CHAPTER FOUR

SUDS AND BUDS

MAX PUT ON HER GARDENING CROCS and stepped through the sliding screen door to her garden, a twelve-by-fifteen-foot paradise. The backyard actually had more square footage than her apartment, even counting the closets. The usual background sounds—strains of salsa music, a passing siren, honking cars—were not quite drowned out by the constant hum of the building’s air-conditioning system. A few tomatoes were still hanging on the vine. The basil was growing like a weed.

When she’d first moved in, the “garden” was an unruly rectangle of concrete and stinkweeds, with the promise of peaches, azaleas, and roses climbing the worn wooden fence and now the last of this season’s late bloomers. The outdoor space was one of two reasons she’d taken the ground-floor studio in East Harlem with fifteen-foot-high ceilings and a wall of windows, but barely enough room for a pullout couch. The other was that the building, a block from the river, was thirty-five stories high. She was a “tower runner.” Every morning at dawn, she religiously did one hundred flights of stairs, two at a time with a weighted backpack.

The Empire State Building race was in January and this year she wasn’t going to settle for runner-up. As Grandpa Calvin always said, Qui audet adipiscitur. Who dares, wins, a motto from his days in the British Army.

She’d spent summers with her grandfather, Caleb “Calvin” Forsythe, a physics professor at MIT and devout atheist, while her parents did their yearly grand tour of Europe. Two months every summer were spent barefoot and in cutoffs. He taught her to garden, drive a tractor, shear alpacas, and even to box. When she was fourteen, her parents, fed up with her rebellious nature—smoking, drinking, cutting school—took her out of private school and sent her to live with Calvin full time. They considered it a punishment. The captain in the Royal Army would put her through her paces—but for Max it was the first taste of freedom she’d ever had. Calvin let her buzz her hair, tend his beehive, and didn’t get angry when she accidentally let the chickens out. He was also the first one to call her Max. He liked to say she was the best grandson a man could ever want. And so much like her grandmother, Evelyn, though Max had never known her. She died of cancer when Max was only six months old.

Calvin and Evelyn had met at Allied Forces headquarters in London during basic training. She was an officer in the United States Women’s Army Corps, in the first battalion sent to the European Theater of Operations. They were both in the Eighth Air Force, Calvin a fighter pilot and Evelyn assigned to an aerial reconnaissance mapping team. A fourth-generation New Englander and one of seven girls, she’d joined WACs because she wasn’t interested in staying home and doing those “humble homey tasks”; she wanted to serve her country. Getting married had never been on her radar. But it was love at first sight, at least for Calvin. He’d never met another woman who could do more pushups than he could. His family was brokenhearted when, after the war, he abandoned his country to marry a Yankee. But he followed his heart and never looked back.

Max turned off the garden hose, then collected the cigarette butts and joint filters that the new tenants on the second floor regularly tossed off their balcony into her yard. Last week she taped a note to their door. Please don’t litter in the garden! But today she wouldn’t be so polite.

* * *

Later that afternoon, when Max returned from a sixty-mile bike ride up the Palisades, she found an unmarked package wrapped in newspaper in front of her door. A very “successful” drug dealer lived next door and he frequently received deliveries and questionable visitors late into the night. Max had never dared peer over the high fence that separated their adjacent gardens, but she knew it was no Versailles.

The drug dealer’s door opened; he was wearing a white tank top and overalls, the straps down around his waist. Max appreciated his well-defined physique. The rich dark color of his skin made his body look even more ripped. He pushed his Prada sunglasses onto his forehead. His pet ferret was in its usual spot around his neck.

“Shorty, you’re looking fine today,” he said.

She gave him her shut-you-down glare. She was in no mood to fend off yet another proposition from the drug dealer.

“This must be for you,” she said, handing him the package.

“No, Shorty, not mine. I opened it by mistake. I should have known with all the glitter and shit.”

Max lifted the edge of the newspaper. Pink confetti hearts fluttered to the floor. Another copy of The Love Book. The first had come by FedEx and Max had refused to sign for it. Cathy was nothing if not persistent.

“Fuck!” she said.

“Can’t now, Shorty,” the drug dealer said. “I might have time if you want to link up later.”

“My name’s not Shorty and not in this lifetime, Simon.”

“Why the attitude, mon? Did I do something?”

“Would you tell your ‘friends’ I’d appreciate if they not ring my buzzer in the middle of the night?”

“Hush, I told you last week I’d take care of it.”

“And if I find the service door open one more time I’m calling the landlord.”

“Why you blaming me?”

“It doesn’t take a brain surgeon.”

“You’re in luck, then. Here I am. Your own personal neurosurgeon.”

“Interesting euphemism.”

He laughed. The ferret was getting restless. Simon cradled it under one arm, rubbing its underside. “Truce?”

“I guess,” she said. “For now.”

She read the first and last line of The Love Book before tossing it in the recycling bin. Everyone you meet is a mirror. The sort of trite crap found on the back of bags of Famous Amos cookies.

She showered, put on her last clean pair of board shorts, stuffed her gym clothes and regular clothes—not that there was much difference between them—into her grandfather’s army duffel bag, slipped on her “street” Crocs, and headed to the all-night laundromat. A conspicuous trail of glitter led to the drug dealer’s door, and surprisingly, but also somehow not, The Love Book had been removed from the trash bin.

Before leaving the building, she slammed the service door so hard it rattled. No point being subtle.

