Precious Blood

by Tonya Hurley

  “It’s a necklace,” he said. “Didn’t have enough to make a chandelier.”

  “Thank God,” she said, relieved, putting it around her pale, long neck. “Recycling?” Cecilia asked, tying it in the back and fixing the needle casings so they all pointed down in a V formation. “Don’t tell me you’re going green on me.”

  It was sure to be the envy of every wannabe fashionista from Smith Street to the Bowery. But to her, it was the kindest gesture from a friend, made just for her with his own two hands. With the only thing he had.

  They’d met several years ago; she would pass him every day on her way to the subway and routinely hand him what was left of her egg-and-cheese bagel. A one-time punk poet who’d fallen on hard times in his middle age and who would willingly trade you a quip from Jim Carroll or Billy Childish, or personal stories from the Chelsea Hotel or the Beat Hotel in Paris, for what he needed that day.

  It wasn’t just the daily word of wisdom for her that tipped him off as a writer. It was the dilapidated vintage Royal typewriter, his prized possession, that he positioned in front of himself, turning the sidewalk into a desk of sorts. All the keys seemed to work, but it had no ribbon or paper, which was to her more profound than anything he might have said or written. The lack of ink didn’t stop him from banging away, however, typing his thoughts into the ether as if he were composing out loud or dictating to an imagined Girl Friday from deep in his past. Whether it was drugs, mental illness, or just plain determination, she found it, and him, inspiring.

  More than any preacher, spiritual figure, or self-help guru, he spoke to her soul. A maestro, playing his typewriter like an instrument, performing his thoughts. As a musician herself, she could relate. He needed to write, but he didn’t need anyone to read it. A confidence she strived for but had yet to attain. She would bring him paper and ribbon when she could get it and catch what she could.

  He looked sophisticated, like a William Burroughs doppelgänger, sitting there in his baggy suit, elegant even, despite the fact that his pants and sport coat swam on him. He was so gaunt, given his proclivity for drinking his meals, that she was sure her sandwiches were the only solid food he got. Not that she was one of those “pay-it-forward” types. She hadn’t been on the receiving end of much kindness or generosity to transfer anyway.

  Besides, she’d met plenty of those and there was something so unnervingly self-serving about them. Do-gooders willing to volunteer or donate but not if it hurt, not if it really required some effort or compassion and only as long as someone was watching, as long as there was credit to be taken in exchange for their largesse.

  They became closer the night he was attacked by some street thugs and she offered him her rooftop. It didn’t belong to her, but it was something she could let him in on. She’d been taking him sandwiches, and vodka, and an endless supply of paper ever since.

  Cecilia handed Bill a bottle of Stoli that she’d carried from the gig. He looked sick, his eyes hollow and desperate, and she knew he needed a drink. But he would never come out and ask her. Not her. Then again, he didn’t need to.

  “That shit’s like drinking poison, you know,” Cecilia said, as she kicked a few needles out of her way to get to him.

  “No, Night Queen. Anger is like drinking poison. . . . ”

  “And expecting the other person to die.”

  “That part sounds more like jealousy to me.”

  “You’re a smart man,” she said, unwrapping his sandwich to make sure he ate something.

  “No, I’m just a junkie with a typewriter.”

  “Okay, then, you’re a dangerous man.”

  She sat there in the dark, next to a smoke stream of sandalwood incense, strumming her guitar for him until he ate. Then they sang the parts of “Fairytale of New York.”

  She watched as he began to nod off, bottle still clutched in his hand.

  A junkie lullaby.

  It was the same every night—Cecilia covered him up with a spare suit jacket that he carried around, finished smoking his lit cigarette, took the poem he wrote out of his typewriter, and then made her way over to the steel reinforced door and down to her apartment. She would read his work at night and return it before he woke up in the morning. He was writing for her, anyway. He would never sell his soul, but he would give it freely, lend it to someone who needed one. To her.

  That particular night, as she reached her floor and rounded the corner, she could see the sign on the door.

  She was marked.

  She’d seen the signs on the doors of others and knew exactly what it meant.

