A few rosebushes were in full bloom under Andy’s window, and their fragrance was commingling with his man-scents and the lingering fragrance of Dial soap. He’d showered before he went to bed, something he never did when he had to work the next day. On workdays he wanted to wake up and smell the assignment behind him, which gave him a leg up, at least in mind-set, on the assignment ahead. But with the smoke and the stale beer and the sweat from the bars and discos he’d been circling and casing on Northern Boulevard gone, the scruff shaved away and circled down the drain in his bathroom sink, the smells were rousing him. His right hand wandered down the treasure trail to his navel and grazed the small tuft of chestnut-brown hair on his stomach, then started under the waistband of his boxers. This was something else he never did while he was on call, but now that he was off for a few days, he could relax.
Before he could really get started, though, her face came back into his mind. He’d filed it away, put it on a kind of constant snooze alarm, while he was finishing his assignment that day in Midtown a few weeks ago, but now it met him again as if by appointment. He hadn’t been able to figure out why he thought he recognized that strange woman in the subway — the tumblers had been only half falling, the way they did at precinct functions or family reunions when he backslapped and glad-handed colleagues or distant relatives whose faces he sort of knew but whose names deserted him, like calculus equations after he’d taken the A.P. test and gotten his course credit.
After he thought about her for a few minutes that morning in bed, though, something clicked. It couldn’t be, he thought. What would she be doing there, on the streets of Midtown alone, no sign of a retinue or autograph hounds or flunkies or shields? Surely if it had been she, somebody else in New York besides him would be on her tail. He’d lost track of her while he was in college and hadn’t heard her on the radio in a while. Still, she was about the most popular singer around for a few years when Andy was in high school. And, Andy thought at the time, the finest. A voice so low and so clear, so pure and yet broken somehow. Full of youth and vigor and yet older than dirt, hope and despair fighting to a draw. Utterly guileless. A voice with space in front, behind, on either side of it. A voice with space to spare. Someone like her wouldn’t be so accessible on the street. Famous people, even the ones not trying to be incognito, still had enough invisible force fields around them, transmitting from a friend, a dog with a long leash, an attitude. Her defenses, he thought, had too many cracks in them. But when he was face to face with her, he was so distracted by the boniness, the spectral projection of her, that he never quite made the connection.
Andy got out of bed and, still in his bare feet and boxers, padded over to the hall closet. His bachelor flat was small and well swept, clear open lines and pathways in seemingly every direction. A couple of bookshelves, a narrow sofa, a solid, uncomplicated remnant, in deep leagues of indigo, on the floor in front of it, a crystal vase that he always cleaned but almost never filled on his small oak dining table. On a side table, a 3-by-5 picture of his parents — both schoolteachers, retired in Florida now — on their honeymoon in the Catskills, his father full-haired but still studious in glasses and a car coat, his mother with a wavy coif and lipstick that shone even in the black-and-white tones. His cupboards, like everything else in his place, were roomy, half stocked with bachelor food: cereal, soup, tuna fish, boxes of pasta and Irish tea. Beer and milk and O.J. that stood unclustered in the fridge. Across from the couch in the living room there was a decent sound system that his parents gave him for his 16th birthday, ahead of its time in that it was components and not one of those tinny-sounding things that folded up like a suitcase. The linen-white walls were empty and unstained and warm.
From the closet he pulled out a box of albums and singles he’d had since he was a teenager. He didn’t buy records that often anymore, but he took care of the ones he did have, and he had carted them all with him over the years. Looking at record collections was for him still better than looking through one of his yearbooks or photo albums, so vested were these records with memories; his included More of the Monkees (sixth grade and a tall, dark young dynamo of a teacher named Mr. Marino); Blood Sweat and Tears (pimples and his first jockstrap); No Secrets (while the guys at school fixated on the subject of “You’re So Vain” and on Carly Simon’s pokey nipples, he was taken by the jazzy, elegant chords of “The Right Thing to Do”). As he flipped through the albums, with worn spines but otherwise in mint-minus condition, he got almost to the end before he found the ones he wanted. They were by the only artist, a girl-boy duo, with two entries in his collection. One had a silver-and-blue cover and the two of them in a wedding-like picture on the cover, her dress lacy, his hair shaggy but somehow kempt. The other one had a flap, all the same color, with just the duo’s name — their family name, as they were brother and sister — stamped on the front in a curvy logo. Andy jokingly used to call it the “Tan Album,” mocking not it but the Beatles’ “White Album,” which he never liked. Too unfocused and weird for its own sake. Too strung out.
