New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  As dawn began to slide in between the buildings, the thin, drawn man found a small ivory box.

  “Myrna Lavaliere, who and where are you now?” he asked and opened the lid. It was full of business cards bearing the usual double Myrna’s Place-and-coronet logo. Below that was an address on the Upper East Side, a Butterfield 8 telephone number and the motto, “Halfway between Park Avenue and Heaven.”

  “More like far from Heaven and down the street from Hell,” the man said. “You kids have any idea what you have here?”

  Larry and Lilia shrugged. Other customers wanted their attention.

  “Wickedness always sells,” the man told them. “And after the war in the late 1940s, rumor had it this place was wicked. Myrna’s was a townhouse where you went in human and came out quite otherwise.”

  A tall woman with a black lace kerchief tied around her long neck and wearing sunglasses in the dawn light had stopped examining a pair of Myrna’s Place candlesticks and paused to listen.

  She gave a short, contemptuous laugh and said in an unplaceable accent, “Oh please, spare these not-terribly-innocent children all the sour grape stories spread by all the ones who couldn’t get inside the front door of Myrna’s. What happened there happened before and will happen again. If you know anything about these phenomena at all you know that.”

  She faced him and raised the glasses off her eyes for a moment. Neither Larry nor Lilia could see her face. But apparently her stare was enough to cause the man to first back away then scuttle off.

  “Fifty gets you the candlesticks,” Larry told her. They were getting bold.

  “I just wanted to make sure these weren’t as good as the pair I have. But I will let others know about you. I think the time is right.”

  That morning the wizened pack rats and sleek interior decorators were all at the booth hissing at each other as they pawed through the items. Lilia and Larry tried to spot people they thought might actually have gone to Myrna’s.

  As morning sunlight began to hit the Sixth Avenue Market, club kids coming from Danceteria in fifties drag found Larry and Lilia’s stall. Dolled up boys in pompadours, girls in satin evening gowns who looked like inner tension was all that held them together, stopped on their way downtown. They seemed fascinated, whispered and giggled, but didn’t buy much: a handkerchief, a cigarette holder.

  But the stock of Myrna’s Place items was almost cleaned out when a lone deathpunk girl, her eye shadow and black hair with green highlights looking sad in the growing light, appeared. She pawed through the remaining items, dug in her pockets and gave Larry three dollars and seventeen cents, all that she had with her, for a stained coaster.

  Around then Lilia realized that if she held any of the items at a certain angle, the Myrna’s Place design looked like an upper and lower lip and the coronet was a sharp, gold tooth. Once she saw that and pointed it out to Larry they couldn’t see them any other way.

  They weren’t naive. In the demimonde they inhabited gossip lately concerned ones called the Nightwalkers. That morning they began wondering about Myrna’s Place.

  2.

  Thirty years later, on the morning after the dinner party, Larry called Lilia on her cell phone several times.

  But she was on an errand that took her uptown and onto the tram to Roosevelt Island. Though this situation hadn’t occurred recently, Lilia remembered how to play Larry when she had something that he wanted.

  Roosevelt Island lies in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. On that small spot in the midst of a great city is a little river town of apartment houses. Along the main street the buildings project out over the sidewalks providing a covered way.

  In one period of Lilia’s life the sun was unbearable and had to be avoided. Now walking under cover she was glad the habit had remained and helped her avoid skin cancer.

  Lilia remembered the others who took the cure when she and Larry did: the old man with wild white hair and gleaming eyes who required three times as much Ichordone as anyone else in the program and wore a muzzle like a dog because he tried to bite, the mousy woman who had been turned into a vampire when she saw Bela Lugosi as Dracula on TV twenty years before.

  Generations ago Roosevelt Island was called Welfare Island. It was where hospitals for contagious diseases were located. Their ruins still dot the place. Hospitals are still located there, most of them quite ordinary.

  But in one there is a ward for patients with polymorphous light eruption (allergy to the sun) and hemophagia (strange reactions to blood) and several other exotic diseases. Behind that hospital are cottages.

