Years after he had last seen Roy, Alex saw a picture in a newspaper of a man leaning out a window, firing a rifle at the police. The accompanying article explained that the man had been holed up in an abandoned building on Bleecker Street and was making demands regarding the security situation of Israel. The rifle was an AK-47. He wanted to negotiate with the State Department. They fired tear gas into the building and brought him out choking. No police were injured in his capture. It was Levi.
NOW, ON FREEZING Crosby Street, a woman desperately holding on to her dog staggered past him, and it all came rushing back and sprang up before him like a hologram. He saw Roy, and the long creaky staircase that led up to the loft, and the excited and clueless face of the boy he used to be, and the expression of that girl holding on to her dog. He saw the expression on his mother’s face as she watched him pour the nickel bag into the garbage, as though by the force of her will she would make him upend time along with the nickel bag.
The woman in the peacoat passed him in the other direction, still struggling to control her dog. He felt perched on the edge of a reunion of some kind, but it wasn’t the same girl, and he didn’t even know what it was, exactly, that he would be reuniting with. The past refused to cohere into any explicable pattern, it merely surfaced briefly to wave merrily at him, the way two acquaintances might wave to each other from two escalators, one going up and the other down.
He wanted to say something to this woman, but couldn’t think what.
“Hey!” he called out after her, and his voice echoed against the cast-iron buildings. “What ever happened to the yippies?”
But of course she didn’t answer, or even turn around.
Stay
(On Falling Asleep in the Company of Another Person)
SHE WAS AWAKE WHEN HE CAME HOME. IT WAS A HOT summer night, and he had been to Blanche’s.
Blanche’s was a smoky bar with a pool table and relatively cheap drinks that had very little to distinguish itself from every other cheap bar in the world, except it was Alex’s first bar, and like all firsts it was special. There were several things to recommend it: the noise, the smoke, the fairly regular group of youngish hipsters who could be found there, and the fact that it was on Avenue A. The entire East Village was a new world for Alex, and on almost every night since school ended he had commuted there on his bicycle from his home on the Upper West Side.
Interesting things often happened on the ride there or back. Once, at Seventh Avenue and Thirtieth Street, he saw a gang of kids pelting passing cars with orange rinds. A store that sold fresh-squeezed orange juice had put out bags of already squeezed oranges, and these kids, who were all black, with bony elbows and ecstatic smiles, were throwing them like snowballs. They threw oranges at Alex. He thought it was sort of funny, and at the same time he was antagonized, and so about half a block past them, when an orange thudded against him, he stopped, picked it up, and threw it back.
What followed was a small riot in which twenty or so kids chased him for blocks throwing anything they could get their hands on, including bottles. The glass smashed around him. Something sharp hit his shoulder. He enjoyed the whole thing.
NOW IT WAS almost morning, and his mother was working. She was sitting at the small typing desk in the study, which was surrounded by several other even smaller tables on which open books and papers were stacked haphazardly, an arrangement which made her seem like the navigator of a very disheveled spaceship, surrounded by her maps and controls. She looked up at him when he poked his head through the door.
This was their new ritual, these late-night encounters in which they each occupied a certain terrain of semiwakefulness. It was too late for it to be night, but too early to be morning. The days were hot and sweltering, except for this one sweet spot of cool that started around four in the morning and ended near seven. It was in this cool sweet spot that they intersected, as she began her day and he prepared to end his. He always found it jarring to encounter his mother in this manner; she was fragile in that newly awoken way and he was hardened by prolonged exposure to the world and its elements: the cool night air, the smell of cigarette and, more faintly, marijuana smoke on his clothes, loud music, and the twisted force field of girls. He considered the world and its elements and his mother to be two separate spheres of existence. Particularly the world of girls.
Not girls touched, but girls thought about, obsessed about, fantasized about. An actual embrace would have seemed quite wholesome and innocent compared to the images that ran through his mind all night as his eyes wandered over faces and bodies.
SHE WAS STILL moist with sleep and in her nightgown, which was made of some mysterious white cloth that cloaked her body and made it vague and shapeless, but which also had a somewhat gauzy transparency, within which the outline of her body was almost discernible. On the whole, he wished she had a more sturdy nightgown. She was as much a vapor as a person, and if she was not properly clothed then she would seep out into the immediate atmosphere and he would inhale her. He didn’t want to inhale his mother.
“You’re back,” she said, stating the obvious. Her electric typewriter might have seemed vaguely state-of-the-art several years earlier, but now seemed antique, like a completely wrong prediction of the future. Her right index finger was poised above the keyboard, pointing down. This was how she typed. With one finger.
“You’re working,” he said, stating the equally obvious. In both of their comments there was a mixture of warmth and criticism. She felt he ought not to be out so late, and he felt she ought not to be working so early.
“Did you have a nice night?” she asked. There was a conspicuously false note in her voice. It was his summer of not being a high school student. He had yet to become a college student. He wasn’t really sure what he was, and neither, he sensed, was she. Was she supposed to let him go be an adult already?
Did you have a nice night?
