*
One night a few weeks later, I happened to be the last one left at work. Hating the place as I did, I’d been amazed that Petey should have entrusted me with a set of keys to lock up. But despite everything, when given a task, I remained a Girl Scout at heart; and being able to escape into music had made me newly pliant—quiescent to the point of being almost narcotized, in fact. I did the rounds, checking to see that nothing was on fire, making sure that the wheezing photocopier had been turned off and Nikki’s hair straightener unplugged, closing all the windows. When I came out of Dee-Dee’s empty office, something made me stop and look into the palm tree basket.
On top of the tangle of yellowed strips of paper, I saw this:
QI-SHI CHEUNG 4/24/09
And I thought, You know, feng shui might be some goofy white-people’s stuff, but there’s no way I’m going to leave this boy’s name moldering in this wretched holding pen for all eternity.
I grabbed the slip of paper, pushed back into Dee-Dee’s office, and heaved up the old sash window. I stuck my head out over the street. It was a tender night in May. I ripped Qi-Shi’s name into tiny bits and flung them out into the night sky.
I watched as the pieces swirled together a moment in the breeze, then flew apart, freeing themselves over the sleeping Garment District.
24
Someone else should take this over now, tell the story of Jerry, the story of Jerry and me. My methods break down. Suffice it to say—to be entirely insufficient, actually—we were together for six years. A long time, in a way. In another, no time at all.
We figured out a way to live. Meds do wonders, it’s true. After much trial and error, after mood swings as high as mountains and as low as cracks in the earth that send you plummeting, Jerry would become some new version of himself, functioning, slower, calmer…reduced. I don’t know the right words; I am just saying what it was like. I would ask him to explain it, and all his metaphors were architectural. There is a high wall, and I know I can put a ladder to it and climb up and see, but I don’t care to find a ladder. There is a long hallway, with many doors, and I go and try a door and see that it is locked and I know I can probably open it, but I just keep walking down the hallway. Sometimes his eyes seemed abnormally dull, as if occluded by his internal weather; sometimes their green was so bright he didn’t seem human. Sometimes when he was in a bland period he didn’t seem even to understand what was lost. He was like some nice, vague neighbor I didn’t know very well. Sometimes he was so content he was like a baby, preverbal and unreachable. There was never any still point for long. He was always the same Jerry, but there were many differently calibrated versions of him.
When he was level and okay, the scales tipped, and I became the one who was uneven, discontent, questing. I took as a given that we would always be together, and I chafed under this even as I loved him. Sometimes I would look at him sitting at the window in our apartment, the light washing over him, and he seemed closed like a book, slightly imbecilic and thus someone to protect. Sometimes he was arrogant and critical and he focused on everything wrong with me, corrected my terrible French pronunciation, was newly amazed at some foolish, malformed idea I had, reminded me how unworldly I was. Like Clarice, he was always trying to school me in the ways of his class, of the specific and rarefied class fraction that the Marr-Löwensteins inhabited. I was so much a bumbler and a boor. He took me to Paris and Rome and Barcelona on his parents’ money and I was thrilled and greedy for experience, but then inevitably things would devolve until I was sobbing in a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, on a cul-de-sac in Trastevere, on a bench on La Rambla, exhausted by the errors I knew I would make.
The class thing grew huge between us. Sometimes I threw it back in his face, dwelled on the worst possible memories, wanted to punish him for it. Didn’t he see what he’d been given, in contrast to what I hadn’t been? Sometimes he did, and that was really the problem. At times he would become so aloof and withholding that I would feel crass and vulgar before him. I reminded myself of the scene in Nana when the two whores go on and on about their wretched past—although in my case it was things like government cheese and being smacked across the face in public—making the young aristocrats before them squirm.
The crucial, the heartfelt, the seeking nature of youth—that fell away from our lives. Or seemed off in the periphery, something we’d meant to get to eventually.
He found steady work, through Clarice, at a classical music label. He was valued for his listening, for his discernment. He was told how uncanny he was, and I made an equation in my head that traded his inability to process things visually for a heightened ability elsewhere. But he couldn’t hear words, especially my words, so much anymore. He heard only music. With praise he grew pompous, and meds made him bloated; between these things, it was as if he had been zipped into an exaggerated, funny-suit version of himself. Sometimes when I was on the street and didn’t expect him to be there, I walked past him like a stranger.
I always thought things would right themselves in the end.
No one spoke to my heart the way he did, even when he was not my perfect Jerry, the Jerry who was passionate and amazed and knew how to smile. Who looked at me with love in his eyes. The Jerry who, when we came out of a film that I loved terribly, instead of dismissing it as sentimental, sought to understand why I loved it. I was vain because I took pleasure in thinking I’d taught him compassion, but that came to seem like some fond old children’s story, a relic.
He rose in his career while I bumped around from temp job to temp job, throwing out the pages of my Great American Novel as quickly as I wrote them. But I would catch up, I promised myself. I would catch up. Meanwhile, I built up so much rancor against him that I looked for criticism in every word he said to me.