  NOTICE OF EVICTION

  The Landlord has legal possession of these premise spursuant to the Warrant of Civil Court.

  She leaned her guitar case against the stack of thirty-gallon garbage bags that had been piling up outside her door, pulled the old filament lightbulb hanging overhead toward her, reached for her key, and tried in vain to slip it in the lock. She didn’t have a prayer that it would fit, and after a few frustrating seconds of recapitulating the stages of grief, she gave up. It wasn’t her life that flashed before her but a series of special-delivery envelopes from her landlord that had been turning up in the past few weeks. Letters that were piled, unopened, six inches high on the kitchen counter next to her beloved vintage hand juicer and a terrarium made from a broken liquor bottle that Bill gave her last Christmas. It was filled with moss, a cigarette butt, a wad of chewed-up gum, an old subway token, and a switchblade, all orbiting a tiny plastic baby figurine—a cupcake topper for a baby shower that he scavenged out of a bakery Dumpster. He called it “Street Life.” She joked that she could sell it for a hundred bucks to a Bedford Avenue boutique. But she never would. Not for a million. Not even now.

  Cecilia collapsed into the door, banging her head against it just hard enough to hurt, hard enough to remind her of how bad things had gotten, hard enough to press a teardrop from her heavily mascaraed eye.

  Besides not having a place to sleep or shower, the thing that upset her most was the element of rejection she was suffering and that it was her own fault. She was used to getting thrown out of apartments late at night; it just wasn’t usually her own. The other thing was something much less self-involved but just as urgent. She grabbed her guitar, slung it across her back, as two black tributaries meandered down her cheeks and flowed together to form a liquid soul patch under her chin as she read what Bill had written.

  Our Lady of Sorrow

  No hope for Tomorrow.

  No soul left to Borrow.

  Your hands hold Tomorrow.

  Cecilia smiled through her tears momentarily, and walked outside with her guitar strung across her back. She nodded good-bye in the direction of her friend on the roof, and hailed a pedicab.

  3 “Don’t ever speak to me again!” Agnes yelled at her mother, her eyelids now in the shape of half-moons. Her mind was a raw, open sore, and Martha would scratch and scratch at it relentlessly, trying to bust it open any way she could.

  “Why? Because I was right? Why are you so afraid to hear the truth?”

  “It’s your truth, Mother.”

  “The truth is the truth, Agnes.”

  Sounded familiar. Agnes began to wonder if her mother and the doctor were conspiring and, just as quickly, refused to give in to paranoia. “I broke up with him. What more do you want from me? Do you want me to grovel, beg for your forgiveness for straying from The Path?”

  “Don’t get hysterical, you’ll bust one of those stitches.”

  “Oh, so now I’m crazy and can’t make my own decisions. Nice, Mother.”

  “What do you mean ‘now’?”

  “I hate you.”

  “Why you would go to such lengths, I’ll never understand,” Martha said, trying to fix Agnes’s bandage.

  “No, you never will,” Agnes said. She pulled her arm away. “I’m not afraid for my future. Not afraid to follow my heart.”

  “How naïve. You’re young. You’ll figure it out.”

&n
bsp; “You are so bitter. No wonder Dad left.”

  Martha was livid. It was the most hurtful thing Agnes could have spit at her. And it was too late to take it away. But Agnes was actually relieved to release the elephant in the room. The ice rattled in Martha’s cocktail tumbler. “When I married your father—”

  “You weren’t married; you were sacrificed,” Agnes cut in. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. I am your mother.”

  “Technically.”

  “The Harrison boy is perfectly nice. Good family, the best schools, polite, well-spoken, SATs through the roof. He’s got everything you need to make it in life. Not like that Pineapple Express understudy you were dating.”

  “Oh, please, Mother. Don’t start with the matchmaking again. It’s lame.”

  “Because you are doing so well?”

  “ ‘That Harrison boy’? You don’t even know his name. What is this, 1950? Besides, I’m sure he’s looking for one of those ‘dress for success’ types who’s a whore in the bedroom, just like all those other future Wall Streeters.”

  “Don’t you dare speak that way to me!”

  “Oh, but you can treat me like that. I just can’t say it out loud. I get it. I am nothing like that. Like him.”

  “Opposites attract,” Martha spit back.

  “I’m sixteen, Mother. I’m not looking for a Trump.”

  “Would it hurt you to fish in a less polluted pond? Or do something with that hair falling all over the place? Throw some heels and makeup on. Sharpen up a little, for God’s sake.”

  “How about a goddamn geisha getup? I know there is something better out there for me. I don’t need to have a master plan drawn up.”

  “You don’t need to because I do all the heavy lifting, I make the sacrifices, so that you won’t have to.”

  “You’re my mother! Do you need a medal?” Agnes screamed, frustrated at the level of selfishness.

  They each took a breath.

  “When I find it, I will know it. Instantly. It won’t take an audit to convince me,” Agnes continued.

  “Find what, Agnes? You obviously don’t have a clue what you are looking for, flitting from loser to loser like some kind of serial romantic.”

  “Love, Mother. Real love. A heart and a soul. Not a wallet with feet. Simple as that.”

  “Please,” Martha pleaded. “Not another lecture about love at first sight, Agnes.”

  Agnes stared her mother down. Both dripping resentment.

  “You know how you explain love at first sight, Mother?”

  Martha sighed. “No, how?”

  “You don’t. That’s how.”

  “Real love.” Martha just laughed derisively, practically gargling the words. “Don’t be so high and mighty.”

  Agnes grabbed at her ears, trying to block out the skepticism, the rigidity, her mother cutting her down to size. She almost felt herself transported back to the therapy session with Dr. Frey, except this conversation was a bit more unprofessional.

  “You were the one who insisted on Catholic school.”

  “And I expected better results for the tuition I’m paying!”

  Always back to money, Agnes thought. And guilt. She was a failure to her mother and her mother was a failure to her. She pursed her lips, trying to hold back the bile that had been building for months—actually years—and then exploded.

  “Can’t you see? I don’t want to wind up like you and your Franken-Forty so-called friends. Drunk by dinnertime, blow jobs for Botox, and sleeping with their divorce settlements under their pillows.”

  “Annulment.”

  “So as long as the Church approves, it’s okay? You hypocrite.”

  “Watch your mouth, young lady! You don’t know who you’re talking to!”

  “And neither do you,” Agnes said. She stormed off to her room and slammed her door, almost breaking the glass doorknob and the mounted antlers that hung above it. Her room was her sanctuary. Her cocoon. It was as Zen as she could make it and exactly what she needed right then. Flooded with light, the high ceilings, dark wood floors, and blush walls were a direct contrast to the harshness of the conversation that had just taken place in the living room. Colorful scarves were draped over her lampshades just inches from catching fire, exactly how she liked it. A vivid kilim rug–upholstered footrest and a bottle-green leather wingback chair, large coffee table books stacked up with cushions thrown on top for seating on her lush sheepskin rug, burlap feed-bag pillows, a huge cement pot filled with succulents in every shade of green, incense holders, and an impressive collection of extraordinary silk robes and caftans.

  She switched on her Moroccan lantern, lit a stick of incense, grabbed her favorite heirloom afghan from her bed, and wrapped herself inside it as she sat down at her desk—an antique door that she had propped up on sawhorses. Her enormous gray Maine coon cat, which she named Elizabeth of Hungary, jumped up onto her lap. She stroked her back and stared at her curiosity cabinet filled with her collection of beautiful, rare things that she’d collected over the years—an antique wooden hand that she used to hold her vintage necklaces, a collection of antique thimbles, and vibrant glass-winged butterflies, once alive and free, pinned to a board. She, like her mother, loved to collect beautiful things. She often felt her mother counted Agnes as one of her pretty possessions. And she was done with being part of her mother’s collection.

  Agnes held her head and began to cry. She knew that her mother was right. Not about everything, but certainly about him. Right then, she wasn’t sure what hurt more, her arms or her ego. They were both so badly bruised.

