by Dale Peck
“Listen to me kid,” Joey cut into my thoughts. “Don’t take too long to make up your mind. Sonny,” he said, and he bent over me, and when he jerked his thumb back toward the van his jacket actually popped a button, sent it pinging across the sidewalk with those loosed sheets of paper. “Sonny’s turned into a bit of a philosopher since his run-in with your little friend here, but he’s still an impatient guy.” He tapped me on the head as if I were a nail he were driving into the concrete. “Don’t keep him waiting.” He left me then, kicking loose pages out of his way, heedless of their real or historic or symbolic significance, and then the van was gone.
I’m not sure how long I sat there. I got up when I started to shiver. I was already freezing, so who knows, maybe I was only there for a minute or two, a few seconds. But before I went inside I cleaned up John’s papers. His baby carriage was too smashed up to hold them but luckily his old dress was there. Nellydean’s old dress. I tied off the arms and neck, stuffed it full as a Christmas stocking. It was so heavy I couldn’t lift it, had to drag it inside, use the elevator to get to the fifth floor. In the elevator I was conscious of the dress’s stink, and I was tempted to burn it, to burn down all of No. 1 regardless of the lack of insurance or the possibility of treasure. But I had brought this burden on myself, in the same way I had brought Claudia on myself, and I dutifully dragged the stinking bundle down the hallway to my bedroom. When I passed the dumbwaiter I was again tempted to get rid of it, to stuff the dress down the shaft like a corpse in a chimney, but even as I thought that I found my hand reaching for the chain on my neck, for the key that dangled off it. Despite the fruitlessness of the past five and a half months I found myself believing, or wanting to believe, that that key still promised something, still opened something somewhere, if not a treasure than a secret—a key—and by the time I’d thought all that I was at the door to my bedroom. Despite the enormity of my apartment, it was the only room I used, and even it was virtually empty, a bed, a bookshelf, a little pile of dirty laundry on the floor. Sighing, I pulled the paper-stuffed dress into the room, felt its odor fill up that confined space so thickly I wanted to run from it. But I didn’t. Just dragged it across the room, and then, because I’m that kind of person, dragged it not to the big empty closet but to the bed. I pulled it onto the mattress, left it festering on a sheet that had been stained by so many night sweats it looked like it had been tie-dyed.
I sat down on the foot of the bed, panting, found myself looking at the bookcase. I stared at it until suddenly I realized the glass front of one of the shelves was open. No prizes for guessing which shelf. I walked over, reached for the book whose single remaining page was stuffed in my pocket. Pulled it from its berth, cracked its spine, shook it over the floor. But nothing fell out, not words, not paper or money, not keys or clues. Nothing.
Sonny Dinadio’s envelope, whatever it contained, was gone.
I AWOKE TO THE SOUND of distant banging and repeated cries to Open the door! My first thought was that Sonny had come back for me, and I stumbled to the window. But Dutch Street was empty, and I stared down at the Belgian blocks with bleary eyes. They were smooth and opaque, frozen like thousands of ice cubes arrayed in an endless tray. Like the grids Claudia and I had chalked on the basement’s walls, like the gridded map of the—
“Jamie! Open the goddamn door!”
I jerked my head up, cracked it against the bottom sash of the window, and when I turned around I came up short again. John’s dress was still on my bed but it looked like I’d attacked it during my sleep. Paper was strewn everywhere and the dress itself was little more than a shredded mound of fabric.
“Jamie! I know you’re in there! Open this door now!”
As I ran down the hall I saw the trail of paper that led from my bedroom to the front door, where once more I was stopped dead in my tracks, this time by a high-backed chair. It wasn’t just its position, tilted and wedged under the doorknob: I didn’t even recognize the chair. But I just pulled it out of the way and Claudia practically knocked me over as she shoved the door open and I was thankful the chair was there, because I sat down in it. Hard.
“What the hell is going on here?” Claudia said, staring down at me. Both her hands were filled with wads of filthy paper. “Why’d you barricade the door?”
Why’d you decide to talk to me again? I wanted to counter, but I figured it was pointless.
