In my daughter Sally’s pre-kindergarten class, there is a boy who was born without a jaw. I see him on the mornings I take Sally to school. There, among the happy chaos of the classroom, the children peering at picture books or playing with blocks, he stands, his arms stiff at his side, eyes darting about, watching all, a boy who has not so much a mouth as a wet, backward-slanting orifice with one or two teeth visibly protruding. Above the top lip is the face of a handsome youngster, with bright eyes and a head of brown hair; below, a dream of fleshly horror. He is otherwise quite normal, I’ve heard, quite bright. He can’t speak, and there is no prospect that he will speak normally for decades, if ever. I’ve also often seen the boy’s parents, who are gray with exhaustion and disappointment. I admit that my heart is tight and small, that I shy away from them and don’t wish to meet their eyes, and that nonetheless my attention is drawn with sick fascination back toward the boy’s face; if possible I steal a second glance at it, if only to reaffirm my revulsion, to derive cheap comfort that this has not been my fate. How difficult it must be for the family, how easy my daughter’s life must seem compared with their son’s. I would not trade places with the father of that boy for anything. Cut me up, I won’t trade places. What is it like, I wonder as I kiss Sally good-bye in the mornings, to have a child like that? Could I take it? Do you blame fate or chromosomes or God? Does the husband, I wonder, see the boy’s face when he is having sex with his wife? Is there enough love and calm and money in this family to carry it through the inevitable operations and disappointments and complications and frustrations? And if not? What is a family made of? From what I can tell, the boy’s family doesn’t seem to be doing all that well; the husband is overweight by a good eighty pounds, his manner joyless. I want to put my arm around him and say I am sorry as hell that this happened. I want to indicate to him that I see his suffering, but instead, as his son says good-bye in sign language, always I am a coward and slip past, through the door, out of the momentary prison of their grief. I imagine that the father works in an office somewhere, servicing other people’s needs. He looks like he might sell something—insurance or advertising perhaps. He makes a salary good enough to afford the school’s tuition, but I suspect that every spare dollar the couple earns is spent on the son, somehow, or because of him. There was a time when this man was himself a boy, a boy on a bicycle, the wind whipping his hair, then a young man falling in love; now he is a gray forty-year-old burdened by fat and a son with a serious birth defect. And the wife—she is haggard and defeated, her skin sallow with deep circles under the eyes. I imagine that she is the one who deals with their son’s special meal requirements and visits with therapists and so on, who asks the doctors about the sequence of the bone-graft operations. She is the one who manages the family’s edifice of torment. Either one of those parents would give anything for their son to have a normal jaw, anything. And were mother and father somehow to gaze through the porch window of the Wren family, say, in the happy, noisy hour before school, either one would see what was now forever lost to them and testify that they, too, would be capable of such joy, if only. And either one of them, particularly the husband, himself subject to the winds of male lust, would tell me that I was insane to be gambling with the wholeness of a family. I don’t care how good the sex is, it isn’t worth it, the husband might whisper into my ear. Look at me, look upon destruction. And listening carefully, respectfully, I would nod my agreement.
Yet. Yet there I was, standing inside the wet black box of Caroline Crowley’s shower, washing my dick. All the surfaces of the shower had been cut from an ebony marble that sparkled with starry constellations of quartz. It looked a foot deep, a thousand dollars a running yard. I smelled her soap and the shampoo and thought better of anointing myself with these odors—Lisa would notice instantly. Then, dressed, I said I had to go, and Caroline nodded, perhaps sadly. The moment was tender, but not happy, more like we’d both just been wounded. The room felt ashen and cold. We made no reference to my wife or her fiancé. We made no reference to the utter inadvisability of what we’d done—it loomed there, stupid and monstrous. She was hunched in an armchair in a white bathrobe with her legs drawn up beneath her, seeming to have passed into a mood of contemplation. There is something about the first sex with a person that invites recollection of all the other first times, near or far, that form the chain of one’s memory; the step that takes us into ecstasy with a new partner is also, by the logic of time, another step toward death, and if we are not chastened by anything else, we had best be chastened by this. I left Caroline pulling a tortoiseshell comb through her yellow hair. My encounter with her had in no way diminished my love for my wife and children—no, that is plain enough; the mystery is that my love for them did not preclude the possibility that I might now love Caroline Crowley, too, in that sudden, sickening, unstable way that one craves and should rightly fear.
