Avis smiled. She touched Perkins’s forehead, brushed his hair with her fingers. “How bad is it?” she said softly.
“Oh …” He wrinkled his nose at the baby. “‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.’ How’s by you?”
“Okay, I guess. So-so.”
“Baga baga baga, pah, pah, pah,” said the baby. He slapped Perkins’s chest. Perkins gave a grunt and lifted him into the air. The baby squealed and wriggled.
Perkins lowered the baby and kissed his neck. He was comforted a little by the softness of the baby’s skin and hair, and by the fact that the kid liked him. With a great effort, he propped himself up so he could set the baby on the floor beside the bed. Then he let go and the baby started crawling away.
“Stick to the classics,” Perkins said, “and don’t put your fingers in a socket.”
The baby babbled his farewells and crawled off among the books.
“My advice to the generations,” said Perkins. He lay back heavily on the mattress. He took Avis’s hand. He looked up at her. The small features of the valentine-shaped face, hovering over him, soothing. She brushed at his forehead again, smiling down at him. He felt his cock stir at her cool touch.
“Your Nana called,” she told him gently.
He closed his eyes. “Oh boy.”
“She says she couldn’t reach you. She says your phone is off the hook.”
“Jesus. I don’t even know where it is. Was it urgent?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You know Nana. It’s a catastrophe.”
“Oh no.”
“I told her you’d be over there in an hour.”
Perkins kept his eyes closed. He felt her cool fingertips. “Maybe I should call her,” he murmured. “Maybe I can find the phone.”
“No, her nurse was just coming. She wants you to come over.”
“Okay,” he said. It was barely audible. His mind was drifting now. He was thinking now about Avis. He was picturing her: the way she had been on the one night he had had her. He remembered her lying facedown on his mattress, sobbing into the pillow. He had stood over her, breathless and helpless. He had just finished dealing with her husband. His knuckles were pouring blood. After a long time, he had knelt down next to her. He wanted her to stop crying, and he wanted her, and he did not know what else to do. His breath caught when she lifted her hips to let him work her leggings down. She had parted her legs too when he stretched out on top of her. All the while he was rocking in and out of her, she had held his hand in front of her and sucked the blood off his fingers. He had murmured to her, and he thought he heard her whisper something. He didn’t catch it though. She would never tell him what it was …
The memory was giving him an erection. He opened his eyes. He saw Avis steal another glance down him. She nearly smiled, but then she took her hands away. She stood up quickly. Grabbed his bedsheet off the floor and dropped it over him.
“You could get dressed, you know,” she said. “You could pretend that I was here.”
“I know you’re here,” he said. The light was bad, but he thought he saw her cheeks color. Anyway, she hurried across the room to the baby, who was stretched across The Idiot now, chewing on Perkins’s sweater. She got the sweater from him. Draped it over her arm.
“You do this too much, Perkins,” she said.
“I got carried away. Don’t clean up.”
“You get carried away too much.” She lifted his jeans while the baby watched her. “It’s like every night, every other night.”
“It’s not every night. Avis … Don’t clean up. I’m telling you.” He tried to get up, but the movement shifted the sand in his head. He could only sit on the edge of the mattress, his feet on the floor. He covered his face with his hands. “Oh man!”
“I’m telling you, Oliver,” Avis said. “It’s getting to be a real habit.”
He forced himself to look up at her. She was placing his clothes on top of the dresser now. Then she was tugging the laundry bag out from underneath the dresser, stuffing in his underwear.
“Avis, would you not do this, please.”
“Well, look at this place, Ollie.”
His shoulders sagged. He shook his head dismally. He turned and squinted dismally at the window, at the strip of blue sky. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I gave a reading at the café last night.”
“Well, that’s no excuse.” She had moved across the room to pry her son’s fingers from the base of a standing lamp. “Everyone always … oof! … loves your readings.”
“Yeah.” He grunted at her. “All those old poems. The same ones over and over. I had to wash away the taste of them. I could feel them stuck in my throat.”
“Oh, Oliver, come on.”
“Two years, Avis. Two years this month since I wrote my last good one.”
“And getting tanked every night is going to help a lot.”
He sighed. Sat silently.
“Shit,” Avis muttered. He glanced at her. She had been restacking a toppled pile of Greek histories and had come up with something. She examined it a moment, turning it in her fingers. “I guess someone lost this,” she said. She tossed it across the room to him.
He caught it in his cupped hands. An earring. Turquoise on hand-hammered silver. Something bought on the street in the East Village probably. “Not one of yours, huh?”
