NO LIFE IS TRULY INSULAR. Peninsular maybe, but the truth is most of us live surrounded by others. I’m talking about the people who make us ourselves—our idealized, our repressed selves—and in my case there’s one person who held that particular role. Her name was Claudia MacTeer, and even though it’s only a few more hours until I meet her I want to introduce her now, because there was a way in which she appeared to me Athena-like, fully formed. From the moment I saw her I knew she wasn’t a passing acquaintance but someone who had a role to play in my life, a walk-on part like Knute maybe, or a recurring role like Trucker’s (or maybe, like Divine, she was someone who meant nothing to me even as the audience at home recognized her from somewhere else). But whatever the case, I knew she was important. Knew that meeting her would change me. What I didn’t realize was that for the first time in my life I would have a similar effect on someone else.
Right now, though, she’s still sleeping. The morning sun’s strong on her body, coming straight in the high-up windows of her father’s apartment rather than reflecting off the metal surfaces of the skyscrapers that hem in No. 1. It streams into the bedroom she’s slept in since she was born—can you imagine!—and warms her flesh, burns it even, kindles a fire and stokes it until it flames red hot in her stomach, breasts, thighs. In her sleep she thinks it’s Reggie, and her fingers wander across her skin looking for his. Surely it must be his hot hands that burn her so! But their search turns up nothing—nothing except Claudia—and soon enough they begin merely to scratch, idly at first, then more determinedly, as the fire inside Claudia burns hotter and hotter. The heat bellows up and down her body, she can feel it pounding against her skull, and the fingers that try to dig it out of her are themselves pincers that have been stoked in the belly of a coal stove. Even her toes seem to leak steam, and eventually she abandons her scratching and begins simply to toss and turn, stop-drop-and-roll as the adage has it: Claudia’s already stopped and dropped and now she rolls and rolls as what is inside her begins to become what it will be. She’s so hot the metal of her parts, her mysterious biological gears and levers, has become molten and sloshes back and forth until, as suddenly as it came, the fever breaks, the fires die so rapidly that a chill replaces them, what was liquid becomes solid again, but not quite. One piece snaps off even as the rest coheres, one tiny piece refuses to cool and become insensate. It’s been forming for weeks, virtually indistinguishable from Claudia herself, its presence as intangible as a dream, but this morning it comes into its own. It becomes something. Something else. Something other. Other than Claudia. Even in her sleep she knows—she’s been late before, and she’s been waiting for a sign, one way or the other. Now she knows. She turns and roots out Reggie on the bed, ends up with her nose buried in the deep cleft between his shoulderblades, and straight into his lungs she whispers, Damn you Reggie. Damn you straight to hell.
OVER THE COURSE of a week The Garden absorbed my mother’s magic cabinet as greedily as my body absorbed the pasta Knute had fed me. It was impossible to imagine Nellydean shouldering the huge thing around; nevertheless it migrated a few feet each day, ending up half concealed by a couple of tubed rugs and a wooden barrel filled with rusty horseshoes. No. 1 cast a different spell on the computer Trucker had sent me: antiquity didn’t defeat technology so much as put it through its paces, and what should have been a straightforward plug-in job ended up taking seven days. And in case you’re wondering: he’d bought me a Mac. A dual processor G5, 2.00 GHz with a 160-gig hard drive and half a gig of RAM, CD/DVD-RW drive with wireless internet capability and something called Bluetooth I never did find a use for. Twenty-inch flat-screen monitor, DSL modem, external speakers, laser printer, enough software to run a Fortune 500 company. And of course that email account.
Screen name: NYBiSon.
Password: GetNaive.
Personally I’d’ve been happy with an iMac. Seven days it took me to set up Trucker’s gift—one more day than it took the Lord to make the world. They say the Lord formed the world out of darkness but in my case the darkness had a name, and on the eighth day I decided to look him up.
According to Trucker’s watch it was a little before midnight when I tiptoed down the stairs and unlocked my mother’s office and saw those huge humming husks atop the dark marble of her desk, a space-age city sprung from desert dust. The screen saver was an old-school copper penny that caromed from one edge of the gigantic monitor to another, and its bounce lent the room a liquid, golden ambiance. The leather of my mother’s chair was cool against my bare back and the backs of my thighs when I sat down. I was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts: what looked like a pattern of yellow happy faces proved on closer inspection to be cleverly shaded prints of rolled-up condoms, and whatever conscious or unconscious irony had driven Trucker to pick them out was beyond my comprehension, and now I sat in front of my new computer, nearly naked but still shivering in the heat and clutching my wallet to my chest like a scapular, because a week after Knute had returned it to me I’d finally worked up the nerve to look at what he’d said was inside.
Patrick was the man who tried to pick me up in the juice bar, and I let the scrap of paper with his name and number flutter into the trash basket. John was me. It was the name I’d used at the clinic uptown, John Street. But “Trucker”: he’d put the quotation marks around his nickname just as Knute had put them around “ancient history” and “English major,” and underneath the girlishly looped letters he’d written “1-800-SYSTEMS” and a few words. “Call me…” something. It was easy to imagine him hurrying to finish his scrawled message before I came back from the trash can in the middle of the Big N’s north lot—he’d asked me to throw away the wrapping paper my presents had come in—but it was harder to decipher what he’d actually written. “Call me…” “Call me Noman” is what it looked like, to which I could only reply, whatever.
But still: Trucker.
Quotation marks or no, I thought I’d put him behind me. I should’ve remembered it was in his job description to return on a regular basis. Now I stared at his card in the bright glow of the monitor. It took an hour of surfing before I was able to track down a name to go with the number. It wasn’t registered to a person, which didn’t surprise me, but the company name was more literal than I could’ve imagined: Systems, Inc. The corporate headquarters was in Chicago, but its web page showed service centers trailing beneath it like a squid’s tentacles: St. Louis, Omaha, Wichita, Oklahoma City, Denver. Trucker could’ve been coming from any of those places on his twice-monthly trips through Selden. For a while I’d tried to chart his progress by watching his odometer, but all I ever figured out was that he drove eight- or ten- or twelve hundred miles every two weeks. Now, with nothing else to do, I picked up the phone I’d used on one previous occasion, and dialed the number he’d left me.
“Systems, Inc. What is your message?”
The voice, a woman’s, crisply professional, answered before the phone even rang. At least I thought it was a woman. I suddenly remembered what Knute had said, about how often people misidentified the gender of voices on the telephone.
“Systems Paging Service. May I take your message?”
A paging service.
The man who’d given me a pair of underwear decorated with pictures of condoms but neglected to wear one on any of the forty-three occasions he’d fucked me had given me his beeper number.
I tried to imagine the words I’d like to see flashing on Trucker’s Blackberry—tried to imagine his wife’s face, or his business associates’, as they looked over his shoulder.
“Sys—”
“You pervert,” I interrupted the operator. “You got me.”
“I’m sorry sir,” the operator said smoothly. “My computer won’t accept the word pervert. May I suggest—” keys clattering faintly “—sexual deviant instead?”
“What?”
“‘You sexual deviant. You got me.’ Sir.”
“Oh. Um. Okay.”
“Is there a name, sir?”
I stared at the scrawl on the Big N’s card. “Call me…” Something.
“Sir?”
“Call me…Trucker.”
“Very good, sir. Have a nice night, Trucker.”
The line went dead as abruptly as it had been answered, and I found myself where I’d started: sitting at my mother’s desk with Trucker’s card in my hand. I wondered what he was doing. Sleeping in some motel maybe, maybe even with some other boy, or maybe at home with his wife. I could see his body well enough, a ribbed tank top pulled taut over his belly, the overextended waistband of his boxers (plain white cotton was fine for Trucker), but for some reason every time I got to his face Knute’s got in the way. Knute. God, what mean parents he had. It occurred to me that I’d never answered his question: I’d never told him I was gay. I suppose it was obvious enough, but still, it felt like a useless titillation, as maddening as the mementos Trucker kept dropping into my life (I’d stopped sweating by then but my underwear was still damp, and stuck to my skin). I let myself imagine Knute as Trucker’s replacement, Trucker’s beanbag of a stomach whittled down to Knute’s trim waist, his extra chins drawn up like a theater curtain into Knute’s nervous, knotted jawline. Knute was so much smaller than Trucker, yet already he took up more space in my mind.
