Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  While someone like Kendra I was quick to coddle, quick to protect.

  At any rate, we made up in some kind of half-assed fashion and attempted to hang out together. She was still working at the design magazine and had found a long-term sublet in Hell’s Kitchen, an old floor-through of a Sam Fuller film noir grimness, a place where the aging chorine would get murdered, and sometimes I’d go up there to see her. These evenings always started out all right, but if we made the mistake of going out to a bar, things quickly got stupid. We’d be sitting in some place on Ninth Avenue, Rudy’s or Holland Bar, neither any place to pick a fight in those days, and the more beer Fang drank, the more full of vitriol she became, hating any man who looked our way. If one of these unlucky guys had the temerity to come up to our table, she’d train a brief eye on him and say something so vile and withering that the cockiest operator would wilt away as if squeezed with the Spock nerve pinch. At some point she declared she’d be celibate: guys were self-impressed fools anyway, needy bastards or preening jerks who liked to dance in front of mirrors. It became so that, to Fang, only anything highly practical or highly theoretical was good, while anything too searching or dreamy—such as reading a poem or looking at the sky over Manhattan or feeling a huge and unspecific sadness—was a total waste of her time. She found me undisciplined, repining; she suggested that I had lost my edge. In contrast, I watched her grow harder by the moment.

  I told myself this was all temporary and all of these things would eventually come to rights.

  The moment of quitting my job with Clarice rolled forward without me. In my deepest giddiness, I saw a future where I was an old lady, Clarice a very old lady, the two of us still together in her cobwebbed study. I would be sitting on the decayed lady-in-waiting tabouret holding a pen in my arthritic hand, while she’d be wearing a Chanel suit so stiff with age it would crumble to the touch like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. She would light her one millionth cigarette—her face now indistinguishable from W. H. Auden’s after her many years of alcohol and tobacco abuse—and then she’d set her Wedgwood lighter back down on her desk, turn to me, and say, I am overjoyed at this beautiful morning!

  I wondered, would Kendra come back? Would Jerry come back ever? And at my lowest I wondered, Did he even care about me?

  Instead, my long-deferred student loan repayment book came in the mail and I flipped through its endless pages of statement tickets, each with a due date in its right-hand corner. Flipping and flipping in that widening gyre, I watched as the dates cycled through into the next millennium—the falcon clearly could not hear the falconer. Barnard had given me huge amounts of grant money, but still it was one pricey place, and to make up the difference I’d taken out loans, signing my name on the dotted line as if it were just another occasion to practice the Palmer method. I was a young, bright dope, and the idea of this money was meaningless until I actually had to pay it back.

  And in these long days of the still-clinging winter, I finally understood something: Oh, this is what grown-ups do. They work for a living. They work and they work. I made some calculations and I realized I’d have to make almost twice as much as I did in order to afford an apartment on my own and be able to keep up my loan payments, eat, have clothes to wear, and do things I liked to do such as buy books and go out to bars or shows at CBGB. All of this somehow came to me as a surprise.

  One afternoon when Clarice was out for lunch, I was in the kitchen eating a bowl of soup when I heard a familiar sound: the buzzer of the old arrotino jalopy trolling the street. I threw down my spoon, ran the length of the hallway, and flung open the front door. Standing in front of me was Fitz, his hand raised in the air.

  “Hello!” I said.

  I was over the moon to see him.

  “Hello!” he said.

  We stood blinking at each other. He was wearing the same threadbare coat and moth-eaten rag-wool scarf but seemed to have made some attempt to make his crazy hair sit flat. The attempt was not successful.

  “What brings you here?” I said.

  “A delicate matter.”

  Out of his pocket he wrested something: a coil of curling index cards bound with a million rubber bands. He started taking off the rubber bands to find the right card.

  “I see you have some state-of-the-art bookkeeping techniques there,” I said.

  “Freddie Knives, Lotus 1-2-3 whiz,” he said.

  It was taking him a long time to get the rubber bands off the cards.

  “I am not OCD, I swear to you,” he said.

  “I like to keep a hair thingie on my wrist.”

  “You’re not going to say ‘scrunchie,’ are you? Please don’t say ‘scrunchie.’ ”

  “ ‘Onesie’ is much worse.”

  “ ‘Onesie’ is obscene!” he shouted.

  “ ‘Doozy’ is okay somehow,” I said.

  “ ‘Doozy’ is nice,” he said.

  “ ‘Nice’ is nice,” I said.

  “Aha!” he said, holding up the card. “Thirty-two dollars. Cash or check?”

  “I’ll raid the cookie jar,” I said. “Come in!”

  But he made no move.

  “Seriously, come in,” I said.

  He checked back and forth.

  “Just…is the dragon lady home? Is she going to run down the stairs and get all Lifetime Reading Plan on my ass?”

  “What?”

