“He says he’s sorry,” I told Clarice.
Clarice shook her head. She was writing something else, and she turned it around and showed it to me.
“ ‘You’re a dilettante,’ ” I read. “ ‘You’ll always be a dilettante. You’re only fooling yourself and you have the writing talent of a grub worm. Of Dan Quayle.’ ”
“Okay, I get that she’s angry,” he said.
“Do you? Do you really? Do you understand what your irresponsible actions have done to this family? You come in here and do what to this family?”
Clarice was waving me down to stop, because I was off-script.
“Please tell her that I didn’t mean to,” Broyer said. “Please tell her that…I love her. Yes, I love her.”
I pulled the receiver to the side.
“He says he loves you,” I told Clarice.
She threw her head back and let out the biggest cackle of all. And then she began furiously scribbling.
“Hold on,” I said, “there’s more.”
“What?” he said. “What is she saying?”
She turned the paper around to me.
“God, Clarice,” I said.
She nodded, smiling.
I cleared my throat.
“ ‘You have a penis the size of a lead pencil,’ ” I said.
He was screaming even before I hung up on him. I dropped the phone into the cradle and slumped back in Clarice’s chair.
She walked slowly around her desk and came to me.
“Thank you, dear,” she said. She leaned forward and kissed me on top of my head. Then she tipped up my chin to look into my face, smiling at me most tenderly.
“We win,” she whispered.
She turned, sashayed across the room under the bright lights, and closed the door behind her.
*
Even before the sun was up the next day, I was gone.
Part III
20
Williamsburg in those days was like the Wild West. Its streets were amazing in their emptiness. Southside was a wounded place, a war zone of burned-out car chassis tipped on their sides, piles of inexplicable rubble rising to crazy heights in weedy lots, and stoops where crack vials crunched beneath your feet like peanut shells. Over by the water, the massive anchorage of the Williamsburg Bridge stamped itself down in front of you like some giant reminding you of your puniness, and the JMZ line, thundering high above, rained down wispy toxic fibers on your head. Standing by the East River, you’d wonder if that thing in the water out there was a shopping cart, a taxicab, a bag of garbage, or someone’s severed torso. Farther inland, the utter quiet and odd slanting light was like nothing so much as a de Chirico painting: grand old columned buildings, forgotten statues casting long thin shadows, an inscrutable something just beyond your line of sight. The melancholy and mystery of a street.
But Southside was also Los Sures, and here it wasn’t empty at all. You’d turn down one of the blocks off Marcy and blam, ten thousand Dominican or Puerto Rican flags would be flying from fire escapes and street signs and clotheslines strung from tenement to tenement, and the sweep and fervor would do something to your heart, like a Childe Hassam painting. You’d see lots of people hanging out on the sidewalks in these parts, and here was where I learned that in a pair of sunglasses I could pass for Hispanic, no problem. Look at her, some chick with her flossy hair in a topknot would say at me with that Boricua pop to her voice, look at her all walking down the street—hmm.
Farther east and past the nonstop racket of the Elevated over Broadway, you’d hit the Satmar Hasidic neighborhood, where no one particularly wanted to see me, while on the fringes of the Northside and up into McCarren Park it was pretty much already Polish Greenpoint. I traveled much in Williamsburg, always with my feet. The Italian section I couldn’t help but be curious about, and here was where I formulated the idea that Italian Americans, with their twin lions flanking humble stoops and needless balustrades topping vinyl-sided houses, were fond of stone as a building material because it’s hard and unchanging and thus reminds them of their heads. Us of our heads, I should say. These folks interested me in some kind of pining, regressive way, but their presence on the street proved elusive. You would be walking down Devoe or Conselyea and look around to see that you were the only person there. But on these blocks you knew that eyes were watching you. Mammas were making braciole behind closed front doors—the kind with the leaded glass insets, classy, that you got at Home Depot—while old Gs lurked at windows to make sure no one touched the still-wet Italian flag colors they’d just painted their narrow driveways. God help the skinny hipster who slapped an Andre the Giant Has a Posse sticker on the corner stop sign.
