by Lou Aronica
My father didn’t say anything but instead concentrated on laying down a row of cilantro seeds.
“You’re not going to be upset if all we get on this plot is a bunch of crabgrass, are you?” I said.
He patted the topsoil down with one hand while he turned to look over at me. “Why would that happen? We’re doing all the things that the guy at the nursery told us to do.”
“We’ve just never done this before. We don’t even have houseplants. We barely have shrubs.”
“The occasional flash of optimism wouldn’t hurt you, you know.”
“I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”
He gathered himself up, walked over to me and kissed me on the top of the head. “Thank you, Anna, for worrying about me. Get out of the way, I’m going to water.”
I dropped the last of the pepper seeds into the ground and patted the topsoil over them. My father’s reference to my grandmother was obviously intended as a way to tell me not to “mother” him. I was flattered, to be honest.
He turned the hose on and sprayed water over the entire plot, drenching the topsoil as the guy in the nursery had told us to do. I stood there watching, until he turned the nozzle of the hose in my direction and sprayed my shoes. I wasn’t looking and was momentarily stunned by the act, wondering if something had gone wrong. When I realized that nothing had, I took two quick steps out of the way of the water.
“Hey, that’s totally not fair,” I said. “You know that I’m not going to try to get revenge on an old guy with creaky knees.”
He sprayed me directly in the face.
“That’s for calling me an old guy,” he said before releasing the nozzle and throwing the hose on the ground.
I wiped my face with my hands. The water was a little chilly, but I didn’t want to go inside for a towel. He walked to the edge of the garden to survey the quality of his sprinkling. When I walked over toward him, he flinched a bit, probably assuming I was going to take the hose to him.
“It’s safe,” I said, putting my hands up. He turned back toward the garden, as did I.
“It’s not too wet, right?” he said.
“Nah. Looks about the way the nursery guy told us it should look.”
He nodded. He seemed surprisingly proud of this accomplishment.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “If nothing grows, though, we’ll know it’s your fault.”
~~~~~~~~
Mark Gray kept me waiting for around twenty minutes that Tuesday. The time was hardly wasted, since I had an article with me to edit, but it did present me with one of those conundrums I’ve never known the etiquette for. Ordering mineral water and drinking it was of course acceptable while waiting for one’s guest. But what about the bread on the table? Were you allowed to eat it before your dining partner arrived? Was it okay as long as you didn’t have a half-eaten piece on your bread plate when he came? In all of my years of restaurant meals (many of which involved waiting for editors to show up), that question had never been sufficiently answered for me. I decided to leave the bread alone and concentrate on the manuscript.
If I didn’t know him as well as I did, I could easily have formed an impression of Mark as someone who too carefully crafted a pushing-the-outside-of-the-envelope image. Hair slightly long. Clothing crisp but decidedly casual. Just enough stubble on his face to suggest three o’clock instead of five. He’d signed on as Features Editor of 24-Hour City (known to those of us on “the inside” as The City) at the same time that Jeff Mingus had been tapped as Editor. Mingus’s job was to make one last effort at reviving a magazine that had had its heyday in the late sixties and had stumbled out of favor somewhere around the same time as Ed Koch. Jeff had done an impressive job of righting the ship, romancing big-time writers and doing a great song and dance for prospective advertisers. But it was Mark’s work that generated the buzz. With Mingus’s support, he took wild chances, commissioning writers to extend beyond their areas of expertise to write pieces that either failed spectacularly or electrified with uncommon nuance and texture. The former pieces were quickly forgotten. The latter were regularly bandied for Pulitzers (with one piece winning the award two years earlier). Circulation rose by more than fifty percent, but more importantly, the magazine was hot again. Ad pages tripled from the point at which Mark stepped in to the point at which I sat there wondering if I should sneak a slice of sourdough olive.
In the general media, Mingus got most of the credit. But within the industry, people knew how much Mark Gray had to do with it. As a result, there seemed to be a new rumor every few weeks about some magazine dangling a top editorial gig in front of him. And yet, he was still seated in the same office in the east twenties that he’d occupied for the past five years.
“Sorry I’m late,” Mark said as he sat down at the table and reached for a piece of bread. “I was in the middle of a screaming match with a writer that was too good to walk away from.” He took the bottle of mineral water from the middle of the table, poured himself a glass, and then refilled mine. “It’s good to see you. It’s been a while.”
“Yeah, I think the last time was the Tapestry cocktail party.”
“Right, at that Cuban/sushi place. It closed something like a month later. Talk about a high-risk venture. So what have you been up to? Your father had just moved in with you the last time we talked. How’s that going?”
“I think it’s going okay.”
“You’re a better man than me. I think I’d last about thirty-seven minutes with my father in my house.”
“We’ve had our moments.”
“Yeah, who doesn’t. So I was really glad you called me. There’s something I want to talk to you about. I was talking to Aline Dixon the other day and she told me about that piece you did on the new Hayward consortium.”
“I didn’t know you knew Aline.”
