The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  Back in those days, I was searching for the answer, capital A. I didn’t have it and looked to everybody else for clues. My mother didn’t seem to have the answer: as a poet, she dwelled in the humdrum; her insights were the insights of a different generation—using the shock of fresh language to wake people up to the daily beauty of a dog’s bark, a sinkful of dirty dishes. This wasn’t what I was after. These weren’t my concerns. Almost a generation older than flower power, my mother watched that short era of hope bloom and die its cynical death from a relatively safe soul-preserving remove and was able to adopt the discoveries worth adopting—namely a sense of liberal self-expression, the only good thing to come of those times besides Abbey Road, she thought: a quality she hoped to instill in me, all too eager to encourage my slightest creative inclinations.

  My father was an early mentor, a man who held sacred his own childhood and through me was able to recapture some of its magic. He taught me a love of collecting—stamps, baseball cards, little-known facts—and fed my interest in science fiction. At the age of nine and ten I was thrilled to spend those rare school-free weekdays at his office on Fifth Avenue, only a dozen blocks south from where I now spent my days with Suriyaarachchi and Dave. He was a draftsman by trade, my father—one of those trades that simply vanished with the advancement of computers. He toiled away at a steeply angled table, tracing intricate ductwork and wiring onto sheets of vellum with a special metal pencil whose soft graphite set down marks as dark as ink. The windows—the office was on the top floor of an eighteen-story building—looked out onto a scale model of a busy street scene: toy cars and buses inching along the replica avenue, complete with tiny streetlamps and blinking crosswalk signs. I can still feel the simple pleasure of sitting near him as he worked, taking up the adjacent table. The person who sat at this desk was invariably in a meeting in the conference room whenever I was around. It only occurs to me now that this man was probably not in a meeting but rather vacating his normal post to allow me to sit beside my father, bringing his work to the big conference table for the day as a favor to us. In my room, next to my piano, is a large cardboard tube, the kind used for architectural drawings. It is filled with poster-sized vellum plans for intergalactic cruisers, light-duty zero-gravity suits, and lethal dense-particle plasma rifles. If you look closely at my 2s, you can see how I tried to undo the loop in them so that they would be more like my father’s 2s, a practical and efficient arrowhead V pointing down at the base of a curve. Next to his, mine looked dopey, the 2s of a student puzzling at the sum of a pair of them. And in the bottom right corner of each of my plans, copying his sturdy caps, I put the name of the project, the name of the draftsman (myself), and the project’s lead architect (my father).

  But while I might have been entertained here of the occasional weekday afternoon, on the weekends—every weekend—I was making my pilgrimage on the Uptown local, plus the six uphill blocks farther by foot, to lock myself away in a practice room in the service of great art. By the time I was able to thunder through a Brahms rhapsody on the keyboard, I had left my father behind. Through my teens, my mentor was my piano teacher, an enormous man, six six easily, as round as he was tall. He had an enormous bald head and enormous hands. To see those fingers move across the keyboard was to understand why people use athletic terms to describe some classical musicians. His fingers were galloping horses, running wild and yet nailing every single note. Mr. Masi. His tastes became my tastes. Fred Astaire, Arthur Rubenstein. These were the greats. I diligently collected all the classic recordings and every old musical he praised with the same feverishness of my days collecting stamps and cards with my father. At the same time, Mr. Masi taught me a sensitivity to grace and beauty—and that such a sensitivity could be a masculine trait. To speak with confidence about how gorgeous a particular passage was and to, upon hearing it, close one’s eyes in submission to it. Artur Schnabel playing Kreisleriana, Maurizio Pollini rolling through a Chopin étude. Some lessons would begin this way, him putting on a recording and letting it fill the room. I would watch him go limp at these climactic moments and then, snapping out of it, turn to me and shout, “See? Good God! Do you see what this is all about?” And I did. He taught me to seek out these moments, to feel the shiver down the spine.

