Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

by Aoibheann Sweeney

  He saw me demur. “But not as hot as you!” he murmured, as if to give me what I asked for.

  I looked away, confused.

  “Whoooeee!” he crowed as he rode away.

  Nate looked up vaguely to see where the noise was coming from, but the man had already taken off, pedaling hard to make the next light. “You knew Dad had to be sailing in June,” Nate said to his sister. “I thought Geoffrey was the one who couldn’t do July or August.”

  “It’s not Geoffrey’s fault.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” Nate glanced at the unchanged light. “You never even asked Dad if he could do it that last weekend. I don’t know what Geoffrey had scheduled but he probably could have changed it. You have to stand up for yourself. It’s like with the dress. You wouldn’t have to worry about Mom’s dress if you just told her you didn’t want to look exactly like her.”

  “I’m not worried about Mom’s dress,” Liz said. “It fits me perfectly.”

  A wave of people started across as the light changed, and I waded miserably into them. Nate’s sister would never have worn a dress like mine; I should have dressed like her, I thought. I looked like an idiot. Why else had that man whistled at me?

  Falafels, it turned out, were sold on the street. We got in a line on the sidewalk behind a cart that was sizzling and smoking with hot food. I stared at Liz’s toenails, which were painted blue. Nate smiled at me encouragingly. I thought of the coffee cart and the strange sweet coffee. Another woman wearing a suit got in line behind us; she shifted her skirt under her buttoned jacket and sighed. There were two more people in front of us and one of them was reading a magazine without any pictures, held up close to his face. The man inside the cart was concentrating; he lifted a metal basket out of hot oil and dumped out the falafel like crabs from a trap.

  “So how long are you here for?” Liz asked, digging again in her purse. She always seemed to be looking for things.

  I shrugged. “A few weeks,” I said, not sure whether she was listening.

  “At least that means you’re not going to be moving in with those two queens,” she said, looking at Nate.

  “It’s not like I was really going to do that,” Nate replied. “Anyway, it’s not like they’re contagious.”

  We were at the head of the line, and Liz gave the man inside the cart an imperious smile and ordered her sandwich without hot sauce. “You don’t want hot sauce,” she said, touching my arm.

  If anyone was a queen, I thought to myself, it was Nate’s sister. It was a better name than faggot though, which was what we called them in Yvesport. I always thought it sounded like a bug. “Queen” was kind of right, for Robert anyway—flighty, regal, dramatic—and for Walter too, in a more matronly way. Two queens.

  “Hot sauce?” said the man behind the cart, dousing my sandwich with red juice.

  “Let’s sit in the sun,” said Liz, signaling to Nate.

  When we’d gotten our sandwiches he led the way toward some park benches, stirring up a group of pigeons on the way. They settled right down again, and came bobbing back toward the woman beside us, who had obviously fed them something from her sandwich. Mr. Blackwell would have waved them away, I thought, though it wouldn’t have done much good—they were all over the park we were in, and with people on nearly every bench they had too good a chance for food.

  “I’m thinking about getting Mom and Dad to help me buy an apartment, anyway,” Nate said casually, as if he hadn’t liked the way the last conversation finished.

  “So you can pay what’s left of the mortgage with your graduate student fellowship and your after-school gig?”

  “At least they don’t have to pay for my wedding.”

  I was sitting between them, juggling my messy sandwich, which was burning the sides of my mouth.

  “It’s not my fault that’s the tradition,” Liz shot back at him. She looked at me. “If you ever get married, Miranda, you should elope.” I nodded, my mouth full. “How’s your sandwich?” she asked.

  “Delicious,” I said.

  “You should eat it with the tinfoil on.” She held up her sandwich to show how she had folded the foil back. The bottom of mine had leaked all over the lap of my dress. I stood up and batted uselessly at the dark spots of oil, making little pieces of lettuce jump up and down on my skirt to create more spots.

