When I was growing up in Bangor, I had a white mouse named Sparky. I kept it in a big wire cage that had a gerbil wheel in it, a water dish, and a dish for food. Sparky grew up in that cage, and when he got to be an old mouse and I knew he was about to kick off, I took him out of the cage and into a farmer's field. I was doing him a favor. I was giving him a taste of the wide-open spaces before death came along and gobbled him up. After all, there were probably ten thousand of his cousins in that field, and how many of them, I asked Sparky, would want to die in a damned wire cage?
But when I let him out of it, he spooked. He froze. He wouldn't budge. And at last I figured out why—he wasn't just Sparky the white mouse. He was Sparky the white mouse who lived in a wire cage with a gerbil wheel and a food dish and water dish. That was Sparky's identity. And I'd tried to take it away from him.
It's kind of what the EL-HI Construction Company did on East 80th Street when that rotten old building came tumbling down. They pushed a lot of scared and shivering Sparkys out into the street.
Which was nothing new. People have been blasting buildings and tearing them down and burning them up for a long, long time.
And interrupting the traffic flow.
Everyone's got to have a place to live, you see. Not just to keep the rain away, and not just to put furniture and drapes and knickknacks in, and not just to repaint and have friends over, but because people are happy having walls around them and roofs above them. It's one of the things that make them who they are, and sometimes, after death has gobbled them up and all the friends have gone away, it's just about the only thing—besides their habits, like turning the TV on at seven-thirty, or making meat loaf and mashed potatoes on Thursday, or having a favorite chair to sit in, or calling Mother on holidays and on every second Saturday, or peeling potatoes, or fixing cars. Habits are comfortable things, at first, like a pair of soft suede shoes. Then they become things we need, then they become passions. And, after it's all done, they become a part of us, like our hair and fingernails.
And, like our hair and fingernails, exactly like our hair and fingernails, they last just about forever.
~ * ~
The second time I saw Abner, I was on my way to the unemployment office. It was the middle of March but still pretty cold in the city, so construction had ground nearly to a halt. I was on Second Avenue, and he was again across the street from me, coming out of the same Greek restaurant I'd seen him come out of several weeks earlier. He was wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve, as he had the first time I'd seen him, and again I called to him, "Hey, Abner. It's me. Sam Feary!"
He stopped, turned his head, looked wide-eyed at me, just as he had that first time. Then he shook his head, slowly at first, as if there were some kind of old engine inside him that he was cranking up, and then faster, more furiously.
After thirty seconds of this, he ran off.
I was pissed. We'd been friends, for God's sake. Sure it had been twenty years earlier, but so what? Twenty years, forty years, it didn't matter. I was one old friend calling across a New York City street full of strangers to another old friend, and I was not about to be ignored. If he was going to run off, I sure as hell was going to find out why.
So I went after him.
I lost him momentarily in the crowds on 42nd Street, but I saw him again, a couple of moments later, in a cab going west, slowly, because a traffic jam was in the making.
I watched as he leaned forward in his seat and his eyes settled on me.
And because I was very close to him, and could see him clearly, I muttered, "Good Lord, because it was hard to believe that it was Abner Cray I was seeing in that cab. What I was seeing was like a skinny caricature of Abner Cray, as if he'd decided that eating was passé. He leaned back in the seat, then an opening appeared in the snarl of traffic, and the cab shot forward into it, which ignited a deafening flare-up of shouted curses and blaring horns.
"Goddamn maniac cabbies!" one of the drivers yelled.
"You wanna kill someone?!" shouted another.
And the cabbie stuck his head out his window and yelled back, "It wouldn't be the first time!" then careened down East 42nd Street.