  But then I went off to college and left Mr. Masi behind as well.

  In my twenties, I was adrift, in search of a new mentor—someone who could help me make sense of this new territory I found myself in, disillusioned with university-level music making but still desperate to do something with my life, make something of myself. But how? For a while, it seemed that Suriyaarachchi had the answer: even though he was young, younger than me, his sheer enthusiasm made him a candidate. To him, creativity was an entrepreneurial endeavor, imbued with the possibilities of great profit and renown. I was drawn to his confidence but saw also that much of that confidence was based on wishful thinking. Which is when Arthur showed up, with his astonishing feat of language, his uptown professorship, his sexy wife and precocious son, and I saw that maybe, just maybe, I had been too hasty in my dismissal of art. Here was a man who seemed to have it all: prestigious job, family—and an audience. What more could one want?

  And then there was the business of that cadenza. In the middle of my formative stages as a young artist, to witness that act on that stage. It was so shocking, so out of the realm of what I knew art to be—even compared with those sixties experiments involving pianos rolled off stages. Thinking back on it, I can see that it was both the catalyst that propelled me onward, down the path toward a bachelor’s degree, as well as the poison pill that had slowly, over the course of my four years at conservatory, forced me back off that path, dissatisfied with the smaller and smaller territories academic composers were mapping out for themselves. Nothing I had experienced in those four years lived up to the sheer enormity of that act. But what did it mean? The memory of that incident had troubled me—for years afterward—remaining a knotted question in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there until bumping into him again after more than a decade. And here he was; it was an opportunity to work out that knot. I was happy to have been given a second chance with him.

  So then: A mentor. And answers.

  I arrived at Dave’s exhausted. Strange dreams involving Arthur and a shotgun. The gun would go off, and I’d wake up. This happened several times. Finally, I gave up and turned on the light. It was three in the morning.

  Suriyaarachchi was on the phone with his father, a one-sided conversation in which he stared down at his feet and plucked at his eyebrows, grunting occasionally. After he got off, he was in a foul temper. Dave, too, was in a mood, which had to do with losing a big contract he’d been counting on. We sat around the suite barely speaking. Interestingly, neither of them seemed upset at each other.

  At this point, we had a rough cut that was too long—two hours and twenty minutes—and were looking for places to trim. Dave suggested we watch it from the beginning and, after a few clicks of the mouse, shut off the desk lamp and sat down between us.

  Halfway through, Suriyaarachchi said, “What else do you have to watch around here. This movie sucks!” He leaned forward and used the remote on the coffee table to mute the sound and turn up the lights. He put his head in his hands and groaned. “God! What am I going to do?”

  Dave got up. “I think I have just the thing for today. I’ll be right back.”

  After he left I said, “So what did your father say?”

  “That it would have been better if I’d spent four years in an insane asylum, rather than film school. At least, he said, they teach you practical skills like basket weaving. He’d be half a million dollars richer by now and have some place to put his dirty laundry.”

  Dave came back with a VHS and popped it into one of the decks. He said, “How do you feel about baseball?” As it happened, Suriyaarachchi loved baseball. “World Series, game three,” Dave said. He had set it to record before going to sleep and made a concerted effort to avo
id learning the outcome this morning. Suriyaarachchi had learned the final score but hadn’t seen the game; he promised not to tell.

  I left the two of them to their mutual interest while I went downstairs for another coffee and a copy of the Village Voice. When I returned, I spread the rental listings out on the kitchen counter. It was time for a change. I needed a place of my own—spending time at Dave’s and Arthur’s helped me realize that it was more than just a thousand-dollar-a-month hole in your pocket. It was where you could, if you so desired on a Saturday afternoon, pop the cap off a cold beer to be savored with a smoke in the wide-open comfort of your own living room. Where you could entertain a certain lovely tall girl with alien amber eyes and appealingly crooked teeth.

