“Maybe you should think about it for a little longer?”
Of course, Nathalie was right. And so, her bewilderment and my own self-doubt combined, I agreed to sit on the idea. But I thought about it constantly—as we ate dinner that night, in my sleep, the entire weekend through, on my walk to work, when I should have been entering data into spreadsheets, all the fucking time. In fact, I even started cruising the Internet and found out which licenses a person needs to open a small business in Manhattan. I downloaded applications and jotted notes about required fees. I grabbed my checkbook and worked out numbers. I drew sketches of business-card logos and window displays and contemplated stupid shit like whether I’d use a cash box and calculator or a register. Night after night, I walked past the storefront on my way home from work, dreaming about all the cool things I wanted to sell. And, as if to keep me torn between hard reality and daydream fantasies, the red rental sign stayed in the window. The shop seemed to be waiting for me to come and take claim of it.
Two weeks from the day I first spotted it, Nat and I were eating dinner when she said, “I saw the rental sign is still in the shop window …”
That was all the encouragement I needed.
Even though it was after office hours on a Friday night, I called the phone number that still blazed brightly in the foreground of my mental Filofax. An old woman answered the phone this time. In the background, I heard what sounded like a football game playing full volume on the television.
“Hello, I’m calling about the property on 9th Street.”
“Hold on just a second, dear … Harold, phone!”
And then the old man said: “Harold speaking.”
The next morning, nine o’clock sharp, I met Harold in person. Luck shining down on me, he was a jovial guy with sparkling, kind eyes.
“Bet you didn’t know this used to be a hardware store, did you?”
And so began the narration of his life story:
Born and raised, he’d lived his whole life downtown. Right out of high school, he’d started working in a hardware shop—this shop, the shop I now wanted to rent. Back in 1949, he’d met his wife in this same shop. She’d come in looking for a rat trap. Little did she know she’d end up with the rat. He nudged me and laughed gently. They married. Started a family. He kept working hard. They saved any money they could. Eventually, the owner sold him the shop. “For practically nothing. He was a good man, that one.” Decades passed, and when it was time to retire, he and his wife decided to rent out the storefront. They moved to New Jersey. “So the grandkids would have a yard to play in,” he said.
He asked me what my plans for the storefront were. I told him. He asked if I had the paperwork in order. No, I confessed, I didn’t. “But my family had a little shop back in California. Running a business is in my blood,” I said, padding the truth. He smiled. He said he liked me, I seemed like a nice kid, I had gumption, just like him when he was young.
“My nephew Sammy, he works at the Department of Consumer Affairs. Over on Broadway. He’ll pull some strings for you.”
I was given the necessary details and instructed to meet with Sammy on Monday morning.
“First and last, and the place is yours. Call me.”
I practically ran home to tell Nathalie.
“No way … seriously?”
“I can’t even tell you how excited I am, Nat.”
“This is totally crazy,” she sort of laughed, but there was a warm glow to her and I could tell she was impressed.
That Sunday night I called in sick at the temp agency. Bright and early Monday morning, I walked over to meet Sammy. He was as nice as his uncle—exactly where do these people come from?—and like his uncle had promised, he helped me with all the necessary forms. As I sat at his desk with a small Styrofoam cup of coffee he’d insisted on getting for me, he made several calls and arranged to put a rush on all my paperwork.
“You’ll be up and running in four weeks, tops,” he said, smiling.
The holidays were little more than a week away. Harold and Sammy would be receiving gift baskets of the nicest dried fruits, chocolates, and peanut brittle that Russ and Daughters’ appetizing shop had to offer.
On the walk home from Broadway, I stopped at the bank and officially drained all my meager savings to obtain a cashier’s check in the amount Howard had specified. The next morning, he met me at the shop, and I signed a one-year lease.
“Now, you can’t sell anything until your license is in order, but you’ve got plenty to do in the meantime,” he said, and handed me keys. “Good luck.”
I called Nathalie, and she promised to meet me at the shop on her way home from work.
