Sumptuous brown waves, blonder on the ends, gathered in a high loose ponytail. The slight widow’s peak.
The skin, January-pale with faint gray crescents under the eyes, betraying late and sleepless nights.
Strong brown brows, thick fringe of lashes on downturned eyes.
Biting on a thumbnail. The remains of a magenta manicure.
One leg folded underneath her, the other tapping the floor in a chunky-soled shoe.
On turn two around the block, I begin to laugh. What insanity is this? I have discovered a twenty-something girl who looks like I used to look in the Bill Clinton era. She has stolen my 1991 clodhoppers! Maybe she found them moldering in the back of a Goodwill store.
Wait until I tell Dennis. He will find this funny.
On the third pass, I soak up all the details so that I can regale him.
On the fourth pass, she glances up and our eyes meet.
Something lurches, in my brain.
Sliding. Tumbling.
For a beat she regards me—maybe with a flicker of interest, or maybe not. Then she simply looks away, the way you do when you catch a stranger staring. She bows her head back to her book.
My heart folds violently.
What I remember about her. About when I was her. And what I cannot remember. What is beyond recall.
Somehow I steer myself back to my desk. I skip lunch.
SESSION NOTES, Dr. M. Unzicker
* * *
A’s boss says a fresh college grad at the entry level needs to make better use of her midday break. Networking lunches, etc. For her future at her job.
This future doesn’t interest her.
She feels she is waiting for something else to happen.
ABBY, JANUARY 20, 2015
Threading through sidewalk bottlenecks to my stop that evening. Clouds collided in the dark gust above Bryant Park. I thought, for the first time in years, of Eleanor Boyle.
She had been my anchor point at twenty-two, when I was that girl. She’d been a year ahead of me at Western New England State, another cash-strapped and ambitious small-town girl who’d opted for the cheap local college while scanning the horizons far beyond it. She landed in New York first. Eleanor swore every other word and she taught me all about clubbing, though we never called it clubbing—maybe the term postdated our actual clubbing days. She wore secondhand silk lingerie, 1930s bed jackets and slips, when we went out, and I’d wear those silver platform sandals, the coat, and underneath an orange jersey dress from the Fiorucci store. Spaghetti straps, red roses printed around the hem.
Confession: I still have that dress. I slept in it, until it almost fell apart. I have never thrown it away.
Now I’d seen the silver shoes, the pink coat, that used to go out on the town with my nightgown.
How many years since Eleanor and I last spoke? Fifteen? No, closer to twenty.
If I called her, perhaps I could ask her: Are you seeing the former you? Is this something that happens to all of us, while passing over the middle tipping point of our lives?
I had to laugh again. This strange latter-day double of me, tossed into my path by a town with a twisted sense of humor.
The subway steps were littered with drifts of spilled packing peanuts, skittering in the windy evening, urban seafoam, city snowdrift.
I couldn’t call Eleanor after so much time has passed and talk about such a thing.
These sightings, these oddities just need to be ignored, I told myself, and swiped my way toward an impatiently waiting train.
BUT THOSE CLUBS, I thought, my hands wrist-deep in soapy warm water later that evening. Rubbing the remains of our pork-chop dinner from the pan. The clubs, the doormen, the clustered hopefuls outside. Those ropes would be unhooked for us, invariably. Eleanor and me. We’d always been so pleased, so surprised. Never bothering to think about why they’d automatically give a nod to such a duo, unescorted, out past midnight on a Tuesday night and dolled up in cheap, cheeky clothing. Not caring that tomorrow we’d be sneakily sleeping at our desks, chin resting on one hand, the other hand idle on the keyboard, perhaps not even showered, perhaps still smelling of adventuring. The perfect club bait. We didn’t let that get in our way.
An experience junkie. That’s what I used to call myself, when I was her. And it had brought me almost to ruin. This much I know.
Pete walked in behind me, towering, telescoping arms reaching for the cabinet overhead. “I’m shooting paintball with Dmitri Saturday,” Pete said. “His brother Milo is taking us, it’s somewhere out, Dyker Heights, I think.”
“How old is this brother?”
“Old, like twenty-five.”
I smiled. “So, did you ever hear what was in the trash can?” I said. “I thought we’d get a robocall from school.”
“False alarm, I guess.” Riffling around, rustling packages. “I need cookies,” he said. “You need to go to the store.”
I turned, dripping suds on the linoleum. “You need to ask your dad to go to the store.”
Because this was what governed life now. The endlessly scrolling list of our needs. The clockwork peregrinations as we hunted and gathered to satisfy those needs. Where did desires fit in?
Pete stood there investigating the far reaches of the cabinets, where stale crackers often could be found.
“We could bake cookies, maybe this weekend.” I dried my fingers on a towel.
“I could get into that,” he said, and he turned to me and grinned, his dark eyes lit up.
“I need to buy flour then.” I hugged him—and as with every hug these days, his body felt different to me, rangier, ropier, the cushioning of childhood melting away. He returned my hug for a delightful instant, then squirmed, recovering his composure.
And I noticed it then—all down one side of his jeans, a spattering. Black-red dots. A spill or a splatter. “Is that blood?”
“Paint,” he said. “I was in the art room today.”
“Paint,” I said. He was always talking about how he had no interest in art of any kind, and never would. He wanted to study economics. What else would you expect? Child of the struggle.
LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT, I descended to our cave-like basement. One wall was lined with the racks Dennis had built when we’d moved in fifteen years ago, to store my old paintings, which were wrapped in brown paper and filed on their sides—a bit like those old library books, it occurred to me now. I wrestled with the drawer of a dented file cabinet, covered, as everything down here was, with a fine grit sifted from the rooms above. In the drawer, embedded in a schist of yellowing receipts and letters, I found my ancient address book. The spine half-broken, green fabric cover torn and patched with duct tape and a Tower Records sticker.
Eleanor’s last phone number was there under B.
And look. Scribbled inside the front cover. Mariah Glücksburg’s name, a long ago landline, and the address of that little house in the harbor flats.
Scribbled haphazardly, as things happened during my first year in Providence.
In the tumultuous year after I was her—the girl of the musty library and the dusky nightclub. The experience junkie.
And there. On the last page, scrawled in his own hand. Eli Hammond. His building number on Avenue C.
Staring at these pencil marks. A faint map of a lost and somehow perilous region. Somehow dangerous. How?
Maybe I actually could talk to the girl. Maybe I could tell her a thing or two.
Ridiculous.
What would I tell her anyway. Steer her clear of some half-remembered trouble? Or direct her straight toward it?
Because, if you could change the outcome, would you change the outcome?
Weigh all you once lost against all you stand to lose.
An impossible equation. An evil sort of math.
Also, ridiculous. Insane. This was a random girl. A cluster of strangely evocative matter that had sailed across my trajectory. She was not me. Seriously.
In any case, I climbed the stair
s and slipped the address book into my bag.
ABBY, JANUARY 24, 2015
Pete shattered a window at a house in Gravesend. A brick landed in the kitchen sink. He hadn’t been shooting paintball. He had been committing petty vandalism with this new pal of his, Dmitri. The brick had dinged the aluminum basin and caused the owner’s dog to shit the floor.
The call—“May I please speak to the legal guardian of Pete Willard?”—came from the Mill Basin precinct, a squat art-deco shoebox that sat an anxious eighty-dollar ride away from my office through sleet and traffic. I found my son sitting on a bench in a begrimed, crowded hallway. I tried to hold my temper and asked for an explanation.
“It was direct action,” he said. “The homeowner is a known fascist.”
“A fascist?” I was baffled. “Isn’t that a bit last century?” Then I saw he was crying. Just a few slick droplets, down his cheeks, swerving around his nose and over his lip. He wiped at them with his sleeve. I wrapped my arms around him and murmured in his ear. “Please don’t worry, sweetheart. It’ll be OK. But was it this new friend? Because this isn’t like you.”
“Yeah it is like me,” he said. He shrugged me away. “It’s not like you.”
