The Christ Child—who is almost always painted as an alert and cherubic toddler—here weighed heavily on his mother, his face drawn, his arms slack.
Like a third figure behind the mother and child loomed a small tree, jagged and leafless. And behind the tree, beyond the distant landscape of mountains and lush vegetation, a gathering of dark clouds.
• • •
Of course, through all of this, I should’ve been pickling beets and attending to that upstairs toilet. But by noon, neither the painting nor the chores could keep me in that stifling house.
Mother Nature had draped a wet wool sweater around the city’s shoulders that day. On these empty summer days, I had a few options—more limited without hitting my $384 with subway fare. The Jefferson Market Library, usually my first choice, was off-limits until I could find that missing copy of Franny and Zooey. There were always the breezes on the piers of the Hudson River Park. Washington Square Park, where I could dip my feet in the fountain. The big modern bookstore with air-conditioning. The clothing stores with air-conditioning, where the security guards would follow me around if I stayed too long.
I walked past a chain store on Sixth Avenue with its doors wide open, its AC spilling out onto the sidewalk. That clinched it. The bookstore would be utterly chilly, and I could sit around as long as I wanted.
That’s when the sky finally coughed and unleashed a pelting rain.
When your entire outfit consists of a 1950s nylon slip, your grandfather’s old white undershirt, and a training bra made of two handkerchiefs and a piece of elastic you fished out of a pair of sweatpants, you don’t really want to get caught in a downpour. So I was running for the bookstore when I heard—
“Hey! Girlie! Get in here!”
I swung around to see Mr. Katsanakis, the owner of New City Diner, holding open the door.
Mr. Katsanakis was not exactly a friend of the family. In fact, he was on my grandfather’s list (The League of Nemeses, I called it). Jack had an extensive catalog of personal grievances against most of his acquaintances, stemming from disagreements over art, politics, sports rivalries, money owed (or not owed), parking violations, and garbage can placement. And like a good lieutenant, I accepted Jack’s grudges as my own. If Jack knew I was—
“What, you like looking like a wet dog? Get in!”
Dry booths, a discarded New York Post, and air-conditioning vs. some long-forgotten slight. I went in.
“You eat already? You hungry?”
What could I say? I had eaten, but I’d been hungry for about a month. I nodded.
“Sit,” Mr. Katsanakis growled and tossed a clean dish towel onto the counter. I slid onto a stool and dried off while Mr. Katsanakis located a plate of meat loaf with mashed potatoes and string beans. It was pretty much the last thing you’d want to eat on a humid summer day, but it was all I could do not to grab the food with my bare hands. I hadn’t even seen meat in months.
“You eat,” he said, and plunked the plate in front of me. Then he sat back and watched me with his hairy arms crossed over his apron, clearly proud of his generosity.
“You eating these days?” he asked.
The question stirred a feeling of disloyalty in me. “Enough,” I said, through a mouth full of mashed potatoes.
“Ha!” His laugh was like a rifle shot. “Ha! That’s why you eat like a wolf! A wolf with a meat loaf, ha!”
“Actually, I just ate, thanks.” I pushed my plate toward him, with what was probably a visible wince.
“Okay, okay, girlie.” He pushed the plate back to me. “You are hard, just like your grandfather. But it does not have to be difficult. You are hungry. I have food. You eat. You come by when you are hungry. Okay?”
“Okay,” I mumbled, scruples abandoned in favor of meat loaf again.
“Your grandfather . . .” Mr. Katsanakis sighed heavily. “Jack was a good man. But also a pain in my popos.”
“I know. He used to say the same thing about you. Except he said keister.”
Mr. Katsanakis’s thick eyebrows lowered threateningly, then popped up again. “Ha! He was right! We are the same that way.” He looked at me with tenderness. “We were, I guess.” The door jingled with a group of tourists, and he started to move away.
“Um, Mr. Katsa—” I ventured.