  “She loves to tell me how bright I am and what a waste of brain I represent. She’s really down on me because I never finished college. And I haven’t read The Closing of the American Mind.”

  “You never finished college?”

  “Sheesh, rub it in!”

  But he came inside, and followed me down the hallway and into the kitchen. The room glowed with late winter light.

  “Wow, it’s nice and warm in here,” he said.

  “Don’t you have heat in that truck?”

  “That the truck runs at all is a miracle. It’s like some Twenty-One Balloons contraption with an elf and a bellows.”

  “You know,” I said, “I just made a pot of soup. All vegetarian. Would you join me?”

  He hesitated.

  “Oh, why not?” he said.

  I got busy putting out a setting for him, but he hung back, suddenly very shy.

  “Maybe, I don’t know, take your coat off?” I said.

  “I didn’t really think I was going to be taking my coat off in public today.”

  “Oh, so now I’m public?” I said.

  He untwined his scarf, laid it on the butcher-block counter. It was tattered like a doily. He unbuttoned his coat slowly but held it closed.

  “Okay, I’m taking the plunge,” he said. All at once he pulled off his coat and slapped it to the floor.

  He was wearing many, many, many layers of shirts, the topmost one a huge electric-blue sweatshirt that said NASCAR.

  “Wow,” I said. “Wow. I’m, um. Wow.”

  “So they turned off the heat in our building over there on Avenue C last month and we went on rent strike, but we’ve got the stove, so basically we just boil water and bake apple crisp all day, and one of my roommates goes to FIT, and she brought home this ragbag of stuff, most of which is like tubular body stockings and useless little knitted things that apparently are called capelets. Capelets and Montagues. This was the only thing that fit me.” He regarded himself in the crazy sweatshirt. “I was hoping I could rock the irony? But I don’t even say things like ‘rock the irony,’ so who am I kidding? I just feel bad for the obese twelve-year-old who must’ve owned this.”

  “You have no heat in your building?”

  “Oh, we’re fine. I mean, we’re not, but we are, and it can’t go on forever. I mean, spring’s around the corner. I just get myself through it by thinking, What would Knut Hamsun do? I mean, the young distressed Knut Hamsun with the bundle of candlesticks, not the old fascist Knut Hamsun who wrote that stunningly ponderous Growth of the Soil.”

  “I love Hunger!” I said.
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br />   “Yeah, yeah, but his others, not so much, it’s a shame. Pan, wow, unreadable. Mysteries—”

  “Oh, I love Mysteries,” I said. “Don’t say anything bad about it!”

  We sat with our big bowls of soup in front of us. He was so present and quick and funny, and a listener. It was as if I knew him from another place. He was way into theory-head stuff like Foucault but said things like “parrhesia” and “Geez Louise!” in almost the same breath. He asked me all kinds of questions and I asked him about his art; at first he was shy, as if he didn’t think it would interest me, but then he talked about how he did everything from woodblock printing to lithography to complicated techniques that I sort of understood—mezzotint, aquatint, methods of intaglio printing. He talked about the artists he loved, the force of Käthe Kollwitz, the sureness of the black space in Félix Vallotton’s Intimités, ghoulish James Ensor etchings like Christ’s Entry into Brussels, but then all the beautiful old things, Dürer, Rembrandt; Goya was devastating, he could not look enough at Japanese ukiyo-e artists like Hiroshige, Hokusai. He talked about how Max Beckmann was one of his favorites and about how much he loved, loved Frans Masereel. He took classes with an artist named Bob Blackburn, who did the most finessed work in the world, genius work, and in fact there was a show coming up that maybe I would like to…

  I saw the clock and sprang out of my chair.

  “Jesus,” I said, “Clarice’ll be back any minute!”

  Fitz hopped up just as quickly.

  “How’d you do that?” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “Make hours feel seconds,” he said.

  Impossible not to smile at this boy.

  He was pulling his coat on, and picked up his scarf, turning away as if to hide the full extent of its shabbiness from me. I thought of something.

  “Wait, wait,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I ran out of the room and up two flights to the bedroom, grabbed the thing out of its box, and ran back down.

  “Here,” I said, coming back into the kitchen. I handed it to him.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “It’s a scarf, silly.”

  “I have a scarf.”

  “What you have there is a sight gag,” I said.

  He held it out in front of him and then touched it to his cheek.

  “It’s so soft,” he said.

  “It’s cashmere,” I said.

  “I can’t accept this,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s so nice.”

  “Well, you’re nice,” I said.

  “You’re too nice,” he said.

  “I’m actually kind of a jerk,” I said.

  “No—but I’m a crazy moron,” he said.

  “I’m a freaking b-word.”

  “I’m an outrageous asshole.”

  “I’m a hideous shrew.”

  “I’m a pathetic mass of human sewage,” he said.

  “Wow, you are a crazy moron,” I said.

  Upstairs, the front door slammed and Clarice’s heels began marching across the ceiling.