On my way back to bed I lingered on the mezzanine outside my mother’s office. I could almost feel the dusty air cohere to my damp skin as I looked down at the shop. From up here I could see that the shop had originally been laid out in a gridded pattern like any other store, but the grid had overgrown its boundaries as stuff spilled off shelves, onto the floor, into the aisles, creating wrong turns and cul-de-sacs, detours and dead ends: The Garden of Lost and Found. In the half light, Knute’s slip of the tongue seemed the appropriate appellation for so much junk. There, I thought, that shiny shadow: that was Nellydean’s magic cabinet. And there, that identical shape: that was my mother’s. But everything else was just boxes. Not empty—not literally anyway, just as most of the containers below me weren’t literally boxes—but when I thought of all those closed cartons I found myself unable to imagine what they might hold. Instead I thought of what Nellydean had said before Knute appeared the other day. Your momma didn’t believe in people. She only believed in buried treasure. Down below me ten thousand containers were piled one on top of another like a crude molecular model of history, and underneath them was the basement, filled with who knows what. Walled earth. Rat’s nests. Maybe nothing at all. Or maybe…
I let myself say it out loud.
“Buried treasure.”
The shop’s silence folded around my words—Nellydean’s really—like batter. I tried to laugh, but there was the admonition of those boxes, the promise: we can contain anything. Even that.
Even buried treasure.
The answer to all your questions, the solution to all life’s problems.
The magic bullet, don’t give up hope, the truth is out there. The truth is right beneath your feet or the truth is directly under your nose. Wherever it is—whatever it is—the truth will set you free.
A shiver interrupted my thoughts. I hugged my arms around my bare chest, looked down at those thousands upon thousands of ridiculous boxes. When I first moved to No. 1 I’d thought those boxes might hold my mother, or at least some clue to who she was. Who she’d been. But now, finally, I understood that the past, no matter how well documented, can never be boxed up. If I opened every single container below me I wouldn’t find her—or Trucker, or Knute, or even myself.
But still.
Maybe. Just…maybe.
I didn’t say it out loud this time, but with sudden resolve I turned for the stairs. Blindly I ventured into the shop. Into my shop, I reminded myself—not my mother’s, not anymore, and not Nellydean’s. For better or worse, mine. I piloted solely on instinct, followed my bare feet through a dozen twists and turns of the labyrinth until I came upon a leather-sided upright chest with a tiny brass plate on it. I could barely read the faded inscription: “Johnson Montgomery Croft.” Inside was a column of drawers large and small, for hats and toiletries and undies, and, on hangers, an entire wardrobe: pants, shirts, jackets, waistcoats even, the sorts of things a well-heeled gentleman of the teens or twenties might have packed before embarking on a cruise to some summer spot. The shirt I selected was probably meant to be worn as an undergarment, the pants a little too long and much too big around, but the sandals, tiny, light, and leather, fit me perfectly. I put them all on to see if they fit (a pair of suspenders compensated for the pants’ loose waistband) then took them all off and then, the camphor-smelling bundle clutched to my chest, I made my way back upstairs. The first thing I saw when I entered my bedroom was the clothes I’d been wearing since the day I’d had lunch with Knute, the powder blue tux pants and the ruffled pirate shirt and Divine’s ruined shoes, and I kicked them under the bed and deposited My! New! Clothes! on the bedside table and climbed into bed. The bundle on the table was tiny, pale, shapeless as an anthill, yet it seemed to me abuzz with almost as many lives. It wasn’t exactly buried treasure but it still had worth to me: it got me out of Trucker’s clothes, at any rate, out of Divine’s shoes. Who- or whatever Johnson Montgomery Croft had been didn’t matter. Didn’t matter to me anyway. He hadn’t given me these clothes. Hadn’t forced them on me or slipped them to me unawares. I had picked them out. I had taken them. They were mine.
I closed my eyes.
“Goodbye,” I whispered into the darkness. The fact that no name followed the farewell, not Trucker’s, not Divine’s, not my mother’s—not even my own—felt like a blessing, an affirmation that I was finally letting go of the past, and, after I wiggled out of the damp spot left by my earlier sweat, I slept the rest of the night straight through.
LIKE MINE, CLAUDIA’S MOTHER has been gone for years, but you’d’ve never known it by the family mailbox. The name on the brass plate reads simply MACTEER, but all the magazines and catalogs and political solicitations inside are still addressed to Mrs. Toni MacTeer. Only the bills come in her father’s name. Among the magazines that Toni MacTeer first subscribed to more than two decades ago is the magazine that bears the name of the dying city, a subscription whose annual renewal Joseph MacTeer performs on receipt of the very first notice. By nature he is a thrifty man, but he renews his wife’s subscriptions one year at a time, ignoring the discounted two- and three-year options. He brings her mail upstairs every morning when he returns with the cup of Spanish coffee he’s bought from the same bodega for nearly forty years, and I’m sure he read about me with the same detachment he read about the mayoral campaign and the recovery of Manhattan’s last two native deer and the burgeoning heat wave, and when he finishes his coffee he leaves the unfinished magazine on the kitchen table in a gesture that still, if intangibly, has something to do with his wife, and, more substantially, with his daughter.
About an hour after he’s gone to his bridge game Claudia finds the magazine on the kitchen table where he’s left it for her. She looks at the picture of No. 1 and the photoshopped inset of the two crazy white people floating in the Hudson River (they dropped the image right in a window, as if The Lost Garden sold not antiques but miracles, salvation) and as she stares at the two faces—blearily; she’s slept terribly, has vague memories of tossing and turning all night—she ponders who’s the bigger fool, the one who jumped in first or the one who jumped in after, and she concludes: the one who jumped in after. For Claudia knows: you can’t save anyone. For years she tried to save Reggie, but now she’s given up. Given up and given in. Now she’s just enjoying him while she still has him.
She’s worn nothing but a short silk robe into the kitchen. It’s too hot for anything else, too hot even for that skimpy garment, but she finds it impossible to walk naked beneath the photographed smiles of her mother and brother, and after she glances at the magazine cover (the building’s facade is familiar but it’s not as if No. 1 is the only brownstone in New York City) and the headline—THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE—Claudia puts on a pot of coffee for tomorrow, pulls yesterday’s from the fridge. It’s the only planning ahead she ever does, and only in the summer: in the summer she only drinks iced coffee and she always makes tomorrow’s coffee the day before so she won’t have to wait for it in the morning, won’t have to think even, just pour, and drink, and swallow, which is enough for anyone to do first thing in the morning at one o’clock in the afternoon—but ask her why she makes tomorrow’s coffee before she drinks yesterday’s and she’ll only stare at you blankly. She’s halfway through her second glass and nearly finished with the article about the eccentric new landlord of No. 1 Dutch Street when she hears the key in the back door. Her father always comes and goes through the maid’s entrance in the utility room, just off the kitchen, and she hardly has time to pull her robe closed before he’s in front of her. He wears a powder blue cap, Kangol, sans kangaroo, a red cotton jacket zipped all the way up, and khaki slacks with leg-length creases ironed into them. The ironing board’s in the utility room, right next to the washer and dryer and treasure chest ice box where her mother, when she was alive and when she was living with them, and when her three children were children, would keep frozen treats during summers and winters both, and even though it’s over ninety degrees there isn’t a drop of sweat on him, because her father only sweats when he’s angry.
He stops on the other side of the pantry doorway when he sees her. He takes his cap off and hangs it on the peg he has hung it on since before Claudia was born, unzips his jacket and takes it off and says, “Afternoon Claudia,” and hangs his jacket on a second, waiting peg. The second peg wobbles slightly. It would be better to switch it with the hat, but the old man has his routine, and when the peg does finally break beneath the jacket’s weight, Claudia doubts he’ll even notice it.
