Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  The photo was taken at a picnic they’d had with their neighbors, the Estradas—it was his mother’s romantic but unrealistic idea. Hart got drunk, as usual, and was sarcastic. Summer took a long walk, came back crying, and didn’t really cheer up all afternoon. Marcus and Jessica and Rosie and little Rafaelito, who still drank from a bottle, were all the wrong ages and sexes to play together successfully, and they could sense that their parents weren’t having a good time, so they spent the afternoon being crabby.

  Marcus remembers wanting to glide down the river in one of the canoes for rent by the bridge, and he asked Hart if they could rent one, and Hart said nastily, sure. They could rent one, he sneered, and the kids could come for a ride. Then he said with a chuckle, “Don’t be surprised if I push you all over the side, one by one, at the deepest part of the river.” Jessica Estrada burst into tears. Her father—who was called Big Rafe and didn’t like Hart any more than Hart liked him, maybe less—took his daughter on his lap and said, “I don’t think that was funny.” Hart said, “Who’s joking?” Then Mrs. Estrada said, “Maybe it’s time to head home, they said we might get a storm.” They all packed up to go, squinting at the bright, cloudless sky, and then before they left she took pictures. Somehow this one ended up in Marcus’s possession. It’s the only picture he has from his childhood.

  Marcus stares at the photo thinking, Anyone who didn’t know us would think we were a happy family. The overweight but radiantly blonde mother, and the tall, slightly bohemian father, maybe an artist or musician. Looks like the kind of guy who relocates from the city to the country because it’s a more wholesome place to raise a kid. And the kid in question is weedy and knock-kneed but his smile is pretty cute; the tilt of his head and a certain sharpness around his eyes indicate intelligence or at least curiosity.

  It’s Hart Marcus stares at most particularly, though.

  Hart’s hand on his shoulder looks imprisoning, not fatherly.

  When he looks at his father’s face, he tries to fathom what’s going on behind the false smile. When he was ten years old he couldn’t decide whether Hart was crazy or evil.

  It’s eleven years later, and he still doesn’t know.

  5

  Swap for a pair of paws

  (1991)

  Emily moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn because that’s where her friend Gene Rae Foster went to be with her boyfriend Kurt. It was only one subway stop across the river from Manhattan, and Gene Rae said the neighborhood was cheap and eccentric and full of artists and other interesting people. So it proved to be: Williamsburg was an urban wilderness of warehouses and factories, desolate streets, and crumbling, asphalt-fronted row houses you could see had been pretty once, with grand cornices and intricate iron fences, but were now ratty little boxes. The streets were almost bare of both the delights of nature and the amenities of civilization. There was the occasional ailanthus, some sycamores, a few linden trees with their starry spring blossoms, and the vast but barren park. There were two delis, a dubious natural foods store, a Polish restaurant and a Polish bakery, a café near the subway entrance, two stores catering to the neighborhood pigeon flyers, and rumors that an art gallery was planning to open on North Ninth. Someday. You wouldn’t know you were in New York City if the maddening, magnificent towers of Manhattan hadn’t glittered just across the river.

  Gene Rae found Emily a place to live, the corner of a cavernous loft on Grand Street, which Emily rented for almost nothing from two gay sculptors, one of whom was Luther in his pre-fame, pre-Lamont days. Emily’s space was boxed in with tall bookcases. She had a square of splintery wooden floor, a mattress, one window, access to the kitchen and the startlingly squalid bathroom, and a key to the roof. During that first summer, she would go to the roof in the evenings and photograph the sky and the skyline as the sun went down across the river. It was a scene that, like the Lake District sunsets Dorothy Wordsworth described in her diary in the early 1800s, was never the same no matter how many times she witnessed it. Then she would sit on the warm tar until dark, her arms wrapped around her knees, thinking about, among other things, her words.

