The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  No matter. I breathed in the umber air on Pineapple Street, breathed it in deeply. Clearly, the Fishers weren’t home right now, but they would be home soon. They would be making dinner, telling one another about their day, watching a little television. The father would be thinking, for the hundredth time, I really need to fix that spot on the widow’s walk. Saturday. The mother would be asking the daughter if she’d done her homework. The daughter would be skipping in the living room. (She would skip with a serious expression.) I was quite respectful toward the Fishers; I had never crossed the street, but always stayed, invisible hat in hand, leaning against the lamppost, smoking just one cigarette, getting one good, long hit of the house. On this Tuesday, feeling infinitely better at the sight of it, I finished my cigarette, stubbed it out on the curb, and turned away.

  7:03. Back at the half-empty office, I wrote that May was crowned Miss Rockette of 1939 and a few other highlights and sent the obit off to copy. Click. The Miss Rockette part and several of the other highlights weren’t true, but the fact checker—we had only one, cost cuts, and we weren’t so heavy on facts anyway—was usually so tweaked on triple espressos from the Starbucks downstairs that he confirmed everything in a manic rush to get through as many stories as he could in the shortest possible time. He never questioned any of my extra sentences, overwhelmed as he always was with anxiety about closing on time, though why he thought that it mattered if we closed on time, or even existed, was beyond me. We all had ways of convincing ourselves that the paper wasn’t a fraud, that what we did was necessary, that we weren’t about to be erased altogether; adding a few extra medals here and there was mine.

  Sometimes I wished those medals, like the Cowardly Lion’s badge of courage, could convince me that I still cared. Sometimes when I walked past the frozen bull, I remembered the three whirlwinds that had rushed up the creek toward me and filled my ears, I remembered my father, I remembered the City rising from the living room floor in Bishop. Sometimes there was a whisper, a rustling of leaves, when I was in my apartment looking at what I called my art wall. I’d never been able to afford separate studio space, so when Caroline moved out eleven years ago, I ripped out the shitty cabinets on what I could see was a pretty good, pretty big wall in the ratty kitchen. I went to the lumber yard on Avenue D and got eight six-foot-long pieces of plywood, brackets, runners, thick screws, and plastic anchors. I hung the eight shelves, floor to ceiling. On the shelves I put my precious Belgian nails, my tiny jars of paint, my hammer and cracked screwdriver and needle-nose pliers, my stash of manzanita, wire and glue, and all sorts of treasure.

  The city, I had discovered right away, abounded in treasure. The streets were paved with it. On the upper shelves, the ones I couldn’t reach without a ladder, I put the boxes I had finished. They made the kitchen look like a curiosity shop or an apothecary. On the floor, underneath the first shelf, went issues of Artforum and Art in America, catalogs from shows I’d liked, my art history textbooks, and a few issues of Butt magazine and Bound and Gagged. I bought four huge green plastic storage bins and stacked my random collection of dishes and silverware, cereal and spices, in them. I labeled the lids.

  My wall was fantastic, and I never failed to feel a glow when I regarded it. It was a really cool wall, my art wall, and it had only improved over time. Sarah thought so, too. It looked like a vertical archaeological dig. On the very top shelf were my Pineapple Street boxes: Pineapple Street in summer, Pineapple Street in winter, Janos and I at the door of the house on Pineapple Street, carrying enormous fish in our arms: these boxes were sentimental, secret, true. I made them rarely.

  Sometimes there was more than a whisper in the shadow of the art wall. A week before the time of which I’m writing, for instance, I called in sick to work one day—I felt really tired. I went to the bathroom and rubbed in a good handful of Bedhead Manipulator until I got my hair the way I wanted it, which made me feel more awake. I went to the kitchen, took down my tools and the peculiar figurine I’d been attempting to whittle for months. My whittling energy felt incredibly strong. Today I might finally be able to get the figurine’s strange face right. I had already tossed a dozen bad versions of her into the scrap box. I turned on my father’s radio, sat down at the kitchen table, and set to work, shaping her large jaw line with my best, smallest knife. My plan was to make her blue with big, curving, bluer horns, like rams’ horns, on her head. Sort of like Integrity, or maybe it was Mining. I might whittle her a deer for a companion. The deer would be blue, too. I had just invented this great thing, pagan realism. No one had ever done that before. It would be my signature. I dug into the wood with the knife edge, turning it just so, delicately. At last the wood responded. It gave me a yielding, exact curve, another. I unearthed the left side of her jaw line, the beginning of the point of her chin. I felt her small, solid weight in my hand.

