Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  After that, I was free to leave the house.

  And once I hit the sidewalk I could finally breathe again. True, I was on a short tether—this was the errand portion of my day—but just to be outside was amazing. Don’t get me wrong: in those early days I loved my job, I loved having such responsibility placed on me, I loved being Gal Friday to a person whose books, even if they weren’t my cup of tea, I could reach out and touch in a bookstore. Actual books written by someone I knew. It was as if that luster rubbed off on me: I was an emissary of that world. I clearly had value, because such value was an extension of Clarice’s.

  And yet I was quickly becoming aware that the person I had to be in front of Clarice was a buttoned-up, laconic, and in fact dully inaccurate version of me. On the street I was myself again, and often, as soon as I turned the corner off Eleventh Street, I’d make the world’s craziest face, opening my mouth wide as a satchel and squeezing my eyes shut. On particularly stressful days I’d stab my hands in the air and go wah-wah-wah in short, bleating blasts.

  At any rate, my afternoon errands might take me to places like the stationer’s, the elegant hardware store on University Place, the picture framer’s over on Third Avenue, the Jefferson Market Library. Sometimes I’d go to the garden by the library and try to imagine the women’s prison that Kendra had told me about all those years ago, which had once stood there. I’d think about her, wondering where she was (Morocco?) and what she’d make of all this. I could still hear her calling her brother Bertrand a successful parasite back in the day when he worked for their mother. And since I could imagine Kendra’s disdain all too easily, I’d quickly push those thoughts away.

  Sometimes my errands for Clarice would take me out of the neighborhood entirely. She was a great giver of books, the rarer the better, and so I’d be sent to any number of specialty bookshops in search of these gifts, an envelope of clean fifties tucked inside my pocket. Maybe I’d go to New York Bound up in Rockefeller Center for a first edition of Gangs of New York, or to the Complete Traveller for a WPA Guide to Nebraska (!) or a Baedeker of Lower Egypt, or over to the Diamond District, where the Gotham Book Mart was—and where Trina had just got a job—for a 1940s-vintage New Directions hardback, say, Three Lives or Nightwood, with a perfect jacket by the great Alvin Lustig. Or I’d go up to the Argosy on Fifty-Ninth Street for the 1930 edition of the last word in deco bookmaking, The Savoy Cocktail Book. These errands stay in my mind with a singular sweetness. Wrapped up in this was the excitement of exploring the city, out on my own and earning my bread; the beauty and charge of the summer afternoon, and being surrounded by books, which I loved most of all.

  I’d signed on to make dinner once a week. “Something robusto,” Clarice had told me—just assuming I’d been born with a wooden spoon in my hand—and so, back in the neighborhood, I’d often end up at Balducci’s. I had a kind of fetish for how much I loved Balducci’s, which I remember back then, in its old incarnation, as dark and dramatic, still a little bit ’70s but lovely, painted all over a deep forest green, with amazing cheeses, fruit that looked like jewels, and marbled meat stamped in purple and unsettling in its bounty, all of it twined around with faux grapevines. Everything looked like a gift there. And I probably didn’t put this together at the time, but I think I loved the specific nature of the Italian Americanness that played in that store. There wasn’t anything cheap about it. The feeling was graceful, hardworking, rightfully proud of itself: This we know how to do. I have always liked people who take pride in their craft, whatever that craft is.

  Most nights dinner was just Cornelia and I, but often on a day I cooked, Clarice would join us. And every blue moon Sidney, the elusive Mr. Löwenstein, would materialize.

  It was frankly a disappointment to finally meet him. The first time I was told that he was in town and would be coming up to say hello, he walked into Clarice’s office with such self-effacement that I actually craned my neck to look behind him to await the real Mr. Löwenstein. How can I put it? This man…there was no moment about him. He was nearly a head shorter than Clarice, rounded and shoulderless and with a slight walrusy aspect, an effect that was offset by a child’s too-pretty green eyes. He was a mild person, tending toward kind, and seemed so in thrall to Clarice it was embarrassing. I fought down the image of Erich von Stroheim as the butler to aging bitch-goddess Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

  At the first dinner together I made the mistake of asking Sidney what he did for a living. All movement at the table stopped dead.

