Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

Even so.

  When I saw it, I actually stepped back and put my hand to my chest. It felt like a physical blow. I stood looking up at the house and at the blue shingle hanging in front of it. The windows of the house once so beloved were filthy.

  It was empty. It was up for sale.

  I’d read that Clarice had been predeceased by her husband, Sidney, but somehow I thought…Oh, what had I thought?

  I turned and kept walking. Fitz caught up with me, took my hand, and said nothing, leaving me to my romantic notions of loss. He had history there too.

  “Why don’t they wash the windows?” I found myself saying to him.

  Why don’t they wash the windows?

  *

  The morning after I first slept over, I remember, it was the light that awakened me, the winter morning light from the south-facing windows, French doors that gave out onto a terrace that overlooked a garden. I remember lying there, disoriented, feeling something curious going on with my scalp, almost as if it were actually rippling with my hangover in some articulated cartoon way. I opened my eyes to see a little girl with a serious face bending over me, attempting to comb my uncombable hair.

  “Hi,” I said to her, blinking.

  “Who are you?” she wanted to know. She was kneeling on a chair pulled over to the bed, holding an enormous, antique-looking comb and peering into my face with somber curiosity. She had a fretful, lopsided look.

  “Chess,” I said.

  “That’s your name?” she said. She was ten or eleven, but she talked like a little schoolteacher.

  “It’s really Francesca, but nobody calls me that,” I told her.

  “That’s really better,” she decided.

  “Are you Cornelia?” I asked her.

  She tilted her chin up, as if to meet a challenge.

  “I am,” she said.

  I am. She was like Kendra in that she seemed almost chillingly poised, used to being looked at. All the siblings shared this, I would see: the professional grace of children all but raised in public. She had the same pale skin as Kendra but a different demeanor—much less languid, less heavy-lidded and indolent. Her face had a cruel severity for a little girl and an almost planar smoothness. She looked like a stolid little businessman, worried because his train was late. But there was something odder to her still. I realized that she had different-colored eyes: one brown, one half green, half brown.

  “Are you black?” she asked me.

  “Black? Um, not so much,” I said.

  “You have very ethnic hair,” she said to me.

  “Is that a good thing?” I wanted to know.

  I rolled over to sit up and found Kendra propped up and looking at a huge, illustrated copy of Louise de la Vallière.

  “Sorry, she just does that,” she said to me.

  “Sorry, she just does what?” Cornelia wanted to know.

  “Loves being the Annoyance Factor,” Kendra said.

  “You are so fat it’s shameful,” Cornelia said, resting back on her haunches and sliding into a sitting position on her chair.

  “Hogface,” Kendra said to her. She had her hair tied up in a tropical-print wrap and what looked to be cold cream lathered on her face, like someone’s mother from the ’50s. “Criminal hogface,” she went on blithely, “revolting, stunted character. Wretched, horrid fussbudget.”

  Cornelia studied her as if to come up with the perfect insult.

  “Hideous flower of rosacea,” she finally said.

  Kendra turned a shocked, sullen face to her.

  “That was really very cruel,” she said quietly.

  Surprisingly, Cornelia was instantly crestfallen.

  “Really beyond cruel,” Kendra said, looking down.

  “I’m sorry,” Cornelia whispered, sliding farther down into her chair.

  Kendra suddenly looked back up.

  “Filthy little Jew!” she yelled, bounding out of bed as Cornelia shrieked and leapt from her chair. I pulled up into a ball as they ran around the room and jumped across the bed—Kendra in her rainbow-striped knicker-length nylon romper pelting Cornelia with slippers, throw pillows, and, repeatedly, a giant stuffed strawberry. Then Kendra caught Cornelia’s ankle and she screamed and thrashed and kicked until the whole thing dissolved into tickles.