This last word landed on me like spit.
Basketball, action films, video games. Yes, he cared about these things. Political philosophy? Not to my knowledge. But what did I know about him, now, this month, this week, this new year. So much newness all the time. Six more inches, forty more pounds in the last eighteen months, and, perhaps it stood to reason, a few more ideas in his head. Still, I wondered about the new friend, Dmitri, who’d joined the class midway through last term—out of the ordinary, at their painstaking, orderly private school. Pete had introduced me to him at pickup, a coal-eyed kid climbing into a snarling black car. “A 2015 Mercedes S550,” Pete said as it roared away. “Best parent ride by far.”
I tried again to text Dennis. He wasn’t answering—but I knew he had a meeting about a hockey arena project, somewhere upstate—was it Poughkeepsie? I wish I’d listened closer to him, but who catches every detail, every day, of a spouse’s work reportage?
Down the hall, a man shouted about a nuisance summons. “I am not a fucking nuisance!” he yelped, flapping his arms.
And while I dug in my purse to find a tissue for my sniffling Pete, the other half of my brain took in the detective observing us, clearly waiting to speak to me. The long-limbed cantilevered stance, with one shoulder against the wall, hands in the pockets of his precisely cut sports coat. A pleasing vertical composition, a tall graceful shape. Dark hair trimmed short to tame a wave, threaded with tarnished silver. A face that seemed shadowed even in the stark fluorescence.
“We’ll charge him as a juvenile,” this detective was now saying to me, “but be aware that Homeland Security may need to do its due diligence. Take him home now, we’re all done, but you’ll be hearing from me, Mrs. . . .”
A slow smile, embellished along one side with a single dimple. A smile strategically deployed to reassure me, maybe.
“Willard. Abigail. Homeland Security? For a brick?” I willed my voice not to shake, put my hand on my boy’s sharp shoulder, I could see him slumping lower in his chair.
“Welcome to my world, Abigail.” He handed me a fat stack of forms. “A win for the terrorists—all these years, they’re still killing us on the paperwork front.”
“What’s next? Do we need a lawyer?”
“Depends. The complainant holds those cards right now. Try not to fret.” He reached into his jacket, thick caramel-hued wool, and pulled out a small loop strung with red beads. He sat down next to Pete and slipped the string around my boy’s wrist. “Ever seen these? Worry beads. Best way I know to work out the stress,” he said. “I learned it from a bad guy I arrested three times. This hooligan stayed frosty through extortion, narco trafficking, and murder-one trials. Never broke a sweat, beat the rap every single time,” he said. “He’s a happy Brooklynite to this day.” He thumped a hand on Pete’s shoulder, then rose again and turned to me. “My contact info is on the forms—I’m always checking my email. And that’s how I’ll keep you in the loop.”
Did his hand linger on my elbow just a few seconds longer than needed, escorting us past the yelping nuisance guy in the hallway of Brooklyn Precinct 63?
I wanted to say something about that hand on my elbow, about the gift of those beads. I wanted to demand of him: How different would all this be if we were not white, not from the Slope, if my kid didn’t attend that painstaking school?
I said nothing though. I wanted to get us out of there. Maybe I was imagining it, the hand on the elbow. But the benefits we enjoyed, by virtue of who we were: unmistakable.
When we reached the station exit, he held the door open for us. “And look what else, you charmed citizens,” he said, as if he’d been reading my mind. “The sun came out for you.” It was true, the ugly block was bathed in low orange rays. “It’s like you just can’t lose.”
He turned to Pete. “You want to change the world? Invent an app.” My boy nodded silently, face downcast.
The detective smiled at me again. In the strange light, his eyes looked like beaten bronze, and his skin was tawny. He might’ve been biracial, or a mix of Mediterranean stock, or just about anything. He was clean-shaven with an undertone of dark beard, a slightly crooked nose and a square chin. I wondered who he was, with the vague sense that I would keep wondering.
“I think there’s going to be an upside to this little incident,” he said. “Now we just watch and wait.” He tossed me one more dimple, then disappeared as the door swung shut.
