From behind some shelves piled eight feet high with stuffed animals, including two life-size gorillas made out of some kind of mink-colored plush, Tolya appeared. I had half expected him to show up in clown clothes, but he wore a black silk shirt, bright red silk pants and red loafers made of some sort of rare skin. In one ear was the big emerald he sometimes wore. Beside him Valentina, who was wearing a short pink silk dress, held Luda’s hand and looked at her father’s shoes affectionately.
“Not exactly your regular American daddy,” she said to me. “Imagine how many reptiles died for my dad’s shoes. You think I’ll inherit them?”
“So nice birthday party for Luda,” Tolya said. “I buy whole store for tonight. Billy, I apologize that is mostly little girls.”
“That’s OK. It’s her party.”
“I have car for you, though, and video games. You want to see? Downstairs. One girl has brought her brother, about same age as you, so we should go downstairs.” He had fallen into his hood’s English.
“Wow,” said Billy turning to grin at me. “Sure. Thanks. I’d like that a lot.” He hesitated.
“What is it?” I said.
“What should I call you?” he asked Tolya.
“You could call me Uncle Anatoly, if you want. But Tolya’s OK.”
With Billy in tow, Tolya started for the escalator and the two made their way between shelves of lime green stuffed frogs, yellow plush snakes and kangaroos bulging with baby kangaroos all in blues and purples and other colors not really known in nature.
In the background, music from a karaoke stand played and a tiny girl in tight pink shorts and a halter-top, a miniature Streisand in the making, belted out “People”. Four “Village People”, all of them little girls, followed her and performed “YMCA”. The kids knew all the moves.
“God, they’ve been playing that at kids’ parties since I was a kid,” said someone standing near me.
Half a dozen adults moved among the children, introducing themselves as guides and gurus. One of them, a guy who looked like he was in some chorus line on Broadway on other nights, introduced himself to me as the guru Heathbarishi whose mantra included good things about the Heath Bar. There were a couple of hobbits, and an Incredible who looked a lot like an out of work Arnold Schwarzenegger. All of them carried huge pink knapsacks out of which they produced presents for the kids – watches that sang, digital cameras, an assortment of clothing, bags of candy, and real money; the coins were colored pink.
Standing near me and holding Val’s hand, Luda jumped up and down, chattering in Russian, unable to stand still. Her hair was braided with glittery pink beads. Her purple dress matched high-heeled shoes, which were covered in glitter.
Part of the store had been turned into a designer boutique, and the girls selected what they wanted and changed into their new party clothes in a dressing room screened off by a pink velvet curtain.
“Stella McCartney,” said one midget fashionista emerging from behind the curtain.
“Galliano,” said another, adjusting her skirt. It was part of the deal, she said to me casually, and added she had attended quite a few of these parties. “At one we got very nice little mink jackets,” she cooed.
Luda plucked at my sleeve, and said in Russian, “Look, over there.”
“What?”
My sleeve still in her tiny hand, she steered me towards an area where a sign read: NURSERY.
In white nurse costumes, young women tended fake babies in this make-believe hospital nursery. The nurses picked up the babies and burped them. They fed them with real bottles. The babies came in white, black and Asian and could be special-ordered in “other”, which, the nurse informed me, included Native American. Another of the nurses who, given her body and the way she moved, probably worked most nights as a pole dancer on Eleventh Avenue, put a doll in my arms.
“Real lifelike, right?” she said. “The little girls love them. We keep running out, the mothers come in and go crazy. It’s the hot item, I mean we can’t keep them, I heard there’s people selling them off the back of trucks, on the black market, they get double, triple even. Nuts, right?”
Swaddled in real baby clothes and a blanket, wearing a cloth diaper, the thing I held was four or five pounds and had the flesh of an almost real baby. I gave it back to the nurse fast.
Ponytails jiggling with effort, two of the little partygoers were taking lessons in tending babies from the woman who looked like a pole dancer. One of the girls rocked the fake baby in her arms knowingly. “These are not like dolls for little girls, you know,” she said. “These are like real babies.” She was very certain.
The nurse held one of the dolls out to Luda who recoiled from the feel of the rubbery flesh and pushed it back at the nurse. She was distracted by a row of computer screens across the aisle.
Face red, she climbed onto a stool in front of one of the screens.
“What is it?” Luda said to me.
A young guy with a digital camera tried to take her picture, explaining that he would put it in the computer and she could then choose hair and eye color. Then a doll, looking just like Luda would be produced.
I didn’t know if Luda understood any of the English, but she was too high on sugar and excitement to care. I translated; I told her about the lookalike dolls; and she started crying.
“I don’t like this,” Val said. “It’s creepy. Come on Luda, darling, let’s go dance.”
Silently, Luda cried; obediently she followed Val towards a dance floor that had been set up in an open space and the two of them jiggled around to the music from the karaoke.
“POS,” someone whispered as I glanced at a trio of girls smearing make-up on their faces.
“What?”
“Parent Over Shoulder,” whispered the girl who wore a white bunny jacket as she spoke into the pink cell phone, which she dropped because her hands were greasy from eating pink potato chips. The phone bounced, its case made of something pink, thick and rubbery, the girl picked it up and began giggling into it again. POS, she said again, meaning me.
