by Paul Auster
“And?”
“Well, you know what he’s like. Not the easiest man in the world to talk to.”
“And what about the Zorns? Are you still in touch with them?”
“A little. Philip invites me out to New Jersey for Thanksgiving every year. I never liked him much when he was married to my mother, but I’ve gradually changed my mind about him. Her death really tore him apart, and when I understood how much he’d loved her, I couldn’t bear a grudge anymore. So we have a mild, respectful sort of friendship now. The same with Pamela. She’d always struck me as a brainless snob, one of those people who cared too much about what college you went to and how much money you earned, but she seems to have improved over the years. She’s thirty-five or thirty-six now and lives in Vermont with her lawyer husband and two kids. If you want to go to New Jersey with me this Thanksgiving, I’m sure they’d be happy to see you.”
“I’ll have to think it over, Tom. For the time being, you and Rachel are about the only family I can stomach. One more ex-relative, and I’m liable to choke.”
“How is old cousin Rachel? I haven’t even asked.”
“Ah, there’s the rub, my boy. In herself, I believe she’s fine. Good job, decent husband, comfortable apartment. But we had a little tiff a couple of months ago, and the fence is far from mended. In a word, there’s a good chance she never wants to talk to me again.”
“I feel sorry for you, Nathan.”
“Don’t. It’s not worth it. I’d rather you let me feel sorry for you.”
THE QUEEN OF BROOKLYN
When Tom and I met again for lunch the following afternoon, we both understood that we were in the process of creating a small ritual. We didn’t articulate it in so many words, but excepting the times when other plans or obligations arose, we would make it our business to get together as often as possible to share our midday meal. No matter that I was twice his age and had once been known as Uncle Nat. As Oscar Wilde once put it, after twenty-five everyone is the same age, and the truth was that our present circumstances were almost identical. We both lived alone, neither one of us was involved with a woman, and neither one of us had many friends (in my case none at all). What better way to break the monotony of solitude than to chow down with your confrère, your semblable, your long-lost Tomassino, and chew the fat as you shoveled in your grub?
Marina was on duty that day, looking terrific in a pair of tight-fitting jeans and an orange blouse. It was a delectable combination, since it gave me something to study and admire when she came toward us (the front view of her ample, poignant breasts) and also when she walked away (the back view of her rounded, somewhat bulky rear end). After my recent fantasy of our late-night tryst, I felt a little more reticent with her than I normally did, but there was still the matter of the outrageous gratuity I’d left for her the last time I’d been in, and she was all smiles with us when she took our orders, knowing (I think) that she had conquered my heart forever. I can’t recall a word we said to each other, but I must have wound up with a rather dopey smile on my face, for once she walked off toward the kitchen, Tom remarked on how odd I looked and asked if anything was wrong. I assured him I was in top form, and then, in the next breath, I heard myself confessing to my mad, unrequited crush. “I’d move heaven and earth for that girl,” I said, “but it won’t do me a bit of good. She’s married, and one hundred percent Catholic to boot. But at least she gives me a chance to dream.”
I braced myself for Tom to burst out laughing at me, but he did nothing of the kind. With an utterly solemn expression on his face, he reached his arm across the table and patted me on the hand. “I know just how you feel, Nathan,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing.”
Now it was Tom’s turn to confess. Now I was hearing my nephew tell me that he, too, was in love with an unattainable woman.