He made a quick inventory of what was false about it: (1) She was trying to sound awake. (2) She was trying to sound as though she had acclimated herself to this idea of him coming and going as he pleased at all hours. (3) She was trying to sound lighthearted and vaguely uninterested; she was affecting the casual tone of a peer, a friend, but parents are not the same as friends, however much they might approximate the role.
The stiffness of her language reminded him of the time that he had complained, at the age of six, about her bedtime stories. They were all populated by an old wizened man with a long white beard who lived in a dense forest, into which a prince or princess would wander, that kind of thing. And they all began with the phrase “Once upon a time.” He found that opening gambit to be somehow false, inaccurate, insufficiently American. Even at the age of six, he possessed the uneasy feeling that his mother was out of sync and living apart from the world he was living in. He wanted her to describe a world more recognizable as his own.
“Tell me a story about Superman,” he asked. There was a long pause.
“Once upon a time…” she began.
SHORTLY AFTER HIS father died, in those hot days of early summer, he had made her promise that she would not see other men. He did not understand sex explicitly, as he was only ten years old, or rather he only understood it explicitly, but he conveyed the idea that he did not want other men around.
What followed was about four more years of her putting him to bed. This was a cherished ritual of youth, though it only became exceptionally vivid to Alex after his father died. They called a putting-to-bed session a “stay.” In their household, “stay” was a noun.
They talked about all kinds of things during the stay, or rather he talked and she mostly listened. He talked with his eyes closed, while he held her hand, long rambling half-asleep ruminations of the difference between never and forever.
Not long after his father died he said, “I know that at some point in the future I’ll have hairy legs and that you won’t make a stay anymore.”
The stays did indeed last up to the advent of hair
on his legs, and when they petered out, coincidentally, he rescinded his ultimatum, and told his mother that he wouldn’t mind if she saw other men. But, as far as he knew, she hadn’t.
How had she taken this bit of revised policy? He didn’t know. She seemed to take the first ultimatum fairly seriously, because as far as he could tell there were no other men. She went on dates. But he had a very straightforward conception of dates. There were concerts and dinners and maybe even some flowers in dates. But there was no sex.
Once he had returned from school—this was after the ultimatum had been rescinded—and found a man sitting at the kitchen table with his mother. He wore a white linen shirt—not like a businessman, but open at the top, with a bandanna around his neck—and had a riotous tangle of gray hair that was tossed to one side of his head. He had—and this made a strong impression on Alex for some reason—hair in his nostrils. He noticed that on the table, in addition to the various meats from Zabar’s and cheeses and bread that surfaced whenever there were guests, there was a small bowl of water in which floated rose petals. They were red.
Based on this information he concluded that his mother was in some way involved with this man. He said hello to the man, felt his own body being strafed by what, he felt, was a scrutinizing, admiring, and respectful glance from the man. He felt the appropriate action would be to show, if not approval exactly, then some sign that this man was acceptable. Perhaps this is how fathers feel when their daughters bring home dates. Alex searched within himself for the necessary magnanimity, found it, and chatted amicably for a few minutes before heading to his room. For a period of weeks, maybe a couple of months, Alex could sense this man’s presence in his mother’s life, though he never saw him again. He could sense it in the abundance of flowers around the house, in the way his mother got ready to go out, in a certain something about her. Then he was gone, or his aura was gone, and it was never remarked upon. It occurred to Alex that the episode might have caused his mother pain. He hated to think it, but he was sure it had, somehow.
That was a couple of years earlier. Now his mother had descended into a tunnel of work, an impossible project about the origins of World War I that was destined to turn her, he thought, into a madwoman. It was a grand and historical book. It required research, interviews. He wondered if he would like it better if his mother, instead of becoming this mad Don Quixote in a night-dress awake at four in the morning, had done the normal thing, remarried, and if now there were some strange guy with nose hair walking around the house in his underwear, living here. It occurred to him that once he was in college it would all be different for his mother, there would be no one in the house whose privacy or space or anything had to be accommodated, and she might behave differently with regard to men. On the other hand, she might just be lonely.
“Don’t you have a bedtime?” he said now, leaning against the doorframe.
She laughed.
“Don’t you have a bedtime?” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m all grown up. What’s your excuse?”
She laughed again.
They stayed there for a moment, grinning dumbly at each other.
“Well, have a nice night,” he said.
“And you have a nice morning,” she said.
They both laughed with the peculiar camaraderie of a night watchman turning over the shift to the day watchman, with the tacit understanding that what they were guarding was each other.
Vas Is Dat?
THE BIG DAY ARRIVED AT LAST. ALL THE BOXES HAD BEEN shipped in advance. There was only one small suitcase to suggest that she was going somewhere—that and her two nephews, Karl and Alex, sitting over cups of coffee and talking soothingly at her about “the trip.” She was wearing a floral-print dress and her nice shoes. Esmeralda, the housekeeper-turned-nurse, had helped her apply some lipstick. Finally they coaxed her out the front door of her apartment and into the elevator.