  “Go!” I whispered to Fitz. I shooed him down the hallway and he tossed the scarf to me and I tossed it back to him and we batted it to and fro between us all the way down the hall as he ran backward to the door with absurd, exaggerated slowness, smiling at me all the way.

  *

  The routine with Clarice shifted again.

  I was now warned away from answering the phone at all, and if my friends had to call, they were to do so only within the window of seven and eight in the evening. I could also now only make calls after eleven p.m. If the phone rang after eleven, however, I was by no means to answer it. Along with this, as if to contradict these directives, Clarice began spending more and more time out but gave strict orders that I was to stay inside and mind the house. Many an afternoon I stood by, watching the phone ring before the answering machine finally clicked on and the voice of Hat Lady or a personal shopper from Barneys or one of Clarice’s editor cronies unspooled itself onto the tape. Other times there was nothing but what sounded to me like an exasperated mouth sound, expressly male, followed by an angry hang-up.

  Clarice began coming down for our morning sessions increasingly late, sometimes not until noon. Now, however, I didn’t go up to her bedroom looking for her but remained waiting in her study. Instead of sitting on my ridiculous little dictation stool with my spine straight as a plumb line, I tried sprawling across one of the ornate fauteuils in the corners, my legs dangling over its tufted arm. This feigned nonchalance would last about a quarter hour before I was sitting grammar-school straight again, reading Gayl Jones or Natalia Ginzburg or leafing through an art book, looking at pictures of Marys and saints and angels. But more often I just sat there dreaming.

  A lonely chill blew through that room. I knew Clarice and I were beginning to play out our endgame, but I remained anchored to the house, inert, dilatory, mute. I was floating along, waiting for something to happen. At night I lay in Cornelia’s bed, watching the patterns of light from passing cars dance on the ceiling.

  One night Clarice came home very late and burst into the room.

  I was sitting up reading when she stumbled through the door and plunked herself down beside me on the bed. Her face was a mess. She was mad drunk in that whisky way that seems to engender persistence.

  She rocked and swayed, trying to get her balance.

  “Is this what you wanted?” she asked me.

  “What?”

  “Is this what you always wanted?”

  “Oh God, Clarice, you should go to bed.”

  She saw the book I was reading and picked it up.

  “Sybille Bedford?” she said. “That woman is for shit.” She threw it across the room. “Why are you still here?” she yelled at me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  All I wanted was to get away from her, but she caught my arm.

  “No, you don’t leave, of course you don’t. I’m only joking. You know I’m only joking.” She got to her feet, brushed herself off. “Come here,” she said. “I need you to make a phone call for me.”

  “It’s after midnight,” I said.

  “Come on, it doesn’t matter,” she said. She pulled me down the hallway and the stairs and into her office. She turned on the wall switch—nothing that had ever been done before—and light flooded the room from the huge chandelier. The effect was at once grand and dwarfing.

  She swung me around the desk and put me in her seat. She indicated the black rotary phone.

  “Algonquin four eight six two nine,” she said. “Dial it.”

  “Clarice. That’s this number.”

  She looked at me, sure she was being fooled.

  “And so it is,” she said. “And so it is.”

  “Clarice, you should go to bed.”

  “Never mind that. Call this number.”

  She recited a number to me and I slowly dialed it. The rotary seemed to take forever to spin back around after each digit.

  It started ringing and I held the receiver out to her.

  “No,” she said, “you talk.”

  A male voice picked up in a moment.

  “Clarice?” he said.

  I could hear an entire world of smarm in that one word. Broyer Weatherhill.

  “Hi,” I said to him, idiotically.

  Clarice held my gaze, nodding at me.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Francesca Varani, Broyer. Clarice’s secretary.”

  “What do you want? Is she there?”

  “She is,” I said. I went to pass the receiver to her, but she shook her head again.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  Clarice nodded her head approvingly.

  “So why are you calling?” he asked.

  “So why are we calling?” I asked Clarice.

  She smiled broadly at me but said nothing.

  “Look, can I talk to her?” he said at last.

&nb
sp; “No, you may not,” I said.

  “Can you at least tell her I’m sorry?” he said.

  “He said he’s sorry,” I said to Clarice.

  She let out a cackle of delight. Then she shook her head, took up her fountain pen, and began writing something. She held it up to me.

  TELL HIM I HAVE A MESSAGE FOR HIM.

  “Clarice has a message for you,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “What is it?”

  She wrote something else and then held it up to me, smiling.

  “I can’t say that,” I said to her, talking into the phone.

  “Can’t say what?” Broyer said.

  Clarice was nodding: Certainly you can.

  “No,” I said.

  Clarice rolled her eyes and shoved the paper my way.

  I cleared my throat.

  “ ‘You’re a scoundrel,’ ” I read, “ ‘and a rat.’ ”

  “My God, please tell her I’m sorry,” he said. He sounded more impatient than distressed.