Later, an email from him. None of the gruff world-weariness you’d expect from a New York cop—his written words struck me as courtly somehow. Intimate, even? He reassured me that he’d handle Pete’s case carefully. “I want to put your mind at ease. This is a juvenile case and the legal fees will work in our favor. The complainant may drop the charges.” And then, “Please call me anytime, happy to meet with you at any point in or out of the station. Here at your service.”
And his name and rank. Lieutenant Detective, Criminal Enterprise Squad.
“Criminal enterprise.” A broken window, a dinged sink, a prank by teens on a sleepover? Does that qualify as a criminal enterprise?
Criminal enterprise. Homeland security. What did my darling bumble into here.
“In or out of the station.”
I reread that bit.
“It’s normal boy stuff,” said Dennis, when he arrived home at last, late that night, yes it had been Poughkeepsie, and it had been a meeting over martinis, judging by his bleariness. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned his rumpled shirt, and tossed them both on the bed. He always shucked his work clothes as soon as possible, preferring to stroll around the house shirtless and barefoot in a pair of faded low-slung shorts. I had to admire how he pushed back against middle age, working out at a little weight bench in the basement and surfing at Rockaway every weekend from early spring into almost December. He cut corners in some areas, but not there. But ever since I’d met him, in all ways, even in his art, he inclined toward the physical. Now he encircled me with his arms, pulled me to him, the firm, lightly fuzzed warmth of him. “My brothers and I once tried to explode an empty oil tank at the abandoned hangars.” He laughed. “At least our boy didn’t create a Superfund site.” He spoke into my hair. “This is a phase, Abby, you’ll see.”
ABBY, JANUARY 27, 2015
Life normalized, as it does. Today Esther Muncie peeked, puppet-like, over the top of my cubicle wall, bleached corkscrewed curls twitching, frenetic: “Got something for me? Client wants that deck by five. That means twenty-three needs it by four.”
I nudged my monitor in her direction.
“Lavender?” She frowned. “Too gyno.”
“What color do you think they’d like in a stomach?”
“Color is your competency, Abby. Not mine.” Her little puppet head disappeared, a shout rolling bac
k toward me. “More options asap, if you please!”
Color is your competency, Abby.
Gray carpeting on the floor, nubby gray fabric on the wall, gray molded plastic all around the edges of my domain. But then, up above, the big square window, a box of sky from this seventeenth-floor vantage. Looming over my desk, the square pane of glass, entirely filled with a sharp, glancing blue on this winter morning.
Sometimes I considered this window my painting: I’d ease back into my chair, raise my face to it, admiring. Different each time I looked. Pink fish-scale clouds on a turquoise ground. A wispy white contrail against deep violet. A speckling of charcoal on cement as pigeons dove toward their nests. Snow flurries in urban dusk: a static of pale orange. I would claim this twelve square feet as mine, a work produced by a union between the great world and my longing for it.
At art school, at RISD, they told me that color would give me a career.
Certain moments stay so crystalline in the mind.
For example, the day in Providence when Bremer summoned me to his office. And I sometimes remind myself that art historians place Hans-Dietrich Bremer more than once in Mougins, drunk and disorderly with Picasso, and noted that he had sketched Jacqueline Roque a number of times, alongside Pablo, and also on his own—and that, in Taos in the early seventies, he built an adobe studio that was used for many years by Agnes Martin, whom he called Magsy. The master had summoned me to his office, one day toward the close of my final year. Stacked grapefruit peels, fresh deposits on top of dry and drying, formed a leaning tower on one corner of his desk. He prepared two pouch-tobacco cigarettes with a squeaky little rolling machine. It took a very long time, and I sat there, unable to think of a thing to say. I remember his eyes bright and watery and set deep among many soft and mottled folds as he finally looked up from his task. Lit the cigarettes in his own mouth, then handed one to me with shaking hands. People are always hungry for color, he said, and not many can use it like you do.
I had never smoked a hand-rolled cigarette before. Trying to pick the ticklish threads from my tongue without letting him see.
You Again Page 2
