The Rise and Fall of Rocky Love

Rocky sits alone on the terrace in the bright summer evening, a glass of white wine in her hand. Just one glass, she promises herself, to help her relax and stave off the loneliness that has begun to invade her these past weeks. No Connie. No Larry. No Yves. And since Annie and Parker left yesterday to spend August at the beach house, the prickly sensation of abandonment has imploded, creating a cavernous void that echoes, echoes, echoes. She sips her wine and gazes out and down at the city streets. She can see Madison Avenue as it reaches up into East Harlem, though from here she can’t really see the details that far uptown. What she sees is the march of time, the evolution that laid this city and will someday forget her. She will fade away as if she never existed.

Just as she is beginning to feel safely enveloped in the deepening purple of twilight, the telephone rings. She answers it in the kitchen. When she hears the breathing silence that follows her hello, she knows who it is. Somehow, through the ether of night and loneliness, he has read her signals.

“Everywhere, all the time. I’ve seen your show a million times. I heard you talk on stage. I was there, I saw you.”

He hangs up. She stands in her kitchen, surrounded by surfaces she barely knows, and listens to the long drone of the dial tone. Nathan, her Nathan. Tomorrow, seeing him, she will feel so much better.

On Thursday morning, Cat arrives at the penthouse and is struck by the spookily abandoned feeling of the place. She looks into the dining room and kitchen, then proceeds down the hall toward Rocky’s suite of rooms. Both doors are closed.

She goes to her office. On her desk is an empty wine glass with lipstick marks along the rim, sitting next to a messy pile of papers Cat had left neatly stacked when she went home the night before. Underneath the glass is a sheet of paper with Rocky’s large round script. Make a reservation for noon at Leonardo’s, tomorrow, 2 people.

Cat sits down, neatens her desk and makes the reservation. Then she goes to the kitchen to deposit the wine glass in the sink and make a pot of coffee. She skims the newspaper headlines while waiting for the pot to fill, then returns to her office with her coffee and her head packed with a variety of news details she will have forgotten by the end of the day. Just after eleven, her intercom buzzes.

Now that Annie is gone for the rest of the summer, Cat has been pressed into minor domestic services. She doesn’t really mind, so long as it keeps the peace. In the kitchen, she pours a mug of coffee, prepares it with cream and sugar substitute and carries it to Rocky’s bedroom.

Cat knocks lightly and Rocky summons her in. The shades are drawn and the room is dark. Rocky is in bed, propped up against a mountain of pillows.

“I didn’t sleep well. I have to be ready to go out in less than an hour. You made the reservation?”

By quarter to twelve, Rocky is on her third outfit, none worse than the next, none better. She runs back and forth, up and down the hallway, seeking Cat’s advice. Each time, Cat tells her, “You look terrific.” Rocky answers with a silent, worried expression and departs again only to return in something new.

Finally, around noon, Cat decides she has to escape. It’s a drill she has down pat. First, she makes herself visibly ready for outside: hair brushed, a touch of lipstick, purse on her shoulder. Then she advances to Rocky’s suite, knocks lightly on the bedroom door and pushes it open an inch.

“I have nothing to wear,” Rocky says. She is standing at the threshold of her closet door, wearing black lace panties and a necklace of jet beads.

“But if I get stuck on line, I’ll be out twice as long.” Cat knows that Rocky doesn’t like her domain to be left unattended, and would rather sacrifice a minute now for an hour later. “Is there anything you need before I go?”

Cat rides down in the elevator and listens to her sneakers squeak on the marble floor as she crosses the lobby. The glass panels that frame the front door reflect the blinding summer light. Angel, the doorman, comes in from outside.

“This guy out here, he says she’s meeting him, but I don’t know.” He pushes open the door with one hand. Cat sees a man standing under the awning with a knapsack dangling from one hand.

She goes outside and conjures a professional can-I-help-you smile as she approaches the man. He twists around and she thinks she has seen him somewhere before.