He called her the B.P.M. The initials stood for the Beautiful Perfect Mother, and not only had he never spoken a word to her, he didn’t even know her name. She lived in a brownstone on a block midway between his apartment and Harry’s bookstore, and every morning on his way to breakfast he would see her sitting on the front stoop of her building with her two young children, waiting for the yellow bus to arrive and take them to school. She was remarkably attractive, Tom said, with long black hair and luminous green eyes, but what stirred him most about her was the way she held and touched her children. He had never seen maternal love expressed so eloquently or simply, with more tenderness or outright joy. Most mornings, the B.P.M. would be sitting between the two children, an arm wrapped around each of their waists as they leaned into her for support, nuzzling and kissing them in turn, or else dandling them on her knees as she enclosed them in a double embrace, an enchanted circle of hugging, singing, and laughter. “I walk by as slowly as I can,” Tom continued. “A spectacle like that needs to be savored, and so I usually pretend I’ve dropped something on the ground, or pause to light a cigarette – anything to prolong the pleasure by just a few seconds. She’s so beautiful, Nathan, and to see her with those kids, it almost makes me want to start believing in humanity again. I know it’s ridiculous, but I probably think about her twenty times a day.”
I kept my feelings to myself, but I didn’t like the sound of it. Tom was just thirty years old, in the prime of his young manhood, and yet when it came to women and the pursuit of love, he had all but given up on himself. His last steady girlfriend had been a fellow graduate student named Linda Something-or-other, but they had broken up six months before he left Ann Arbor, and since then his luck had been so bad that he’d gradually withdrawn from circulation. Two days earlier, he’d told me that he hadn’t been out on a date in over a year, which meant that his silent worship of the B.P.M. now constituted the full extent of his love life. I found that pathetic. The boy needed to gather up his courage and start making an effort again. If nothing else, he needed to get laid – and stop frittering away his nights dreaming about some beatific earth mother. I was in the same boat, of course, but at least I knew my dream girl’s name, and whenever I repaired to the Cosmic Diner and sat down at my regular table, I could actually talk to her. That was enough for an old has-been like myself. I had already danced my dance and had my fun, and what happened to me was of little importance. If the opportunity came along to add another notch to my belt, I wouldn’t have said no, but it was hardly a matter of life and death. For Tom, everything hinged on having the guts to barrel himself back into the thick of the game. Otherwise, he would go on languishing in the darkness of his private, two-by-four hell, and as the years went by he would slowly turn bitter, slowly turn into someone he wasn’t meant to be.
“I’d like to see this creature for myself,” I said. “You make her sound like an apparition from another world.”
“Anytime, Nathan. Just come to my apartment one morning at a quarter to eight, and we can walk down her block together. You won’t be disappointed, I guarantee it.”
And so it was that we met early the next morning and walked down Tom’s favorite street in Brooklyn. I assumed he was exaggerating when he started talking about the “hypnotic power” of the Beautiful Perfect Mother, but it turned out that I was wrong. The woman was indeed perfect, indeed a sublime incarnation of the angelic and the beautiful, and to watch her sitting on the front steps of her house with her arms wrapped around those two small kids was enough to bring a flutter to an old curmudgeon’s heart. Tom and I were standing on the other side of the street, tactfully positioned behind the trunk of a tall locust tree, and what moved me most about my nephew’s beloved was the absolute freedom of her gestures, an unselfconscious abandon that allowed her to live fully in the moment, in an ever-present, ever-expanding now. I guessed her age to be around thirty, but her bearing was as light and unpretentious as a young girl’s, and I found it refreshing that such a lovely figure of a woman would show herself in public dressed in a pair of white overalls and a checkered flannel shirt. It was a sign of confidence, I felt, an indifference to the opinions of others that only the stea
diest, most grounded souls possess. I wasn’t about to abandon my secret infatuation with Marina Gonzalez, but by every objective standard of feminine beauty, I knew she couldn’t hold a candle to the B.P.M.
“I’ll bet she’s an artist,” I said to Tom.
“What makes you say that?” he replied.
“The overalls. Painters always like to wear overalls. Too bad Harry’s gallery went out of business. We could have organized a show for her.”
“It could be that she’s pregnant again. I’ve seen her with her husband a couple of times. A tall blond guy with big shoulders and a wispy beard. She’s just as affectionate with him as she is with the kids.”
“Maybe she’s both.”
“Both?”