“Mr. K, you call me.”
“Mr. K then. Just—thanks, I mean.”
I was astonished to see him wiggle his eyebrows at me, then wander away, wielding big plastic menus.
I dug back into my feast, feeling happy with just a side of guilty. As I looked around for a copy of the Post, I noticed a girl my age sitting alone at the table behind me.
It was strange to see another girl alone in the city. Jack had given me free rein from the time I was eight, but I might as well have been an orphan. Anytime I went out, someone would stop to ask if I was lost. Even now, other kids my age are almost always in tight groups, arms draped over shoulders, plugged into the same electronic device. “That’s the problem with your generation,” Jack would say, “letting machines doing the thinking for you.”
In fact, the girl at the next table was immersed in her cell phone, too, sometimes jabbing, sometimes swiping, and occasionally even speaking into it. Which is all very well as you sit at a diner, but you wouldn’t believe the people stumbling around the sidewalks with their faces glued to these things, not paying attention to a thing around them.
“May I help you?”
I realized I’d been staring this whole time and, naturally, pretended I was studying something utterly fascinating just beyond the girl’s head.
“Listen, I don’t have any autographs on me, so don’t bother asking.”
Autograph? So this girl was a famous . . . what? My knowledge of famous faces was limited to whoever I passed on the newsstand, but this girl didn’t look like much of a celebrity. She was wearing a white button-down shirt tucked into high-waisted khaki pants, and her dark, glossy hair was braided in long pigtails, tucked behind each ear. She looked less like a pop star and more like Pocahontas with a job at the Gap.
I let a psshshh out of the side of my mouth. “So? Who wants an autograph anyway?”
“Well, I don’t do pictures either.”
“Well, that’s good news, because I don’t have a camera.”
This struck the girl as very funny. “Oh, okay! Ha. I guess you’ll just be getting out your cell phone now. . . .”
“Don’t have one of those either.”
Now it was the girl’s turn to look surprised. “What? How do you text people?”
I shrugged.
“I mean, okay, you can just use e-mail. But what about calls? Do you use pay phones or something?”
I wasn’t about to explain that I didn’t have anyone to call. I shrugged again.
“Wow, that’s cool. Kind of like meeting someone from the olden days who time travels to the future. Like Return to Tomorrow, you know?”
“Yeah . . . The book?” I ventured.
“The book? No, the movie. Came out last summer? It grossed, like, three hundred mil domestic, seven hundred worldwide. The sequel’s in post-production now for release next summer, but you should really download the original first.”
“Sure.” I understood about three of the words in her last two sentences.
The girl put down her phone and squinted at me. “So you really don’t know who I am?”
“Should I?”
The girl smiled, revealing a row of teeth so white and perfect they could only be called dazzling. “Nope, not at all.” She got up and joined me at the counter. “I’m Bodhi. What’s your name? You live around here?”
“Theo. I live on Spinney Lane.”
“Oh yeah? Me too! Just moved in last week.”
“Oh, the house with all the—”
“Paparazzi. Yeah. I
hate it.”
“So your parents are—”
“Jessica Blake and Jake Ford. Yeah.”
I was glad she’d filled in the names, because while I might recognize their faces from the newsstand, their names would definitely be pushing the limits of my pop culture knowledge.
“Big house,” I said reluctantly. It was the only house on the block bigger than ours. It was also a lot, lot nicer.
“It’s okay, I guess. They’re still moving in and finishing the renovations, so it’s too crazy to hang around. I try to stay out all day. This place has become my second home.”
“And your parents don’t mind?” My experience was the richer the family, the more people watching the kids.
“Who’s gonna mind? My mom’s in Morocco shooting a new movie. My dad’s on set all day in Brooklyn. And we have eight different employees—oh, sorry, I’m supposed to call them ‘team members’—anyway, eight other people in the house, all of whom think someone else is watching me.” Bodhi looked over to the counter. “Hey, want some pie? On me. Mr. K, two coconut, please!”
