Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  Actually what I’d really be wondering was why she always seemed to have such a nonresponse to the smallest suggestion of empathy.

  One night when it was just Fang and me, I suggested we meet up for sushi at Sapporo in the East Village. Fang sounded fine on the phone, but when she turned up I instantly saw she was in a bad mood. She gave me a stiff hug and spilled herself into a chair.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said, immediately hiding her face behind the menu.

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “Nothing.” She turned to the side and flipped her long hair in her characteristic way, so that it instantly flooded down again to wash her bird-wing shoulders.

  “Really, what is it, Fang?”

  “Nothing. Nichts—méi shénme.” She redoubled her studying of the menu.

  “You want a Sapporo?” I asked her.

  “I guess.”

  And because it was summer and Friday and golden with light, I started talking. I talked about how great the week had been and the view out the terrace to the backyard hydrangeas all lazy with summer; about my transect walks of what I called “our neighborhood” for Clarice’s Jane Jacobs essay—a topic that did interest me; about Clarice’s way of saying “rother” rather than “rather” and “dour” like “door,” about how she—

  “Clarice, Clarice, Clarice—do you know how sick I am of Clarice?”

  I sat up in my chair.

  “Geez, sorry,” I said.

  “All you talk about is Clarice.”

  “Geez, um, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What are you, in love with her?”

  “That’s supposed to be funny?”

  Our food had come and we both shut our mouths until the server, a lanky guy with a rocker-boy haircut, went away again.

  “Wow, retro boy could be one of the Plastics,” I said, sliding my chopsticks out of their paper wrapper and trying to defuse the situation.

  “Jesus, Chess—fucking don’t rub your chopsticks together. Don’t you know that’s an insult?”

  “What? Why?” I said. I’d only recently learned how to eat sushi, and I thought I was slick.

  “It’s like telling them they have shoddy stuff that you have to repair,” she said.

  “But Cornelia showed me,” I said.

  “Yeah, Cornelia would know,” she spat.

  “Geez, should we even stay and eat?”

  But she was already tucking into the food, putting a huge piece of sushi into her little mouth like someone angling a couch through a doorway. She looked down at the plate, chewing away and ignoring me. What was bugging her so badly? I tried to ask her again, and opened and closed my mouth several times. I gave up, too easily, and picked up a piece of sushi.

  We said very little. Dinner was a joyless chewing exercise that went on forever. Fang was simmering. When the cute waiter finally came to take our plates, he gave Fang a long, tender look. Once his back was turned, Fang leaned in my face and hissed, “Did you know the Japanese race was started when a bunch of thugs kidnapped a Chinese princess and raped her?”

  “Jesus Christ, Fang, can we get the fuck out of here?”

  Out on the street, we pounded down the avenue until I finally had to turn to her.

  “Would you talk to me?”

  Her eyes were open wide and she was staring down wretchedly at the ground as she walked, her mouth all contorted. She didn’t say anything.

  “You’re looking like some grieving Mary out of Mantegna,” I said.

  “Why do you have to make everything into a joke?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t know. The opposite’s worse.”

  “The opposite’s reality,” she said.

  “Since when has either of us been so fond of reality?” I said.

  “Well, it’s not like you have to live in reality. You have your shit all taken care of.”

  “What is up with you?” I said.

  But she’d stopped walking and just stood on the sidewalk staring at the ground.

  “This is just crap,” she said. “This is all just total crap.” She put her hands over her face and in a moment she was dry-crying, hiccup-crying…

  I wanted to get her off the street to someplace sheltered, but all I could do was wrap my arm around her skinny shoulders. Some stupid guy walking by turned to pointedly ogle us and I flipped him the bird—Mind your own fucking business.

  “Come on, Fangy, let’s move it on down,” I said.

  She let herself be maneuvered down the street and we ended up in the sliver of park by the subway, a place where people went to puke or shoot up. We sat down on a bench. I pulled out my cigarettes and offered her my pack, and she shook her head, not unkindly, and took out her own.

