When I dared open my eyes again, I was startled to find myself face-to-face with the gargoyle, which I’d forgotten I still held in my arms. He was staring at me with penetrating, deep-set eyes. He had the facial features of a Labrador retriever, or a gryphon or dragon, or maybe a lion; he was all these things and yet not quite any of them. But I liked him. He was giving me a sneaky, conspiratorial grin, which I appreciated.
He also had something around his neck. Fighting the overwhelming exhaustion that pressed on my eyes, I lifted my head to peer more closely at this odd, comforting creature and saw that he was still wearing his little chain leash. That made me laugh.
“Good dog,” I said, laying my head down again beside him and shutting my eyes against the world.
22
ON A HUNCH, ZEV CAME in to work the next morning, a Saturday. He just figured he’d be needed, he told me, either to bail my dad out of jail or to pack up some rare Gothic terra cotta for immediate shipping: “You don’t work twelve years for a man like your father without figuring out that he tends to do what he wants to do, especially when he’s in one of those revved-up phases of his.”
We were sharing some day-old macaroni salad at a card table in the office, the big fourth-floor room with the framed oil portraits and that Flat Stanley slot in the floor. My father was on the phone, leaning way back in the swivelly oak chair with his big boots on the desk. He was grinning broadly.
“Well, the thing is, Don, it’s going to cost you,” he was saying. “It’s the last one. The very last one. And I’ve got it.”
Dad listened awhile, dabbing Neosporin on the vicious pink stripe of raw flesh that the flying rope had burned into his left palm as I was falling last night. When he was done ministering to his left hand, he began, with a wince, to apply the ointment to the matching wound in his right.
“Sure, sure, of course,” he said. “You can come see it anytime you’re in town. I’m just saying, I’m not gonna be able to give you a number right away, that’s all. I’ve got to live with the piece awhile first. Pricing the priceless is a tricky business.”
There was only one place in TriBeCa that sold even rudimentary groceries—Morgan’s, a butcher shop on Hudson—because the few artists and eccentrics who lived down here were doing so illegally. But Morgan’s didn’t have an ice machine, so Dad had sent Zev to the Towers Cafeteria on West Broadway to beg some ice from Artie and Joan, the couple who ran the place. Wrapped in a stained dish towel, the frozen cubes helped numb the pain in my shoulder quite a bit.
Zev was trying every way he could think of—short of coming right out and saying it—to convey to me how horrified he was that my father had sent me out into the night to fall off a skyscraper. The whole time I’d been telling him the story, he kept shooting sardonic, disgusted looks at Dad. Zev wanted me out of the gargoyle-hunting business once and for all.
“Don’t you have friends you could be hanging out with instead of us boring old people?” he asked. “Isn’t there a chick you might like to take to the movies?”
But trusting your parents is an occupational hazard of being a child, and which of these men was I going to put my faith in, anyway? My passionate father with his invigorating sense of mission or this lanky, gray-ponytailed hippie with his fretful pinprick eyes?
Finally, frustrated, Zev dropped all pretense of tact. “Look, Griff, what I’m trying to tell you is that your dad’s getting into some pretty heavy shit you don’t know about that it’d be a real good idea for you to steer clear of.”
I wanted to punch him in the nose. Why was he trying to separate me from Dad now that I’d finally gotten him back? Surely my father wouldn’t have put my life at risk without a really good reason.
The melting ice was beginning to soak my shirt. I left the wet dish towel on the card table and went over to take a look at my gargoyle, which was lying aslant on the oak desk. I wanted to get another look at his sneaky grin, feel again that strange energy coming off his body.
But all the vitality had drained out of him. Just like that. Here on a desk with a bent bronze rod sticking from its neck, that terra-cotta gargoyle was just an object. A thing. Without its high-rise perch, without the Woolworth—without the city—it had lost its magic.
I reached down to touch its dull beige surface, but Dad, glancing up from his conversation, flicked me away with his fingertips. I was stung. I went and sat back down at the card table.
“I could’ve told you that would happen,” Zev said, his mouth half-full of macaroni salad. “He’s already forgotten that you’re the one who actually climbed out there and sawed the damn thing off.”
He gave a long look over at Dad, who was now cradling the gargoyle’s head in his hands and staring at it with hungry wonder. After several moments in that posture, the phone pinched awkwardly between his chin and shoulder, he abruptly laid the head down again and sat upright in his chair.
