Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  I was frying up the French toast by now, and looked over at Jerry, perched on his kitchen stool in his watchful silence.

  “I think most people talk too much,” he said.

  “There’s that,” I said. “There is that.”

  I imagined myself flipping the French toast up so violently that it would never come down again.

  “But you are…interesting,” he said.

  I turned and stared at him.

  “Well, thank God for that,” I said.

  Like his mother, Jerry had no ear at all for sarcasm, and so he actually nodded in reply.

  I’d already set the table, and in a moment we sat to eat. I served him a few pieces and he slathered them with butter and drowned them in maple syrup and tucked into them as if it were the first food he’d had in weeks. Not to say he was sloppy. He was elegant, elaborate, and European, moving hands and knife and fork around with complex orchestration.

  In a moment he stopped dead to gaze at me.

  “This is delicious,” he announced.

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  “What makes it French?” he asked in a moment.

  “I have no idea,” I said, and I did something strange, made dancing scales in the air with my fingers and then opened them wide to send the music into the room.

  “Vous êtes belle,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “No one’s made me breakfast in years,” he said.

  I looked down and moved my French toast around my plate. What made it French? I didn’t understand what he wanted from me. Sympathy?

  “Do you ever hear from Kendra?” I found myself asking him.

  “Not for a while,” he said. “Maybe six months.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Málaga.”

  “Málaga?”

  “Spain.”

  “Spain!” I said.

  He sat blotting his mouth with the cloth napkin with precise, womanish gestures.

  “Have you been?” he asked me.

  “To Málaga?”

  “To Spain.”

  “Spain?” I said.

  I should lie, I thought. Tell him I’ve been everywhere, no one has ever been so worldly, so elegant, so lucky…

  “I’ve been nowhere,” I said at last.

  “Your parents never took you to Europe?”

  “No.”

  I looked down at my plate. I am not at all interesting to him, I thought, and I have failed.

  I looked up to see him staring at my plate.

  “Would you like this?” I asked, though it seemed rude to offer him something I’d been eating.

  He hesitated.

  “I’m sorry, I know I was eating it, so maybe that seems odd to you,” I said miserably.

  “No no no, not at all, I just want to be sure you’re not going to eat it.”

  “I guess I wasn’t very hungry,” I said.

  “I would very much like it, then,” he said. He reached over and stabbed the toast with his fork and flew it to his side of the table and dexterously folded it into his mouth.

  “How did you learn to make this?” he said, chewing. “It’s really excellent.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  He stopped and tilted his head at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, seriously, you’ve never made French toast?”

  He was blotting his mouth again, and then he knotted his napkin and threw it down.

  “Clarice didn’t let me in the kitchen. She thought it wasn’t manly. She thought I’d grow up to be homosexual. Because Bert is of course as gay as a daffodil. He can make all sorts of things like marrons glacés. She said she didn’t want two fags in the household. ‘Fags’—her word. So when I’m in the kitchen I always feel like I’ll ruin something. Once when I was eleven I tried to help with the dishes and I overstacked the wooden thing and it broke and I smashed a whole set of Spode or whatever it was she loved so much and Clarice burst out crying.” He said this with a kind of hypnotized wonder.

  “That’s a shame,” I said.

  He looked at me with disgust.

  “Yes,” he said, deeply back in his bitterness.

  “No, I mean it’s a shame that she made you feel so bad. Who cares about the damn dishes? It’s mean to do that to a kid. You didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said. It was as if I’d just presented him with a revelation. “She didn’t understand that. She accused me of sabotaging her.” He cast his gaze around the surface of the table, as if to find something there to testify for him.

  “I’m sorry that happened,” I said.

  “The thing is,” he said, looking up at me, “that was the only time I ever saw her cry.”

  I dropped back into my chair. What kind of a mother is this? I put my hands over my eyes, and when I pulled them away, Jerry had recovered himself.

  He was looking at me so coldly I couldn’t even speak.

  “If you find Kendra’s address, I’d like to write her,” I said finally.

  “She probably wouldn’t want to hear from you,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you work for Clarice,” he spat.

  “Excuse me?”

  “She’ll think you’re in with her. Siding with her. That you took this job to insinuate yourself with her. To get in with her.”

  I stood up.

  “I took the job because I need the money,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “So what do you live on?” I said to him. “What do you live on, Jerry? Why do I feel like you’ve never had a job in your life?”

  He stood now too. We squared off, and we were circling like prizefighters. He looked furious but had no words for it.

  But here I had the trump on him, because I grew up in a screaming family.

  “Why’d you let that girlfriend of yours get down on her knees to pick up your money?” I was nearly spitting at him. “Why, so you can register your contempt but still benefit from the cash? So you get to have your—your—your fucking cake and eat it too?”

  He opened his mouth to fulminate against me but instantly snapped it shut again. He swiped his hand in the air. He advanced toward me and then thought better and suddenly pushed out through the kitchen doors so violently they slapped against the wall and then just flapped and flapped and flapped.

