The Garden of Lost and Found

by Dale Peck

  “Get out!”

  I think I still could have gone straight out the side door of the building, but the next thing I heard was a laugh, a man’s laugh, so derisive and so confident in its ability to deride that I had to see who could scoff at Nellydean in such a manner. For once I blessed the shop’s idiosyncratic layout. It wasn’t difficult to slip into the room unseen in my new outfit—drab and brown, just like the dust-covered boxes that surrounded me—and make my way, albeit circuitously, fairly close to the main counter, where Nellydean faced a tall man in a dark suit with a white neck and thick graying cap of black hair. His back was to me, and beyond him Nellydean was quivering with rage, and the tall man’s shoulders were shaking with yet another laugh. His voice was condescending: not the voice of an adult talking to a child, but of a white man talking to a black. “Come on Nelly, let’s be reasonable about this.”

  “I don’t got to be reasonable, and I don’t want to. And I said get out of my shop.”

  “Nelly, be realistic. How much longer do you think you can keep this going on?”

  “I been here thirty-six years and I’ll stay another thirty-six if the good Lord gives me that many.”

  “But what have you got to look forward to? High ceilings, a little bit of green out back. What if you have an accident, trip over these piles of junk you got laying around. Fall down the stairs or”—the man stamped on the floor, twice—“crash through one of these old floorboards?”

  “If that floor can hold you up it’s proof enough for me.”

  “Nelly.” The man’s hand darted out and caught Nellydean’s and trapped it against the countertop. “You know I only want to help. I only want to make your life easier, instead of full of hardship and—”

  Just then the bells at the front of the shop rang, and at its sound all three of us jumped a little, and Nellydean was able to yank her hand free as a woman’s smoky voice drifted into the room.

  “Aunt N.D.?”

  A chill tickled my spine. Aunt N.D. The title simplified Nellydean, rooted her in the mundane world of family life. I call it mundane, though to me, who had an attenuated relationship to my forebears, it felt exotic, and the sudden knowledge that Nellydean had a family—Aunt N.D. they called her—distracted me so much I forgot the person who had so named her until she spoke again.

  “‘S’everything okay?”

  The voice was quiet and deep and had a slight drawl to it—not a drawl actually, but a slur, as if the speaker were a little bit drunk. But underneath that was a kind of bubbling. A fizz, an effervescence.

  Nellydean didn’t say anything immediately, and the man didn’t either. He turned slightly, toward the door, and for some reason his profile reminded me of the man I’d pulled from the river, even though the impression this man gave was of brutish strength and his voice didn’t sound anything like that other man’s. Nellydean turned toward the door as well, and I thought I saw the slightest trace of fear on her face. Not for herself, but for the person who’d called out to her.

  When I turned I didn’t see anything at first, only the shadowy interior of the shop. Then a silhouette the shape of a pop bottle or a keyhole emerged from its darkened grotto, a woman cloaked in a shiny silver dress, a river of fabric flowing over every one of her body’s ample curves on its way to the floor. Her arms were bare, and her throat and her face, and her honey-colored skin was as iridescent as her dress, slicked by a film of sweat. A purse hanging by a chain as thin as the one that had once held my mother’s key dangled off one shoulder, and she clutched a magazine in both hands rolled up like a scroll. And she was her aunt’s niece: she took silent steps, her feet invisible beneath her dress, so that it seemed she wasn’t walking but floating toward me, her black eyes wide and blank and bright, and even after she’d stepped all the way into the light I could’ve sworn there was an inch of empty space between the bottom of her dress and the floor, and then Nellydean said,

  “Claudia.”

  My knees almost buckled. The only thing that had happened was that Nellydean had spoken a name aloud, but in that one word was a host of emotions I’d never heard applied to my name—not just love, or concern, but something more complex. Resignation, even disappointment. An entire history was alluded to: Nellydean knew this woman. She had relations with her.

  The woman called Claudia was smiling uncertainly.

  “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  “Mr. Dinadio was just on his way out.”

