“Who’s your favorite pizza man?” she asked.
“Oh God, please don’t right now,” I said.
“Come on! Who’s your favorite pizza man?”
I wiped at my eyes. “I guess you are,” I said.
“I can’t hear you!”
“You are! Jesus Christ, Trina.”
She tilted her head to the side and made a silly face—and her amber eyes were the most wonderful thing in the world to me at that moment.
*
The next day Trina called me at work—and the receiver was in my hand before the ring finished.
“Did you talk to her?” I said.
“The woman’s a freak,” she said.
“What? Why? What happened?”
“I don’t know—she was all bubbly. Like she was on a talk show. She was all silver-bells laughter, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, so happy! Total phonus balonus. I’m like, Hi, this is Trina, Chess’s friend, and it was like she pretended she knew I’d be calling. Just all friendly and fakey and bizarre. Anyway, she said we can come by on Saturday to get your stuff. One o’clock, is that good?”
“What? She wasn’t angry?”
“No, I told you, it was like water rolls off her back, it’s nothing at all to her. Who knows how she really feels about anything? I asked her about Jerry and she was like, Oh, who knows, he’s a grown man, he could be anywhere, ha-ha-ha silver bells. She’s a got a nine-volt battery for a heart.”
I was silent, looking up at the ceiling.
“This just doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Look, don’t get all melancholy, okay? If this guy ever does show up I’ve got a million questions for him, like what is your sorry, purposely elusive behavior about and who died and made you Hamlet, okay? Look, Saturday we’ll go by there and get your stuff, okay? Then we can come back to Williamsburg and drink our faces off.”
*
That Saturday at exactly one o’clock I stood at the top of the stoop with Trina and rang the doorbell of the house on Eleventh Street. It seemed wrong to have to ring the doorbell.
Dolores opened the door.
“Girls, you come in,” she said, waving us inside. She gave a scan up the street, down the street, and then suddenly jerked back and slammed the door. Trina and I looked at each other—what? When Dolores turned around again, I introduced her to Trina and she nodded gravely.
“Ms. Marr no’ here,” she said.
“Upstate?”
“Yes. She has a note for you. With your belonging.” She stepped aside, and in a row down the entrance hallway were all my things, neatly packed by someone else’s hands. There was an envelope on top of the first box, and I picked it up and looked at it.
FRANCESCA VARANI, it read. As if legions of other Francescas might be tramping through there. I ripped it open, and inside was a prorated check for the last four days I’d worked. Nothing else. I pulled the envelope around to make sure there was no tiny note hiding in there. Amazingly, Dolores and Trina both reached out to touch my arms at the same time.
“She has never been a nice lady,” Dolores said.
“She’s an A-hole,” Trina said. “She’s an ass-H.”
“Did she say anything?” I asked.
Dolores shook her head.
“Oh. Oh, well. Well, thanks for packing up my things, Dolores.”
“Oh, she does that,” Dolores said.
Dolores insisted on helping us move everything out to the stoop. She and I shook hands good-bye, solemnly enough, and then Trina went to get the Chevy. Once the door was closed on me I stood alone on the stoop, surrounded by my bag-lady things.
I had been banished from the kingdom.
In a moment Trina pulled up and was honking the horn like a madwoman, jolting me back to earth. We managed to jam everything into the Chevy, and then it was whoosh down Eleventh Street, a full turn around to go east, and a careen down the Bowery to Delancey. It’s very fancy, I sang, my heart suddenly lifting, and we waved like mad at a cute G in some kind of porkpie hat in front of Ratner’s; we could have sworn he was blowing bubbles. Oh, was it ever April. The light changed and immediately we were spinning across the bridge, the big Xs of its struts to one side and the rickety, racing J train to the other, the view down the East River to the bay beyond all the bridges like a world opening up, and then we were across the bridge to the other side, to Brooklyn, the shortest journey ever when you go west to east, sailing by the great Renaissance pile of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank with its IT’S TIME TO SAVE sign nearly jammed up against the roadway and then the ad for Peter Luger Steakhouse peeling from its brownstone wall. Brooklyn felt wonderful, wide open, the loveliest punch line, like a million bucks. We blew down to street level by the bus turnaround and then we were spinning up Havemeyer and sailing, sailing down Metropolitan Avenue to my new place, to my new life. I felt like the most tremendous weight had been lifted off me and also I felt like crying.
We pulled up to the apartment on Metro and Trina slid the Chevy into the only open parking space, magically right in front. We got out of the car at the exact same time and slammed our doors in tandem, making each other laugh. A taxicab had stopped behind us and was idling, and I thought he must want the space we just took. Instead the light suddenly clicked on, and out of the backseat stepped a wild-looking homeless man.
Who was Jerry.
21
“Who is that freak?” were the first words out of Trina’s mouth.
Jerry was slanting toward us, and though he wasn’t in earshot suddenly he stopped, shook himself off like a cat, and reordered himself. He changed before my eyes. His coat was caked with dirt and he had a sprawling beard, fire-red and wild, but it was as if he straightened up, clarified himself, and became once again the young lord.
“My God, that’s your Werther,” Trina whispered.