* * *

At Suds and Buds, after dumping her clothes in a washing machine, she grabbed a seltzer from the glass refrigerator case, found a stool by the window, and opened the well-worn copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther she’d found at the Strand. Squeeze was playing on the stereo, an album that conjured a time fixed in her memory like Calvin’s chloroformed beetles.

Her father had been livid when she announced she was dropping out of the premed program at Harvard. Moving to New York? After all the strings he’d pulled to get her in? Maxine Latham Forsythe, valedictorian, daughter of the chairwoman of the local Junior League, a fitness instructor? But she’d made up her mind. She’d rather be groped by muscleheads than limp-dick, lard-assed professors with mint-masked sardine breath and all the power.

She would have stayed with Calvin forever, but her parents had enrolled her in summer school before sending her to Deerfield Academy for her senior year. A month after she left, on June 6, 2004, the sixtieth anniversary of D-day, Calvin killed himself. After the funeral, Max drank, snorted, or screwed whatever or whoever was in front of her, trying to dull the pain and quiet her mind and the incessant thought: if only she hadn’t left him. The pain was still right under the surface. It began with pressure behind her eyes, then flickers of light, a knife in the base of her skull. Drinking had masked it, sex had numbed it, exercise had given her the feeling she could get beyond it. But it was only an illusion.

Now that you have gone, there’s no other . . .

A group of rowdy guys crowded around the beer cooler. Like many people at the laundromat, they were more into the free Buds than suds. Max wondered how many of these guys would eventually end up in AA. She’d been clean and sober for almost two years. She’d tried to do it on her own, to cut down, only drink on the weekends, after five, muscling through the days like her workouts, but eventually she couldn’t remember entire evenings or how she’d wound up in some stranger’s bed, again. Giving up drinking had felt like a betrayal of her grandfather’s memory. It had been Calvin who had taught her to hold her liquor when she was fourteen, shown her how to mix and throw back one martini after another as they sat watching the sunset from the porch.

“That’s my boy,” Calvin had said proudly the first time she didn’t puke.

The Golden Hour, he’d called it. The only time of day he ever spoke about being in the trenches.

She’d read only a few pages when she sensed someone behind her.

“Mi hermosa,” Hector said, kissing the back of her neck. Just the sound of his voice aroused her.

She and Hector had met five years ago at a dingy gym on Nineteenth Street when she’d first moved to New York. He was a gorgeous Adonis of a man as serious about weightlifting as she was. It didn’t take long before they became training and—though his sexuality was somewhere on the Kinsey continuum—sex buddies. He gave her a lead on an apartment in his building—a tiny walk-up in the East Village with a bathtub in the kitchen—helped her move in, and built her floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She had few possessions, mostly disposable, except for her books and whatever she’d managed to salvage after Calvin shot himself with his army revolver: his maroon beret, an ivory chess set, a glass-covered box containing his rare beetle collection, and a fisherman’s sweater that she’d worn so often it had unraveled at the neck. After a few months, like every other guy she’d ever slept with, Hector started getting serious. She’d thought he’d been a safe choice, and it was a shame, because he rocked in bed, but he said she was the first woman who’d ever satisfied him. She told him they were done and moved uptown. It was self-preservation. Calvin would have been proud; he’d taught her well.

Hector straddled a metal chair. He smelled irresistible, a mixture of salt, sand, and sun, and if she knew what was good for her she’d get away from him as quickly as possible. She checked the time on the machine. The wash cycle seemed to be taking forever. She considered lugging home her wet clothes and hanging them in the backyard.

“Hiding from me again?” Hector asked.

“I was in Normandy.”

“Oh, right. Pam.”

Pam was her rich client with the Central Park South duplex who’d just had shoulder surgery and couldn’t go on the Tour de Flaubert. One of the perks of being a personal trainer was that she was the recipient of her clients’ hand-me-downs and castoffs, like never-worn outfits from Bergdorf’s, all-inclusive vacations, and the occasional man.

The only reason she’d accepted the bike trip gift had been to honor Calvin’s memory. While the rest of the group went to Madame Bovary sites, Max would take off, visiting military cemeteries, D-day museums and battlefields, paying her respects to the lost soldiers including her grandfather, who had made it home though part of him had never returned.

“I knew I’d find you here,” Hector said, leaning on the back of the chair.

“How?”

He smiled. “We’re almas gemelas.”

“There is no more we. We’re done.”

“We’ll never be done.”

Suddenly, there was a commotion. Someone rushed over with a bucket and mop. Water and suds covered the retro linoleum floor.

“Shit,” she said.

Hector laughed. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you all things in moderation?”

She transferred her clothes to an available washer and deposited six more quarters. When she sat down, she felt the throbbing begin behind her eyes. She’d already done her hundred flights. Suck it up, Max, Calvin used to say.

Hector got up and sat behind her, his thighs wrapped around hers. He always seemed to know. “Close your eyes,” he said, pressing his thumbs into the knot at the base of her neck.

Memories of it still keep calling and calling, but forget it all I know I will . . .

“Mi cariño,” he whispered. Of course the word for beloved in Spanish would be gender neutral.

* * *

The next morning, Max was on her final flight of stairs, making good time, but she knew she could do better. When she reached the top landing, she rested for a few seconds, hands on hips. A rusty bicycle was leaning against the fire door. She disabled the alarm, pushed the door open, and stepped out onto the roof, breathing in the misty morning air. The steeple of the Methodist church just three blocks away was barely discernible. She could still feel Hector’s hands on her skin like a sunburn. At least he’d had the decency to leave before dawn. It was Sunday, after all.