I’d been there a lot to hang out with Trina, and we’d go around to look at the great big signs shaped like scissors and glasses and thread spools along Metropolitan and wonder who made them and what they could have been made out of. Balsa wood? They crumbled in a way that reminded us of very old foam rubber. We’d buy semolina loaves at a bakery that had a sign from the 1930s and a curved glass display window, or walk down to Domsey’s to troll for clothes. You could always count on Trina to score a green suede A-line miniskirt with three-inch-round tortoiseshell buttons for five dollars cash. In the field in front of Domsey’s was a school bus that I remembered from the ’80s, smack in the middle of an acre of rubble, burned to a carapace and covered with graffiti but otherwise perfectly habitable.
There was a handful of bars we’d go to, most of which hadn’t yet been fully colonized by groovers priced out of elsewhere, those people who—even as we squirmed at the idea—must have seemed to the folks who’d lived in Williamsburg for years to be a lot like people like us. We’d sit and drink and talk while revolving pairs of cops, firemen, and fellows who worked at the neighborhood spinning-and-stamping shops chatted us up. We’d smile and graciously rebuff them and that would be it: no one was an asshole to us. There may have been no end of Beefy Art Dudes around, but somehow these guys tended to just sit and stare at us over their cans of PBR, swaddled in their Carhartt jackets, Jim Thompson novels sticking out of their cross-strapped messenger bags. The pizza man on Driggs who looked very much like the drawing of the pizza man on the universal pizza delivery box had taken a shine to Trina, and sometimes we’d order the penne alla vodka and get extra-huge portions, causing us to huff with effort lest we not finish our aluminum containers of food and thus hurt the pizza man’s feelings. The pizza man was very attuned to Trina’s moods, and if she ever went in there with a long face, he could always cheer her up by saying, Who’s your favorite pizza man? Come on, who’s your favorite pizza man? There was a notorious coke bar called Kokie’s only blocks away, but this was no place we would ever go.
I had a friend called Kelly who was in her last year at Pratt—she was an old Brooklyn hand and was forever reminding me of this—and she did some work with a community group called El Puente, on the Southside. When I told her I’d found a beaut of an apartment for $250 a month right by Gabila’s Square Knishes on South Eighth, she told me that if I moved there and planned on ever going out after sundown, it would only be a matter of weeks before I left the neighborhood in a body bag.
So I ended up moving in with Kelly in a sort of two-bedroom apartment right on Metro Avenue, $400 a month split two ways. This was off the third stop on the L, and there was something about the way the street zagged at that point, taking you past a White Castle and a gas station on the way to our apartment, just before you hit the spooky industrial expanse around Maspeth Creek, that made your heart sink. Sometimes walking home at night I felt like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man: the last person on earth. Other times, walking west toward the groover epicenter where Trina lived, more than once when I hit the dim section beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway some dad in a sedan would slow down to ask me, was I working? Was I working? I had by now found a temp job at an entertainment conglomerate, nonsense work but decently paid, so yes, I was working. I would always thank h
im for his concern.
“Chess,” Trina told me, rolling her eyes, “these guys think you’re a ho.”
Which you’d see many of over by Kent and Wythe, standing on those joyless low-rise industrial corners, always with short skirts and big bags. I wondered about their lives, what they had to kill off in themselves to get out there. And I was shocked to witness more than once minivans driven by Orthodox Jewish guys slow down to pick up one or two of them. I don’t understand, I’d say to Trina. They’re not even supposed to touch women. I was reading Daniel Fuchs’s Williamsburg Trilogy by then, and loving these books so much, I was even more given to thinking of anything Jewish as automatically good. Hasidim picking up streetwalkers just didn’t fit the picture.
