by Dale Peck
Oh, Jamie, I thought I’d made the right deals, thought I’d prayed the right prayers. I used to tell myself or whoever was listening that I’d give him up for adoption if he was born okay. My head would be hanging over that bucket in that foul-smelling moldy basement and you’d be hammering and yammering and I’d be saying, Lord, I know I am not fit to raise this baby, but please don’t visit the sins of the mother on the child. Only let my baby be born healthy and I’ll change my evil ways, or send him so far away he won’t have to bear the taint of a mother like me. That’s the one thing you never thought of, did you, Jamie? “It would have been worse if I stayed.” You thought she was taking off to save herself from you, but how do you know she didn’t think she was saving you from her?
Call it statistics, call it the power of prayer. In either case Divine was born negative. He was born negative and I got handed a bucketful of pill bottles and was told that if I took care of myself there was no reason I shouldn’t live to see my son graduate from high school. I wanted the doctor to say I’d live to see Divine get married, have kids of his own, but all I got was “It’s certainly not impossible.” That’s not a lot to go on, is it? “You just take care of yourself” isn’t exactly a blessing. When you get right down to it, it’s more of a curse. And, Jamie, I’ll tell you: the only way I’ve ever been able to take care of myself is at the expense of the people around me, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that I’ll never be able to take care of myself and also take care of Divine. And that’s not something I want my baby growing up with. A mother with a monkey on her back and poison in her blood. A mother who might go at any time, for whatever reason. Better he should lose me now.
That looks a lot like “it would have been worse if I stayed.” My apologies to you and to Ginny, but I’m beginning to understand her now, to sympathize with her I should say, a lot more than I did when she was fucking my fucked-up brother. Because a kid, Jamie—that’s a life. A life. It’s not something you can bargain for, or bargain with. At first I just thought I’d leave. But then I thought of you waiting all those years for your momma to call you up and say, “Honey, I’ve come back.” I don’t want that hanging over my baby’s head either. I don’t want it hanging over mine.
It’s funny. When I started writing this it was to tell you why I left. That was my original plan—when Divine was born I was going to split, just clear out of here and let my baby take his chances with you and Endean. Then halfway through it morphed into an apology and an explanation and a request—for misleading you, and why I misled you, and could I stay here and raise this kid with you. And now it turns out to be goodbye after all, although a different kind of goodbye—the big goodbye, I believe it’s called, the permanent farewell. But the funny thing is, it didn’t take much to change it from one thing to another. A word here, a word there, a couple of sentences cut, a couple more added. What this note has helped me realize is that death and the future are equally unknowable, and when you think about it what’s life but the future continually giving itself up to the past. Life and death, Jamie: one’s no more of a dream than the other.
(Oh, but you thought you had AIDS. I don’t know why, but I never suspected that out of all the things that might have made you what you were—abandonment, anorexia, whatever the hell happened with K.—that that might be one of them. But you thought you had AIDS and you thought that explained everything: you thought you were going to die. But I’ll tell you, Jamie, that’s the scary thing about AIDS now. You might die, but then again you might not. You might live.)
And I know you, Jamie. I know you think you should have—could have—saved me. But I was past saving a long time before I met you. I’m not talking about AIDS, not talking about drugs or Reggie or my brothers or even my mother. I think what I’m talking about is buried treasure. What I mean is, I wouldn’t have needed to believe in buried treasure if I’d believed in me.
But I believe in your goodness, Jamie. That’s a man’s weakness: he needs a woman to tell him he’s good. And a woman’s weakness is that she can’t resist telling him, sometimes when it’s not even true. But I believe in you, Jamie, and I don’t think you’re really nuts. I know about needing to believe in something even though you know it’s a lie. You might be even better at that than I was, but that doesn’t make you crazy, and it doesn’t make you bad. It just makes you wrong. I guess what I’m saying is, I think it’s time to take this contract to Sonny and see what you can work out. Allow the girl from the ghetto to state the obvious: you spent six months looking for a treasure chest when all that time you were living inside it.
One other thing. I put Reggie’s name down on the birth certificate. I know it’s lame but I chickened out at the last minute. What I mean is, my son’s real name is Reginald Packman MacTeer, and you can call him that if you want. But you make sure to tell him that in his mother’s heart he’ll always be Divine.
seven
DYING CITY.