“Who doesn’t know Aline? She’s great, and if she likes you she invites you to those tastings they’re always having. Anyway, she e-mailed it to me. You really nailed it. I’ve seen a number of pieces on Hayward over the years. I think we actually did one a while back when he put that experimental thing together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But this is the first time I’ve seen him come across as a human being. You have a future as a novelist.”
“Every word of it is true.”
“I figured that, actually. But it was really good stuff. Really good stuff. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it was light years ahead of your other writing.”
“I appreciate the compliment and I’ll get over the criticism.”
“So after reading it, I thought of you for this piece I want to do.”
I’d been waiting for Mark to say something like this for years. I’d pitched him a number of stories at The City and other places, but never even gotten close to connecting with him. Of course, his timing could not have possibly been worse. If I were successful at convincing him to move to Brad’s startup, he wouldn’t even think about commissioning me for anything because of my relationship to Brad. It wouldn’t be seemly for the renegade to be charged with bowing to nepotism in his first top editorial gig. This wasn’t an issue that had occurred to me earlier, because I’d all but given up hope of ever working for him. I gave a moment’s thought to betraying my brother-in-law and then decided that I couldn’t go through with it.
“You might want to hear why I asked you to lunch first.”
“You’re moving to Northern California.”
“No, though the thought has entered my mind.”
“You’ve decided to open a restaurant in Newark.”
“Right, because I want to work fewer hours.”
“You’re not really thinking about becoming a novelist, are you?”
“No, no. This isn’t about me. It’s about you. Someone has asked me to talk to you about taking the top editorial spot at a startup with great financial backing.”
His eyes grew wide. “A job? You called to recruit me?”
“You say that like
I’m asking you to join a cult.”
Mark laughed and sat back in his seat for the first time since he entered the restaurant. “I just signed a new contract with the magazine. A great new contract, I might add.”
“So break it. What’s a contract?”
“Hmm, maybe I should re-think the commission I was going to offer you. The issue isn’t the contract. It’s the job. I don’t know why people keep trying to hire me. I thought I’d made it very clear that I wasn’t moving.”
“Yeah, but everyone thinks you’re just posturing.”
He shook his head. “Figures. If I were actually posturing, no one would want me. I’m not playing. I have the perfect situation for me. I get to do basically anything I want. I work for people who love me. And I don’t have to take all the shit that Mingus has to take at budget meetings. It’s about as no-lose as these things come.”
“So you don’t even want to hear my pitch?”
“Do you feel morally obligated to make it even though there is absolutely no chance I’ll take you up on it?”
“Not when you put it that way.”
“So then let me tell you about this other thing.”
While Mark moved back to the front of his chair, I considered the expression on Brad’s face when I told him that I not only hadn’t pitched for him, but I didn’t even get to stand on the mound.
“What do you know about home schooling?” Mark said.
“Just about nothing.”
“Excellent. I suppose that means you don’t know anything about what AnnaLee Layton is doing with a bunch of kids on a block in Yonkers.”
“Nope.”
“It’s amazing stuff. One kid wins a statewide science award, another gets 2210 on his SATs, and another has an essay published in a local magazine – and she’s eight.”
“Wow.”
“She’s pretty impressive. School boards all over the country are trying to get her to tell them what she knows and she says she doesn’t have time. She’ll let us do a piece, though. Do you want it?”
“I truly know nothing about this subject.”
“What’s your point?”
“And I’m dating a schoolteacher. Is that something like a conflict of interest?”
“Are you trying to find a way to say no? I can handle rejection, Jess.”
“No, it sounds great. I’m just doing the full disclosure thing.”
“Fine. So do it. It would be fun to work together on something.”
Yes it would, I told myself. This was the last thing I had expected to happen at this lunch.
Brad was not going to be happy. But he’d get over it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When Mickey thought about it, he realized that he probably hadn’t been in the City in a couple of years. He used to love going into town with Dorothy; she had a thing about Rockefeller Center, which somehow always led to a trip to Saks. For a simple woman, she had an incongruous fascination with silk scarves. It was really her only impractical extravagance, and Mickey was more than comfortable about satisfying it.
A couple of months before they found out she was sick, Dorothy stopped showing any interest in traveling into Manhattan. She even turned Mickey down when he suggested it a few times. Mickey still didn’t understand what that was about, since there was no indication that she was really sick before going for that procedure. And then after she died, he just never found any reason. Denise lived in the city, but when she wanted to see him, she came out and Mickey would never have thought of inviting himself over. Jesse went in all the time, but Mickey never had any reason to join him. After a while, he just stopped thinking about going there at all.
Jesse’s mention that he was having lunch in Union Square got him thinking, though. His old apartment had been a short walk from Union Square, and he would often wander over there when he went out walking. He hadn’t been down in that area in easily twenty years. It would probably be unrecognizable, though of course, some things would be the same.
Jesse was watering the garden. It had become a habit of his to do so after breakfast before he got to work. Mickey felt like it was really his responsibility, since he had talked Jesse into planting the garden in the first place, but Jesse insisted it was a good “focusing tool” for him. That kid had so many different techniques that he used to get himself going, it was amazing that he didn’t spend the entire day in preparation.
