Cobble Hill

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  * * *

  As soon as Wendy and Shy left that morning, Roy Clarke had gone out for his morning walk. The sun was bright and the air was crisp and full of promise. Autumn was coming. He loved autumn in America. It was so American. Apple pie. Burning wood. Pumpkins. Mulled cider. Tartan shirts and down gilets. Ambition. It wasn’t the same in England. In England autumn didn’t feel like anything, with the exception of Bonfire Night, when there were bonfires and fireworks and everyone got very drunk and stood outside. Roy and Wendy had decided to get married at the bonfire on Primrose Hill. “Let’s get married then,” he’d said, and she said, “All right,” and then the fireworks began and they held hands with their faces turned up to the night sky, murmuring, “Ooh,” as each one went off. Pure magic.

  This particular autumn day felt so promising that he dashed back inside to retrieve his laptop and set out once more with the idea that he’d go and work on his new novel somewhere in the neighborhood. All the autumn energy might somehow permeate his skull, resulting, hopefully, in words on the screen.

  “You can’t force these things,” he always told Wendy when he tried to explain why he hadn’t written a new book in six years. She would nod resignedly as he went on, “It’s like a snowstorm, dusting and dusting, building and building, so slowly and quietly, until you look out the window in the morning and find it piled up on the cars and stoops, glistening in the sun, finished and perfect.”

  The building-and-building part was the challenge. He’d thought starting with a title would somehow inspire him, so he’d come up with Black and White—two noncolors, unlike the splashy titles of his previous books. But he’d begun to think the new title felt ostentatious and overly ambitious. He would feel obligated to explore race relations and the history of the newspaper trade. He hated even the idea of research, let alone the actual practice of finding information, taking notes, and getting it into his story properly and accurately. All of his other novels had been chatty and witty and not about anything, really, just people from deranged families, talking. Or deranged people starting families accidentally. He preferred to simply make things up. Black and White seemed to build up some kind of expectation that he couldn’t possibly fulfill.

  Roy walked down Kane Street to the bicycle path that ran along Columbia Street toward Red Hook in one direction and Brooklyn Heights in the other. Deciding which direction to go seemed like a life choice, very Robert Frost, arbitrary yet not. It might mean everything. Red Hook had a reputation for being cool, full of young men with beards making furniture out of salvaged barns and deer antlers, distilling their own barrels of rye, tending beehives on their roofs, or painstakingly smoking cuts of meat from locally sourced livestock. Roy turned right, toward Brooklyn Heights, a staid and pretty residential neighborhood. The sun warmed the path in that direction, beckoning him. Black and White Black and White. The title did nothing but make him feel anxious. Gold would be better. Gold, like the sun. Gold was glamorous and provocative and wide open to interpretation. Gold. Yes, he could change it. There was time. He didn’t even have a contract for this book, because he hadn’t written anything. There was always plenty of time. The problem was putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and writing something.

  Joggers whooshed by him, music blaring from the white pods in their ears, their rhythmic footfalls marching out a mixed tune of Zen and impatience. Roy never felt the least bit guilty amidst the exercising throng. He was trim, in a middle-aged, fleshy sort of way. His clothes from his thirties, when he used to cycle around London all the time, still fit. He was proud of that.

  He continued down the bicycle path toward the piers that had been transformed into a sprawling, modern waterside park. There were creatively designed play areas for children—rocky water parks, dangerous-looking rope swings, towering slides, a gigantic soccer pitch, basketball courts, a roller-skating rink, barbecue areas, grassy knolls and beaches, docks for sailboats and kayaks, dog runs, a bridge made of rope and wood, and benches facing New York Harbor and the endlessly entertaining view of the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan off to the right, Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty off to the left. Roy had taken numerous photos of the sunset from there when they’d first moved, and sent them to his young agent in London. She’d assumed he’d used an effect of some kind on his camera. It was that breathtaking.