Thinking of the “White Album” distracted Andy from the woman for a few minutes, bringing him back to a Christmas Eve when he was about 13 and hanging out with his cousin Tom, who was a few years older, with stringy blond hair, a thin but flabby frame, a hippie in waiting. Their families had just come back from Midnight Mass. “God, wasn’t that endless?” Tom said. “All that stink from the incense. And the folding chairs” — when they got to the church, all the pews were already filled with the once-or-twice-a-year Catholics, whom the pastor, Father Monaghan, called “the irregulars.” So Andy and Tom and their families had to sit way in the back on metal chairs with worn padding on the seats and kneelers. “I still have a dent in my ass,” Tom said, and then pulled a flask from his back pocket and offered Andy a swig.
“No, thanks,” Andy said, neutrally, no syllable emphasized, no judgment passed, wondering though if it was really the flask that caused the dent.
“Smoke?” Tom said. Again Andy declined. “Weed?” Tom said. “C’mon, there’s got to be at least one vice there. I know, you must jerk off by now.” Andy had in fact started having wet dreams — “nocturnal emissions,” his health teacher called them, and when his mother started seeing the stains in his underwear when she did the laundry, she told Andy’s father that it was time for “the talk.” Which consisted of Andy’s father saying to him, one fall day when they were out raking leaves, “How’s your hygiene?”
“It’s fine, Dad.” “Good, keep it that way.” Cousin Tom wouldn’t let the matter drop. “If you don’t jerk off yet, you will soon. By the time I was your age I was up to like, four times a day. Hey, you want to rub one out now? We probably have time before breakfast.”
Tom slid his hand down between his legs, threw his head back and started a slow, stoned stroke. Andy felt a rustling underneath his dress pants. But he didn’t want to defile Christmas by masturbating with his cousin. And he was more interested at that moment in Tom’s record collection, a small aisle of albums jutting out on the side of his bed. “Mind if I flip through these?” Andy said. It was mostly trippy stuff — the Doors, Iron Butterfly, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone. An occasional Supremes or Temptations collection. And of course, the “White Album.”
“Janis Joplin, I saw her on The Ed Sullivan Show,” Andy said. “She’s kind of a screamer.”
“Oh, brother, she’s the blues, the truth,” Tom said. “You’ll see, when you get older, after you start smoking weed and wanking regularly.” Andy, though, much preferred Dusty Springfield, the British pop singer who had a hit out then called “A Brand New Me,” all low lights and gently lapping voice, as opposed to, say, Joplin’s overhead, overheated glare. He thought about trying to explain that to Tom, but by then Andy could smell the bacon frying and his mother’s cinnamon rolls heating up in the oven downstairs. “I’m going to eat,” he said, leaving Tom rubbing his crotch and going on about the blues, the truth.
Andy lost track of Tom w
hen he disappeared into Canada a few years later to outrun the draft.
Andy opened the flap of the “Tan Album,” and there was the idyllic sunbeamy-meadowy shot of the two of them. He studied the woman, standing behind the man. “Geez, it couldn’t have been her,” he said out loud. “She’s too big, too full-faced.” He figured that the woman he’d seen in Manhattan a few weeks back would had to have lost almost a quarter of her body weight to have actually been the singer. But something made him look again. Maybe. Then he stared at the album with the silver-and-blue cover; still, he still wasn’t sure.