  The half of Mr. Dinadio’s face I could see creased into a smile. “Good morning,” he said, the way country folk say goodbye, “Claudia.” He turned toward Nellydean. “I had no idea you had such a pretty niece. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other real soon.”

  It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to Nellydean or Claudia, but as he passed Claudia his head inclined slightly. I couldn’t see his face but I could tell he was checking out Claudia’s figure; but Claudia was the kind of woman who could look a man in the eye while he examined the merchandise and let him know in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t afford it. She continued to stand in the same spot after the man had walked past her—as if, in case he turned around, she wanted to offer the best possible view—but as the bells rang and the door was swinging to she giggled and called out: “Bye-bye, Sonny.”

  The words took me by surprise. My eyes had been fixed on the magazine Claudia held in her hands. The portentous funnel reminded me of the rolled-up newspaper Nellydean had carried the day she found me sleeping on my mother’s desk, but then the name Sonny came out of Claudia’s mouth and the newspaper was gone, and my mind flashed instead to the top of the dark-haired head I’d glimpsed from my bedroom window, the bulky body that had leaned out the driver’s side door of the white van. I craned my head then, tried to catch a last glimpse of the man, Sonny, Mr. Dinadio, Sonny Dinadio, she used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was, well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid, but all I could see was a white glare that filled one of the front windows. Then a door slammed, an engine started. The white disappeared from the window, and I realized it hadn’t been glare at all. It had been Sonny’s van.

  The click-clack of footsteps pulled me back into the shop. The woman called Claudia had lifted the hem of her skirt with the hand that held the rolled-up magazine, and now she half ran, half danced toward her aunt on a pair of thin high heels. She dropped the magazine on the counter and Nellydean leaned over to receive a kiss, and even before she straightened up she said,

  “Girl, where you been at? You smell like a cigarette put out in a beer can.”

  “Oh, Reggie got me a interview at some—” A limp wave of Claudia’s hand completed the sentence.

  Nellydean frowned. “That man still blowing his horn?”

  “He’s a singer, Aunt Endean.” Not N.D. then—Endean.

  “Like I said—”

  “Hey!” Claudia smacked the magazine on the counter. “D’you see this?” Again the slur—was she drunk? “I couldn’t believe it. Right on the cover.”

  Nellydean glanced disdainfully at the magazine. “You come all the way down here just to meet him?”

  And here, for the first time, Claudia faltered.

  “Well, I, uh, I mean—”

  “Save your excuses,” Nellydean said, her voice sharp but softened by a half smile—which wasn’t, I suddenly realized, directed at Claudia. It was aimed at me. Her eyes had found mine through the same gap in the shelves I was using to look at her and, mockingly, she said, “He’s right behind you.”

  Claudia twirled around. The magazine came with her, flapped wildly in her hand, slapped against her abdomen. So did her dress: the shiny material spiraled away from her body then fell to rest against it. Her breasts moved inside their thin lining, the nipples plainly visible, also the bite of her underwear at the top of her hips. But it was her eyes I focused on as I crashed through the shelves: Claudia’s eyes were two glowing black stars, and as I half stumbled, half catapult
ed my way toward her I realized she wasn’t drunk at all. She was high as a kite. Her eyes opened so wide as I charged toward her that I could see a white ring around her glowing pupils, and I’m not sure if her “Oh!” was a cry of delight or fear because I’d grabbed the magazine from her hand and turned away before she had time to say anything else. I tore wildly through the shelves in a vain attempt to escape through the front door, but the path through them—the same path I’d negotiated with such ease last night—had become completely unfamiliar to me, and even as I wondered if it were my new sandals that were confusing my feet I suddenly burst upon the doors to the garden, wide open and waiting for me, while behind me Nellydean’s voice filled the shop with a plaint so resigned it sounded like an echo of itself:

  “It’s about time you showed up. I got a job for you.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or Claudia, but in either case I ignored her. I ripped through pages as I ran into the garden, practically tearing them from the magazine, until finally I saw the same picture that had been on the cover of the Post. Instead of TAKING THE PLUNGE the headline was THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE, and instead of a one- or two-line caption there was…well, there was this:

  This is not your typical New York story, because James Ramsay is not your typical New Yorker.