“Hey Dad,” she says as her father walks to the refrigerator. He pulls out a pitcher of lemonade and takes it to the counter and pours some into the single glass waiting in the strainer by the sink. “I thought today was your game.”
A little too quickly, a little too eloquently, her father says, “It’s a sad story when a daughter knows only her father’s absences but never marks the time when he will be at home.” He lifts his glass to his mouth and drinks it down in long measured gulps less greedy than efficient. Then, empty glass in hand, he sits at the table opposite Claudia. “So tell me. What does a person do all day? When they don’t have a job I mean. Or a house to clean. Or anything better to do.”
Claudia has a distinct sense of her body, not so much of its nakedness as of the sweet odor rising from her skin, and she prays Reggie won’t decide to wake up right now. Reggie feels no compunction about walking around naked in her father’s house, beneath her mother’s nose.
“Actually, I was going to talk to some people Reggie knows. They’re opening a new nightclub, a nice place, and they need bartenders and cocktail—and waitresses, things like that. A nice place,” she says again, but the phrase her father chooses to repeat is “Things like that,” and in his voice Claudia hears the futility of her words. Her father licks what is either a rime of lemonade or the thinnest line of sweat from his upper lip, and Claudia looks down at the magazine on the table. She’d closed it when her father came in, so she finds herself staring down at the picture of me in the Hudson River, in the window of No. 1. THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE. She wonders if her father noticed, if he read the article, if he remembers his sister and that “dust-heap with the garden out back” his wife used to leave her children at when she was working or needed a break.
But all he does is sigh. “Claudia.” His voice is weary with a single ineluctable truth: she is the only kin he has left. “You’re thirty-two. You’re bright, and beautiful, and charming. Claudia, please don’t read when I’m speaking to you.” Claudia looks from my face to her father’s. There is no sweat on his skin, and somehow that makes it worse, that he no longer gets angry. “Daughter,” he says, “you can do better than ‘things like that.’”
At his words, Claudia’s eyes drop again. Past the magazine, past the table’s edge, to her lap. Reggie had given her the robe, and it’s so short she can see a few hairs where its halves fall open in an inverted V at the top of her legs. She presses her thighs together, pulls the belt so tight it cuts into her stomach, and at the pressure she remembers what it is she’d forgotten until just this moment, the tingle in her groin, the fever in her abdomen, natality like a fire inside her, and she closes her mouth lest her father see its distant glow at the back of her throat. She puts a hand on her stomach, looks up at her father with a wild smile: she will tell him!
But she doesn’t. His stony eyes meet hers, then he gets up and goes to the sink with his glass, washes it and puts it in the strainer where there is also one plate, and one fork, and one knife, and one spoon, and when he’s done he dries his hands on the towel that has hung from the same drawer pull for nearly forty years, and without looking back at his daughter he leaves the room. Claudia waits to head downtown until she hears the closing slide of the doors of the room where he keeps a picture of his bride and the ashes of his youngest son. He also keeps his record player in there, and the staticky sound of a vinyl recording is slipping under the doors’ wheeled treads by the time she’s pulled on last night’s dress and walked past the double doors’ white-painted panes with the rolled-up magazine in her hand. It’s a woman’s voice, but it’s not her mother’s—it’s not his wife’s—but even so, it will have to do.
TRUCKER’S WATCH SAID it was a little before three in the afternoon when I woke up and saw and smelled the moth-balled bundle of faded linen on my bedside table, and the first thing I did at the beginning of that very long day was put on my new clothes. Then I took them off again. I took the top sheet from my bed and used it to sponge the sweat from my skin, then got dressed a second time. I washed the sheets and hung them in a back bedroom. In the bright light of day I could see that Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothes hung on my skeleton as loosely as my sheets hung over the clothesline. A breeze could have filled shirt and pants like a sail, I thought, could have picked me up and blown me away.
I heard the voices as I reached the second story landing—one voice actually, but one voice generally implies another. Nellydean’s voice, and what it said was:
“Get out!”
I think I still could have gone straight out the side door of the building, but the next thing I heard was a laugh, a man’s laugh, so derisive and so confident in its ability to deride that I had to see who could scoff at Nellydean in such a manner. For once I blessed the shop’s idiosyncratic layout. It wasn’t difficult to slip into the room unseen in my new outfit—drab and brown, just like the dust-covered boxes that surrounded me—and make my way, albeit circuitously, fairly close to the main counter, where Nellydean faced a tall man in a dark suit with a white neck and thick graying cap of black hair. His back was to me, and beyond him Nellydean was quivering with rage, and the tall man’s shoulders were shaking with yet another laugh. His voice was condescending: not the voice of an adult talking to a child, but of a white man talking to a black. “Come on Nelly, let’s be reasonable about this.”
“I don’t got to be reasonable, and I don’t want to. And I said get out of my shop.”
“Nelly, be realistic. How much longer do you think you can keep this going on?”
“I been here thirty-six years and I’ll stay another thirty-six if the good Lord gives me that many.”
“But what have you got to look forward to? High ceilings, a little bit of green out back. What if you have an accident, trip over these piles of junk you got laying around. Fall down the stairs or”—the man stamped on the floor, twice—“crash through one of these old floorboards?”
“If that floor can hold you up it’s proof enough for me.”
“Nelly.” The man’s hand darted out and caught Nellydean’s and trapped it against the countertop. “You know I only want to help. I only want to make your life easier, instead of full of hardship and—”
Just then the bells at the front of the shop rang, and at its sound all three of us jumped a little, and Nellydean was able to yank her hand free as a woman’s smoky voice drifted into the room.
“Aunt N.D.?”
A chill tickled my spine. Aunt N.D. The title simplified Nellydean, rooted her in the mundane world of family life. I call it mundane, though to me, who had an attenuated relationship to my forebears, it felt exotic, and the sudden knowledge that Nellydean had a family—Aunt N.D. they called her—distracted me so much I forgot the person who had so named her until she spoke again.
“‘S’everything okay?”
The voice was quiet and deep and had a slight drawl to it—not a drawl actually, but a slur, as if the speaker were a little bit drunk. But underneath that was a kind of bubbling. A fizz, an effervescence.
Nellydean didn’t say anything immediately, and the man didn’t either. He turned slightly, toward the door, and for some reason his profile reminded me of the man I’d pulled from the river, even though the impression this man gave was of brutish strength and his voice didn’t sound anything like that other man’s. Nellydean turned toward the door as well, and I thought I saw the slightest trace of fear on her face. Not for herself, but for the person who’d called out to her.
When I turned I didn’t see anything at first, only the shadowy interior of the shop. Then a silhouette the shape of a pop bottle or a keyhole emerged from its darkened grotto, a woman cloaked in a shiny silver dress, a river of fabric flowing over every one of her body’s ample curves on its way to the floor. Her arms were bare, and her throat and her face, and her honey-colored skin was as iridescent as her dress, slicked by a film of sweat. A purse hanging by a chain as thin as the one that had once held my mother’s key dangled off one shoulder, and she clutched a magazine in both hands rolled up like a scroll. And she was her aunt’s niece: she took silent steps, her feet invisible beneath her dress, so that it seemed she wasn’t walking but floating toward me, her black eyes wide and blank and bright, and even after she’d stepped all the way into the light I could’ve sworn there was an inch of empty space between the bottom of her dress and the floor, and then Nellydean said,
“Claudia.”
My knees almost buckled. The only thing that had happened was that Nellydean had spoken a name aloud, but in that one word was a host of emotions I’d never heard applied to my name—not just love, or concern, but something more complex. Resignation, even disappointment. An entire history was alluded to: Nellydean knew this woman. She had relations with her.
The woman called Claudia was smiling uncertainly.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
“Mr. Dinadio was just on his way out.”