  It was always words that interested Emily, and so it was words she wanted to photograph. Though she majored in literature in college, only taking photography courses as electives, she became as enthralled with taking pictures as she was with reading English poetry and French novels. Her two passions coexisted very nicely—by day, she roamed the streets taking photographs; by night, she curled up in bed with a book—and she knew, without being able to explain it, that she was a better photographer because she loved words. At first, they were BREAD, MEMORY, and TIME. It wasn’t long, though, before she realized not only that MEMORY and TIME were too closely related, but that MEMORY was almost impossible to find.

  She narrowed her focus down to BREAD and TIME.

  That was satisfactory for a while, but she knew she had to have three words: she was like a woman with two children who just knows—knows—she was meant to have three. She devoted many hours of thought to choosing a new word, but didn’t come up with one she liked until, at the combination animal shelter and pet-food store called the Pet Pound on Metropolitan Avenue, she fell in love with Harry.

  She had never meant to love a dog, much less own one. Her life was to be devoted to art, not to a pet or a husband or a child or any other living creature. Her life was about her Hasselblad and her Nikon and her two, soon to be three, words. But she would visit the Pet Pound sometimes, the way she visited the Polish bakery or Marta’s beauty shop, with no intention of eating the doughy pastries or getting her hair cut, but because she liked to chat. Gaby and Hattie, who ran the Pet Pound, were a long-time couple, friends of Gene Rae’s boyfriend, Kurt, who had gotten his dog from them. They also knew Luther—in fact, Hattie introduced Luther and Lamont a few years later when she found out they both had cats named Daphne. Everyone went to the Pet Pound because it was an entertainment—like going to the theater, only it was free and you didn’t have to get on the subway. The Doggie Dorm was out in back, with a run attached, but the shop itself was small—too small—and full of what Emily thought of as free-range cats. They perched on windowsills, on the counter, on the stacked bags of litter and kibble, and on top of the cages in which a few of the dogs waited, noisily, to be adopted. One dog, old half-blind Babyface, missing half a tail and most of one ear, had lived there for years, unadopted for obvious reasons, roaming the place by radar, mingling with the cats, who accepted him as they might accept a walking tree stump. A parrot named Bugsy screeched his own name from time to time, and wouldn’t stop until someone gave him a piece of celery or scratched his head. For a while they had a miniature goat, and for another while a pot-bellied pig, and one afternoon when Emily stopped in just to check things out they had Harry in a cage with two cats draped across it, asleep.

  She wouldn’t have noticed the dog, she sometimes thought, if she hadn’t stopped to pet the cats, two sleek and beautiful mackerel-tabby brothers in the process of being adopted. The cats didn’t wake up when she petted them, just purred and stretched in their sleep. When Emily looked down to see whose cage they were lying on, the sad brown eyes of a true mutt looked back up at her.

  “Well, hi there, cutie pie,” she said, and he whined with joy.

  Harry was an older dog, with, Gaby told her frankly, bad teeth that needed seeing to. He wasn’t pretty: a little foxy fellow with short, rough, tan fur that leapt out in long, inexplicable wisps here and there. He had short ears and a long muzzle and a solid, piggy body.

  “He’s obviously part terrier,” Hattie said.

  “And maybe part toilet brush,” Gaby added. When she opened the cage door, Harry shook himself and emerged. He sat on the floor looking up at Emily with an expectant grin. A black cat came over and sniffed him disdainfully.

  “You have to admit he’s a really silly-looking dog.”

  “For Harry every day is a bad-hair day.”

  Gaby and Hattie stood over him, ch
uckling. They knew they could say anything. They had been in the pet placement business long enough to recognize love at first sight when they saw it.

  Emily bent to pet him, and he licked her hand once, politely, then freaked out and tried to lick her face. He smelled good, she thought: He smelled like a dog, with an overlaying smell that reminded her of pancakes. Pancakes? How could a dog smell of pancakes?

  “Harry, get down,” Gaby said. “Don’t be disgusting.”

  Emily found she had the beginning of tears in her eyes. She didn’t mind if the dog licked her face. She hugged him, and he quivered all over, then tried to jump up on her again. His head knocked against her chin, jarring her teeth together. How long had it been since she had loved anyone so intensely?

  “I really want him,” she said. “Am I crazy?”

