All the Greys on Greene Street

by Laura Tucker

  “I won’t go back there, Ollie. I can’t.”

  Then she rolled over onto her other side, away from me and the shape I’d left in her bed.

  WAKE UP!

  Back in the big room, I watched TV for a while. Then I grabbed my notebook, rolled open the huge window, stepped up onto the splintering sill, and crawled out.

  Most of the cast-iron buildings in SoHo have fire escapes running down the sides. I spend a lot of time on ours. You’re invisible to people on the street when you’re out there; nobody ever looks up.

  It was cold out there, but it felt good, so I sat with my arms wrapped around my knees and watched the trucks leaving the button factory next door for the day. When they’d gone, Greene Street was empty and quiet, which might have been the only reason I noticed the movement in the empty lot across the street.

  Someone was climbing the chain-link fence.

  I leaned forward to see, pulling my sweatshirt around me against the chilly spring evening. A small guy, wearing a wide-shouldered brown suit and a brown fedora over longish dirty-blond hair, skillfully avoided the barbed wire at the top of the fence and jumped down to a crouch before heading over to the brick wall at the very back of the lot.

  He was putting up a poster.

  His suit surprised me. When my mom went through her poster phase, all of my jeans had scaly patches on them from the wheat paste, even though I was just the lookout. It isn’t the kind of job you’d wear a suit to do, unless you were trying to look like someone in an old movie.

  Dapper, my dad would have said.

  The guy stepped back to look at his work, now drying on the wall. I could tell he was happy from the way he was standing. I picked up my notebook again, thinking I’d sketch him through the thickly painted iron bars of the fire escape.

  But he turned around to face my building and looked right up to where I was sitting.

  My heart sped up, even though I wasn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, he was: paste-ups are illegal, although the cops don’t usually arrest people for them the way they do for graffiti.

  Then he tipped his hat to me.

  Before I could do anything—in fact, before I could even think of what that could possibly be—he had clambered back over the heavy barbed wire fence. By the time I’d gotten myself together to respond, he was already halfway down the deserted block, moving fast, with small, tidy steps that made it look like he was dancing.

  I watched him go, then grabbed two of the iron bars and pulled myself up to a squat so I could see the poster.

  It was an egg, wearing black sunglasses and white gloves. Fat, flowing, bright yellow script ran along the top: WAKE UP! When you looked closely, you could see the egg’s shell was covered in cracks.

  I sat back against the bars. I knew it was stupid, but the poster felt like a message to my mom.

  SIR

  It’s twenty-two steps up to the studio from our fire escape. I don’t have a fear of heights or anything, but I do it without looking down.

  Once I had my face pressed up to the huge studio windows, I could see Apollo standing in front of one of the easels, cleaning a painting of triangles with a cotton ball. The big floor fans weren’t on, so I guessed he was just using water. My dad says you can do most of what you need to do in this life with intelligence and water.

  Even though the window was closed, I could hear Apollo’s music, which is always jazz and very loud. If my dad needs a little quiet, Apollo listens through earphones connected to the bright yellow Walkman he clips to his belt. Every once in a while, he’ll stop what he’s doing to lead the band, or to shimmy.

  My dad and Apollo usually work back-to-back, but there was nothing on the easel where my dad usually works. There hadn’t been, since he’d left.

  Something else was missing, too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Nothing had felt quite right since my dad had gone. Except for Apollo, who is my favorite and always the same.

  The thing about Apollo is that he’s the ugliest person I’ve ever seen. I’m not saying that to be mean; it’s just a true fact. When I was really little, I did say it right to his face, and he laughed. Mostly, he looks like a lion. He’s enormous, first of all, and when he was a teenager, he had the kind of acne that hurts and leaves scars, so his face looks like it’s melted. But he has incredibly kind eyes, and once you get over being scared to look at him, you can’t stop: His face never gets boring like regular people’s faces do.