He stepped up on the curb and put out his hand.
“You’re Trina,” he said.
I watched as Trina slowly answered with her hand, barely outstretching it as Jerry swept it up, raised it to his lips, and bestowed a kiss upon it. Trina was no pushover, but some idea corrected itself in her, and I watched her look at him, watched her understand now what was so solitary and strange and electric about this boy. And all of her million questions to him were stilled into silence; as were mine.
*
That evening he and I went up on the rooftop and looked out over Williamsburg.
We must have unloaded all my things from Trina’s car and taken everything up to the apartment—I’m sure we did this—but it was like I was in a cloud. I remember him casting a look around the place, and how I was unable to read him at all. I couldn’t believe he was there. I remember Trina hugging me good-bye and then I stood at the window, watching her pull the Chevy out of the space, out onto Metropolitan Avenue, and then drive away. I pictured her turning at the next block, by the Catholic church, to go back west. I was alone now with Jerry and somehow was delaying the moment when I would turn and look at him.
“Won’t you look at me?” he said, as if reading my mind.
I turned, and he was standing in the middle of the floor, tall and unto himself, an unlikely incursion in that room. The apartment seemed to have shrunk around him.
“Is this yours?” he asked.
“I have a roommate,” I said, and this might have been the first sentence I spoke to him.
“Is it a she?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me, questioning.
“She’s away. All week.”
He came over and took my hands in his.
“I don’t understand,” I said, stepping back and taking myself away from him.
In a moment he bowed his head.
“It feels very small in here now,” I said. The trucks rumbling down Metro were so heavy they made the windows clatter. It was all too close to the outside, too precarious. I had been thinking I had gotten away. But this was no place to live, I understood now.
That was what his un
readable look had been. No place to live without him.
“Let’s go to the roof,” he said.
Traffic seemed to be running east below us, trucks hauling things away, out into Queens. I could see the pigeon man on the Southside, the flocks of birds circling above him as he stirred them down from the sky. Looking west I could see the towers of the Trade Center and, turning again, Jerry, standing in the middle of the silver roof.
“Why did you leave?” I said to him at last.
“I told you, I had to.”
“It makes no sense. You made it sound like…you would be back. You would be back for me.”
“I’m back now.”
“But you never said anything. You never got any word to me. It was months and months, and at some point I thought you were just gone for good. Why did you do that to me? Don’t say you were testing me—”
“I can’t explain,” he said.
“That’s nothing I can hear. You left and that was it.”
“But I’m here now,” he said.
“And what can I do with that?”
“I’m telling you, I’m here now.”
“And then what?” I said.
“I thought you had faith,” he said to me.
In the yard behind the building, sheltered from the noise and filth of Metropolitan Avenue, the landlord and his wife grew tomatoes in the warm months. Now it was a square of dirt was all, as I stood looking down at it. I was nowhere near the edge and there was a lip that came to my knees, but our feelings were too large for that small space and I turned too fast and did some kind of idiotic sprawl, and Jerry grabbed me and reeled me in. And then he was holding me and crooning over me and petting me as if I were some precious thing.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he said.
“It hurt me—you left and it hurt me,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“God, I missed you so much. I hated how much I missed you. I missed you so much. Why did you make me miss you like that? Why did you come into my life and make me care about you and then leave? It was like you’d gone and died and I’d never see you again.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never want to leave you. Never again.”
“Don’t say things you don’t mean,” I said.
“But I mean it,” he said. “Believe me—please believe me.” He closed tight around me, pulled me to him and would not let go. How can I explain. We were like this for hours, up on the roof, trying to understand this thing between us, trying to understand the two of us, the possibility of an us, and we were there so long evening went into night and then into morning. I remember the sadness in his green eyes, the pained way he held his mouth. He held my hands tightly in his and rubbed my knuckles almost raw, as if he were breaking down the composite of me. I remember how the sky changed, how the pink showed east and then streaked across the sky. And with the morning something was sealed for us. We would be together. That was how we would be: together.
What is impossible to capture here so many years later is the joy I felt at this. The joy, the bliss, the perfect kiss.
*
He told me that when he came back for me Clarice slammed the door in his face. The timing was impossible; it turned out I had left just one week before he came back. He told me he was seized by a kind of mania and he haunted the block, waiting for the door to open. The first time Clarice left he rushed the house and Dolores let him in, gave him something to eat. As far as she knew, I had left no address.
He didn’t know what to do. He told me he was convinced that Clarice knew where I’d disappeared to but she was hiding it. He decided he’d just sleep in front of the house—he would advertise his presence. At first he slept under the stoop, but then he took to sleeping at the top of the stairs, in the tiny checkerboard space between the unlocked street door and the door of the house itself. Clarice would pull aside the curtain and rap on the glass to make him go away. She told him she would call the police. He said, Good, call them. But eventually he’d go away. There was a deli on Fifth that used to be the Lone Star, a place with a big iguana sculpture on its roof. They had a bathroom and tables upstairs, and he would go there and drink coffee and nod as he sat looking out the window. There were homeless people who hung out there, teen runaways and sad old winos. At some point he realized he was homeless too.