“I thought you were Sonny.”
Claudia just stared at me. “Get up,” she said, “and for God’s sake get dressed.” She sank heavily into the chair.
I glanced down at my stomach’s concavity—if I remembered right, the briefs I had on were called “the Fundoshi”—then started toward my bedroom. Nellydean’s dress was there waiting for me, half stuffed with John’s papers, but so was the neatly folded pile of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothing, threadbare but intact, because whatever else had happened yesterday, it had been laundry day, and I had washed my clothes, and dried them. I kicked the dress and the paper into a corner and put my clean clothes on and made my way back to Claudia, still sitting in the hallway, and the first thing I said was, “Why’d you give John your dress?”
“John?”
“Justin. Justine. Jane. You gave him your dress.”
Claudia lifted one of her feet and looked at the rubbery shoe on her swollen foot, then let it fall back to the floor. She looked up at me.
“Nobody else was going to.”
I almost stamped my foot with impatience. “Claudia, what happened that day? After I left you at the restaurant.”
“What happened?” There was a piece of paper on the floor—I could make out the letterhead, Buchman & Kahn, 120 Wall Street—and she kicked it with Divine’s old shoe. “What happened was that Endean found out about Sonny. She found the contract, Jamie. She knows you’re going to sell.”
Damn, but she was good at this—so much better than I could ever hope to be. I’d asked her about herself and she’d answered me Endean. She stared at me, her expression defiant. Finally I just picked up the paper and wadded it in a ball, threw it in the direction of the dumbwaiter’s shaft. I missed. When it was clear I was going to drop it—drop all of it—she smiled slightly, and held out her hand to be helped to her feet.
God, she was heavy.
“I haven’t sold it yet,” I said when she was standing beside me. “I’m not sure I—”
Claudia cut me off with a finger on my lips. “You haven’t sold it yet. That’s good enough for now.” She put both hands on my waist, then drew me so close that the roundness of her stomach filled the hollow of mine. She kissed me on the cheek, smiled at me, and after the coldness of the past ten days I nearly melted in the warmth of her love. But maybe it was just the feverish heat coming off her body.
She stepped back then, turned to lead me downstairs. I could still feel her lips’ hot impress on my skin, the soft pillow of Divine’s bed against my ribs. I waved at the chair that had been propped under the door, the few pieces of paper that still dotted the hallway floor.
“I, um, I wish I could explain.”
Claudia pulled her key from the door of my room. “So do I,” she said, letting a hand rest on her stomach. Then: “I want a nursery.”
We’d brought the crib from her father’s, of course, and there was the second one as well, from Nellydean. God knows there was more where that came from. Age-softened hand-hemmed diapers, baby clothes from the past century, beautiful wooden mobiles and ceramic-headed dolls whose soft bodies had been stuffed with dried beans. A bassinet, a covered baby carriage that truly deserved the name “perambulator.” The pram reminded me of John’s carriage, and I wanted to ask Claudia if Nellydean had said something, but settled for popping my head out the front door to see if there was any sign of him, but the carriage was gone, and the few pulpy sheets of paper—it was warmer today, and the slush had melted to dark gray puddles—could’ve just been trash.
We found the paint in the basement. Room 11. Four gallons of
pale yellow just waiting for a nursery to brighten up. I ran a brush (room 23) over the walls while Claudia sat on a low wheeled stool and used her heels to drag herself around the perimeter of the room. She was armed with a palette and thin paintbrush with which she painted a crude frieze at toddler height. The palette also held a pint of ice cream, and in between painting little stick figures she exchanged brush for spoon and dipped in liberally.
“Slow to show means big to grow,” she said, the dry joints of her wheeled stool squeaking as she sat up. The change in her demeanor was physical as well as mental: for the first time in months she seemed completely happy. Her skin glowed radiantly, her appetite was insatiable. An unbuttoned buttondown fell on either side of her stomach, and within its paint-flecked walls Chez Divine had added several new rooms in the past week. Claudia was rubbing her stomach, looking down at it as if she could see through shirt and skin to baby within. But it was her face that held me. Her do-rag was tied over her hair, a green drop of paint flecked one cheek like a lily pad, and the light of the setting sun, as if eager for something worthy of its attention, had bounced all the way down the garden’s reflective walls to shine on her glowing countenance. She saw me looking at her and smiled brightly, and I said, “I thought only gay men say that.”