  I was happy, whittling and listening to Nirvana. I had a vague urge to have a wank, but I wanted to finish the line that was flowing so well, like reeling in a big fish. Her chin pointed. Luck ran from my shoulders to my fingertips, guiding the knife effortlessly. It was the right thing to do, calling in sick. And I did feel sick, in a way. I was about to have a fever. In my feverishness, though, I had grace. This one, the blue goddess, might even get me into a juried show in Queens that Sarah and I were entering. I knew what the blue figurine’s box was going to be, and her vibe alone was already amazing. I sashayed to the right side of her jaw line. Then the knife slipped, cutting deep and clean into my forefinger. Blood everywhere, and the pain came, a sickening throb. Motherfucker. I ran to the kitchen sink and turned on the cold water, which turned red, then pink, then red again. I wrapped my finger in a dishrag and sat down heavily in the kitchen chair, feeling slightly nauseated. The rag soaked through. Fuck. Fuck.

  Three hours, one shot of Novocain, one tetanus shot, six stitches, and two extra-strength Tylenols later, I sat in a plastic bucket seat in the emergency room of St. Vincent’s while Janos asked questions about the discharge instructions. I looked at my hand with its one grotesquely large forefinger wrapped in gauze. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my palm. Sensation, uneasily, began at my wrist. Maybe my hand was paralyzed and I could quit my stupid job. I opened and closed my other hand, pinched it below my pinky. It felt. Good, I thought; I have one, anyway. My wanking hand, luckily. I wiggled my toes in my shoes, stretched my neck. I swallowed a few times. All systems go. I stayed at Janos’s that night, went obediently in my tie to work the next day (I was sick, I was injured, after all).

  Everyone in the office said I looked wan, which was satisfying, and told me to go home early. I still felt like I might have a fever coming on. When I got home to the afternoon quiet of my apartment, the half-formed figurine, like a totem, was lying next to the bloody knife on the kitchen table. She was spattered with blood. And I hadn’t even started on her horns yet. I washed the knife, but I didn’t wash her. If she wanted blood, she could have it. With this blood offering, she would get me into the show for sure.

  It was a strangely exciting day, cuspy and painful. The stitches felt like they might let something in or out, but then it passed. Days like that had become rare. I sensed that my whirlwinds were dying down, slowly unwinding, like a clock whose spring had stretched over the years.

  Ciao, I IMed to Sydnee. I checked out the Advances queue, where the very important living were laid out in their finest achievements, ready to meet their Maker and the next day’s close. As far as I knew, they were all still dully alive. A familiar melancholy brushed me. I clicked around online for a minute, like May clicking around the kitchen linoleum to the radio after Roy died. I was hungry; my eyes hurt. The gauze on my finger had been replaced by a modest beige Band-Aid. The cut was taking a while to heal. May, on her way to print, was already fading away, like the Cheshire Cat, leaving just her showgirl smile behind. Her spirit pressed close; I almost thought I could hear her voice, her accent; then it dwindled and disappeared. All her unlived lives, tap-tap-tapping away.
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br />   I sometimes thought that I needed a new job. A new life. I had been unusually tired recently, like the air was slowly leaking out of me. My fake job at the fake newspaper was draining my real, vital forces. I looked out the window again. It was dark. The river had disappeared. I quickly logged out and left the office, trotting up Wall Street again. All the cart guys were gone. Like the traders with their badges, the cart guys were a determined bunch. What did I care about? I wished I could walk over and ask the bull. I certainly didn’t care about The Hudson Times, though I liked hearing the dead people’s stories and cropping their pictures. I was finding it increasingly hard to care about my boxes. And, in my most secret heart, I didn’t know if I cared that much for Janos, though he cared so much for me.

  Janos was huffing impatiently at the entrance to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, standing underneath a banner with an enormous image of a ballerina in a feathered tutu, her long neck arcing back, her arms extended midflutter. Next to him was his mother, a tiny, ancient Hungarian woman, straight as an arrow in a silver beaded suit with matching heels, standing up proudly gripping her walker, glittering. Janos was on his cell phone, frowning, but he gestured at me to come on quickly, pulling the tickets out of the breast pocket of his fawn-colored cashmere overcoat.