  And then I heard the front door slam, and he was gone.

  14

  “Stupid girl,” Clarice said to me when I told her that Jerry had come for his flute. “That was a sterling silver Muramatsu. It cost eight thousand dollars.”

  All I could say was, “What?”

  I didn’t know things could cost that much. I mean, my flute, back in the day, had been a student Gemeinhardt that seemed mad expensive at $200 used. When I gave it up because of my utter lack of skill, my mother was all long faces at me for weeks, as much as for my dearth of stick-to-itiveness as for the amount of money she had wasted on my fickle musical ambitions.

  I was so hurt by Clarice’s words and felt such a wretch that all I could do was hang my head.

  “But how would you know?” she said. “No one ever told you the boy wasn’t to be trusted.” She touched her hands to her cheeks as if to express a sudden idea. It struck me as rehearsed—an actress summoning up a housewife’s eureka moment.

  “You’ll just have to go and get it back,” she said.

  “I what?” I said.

  “Just pay him a visit.”

  “Do you even know where he is?”

  “I’m sure Cornelia has the address,” she said.

  “I feel very awkward about this,” I said.

  “There’s no reason to,” she said with a sunny finality that made my heart sink.

  And so a week after Jerry’s visit, despite my many protestations, despite the sense that I was on a fool’s errand—despite, stronger than these, my still being so furious with Jerry for thinking
I was some double agent that I only wanted to slap his smug face—I found myself way east on Fifth Street, yelling up at a squat from the middle of the street.

  The building was a battle-weary old tenement with mountains of rubble piled up against it. Instead of a door, a sort of reinforced wood pallet covered its entrance. Its first-floor windows were cinder-blocked up and all the other windows were dark above them, most of them broken and taped up with plastic. There was of course no frivolous nicety such as a doorbell.

  I am no kind of outdoor yeller unless angry or surprised by a truck backing into me, but I tried a few weak little exclamations of Jerry! My words barely rose in the air before evaporating into the slumbering dusk. Still I stood gazing up at the dark windows. No one stuck a head out.

  In fact I knew this block well, because the bar Sophie’s was at the far end, a few doors in from a bunkerlike Con Ed station, in front of which no end of lost souls could be found, in even the coldest weather, doing the heroin nod. Earlier that summer I’d been at Sophie’s with Trina when, because of the hot dry air, my rigid-as-a-Pringle contact lens suddenly popped out of my eye and flew behind the bar. Of course I had only one pair of contact lenses, which I took great poor-person’s care of, so when the bartender saw us freaking out and leaning over to look at the filthy floor behind the bar, he came on up and said, “Contact lens?” I said yes. He swooped down, disappearing from view entirely, and in less than a minute stood and handed me my contact lens. I gushed my thanks at him, popped my contact lens in my mouth to “clean” it, and stuck it back in my eye.

  At any rate, it would be hard to express just how hopeless and utterly uncool I felt sounding my feeble yawp in front of an East Village squat with the specific goal of repo-ing an $8,000 Japanese flute. There was a bunch of assorted junk in the rubble piled up against the building, so in a moment I pulled out a cinder block, dragged it to the curb, perched myself on its upended side, and lit a cigarette. I needed a plan. What was my plan? There was some meager light from the streetlamp, so I took out my copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I’d slid into the back of my jeans—I always liked to keep my hands free—and began reading. I was on what would turn out to be its densest chapter, “Philosophy.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” a voice said.

  I looked up to see the head of Hard Bettie Page Girl sticking out from a second-floor window. I stood up and swallowed.

  “I need to see Jerry,” I warbled, drowning in uncoolness. “I’m supposed to get his flute.”

  She only stared down at me.

  “He’s in bed,” she said at last.

  I gestured to my nonexistent watch.

  “This early?” I said.

  She leaned there, staring at me. There was something going on, some assessment. In a moment I felt I could read something in her face and was surprised to realize what it might be: defeat.

  “Wait,” she said. Her head disappeared.

  It took forever. I lit another cigarette, paced the length of the building, lit another. Finally I heard almost like a battering noise and turned to see the pallet shudder, shudder, buckle and then a person pop out. A person just barely, more like a Dr. Seuss creature.

  It was Jerry, wrapped up to his neck in a zigzag afghan. He stood there a moment as if to let us both register the weirdness of this, and then he erupted in a fit of hacking. The tail of his afghan must have been snagged in the door, because he turned to yank it free, but the effort pitched him forward. His hand with the flute case in it swung out and his feet cycled on the rubble and all at once spilled him down the hill. Then he stood before me, breathless, blanket stripped from him, and neatly wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “I seem to have a cold,” he said, setting the flute case on the ground.

  He looked insane. He erupted in another fit of coughing and covered his mouth with his hands, then pressed his fingers into his ears, dulling some pain. His face was swollen, distended, and his eyes were bloodshot and purpled as if he’d been punched. His hands and face were riddled all over with tiny welts. He wore his coat, but I saw that he was literally shivering in the cold.

