Why did he go with Sachin? That’s what he would ask himself after, leaning against the fence and spitting blood onto the sidewalk, his face mangled and swollen. He could not explain it. Sachin had stood on the sidewalk outside the Little Sweet, staring at Clive through the glass with such coldness. He curled his index finger, gesturing for Clive to come out as if offering an invitation. Clive felt his body rise from his chair. He had the feeling that he was walking toward something he’d been trying to avoid for a long time, that Sachin had something to show him about himself, and that it would be the truth.
When they entered the vacant lot, Sachin stumbled on the uneven ground, then swung his arms wildly to steady himself. He was very drunk. “This is your final chance,” he slurred. His voice was brittle and ironic, as if this were a poorly acted performance they were both in on, as if his own anger were hilarious to him.
“I didn’t take your bloody money,” Clive grunted through clenched teeth. He was suddenly furious, because he understood now that Sachin didn’t even really believe he’d taken it, but it didn’t matter. He was hated.
The first sloppy blow glanced off Clive’s jaw. Sachin spun on his own momentum, regaining his footing just in time for his chin to meet Clive’s fist. Clive heard the gnash of Sachin’s bottom teeth smashing into his top teeth, saw his head snap back.
Well, Clive thought, he’d given Sachin his chance. It wasn’t his fault if Sachin had shown up too drunk to put it to use. He turned and walked over the uneven ground toward the sidewalk. He was almost at the fence when he heard the pounding of feet behind him. Then Sachin was on him. An arm hooked around Clive’s neck, the crook of an elbow crammed against his windpipe. He fell to the ground and Sachin sprang on him. Clive felt every blow—on the rim of his eye socket, his throat, his chin. Finally, he was able to grab hold of Sachin’s shirt and shove him off. Sachin flew backward. Clive heard a crack. Skull hitting concrete.
The night filled with a terrible stillness. Sachin lay on the ground, motionless. “No,” Clive whispered. “No, no, no.”
Then Sachin raised his arm. Clive had never felt such relief in his life. Sachin brushed his hand against the back of his head, held it up to the moonlight to confirm a gummy swipe of blood. He pushed himself off of the ground and rushed at Clive. Clive let Sachin pummel him, too terrified of what he’d almost done to retaliate.
Sachin began to laugh. “Is the big man scared?”
He punched Clive in the gut. Clive did not respond.
“Does that make you angry? Does that get you going, big man?”
Sachin’s pale eyes never wavered from Clive. He was a father whose child had been taken from him; his loss was black magic, allowing him to see through Clive and know the things that he had taken. When Sachin delivered a swift, fierce kick to his groin, Clive fell to his knees, spat into the dirt. The world began to swirl. Sachin kicked at his ribs like he was trying to dislodge a stubborn flat tire. He kicked and kicked—he was moaning, Clive realized. The sound had been going on for some time. It filtered down from far above his body like the voice of God.
Then footsteps, stumbling away. He caught a fleeting whiff of berries. Tinkling laughter. A final howl: Sachin’s? His? Hers? Clive sailed away on it.
HE COULD not stay in the apartment. It wasn’t just Sachin. After that night, he could find within himself only pity for Sachin, whose family was gone and always would be, no matter how he tried to batter the truth of his life out of existence. But he hated Fazil. (Where would the money he’d stolen end up? Clive wondered. He imagined grandkids in Guyana opening a package of Nikes and CDs. Or maybe Fazil had no one back home and would spend the money in small morsels on himself; he saw him hunched over a large slice of red velvet cake in a café, scraping every last bit of frosting from the plate.)
Ouss loaned him the money for his back rent and the deposit on a new place. He found an open bed in an apartment shared by five roommates just a few blocks away. Not long after that, a shift opened up at the garage, and Clive returned to work. His first night back, in early March, was the first warm night of the year, a promise of spring. When he got off in the morning, he decided to walk. He crossed Manhattan on Forty-Second Street, Times Square so early in the morning empty, his. When he reached First Avenue he turned south. He walked past the United Nations, its sweep of flags snapping in the wind, past the brick projects of the Lower East Side, quiet and softly lit at this hour. At Delancey, he turned onto the pedestrian ramp for the Williamsburg Bridge. He crossed the bridge, pushed forward by westward winds and fanned, at intervals, by ephemeral breezes from bikes whizzing past. When he reached the bridge’s apex, he stopped. At the edges of the panorama, the silver tip of Manhattan and the brown façades of Brooklyn aproned the river; the water was a rich, indeterminate color, as if the essence of the city had been condensed into a dark, sparkling broth, and here he was above it, catching its cool upward breezes.
Things would get better now. He would be able to wire money to Sara and his grandmother soon. His cuts from the fight with Sachin had scabbed over. His whole body felt tight and new as a bud. He got on the J at Marcy Avenue, then rode the B46 down Malcolm X and Utica. When he got home, the phone was ringing. He picked it up just in time. It was Sara.
“I was just thinking about you,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I’m back at work. It’s all sorted out. I’ll be wiring money in a few days.”
She said nothing.
“Sara?”