The half of Mr. Dinadio’s face I could see creased into a smile. “Good morning,” he said, the way country folk say goodbye, “Claudia.” He turned toward Nellydean. “I had no idea you had such a pretty niece. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other real soon.”
It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to Nellydean or Claudia, but as he passed Claudia his head inclined slightly. I couldn’t see his face but I could tell he was checking out Claudia’s figure; but Claudia was the kind of woman who could look a man in the eye while he examined the merchandise and let him know in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t afford it. She continued to stand in the same spot after the man had walked past her—as if, in case he turned around, she wanted to offer the best possible view—but as the bells rang and the door was swinging to she giggled and called out: “Bye-bye, Sonny.”
The words took me by surprise. My eyes had been fixed on the magazine Claudia held in her hands. The portentous funnel reminded me of the rolled-up newspaper Nellydean had carried the day she found me sleeping on my mother’s desk, but then the name Sonny came out of Claudia’s mouth and the newspaper was gone, and my mind flashed instead to the top of the dark-haired head I’d glimpsed from my bedroom window, the bulky body that had leaned out the driver’s side door of the white van. I craned my head then, tried to catch a last glimpse of the man, Sonny, Mr. Dinadio, Sonny Dinadio, she used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was, well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid, but all I could see was a white glare that filled one of the front windows. Then a door slammed, an engine started. The white disappeared from the window, and I realized it hadn’t been glare at all. It had been Sonny’s van.
The click-clack of footsteps pulled me back into the shop. The woman called Claudia had lifted the hem of her skirt with the hand that held the rolled-up magazine, and now she half ran, half danced toward her aunt on a pair of thin high heels. She dropped the magazine on the counter and Nellydean leaned over to receive a kiss, and even before she straightened up she said,
“Girl, where you been at? You smell like a cigarette put out in a beer can.”
“Oh, Reggie got me a interview at some—” A limp wave of Claudia’s hand completed the sentence.
Nellydean frowned. “That man still blowing his horn?”
“He’s a singer, Aunt Endean.” Not N.D. then—Endean.
“Like I said—”
“Hey!” Claudia smacked the magazine on the counter. “D’you see this?” Again the slur—was she drunk? “I couldn’t believe it. Right on the cover.”
Nellydean glanced disdainfully at the magazine. “You come all the way down here just to meet him?”
And here, for the first time, Claudia faltered.
“Well, I, uh, I mean—”
“Save your excuses,” Nellydean said, her voice sharp but softened by a half smile—which wasn’t, I suddenly realized, directed at Claudia. It was aimed at me. Her eyes had found mine through the same gap in the shelves I was using to look at her and, mockingly, she said, “He’s right behind you.”
Claudia twirled around. The magazine came with her, flapped wildly in her hand, slapped against her abdomen. So did her dress: the shiny material spiraled away from her body then fell to rest against it. Her breasts moved inside their thin lining, the nipples plainly visible, also the bite of her underwear at the top of her hips. But it was her eyes I focused on as I crashed through the shelves: Claudia’s eyes were two glowing black stars, and as I half stumbled, half catapulted my way toward her I realized she wasn’t drunk at all. She was high as a kite. Her eyes opened so wide as I charged toward her that I could see a white ring around her glowing pupils, and I’m not sure if her “Oh!” was a cry of delight or fear because I’d grabbed the magazine from her hand and turned away before she had time to say anything else. I tore wildly through the shelves in a vain attempt to escape through the front door, but the path through them—the same path I’d negotiated with such ease last night—had become completely unfamiliar to me, and even as I wondered if it were my new sandals that were confusing my feet I suddenly burst upon the doors to the garden, wide open and waiting for me, while behind me Nellydean’s voice filled the shop with a plaint so resigned it sounded like an echo of itself:
“It’s about time you showed up. I got a job for you.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or Claudia, but in either case I ignored her. I ripped through pages as I ran into the garden, practically tearing them from the magazine, until finally I saw the same picture that had been on the cover of the Post. Instead of TAKING THE PLUNGE the headline was THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE, and instead of a one- or two-line caption there was…well, there was this:
This is not your typical New York story, because James Ramsay is not your typical New Yorker.
The eighteen-year-old Kansas native is hardly a New Yorker at all. He’s been here less than a month. But already he owns a building and antiques store improbably located in the heart of Wall Street—and he’s already taken a dive into the Hudson River.
Ramsay passed his formative years in a kind of country idyll, working on his foster parents’ farm in Kansas from dawn to dusk, time grudgingly taken off for school and church. The orphan laid miles of fence, sowed acre upon acre of corn, worked round-the-clock to bring in the harvest before hail storms could beat it to the ground. Such old-fashioned values stood the slightly built youth in good stead on that sweltering summer day—92 in Central Park but perhaps a little cooler at river’s edge—when he saw Thomas Muirland struggling against the current that swept him toward the treacherous pilings of a derelict pier at the edge of Chelsea. Without any thought for his own safety, Ramsay shucked his shoes, scaled the fence and launched his wiry frame into the not-quite-dirty water of the Hudson. Witnesses report Ramsay was under water so long they feared he’d been sucked away by one of the river’s notorious undertows, but eventually the boy’s somewhat ragged light brown crewcut poked through the oily water and began to bob toward the ailing Muirland. Muirland struggled in the youth’s grasp, perhaps not recognizing him as his savior. One man says Ramsay had to smack him to subdue him, another that he managed to pin the weakened older man’s arms to his side. But one woman insists Ramsay planted a kiss on Muirland—a good long smacker right on the lips—and only after that was he able to drag Muirland’s body to the shore like an abandoned pool toy.
“I don’t think of myself as—
“Ginny’s son?”
A voice cut into my reading. Claudia’s voice. I looked up and there she was.
“You’re Ginny’s son,” she said again. “Holy mother of God.”
NOW: CLAUDIA.
In that dress, in the garden.
She looked like a skyscraper’s sapling or a pillar of salt or a steel pylon, the relic of a lost future civilization. Knute’s fictitious biography had eclipsed the morning’s actual events from my mind, but now Claudia was in front of me, and Claudia was real. In the garden’s light I saw that the iridescent material of her dress was stretchy and velvety, and that here and there—at the side of her hips and the vale of her cleavage—the velvet had worn smooth. The smooth places suggested not so much age as the impress of hands on softness—soft velvet, soft flesh—and she held, in one of her own hands, her silver shoes, and in the other her purse. The only hardness to her was her hair, covered in tightly marcelled fingerwaves. She had a tentative, inscrutable smile, and these were the first words she actually said to me. She said:
“How does it feel to be a hero?”
And I thought: how did it feel? I looked down at the magazine, tried to summon up the feeling of the river, of that man—Thomas Muirland was his name—his body against mine, but all that came was a tingle in my lips, a faint reminder of his stubbled cheek. I tried to remember what it had felt like watching the deer from behind a tree because that seemed part of it too, and I tried to remember what it had felt like eating lunch with Knute, but all I remembered was red fur and blue eyes, which is another way of saying I didn’t remember anything real at all. I looked down at Knute’s article, searching for the end of the sentence I’d just read, but all I saw was “I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man.” The sentence was in quotation marks, as if I’d said it, and I decided to try it on for size. I said:
“I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man.”
Claudia shrugged. “Whatever.” She tried to open her purse’s tiny clasp with the hand that held her shoes, couldn’t. “Hold these?”
She took a step toward me, I took a step toward her; there was still a step between us. Claudia looked at me.
“Don’t worry, I just want a cigarette, brotherman.”
I took the second step and took her shoes from her. They seemed impossibly light and flimsy, and I couldn’t imagine how they’d held up a whole woman. But the tiny platforms, pillared and sloped like miniature slides, were still warm from Claudia’s soles, still smelled of feet.
I jumped back when I felt Claudia’s hand on my head. Claudia was looking at my hair but her eyes were only half focused.
“Nappy.” Then: “I guess white folks call it shaggy. You could use a haircut, Mr. Ramsay.”