When she arrived, she said, “Oh my God, this place is such shit,” and laughed nervously.
It was true. I’d spent the entire day sweeping and mopping and wiping things down, but the storefront was in need of some serious love. Over the next several days, the white on the raised numbers of my credit card began to rub off for how often I used plastic to buy supplies. I had no fucking idea what I was doing really, but, a growing lump of debt all mine, I’d gathered some supplies and was getting down to work. As other people did whatever it is they do at Christmastime, I wore my shittiest jeans and hoody and shivered with the door propped open as I painted the shop.
By New Year’s Eve, the paint had dried and the space was immaculately clean, but still, other than permanent shelves and display counters, the place remained empty. Obviously, that was a problem. A big problem. I was sitting on the floor of the shop, head in hands, wondering what the fuck I’d gotten myself into, a pulsating knot in my chest feeling like it just might expand and become a full-fledged freak-out—when there was a tap on the glass of the shop door: Nathalie, with an immense cheapie bottle of champagne in tow.
“To all good things,” she cheered, then popped the cork.
Champagne splashed on the floor. I cleaned up the spill with paper towels as Nathalie and I took turns drinking from the bottle.
Luckily, my ability to spot vintage kitsch gold amid piles of crap was Superman keen. To get my shop stocked, I made expert use of the thrifting skills I’d refined from adolescence onward. Each day for two weeks I rented a car and tore through every estate sale in the tri-state area. At night I returned to the shop to drop off carefully picked vintage clothes, jewelry, record albums, and other trinkets and enticing oddities.
Sammy called. He had my license ready for pick-up.
The shop was stocked.
All that was left to do was hang a shingle and pass out flyers.
“Nat, which do you like more, Frank’s Finds or Curro’s Curios?”
“What’s a Curro?”
“Nickname for Francisco.”
“How do you get Curro from Francisco?”
“Don’t know. How about Dick from Richard?”
“Curro’s Curios,” she said. “Definitely, Curro’s Curios.”
And so it was decided.
Nat helped me Xerox flyers announcing the shop’s grand opening—Saturday, January 18, 2003—and then she walked around the neighborhood, looking fabulous and charming people into promising they’d come check out the shop. The night before opening day, she even made batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies and bought tons of brightly colored napkins and plastic cups along with huge cartons of punch and lemonade from the grocery store. She was having a blast preparing to play hostess.
Opening day finally arrived. People trickled in, and slowly, too slowly really to be comforting, I began to sell some stuff. Nat, continuing in her role as the sensible one for the first time in our relationship, kept her temp gigs and offered to try to cover all our basic home expenses until the shop took off. She even threw down most of the second month’s rent and utilities and offered to help out on weekends. For a while at least, I had hope.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
13 February 2003.
Given that it was smack in the middle of a brutally freezing winter and Nathalie
had stayed home with the flu, I was more than a little surprised to come home and find her stark naked but for a rhinestone barrette pulling her bangs off her freshly cleaned face, broom and dustpan at her side. It seemed she’d been “cleaning” the closet—really just rifling through piles of clothes, dusty stacks of record albums and magazines, and, it appeared, my father’s briefcase.
“Nat?”
“Hi, love,” she said, and gave me a quick kiss.
“Shouldn’t you be resting?”
“I did all day. I feel better,” she said, sweetly and almost convincingly. And then: “By the way, you left your wallet this morning.” She pointed to the nightstand.
“Thanks.”
Nathalie responded with distracted nod and a pinched smile.
I found myself wishing she could afford a polite, How was the shop today? With meager sales those first few weeks the store was open, she probably figured it better not to ask. But why the strange vibe? She was clearly all worked up over something. Exhausted from yet another stressful day, I didn’t have the energy it would require to get to the source of her bizarreness. Hoping to avoid the topic entirely, I took off my hat, scarf, coat, and shoes, lay down on the bed, and tried to distract myself with opening mail. At one point, Nathalie disappeared into the bathroom—and reappeared wearing something that momentarily stunned me.