  “I’m in the fur business,” he said at last, not looking up from his plate.

  “Oh,” I said helpfully.

  Clarice and Cornelia quietly continued eating, their icy silence communicating to me the terribleness of my huge piece of gaucherie.

  Sidney traveled all the time, to places like Denmark and Finland, which was a good thing because these dinners à quatre were pretty stiff and performative, as if we were being watched by an outside party. More often, however, Clarice was out of the house for dinner, at an event or one of the clubby restaurants where she loved being seen—La Caravelle, Le Grenouille, La Côte Basque, Lutèce; things generally had to be French, and expensive. If she told me what time she’d be in, that meant I was to be ready for her and we’d have some after-ten work session. If not, that meant I could fly out into the night. And so I’d usually be right on the horn with Trina or Fang.

  Trina had found a place in Williamsburg on the cut between Southside and North, Grand Street, while Fang had moved in with Decon Head in his apartment up by the old CU, much to our distress. Since there was only one phone line in the Marr-Löwenstein house and no call waiting, I had to keep my phone calls quick and infrequent. Whenever the phone rang I was always pouncing on it lest it be one of my friends and, God forbid, Clarice had to answer it. Thus I was up and down the four flights of stairs in that house many, many times a day, panting like a son of a bitch. On the weekends, however, the phone could ring all it wanted to, because Clarice would be at the country house up near Hyde Park, miles and miles away.

  Usually she’d go alone, or with Sidney on the rare occasions when he was in town. Always, however, at exactly the moment Clarice’s old Volvo turned the corner off the block on Friday afternoon, from the other direction, timed like a break-in caper, a dark-blue Toyota would roll into view. This would be Sidney’s sister Anne—Kendra’s “Jewy aunt” from days of yore—bringing Zeyde to stay the weekend, to be watched over by Cornelia and me.

  When I saw him again, I realized Zeyde was in deep decline. Evidence suggested that once Kendra went AWOL the task of caring for him fell completely to Anne, who seemed permanently exhausted and very much needing these weekend reprieves. She was a modest, momish lady, shy about her girth, and her eternal long skirts and long sleeves suggested that she practiced a much more conservative Judaism than anything her father or her brother might. She was in her late forties when I first met her, and spryly youthful in that way that big but agile women can sometimes be. She was not book-smart at all, but she had a quick wit and a compassionate way about her.

  She really was the polar opposite of Clarice, the least glamorous or public-faced person one could think of. On the rare occasions when I saw the two of them in a room together, it was clear that each was the other’s least favorite person, maybe in the entire world. Clarice’s glittering eyes would travel Anne’s body, going from sexless mom haircut to wide-stripe I’m-so-big-I’ve-just-given-up shirt to skirt that pitched to the ground in front and in back revealed thick ankles and sneaker-clad feet, pulled up as it was by the bulk of her huge bottom. Sometimes Anne wore appliqué sweatshirts with bears on them. Clearly to Clarice she was the last word in the Suburban Horrendous.

  So anyway, on the weekends it was just Cornelia, me, and Zeyde in the house. During Saturday afternoons we’d take him for brunch at one of the wheelchair-accessible diners on Sixth Avenue, and then we might wheel on over to Washington Square Park so that he could watch the chess players. From th
ere I might leave him with Cornelia and go off briefly to buy stuff for our dinner, or just to snatch a little time alone. But never too much time. And when I’d come back, I’d always feel a smile on my lips as soon as I saw the two of them sitting together, both so stolid, heads bowed, Cornelia reading Battle Cry of Freedom or The Silver Palate Cookbook and Zeyde napping or dreaming or enjoying the sun on his ancient head. I would have a leap of something like joy in my chest when I saw them: I was here to protect these people.

  Zeyde phased in and out much more than before, but sometimes he’d have incredible spates of lucidity. At these times he might go into a story from the past, tell a joke, or ask me to read from his favorite author, Anthony Trollope. Anthony Trollope! I loved this fact so much it could almost bring tears to my eyes. The stories from the past would sometimes make him go straight to Yiddish, which fascinated me and made me think of my Abruzzese grandfather, who’d spoken Italian, dialetto guardiese, and Portuguese but had no use for English, which he once termed distaccata. “Detached.” This I took to mean that it could not express what he needed to say.