She let her hand rest on my scraggly skull a moment longer, then took it off to light her cigarette. The lighter flicked and she inhaled deeply, held the smoke in with closed eyes.
“That’s the ticket,” she said after she finally exhaled. But as soon as the words and the smoke were out of her mouth confusion clouded her face. She looked down at the cigarette pinched between the tips of her thumb and middle finger—Lily Windglass, who preferred the plierslike clamp of extended middle and index fingers, used to say only fags and foreigners smoked that way—then she looked around the garden until her eyes ended up on me. “Do you want this?”
“Um, I don’t smoke?” I said, although I was thinking that if she asked me too I just might.
Claudia looked around again. “Oh well.” She dropped the cigarette on the ground. A bare foot emerged from beneath her dress to stamp it out and I lunged forward.
“Careful!” I said, catching her waist with my arm. Claudia oofed in my face, a jet of residual smoke and alcohol and something else, something sweet, minty, and I remembered that she was high as we tumbled to the ground.
The cigarette smoked silently in the grass.
Claudia propped herself on her elbows, gave me a sloppy grin.
“What is it with you, a compulsion?”
“What’s what?”
“The hero thing. ‘Saving people.’” Like Knute, Claudia made quotation marks with her fingers, but because her elbows were on the ground her fingers seatbelted her waist. “Anyway, thanks. I dated a guy who was into the whole cigarette thing, and believe me, it was no fun.” She was brushing herself off when she noticed the look on my face. “Um, I was joking? Hello? Irony?”
I stood up, put the cigarette out with the sole of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s sandal and picked up the butt. Lacking anything else I ripped a page from the magazine and folded the crushed cylinder inside it, and as I smoothed creases into Knute’s words I found myself thinking of his hand—of his finger, dipping into the pocket over his heart. “Trying to quit?”
Claudia’d sat up but showed no inclination to stand, instead stared down at the taut plain of dress pulled tight across her thighs.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What are you, pregnant?”
The look Claudia flashed me was filled with such fury and fear that I crunched up the folded page in my hand.
“Didn’t your momma teach you to mind your own business?”
“My ‘momma’ abandoned me when I was a year old,” I shot back. “For all of ‘this.’” In lieu of quotation marks I threw the crumpled page in the direction of the shop.
With a little laugh Claudia attempted to compose herself.
“Well then,” she said, and held up a hand to me, palm down, wrist relaxed, as if to be kissed. “I’m Claudia.”
I ignored her hand. “I know that.”
“I’m Claudia MacTeer.”
I hesitated, then decided to play along. “That I didn’t know.” I took her hand, but instead of kissing it I hauled her to her feet.
Claudia whooped as she came up, caught on to me to keep from toppling in the other direction. Her giggle was more of a snigger, at her own intoxication I think, and, indecorously, she pulled her dress out of the crack of her ass, then stepped back and curtseyed as if we were meeting at a cotillion.
“And you are?”
I retrieved the magazine from the ground and held its surreal headline beside my face. “I’m the man who saves people.”
And suddenly we were friends. Or almost friends. As good as friends. I don’t know how else to put it. The choreography of introduction had been managed, or mangled, and Claudia began walking deeper into the garden with the steady stride—well, not so steady actually—of someone who expects to be followed. Her dress had inchwormed up her body, and as she smoothed it down her hips she called back,
“Stop staring at my ass.”
“How do you know I’m staring at your ass?”
“Because,” Claudia said, and turned back to me. “Boys always stare at my ass.”
I put my hand to my chest, fingers splayed. “Even boys like me?”
Claudia squinted, then put a like hand to her chest and said, “Especially boys like you.” A complicated series of expressions distorted her face. “Who would’ve figured? Ginny’s son a fag. I guess this is one case where no one can blame the mother. Oh, I don’t mind,” she said as if I’d protested. She turned and continued into the garden. “Just don’t go gettin’ all black girl on me, okay?”
A dozen pitchy trunks made a miniature pine forest, then all at once ended in a tiny clearing. Eight mulberries marked the clearing’s perimeter: you could see someone had spent years espaliering the mulberries into a bower, ragged-edged now, but filled with green-gold light and the sound of birds and the faint mechanical hum of air conditioning in the adjacent buildings.
“Look,” Claudia said. She pried open the tentacles of wisteria that formed the bower’s misshapen arched entrance. Within the vine-tree’s depths I could see fragments of trellis, flecks of white paint still clinging to broken lath like barnacles. “We used to play here when we were kids. Me and Ellis and Parker.”
“Your…brothers?”
Claudia looked me full in the face, and in a voice that was more warning than invitation she said, “They were.” Then she turned back to the bower. “Oh look!” she said again, the warning gone, her voice all childish glee.
It took me a moment to make it out. A table, three chairs. They were made of rusted metal and were nearly invisible beneath—inside—a mound of vines in the center of the tiny clearing.
“I guess it’s been a while since you were kids.”
“It’s been a while since they were alive.” Claudia’s eyes darted to the magazine in my hand. “Families, huh?”
I wasn’t sure if she was referring to hers or mine. “I wouldn’t know.”
But Claudia was already heading to the far side of the mound of vines. She attempted to pull out a chair, and I knew from the way she’d circumnavigated the table that this had been her chair. It only moved a few inches, and Claudia pushed as much vine off it as she could and plopped down. She sat there as if exhausted, or defeated. Her back slumped, her head hung, the soft flesh under her jaw pushed up into a double chin. “My God,” she said without looking at me. “I am too old for this game.”
I don’t know why but I took that as license, and went to the chair across from hers. The magazine, nearly weightless, floated on a hammock of leaves and vine, but my sharp elbows poked right down to the table’s rough metal weave. It was uncomfortable, yet also comforting. It felt good to be more substantial than the stories Knute had made up about me.
Claudia started a little when I sat down, and I saw that her fingers were pressed into the soft little mound of her stomach. I noticed the lines around her bright wet eyes, the gray strands scattered through the scalloped skullcap of her hair.
“Who was it?” She raised the almost-firm flesh of her arms above her head in a modern dance pose. “Mythology. Turned into a tree.”
“Daphne,” I said. “Among others.”
“Right. Why was she—”
“To protect her chastity.”
Claudia’s not-quite-plump arms fell to her lap. “I guess it’s too late for me,” she giggled, reaching across the table and turning the magazine toward her. “So. What questions do you think your Kay would have if he were here?”
“Kay?”
Claudia tapped the magazine, and for the first time I noticed the cover story’s byline: “THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE, by K. Lingon.”
“Not exactly a judicious use of the leading initial.” Claudia looked back at me. “So? I’m sure you must be full of questions.”
I thought, given the circumstances, that it should be Claudia who was full of questions—it was my picture on the cover of New York magazine, after all, not hers—but she only stared at me with a wide-open smile, slightly less opened eyes.
“What’re you on anyway?”
Claudia giggled and made the sign for a toke.
“Weren’t you worried about the baby?”
“Don’t preach at me, boy,” Claudia frowned. “I get enough of that from my father and her in there.” Then, again, she tried to draw me out. Draw me in rather, to her world, her past, rather than mine. “I believe the expression,” she said, waving her shoeless feet in the air, “is barefoot ‘n’ pregnant.”
“Who was that man in there?”
“Who was—oh. You mean Sonny.”
“Sonny Dinadio.”
“I haven’t seen Sonny for years. Not since—oh!” She looked me in the eye with what I thought was a knowing expression. “Not since Ginny was around.”
I waited for her to continue, but she looked down at the polished tops of her toenails—midnight blue, not yet chipped—and then she folded over at the waist until her stomach rested on her thighs and her breasts ballooned over her knees. A finger snaked down and picked at something on one toe, and when she finished the polish was chipped.
All the sudden she turned to me. “Can I tell you something?” She was still bent over, bent way over, her skin stretched tight as canvas and her lips pulled apart by a line of tautness that pulleyed around her hip joint all the way to her feet.
“Only if it’s about Sonny Dinadio.”
At my words Claudia sat up and turned the full light of her face toward me, as if I’d said exactly what she wanted to hear. She sucked in a breath, then wheezed out, “Sonny Dinadio wants to buy No. 1 but Endean won’t sell to him. Do you know why?”
“Because it’s not hers to sell?”
Claudia’s smile faded, her eyes fell to the table. But then she said, “Oh look!” once again, and there, suspended by pale green corkscrews of vine, shrouded by leaves, were three teacups. “After all these years!” She reached for one of the cups but the vines resisted, and slowly, tenderly, she began to extract it from their grasp.
“Sonny Dinadio,” I prompted.
“Right.” Claudia’s interest in this relic of my past had been superseded by the teacups, a relic from hers. “The shop’s been losing money for decades, and Sonny’s offered Endean, like, a lot of money. But she’s not even interested.”
I recalled the conversation I’d overheard between Sonny and Nellydean.
“Sonny Dinadio wants to buy No. 1?”
“He’s offering, like, millions. But Endean doesn’t care.” She’d freed the first cup, was on to the second. “Your mother wouldn’t sell either. The IRS has been sucking this place dry for as long as I can remember but your mother wouldn’t sell to Sonny Dinadio or anyone else.”
“Claudia,” I said then, using her name for the first time. “Is Sonny Dinadio my father?”
Claudia’s fingers stopped what they were doing but her eyes remained fastened on them, and then she unwrapped the last tentacle of vine from the second teacup. It was full of rainwater and she handled it gingerly, clearing a little space on the table and setting it upright.
“I didn’t know your mother well. But she said to me once—she told me she’d made a provision for the building. Set something aside.” The last cup wouldn’t twist free and, clucking her tongue, Claudia gave it a little tug. I think she expected the clinging strand of vine to snap but the handle did instead, and she winced a little, set the cup down. She worked the sliver of handle from the coil of vine and dropped it inside the cup. “Parker,” she said, more to the cup than to me, and only then did she look up. “She said it was in the building or the garden. She didn’t say which, but she said it was worth a fortune.”
She was coming down, I saw then. Fatigue weighted her eyelids until they sagged like half-lowered curtains; the light beneath had dimmed to a smolder. She moved the teacups around the table like an open game of three-card Monte until I couldn’t hold myself back any more. I grabbed both her hands to still them. The sleeves of my new shirt came all the way to my knuckles, covering up my watch and my bones but not quite my desperation, and I tried not to squeeze too hard.
“Claudia,” I said when she finally looked into my eyes. “Are you talking about buried treasure?”
The words surprised me. I’d meant to ask her about Sonny, not some fairy tale I was pretty sure Nellydean had cooked up—probably, it occurred to me now, to keep me from selling the building to Sonny—but Claudia didn’t look up from the teacups.
“Endean used to call it that. She said there ain’t no such thing as buried treasure but if I wanted to waste my time looking it was my own life I was throwing away. Sonny’s not your father, Jamie. Your mother always said she didn’t know who that man is.” It was only when her fingers went slack in mine that I realized she’d been gripping my hands as tightly as I’d gripped hers. “Knew,” she amended herself. “Was.” Then: “James.”
For a moment I saw us from a distance, sitting on opposite sides of a table with the palms of one in the palms of the other, a supplicant seeking guidance from a soothsayer. I saw the teacups, white, crazed like eggs too long boiled. The faintest shadow of pattern—vines perhaps, or perhaps simply woven lines—was visible around their brims, and I thought, this is what The Garden is. Not a physical maze but a mental one. A skein of warped perception, lines of history tangled up and rendered indistinguishable. But every once in a while something slips free, and almost always it’s something beautiful. Something, at any rate, so filled with the promise of meaning it acquires beauty, like a rusty key hatched from a ceramic egg. Sometimes it’s easier to believe in a metaphor than the truth, and if that’s true then I believed in buried treasure: three teacups, one filled with water, another holding its own broken handle, the third empty, as perfectly synced with the lives they represented as a high-noon shadow.
I picked up the water-filled cup.
“Yours?”
Claudia nodded.
I pointed to the empty one. “Then that must be Ellis’s.”
Claudia nodded again.
For the first time I noticed there wasn’t a ring on her finger, and I wasn’t surprised so much as I was…sad, I guess. For Claudia. I wanted my question to be larger than what was in front of us, so I said, “What happened to your family?”
Claudia saw where my eyes were aimed and pulled her hands from mine. She smiled as she shook her head, her solicitations of five minutes before replaced by sudden if tender withdrawal.
“I won’t be a representative of my past,” she reproached me, “let alone for the race,” but her voice was gentle. “Not for my father, and not for you either.” One of her ringless hands took her teacup from me and drank the water in it, and she made a face. “Acid rain,” she giggled. But then she looked at the three cups for a long time and her face went soft. “Drugs,” she said finally. “It’s a black thing. I’m sure you understand. Enough stories for one day,” she went on in a firmer voice. She stacked the three cups together, Ellis’s holding Parker’s holding its handle, Claudia’s on top of them. Then she looked up at me, and it was as if the water from her cup had welled into her eyes. “I can’t go home like this. Can I sleep here for a while? Please?”
I put her in my bedroom, on my sheetless bed. She asked me for a T-shirt to sleep in and in the time it took me to pull one of Trucker’s Stephen Sprouse wannabes from a drawer Claudia had slid her dress down her body, where it lay at her feet looking for all the world like a rolled-up condom. She stood within its ring of safety in surprisingly chaste broad-bottomed white panties and strapless bra, idly scratching one of her wrists.
“What you looking at, boy?”
I blushed and stammered, “Y-you left your shoes in the garden.”
Claudia just smirked as she pulled the T-shirt over her neck. Her arms writhed under the shirt and I wondered if she were too stoned to find the sleeves, but then her bra fell to the floor and her hands poked out the sleeveholes. She scratched her wrist again, looked down at it, frowned. Then she lay down on the bare mattress and languorously rolled on to her stomach. “You’re my hero,” is what I think she said, but the pillow muffled her words.
She rolled on her back then. Her eyes were sealed, her right hand scratched her left, her mouth was a thin slit between lipstick-mottled lips. She reached for a sheet but it was still drying in the back room, and her hands pulled warm air up over her body.
“Claudia—”
“Sshh.”
But I couldn’t help myself. I knelt down beside the bed and put my hand on her stomach. “Are you going to keep him?”
“No.” Claudia smiled without opening her eyes. “I’m going to let him fly away.” She was scratching her stomach through the fabric of the T-shirt, and the toenails of her right foot made a rasping noise as she dragged them up and down her left ankle. “Jamie,” she whispered.
I practically laid my ear against her mouth. Again the smells, smoke and booze and mint. “Claudia?”
“Oh Jamie,” Claudia breathed. “We fucked up. We fucked up big time. We were playing with HIV.”
There was a soft smile on her face and she was scratching her belly, but as I watched the smile relaxed, her hands stilled. Her lips pouted open and a thin steady wheeze passed through her lips.
“Claudia?”
If she wasn’t sleeping she was a good actress. Her face softened until it was as round and open as an infant’s, her tongue just visible between parted lips. I crept out of the room and down the hallway and into the stairwell, her last words beating in my ears. What did she mean, playing with HIV? And all of that scratching? What was that about?
When I got to the shop I veered toward the garden, thinking I’d retrieve Claudia’s magazine and read Knute’s article. But on my way to the back of the building I passed Nellydean’s office, and I detoured into the small room.
The phone book was still spread to the page I’d left it open to not quite a month before. I reached to close it but my hands had ideas of their own. As it turned out he was listed under the same name he’d given the magazine, Lingon, K., but nothing resembling that name appeared on the buzzer panel of the white glazed-brick building that took up the whole block of First Avenue between 61st and 62nd, and I had to sit there for three hours waiting for him to come out. As it turned out he wasn’t home: he came walking up the sidewalk, the setting sun casting one faint shadow behind him, a street lamp casting another thicker one before him, a pair of spectral towers that collapsed in on him until just the man stood in front of me, solitary and brightly lit. Not that I noticed any of this: I was too busy scratching the red welts that had sprung up on my arms and ankles, hands and feet and neck. I scratched with gleeful abandon—gleeful, because the constellating rash enabled me to realize Claudia had said itch ivy, not HIV.