And then, behold the adulterer. In the mirrored brass of the elevator I gazed upon myself—flushed, hair wet, lips slightly swollen. I felt less shame than I should have, I felt a dark little thrill, I felt an echoing pleasure in my balls. I tightened my tie and buttoned my wool coat. I would, of course, have to understand myself as a man who had, for the first time, cheated on his wife. Almost spontaneously. Yet I see now how much better it might have been if I’d understood myself in another way, too—that I had entered a labyrinth far stranger and more dangerous than I could ever imagine, far more wretched than the mere banality of adultery. The brass elevator door slid open, and I walked out of the lobby, past the front desk and Napoleon, the uniformed doorman. He was a tiny, greasy thumb of a man, and his eyes darted sideways as I went by. He gave me a slow, unctuous nod, tipped his finger to his cap, and indicated that a taxi was waiting outside. Only by the merest chance, after I had settled into the cab, after the doorman assumed I was looking elsewhere, did I see him glance at his watch, pull a pen and pad from his pocket, and make note of something—make note, I realized only later, of me.
We think we know the city, but we never do. For all brightness there is corollary darkness, for all places known there are others full of unremembered lives and lost music. I always have been drawn to these spots; they are damp and cold and defy hope, they sag and rust and rot, they repel vanity and beckon death: a woman’s shoe in a gutter, an empty bottle left on a stone step, a door repainted a dozen times in a hundred years. Early the next morning I stood in one such place—the north side of Eleventh Street, just off Avenue B—for no useful reason except that I had awoken with an odd desire to see number 537, the fenced building lot where Simon Crowley’s body had been found seventeen months earlier. But whereas the corpse had been discovered in a rubble of bricks, the space was now flat and divided into small garden plots, such as single families might use. I could see this even though the snow was still deep in places, the wind having swirled violently around the lot and piled up drifts, even building a three-foot-high ridge that began near one wall, passed through the chain-link fence, and around in front of number 535, the building next door. But it was the garden plots that interested me; the corn husks, dried tomato vines, and rotted flower beds separated by curving paths of scavenged brick and festooned with Christmas lights and chrome hubcaps. A small Puerto Rican flag flew over the garden, and despite the cold, chickens pecked around a shack at the rear of the lot. To one side was a bench seat from a car. An immense and eyeless stuffed animal, gray from the weather—a bear or a dog—hung from the wall of the adjacent building, as if blindly guarding the garden or perhaps, more particularly, the statue of Christ standing in a small grotto planted with roses and hollyhocks. All had been blasted by the winter, but come spring it would be a place of lushness and color, of life.
An obese older woman came out of the shack with a rake and started to drag it across one of the small beds. It seemed an odd activity for a winter day, even a warm one, but she seemed content, smoking a cigarette as she worked. Then she noticed me, as I’d hoped, shielding her eyes to see the figur
e shadowed against the fence. “¿ Qué quieres?” she shouted. What did I want? I shrugged theatrically. She came toward me, picking her way past many of the largest pieces of rubble, and I could hear her wheeze as she approached. A remembrance of my mother, dead more than thirty years, ticked somewhere in my brain. My mother had loved me, her only child, with all her heart, but it was a heart choked with fat; she was so immense that she died lifting me out of the bathtub when I was six. I still didn’t have a way to explain it to myself.
Now the woman neared; in her hand she held a small plastic canister, her finger set on a button. I saw that her face was marked by struggle and ill health and sadness; her eyebrows had the thin, hatched scars of a woman who had been beaten.