“Both pregnant and an artist. A pregnant artist in her dual-purpose overalls. On the other hand, take note of her slender form. I cast my eyes toward the region of her belly, but I detect no bulge.”
“That’s why she’s wearing the overalls. They’re loose enough to hide it.”
As Tom and I continued to speculate on the meaning of the overalls, the school bus pulled up in front of the house across the street, and the B.P.M. and her two little ones were momentarily blocked from view. I realized that I didn’t have a moment to spare. In another few seconds, the bus would drive off down the block, and the B.P.M. would turn around and go back into her house. I had no intention of spying on the woman again (there are some things you just don’t do), and if this was my only chance, then I had to act immediately. For the sake of my bashful, lovesick nephew’s mental health, I felt obliged to destroy the spell he was living under, to demystify the object of his longing and turn her into what she really was: a happily married Brooklyn housewife with two kids and perhaps another on the way. Not some saintly, unapproachable goddess, but a flesh-and-blood woman who ate and shat and fucked – just like everyone else.
Given the circumstances, there was only one possible choice. I had to cross the street and talk to her. Not just a few words, but a full-fledged conversation that would go on long enough for me to wave Tom over and force him to join in. At the very least, I wanted him to shake her hand, to touch her, so he would finally get it through his thick skull that she was a tangible being and not some disembodied spirit who lived in the clouds of his imagination. So off I went – rashly, impulsively, without the first idea of what I was going to say to her. The bus was just beginning to move again when I got to the other side of the street, and there she was, standing on the curb directly in front of me, blowing a last kiss to her two darlings, who had already found their seats on the bus and were now part of a mob of three dozen howling tots. Putting on my most pleasant and reassuring salesman’s face, I advanced toward her and said, “Excuse me, but I wonder if I could ask you a question.”
“A question?” she answered, a bit taken aback, I think, or else merely startled that a man was now standing in front of her where just a moment before there had been a bus.
“I’ve just moved into the neighborhood,” I continued, “and I’m looking for a decent art supply store. When I saw you standing here in your overalls, I thought maybe you were an artist yourself. Ergo, it popped into my head to ask.”
The B.P.M. smiled. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she didn’t believe me or because she was amused by the lameness of my question, but as I studied her face and saw the crinkles forming around her eyes and mouth, I understood that she was a tad older than I had thought at first. Perhaps thirty-four or thirtyfive – not that it made the least bit of difference or detracted from her youthful luster in any way. She had spoken only two words to me so far – A question? – but in those three short syllables I had heard the resonant tonality of a born Brooklynite, that unmistakable accent so ridiculed in other parts of the country, but which I find to be the most welcoming, most human of all American voices. On the strength of that voice, the gears started rotating in my head, and by the time she spoke to me again, I had already sketched out the story of her life. Born here, I said to myself, and raised here as well, perhaps in the very house she was standing in front of now. Working-class parents, since the Brooklyn gentrification boom didn’t begin until the mid-seventies, meaning that at the time of her birth (mid- to late sixties) the neighborhood had still been a shabby, rundown area inhabited by struggling immigrants and blue-collar families (the Brooklyn of my own childhood), and the four-story brownstone that loomed behind her, which was now worth at least eight or nine hundred thousand dollars, had been bought for next to nothing. She attends the local schools, stays in the city for college, loves several men and breaks more than a few hearts, eventually marries, and when her parents die she inherits the house she lived in as a girl. If not precisely that, then something very close to it. The B.P.M. was too comfortable in her surroundings to have been a stranger, too settled in her own skin to have come from somewhere else. This was her place, and she reigned over the block as if it had been her realm from the first minute of her life.
“Do you always judge people by what they wear?” she asked.
“It wasn’t a judgment,” I said, “just a guess. Maybe a stupid guess, but if you’re not a painter or a sculptor or an artist of some kind, then it’s the first time I’ve ever guessed wrong about anyone. That’s my specialty. I look at people and figure out who they are.”