“Only gay men say—?” Claudia’s eyes glanced toward the ceiling, as if thoughts like typewriters could scroll their way upwards. When she got to the top of the last paragraph she smirked. “Oh.”
She blinked a few times. “You know what this room needs? A light. Can’t be fumbling around with matches and candles when baby wants his bottle at two in the morning.” She dropped her paintbrush into a can of turpentine, picked up her spoon.
“You’re not going to breast feed?”
Claudia’s gaze softened and the spoon, pendulumlike, slipped in her hand, then swung back up and she stuck it in her pint.
“Naw,” she said, picking out a single lump of cookie dough and putting it in her mouth. “Not really my style. Leaking on my clothes and shit, and that pump thing.” She made a face. “Baby gets formula. Baby,” she repeated. “Divine.” She tapped her shoes on the floor then, acknowledging her son or daughter’s namesake. “It’s getting too dark to talk. How’s about we run a light up here?”
I held out my hand and did my best to ballast her up. She even whooped as she had that first day, caught my waist with both hands.
“Claudia—”
“Sshh,” Claudia put a finger to her lips. “We don’t want to wake Divine.”
She spread her whole hand over her mouth, covering something that could have been a grimace as easily as a smile, an O of distress or pleasure. I looked beyond her to her frieze and saw it wasn’t stick figures she’d been painting, but little grids, their lines as crooked as the streets below Canal.
“What can I say?” Claudia said. “Verisimilitudinist I’m not.”
It was easy enough to disconnect the extension cord from the chandelier in my dining room and feed it from the fifth floor down to the fourth; it was harder to ignore the occasion on which we’d been here before, Claudia’s face below me, sweat-dampened and poking out of a hole in the wall as if it were she who was preparing to be born. But this time instead of grabbing the extension cord out of my hand she yelped and let go of it, and the cord slithered into the darkness four floors below her.
“Are you okay?” I called down.
“Sonofabitch kicked me.”
“Who? Oh. Duh. You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Claudia said, but her sigh filled the dumbwaiter with fatigued vibrations.
“Why don’t I go get the cord? We’ll have to feed it back down from your apartment. You stay put. Rest a bit.”
A half hour later Claudia waddled out of the elevator into the shop.
“Hey, white boy.” Divine’s shoes dragged across the floor like an old lady’s slippers. “You fall in?”
“Listen,” I said as she lowered herself on top of the nearest pile. I knocked on the floor of the dumbwaiter where I’d cleared it of extension cords. Hollow echoes sounded all through the shop.
“Oh, James. Isn’t it a little late in the day? Literally and figuratively?”
I held up a hand. “What’s the first rule of detective work?”
“Hire a detective?”
“The most obvious solution,” I ignored her, “is usually the correct one.” With a flourish, I pulled on the handle I’d found under the cords, and I couldn’t suppress a giggle when Claudia’s eyes went wide with astonishment. She heaved herself to her feet and shuffled over to me.
“How far down does it go?” she said, practically elbowing me aside to lean over the hole.
“Hard to tell. If your aunt would leave behind Roman times and buy a flashlight—”
“I’ve got it!” Claudia interrupted me. “We’ll lower a lantern down on a rope. Don’t just stand there!” she said when I just stood there. “Go get the lantern!” As I headed toward the stairs she called after me, “And keep it quiet. We don’t want”—she pointed a finger at the ceiling—“to hear.”
I looked up. “No,” I said, “we certainly don’t want”—point, point—“to hear.”
“I used to have a figure like that,” she said ten minutes later, staring wistfully down the shaft of the dumbwaiter at the illuminated hourglass of the lantern. She ran a hand over the bulb of her stomach. “Avant Chez Divine.”