“Jes, mister, can I help you?”
“I like gardens, so I stopped to look.”
“Jes?” Her eyes were wary.
“We kept a garden when I was growing up,” I told her. “We grew a lot of vegetables. Corn, tomatoes. You grow that here?”
“Jes.”
“We used to grow lettuce and cabbage and broccoli and all kinds of stuff. Peas early. I bet you could plant them in April here. Get some rows of marigolds in between the rows for the bugs?”
“Marigolds?” she asked. “¿Las floras?”
“Yes, the flowers. Marigolds. Put them in and the bugs hate the smell.”
The thought intrigued her. “I show the garden to you?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’d like that very much.”
I followed her through the chain-link door, and she locked it carefully.
“My name is Estrella Garcia,” she said.
“Porter Wren,” I said.
She didn’t seem to recognize the name, which was just as well.
“What is that stuff anyway?” I asked, pointing at the small canister in her hand. “Mace?”
She shook her head solemnly. “You no can use the Mace on the dogs. You have to have tear ducks.” She pointed at her own eyes, which were a greenish-brown, and it occurred to me that once, long ago, they must have been described as beautiful. “This is pepper, ’cause pepper go in the nose, okay? The pepper work on dogs and bad peoples, okay?”
I nodded. “I was worried you were going to give me a shot of that.”
She frowned. “You no be scared now.”
We followed a crude brick path around the lot. I silently located the approximate place where Crowley’s body had been found; now it was a patch of dead zinnias set in planters made from sliced car tires. The soil wasn’t very good, full of bits of mortar and shards of brick and window glass. The demolition company had left some large fragments of poured concrete and even some steel beams, and I wondered if the discovery of Simon Crowley’s body had spooked the workers and made them finish up sloppily.
“In my country we have very many gardens everywhere,” Estrella Garcia was saying. “In the little town people grow a corn, tomato, this place is just someplace for peoples to be happy and grow maybe some flowers, maybe some peppers …”
“It’s a new garden?” I asked casually.
“Just one summer. Everybody they work very hard last spring because the peoples, they put, you know, lots of trash and broken things first, see, this was planted by my grandson—” She pointed to a scraggly row of sunflower husks. “We make it so beautiful for some peoples who live here. Everybody, you know, love this garden.”
“Everybody who uses it lives on the street?”
She nodded absentmindedly, poking at an errant brick with her puffy foot. “My family, we live next door over there.” She gestured at the adjacent building, 535. “Some peoples they live across the street, you know, everybody they come from right around here.”
“Was the building that was here falling down?” I asked.
She shrugged. “No, not so bad, you know.”
“Not boarded up and falling down?”
“Nobody they live there, but it was okay, you know?”
“How was the roof?”
“I don’t know these things. Some peoples they tried to live there, but they got kicked out. Our building is better. My son-in-law is the super. He do a very good job. He always cleaning the hallway, the front steps, everything …”
We walked back to the high fence.
“Did they need to tear down this building?”
“No, it was pretty good, I think.”
“Does your son-in-law know about the building?”
“Oh. jes.”
“Would it be a bother if I asked him about it?”
Whether it was a bother or not, she didn’t say. We made our way toward the back of the property, and Mrs. Garcia led me down three cement steps blocked with children’s bicycles, through another door marked OFFICE, and then down a wooden staircase, where the air suddenly became quite hot, and into an immense, dark room with pipes snaking everywhere and a roaring furnace the size of a truck, a row of hissing hot-water heaters, an empty elevator cage, more bicycles, a far stairway, miscellaneous lumber, and, under a lightbulb with a long chain and a tennis ball at the end of it, a rather fine antique desk, where a graying Latino man in spattered, heavy-lensed glasses sat filing a small piece of oily equipment with an angry determination that gave me to understand that he knew exactly what he was doing and, on the whole, would rather have been elsewhere.
“Luis,” said Estrella Garcia, “this man was asking about the building they tore down.”
He looked up, flicked his eyes at me. “Next door?”