He is tall and thin, with thick once-brown salt-and-pepper hair and a long rounded nose. He has a wily been-there face and intense eyes that feel like bullets when they look at her. The eyes are not afraid; they seem to know just who she is, and it frightens her.

“Tell her Nathan’s waiting. Tell her Nathan’s been waiting a long time.” A bitterly ironic smile fans across his face.

She goes back in to use Angel’s phone, and rings and rings until finally Rocky answers. She promises to be right down. Cat delivers the message, to which Nathan replies, “Sure, like I haven’t heard that before.” She represses a smile, bids him goodbye and walks away. He’s either crazy or he knows his sister well.

When Cat gets back from her errands and is alone in the penthouse, she can’t resist spiriting into Rocky’s study to look at the Love Wall — the tilted collage of new and old photos, in color and black-and-white, big ones and small ones, publicity photos, family photos, baby snaps, sunsets, winter trees, every image of life Rocky values. She searches and searches and then finds Nathan in a small scallop-edged black-and-white snapshot from a long time ago. A young Rocky stands with him, arm-in-arm, and they both look dazed. Now Cat remembers what she thought when she first saw the picture — that they looked like lovers — and what Rocky said: “No, that’s me and my brother Nathan, after he got back from Vietnam.” He has the same look on his face, the same bullet eyes.

And she knows, in that instant, that there is something between them, something that has kept them passionately apart all these years. Something that even Rocky Love has been unable, or unwilling, to talk about.

The moment Rocky sees Nathan waiting under the awning she feels euphoric. She can still see the last glimmer of his face, twenty years ago, turning away as he pulled shut the door behind him. She had never imagined they would be apart so long. He looks so much older now, weathered and lined, and his eyes are so brilliant they frighten her. She rushes to him. He stoops to lay his knapsack on the pavement but doesn’t have time before she is in his arms.

“Whoa, watch out, you’re knocking me down.” He staggers backward but manages to keep them both standing. She kisses his cheek. “Hey, hey, lemme go.”

She reaches into her purse, finds her sunglasses and puts them on. Mustering a smile, she leads her brother, her dear long-lost finally-found Nathan, to the corner of Madison Avenue where they turn south. He walks silently at her side. She feels vulnerable, under-clad, in the russet washable silk dress she finally decided to wear. The fabric keeps billowing up, revealing skin. Now and then she receives a glance or a nod from a passerby who recognizes her. She smiles, lifts her chin. After the third time, Nathan says, “Man, it’s too much, little Miss Celebrity, ha ha ha!”

“I’m used to it,” she says. “You’ll get used to it, too, if you hang around long enough, Nathan.” Nathan. She loves saying his name. She can’t believe they are together again.

She takes him into Leonardo’s, a small, expensive Italian restaurant, and is led to a table in the middle of the room. She automatically sits facing the door, and then regrets it; this is a private, not a public, moment. But it’s too late — Nathan has already planted himself across from her.

He pauses a moment, and smiles. “Downtown, I have a little place of my own. Took me half an hour on the subway just getting here, you wouldn’t believe it.”

His eyes, embedded in folds of tanned skin, fix on her. She smiles, he does not, and the strange tension hovers until Nathan finally shakes his head. “Man, it costs a buck twenty-five, can you believe it? I would have jumped the turnstile but there was a cop. Buck twenty-five, it isn’t right, it’s too much.”

“It’s too much for that stinky subway,” she agrees. “You should take taxis, it’s much nicer.”

A flash of humor brightens his face. “Good idea, sis. I have this great job, pays big, I’m a rich man, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Of course I would. I’ve always known that we were both destined for great things.”

Their eyes lock in a silence that is broken only when the waitress appears with two menus that are so large they have to lean back in their seats to hold them.

“The food here is great,” Rocky says. “Have whatever you want, lunch is on me.”

Rocky squares herself in her chair, faces him directly and folds her hands together on the table. She will scale every obstacle he raises between them. She will not let him defeat her; he will not escape from her again.

