Buy Me Love

by Martha Cooley

  Morning, the proprietor said in a gruff cheerful voice.

  Morning, Mr. Reyes.

  He gestured in the direction of the avenue she had just crossed. A car sat in the middle of the intersection, waiting to turn. Immediately behind it, a beat-up black Lincoln honked aggressively.

  Car services! Idiots, those drivers! Why can’t Brooklyn have regular taxis, like in the city?

  The Lincoln’s driver leaned out of his window and began yelling at the driver ahead of him. Mr. Reyes clucked his tongue.

  One of these days, he said, you’re gonna walk against that light and get mowed down. Those guys can’t drive to save their own lives!

  Oh, I’ll be fine. But thanks for worrying about me.

  Your usual? He reached for the coffee pot.

  Please. And one of those cookies your wife makes. They’re so good.

  I haven’t put them out yet. First have some of this . . .

  He handed her a paper cup filled to its brim; she sipped cautiously.

  Hot, strong, reassuring.

  She fished a ten-dollar bill from her pocket and handed it over.

  Anything smaller? asked Mr. Reyes.

  Oh, sorry—hang on a sec . . .

  Reaching into her bag, she pulled out her wallet, attempting to open it with one hand while stabilizing her coffee with the other.

  Put that cup down, said Mr. Reyes. You’re gonna spill all over yourself!

  Setting the cup on the counter, she spread open her billfold and walked the tip of her forefinger through its contents. No singles, just larger bills.

  No dice. I just went to the bank last night, all I’ve got are twenties . . .

  Rich lady, eh? Mr. Reyes chuckled.

  I wish!

  You could be.

  What, rich?

  Yeah! You should play this new lottery game. Win big-time. Really big!

  Like what?

  Like, a hundred million, he smiled. That’s the jackpot.

  She sipped more coffee. But I never play—I mean, I’ve never even bought a lottery ticket. Too complicated, all those rules.

  Complicated? Nah, it’s easy! You just pick seven numbers. See?

  The printed form he handed her had seven empty squares in the middle. Tiny text swarmed across the white spaces above and below the squares.

  Squinting, she reached into her bag in search of her reading glasses. Mr. Reyes pointed to something like a cash register sitting on the counter, near the dog. A modest white box with a small keyboard.

  Don’t bother reading anything on that form, he said. It’s all automated! All you gotta do is pay your dollar and pick your numbers. They can be single or double digits—it doesn’t matter. I’ll punch them into that little machine, and you check your TV tomorrow to see if you’re the winner.

  I don’t own a TV.

  Really? His brows rose. You don’t get bored?

  I do get bored. That’s why I don’t own a TV.

  He laughed. Ah well, I can’t make it through a day without watching a little soccer. Plus the news. You know, if something should happen . . .

  If something should happen, I’ve got a radio, so I’d know.

  Yeah. Sometimes I wonder why we need to see everything. Who wants to watch buildings fall down over and over?

  Exactly.

  Or car-bombings, suicide attacks . . .

  We’ve got ourselves into quite the mess over there, haven’t we? Hard to believe we’ve been at war over two years already.

  Ayudanos! Listen, you really should try the new lottery. It’s called “Pick Seven.” These crazy times we live in . . . I just have this feeling one of my customers is gonna win big. I’ll even say a prayer for you!

  She laughed. Who will you pray to, Mr. Reyes?

  A divine figure, of course. Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha—I rotate them each week. Today’s Monday . . . I have to check my calendar.

  You rotate them? Really?

  He nodded earnestly.

  To increase the odds, he said. Look, buy a ticket! And bring in your numbers tomorrow—that’s when the drawing is. I’ll tell you if you’re a winner. Even if you don’t hit the jackpot, they’re giving out lots of smaller prizes. Wouldn’t you like a few extra grand in your bank account? Or a trip to Barbados with your boyfriend?

  He smirked in a friendly, non-lascivious way.

  Hah, she said. Right, my boyfriend, Casper the Friendly Ghost.