  In one of those sat the person Lilia had come to see. She was in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets and looking out the window at the sunlight and water. The woman had seemed ancient to Lilia that morning years before at the Flea Market when she examined the candlesticks and told the man to spare her his sour grapes stories. Now Myrna Lavaliere was a mummy: nothing more than skin and bones and a voice.

  “When one is old the smell of rot is omnipresent. Men are the worst but none are immune. Each time you come here you are awestruck by my age and corruption. I don’t blame you. I am well over a hundred. My addiction, first to blood and then to Ichordone, prolonged my life, but look at the result.

  “Up in the hospital they’d have me in restraints with my head immobilized because they are afraid I’d bite them.” She laughed noiselessly and showed Lilia her toothless gums.

  “All I want,” she said, “is to die in this room with a bit of privacy, not up in that cadaver warehouse.” She indicated the main hospital building. “Like everything else in this country, that requires money.”

  In earlier meetings she had told Lilia how much longer she had to live, how much that would cost, and how many treasures from Myrna’s Place and other clubs she had stashed in storage lockers.

  Lilia had told her of a plan she had. Today she told her what was required to implement it. “I need more bait for the market,” she said.

  Their eyes met and they understood one another. A nurse’s aide was called and she brought Lilia a package of collectibles like the one she’d been given the week before.

  3.

  Lilia waited until she was back at her shop before answering one of Larry’s calls.

  Immediately he asked, “Where did you find it?” She heard voices echoing behind him in Stepelli, his large gallery space in West Chelsea.

  She told him a tale of the Garage, that last sad remnant of the once sprawling Sixth Avenue Flea Markets, and the napkin she found the Sunday before when she ducked in there to get out of the rain.

  “Was there anything else from Myrna’s Place?” he asked.

  “That’s all that was left,” she said. “But the dealer said there was quite a flurry when she opened. Young people apparently.”

  “Where did she get it? Does she have any more?”

  “Yes,” Lilia told him and gave no hint of her amusement. “She got it from a woman who got it from and a man who may have more. I have a lead on her source.”

  None of this was entirely true, but in his eagerness that escaped him.

  It was Friday afternoon. They made plans to visit the Garage early Sunday morning.

  Her shop, Reliquary: once so very trendy and notorious, later a charmingly creepy holdover, a bit of stylish nostalgia, now hung by a thread. The landlord, unable to find another tenant, had let Lilia slide on the rent from month to month. His patience was running out.

  That afternoon as Lilia went on various errands, she remembered the Saturday night and Sunday morning after Larry and her first triumph.

  That second week they brought all their good Myrna’s Place stuff: the flasks, the scarves, the elephant foot umbrella stand. They were surrounded from the moment they set foot in the flea market. All the flashlights were around them. Customers from the previous week were back and others as well.

  The dealers who looted a house each week had a daycare center’s worth of children’s chairs, toys. They paused to w
atch the commotion across the aisle.

  Larry and Lilia discovered that the first deathpunk girl had been a harbinger. Out of the night, smelling of cigarettes and amyl nitrate, came club boys and girls in black from head to pointed-toe shoes. There were the retro and extreme retro kids, dressed as twenties flappers, Edwardian roués, and whores. One young man with a cravat and a face painted almost white carried a small, antique medical bag, and was called Doctor Jekyll.

  They bought small souvenirs—a teacup or a doily. When asked what was so fascinating about Myrna’s Place they shrugged and said this was Nightwalker stuff, the new thing.

  Then, in the pre dawn, the club kids, awe-struck, watched as half a dozen figures flitted toward them like bats, like shadows. Lilia heard the flea across the way call out to someone, “Dracula and company just showed up!”

  The newcomers all seemed tall, elongated. They wavered in the first light. Many of them actually wore capes. They were thin and their smiles were a brief flash of teeth.