He pulled the record out of the silver-and-blue jacket, untouched for years in its inner sleeve, put it on the turntable, returned to his bedroom and crawled back under the sheets, picking up where he left off, his hand working in the tempos of the songs on that first side. He started in the small, soft thicket of his chest hair, carpeting pectorals that were solid platforms beneath, pushing his fingers through along with the passionate cleanliness of the album’s opener, a big hit single, featuring a vibrant tambourine, then gaining even more steam next with the bubbly but short Latin number, slowing down for the seaside ballad, gathering some momentum again with the perky countryish tune and the goofy Beatles cover, until he came to the last song, the one that started it all for them, and, in a way, for him. It was the song that he had hummed or whistled to himself over the years in locker rooms — high school, college, police academy — as he absent-mindedly cast, or had cast upon him, sidelong glances.
His morning fullness now couldn’t hold out much longer. Andy waited for the second verse, so that what was happening in his bed would be the opposite of what was happening in the song: stars shooting back into the sky.
By now the devil was out cold.
4. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1982
The good sisters would be at table, sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes all four, dispensing their advice for living a clean life, for being closer to God:
“If you die within 24 hours of Easter, you go right to heaven.”
“Everything was fine until they moved to Linden Boulevard.”
“If only he’d left 15 minutes sooner.”
“Ask the Little Flower.”
“You have to cut the corned beef across the grain.”
“Sundays you get a break from Lent.”
“She thought Social Security was Welfare.”
“Don’t ever drive through Bethpage.”
“It happened because he ate meat on Good Friday.”
“Why would The Enquirer print it if it wasn’t true?”
“It happened because they had relations during Lent.”
“We buy only Ronzoni and Bumble Bee and Boar’s Head.”
“Is that Carmen Miranda?”
“Her husband was very sick.”
“We always went to the mountains.”
“That house in Ditmas must be worth a quarter of a million now.”
“That’s not music nowadays. I don’t know what to call it, but it sure isn’t music.”
“It’s in God’s hands.”
“If only. . . .”
The sisters who dispensed these morsels of experience and wisdom were the Rooneys — Sib and Kieran’s mother, Genie, and their aunts, Maddy, Constance and Bern — and the kids had heard variations of them practically all their lives, spoken in one or the other’s kitchens over individual chalices of beer and consecrated bowls of pretzels. Sib called them the aunts’ greatest hits, and in fact they had become repeated, almost chanted, played and replayed and drilled down to their barest grooves, so often that the original context was frequently lost. Some of them stood on their own — Ronzoni and Bumble Bee and Boar’s Head (and Hellmann’s), always. But who had moved to Linden Boulevard? Who owned the house in Ditmas, and why was it lost? Who had the willies about Bethpage, a town on Long Island? Carmen Miranda, they knew, was the default response whenever some Latiny-sounding woman was on TV. “Is that Carmen Miranda?” came a voice from the kitchen. But mostly these life lessons were spoken with little or no back or front story, caught on the fly as Sib and Kieran and maybe their cousins passed through. For Sib it was like how the words “supreme” or “shangri-la” evoked the names of singing groups, how “avocado” was a paint color, the words detached from their original meanings. Kieran had two names for them — the Incauntations; the Commauntments.
After the litany, the sisters would often break into song. Some ancient thing like “Sidewalks of New York” that would inspire giggles and eye rolls from Sib and Kieran. Sib didn’t giggle anymore, though, at the thought of those old songs; she knew that someday Barry White and Donna Summer would be in heavy rotation at nursing homes, favorites at the Saturday-night wheelchair roller-disco party.
The sisters’ voices were going through Sib’s head as she was get- ting dressed up for the first time since graduation, readying herself for what she had been dreading: a round of job-seeking in Manhattan. Where was the Commauntment to get her through that, putting on makeup and a skirt and nail polish when she would rather be shooting hoops? Aunt Bern, who at some point worked at the cosmetics counter in Alexander’s department store, once tried to give her some tips — go light, start from the inside and work out, “Just like tossing a salad,” her happy-go-lucky husband, Uncle Billy, would chime in — but Sib always treated the eyeliner brush or the pancake puff like a lacrosse stick, and so her face, on the rare occasions when she did wear makeup, was always raining colors. She didn’t have too much more success, either, at least in her own eyes, with clothes. For someone who excelled at anything physical, who could run a six-and-a-half-minute mile and sink 100 consecutive foul shots and dig sizzling ground balls deep out of the hole at short and fire them to first, she was all thumbs when it came to putting on a dress. In her mind the dresses always clung, accenting, underlining, she thought, her thick frame, while sports always made the awareness of it go away. Aunt Maddy often bought her frilly clothes for Christmas and told her she’d grow out of this discomfort with all the “feminine pleasures.” But Maddy’s gifts almost always stayed in the boxes. Sib had even worn gym shorts under her First Communion dress.