  “Hello, darling,” Janos’s mother said to me in her thick accent. “Janos is closing a deal.” She beamed. Despite two hearing aids that were practically bigger than her ears, she was stone-deaf.

  “Hello, Margit,” I yelled, kissing her on the cheek.

  “You’re late!” Janos said, flapping the tickets at me, his accent a faint imprint of his mother’s. He snapped the phone shut. “Are those the only shoes you have?”

  “The swan dies,” I said. “Let’s go get dinner.”

  “Very funny.” He led the way through the crowd, my lover, Janos: a short, strong, dark man in his mid-fifties with a rough, irregular face, wearing, under the cashmere overcoat, a white Egyptian cotton shirt open at the neck, suit pants and jacket, no tie. Excellent black shoes. He pushed efficiently through the sparrow-like elderly ladies in sparkling embroidered jackets, the skinny high school girls in too much makeup, the doctors and lawyers who were already bored and looking at their watches as they waited in line at the elegant bar for champagne, the handsome young men with good haircuts. He was like a tugboat steaming through a harbor filled with yachts and bright sailboats, albeit a tugboat draped in cashmere, clearing a path for his mother.

  I followed with Margit on her walker. She took a step, glanced to her right, her left, like the Queen Mum, took another step. I pulled off the brown tie, rolled it up in my jacket pocket, unbuttoned my collar. From my other pocket I pulled out the signet ring Janos had given me and put it on. Bulky, heavy, with excessively swirled initials (mine), it fit me perfectly. Did I love him? I wondered, slowly escorting Margit, encased in steel, across the thick carpet. When we had taken our seats (orchestra, fifth row, his mother on the aisle), and he was impatiently flipping through the program with that same feathered, arcing, dying ballerina on the cover as if he were looking for a phone number in the yellow pages, and the murmur of the audience was mixing with the bleats of the oboes, the long notes of the violins tuning up—when we were settled in I turned the heavy ring around on my pinky and wondered, Do I love him? Is he just one more of my kneeling men?

  Right before the intermission, I leaned over and whispered in Janos’s ear, “I have to go.”

  He frowned, shook his head.

  “I’ll call you later. I’m not feeling well.”

  “Gabe,” he whispered heatedly. “Gabriel.”

  I squeezed his hand, quickly kissed it, and turned away.

  Margit, transported, smiled radiantly at me as I carefully stepped over her light, gleaming frame and headed up the aisle and into the open air. Outside, the evening was chilly. A line of limos waited on the service road; the drivers stood together in twos and threes, chatting and drinking coffee out of paper cups. With a sigh of relief, I went down to the train station with its colorful mosaics of dancers and musicians, whole and untouched by graffiti, inlaid on the walls.

  I turned the heavy ring around on my pinky and again I wondered, Do I love him? Or is it just a daddy thing? I did like to be adored, time expanded deliciously in those moments—though now, waiting for the train, this fantasy felt pale, threadbare. But it wasn’t like Janos was a simple man. No grateful construction worker, no guilty married accountant. Not easily dismissed. He was known for his kindness and generosity, but his arms seemed to be slightly longer than his torso and his eyes were quick, black, beneath a firm brow. Those eyes put you on notice that he was someone to reckon with.

  That had turned me on at first. He was someone to reckon with. As he often remarked at dinner parties, as he’d remarked at the benefit dinner where we’d met, he came from pure Hungarian trash: gypsies, gangsters, drunks, thieves. “One scoundrel more handsome than the next,” he liked to say. “Except me. Not only am I the ugly runt, but I’m honest. An embarrassment to my entire family.” Everyone always laughed, because they knew he was rich and successful, and they hoped, just a little, that he’d stolen or cheated his way into at least part of it. For many years, until I came along, he had been the single man at dinner, the walker, the confidant, the fixer. Silly boys came and went. He rarely bothered to introduce those boys to his friends. But We’re so glad to meet you, his old friends had said to me, earnestly pressing my hand. We’re so glad Janos has met someone finally. They murmured in his ear that I was adorable, charming, and never, ever remarked on the age difference. They always asked me about my art projects. Several of them had bought boxes from me and hung them in their foyers and hallways. I signed the back of each box with a flourish. My work, I said when asked, was mostly in private collections.