  It was from Zeyde that I first heard a version of the herring joke: “So a rabbi asks his student, What is green, hangs on the wall, and whistles? And the student says, I don’t know. And the rabbi says, A herring. The student replies, You might be able to paint a herring green and hang it on the wall, but definitely you can’t make it whistle. And Mr. Rabbi says, So it doesn’t whistle!”

  Cornelia would scream with glee at this, but I, always scratching around after causality, couldn’t make any sense of it at all. I mean, Catholics just didn’t have jokes like this. It was only once I’d hit about thirty and realized that life ran on all kinds of random tracks and you had to roll with it or stand by sniffing and blinking about “unfairness” that I could finally appreciate the thing.

  After dinner, if I wasn’t reading The Way We Live Now to Zeyde, we’d wheel him into the piano room and Cornelia would play for us. This wasn’t like it had been in the past, however. Without Kendra, none of us seemed to know how to begin to sing. It was one day late in that summer when Zeyde, after dinner, turned his milky old eyes to me and said, “Kendra, honey, why don’t you sing for us?”

  I looked at him and then looked to Cornelia, who just shook her head.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said in a moment, tenting his hand over his eyes, squeezing his temples, trying to draw the right memory out of himself again.

  Fond of Cornelia and Zeyde as I was, Saturday nights round about eight my foot would start to tap and all I could think about was getting over to the East Village to meet up with Trina and Fang. We had a standing order to convene at the Holiday at nine p.m. Back then this was our clubhouse, the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, and I remember in each booth in the back they had little shanty-style wall-sconce lights with tiny pull chains. In my enthusiasm I’d often go early, and when Trina showed up and slid into the duct-taped maroon vinyl booth, she’d reach over and turn on the light. I was so glad to see her, always, that I thought of this as a kind of THE DOCTOR IS IN sign. We loved the Holiday, with its eternal Christmas lights, crummy wood paneling, dented pressed-metal ashtrays, so-so jukebox, and complete lack of, I guess you might say, pandering.

  The bartender was an old Ukrainian guy who scared the bejesus out of us. One could readily imagine him eating boiled shoe leather in the forests of Galicia during World War II or killing a man with his fingers. Beside him we felt young, sheltered, and frivolous—which I guess we were. He was always decent enough to the three of us, I remember, because he never yelled at us or threw us out (which you’d see happening frequently enough), but in all the endless bar-well V&Ts or bottles of Bud we drank there I don’t remember one buyback. Which was fine, actually, because the prices there were strictly 1972. Under the ledge around the bar, they had those press hooks like you see in older churches where men could clip their fedoras. There was also a tall, depressed-as-fuck barback I remember, with a Fu Manchu mustache, who would go around collecting your beer bottles, take them into a back room, and smash the crap out of them.

  The Holiday, Mona’s, Joe’s, Sophie’s, the International, the Old Homestead, Bar 81, sometimes Max Fish, less so the Blue & Gold and Blanche’s and the stupidly named Downtown Beirut, every once in a while the Horseshoe Bar or the Mars Bar (where we once saw a guy, in a misguided attempt to prove his punk-rock bona fides, smash and smash and smash another guy’s face against the floor), the Wah Wah Hut, No-Tell Motel—we were all over them. Anything that was too slick or themey confused us, so we’d never set foot in, let’s say, Korova Milk Bar, which had a kind of silly cheap-futuristic vibe. We were out to make our own thing, our own meaning.