“There’s so much I don’t know about you. Did you ever marry? Have children? Tell me everything, Nathan. I want to know everything about you.”

He continues to stare at her. “Oh yeah, I’m married and everything, a coupla kids, the whole bit, and I’m a doctor.”

“Okay. I’m a building whatever, I wear this uniform, I’m a whadyacallit.”

Rocky feels her heavy celebrity smile hanging on her face, the one that attaches to her persona like a Halloween mask she is expected to wear and so wears with enthusiasm, the one she hides behind. But she doesn’t want to use it on Nathan and tries to yawn it away. “I’m so tired.”

The waitress stops to give them a basket of warm bread and a tiny bowl of butter slices. Nathan reaches for a piece of bread, butters it and devours it in two swift bites.

Nathan butters another piece of bread. The waitress smiles patiently, until finally he notices. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

“I don’t care. I’ll have what you’re having. That’s what I want.” There is a note of anger in his voice, to which the waitress responds by nodding and moving away. He reaches for more bread.

Rocky wants to ask him about California, about wherever else he may have been, but she won’t do it. She will have to wait until he tells her. She wishes he would show some interest in her life, ask her some questions, help get the conversation, their future, started.

When the waitress returns with their pasta, Nathan orders a caffeine-free Coke, and Rocky asks for a glass of white wine. He eats ravenously. She picks at hers, lacking an appetite. She just can’t get over the fact that he is here.

“Wait!” She gathers her credit card and the receipt and follows him outside into the sticky afternoon. “Where can I find you?”

“You’re too much, sister.” The glint in his eye frightens her in so many ways, for so many reasons. “Gotta go, I’ll be late.” He hurries off in the direction of Lexington Avenue.

“But Nathan!” she calls after him. “Where can I find you?” Rocky stands there and watches him vanish as inexplicably as he appeared.

Cat spends Saturday morning cartooning at her kitchen table. By early afternoon, she decides to tackle her laundry, despite the inevitable crowd at the laundromat. Maybe, if she has some energy left over, she’ll call a friend to meet her later for dinner.

Miraculously, she finds two free machines, loads them up, then decides to take a walk during the hour-long wash cycle. Because she now reflexively avoids St. Mark’s Place — where she last saw Teddy and Isabel together, and where Isabel and Freak sit like a bunion on Cat’s life — she walks quickly in the opposite direction, deep into a neighborhood in which she has grown comfortable. She doubts she ever would have moved to the East Village if not for Teddy. The surface can be frightening, a dragon-eyed tattoo of poverty and drugs and homelessness and hopelessness. But now that she’s been here a while and can see beneath the sur-face — the muscles under the skin — she loves it, actually loves it here. She has seen strength and history in the face of the craggy old man staked-out in the tenement doorway, sadness and loss in the pained stoop of the urine-soaked lady with a matted brown wig who lives in a refrigerator box in wintertime, bitterness and disappointment in the green eyes of the young mulatto man beset with the bloat and scabs of heroin addiction, and the energy of hopeful imagination in the children who each season grow bigger and smarter as they pound their turf like warriors demanding, “Gimme change, lady.” Sometimes they say please. She has seen their faces enough times to know who they are. Sometimes she gives them change, sometimes she doesn’t, depending on her mood. Either way, she doesn’t feel guilty down here like she does uptown when she sees street people, because up there the contrast is so much starker with their poverty set against the background of such great wealth. Here, she lives peaceably with the less fortunate, shops and eats and goes to work and launders her clothes. In a funny way she is more comfortable here than uptown in the penthouse, where she has become a sticky combination of helpmeet and undercover spy.

She walks down Third Avenue, browsing in stores, finally heading toward the homemade ice cream parlor on the corner of Bowery and Fourth Street. She comes away with a big dip of chocolate-chip ice cream on a cone. In the heat she has to lick fast to keep the ice cream from dripping to her hand. By the time she looks up from her melting scoop she is nearly at the corner of First Street. She arbitrarily heads east and two blocks later, as she nears Second Avenue, her cone is a little stump. She pops it into her mouth and chews, savoring the final bite of her treat. Then, as her eyes veer left toward the avenue, she is struck by the sight of Nathan Libbon, filthy and agitated, hunched over a garbage can.

