When You Don't See Me

by Timothy James Beck

  In time, he became something of a babysitter to Emily, although she had a real nanny who came to the apartment every weekday. There was no lack of adults who could take care of her. Wanted to take care of her. But as her grandfather, Kruger had a stronger claim than most.

  Emily probably couldn’t remember a time when Kruger hadn’t been there. I understood the feeling. I’d gotten attached to him and our occasional backgammon games over the past couple years.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Are you getting some?”

  He took a chance and bore off his two men, returning his hands to his knees and sucking in his breath when I rolled my dice. Double sixes, and since I had a man out, and he had his six point blocked, he was safe. I rolled my eyes, and he looked pleased. Kruger took his backgammon seriously.

  “I suppose you think I’m too old for all that,” Kruger said. He grimaced as he worked out his possible moves and realized he’d have to leave a man open.

  “You’re the youngest sixty-five-year-old I know.” I couldn’t help but grin when my roll allowed me to bump his exposed man, buying me the time I needed to get back in the game.

  “Do animals still fool around after they stop making babies?” Kruger wondered aloud.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t some of them mate for life? Is mating just about sex? I should have paid more attention in biology.”

  He grunted when I blocked all the points on my home board; then he said, “You can learn just as much watching the Discovery channel.”

  “That’s not much of an endorsement of public education.”

  “The best education is life.”

  “Yeah, I used that line when I dropped out of Pratt. It didn’t go over well.”

  He shrugged, scowled at my continued luck with the dice, and said, “You’re old enough to make up your own mind about your education. My problem is, I can’t pick a girlfriend.”

  I won the game, and as we repositioned the checkers for the next one, I asked, “You can’t commit?”

  “I’ve got too many choices.”

  “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” I asked. “You’re like James Bond’s father. Who are all these women that are after you?”

  “There’s Miss Goldman.” His tone indicated that I should know who he was talking about, but I was drawing a blank. “At the dry cleaner’s.”

  “Uncle Blaine’s dry cleaner? The woman who does alterations?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never heard her say a word,” I admitted. “How did you get to know her?”

  “We’re both German,” Kruger said. “She suggested we do genealogy together. She’s sure we’ll find ancestors in common.”

  “I’ve never understood that,” I said. “Why does it matter? It’s just names on paper.”

  Kruger rolled the dice. I assumed his preoccupied frown came from trying to decide how to move, until he said, “Maybe Miss Goldman would rather research distant generations than think about this life.”

  “Maybe Miss Goldman hasn’t had much of a life to think about.”

  He looked at me over the top of his eyeglasses and said, “She’s a Holocaust survivor. She lost her parents and her brother in death camps.”

  My stomach churned, and I quickly asked, “Who are your other girlfriends?”

  “There’s Mrs. DeSalvo,” Kruger said. “She treats me to spicy cooking and invites me to Knights of Columbus senior dances. She loves to talk about her Aldo. They bought their little deli with a loan from their fathers, and it was the center of their lives. They could never afford good help, or wouldn’t trust anyone, so they opened the store every morning and closed it at night. Her children did their homework on barrels in the back. That store put five kids through college. They all make a good living, and they wanted their parents to retire to Florida. Aldo and Bella wouldn’t even consider it. Leave New York? Leave the store? That was crazy. Then Aldo died in his sleep one night, and Bella had no husband and soon, no store. But I’ve never heard her complain. She talks about Aldo, wipes her eyes, then dances with me.”

  “She sounds fun,” I said. “I think you should pick her.”

  “I haven’t told you about Mrs. Bostany,” Kruger said. “Her husband was a firefighter. He died on the job back in the eighties, so she’s been a widow nearly twenty years and has a half dozen grandchildren, but you’d never know it. She can tell a dirty joke, throw back a few shots of whiskey, and still be every inch the lady who knits scarves and hobnobs with mayors.”

  Kruger won the game with a flourish and smiled at me.