  I have to say, I felt embarrassed to hear someone use the word “Jew” like that. It was shocking and it confused me. Later I’d come to understand the way the Löwenstein siblings talked, with their slippery little mouths…I thought at first it was a kind of self-loathing. Later I’d realize it was a throw-it-back-in-your-face thing to people who really did say things like “filthy Jew.” (And later still I would learn what the root of it all was: what Clarice’s mother called her daughter’s fiancé when she announced her engagement.) But I was stunned when I first heard it, because I grew up in a household where if you said anything like that when you were a kid, if you were stupid enough to, for instance, try out the n-word, you would be slapped right across the mouth.

  It was a bright winter day. I had no memory of coming up the stairs the night before, but in those days I often drank to the point of blacking out, so this was nothing new. I remember the morning light in Kendra’s room so well, that first time, but I was to spend so much time in that house that I can’t properly remember my first impression of it. Beautiful things would often hush me, so maybe the memory is buried with that silence.

  I remember going down to the parlor floor alone that morning and pausing to look in the front room. The tall curtains were pulled against the light. And then I realized there was a man sitting in there, a very old man in a wheelchair. He must be blind, I thought.

  “Kendra, that’s you?” he said to me.

  I cleared my throat.

  “It’s her friend, Chess.”

  “Open the drapes,” he said to me.

  So he was not blind? But just sitting there in the dark, no one to help him?

  I crossed the room and opened the curtains.

  “Turn me around,” he said then.

  I wheeled him around in my confident yet inept way and we both were at the window, looking out on Eleventh Street. He was scanning the street with great expectancy.

  “What happened to my father?” he said.

  “Your father?”

  “My father was right here,” he said, pointing his gnarled hand toward the window.

  I felt shy about looking directly at him, but I did. His eyes were milky with cataracts, but he was able to see somewhat, because he was tilting his head around to find the sweet spot. He’d been a big man, I could tell, and still gave the impression of hardiness, of toughness, even hunched in a wheelchair. He had a singular appearance, with his bald head covered in liver spots and trimmed with a small, countable number of discrete white hairs, his large, waggly ears, his incongruous cupid’s-bow mouth, his cloudy eyes and mashy prizefighter’s nose. I found myself thinking of the Jewish Mafia, mug shots of Monk Eastman, Louis Lepke, people like that. He looked very, very old to me, and the idea of his father existing I chalked up to dementia. And yet he seemed lucid enough.

  “Shit,” he said, “not my father…my father.” He tilted his head around, looking at me as if I could give him the answer. I heard Kendra bounding down the stairs and I felt great relief.

  “MORNING, ZEYDE!” she called out.

  “I’m not deaf, you know,” he said.

  “Sure you’re not, honey!” she said, kissing him on his head, while he, turning from her, resumed looking out the window.

  “What was my father, there?” he said, more annoyed than confused.

  He’s looking for the car, she mouthed to me.

  “They drove it upstate,” Kendra explained. “Sidney and Clarice and Bert went upstate to the house, remember?”

  “Upstate!” he said. “That they can have!”

  Kendra looked at me with a twinkling little smile. She loved this guy, her grouchy old gramps, her zeyde (which I honestly thought was his name and which, in
fact, I called him to his face all the time I was to know him, not understanding that it was Yiddish for “grandfather”; but he never took issue with it, so I think maybe he didn’t mind). I would think years later that maybe her zeyde was the only person Kendra really loved, completely and without conditions. Maybe because he was powerless, nearly helpless? She could demand only so much of him, and so he would never fail her.

  She clicked down the brake to his wheelchair—I saw that she had put on ridiculous, denim-trimmed platform sandals, a quilted satin bolero, and a kind of sarong picked out with beadwork—and announced in a cartoon-posh voice that we would be going into the “solarium,” where, it turned out, Cornelia had laid out breakfast for four, with extremely formal place settings involving grapefruit spoons and napkin rings.

  *

  “Did you ever notice that Kendra dresses like a drag queen?” one of my wiseacre friends said soon after this, as the four of us—Trina, Audrey, Fang-Hua, and I—sat together in the dining hall, John Jay, over the remains of our dinner.