“You know it’s not.” She showed him her back, walking toward the kitchenette.
Perkins gazed down at the earring, trying to remember. He had a vague flash of the café. The black microphone in his face. The cool neck of the beer bottle in his fist. Candlelight in the white wine at the tables. Faces at the tables, young men, young women’s faces; the grizzled chins of the old Village denizens; the candlelight in their eyes.
Avis flicked on the light in the kitchenette. “I hope it’s a girl’s, that’s all,” she said darkly.
“There was someone.” He studied the earring.
“You said you weren’t going to do boys anymore. It’s dangerous—especially when you’re too drunk to think.”
“Cindy,” he said. “Or Mindy. Maybe it was Mindy …” He looked up then and saw her in the kitchenette. He flinched. A dolmen of encrusted pots and dishes rose out of the sink. Avis was sponging some red slime off the countertop. A roach was scuttling for a crack in the caulking.
“Well, I’m sure she was a nice girl,” she was saying. “She probably just had to get back to school in time for recess.”
“Avis,” said Perkins. “Would you put down the fucking sponge.”
“You want eggs?”
“Oh, don’t make me breakfast. God, Avis, don’t take care of me. I mean it. This is your whole problem.”
“I’ll get a psychiatrist first thing tomorrow. You want them scrambled?”
Perkins let out his breath, dejected. His chin fell to his chest. There was the baby. Crawling over a Sam Adams to get to his foot. Smiling up at him from his hairy toes, waiting for some attention.
Perkins reached down and picked the baby up. The baby put his arms around the poet’s neck. “Yeah,” Perkins said quietly. “Scrambled is fine.”
He lay down with the baby on top of him. He blew out his cheeks again to make the baby laugh. But now the kid had noticed the buttons on the mattress. He was climbing down off Perkins to see if he could get some to eat.
Abandoned, Perkins lay where he was, staring up at the ceiling. He licked his lips, picking up the faint taste of dried vomit. He listened to the running water in the kitchenette. The clattering of pots as Avis cleared them. He listened to the baby gurgling. The loneliness settled down over him like a blanket.
Two years, he thought. Not since the river house. He had sat on the porch there in the evenings and watched the view. The green Catskills rising against the pale and darkening sky. The beaver pond lying in the meadow just below, a black oval in the high grasses. He could see Julia floating on her back down there. Her long body white be
neath the black water, her breasts breaking the surface of it. Her white thighs lifting and falling lazily as she kicked along. Sometimes he heard an explosive whap! as a beaver slapped its tail against the water to warn the others she was coming. More often, the creatures swam right over to her. He could see their V-shaped wakes, the domes of their heads. They would bump their black noses against her side and make her smile.
And Perkins would sit on the porch, balancing a pad on his lap, twirling a pen in his hand. Soon, the evening star would shine dimly in the big sky above them. Other stars would show through the tendrils of mountain mist. Raccoons would waddle to the pond’s edge and drink while Julia floated with the beavers. And deer too would sometimes step from the grass and bow their heads gracefully to lap the water. There had seemed to him a luxury of life and death, night coming like that. And just as the light was almost gone, he would begin writing.
This is the animal hour.
The slow October flies, despairing on the porch chairs,
blink into the shards of the sun they see setting.
Blue and then a deeper blue ease into the air,
and bats suddenly dive and butterfly up out of the trees …
His last good poem. The last poem in the collection.
“Christ.” He groaned, his head going back and forth on the pillow. He rubbed his eyes with both hands. He yawned. “So what did Nana want anyway?” he said.
“What?” Avis was at the sink, the water running. She glanced over her shoulder, holding a pot under the stream.
“I said, What did my grandmother want?” Perkins called. “What was the big catastrophe?”
“Oh,” Avis called back. “It’s your kid brother again.”
“Zachary?” Perkins came up slowly onto his elbow. “What the hell’s the matter with Zach?”
Avis shrugged. “You know how Nana is.”
“What?” he called. He couldn’t hear her over the water.
“I say you know how Nana is,” Avis shouted back to him.
“Agga agga agga,” said the baby, climbing up Perkins’s back.
Avis placed the clean pot in the drainer. She shouted: “Apparently, he’s disappeared.”
Deep breaths, she thought.
She was sitting on a bench in City Hall Park. One in the line of green benches that bordered the park path. She was sitting under sycamores. Their yellow leaves rattled above her in the breeze. Brown leaves and red leaves clattered by her feet along the pavement.
