by Peter Manus
I spot a cop, at one point, and it is my cue to leave. He is in the typical patrolman’s uniform, his weapon secure at his hip, and he appears to be checking something that he carries in his hand and then glancing about, his eyes penetrating the crowd. I wonder if it is me he seeks in that audience. It is not inconceivable that they are onto me. The detectives who visited Simon are not stupid, and of course she possesses the extra sense. Has this female cop seen me in her mind’s eye? Has she done up a composite sketch, mystified as to its origin, and spread it about amongst the street officers? Such a day will come, sure. Perhaps not yet, though.
At Tati’s, I gather my remaining belongings, which fit snugly in my case. Tati chats at me in the front hallway. “I hope we are taking care,” she says, reaching out to pat my stomach meaningfully. “I know how these ‘second chance’ things can go, honey, so if it don’t work out—and I pray to the good Lord that it do but if it don’t—you just remember Tati’s address, and if it ain’t this room I got available, well, there’s plenty more upstairs, you hear?”
On the train, staring through my reflection into the blackness beyond, my thoughts wander to memories I have not visited in years.
I am behind a bar where I work, pressing trash into a can, pushing down on a greasy bag with the cover. I turn and a couple is approaching, back-lit, the man with his hand on the girl’s shoulder. I think nothing, but when I go to reenter the kitchen he grips my arm. I see now that the girl is a younger man, slight, practically a boy. The older brother grips my neck and thrusts me to my knees on the cobbles as the younger one undoes his pants. Afterwards, the man shoves me over with his boot and then throws some rolled up money in my face. $600. Perhaps he feels guilt. Perhaps he thinks my keeping this money makes me complicit.
Some weeks later I see the younger brother by chance, on the street. I follow him onto a crowded T and stand so near him I can hear the music through his ear pods. He listens to “Dragostea Din Tei” and reads a Watchmen comic book. When the train jostles us, I rub the front of his jeans with my thigh. I do it again when the train does not jostle. Suddenly aware, he looks at me, startled. His face is inches from mine, and I see that he barely shaves. I look into his eyes and touch his chin with my nose. He smiles.
One day much later I read to the dying ladies about Jakey in the paper. The Dorchester Five is big news and I am stirred. That night I lay out some clothes: a loose blouse covered in flowers, white pants, clogs, cardigan, and a quilted satchel. Around my neck I string my cross. Next day, I find his lawyer’s office and sit in the tiny reception area as the girl chats into the phone while darting me the sour glances. Late in the afternoon, Elliot bangs the door out of his way, ignoring the girl as he laughs into his phone about “not budging on escrow until the wire goes through, my friend.” He is about to elbow his office door closed when he happens to glance over, still sparring. I rise, presenting my parts for his examination. Perhaps I suggère—who knows?—but after some moments, he waves me in. I wait while he finishes his phone deal. Afterwards, we reach an agreement quite easily, as we are of a mind and he has, so he says, been looking for a woman such as I. “A presence,” he calls me repeatedly. He wonders aloud about my hair, whether I might cut it short, and when he touches it, I do not flinch. He touches my face, gently, rubs a thumb across my lips. We meet eyes. The girl has left for the day, but he locks his office door out of propriety. Fifteen minutes later, I leave with a sum he calls my retainer. I understand my life.
I find Simon sleeping, partially covered by the thin blanket. Working quietly, I stow my case under the bed. His violin sits on the table, the bow across it. I study it—it is old, and the stain has worn away in places. I move my head minutely to read the yellowed label affixed to its inside. Moinel Cherpitel, it reads.
I am wearing a dress, black, very simple. I slip it down over my hips. I flick the blanket from Simon and climb on him and lie upon him, undulating slowly until he is quite erect. Then I slide down his body until I am folded, on my knees, between his legs. I have become quite a master over the years, and when his body begins to twitch, I roll off the bed and step into my dress. He begins to wake. I leave before he sees me.
Outside, I lean my elbows on the hallway banister rail, looking down into the stairwell, smoking. The ground floor is tiled in little octagonal white tiles, trimmed with a rim of blood red tiles, many of them chipped. I tap my ash and watch it float in the still air. I listen to the violin, warming up with a series of rapid, vital arpeggios. I listen for an hour, maybe more, then enter quietly. Simon is standing with his eyes closed, playing. He is naked except for his black-framed glasses and the small cloth he drapes on his shoulder under his instrument. I lean against the door, listening. He begins to walk up and down, repeating a passage, then playing a variation of it, frowning. When he opens his eyes, he is surprised, not having heard me enter.
“What you did before,” he says. It seems to be a question.
“I want you to play well,” I say.
He puts down the instrument in its case and walks over to me. He cups my face and studies it. He undresses me himself, this time. The room is quite dim.
Afterwards I smoke, using the damp hollow of Simon’s chest as an ashtray.
“You don’t owe me any of this,” he says.
I nod, idly singeing one of his chest hairs, then another.
“We do it while I’m sleeping,” he says. “I thought I’d dreamt it.”
“It is something that I used to do,” I explain. “Cures the nightmares.”
He nods. “And I have nightmares?”
