The Garden of Lost and Found

by Dale Peck

  Patrick was the man who tried to pick me up in the juice bar, and I let the scrap of paper with his name and number flutter into the trash basket. John was me. It was the name I’d used at the clinic uptown, John Street. But “Trucker”: he’d put the quotation marks around his nickname just as Knute had put them around “ancient history” and “English major,” and underneath the girlishly looped letters he’d written “1-800-SYSTEMS” and a few words. “Call me…” something. It was easy to imagine him hurrying to finish his scrawled message before I came back from the trash can in the middle of the Big N’s north lot—he’d asked me to throw away the wrapping paper my presents had come in—but it was harder to decipher what he’d actually written. “Call me…” “Call me Noman” is what it looked like, to which I could only reply, whatever.

  But still: Trucker.

  Quotation marks or no, I thought I’d put him behind me. I should’ve remembered it was in his job description to return on a regular basis. Now I stared at his card in the bright glow of the monitor. It took an hour of surfing before I was able to track down a name to go with the number. It wasn’t registered to a person, which didn’t surprise me, but the company name was more literal than I could’ve imagined: Systems, Inc. The corporate headquarters was in Chicago, but its web page showed service centers trailing beneath it like a squid’s tentacles: St. Louis, Omaha, Wichita, Oklahoma City, Denver. Trucker could’ve been coming from any of those places on his twice-monthly trips through Selden. For a while I’d tried to chart his progress by watching his odometer, but all I ever figured out was that he drove eight- or ten- or twelve hundred miles every two weeks. Now, with nothing else to do, I picked up the phone I’d used on one previous occasion, and dialed the number he’d left me.

  “Systems, Inc. What is your message?”

  The voice, a woman’s, crisply professional, answered before the phone even rang. At least I thought it was a woman. I suddenly remembered what Knute had said, about how often people misidentified the gender of voices on the telephone.

  “Systems Paging Service. May I take your message?”

  A paging service.

  The man who’d given me a pair of underwear decorated with pictures of condoms but neglected to wear one on any of the forty-three occasions he’d fucked me had given me his beeper number.

  I tried to imagine the words I’d like to see flashing on Trucker’s Blackberry—tried to imagine his wife’s face, or his business associates’, as they looked over his shoulder.

  “Sys—”

  “You pervert,” I interrupted the operator. “You got me.”

  “I’m sorry sir,” the operator said smoothly. “My computer won’t accept the word pervert. May I suggest—” keys clattering faintly “—sexual deviant instead?”

  “What?”

  “‘You sexual deviant. You got me.’ Sir.”

  “Oh. Um. Okay.”

  “Is there a name, sir?”

  I stared at the scrawl on the Big N’s card. “Call me…” Something.

  “Sir?”

  “Call me…Trucker.”

  “Very good, sir. Have a nice night, Trucker.”

  The line went dead as abruptly as it had been answered, and I found myself where I’d started: sitting at my mother’s desk with Trucker’s card in my hand. I wondered what he was doing. Sleeping in some motel maybe, maybe even with some other boy, or maybe at home with his wife. I could see his body well enough, a ribbed tank top pulled taut over his belly, the overextended waistband of his boxers (plain white cotton was fine for Trucker), but for some reason every time I got to his face Knute’s got in the way. Knute. God, what mean parents he had. It occurred to me that I’d never answered his question: I’d never told him I was gay. I suppose it was obvious enough, but still, it felt like a useless titillation, as maddening as the mementos Trucker kept dropping into my life (I’d stopped sweating by then but my underwear was still damp, and stuck to my skin). I let myself imagine Knute as Trucker’s replacement, Trucker’s beanbag of a stomach whittled down to Knute’s trim waist, his extra chins drawn up like a theater curtain into Knute’s nervous, knotted jawline. Knute was so much smaller than Trucker, yet already he took up more space in my mind.