“That’s wonderful.” She paused. “I want you to know I’m proud of you, Clive. I know it hasn’t been easy there.” Years later, the memory of it was enough to pull tears to his eyes. “I’m calling because I have something to tell you.” Her voice sounded neither happy nor sad.
“What is it, Sara?”
“I’m married.”
For a moment he couldn’t speak. “You’re—Sara, did you say y-y-y—”
“Yes,” she snapped. “I said I’m married. I got married. Last week.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Clive.”
“You should have told me. You should have given me a chance to—”
“To what? To try to stop me? I’m sorry, Clive, but I couldn’t do it anymore. I’ve been here, all this time, raising our son alone.”
“While I’m up here slaving away for that boy.”
“And how do you think it’s been for me? You don’t have to take the stares when all you want is to buy groceries.”
“Please, Sara. Listen to me. I love you. I—”
“It’s Edwin,” she said. “Do you hear me? It’s Edwin.” Her voice seemed to study the words, as if she only half believed them. “I married Edwin.”
Bery Wilson, Sculptress. That’s what it says on my business card. These days every actress wants to be called an actor, every waitress wants to be a waiter. But I’m a woman and I want every last person who sees my work to know it. My artist friends scoff when I show them my card. They think it’s vulgar, like I’m an electrician or an accountant hocking my services. But I’m making a living doing what I love, and I want the world to know that, too.
In my twenties, when I was new to New York, my love affair with the city just beginning, I salvaged my materials from its streets: twisted bike rims, concrete, pigeon feathers, lots of metal. My latest pieces are different. In this place of my adulthood, I resurrect the spaces of my youth.
Rubbish Day went up last year in a pocket park in the West Village. If you’re not from where I’m from, you’d see it and think it was just a sculpture made of castaway items, but anyone from home would see the bottle of Maggi and the box of Goya Sazon, the Ivory soap and Crix crackers wrappers, the bottles of D&G pineapple soda and Vita Malt and the canister of Nestlé Klim and know it was a love letter.
School Girls was installed in front of the Adam Clayton Powell Building in Harlem a few years ago. A circle of straw-and-plaster girls with painted-on skirts and blouses, maroon and pink. On the opposite edge of
the plaza there was another girl, alone, looking back at the others and flaying them with her eyes. The piece was up November through March. The decay of the materials over the course of the winter was part of the project from its inception. I used to ride up there to see how people interacted with my work. Hardly anybody noticed the lone girl. I would watch her as if held there by something. Watch the snow settle on her shoulders, pigeons peck at her straw, sleet lash her wide-open eyes. I wanted to take her home and make her cinnamon tea and tell her, Just you wait.
Faraway Woman will be my next project, on Governors Island. I’ve only done sketches so far, but I know she will be larger than life. A woman twelve feet high with locks of black hair six feet long and bright white haunches thick as tree trunks. Hooves for feet. I want people to fall in love with her. I want her to give them nightmares.
When that girl died on Faraway, I knew it was the woman who took her. You might expect me to believe it was Gogo Richardson, on account of the afternoon he punched me so hard my legs flew out from under me. But that afternoon wasn’t what I thought about when I heard that he and Edwin had been taken into custody. Instead, I thought of a morning many years earlier, the first day of second grade, when Gogo’s terrible stutter almost caused him to wet himself in front of the entire class. I felt such rage at him then. Rage for allowing something so humiliating to happen to himself. Rage that he couldn’t just fit in. I know, I know. Irony is a live wire. It seems to me now that for years of my life, rage is all I was. It lived in my skin and crackled in my teeth. I would have followed it anywhere.
STARLIGHT
YOU GET FAR ENOUGH INTO winter and you no longer believe it was ever warm or ever will be again. The trees seem as unalive as the other fixtures of the city’s sidewalks: newspaper boxes, abandoned bicycles, hydrants (their tops covered now in little ushankas of snow). During the day, the light seems filtered through a dishrag, and by late afternoon, day is gone; the surrendering blue of a four o’clock twilight becomes your whole world.
When I try to get myself back into that winter, to reenter my psychic state during those frozen months, I find that I can no longer do it. I can remember that period in an external way, using the things I did and said to reconstruct what I must have felt. But I can no longer inhabit those memories as I can inhabit even more distant ones: Sipping espresso with Aunt Caroline in the Place des Vosges. My skin peeling in the days after Alison’s death. Me say day me say day me say day. The best I can do is to describe how the world around me seemed altered. Before that time, the city was for me what I believe it is for most people: a commons, all of us grazing together in its glass-and-steel meadows, a place the most salient feature of which is not, in the end, its skyscrapers or its cacophony, but the excruciating and ecstatic demands it places upon our empathy. To push through the crowds in the Times Square subway station, zigging by tourists with suitcases, zagging around bankers in suits, brushing past people hawking churros, EPs, God, veering around a troupe of young men performing backflips above the hard tile floor, and squeezing onto a train so packed your chest compresses in the crush of bodies, and to know that every one of these people is in the thick of a life every bit as complex as your own, that you are all extras in one another’s dramas—isn’t this the quintessence of urban life? But during those months, it was different. The city seemed not public but private, a place created for me and the things that were playing out in my life. New York was mere backdrop, a screen painted with buildings and delivery trucks and dog-walkers and children on scooters, in front of which I enacted my life. I did not care what people around me thought of me because I did not entirely believe they were real. On the subway I bit my nails with impunity; I traced words in the air without bothering to disguise my behavior.