“Well, I’m sorry you think I’m being difficult,” he said into the phone. “I did mean it when I said you’d get first crack at it. But the fact is, Don, it’s mine. And if I say I’ve got to live with it awhile, that means I’ve got to live with it awhile. Okay?”
Zev was still watching him. Chewing his macaroni salad in thought. He leaned in close to me without taking his eyes from Dad, who was now glaring at the gargoyle, his fingers resting on the ragged edge of its neck.
“It’s a funny thing about collecting,” Zev told me. “It starts out as love. But it becomes something much more grasping and corrosive.”
23
MOM WANTED TO HAVE a word with me. In her room. Now, if I wasn’t too terribly busy.
This was the conversation I’d been dreading. Back when they were still living together, my mother had made it clear she would leave my father on the spot if he stole even one more piece of New York. So what did that portend for my future in the brownstone if she’d learned of my serial larceny?
I was pretty sure she suspected. I’d seen her inspecting the stone powder on my jacket sleeves, and once she’d even found a chisel in the pocket of my down jacket. But I could tell she didn’t want to believe I was preying on the streetscape. She’d seemed downright relieved when I assured her that I’d gotten my broken nose and bruised shoulder during fistfights over a girl.
This time, however, she had clearly discovered something that alarmed her.
“Griffin,” she said, as I sat on the end of her bed facing her. “I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to give me an honest answer. You understand?”
I nodded.
“Griffin, I found—” Flustered, she stopped short, then tried again: “Griffin, I’m not mad—I mean, why would I be; I guess it’s all perfectly natural for a boy your age, and God knows I’m no prude. But I guess, well, I just really need to know the truth about this one thing: Why in heaven’s name do you have a slab of boiled ham hidden under your bed?”
Now it was my turn to be at a loss for words.
“It must’ve been under there for ages,” she went on, her eyebrows furrowing in worry and disgust. “It stunk to high heaven. And when I think what you must have been doing—”
I could see it wasn’t a good idea to let her keep talking.
“Well,” I started, “it’s not the easiest thing in the world to talk about, but have you ever heard of, um, the Beak of Doom?”
“The beak of what?” She looked vaguely appalled.
“The Beak of Doom. I mean, not too many people can even do it, but there’s this legend that, well, and I guess they probably didn’t even use ham in Malaysia—but I just thought if I practiced really hard I could kind of learn to beak my fingers together and…” I let the sentence drain away. The slab of ham under my bed wasn’t something that could be explained in a way an adult could understand.
But my mother had heard all she needed. Her eyes grew soft. “It’s okay,” she told me, leaning forward to give me a reassuring little pat on the shoulder. “You don’t need to explain. I’ve read Portnoy’s
Complaint.”
I didn’t know what this meant, but it was clearly time to change the subject. I asked her if she was going to go see Quigley in the talent show at seven.
“Oh, goodness, is that tonight? I guess I really should, but I’d be afraid I’d run into your father.”
I told her there was no chance of that. “He said the same thing when I asked him, that he couldn’t go because he didn’t want to risk seeing you. I think you really oughta go.”
“Are you going?”
“God no,” I said, and I started backing out of the room. “But I’m not her mother.”
“Well, I’ll think about it. Oh, and if you’re going downstairs, would you make me a cuppa? There should be some Medaglia d’Oro instant right by the stove.”
—
Against all logic, Quigley had saved three seats in the front row, each marked WATTS FAMILY. I sat in the middle one and tried to spread myself onto the two empties like a really fat guy making himself right at home. The wait for Quig to come on was brutal. I had to sit through a god-awful recorder duet and a wobbly, keening rendition of “Greensleeves” played on a saw with a violin bow.
But Quigley made quite an entrance. The church went pitch-black, except for the red EXIT rectangles every fourth arch or so, and this darkness lasted much too long. Then, just as everyone was beginning to rustle around uncomfortably in their seats, an enormous spotlight shone onto the stage and a deep, syrupy man’s voice intoned over the loudspeakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are privileged tonight to present to you, live on our stage: the one…the only…Watts Sisters!”