  Janos had cheated to get rich, of course. But not that much. I knew that I should love him for that. Did I? The train came and I got on it.

  Forty minutes later, I was in Williamsburg, pushing open the chain-link gate in Mrs. Wieznowski’s yard, which led to Sarah’s little crooked rental house behind Mrs. Wieznowski’s house. All Sarah’s floors tilted away from Mrs. Wieznowski. As I opened the front door, I could hear the strains of “Goodnight, Irene,” Sarah’s signature piece, coming from the living room. I paused a minute in the low, musty, water-stained hall to listen. It was beautiful. I never got tired of hearing that one, which worked out well, because Sarah played it often, with variations. Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene: that was our waltz. No swans in tutus in it.

  I went in. Sarah was sitting in her straight-backed practice chair, embracing the gleaming accordion. It looked like she was playing an air conditioner, albeit a handsome navy-blue air conditioner with shiny silver fittings. The accordion was the newest, shiniest thing in the tilted house; it made the house look even smaller. With her high, pale forehead and thin, flat fingers and delicate collarbone, Sarah looked as if she could barely lift one of the accordion’s heavy buckles, much less play the thing, but by bending all the way into it, she was able to produce quite a sound.

  She smiled at me, bathed in the light of the secondhand green leprechaun lamp. Across the room from the straight-backed wooden chair where she sat was her makeshift sofa: random cushions piled onto plywood on cinderblocks and covered in a vast length of brown fake fur that trailed onto the cold floor. On the bumpy living room wall above the furry sofa was the frilly pink vintage dress she had pinned there for decoration when she moved in eight years ago; the dress was dusty and the lace around the hem was torn. She used to wear that dress, with flip-flops, in Arizona when she went out to bars. Sarah pushed, grimacing, at the keyboard as she leaned into the last, sad notes. The accordion was the right instrument for her, though I was never sure that she was serious about getting famous by playing it. I still liked her eerie ceramics pieces of a few years back. I still liked her stalactites. I still liked her paintings from junior year at Arroyo D’Orado College, for that matter.
She played the last note of “Goodnight, Irene.” I clapped. Underneath us, an L train went by, rumbling for our attention, as if it were our pet.

  We ignored it. I kissed her forehead, helped her out of the heavy accordion.

  “Damn,” she said playfully, “maybe I should have gotten one of the littler ones. The fucker is heavy.”

  “It sounds great.” I sprawled on the fake fur sofa, kicking off my shoes. “You’re a star.”

  “Doesn’t it? So much richer than that other hunk of junk. It’s like playing a whole different instrument.” She bent her head to rub one shoulder. Along the part in her hair, where gray strands had appeared, there was now a streak of magenta. She had recently engineered a way of twisting and braiding her long, dark hair so it looked like topiary, or hair from outer space. She put her armful of wooden bracelets back on. “I just need my own Sherpa to carry it, I guess. How was work?”

  “Absurd. I need a new life. Or vitamins or something. I have this cruddy feeling all the time. My joints ache. Maybe I need a new boyfriend. And”—I shook my head—“I think my ears are ringing.” They were, faintly, as if a large bell, like the Liberty Bell, was ringing far away. “I went to see my house today. It was great.”

  Sarah leaned over to push my hair out of my eyes, bracelets clacking. “You’re such a freak.” The lines around her eyes were kind. “What you need is a haircut.” She sighed. “I’m sort of cold,” she said. “Aren’t you?” It was always drafty in Sarah’s house. The cold seasons arrived there first. “Let’s have a bath.”

  Up the tilting stairs, there were two rooms: the bathroom on the right and Sarah’s tiny bedroom on the left. In Sarah’s room, a desk filled half of the space and a loft bed took up most of the other half. Under the loft were a few dressers painted different Day-Glo colors. The bathroom, hilariously, was bigger than the bedroom, with an old clawfoot tub and dark wainscoting. It was as if someone had fixed up the bathroom back in 1936 but didn’t even try with the rest of the crooked house. And since Mrs. Wieznowski couldn’t be bothered to wreck the bathroom with a bad plastic built-in shower and flimsy drywall, that one room had remained great. Sarah indulged in thick, soft towels for it; she kept a shelf of books in there, a low-slung rattan chair with a flowered cushion. You could stay there for hours, decades.