He hung his poster—a brilliant African sunset over the veld—over his bed. He began to plan what he would do when he got out. He knew a lot of the kids here stayed in town. Fine for them, he thought. They could wake up to the pollution reports; they could wash their hair every day because it was so grimy. But he—he was going to be different.
He began to study a little harder in classes, trying to get better grades so he could get a scholarship to some college. Because of his hard work, he was given more free time away from the home. He fed his loneliness at the cafeterias, at the cafés that were just springing up. He nursed the bitter espressos, tried to look cool and important, and talked to whoever would listen to him. At first it was simply housewives, older women who were always comparing him to their sons, inviting him over to their houses, and almost always thinking he was a few years younger than he really was, because he was so small and skinny. He liked talking to the women, but he didn’t want them pitying him, so he made things up about himself. He was Teddy, he was Bill, and once, for a week or so, he was Simpson, Jr., the son of a famous surgeon. Some of the women got to recognize him and he liked that, although it was awkward when they called him by last week’s name. He had to pretend to have two names then, a middle and a first.
He began to look for kids his own age. He wandered around, trying to figure out where the high-school hangouts were, the places outsiders might go. Musicians. Poets. And girls. He wanted to meet girls. Their hair clean and long, wearing velvet or suede, looking at him like he was some secret they had to discover.
He found one place after a while, a café called Marks, owned by two University of Pittsburgh students who weren’t even there half the time. You could get a huge platter of blueberry pancakes for a dollar. Or you could sit at one of the splintered wood tables for hours and not order one thing and no one would care, no one would slap down a menu unless you were impatient enough to ask. It was rumored that the café would close down any second, that there were all these shady matters of unpaid taxes and unpaid bills.
Nick believed it. The lights flickered on and off, the heat never worked, and no one ever counted the money Nick gave them for his bills. Sometimes no one even gave him a bill at all, and when he asked for it, he was told to do the tally himself; he was trusted. Most everyone in the place was his age or a little older. He saw sleeping bags shoved into corners, he saw girls helping themselves to muffins and coffee, and he saw a few guys getting up to wash a dish or two before they sat down again.
Nick loved Marks. He would go there and sit at one of the tables and fool with the chessboard until someone would sit down beside him and want to play. He became a decent enough player because of all the people offering to teach; and it was at Marks, too, that he learned to smoke cigarettes.
He thought it looked really cool—that long, easy drag on a cigarette, the tapping ashes dusting onto the floor as you leaned toward some girl, talking to her in a low, soothing kind of voice, getting her to lean just a bit closer. He’d wanted to try smoking, but was too proud to admit he didn’t know how, too ashamed to let anyone see him fumble. So he waited until it was time for him to rush out for the last bus back to the home, and then he casually bummed a cigarette, shaking his head at the proffered light, saying he’d use his lighter, and then dashing out before someone could ask to use it, too. Outside, instead of asking a stranger for a light, he went into a cheap diner and filched a pack of matches. Then he made his way onto a deserted side street and huddled in the darkness.
He let the cigarette hang between his fingers. He took slow, careful draws at first, doubling into his coughs, forcing himself past the nausea. He goaded himself into puff after puff, trying to smooth it out, to gain a little finesse. He reeled home, greenish, swaying a little, and curled up into a tight ball on his bed, trying not to look at anything. Above his head, the poster of the African veld spun.
The finer points of smoking he took care of in the early morning, an hour before anyone else was up. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror, a pencil stub between his fingers, practicing different methods of holding the cigarette. It took him weeks to get really proficient, and by then, smoking had become a craving. He had to sneak his packs of Luckies into the home, and in the middle of the night he’d go into one of the toilet stalls and surreptitiously smoke. He thought of his addiction as a kind of victory.
He smoked at Marks constantly, watching the couples, hiding his yearnings behind a veil of smoke. There was always some guy with a crummy Sears guitar, strumming “Five Hundred Miles” or “If I Had a Hammer,” trying to get everyone to sing along. Some people did, but Nick, who couldn’t carry a tune, looked away. Someone else was reciting from a book of beat poets, pounding the table as if it were a bongo drum.