  Lower Manhattan was all tall, sleek steel and glass. Wendy’s office was in one of those buildings. The Brooklyn Bridge hung majestically over the sun-dappled water, as if suspended invisibly from a more old-fashioned place, where everything existed in tones of sepia and brown. He’d read the bridge’s story, how people had died building it, how the men had wanted to give up and the women had shown their mettle. It was the type of story a more ambitious writer might incorporate into a sweeping mega-saga.

  Whether they knew the bridge’s story or not, a never-ending queue of tourists tramped across it from Manhattan with no objective except maybe to eat a good slice of Brooklyn pizza. It always alarmed him how many of them there were. Roy turned away from the bridge and circled back toward Cobble Hill. The skyline lowered and his confidence returned. He walked up Congress Street, across Hicks Street and then Henry Street, and into Cobble Hill Park.

  It was a tiny, pretty, stop-and-rest sort of park, with carefully tended flowers and protective old trees. A generous number of wooden benches beckoned to him: “Write here!” But writing on a laptop out of doors never worked. The sun glared from the screen and made his eyes tear. He was always too hot or too cold. The benches were hard. There were mosquitoes, barking dogs, screaming toddlers.

  He kept walking. A couple of blocks down Henry was a bar he’d passed many times and never gone into. The Horn and Duck was closer to home, but the food was too pretentious—they made their own ketchup; Heinz was better—and the staff were too chatty. He never got anything done there. This bar looked quiet.

  Monte—that was the name of the bar. Not Monte’s, just Monte, with a Budweiser light glowing tiredly in the window. It was barely noon, but the bar was open. Roy pushed open the smudged glass door and went inside.

  “Morning,” a cheerful woman with dimples in her cheeks greeted him from behind a set of drums at the back. “Don’t mind me.” She wasn’t drumming; she was looking at her phone.

  “Not at all.” Roy chose a green vinyl–cushioned stool at the bar and placed his laptop on the shiny wooden bar top. The stool was comfortable, its back just low enough to offer lumbar support, with a perfectly positioned slat across the legs to rest his feet on. He opened his laptop and powered it on. He might just be able to work here.

  Gold, he thought, opening a new Word document. Boris Bowne Books is thrilled to announce Gold, the long-awaited new novel by Roy Clarke. Or perhaps Golden was better. No, too 007. His readers would think he’d taken to writing spy novels. Race relations and secret agents—not subjects he could tackle without doing extensive research. Best to stick to what he did best—the quiet humor of two grown children traveling with their incontinent father, a drunk boy driving to pick up the girl he likes, a tedious dinner with an incompetent waiter, a hilariously muddy outdoor wedding.

  Gold. Not exactly a title for a family novel. Unless… Roy’s daughter Shy had a rich Russian-American classmate whose grandmother gave her a solid gold Krugerrand every Christmas, one for every year she’d been alive. Last spring the family had relocated very abruptly to the Bahamas.

  Roy appeared to be staring hard at the blank screen, but really there was a scene playing out in his head in which a teenage girl was burying a pile of gold beneath a palm tree.

  “There’s no bartender,” the woman called from the back of the bar, distracting the partially awakened lumbering beast that was his brain. “But I can probably grab whatever you need.”

  Roy swiveled around. “Tea?” he said distractedly, forgetting he was in a bar and that Americans didn’t drink tea constantly, as if it were some sort of vital fuel that one’s body couldn’t function without,
the way most of the English did.

  She slid off her drum stool and ducked behind the bar. “Sure, just a sec. There’s an electric kettle, I think.” She looked up and smiled. “I’m Peaches. I work at the school, as a nurse. You’re Roy Clarke. I read in the real estate section last year that you moved to Strong Place. And my husband went to your book thing at the new bookstore on Smith. How do you like it here?”

  Roy hated being recognized. Blustering internally, he hit return twice to demonstrate that he was writing, even though his screen was still blank.

  “That was a dumb question, never mind.” Peaches pushed a nondescript white mug across the bar. A Lipton tea bag dangled in the steaming water. “We only have that really coarse sugar they use in cocktails, and nondairy creamer.” She set the containers on the bar. “I can’t find a spoon, but there are cocktail straws there. Help yourself.”