Cracked city.
City that dreams its citizens, city of uninterrupted interruptions. City where myth and money exist as they do in no other place: in symbiotic harmony. What I mean is, in the end—in New York—it always comes down to real estate.
Twenty-two square miles. Fourteen thousand acres. Two thousand twenty-eight blocks. The average city lot measures 25 x 100 feet, meaning that No. 1, building and garden, was four times larger than normal. What I mean is: the house was wide but my fortune narrow; and neither was sufficient to provide for Nellydean and me and Divine, the ghosts of K. and Claudia and my mother. What I mean is (what I’ve meant from the beginning):
I sold the building.
MYTH AND MONEY.
Perhaps the most pervasive example of New York’s will to power is the story that a Dutch trader named Peter Minuit hoodwinked the native population into selling Manhattan Island for a chestful of axes, hoes, wampum, drilling awls, and Jew’s harps. That was in 1626, but it wasn’t until 1856 that a 230-year-old letter surfaced, detailing the transaction and affixing to it the value of sixty guilders, a figure that was then and forever set at twenty-four dollars. To many people, the character of the entire city is transparent in that story, not just the opposition between jaded and naive, cons and marks, haves and had, but the idea that history is for sale and the highest bidder writes the book. Some people talk about the fact that in native conceptions land couldn’t be owned but only used and what the Manahata were really selling the Europeans was the right to share the land’s bounty; others simply zero in on the fact that Minuit’s was the most profitable real-estate transaction in history. By the time I sold No. 1 that debate had been rendered moot from an historical perspective if not a moral one. The Garden was mine to sell and I sold it, and it remains to be seen who was the wooden Indian, who the thickheaded Dutchman of the deal. And yes, I did sell it to Sonny Dinadio, not least because he was the one person fate had put in my path who could afford to buy it, but also because he was willing to pay fair market value on the terms I came up with.
Some stories are hard to start but easy to finish: Moby-Dick ends with a shipwreck, a Kennedy biopic ends in violent death. This story is the opposite. It begins on June 1, 2001, the day I moved to the city, but seems to end over and over again; even now I’d have a hard time calling it finished. Certainly it ended on February 5, 2002, the day I drew an old key the length of my arm in a vain attempt to find a center to the world. It ended again on February 8th, the day I got home from the hospital and found out Claudia had been dead nearly twenty-four hours: ended when I read her suicide note on Trucker’s computer; ended again when I went to her apartment and found, among other things (syringes and baby bottles and unopened bottles of AZT and Ritonavir), a three-inch yellowed newspaper clipping about the shooting deaths of Parker Joseph MacTeer, aged nineteen, and Ellis Anthony MacTeer, aged eighteen, in a crackhouse on 127th Street between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards; ended for a third time when I went out to the garden where the sunlight was thick as honey in a jar and
the few plants that had deigned to acknowledge winter were now rushing to salute a spring still a month or two in the future for the rest of the city. There were irises that smelled like irises and lilacs that smelled like lilacs and phlox that smelled like lilacs too—but that was okay, because phlox does smell like lilacs, even if it doesn’t normally bloom until May—and there were hundreds, thousands of sheets of paper plastered down by rain and gravity into a rippling white carpet. Each of those sheets was its own kind of obituary, and I went from one to another to another until I finally found what I was looking for. It had fallen into a thistle, of course, but the only thing torn by their tiny thorns—of course, of course—was my already-torn skin. The page had mottled like wax paper after eight months of weather. The garden’s weather admittedly, but still, rain had fallen, dew had risen, it had been hot and it had been cold but the one remaining page of the article K. had written about me was still solid enough to contain Claudia’s flattened cigarette and, as well, its own secrets, its own revelations. —kicked my mother out of the house, is where the story took up, then:
she decided after a lot of soul searching that she couldn’t take me with her. And I guess I understand: I mean the money thing, and she was still a teenager. I don’t suppose she counted on her own mother dying and me disappearing to Kansas—I’m sure she meant to come back some day. Instead she ended up saddled with the shop. I’m sure when she got it she thought she’d stumbled across some kind of treasure trove, that in a few years she’d be so rich she’d just swoop down and sweep me away from wherever I was and set me up in style. But it didn’t work out that way.”