The lantern’s glare was so bright it was hard to see below it, and I let the string out slowly, lest the glass crack against something. But the shaft was empty, and inch by inch the lantern Tinkerbelled down. Every few feet Claudia would poke me and say, “How far is that? Is that the basement?”
When I was able to make out a door in the wall directly beneath us, I said, “See that? That’s the basement.”
“Keep going, keep going!” Claudia’s voice was high and giddy as a child’s. “This is nerve-wracking. I can’t stand it.” Ten days ago—eleven?—she’d denied that we’d ever been looking for anything; ten minutes ago she’d cared about nothing but making a pretty room for her baby. But her grids and her voice gave her away: she still believed. In what I don’t know, but she still had faith.
The lantern dangled a good fifteen feet below us, and it had begun to sway slightly, casting translucent shadows of dust motes up and down the walls of the dumbwaiter. A thin odor of burning kerosene tickled my nose. All I’d have to do was let go and whoosh.
With a tnk, the lantern hit bottom. Claudia was quivering with anticipation. “What was that? I can’t see anything. What’s happening?”
“There’s…a…door,” I said, wanting to be sure.
“Oh my God! This is it! You’ve found the way in!” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sshh,” she shushed herself through slightly spread fingers. “Okay,” she said, drawing in a second deep breath. “Just like Lamaze, right? Breathe in, breathe out. Okay,” she said. “We use a rope. We tie one end around your waist, the other end—here.” She grabbed a pillar. “Oh Christ, I’m gonna wet my pants. Are you ready, Jamie? Come on, let’s go!”
But I was caught by her face: it was dripping with sweat, big fat drops that rolled off and spotted the front of her shirt. I wanted to taste it, wanted to lean over and lick it from her skin, but then I remembered its leaden odor from the diner two weeks ago, and realized I already knew what it would taste like. It would taste like the Hudson River.
“Jamie? Don’t go to that place on me, boy. Not now.”
I shook my head to clear it, breathed in deeply. The dumbwaiter exuded a single stale fishy breath and for a fraction of a second time melted, and when it congealed again I could hear the fading echoes of my voice but couldn’t remember what I’d just said.
“I know he did, honey,” Claudia was saying. “But he’s gone now, and you’ve got to get on with your life.”
She was tugging at the tails of her shirt, and I took her hands and made her look at me.
“Not him. Cousin Benny. He
loved me.”
Claudia smiled at me helplessly. “Who’s Cousin Benny, honey?” her voice gentle, as if it were handling nitroglycerin.
“When I was fourteen—” I began, and before I could finish Claudia pulled me in her arms.
“Oh, baby! Oh you poor, poor baby. I knew it had to be something like that.”
“No, no, no,” I said, pushing her away. “You don’t understand. He…loved me. He made me sleep with him because he just had the one bed, but the only time he ever touched me was to hug me. Do you understand? He hugged me. He just hugged me. He just loved me. Me. And no one called him Cousin Benny. I only call him that to try to cut him down a little. His real name was Ben. Benjamin. He loved me and I—I made up stories about him.”
Claudia was shaking her head back and forth, blinking the doubloons out of her eyes. “Did he go to jail?”
“It was just that after everyone, after everything, I wanted to be the one who got to send someone away for once.”
“Jamie,” Claudia said in a firmer voice, “did he go to jail?”
I shook my head. “I ran away before he was arrested, and since I’d only told a counselor at school there was no way to make the story stick. But he had to move away from the town where he’d lived his whole life. He lost his job, his friends, everything.”
Claudia stared into the shop’s dark shelves for a long time. “Jesus Christ. How old were you?”
“Old enough to know better.”
Like I said before: no one tells a story without intention. But that doesn’t mean the intention’s always known. This wasn’t like the stories I’d told in the basement when I was trying to distract Claudia from her morning sickness, trying to make her feel better. Who knows, maybe I’d told this story for myself. To make me feel better. But I had told it to Claudia, and it was up to Claudia to do something with it. But all she did was look around the shop one more time, as if wondering how in the hell she’d ended up there, how quickly she’d be able to leave.