“Hey.”
I turned around. It was Billy, who wanted me to see the radio-controlled car pit downstairs, and I started after him but I got sidetracked by Luda who was calling my name from the dance floor.
“I’ll meet you down there,” I said to Billy.
He shrugged, and turned away.
“Wait,” I said, but he was already gone.
“He’s a really great-looking boy,” a voice said. It was Lily Hanes.
“Thanks.”
“It’s Billy Farone, right?” She leaned lightly against a rack of rag dolls with yellow hair.
“Yeah.”
“Beth is here.” Lily waved an arm in the direction of a gang of girls dancing; the tallest one with the black hair was Lily’s adopted daughter.
“I can see. She looks terrific. She’s going to be tall, like you.”
“Can’t be the genes,” Lily smiled. “How are you, Artie? I’ve missed you.”
I said I was fine and tried to ignore the effect her words had on my gut.
Lily looked good. Her red hair was pulled back from her face and she was wearing a green silk shirt and black jeans. I didn’t know she was back from London.
The last time she’d been in New York for a while, I had seen her a couple of times. I went to her apartment to visit Beth who I had helped her adopt. I felt connected to Beth and sometimes I took her to the movies and then home. On those occasions, Lily and me, we were polite, like divorced people who had made their peace. I never drank with her. I never even sat down at her place. A while back I’d heard she and Beth had both gone back to London.
I said, “You’re in the city for good?”
“I hope it’s for good.”
“On Tenth Street?”
“Yes. Always. I only ever sublet my place.”
“Alone?”
She smiled. “Should I assume you mean, is Beth living with me?”
“S
he looks great.”
“She’ll go back to London next week.”
“She’s going to be with what’s his name, Ted, Ned, Fred, the one you married?”
Lily said, “He already had a family from a previous marriage and it’s good for Beth when she’s there, all the kids, the house with the garden. She wants to spend the summer there, maybe stay for part of the school year.”
“You OK with that?”
“I don’t know. She adores her school. I don’t mind her getting some of her education in London. I go over. She comes here. We’ll see. It makes me sad when I’m not with her.”
“Not sad enough to stay married to what’s his name?”
She changed the subject, “I came to see you last summer. I went to your place. I waited outside.”
It wasn’t long after Maxine and I got married and I had seen Lily waiting outside my building. From my car, I had seen her standing in the rain and I had driven away.
“You didn’t answer my calls, either,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said and realized there wasn’t any tension between Lily and me now; maybe after all the years we could be friends.
Lily looked around her.
“I hate this kind of shit, spending like this for a kid’s party, but it’s what people do now,” she said. “They give parties for one-year-olds at the Four Seasons that cost thousands. I heard about a woman who turned her apartment into a zoo and brought in animals. I mean it’s insane, talk about fiddling while Rome burned. You want to talk about Billy? You want to tell me?”
“You think there’s any booze in this place?”
“If Tolya’s giving a party, there will be booze,” she said and I followed her as she made her way towards a soda fountain in the middle of the room.
Everywhere were security guys; Tolya had his people out in force, Russians made of muscle and tattoos. Although dressed in red and white striped shirts, they still looked like weight-lifters, their huge arms like slabs of meat.
Suddenly, a clown jumped in front of me and made faces. I pulled back. I always hated clowns. Hated them even when I was little and a trip to the Moscow Circus was the only entertainment going. My mother took me to it and I cried all the way home, she said. I was five.
We got to the soda fountain and Lily climbed onto a high stool and I got on the one next to her.
“Hello,” said a milkmaid in a ruffled apron. “We have grown-up pop for the grown-ups,” she said and pulled a bottle of pink champagne from a miniature fridge behind a soda fountain.
Reaching across the soda fountain for a bowl of Red Hots, Lily began tossing them in the air; she caught each one in her mouth, and then downed them with the champagne. “Hey, this is good stuff,” she said.
“How long do they let the kids stay?”
“All night,” said Lily. “It’s a slumber party.”
“Christ.”
“So tell me about Billy.”
“Yeah, well, he did really great in the place in Florida, and they said he could have a couple weeks at home. I went down to get him because Genia – you remember Genia? – she went pretty nuts when they sent Billy away. She wanted him to go to one of those hotsy-totsy schools for kids with problems, kind of school that costs ninety grand. The judge didn’t agree with the idea.”
“Artie darling, you know judges put kids in those schools when they’re emotionally fucked up and have maybe a brush with the law, shoplifting, selling weed. Not like Billy.”
“I know. But when I saw him and talked to his shrink, and having been with him, I know he’s OK. You think it can happen like that?”
She looked at me with the pale gray eyes, and I knew she’d tell me the truth. Lily Hanes, who I’d been with on and off for more than ten years, was never coy, never smuggled messages, didn’t lie.
