by Rachel Cline
There’s still grimy snow at the curb and the wind cuts right through me as I walk parallel to the towers of Cadman Plaza through the alley of bare London planetrees in the park. When I was young, this area was going to be a shining city of affordable housing and common spaces—and for years it seemed as though any time I entered the north end of the Heights, I was under a construction bridge or avoiding a gantlet of hard-hatted men of the sort who attacked antiwar protesters. We would be playing Ringolevio or Sardines but then the perfect hiding place would turn out to be the claimed domain of some towering dude in rags, or a trysting place for un-fun-looking sex, or a public urinal. All along Clinton, Clark, and Fulton Streets the vacant lots were enclosed in a picket of old tenement doors, their interior paint faded to the colors of Necco Wafers. I have a weird nostalgia for those doors. They remind me of the saying, “safe as houses.” Of course, I’ve never lived in a house. The only person I knew who lived in a house was Beth—a huge house in Kensington, with plastic slipcovers on the “good” furniture and sugar-free candy in a dish by the front door.
Walking down Middagh Street I wonder if Cat Rescuer Guy is a bit sketchy—this end of the neighborhood still feels a little hostile to me. When I was a kid, it was deserted around here; kids even played stickball in the street. The occasional car came through at a crawl, trolling for parking, and people thought it was safe until a kid got hit running for a ball and never recovered.
At the corner of Poplar and Henry, I scan the block ahead, trying to discern my destination. There’s one apartment building mid-block that I have a mental picture of—it always seems to have people’s used clothing and books piled up outside. I have assumed it to be my destination today—where I mentally placed Cat Guy when he said “Poplar Street.” Now I’m feeling uneasy about this mission. I don’t like strangers, strange men in particular, and now what am I doing? Going to meet one, alone. I think as hard as I can of Tin Man’s silver paw, the way it felt when he extended his claws just a little, as though responding to my hand-holding the way a human might.
It turns out Everett, as he introduces himself, lives in the fancy new condo building on the corner. It’s still got the sign up, advertising available units. So he’s not a character from a Tom Waits song but some millionaire who rescues cats and works nights. His fourth-floor apartment is practically a loft—I can’t even smell the multiple cats that live there with him and his girlfriend or wife. (There is a strangely evocative array of women’s shoes lined up near the door: a huge relief.) I follow him through his dramatically sun-dappled and catinfested living-dining-kitchen space to the bathroom where the latest rescue is cloistered.
“Here, this is the guy,” he says, opening the door to reveal a skinny, miserable creature much more tabby than tiger. He mews at us dolefully.
“Not mine,” I say and my chest collapses.
“Do you want him? You could foster him . . .”
“No, thanks. I guess I’m a one-cat household.”
“Right,” Everett says, as though I’ve said I believe in slavery.
“Mine’s grayer than that, and bigger, and not as skinny . . . if you see him.”
“No collar?”
“He has a collar.”
“You let him out? In the city?”
“I don’t have a ‘country,’” I say, defensively. “Anyway, if you see him . . .” I turn and walk back across his living room, heading for the door, determined not to weep. He walks ahead of me toward the entrance. In his wake, cats look up and resettle in their various sleeping spots.
“Good luck finding him,” he says, as he opens his apartment door and skillfully blocks the attempted exit of a small black thing with his foot.
I adopted Tin Man at some cat rescuer jamboree at the Union Square Petco and I signed a contract saying I’d follow all their rules (shots, regular vet visits, indoors only). But the deal I made with myself was different: I would provide food, water, a place to shit, and a place to sleep. I would admire him from a distance as he slept on a sunny windowsill and scratch behind his ears if he deposited himself on my lap. But my cat bolted out the apartment door every time I opened it. So I took him down to the laundry room a few times and then one summer night I opened the service entrance to see what he would do. And that first time, he glanced at me before walking away; the second time, not. “He’s a cat,” I told myself, which meant that I respected his autonomy and that he is only an animal, and that I should know better than to get too attached.
I have been walking down Willow Street at a brisk pace and my nose is running. I stop and fish around in my bag for a tissue. I am essentially across the street from the ornate terracotta façade of the old Academy building, now condos. The eighth-grade classroom was on the third floor and my seat was beside the northernmost window. I would gaze out at Rasmussen’s brownstone near the next corner, with its ridiculous red-and-black-and-green-painted stoop, and wonder why I felt so left out. It wasn’t just Beth who’d fallen under his spell—there were about six of them, coming and going like his brownstone was some kind of clubhouse, hanging around after school when they were supposed to be over at the Heights Casino, playing tennis; or at the Roosa School of Music, studying piano and violin.
My big project that year was a “report” (as we called those things that were not essays or reviews or any other now-familiar form of prose expression) on the teachers’ strike of 1969. It’s difficult to imagine what research then meant to me, or how I went about identifying sources, but Rasmussen offered me his “archives” at home as a resource. I was fourteen but I was still secretly searching for a secret passageway or a false-fronted fireplace, some entrance to Narnia, and I accepted his offer as much because I wanted to explore his house as for any other reason. His study was on the second floor, above the living room. It did contain a fireplace and the fireplace did have decorative grillwork and some kind of iridescent glazing on its tiles, but it was not a portal to another dimension and otherwise the study was just a book-lined room with a lumpy green couch in it—nowhere near as cool as the library in my grandfather’s apartment. I sat there for about an hour, reading back issues of Ramparts and the New Yorker and taking notes.
When I crossed the hall to use the bathroom, I glanced into the master bedroom, which contained an immense waterbed under a canopy made by a purple tie-dyed sheet. The canopy matched the color of the stained-glass window lozenges almost perfectly. I didn’t sit down on the waterbed, but I was standing in front of it, wonderingly, when Tamsin Green padded into the room, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and underpants. Tamsin was a year older than me—attending high school at that point. I knew her by sight, but I had never actually spoken to her. I knew she was especially close to Rasmussen because I had noticed them joking around together at school the year before. I also knew that her parents were divorced and that she was, like me, effectively fatherless. We were supposed to know and like each other because of this in the eyes of one or more adults at school, but there has never been a worse reason for liking someone, if you ask me, than that you share a common flaw. She saw me standing stupidly in front of Bob and Naomi’s bed and said “Hi,” before seating herself carefully and skillfully on the rolling seas. I then realized that she had been resting there before I came in: there was a box of Kleenex on the bedside table next to a splayed-open copy of Demian by Hermann Hesse. She picked up the book, and I said “Hi,” back and then scooted back to the study, hoping she wouldn’t tell on me for snooping.
17
Nora
Tamsin is the one in that photograph that sometimes haunts me, with her ribcage crosshatched by shadows. I was under the impression that her divorced parents were media big shots—screenwriters or something. She sometimes flew to the Hamptons for the weekend. And I’d heard that they were the ones who extracted Rasmussen’s agreement to stay out of New York for ten years after the arrest in Arizona. There was no sex offender registry back then. Still, it seemed an arbitrary and limited boundary. Tamsin had been
famously inconsolable.
She looked me up once, in 1995 or so, when we were all new and enthusiastic email users. Her message came under the subject line “worms!” which referred to a lunchtime ritual at the Academy. It consisted of someone tricking someone else into saying the word “worms,” which was the signal for everyone else to throw the contents of their water glasses at the victim. The amazing thing about this game is that it worked more than once. Conversations about fishing, gardening, and internal parasites were all equally rare in our cohort and should have caused immediate suspicion. But Rasmussen had the God-given ability to start a fight on any subject, and that was the trick. He’d get you off on some tangent where you were defending what you knew to be true (fish don’t have legs, normal body temperature is 98.6°) so vehemently that you wouldn’t notice as you’d turned the corner into dangerous territory. The moment the word left your mouth you knew it, though, so there was a horrible freezeframe of inevitability, self-recrimination, and physical stress before the cannonade let loose.
I hadn’t thought about “worms” for thirty years and, seeing the word, and Tamsin’s name, I was just flattered to be remembered and curious as to why, of all people, she would look me up. Her note was brief: “This is a voice from your past! I’m so glad I found you!” and the explanation that she was in from her new home in Tucson because her grandmother was ill. We made plans over email to meet at the Odeon, one of the few places in New York City we both knew from what even white girls like us had begun to call “back in the day.” When she came up to me, I was sitting at the bar and she said, “Hello, stranger,” and I just stared. For one thing, she was alarmingly thin, but also her face had changed. It was as though her features had been shaken up and reassembled, thrown like a handful of jacks.
“My face,” she said. “I was in a car crash—I lost my looks.”
“I’m so sorry!” I said, which sounded like I was agreeing with her last remark though I wasn’t. She looked no less pretty, except insofar as any forty-year-old woman looks less pretty than any teenager and any anorexic begins to look a little like her own corpse. She must have been used to people saying sorry, though.
“I’m fine. Just a little Humpty Dumpty action—check it out.” And then I did know her, because “check it out” had been so much a part of her speech, our speech, back then. She had a husky, sexy voice that had been way out of place in her underdeveloped body of once upon a time. I got off my barstool and hugged her.
We found a table and fortunately—or unfortunately—ordered martinis. It was fortunate because, drunk, it all seemed funny and long ago, but unfortunate because I soon saw that more than Tamsin’s face was broken. Her story was simple, more or less. The car accident—a head-on collision at a stop sign—had ended her college education and financed the next ten years of her life. The other driver’s insurance had paid her medical bills and a hundred thousand dollars in damages. In retrospect, she said, she should have asked for much more. Her chances of ever becoming a model had been ruined, and she could have been, she insisted. I didn’t disagree. Also, her short-term memory had been affected, she couldn’t really grip with her left hand, and she only had one working lung. She had spent all the money, however, by the time she was twenty-eight. “I bought a huge television,” she told me, “and a lot of dinners in nice restaurants.” The rich parents were, it seemed, no longer rich or, in any case, no longer in the picture.