He always went back to Eleventh Street. He sat on the stoop and waited for me. Weeks passed and I never came. And then one day I did.
He wouldn’t tell me where he’d been the many months leading up to these moments. I had a million questions that he would not answer. My words were left to float between us until they split into tiny particles and disappeared. He was trying to tell me something else, something important, that he’d stayed away until he knew he could come back and best his mother. He had come back to disgust her and embarrass her and wear her down. He was paying her back. He would never give in—but neither would she. And so they were exactly matched.
The battle they fought was over me.
But what I wanted to know was how he lived all that time, what he ate to keep himself alive, where he laid his head at night. Maybe who was there to comfort him.
Finally I learned to let it go. I didn’t understand this way of relating with someone. This way of not relating. I didn’t understand then that this would be the pattern of our life together.
*
We had fallen asleep in my room, on the thin mat I was borrowing until I could get a bed. We awoke in the early evening, and I found a can of soup for us to eat. I had become watcher and listener and tender. I felt like we were bandits, doing something illegal together.
“We can’t stay here,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“Cancel your job thing. Tell them you have the flu.”
“But we’ll need the money.”
“Don’t worry about that. There’s always a way.”
This time I didn’t question him. We locked ourselves in, hung bedsheets against the sun, talked and prowled at night, drank endless coffee in three a.m. diners. These times were burdened and tentative but also they were lustrous. They were magic. Empty, except for us. We were always together and we learned each other’s bodies. I loved the way he touched me. I loved to look at him. I loved to watch him as he slept, to study the curve of his closed eyelid, to put my arms around him and guard him from the world.
On one of the last days there I finally opened the boxes that Clarice had packed. It was as if I’d been afraid of contagion, of her hands on my things, I was afraid of bringing it into the temporary autonomous zone we were sheltering in together. From the last box I pulled out Jerry’s flute case.
“Look,” I said, handing it to him.
He set it before him, then quietly snapped it open. He drew back, reacting to something inside. And then he took it out and handed it to me. It was a thick envelope, with these words written on it:
YOU WIN, GERHARDT.
“Jerry,” I said. “My God.”
Of course we knew what it was. Jerry’s murderer’s smile spread across his face. I ripped open the envelope and shook out every last bill, all the money, all the dirty money—money so dirty that in a way it was absolutely clean.
*
We found a place on the Northside, $700 a month, a railroad that was one half of the top floor. Asphalt shingle and one of those old clotheslines on a wheel that attached to the building across the backyard, which was choked with ailanthus trees, bathtub planters, rusted bikes, and indoor furniture left outside so long it looked like Claes Oldenburg sculpture. Inside our apartment, the floor was old linoleum and the walls were painted with something that left a light, chalky coating when you touched it with your fingers. In the kitchen above the oven was one of those metal flue covers that sealed up the hole where the old stovepipe had connected to the wall, this one with a winter landscape scene printed on it in soft colors.
We had very few belongings and no furnitur
e at all. I had my Abruzzese grandmother’s spaghetti pot and cutting board, five wooden spoons, two bowls and two plates, a fry pan that Kelly gave me, a serrated knife from the grocery store, and a can opener. Jerry had sheet music, a metronome, a button accordion, and a full set of silver plate from the St. Regis Hotel. Our bed was a swaddling of old blankets. We camped out like children, ate dinner sitting on the floor with cloth napkins in our laps.
We made love and held each other, listening to music on the radio. Often I would read to him, his head resting in my lap. He told me he had stopped singing—his illness had done something to his voice—and so instead he played his flute for me. I was so happy to look at him. I close my eyes and think of this now.
*
I remember it was easy for me to find temp work. There were some agencies where, if they didn’t have a gig for you right off, you could go on-call, show up at their office by 7:30, and sit reading your book as the calls came in. I was good at this kind of thing; you could throw me in anywhere and I’d figure it out. In certain stretches of Midtown I temped in every building, and even years later I could tick them off on my fingers: in the canyon of towers on Sixth Avenue, in skyscrapers all along Fifty-Seventh Street, down Fifth Avenue, across Forty-Second, up Lex and down Third. We had gone through the packet and whatever I had for our deposit and rent, and we needed money.
Mornings we’d go out the door together, and yet we were still in our own world. We would get on the L train, tight against the doors, our bodies meshed together and smelling of sweet sleep. We saw no one but each other; it was as if the outside, breathing world were not real to us, were invisible. At Union Square we would part, and every parting seemed to suggest terrible and irreparable loss. And so we clung in that moment of parting as if our hearts would break.
I would go to my temp job, doing my work diligently and yet dreaming of him all day long. He would go up to Forty-Second Street and busk, playing his flute with his case open on the ground before him. I picture him there, this improbable young man so dour in his clothing but with an absurd red silk foulard knotted around his neck. Often he would wear this scarf or some other odd, dainty object of mine, decorating his person with it. It was as if by this he were advertising his love for me. In the evening we rushed home to be together as if a year had passed, and we were each so relieved that the other had come back again. We haunted Williamsburg in the night hours, were thrilled to drag in old furniture off the street, would go to the rocks down by Grand Street and step around the crack vials to look out across the water.
Time's a Thief Page 28