  Apollo seems younger than my parents, even though he’s the same age. Mostly, that’s because of his clothes. He was wearing a pair of olive-green army pants, a yellow button-down shirt over a red T-shirt, a shiny black patent-leather belt, and an aquamarine bandana as a scarf. For him, this was fairly toned down. He says he loves color because they didn’t have any in Poland when he was growing up, which is the kind of joke he makes. But my dad says Apollo knows more about color than anyone he’s ever met.

  I didn’t want Apollo to think I was a creeper, so I tapped on the window. He turned around and smiled wide when he saw me, then rolled the gigantic window up to let me in. He held my hand to help me down from the windowsill like I was a fancy lady getting out of a carriage. On one foot, he was wearing a purple sneaker; the other one was white. Sometimes he does that, just to throw you off.

  “You provide a delightful interruption, Olympia; I am about ready to stop. It is very stupid garbage, this painting. But money is money, am I right, little bird?”

  I nodded. Money was something I’d been thinking about a lot since my dad went off to France. It’s hard not to worry when you don’t know how much money there is and how much everybody needs.

  Apollo saw the look on my face.

  “Sit for fifteen minutes and let me finish, and then we will have supper together? If you are up for it, perhaps we could take a walk over to The Spicy One?”

  I nodded gratefully. The Spicy One is our favorite restaurant, but we usually only go on the weekends because it’s all the way over on East Broadway. On school nights, we go to Wo Ping because they have the best pressed duck and the line is shorter there than at Bobo’s on Mott. But the long walk over to The Spicy One would be a good time to ask Apollo if he knew how to get in touch with my dad.

  The sign outside The Spicy One says Hwa Yuan Noodle Shop, even though the best thing there is the roasted pork, which they make with Szechuan peppercorns. Eating one Szechuan peppercorn makes your mouth go numb; Richard says they make your tongue feel like it’s a zombie. My dad and Richard share an interest in movies about monsters, so my dad calls The Spicy One “Zombie Chinese.”

  While he was finishing up, I asked Apollo what color he thought his T-shirt was.

  “Vermilion,” he said immediately. Then he looked down and changed his mind. “Cinnabar.” Those are basically the same thing, except that cinnabar is the unground mineral and vermilion is the color. But if there’s a difference between the way it looks ground and unground, Apollo can see it.

  I love the studio. The walls are white and tall, like in our apartment downstairs, but in our apartment, the two couches and the trunk we use for a coffee table seem lost in the space. The studio, on the other hand, is filled with a wonderful mess—everything a person could possibly need to build or fix or make some art.

  The planks of the wood floor are spotted with paint and pieces of masking tape, and there are fingerprints—paint and solvent—on every surface. But everything has a place. Brushes are kept under the long, low tables by the windows in big tin cans; rags are under there, too. Taking them to the Beautiful Vieques Laundry and folding them when they come out of the dryer is one of my jobs.

  In the middle of the studio, there are four tables like my mom’s workbench downstairs, big enough that you can really spread out. Between them, paint-spattered wooden carts on wheels hold spools of cotton batting, putty and film for patching, long-handled Q-tips for detail work, and
little trowels for mixing paint.

  Shelves between the windows hold chemicals in white plastic containers, as well as different types of paints. There’s a pegboard covered with tools: screwdrivers, saws, pliers, hammers, planes. Opposite, three long shelves sag with hundreds of hardcover art books, most of them found on the street or bought used. It’s hard to have a conversation with my dad or Apollo without one of them running over to the bookshelf to show you a picture.

  But my dad wasn’t there, and I wasn’t in the mood to look at a book, so I cleaned the brushes in the sink while I waited. The brushes that art restorers use are very expensive and need to be handled carefully, but I’ve known what to do since I was little. You have to get every smidge of paint out, which means rinsing long after the water has run clear, keeping all the hairs going the same way.

  When he was done with the triangle painting, Apollo took out his own notebook to find the telephone number of the girlfriend he was supposed to have dinner with.