  On my way back to bed I lingered on the mezzanine outside my mother’s office. I could almost feel the dusty air cohere to my damp skin as I looked down at the shop. From up here I could see that the shop had originally been laid out in a gridded pattern like any other store, but the grid had overgrown its boundaries as stuff spilled off shelves, onto the floor, into the aisles, creating wrong turns and cul-de-sacs, detours and dead ends: The Garden of Lost and Found. In the half light, Knute’s slip of the tongue seemed the appropriate appellation for so much junk. There, I thought, that shiny shadow: that was Nellydean’s magic cabinet. And there, that identical shape: that was my mother’s. But everything else was just boxes. Not empty—not literally anyway, just as most of the containers below me weren’t literally boxes—but when I thought of all those closed cartons I found myself unable to imagine what they might hold. Instead I thought of what Nellydean had said before Knute appeared the other day. Your momma didn’t believe in people. She only believed in buried treasure. Down below me ten thousand containers were piled one on top of another like a crude molecular model of history, and underneath them was the basement, filled with who knows what. Walled earth. Rat’s nests. Maybe nothing at all. Or maybe…

  I let myself say it out loud.

  “Buried treasure.”

  The shop’s silence folded around my words—Nellydean’s really—like batter. I tried to laugh, but there was the admonition of those boxes, the promise: we can contain anything. Even that.

  Even buried treasure.

  The answer to all your questions, the solution to all life’s problems.

  The magic bullet, don’t give up hope, the truth is out there. The truth is right beneath your feet or the truth is directly under your nose. Wherever it is—whatever it is—the truth will set you free.

  A shiver interrupted my thoughts. I hugged my arms around my bare chest, looked down at those thousands upon thousands of ridiculous boxes. When I first moved to No. 1 I’d thought those boxes might hold my mother, or at least some clue to who she was. Who she’d been. But now, finally, I understood that the past, no matter how well documented, can never be boxed up. If I opened every single container below me I wouldn’t find her—or Trucker, or Knute, or even myself.

  But still.

  Maybe. Just…maybe.

  I didn’t say it out loud this time, but with sudden resolve I turned for the stairs. Blindly I ventured into the shop. Into my shop, I reminded myself—not my mother’s, not anymore, and not Nellydean’s. For better or worse, mine. I piloted solely on instinct, followed my bare feet through a dozen twists and turns of the labyrinth until I came upon a leather-sided upright chest with a tiny brass plate on it. I could barely read the faded inscription: “Johnson Montgomery Croft.” Inside was a column of drawers large and small, for hats and toiletries and undies, and, on hangers, an entire wardrobe: pants, shirts, jackets, waistcoats even, the sorts of things a well-heeled gentleman of the teens or twenties might have packed before embarking on a cruise to some summer spot. The shirt I selected was probably meant to be worn as an undergarment, the pants a little too long and much too big around, but the sandals, tiny, light, and leather, fit me perfectly. I put them all on to see if they fit (a pair of suspenders compensated for the pants’ loose waistband) then took them all off and then, the camphor-smelling bundle clutched to my chest, I made my way back upstairs. The first thing I saw when I entered my bedroom was the clothes I’d been wearing since the day I’d had lunch with Knute, the powder blue tux pants and the ruffled pirate shirt and Divine’s ruined shoes, and I kicked them under the bed and deposited My! New! Clothes! on the bedside table and climbed into bed. The bundle on the table was tiny, pale, shapeless as an anthill, yet it seemed to me abuzz with almost as many lives. It was
n’t exactly buried treasure but it still had worth to me: it got me out of Trucker’s clothes, at any rate, out of Divine’s shoes. Who- or whatever Johnson Montgomery Croft had been didn’t matter. Didn’t matter to me anyway. He hadn’t given me these clothes. Hadn’t forced them on me or slipped them to me unawares. I had picked them out. I had taken them. They were mine.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Goodbye,” I whispered into the darkness. The fact that no name followed the farewell, not Trucker’s, not Divine’s, not my mother’s—not even my own—felt like a blessing, an affirmation that I was finally letting go of the past, and, after I wiggled out of the damp spot left by my earlier sweat, I slept the rest of the night straight through.