  The eighteen-year-old Kansas native is hardly a New Yorker at all. He’s been here less than a month. But already he owns a building and antiques store improbably located in the heart of Wall Street—and he’s already taken a dive into the Hudson River.

  Ramsay passed his formative years in a kind of country idyll, working on his foster parents’ farm in Kansas from dawn to dusk, time grudgingly taken off for school and church. The orphan laid miles of fence, sowed acre upon acre of corn, worked round-the-clock to bring in the harvest before hail storms could beat it to the ground. Such old-fashioned values stood the slightly built youth in good stead on that sweltering summer day—92 in Central Park but perhaps a little cooler at river’s edge—when he saw Thomas Muirland struggling against the current that swept him toward the treacherous pilings of a derelict pier at the edge of Chelsea. Without any thought for his own safety, Ramsay shucked his shoes, scaled the fence and launched his wiry frame into the not-quite-dirty water of the Hudson. Witnesses report Ramsay was under water so long they feared he’d been sucked away by one of the river’s notorious undertows, but eventually the boy’s somewhat ragged light brown crewcut poked through the oily water and began to bob toward the ailing Muirland. Muirland struggled in the youth’s grasp, perhaps not recognizing him as his savior. One man says Ramsay had to smack him to subdue him, another that he managed to pin the weakened older man’s arms to his side. But one woman insists Ramsay planted a kiss on Muirland—a good long smacker right on the lips—and only after that was he able to drag Muirland’s body to the shore like an abandoned pool toy.

  “I don’t think of myself as—

  “Ginny’s son?”

  A voice cut into my reading. Claudia’s voice. I looked up and there she was.

  “You’re Ginny’s son,” she said again. “Holy mother of God.”

  NOW: CLAUDIA.

  In that dress, in the garden.

  She looked like a skyscraper’s sapling or a pillar of salt or a steel pylon, the relic of a lost future civilization. Knute’s fictitious biography had eclipsed the morning’s actual events from my mind, but now Claudia was in front of me, and Claudia was real. In the garden’s light I saw that the iridescent material of her dress was stretchy and velvety, and that here and there—at the side of her hips and the vale of her cleavage—the velvet had worn smooth. The smooth places suggested not so much age as the impress of hands on softness—soft velvet, soft flesh—and she held, in one of her own hands, her silver shoes, and in the other her purse. The only hardness to her was her hair, covered in tightly marcelled fingerwaves. She had a tentative, inscrutable smile, and these were the first words she actually said to me. She said:

  “How does it feel to be a hero?”

  And I thought: how did it feel? I looked down at the magazine, tried to summon up the feeling of the river, of that man—Thomas Muirland was his name—his body against mine, but all that came was a tingle in my lips, a faint reminder of his stubbled cheek. I tried to remember what it had felt like watching the deer from behind a tree because that seemed part of it too, and I tried to remember what it had felt like eating lunch with Knute, but all I remembered was red fur and blue eyes, which is another way of saying I didn’t remember anything real at all. I looked down at Knute’s article, searching for the end of the sentence I’d just read, but all I saw was “I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man.” The sentence was in quotation marks, as if I’d said it, and I decided to try it on for size. I said:

  “I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man.”

  Claudia shrugged. “Whatever.” She tried to open her purse’s tiny clasp with the hand that held her shoes, couldn’t. “Hold these?”

  She took a step toward me, I took a step toward her; there was still a step between us. Claudia looked at me.

  “Don’t worry, I just want a cigarette, brotherman.”

  I took the second step and took her shoes from her. They seemed impossibly light and flimsy, and I couldn’t imagine how they’d held up a whole woman. But the tiny platforms, pillared and sloped like miniature slides, were still warm from Claudia’s soles, still smelled of feet.

  I jumped back when I felt Claudia’s hand on my head. Claudia was looking at my hair but her eyes were only half focused.

  “Nappy.” Then: “I guess white folks call it shaggy. You could use a haircut, Mr. Ramsay.”

  She let her hand rest on my scraggly skull a moment longer, then took it off to light her cigarette. The lighter flicked and she inhaled deeply, held the smoke in with closed eyes.

  “That’s the ticket,” she said after she finally exhaled. But as soon as the words and the smoke were out of her mouth confusion clouded her face. She looked down at the cigarette pinched between the tips of her thumb and middle finger—Lily Windglass, who preferred the plierslike clamp of extended middle and index fingers, used to say only fags and foreigners smoked that way—then she looked around the garden until her eyes ended up on me. “Do you want this?”

  “Um, I don’t smoke?” I said, although I was thinking that if she asked me too I just might.

  Claudia looked around again. “Oh well.” She dropped the cigarette on the ground. A bare foot emerged from beneath her dress to stamp it out and I lunged forward.

  “Careful!” I said, catching her waist with my arm. Claudia oofed in my face, a jet of residual smoke and alcohol and something else, something sweet, minty, and I remembered that she was high as we tumbled to the ground.

  The cigarette smoked silently in the grass.

  Claudia propped herself on her elbows, gave me a sloppy grin.

  “What is it with you, a compulsion?”

  “What’s what?”

  “The hero thing. ‘Saving people.’” Like Knute, Claudia made quotation marks with her fingers, but because her elbows were on the ground her fingers seatbelted her waist. “Anyway, thanks. I dated a guy who was into the whole cigarette thing, and believe me, it was no fun.” She was brushing herself off when she noticed the look on my face. “Um, I was joking? Hello? Irony?”

  I stood up, put the cigarette out with the sole of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s sandal and picked up the butt. Lacking anything else I ripped a page from the magazine and folded the crushed cylinder inside it, and as I smoothed creases into Knute’s words I found myself thinking of his hand—of his finger, dipping into the pocket over his heart. “Trying to quit?”

  Claudia’d sat up but showed no inclination to stand, instead stared down at the taut plain of dress pulled tight across her thighs.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What are you, pregnant?”

  The look Claudia flashed me was filled with such fury
and fear that I crunched up the folded page in my hand.

  “Didn’t your momma teach you to mind your own business?”

  “My ‘momma’ abandoned me when I was a year old,” I shot back. “For all of ‘this.’” In lieu of quotation marks I threw the crumpled page in the direction of the shop.

  With a little laugh Claudia attempted to compose herself.

  “Well then,” she said, and held up a hand to me, palm down, wrist relaxed, as if to be kissed. “I’m Claudia.”

  I ignored her hand. “I know that.”

  “I’m Claudia MacTeer.”

  I hesitated, then decided to play along. “That I didn’t know.” I took her hand, but instead of kissing it I hauled her to her feet.

  Claudia whooped as she came up, caught on to me to keep from toppling in the other direction. Her giggle was more of a snigger, at her own intoxication I think, and, indecorously, she pulled her dress out of the crack of her ass, then stepped back and curtseyed as if we were meeting at a cotillion.

  “And you are?”

  I retrieved the magazine from the ground and held its surreal headline beside my face. “I’m the man who saves people.”

  And suddenly we were friends. Or almost friends. As good as friends. I don’t know how else to put it. The choreography of introduction had been managed, or mangled, and Claudia began walking deeper into the garden with the steady stride—well, not so steady actually—of someone who expects to be followed. Her dress had inchwormed up her body, and as she smoothed it down her hips she called back,

  “Stop staring at my ass.”

  “How do you know I’m staring at your ass?”

  “Because,” Claudia said, and turned back to me. “Boys always stare at my ass.”

  I put my hand to my chest, fingers splayed. “Even boys like me?”

  Claudia squinted, then put a like hand to her chest and said, “Especially boys like you.” A complicated series of expressions distorted her face. “Who would’ve figured? Ginny’s son a fag. I guess this is one case where no one can blame the mother. Oh, I don’t mind,” she said as if I’d protested. She turned and continued into the garden. “Just don’t go gettin’ all black girl on me, okay?”