She emerged from the elevator, a nephew supporting her on either side, and stepped cautiously onto the lobby’s marble floor, as though it were ice. This lobby she had walked through for thirty years was now traversed with an acute sense of ceremony, as if she were getting married. She seemed to understand the absurdity of it, the slightly royal atmosphere of a processional, with the morbid undertones of someone being led to her death, but she didn’t seem to grasp that she would never see this place again. A white stretch limousine sat at the curb, waiting for her.
“Well, Aunti B,” said Karl. “Whaddaya think?”
The B stood for Beatrice. Her brow furrowed, she frowned, and against this improbable facial scenery she began to laugh that particular steam-escaping-from-a-pipe laugh that someone who didn’t know her might initially mistake for crying. Her laugh seemed to express a kind of relief and gratitude that against all odds the world had managed to deliver one more absurd surprise.
“Vas is dat?” she said.
The driver, in white shirt and black tie, came around and opened the door. For a long she time refused to get in. Karl coaxed her in his not-so-gentle baritone.
“Come on, Aunti B, we’re going for a ride in a stretch limo! You’ll love it! Tons of leg room!”
Alex stood there, rendered mute by the sight of this last ridiculous extravagance of Karl’s, who was not content to merely hire a stretch limousine for the last person in the world who needed extra leg room, but a white one, as though she were going to the Academy Awards and not to a nursing home in Pennsylvania. Also, his aunt was still holding on to his forearm with her small hand, and it was as though he needed all his strength to bear the weight of this tiny woman. She started to cry. But then she stopped abruptly. She suddenly seemed quite pleased to get in the limo, and at the last second a look of impatience crossed her face, as if she had been waiting a long time for this white stretch limo to show up and it was about time it did! Esmeralda got in after her—she was going to help smooth the transition—and then Karl. He and Alex exchanged a look. Alex wasn’t sure if it meant good luck, or goodbye, or neither, or both.
WHEN THE LIMO was gone, Alex went back up to her apartment. The harsh light of the hallway was replaced by the dim, dreamy morning light that made its way through the dirty windows. It was very quiet, except for the sound of children playing in the alley. He closed the door behind him, leaned against it, and marveled that the place was now his. It was the sort of one-bedroom apartment that real-estate agents, in their inflationary use of language, might call gigantic. Or huge. But it faced another building, and in between was an alley where the neighborhood kids played.
He stood looking over the topography of the living room. A roll of tape and scissors sat on the coffee table. Otherwise the apartment looked untroubled. His aunt might as well have stepped out for some groceries.
He took a deep breath, and with it came the apartment’s distinct aroma, not unpleasant exactly, but a smell, something one noticed as soon as one walked in the front door, that little pheromonal clue that you have arrived on someone’s turf. If it’s your own smell it can be exquisitely comforting. If it is someone else’s it can be repulsive. This was somewhere in between. Somehow, he thought, he would have to get rid of that smell.
In order for him to live in the apartment it had to be clean. Not just clean of dirt, or grime, but clean of history.
HE PAINTED THE bedroom. He chose a buttery yellow for the walls, white for the ceiling and trim. He felt grateful for the over-powering smell of the paint. There were dark finger smudges on the doorframes. They were where she had reached out to steady herself day after day. He put on a layer of paint, but the dark smudges persisted. He put on layer after layer of white paint, until at last the smudges were gone.
Then came the living room. The obvious thing to do was dispose of the rug. It was an ungodly orange, something toxic, a color so belligerently cheerful as to be manic-depressive. That orange rug had absorbed an enormous amount of his aunt’s atmosphere. Like his aunt, it did not go without a fight. He wrestled with it and barel
y managed to get it into a massive roll. It struggled against him as though it were a person whom he was trying to kidnap. Finally he got some tape around its top and bottom. He had it bound and gagged. He dragged it out the back door and dropped it next to the service elevator.
In the living room there remained a desk, couch, coffee table, bookshelves, and a bunch of lamps. It was the sort of Scandinavian wood furniture that was fashionable when his aunt had decorated the place in the early sixties, and it was once again percolating into the realm of super fashionability. But Alex didn’t know that, and would not have cared. He did exist in the world of irony and trends and fashion and the lovely brimming surface of popular culture, but that was in another life, a parallel universe to the one in which he stood. There was no irony here, only the ghost of his aunt, and others.
He got rid of the lamps by putting all five of them out on the sidewalk on Amsterdam Avenue in the middle of the night. Traffic rushed by in waves. Three table lamps and two standing lamps sat there on the sidewalk like a family, two parents presiding over the three children. At the last moment, as he was turning away, he saw how beautiful one of the standing lamps was—a slender shaft of dark wood on top of which glowed the crescent of a low moon. It looked exposed and beautiful, like a woman whose bare arms are shivering on a cool night. He took it back upstairs.
He now had one lamp for the living room. The result was dim and atmospheric.
He moved the furniture around in an attempt to make the place less her place and more his own. He took the couch and put it where the desk was. He took the desk and put it where the couch was. They switched sides and were now looking at each other from opposite directions.
ALL HIS LIFE Alex had visited his Aunti B rarely and reluctantly. This was because:
Her apartment was dark.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 8
