Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  “What about me?” I said. “You want me—Criminal Fishrug!—to go with you? I know the place.”

  “No,” said Tony. “You go explain to Julia.”

  Julia Minna had come back with Frank from wherever he’d gone between the dissolution of the moving company and the founding of the detective agency. She might have been the last and greatest of the Minna girls, for all we knew—she sure looked the part: tall, plush, blond by nurture, defiant around the jaw. It was easy to imagine Minna joshing with her, untucking her shirt, taking an elbow in the stomach. But by the time we got to meet her the two had initiated their long, dry stalemate. All that remained of their original passion was a faint crackle of electricity animating their insults, their drab swipes at one another. That was all that showed anyway. Julia terrified us at first, not for anything she did, but because of her cool grip on Minna, and also how tense he was around her, how ready to punish us with his words.

  If Julia and Frank had still been animated, quickened with love, we might have remained in infantile awe of her, our fascination and lust still adolescent. But the chill between them was an opening. In our imaginations we became Frank and loved her, unchilled her, grew to manhood in her arms. If we were angry or disappointed with Frank Minna we felt connected to his beautiful, angry, disappointed wife, and were thrilled. She became an idol of disillusionment. Frank had shown us what girls were, and now he’d shown us a woman. And by failing to love her, he’d left a margin for our love to grow.

  In our dreams we Minna Men were all Frank Minna—that wasn’t news. But now we shot a little higher: If we had Julia we would do better than Frank, and make her happy.

  Or so went dreams. I suppose over the years the other Minna Men conquered their fear and awe and desire of Julia, or anyway modulated it, by finding women of their own to make happy and unhappy, to enchant and disenchant and discard.

  All except me, of course.

  In the beginning Minna had Julia installed in the office of a Court Street lawyer, in a storefront as small as L&L’s. We Men used to drop in on her there with little deliveries, messages or gifts from Frank, and watch her answering phones, reading People, making bad coffee. Minna seemed eager to show us off to her, more eager than he was to drop in himself. Similarly, he seemed pleased to have Julia on showcase there, under glass on Court Street. We all intuitively gasped Minna’s instinct for human symbols, for moving us around to mark territory, so in this one sense Julia Minna had joined the Men, was on the team. Something went wrong, however, something soured between Julia and the lawyer, and Minna dragged her back to Carlotta Minna’s old second-story apartment on Baltic Street, where she’d stayed for most of fifteen years, a sulking housewife. I could never visit without thinking of Carlotta’s plates of food being carried down the stairwell by Court Street’s assorted mugs. The old stove itself was gone, though. Julia and Frank mostly ate out.

  I went to that apartment now, and knocked on the door, rolling my knuckles to get the right sound.

  “Hello, Lionel,” Julia said after peering at me through the peephole. She left the door unlatched and turned her back. I ducked inside. She wore a slip, her ripe arms bared, but below it she was already in stockings and heels. The apartment was dark, except for the bedroom. I shut the door behind me and followed her in, to where a dusty suitcase lay open on the bed, surrounded by heaps of clothing. It wasn’t going to be my privilege to be first with the news anywhere, apparently. In a mass of lingerie already inside the suitcase I spotted something dark and shiny, half smothered there. A pistol.

  Julia rummaged in her dresser, her back still turned. I propped myself in the closet doorframe, feeling awkward.

  I could make out her labored breathing as she fumbled through the drawers.

  “Who told you, Julia? Eat, eat, eat—” I ground my teeth, trying to check the impulse.

  “Who do you think? I got a call from the hospital.”

  “Eat, ha ha, eat—” I revved like a motor.

  “You want me to eat you, Lionel?” Her tone was grimly casual. “Just come out and say it.”

  “Okayeatme,” I said gratefully. “You’re packing? I mean, I don’t mean the gun.” I thought of Minna reprimanding Gilbert at the car, a few hours before. You with no gun, he’d said. That’s how I sleep at night. “Packing your clothes—”

  “Did they tell you to come over here and comfort me?” she said sharply. “Is that what you’re doing?”