  “If you’re not, it’s okay. Harry is.”

  Harry had belonged to a textile designer from Greenpoint with the wonderful name of Malaysia Morales—they knew Emily would want to know this—until she moved to Baltimore with her boyfriend, who was allergic to dogs. Malaysia was broken-hearted, but Gaby and Hattie were delighted that she entrusted Harry to them. “We knew he’d be adopted in a week,” Gaby said.

  “So how long has he been here?” Emily asked.

  “Six months,” Gaby said, and giggled. Then she said, “Just kidding. Four days. We’ve had lots of inquiries.”

  Four days, Emily thought. What if she hadn’t come in? What if someone else had adopted him? Harry was gazing at her with a sort of calculated enthusiasm—comparing her, Emily figured, with his lost Malaysia. Well, who could blame him? Her job was to measure up. He looked like the frisky kind of dog who enjoyed having a ball thrown for him, so she bought a red ball with a bell inside it. She also bought a red leather collar with a brass plate where she could have his name engraved, and a red leash and a box of dog biscuits, size small. She arranged to have a sack of Science Diet (for Older Dogs) delivered. She filled out the adoption forms, wrote a check, and got the name of a veterinarian who could do something about Harry’s teeth.

  “Good luck,” Gaby said, snapping on the leash. She scratched Harry’s head, and Harry closed his eyes and put his ears back in pleasure. “He’s pretty needy. If he doesn’t drive you nuts, you’re going to love him.”

  The parrot screeched “Bugsy!” as they left, but Harry never looked back.

  DOG, Emily thought as she and Harry walked down Metropolitan, BREAD. TIME. DOG. “Dog,” she said to Harry, who paid no attention, just kept walking toward the corner, where he turned left as if he had lived on Grand Street all his life.

  Luther was happy about Harry, though Daphne the cat wasn’t—she skulked under the bed, then moved to the top of the refrigerator, blinking her yellow eyes and hissing. But Stephen, the other sculptor, said, apologetically, “I’m just not a dog person,” and told Emily she’d have to move. She’d just sold two BREAD photographs to Dr. Demand for two thousand dollars and a cleaning. She had planned to use the money to travel around Italy, where she had never been, photographing PANE and TEMPO signs, but the check was also the equivalent of half a year’s rent for her own place, provided the place was cheap enough. The loft in Anstice Mullen’s building on North Third Street was advertised on a hand-printed flyer attached to the wall outside the natural foods store:

  LARGE LOFT FOR RENT $300.

  NO FREAKS.

  PREFER PET-OWNER.

  Emily Lime was twenty-five, she had an old dog named Harry, and she thought she was on her way to being a real photographer, one who could make a living at it. She moved into the loft, which smelled strongly of cinnamon from the spice factory and had an ancient, dangerous freight elevator that required brute strength and extreme bravery to operate. She painted the floors battleship gray and each wall a different color. The ceilings were eighteen feet high, and to paint the upper parts she had to borrow an extension ladder from Anstice and, terrified, lean out and up and down to slap on the paint with a giant brush. It took her most of a week, at the end of which she was exhausted. She spent a whole day sacked out on her mattress with Harry. He didn’t smell of pancakes any more, he just smelled of Harry, which was fine with her. Harry slept nicely at her side when she slept, and woke up instantly when she stirred, and began alternately begging for breakfast and looking for his ball. She remembered part of an Ogden Nash poem she had learned as a child:

  I envy oft my faithful pup.

  He has no trouble getting up.

  Harry’s playfulness energized her, and she felt the exercise of chasing a ball was good for him, at his age. She would throw the ball for him from the mattress end of the loft to the kitchen end where she had a mini-stove and mini-refrigerator. The second she let it go, Harry would let out a joyful yip and take off. Sometimes he would catch it in midair, a dazzlingly graceful maneuver that turned her ridiculous little dog into a ballerina.