  Memory is imperfect, but it was most likely Fang-Hua, who, as a self-punishing dancer, comp lit major, worshipper of the Frankfurt School, and hoity little reverse snob—her family had come over from mainland China when Fang was little, and her father had gone from being a teacher to being a mechanic—was extremely critical of other people. Which was something we had in common, and for similar reasons. Her criticality, however, most often manifested itself in judgments about people’s weight and looks, whereas I was much more likely to brand a person stupid, shallow, sheeplike, but neither of us had exclusive rights to either course of criticism. What charming, well-adjusted eighteen-year-olds we were. Fang and I shared the idea, unspoken but understood, that much of life was about having your back up against the wall, better to fight My War. She and Trina both came from the greater D.C. area, and this being at the height of second-wave D.C. hardcore—a golden age!—they had a whole scene down there that they shared and that provided meaning and identity for them, something I was more than a little jealous of. The fourth in our group was Audrey, who came from a Nowheresville similar to the one I’d come from, a town where, as she once put it, People still say “colored.” She was an artist and an introvert and without a doubt my closest friend during the first two years of college. When I first knew Audrey, she was a deep, contradictory, haunted person, a lover of Lucien Freud, the English band Crass, Harley-Davidsons, and the romance of her own family, which her brother Ciaran, well in his cups, once famously characterized as The Walking Irish Tragedy. Audrey’s father was a college professor, and her mother taught piano at a Montessori school. To my mind, there was a safety net in her life (as there was in Trina’s) that people like Fang and me didn’t really have, even though Audrey would try to tear her net to shreds. Meanwhile, Kendra’s safety net was that much bigger, that much stronger, and her will to destroy it, and herself, that much fiercer as well. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the late ’80s we were just teenagers, freshmen, with our tics and our mouths and our wants, coming together, hungry for experience and knowledge and sensation.

  Kendra wasn’t on meal plan, so you didn’t see a lot of her on campus. What was her deal, anyway? Everyone wanted to know. There were all kinds of rumors about her. That she’d been a dancer as a child, a young prodigy at the School of American Ballet. That her mother was some big literary muckety-muck, although the name Löwenstein rang no bells with any of us. When Kendra was spotted around the neighborhood, it was almost never in class but in places like the Night Cafe, a dive bar on Amsterdam, where she was seen with some roving-handed older guy, snorting coke in the men’s room. Stories like this freaked me out, because I wanted to see her as my friend, but hard-line me just couldn’t get with this kind of behavior. I told Trina, Audrey, and Fang all about the adventures the weekend before—leaving out the part about Kendra stealing Knucklehead the Nonracist Skin’s stash, and also the fact that the next day, not long after breakfast, she was already mad deep into what she called her “Saturday morning chill-out,” which involved bunches of little pink Percocets. She’d asked me if I wanted some, and I was pretty frank in telling her that while I drank like a fish, pills and things you snort and any shit like that just weren’t my cup of tea. This attitude was shared pretty much by Trina and Fang, children of the straight-edge scene, while Audrey, like Kendra, would generally gobble up anything in the name of having a transformative experience. Anyway, I remember Kendra sighing deeply when I told her this on that Saturday morning, as if I’d confirmed a guessed-about aspect, perhaps peasantish, of my personality. Not long after, however, we were bundled up and walking around the Village, and I felt happy as a clam to be with her.

  It was a beautiful winter day. Her family had long been in the neighborhood, and as we walked she’d point out a building here or there and tell me something about its history: a narrow house on West Twelfth Street that had in fact been cut in half, the little gate that led to Patchin Place, where Djuna Barnes and e. e. cummings used to live, the apartment building named for Albert Pinkham Ryder, a painter of great appeal to the young and mystical. Toward Sixth Avenue was the tiny, triangular cemetery of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, and, on the avenue, the great Gothic stack-up of the Jefferson Market Library, beside which, Kendra told me, there used to be a ghastly, light-blocking women’s prison, where she remembered seeing as a very little girl women hanging out the windows to throw down notes to their lovers on the street.