  She turned. I saw the redness in her eyes and the heaviness and softness of the flesh around her mouth. She groped for a pack of cigarettes that lay on the dresser, and when she put one between her grief-swollen lips I checked myself for a lighter I knew I wasn’t carrying, just to make a show of it. She lit the cigarette herself, chopping at a matchbook angrily, throwing off a little curl of spark.

  The scene stirred me in about twelve different ways. Somehow Frank Minna was still alive in this room, alive in Julia in her slip with her half-packed suitcase, her cigarette, her gun. The two of them were closer at this moment than they had ever been. More truly married. But she was hurrying away. I sensed that if I let her go, that essence of him that I detected would go, too.

  She looked at me and flared the end of the cigarette, then blew out smoke. “You jerks killed him,” she said.

  Her cigarette dangled in her fingers. I fought off a weird imagining: that she’d catch her slip on fire—it did seem flammable, practically looked aflame already—and that I’d have to put her out, drench her with a glass of water. This was an uncomfortable feature of Tourette’s—my brain would throw up ugly fantasies, glimpses of pain, disasters narrowly averted. It liked to flirt with such images, the way my twitchy fingers were drawn near the blades of a spinning fan. Perhaps I also craved a crisis I could master, now, after failing Minna. I wanted to protect someone, and Julia would do.

  “It wasn’t us, Julia,” I said. “We just didn’t manage to keep him alive. He was killed by a giant, a guy the size of six guys.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “That sounds great. You’ve got it down, Lionel. You sound just like them. I hate the way you all talk, you know that?” She went back to stuffing clothes anarchically into the suitcase.

  I mimed her striking of the match, one long motion away from my body, more or less keeping my cool. In fact, I wanted to run my hands through the clothes on the bed, snap the suitcase latches open and shut, lick the vinyl.

  “Jerktalk!” I said.

  She ignored me. A police siren sounded out on Smith Street and Baltic, and I shuddered. If the hospital had phoned her, the police couldn’t be too far behind. But the sirens stopped half a block away. Just a traffic stop, a shakedown. Any given car on any given evening on Smith Street fit a profile, some profile. The cop’s red light strobed through the margin of window under the shade, to throw a glow over the bed and Julia’s glossy outline.

  “You can’t go, Julia.”

  “Watch.”

  “We need you.”

  She smirked at me. “You’ll manage.”

  “No, really, Julia. Frank put L and L in your name. We work for you now.”

  “Really?” said Julia, interested now, or feigning interest—she made me too nervous to tell. “All I see before me is mine? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I gulped, jerked my head to the side, as though she were looking behind me.

  “You think I should come down and oversee the day-to-day business of a car service, Lionel? Have a look at the books? You think that might be a good occupation for the widow?”

  “We’re—Detectapush! Octaphone!—we’re a detective agency. We’re going to catch whoever did this.” Even as I spoke, I tried to order my thoughts according to this principle: detectives, clues, investigation. I should be gathering information. I wondered for a moment if Julia were the her had lost control of, according to the insinuating voice on the wire at the Zendo.

  Of course, that would mean she missed her Rama-lama-ding-dong. Whatever that was, I
couldn’t really picture Julia missing it.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I forgot. I’m heir to a corrupt and inept detective agency. Get out of my way, Lionel.” She set her cigarette on the edge of the dresser and pushed past me, into the closet.

  Inupt and corrept, went the brain of Essrog the Idiotic. You are corrept, sir!

  “God, look at these dresses,” she said as she poked through the rack of hangers. Her voice was suddenly choked. “You see these?”

  I nodded.

  “They’re worth more than the car service put together.”

  “Julia—”

  “This isn’t how I dress, really. This isn’t how I look. I don’t even like these dresses.”

  “How do you look?”

  “You could never imagine. I can barely remember, myself. Before Frank dressed me up.”

  “Show me.”

  “Ha.” She looked away. “I’m supposed to be the widow in black. You’d like that. I’d look really good. That’s what Frank kept me around for, my big moment. No thanks. Tell Tony no thanks.” She swept at the dresses, pushing them deeper into the closet. Then she abruptly pulled two out by the hangers and threw them onto the bed, where they spread over the suitcase like roosting butterflies. They weren’t black.