My father’s blind man dark glasses.
The stupid Dean & DeLuca catalog I’d been studying— glossy pages still open to the smoked salmon items whose descriptions I could recite by heart for how they suddenly stuck in my brain—slid from my hands and landed on the floor with a slick pathetic thump.
“Mind if I wear these?” Nathalie asked.
“You already are,” I said, deeply uncomfortable but totally at a loss to articulate that discomfort, even to myself.
“So, it’s okay?” she asked.
“They’re for blind people.”
My words were coming out too simple and slow. I sounded dumb. I wasn’t angry exactly, but I felt violated on a cellular level somehow.
“Can I wear them?”
“Why do you want to?”
“Can I?”
“I guess.”
“Good.”
I was trying to figure out a way to tell her to please take off the glasses without seeming too sensitive, when, barely a beat later, out of nowhere, she said: “Frank, let’s have a baby.”
Mind you, she stood there wearing absolutely nothing other than a barrette and my father’s glasses.
“Very funny, Nat.”
She took off the glasses, left them on the kitchen counter, crossed the room, and lay on the bed next to me.
“Come on,” she asked, “don’t you want a baby?”
Sweet mercy—had Nat’s fever finally gotten the best of her? No, she was serious. My brain struggled to catch up. If there was anyone in the world I would want a baby with, it would be Nathalie, but …
“It’s not just if I want or don’t want a baby, Nat.”
I imagined checkbooks, science labs, fertility doctors, not to mention my father’s blind eyes trailing along for the ride. Most importantly, I wasn’t even sure I wanted kids.
“We’d figure everything out,” Nathalie said cheerily.
Did she really want me to delineate the obvious aloud? First of all, we didn’t have the money necessary to raise a kid responsibly. And even if we did, Nathalie knew that having a baby wouldn’t be just prenatal vitamins from the corner pharmacy and don’t use a condom for a few months. She knew it wasn’t as simple as my saying, Sure, sweetums, let’s do it, we’ve got nothing to worry about and we’ll have a perfect baby so long as you don’t chug Wild Turkey or hit the Parliaments while you’re pregnant. She knew this.
But still she said, “You don’t think we’re a good family?”
Whatever came out of my mouth next needed to be damned articulate. I didn’t respond.
“Frank,” she said, “come on … tell me.”
And so I said the only honest and kind thing I could at that moment: “I love you, Nat.”
“Never mind,” she said and play-slapped me. “I was just kidding.” Her laughter was too loud, forced.
Sick twist was that if I had agreed with her and said, Yes, heck, why not, let’s have a baby, she might have dropped the subject, never to pick it up again. But I couldn’t just blurt out that I wanted a baby if I wasn’t totally sure whether I did or didn’t. That’d be plain wrong.
“We’re going to the protest on Saturday, right?” Nathalie asked.
“I figured.”
This new thread wasn’t exactly a change in conversation. In our neighborhood, the upcoming protest at the U.N. had been on the tips of everyone’s tongues for weeks. You couldn’t walk through the park without getting at least four flyers about different groups organizing volunteers. NPR was constantly making announcements about whether or not the federal government was going to let the protest happen. Over two hundred thousand people were expected to show up at the U.N. to demonstrate against sending troops to Iraq. The topic was omnipresent; it pervaded even conversations that seemed to have no relation to it at all.
“The Socialist Party is meeting in front of the library on 42nd and Fifth at ten,” Nat said.
Since when were we Socialists? I mean, I know marching with the proto-Commies sounded sexy, but wouldn’t it have been more honest to march with Democrats or the Green Party or even just the Lower East Side contingent? Whatever. I figured we could be fist-pumping Socialists for a day. Why not?
“Sounds good.”
“I have a surprise,” Nathalie said excitedly, stood up, and walked to the closet.