This is what you do when you expect to be together always. You feel free to criticize a building that is standing, never expecting that your criticism might cause it to be torn down. You maybe do not understand that you will be the one to tear the building down.
I always thought things would right themselves in the end.
One Sunday morning I was reading the paper to him, an article about the letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya—Speak Low, the book was called. She was from a poor family, the daughter of a coachman, she worked as a domestic and sometimes a prostitute, and he was from a “good” background, the son of a cantor. This is how I remember it. Lotte was amused to find that Kurt had left his butter out so long that it had become rancid, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings and said nothing. And so after she stayed over one night, the next morning she ate rancid butter with him. At the end of the article, Jerry asked me to pass him the paper so that he could look at the picture of them. He looked at it for a long time before he said to me, They are like us, they are just like us. And I said, I’m a prostitute? It seemed amazing that we could have been together as long as we had by then and yet I was reducible to an outline.
Almost like I still was not real to him.
I banged out the door and walked the length of Manhattan Avenue to Newtown Creek, up at the top of Greenpoint where Brooklyn runs out. There was a big brick complex up that way, warehouses or manufacturing buildings, guarded by a pack of Dobermans straining their leashes and barking like they would rip you apart. I couldn’t get to the water from there, so I cut over to a sad little park off the East River, where I sat on the back of a bench and looked across the water at Manhattan. I realize now I was looking into another version of our life together, us back those years before, when Jerry was sick in bed and I was the person who stole fire for him. When so much was about imagining. I missed the way we had been. I missed him. I realized, at the end, that I missed him even when he was there with me.
Love is pure gold, and time a thief.
*
So, swing it out, it’s funny to remember these things now.
And it did end with a whimper. I left Jerry slowly, I drained the sweetness out of our relationship. I
used another man to get away and then I left him too.
I went to another city for graduate school, and in the summer I came back to New York to temp and earn some money.
I had a friend from one of my earlier temp gigs, a woman named Max, a musician who had an apartment up on 106th Street on the West Side. Her roommate had disappeared into some leftist missionary work, and so I rented that woman’s bedroom, which had in it a bed, a shoe-shine kit, and a chair with a well-read copy of Adorno’s Quasi Una Fantasia sitting atop it.
Max had been dropped just weeks before by her girlfriend, a sallow woman called Natorah who looked like some tall, pole-bean cowboy with a line for a mouth. I never did click with Natorah or think she was all that, but I understood how much Maxie was devastated when it ended. It was a hot summer of sadness for us both. Our bedrooms were right beside each other and our windows looked out on the same view, a basketball court up on 107th, next to the Booker T. Washington School. In the evenings sometimes I couldn’t sleep, and sitting smoking by the window in the hot breeze, I’d hear Max crying in the room beside. Other times I’d be the one crying and I’m sure she heard me too. We were there in our identical box bedrooms on either side of the same wall, both so crushed by our own sadness that we weren’t able to comfort each other at all.
We were about the same size, and I remember there was an all-black sailor-style dress and a black silk shell that we’d trade back and forth to wear to our various boring temp gigs. Do you have the dress? one of us would say to the other, frantic and hungover in the morning, stray toothpaste on the eyelid. Max was newly out and went to New York Liberty games, women’s health events at the LGBT center, and the weekly Xena: Warrior Princess party at a lesbian bar in Park Slope with a certain to-hell-with-criticizing-this-cliché resolve, determined to fight her way past her heartbreak. In time she started bringing women home, and one in particular stuck—an NYU junior Maxie called (not to her face) Baby Dyke. Baby Dyke looked like Hothead Paisan in a baseball cap and was always doing things like drinking our milk straight out of the carton, adjusting her crotch, and describing cunnilingus techniques in exquisite detail to see if she could make me blush. I kind of wanted to chuck her off the roof, but she was a nice distraction for Max.
As that summer went on Maxie was out of the house more and more, and I’d find myself alone on weekends, too sad, somber, and poor to make any plans. Sometimes I’d cry to Trina on the phone, but mostly I’d lie on the futon couch in the living room and read until the sun went down and I couldn’t see the page anymore. The window shared an airshaft with a battered women’s shelter, bizarrely donated by the Duchess of York, if one were to believe the engraved placard on the front of the building, and come evening these women would start wailing out the windows:
Oh Lord
Why did you do this to me?
What did I do to deserve this?
Oh Lord
Please deliver me
I have been good
I am hurting so bad
I have been good
I would start crying along with them, at once feeling for these women, missing Jerry in a thousand ways, and thinking my hurt was bullshit in comparison. I’d think, Why don’t I just go back to him? Why don’t I just go back? Sometimes the cries from next door would get so heartrending that I’d turn up music way loud to drown them out, but Max and I had very different taste and I had no great love for her Righteous Babe CDs or copious lute music. I did find a Duke Ellington CD, and this I’d put on, up there on Duke Ellington Boulevard, and it was there that I first heard the song with the alternate title: “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.”
Jerry had gotten Max’s number somehow and he’d call me on the phone to talk. I was so close so many times to giving in. I was mad lonely and I did not understand what I had done to my life.