  She walked out from behind the bar and retrieved her denim jacket from the drum stool.

  “I have to get back to work. I was an English major, but now I’m an elementary school nurse. Don’t ask.” She shrugged on the jacket and buttoned it up. “I have to admit, I own all your books. My husband gave me the box set for my birthday a few years ago. We both genuinely intended to read them, but we never did. Sorry.”

  Roy nodded. “It’s a thing, I understand. My daughter explained it to me. Everyone has my books displayed prominently on their bookshelves, but literally no one has read them. It’s all right. The covers are nice to look at. I’m flattered all the same.”

  The dimples resurfaced on the drumming nurse’s cheeks. “You’re a nice man, but don’t be too generous with us. One day I’m going to read them all, I promise. I was an English major, I really was. I used to love reading books!”

  Something buzzed. She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and glanced at it.

  “Fuck. I have to run.”

  Roy picked up the mug. “Thanks for the tea.”

  He watched her through the smudgy storefront window as she hurried down Henry Street, sorry to see her go. He was alone in the bar now. Presumably the proprietor was in the back someplace, rotating beer kegs or sorting the whiskeys. Roy didn’t mind. He removed the tea bag from the mug, drizzled in some creamer, turned back to his computer, and began to type.

  * * *

  Liam lay on his back in the school hallway, too exhausted to go out to lunch. Besides, he didn’t have any money. He never had any money; his parents wanted him to get the free school lunch.

  Sometimes the insanity got to him. It got to all of them. He could feel the pressure in the classroom rising, the barometer that was his brain constricting so that his thoughts were not really thoughts anymore but feelings of discomfort: hunger, numb feet, suppressed farts, cranial itching, sweat, shaking hands, exhaustion. Back in middle school they’d all carried spinning devices—fidget spinners—meant to alleviate the stress, but they’d grown out of them. Now the focus was on sex, and, to a lesser extent, college.

  Liam’s father, Greg Park, had “peaked in college.” Liam didn’t really get what that meant. It was something his mom always said when Liam’s skin or hair or outfit looked particularly bad.

  “At least you won’t peak in high school, or even in college like your dad. You’ll peak later, when it matters.”

  Somehow in Liam’s mind, “peaking” was intrinsically linked to virility, which was how much sex you were having, and he definitely wasn’t waiting until after college to have sex.

  Some of his classmates had had it, or claimed to, the ones who’d ventured to parties hosted by kids whose parents were never home. “It wasn’t that long ago we were the ones at those parties,” his parents would say, trying to make him feel better about his stay-at-home lameness. “We know what happens. You happened.” Most of the time Liam just hung out with them. They watched the same TV shows he wanted to watch anyway. And they let him eat most of the pizza.

  There was a girl he liked. She was new last year, from England, with a famous dad. Liam hadn’t told his parents about her. He knew they knew about her dad. They were always spotting him, talking about him, acting like they knew stuff about him, when all they really knew was what they’d garnered from the New York Times, Wikipedia, Google, and his book jackets. He was older and English. The mom was American, with some fancy magazine job.

  The girl’s name was Shy. She was extremely tall and thin and clumsy-looking, like she woke up in the morning much taller than she’d been the night before and had no idea where her arms and legs began and ended. She didn’t seem that shy either. They only had one class together, Latin II, and she was always raising her hand, bulldozing her way through readings and translations in her English accent. Their Latin teacher, Mr. Streko, had a thing for her, Liam could tell. It bordered on inappropriate.

  “Shy is my best student,” Liam could hear Mr. Streko’s voice now, resonating down the hall. “I’m surprised to hear she’s struggling so much in her other subjects. She’s never late, she’s always prepared, her grasp of Latin is profound.”

  Liam sat up and crept closer to the classroom door on his hands and knees. It was a meeting of some sort, about Shy.

  “Yes, well, her father is a writer. He must have passed on some of his gift for language.” This must be Shy’s mother. “But she’s not just struggling in her other subjects. She’s almost failing.”