  “Since when do you smoke lights?” I said. I hated it when my friends changed things on me.

  She shrugged. She had regained her cool, tough, yé-yé girl exterior.

  “Is it about…is it about, um…?” I knew all this had to be about Decon Head, but I so totally thought of him as Decon Head that I was completely blanking on his actual name.

  “Yes, it’s Clark,” she said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I think I need out,” she said.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  She turned to the side and put her feet up on the bench, pulling herself into a little ball.

  “I don’t even know where to start. It’s like he doesn’t know how to share. Sometimes he comes home and I don’t even know he’s there until I go to the kitchen and find him crouching inside the refrigerator door cramming cheese singles into his mouth. This is just not normal behavior, right? He actually snapped at me for leaving a bookmark in his copy of Truth and Method. He said it might crease the pages. Like crease his ass, right? That’s just really weird OCD kind of fucked-up behavior, right? And he’s greedy. He’s greedy! This one time we were at Dynasty and he ordered moo goo gai pan and I guess I said something about the way it looked when they put it on the table and he said, Okay, too bad, you’re not getting any. I thought he was kidding and then when I reached out to get some he actually slapped my hand away. Not like a funny kind of thing either. And it got me that he’d been just looking for an excuse not to share his moo goo gai pan. He’s greedy, and he’s cheap. And his parents are like filthy rich motherfuckers.”

  “Of course they are,” I said bitterly.

  “And you’d think this would be like suggesting that he wants to be by himself, right, wouldn’t you? We got into a huge fight last week and I went to get the fuck out of there and he grabbed my shoes off the floor and held them way up in the air above my head. He’s like, Where you going, where you going, little Fang? You can’t go out without your shoes.”

  “Jesus Christ, Fang,” I said.

  “I know, right?”

  “Don’t you have another pair of shoes?”

  “Like, well, yeah, but they’re all in storage. I have my work shoes and those plastic shower things you buy in the grocery store that your Chinese grandpop has.”

  “I want to slap Clark’s head off,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s not so bad,” she said.

  “Fang, he’s a sociopath. That behavior is abusive, is what it is.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said.

  “I’m serious. You’ve got to get out of there.”

  She straightened up, slid her feet to the ground, and stretched. Then she looked at me.

  “Whatever, it feels better now. I guess it’s what they say. It feels good to talk about it.”

  “But no, don’t you see? It’s only going to escalate.”

  “Yes, but whatever. Where would I go, Chess? Hmm? Back down to D.C. to ask can I have my old job at Olsson’s back? I’m going to move in with my fucking family?”

  “Why are you acting like that’s your only option? There’s a million apartments or shares or whatever you can find here—did you even look?”

 
; “Did you even look? No, you didn’t—you got hooked right up. Job, apartment, lifestyle, welcome to swanky town. Climb that social ladder.”

  “Please don’t be quoting Marginal Man at me, okay? What the fuck, Fang? It’s a job. I work and I get paid for it. What’s so wrong about that?”

  “What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong? What’s wrong is I see you changing. I see you modifying yourself to fit into some kind of new shape, modifying yourself to please that bitch.”

  “Look, that’s not true. How can that be true? I don’t think it’s true. Look, what if it’s true? I mean, I have so much to learn anyway. Can’t you cut me some slack here and not be so eternally hard-line? I mean, Jesus, Fang, maybe I have a million things to learn. Maybe I need modifying.”

  She didn’t answer but busied herself with lighting a cigarette. I fumbled for my pack, tried to shake one out, and realized it was empty. I sat staring at my empty pack until Fang reached over and handed me her lit cigarette.

  “It’s my last one too,” she said quietly. “We can share.”

  I said nothing, but took it and nodded. Across the tiny square, we watched as a short punk-rock kid, TSOL painted on the back of his jacket, went up to the wall of the bunkerlike building in the middle of the park and unzipped.

  “Hey. Hey!” Fang yelled at him. “Yeah, you, BAD TASTE IN MUSIC BOY. Take your goddamned potty break somewhere else, you little WRETCH. Can’t you see we’re having a CONVERSATION?”

  Fang turned gently back to me.

  “Thing is, Chess,” she said, “you always seemed okay to me. You know? You always seemed okay to me.”

  *

  So right here might be a good place to reiterate some things about me. First off, while I did nothing but pretend otherwise, even after four years at Barnard, next to the sophistication of the Löwenstein family I was really as green as Kermit the Frog. I was the wide-eyed peasant who’d hitched herself a ride to the big city on the hay baler. I’d come from such a closed-off background that when I entered college I thought if your family had a microwave or VCR you were well on your way to being “rich.”

  That said, I was also a quick study. If I found something to my liking, I could immediately assimilate whatever it was—ways of thinking, talking, acting, even eating—and pretend that I’d done it all my life. Some of this behavior was almost universally convincing, some 50 percent successful, some as transparent as weak tea. Despite my fancy speech to Fang, it took a while for me to fully realize what a hideous little provincial I still was, and I had the Löwenstein family to thank for that. I mean, I must have been some real weak tea to Clarice. Kendra—I like to think she was fond of me in spite of this tendency of mine, or maybe even a bit because of it. I think maybe she was moved by—how to say this?—the evidence of my striving. Theirs was the club I longed to join.

  Just to digress a bit further for a moment here. Recently I remembered this guy who worked at the Barnard bookstore. He had deeply pockmarked skin and wore Aloha shirts, but I remember realizing one day that I found him curiously attractive. Later I was talking with a group of women, and one of them—I think it was Karina, the L.A. scenester who, among other fantastically cool things, had attended John Doe and Exene Cervenka’s nuptials back in the day—mentioned the Barnard bookstore guy and how she found him “curiously attractive.” She used the very same words that I’d used in my mind. And it turned out that all the women in this group found the bookstore guy curiously attractive, which says something either about tenderness and vulnerability or maybe about the kind of women I knew in those days. But just to get to the point here, sometime after that I was in the bookstore buying The Book of the City of Ladies when Curiously Attractive Bookstore Guy happened to be working. One of his coworkers was going out to get coffees, and at the door he turned around to ask Curiously Attractive if he wanted anything else. Curiously Attractive was up on a ladder, I remember, and he called out to the guy, Yeah, get some water. And don’t get any of that domestic crap—get some Evian!

  I stood there clutching my Christine de Pizan, and I was fascinated. I was amazed by such a fine level of taste. I mean, in every sense. He could tell the difference between domestic and imported bottled water? Or did he only think he could? Or did he only want others to believe he could? I bring this all up as a way of saying that this was the thing the Löwenstein family had: if not a rarified, excruciating, impossible taste, then the ability to make other people think that such a thing existed. And to have those people eat their hearts out over not being invited to the club.

  Needless to say, after my upbringing by an outraged-by-the-injustices-of-the-world father and an offer-it-up Catholic mother, to me this ability was (guffaw-inducing understatement) a surprise. But after working my butt off for Clarice for a few long months and showing myself to be diligent, dependable, and doggishly loyal, it seemed like the door to the club was being ever so slightly held open for me.

  Looking back on that summer, really this was my education in a certain kind of New York City–ness, a certain strain of upper-middle-class Manhattanness that traded in knowing all about particular institutions, attitudes, preferences. The New York City Ballet, family-run butchers where you took a ticket to buy a chop, the Municipal Arts Society, the watch repair place in the tunnels beneath Grand Central, taciturn sweater-menders who’d emigrated from the Balkans with only a golden zlatka in their pocket, tiny shops that sold antique scrimshaw buttons—the Löwensteins knew all about such things. They knew all the old-school types and—yelp!—what ethnicities did what trades best. They liked superlatives, exclusivity, and it wasn’t necessarily the most expensive of something, it was the most singular, rare, or ineffable. There was an itinerant arrotino who cruised the streets of the Village in his heap of a jalopy, ringing a bell so that you knew to bring out your knives to be sharpened on his medieval-seeming razor strop, and the Löwensteins would never consider taking their knives anywhere else. There was one right way to do something, and anything else was heresy.

  On her own, Clarice made herself even more rarefied. Because she was without what I thought of (bear with me here) as the warmth and the humor of the Jewish side, her brand was mandarin, bespoke, exclusionary. Chilly. Quickly that summer I learned the simple rule that anything old was pretty much good, while anything new was pretty much bad. But the list of Clarice’s specific dislikes, written on ticker tape and laid flat on the ground, would easily encircle the globe. She did not like the “tacky” light-wrapped trees of Tavern on the Green; the tendency of Hollywood movie directors to rely on close-ups; the use of “less” to mean “fewer than” in grocery store signage; the word “signage”; any woman who carried a knockoff handbag; any woman who was at all overweight, unless elderly; any woman who was taller than she was, regardless of age; any woman who wore the color pink, even for Breast Cancer Awareness Day; working-class Chinese people (“They sit down in the subway with their sixteen bags and they just expand”); Chinese cuisine; Mexican cuisine; Indian cuisine; the entire borough of Queens; the entire landmass of Staten Island but for Sailors’ Snug Harbor; anyone who ate anything at all while walking down the street or gave evidence of chewing gum by moving their jaw in a repetitive fashion; architecture after 1945; architectural restoration work that sought to tip a postmodern hand to separate itself from a building’s original vintage; children who made any kind of noise at all in enclosed public spaces. She cursed Marcel Carné for his sentimentalism, hated the sight of young men in baggy “thug” pants, and with a certain smiling pride would tell anyone who listened that she had never used an ATM. She was overly fond of the word “dreadful.”

  Clarice also didn’t waste time being concerned with other people’s feelings. My realization of just to what degree this was true came one evening late that summer. Jovanna, the cleaning lady, had made the mistake of buying not the brand of dishwashing detergent Clarice liked but instead a bottle of Joy. Lemon Fresh Joy, innocuously enough. I remember it was one evening when I’d cooked dinner
—I’d pulled out all the stops and made my Abruzzese grandmom’s scrippelle ’mbusse as an appetizer, which is nerve-racking, because you have to make like a million little crepes on top of whatever else the dinner is. But it must have gone okay because Clarice, in an uncharacteristic show of goodwill, had helped carry the plates into the kitchen. Once at the sink, however, she did a kind of theatrical double-take and pointed.

  “What is this?” she asked me.

  Cornelia and I both snapped to attention.

  “The Joy?” I asked.

  “The Joy,” Cornelia said.

  “Did you buy this?” Clarice nearly spat at me.

  “Um…no. I know you like the eco stuff,” I managed to say.

  And then she did that thing that I would grow to hate, which was to stare at a person who was awaiting a response for way too long without saying a word. Her face would betray nothing, leaving you to sweat and squirm.

  “Of course you didn’t buy it,” she said at last, “because you see things. You observe things. You are careful. But some people are not.” She picked up the bottle of Joy and carried it over to the step can, holding it well away from her person. She put her Ferragamo foot down on the pedal, flipped up the lid, and dropped the bottle into the trash.

  “Joy,” she said. “Disgusting.”

  And she was so angry and I was so hardwired to think I was a fraud that I thought, My God, did I buy the Joy? Did I buy the Joy?

  But of course I hadn’t bought the Joy.

  “That Jovanna’s always breaking something,” Clarice said.

  “She’s been fine lately,” Cornelia said quietly.

  “No, Cornelia, she hasn’t,” Clarice said. “And you’d think she’d be grateful to clean such a beautiful house.”

  With this, Clarice turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen.

  Cornelia and I stood there, staring after her.

  I turned to Cornelia. She turned and looked at me. I was about to mouth the words, You’d think she’d be grateful to clean such a beautiful house, but then I saw her make her face blank. Zotz! Totally blank. She stared back at me with her strange different-colored eyes. She was telling me that she wasn’t going to sell her mother out. And that she wouldn’t side with the hired help.