Over dinner, she mentioned Rasmussen—in an aside, but as though he were a current and relevant point of reference. I asked her if she still thought about him a lot.
“I’m so sick of that story,” she said. “I used to think it defined me, you know?” She flipped her hair over her ear with a characteristic motion, a small gesture that drew attention to the silver bracelet on her wrist. Then I realized that she was dressed almost exactly the way we all used to dress at the Academy: Levi’s, smock-y shirt from India, cowboy boots. She saw my eye on the bracelet and put her hand in her lap. It was almost identical to the one Naomi used to wear, and the one Beth had had, and there were others—engraved with secret messages from Bob (or so Beth had always implied), but I saw hers once and I’m pretty sure it was just his special name for her. They all had nicknames: Uhura, Tiddlywinks, Sloopy. Tamsin’s was Christmas.
“I was in love with him,” she said then.
“I guess we all were, a little,” I said, though I was surprised to hear myself say it.
“Not like that.” She shook her head and I saw that her eyes were wet. “Really in love. I thought we were going to grow old together.”
“But he raped you,” I said, ignoring her feelings in the hope that she would do likewise—I really didn’t want to be sitting at the Odeon with a weeping hippie skeleton.
“Who told you that?”
“No one told me. I mean, I know you thought you were willing but you were just a kid.”
“I tried to say no but it happened anyway. With Naomi lying there next to me, holding my hand.”
“Jesus. Really?”
Tamsin nodded, with a quizzical expression as if to say, I know, crazy, right? “It was a Sunday morning. He made waffles.”
“You said you were in love with him.”
“I was. I thought I was. I don’t know. At that moment I was scared to death but then I couldn’t un-happen it, right? A week later I wanted to move into their house.”
I had been envious of Tamsin when we were at the Academy. She was gentle, and frail, and ethereally beautiful. We all wore our hair the same way then: long and center-parted. But Tamsin’s looked the most like Naomi’s—thick enough to make a true curtain over one eye, as it does in that photo of her naked, at fourteen. She looked like she belonged to both of them, a daughter and a sister at the same time.
After dinner, Tamsin and I took a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a clear fall day and the walkway was dense with tourists. At the second tower, we stopped with the rest of them to look out across the harbor and Tamsin returned to the subject of Rasmussen. “Naomi wasn’t his first wife, you know. There was Lee Ann. They got together at boarding school. They were just kids.”
“So what happened to her?” I asked.
“They ran away together—hopped freight trains. Her parents were outraged and kept them apart. I think she killed herself.”
“It sounds like an opera or something.” I meant that I didn’t believe a word—the story was too close to the one I’d heard about Tamsin, herself—the parental fortress, the agonized girl. At least she hadn’t killed herself.
“It was heavy for him,” she went on. “He never got over her.”
“And she never got over him,” I said, almost reflexively. I detested stories of young love gone wrong, always had. “So why’d you look me up, anyway?” I asked her—in part to cover my reaction.
“Well, to be honest, I thought you could help me out,” she said.
At the time, I was working as a freelance copyeditor and living in an East Village walk-up with the bathtub in the kitchen. I had no assets to speak of but I knew the “help” she had in mind was financial; she’d been setting it up all evening.
“Wow, Tamsin. I’m totally broke, I’m sorry.”
“But—your grandfather. I mean, he was on a stamp.”
“Yeah, well, if he left anything behind, my mother’s got it.”
She believed me, I could tell—it was the truth.
“I just thought . . . even if it was like a job or something to come back to. I’m done with Tucson.”
“You can stay in my apartment for a week, if that helps, but I warn you there’s no couch and the roaches have not entirely checked out.”
We emailed a few times after that, and spoke on the phone once. In that conversation, I asked her why she didn’t ask Rasmussen for help (she’d given me the impression they were still in touch).
“I did go looking for him, actually,” she said. “To his parents’ summer place in Vermont. I knew that’s where he’d be. It
was right after my accident.”
“And?”
“He apologized.”
I couldn’t picture this.
“He said he thought he was rescuing me back then. From my crazy parents. You have no idea how crazy they were.”
“The only person he was taking care of was himself,” I blurted.
“He never really messed with you, did he?” she said. It was a non sequitur, but also a jab.
“Not really,” I said.
“I guess you’re still jealous,” she said then.
“Go fuck yourself,” I told her, or words to that effect.
Of course, she had a point. I did feel left out of their little cult. Even back in 1990-whenever-that-was when Tamsin showed up, I still felt it. It’s amazing how long these things take to get sorted out.
18
Naomi
Igrew up in a two-room house in Sherrard, West Virginia. Front room, back room. We slept in the back—me, my folks, my two sisters, my brother, Duff. When I left them all behind was the first time I thought of myself as a sinner. Because even though I taught myself to sleep through the night, to sleep through anything at all, I knew I was leaving my sisters in the hands of the devil. We weren’t churchgoing so I’m not being biblical: my daddy was just a man of no conscience and no love in his heart. Bob has many flaws but there’s no comparison. I can promise you that he feels what happened to our family like a stake in his heart. I know that.