  As they moved through the kids around Larry and Lilia’s tables, one of them reached over and, almost too fast to see, pulled down the collar of a girl’s jacket, and first kissed then nipped her neck. The club girl shivered with ecstasy.

  Lilia was uneasy, but Larry was star struck. Here was true glamour, the very heart of the most exclusive club back rooms. The sky was getting light. The newcomers surveyed the booth, nodded, put on sunglasses, exchanged glances and smiled. These people were impressed with him.

  Raised cloaks hid what happened from the casual customers. In an eye-flash Larry’s leather jacket and shirt were pulled off his shoulders. The smiles and fine sharp teeth looked like the ones on the Myrna’s Place logo.

  Larry’s eyes went wide. A tiny trickle of blood ran down his chest. He stared after them as they left the market and didn’t even notice Lilia pulling his clothes back in place.

  Other customers appeared. Larry and Lilia were Flea celebrities and had a good day—even the dollhouse sold.

  Larry was bedazzled. Lilia knew that he always gravitated to the key clique and always managed to get himself accepted. Now he’d found a group so special it was legend and they loved him.

  That week Larry was distant and distracted. He got on her nerves. She got on his. The next Sunday morning they brought to market all the remaining Myrna’s Place material and everything else they had for sale.

  In the predawn the flashlights found them and so did the woman with the neck scarf and sunglasses. The club kids stared at her reverently. She glanced at Larry and almost smiled. She gave Lilia a slip of paper with some names.

  “In one’s old age, collections, however beloved become a burden. These are ones who are ready to give up theirs.”

  As she turned to go, the young Nightwalkers appeared. They bowed their heads and parted for her.

  “Myrna,” Lilia heard them murmur, “Myrna Lavaliere.” The woman nodded and disappeared into the last of the night.

  When the Nightwalkers exposed Larry’s neck, Lilia told them not to because it had made him stupid. But he pointed at her and capes were raised, Lilia’s arms were pinned, her blouse opened. Before she could even cry out, she felt teeth and a nick on the side of her neck.

  Lilia turned to see who had done that but the effort made her head spin. Lilia knew a few things about drugs. None felt like this: it was like acid cut with heroin. She and Larry were in trances for the rest of that day and most of the next.

  When they recovered, they took the list of names and telephone numbers the one the Nightwalkers called Myrna had given them. The people on the list were old and fragile, looking like they might break. But their eyes were sharp and sometimes their teeth. They all had memorabilia they were ready to get rid of. One or two liked to bite but they were mostly harmless.

  4.

  Late on a summer night thirty years later, Lilia met Larry in front of Reliquary on West Broadway at the trashy end of Soho. Tense, knowing things had to go just right; she noticed he wore the napkin with the Maud’s Place logo displayed like a handkerchief in his jacket pocket. She did wonder where he had told Boyd he was going.

  Cabs cruised and groups of young people searched for afterhours clubs. On weekends near the solstice, Saturday darkness comes later and Sunday morning is very early. There’s almost no place left for the night.

  Larry looked at the sign, the darkened windows, and shabby aura of the store. “Some amazing times here,” he remarked and shook his head.

  Once it had been different: Cool Reliquary! the ads in the Village Voice had said. Not Your Mommy’s Kind of Boutique—Not Your Daddy’s Either had been the title of the article in New York Magazine just after the shop opened in the early eighties.

  Suitable designer styles were offered: capes in a variety of lengths, parasols to keep the sun out of the eyes, shirts and blouses that displayed best half open and exposing the throat and neck.

  Then there was the tchotchkes, relics from what turned out to have been an endless succession of mysterious clubs and salons. Fra Diablo just off Union Square had attracted rumor and curiosity in the 1870s, the Bat Bar flourished just after the turn of the century. Club Indigo in Harlem in the late twenties had introduced white patrons to an impeccable African American staff and entertainment that could only be talked about in whispers.

  “All those venues and every one of them produced artifacts,” Larry said. “Certain individuals liked to have stuff like that around. Other people in the know would be aware of their interests without a word being spoken.”

