BE CAREFUL WHAT you wish for, O’Hara’s mother likes to say. You might get it. For the next couple weeks, the weight of her long-sought answers feels like a backpack full of stones, and she’s almost nostalgic for the ignorance with which she arrived that morning at Manny’s Fix-It.
The onset of fall always knocks O’Hara off balance—something about the crisp air and the school-bell chill—but this year the malaise seems deeper. She knows K is right. It’s time for a change. Long past it. She should call her old boyfriend Leibowitz and ask for another chance, or at least have him give her the name of a good Jewish shrink. But of course, she does neither. Instead, she calls in sick, takes a subway downtown, and wanders the East Village.
It’s mid-October, midweek, midafternoon. Few people are out, and those who are seem underemployed and at loose ends, marooned by the day. At the bodega on Sixth and B, O’Hara buys a coffee and carries it across the street to the garden, where the entrance, with its garland of tiny stamped-out hands, is locked. O’Hara sips her coffee and peers through the bars at the overgrown quarter acre. That the Big Roma made Fudgesicle rebury the boy in here almost makes sense. Having brought the kid into the world and brokered his adoption, it was on her to send him out of it, and if possible, square things with the boy’s mother.
This afternoon the garden feels as slack as the streets, adrift on the same autumnal lull. From the entrance, O’Hara has a good view of Christina Malmströmer’s garden. Even dormant, its tidiness stands out. While other plots have been abandoned in haste, Christina’s has been thoughtfully shut down for the season and a layer of loam spread over it to rejuvenate the soil. As Christina told O’Hara, she’s the one in the family who is good at growing things.
O’Hara was so much luckier. Eight months into her pregnancy, she was in such denial about her predicament that she almost forgot about it. Had the bulge been detected by a sharp-eyed baby broker instead of the school nurse, and had that person promised to make it all go away without anyone being the wiser, she couldn’t have resisted the offer any more than Christina had. And after Christina saw how the old man treated her sister for infractions that were so minor by comparison, she would have feared the worst. Then again, old man Malmströmer didn’t get off any easier, spending his nights making furniture while his flesh and blood hopped around the neighborhood on a broken leg.
O’Hara tosses her cup into the trash and pushes from the gates. She walks past Malmströmer’s basement workshop and a fortune-teller’s window and keeps going, all the way to Lafayette. At St. Mark’s, she dodges the skaters around the Cube and enters the subway at Broadway and Eighth. As she waits on a bench, whose inhospitable angles have been designed to deter the homeless, a schizophrenic at the end of the platform goes off in a sputtering rage. Each eruption lasts about twenty seconds, subsides, and builds again, and O’Hara sits through a dozen before the R arrives.
Four stops later, O’Hara gets out at Times Square. Unlike the Village, it’s streaming with New Yorkers and visitors. The locals ply familiar routes in silence. The tourists move in thrilled packs, chirping in their native tongues. O’Hara is swept along in the flow, barely participating in her own locomotion, until she starts up the stairs and sees five feet in front of her the back of a tall red-haired man carrying a guitar case and a tiny amp and realizes it’s Axl.
The stairs lead to a mezzanine, with a walk-in newsstand to the left. In the sprawling subterranean archipelago, it occupies its own level, floating above the Queens-bound tracks from which they just ascended and below the pedestrian thoroughfares that lead to the shuttle, the 1, 2, and 3, and the A, C, and E. Just short of a railing overlooking the tracks, Axl puts down his guitar and amp, and O’Hara ducks behind a column.
When she looks back, Axl is crouched on one knee. He plugs in his old Fender, fiddles with some knobs, and casually strums a few chords as if alone in his room, picking out a melody. From the track below come the hiss of brakes and the recorded female voice: “This is a Queens-bound R train. The next stop will be . . . Forty-Ninth Street.”
As passengers sweep by, O’Hara makes out the start of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” and despite her precarious state, the riff lightens her heart, just as it would if she stumbled across it on a radio dial or it dropped on a jukebox. It has the same effect on three young skateboarders. When Axl reaches the chorus, using a wah-wah pedal to simulate Steven Tyler’s wail, one puts his hands on his hips and performs a cocksure urban strut. In the midst of the second verse, another train pulls in. Rather than compete with the clamor, Axl stops playing and talks to the skaters, cultivating his little audience, keeping it intact. When enough quiet returns, Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” snags a couple more travelers. So does Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.”
O’Hara is mortified to see her one and only son busking in the MTA, not even in a good spot. At the same time, she is in awe of the stones required to take out a guitar and play in front of the passing crowd. She couldn’t do it in a million years, not with a gun pointed at her head, but Axl can. He’s good at it and likes what he’s doing, and people can tell. It puts them at ease and inclines them to linger, and after every song newcomers outnumber deserters. In fact, the spot he’s chosen isn’t half bad. With the airiness of the space and the tiles on the walls, put on during the eighties, when the city was awash in cash, the acoustics are excellent. And of course she approves his choice of covers. Maybe this is not such a bad development, she tells herself. Maybe this can all work out.
“There’s something I should tell you,” says Axl when the subways cooperate. “If anyone out there is tempted to steal my tips, you should know that my mom is with NYPD. In fact, she’s a homicide detective. No shit. Not too many females in homicide. When she had me, she was young and crazy. She still is, but that’s another story. When I was colicky, or refused to fall asleep, she sometimes put this on the stereo. Whenever I hear it, I think of her.”
The song builds slowly and takes a minute or two to morph into ZZ Top. As a fresh surge of travelers scale the stairs, Axl sings.
Hot, blue and righteous
an angel called me aside
Hot, blue and righteous
said, “stick by me and I’ll be your guide tonight.”
O’Hara’s love for her son buckles her knees, and she grabs the column for support. By the time she collects herself enough to peer out, Axl has unplugged and packed up, and is descending the stairs. O’Hara is proud of her son and scared to death for him, and as she watches his shaggy head disappear from view, she knows that her worst fears and fondest hopes have both come true.