“See anything yet?” Mickey said as he walked up to his son. It had been five days since they put down the seeds.
“Yeah, I was going to come get you when I finished. If you look really closely where we planted the cilantro, you can see a couple of tiny shoots.”
Mickey looked over. If he squinted, he could see perhaps an eighth of an inch of green poking out of the ground in two places.
“They’re probably weeds,” Jesse said. “But at least we didn’t sterilize the ground.”
Jesse continued watering. It was probably just Mickey’s imagination, but it seemed that he eased up on the spray just a little when he got near the “shoots,” as though he wanted to handle them delicately. He finished and started walking the hose back to the side of the house.
“My apartment was on Gramercy Park,” Mickey said as he walked with Jesse. Jesse threw him a glance that made it clear that he had no idea why Mickey felt it important to mention that then. “I had a key to the park and everything.”
“Really? That must have made you a popular guy.”
“It was a big deal then, but not as much of one as they made it later. It just meant I could get into a nice place to read the newspaper on Sunday mornings.”
Jesse nodded and set about coiling the hose back on its rack.
“I haven’t been back in a couple of decades,” Mickey said.
“I get over there every now and then. There are some great places to eat in that neighborhood.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
They went back into the house and Jesse refilled his coffee cup.
“Wanna go?” Mickey said.
“Go where?”
“To Gramercy Park. If you felt like taking a walk around there, I wouldn’t mind seeing my old haunts.”
Jesse wrinkled his nose. “I sort of have a bunch of work to do. I have to get my thoughts together for my first interview with AnnaLee Layton.”
Mickey was disappointed. He’d pretty much convinced himself that he was going into the City, and it wouldn’t be the same if he went in by himself. Jesse must have noticed this because a few seconds later, he added, “As long as we’re back by the middle of the afternoon, I should be fine.”
They didn’t say very much while they were in the car. Jesse talked some more about this teacher he was doing an article on, and they put on the radio and disagreed over a news story about tax appropriations. Otherwise, Mickey didn’t say much. He realized as they came out of the tunnel and headed toward the east side that he was feeling a little nervous. He wasn’t sure what was waiting for him there.
Jesse pulled into a parking lot about a block from the park. The neighborhood was made up mostly of brownstones, nothing particularly distinctive. People kept their places up, which was smart considering how much they were paying to live in this area. Mickey felt himself calming as they started walking down the block. He realized it had been a very long time since he’d been in a real Manhattan neighborhood. The streets were different here. Far fewer people, and most of them seemed to have some idea of where they were going. It wasn’t as though anything specific was familiar – certainly nothing jumped out at him or called to his memory – but there was a familiarity to the entire thing. Maybe it was because he had been spending so much time in this neighborhood in his mind lately. This felt a little bit like home.
By the time they got to the southwestern corner of the park, Mickey was feeling transported. There were probably only a dozen or so people inside the private park at the moment. A guy about his age reading the News. A guy in his early twenties weari
ng headphones and rocking left and right as he walked. A woman in her mid-thirties sitting on the edge of a bench talking intently into a cell phone. A guy sitting on a bench further down with his laptop open, his closed eyes searching the skies for inspiration. With the exception of the guy reading the paper, none of these types were anything like the people who had frequented the park when he lived there. All the same, Mickey felt a sense of collegiality with them. Maybe the woman with the cell phone sat on that bench holding her boyfriend’s hand on Sunday mornings.
“Too bad we can’t go in,” Jesse said.
Mickey shook his head. “It always seems like a bigger deal on the outside than it does on the inside. Let’s keep walking.”
As they did, Mickey picked up his pace. His knees weren’t hurting as much as they normally did, and he actually felt a little spring in his step. They passed a dry cleaners he used to bring his suits to, and Mickey wondered if the same family still owned it. There was a deli down the block with a sign that could easily have been from Mickey’s time. Mickey wondered if the current residents thought the sign was quaint or an eyesore. They got to the corner of 18th and Lex, and Mickey simply stopped and looked around. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t a single familiar sight. Mickey knew this was the location of one of the most meaningful kisses of his life. It was the kiss he gave Gina, right out there in the open, the morning after the engagement party.
“I’m kinda hungry,” he said to Jesse. “Want to get something to eat?”
“There are some great Indian places a few streets up.”
Mickey threw his son a smirk. “You’re kidding, right.”
“I am, yes. There’s a nice Italian place a couple of blocks down.”
The restaurant was nothing like anything that was in the neighborhood when Mickey lived there. A lot of brass and marble and hard lines. Too flashy for Mickey’s tastes, but Jesse said the food was good, and one thing he’d learned was that when it came to food (at least the kinds of food that Mickey liked to eat), Jesse knew what he was talking about.
Mickey looked through the menu quickly and was glad that the waiter was attentive. The walk through the old neighborhood had left him in the mood for talking.