  I made some calls with the wall-mounted phone, sipping my scalding coffee through the sharp snapped-off hole in the cup’s lid. On the face of it, hundreds of landlords around the city were vying to rent their cozy studios to me; however, all calls led to the same three brokerages, none of whom would get specific until I had filled out an application. Today was one of my two days off at the theater. I had been hoping to explore a lead or two during the late afternoon, but it wasn’t looking good. I popped my head into the editing suite and caught the roar of the crowd.

  “You don’t have a fax machine, do you?”

  The editor came out in his bare feet to microwave some popcorn and revealed it hiding in plain sight under a stack of books. I sat cross-legged on the floor, using the receiver to communicate with the realtors. The application was a joke. It asked for my occupation and income but for no other information that might tie me to these answers. I could have put down anything, and did, and by three thirty I was lined up to see half-a-dozen places. The broker asked me how soon I could get downtown. I told him to give me an hour.

  I pulled out my wallet and removed the slip of paper that Viktoria had given me that day, the words call me in her loopy schoolgirl hand. I dialed the number. When she answered, I said, “How would you like to go apartment hunting with me?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “The guy who hasn’t called you back in a week.”

  “Hey! I was wondering about you. I almost didn’t pick up because I didn’t recognize the number. It’s been a very upside-down world I’ve been living in. Usually, I’m the one who doesn’t call you back. Interesting feeling, being blown off. And by interesting, I mean it sucks. Apartment hunting, why not? Where should we meet?”

  I put my head into the editing suite again to announce I would be leaving early. Suriyaarachchi, engrossed in the game—it was apparently a nineteen-inning nail-biter—said, “Why don’t you just take the rest of the day off?” I was about to tell him that he was paraphrasing what I had just told him, then thought better of it.

  I thanked him and left.

  I met Viktoria on the corner of Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. I was struck anew by her beauty. She was stunning. Tall and thin, with long blond hair that today she had divided into twin pigtails. She wore a skirt, high-heeled Mary Janes, and a cardigan over a button-down oxford. I felt both sheepish and overjoyed to be walking down the street with this sexy jailbait. Every man we passed without exception was dumbstruck, even the two holding hands. She was, to say the least, out of my league. She seemed at ease with the attention, absorbing it and deflecting it in equal measure, returning a smile or lowering her gaze or staring straight ahead. There was something electrifying about being the guy she was with, like riding a motorcycle for the first time—power, danger, lack of control.

  We met the broker outside a tenement on Fifth Street and Avenue A. He had to correct himself when telling us his own name. “Hector, I mean. Viktor is my brother. Hector Villanova.” He handed us his business card with trembling fingers.

  “Villanova,” Viktoria said. “That can’t be your real last name?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Villanova means ‘new house.’ ”

  “Yes, it does,” Hector said, not catching her drift.

  Viktoria looked at me poker faced.

  Hector fumbled with the keys before letting us into the lobby. It was a five-floor walk-up, past dimly lit hallways and the smells of cat pee and frying onions. Hector described the apartment as “newly restored,” but all that seemed to mean was the stove had been cleaned. A sponge and a can of Ajax stood on the counter. One of the walls had been given a recent touch-up; the smell was intense.

  One couldn’t really be given “the tour” because there wasn’t anything, properly speaking, to tour. The place was a kitchen. Nevertheless, Hector tried his best. “These are the original linoleum floors,” he said, and tapped a buckling tile by the refrigerator with his tassled dress shoe. I went to the windows and looked down at the street corner. Hector came over to narrate the view for me, as if to revise what I was seeing. “What we have here are two exposures, unusual for the building, but this is a corner apartment. North facing and east facing. You will get very nice light here in the morning, and it should maintain an even brightness throughout the day. You can see the features of the neighborhood from here. Restaurants, nightlife, shopping. It’s very safe at night. There are people around all hours. Eyes on the street, we call it in the business. Keeps the criminal elements at bay.”