  “And obviously she has the aptitude, given how she’s excelling in the one subject.” This was Miss Melanie, the principal, friend to all but otherwise pretty useless. The parents loved her until high school, when they realized her passive good nature was not going to help their kid get into college.

  “Of course she has the aptitude. She is my daughter; I know what she’s capable of. The question is, why is she making an effort in only one subject and slacking off in all the others? Perhaps we should make her drop Latin so she has time for math.”

  “Uh, I wouldn’t recommend that,” Mr. Streko said.

  There was an awkward pause. Liam sat on the floor outside the classroom and pretended to look for something deep in his backpack. He wasn’t even supposed to be upstairs right now, unless he was studying in the library, or in the darkroom, working on his “generic definition” project for photography.

  “Most likely she never encountered American history before now,” Miss Melanie went on kindly. “And perhaps she could use some extra help in algebra and physics.”

  “Is it possible she’s cheating and you haven’t noticed? In Latin, I mean.”

  Whoa. What mom accused her own daughter of cheating?

  “I’m sure it’s nothing like that.” Miss Melanie rushed to Shy’s defense. “You’d have noticed. Right, Sammy?”

  Liam almost snorted out loud. Sammy Streko? What the fuck kind of a name was that?

  “Not at all,” Mr. Streko agreed. “I’m a pretty tough teacher, actually. I conduct most of the class in Latin and the kids look at me like I’m a lunatic. Except Shy. She’s got a good ear. It’s like she can hear the roots, you know?”

  Total silence. Poor Sammy.

  “Unless she’s cheating,” Shy’s mom insisted. It was almost like she wanted Shy to be more devious than she actually was.

  “It’s pretty hard to cheat in Latin. The vocab has to be memorized. I ask a lot of open-ended questions. There’s no right answer. You just have to be engaged.”

  “I’ll speak to Shy about a peer tutor in algebra and maybe physics,” Miss Melanie suggested gently. “That often helps.”

  “Mmm.” Shy’s mother didn’t sound convinced. “I have to get back to work.” There was a rustling as she tied on her trench coat, or whatever rustling item of clothing she was wearing, and swept out of the classroom.

  “Honestly,” she muttered, nearly tripping over Liam.

  Liam leapt to his feet, his last calculus test in his hand. He’d gotten an A minus.

  He waited for Shy’s unnecessarily frantic mom to rustle away and some of the teachers to wander back to th
eir offices. Then he lunged awkwardly into the classroom.

  “Hello, Liam.” Miss Melanie offered him her useless, sunshiny smile. “We were just finishing up a conference. Do you need this room?”

  Mr. Streko was typing on his phone. A half-eaten Chipotle burrito rested in his lap. He looked wiped, like Shy’s mom had grabbed his mangy beard and dragged him around behind her Mercedes.

  Liam took a deep breath. He’d never done anything this bold before. “Sorry, I was totally eavesdropping. I can tutor whoever it is. I do pretty well.” He held up his test. “I could use some extracurriculars and stuff. You know, for college?”

  “The student in question is female,” Miss Melanie said.

  Liam shrugged his shoulders as if to indicate that tutoring some dumb girl would be kind of annoying, but he could handle it. “That’s okay.”

  “You know Shy Clarke?”

  He shrugged his shoulders again. “Kind of?”

  * * *

  Torso of Woman Found Behind Ikea Red Hook

  A man (who wishes to remain unnamed) was walking his dog along the pier behind Ikea Red Hook early Monday when he spotted what looked like a mannequin in the water. Upon closer inspection, it appeared to be a headless human torso, severed just below the chin and at the waist, with the arms intact. The man called 911.

  Torso of Woman Identified by Sister

  The dismembered torso of a Staten Island woman was identified by the woman’s sister late Tuesday evening. Police had released photographs of a tattoo of a red rose with green leaves on the upper arm of the torso in hopes that it would help to identify the body. A woman has since confirmed that her youngest sister had been missing since late Friday night after leaving the Staten Island restaurant where she worked part-time as a hostess. The woman’s house, where she lives with her parents and younger brother, is now a crime scene. The entire family has been brought in for questioning.