I sat on the bed, tempted to curl up and sleep. If it weren’t for the simple fact that being near Nathalie’s bursts of energy felt like shots of adrenaline, I would have been the world’s most exhausted man. A gust of cold air blew in from the window and chilled me. I thought: This is what it felt like—the air turning cold so quick without her by my side to warm me. This is exactly what it felt like when she bailed.
I watched as Nathalie took something from the closet and hid said wonder behind her naked back. Then, straddling me, her body so close I could smell the salty clean of her skin, she presented a gift to me.
“Ta-da,” she said, and leaned forward to loop the softest of handmade angora scarves around my neck. The smoothness of her skin rubbed against my jaw. I wanted the scarf to stretch for miles and miles so she’d never stop wrapping it around me.
“Did you make this?” I asked, both touched and confused.
“Yeah, today.”
“Since when do you knit?”
“I’ve always known how. I just had time today. So, what do you think?” she asked, and leaned back to survey her work.
I thought it was both thrilling and terrifying that even after seven-years-plus Nathalie could still so completely take me by surprise, that’s what I thought.
“Beautiful, absolutely beautiful,” I said.
And I meant it. Beautiful. Her skin flushed rosy, her limbs relaxed, her very being so present and still and close to me. That particular moment was so damned beautiful.
“It’s too long. I made it too long,” she said, and began unwinding the scarf from my neck.
“No, I love it,” I said, holding the scarf and her hands in my own. “Please, it’s perfect.”
“It’s not right,” she said, and took back the treasure she’d made for me.
After you’ve dressed, remove at least one accessory or you’re no better than common trash.
This was among the many commandments my Pilgrim mother taught me as a child. And that’s how I knew for certain my mother’s lip would have curled to watch Nathalie get dressed.
Soggy tissue in hand to catch frequent sneezes, after taking back my scarf and shoving it in a storage box of her things in the closet, Nathalie had reassembled the remainder of the closet to its pre-naked-girl-“cleaning” order. And now, slowly, deliberately
, and slightly wobbly, she donned layer upon layer of silk organza, darned cashmere, and pizzazz. Busy clusters of rhinestones sparkled on her perfect little ears. Brick red lipstick transformed her face from fresh-scrubbed to fuckably dangerous. Powder turned her sniffle-red nose porcelain pale. Her hair was tucked into a tangled French twist. She grabbed a sequined gold clutch to go, but not before adding the one accessory I wished she’d leave behind. To my annoyance, once again, she wore my father’s glasses.
“Take me somewhere divine, won’t you, darling?” she said in her best patrician accent.
“You should be in bed.”
“Frank, come on, I’m stir-crazy. Please, let’s go out,” she said, and then let out an ear-piercing sneeze.
“Nat, you really should rest.”
I may have been stubborn, but I wasn’t dense. I knew what was going on. I might deny her the instant baby she was so convinced she wanted, but there was no denying how tantalizing she was even when in the throes of a flu. She was so foxy sweet that even just looking at her was enough to give a person cavities. She wanted to be arm candy that night. She wanted reassurance that all she had to do was bat her eyelashes to get me wrapped around her little finger. She knew I’d give in. To pretty much anything she wanted of me.
So, fine, if we were going on a proper date—which, clearly she wanted to—at least I could play my role well and present her with a token of my affection. I had no bouquet to offer, but I knew if Nathalie had been able to see herself in the mirror through those opaque blind man glasses, she would have wanted, in total opposition to my mother’s rules, even more bling to set off her ensemble. In search of the one object I knew would be perfection, I went to the closet and took down the briefcase Nathalie seemed to have gone through too quickly earlier that night. Tucked in the interior leather pouch, I found her treat.
“Here.” I placed the gift in her hand.
“What’s this?”
“Walking stick. Goes with the glasses.”
“Delightful,” she said and smiled.
As Nathalie fumbled with the red-tipped walking stick and snapped it open to full extension, I noticed how damn sexual the thing was when in her hands. Blushing, I helped with her coat. In the kitchen, I placed a single orange in a paper bag to bring with us. I knew exactly where to take her.
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