She put her hand on my arm. “Yes,” she said. “I have to believe that.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m not just telling you what you want to hear. I’m a fucked up old leftie, and I believe in nurture, and if Billy had a screwy childhood, but someone in Florida got hold of him and got him to understand himself, why couldn’t he be better, and if you don’t believe that, what’s the point? There’s always some fucking fashion in head cases, you know? So they discover Asperger’s syndrome, that’s supposed to be a way to describe variations of autism, but now everybody has it. You’re a guy and you’re a self-centered prick and your wife turns fifty and she realizes you’ve been focused only on your work, so she says, you know he’s kind of Aspergerish. So many brilliant guys are now supposed to have some version that they call it Geek Disease. The dumb ones they label Fragile fucking X Syndrome.”
“Billy doesn’t have that stuff. I talked to his shrink. What’s Fragile X?”
“Genetic shit, mostly boys, they did a lot of criminal studies over at Riker’s, inmates, a lot of them have it,” said Lily. “Like I said, I have to believe a lot of this genetic stuff is bullshit, and if you fall for it it’s like being some kind of fucking Calvinist or something, no free will, everything’s wired into you pre-birth, you might as well stop trying. Christ, I could sure use a cigarette. You want to go out on the street for five minutes?”
“Thank you.”
“You’re not going to get weepy on me, like some old Russian who’s thinking of home and the silver birch trees, are you?” She smiled. “Come on.”
I wanted to go out on the street for a cigarette with her. I wanted everything with her.
“It’s just nice to see you,” I said. “Do you remember that time we rode the Staten Island Ferry at night for hours?”
“Don’t,” Lily said.
As we looked for an exit sign, I spotted Tolya. Surrounded by ten-year-old girls sitting on the floor in a circle, he was playing a guitar and singing a Russian love song to them. No band, no bass, no backing of the kind he’d had when he was a rocker, Tolya’s voice was pure. Standing at the back of the circle of children was Billy. For a moment he stood and listened and then turned and walked away.
“Did you know Tolya could do that?” I said to Lily.
She nodded. “He used to sing to Beth when she was little. Lullabies, too.”
“Now you’re crying.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
At the back of the circle of girls listening to Tolya I found Valentina who was sitting cross-legged, her arms around Luda. She got up off the floor.
“Do you know where Billy is?”
“He’s fine, downstairs, playing with cars and video games. He said he’d come back up for the birthday cake. I’m Valentina,” she added, holding out her hand to Lily. “Tolya’s kid.”
“This is Lily Hanes,” I said.
“I know that,” Val said. “I’m really happy to meet you. Gosh. Hi. My dad talks about you all, and I mean all, the time!”
“Hi,” Lily said. “I need a cigarette.”
Val looked at both of us and said, “Go on. Go.”
It was midnight. The streets were empty. The air was cold, the sky clear and we stood outside the toy store. Lily’s cigarette smelled good. She passed it to me and I took a deep drag.
After a while, she started laughing. She laughed hard, like she always laughed in my dream – I dreamed about her more than I wanted to admit. It was infectious and for a while we stood on the empty street, and laughed.
“What?” I said, catching my breath.
“It was so completely hilarious,” she said. “The store. The toys, Tolya in those red pants, you and me trying to party with ten-year-old girls who look like they’re going on thirty, and the fake babies, and the milkmaid.”
Lily’s shoulder was touching mine and right then I knew it would never be any good without her. Standing alongside her, it was as if I could breathe again.
I thought about Maxine and the girls, about the apartment, about everything. I would stick with it, best I could. I wouldn’t sleep with Lily, either. I had to talk to her, though; I had to see her.
“It’s no good,” she said. “Is it?”
“No.”
“No good with us apart, I mean.”
“I know that was what you meant,” I said.
“What should we do?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, probably.” Lily took my hand and leaned her head against mine. “I feel better. Seeing you,” she said, then she tossed the butt of her cigarette into the curb where it landed in a tiny puddle and floated, like a miniscule boat. “I can feel OK so long as we can see each other once in a while. We should go back in,” Lily said. “Artie?”
“Yeah?”
“It’ll be OK with Billy, you’ll see. It’ll be good.”
The screams were shrill and compulsive and seemed to go on forever, the sound of a small girl screaming so that you figured her lungs would explode. It was like a car alarm going off in the night except it was terrified and terrifying.
In the crumpled purple dress and dirty pink tutu, Luda was huddled on the floor of the toy store, Val crouched next to holding her as best she could. Next to them, also on his knees, his arms around Luda’s shoulders, was Billy. Head down, he was whispering to her.
Lily had taken Beth home. Tolya had the rest of the kids at the soda fountain and was singing Beatles songs with them while the milkmaid dished up ice cream to keep them distracted.
Luda gave another horrifying scream and Billy suddenly jumped up, his face blank, then turned and ran across the floor, and down the stairs. I started after him. Tolya saw me and caught my arm.
“Let him be for a minute. I’ll send one of my guys down to make sure he’s OK. Her screaming scared him.”
“What happened?” I said.
“The dolls.” He tossed me a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t care what store policy was. I lit up.
“What?”
“Look, I better keep these kids quiet until we can get them home. It was the dolls they make to look like the children,” said Tolya, pointing to a shelf with a row of dolls that had Luda’s face.
Fresh Kills Page 13