  Ah . . . Well, escaping to Barbados by yourself wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

  The coffee had cooled to just the right temperature. A reprieve—a few instants in the seat of happiness.

  The lottery form: seven empty boxes, waiting to be filled in.

  You’ll get a cut if I win, right?

  You bet! Mr. Reyes’s smile elongated, revealing a pair of gold-capped incisors.

  All right, then. Here’s a buck. Pray to whomever you like. I’ll take whatever help I can get.

  He grinned, gold teeth glinting.

  You’ll get it! Oh, your cookie—wait—I almost forgot . . .

  I wouldn’t let that happen.

  Mr. Reyes disappeared into a small room at the back of the shop, returning with a plate of nut-studded cookies. Selecting the two largest, he wrapped them in a paper napkin.

  Here you go: two for one, he said.

  Thanks for the extra. And tell your wife she’s a terrific baker. My mornings have become unthinkable without her cookies.

  Don’t I know it! Mr. Reyes grinned. She should go into the dessert business, I tell her. What do you do for work?

  Me? I’m a writer and editor. Pausing, she added: a poet, actually.

  A poet! You earn a living that way?

  No. I earn a living editing stuff for other people.

  You get any of your poems published? Like, in newspapers, or wherever they print poetry these days?

  Not recently. You read poetry, Mr. Reyes?

  Oh, I used to, in school . . . I still read some Neruda now and then, since I’m Chilean. It’s tough being a poet, isn’t it? Neruda did other things, too, didn’t he? Wasn’t he a mayor or something?

  An ambassador. To France.

  Then at least he had a salary! My niece says she wants to be a poet. Dreamy kid . . . I tell her go right ahead, but it’s no way to buy a house!

  You’re a wise man.

  He shrugged amiably. So, you own your apartment?

  No, I rent.

  He nodded. Yeah, who can afford anything around here? A doghouse is out of my range! That’s why I live in Sunset Park. Still not cheap, but better than this neighborhood . . .

  My brother lives in Sunset Park, too. His rent’s lower than mine, and his bathroom’s a lot bigger.

  Hah. Well, what can you do. Okay—here’s a pen, go ahead and fill in your numbers . . .

  Staring at the lottery form, she pictured a large glass barrel on its side, rolling in some sort of metal cylinder. Hadn’t such a contraption been on TV, years earlier?

  Yes, and there’d been a blonde in a sequined gown who’d turned a crank that set the barrel spinning. And a dapper little man who’d opened the barrel’s side-door and pulled out a single slip of paper from amongst the thousands stuffed in there. And our winner is . . .

  She took the pen Mr. Reyes held out to her. Seven numbers. Why not trio, quartet?

  She filled in the seven squares and handed back the form.

  I wish you luck, Mr. Reyes replied, tipping forward in a bow.

  He punched her numbers into his machine and gave her a small piece of paper.

  Don’t lose this ticket, it’s your new life!

  I won’t . . . Thanks!

  Folding the ticket in half, she shoved it into her bag, her fingers tunneling down til they touched leathery bottom. Then, coffee in hand, she continued her uphill hike.

  6

  What might be done with an unexpected influx of cash?

  That Mr. Reyes, what a salesman . . . A cup of joe and a lottery ticket, for God�
�s sake.

  On the street, she sipped her coffee. An unexpected influx, okay—but what amount? Not just a couple of thousand, or even a couple of hundred thousand. Or a million, or several million. A lot more. A hundred million, say. A fairytale trove, pie in the sky, pot of gold. An honest-to-God windfall.

  What to do with it? If one already had a bit of money, a windfall would surely mean something different than if one were broke to begin with. So what was a bit of money? In her own case: sixty thousand bucks. For oil sheiks and Bill Gates, that was chump change. For the very well-off but not truly rolling-in-it, that’d be merely a little something. For the comfy-but-not-wealthy, a decent but unexceptional amount. For a whole lot of working folks, a helluva lot. And for hundreds of millions of humans around the globe, sixty thousand dollars would be a truly vast sum. When it came to money, nobody was ever talking about the same thing. A person could have twenty bucks to her name and feel safe, or a million and feel vulnerable.