“I see them in your head,” I say simply. “I am sorry, but you are a mess in there.”
He studies me, then gropes for his glasses and puts them on to study me some more. “Are you seeing what’s in my mind now?” he says.
“It is not like that. I do not guess the playing card that you are looking at. And with you I only looked inside to see if I can stop the nightmares.”
“Do you only see images or do you hear thoughts, too?”
“With most, words. With you, the pictures. And music. Sometimes the screams.” I turn on my side, putting my face against his. “Maybe you want to punish yourself, for one reason or another. Maybe this is why you do not defend yourself when you are arrested and even the other defendants know that all you did was to try to stop that riot.”
“I was guilty,” he says.
I sit up. “You are a liar.”
He puts an arm around my shoulders. “I’m happy now,” he points out.
Later I walk over to the church through the lifeless afternoon. I sit in a pew near the back and watch them. The other player is very different from Simon—he is beefy with hairy cheeks, and so effusive when he plays that his black ringlets shake and the stool squeaks. Simon, in contrast, is uncommonly still. Only his eyes move constantly as he picks up signals from the other man’s minutest flourish. He is a dog reading the body language. They speak little, instead conversing with nods and head nudges and the occasional scribble of a pencil against the score.
Afterwards I stand in the aisle while they pack. The big man blows his nose and slaps his case closed with a loud report, while Simon studies his instrument closely. His attention is caught by my swaying sweater-coat and he does the double-take. For that moment, I see fright in his eyes. Then he smiles.
I take his arm as we walk and can see this pleases him. We pass a diner, and I stop and we retrace our steps. We sit in a booth by the cash register, and I order tapioca pudding with my coffee but find that I am not hungry. He shakes his head when I offer the spoon, but I insist and he lets me feed him a mouthful. Finally, I take his hand and pull it across. I examine the fingertips, which are calloused and stained with the rosin.
“You play well now,” I say gloatingly.
He scoffs, pleased. “The other part is being played well. Werner is a master.”
“That is shit. You know you are playing well because if you did not you would be dissa
tisfied,” I say. “But you are content.”
“I’m content,” he admits.
“So you are ready, I think, for the performance?”
He leaves his hand captive in mine, but it goes cold to my touch. I look up into his eyes that look naked without his glasses.
“You’ll let me do it,” he says. “Before…?”
I turn my head away sharply. For a moment I almost rise, but he does not release my hand, and I lose the urge to flee as quickly as it comes upon me. Finally, I nod at the table. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he says, then adds, “you’re my Nightingale, just like you were his.”
I look up and see the world grow starry as the tears block my view of him. I am still clutching his hand. “My name is Agnès,” I say.
“Well, I love you, Agnès,” he says. He pronounces my name correctly.
Très sincèrement,
Nightingale
NINETEEN
I am Nightingale—
On the night of his final rehearsal, he tells me. I have just twisted the shower handles and am standing in the tub with the curtain all around me. He passes a towel through, and I begin to dry off. He has made coffee, and I can smell it as it begins to perk. He says, “Do you know why I’m guilty of Jakey’s injuries? Have you seen it in my mind?”
“I have told you that I do not read your mind,” I say.
“I need to tell you, then.”
“You are guilty because it is what you want,” I say.
“And you want to abandon your plan because you don’t know the truth.”
I feel a chill when he talks of my hommage this openly. “So we are not objective, either one of us. But Wilkie told me you are innocent. A third party.”
“Was that on the night of his death?”
“Yes. He would not lie in his last moments. He would be honest, just then.”
“He was wrong.”
“He said that you were responsible for his own attempt to save Jakey’s life. He was mistaken about that?”
“He was correct about that,” Simon admits. “But not about my guilt.”
“How do you know all about guilt and sin?” I say, a shrill undertone entering my voice. “You think that because you wallow about in guilt you understand it?”
“Wilkie was grateful for some work I’d been doing, but he was wrong in what he thought, even about that. His view was as subjective as any of ours.”
I fist my hands in the towel. When he goes to speak I stamp a bare heel against the wet porcelain. “Enough!” I say from inside the shower curtain. He waits.
“Some day you’ll want to know,” he says.
“I don’t!” But, for a moment, I realize he is right. I want to know, and in that moment his memory explodes in my head.
He waits on the steps of the church, in the darkness cast by the shadows of the overgrown yews. He has failed at his vocation; he is foul, and they come to cast him out.
He wants for nothing, standing there in his filthy linen shirt, his jeans worn to thread at the knees and hem, his sandals, ponytail, beard. He rejects mercy and pity, empathy and compassion. God’s love, he’s come to suspect, is a hallucination. If he has a yearning, it is for anything that will make him imagine he can feel God again. He does not fear remonstration or humiliation or condemnation. As a vessel of the Lord, he’s deformed and unworthy. He personifies the perversity of God’s flock, the extent to which Man may stray, yet dwell among the pious. He is floating, there on that hot summer day, amid the fray. He floats because he is closer to death.