  Viktoria said, looking out, “Oh my God, that place!” She pointed to the bar directly across the street. “We used to cab it down there once the clubs closed. Nice thing about it—only thing about it, really—is that there’s no last call. They’d just let us hang out until we had to go to school in the morning. I don’t know how many times I barfed in that garbage can on the corner.” She took me by the hand. “Come look,” she said, and brought me to the bathroom.

  She sat down on the toilet. “Try closing the door.” I tried, but her knees protruded past the threshold and the door bumped into them.

  I turned to Hector. “Small bathroom.”

  Hector came over, and we both considered Viktoria as she sat on the toilet. “But you have very long legs,” he said.

  “Taking a shit in this apartment would be a public act,” Viktoria said. “It’s okay, I don’t mind.” She got up, keeping her bare knees together.

  “I will ask the landlord what he can do about that,” Hector said, making a note.

  Apartment hunting in New York City, I came to learn after Hector had shown us the others, is a special kind of hell. Each was more depressing than the next. If Viktoria hadn’t been with me, I would have quit after the first two. She was sweet and game and helped me see that, yes, I could build shelves over here or have a loft made over there and put a desk right under it. She showed me the cool thing about this place: a safe, built right into the wall! Or that one: roof access! Or: Couldn’t I just picture a cross-legged, candle-lit cocktail party in here?

  By the end, six turns deep into the realtor’s labyrinth, I began to see these apartments not for each one’s objective awfulness but for the way each stacked up against the others. It was a trick of the eye that fooled me into believing that maybe number 4 wasn’t so bad after all.

  Only to be told that if I was interested, I would need to act fast.

  “What does ‘act fast’ mean, in this situation? Me saying, ‘I’ll take it’?”

  “And filling this out completely.” He handed me a form that required my divulging all of the relevant information that the initial application hadn’t, including bank account numbers, landlord references, and a signatory waiver for a credit check. “Get it back to me as soon as you can,” Hector said. “And confidentially,” here he handed me the faxed copy of the form I had filled out earlier, “I would suggest putting something steadier sounding on your final application than ‘filmmaker’ and”—he pointed to the number I had listed for income ($300,000/year)—“make sure you have a figure here that can be verified.”

  After parting ways with Hector, we strolled back west, toward Viktoria’s apartment. Now that the sun had gone down, it was much cooler, and she hugged herself against
my arm as we walked. We stopped at the front window of the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a storefront I’d passed dozens of times on my way to the movie theater, never once having the urge to slow down, to take in what was on display.

  We went inside. I took pleasure in losing Viktoria for a short while as I wandered the store—to discover her again, at the far end of an aisle. She’s with me, I thought, just to make myself flush. I showed her Arthur’s book, which was on display. “I know him,” I said. This didn’t seem to impress her, though.

  She said, “Is it any good?”

  “Very good.”

  “Reading isn’t really my thing. I’ve got nothing against people who read, there’s just so much else to do in life. Do you think they have any books on BPD? I need to figure this thing out better.”

  She went to the counter and asked. Even the hipsters who worked here in their tight flannel shirts and horn-rimmed glasses were not immune to Viktoria. She shook them from the heights of their affected boredom to the very core of their once brace-faced, high school selves—stammering, tripping over their own feet to show her what she was looking for. It was a joy to watch.

  She brought a book to the register. Girl, Interrupted. “I hope it doesn’t suck,” she said.

  I offered to pay for it. In my head while she was picking something out, I practiced a line about how paying for her book would be my contribution to the fund for her enjoyment of reading, but all that came out was “No, seriously. I insist.”

  The clerk had already rung through her credit card. “Do you want me to void this transaction?”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  We continued on our way, through a crowd outside a velvet-roped place on Ninth Street. Viktoria looked at her watch. “What are these losers doing out so early? It’s not even eight o’clock! Remind me to tell you about that place one day. Crazy story!” As we passed the crowd, I noted the slight shift in Viktoria’s gait, taking on a bitchy catwalk.