  As for that sixty grand of hers, where might it be found?

  Molting in an ordinary savings account.

  And apart from those so-called life savings, what other assets were at hand?

  Hah. No stocks, no bonds, no 401(k) (or whatever the right letter was), no Roth IRA (was that one named after Philip, Henry, or Joseph?), no wads of dough stuffed into a mattress. Her checking account balance? Rarely more than five hundred bucks. Hovering at three hundred just now, in fact. Additional valuables? No real estate. No car. No fine art. No fancy furnishings. No expensive jewelry. No coin or stamp collection. No first editions or rare books.

  Rich relations? Nola’d left twenty grand when she died—a stack of bills in a safe-deposit box. Cash she’d literally forgotten about. The key to the box had been in an old, zipper-less purse in Nola’s closet—found by accident. Hence ten grand for herself, ten for Win. Spent long ago, of course.

  What about other relations—grandparents, aunts, uncles, some familial hero to the rescue? Uh-uh. Not a single relative would come crawling out of the woodwork or the grave. The buck had already stopped.

  And the paterfamilias?

  Impossible to say how much Walter might’ve socked away—euros in an Italian bank account, dollars in New York . . . A nice chunk of change. The man had been gainfully employed for decades, after all. But none of his money would land in his progeny’s laps. He’d probably leave it all to La Scala, his favorite concert hall. Or to Bruno, who in turn would bequeath the money to some good-looking Italian boy he’d start up with after Walter’s death, to assuage his grief. Then fall pathetically in love with. And get ripped off by.

  Opera buffa. Singspiel.

  7

  Onward, freelancer!

  She proceeded up Ninth Street.

  Where’d her piddly income gone each year? Into poetry, mostly. Hardcovers, paperbacks, chapbooks, series and anthologies, translations, special editions. Loads of books and journals. Dale liked to say she spent more on poetry than a wino did on plonk.

  Other expenses? Occasional music or theater performances. Drinks or meals with friends, though not often. Now-and-then shopping sprees. (Biggest splurge in months? A pair of second-hand Armani flats for a mere thirty bucks. Thank God for Upper East Side thrift shops.)

  Freelancing was a choice, though. Nobody’d strong-armed her into it. And she’d gotten by. It wasn’t really a matter of living modestly; it required magic tricks of the mind. Negative capability. And hope, the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson’s mute little bird . . .

  How about that earlier question: what would an unexpected windfall actually do for the recipient?

  It would make that person a believer. In what? In this: after all the practical impediments were dealt with, the sluicegates would open and happiness would flood in, filling all the cracks and crevices and creating a sunlit, pearl-bottomed, tranquil lake of blessedness to swim in, for ever and ever amen.

  But the real impediments wouldn’t be the practical ones, would they?

  No, dear, they wouldn’t.

  Oh, come on. People in Uzbekistan weren’t complaining about the non-practical impediments! In Haiti and Sudan, they weren’t griping about obstacles in their heads. They were looking for the next meal and some drinkable water.

  True. All the same, it’s your own desert places that mess with you most.

  At Eighth Avenue, she passed a heap of cardboard on the curb. Someone was moving in, or out.

  Dale fretted about something his economist colleagues called the housing bubble. There was a big one now, they said, and it’d pop soon, and all hell would break loose. But wouldn’t real estate in New York City be immune from bubble-popping? Dale said no, but in any case the issue was irrelevant for him. He’d turn blue at the gills if anyone took him out of his urban pond. And now, despite being partnerless and kidless, he was getting what he’d always longed for—a Lower East Side fixer-upper. A place of his own. Which was more than could be said for his buddy across the bridge in Brooklyn, with her rented apartment and a paltry sixty grand in her piggybank.

  Dear girl, Dale would say, your real problem isn’t money. After all, you’ll collect Social Security when you stop working, and you can always sleep on my couch. Your real problem is you sit on your hands. Write some more poems!

  Fecha Límite

  1

  She’d be going underground soon, into a subway station. Her next project would be called “Euphemisms.”