  Apollo always has seventy-two different girlfriends going at once, and they’re almost always crying or mad at him. This one was no different. She had a lot to say when she heard he’d made other plans, but Apollo held the phone away from his ear and winked at me.

  “It is beyond my control. This thing that has come up is very important and must be attended to. I am very sorry, but it cannot be helped.”

  They went on like that for a while. I didn’t listen to all of it, but wandered off to the corner of the loft where Apollo keeps his colors.

  I love everything about the studio, but I love this corner the best. Narrow wooden shelves are stacked with jars, their labels soaked off—another one of my jobs. Some of the jars have powders inside, or oils, or chunks of wood. Some have nothing in them but one tiny rock. Every one of them has a paper tag, tied to a piece of string around the neck of the jar and labeled in Apollo’s bristly European handwriting.

  The jars hold our pigments. For hundreds of years, artists made and mixed their paints themselves instead of buying them from a store, and Apollo still does it that way. It’s useful to know how to mix colors from pigment when you restore canvases that are very old. But Apollo mixes colors for his own paintings too, which is why they’re so beautiful they make your chest hurt.

  Most of our pigments don’t look like the colors they make. In fact, most of them don’t look like anything at all. But the names on the labels are clues that there’s magic inside: Orpiment. Azurite. Rose madder. Ochre. Ancora. Cinnabar. Malachite. Antimony.

  Our grinding table is a giant slab of bottle-green glass that Apollo found on the street and set up on sawhorses. I ran my finger over the wavy glass with the uneven spray of bubbles inside. There was a fine layer of dust on it. With my dad gone, I guess Apollo hadn’t had much time to make colors.

  The easel in the corner held a yellow study we’d been working on before my dad left. The best yellow comes from Cambodia. To get it, you tap a tree like you’re making maple syrup; it takes a whole year to get a bucket. Dried gamboge doesn’t look like much—just another sticky, ugly brown rock. But put a drop of water on it, and that rock will weep a tear so brightly yellow it will hurt your eyes.

  Last year, Apollo made me his apprentice and gave me the first color study we made together: a wash of blues, some so light they looked white, others almost black in their intensity. The blues in between were so deep and rich that looking at them made you feel like you were learning something. It hangs opposite my bed and is my most prized possession.

  “Please accept my most sincere apologies. I will make it up to you, Beautiful. I promise.” On the other side of the loft, Apollo’s call seemed—finally—to be winding up. With a sigh of relief, he replaced the heavy black receiver on the wall, and I grabbed my sweatshirt and my notebook, my stomach growling in anticipation of dinner.

  But as we were heading toward the door, the phone rang again.

  Apollo backed away like the phone was a bomb about to explode, eyes wide with mock terror. Annoyed, I rolled my eyes at him and took the heavy black receiver from the cradle on the wall.

  “Greene Restoration,” I said. Whenever I answer the phone in the studio, I pretend to be a secretary in an old-fashioned movie. On the side Apollo couldn’t see, I snuck up a hand to remove an invisible clip-on earring.

  It wasn’t the girlfriend again but some guy with an accent, who sounded like Alex when he’s pretending to have an accent. The guy on the phone pronounced Apollo’s last name correctly, which is practically a magic trick.

  “Hold please,” I said, sounding bored and professional like a real secretary, and held the phone out to Apollo. When he took it from me, I rolled my finger at him—keep it moving—so he wouldn’t get stuck for twelve hours on one of his hot topics, like the pros and cons of painting on canvas with automotive enamel. (In case you care: The colors and finishes are beautiful, but the paints can make you sick, and they sometimes yellow as they age.)

  Except that it wasn’t another artist on the phone.

  “As I have said many times now, I am not in possession of this piece of art,” Apollo said, turning his big bear body away from where I’d planted myself in front of him. “I would be happy to help; unfortunately, my partner is not here. He is out of the country at this time.”