  And of course there was what Kendra and her siblings called “the Blown-up House,” which was an object of fascination for them. One can read about it all over the Internet now, but back then information about the Blown-up House had a kind of samizdat quality: it was where members of the Weather Underground accidentally detonated a bomb meant for, by some reports, the tunnel system under Columbia University. (What’s funny was that not long after Kendra showed this house to me, two Columbia students in our year entered the realm of bubble-headed myth by stealing uranium-238 from somewhere in that same tunnel system.) In the window of the Blown-up House—which had a cornice and top row of windows in line with the other Greek Revivals on the block, but a protruding modernist treatment on the two floors below, as if the facade were a pivoting door that had been pushed in on one side only to jut out on the other—Kendra pointed out to me the bear. It was a Paddington Bear that, she told me, the owners would dress up according to the weather. The Weather Bear. It was wearing a wintry ensemble on that day. Its existence in that window seemed to her to underscore the comparative toothlessness of the times we lived in, the Reaganomic ’80s.

  At that point in my life, I just didn’t know anyone who could do this, who knew secret histories, who could point to a place and tell you what it was witness to, what had happened there, what a building was “doing” and why this was so. I was always looking for signs, for secret gestures, in the city where I grew up, but it was a dull, conservative place, and things like this were rare. I looked nonetheless, and I do remember not long before I left for college walking under a construction shed in that city’s paltry downtown and doing a double-take when I saw, on the plywood wall, a naïf painting of a woman with this written underneath: Young Lesbian Girl Crying at the Funeral of Alice Neel. I stopped and stared at it. It seemed amazing to me that anyone in that soul-crushing city would know anything about the existence of lesbians, let alone Alice Neel. It must have been some kind of temporary public art, and I remember I found myself looking around me, as if to find out who had done this and meet them. But I was alone.

  After we walked around the Village that Saturday, Kendra and I got a slice at Stromboli’s on University and sat in the window making obnoxious noises with our drinking straws and looking at the people passing by. Some of them were neighbors of the Löwensteins, and Kendra seemed to have stories about them all, culled from years of studying their habits with Harriet the Spy–like intensity. Such-and-such was a famous stage actor and a drunk, putatively straight b
ut who wore a marabou-trimmed wrap around the house—she’d once seen him close the arm of it in his dishwasher and stay stuck there for a full hour. Such-and-such made what Kendra called “loud sex sounds” that echoed through the backyard canyons of their block. Such-and-such would stand at her kitchen sink washing her hands like Lady Macbeth and singing “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

  It was starting to get dark—the early dusk of winter—and I had to get back uptown and get cracking, seeing as how I had a paper for my Latin class due on Monday that I’d barely started. Kendra walked me to Union Square, and it was there that she began a strange little pleading routine, as if we were lovers about to part. Did I have to go back already? We could make dinner and watch movies at her house. I was flattered that she was enjoying my company so much, and it was tempting to stay. But I really did have work to do; didn’t she? Kendra waved this away, as if to suggest that school was the least of her concerns. I kept telling her I was sorry, I really did want to stay, and we did one of these complex multiple-good-bye back-and-forth dance routines at the subway entrance. When we finally said good-bye, we hugged and I ran down the steps to the subway, not looking back in case I lost my nerve. I touched my face and found there some of the extreme-white foundation makeup that Kendra used, I understood now, to hide her rosacea. And on the train I thought about how it seemed like she had tears in her eyes when we parted.

  These things I did tell my friends in the dining hall some version of, jerk that I was. Mostly I was—and they were—annoyed by Kendra’s lack of seriousness about school. Because if you messed up and flunked out, then what? Go back to your town of Bumblebee, Pennsyltucky, and get a job flipping burgers at the DQ? Go to the local community college in better-living-through-chemistry land so you can get a secretarial certificate and a typing gig? Similarly, when those dopey Columbia guys got busted for stealing the uranium-238 from the tunnel some weeks later, my friends and I had nothing but scorn for them. Does this life mean so little to you, our thinking was, that you would do something that meaninglessly stupid and screw it all up? Again, it seemed to us that these were the actions of seriously entitled kids who, if they fell, had a hundred strong arms to catch them.