I walked around Daniel Fuchs’s old neighborhood in the Southside looking for traces of this past. I loved the old Yiddish signs, the ones in English but in wavy pseudo-Hebrew lettering, and I loved the still weirdly extant bits of Depression-era enticement: Try a Lime Rickey, You Don’t Like It, You Don’t Have to Pay! I loved the botánicas with their Chango Macho bath salts and El Jorobado de la Suerte perfume that smelled like Pine-Sol and was supposed to get you fat cash. I loved going by the tiny brick Leonard Library, Betty Smith’s own, and seeing the banners of all the Brooklyn writers: Marianne Moore, Walt Whitman, Betty Smith herself. I loved all the faces you’d see, so different from what you got on Eleventh Street—drama-queen Latina girls with huge hoop earrings and starlet lips, ancient men dressed for temple like something out of Roman Vishniac, Polish drywall hangers with hard faces and blue-sky eyes. Less easy to say what all these different folks made of me and my tribe. My friends and I were in many ways the beginning of the disease that would all but destroy working-class Williamsburg, but I loved being there, and I loved Williamsburg for what it was.
Thinking back on those times, I really was always walking everywhere. I was in transit, literally and emotionally, and walking was the way I coped with everything that was roiling inside me. I was afraid that if I slowed down and let myself be alone with myself, the floodgates would open. It was better and cleaner and cooler to keep moving, not to give in. I thought of Kendra, drowning in her unhappiness, and Audrey, who was always on my mind even though I hadn’t actually talked to her in forever. I felt for them, but part of me, some practical, hardheaded, peasant part of me, told me that if they’d just kept better fucking control over themselves, they wouldn’t have slid down into their misery. They had arms to catch them, or else they wouldn’t have let themselves fall. I wasn’t like them. I’d grown up in a row house and my parents had had a combined income of $35,000 a year for a family of seven. These were the things that I told myself.
Anyway, the temp job I’d gotten was a quick skip from the L to the 4/5 to Madison Avenue, and the story I found there was half of the story that would repeat in my work life for years to come. That is, no one at the place did a lick of work. They might as well have been a crowd in a field flying a single kite. This stood in ridiculous contrast to what I’d eventually find in the architecture industry, where people cranked until all hours, bleeding out their talent over CAD drawings or the successful “value-engineering” of a broadloom “requirement” to a craftily similar carpet tile “solution.” This is not why I went to Yale Architecture, a skinny, sexy older lady from East Texas once told me while we sneaked a cigarette in the mailroom in our company’s offices at the World Trade Center, but that’s another story.
Within a few weeks at the entertainment conglomerate I’d finished every last task given me, and I was mad bored. Mad, mad, mad, mad bored. Amazingly, my one foray into reading a book on the job had been met with a word of advice called in by my temp agency after being tipped off by an anonymous snitch. And so I began making the rounds of the other admins to ask, Do you need a hand with anything? At this they would have one of two responses: annoyance or stark, staring terror. After several days I was given to understand that I risked being the Goody Two-shoes who, if this were a prison instead of a corporate office, would get knifed to death by an unwitnessed mob on the basketball court. Everyone reveled in their inertia, their daily trips to the Duane Reade, their hours of deliberation over whether to order Cookie Puss or Fudgie the Whale for Michelle in accounting’s ten-year work anniversary. Greenhorn that I was, I’d risked messing up the natural order of things by my moronic diligence. And so I spent my days writing long letters to my friends, staring at the picture of the stupid cat with the stupid pince-nez, or just sitting there dreaming.
All this time I was trying so hard not to think about Clarice and Kendra and Jerry and the whole Marr-Löwenstein family that all I could do was think about them.
The night I left, I simply packed my bag and slipped out and showed up at Trina’s door. I figured I’d go back for the rest of my stuff once things had cooled down—I just needed to get away from Clarice and clear my head. I’d left her a note, telling her I was sorry but this wasn’t working out and I’d call her in a few weeks. I’d made it sound as bland-vanilla and un-blamey as possible, but I knew that whatever I wrote wouldn’t matter. She would be furious regardless. I pictured her reading the note and then crushing it to her breast like Joan Crawford in extremis. Trina, Kelly, and I had just seen Mildred Pierce at Theatre 80 and were forever doing reaction shots from it, cringing in horror, lashing out in fury, or welling up with emotion like any good drag queen.