  The man on the other end interrupted; I could hear his agitation. The skin on the back of my neck prickled: Apollo was talking about my dad.

  What piece of art?

  Apollo sighed. “I am very sorry. As I told you the other day, I am not in touch with him.”

  That had the alarming ring of truth, and my stomach sank. I’d been counting on Apollo to help me to get in touch, dead sure that the trickiest part of getting the information would be hiding what was going on with my mom. But if Apollo was telling the truth—if he really didn’t know how to get in touch with my dad—then nobody would.

  Which meant I was back to square one. Worse, even, because I didn’t have another plan.

  “Yes, I have your number. If I hear anything at all about the piece, I will not hesitate to call you. Thank you, sir. Good night.” With that, Apollo replaced the heavy black receiver onto the cradle on the wall. Hearing him call someone “sir” felt like the worst thing that had happened yet.

  I was right in front of him when he turned around. “What was that about?” I asked.

  He shook his head, not looking at me, his big body moving uncomfortably from side to side. “Forget about it. Please. It was nothing, little bird.”

  At least he looked miserable lying to me.

  I cut to the chase: “You don’t know how to get in touch with him? Was that part true?” We both knew which him I was talking about.

  “We have not spoken since he left,” he said, setting his jaw and looking toward the windows. In that moment, I realized that Apollo might be one of the people who didn’t agree with what my dad was doing. And I didn’t like that at all.

  I tried to think of something mean or smart to say, but I ended up saying what I was thinking, which was, “Why won’t anybody tell me what’s going on?”

  We looked at each other for a long time and then Apollo made a face and shook his head: I can’t.

  I bit my lip hard as the weight of the day crashed down around me. I thought about the dumb fight I’d picked with Alex on the way to school, and Richard’s panicked eyes when I’d told him about my mom. I thought about my blotchy, botched self-portrait in charcoal, and about my mom’s blank eyes.

  When I could trust my voice, I raised my chin. “How do I know he’s okay?”

  Apollo came forward to reassure me. But there wasn’t anything he could say, and I turned away from the comfort of his familiar face.

  Even if my dad was okay, my mom wasn’t. And if my dad didn’t come home, I wasn’t going to be okay, either.

  FIVE FOR A DOLLAR

  Upset as I was, my stomach growle
d again as I followed Apollo out of the studio.

  I waited as he bent down to pick up a ball of newspaper and some other scraps of trash that had blown into the little tiled vestibule at the bottom of the stairs. He passed them to me to hold while he pressed down the ratty silver duct tape securing the ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE sign to the front door of the building.

  The A.I.R. sign is there to let firemen know that our building isn’t abandoned, or a factory—empty at night. Some of the A.I.R. signs you see around SoHo are official looking, white letters embossed onto plastic plaques like the name plate outside the principal’s office at my school. But the sign on our door is a piece of cardboard box wrapped in plastic and duct-taped to the window, A.I.R. 2 written in thick black marker on the front. The two is because we live on the second floor.

  Maintenance complete, the two of us walked down Greene Street toward Canal. Even though it was almost dark, there were very few lights on in the buildings we passed. The lofts near us that don’t have factories or artists in them are mostly used for storage. Bundles of old rags and paper, and not very many people around to call 911 when they smell smoke? There’s a reason that firefighters call my neighborhood Hell’s Hundred Acres.

  We turned left at the corner of Canal, and the subliminal mind control I used on Apollo must have worked, because he looked across the street at the art supply store, but he didn’t cross to go in. I love Pearl Paint, too, but I was way too worn out and hungry for an hour of small talk about solvents.

  We did stop to look at the boxes outside the hardware stores on Canal. Apollo was standing over a tray filled with skinny spatulas when a cardboard box filled with tiny brass objects caught my eye. They were little faucets, like the red ones you use to turn off the water supply under a sink, except brass and miniature—only a little bigger than my thumbnail. Too big for a dollhouse, too small to be used under a sink for real.