Everybody seemed to know everybody else, but they were still friendly enough to Nick. They bummed smokes and borrowed chairs from his table, and then conversations would start. Nick kept up an air of mystery. He wouldn’t talk about his school or his parents, and when prodded, he’d get up and go for more coffee, waiting for the conversation to turn before he came back. It just made them all the more curious about him. Finally, he said he went to a special place for gifted kids. He said his parents might just as well not exist. He said this darkly, with his lids lowered.
He studied the girls, anxious, afraid. He didn’t want to catch any girl’s eye, because he was terrified of seeing disapproval or, worse, amusement. He was suddenly hypersensitive about his looks. When he sat, he cupped his hands about his ears so they wouldn’t look too big. He tried to sit most of the time so you couldn’t tell he was small. He began wearing his hair longer because he saw the girls gravitated to shaggy-headed boys.
He lay awake nights, twisting in the sweaty sheets, listening to the helpless syncopation of his heart. How could he ask a girl out when he had a curfew? How could he compare with guys who had cars and records and homes? If he dared to tell a girl the truth, she’d tell the others, wouldn’t she? And that would infect his mystery with pity, make everyone polite and distant to him.
There was this one girl, though, who actually seemed to like him. Her name was Desmond Dickens. She was sixteen and she went to Allegheny High with most of the others. She was small and had red curly hair, and when she was beside Nick, he felt his breath clamping up inside of him. He couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying; he had to hunch his body forward to hide his desire. She wanted him to come to some party she was having. She smiled at him, and he suddenly stood up. “I can’t make it,” he said. He never gave explanations—no one at Marks ever expected one. But still, when he saw how her face was folding up, how it was losing some of its light, he felt ruined.
He began lying. He started idly telling everyone about his girl, Betty, who lived in a big white beach house in Florida and was always begging him to visit. When he talked to Desmond, he asked her what kind of a gift he should get Betty for her birthday. “Oh,” Desmond said, picking at a nail, and he hated himself, he wanted to lean across the table and grab her and smash her against him. “I like bracelets,” she said. He looked at her wrist, thin and cool and white, and thought of encircling it with his fingers, and then she stood up, excusing herself, and went to another table, leaving him helpless and confused.
He worried her in his mind, he played out scenarios, and then one day she waltzed into Marks on the arm of Freddy Johansen, a guitar player with a local band. They sat at a table and held hands, they nuzzled while Nick sat there, queasy, and when Desmond came over to say hello, he was curt. The whole bus ride back to the home, he thought about her hair. Her eyes. The heat from her body. The way her voice was. And when he was finally dropped off in front of the home, he felt as if something important had been taken from him.
By Nick’s last year at the home, he was one of Marks’ regulars. He knew everyone by name, although he had never been to anyone’s home, had never really socialized. It was a year when everyone was applying to colleges, talking about Harvard or Yale or the Uni
versity of Texas. Nick slunk off by himself those uneasy nights. He walked the streets, miserable, unsure.
He had applied to twenty different schools, all for scholarships, and although he had been accepted at Berkeley, there was no money, and he hadn’t saved enough to buy books for one year, let alone tuition. He told himself it didn’t matter. He’d go to New York—he had money enough to get there—and he’d find a job, take classes at night.
He swaggered into Marks, almost defying anyone to tell him good news. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder and he whipped around. Desmond.
“Say hey,” she said, smiling. She sat down, pushing at the sleeves of her sweater. “So guess what?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Nick said, tapping cigarette ash on the floor. “What?”
“I was accepted at Oberlin.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and lighted another. “Great,” he said.
“Urn, yeah, it is,” she said. She started fiddling with her sweater cuff. “So, if you get out that way, I hope you’ll come and visit.”
He looked over at her.