  She pressed a fingernail into the least healed portion of her wound, bit her lip, and forced a wince. In a way, having an open gash was convenient, more so than the tiny little injuries she’d been inflicting. Now there was a big enough target to deliver the sufficient dose of pain and discomfort she felt she deserved.

  She didn’t cut, or pick, or break her fingers and toes as a general rule. She punished herself by refusing to be herself. Denying herself. To go along with the life her mother had plotted out for her. Until recently. She’d begun choosing guys and friends on her own, letting her hair grow, literally. Not happier, necessarily, but freer.

  Her mom just put it all down to hardheadedness, a phase she was going through. And there were times that she, Agnes, felt that way. But this wasn’t one of them. Her mom was too rigid, too angry over her divorce and the fighting and scratching she had to do to rebuild her life, or as her mom liked to say “repositioning herself.” She couldn’t be heard any longer. Where once she felt like her mom’s “prized possession,” she had lately become just another obstacle, an insubordinate ingrate.

  “I have no idea what to do.” Her mom’s voice seeped through the door and into her room. “She’s ruining her life. And mine.”

  Agnes scrolled through her smartphone playlist for one of her favorite songs, “Summer Lies.” She popped the phone into her speaker dock, pressed play, and dragged the volume bar as far as it would go. It had special meaning for her after the whole Sayer thing, but more importantly, it could drown out the hurtful conversation going on right outside her door.

  All the sweetest things you said and I believed were summer lies

  Hanging in the willow trees like the dead were summer lies

  I’ll never fall in love again.

  Whichever neighbor or relative her mother had chosen to bitch to over the phone, it was the last straw for Agnes. She knew she couldn’t stay there any longer. She stared out her bedroom window for a while, watching a car parked across the street disappear in the twilight, giving up a precious spot on their busy street for a different destination.

  I whispered too but the things I said were true

  and I gave up my whole world for you

  The sudden touch of the sheer curtains blowing away from the sill and lapping her cheek seemed to her like the billow in a sail that had just caught a breeze and was ready to leave port
.

  I pine and wane, pale and wan, never knowing

  when it’s dawn, curtains drawn, hiding in my room,

  wasting away, cutting myself.

  The song was over. She opened the window, fastened her bracelet tight under her bandage, and climbed out into the garden of her Park Slope parlor-floor brownstone, hopped the fence that bordered her yard and her neighbors’ and—

  She was gone.

  7 “Drizzle is such a limp dick,” Lucy bitched, opening up the driver’s side of the cab parked in front of the club and nudging the driver over onto the passenger side. “Either rain or not!”

  “What are you doing?” The club was a regular pickup for him. He’d seen her come and go. He’d heard stories. He knew.

  “Driving!” She slammed the door and peeled away. Tires spinning and squealing over the slickened DUMBO cobblestones toward Furman Street and Atlantic Avenue. At first all he could see was the anger in her eyes, but now the liquor on her breath was making its presence known as well.

  “Miss, I can gladly take you home.”

  “I don’t want to go home. There is nothing there for me but my laptop, and I can’t face it. You understand?”

  “But it’s very late and the storm is coming.”

  “You have anything better to do?” Lucy slurred, licking her lips seductively. It was just a tease, more tactical than sexual, but enough to keep him in line, as she knew it would be.

  The mist was coalescing now into fine droplets, obscuring her view of the road ahead just enough to irritate but not enough to give her pause.

  “God’s tears, they say,” the cabbie said without missing a beat.

  “What?”

  “The drizzle,” he said, looking Lucy up and down, focusing on her exposed long legs.

  “Who says that, exactly? I forgot to vote in that online poll.”

  “People say, I guess.”

  “Well, I say, maybe they’re right.”

  “Where are we going?” he asked, clicking the meter and then sliding his hand over to her knee. She didn’t have a car in the city, and so when she needed to get somewhere, she would just drive herself by taking over someone’s cab. Usually it worked out because of her strong sense of entitlement, her looks, and the domination fantasies held by the perverted cabbies, most of whom had religious statues on their dashes.