  “You’re really sick,” I said.

  “I’ve got to get back,” he said, picking up the flute case again and handing it to me.

  I set it back down.

  “Please, you’re much too sick to be fucking around like this,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m fucking around, am I?”

  “Do you guys even have heat?”

  He showed his canines in his wretched unhappy smile.

  “We’re having some technical difficulties this week,” he said.

  Something in me fell away then.

  “You look like you’re dying,” I said.

  I had my arms out—I don’t know. He went to turn but instead swayed before me. “Please,” I said, and his knees buckled…and then the tall, dissolving entity of him collapsed into my arms.

  “Jerry,” I said, “Jerry.”

  “You are soft,” he said, his face buried in my neck. “I like that you are soft.”

  *

  I got him in a cab back to Eleventh Street. Clarice was at a dinner party.

  He leaned heavily on me, wheezing as I got him up the stairs. We went slowly, feet going together step by step. Once we cleared the first staircase he pointed up, meaning keep going to where his solitary bedroom was. We kept on, and it was as if we were on that staircase for hours.

  He collapsed on his bed, shivering. I went to take his coat off and get him under the covers but he resisted me, hugging his dirty coarse coat around himself. I ran to get blankets from the hall. This was all like steps you do in extremis, like building a fire with your two last matches. I covered him with blankets, but he was still shivering so badly the bed shook. He was wheezing and went through a horrible hacking bout, painful to watch, like some scrap of lung was going to fly out of his mouth. Then something clicked off, his eyes closed, and he began to speak.

  “Laudo,” he said. “Laudas. Laudat. Laudamus, laudatis, laudant. Laudabam, laudabus. Laudabus? Lauda-bas. Laudabat. Laudabamus, laudabatis, laudabant.”

  He was delirious, and conjugating Latin verbs.

  I dropped to my knees and began petting his head.

  “That was very good, very good, first conjugation. Present and imperfect, Jesus Christ, you can do the rest later, okay, what the fuck, let’s let that go, okay?”

  “I’m so cold,” he said. “I’m so very cold.”

  He was burning to my touch, shaking. I ran my hands on him up and down over the bedclothes, up and down, building friction, trying to warm him. In a moment I knew what to do. I climbed on top of him and lay down flat on his body. He was lean and taut and stretched beneath me. I lay on him, forcing my weight on him, kindling him.

  “That is good, thank you, thank you, that is so good,” he murmured.

  And I don’t know how long it was but he fell into a noisy, racked sleep.

  Oh, thank God, I thought. Thank God, thank God.

  I lay there as strong and still as a sentry, forcing my heat down into him. This might have been hours. From the hallway there was a noise at last.

  “I wish I had a camera,” Clarice’s deeply smirking voice said.

  *

  And so it turned out that Jerry had a bad case of bronchitis, Jerry had an intense allergic reaction to black mold that brought back his childhood asthma, and Jerry had fleas. Fleas?

  “My poor boy! It’s as if he’s won the Triple Crown,” I would hear Clarice saying over the phone for days afterward. She told everyone with huge, hushed concern how the doctor had warned that Jerry was too weak to get out of bed, let alone go anywhere; but it seemed to me she was simply thrilled to have him home with her.

  She made calls now all through what were supposed to be our work sessions, and I heard her tell the story of Jerry so often that it lost the weight of meaning. And slowly it morphed into her story, her daring venture into the wilds of the Ea
st Village to rescue her prodigal son. It was all so strange. I would put aside my pen and notebook, hop up from my stool, and go around the room pulling down random books, waiting for her to finish. I’d stare at her with searching eyes, willing her to look up at me and explain herself. But she never did, and I might as well not have been there at all.

  Sidney flew back from Denmark to be with his son, and whatever break he’d had with Clarice was mended. Clarice told me we’d have a temporary moratorium on work sessions, but for some reason she brought in Dolores to tend to the young master, even though I was there, walking the five stories of the house, wringing my increasingly idle hands. It got so that it felt like a treat to be given any task at all, any tiny errand, from going around the corner for a loaf of bread to taking the knives out to the arrotino in his old jalopy. He was an ancient man and seemingly deaf, never answering me even if I tendered some stiff Italian at him, but unlike Clarice in her current state, he never seemed to mind my presence.

  What was going on? On the upside, since I was released from work duties, I was free to go eat lunch with Trina and ponder the situation. I’d meet her up at Gotham and we’d sit in the big bay window of its second-floor gallery with our tuna sandwiches, looking out over the bustle of the Diamond District. We’d take out from Berger’s, where if you got a coffee and the counterman asked Sugar? and you said No, he’d smile and say, Sweet enough as you are, which caused me no end of existential torment, so much so that I began getting sugar in my coffee even though I didn’t like it.

  Trina cleared things up for me.

  “Duh,” she announced. “You were the bait.”

  “I don’t get it.”