Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  It was a communication we would almost never be able to reach with words in the life we would have together.

  *

  He was slender, tall, with dark auburn hair and Kendra’s pale skin. The cruelly pale skin. He was narrow, trim in his clothing. He looked sickly almost, nearly transparent. Something about him suggested a person in the ministerial profession. His eyes were a strange pale green and turned up at the corners. Kirghiz eyes. There was a quietness, but also an arrogance, about him. There was precocity, a precocity past the right age for the word, and an anger over its passing. Maybe he was a bit of a show-off? Like Kendra, like Cornelia, like Bertrand, there was the chilling poise. But there was also a terrible formality about him. This was beyond the formality of a child who had grown up performing. It was as if his own private self had been stolen from him.

  *

  I sat watching him take his bows with the other singers. He wasn’t looking at me, but I was aware that we were communicating across space.

  I drank him in.

  The doors to the auditorium were open by now and people were gathering their things, talking with the singers, taking their leave. How would I approach him? A handful of people encircled him and were shaking his hand.

  And yet it seemed as if he were waiting to talk to me. I felt a childhood shyness in my limbs, a churchy embarrassment. I got myself out of my seat and stood a little away, as if enjoying the random middle air. As soon as the others left, he looked at me.

  He looked at me, reader, as if I were an angel.

  I clutched the package to my chest.

  “Are you Jerry?” I said.

  He tilted his head to the side.

  “I am,” he said, curious.

  “I’m a friend of Kendra’s. I mean, I was a friend. I’m supposed to give this package to you. I mean, it’s from your mother. I work for your mother. Your mother asked me to give you this.”

  In the course of my little speech, I watched his interest warm and then drain and then turn into anger.

  “Oh, Clarice is giving me something?”

  “I don’t know—she just asked me to bring it to you.” I held it out as if it were dirty.

  He snatched the package from my hands and immediately yanked it open to show me what was inside.

  It was a massive, massive wad of greenbacks.

  “I don’t want her money,” he yelled out grandly.

  “I didn’t know what it was,” I said.

  All at once he took the package by either side and ripped it in half. Bills and packing fluff exploded into the air. He slapped the mess of it to the floor with a violent flourish.

  “I do not accept this,” he announced.

  And with this he marched out of the auditorium.

  I stood frozen, staring at the money scattered all over the floor amid the settling cloud of confetti. My face was burning. Don’t look up, I told myself. God, don’t look up. Silence was all around me, which made it that much worse. I didn’t know what to do. If I touched the money, I was implicated. I was dirty. But if I left it…? My heart was pounding, but I also felt an expansion, that terrible thing when people raise their voices in anger and something in me clicks back to childhood and I think, Now we’re really living.

  In a moment people began speaking again.

  “He’s like that,” a woman’s voice at my elbow suddenly said.

  I turned to see the Bettie Page girl from outside.

  “Like what?” I said, my voice stupidly cracking.

  “Like he knows someone else will pick it up for him.”

  She got down on the floor in her tight vamp dress and stilettos and began to gather up the bills. I felt a visceral repulsion watching her on her hands and knees. I knew I should join and help her, but I just couldn’t get down on my knees.

  “Dude,” she said, briefly looking up at me, “don’t worry. We can totally use the cash.”

  And she went back to her task, completely unfazed.

  13

  I wonder if I knew the word “enmeshment” back then. Or knew what it actually meant.

  What I knew was that Clarice would be waiting for me back on Eleventh Street, but all I wanted to do now was run away. I dragged my feet as I walked, stopping at some hard-luck pizza place on Chrystie Street where I ate a slice and watched a roach slowly crawl up the white-tiled wall. I sat chewing the straw of my seltzer.

  I thought of Trina over in Williamsburg, Fang stuck in her own unhappiness up in Morningside Heights. I thought of other friends, Bronx up and Battery down, with couches or futons or even extra rooms. I could crash with any of them for days or weeks or even months. But in the end I’d have to go.

  And I had nowhere to go, of course, but back to Eleventh Street.