Once Sib got to high school, her father would take her to a mall on Long Island, where there was a store that sold clothes for bigger-framed girls. They would have dinner on a weeknight and then drive out; she told him she wanted to go then so that she didn’t have to waste their Saturdays. But she knew that by going at that time of the week and night, she probably wouldn’t run into any of the girls from school. Her father went along with the ruse, but he knew.
Three of the sisters were gone now. Maddy from a stomach cancer that was discovered too late. “If only she’d gone to the doctor sooner.” Bern, found dead in her bed one morning of unspecified causes, though at the wake Sib heard someone say it was a broken heart. “If only Uncle Billy hadn’t left.” And her mother. If only. . . . Just Constance, who never married, was left, in her late 70s and retired for decades from the phone company and still in Brooklyn. “Live a little less when you’re young,” Sib could hear her saying, as if someone had dialed “O” for life advice and she were dispensing another Commauntment, “and you’ll live a little more later.” Or as if Constance’s early investments of virtue, of talc and cabbage and the daily Rosary, of avoiding Bethpage, were now paying the dividends of dotage.
Sib hadn’t slept much, again, the night before, the normal insomnia compounded by the job-search stress. Reruns of Mary Tyler Moore, The Uncle Floyd Show, a few chapters of East of Eden got her through most of the night, but now she could see the damage in her eyes, the premature droop, for that time of day, for her age. “The radio,” Sib thought, usually the universal cure; in those first months after her hearing came back years ago, even the static between the stations had a symphonic ring.
But these days the radio was letting her down. WABC, the great musical behemoth of her youth, was gone now. The FM stations were all stratified: synthy Brit stuff or post-disco reductioni
st dance-soul or soulless rock or adult contemporary. “Ebony and Ivory”? Lame. Toto? All pop and no fizz. “Don’t You Want Me?” A nice beat but overall a big drone. Sib turned and turned and turned the dial with one hand, blow-dryer in the other, as she searched for something to help her wake up. Finally she landed on one of the more recent songs that she really loved: “Forget Me Nots,” by a jazzy R & B singer named Patrice Rushen. There were so few black artists on the radio now, and practically none on MTV, the new video channel. Was this all still part of the disco backlash? Sib once almost caused a riot at Whelan’s when she filled in for her friend Larry, the D.J., during a bathroom/weed break and played one Earth, Wind & Fire and two Michael Jackson songs in a row. “What’s with this nigger shit?” one of the locals, whose name was Tuke, shouted across the foosball table that abutted the D.J. booth. So when Larry came back he threw on the Who’s “Eminence Front” and a couple of Zeppelin tunes, hard- rock sedatives, savage soothers. Sib had heard there would be a new Michael Jackson album at the end of the year, but she couldn’t imagine he’d be able to top his last one, Off the Wall, most of which she thought was brilliant. And in spite of its success only a couple of years ago, there was now enforced apartheid on the radio, at clubs, even in crappy bars like Whelan’s. She was skeptical about the new album’s messianic potential.
If the job hunt went well that day, Sib thought, she would stop at one of her favorite record stores in Manhattan, Downstairs, on 43rd Street, and pick up “Forget Me Nots.” As she headed out the door in her one interview outfit — a green top, black denim skirt, sneakers that she would change out of when she got close to the employment agency — she saw that her father had left her a $20 bill on the kitchen counter. She thought, I can’t keep sponging off Dad, and started down the stairs and out the back door. But then she took a glance back at the 20. “Well, in case of an emergency,” she said to herself, and went back into the kitchen and scooped it up like one of those hot grounders to short.
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