First meat loaf, now pie? Yes, please.
Mr. Katsanakis clattered two plates in front of us and went back in the kitchen to yell at the line cooks.
In the space of one rainstorm, I had gone from being one of the Village’s eccentric outsiders to being the kind of girl who wanders into her local diner to chat with the owner and share some pie with a buddy.
I kind of liked it.
“Hey,” said Bodhi, looking down, “I used to have a pair of sneakers like that! OnDa1 gave them to me—you know, the hip-hop artist? No? He was in a movie with my dad last year. Only got to wear them a couple times before I outgrew them. Where’d you get ’em? I thought the company only made, like, three pairs.”
“Hey, I like your . . . shirt.” I fumbled for anything to change the subject.
“This?” Bodhi snorted. “This is just my paparazzi uniform. I wear the same thing every day, no matter what. I got the idea from this rock star who used to go jogging in the same outfit every day so the paparazzi’s pictures would always look the same. That way they can’t sell the pictures, and they leave you alone.”
“Aren’t you hot, though?”
“Oh, man, I’m sweating my pits out. Why do you think I hang out all day at this diner? AC, baby.”
We finished our pie in silence, neither of us able to think of a topic of common interest.
“Why don’t we go to your house? Watch TV or something.” Bodhi threw some bills on the counter and hopped off her stool.
I hesitated. We hadn’t had a visitor in . . . years? Decades? I’d certainly never had friends over. I didn’t even have friends.
Plus there was a certain safety here in the diner, where I existed outside the backyard chickens, the ramshackle house, the strange mother. Couldn’t we just stay here? We had pie. We had air-conditioning. What more did we need?
“Hey, let’s go.” Bodhi already had the door open. “The America’s Got Reality Stars marathon is coming on.”
To my surprise, I found myself saying, “Sure. It’s just, we don’t have a TV . . .”
And as I left, I wrapped the rest of my pie in a napkin and tucked it in my bag.
Chapter Four
What looked increasingly shabby to me each day looked positively condemned through Bodhi’s eyes. I saw the house clearly now: the water stains, the unraveling rugs, the hallways taken over with Jack’s hoard of street finds. I rattled on about the house’s history and our sidewalk treasures, trying to fill the gaping silence left by Bodhi, whose eyes got wider and wider the deeper we dove.
After a brief tour of the kitchen (puddle under the leaking fridge, mouse droppings under the radiator), I led the way to the garden.
“So . . . this is where we grow most of our food. We don’t just go to the grocery store and buy, you know, Chili-Powdered Cheez Janglers, or whatever most people eat. We grow it here. It’s a lot better than what you get at the overpriced farmer’s market, too. And the chickens—that’s Adelaide, and that little eye-pecker is Artemesia—um, they live over here in the coop. They’re pretty quiet. They’re all hens, no roosters, you know. But our neighbor,” I lowered my voice, “Madame Dumont, she complains all the time that they wake her up in the morning. And that they smell, which you can see, they don’t . . .” I stopped, at a loss, and just let the silence settle over the yard.
Bodhi stood rooted, slowly shaking her head. She finally murmured: “This . . . is . . . awesome!”
She walked slowly around the garden, touching the vegetables and tapping at the chickens with her foot. She finally looked up, her face bright with excitement.
“So cool! Seriously. Just phenomenal. I’ve gotta wrap my head around this. Okay, so . . . do you have a TV?”
“No. Never have.”
Bodhi nodded to herself. “So no DVR? No DVDs? No TiVo? Not even a VCR?”
“No.”
“Okay, this is fun. What about a dishwasher?”
“Nope.”
“Washing machine?”
“Laundromat on Grove Street.”
“Okay, don’t tell me you don’t have a computer?”
“Just the terminals at the library.”
Bodhi’s eyes narrowed. “What about a bathroom?”