  LIKE MINE, CLAUDIA’S MOTHER has been gone for years, but you’d’ve never known it by the family mailbox. The name on the brass plate reads simply MACTEER, but all the magazines and catalogs and political solicitations inside are still addressed to Mrs. Toni MacTeer. Only the bills come in her father’s name. Among the magazines that Toni MacTeer first subscribed to more than two decades ago is the magazine that bears the name of the dying city, a subscription whose annual renewal Joseph MacTeer performs on receipt of the very first notice. By nature he is a thrifty man, but he renews his wife’s subscriptions one year at a time, ignoring the discounted two- and three-year options. He brings her mail upstairs every morning when he returns with the cup of Spanish coffee he’s bought from the same bodega for nearly forty years, and I’m sure he read about me with the same detachment he read about the mayoral campaign and the recovery of Manhattan’s last two native deer and the burgeoning heat wave, and when he finishes his coffee he leaves the unfinished magazine on the kitchen table in a gesture that still, if intangibly, has something to do with his wife, and, more substantially, with his daughter.

  About an hour after he’s gone to his bridge game Claudia finds the magazine on the kitchen table where he’s left it for her. She looks at the picture of No. 1 and the photoshopped inset of the two crazy white people floating in the Hudson River (they dropped the image right in a window, as if The Lost Garden sold not antiques but miracles, salvation) and as she stares at the two faces—blearily; she’s slept terribly, has vague memories of tossing and turning all night—she ponders who’s the bigger fool, the one who jumped in first or the one who jumped in after, and she concludes: the one who jumped in after. For Claudia knows: you can’t save anyone. For years she tried to save Reggie, but now she’s given up. Given up and given in. Now she’s just enjoying him while she still has him.

  She’s worn nothing but a short silk robe into the kitchen. It’s too hot for anything else, too hot even for that skimpy garment, but she finds it impossible to walk naked beneath the photographed smiles of her mother and brother, and after she glances at the magazine cover (the building’s facade is familiar but it’s not as if No. 1 is the only brownstone in New York City) and the headline—THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE—Claudia puts on a pot of coffee for tomorrow, pulls yesterday’s from the fridge. It’s the only planning ahead she ever does, and only in the summer: in the summer she only drinks iced coffee and she always makes tomorrow’s coffee the day before so she won’t have to wait for it in the morning, won’t have to think even, just pour, and drink, and swallow, which is enough for anyone to do first thing in the morning at one o’clock in the afternoon—but ask her why she makes tomorrow’s coffee before she drinks yesterday’s and she’ll only stare at you blankly. She’s halfway through her second glass and nearly finished with the article about the eccentric new landlord of No. 1 Dutch Street when she hears the key in the back door. Her father always comes and goes through the maid’s entrance in the utility room, just off the kitchen, and she hardly has time to pull her robe closed before he’s in front of her. He wears a powder blue cap, Kangol, sans kangaroo, a red cotton jacket zipped all the way up, and khaki slacks with leg-length creases ironed into them. The ironing board’s in the utility room, right next to the washer and dryer and treasure chest ice box where her mother, when she was alive and when she was living with them, and when her three children were children, would keep frozen treats during summers and winters both, and even though it’s over ninety degrees there isn’t a drop of sweat on him, because her father only sweats when he’s angry.

  He stops on the other side of the pantry doorway when he sees her. He takes his cap off and hangs it on the peg he has hung it on since before Claudia was born, unzips his jacket and takes it off and says, “Afternoon Claudia,” and hangs his jacket on a second, waiting peg. The second peg wobbles slightly. It would be better to switch it with the hat, but the old man has his routine, and when the peg does finally break beneath the jacket’s weight, Claudia doubts he’ll even notice it.