  “Tony?” I said. I was distracted, my eagle eye watching the ash burn longer, the glowing end of the abandoned cigarette inching toward the wood of the dresser.

  “That’s right, Tony. Fucking Frank Minna Junior. I’m sorry, Lionel, did you want to be Frank? Did I hurt your feelings? I’m afraid Tony has the inside track.”

  “That cigarette is going to burn the wood.”

  “Let it burn,” she said.

  “Is that a quote from a movie? ‘Let it burn’? I feel like I remember that from some movie—Burnamum Beatme!”

  She turned her back to me, moved again to the bed. Untangling the dresses from their hangers, she stuffed one into the suitcase, then held the other open and stepped into it, careful not to snag the heels of her shoes. I gripped the closet doorframe, stifling an impulse to bat like a kitten at the shimmery fabric as she slid the dress up around her hips and over her shoulders.

  “Come here, Lionel,” she said, without turning around. “Zip me up.”

  As I reached out, I was compelled to tap each of her shoulders twice, gently. She didn’t seem to mind. Then I took hold of the zipper tab, eased it upward. As I did she took her hair in her hands, raised her arms above her head and turned, so that she rolled into my embrace. I kept hold of the tab, halfway up her back. Up close I saw how her eyes and lips looked like something barely rescued from drowning.

  “Don’t stop,” she said.

  She rested her elbows high on my shoulders and gazed up at my face while I tugged at the zipper. I held my breath.

  “You know, when I met Frank I’d never shaved my armpits before. He made me shave.” She spoke the words into my chest, her voice dopey now, absent-sounding. All the anger was gone.

  I got the zipper to the nape of her neck and dropped my hands, then took a step back and exhaled. She still held her hair bunched above her head.

  “Maybe I’ll grow the hair back. What do you think, Lionel?”

  I opened my mouth and what came out, soft but unmistakable, was “Doublebreasts.”

  “All breasts are double, Lionel. Didn’t you know that?”

  “That was just a tic,” I said awkwardly, lowering my eyes.

  “Give me your hands, Lionel.”

  I lifted my hands again, and she took them.

  “God, they’re big. You have such big hands, Lionel.” Her voice was dreamy and singsong, like a child, or a grownup pretending to be a child. “I mean—the way you move them around so quickly, when you do that thing you do, all that grabbing, touching stuff. What’s that called again?”

  “That’s a tic, too, Julia.”

  “I always think of your hands as small because they move so fast. But they’re big.”

  She moved them to her breasts.

  Sexual excitement stills my Tourette’s brain, not by numbing me, dimming the world like Orap or Klonopin, those muffling medications, but instead by setting up a deeper attentiveness in me, a finer vibration, which gathers and encompasses my urgent chaos, enlists it in a greater cause, like a chorus of voices somehow drawing a shriek into harmony. I’m still myself and still in myself, a rare and precious combination. Yes, I like sex very much. I don’t get it very often. When I do, I find I want to slow it down to a crawl, live in that place, get to meet my stilled self, give him a little time to look around. Instead I’m hurried along by the conventional urgencies, by those awkward, alcohol-fueled juxtapositions of persons that have so far provided my few glimpses of arousal’s haven. But oh, if I could have just spent a week or so with my hands on Julia’s breasts, then I could think straight!

  Alas, my very first straight thought guided my hands elsewhere. I went and plucked the smoldering cigarette off the dresser, rescuing the finish, and since Julia’s lips were slightly parted I stuck it there, filter end first.

  “Double, see?” she said as she drew on the cigarette. She combed her hair with her fingers, then straightened her slip under her dress where I’d held her.

  “What’s double?”

  “You know, breasts.”

  “You shouldn’t make fun of—Lyrical Eggdog! Logical Assnog!—you shouldn’t make fun of me, Julia.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Did something—Is there something between you and Tony?”