Out strutted just one girl, a proud one: Quigley. She wore a sparkly gold top hat, black tails, and a Danskin top with a tuxedo shirt and bow tie printed on it. She carried a silver-tipped black cane, which she swung around with an air of self-assured razzle-dazzle. As she stepped into the circle of light at center stage, she was grinning so broadly you could see quite a bit of her pink gums above her upper teeth. A slightly too red and too round circle of rouge decorated each of her freckled cheeks.
With a pull of a concealed string, someone unfurled a homemade red-on-gold satin banner bearing the words THE WATTS SISTERS in swoopy, showbizzy letters. In the pews all around me, necks were craned and murmurs were exchanged, until at last the crowd came to realize that this was it—this one girl up there was the only Watts Sister they were going to get—and a ripple of what I took to be admiring laughter made its way through the church.
When Quigley opened her mouth, out came an astonishingly throaty, husky voice, so unexpected issuing from this proud, freckled imp that it seemed as if she must have swallowed a gruff fifty-six-year-old carpet salesman from Canarsie: “Let me…entertaiiin you,” she growled melodically. “Let me…make you smiiile…” It was a song from the musical Gypsy, which she’d been playing endlessly at home on her portable beige plastic record player.
She was having the time of her life up there, grinning so widely it practically made my own jaw hurt to watch. The crowd loved her—her gumption even more than her singing voice—and she was loving them right back, until her eyes, scanning the audience to take stock of her fan base, spotted me sitting in the front row, flanked by matching empty seats. I saw her eyes dart around the church—searching the aisles for late arrivals, I suppose. When she didn’t find what she was looking for, her face flushed burgundy and she glowered down at me, as if it were obvious that our parents must have been there until just a second ago, and only some unforgivably obnoxious act on my part could be responsible for their absence.
I was mortified. As soon as she looked away again, I got the hell out of there. I knew she had a second number at the end of the evening’s program, a tap solo in the middle of a full-cast finale, and I figured it might not be too late to make things right. While I jogged home, down Ninetieth Street, right on Madison, then left on Eighty-Ninth two blocks past Dalton and Service Hardware, I tried and failed to make sense of Quig’s whole strange decision to call herself the Watts Sisters. It was just the two of us kids in our home, Quig and me.
As I crossed Lex, I saw the boarders down the block, hightailing it out of the brownstone en masse, in the way of animals fleeing a forest fire. When they reached the sidewalk they quickly dispersed, Mathis trotting my way, the other two making for Third Avenue: Mr. Price in full scurry, Monsieur Claude somehow managing to look languorous and bored, even while moving at speed.
By the time Mathis saw me, it was too late for him to change course. He practically bumped right into me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Where’s everyone going?”
“Who knows, who knows,” he said, woggling his head uneasily. “I just felt a bit of private time might be in order. Why’re you out of breath?”
I told him about Quig’s performance, and the empty seats. I asked if he’d go fill one of them; it was only a few blocks away.
“Tough to say, tough to say,” he muttered, moving his fingers quickly in front of his face as if he were trying to count something very fast. “How do I know there really is a show? You Watts kids are a slick pair. Quigley sent me on the Staten Island Ferry last October to a Beckett play that didn’t exist. And you told me you barely knew the rules of backgammon, and now I owe you two hundred thirty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents.”
That gave me an idea. I told Mathis he wouldn’t have to pay me his backgammon debt if he just went to see Quigley’s tap-dancing number. His eyes lit up behind his Gandhi glasses.
“I’ll do it!” he said. “I’m a man of honor, you know. I always had every intention of winning that money back from you.”
—
Mom and Dad were too busy yelling at each other to hear me unlock the front door. They were in the dim middle room at the base of the stairs, where everyone’s mail was always sorted on a small wicker table. I wondered if my Sea-Monkeys had arrived; I had ordered them from the back of an Archie comic almost six weeks ago.
“You’re losing the brownstone, aren’t you?” Mom was saying in a prosecutorial tone. “You’re losing the brownstone on purpose!”
“Excuse me? Get your head out of your ass, Ivy. I’m the one who owns this place. If the bank takes it, I’m the one who loses, not you.”
I stayed in the front room, standing just out of sight on the Persian carpet’s threadbare edge.
“I live here, Nick. The kids live here. This is our home!”