“Jamie.”
I was immersed in scratching, but his voice didn’t startle me. It was almost as if I’d been expecting it.
I looked up at him. “How did you know about that name?”
Knute smiled down at me. “I think this is yours.” His free hand—his right hand carried a white plastic bag through which I could read the labels on a tin of steel-cut oats and a bottle of Beaujolais—reached into his front pocket. What came out first was a silver chain; what followed, swaying back and forth like a hypnotist’s pendulum, was my mother’s key, and as I looked at it my mind filled with an image of mer-Knute, clothed as he was now—and as he was when we first met, in pale khakis and white buttondown shirt open at the throat—swimming down to retrieve the key from a murky river bottom populated by spare tires and unlaced boots, pickled gangsters in cement overshoes. Oh, I had it for him. I had it for him bad.
“How did you—”
“From Ellen, Nelly, Endie—”
“Nellydean.”
“That’s her.” Knute slipped the chain, warm from his pocket but still cool against my skin, over my head. “That’s a nasty rash. Itch ivy?”
I smiled, wanly.
“We should put something on it.”
I could smell the paint before Knute opened his door. The periwinkle walls of the foyer still glistened, and in the living room all the furniture had been pushed against one wall. The empty side was carpeted in newspapers, and I scanned them for good headlines but Knute only read the Times: “Amid Rising Prices, the Quest for Affordable—and Comfy!—Manhattan Living.”
“Pardon the mess,” Knute said, and he disappeared down the hall. By the time he came back I’d found the candles—the ones I lost the day I lost the key around my neck. They lay on the paper-wrapped mantle, four white tapers, their thick wax bodies broken in several places but their wicks still intact, so that when I picked one up its segmented length curved like the stacked boxes on the shop’s mezzanine.
I heard Knute’s feet on the paper behind me, the sound of liquid in a bottle being vigorously shaken. The candle flopped back and forth in my fingers, and I felt Knute’s wet hand on my neck, rubbing something cool and unguent over my itch ivy rash.
“That pier queen? The one who sold your wallet to the magazine?” I was startled at how close his voice sounded: his lips practically tickled my ear. “He found them.”
One of Knute’s hands was still rubbing the back of my neck; the other traced the curve of my ear lightly, almost surreptitiously, and I stood there while he kneaded a curl of my hair in his fingers as though spinning it into thread. Or a dread—a tiny dreadlock as thin as pencil lead. His fingers pulled slightly, as if testing the strength of what he’d made.
“I’ve always loved hair like this.”
“Curly? Or short? You had everything,” I said before he could answer. “The candles, the key, my wallet, my shoes—everything.”
Knute’s voice sounded confused. “You put your shoes and wallet in the bag before you jumped in the river. Don’t you remember?”
Still facing away from him, I flopped the candle in my hand. “Were you planning on keeping these?”
“They were broken—”
“They were mine.” When I turned, Knute’s wet hand caught the chain around my neck and pulled it tight. “What do you mean, Endean gave the key to you?”
Knute kept his finger on the chain, kept the chain pulled tight against the back of my neck. “She told me she took it off you when you were sleeping on the, on the fountain,” he said, as if just now sensing something fishy in her story. “For safe-keeping?”
“Why did you make up those lies about me?”
Knute let the key fall against my chest. “You wouldn’t talk to me, I had nothing to go on. I had to think of something.”
“But you wrote them down. You published them in a magazine.”
“I had one of my friends pretend to be you.”
“What?”
“For the fact checkers. They don’t just print anything, you know. There are safeguards. But I gave them my friend’s number, they talked to him as if he were you.”
“But—but why? Why work so hard? Why not just say there was no story, I wouldn’t talk, I was so boring nobody’d want to read about me.”
“Because that’s not true.”
“But the key, the candles—”
But Knute was still speaking over me. He said, “Because,” over and over until I stopped talking, and then he said, “I wanted to see you again.”
There was a beat, and then another, and then Knute stepped back and gestured nervously at the pile of furniture. “Look, why don’t we—” He whipped the plastic from a swivelly modern chair with industrial-strength upholstery, beet purple. “Here, sit, please.” He waved a hand at the half-painted walls, a gray dawn encroaching on midnight blue. “I was about to open a bottle of wine. It’s just Beaujolais but—”
“I didn’t come over for a glass of wine.”
“Then why did you come?”
“What?”
“Why’d you come over?”
“What,” I said again, but Knute didn’t repeat his question a third time. “But, but…you wrote those lies about me.”
“Then why not go to the magazine? It published them. Look, Jamie—”
“You must not call me that! Only my mother called me that.” But even as I protested I heard the word in Nellydean’s voice, and then, again, in Claudia’s.
Knute smiled, and in his wry grimace I could see he knew much more about me than what he’d written, or what I’d read.
“James,” he said. “I’m at that age when men fall in love with their younger selves.”
“Did you rehearse that bullshit in a mirror?”
Knute raised his hands, guilty as charged. “What I’m trying to say is that choices that once seemed mutable have become fixed. Options are limited. I look back at certain times in my life and I think, what if I’d done that instead. What if someone had done that for me.” He shrugged. “When I was eighteen, I used to meet this girl on the dunes behind Long Beach. She was kind of brilliant and kind of crazy and she was a lot more savvy in matters of the heart than I was, or am for that matter. Do you know what she did?”
“I dunno. Did she marry you?”
“Uh, no.” Knute’s smile was brief, pained, as if he almost wished she had. “She told me I was gay. And I…”
“You what?”
“I want to do that for you.”
I suddenly remembered: I’d never told him.
“Knute,” I said, softening at this weirdly chivalric gesture. “I already know. I am gay.”
Knute shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just…I mean…I guess I wanted to tell you that you can be who you are. For my generation, being gay was our identity. We ran to New York or San Francisco, Ptown or Silver Lake, and more or less pretended everything in between didn’t exist. But your generation is different. You have to find a way to live in the middle of the country, as well as at the edges. Okay, I’m working this metaphor a little hard. I guess what I’m trying to say is that people your age have to figure out how to incorporate a gay identity into the rest of their lives. I mean, it’s better in some ways. You have more choices. More freedom. But that makes it harder too. Everything’s so goddamned nebulous with you kids. Post-identity, post-gay, post-AIDS.” Knute shook his head, snorting. “I mean, Jesus Christ, every time I woke up sweating in the 1980s I was sure I was seroconverting, but your generation—”
I must have made a face because Knute stopped, waved his words away. “I’m getting off track. Talking to myself as much as you. What I’m trying to say is, I wanted to save you, James.”
“From…being gay?”
Another snort, another shake of his head. “No. From New York.”
Knute’s face had a look of pleading, as if what he was saying was tremendously important—so important that I had to look out a window. But all I saw was a broken checkerboard of tarred roofs and blanched blue sky.
Behind me, Knute was still talking. “I know how crazy this sounds. I know. But it’s not real. It doesn’t exist.”
“What doesn’t exist?”
“That,” Knute said, and pointed out the window. “The promises in all of that. They’re not real. They don’t ever come true. People come here thinking New York will help them realize their dreams. But it doesn’t. It only helps them realize its dream. We—my generation—we had to learn that the hard way, and I guess I didn’t want you to have to go through the same thing. At least not on your own.”
You’re too late, I wanted to say then. But all I did was look out the window again, and what I saw was a column of windows in the building directly across the street from Knute’s. Through each window I could see a television. Some were large and some were small, some were on and some were off, but they were all in exactly the same place, as if in refutation of the options promised by the views opposite them, the alternatives to the New York lives their watchers were leading.