“Right,” she said.
“Yes?” he said to me, taking off his glasses.
“I was wondering about the apartment house next door. Number five-thirty-seven. Why’d they tear it down?”
“It was no good.” He shrugged, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Oh. Your mother-in-law said it was in pretty good shape.”
He shook his head disgustedly. “No, no, she don’t know nothing about how these buildings work. It was no good. They didn’t replace nothing after, like, 1970. I was in that building a thousand times. The roof was terrible, the second floor had structure failure, it had bad cracking, no good. They didn’t replace the roof, and you gotta do that. You gotta fix the roof or else that water gets down in there, see, things start freezing and cracking and rotting. Place was full of rats, too.”
I identified myself, told him I was a reporter. “What about the body they found when they were knocking the building down?”
The superintendent nodded and sighed, as if all human activity was a burden to him, unsurprising in its idiocy. “Thought it was something like that.”
“I suppose the cops asked a lot of questions?”
“They asked a few.”
“They never solved it.”
He shrugged. It was no matter to him. “People keep on getting killed, you know? We had a lady up on the fifth floor. And some kid down the street.”
I nodded. “Did you ever wonder about how the body got onto the lot?”
“Not really,” he said. “Not my business.”
“Well, I mention it because the lot was sealed off by a sidewalk shed with concertina wire on top and the building was sealed up, too.”
“Except for the front door.”
“Right, but that was locked,” I said. “That probably wasn’t—”
“Hey, hey, wait a minute,” he said, wiping his hands again forgetfully. “You know how many locksmiths there are in this city? I got tenants upstairs changing their locks all the fucking time. They don’t want to pay their rent anymore and they change their locks.” He shook his head. “The landlord used to change locks! Now the tenants. Always screaming about a rent strike.” He threw the rag down on the desk. My inquiry did not interest him; rather, he was taking the opportunity to issue a general complaint. “I’m telling you, it gets old trying to fix everybody’s sink and shit. I got only one guy helping—” He turned toward a dark corridor that ran alongside some large pipes wrapped in insulation. “Adam! Come in here.”
&
nbsp; A short, soft-looking young man in a Mets T-shirt emerged. He was chewing his lip.
“Adam,” the superintendent yelled. “Get the box. Show the reporter-man how many keys you got.” He turned toward me. “I got Adam keeping track of the keys.” He turned back. “No, Adam, get the big box. Tenants supposed to notify and give me a new key—that’s in every lease—and then they don’t give me a key. I work for the landlord. Fucking shit-dick. Hairplugs on his head. Every time I see him it’s more hairplugs. I work for him. I make money for him and he turns it into hairplugs. Looks like little bushes in a row, heh!” He smiled bitterly. “But I work for him. Everybody got to work for somebody, right? He gets me to put on these special locks, double-keyed and special hotel locks and all kinds of shit like that, and then I come back three days later and the tenant fucking got a locksmith to get it open so maybe she can go get her teakettle, right? Right, Adam? You get that box of keys, now, Adam. Hey, stop fucking around back there!” He looked back at me. “I used to know all the locksmiths, and they would check with me first on the way in, but them days is—” The phone rang, and he lifted a heavy black receiver from a set on the wall. “Yes, yes. No! Don’t touch it, Mrs … . Tell Maria don’t touch it. No, that won’t work. I’m coming.” He hung up and looked at me. “Lady on the second floor got a five-year-old girl. The ball thing fell off the TV antenna. The kid stuck the antenna in the light socket. That kid should be fucking toast right now, but she’s okay. Don’t ask me why. Maybe the socket is dead. I gotta go get it out” He picked up a toolbox, then walked over to the empty elevator cage and pushed a red button. “So anyway … yeah, about the whole lock thing there, that building—maybe they didn’t go in the front door, but they could have, they could have done anything, they could have gone from my roof over to their roof, and then smashed in the roof-access door and had a party up there.”
Manhattan Nocturne Page 10
