in her arms. “We’d like to request an extension so we can transfer our families to other programs.”
The man wipes his shiny forehead. He has a hanging belly in a navy pinstripe suit and its sharp lines are somehow out of alignment with his limbs.
WOLF IN COSTLY SHEEPSKIN, I write.
The man says, “I’m sorry, Sister, I really am, but we have people waiting to move in, too. Families who need places to live, just like yours—” and at this the other Sisters darken and murmur and the rumble spreads across the protesters like a storm cloud. The man puffs his cheeks and exhales and the terrier growls at him and the man looks like he wants to growl back.
Someone stops next to me and takes a picture of the crew, and two people move under an awning and light cigarettes, shaking their heads, and they are minor hiccups in the unceasing movement of the street. People part around me, streaming around the big man and his crew, and some are looking at their watches, their papers, and others are looking at the store numbers, the curb. People glance at the sledgehammers; most everyone keeps going. A duffel bag swings and pushes me off the sidewalk and a car slams its brakes and horn and people cut in front of me and I am forced farther away, swept up by the current.
The Luster of Lost Things Page 4