Patronage

THE GODS get by on charm, that’s their secret. It’s the black greasedback hair, the flashing smile that momentarily sears the eyes, the sex lights in their cars that draw us in. Swordfish cufflinks and satin underwear. Salty, whispering lips. The gods glide into our hearts point blank. Slip presents into our open hands. Gifts. El rewardo, as your father used to say. Do you remember our life together? It was a peak time, madness unfurling, and your father buzzing around the edge of it like a filthy little fly. For two years he drove everyone crazy speaking Spanish. His Spanish. El batso, he would say, el nutso. He stole tips off restaurant tables. He liked to tell how he knocked your mother up, banged her against a brick wall behind the Majestic Theatre. They laughed about it at Sunday dinner, your older sister choking on the ham while he demonstrated how her head was flatter than yours. Embarrassment was a kind of currency in your family. When you were a boy your father used to grab you and pull down your pants in front of guests. For a joke. What a nut, they laughed. A pair of nuts, he corrected. El nutso. Your father was like a body falling in another room.

Everyone was writing rat poetry then. I wrote a poem in which the rats had red lips and were the lithe blue princes of the bay. The bay was my bay. The body of water I carried around with me and laid down like a placemat wherever I needed it. At night I set it in front of my downtown apartment, my little seashell slum. With cockroaches running inside the walls along the wiring like a network of familiars, I submerged the heart of the city. Cars rolled into waves that rocked me to sleep. Currents carried drunks and midnight walkers away, their anguished dead-of-night prayers floating ahead of them like black dogs. As I slept, I stocked my bay with drop-offs into darkness and lithe blue Speedo rats with red lips and southern tongues.

This bed of memories is a decaying fertile mulch. I poke around in it and I see your mother coming to visit, trying to comprehend the attraction of dirt fossilized in corners and baggy second-hand clothes. Dents in the wall where people have thrown things at one another, where heads have hit cracking plaster. She braved the stairs and the treacherous winding walk across the roof, and was smiling in at me through the ripped screen when the floorboards gave way beneath her feet. Amazing that they should ripen into perfect rottenness the moment she stepped on them, light as a moth in her white Amalfi shoes. This is what marriage into your father’s family must have been like. Shadows cruising a bloodline for centuries then suddenly appearing, like a bruise, all around her. Those times your father intruded, blundering stupidly over the threshold, bullying us with the wrong kind of passion – and he never sank through the floor. Rottenness upheld him. But your mother married into misfortune, didn’t she, the ground always shifting beneath her feet. At their wedding, all those sleazy uncles of yours stalking the bridesmaids, introducing chaos. Your mother was the pretty one, dressed in silk, smiling, hopeful, disappearing in a cloud of dust.

Your feet never seemed to touch the ground. Not for long anyway. After I moved in, you moved out. You got lost for a while, then came back and found a place around the corner, the landlord a weasel with inflamed eyes. Just the sort of person you like. You decided to become an actor, and then a teacher. Then a mirage. You slid into basement bars with the scum, drove taxi for a time, washed dishes. Got a job in a local radio station and flew to Montreal to buy a pair of sunglasses. Once you went out to dinner with friends and called me at three in the morning, from Baltimore, asking for money to pay the bill. You were a target that never stopped moving. I watched you ebbing in and out of the city, bursting through doors, rushing down stairs. That shirt I gave you for your birthday, the one with the lobsters on it. Well, all I ever saw was the back of it, claws frozen in a parting gesture. When you weren’t here there was no one to feed the fiction. Your mistake. It was your myth, remember. Not mine.

Sometimes, in dreams, you surface. You loom out of a depth, dolphin-smooth and powerful, secrets in your eyes. You might give me something, tell me something. Instead, you flip yourself like a large silver moon and land, bright side turned away, like a stranger.

When you met me I still climbed trees, I didn’t know how to act in the city. I liked running, real running, gut-busting, erratic with dodges and the smell of escape. I had animal blood in me. I was wild and rough like a storm in the bay. Everything in the city looked pissed on – claimed by someone or something else. I kept to myself. You discovered me like a spider under a rock, a coiled snake. You introduced me to your friends, whose tongues fluttered like leaves, and to your father, who said I had big feet. A country girl with all that fierce innocence clenched in two rock-hard fists. Now I’m ambercoloured, uncoiled, down from the trees.