She stops and stares. Could it really be him? It’s almost impossible to believe, this man whose sister has so much, this man whom she saw only four days ago standing under Rocky’s awning. But when she recalls his vivid, haunted face, she can believe what she sees now: a broken man who is either poverty-stricken or deranged or both. She can believe, in fact, that he is just like his sister, lost and desperate and unequipped for life, but with less money or possibly no money at all.

She steps back into the doorway of a bodega and watches him. When he gets what he can from the garbage — two soda bottles, a paper cup and a greasy crushed paper bag — he lurches away. She follows him down First Street past First Avenue. Just before the intersection, he turns into a vacant lot.

She waits a minute before approaching it, then walks by slowly enough to look and see what’s there: nothing, just a few piles of rubble, an overturned rusted shopping cart, a few split retreaded tires and, against a brick wall at the back, a wire mesh garbage can black from fire and two battered doors leaning against each other in a kind of tepee. Inside is a filthy mattress half-covered in green plastic bags onto which Nathan lowers himself. He lies down on his side and props himself up on his elbow. With his free hand he places the paper cup in front of him, then pours in a little liquid from both soda bottles, a Diet Coke and a Sprite. He opens the paper bag and stares inside a moment before reaching in for the butt-end of a hero sandwich which he promptly eats. He washes it down with the mixture of sodas. Then, in one fierce movement, he swipes away the refuse of his meal. His elbow buckles and he lies down, staring up at the top of his ceiling where the doors meet in a point.

Cat turns around and runs back up First Street. She runs and runs until she is back on Second Avenue and heading uptown. When she can run no more, she stops to catch her breath. She thinks she ought to tell Rocky. But should she? There is something so deeply private about Nathan’s predicament; she feels as if she has peeped through his window and watched him undress. Suddenly, she remembers her laundry. Over an hour has passed. She hurries back to the laundromat on Sixth Street. Someone has taken her clothes out of the machine and piled them haphazardly into a basket on the floor.

The Legend of My Hunger

The funny thing about instability is that routines can stay the same for years and years and then one day the whole mechanism just breaks down, as if trouble appeared out of nowhere like the Dark Invader.

I lived my life assuming that my family was like every other family: that Daddy was hardly ever home, Mommy was usually drunk or asleep, and brother hated our home life so much that after boarding school he went to college three thousand miles away. It didn’t seem strange to me that at the age of eleven I did all the housework. Things needed to get done and no one else took care of them, so I did.

When I was in the sixth grade my best friend was Maddy. She lived two blocks up and one block over. Maddy was little, with a round face and black eyebrows and dark brown hair that her mother braided each morning. We had a deal that if I went with her to church on Sunday mornings, she would keep me company when I did my chores. Maddy did not have to directly participate. I figured it was only fair, since I wasn’t Catholic and didn’t believe in church but just sat there and waited for it to end.

The Red Apple supermarket was right around the corner from our apartment. Every Saturday morning, we struck out to the store with a big clattering foldup shopping cart. I carried a purse containing only the blank check Dad had made out to Red Apple, the check cashing card and a letter authorizing me to use it. Dad slept late on Saturdays because his band played clubs until four or five in the morning; he crept in around sunrise, and when I got up I usually found him sprawled out on the couch. The TV lived in my room, so when Maddy came over we could shut the door and watch our shows without bothering anyone. If Mom was out of bed when we left to grocery shop she would follow us to the door, apologizing for not going herself and explaining that she was just too tired. Once we were in the elevator, we would break into hysterical giggles and mimic my mother’s standard lines: “Oh, thank you, girls” or “I’m just so tired today” or “You’re much better at the dishes than me anyway” or Thank god for daughters.”

“You know what it is, though?” Maddy said. Her standard line.