“Yes, of course. Jeez.” It was one thing to be thought eccentric but another to be thought unhygienic.
“Okay, okay, had to ask.” Bodhi peered around the yard, still looking for an outhouse.
“Seriously. We have two bathrooms. In fact, the one upstairs has one of those old-fashioned toilets where you pull the chain to make it flush.”
“Cool! Show me everything! Race you to the top.” And before I could stop her, Bodhi was back inside, her footsteps pounding up the stairs.
• • •
“What’s this room?” I heard from the third-floor landing.
By the time I reached Jack’s studio, Bodhi was already riffling through his canvases, pulling out paintings that caught her eye. “I like these,” she said, sliding around some wall-sized abstracts. “And I like the colors on this other one. My dad has one like that in his meditation room.” She paused momentarily to look up at the painting I’d put back over the fireplace. “But what’s that one? Kind of old school compared to the other stuff, isn’t it?”
I paused. I thought about how my grandfather had hidden this painting for decades. How he left it to me—and me alone—as a “treasure.” How carefully I needed to tread, not knowing what this unpredictable stranger would think or who she would tell.
Blame it on the heat. I spilled it. The paint, the rag, Jack’s last words, all of it.
As it turns out, Bodhi was fascinated.
“It’s what—a Madonna and Child, you said?” Bodhi pulled out her phone, snapped a few photos, and then started mining Google. “Okay, let’s see, search Madonna plus child plus painting plus bird . . . Oh man, twenty million results! Let’s try Madonna plus sleeping child plus flying bird . . .”
“I don’t think that’s going to help. You could probably find thousands of paintings that fit that description.” Impressive words from Jack’s art history lessons bubbled up into my mouth. “It’s a popular composition of the Renaissance era, perhaps cinquecento . . .”
“So, it’s what, a family heirloom?”
“I’m not sure. But . . . my grandfather did work at the Met. He was a security guard.”
Bodhi’s eyebrows went up.
“In European paintings. But he never—”
“Wow. Did he bring home . . . souvenirs?”
“Of course not! You can’t sneak anything out. They check your bags; they check your background and references; there are cameras and alarms everywhere.” I reached up to pat the painting’s elaborate gilt frame. “One time when I was little I put my han
ds on the frame of a Degas, and a zillion sirens went off. How would you fold up this thing and tuck it in your pocket?”
Bodhi thought for a moment. “I saw this movie once where they cut a painting out of its frame, rolled it up, put it in a suitcase. . . .”
“It’s painted on a wood panel,” I interrupted, “not canvas. So you could remove the frame maybe, but you’d still have to smuggle the whole thing out.”
“Where’d he get it then? And why’d he hide it?” Before I could answer, she finished, “That’s the question—well, two questions—isn’t it?”
I nodded.
We stood unified before the painting.
“So who painted it?”
“I don’t know. But there’s something familiar about it . . .”
“What about a signature? What’s all this stuff down here?” Bodhi poked her finger at the letters marching along the bottom edge.
“It’s not signed. The words are Latin, but I don’t know what they mean.”
Bodhi was back on her phone. “Well, that’s easy enough. Latin-to-English dictionary. We just punch each word in, write it down, and voilà—we have our first clue.”
I was liking this. In the five minutes since Bodhi barged in, we’d made more headway together than I had all morning with the painting myself. I grabbed a nearby sketchpad and charcoal pencil, while Bodhi methodically worked her way through the verse. In no time, we had this:
Bread alive, that grew but didn’t grow, suckled the plump, and also cured a doctor angel
“Maybe there’s a better website,” mumbled Bodhi.
Jack was right. This is what you get when you let machines do the thinking for you. “Would you put Picasso into Paint by Numbers? I don’t think translation software is the answer here.”
“Then you need a translator. Know anyone who just happens to speak fluent Latin? And won’t report you and your mysterious discovery to the cops?”
Under the Egg Page 3