  Friends, this was an exciting time. Fang had gotten a paid internship with a slick design magazine and Trina, like I said, was working at Gotham Book Mart, which was in those days one of the maybe ten best places in the world. Gregory Corso, all big and wrecky, might come streaming inside dressed in a huge rumpled raincoat, or maybe a gaunt and saddened Arthur Miller would show up, and definitely Ginsberg, in a surprising cloud of modesty, like a shy, avuncular sunflower. Once Trina answered the phone and there was some strange old lady putting on an impossibly exaggerated Katharine Hepburn voice. Trina was about to hang up on her when she looked up at the stacks of Katharine Hepburn’s new autobiography that had been set aside for signing and realized, Oh. The owner treated anyone nonfamous, especially his young employees, like dirt, but one of the buyers there was a cool middle-aged surfer-looking cat, and he was forever giving Trina her weight in remainders, titles they had too many of, or other things that caught her fancy. A free book to us in those days was like a bar of gold, and Trina would bring out her score, having snagged books for me and Fang as well. We were over the moon with delight.

  Emblematic of these times, the wide-open world ahead of us, was one night that hot June when we were at Holiday, just before last call. Holiday closed early, at one a.m., and the three of us had put all our money on the table and were trying to arrange it in such a way to make it equal more than $4.73, when an older guy came over to us and said, “Do you girls need any money?”

  Trina squinted at him like a cowboy.

  “Never that badly,” she said.

  “No, no, ladies, I don’t mean anything by it—I just like to do people a good turn.” He smiled at us, surprisingly uncreepily, and I registered him as looking like my childhood best friend’s uncle Yahtzee, who managed a Cumberland Farms franchise. Then the guy dropped a $50 bill on the table, told us we were all very cute, and walked out the door.

  We sat looking at the $50 on the table. Then we looked up at the door, then back down at the $50. In a moment Fang was on her feet. We watched as she looked up St. Mark’s Place and then down St. Mark’s Place and then came back in.

  “Fuck it, girls,” she said, “let’s get plastered.”

  We couldn’t get enough of talking and drinking and laughing and loving the night—New York City, glittering Manhattan, the East Village back when it still scared most white people away. When the Holiday closed for the evening we’d roll east, and then up Avenue B because Mona’s had the best jukebox, then down Avenue A, maybe to 2A or this one sort of heavy-metal place that had a good pool table. Trina was absolutely crackerjack at things like shooting pool and bowling, whereas I, nothing if not enthusiastic, was the one most likely to sink the wrong ball or throw the iridescent purple Brunswick into the next lane. After that maybe we’d go down to Houston for a late-night bagel or back up Second Avenue for pierogi at Veselka, which still at that time had a tiny little john area accessed via short yellow saloon-style doors, the passage through which provided something of a laff riot if one was three sheets to the wind and desperately in need of a pee. I never knew when to quit, which meant I was always the sloppiest drunk and the one insisting we stay out till four a.m., when Trina would be saying some equivalent of There’s still tomorrow and Fang, elbow propped on a tabletop, would be falling asleep into her
hand. But I never wanted these nights to end.

  Gather those rosebuds!

  By late July, though, Fang was coming out less and less, and when she did, she was filled with complaint about the long trip down from Columbialand. Actually she was filled with complaint about everything. Her drink was too strong or too weak; her magazine job was increasingly monotonous; her guy, Decon Head, had an annoying propensity for disappearing to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, manly chessboard tucked under his arm, while she did their laundry.

  “Why are you doing his laundry?” Trina asked, incensed.

  “Because I don’t like the way he does laundry,” Fang said.

  “What’s there to like and not like?” I asked.

  “He mixes everything together so my whites turn pink.”

  “Couldn’t you maybe teach him?” Trina said.

  “He’s not interested.”

  “Girls, is anyone actually interested in laundry? Why’s it fair that it always lands on you?”

  “It just does,” she said.

  “And Jesus, Fang—when do you ever wear white?”

  Fang took a long sip of her drink.

  “I’m bored by this topic,” she announced.

  Fang was also heavy into one of my least favorite habits of hers: the Astonishing Contrary Paraphrase. She’d be talking about something that annoyed her, some Murphy’s Law thing, and I’d say in sympathy, for example, “Yeah, it’s like when you’re waiting for the bus and debating having a cigarette and as soon as you light one, the bus comes,” and she’d say, “No, actually, it’s like you’re waiting for the bus and you light a cigarette and then the bus comes.” With this, she’d look at me as if I were the biggest moron in the world. And I’d think, Girl should really stop reading that Žižek.