I shrugged. My standard denial.

“My mom says your mom drinks.”

“Everybody’s parents drink.”

“Yeah but —”

“Oh darn, I forgot the coupons.”

“So what? You have a check.”

We agreed that coupons didn’t matter as much if you were paying by check, it was just that Dad always told me to bring them. But a check, being only a piece of paper, was less significant and therefore less valuable than real money, we agreed, and so your purchase was already discounted. In a wave of relief, having passed swiftly through the danger zone of Mom’s alcoholism, we swished through the lobby and onto the street, talking and laughing, dragging the shopping cart.

Sometimes after shopping we would take over the kitchen and make box cakes or slice ‘n bake cookies. I had a rule that before we ate any of it, I had to dust and vacuum the whole apartment. If Maddy was desperate enough, she would help. Wet work — cleaning the bathroom and washing the kitchen floor — was saved for Sunday afternoons, after church.

Sometimes, for fun, we would shut ourselves into my room and read Zap Comix and MAD. And sometimes I would drag Maddy out to Planet Z Comics on 79^th Street. But she didn’t like to go because we were always the only girls and she was developing and it made her self-conscious. So after a while I got in the habit of going alone.

There was not a comic book I did not admire. I read, studied, learned them all: their palettes and techniques, their organization, their quests. And I fell in love with every superhero; it was impossible not to. But I never related to the buxom blondes the heroes saved. Those females were different creatures than me. I knew, even then, that I was not the kind of girl who would grow up to be coddled and protected. I already knew too much about independence, and I didn’t really trust love (at the time, my parents’ love) to make you safe.

I ate TV dinners once or twice a week. Otherwise I would cook hamburgers or spaghetti. But the best meals were when Dad cooked, and then we would have steaks with fancy sauces and complicated potatoes and salads with dressings flavored with mustard or lemon or dill. These special dinners always happened on the spur of the moment. If Dad decided to come home for dinner and wanted to eat well, he simply showed up and said, “Let’s go to the store,” and off we went on our treasure hunt.

We never went to Red Apple for these special meals, but to Zabar’s and Fairway on Broadway. And we didn’t take the shopping cart, either; Dad said it made him feel old. Zabar’s always had a festive atmosphere. Tables were piled with fancy foods — cheeses and dried fruits and foreign chocolates and handmade breads and jams and pâtés and everything the grocery store didn’t have, special vinegars and pastes and all kinds of nuts and fishes and cold cuts and everything, everything, too much almost to choose from. Dad would tell me not to get lost and then he’d charge into the crowd with a plastic shopping basket slung over his forearm. I had to chase him. He pushed through layers of people to get to what he wanted: Indian peppercorns and French mustard and New Jersey cream and Norwegian cheese and German crackers and dark Russian bread. Next we would go to Fairway, whose stalls spilled fruit and vegetables onto Broadway like mounds of colorful poker chips. Dad selected fat purple eggplants and huge naval oranges and shiny apples and long perfect greenbeans and curly red leaf lettuce and the biggest container of cider. He didn’t look at prices, not for these special meals.

When we got home, if Mom was awake, she might dress up a little, put on some makeup and do something a little different with her hair — tie it back with a scarf or barrette. We’d turn off the lamps and light candles and Mom wouldn’t drink and Dad would act cheerful and I might feel good. It was a starvation diet of happiness but it kept us running for years.

Then I reached puberty, and everything changed. Not because my parents changed, but because my perception shifted, my feelings enlarged and distorted, and my role of caretaker started to make me feel shortchanged. It was amazing how a little blood on my underpants at the age of thirteen suddenly altered everything, but it did. One day, I simply pulled out: stopped taking care of the apartment, stopped filling the cupboards with food, stopped pretending everything was all right or would be.

After a while, dust began to grow so thick in the corners that it was visible from across the room, floors lost their shine and started looking shabby, cupboards emptied without being restocked, sinks and tubs developed a greenish hue.

Mom seemed aware of a change; she would remark that things seemed quiet. One day she told me she was lonely. She told me how much she hated my father, how much she missed Eddie. My presence didn’t seem to comfort her at all. She drank earlier and earlier, filling her coffee mug with vodka, convincing herself (and no one else) that it was water. By afternoon her mind was filled with white noise and veils and she was not happy but she was not quite so sad.

It was Dad who looked at the dust and saw dust, not helplessness; to whom a sink full of dirty dishes was a sink full of dirty dishes, not abandonment; who opened a cupboard looking for something to eat, and finding nothing but two old cans of kidney beans and half-a-box of lasagna noodles decided it was time to shop, not give up. So he took the shopping cart to Red Apple and bought what he thought we needed, based on what we normally had in the cupboards. And since the apartment was so dirty he got up on Saturday morning and dusted, vacuumed and scrubbed the bathroom. Then he started coming directly home from work to make sure there would be something for dinner, because even though I had grown into a long stalk of a wisecracking teenager, I was still his little girl and it was his responsibility to see that I ate.

I was very thin and I wore only black, and except for my long light hair I would have been a shadow. I was waiting to get through high school and go away to college, to grow up as fast as possible so I could move out and up and on. I slept at Maddy’s whenever I could.

My happiest moment was when I broke the triple digit barrier and weighed in at ninety-nine pounds.

The harder Dad tried to get me to eat, the harder I refused. He cooked and baked up a storm, left out plates of brownies and Tollhouse cookies which he knew I used to love, cooked thick juicy steaks and overfed chickens and doused vegetables in butter. But I wouldn’t eat off my diet, which consisted of one hard-boiled egg in the morning, one cup of plain yogurt and one apple at noon, and one bowl of salad, no dressing, and a glass of skim milk in the evening.

Mom’s attitude was live and let live; it had to be, since she was so tired of people telling her to stop drinking. So when Dad in despair tried to enlist her in his crusade to fatten me up, she said she couldn’t help, it was out of her hands, I would get hungry one day and eat.

Three years passed.

Eddie lived in Washington, D.C. now, having traveled miles and years from the upstate prep school, to UCLA out west, to law school at George Washington where he was editor of the law review. When he called to announce one of his rare visits, he said he’d be bringing a friend, but only when they walked in one Saturday did our family realize that Eddie was a man and had paired himself with a woman.

Dad made a pot of coffee, which he served in the living room along with a plate heaping with homemade raisin-walnut rugelach, Rose’s recipe. Penny, the friend, sat between Eddie and Dad on the couch. Mom sat in the armchair, looking washed-out from all her drinking and not sleeping enough. I sat crosslegged on the floor in my black jeans and black sweater and black pointy-toed boots, all angles and bones like a stick figure, and felt like Eddie was just some faded-out-of-my-life uncle who’d dropped in for the afternoon.

Penny said, in a friendly voice, “Hello, Cat, how are you?” and I knew they had been talking about me. Then, after an awkward silence, Dad asked Penny what she did, and she said, “Me? Well, I’m getting my master’s in social work,” and Dad and Mom both oohed and ahhed but I just looked at my knee, admiring its sharp bend.

Penny sat on our old sofa like it was something special, in her clean bluejeans and crisp pink blouse. I thought she was too perky and too nice. She was what you would call petite, like a fluttery bird, with brown hair feathered over her forehead and ears. She had that fresh, healthy glow.

Eddie sat next to Penny, looking oddly grownup. Over the ten years since he’d left home, he had visited a total of four times, including now. The first time was after he finished high school, when I was eight years old, and things had not changed that much. He still wore tattered clothes and crazy hair and carried a chip the size of a skyscraper on his shoulder. Then, two years later, he flew out from California for the holidays, and he seemed strangely calm. He had chopped off much of his hair so it was a finger-length golden halo, and he had shaved so his face looked smooth, and his clothes were clean, and he talked about school as if he really liked it. The next visit was before he started law school, when he flew in to New York to interview at Columbia and NYU. He was accepted at both schools, but chose George Washington because, he told me with the old secret glitter in his brown eyes, “Anywhere in New York is too close to home for me.” So now here he was again, and it was 1979 and he was twenty-six years old and practically a lawyer and had a steady girlfriend who was so normal it was weird.

Eddie stared at me, which made me uncomfortable because he had turned out so handsome and I felt like such a dumb kid. What I didn’t know was that he remembered me better than I remembered him, because he was older and had known more about life during the nearly six years we had lived together, when I was just coming into life. I remembered that he was my big brother, his name was Eddie, and he was the boss. I remembered I had liked it that way. I glanced up and found he was still staring, and smiling now, too.

“You’re pretty,” he said. “Do you know that?”

I shrugged.

“I mean, I can remember you when you were a little kid. You were really cute. And now you’re grown up and you’re pretty. And I really like you in black.”

Mom watched Eddie with a strange expression as if she didn’t know why he was saying those things, because everyone knew I was too thin and it was depressing the way I wore black all the time.

But I smiled. “Really?”

“Oh, yes!” Dad said, and I knew he was faking it, following Eddie’s lead in trying to make me feel good, because he lifted the plate of rugelach and practically threw it at me, saying, “Here, have one!”

“No thanks, Dad,” I said.

“You know,” Penny said, “they really are too fattening. But oh, I’ll have one, even though I shouldn’t.” She picked the biggest one off the top of the heap, and bit half of it.

Something about Penny eating that rugelach and savoring it even though she shouldn’t made me want one, too.

Then Penny said, “You know, Cat, I wish I had your discipline. I bet you’d look great in those skinny little dresses they’re wearing now. Hey, let’s go shopping this afternoon, Eddie’s treat.” She touched his knee.

A moment of astonishment flashed across Eddie’s face, then his expression turned paternal. “Good idea.”

“Can I bring Maddy?”

“Sure,” Eddie said.

So I called Maddy, who came right over, and off we went to Bloomingdale’s. We raided the Casual Dresses department, led by Penny’s infectious enthusiasm. Eddie waited outside the dressing room to give opinions when requested. Penny darted in and out in clothes she knew were way too expensive. She looked good in almost everything, and would buy nothing, not today.

Maddy lumbered in and out of the dressing room, whining about how she was too fat in everything, and Eddie told her she looked just fine. She sighed and went back in to change and came out in something else.

When I came out to look at myself, I just stared blankly into the three-way mirror. Everything was too big; I couldn’t understand why they didn’t make clothes small enough to fit. There was only one thing that wasn’t loose on me: a red knit dress, size one, that hugged me like a second skin, and told the truth. I looked at myself in this bright color in this bright light, repeated three times, and was surprised to see so many bones. Eddie stood back and surveyed me. He must have seen even more than I did, because he could see my back with its long knobby spine and skin stretched tight over ribs. I must have looked like a fossil, like a refugee from Bangladesh, like an incarcerated Jew. I hadn’t realized how small I’d shrunk myself. My control had backfired and gone out of control like an overzealous leader who in his desire to rule becomes a ruthless killer.

I didn’t have the courage to turn around and look at Eddie, so I met his eyes in the mirror. His face looked tight, like he was holding something back.

“This fits,” I said softly.

And he said, “Hey, Cat, put some meat on those bones.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, “all right.”

“I mean it.” His voice was low yet strident. “This is Eddie talking, you have to listen to me, don’t forget that.”

When Cat finally turns from the computer, she notices that three hours have passed. Her laundry is still jammed into the bag, probably wrinkled beyond hope. She saves her file on a disk — she doesn’t keep anything on Teddy’s hard drive in case he comes one day to claim it — and switches off the monitor.

As she folds her clothes into neat piles on her bed, she can’t stop thinking of Nathan. Of his filthy tattered clothes, his skin streaked with sweat and grime, his hand shaking as it grasped someone’s garbage for his meal. What always strikes her when she sees lost people living on the street is that they were once someone’s child. They were once standing on the same ground as everyone else before a chasm opened up and swallowed them.

Cat stops folding her clothes and goes to the kitchen. There must be something here, something better than garbage for Nathan to eat. With all the cooking she’s been doing lately, she always has too many leftovers. She fills a plastic container with Mediterranean Chicken Salad, and cuts two fat slices of mocha cake. She packs paper napkins and a fork. She stops at the deli for a loaf of Italian bread and a liter of spring water.

First Street seems like the end of the world, a crack in the city’s surface into which half its refuse falls. In a town in which empty lots are gold mines for developers with skyscraper visions, the redundant rubble-filled vacancies on this street feel like broken promises. And just a few miles uptown live some of the richest people in the world. Cat banishes these thoughts and marches on. She is on a mission, a lone person doing what she can.

When she reaches the vacant lot, she finds him lying exactly where she last saw him, prostrate under his makeshift tepee. The plastic bag full of food feels heavy and she wonders why she didn’t think to bring other provisions as well — a wet washcloth, bandaids, antiseptic, a clean sheet. Mocha cake? Will he laugh at her? She is just considering putting down the bag and leaving when his head snaps in her direction.

He stares at her, standing on the sidewalk, looking in. Then he twists around to his knees and bolts to his feet. “You?”

“I’m sorry.” She takes two steps backwards. “I brought something to eat.”

Nathan laughs with a peculiar mixture of ridicule and empathy. “Yeah, you are. Everyone’s her slave. I’m her slave.” He shrugs his shoulders and her compassion for him returns. He could be her own brother covered in dirt, if Eddie had not had the good sense, or ability, to grow up and get a grip.

“I have my own problems. I just thought you might be hungry, okay? Do you want it or not?”

She stands firm as he approaches her, crossing from his carpet of rubble onto the sidewalk. He reaches for the bag and she gives it to him. His fingers brush hers and she feels an urgency to wash her hands. A symphony of odors fills the air between them. It takes all her might not to run away. He nods his head quickly, for what seems a long time.

“I have to go.” She leaves him behind, standing on the sidewalk, holding the plastic bag. Her feelings are mixed to a froth; she’s not sure what she has done or why. But she knows she will go back.

He is not there when she returns the next evening, and she feels relieved, exempted from the challenge of another strange conversation. She walks into the rubbly lot all the way to his tepee and deposits the large brown shopping bag.

Toothbrush, toothpaste, gallon of water, towel, sheet, razor, shaving cream, peanut butter, jelly, a loaf of pre-sliced bread, a pound of homemade Technicolor Bean Salad, a homemade pear-and-apple pie in an aluminum plate, plastic utensils, a roll of paper towels, and a neatly typed list of addresses and phone numbers of emergency services for the homeless. At the bottom of the list she has typed her own phone number, but not her address. She hurries out of the lot, onto the sidewalk and around the corner — away from the bleak avenue.

At home, she serves herself the remaining portion of Technicolor Bean Salad, with some bread and cheese on the side, and pours herself a glass of red wine. It feels perfect to be locked inside her apartment tonight. Alone and lucky. She turns on 60 Minutes and eats with the plate propped on her knees. When the phone rings, she lets the machine answer.

“Hey good fairy slave. Beans beans they make me fart good for your head good for your heart. You spoil me. Is she paying you for this?”

“Were you sitting there the whole time listening to my voice?” She can hear the honking sounds of traffic in the background

“You have no sense of humor, that’s your problem. I bet she bosses you around. If you had a sense of humor you wouldn’t feel so fucking guilty you had to feed the fucking poor.”

“Poor? All you have to do is pick up the phone and Rocky’ll give you whatever you want.”

“You don’t know how much she loves me. You don’t know how much she loves me.”

“I got two choices, that’s why, only two.” He slams down the receiver and she is left with a buzz in her ear. One man. Two choices. And a lifelong secret that won’t stop resonating in what’s left of his mind.

Chapter 15

You Look Like Someone