by Dale Peck
A dozen pitchy trunks made a miniature pine forest, then all at once ended in a tiny clearing. Eight mulberries marked the clearing’s perimeter: you could see someone had spent years espaliering the mulberries into a bower, ragged-edged now, but filled with green-gold light and the sound of birds and the faint mechanical hum of air conditioning in the adjacent buildings.
“Look,” Claudia said. She pried open the tentacles of wisteria that formed the bower’s misshapen arched entrance. Within the vine-tree’s depths I could see fragments of trellis, flecks of white paint still clinging to broken lath like barnacles. “We used to play here when we were kids. Me and Ellis and Parker.”
“Your…brothers?”
Claudia looked me full in the face, and in a voice that was more warning than invitation she said, “They were.” Then she turned back to the bower. “Oh look!” she said again, the warning gone, her voice all childish glee.
It took me a moment to make it out. A table, three chairs. They were made of rusted metal and were nearly invisible beneath—inside—a mound of vines in the center of the tiny clearing.
“I guess it’s been a while since you were kids.”
“It’s been a while since they were alive.” Claudia’s eyes darted to the magazine in my hand. “Families, huh?”
I wasn’t sure if she was referring to hers or mine. “I wouldn’t know.”
But Claudia was already heading to the far side of the mound of vines. She attempted to pull out a chair, and I knew from the way she’d circumnavigated the table that this had been her chair. It only moved a few inches, and Claudia pushed as much vine off it as she could and plopped down. She sat there as if exhausted, or defeated. Her back slumped, her head hung, the soft flesh under her jaw pushed up into a double chin. “My God,” she said without looking at me. “I am too old for this game.”
I don’t know why but I took that as license, and went to the chair across from hers. The magazine, nearly weightless, floated on a hammock of leaves and vine, but my sharp elbows poked right down to the table’s rough metal weave. It was uncomfortable, yet also comforting. It felt good to be more substantial than the stories Knute had made up about me.
Claudia started a little when I sat down, and I saw that her fingers were pressed into the soft little mound of her stomach. I noticed the lines around her bright wet eyes, the gray strands scattered through the scalloped skullcap of her hair.
“Who was it?” She raised the almost-firm flesh of her arms above her head in a modern dance pose. “Mythology. Turned into a tree.”
“Daphne,” I said. “Among others.”
“Right. Why was she—”
“To protect her chastity.”
Claudia’s not-quite-plump arms fell to her lap. “I guess it’s too late for me,” she giggled, reaching across the table and turning the magazine toward her. “So. What questions do you think your Kay would have if he were here?”
“Kay?”
Claudia tapped the magazine, and for the first time I noticed the cover story’s byline: “THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE, by K. Lingon.”
“Not exactly a judicious use of the leading initial.” Claudia looked back at me. “So? I’m sure you must be full of questions.”
I thought, given the circumstances, that it should be Claudia who was full of questions—it was my picture on the cover of New York magazine, after all, not hers—but she only stared at me with a wide-open smile, slightly less opened eyes.
“What’re you on anyway?”
Claudia giggled and made the sign for a toke.
“Weren’t you worried about the baby?”
“Don’t preach at me, boy,” Claudia frowned. “I get enough of that from my father and her in there.” Then, again, she tried to draw me out. Draw me in rather, to her world, her past, rather than mine. “I believe the expression,” she said, waving her shoeless feet in the air, “is barefoot ‘n’ pregnant.”
“Who was that man in there?”
“Who was—oh. You mean Sonny.”
“Sonny Dinadio.”
“I haven’t seen Sonny for years. Not since—oh!” She looked me in the eye with what I thought was a knowing expression. “Not since Ginny was around.”
I waited for her to continue, but she looked down at the polished tops of her toenails—midnight blue, not yet chipped—and then she folded over at the waist until her stomach rested on her thighs and her breasts ballooned over her knees. A finger snaked down and picked at something on one toe, and when she finished the polish was chipped.
All the sudden she turned to me. “Can I tell you something?” She was still bent over, bent way over, her skin stretched tight as canvas and her lips pulled apart by a line of tautness that pulleyed around her hip joint all the way to her feet.
“Only if it’s about Sonny Dinadio.”
At my words Claudia sat up and turned the full light of her face toward me, as if I’d said exactly what she wanted to hear. She sucked in a breath, then wheezed out, “Sonny Dinadio wants to buy No. 1 but Endean won’t sell to him. Do you know why?”
“Because it’s not hers to sell?”
Claudia’s smile faded, her eyes fell to the table. But then she said, “Oh look!” once again, and there, suspended by pale green corkscrews of vine, shrouded by leaves, were three teacups. “After all these years!” She reached for one of the cups but the vines resisted, and slowly, tenderly, she began to extract it from their grasp.
“Sonny Dinadio,” I prompted.
“Right.” Claudia’s interest in this relic of my past had been superseded by the teacups, a relic from hers. “The shop’s been losing money for decades, and Sonny’s offered Endean, like, a lot of money. But she’s not even interested.”
I recalled the conversation I’d overheard between Sonny and Nellydean.
“Sonny Dinadio wants to buy No. 1?”
“He’s offering, like, millions. But Endean doesn’t care.” She’d freed the first cup, was on to the second. “Your mother wouldn’t sell either. The IRS has been sucking this place dry for as long as I can remember but your mother wouldn’t sell to Sonny Dinadio or anyone else.”
“Claudia,” I said then, using her name for the first time. “Is Sonny Dinadio my father?”
Claudia’s fingers stopped what they were doing but her eyes remained fastened on them, and then she unwrapped the last tentacle of vine from the second teacup. It was full of rainwater and she handled it gingerly, clearing a little space on the table and setting it upright.
“I didn’t know your mother well. But she said to me once—she told me she’d made a provision for the building. Set something aside.” The last cup wouldn’t twist free and, clucking her tongue, Claudia gave it a little tug. I think she expected the clinging strand of vine to snap but the handle did instead, and she winced a little, set the cup down. She worked the sliver of handle from the coil of vine and dropped it inside the cup. “Parker,” she said, more to the cup than to me, and only then did she look up. “She said it was in the building or the garden. She didn’t say which, but she said it was worth a fortune.”
She was coming down, I saw then. Fatigue weighted her eyelids until they sagged like half-lowered curtains; the light beneath had dimmed to a smolder. She moved the teacups around the table like an open game of three-card Monte until I couldn’t hold myself back any more. I grabbed both her hands to still them. The sleeves of my new shirt came all the way to my knuckles, covering up my watch and my bones but not quite my desperation, and I tried not to squeeze too hard.
“Claudia,” I said when she finally looked into my eyes. “Are you talking about buried treasure?”
The words surprised me. I’d meant to ask her about Sonny, not some fairy tale I was pretty sure Nellydean had cooked up—probably, it occurred to me now, to keep me from selling the building to Sonny—but Claudia didn’t look up from the teacups.
“Endean used to call it that. She said there ain’t no such thing as buried treasure but if I wanted t
o waste my time looking it was my own life I was throwing away. Sonny’s not your father, Jamie. Your mother always said she didn’t know who that man is.” It was only when her fingers went slack in mine that I realized she’d been gripping my hands as tightly as I’d gripped hers. “Knew,” she amended herself. “Was.” Then: “James.”
For a moment I saw us from a distance, sitting on opposite sides of a table with the palms of one in the palms of the other, a supplicant seeking guidance from a soothsayer. I saw the teacups, white, crazed like eggs too long boiled. The faintest shadow of pattern—vines perhaps, or perhaps simply woven lines—was visible around their brims, and I thought, this is what The Garden is. Not a physical maze but a mental one. A skein of warped perception, lines of history tangled up and rendered indistinguishable. But every once in a while something slips free, and almost always it’s something beautiful. Something, at any rate, so filled with the promise of meaning it acquires beauty, like a rusty key hatched from a ceramic egg. Sometimes it’s easier to believe in a metaphor than the truth, and if that’s true then I believed in buried treasure: three teacups, one filled with water, another holding its own broken handle, the third empty, as perfectly synced with the lives they represented as a high-noon shadow.
I picked up the water-filled cup.
“Yours?”
Claudia nodded.
I pointed to the empty one. “Then that must be Ellis’s.”
Claudia nodded again.
For the first time I noticed there wasn’t a ring on her finger, and I wasn’t surprised so much as I was…sad, I guess. For Claudia. I wanted my question to be larger than what was in front of us, so I said, “What happened to your family?”
Claudia saw where my eyes were aimed and pulled her hands from mine. She smiled as she shook her head, her solicitations of five minutes before replaced by sudden if tender withdrawal.
“I won’t be a representative of my past,” she reproached me, “let alone for the race,” but her voice was gentle. “Not for my father, and not for you either.” One of her ringless hands took her teacup from me and drank the water in it, and she made a face. “Acid rain,” she giggled. But then she looked at the three cups for a long time and her face went soft. “Drugs,” she said finally. “It’s a black thing. I’m sure you understand. Enough stories for one day,” she went on in a firmer voice. She stacked the three cups together, Ellis’s holding Parker’s holding its handle, Claudia’s on top of them. Then she looked up at me, and it was as if the water from her cup had welled into her eyes. “I can’t go home like this. Can I sleep here for a while? Please?”
I put her in my bedroom, on my sheetless bed. She asked me for a T-shirt to sleep in and in the time it took me to pull one of Trucker’s Stephen Sprouse wannabes from a drawer Claudia had slid her dress down her body, where it lay at her feet looking for all the world like a rolled-up condom. She stood within its ring of safety in surprisingly chaste broad-bottomed white panties and strapless bra, idly scratching one of her wrists.
“What you looking at, boy?”
I blushed and stammered, “Y-you left your shoes in the garden.”
Claudia just smirked as she pulled the T-shirt over her neck. Her arms writhed under the shirt and I wondered if she were too stoned to find the sleeves, but then her bra fell to the floor and her hands poked out the sleeveholes. She scratched her wrist again, looked down at it, frowned. Then she lay down on the bare mattress and languorously rolled on to her stomach. “You’re my hero,” is what I think she said, but the pillow muffled her words.
She rolled on her back then. Her eyes were sealed, her right hand scratched her left, her mouth was a thin slit between lipstick-mottled lips. She reached for a sheet but it was still drying in the back room, and her hands pulled warm air up over her body.
“Claudia—”
“Sshh.”
But I couldn’t help myself. I knelt down beside the bed and put my hand on her stomach. “Are you going to keep him?”
“No.” Claudia smiled without opening her eyes. “I’m going to let him fly away.” She was scratching her stomach through the fabric of the T-shirt, and the toenails of her right foot made a rasping noise as she dragged them up and down her left ankle. “Jamie,” she whispered.
I practically laid my ear against her mouth. Again the smells, smoke and booze and mint. “Claudia?”
“Oh Jamie,” Claudia breathed. “We fucked up. We fucked up big time. We were playing with HIV.”
There was a soft smile on her face and she was scratching her belly, but as I watched the smile relaxed, her hands stilled. Her lips pouted open and a thin steady wheeze passed through her lips.
“Claudia?”
If she wasn’t sleeping she was a good actress. Her face softened until it was as round and open as an infant’s, her tongue just visible between parted lips. I crept out of the room and down the hallway and into the stairwell, her last words beating in my ears. What did she mean, playing with HIV? And all of that scratching? What was that about?
When I got to the shop I veered toward the garden, thinking I’d retrieve Claudia’s magazine and read Knute’s article. But on my way to the back of the building I passed Nellydean’s office, and I detoured into the small room.
The phone book was still spread to the page I’d left it open to not quite a month before. I reached to close it but my hands had ideas of their own. As it turned out he was listed under the same name he’d given the magazine, Lingon, K., but nothing resembling that name appeared on the buzzer panel of the white glazed-brick building that took up the whole block of First Avenue between 61st and 62nd, and I had to sit there for three hours waiting for him to come out. As it turned out he wasn’t home: he came walking up the sidewalk, the setting sun casting one faint shadow behind him, a street lamp casting another thicker one before him, a pair of spectral towers that collapsed in on him until just the man stood in front of me, solitary and brightly lit. Not that I noticed any of this: I was too busy scratching the red welts that had sprung up on my arms and ankles, hands and feet and neck. I scratched with gleeful abandon—gleeful, because the constellating rash enabled me to realize Claudia had said itch ivy, not HIV.
“Jamie.”
I was immersed in scratching, but his voice didn’t startle me. It was almost as if I’d been expecting it.
I looked up at him. “How did you know about that name?”
Knute smiled down at me. “I think this is yours.” His free hand—his right hand carried a white plastic bag through which I could read the labels on a tin of steel-cut oats and a bottle of Beaujolais—reached into his front pocket. What came out first was a silver chain; what followed, swaying back and forth like a hypnotist’s pendulum, was my mother’s key, and as I looked at it my mind filled with an image of mer-Knute, clothed as he was now—and as he was when we first met, in pale khakis and white buttondown shirt open at the throat—swimming down to retrieve the key from a murky river bottom populated by spare tires and unlaced boots, pickled gangsters in cement overshoes. Oh, I had it for him. I had it for him bad.
“How did you—”
“From Ellen, Nelly, Endie—”
“Nellydean.”
“That’s her.” Knute slipped the chain, warm from his pocket but still cool against my skin, over my head. “That’s a nasty rash. Itch ivy?”
I smiled, wanly.
“We should put something on it.”
I could smell the paint before Knute opened his door. The periwinkle walls of the foyer still glistened, and in the living room all the furniture had been pushed against one wall. The empty side was carpeted in newspapers, and I scanned them for good headlines but Knute only read the Times: “Amid Rising Prices, the Quest for Affordable—and Comfy!—Manhattan Living.”
“Pardon the mess,” Knute said, and he disappeared down the hall. By the time he came back I’d found the candles—the ones I lost the day I lost the key around my neck. They lay on the paper-wrapped mantle, four white
tapers, their thick wax bodies broken in several places but their wicks still intact, so that when I picked one up its segmented length curved like the stacked boxes on the shop’s mezzanine.
I heard Knute’s feet on the paper behind me, the sound of liquid in a bottle being vigorously shaken. The candle flopped back and forth in my fingers, and I felt Knute’s wet hand on my neck, rubbing something cool and unguent over my itch ivy rash.
“That pier queen? The one who sold your wallet to the magazine?” I was startled at how close his voice sounded: his lips practically tickled my ear. “He found them.”
One of Knute’s hands was still rubbing the back of my neck; the other traced the curve of my ear lightly, almost surreptitiously, and I stood there while he kneaded a curl of my hair in his fingers as though spinning it into thread. Or a dread—a tiny dreadlock as thin as pencil lead. His fingers pulled slightly, as if testing the strength of what he’d made.
“I’ve always loved hair like this.”
“Curly? Or short? You had everything,” I said before he could answer. “The candles, the key, my wallet, my shoes—everything.”
Knute’s voice sounded confused. “You put your shoes and wallet in the bag before you jumped in the river. Don’t you remember?”
Still facing away from him, I flopped the candle in my hand. “Were you planning on keeping these?”
“They were broken—”
“They were mine.” When I turned, Knute’s wet hand caught the chain around my neck and pulled it tight. “What do you mean, Endean gave the key to you?”
Knute kept his finger on the chain, kept the chain pulled tight against the back of my neck. “She told me she took it off you when you were sleeping on the, on the fountain,” he said, as if just now sensing something fishy in her story. “For safe-keeping?”