  “I always do that,” said Nate, giving me a clean napkin. He had already demolished his own sandwich and was using his other napkin to wipe a little bit of hot sauce at the corner of his mouth. He balled up his paper bag and tinfoil and aimed it at a nearby trash can. It landed deep inside and his sister watched with satisfaction. They had the same nose—pert on her, well-defined on him. They had, in fact, girlish and boyish versions of everything: Her fine, graceful shoulders were square and strong on Nate; her narrow waist translated to his long torso; her blue eyes into his handsome green. No doubt, I thought, standing there in my stained skirt, they were perfect children, like Julie and her brother in their Christmas cards, always dressed in the right clothes.

  “Fried food’s probably good for you,” she said to him as she got up, walking over to deposit her trash more delicately. “Slows your big brain down.”

  Nate stretched his long body, pretending not to hear her. “I was thinking I could show Miranda your gallery before we go back to the institute,” he said.

  I could feel the stains on my skirt deepen, but Liz looked pleased, and soon we were headed back toward the West Side. She had been working at the gallery for a year, she explained on the way over, but already she hated it. Her boss was a prima donna, she said, and so were all the artists. When we arrived she rang the doorbell and we could see a girl with a short ponytail, wearing a shirt just like Liz’s, coming across an empty wood floor to answer the door. I glanced at her nose, thinking maybe they were all related, but it was freckled and sort of broad.

  “The tent people called,” she said to Nate’s sister, holding the door open for us.

  “I told you,” Liz rolled her eyes. “Did they say they could get the white one?”

  “They said to call them back.”

  “Like they ever answer the phone.”

  “They sounded nice,” the girl said, to be helpful. She, too, was pretty in a polished, shining way, her skin smooth as wax.

  The gallery had offices on one side and open space on the other, with glass windows down to the floor that faced the street. There must have been no more than ten paintings on the walls. They were all black and white, shapes made of thickly painted lines.

  “Those are Franz Kline,” Liz said. “We’re about to take this show down.”

  “Cool,” Nate said, walking over to one of the canvases.

  I looked at the nearest one: a picture of a structure, like a bridge, the white around it like melting snow. Franz Kline was the artist’s name, I realized, peering at a small plaque on the wall: “Franz Kline, oil on canvas, 1953.”

  Up close the black streaks looked huge and flat, but when I looked around the room they jumped out at me like angry letters. Who would think of these things? I felt very small, standing in front of each one. They were giant and bold, and meant nothing but themselves. Or they meant everything, but nothing specific. Had they been done quickly? Each one took up its own space, balanced. Mr. Blackwell would have waved them away. They were only black lines. For a minute I wanted to scatter them like pigeons.

  Nate’s sister was talking about the wedding again. I heard Nate walk over to chime in. The paintings stared at me. I stood there in my stained blue dress, looking back, hopelessly innocent. Did everybody already know this? That you could make something like this? I looked back at Nate and his sister, talking by the door. Maybe they’d all seen things like this before.

  They looked at me as I approached. “What do you think?” said Nate’s sister, coy.

  “They’re wonderful,” I said, unable to stop myself.

  She smiled. “They’ve been really popular,” she said.
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  Popular! I looked back at them, amazed. Maybe everybody knew these things. Maybe this is what a city is like. The phone rang and she gave Nate another kiss before she rushed off to get it.

  “God—sorry,” Nate said, holding the door open for me as we left. “It’s hard to get her to talk about anything else, you know? She’s been freaked out about the wedding for like a month. They’ve invited four hundred people.”

  “Gosh,” I said, still thinking about the paintings. People smiled when they passed us, stepping slightly to the side, making more room as if we were a couple. Nate paused for a moment to let a fragile old woman wobble by with her tiny dog on a leash.

  “It’s mostly for my parents,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “The wedding,” he said, looking at me curiously.

  “Oh,” I said, wondering suddenly if he and Liz had ever disappointed their parents. It seemed impossible. “Were you really thinking of renting that room?” I asked as we neared the institute.

  “Not really. I think it would be a little weird, living there and also working there, even if it’s only a few days a week. But it’s a great deal.”