“Thomas Muirland killed himself the day after you pulled him out of the river. Only this time he did it by cutting his wrists open in the bathtub of his hospital room. You can’t save people, James. Not if they don’t want to be saved.”
I whirled on him. “Then what the hell are you doing with me?”
Knute sighed.
“Each man flies from his own self;
Yet from that self he has no power
To escape: he clings to it in his own despite,
And loathes it too, because, though he is sick,
He perceives not the cause of his disease.”
He shrugged. “Lucretius.”
“Lucretius.” I repeated. “Lucretius?”
“A Roman poet. Just about the only thing we know of him is that he was driven mad by a love potion. ‘English major,’” he reminded me. “‘Ancient history.’” And then: “You’re only going to make it worse.”
“What are you talking about now?” But all he was referring to was the fact that I was scratching my rash. I remembered I’d also scratched myself the first time we met; at least this time I had just cause. The itch ivy Claudia and I had sat in had spread to a half dozen places on my body—carried by my hands, which itched most of all.
I risked a look at Knute’s eyes. Gray as hearthstones. The same color as his walls, the same color as mine.
“Look, can I, do you mind?” I pointed to the bottle of calamine lotion in his hand.
“Sure, let me—”
“No, let me.”
I put the broken candle in the roomy pocket of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s linen pants, took the bottle and went to the chair. Knute started to say something, then stopped, and I almost didn’t sit down, then sat down anyway. Ruining his priceless collectible was the least he deserved for that article. I slathered lotion on the rash, and only when I’d covered every lump and welt did I speak.
“Do you know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of everyone having a motive except me. I mean, Nellydean’s never sold No. 1 to Sonny Dinadio because No. 1 means more to her than money, or freedom for that matter, and Sonny Dinadio, I mean I guess he wants the lot so he can develop it or something, and it looks like you wrote that article so you could get in my pants. And Claudia.” I paused. What was Claudia’s motive? What was Claudia doing? I asked myself, but all I heard was her whisper: I’m going to let him fly away.
I shook my head. “So tell me: why did I move into my mother’s building? Why didn’t I just let the estate lawyer dispose of it and send me a big fat check? And tell me this: why did I jump into the river after Thomas Muirland? And why did I come here? Would you tell me that, please? Because I really don’t have any idea, and I’m beginning to think that as long I don’t know why I do things I’m going to continue doing them, jumping into rivers and going three or four days without a meal and—”
I stopped then, because what I’d been going to say was sit down on the cocks of HIV-positive men, but there were all sorts of ramifications to that statement I didn’t want to deal with just then.
“Knute,” I said, then snorted. “I cannot deal with that name. Do you mind if I call you something else?”
Knute shrugged. “I suppose you’re entitled. What’d you have in mind?”
“K.,” I said, so quickly I realized I’d been calling him that in my head ever since Claudia had.
“It’s a little Kafkaesque, don’t you think?”
I said it again, experimentally. “K.,” I said, “do you ever get the feeling you’re acting out a script? That someone, something, fate or whatever, has something in store for you, and there’s nothing you can do about it?”
Then K. was on his knees in front of me, his hands atop my thighs. An image of Divine flashed through my head, but K.’s attention was focused not on my crotch but on my face.
“You silly boy. Don’t you realize I’ve felt that way ever since I met you?”
IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT when my cab stopped at the top of Dutch Street (but no sex, no sex; just the bottle of wine and a reheated container of his mother’s chicken Bolognese, the occasional medicinal massage of calamine lotion). I paid the driver with the money K., like Trucker, insisted I take. My hip was sore from his hard floor. We’d eaten supine, like Roman senators on their couches, but our only cushion had been the thin pages of the Metro section: “Prosperity’s Double-Edged Sword Divides Immigrant Neighborhood”; “A New Name for a New Era: Clinton Spruces Up Its Image.” My lips were sore too, from the kisses I’d submitted to, but no sex, no sex: not while angry red welts dotted my body like chicken pox or measles or something more nefarious than mere itch ivy.
You could put a face on it if you wanted: the windshield’s high brow, the expressionless eyes of the headlights, the silver serrated mouth of the grille, perpetually open like a shark’s. That van. You could even put a face on the man who stood beside those gaping jaws, a face haloed by the words Your father was one of three black-haired boys and Well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid.
She used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was.
And Sonny is…your father?
I suppose I could have run. I could have come back later. But I didn’t. I walked Dutch Street’s plank, my time metered out by the slap of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s sandals against the Belgian block cobblestones. The sandals’ straps irritated the rash on my feet and the chain of my mother’s key cut into the rash on my neck, but my hands, as naked as Claudia’s, itched of their own accord. But I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man and I could never refuse a gift, and I called out to Sonny Dinadio softly, in case Claudia was still asleep in my bedroom.
“Are you my father?”
Sonny Dinadio laughed a little, quietly, as if he too wished to remain undisturbed. “I’m a lotta things, but I ain’t your old man.”
And you might think I would have been relieved, but the truth is that’s when I began to be afraid. Because K. had reminded me: he was from Long Island. Just like me.
Sonny Dinadio said, “I can see you’re a man who likes to get right down to business, so I’m gonna get right to business too.”
“You can’t have it.”
In the time it took me to glance in the van to see if the sausagey man was also present Sonny Dinadio grabbed me up in two big fistfuls of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s shirt. He lifted me up and pressed me against the hard-edged quoins of No. 1. “I will have what I want.”
“No,” I said, my voice eerily calm, even to my ears. “You won’t. Not while I’m alive you won’t.”
Sonny Dinadio held me half a foot off the ground and still my eyes weren’t quite level with his. “What is it with you people?”
“A compulsion,” I said, and laughed.
“It must be. Jesus Christ kid, you’d never have to worry about money again. You’d be set for life.”
“I already am set for life,” I said, and I looked with my baleful gray eyes into Sonny Dinadio’s colorless orbs.
They’re gray. Just like yours.
My mother, I’d been told, had brown eyes to go with our brown hair, and I’d always assumed my gray eyes came from my father. Now I tried to imagine Sonny Dinadio’s face heaving over my mother’s but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t imagine my mother’s face. But I could imagine K.’s. “We’d meet on the dunes behind Long Beach,” he’d said of the girl who’d told him he was gay. “Or maybe it was Robert Moses. There must’ve been ten gay guys for every straight one, I don’t know how in the hell she managed to find me. She told me I was gay too, but she never did tell me her name.”
I meant, like, old enough to be your father.
A wail pierced Dutch Street. It was loud as a car alarm, irresistible as a Siren’s song. Sonny Dinadio let go of me and I fell to the Belgian blocks and from their ballast I watched him scream as a wraithlike figure loomed out of the darkness with a glinting spike raised above the perfect silver sphere of its head. The spike came down in Sonny Dinadio’s eye and I could see the spatter of dark drops outlined against the phosphorescent sky like antistars. Sonny Dinadio staggered and nearly fell, smashing his head against the side of his van. He was clutching his face with one hand, the door handle with the other, and the wraith drove the spike into the meat of his cheek again and again. A putrescent stink filled Dutch Street, and Sonny Dinadio’s bellows, and a keening like Aunt Clara used to make when she called the pigs in for the night. The stench was like that too, like a foot of hoof-churned offal, and when the wraith turned from the closed door of the van and descended on me the stench came with it. The van lurched into life and headed north on Dutch Street even as the wraith laid itself atop the length of my body, and here are the facts of the situation: the wraith was the homeless woman and the turban enveloping her head was actually a football helmet wrapped in silver duct tape. The bloody spike she still clutched was one of Claudia MacTeer’s high-heeled shoes and the filthy dress that draped her body had once belonged to Nellydean. That body was as bony and hard as a man’s. The flopping appendage at its groin was as soft as a man’s and the voice that issued from within the helmet’s depths reeked of rotting fish and a drag queen’s sibilant whisper.
“Your name is James Ramsay,” the voice of the dying city sang in my ear. “You’re the man who saves people. My name is Justine, and I’m the man who saves you.”