Indeed it didn’t: the golden goose laid only rotten eggs. Virginia Ramsay’s treasure chest was full of wooden nickels, and, according to shop manager Ellen Dean, six years after Ms. Ramsay inherited No. 1 Dutch Street from her father she bought a one-way ticket “overseas” and only the sporadic arrival of odd artifacts—a native of the working-class Long Island village of Brentwood with only a high school education, Ms. Ramsay either had a love of reproductions, counterfeits, forgeries, and fakes, or she didn’t know thing one about antiques—testified to our hero’s mother’s continued existence. Indeed, even after her drowning death in 2000, the occasional item still trickled in, among them the man who saved
And that was it. The rest of the page was devoted to yet another picture of the Hudson River, empty save for a half-submerged white shirt I was willing to bet had been planted by the photographer and an ad for a dermatologist with a Greek last name and a Park Avenue address. I read K.’s sentences over and over, but no matter how hard I stared at them they refused to answer the question that had dangled like a carrot in front of me for three-quarters of a year. The man who saved who? The man who saved what? Everyone I’d been compelled to save was dead or gone now, everything I’d tried to hold on to had slipped through my fingers like dust, and I was so obsessed with my losses that I almost missed the fact that the article did answer one question.
Inherited. From her father.
Even though everything else he’d written was a lie, I sensed K. hadn’t made this part up: it didn’t have anything to do with me. His broken words bordered the square of water like one of the decaying stone fences on the farm Johanus Peeke had sold to him on time. In England a stone fence is an enclosure, a property marker required by law, a way to separate men not just from each other but from the land they live on, but in New England they’re little more than the by-product of clearing the soil for crops or houses or highways, and I thought about that for a long time, there in my mother’s garden with its humming air and headless statue and phlox blooming in February, and then I went to see Sonny.
It took a few hours to get to the Staten Island address that was printed on the contract in the envelope addressed “To the Son of Ginny Ramsay,” but once I’d made my way there I marched straight into his cheap paneled office and signed over the rights to No. 1, shop, building, and garden. I was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt I’d found at the bottom of my closet (because I had possessed my own clothes, before Trucker gave me his) and Johnson Montgomery Croft’s sandals (because Divine had taken my shoes, and I’d given his to John), and when Sonny asked me how I’d gotten that nasty gash on my arm I said, “None of your fucking business.” Sonny laughed at that, the half of his face that could still move curling up in an expression of unadulterated mirth, and without asking me what I’d come for he pulled out a checkbook and a cashbox. He had to throw away the pre-prepared contract (among other things, the date on that contract was August 1, 1991, which attentive readers will recognize as the day after my mother mailed me the letter “Outside Istanbul” informing me of the color of my fathers’ hair); the new contract took another six months to write and rewrite and revise, so that when I left his office on that day in February all I had was a second installment on an eventual sale, and, as well, the key to his van. And Sonny didn’t ask but I told him anyway: I needed something to get me out of the city.
In fact the money was to get me out of the city.
The key—the van—was for John, but by the time I picked up his papers and put them in the back and returned to the hospital he was gone.
HABEAS CORPUS.
Claudia’s funeral was on the ninth of February. I assume, like her mother and brothers before her, she was cremated, assume she rests on the mantle in her father’s study and sleeps peacefully to the sound of her father’s scratchy old 78s, Sarah in the morning, Ella in the afternoon, Billie in the evening and sometimes, late, late at night, Doris Day singing about her secret love. Nellydean had left No. 1 to give me the lock that fits the key I wear around my neck to this day, but she didn’t leave to go to Claudia’s funeral, and neither did I. However, in an act that proved she was as susceptible to the power of symbolic gestures as I was, she kept the shop locked that day. Unlike contemporary signs, the obverse of the faded OPEN placard didn’t thank shoppers for stopping by or ask them to please come again later. It read, simply, CLOSED.