He sees the woman, down the cement path, beyond the gate, across the sidewalk and the street. The traffic slices between them. The old lady, out in the glare of the day with her brigade rolling behind her, all of their dresses splashes of pink and yellow and rioting flowers, all of their faces etched with righteous fury. She has come to claim her church. Her sanctity. Her God’s purity. He doesn’t blame her for her efforts to protect her domain. He is not one to condemn anyone’s crusade. His fate is to bend to the will of others, to be trampled by the hoard of the righteous. This is his calling.
“Simon, dammit!” He hears the sharp whisper from the youth center entrance behind him. No—it comes from below, from the metal hatchway under the stairs. “Come on, pussy! I got the key to the gate out back the nave, and I got to get it back before one of them bitch sisters find it missing. What are you, stoned? Look, do this for me now, I fuck you good later. You like? Yeah, I think so…” He steps away from the girl’s urgent voice. He is finished with temptation. It is time for retribution.
He sees the car, then, up the street, swerving to pass a bus that pulls out from the curb. It is the pale blue bug from Southie. There will be no salvation today. He steps forward, grips the rail, watches.
“Simon, you fuck! Get back here, goddamn you!”
He throws his satchel off, over his head. He begins to run down the path, his sandals slapping the pavement. He knows he must try to stop the inevitable. He knows, with absolute certainty, that he will fail. His is an ironic God…
I begin to cry against the towel. When he is sure I will listen, he speaks.
“I was taking crack. We had a policy at the youth center that if they turned over their drugs, we wouldn’t ask questions. This girl said she could have flushed it herself, but she was trying to prove she was going straight. I congratulated her. That night I smoked it. I don’t know why; maybe I wanted to humble myself, to prove that I, too, could sin. The next day she asked me if I wanted more. I pretended to think she meant she wanted to turn over more of her own stash. But it was a tactic. She was getting me hooked.”
“Why?”
“Her boyfriend was a dealer.”
“Her boyfriend was Terence D’Amante.”
“Yes.”
“So you became his customer.”
“No. Bruno caught on. Must be easy, if you know what to look for. Pulled me aside, offered to set me up, said he knew someone safer than D’Amante. I told him I was getting clean. But later he came back, and I said yes.”
“What was in it for Bruno?”
“At first he seemed like a punk, or maybe a petty blackmailer, just wanting to score some piece of whatever action he set up. But it was more than that. By the end, he started talking about my testifying at his probation hearing.”
“Lying under oath. But that was the point, eh?”
“He liked testing people.”
I digest all this. Finally I speak up, my voice laced with phlegm. “How long?”
“Months. Maybe four, five.”
“Others knew?”
“Oleander Tidwell. I heard she wanted to publicly shame me—the seminary student running a youth center, hooked on crack, buying it on church property. She was right to feel that way, but Wilkie Morley was trying to talk her into letting him work it out privately with me.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The girl told me. Neva.”
“Why did this girl do that?”
“I think she realized that things would go violent when D’Amante discovered that another dealer was on his turf. She went to Bruno, tried to warn him off.”
“A girl hooks a guy on crack, then suddenly develops the conscience.”
He glances at me. “I think she figured out her boyfriend.”
“He was perhaps uncontrollable, that one.”
He sighs. “I am worse. I raped her.”
I open the curtain. He stands in profile, staring through the trail of steam that rises from the coffee pot to fade into the foggy window. The water in my lashes makes him little more than a silhouette. I see the gleam off the crown of his head as he lowers his gaze to his clasped hands.
“She made the move when you were high?”
He nods.
“She wanted a child. Your child. She got you stoned. You call this rape?”
“She was sixteen. Unable to consent.”
I think about all this, my face buried
in the towel. “You may condemn yourself for that if it suits you, but none of that makes you guilty of what happened to Jakey,” I say.
He turns and meets my eye. “The dealer Bruno set me up with was Dylan Culligan.”
The air between us seems to yellow. I shut the curtain abruptly and finish drying myself. I hear the door close, and when I come out, Simon has left the apartment.
Très sincèrement,
Nightingale
TWENTY
Marina Papanikitas’s Personal Journal
Yolanda Myeroff is…let’s go with idiosyncratic. Gorgeous kitchen—black and white tiles, take your pick of ranges, pantry with a rolling brass ladder so the scullery maid can scamper up to the high shelves—you’d have forgiven her all foibles, Zoey, just to get your foodie mitts on that cook’s playground for an evening. For us flatfoot types, however, all the lady had to offer is a lot of the ritzy-ditzy.
Had our little sit-down with her a couple of hours ago. Incidentally (if I can be off-hand enough about my iconic mental condition to relegate it to the “incidentals” category), the partner and I have entered a kind of neutral zone about my “fainting spell,” as Harry has dubbed it. I insist that it’s a nutrition thing and that I’m scheduling a check-up, soon as I get around to it. Just to let me know that he’s pretending to buy that story, Harry detours through the Tex-Mex drive-through and tosses me a scrambled egg burrito. Extra hot sauce. I eat it, and it actually helps. On some level, of course, he gets that I am a spastic psychic with no control over when and how I pick shit up, and on some level I get that I need to come clean about it. Sigh. Just couldn’t settle for an average gal, could you, Zoey?