  “You’ve got your own League of Nations,” I said. “What country is Mrs. Bostany from?”

  “Brooklyn,” Kruger said. When I squinted at him, he said, “Her parents came here from Lebanon. That doesn’t matter to you, right, since they’d just be names on paper?”

  “We all came from somewhere else,” I said with a shrug. “I happen to think it’s the here and now that matters.”

  Kruger leaned against the back of his chair, lighting a Camel to let me know we were taking a break from backgammon. I could tell I was about to get a story, so I settled in to listen.

  “When I was a kid,” Kruger said, “many of the men in my family went away. World War Two. Some of them fought in the Pacific. Most of them were in Europe. But we were all German, so they were fighting people who’d been their neighbors a generation or two before.”

  I watched two Rollerbladers in the distance as Kruger talked. I hadn’t skated in years, and I’d never done it with the agility these two were showing. They mirrored each other’s movements, like a skater and his shadow. Like twins.

  “Our parents told us not to speak German outside our houses. When our mothers walked to the market, people who knew they had German names would cross the street to avoid them. My grandfather’s two dogs were poisoned because they were German shepherds. People threw red paint on my uncle’s bakery or painted swastikas on the brick walls, with slogans like ‘Nazi, go home.’”

  “That’s horrible,” I said. “Didn’t they know you were Jewish?”

  “It was a crazy time. We were being persecuted in Germany for being Jewish, and persecuted here for being German. My father was risking his life for both his countries.” Kruger shook his head. “When our fathers and uncles and their friends started coming home, they didn’t brag about what they’d done. They barely talked about the war at all. Unless they talked about friends they’d made in the ranks. Or places. Not battlefields, but little towns or farms. Castles or great cathedrals.”

  The Rollerbladers looked like birds: swooping, dipping, making wide, graceful arcs.

  “But the women—they had stories. When Gretchen was little, she’d sit on her grossmutter’s lap in the kitchen and listen. To what it was like when the men were away. To endure rationing of food and gas. To have a husband or son that never came home. To be treated like dirt because you, or your parents, or your grandparents, had come from Germany. I used to worry that was what turned her into such an angry adult.”

  “Angry?” I asked. That didn’t sound like the Gretchen I knew, who was always laughing or celebrating something.

  “She was so serious all the time. I expected her to turn into a boy-crazy teenager, but instead, she was always signing petitions or organizing something.” Kruger lit another Camel and grinned at whatever memories were playing through his head. “It seemed her mother and I were to blame for everything. Vietnam. Watergate. Race riots. Discrimination against women. She turned our dinner table into a battlefield. She and I were on opposite sides, with her mother in the middle trying to make peace between us. But even Miriam gave up when Gretchen told us she was a lesbian.”

  “Did you think she was telling you that just to get your attention?” I asked. “That’s what I got accused of.”

  “I thought it was a phase,” Kruger admitted. “By then, she was putting herself through college. Then she started working here in New York, making money hand over fist. She seem
ed nothing like that little girl who used to listen to the women’s stories in the kitchen. She stopped going to Pennsylvania, even on holidays. It was too much of a strain for all of us to be together.”

  “How did things get worked out?”

  “Miriam was diagnosed with cancer. I was almost afraid to tell Gretchen. I didn’t want her to break her mother’s heart again. What if she wouldn’t come home? What if she stayed mad at us?”

  I didn’t have to ask how Gretchen had reacted. I knew she’d never disappoint anyone who needed her.

  Kruger briefly talked about the progression of his wife’s disease, and how their daughter came home as often as she could. “Gretchen was standing next to me at her mother’s hospital bed when Miriam died. I wanted to comfort her. Instead, she hugged me and repeated a saying of my mother’s. ‘With faith, there is love. With love, there is peace. With peace, there is blessing.’ It was weeks later before I realized that Gretchen had said it in German. She hadn’t turned her back on her family after all.”

  “It’s not fair how much you’ve lost,” I said after a pause.