The significance of Clive’s pilgrimage to Manhattan Beach was clear to me. He had been marking Alison’s death. It had been months since I had entered his life, and I knew it was time to move things forward. Either I’d gained his trust or I hadn’t, and it was time to find out. Every night before I stepped into the Little Sweet, I promised myself this was the night I would press him, the night I would bring the conversation around to the secrets of his past. But these were false promises; even as I made them I don’t think I believed them. Instead, I spent our evenings lamenting the hideous condo tower rising on Fifty-seventh Street. We groused about the disastrous snow removal after the most recent storm. Clive explained to me the workings of cricket and the Windies’ tumultuous history of shame and glory. On the walk home afterward, I would excoriate myself for my cowardice, though I knew it wasn’t really cowardice preventing me, but something else, something I wouldn’t be able to fully understand for a long time. In truth, I had altogether lost sight of the purpose of my time with Clive Richardson. The winter, these nights, this man—it stretched on and on. I could see no end in sight.
I GUESS what happened next was inevitable. On a Tuesday in early February, I called in sick at work. Tuesdays were Clive’s day off, and I spent this one trailing him as he ran various errands. The next morning when I arrived at work, my boss called me into her office. As I sat across from her, she proceeded to describe to me the events of the day prior. Astrid Teague had come in for a marketing meeting. When she was ready to leave, it was sleeting, but she didn’t have an umbrella. My boss took her over to my cubicle, hoping to lend her one, and in my locker, amid an accumulation of dirty Tupperware, they discovered the stack of copies of The Girl from Pendeen which I had never mailed, along with the untouched manuscript by the debut novelist, which my boss would now have to edit herself in a hurry.
I was told to pack my things. I did so quickly. I removed the pushpins that had for the past four years affixed my photographs and decorations to the wall. I gathered my belongings from my locker. Everyone around me was very quiet. My coworkers avoided walking by my cubicle, except for the few who made a point of it, stealing pitying glances at me as they passed. I think this was when I understood that I would lose things in pursuit of the truth that I could not get back, that my life might be derailed in ways I could not recover from.
I COULDN’T tell my parents I had been fired. How on earth would I explain it to them? I couldn’t tell Jackie. She had given up on me—there had been no texts, no attempted interventions, since the morning I brushed her off at my apartment. The only person I could talk to was Clive. That night, when I told him I had lost my job, he said the usual comforting things. It happens to everyone at some point. I would find another. That old chestnut: “Everything works out for the best.”
“You can’t actually believe that,” I said.
He cocked his head back. “I guess not.” He furrowed his brow, chuckled.
I began to cry, tears that were at once utterly genuine and a command performance. “What should I do?” I reached for his hand, and he took mine in his. He stroked the inside of my wrist with his fingertips. When our gazes met, it seemed they were both filled with the same question. I leaned toward him. I closed my eyes.
It is impossible to say how much of this action was strategy and how much of it was desire. These two tracks had collapsed in on each other. I had reached a level of cognitive dissonance that seems almost impossible to me now, but of which I had only the most submersed, peripheral awareness then: I simultaneously trusted and distrusted Clive Richardson absolutely. I loved him and loathed him. I wanted to destroy him and was terrified of losing him.
Clive dropped my hand. He leaned away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted.
His eyes darted from the floor to the television to the table, looking at anything but me.
“God, I’m a shit show tonight,” I said, wiping the tears from my eyes. “Can we just pretend that never happened?” I attempted a lighthearted smile.
“I’m sorry if I—” His gaze had fallen on my hand.
I shoved it under the table. “A cramp.” I’d been doing it without even realizing, tracing a finger through the air: N-e-v-e-r. N-e-v-e-r. N-e-v-e-r.
He looked warily at me, and a rush of embarrassment flooded me.
“I think we could both use a drink,” I said. I got up and went to the counter and bought two cans of Carib.
When I turned to walk back to our table, Clive was gone.
HE WASN’T there the next night, or the next. I sat at the Little Sweet alone, lingering until closing in case he should appear. By the fourth night, I was in a panic. I had pushed things too far, driven him away with the very expressions of intimacy with which I’d hoped to pull him closer.
“Clive hasn’t been around lately,” I said casually to Vincia on the fifth night of his absence, as if I were merely making conversation. She pursed her lips and continued scooping rice onto a plate. “Do you know if he’s, like, away or something?”
“I know if he didn’t tell you, it’s none of your business.”
After that, I didn’t go inside the Little Sweet. I spent hours every night walking the streets, looping past his building to see if he would emerge, which he never did. Back in my apartment, I occupied the liminal space between sleeping and waking all night long, and in the mornings I couldn’t say for sure whether I’d slept at all. I had nowhere to be during the day. I returned to Alison’s diaries, searching her voice for some hint of where to go from here. I roamed the streets of Manhattan, looking in every taxi for his face.
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