  What was strange was that when I went in, Clarice was waiting for me, but her mood had changed again. She was stretched out in an uncharacteristically languid drape across the scroll-head daybed in the front parlor, one foot tucked beneath her, an arm thrown behind her head, a photo album I’d never seen open on her lap. Embarrassingly, I realized that her pose reminded me of a Giorgione: the Dresden Venus. Except in that case Venus was naked.

  “How was the concert?” she said, smiling her luxurious smile.

  It would take me years to learn how not to ape other people’s behavior, how not to copy their tone and reflect back at them their own uncontested view of reality.

  “Wonderful,” I said, smiling.

  She indicated one of the low fauteuils, and I pulled it over and sat with her.

  “Did you give him the package?” she asked.

  “I did,” I said.

  “Did he open it in front of you?”

  “He did,” I said.

  “Well?”

  “He threw it on the floor and stomped out like Mozart,” I said.

  She threw her head back and laughed and laughed.

  “Such grand gestures!” she said approvingly.

  “But his girlfriend picked it all up.”

  “His girlfriend! His girlfriend. What did she look like?”

  Clarice sat up and leaned forward with curiosity. I was instantly warm on the subject.

  “Like, va-va-voom,” I said, tracing curves in the air with my hands. “Like retro fifties. Red nails, red lipstick, serious eyeliner. The chick who stands outside the sock hop with a scarf around her neck, waiting to split your lip.”

  “Oh, that’s not a girlfriend—that’s just the circus girl who lives at the squat with him. A disgusting word, ‘squat.’ ”

  “Circus girl?”

  Clarice waved this away.

  “One of those idiotic Coney Island things. Neo-vaudeville. They like to play dress-up, hang from wires. As if this is something new! Fortunately your education has saved you from such tendencies.”

  And with this she clapped her hands, and it was time to go to bed.

  *

  The next day was Saturday, and when I went downstairs I found a note from Clarice saying she’d left for the country house.

  It was the first time she’d gone since Cornelia had been carted off to boarding school. And because without Cornelia there Zeyde hadn’t been coming over on the weekends, I realized that I’d be alone in the house for the first weekend ever.

  How strange an idea this was. Looking up from the note, I immediately stiffened, as if a surveillance camera were trained on me. With dainty movements I made my coffee and, once it was ready, sat with it at the breakfast table with excruciatingly correct posture. When I finished, I immediately washed my cup and saucer, dried them, put them away, and walked quietly into the parlor, where, very carefully, I eased myself onto Clarice’s bergère à la reine. I looked about me, gently smiling.

  I realized I was reminding myself of spaz-faced Joan Fontaine creeping around Manderley.

  And then I saw that Clarice had left the photo album out on the side table. It was a fancy thing, covered in leather, into which was embossed the name Gerhardt.

  Jerry.r />
  I opened to the first page, and there he was.

  A newborn. A pale baby on a light blanket in a dark wood. I studied the photograph. It was black-and-white, “artistic,” distanced. The baby looked away from the camera, almost as if he’d been abandoned—it was the kind of thing Roland Barthes could write a whole chapter about, dwelling on the punctum, the thing that made it strange. I turned the page and there was Jerry again, a toddler in overalls, lurching across the very room in which I now sat, the waist-down body of Clarice having just sent him across the rug, the crouching figure of Sidney (thankfully) there to catch him. There he was again, perhaps five years old, mouth contorted, tiny tie askew, reaching up with some hideous puppet as if to demand a hearing while the cocktail dress that is his mother turns her back on him. So many of the images were like this, with the photographer taking a worried child’s-eye view of the world and, in the process, cutting off Clarice’s head.

  I sensed something odd and looked up. Jerry stood in the doorway.

  “Jesus!” I shouted, leaping up.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you’d have heard me.”

  “No,” I said. For some reason I was clutching the album to my chest.

  He stepped into the room, trailing his coat behind him.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked me.

  “Your mother left it out,” I said. I held out the book like a supplicant.

  He looked at me. He wore a shirt as white as his skin, ripped black jeans, combat boots. An absurdly long and badly knitted scarf fell blackly to his knees. In the bright light of day he looked seriously ill, like an invalid unused to the open air. His dark auburn hair was matted and greasy, and he smiled an unhappy smile, something so thin and tight-lipped that it suggested smiling was a form of punishing himself. Or that he was just barely suffering the fool in front of him. His all-over thinness and singularity suggested that he was self-engendered, had nothing to spare. And yet his pale green eyes sought something.

  “She was looking at it?” he asked.

  “I think she misses you,” I said.

  “Too bad about that,” he said coldly.

  You are all so solitary, I thought to myself.

  He opened his mouth to say something else but suddenly thought better of it.

  “She’s gone upstate, if you’re wondering,” I said.

  “I wasn’t,” he said.

  I said nothing at all, and quietly put the book down on the table.

  “I’m really just here to get something,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, making to turn my back, “I’d imagine you know where it is.”

  “I’m not supposed to be here unattended,” he said.

  “You what?”

  “I think you heard me.”

  “Why?”

  “Clarice is afraid I’ll steal something.”

  “But she just gave you all that money!”

  “If she gives it, that’s one thing—”

  “Jesus, this is your house,” I said.

  “This has never been my house,” he said.

  He cast around the room with his gaze, throwing contempt everywhere. When it seemed he’d finally exhausted himself, his eyes came to rest on me.

  “Where are you from?” he asked me, almost violently.

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  *

  He had come, it turned out, to get his flute.

  His old bedroom was at the very top of the house, on the low-ceilinged floor that had a series of rooms that had started life as maids’ quarters: oddly shaped, diced-up pockets, among them the windowless typing study where I did my work for Clarice. I had by then scoured all these rooms, picking up in my hands anything there was to be touched, but I’d never gone into Jerry’s room. I’d only as much as opened the door, stood at the threshold, and peered inside.

  It was neat as a pin and bare as a monk’s cell. It spoke of rigor and starvation. Somehow, perhaps because it was whitewashed and received intense early-morning light, it put me in mind of a certain kind of Nordic desolation, of Knut Hamsun walking around Christiania wretched with hunger. Inside was a narrow bed covered in a rough, woven navy-blue fabric, a nickel lamp sitting atop an old orange crate, a five-drawer highboy of pale wood. And that was about it. There was a thin shelf affixed to one wall with small items on it. The only other object, and the one thing that seemed to indicate anything other than utility and deprivation, was a famous poster that I knew to be by Cassandre, of the enormous hull of an ocean liner: L’Atlantique. Bold, graphic, almost filmically stirring, the image trumpeted the idea of escape.

  Jerry was standing in the middle of his room. He turned to me.

  “You can come in,” he said.

  “No thanks,” I said, gesturing down the hall. “I actually have some work.”

  “Please come in,” he said, bowing formally.

  I laughed and stepped inside.

  “Will you sit?” he asked.

  There was no place to sit but the bed. Slowly I sank down on it and crossed my ankles, upright and Catholically demure.

  He dropped to his knees before me. He ducked and I reeled back. My hand flew to my mouth and I stifled a scream. In a moment he reappeared from under the bed, a flute case in his hands.

  “Do you play?” he said.

  “Do I play?”

  “The flute.”

  “I know.”

  “So you play.”

  “When I was little I did. I can play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ And it would be terrible.”

  He slowly blinked his eyes.

  “Please play it for me, then.”

  I opened the case, and it was odd how familiar it felt to put a flute together, especially the moment of turning the last piece slightly clockwise to accommodate the short pinkie, even though I hadn’t done this since I was ten years old.

  “I’m terrible. I had a scary Austrian teacher who was always telling me how bad I was. My older brother Sandy had the musical talent. It’s like that thing in big families where you get to have only one of each. You know? Everything gets apportioned. I was the verbal one.” And true to form I was chattering away, unfortunately like an idiot.

  But he nodded.