  I nodded, relieved.

  “So how long was your father at the institute?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I think he helped Arthur Mitchell start it, or start the library anyway.”

  “Sounds like Arthur was a real character,” Nate said. “Not that there’s any shortage of eccentrics there now.”

  Two queens, I thought again. Did they think I didn’t know?

  “So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  I looked around, startled to realize we were standing on the corner of the institute’s block. “Oh—I guess so,” I said.

  He gave me another little bow. “Thanks for coming to lunch,” he said, before he turned to go.

  14

  I didn’t go back to the coffee cart right away. For the first week or so I walked around the West Village watching what other people did. I found the café that I figured Robert liked to go to, a glassy affair where women perched on stools and read magazines and the boy behind the counter had a nose ring. The music was blaring, and the air-conditioning gave me goose bumps. But the first time I ordered an espresso there, and watched the rich dark rivulet trickle out from the shiny machine into a cup below, I understood exactly why people kept coming. Most people loaded their espresso with mountains of foamy steamed milk, but alone, it was like nothing I had ever tasted—dark yet sweet, rich yet fresh as the steam it was made from. One cup and I was cured of Walter’s watery coffee.

  Afterward I would sit down at the computer in the library and type the way I did when my father was sober, as if we were both under a spell. I took the drawers out of the big card catalog and set up a system, moving the cards from one drawer to another when I was finished, like pressing the return button on the typewriter. Though the institute was filled, four days a week, with the noisy sounds of the boys who came for tutoring, an espresso left me capable of a kind of focus that could make everything disappear: laughter, running in the hallway, the occasional thunder of Robert or Nate intervening. When Robert was there he always shut the door quietly, with a little nod to me, as if I was playing the piano.

  The boys came from private schools around town, the crests of which were sewn onto their school blazers. I wasn’t certain whether Robert insisted they keep their uniforms on during his tutorials, but the ease with which they wore their little coats and ties as they pushed and shoved each other in the halls reminded me of the town meetings Mr. Blackwell and my father never went to, with city officials and businessmen from Bangor deciding to tear down houses. My second coffee break, I quickly decided, would be scheduled during the time that the boys came in, so as to avoid the mayhem in the hallway and on the front steps.

  The fourth night that Robert and Walter weren’t home for dinner I began to clean the kitchen in earnest. I tested the oven to see if it worked and noted the sizes and types of electric burners that needed to be replaced, and then I dug for pots and pans. Before I knew it I was taking all the boxes out of the cabinets: I unearthed several dozen wineglasses, which I washed and turned over on a towel to dry, and I found saucers for all the teacups, which I rinsed and piled on the counter like a long, shiny white snake. I still hadn’t found any pots and pans when I opened a box of the same whiskey glasses my father drank from at home. I knew what they were before I unwrapped the first one from its tissue paper: he drank from them every night.

  They were made of thick glass, diamonds cut on the outside and a clever triangular pattern on the base that made it difficult to judge the level of the contents from above. They’d seemed almost magical to me when I was a child, like a kind of crystal ball. Once I’d seen my father holding one over his eye, late at night, to look at the way the kitchen kaleidoscoped through the bottom. I had always imagined he saw the kitchen in a star of fragments, the wood floor jig-jagging and the windows and walls turned upside down. But when I held one up to look through it myself the floor of the institute kitchen was only blurry, the grooves in the glass dusty and unimpressive. I put the glass down and looked around at the piles of tissue paper and empty boxes, suddenly realizing what a mess I’d made. The evening had come without my noticing it, and the glasses I had cleaned shone with a dim, watery light. Dusk would be filling the living room at home, and I knew my father would be watching it too, surprised to find himself in the dark.

  “Hello?” Someone unlocked the front door of the institute, and suddenly the hall light flashed on. “Miranda?” said Nate, standing in the kitchen door.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, embarrassed. “I was just—cleaning glasses.”

  “Whoa. I guess they used to have a lot of parties, huh?”