“Don’t be an imbecile! You can’t lose anything when you don’t own anything.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The drawing in the Sea-Monkeys ad showed a cheery, web-toed pink king with his tail covering his privates and his arm around his queen and their two scaly, smiling offspring. There were jolly bubbles all around and a castle in the background. The queen had a bow in her antennae and was heavily made up, with plump red fish lips and flirty eyelashes.
“WORLD-FAMOUS Sea-Monkeys are SO full of surprises you can’t stop watching them,” the ad had promised. “They swim, play, scoot, race and do comical tricks and stunts.” It was unclear how that fun-loving aquatic royal family could actually be shipped through the mail, but it was understood that when they arrived I needed only to pop them in a glass and add water to make them come to life. I had Scotch-taped six quarters, two dimes, and a nickel to a piece of cardboard for the privilege, mailing it all off with an order form to something called Sea-Monkey Aquarium at 200 Fifth Avenue.
“How the hell am I supposed to pay a bill I never saw, anyway?” Dad was saying.
“It wasn’t one bill, Nick. This says Third Notice. Third Notice of Arrears.”
I stepped into the room. Both my parents looked at me, their mouths half-open in mid-assertion.
“Did my Sea-Monkeys come yet?”
Both Mom and Dad crinkled their eyebrows at me, taken aback, maybe, by the childishness of my question. But neither answered. Instead, they turned back and resumed their important grown-up business of yelling at each other, as if none of this had anything to
do with me. For a brief moment I thought how nice it would be to Scotch-tape them both to a giant piece of cardboard, or maybe a blue plywood sheet from a demolition site wall, and ship the pair of them off to 200 Fifth Avenue. I wondered how many stamps it would take, and if there was a kid at the Sea-Monkey Aquarium who would sign for them, as I had signed for Dad’s Notice of Arrears.
“What the hell are you doing opening my mail, anyway?” Dad asked Mom. “Who’s signing for certified letters that belong to me?”
“I only signed for this one, Nick. But that’s beside the point. That’s not what we’re talking about here!” What we were talking about was how he was squeezing her, how his lawyer had rigged it so his payments to her were alimony rather than child support, so that she had to pay taxes on it all. What we were talking about was how irresponsible he was being with our home.
“Irresponsible?” His eyes grew wide with indignation. Who had been on-the-ball enough to refinance the brownstone with a fixed rate way back before interest rates went through the roof? Who had gotten them into that affordable health insurance plan? Who had made one well-researched financial arrangement after another that she was either too lazy or too stupid to even try to understand? “And then you repay me for all that by rifling through my goddamn mail?”
He moved to the table and grabbed a fistful of our boarders’ letters in his left hand. With his right, he began shredding them, ripping corners and edges off envelopes and letting them fall through the air like ticker tape.
“You think it’s fine to just rip open other people’s letters?” he raged. “Invade their privacy? I wonder how you and all your men will like being treated with the same—”
“Stop! Stop! That’s not yours!” She was grabbing at his hand, jumping and scrabbling and scratching at his wrist with her maroon nails as he held the mail above her reach. “How dare you, Nick! How dare you!”
I stepped forward then, went right at the middle of them, and grabbed each one by the wrist. I was taller than her, smaller than him, but mostly I was just in the middle, the most pivotal and horrible place to be, and I used my position there to shove them apart, get my reluctant body between them. I couldn’t look at them, either of them, didn’t want to see the ugliness in their faces. But I sure felt them. Mom’s wrist was tiny and veined, with little bones running lengthwise under my fingertips. Dad’s was meatier, with coarse hairs that tickled my palm grotesquely. But my parents were exactly alike in one way. The flesh of both their wrists quivered with a hostile buzzing energy, a pent-up current of rage itching for release. And standing between them, gripping their wrists, I completed the circuit. I became—or maybe had been for years—the crucial connection through which that destructive current could pass. The jolt was immediate. I felt that itching torrent of hatred, or corroded love, or whatever name you give to such a thing, surge from both my parents and meet inside me. I felt it vibrating through my fingertips—like the time I touched the robot girl’s damaged nipple at Dad’s studio door, only much, much worse—coursing up through the soft skin of my inner forearms and through my armpits to my heart and throat. It made me short of breath, and it made my face hot from the inside out, and it made me—well, it made me furious.
The Gargoyle Hunters Page 19