  “That’s not the point,” Kruger said, grinding out his Camel. “When I was first widowed, I thought I’d spend the rest of my life lonely. I’d have my daughter and later, my granddaughter, but romance was for young men.”

  “And now you’ve got too many girlfriends.”

  I watched as he repositioned the game pieces on the board for another match. We were quiet for a while, concentrating on our strategy.

  “I moved to New York, and life started over,” Kruger finally said. “I made a new family, but that doesn’t mean my other family was less important.”

  I glanced up as he rolled the dice. I understood the little smile that vanished almost before I saw it. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was winning our game. I’d been tricked. He wasn’t talking about himself after all.

  It was dusk by the time I closed the backgammon board while he threw away our coffee cups and his little pile of Camel butts. His hug was brief but heartfelt.

  “Same time in a couple of weeks?” he asked, taking the game from me.

  “If you don’t elope with Mrs. DeSalvo.”

  I stopped at Bethesda Terrace on my way out of the park. I stared at the fountain and thought about families. When Chuck and I had turned fifteen, my mother wanted to have a family portrait done. She made an appointment at a local studio. The plan was that we’d all dress up, get the photo taken, then have our birthday dinner at Fisher’s White House, a restaurant in Eau Claire. My mother wore a black dress and her pearls. Like my father, Tony and Chuck dressed in blazers, but instead of ties, they kept their collars open. They looked like the healthy young animals they were.

  When I came downstairs, I was wearing jeans with a thrift store black leather jacket over a black T-shirt. My father hit the roof.

  “Why do you always have to ruin everything? Let your mother have one goddamn picture of us looking like a normal family.”

  Before I could answer, Tony said, “He can’t, ’cause he’s not normal. He’s a freak.”

  When my father told me to change clothes, my mother said, “We’ll be late. In twenty years, when I look at the picture, I’d rather see him dressed this way than remember everybody fighting. Let’s just go.”

  It didn’t matter that I hadn’t done it to piss them off. I’d had a different opinion of what made a picture-perfect family. They wanted to look like something out of a catalog. I thought we were supposed to look like who we really were. Later, at the restaurant, when the waiters sang “Happy Birthday,” they put the cake in front of Chuck. The glow of the candles made him look like Mr. Golden Boy. No one in my family bothered to mention that it was my birthday, too. My leather jacket made me invisible.

  I walked out of the park onto Fifth Avenue, but instead of turning toward home, I went the other way. I had no particular destination in mind. I just didn’t feel like another unfinished story from Kendra or a confrontation with Morgan. Roberto was still at work. I hesitated when I got to Drayden’s, then kept going.

  I thought about the surprise birthday party Gretchen and Gwendy had thrown for Daniel in their Tribeca loft when Emily was nine months old. Gretchen loved to host a crowd. The reflection of the candle flames danced in her eyes when she brought in the cake, singing off-key until Uncle Blaine took over the tune. Josh snapped pictures, and Sheila handed out slices of cake after Daniel blew out the candles.

  Then Blaine sat with Emily on his lap, his arm draped across Daniel’s shoulders. We all listened to Gretchen’s stories of the days before Blaine had known Daniel. Now and then, she’d slap Gwendy’s greedy fingers away from the cake frosting with warnings about processed sugar. We stayed up late that night, long after Emily was put to bed, talking and laughing while Daniel and Gretchen reminisced. Gwendy shared stories about growing up with Daniel as her big brother. Everyone seemed lazily content to sit there while Daniel got his moment in the spotlight.

  Blaine finally insisted that it was time to go. He went to Emily’s room to take a last peek at her. Then he and Gretchen hung on each other while everyone else hugged Daniel good night and repeated their birthday wishes, put on jackets, and gathered up purses and cameras.

  That Saturday was the last time we’d all been together before. Before the Tuesday in September when everything changed.

  With faith, there is love. With love, there is peace. With peace, there is blessing.