“Well, will you?’ she said. She rummaged in her purse until she fished out a pen, a scrap of paper, and then she scribbled out her address and handed it to him. “I don’t know what dorm I’ll be in yet or anything, but that’s my school address.” She laughed, her nose bunched up so that all he could think about was what it would be like to kiss it. “My school!” she said. She leaned toward him. “Would you come out that way, do you think? I know it’s Ohio and all”—she made a face—“but really, it’s the coolest school. Big in the arts and stuff.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll come out.”
He took her address and put it into his back pocket and then he looked at her again.
“Well,” she said, “is the offer reciprocal?”
“Reciprocal?”
“Yeah, I mean, am I invited to come and visit you?”
He hesitated, and then he took the paper and pen and wrote out Nick Borden, 141 West 22nd Street, New York, New York. He had no idea what the zip was, so he scribbled in 14772, hoping it was at least close, hoping she wouldn’t really know either. He handed it back to her.
“God, New York,” she said, impressed. “You’re going to school there, you lucky duck.”
He shrugged.
“You know Donald Ditwild? He’s going to Columbia.”
“NYU,” said Nick.
“You’d show me around if I came up that way? I’ve always wanted to see New York.”
“Sure. Sure I would.”
She shook her head. She said she couldn’t get over it. New York.
She said she might have known he wouldn’t be living in a dorm like everyone else, not the way he was about his privacy and everything, but how did he ever find a place he could afford?
“Oh,” he said, “you know….” And he suddenly began worrying about just how much a place might cost him, just how much it might be to live in a city like New York for even six months. He had his savings, the little he put aside every month in a local bank; and, too, he would find a job.
She grinned. “I knew you wouldn’t tell me.” She suddenly reached over and took his cigarette, taking a slow, easy drag from it before passing it back to him. His fingers felt charged when he touched the cigarette. He was afraid to put it back to his mouth, and when he looked at her, she flushed.
“Listen,” she said. She looked at her hands, at the glimmery rings across her fingers. “Listen, the thing is, I’ve… I’ve always kind of loved you.”
She stood up, not looking at him. “I’m not seeing Freddy anymore,” she said, and then someone called her name, and she turned, just long enough for his panic to propel him outside.
He didn’t know what to do. He stuttered back and forth in front of the door. He could see her still in there, leaning across a table, talking to some girl in a red bandanna. She was laughing, and when she glanced up toward the table where he had been, he sprinted ahead.
He was sweating. He’d call her, he’d make some apology. He’d wait a month or so. No. He wouldn’t. She’d think he had been making fun of her. She’d think he was pathetic. He looked back at the café. “Baby, I Need You.” That was the song the five-hundred-miles guy had been singing before. He turned away, and then he started the long, lonely walk home.
He never went back to Marks. He did write Desmond one letter, telling her the truth, pouring it across the pages, but he couldn’t quite seal the envelope; he kept reopening it to stare in abject terror and mortification at his words. In the end, the stamp wore off the envelope, the address smeared in the rain, and he threw it out.
He concocted scenarios. How she’d write and write to the address he had given her, her letters bouncing back, stamped “addressee unknown.” Frustrated, she might write to that jerk she knew at Columbia; she might sweetly plead with him to hand-deliver her letter, promising to take him to dinner, maybe even hinting that she might take him to bed. Her friend might take a subway over to the address, the whole time thinking about the white flash of her legs, the swell of her breasts. He might buzz the number, might wake some poor old man who might buzz him up thinking he was the grocery boy. Desmond’s friend might puff his way up five flights just to find out there was no Nick there—had never been a Nick.
Or maybe there wasn’t even an apartment at that address, maybe there was a Chicken-a-Go-Go, an establishment the owner would hotly insist had been there a good forty years. Desmond would hear the news by phone. She’d gently get out of her promise of a movie, a dinner, a night that already had him itching, and when she hung up, she would take the letter she had been writing to Nick and carefully fold it into a drawer. He’d be in her blood then, a mystery she had never solved.