  “I don’t know. Screw Tony. I like you better, Lionel. I just never told you.” She was hurt, erratic, her voice straying wildly, searching for a place to rest.

  “I like you, too, Julia. There’s nothing—Screwtony! Nertscrony! Screwtsony! Tootscrewny!—sorry. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “I want you to like me, Lionel.”

  “You’re—you’re not saying there could actually be something between us?” I turned and slapped the doorframe six times, feeling my face curdle with shame, regretting the question instantly—wishing, for once, that I’d ticced instead, something obnoxious to obliterate the conversation’s meaning, to smother the words I’d let myself say.

  “No,” she said coldly. She set the cigarette, what was left of it, back on the dresser. “You’re too strange, Lionel. Much too strange. I mean, take a look in the mirror.” She resumed crushing her clothes into the suitcase, more than seemed possible, like a magician stuffing a prop for a trick.

  I only hoped the gun wouldn’t go off. “Where are you going, Julia?” I said tiredly.

  “I’m going to a place of peace, if you must know, Lionel.”

  “A—what?” Prays of peach? Plays of peas? Press-e-piece? “You heard me. A place of peace.” Then a horn sounded outside.

  “That’s my car,” she said. “Would you go and tell them I’ll be out in a minute?”

  “Okay, but—pressure pees—that’s a strange thing to say.”

  “Have you ever been out of Brooklyn, Lionel?”

  Breasts, underarm hair, now Brooklyn—for Julia it was all just a measure of my inexperience. “Sure,” I said. “I was in Manhattan just this afternoon.” I tight=”0em” not to think about what I’d been doing there, or failing to do.

  “New York City, Lionel. Have you ever been out of New York City?”

  While I considered this question I eyed the cigarette, which had at last begun to singe the dresser top. The blackening paint stood for my defeat here. I couldn’t protect anything, maybe least of all myself.

  “Because if you had, you’d know that anywhere else is a place of peace. So that’s where I’m going. Would you please go hold my car for me?”

  The car service double-parked in front of the building was Legacy Pool, the furthest upscale of the Brooklyn competitors, with all-black luxury models, tinted windows, cell phones for the customers, and built-in tissue-box holders under the rear window. Julia was running in style. I waved at the driver fro
m the stoop of her building, and he nodded at me and leaned his head back on the rest. I was trying out his neck motions, nod, lean, when the gravely voice appeared behind me.

  “Who’s the car for?”

  It was the homicide detective. He’d been waiting, staking us out, slumped to one side of the doorway, huddled in his coat against the chilly November night. I made him right away—with his 10 P.M. Styrofoam cup of coffee, worn tie, ingrown beard, and interrogation eyes, he was unmistakable—but that didn’t mean he had any idea who I was.

  “Lady inside,” I said, and tapped him once on the shoulder. “Watch it,” he said, ducking away from my touch.

  “Sorry, friend. Can’t help myself.” I turned from him, back into the building.

  The elegance of my exit was quickly thwarted, though—Julia was just then galumphing down the stairs with her overstuffed suitcase. I rushed to help her as the door eased slowly shut on its moaning hydraulic hinge. Too slowly: The cop stuck out his foot and held the door open for us.

  “Excuse me,” he said with a sly, exhausted authority. “You Julia Minna?”

  “I was,” said Julia.

  “You were?”

  “Yes. Isn’t that funny? I was until just about an hour ago. Lionel, put my bag in the trunk.”

  “In a hurry?” the detective asked Julia. I watched the two of them size one another up, as though I weren’t any more a factor than the waiting limo driver. A few minutes ago, I wanted to say, my hands—Instead I hoisted Julia’s luggage, and waited for her to move past me to the car.

  “Sort of,” said Julia. “Plane to catch.”

  “Plane to where?” He crushed his empty Styrofoam cup and tossed it over his shoulder, off the stoop, into the neighbor’s bushes. Thy were already decorated with trash.

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “She’s going to a precipice, pleasurepolice, philanthropriest—”

  “Shut up, Lionel.”

  The detective looked at me like I was crazy.

  My life story to this point: