by Dale Peck
The clothes Trucker had given me were heaped on the floor of my closet. I selected the uni-short, gingerly pulled the elasticized straps over my red-rashed shoulders and made my way downstairs. Nellydean’s apartment smelled like fried onions and the shop was quiet, slightly darker inside than it was outside. But Dutch Street was simply Dutch Street: deserted but not desolate, dirty but not defiled. There was no evidence of last night’s altercation is what I mean. The Belgian blocks were no grimier than they’d ever been, the cloistered air stuffy but no stuffier than yesterday, and so, with the change from last night’s cab ride, I bought some calamine lotion at a Duane Reade—the one located between Duane and Reade—and as I made my way back to the shop I picked through a Wall Street Journal in one trash can, an Observer in another, finally found a Post in a third. I’m not sure what I was looking for, but the tabloid’s headline was CUTTING HER LOSSES, and even though the words had nothing to do with what had happened last night they gave me an idea.
Back in the shop I poked around until I found a knife, a small sword actually, its gilt handle scabbarded in a box full of slightly slimy, slightly stinky parti-colored wigs, and I took lotion and newspaper and weapon out to Claudia’s table and hacked away the itch ivy vines that engulfed it until the table’s delicate metal curves were fully exposed. I used pages from the sports section to protect my skin as I cleared the vines away. It was a pointless task and I didn’t know why I was doing it, but at least I knew what I was doing. I was clearing the itch ivy vines from Claudia’s table. I was CUTTING HER LOSSES. Maybe one day Claudia and I would have a proper cup of tea out here—maybe the table’s third chair would be occupied by her baby, or even Nellydean—but in the meantime I was going to sit out here and read the paper like a normal boy. The sun, directly overhead, confirmed that K.’s calamine lotion hadn’t clogged the gears of Trucker’s watch and rendered it unable to tell time; my mother’s key was safely around my neck. I peeled down the bib of the uni-short and slathered a soothing coat over my chest and arms and throat, and when I finished I sat down in what had been Claudia’s chair and wrapped my head in—Friday, the paper confirmed Trucker’s watch—I veiled my face in Friday’s papers and sobbed into their dry dark depths.
An idea can overgrow its borders like a garden. Hack at it, spray it with pesticide, unleash a plague of locusts and still it grows like the wisteria at the entrance of the mulberry bower I sat in, devouring the thing that had once supported it, taking on a life of its own. The trellis was old and it hadn’t endured; the wisteria was equally old and it had. The lesson seemed to be that some things endure at the expense of others. What I’m trying to tell you is that I didn’t believe K. was…was connected to me just because he’d had an affair with a nameless girl in the dunes of Long Island. When? I don’t know, it must’ve been ’78, ’79, fall of my senior year. God, were you even alive then? But still, I couldn’t shake the idea, and, with the elimination of Sonny Dinadio, I couldn’t find anything else to support it either, and unlike the wisteria the question of my paternity wasn’t strong enough to hold itself up. What I mean is, it collapsed on me, and nothing K. said afterwards did anything to prop it up. I have no idea where she was from actually. She mentioned Suffolk County once, south shore of course, you could tell from the accent and clothes she wasn’t a Hamptons girl. But, you know, we didn’t exactly exchange life stories. And I’ll tell you: unlike itch ivy, a ghost can’t be cut down with a material sword; you have to stab it with a weapon of like ether. The questions I fired at K. were, of necessity, oblique, but his answers were alarmingly direct. A friend of hers told me she moved. I don’t remember quite how the friend put it, but something made me think she’d been sent away—you know, like they did to girls in the fifties. Really, James, it’s not all that interesting. At any rate, K. finished up, I went off to college, and then he said, as he always did, “English major.” And I was crying because even though I could intuit how the English major in K. had taken the few snippets of biography I’d furnished him and turned them into the fairy tale he’d published in New York magazine, I couldn’t understand how I’d managed to make my mother out of Long Island, Suffolk County, south shore, we’d meet on the dunes behind Long Beach, you could tell she wasn’t a Hamptons girl—you know, like they did to girls in the fifties—and I couldn’t even begin to guess what that made K. It’s a little Kafkaesque, don’t you think? But all I knew of Kafka was a name on a bookshelf. I didn’t know what made K. or anything else “Kafkaesque,” and, even worse, I didn’t know what it made me.
When I finally looked up Nellydean was standing in the bower’s sagging wisteria arch, staring at my pink neck and torso as if I’d painted my skin with feces.
“I don’t wanna know.”
“It’s just calamine lotion.”
“I said I didn’t want to know.” She smirked. “Justine tells me he made your acquaintance last night.”
I remembered his dress then—Nellydean’s dress—and I remembered Claudia’s shoe and the side of Sonny’s face. Then I remembered the teacups, which were missing from the table: who had them, I wondered?
“You okay?”
I held up my arms for inspection. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“I meant Sonny.”
The jet of blood against the bright dark sky flashed in my mind, the pulpy smack Sonny Dinadio’s face had made when it hit the side of his van.
“Better than him, I guess.”
For the first time in my memory Nellydean smiled at me. “It was your momma gave him the key.”
“Sonny Dinadio has a key to No. 1?”
“He better hope not.” Nellydean shook her head. “Justin. Justine.” She made a swinging motion with her arm, and I realized she was pantomiming Justine striking Sonny’s face with Claudia’s shoe. “Your momma gave him a key to the back gate,” Nellydean said now, and nodded at something behind me.
I turned and looked, but beyond the bower’s interlaced branches I could see nothing but a wall of steel stretching up to the sky. Still, who was I to doubt her?
I turned back to Nellydean. She was at the table by then. She was sitting down, and she actually reached across the table and tapped the key dangling from my neck. “Looks like you been seeing a lotta people.”
I folded the key protectively in my hand. “K. gave it back to me.”
“‘K.,’ huh?”
“You had no right to give it to him. This key is mine.”
Nellydean looked at me with a bewildered expression. “Well I guess it is,” she said, and she raised an invisible cup—a teacup I saw from the way she held her fingers. “Here’s hoping you never find the lock it opens.”
“I want to know,” I said then, so forcefully she dropped her imaginary teacup. “What is this thing you and Claudia keep alluding to? This provision. This fortune. This, this treasure.” The word made me blush, but I was pretty sure my pink coating concealed it.
Nellydean frowned at the mention of her niece’s name. I thought she was going to stand up but she settled more deeply into her chair.
“Claudia’s a good girl,” she said slowly, “just not very practical. Never was, never will be. Hold up, hold up,” she said when I opened my mouth. “You always in a hurry but some things take time.” She paused, taking her time, then in a stronger voice she said, “Parker and Ellis was teenagers when she first showed up, Claudia not quite. At any rate they wasn’t around as often as they had been. It was Parker actually your momma took a shine to, she could always spot the fuck-up in any bunch, but Claudia was fascinated by that woman. Where you from. Who your people. How come you here. I think your momma told her that story just to get rid-a her.”
“What story?”
“You listening to a word I’m saying? Buried treasure.” She barked a short laugh. “Well look around you. You a twelve-year-old girl whose momma left you in custody of a daddy with a face like Hades, you’d be inclined to believe in buried treasure too. Especially after Ellis and Parker. Claudia ne
ver was the same after Ellis and Parker.”
I shook my head in confusion. “I still don't get it. What did my mother tell her?”
Nellydean sighed. “I believe the expression is, bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a 24-7.”
“You mean a 747.”
“If you say so. She said—your momma said—she said it was somewhere in the building or the garden, and I will say this about her. That woman sure liked to dig holes. Like to dig up the whole shop at one point.” Nellydean gestured at the mulberries walling us in. “She planted these very trees.”
She turned her head to take in the whole of the garden. Left, right, up to the tops of the trees and the sky-high silver walls enclosing them. Her eyes were slightly unfocused, as if she were seeing the garden in every stage of growth it had passed through—taking stock of it, measuring its worth. When, finally, her eyes settled back on me, she looked at my reedy pink limbs as though they were weeds she wished she could pull from her well-tended ranks.
“I didn’t come out here to talk about buried treasure. I come to talk about real money. Before she went off your momma made up some sort-a trust. An account to cover the shop’s expenses and such. This was some time ago, when I guess there was the money to do it. Meanwhile there was taxes adding up, your momma’d set up one crazy payment plan after another, juggling them bills so many different ways I’m surprised she didn’t have the IRS paying her. But at the end of the day she still owed a pretty penny, and her lawyer, on your advice he told me, her lawyer dissolved the trust when he transferred the property to you and used it to pay all them bills. Including, I might add, his own.”
I could only shake my head. “There were emails. Faxes. Letters. I only ever spoke to him once.” I shrugged. “I guess I signed some things, I didn’t pay too much attention. I didn’t realize there was anything at stake.”
Nellydean stood up. “Well, you debt free now, boy. Debt free and dead broke.”
“But what about….”
“What about what? ‘Buried treasure’?”
I shook my head. “What about Sonny Dinadio?
Something changed in Nellydean’s face. She knew that I asked about Sonny Dinadio not because of his connection to my mother, but because of his offer to buy No. 1, and when she spoke it was in a pitiless tone of voice.
“I told Justine he should’ve gone for the heart. If Sonny even has one.”
“Nellydean—”
“You’ll stay away from Sonny Dinadio if you know what’s good for you. That man ain’t nothing but trouble and misery.” She leaned over the table as slowly as a growing vine. I hadn’t realized I’d been clutching my mother’s key until her finger twined into the chain and with a little tug pulled the key from my sweaty fingers like a carrot from muddy soil. She held the chain as K. had held it yesterday, taut against the rash on the back of my neck. “And you stay away from Claudia too. It don’t take a prophet to see which way you headed, boy, but you drag Claudia down with you and there’ll be hell to pay.” She gave the chain one final jerk then released it, and with the same finger she tapped the Post’s headline—CUTTING HER LOSSES—and let it speak for her.
She started out of the bower then, then stopped.
“One thing I would like to know is, what the hell you scratching at?”
I looked over at the pile of hacked-up vines. “Itch ivy—”
But Nellydean was shaking her head. “That ain’t nothing but grapevine. Although I guess they ain’t gonna be no grapes this year.”
“But Claudia said—”
Nellydean cut me off with a snort. “Claudia said buried treasure too. If that’s what you digging for, you got a long way to go.” And, cackling, she made her slow way out of the bower toward the shop.
When she was safely gone I went upstairs to bathe. I took the stairs slowly. What I was thinking was how quickly one thing replaced another in The Garden: my rash, apparently somatic, which had covered up Nellydean’s revelation of No. 1’s ruinous finances, which had in turn superseded a discussion of hidden fortunes and buried treasure. And before that: Sonny Dinadio and Justine. And before that? What came before that? Oh yes: K. He felt like a distant memory now, just another of my mother’s black-haired men. It was as if life in New York City consisted of nothing more than accretion, a stalactite heaviness encrusting heart and mind, and for the first time I could see why my mother would want to abandon it. Flee it, lest she turn into a wizened replica of Nellydean.
It was early afternoon, but there were neither lights nor windows in No. 1’s stairwell, and it was virtually pitch black. I crept up to my apartment as I’d done countless times before—well, dozens really, maybe I’d gone up and down this dark stairwell a hundred times—and I was just rounding the fourth-floor landing when Claudia pssted at me from my mother’s door, and I screamed, just a little, and had to fight the urge to run.
She was standing in the cracked door to my mother’s apartment, one hand muffling the sound of her chuckle, and when she spoke it was in a stage whisper.
“What the hell are you wearing?”
“What are you doing here?” I whispered back.
In answer, she opened the door wider. The problem was immediately apparent: she had yesterday’s dress on, pulled up above her ankles. One of her legs reached all the way to the floor on her high-heeled shoe but the other swung a few inches above it, almost obscenely, like an amputation.
“I couldn’t go out like this. Although if you can go out in that. I don’t mean to be indelicate,” she said, touching one of the uni-short’s straps like a dead thing, “but I think the plantation linens you had on yesterday suited you much better.”
“It was a gift. But how did you? I mean, wasn’t that door locked?”
“I’ve had a key for years,” Claudia said. But she was still whispering.
“Your shoe’s in my apartment.”
I turned to lead her upstairs, but Claudia said, “Wait,” and beckoned me in.
She opened the door all the way. Like mine, the entrance to my mother’s apartment was in the center of the building, and light filtering in from distant windows lit the interior only dimly.
“I’d rather not.”
“C’mon, c’mon. Before Endean catches us.” That was all the prodding I needed. I scooted into the room.
“It’s like she just ran out for coffee,” Claudia said as she led me toward the front of the apartment. She walked with the one shoe on, her body galumphing up and down like a horse on a carousel. “Look,” she said, pushing open the bathroom door. A toothbrush still hung from the thick ceramic holder, a rolled-up tube of toothpaste beside it. A sliver of soap lay curled on the sink and in the shower its thicker cousin was visibly sunk into the wire caddie. The caddie held also shampoo, two different kinds, and conditioner, three different kinds, a nail brush, a stiff folded washcloth. Thick wattles of dust draped off everything—everything but the bar of soap in the shower, which was damp and took my fingerprint like a blotter. “I took a bath,” Claudia said, as if apologizing for disturbing a still-life.
She led me to the kitchen, where the sinkside dishrack was arrayed in pairs: two beautiful blue bowls, hand-thrown, their thin sides whorled with the faint impress of a shaping thumb, two silver spoons whose crest-emblazoned handles were more than an inch wide, two cut crystal goblets. And, I noted, all three of yesterday’s teacups. The teacups were face down but the upright goblets were filled with a froth of dust, and I stared at them for a long time before I said, “Think it was a date?”
“Or a friend,” Claudia said blithely, not hearing or not acknowledging the tightness in my voice. “Think about it. She’s about to go away for who knows how long, but there’s someone she wants to make sure she says goodbye to first.” She tapped one of the bowls with her fingernail and it chimed like a dinner bell. “What do you think she served? Something Asian I bet, like soba, or glass noodles.”
I thought about that, not soba or glass noodles, whatever the hell they might be,
but about dinner in general, last suppers and saying goodbye, and felt a hollow spot in my gut. That food should have been mine.
Claudia was looking at me with a funny expression. “You haven’t been in here? You’ve lived here how long? A month?” But then she just shook her head and led me to the living room. Clouds of dust flew up when she patted a chair for me to sit on, and I could feel it cling to my skin where I’d sweated off my calamine peel.
“Hey,” I slid to the edge of the cushion and caught one of Claudia’s hands. “How’s your itch ivy?”
She sat across from me in a frumpy wing-backed chair, dust-covered doilies on both armrests. Her shiny dress and the dust motes flickering around her body made her look like a figure enthroned on a cloud. I turned her hand over, but both the pale palm and the darker fine-boned top were clear and smooth.
“Itch…?” She looked at her hand, at mine, and with a start jerked away and wiped her hand on the chair arm, then tried to laugh it off. “You’re a little odd, aren’t you? A dreamer. I like that. I’m a dreamer too.” She paused, as if giving her words time to cement the bond between us, and I could feel them adhering with the dust to my sticky skin. “You want a tissue?”
“What?” Then I saw the sweat coursing down my arms and legs, leaving dust-tinted trails in the film of calamine lotion.
Claudia was looking at me with a wondering expression—her face as wet and dust-saddled as my own—and her hands gripped the arms of her chair so tightly the circular doilies were wadded in her fingers. She laughed again when she saw what I was looking at, smoothed the doilies and folded her arms in front of her stomach, then unfolded them and waved them around as if clearing the air.
“Your mother and her hair.”
I shook my head, then nodded, then shook my head again. “What about her hair?”