~ * ~
Let me tell you what I used to believe about death before I went to Nam and while Abner and I were sitting in the Hammet Mausoleum twenty years ago, with Flora's bleached white skull between us, the yellow-orange light of six candles flickering on the walls, and both of us on the verge of being terminally spooked:
I believed that death was it! The end. Zilch. Limboland. I believed that if a truck fell over on me—splat!—then maybe I'd feel a second's worth of incredible pain, but I wouldn't feel anything else because suddenly I'd be beyond pain and feeling. There'd be a stinking, gooey mess on the sidewalk that some poor slob would have to scrape up and shuffle onto a stretcher, but "Sam Feary" would be nothing but a name that someone, a couple of years down the line, would have trouble remembering.
Sometimes I think how really pleasant it would be if all of that dreck had turned out to be what really happens when the curtain comes down.
~ * ~
Abner was never a classic nerd. Even in high school he knew enough not to wear white socks with black shoes, slide rules baffled him, and he wasn't abysmally clumsy, although, after gym class when he was putting his jeans on, they usually had a hole in the knee that he'd get his foot stuck in and he'd hop about, on the verge of a fall, until he found a wall to steady himself against. But at heart, he was a nerd. His view of the world was nerdish. He was convinced that as complex as it was, as baffling and unfair and unjust as it seemed to be, there was a niche somewhere in it for him, and because it was his right—asa creature of the universe—he would find that niche and fill it. And once he'd filled it, the world and its complexity and injustice could pass him by and that would be all right. He'd be comfortable, he'd be set.
I believe that he still thinks that way, though he's not so passionate about it. He used to be a photographer, for instance, which was why he came to New York several years ago, to do a big photo book on all that was wonderful about Manhattan. Now he shrugs and says, "Hell, there's just too much to photograph, Sam."
~ * ~
The tumbledown beach house on Long Island, where Abner is now, was owned by Art DeGraff. Art went to school with Abner and me in Bangor, twenty years ago, and I thought he was a slime-ball right from the start. He was a great actor and had lots of charm, but he smiled too much, as if some invisible layer of mud had made his smile stick on his face.
Art married Abner's cousin Stacy in 1975. It broke Abner's heart, and nearly killed Stacy because, after they were married, she learned that beneath his stiffly smiling exterior, Art liked to beat people up, women especially. Abner said that Stacy called it a "character flaw," which made him smile sadly and made my blood boil. Whatever it was, it gave Stacy a lot of pain.
The beach house on Long Island has fifteen rooms, five on the first floor, seven on the second, and three in the attic. It's a very big place, at least one hundred years old, and when the wind off the ocean is strong enough, it shimmers and shakes and complains so loudly that you have to shout to be heard above it.
For a while, Abner lived there. Madeline, too. You'll meet Madeline by and by.
There have been several fires in the house. One, in 1943, was started by a hobo who broke in one frigid winter night and tried to keep warm by building a campfire in the middle of the living room floor. It killed him and blackened the ceiling, but the house survived. In 1962 a family of four who'd driven up from North Carolina and had no place to stay broke into the house and set up housekeeping. It was late fall, and they were sure that no one was going to be using the house for a while—all its doors and shutters were locked, a thick tangle of dead weeds surrounded it, and the nearest neighbors were a good mile off, blocked by a stand of trees—so they unloaded what few pieces of furniture they had in their rattletrap pickup truck, put up curtains, and made ready to wait out the coming winter.
Two days later three of them died when the wood stove in the living room cranked out carbon monoxide as they slept. The youngest of them, a six-year-old boy named Frankie, survived, no one has ever figured out how.
In 1970 the house was left to Art DeGraff by his Aunt Carol. She'd inherited it from her Aunt Bernice ten years earlier. Aunt Carol also died at the house. She'd been leaning against an attic window frame when it gave way and she fell thirty-five feet to the ground. She weighed close to three hundred pounds, so no one blamed the window frame. And it wasn't the fall that killed her. She died several days after the fall when a fat embolism broke free of her fractured right leg, made its way to her heart, and stopped it cold.
No one, not even Abner, maintains that the beach house is a happy place, if it can truthfully be said that any house, all by itself, is happy or unhappy. But it is a place to be, it has walls, several dozen of them, and roofs, three of them, and it certainly must have its hidden charms, too, because whenever I was there, it was awfully crowded.
~ * ~
I met Leslie the day my boa constrictor died, so I was in a pretty foul mood. I have a tendency to grow very attached to people and pets, and though that boa constrictor had been a dismal conversationalist, he was loads of fun to have hanging around.
I was on my way by taxi to Queens and the possibility of construction work (I had a '68 Chevy Nova that was continually in for one repair or another; I have since given it up). On the corner of East 74th Street and Park Avenue, the taxi stopped. I leaned forward and tapped on the Plexiglas partition. The driver opened it a crack.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Earning a buck," he answered, then my door opened and a tall, stunning, dark-blond-haired woman of twenty-nine or thirty, dressed in a long earth-colored wool skirt and bulky beige sweater, stuck her head in, said, "Oh, sorry," and started to back away.
The driver called, "Where you going, miss?"
"I'm going to Queens," she answered. She had an air of quiet authority about her. I liked it. It seemed to fit her.
"Where in Queens?" the driver asked.
"Mission Boulevard."
"Uh huh." I could tell that he was fighting to keep his patience. "Whereabouts is that?"
"It's in Queens," she answered, and slid in next to me. She smiled congenially, nodded, said, "Hi."
I nodded back. "Yeah, hi," I said, and found that my foul mood over the death of my boa constrictor was beginning to fade.
"We've established," said the driver, "that Mission Boulevard is in Queens. What I need to know is, is it in Jackson Heights, or Flushing, or—"
"Oh," she cut in, "yes. Sorry. It's in Jackson Heights."
"Thanks," said the driver, and pulled away from the curb.
She nodded at me, once more repeated "Hi," and smiled congenially again. What impressed me most about her at that moment, as she smiled, were her teeth, which looked perfect, her high cheekbones--which suggested that she was Indian, though she isn't—her ruddy, even complexion, and the way her entire face got involved in her small, congenial smile, so I did not doubt for a moment that it was genuine. I found myself rapidly warming to her.
"Hi," I said.
She stuck her hand out. I took it. Her grip was very firm. She let go of my hand and gave me a quizzical look. "You've obviously got something on your mind," she said. "I didn't mean to intrude." She turned her head and looked out the window.
I said nothing. Although I had been drawn to her almost at once, she was clearly very perceptive, as well as very attractive, and that's a combination I've always found intimidating. We rode in silence for several minutes. At last I said, surprising myself, "My snake died." I grinned an apology. "My snake died," I repeated, as if she hadn't heard me. "It was a boa constrictor. I was attached to it."
She nodded. "Old age?"
"I think so. It was hard to tell. He got . . . listless. He wouldn't eat. And he died."
She said, "It could have been a virus. Boa constrictors in this climate are plagued by viruses. Did you get him to a vet?"
I shrugged. I smiled. It was a nervous smile because, of all possible topics, my first conversation with this stunning, perceptive woman was about snake viruses. "He went too quickly," I said. I chuckled, embarrassed. "I sound like I'm talking about a favorite uncle.’He went too quickly.'" I chuckled again. I looked questioningly at her. "How do you know about boa constrictors?"
She grinned. "I know about frogs, too, and toads, and salamanders. It's my job. I teach natural history." She paused. "And it's a . . . consuming interest, as well."
"A naturalist in Manhattan, huh?" I said.
She shrugged. It was a slow, graceful, enticing gesture. "Yes," she said. "No apologies."
"None required," I said, which seemed to bring the conversation to an abrupt and uncomfortable halt. I stared straight ahead, through the Plexiglas partition, and grinned vapidly until the conversation resumed several minutes later.
She asked, and I heard immediately that her air of quiet authority was gone, "Do you think we have to go through a tunnel?"
I looked at her. "I think so," I said. "You're new to the city?"
“Yes," she answered. "Relatively so." She paused. "Shit!" she breathed.
"You don't like tunnels?" I asked.
She shook her head. Her straight, shoulder-length, dark blond hair moved freely; she brushed it back from her face. It came to me then how strong and sensual she looked, and what a contradiction that was to the conversation we were having, to the vulnerability she was showing me. "No," she whispered, gaze straight ahead, "I don't like tunnels. I keep thinking they're going to ... cave in, especially with so much weight on them." She looked at me. She had very expressive dark blue eyes—expressive, at that moment, of gathering anguish—and every few seconds, as she talked, her mouth broke into a quick, nervous grin. She was sitting very straight in the seat, her hand clutching the armrest, and when she finished a sentence she turned her head away and appeared to focus on whatever was in front of the cab. "Haven't you ever thought that going through a tunnel, I mean"—she looked away—"that it was going to collapse?" She looked pleadingly at me. I wasn't sure if she wanted me to confirm her fear with a similar fear of my own, or if she wanted me to tell her she was being silly.
I said, "No. Never."
She turned away, grinned nervously, looked back, grinned again. She cocked her head a little, which made her look girlish. "Don't you think there's a bridge or something?"
We headed down a ramp that led to the Queens Tunnel. "Too late," I said.
"Shit!" she said. She sat doubly erect in the seat now as we entered the tunnel. Her hand gripping the armrest turned a bright red. Her other hand found mine and grabbed it as if in panic.
I told her, "We'll be through the tunnel in a couple of minutes. And besides, it's been here for quite a few decades and it hasn't collapsed yet."
Her eyes seemed to be glued on the road ahead, and on the white tunnel walls zipping past. "It's like someone else's dream," she said. "Like someone's idea of a nightmare—a tunnel that keeps getting narrower and narrower, smaller and smaller, until you have to get smaller and smaller, too. But you can't. How can you? So the walls themselves make you smaller, the walls squash you like you're a bug some kid's discovered under a rock." She looked pleadingly at me. I wanted very much to hold her, to reassure her. She said, "I'm sorry."
"This tunnel ends," I told her.
"Yes. I know it does."
A couple of minutes later we came out in Queens and I saw that the clouds had parted and that the sky was a cool, pale blue. "See?" I said.
She nodded and let go of my hand.
"My name's Sam," I told her.
"Mine's Leslie Wirth," she said.
"Good to meet you, Leslie." I shook her hand. Her grip was weaker than it had been twenty minutes before. I said, "Can I call you?"
She smiled noncommittally. "Thanks for the moral support, Sam."
"My pleasure."
When she got out of the cab in front of her sister's house on Mission Boulevard in Jackson Heights, I called after her, "You didn't answer me."
She looked back. "About what?"
"About calling you."
"Oh. You're right, I didn't."
"Well," I said, "can I or can't I?"
"I wish you would," she answered, smiled invitingly, and went up the walk to her sister's house.
~ * ~
I called her three days later. We went to a Chinese restaurant called the Imperial Palace, on East 29th Street, where she made light conversation about an aquarium near our table. A cockroach climbed up the side of the aquarium and we both scowled at it. I didn't know what her feelings about cockroaches were then. For all I knew, she could have jumped up from her seat and run away screaming. But she didn't. She said that the cockroach was gone and that was good. I agreed. If she had jumped up and run screaming from the restaurant I don't believe I'd have anything to write now; I think the whole thing would have ended there. So our first agreement was about a cockroach.
I've always thought that people in love should agree.
After the restaurant we walked in a small park near Second Avenue. There were no streetlamps and the evening was pleasantly cool. My arm slipped easily around her waist, and her arm slipped easily around mine. There was no groping, no uncertainty. It was as easy as our conversation. She told me I had a belly and should get rid of it. I chuckled. I didn't like being told that I had a belly because I was constantly sucking it in and thought no one noticed.
"No I don't," I said.
"Yes, you do. You're out of shape."
I shrugged. "I guess I am," I said, and I found that I didn't at all mind admitting my imperfections to her.