  I looked at all the glasses on the counter, the cups and saucers, realizing he was right. Cocktail parties. No wonder there were no pots and pans.

  “Where are Walter and Robert?”

  “I’m not sure—they’re not usually around for dinner,” I said, trying to sound casual.

  It turned out Nate hadn’t eaten dinner, and we decided to go to a place around the corner, but on the way there I told him I hadn’t been on the subway yet, and he decided instead that we should ride a few stops, to a Korean restaurant uptown. He ushered me happily through the subway station, and handed me a token to go through the turnstile after him. We went down stairs to a narrow platform, like a sandbar, between the tracks, and voices crackled incoherently over the speakers. Everyone looked anxious, as if they’d been down there for hours, but a minute later our train came through, blind and clumsy, all its metal cars bumping and screeching behind it. Its sides split open with an uneven chime, and a few people stepped out. We stepped in and as we heaved into motion I grabbed the metal pole beside me. Nate smiled encouragingly.

  When we surfaced again from underground, the buildings were tall and lit up, their outsides all windows. Nate headed straight across the street through the traffic and taxis and we walked down another street glowing with Korean signs. Inside the restaurant everybody was speaking in Korean; the waiter led us through the crowd to a table and dropped our menus. The tables were sizzling, and each of them had its own barbecue grill. Next to us a girl with ponytails knotted in bundles above her ears plucked a shrimp from the grill in the middle of her table and popped it into her mouth. The boys across from her said something in her singing language and she laughed.

  Nate had to point to the pictures on the menu to show the waiter what we wanted. “So what do you think of New York?” he asked when the waiter was gone, breaking apart his chopsticks.

  “I haven’t really explored that much,” I admitted.

  “It must be a pretty big change for you,” he said. “Robert told me you and your father live on an island? Have you ever been to a big city before?”

  “Bangor,” I said, as if it were nothing. “But not that often.” In fact I’d gone there exactly twice, once with Julie and her
brother when Mrs. Peabody got a brand-new car, and once with my father and Mr. Blackwell in his truck, when Mr. Blackwell persuaded my father that he needed to buy a new generator. We’d had lunch. I had a milkshake and they had frothy beers at a place with a big television inside.

  “I’m not a big-city person,” Nate said. “I love the ocean. I think I could probably spend my life at sea.”

  “But didn’t you grow up in the city?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “But we have a place on Long Island. I used to spend every summer there, on the water. I taught sailing.”

  I nodded. Even Mr. Blackwell, who’d spent his life on boats, didn’t know how to sail. The carrier fleets had been equipped with fuel engines before he was born. The few sailors who undertook the tides of the Bay of Fundy were sailing boats owned either by wealthy summer residents or by whale-watching companies making their money on day cruises. Once in a while I would see a lone yacht approach our shore, its clean white sails fluttering politely before it turned away, like an overdressed dinner guest, too shy to sit.

  The waiter returned to cover our table with small white dishes of pickles and sauces and Nate looked them over expertly. “Try that,” he said.

  I picked up the chopsticks the way he had, improvising, and managed to put a tricky tangle of seaweed into my mouth.

  He watched me chew. “Kind of weird, right?” He popped a fishy-looking thing into his mouth without hesitation.

  Nate explained that he had also been a rower in college (more evidence for his attraction to water) and afterward he had gone on a trip in the Mediterranean, on a replica of an ancient warship. It had been built to resolve a long-standing controversy about the design used by the Greek and Roman navies. He had studied Latin since he was a boy, but that was how he had become interested in classical history and decided to go to graduate school.

  My father always used to lecture me on the difference between myth and legend and history. Myths were “imaginary,” legend was “unverifiable,” and history was “fact,” and anyone who mixed them up, he liked to say, was a sentimental fool. Recreations of Odysseus’s journey, fictions of Ovid’s exile, or any other flights of imagination which used the ingredients of antiquity for their own purposes made him peevish. I had once found a novel about Ovid’s romance with a sorceress in the library, and when I brought it home he said it would be of better use inside the stove.