And Nick…well, he’d remember her. He wished he had a photo of her, something he could look at and think about, a reminder that a girl had loved him, that she had wanted the connection.
Nick took care of the details. He put what money he had managed to save into traveler’s checks; he spent ten minutes making the bank teller reexplain how to use them. He reserved a room at the “Y” in New York City, then went to the library and wrote to colleges for their schedules of evening classes.
Everyone knew he was leaving the home, but no one made any fuss about it. Boys left as soon as they were eighteen. No one told him to write, no one said they would miss what they never really had known. Some boys had parties thrown for them when they left; everyone herded into the rec room for cake and vanilla ice cream, the one flavor Nick hated. Some boys left with jobs, with schools to go to. Some left with nothing—and always returned to the home a month or so later. Just to visit, they said, but they never wanted to leave. The cook had once been one of the home’s boys, and he joked about it, admitted he couldn’t leave. He was thirty-six and he had a girl who came to pick him up evenings, a skinny blonde with a gummy smile.
On Nick’s last day, one of the boys came over to him, Denny Chernoff, a boy who had more friends than anyone. He said he bet Nick was scared shitless.
“No way,” Nick said.
“They think I’m fifteen,” Denny said. “They don’t know shit. My aunt wasn’t real swift with dates, and luckily there wasn’t any birth certificate.”
He squinted at Nick. “You think I’m fifteen? I’m sixteen. Maybe eighteen. I can’t be sure. What am I going to do outside? I’m not that smart. But I don’t like working with my hands, and there aren’t any girls with money lusting to take care of me. What am I going to do, commit some crime so I can get put into jail?”
He saw suddenly how Nick was watching him, dumbfounded. “You tell and you die,” Denny said.
“What did you tell me for, then?” Nick said.
Denny shrugged. “I had to tell someone,” he said. “And I knew you’d keep your mouth shut about it.”
Nick nodded. “I want to leave here,” he said.
“Sure,” Denny said. “You would. You could get your birth cert
ificate forged—you could say the other was a fake. You could get sick. They aren’t about to make someone sick leave.” Nick laughed. Denny grinned, but his eyes were serious. “I’ll see you,” he said, and, turning, he fanned his fingers in a wave. One, two, three, fist closed.
Mr. Rice called Nick into his office to shake his hand and give him a twenty-five-dollar savings bond. He couldn’t understand why Nick wanted to leave Pittsburgh; he said there wasn’t one place worldwide that was prettier. Not with Point State Park, not with the fountains and Squirrel Hill. “Well, I hope you’ll always think of us as family,” Mr. Rice said.
“You think of me as your son?” Nick asked.
Startled, Mr. Rice laughed. “Don’t you?” he said, opening the door for Nick, patting him goodbye on the back.
At first, Nick was so busy in New York, he didn’t have time to be lonely. He had his room at the “Y,” he had a string of terrible part-time jobs—washing dishes, cleaning out other people’s cramped, gritty apartments—and in his spare time he took classes at Queens College. He watched the women in his classes, but he didn’t have the time or money to flirt. He couldn’t buy himself a pretzel on the street, let alone treat someone else—and anyway, he was always mad-dashing from job to job to school to job. He had to stay up half the night nursing black coffee he warmed up on a contraband hot plate, popping Stop Sleep tablets, just so he could get his studying done.
New York astounded him. It was hard to stay inside and crouch over his books, hard to soap up greasy dishes in the steamy back room of a restaurant, when he knew there were marvels going on outside. He tried to walk everywhere because every street seemed dappled with miracles, with vendors selling books and jewelry and strange foods, with girls in lots of beads and high leather boots, with dogs in beaver coats. He saw a man walking a llama one day, and Nick seemed to be the only person turning around to gawk.
Sometimes, he looked for Desmond. He imagined her up here visiting her friend at Columbia. He tried to study in the places he thought she might go to—the coffeehouses in the Village, the grassy parts of Washington Square Park, where there were always people playing folk music on their guitars. He didn’t start to feel lonely until it was time to get up, time to go back home.
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