She cracked another smile and laughed. Who is this silly person, she must have been wondering, and why is he talking to me like this? I decided the moment had come to introduce myself. “I’m Nathan, by the way,” I said. “Nathan Glass.”
“Hello, Nathan. I’m Nancy Mazzucchelli. And I’m not an artist.”
“Oh?”
“I make jewelry.”
“That’s cheating. Of course you’re an artist.”
“Most people would call it a craft.”
“I suppose it depends on how good your work is. Do you sell the things you make?”
“Of course. I have my own business.”
“Is your store in the neighborhood?”
“I don’t have a store. But a bunch of places on Seventh Avenue carry my stuff. I also sell things out of the house.”
“Ah, I see. Have you lived here long?”
“All my life. Born and bred on this very spot.”
“A Park Sloper through and through.”
“Yeah. Right down to the marrow in my bones.”
There it was: a full confession. Sherlock Holmes had done it again, and as I marveled at my devastating powers of deduction, I wished there had been two of me so I could have patted myself on the back. I know it sounds arrogant, but how often does one achieve a mental triumph of that magnitude? After listening to her speak just two words, I had nailed the whole bloody thing. If Watson had been there, he would have been shaking his head and muttering under his breath.
Meanwhile, Tom was still standing on the other side of the street, and I figured it was long past time to bring him into the conversation. As I turned around and gestured for him to come over, I informed the B.P.M. that he was my nephew and that he ran the rare-book-and-manuscript division of Brightman’s Attic.
“I know Harry,” Nancy said. “I even worked for him one summer before I was married. A hell of a guy.”
“Yeah, a hell of a guy. They don’t make them like that anymore.”
I knew that Tom was peeved at me for dragging him into a situation he wanted no part of, but he nevertheless came over and joined us – blushing, his head down, looking like a dog who was about to be whipped. I suddenly regretted what I was doing to him, but it was too late to put a stop to it, too late to offer any apologies, and so I plunged ahead and introduced him to the Queen of Brooklyn, all the while swearing on my sister’s grave that I would never, never butt into the affairs of anyone else again.
“Tom,” I said, “this is Nancy Mazzucchelli. She and I were having a discussion about local art supply stores, but then we got sidetracked onto the subject of jewelry. Believe it or not, she’s lived in this house all her
life.”
Without daring to lift his eyes from the ground, Tom extended his right arm and shook Nancy’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said.
“Nathan tells me you work for Harry Brightman,” she replied, blissfully unaware of the momentous thing that had just happened. Tom had finally touched her, had finally heard her speak, and regardless of whether that would be enough to break the spell of his enchantment, contact had been made, which meant that Tom would henceforth have to confront her on new ground. She was no longer the B.P.M. She was Nancy Mazzucchelli, and pretty as she was to look at, she was just an ordinary girl who made jewelry for a living.
“Yes,” Tom said, “I’ve been there for about six months. I like it.”
“Nancy used to work in the store herself,” I said. “Before she was married.”
Instead of answering my comment, Tom looked at his watch and announced that he had to be going. Still understanding nothing, the object of his adoration calmly waved good-bye. “Nice to meet you, Tom,” she said. “See you around, I hope.”
“I hope so, too,” he answered, and then, much to my surprise, he turned to me and shook my hand. “We’re still on for lunch, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said, relieved to know that he wasn’t as upset as I had imagined. “Same time, same place.”
And off he went, shambling down the block with his heavy-footed gait, gradually shrinking into the distance.
Once he was out of earshot, Nancy said, “He’s very shy, isn’t he?”
“Yes, very shy. But a good and noble person. One of the best people on earth.”
The B.P.M. smiled. “Do you still want the name of an art store?”
“Yes, I do. But I’d also be interested in looking at your jewelry. My daughter’s birthday is coming up, and I still haven’t bought her a present. Maybe you can help pick something out for me.”
“Maybe. Why don’t we go inside and have a look?”