  In the art supply store, Blair stacked cans of turpentine. She’d need a roll of stencil paper; it’d be a little tricky to lift, but she could slip it into an empty carton of cans, take it to the storage area, and transfer it to her backpack when no one was around.

  A guy came in wearing an American flag pin. She turned away. He could find someone else on the floor to help him. Americans were cowards, snug in their homes while people in Baghdad had nowhere to run or hide. Refusing to admit they’d been tricked by their own leaders. What did the ordinary Iraqi know or care about weapons of mass destruction? There weren’t any; it was all a lie.

  Keith always said animals didn’t have wars. They fought, but it wasn’t war. Dogs didn’t send other dogs to fight on their behalf. No dog ever made a profit on a dogfight.

  Right and wrong were beside the point, in any case. Art was beside the point, too; it meant nothing in and of itself, was merely a stone skipping across water. What mattered were the ripples: getting people to do something they wouldn’t normally allow themselves to do. So they’d become strangers to themselves.

  Keith was like the guy in The Stranger who said to be free, you had to make a wild run for it. That was the phrase Camus used—a wild run.

  Why hadn’t Keith let her know where he’d gone? Did he figure she’d tell someone, talk about how he’d shown her how to be a boy? No, that was between them. Talking was pointless.

  He’d turn up. She’d have to wait, was all. You’re a good pup, he’d say if he were here. Just keep quiet and wait.

  2

  Daylight broke as she was packing up.

  On the path that led from the Nethermead to the Long Meadow, early-morning dampness muffled her footsteps. A few birds stirred; the stream made the only other sound, a low steady burbling. Next time she’d bring a sleeping bag and spend the night in the Ravine. The park police would never find her.

  The time? She checked her watch: almost six. Too early to go to work; the store didn’t open til nine. Go home, get a bit of sleep? Not worth it; by the time she reached home, she’d have to turn around and go out again. Might as well stick around the Slope, have some breakfast, get the newspaper. See how the fucked-up war was proceeding.

  Exiting the park, she headed down Ninth Street.

  There were several coffee-shops on Seventh Avenue, but the R train was on Fourth. There’d be a diner somewhere on Fifth.

  At the corner of Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street, the proprietor of a small bodega was opening his shop’s metal gates.

  Morning, he said as she entered.
You’re my first customer. Coffee?

  No thanks, she said. Just the Times.

  Cookie?

  No, thanks.

  Taped to his cash register was a penciled notice: The Slope Shop has a winner! Announce yourself!

  What’s that about? she asked.

  The Pick Seven jackpot, said the proprietor. They announced the win yesterday—a hundred million! And the ticket was purchased right here in this neighborhood. I got a notice from the Lottery Commission; that’s all they’d tell me. But I’m sure it’s one of my customers.

  Anything’s possible, she said.

  The man shook his head soberly.

  When I have hunches, he said, they’re almost always right.

  Almost isn’t a hundred million bucks.

  Again the man shook his head.

  That’s true, he replied. But it’s also true you must trust what you know, here.

  He tapped his diaphragm. Even, he added, if there doesn’t seem to be a reason.

  Yes, she said, that’s true.

  The proprietor regarded her in silence.

  I believe in fate, he said finally. So if you learn who the winner is, tell that person there’s a fecha límite—a deadline.

  In his sternness, he reminded her of her old art teacher. The word “deadline” sounded better in Spanish than in English. More like a challenge, less like a threat.

  I will, she said.

  Man and Boy

  1

  Seven in the evening: prime time at the Ninth Street gym. Worst possible hour—every treadmill taken. No cross-trainers available, either.

  Ellen proceeded to the Balcony. Mounted twenty feet up the walls of the basketball court, the Balcony was an overhanging track, a gray cast-iron oval ringed by sturdy railings whose banked surface was covered with ratty carpeting. Four warmup nooks were located in each of the Balcony’s corners. The one major drawback was noise: basketball players’ cries from the court below ricocheted off the high walls, and on some afternoons, nursery schoolers made an unholy racket during their play-hour. Still, the Balcony offered privacy. No serious exercisers went there.