  The two talked over old times as they walked toward Sixth Avenue while looking for a cab. They remembered the time that Nightwalkers first showed up at the Mudd Club, the way columnists in the Village Voice hinted at a craze that was not quite drugs or sex. The New Yorker had said, “Some call it a very old European tradition.”

  Everyone wanted artifacts, to take back to Westchester, to Chicago, to Paris, to Rome, a sign that they’d had at least a brush with the tingly and strange. Reliquary was where they got them.

  “Daylight was something to be endured,” Larry said. “We lived at night.”

  Lilia remembered those times like she’d seen them through the wrong end of binoculars. But she wasn’t going to contradict him or mention the crash that followed the boom.

  For her, it began when her dentist noticed the way her teeth had grown and ordered her out of his office. Then, on one of Lilia’s rare visits to the Philadelphia suburbs, her mother mentioned the pallor. “Are those hickeys?” she had asked, catching sight of the bite marks on Lilia’s neck.

  She remembered the day the newspaper and magazine articles suddenly turned sour. BLOOD CRAZED! the tabloids screamed. CONTAGIOUS DISEASE DISGUISED AS HIP CULT the magazines cried.

  Rich kids’ families pulled them into elite and expensive therapy. Everyone else ended up in city hospitals and day clinics. Ichordone, horrible and soul deadening, was the methadone of vampirism. She wondered if Larry had managed to forget about that, guessed he had, and saw no reason to remind him.

  At Sixth Avenue they found a cab and rode uptown through the Village and the old Ladies Mile. Groups hung about the corners, stood in front of the desecrated church that had been a nightclub. For a moment, on a side street, Lilia thought she saw a figure in a cape. She felt Larry tense and knew he’d seen it too.

  “It’s always been cycles, hasn’t it?” he murmured. She said nothing. “Every twenty-five, thirty years: one is overdue,” he said, and she nodded.

  The cab turned on Twenty-Fifth Street and stopped at the Garage. This last stronghold of the Flea Market was set in the middle of the block and went right through to Twenty-Fourth. The official opening was eight a.m. but dealers were already getting read. Their vans rolled up and down the garage ramps and visitors were slipping in along with them.

  A thin young woman and buff boy in black went down the ramp to the lower level. Lilia let Larry take the lead and follow them down. She wondered if all this was going to work. />
  The place had none of the mystery of the predawn flea market. It smelled of exhaust and bad coffee and was lighted so there was no need for flashlights. Older buyers watched dealers unpack their stock.

  The couple in black drifted towards the back of the selling floor and a little knot of young people just out of the bars and clubs in a far corner.

  Larry headed in that direction without looking to see if Lilia was with him. She was a step or two behind, following him back into a world they’d once known.

  She knew what he was going to find: place cards with celebrity names: Cole Porter, Winston Guest, and Dorothy Parker from Club Indigo. Delicate fans decorated with cats baring their teeth from the Golden Palace, which had flourished down in Chinatown once upon a time. And, of course, salted into the mix were a few items from Myrna’s Place. This was the contents of the parcel Lilia had been given on Roosevelt Island a couple of days before.

  She watched the way Larry took in not only the items for sale but also the ones who had come to look at them. A few more kids stopped by. This was a gathering spot like their booth had been thirty years before.

  They looked at Larry and his napkin with its crest of lips and teeth displayed. He asked the dealer where she had gotten the stuff and if she had any more.

  The dealer was Eastern European and had trouble with English on certain occasions. She said a woman had sold them and hadn’t left a name. No she didn’t have any more. She was good at this and didn’t once glance Lilia’s way.

  The onlookers stirred. Lilia turned and saw figures in sunglasses moving in the shadows cast by pillars and vans. Nightwalkers had arrived. A new, less formal generation in shorts and flip-flops, though Lilia noticed that several still wore capes.

  Other dealers and their customers paused and shook their heads. Lilia’s spine crawled. She wondered if all this was worth it. Then she saw something that again confirmed fate was with her.