  She doted on Harry, and within a week he was doting back, not wanting Emily out of his sight, and howling—her neighbors reported to her, sourly, in the elevator—like a soul in hell when she left him alone. She had to leave him alone pretty regularly; within three months, Dr. Demand’s money was gone—Harry’s teeth alone cost four hundred dollars—and she hadn’t sold anything else. She couldn’t get a grant or a gallery, or even a spot in a group show in a restaurant in Greenwich Village where she knew one of the waiters, so she took a job working three days a week as the assistant to a gardener named Sophie Lopez.

  Sophie lived in Emily’s building, two floors down. She was English, tall, blonde, fortyish, and classy, divorced from a Mexican painter. She didn’t look like someone who dug in the dirt for a living: She looked like a glossy socialite gotten up in jeans, muddy boots, and knee pads to raise money for the Central Park Conservancy. She specialized in the roof gardens of the wealthy who lived near the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. Emily had almost no gardening experience—as a child, she had, under protest, helped her parents in the yard with weeding and deadheading—but they got along. Emily was strong and willing to learn, and Sophie was easy-going and willing to teach.

  It was on a rooftop terrace on Pineapple Street—the kind of immaculately pastoral place where no wildlife ventured, unless it was the family cat—that Emily encountered Izzy. She and Sophie were working at the home of Victor and Tilda Ramsey, doing the fall cleanup and bulb planting on their fourth-floor terrace. The terrace looked out to the river and to Lower Manhattan on the river’s other shore, the towers of the World Trade Center rising up from the shimmering village at their feet like the twin spires of a strange cathedral. It was a blue-sky day in November, unexpectedly warm. Emily dug a trench and prepared to set some tulip bulbs. She stuck her shovel into the dirt, turned to scoop a handful of bone meal out of a sack, and there sitting on the sack was a pale yellow bird.

  Emily stopped stone-still and stared at it.

  It put its head to one side and stared back with its round black eye.

  Emily didn’t move, but the bird swiveled its head around, first one side and then the other, as if trying to figure her out. Then it said something like “Tk.” Emily replied, gingerly, “Tk.” The bird gave a squawk—“Erk”—and Emily said “Erk” in return. They looked at each other for another half minute, and then Emily, very slowly, raised her arm and stuck out a finger. The bird cocked its head and stared, but when she moved her finger closer to the vicinity of its round ivory breast, it hopped on. Emily stood very quietly with her arm held out straight, making soft “tk” and “erk” noises. The bird’s feet on her finger were dry, with sharp claws that dug in and almost but not quite hurt. Gradually, she bent her arm and brought the bird closer. When it was six inches from her face, it flew suddenly to her head and perched there. Emily said, warily, “Sophie.”

  Sophie looked up from the rosebushes she was tying and said, “Oh sweet Jesus, what the bloody hell is that on your head?”

  “I. Don’t. Know.” Emily spoke between clenched teeth. She was afraid to move anyt
hing, even her lip muscles.

  “I think it’s a cockatiel,” Sophie said. “Cockatoo? Whatever. It’s certainly cute.”

  Emily could feel the little claws on her scalp. She said, “Tk.” The bird didn’t answer at first. Then it said, “Tk tk tk tk,” a soft, contented mumble. Carefully, she raised her finger again. The bird hopped on, and Emily, feeling more confident, brought it down to look at. It was a creamy yellow bird and on its head was a tall tuft that went up and came down at random. It had a spot of orange on each cheek and a long, stiff tail. Its legs and feet were pale pink. It looked her in the eye. It said “Tk” again, and “Erk.”

  “I wonder whose it is,” Sophie said. “The Ramseys don’t have one. Maybe it belongs to a neighbor?”

  “It belongs to me,” Emily said.

  “I think it crapped on your head,” Sophie said. “It’s claimed you for its own.”

  Tilda Ramsey gave her a cardboard box with holes punched in it, and it settled in quietly. Tilda didn’t know anyone with a cockatiel, but Sophie made Emily put up signs in the neighborhood. On the way home in Sophie’s truck, on which was painted: A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN GARDEN DESIGN SOPHIE LOPEZ, PROP, Emily held Izzy’s box on her lap, making noises at it. The bird was quieter, but now and then it would let out a loud “Tk” and once a shrill “Eek.”