  But there was no peace. Only questions that stuck in my throat like tears that wouldn’t come out.

  I was all the way to Washington Square Park before I realized what I was doing. I stopped, looked down the avenue at the empty sky, and said, “I don’t think so.”

  I walked east until I stepped inside Cutter’s. I didn’t see Cookie, so I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. No one asked for an ID. No one paid any attention to me. At least that was what I thought until Dennis Fagan slid onto the stool next to mine.

  “Been a long time,” he said, tipping his beer toward me.

  “Well, you know,” I said.

  He didn’t smile, but his eyes wrinkled a little. “Yeah.”

  He watched a baseball game on the bar’s TV. I thought about nothing in particular. Neither of us talked. I finished my beer and, not wanting to push my luck, waved the bartender away. Then I turned and stared at Dennis until his cornflower blue eyes met mine.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “We’re outta here.”

  There was no conversation while we walked. I didn’t look at the sky. I didn’t really even pay attention to where we were going. We ended up on a street near Wall Street, but I had no idea which one.

  Inside my head, I counted off red building, white building, brown building, red building, red building…Until Dennis stopped at a door next to a deli, opened it, and led me to the second floor, where he unlocked an apartment. Tiny kitchen behind a living room; bathroom and small bedroom to the left. I didn’t look at it with the eyes of a Wamsley & Wilkes employee. In fact, I didn’t see much at all. I took a swallow of the beer Dennis brought from the refrigerator. Then he stared at my face for a few seconds before gently pulling me to him.

  We made short work of undressing. His bed was a jumble of sheets, but they felt good and smelled of laundry detergent. Nothing perfumed, just clean. For a man with massive muscles, Dennis was a surprisingly tender lover. He was furry—manscaping was an idea that would never have occurred to him—warm, and strong. We both knew he was in charge. From the timing, the place, the circumstances, the provision of condoms and lube—it was his show, and that was how I wanted it.

  We lay side by side later, beers propped against our bellies. His open window faced an office building across the street. The building was dark at that hour on a Saturday night. The August air was hot and still, allowing street noise into the apartment. I liked it. It reminded me of Harlem and felt like home.

  “I used to have a better view,” Dennis said. “A fifth floor walk-up n
ear Battery Park. My bedroom window framed a clear picture of the twin towers.”

  I looked at the hard hat on a scarred desk across the room and said, “You worked on the site after—”

  “Yeah, but that’s over. It’s good to go back to building things.”

  “What are you working on now?”

  “A job at the Financial Center atrium.” He took a pull of his beer. “You’d think after months of cleanup, I’d want to get as far away as I could. But it’s been my place since I was a kid. My father and uncles helped put up three of those seven buildings. My brothers, cousins—we’re all in the trade. As long as there’s work, we’ll be there.”

  I nodded. We were quiet for a few minutes, until I said, “The night you got in that fight at Cutter’s because of me. I didn’t know you were gay.”

  Dennis laughed and said, “Gay? Gay is coffeehouses and sushi. Madison Avenue. Chelsea. Abercrombie & Fitch or whatever you boys decide is the next right thing. I fuck men. I’m not gay.”

  “But—”

  He gave me a look that shut me up and said, “There’s a difference. That’s all.”

  “Okay,” I said, realizing he didn’t mean he was one of those men who pretended to be straight and to lust after women. He was right. There was a difference between his world and the world of men like my uncle, who identified themselves with the word gay. “Why’d you take up for me that night?”

  “Too many questions,” Dennis said. He put down his beer, set mine on the floor next to his, and wrapped me up in his body. It wasn’t sexual, although I had a feeling it would be again. It was more brotherly. Not like my own brothers, but like Roberto.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll shut up.”

  “Did I say shut up? No questions, but talk if you want. I heard most of it from Blythe anyway.”

  “She told you about me?”

  “She told me about her,” he corrected. “You figured into her story. But it’s your story, if you want it to be.”