  “Yes. Bertrand is the presentable one. The suck-up. Kendra is the wild girl, the flake. And the scapegoat. Cornelia is the civic-responsibility child. An okay kid but kind of a prig. She’ll turn out essentially boring if she’s not careful,” he said.

  “So what are you?” I asked him.

  He smiled, and this time his thin smile broke, revealing an extremely sharp set of canines.

  “I’m the murderer,” he said.

  And with this he took the flute out of my hands and played a strange wandering song that, had I known anything at all, I would have recognized as Debussy’s “Syrinx.”

  *

  He was an electric presence, an animal trapped in a room.

  There was something black-and-white about him, in every sense: his clothing, his likes and dislikes, his sense of morality. You were either for him or against. Later I would see the woodcuts of Frans Masereel and think to myself, That’s how Jerry must see the world—as a series of struggles, anguishes, epiphanies, all played out on a bold stage. Color in such a world would be a distracting mitigation. His own green eyes and auburn hair—the accidental prettiness of his looks—he seemed to want only to downplay, if not ruin. When he wasn’t smiling his painful nonsmile, he kept his mouth in a sideways snarl of contempt. It seemed almost cartoonish to me.

  And yet all through his flute playing he kept his eyes fixed on me, and just as when he sang, a strange ardor passed between us.

  When he was finished it was as if it had never been.

  “That was beautiful,” I said.

  He shrugged this off as if it were offensive.

  “I would love to be able to play like that,” I said.

  He was on his knees again, taking the flute apart, pulling an ancient cloth through the pi
eces with the thin threaded rod.

  “She taught us to be trained monkeys,” he said.

  “But you have so much talent,” I said.

  He looked up at me for a moment, and then back down at what he was doing.

  “I’d rather have had a childhood,” he said.

  I was standing by now, and I backed myself up against his window. I turned away. On the narrow shelf I saw a tiny figure of a metal rabbit, a handful of acorns, a piece of pyrite, a Big Little Book, Popeye Sees the Sea…

  “I was thinking of making some French toast,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. He was fitting the pieces of the flute back into the case now.

  “No, I mean, would you like some?” I asked him.

  He looked up.

  “For real?” he said. Color rushed to his face.

  “Of course,” I said. I was bewildered. “What a question!” I put my hands together and waggled them at him like an old grandma. “You so skinny! You gotta eat!”

  And with this I saw that he could smile for real.

  *

  Of course I had to go and blow it.

  I knew squatters, and it seemed like all of them took as a given this idea that you pulled together, stone-soup style, and when you made food everyone contributed and everyone ate. These folks were handy and could do things like rehang doors, make a dress with a bedsheet and a glue gun, and wire electricity from sidewalk Con Ed boxes. And yet when we got to the kitchen Jerry just pulled out a stool, sat on it, and watched me work. He watched with such intensity that it was all I could do not to fuck things up. Of course I started chattering away. Had he ever read The Varieties of Religious Experience? I was reading it off and on, and it was kind of uncanny how the experiences of mystics throughout the ages were very often almost identical to those of ’60s hippies taking hallucinogens and experiencing oneness with the universe. Really pretty uncanny. What was this urge for oneness with the universe, anyway? Did it suggest a fear of the abyss—I mean, was it that everyone’s afraid to be alone? I was thinking of that term horror vacui, actually I sort of backed into it through visual arts, I was an art history major, Clarice actually laughed aloud when I told her, suggesting this was all so much basket-weaving, what a thing to formally study, but did he know this idea that people fear blank space and have to fill it with doodling and bric-a-brac, though obviously he didn’t have such a fear, his room being as spartan as it was, I was the opposite, I liked a lot of tiny detail, I was curious about everything and I still did this thing that whenever I went into a dive bar with an old small-tile wall I’d look for a loose tile and pry it out and stick it into my pocket as a souvenir. Things like this, I said, seemed important to me, although I wasn’t really sure why. I guessed I did have a fear of empty space, I said, and sort of was confused when people were…too quiet.