You accepted gifts like tribute. I have this image of the sea and this image of you. People walking down a green hill, stepping onto the burning sand. People trusted you, instinctively. Believed in you. When I think of you I have this image of people standing before the rocking sea, their arms full. Something about you larger than I can say. There were presents from people who hardly knew you. Money and food. Bottles of good wine. Children on the street handed you their treasures, their lunch plums and stones still pocket-warm and glowing with luck. Your friends agonized over the right gifts for you; expensive, special, meaningful gifts with the intensity of their love buried in them. They never seemed to realize that you gave their presents away, and only thought what a wonderful coincidence it was if you forgot and gave their own present back to them. I couldn’t believe the hands extended to you. Strange offerings too, witchy things, knots of hair, paws and tails, talismans, and pieces of glass that were tiny windows to who knows what weird sights. Valued possessions were orphaned on your doorstep. (Once, a jar of pickled bees.) You received unexpected invitations from priests scribbled on holy cards. Life stories from almost everyone, confessions and broken hearts, a jerky stream of unhappiness poured into your hands. I remember this smarmy guy stopping you on the street one day and handing you his shoes. “For you,” he said. Black pointy shoes with clickers on the heels, sweaty and foul inside. He started taking off his pants too, but you stopped him, your fingers touching his wrist. For a time after that I could hear you wherever you went. Clickety-click, on the street turning the corner, smart-ass walking, standing at the door with that grin of yours – what I wouldn’t give you. Then afterwards, clickety-click, duck tail down the stairs. Gone. Blue ravenous sea and golden light, all your gifts intact.

And yet you were never free. Your father just kept reeling you in. You weren’t as different as you supposed; and there were ties, of course, and loyalty. Do you recall that family picnic, your cousins screaming with your father after them, pecker bouncing like a dog’s, cheeks surprisingly firm. He drank too much, yelled too much. Stormed out of the house brandishing the bread knife like a warrior. Your parents’ neighbours were used to suburban violence muffled by huge ball-shaped shrubs, but couldn’t get used to the sight of a man lying in the middle of the road in broad daylight, sobbing. He didn’t like confinement, your father. Remember how he smashed his head and hands through a wall of glass to touch you? He conned you with his blood. Your blood. It made the same black stain on the ground.

I haven’t mentioned crows, have I?

That time you came home from the north, from some expedition or other with an archaeologist friend. It was hot in the city, the way it gets here, the air hypnotic, pressing in, heavy as an illness. Rain, unfulfilled promise. I lay awake most of the night staring through folds in the darkness and got up early. My mind was clear. You were coming, the planet was tilted in my direction. The morning was still as breath held and the sun bulged red over the buildings while the birds, guiding it, sang their urgent dissolving story. I pushed through the screen door and walked out back carrying a box of old party dresses that I’d bought at a flea market a few days before. I lifted them out carefully, organdies and muslins deeply fragrant with perfume and must, and began tying them however I could, by straps and sashes, around the branches of the tree that arched over the roof. Some were delicate and airy, others boisterously polkadotted, or slinky, gaudy as parrots. One of them, densely crinolined and glinting with sequins – worn to a dance it would have rubbed a partner’s hands raw – bristled stiffly on its branch like an aggressive pink star. I hung them all up then sat down and waited. I let my eyes take a spider-walk down cracks and minute paths getting lost for a while in smaller erosions and the cunning creeping politics of rooftop weeds.

About midday a slight breeze slipped into the city and came hissing around the roof, lured to the tree. The dresses shivered and rustled, as if waking from a long sleep. A French lace sleeve lifted – and dropped. A satin skirt billowed for a moment, then abruptly collapsed. The breeze picked at the dresses in a desultory way, tried on one or two, did a slow pirouette in a gorgeous canary-yellow gown, then slipped over the roof, attracted by a squall of red-haired boys skirmishing in the alley below. A keener, more vigorous wind followed, possessing the tree like a demon. One touch and the dresses whirled and leapt, bodied out, substantial as goddesses. This is what you saw standing at the top of the stairs.

And you came down to me, and brought your arms around me, and your body, cool as silk, dressed mine. And something else. You brought the rain.

I don’t know why I started this. Something to do, I guess. It’s a bad habit, straining my eyes backward, whites only directed at the future. I think I wore my face out, laughing. You were very funny. And crying. Sometimes you weren’t. So funny. We were charmed, you said, full of the same quirky light. Blessed. But I’m forgetting: I was the ruthless one. I conjured you and you had to come. I took what you gave me and then stopped believing. I lost faith and you dematerialized. Though I could find you again, if I wanted to. Couldn’t I? All I’d have to do is look for trouble. I know you’re out there endearing yourself to some difficulty. Swimming with sharks, running with rats. You’re the aberration, the disturbance in the distance. Like static on the shortwave, like sin. I didn’t realize then that some things don’t break, no matter what you do to them, no matter how they’re tortured. So many comings and goings. Doors slammed and tires squealing. Who was it? Which of us was left behind the last time to eat dust? I forget. Isn’t that funny. It doesn’t matter now, though, does it? Because it’s finished. El finito, as your father used to say. Over and over. Ad nauseam.