In these weeks, as I was working out this new scene for myself—neighborhood, apartment, job, hard-line attitude of unemotionality—I was also constantly wondering why Clarice hadn’t tracked me down.
“You sound like you want her to,” Trina said to me when I finally spoke this aloud, one night over a beer at the Charleston. The Charleston in those days was generally always empty of customers and thus where we’d go when we wanted near-absolute quiet, even if the scene was kind of like a lite version of Fellini’s 8½. It must once have been a nightclub of some sort, and the couple who ran it defied all notions of dignified old age. They probably looked like a million bucks in 1960, but thirty years on they were ghosts of themselves, the impresario an unreconstructed and slightly vicious carny in a wide-lapel suit and the missus, modeled on Jayne Mansfield, a flirty, dishy grandma with false eyelashes and who knew what else. It was like they were auditioning for Broadway Danny Rose. Booze seemed to be involved, in a maintenance-drinking way, as well as a certain professionalism that suggested that they were perfectly sincere, pre-ironic, and had no idea what their fascination might be for the new kids in town. This was the thing about Williamsburg in that era: all these folks had been doing what they’d been doing for years, in a close-knit-neighborhoody way, and then all these outsiders like ourselves streamed into town and merely by virtue of looking at them made them strange.
At any rate, Trina would always be the person to put me on the straight and narrow.
“Why would you want that?” she said. “Why would you want Clarice to track you down?”
“I guess I want to know that she misses me,” I said, and as soon as I spoke I realized that I hadn’t even admitted this to myself.
“Do you really care?” Trina said.
“I guess I do. I mean, I guess I want her to realize how fucked up she made things. How crazy and untenable. How crazy she is.”
“And that would do what?”
“Make me feel…vindicated?”
“And that would get you what?”
“Make me feel…right? Get me the last word. Oh, not like that, not like in a door-slam way. Make her realize she was wrong. She was wrong and I was right.” It sounded stupid even to myself.
“Good luck with that,” Trina said. She tipped her cigarette into the ashtray, and we both sat looking at it. “Would that even change anything?”
“Jesus, Trina, don’t you ever have a feeling of injustice and you can’t get a hearing and it’s like you could explode?”
“Sure, yes, of course I do! But this woman’s a dead end. You knew how messed up she was when you
first went into this. I mean? What do you want?”
“I want her to like me,” I said miserably.
“But she doesn’t like anyone!” she said.
“God, I miss Jerry,” I said. It just spilled out of my mouth.
I slumped in my chair.
“That guy? You do? I thought you put that whole thing out of your head. Are you serious? God, Chess, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! I didn’t want to seem pathetic. I didn’t want to bore you.”
“Oh, Chess—you can bore me anytime.”
She reached out and rubbed my shoulder, and I guess it was that single touch that made all my hard-line pretensions fly right out the window. Right out the flipping window. I felt myself crumble and suddenly I had my hands over my mouth and tears were running down my face.
“Oh, oh, Chess, oh, Chess,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me these things? You don’t have to be all Lord Jim on me. Geez! I figured you were sad, but it’s like you don’t let on. Look, don’t worry, forgive me if I’m somehow telling you I don’t want to listen, of course I do. Look, why don’t I call her for you? Why don’t I just call the bitch? You still have to get all your stuff—we can go together. She’ll be on her best behavior. Hell, I’ll ask if she knows where Jerry got to, do you think I care? For all we know he’s joined an anarchist klezmer band in the former East Berlin. Sorry, I’m kidding—I just want to cheer you up. Jesus, Chess, you have to let this stuff out or it’ll kill you.” She grabbed a bunch of paper napkins and handed them to me.
I took them and was wiping my face, blowing my nose, starting to calm down and then breaking out crying again.
“Oh, Chess,” she said. She kept rubbing my arm, comforting me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Nothing sorry in it, so please don’t worry.”
“But I’m sorry.”
“Oh, Chess.”
She leaned her face close to mine.
Time's a Thief Page 27