One day late in the summer I did give in. He’d been calling to tell me those random things you tell the person who has wounded you: something terrible has happened, I need to see you to tell you. He’d found out some news. He wanted to show me something. I said okay and he picked me up in front of the apartment building on 106th Street, in a car I didn’t recognize.
We were so glad to see each other. Despite whatever the terrible something that he wanted to show me was, the drive had the feeling of a fine excursion. We left the city and drove through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania, talking all the way in an easy, holiday style. I remembered all the things I liked about him, and looking at his profile as he drove was immediately familiar, what had been done on so many trips together so many times in the past. It made all the sense in the world that we should be together like this. We stopped at an old modular diner clad in diamond-creased stainless steel and ate French fries and strange lettuce sandwiches, laughing easily, glad to be near each other. Comfortable. We talked about things upcoming in the future in a manner that suggested the future was something we would share. We were seduced into dreaming by the sight of each other.
We knew each other’s bodies and gestures and smells intimately, microscopically. All the creature parts, the outside.
It was toward the middle of Pennsylvania, not so far, in fact, from where Audrey had grown up and disappeared back to. There is something about that part of the world that will hang you with loneliness. It was near a town that Jerry said had “closed,” emptied of its people because it was on fire underground, the roads melting, forever burning from a coal-mining explosion. We were on the edge of Appalachia.
The road climbed into a hill town, and both of us grew silent. I looked out the window at the houses. Some of them were fancy but had an air of neglect, and the brick town hall looked permanently closed. It struck me that the town had been built with a hope that had never been realized.
“Why are we here?” I asked him at last.
“You’ll see,” he said.
We turned from the main road and climbed still higher. The houses grew more sparse and ramshackle; some were rusted old trailers. A big yellow dog ran out into the road and Jerry stopped short. I furiously waved away the dog with my hand, but he stood in the middle of the road, watching us as if fascinated.
We drove on up the road, passing in and out of wooded parts. Finally Jerry turned from the road, pulled up in front of a house, and cut the engine.
We sat in the car and looked at the house.
It was narrow and spindly and seemed pitched forward, as if it might throw itself off the hill. It was wooden, painted green around the windows, with skinny clapboard siding that seemed to have been once some kind of white, except the paint had been buffed off in a way that was fantastically total, as if it had been scrubbed all over with a huge wire brush. It had a warped porch that was fenced in with dirty plastic latticework nailed up all over it. It stank of hard luck and suspicion.
“What is this place?” I said.
“Let’s get out and see,” he said.
My hand shot out to stop him as he opened his door.
“They’ll shoot us,” I said.
Jerry laughed.
“No one’s home,” he said.
He got out of the car, and I didn’t move until I saw him disappear around the side of the house. I ran after him.
He was standing in the backyard, looking up at a cheap add-on, even worse than the original house, with a swayback tarpaper roof.
“I guess that’s their idea of a mudroom,” he said.
“It’s awful here—let’s get away,” I said.
“Aren’t you curious?” He looked at me with mischief in his eye.
“I can feel the cold coming out of it. It’s so cold. Please, there’s something wrong here.”
I tried to walk back to the car, but he went around the far end. I turned and ran after him, afraid to let him out of my sight. I found him on the front porch, looking up at something that turned out to be a hornet’s nest.
“It looks just like pottery, doesn’t it?” he said.
There were masses of junk out on the porch
—bales of newspapers, old paperbacks turned to garbage from years of rain, a plastic laundry basket full of dirty toys, empty food jars, something that looked like a neck brace. Jerry reached in and selected a Barbie. Its hair was chopped short and its body was filthy with handling, naked and missing a leg.
“I guess she used to rent it out,” he said.
“Please, Jerry, what is this place?”
There was a yellow sign in the window headed by large letters that read: CONDEMNED.
He turned to look at me.
“This? This is the house that Clarice grew up in,” he said.
“What?”
He studied my face, reading the amazement there.
He was pleased.
“Yes, you heard me right,” he said.
He walked to the edge of the porch and I followed. He turned and gave me his arm for the stairs, splintered and warped as they were. We walked some yards ahead, wordlessly, and then turned back to look at the house.
“I found a letter on her desk,” he said. “I was over there for dinner and I went in to get a picture book and this letter was left out, almost as if she wanted me to see it. This was deeded to her—I don’t know. I guess they tell you when they condemn a place. Except I guess she was hard to find, so it’s been like this for years. In limbo, decaying like this.”
He looked at the house as he said all this, not at me.
“Why did you bring me here?” I said.
He turned to me. His voice was filled with a sudden ardor, as if he could contain something no longer.
“Because now you can see we’re not so different after all,” he said. “You see? See how poor this is? This past is a part of me. Part of me, do you understand? You see, we’re practically the same. Because look at how awful this is.”
I looked at him. I looked at him, his hopeful face. And then I turned, walked to the car, and closed myself inside it.
I went back to school a week later. When months had passed and Jerry called me again, it was to tell me that there was a new woman in his life. To this my reaction was many things at once: I am happy for you. I am worried for her. And, in the fucked-up ardor of my own selfish heart: But no one will love you like I do.
Time's a Thief Page 31