At what point can a life be said to teeter on the precipice? After the third abortion? The fourth? At what point does it fall off the edge? After the first failed intervention, the second? John told me losing his first lover was easy enough and he didn’t really give up until the second was gone. Lovers fell out of his life like cards from a deck, he said, but it wasn’t the loss as much as the terrifying prospect that it could happen over and over again that finally drove him to don dress and helmet, leave behind not one but two names, try on a third, then a fourth. It was easier to give in to madness than desperation, he told me. John dragged his history behind him like everyone else, and so, eventually, did Justin. But Justine and Jane pushed it in front of them. What’s the difference? I’d asked him, and in answer John held his hands before me, folded open like a book. At first I thought they were as empty as the Incomplete Poems but then I saw that his palms were lined with calluses, yellow and white ridges of skin thickened by years of pushing around that shopping cart full of history.
Insert metaphor here, close book, reflect on the meaning of life.
That might have been enough for John, but it’s not enough for me. I still want to know: how many times do you have to get locked out by your landlord (in how many apartments, in how many neighborhoods) before you resign yourself to living at home? How often do you have to wake up next to someone whose name you may or may not remember before waking up comes to feel beside the point, especially when you only went home with that someone because it was four in the morning and the club was closing and you were drunk and broke and his place was “just around the corner, baby,” and he promised the weed was “the best, baby, primo, you never smoked nothing like this shit.” At what point does “ten bucks for cab fare” represent not merely transportation back to a world filled with its own motherless, brotherless realities but the sum of your worth? When, finally, does someone like Reggie become the path of least resistance? How is it that the perpetual doomed effort of saving him can come to seem attractiv
e, not least because it distracts you from the fact that you’re no longer trying to save yourself? One time—just before she moved in, she told me—Claudia said she walked in on Reggie as he was filling a needle. She told me this in the hospital. “By way of explanation,” she said, and at the time I thought she meant the track marks on her arms but in fact she was referring to what she was going to do as soon as she left me. What she told me was that to keep Reggie from taking the shot she took it herself.
“But you were pregnant.”
“I forgot. But if I’d remembered it probably wouldn’t have changed things.”
Before I left New York I went to Claudia’s apartment. What I wanted was a catalog. An inventory, a list, not simply of possessions or credentials, but of proofs. The dress and shoes were gone, of course, but her 50s remained, and the Gucci belt that had held them up, and the white buttondown shirt. Her purse (lipstick, three half-smoked cigarettes, the key to No. 1), her do-rag, slick and richly scented with coconut pomade, sistah’s gone do some cleanin’ now. The clipping announcing her brothers’ death, the syringes and the drugs, some meant to kill her, others to keep her alive, and her spiked heels, the one indistinguishable from the other. Aligned like that they added up to Claudia MacTeer: a Life, but that subtitle was less explanation than qualifier, because what they didn’t add up to was Claudia MacTeer, alive. No italics, no subtitle, no restrictions. I could stare at them, stroke them, bring them to my nose and sniff their various odors, sweet and spicy, pungent and ripe, I stared and stroked and sniffed and each of those sights and scents and textures called to mind a host of memories, a freeze-frame slideshow of our yearlong cohabitation, but no matter how palpable those memories I still couldn’t animate the objects on the table in front of me, couldn’t cause them to be inhabited by the flesh and blood of the one person who’d actually asked for my help. Well, I suppose I could have, but let’s face it: I didn’t really want a catalog or its attendant fantasies, I wanted my mail-order bride. I wanted Claudia. For just one moment as I looked at Claudia’s remains spread out on her kitchen table I wanted to give in to madness as a drowner gives in, finally, to the undertow. But you can’t will madness. You either fake it or you are it, and I was nothing more than a poser. A tease. Madness was the girl in the corner I’d flirted with but, as with the red deer and calling K. my father and my shallowly slashed wrist, I had no real intention of putting out. I mean, I had put out with K., but the truth is that when I fucked K. I was fucking K. I might have been using him as a whipping boy for Trucker or Cousin Benny or my father—or my mother, or myself—but it was still K.’s fingers that wiped the sweat from my eyebrows, K.’s stomach I spilled my semen on, K.’s eyes, gray (but not gray like mine), that had looked at me in shock and fear and betrayed trust. Real insanity is a defense and what I did was indefensible.