  “Hey Dad,” she says as her father walks to the refrigerator. He pulls out a pitcher of lemonade and takes it to the counter and pours some into the single glass waiting in the strainer by the sink. “I thought today was your game.”

  A little too quickly, a little too eloquently, her father says, “It’s a sad story when a daughter knows only her father’s absences but never marks the time when he will be at home.” He lifts his glass to his mouth and drinks it down in long measured gulps less greedy than efficient. Then, empty glass in hand, he sits at the table opposite Claudia. “So tell me. What does a person do all day? When they don’t have a job I mean. Or a house to clean. Or anything better to do.”

  Claudia has a distinct sense of her body, not so much of its nakedness as of the sweet odor rising from her skin, and she prays Reggie won’t decide to wake up right now. Reggie feels no compunction about walking around naked in her father’s house, beneath her mother’s nose.

  “Actually, I was going to talk to some people Reggie knows. They’re opening a new nightclub, a nice place, and they need bartenders and cocktail—and waitresses, things like that. A nice place,” she says again, but the phrase her father chooses to repeat is “Things like that,” and in his voice Claudia hears the futility of her words. Her father licks what is either a rime of lemonade or the thinnest line of sweat from his upper lip, and Claudia looks down at the magazine on the table. She’d closed it when her father came in, so she finds herself staring down at the picture of me in the Hudson River, in the window of No. 1. THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE. She wonders if her father noticed, if he read the article, if he remembers his sister and that “dust-heap with the garden out back” his wife used to leave her children at when she was working or needed a break.

  But all he does is sigh. “Claudia.” His voice is weary with a single ineluctable truth: she is the only kin he has left. “You’re thirty-two. You’re bright, and beautiful, and charming. Claudia, please don’t read when I’m speaking to you.” Claudia looks from my face to her father’s. There is no sweat on his skin, and somehow that makes it worse, that he no longer gets angry. “Daughter,” he says, “you can do better than ‘things like that.’”

  At his words, Claudia’s eyes drop again. Past the magazine, past the table’s edge, to her lap. Reggie had given her the robe, and it’s so short she can see a few hairs where its halves fall open in an inverted V at the top of her legs. She presses her thighs together, pulls the belt so tight it cuts into her stomach, and at the pressure she remembers what it is she’d forgotten until just this moment, the tingle in her groin, the fever in her abdomen, natality like a fire inside her, and she closes her mouth lest her father see its distant glow at the back of her throat. She puts a hand on her stomach, looks up at her father with a wild smile: she will tell him!

  But she doesn’t. His stony eyes meet hers, then he gets up and goes to the sink with his glass, washes it and puts it in the strainer where there is also one plate, and one fork, and one knife, and one spoon, and when he’s done he dries his hands on the towel that has hung from the same drawer pull for nearly forty years, and without looking back at his daughter he leaves the room. Claudia waits to head downtown until she hears the closing slide of the doors of the room w
here he keeps a picture of his bride and the ashes of his youngest son. He also keeps his record player in there, and the staticky sound of a vinyl recording is slipping under the doors’ wheeled treads by the time she’s pulled on last night’s dress and walked past the double doors’ white-painted panes with the rolled-up magazine in her hand. It’s a woman’s voice, but it’s not her mother’s—it’s not his wife’s—but even so, it will have to do.

  TRUCKER’S WATCH SAID it was a little before three in the afternoon when I woke up and saw and smelled the moth-balled bundle of faded linen on my bedside table, and the first thing I did at the beginning of that very long day was put on my new clothes. Then I took them off again. I took the top sheet from my bed and used it to sponge the sweat from my skin, then got dressed a second time. I washed the sheets and hung them in a back bedroom. In the bright light of day I could see that Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothes hung on my skeleton as loosely as my sheets hung over the clothesline. A breeze could have filled shirt and pants like a sail, I thought, could have picked me up and blown me away.

  I heard the voices as I reached the second story landing—one voice actually, but one voice generally implies another. Nellydean’s voice, and what it said was: