Later that summer, Eddie and I decided to make a real home together. We rented a U-Haul and dragged Eddie’s old furniture out of its cool vault and piled it into the van. I couldn’t see the point of it.
“Come on, Eddie, really, let’s chuck the junk, take the van back, or better yet, go for a ride in the country now that we got wheels. But let’s forget about this junk. Why can’t we do it like other young couples starting out? Buy things piece by piece, things we care about? Let’s just dump this garbage, let’s, c’mon, Eddie. Please. New furniture for our new life, our new beginning.”
“Janet, you’ve got a bourgeois streak a mile wide, you know that? Who here would be willing to cough up the bucks for furniture, for Chrissake? I’m not shelling out any dough for furniture. Anyway, we’ve been over this and now it’s too late. What’s wrong with what we got? We’re not moving to Scarsdale, you know. You think you got to impress the neighbors on East Sixth Street? Get hip, Janet.”
“We’ll keep the bed, of course. That’s OK. But the rest of it stinks! I don’t want to live with that crap.”
“Fine, fine, then don’t. I’m getting my furniture out, and I’m moving to Sixth Street, and you can go fuck yourself.”
Eddie disappeared inside.
The apartment Eddie and I had found was formerly a storefront, a floor-through, with one window in the back that looked out on a concrete courtyard. Next to it there was a door, its faded coat of black enamel paint unsuccessfully hiding deep gouges in the wood. There was only a sealed showcase window in the front, which was wide and bare, but an ancient glaze of soot filtered out the north light and afforded some privacy from the street. And if we opened the front and back doors, we figured, we would get a cross breeze, a real luxury. Our immediate neighbors, on both sides of us, and for most of the way up and down the block, were Indian restaurants. ‘Indians are law-abiding and they mind their own business,’ we thought. What we didn’t get is that five or six little kitchens attract industrial-sized vermin: roaches as long as your arm, rats and the spraying toms that follow them. These animals had us pegged for chumps, for the same kind of shiftless interlopers they were. In the back, our one window had bars but no screen. Wild alley cats immediately reclaimed their turf, stinking up everything: clothes, shoes, the armchair, our double bed. The roaches, too big to kill, occupied the walk-in closet a former tenant had installed during a previous era, when the block had still been inhabitable. The hot water boiler sat right underneath us, in the basement. It was like living on top of a furnace in the middle of a desert. Once we moved in, we just lay there on our reeking double bed until the sun went down. It was too hot to move. We lay there, awake but motionless, steeped in this perfect hell.
But it was hard to admit that we had screwed up. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, for a long time we insisted to our chums in the local gin mill a few blocks away that we had plans for the place. We were going to build a wall here, put a couch there. When winter came, it would be fine. The cats would die of the cold; the roaches would retreat.
In the meantime, there were a few unexpected benefits. We were suffering too much to fight. Victims under siege, we began to draw closer to each other. I sweated off the winter’s bloat. It was good for that, too. The most we ever ate was a few slices of plain pizza, or we’d split some kind of meat sandwich from the old Jewish deli down the block.
In the early morning, as the sun came up, we made love in a new way. Not exactly kissing tenderly, but sometimes into the act a gentle caress would creep. Someone might hold someone’s hand. We lay there with our faces pressed together, our eyes open, as if this were intimacy. Intimacy is torture, just as we had always suspected. Torture. To prove it, we lay there like that for hours at a clip.
Evelyn’s budget whorehouse was not far away. One weekday afternoon, when presumably business was even slower than usual, she decided to pay us a visit. She tracked us down at our local hangout, the Monterey Bar and Grill. She wore a sleeveless leopard-print sheath, which clung all the way to the middle of her calves, and gold sandals. Her toenails were bright red. So were her fingernails and lips.
She walked right past Eddie, who seemed not to notice, and over to where I sat at the end of the bar.
“You look awful, Janet. You look like you could get eighty-sixed from the women’s shelter. What did you let him drag you down for? Don’t you know any better than that by now? Never let a man take you down.”
“Hello, Evelyn, how’s tricks?” I said.
She sidled up close and put her arm around my shoulders.
“Janet, you and I used to be friends, sort of. I’m appealing to you now as a friend, capiche? As a friend. He’s no good for you.”
“Want a drink, old friend?”
“I didn’t come here to drink. Talk to me.”
“I love your son, Evelyn.”
She backed away as if she’d been slapped.
“You’re too old for him, Janet,” she screamed at me from the middle of the empty barroom. “Why don’t you leave him alone?”
“All right, Ev, darlin’, calm down,” Eddie said.
He took her by the arm and led her outside. Evelyn stood facing the sun, shielding her eyes and barking at Eddie. He turned and walked out of my view. I saw her chase after him. A few minutes later, he came back inside alone.
“She won’t bother us for a while.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she wasn’t going to get the chance to exploit your tender, little body anymore, that I was looking after you now.”
“Eddie, that’s kind of unfair. After all, your mother never really exploited me. She was good to me.”
“I told her I thought you were beautiful just the way you are, because I do. I told her to beat it.”
“You said that?” I asked, incredulous.
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
Eddie ordered another bottle of cold beer, then went over to the window, where he stood guard. The jukebox played on. It had a rich sound in the sweet silence of the vacant summer afternoon.
Still not yet ready to give up on her son, Evelyn sent her two emissaries. They appeared at our hangout on St. Mark’s Place the next afternoon. They were there, in fact, when Eddie and I arrived at the cocktail hour. It was one of those late-summer days when dirty clouds block the sun and every foul odor hangs undiluted in the thick air. Eddie was restless and probably looking for trouble, I thought. Except when he saw Michael with his sister, Ava, standing together by the jukebox, he stopped inside the door, pivoted on one boot heel, and walked back outside.
“Eddie!” his sister yelled.
He just shook his head.
He was gone. I remained on the spot, pulled in both directions. I watched Michael come toward me across the barroom floor. It had been two years. His stomach protruded a little more than before under the familiar off-white cowboy shirt that he wore with the shirttails loose. His temples were gray. Michael, my north star—Michael the überman set down among us for our possible salvation—Michael to whom I had always so freely gravitated—my other half! Well, perhaps not. He had lost the light. I compared—dared finally to compare—that punk outside with my old flame, and by God, I loved Eddie more. Eddie’s tight body, his streetwise prowl, those smoky eyes flickering with dark mischief—it really was Eddie. I turned to follow him. Just then, Michael reached my side and grabbed my arm.
“Janet, you know you’re killing yourself.”
I shook his hand away and kept moving.
Eddie and I waited behind the window of the secondhand record store across the street. We watched Michael and Ava come out and look around, presumably for us. Finally, they turned and began to walk west. They were both so tall. Ava in profile looked serenely beautiful, her dark hair pulled back in a luxurious ponytail. Then I saw Michael, in a few quick steps, scoot around her to be next to the curb. He was protecting her. They fell into an easy stride. I thought of how, in contrast, when we walked down the street, Eddie seemed always on the verge of pulling away. But I had chosen now for good. I watched Michael and Ava disappear in the St. Mark’s Place crowd, after which Eddie and I went back inside our gin mill, and I quickly got drunk.
Then right after Labor Day, which Eddie and I had celebrated by getting particularly ripped, my mother wrote to me with a proposition. I think she could smell my misery. It must have wafted all the way uptown to the Park Avenue co-op. She offered to take me away to Montauk for a week or maybe even two. Under other circumstances, even circumstances like the Mohican in summer with its Gramercy Park illusion of a breeze, I might have had the character to refuse. You don’t just desert your lover to go off with your mother, become her not-so-well-paid companion when it suited her. A lover is a grown-up, respectable thing to have, while a mother is not. But she had a hook: hotel reservations by the ocean.
At nine in the morning, an old Cadillac limo pulled up in front of our storefront on Sixth Street. Little children scattered like pigeons, while the elderly men on the stoop at the end of the block turned their heads in the direction of the car, watching its slow progress until they were sure it was not a politician coming to disturb them in the sun. The chauffeur, dressed in a tight light brown uniform, his tie loose, came around and opened the door in an absentminded way, looking off across the street, as if the whole charade were beneath him. Maggie climbed out, wearing a long fake-denim cotton shirt over lavender pants, big, thick prescription sunglasses, and old-lady sandals. She tossed her head and looked up and down furtively, as if she expected beggars or muggers, or both, to leap on her from the sun-drenched doorways.
I stood at the encrusted window and watched her. When had my mother decided to become old?
Behind me, Eddie lay asleep on the other side of the musty old curtain surrounding our bed. The night before, he had helped me pack. He even washed out some underpants for me and hung them over the tub. He was so jealous of my beach trip that the feeling had collapsed, imploded, into one of abject self-sacrifice. He certainly did not blame me. It was every man for himself in this world. He would have done the same thing. In fact, he would go to visit his own mother out on City Island. He would swim in the bay there. He would think of me every minute. He would get by somehow.
“Don’t screw around,” he said. “Promise me, Janet. Even you can be faithful for two weeks.”
“Oh, I promise, I promise. I’ll miss you like crazy,” I said, covering him with kisses.
But I felt like someone who was about to be sprung. I thought of Maggie as my savior come to lift me up from Hades, to rescue me from Pluto and his red-hot underground. I watched this unlikely knight of mine in her fake blue-jean-blue shirt with its incongruous ruffle and her clunky open-toed sandals swagger up to my door. She banged against it.
“I thought we agreed you would be waiting for me out on the street. You know this neighborhood makes me nervous,” she said as soon as I let her inside.
“It occurred to me you might want to see where I live.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
She did look around, though, her eyes squinting in the dark. She pulled back the curtain. “Oh, hello, Eddie,” she said.
He turned under the sheet. His morning hard-on poked up through it. “Hi, Maggie, what time is it?” he said, rubbing his eyes like a little boy.
“Time for us to get moving. Come on, Janet, where’s your suitcase? Let’s go. The chauffeur is waiting out there.”
“Say hi to the chauffeur for me, Maggie,” Eddie said, turning his face to the wall.
I leaned over and kissed him. He grabbed me with one arm.
“Don’t cheat,” he said.