Through the trees, to her right, was the parking lot and the domed, white-stoned Hall. A garden of grass and hedges was to her left, a fountain spraying up out of it. Before her were the tall office buildings on Broadway. Their windows caught the sun, flashed white through the red leaves of the oaks by the sidewalk. She could hear car engines gunning and the rumbling of buses, and the patter of pedestrians too. She could see the streaks of traffic through the low branches.
She huddled in her tan trench coat. She bent over her knees, her arms crossed high on her thighs. She felt nauseous.
Just take deep breaths, she told herself. Deep breaths.
And don’t hear voices.
Right. Deep breaths and no voices. And no gargoyles either.
Yeah, lose those gargoyles too. Woof.
She nodded: right. She took slow, steady, deep breaths. She tried to concentrate on the gray asphalt of the path in front of her. As soon as this pea soup blew out of her head, she thought … As soon as her stomach settled … she would take stock, she would figure this out.
You’re not Nancy Kincaid.
The black woman’s voice had been so … unwavering. She rocked a little on the green bench. She pulled her crossed arms in tighter to her middle.
The park was quieter now. The determined men in suits had stridden away, and so had the women in their curt dresses. She lifted her eyes along the curving path. Over the row of wire garbage cans in the path’s center. Over the leaves stirring around the cans. She could feel how the place had emptied. It heightened her hovering sense of panic. To think that all those people were at work now. Bent to their desks, swiveling in their chairs, sipping their coffee in the bosoms of their normal days. She alone was here. And the occasional workmen bopping past. And the policemen—in the parking lot and on the Hall steps just visible through the trees.
And the beggars. The homeless men. They hunkered on benches across the way. They hunched or stretched on some of the benches beside her. There were over a dozen of them. In black coats, or wrapped in soiled blankets. In stained, baggy pants. With shirts like rags. White faces, black with grime. Black faces, gray with dust. Eyes balefully glaring.
I’ll bet some of them hear voices too, she thought.
She shuddered. Took in another long pull of die autumn air. Her mind was beginning to clear a little now. That cottony feeling between her ears was starting to thin out. Her stomach was still up in her throat, but she didn’t think she was going to vomit anytime soon. She began to release her grip on her middle. She straightened slowly. Sat up against the bench back, her purse by her side.
Yeah, I’ll just bet they hear voices all the time, she thought.
She let her breath out in a long stream. So what now? She gazed fuzzily toward the red oaks near Broadway. What the heck, she wondered, was she supposed to do now? Go home? Explain things to Mom?
Why, you’re home early, dear.
Yeah. Everyone at work said I wasn’t me.
Oh that’s too bad. Have some soup. It’ll make you feel better.
She gave a short laugh. That was no good. She had to go back to the office, that’s all. She had to talk to someone who knew her. Or prove to someone that she was who she was. I mean, I am Nancy Kincaid, she thought; that ought to work to my advantage a little. She imagined herself trying to explain this to her coworkers. She imagined herself being quizzed. The silver-haired, authoritative countenance of Henry Goldstein leaning in toward her. I’m twenty-two years old, she told him. I work for Fernando Woodlawn. I’m his personal assistant. I live on Gramercy Park with my mom and dad. My mom, Nora, who does part-time work at the library. My dad, Tom, who’s a lawyer.
She tilted her head back carefully. Looked up over the crowns of the trees. She saw the tip of her office building against the cloudless sky. The faint design of its stonework, the shape of its gargoyles, jutting, still. There was a lull in the noise of traffic. She could hear the hiss and splash of the fountain in the grass plot to her left. She gazed at the building a long moment.
I have always lived in Manhattan, she told Henry Goldstein in her mind. She imagined herself sitting across a desk from him. He leaning back in his chair, finger laid across his lips. His stern eyes narrowed at her. I grew up here, she said. You can ask anyone. Ask Maura. She’ll know me. Maura and I have known each other forever, since we were babies practically. We still see each other almost every weekend. She doesn’t have a boyfriend either, that’s why. I know: It’s arrested development. When you grow up in the city your parents tend to be overprotective. And there’s the Catholic school thing too, like Fernando says. I mean, not that we’re virgins or anything … But that’s another story.
To be really honest, I’m sometimes afraid Maura will meet someone before I do. I mean, a guy. It’s not that I’m jealous or anything, it’s just … Well, you know how girls are: I’d never see her. I mean, I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have her to talk to. Jesus. I mean, we went all through high school together. And believe me, St. Ann’s was no picnic. We were even in elementary school together for two years when I was transferred to …
She came out of her fantasy suddenly. She thought a moment. Her lips parted.
… transferred to …
She felt it again. Like something inside her turning sour: a jolt of fear.
I was transferred … I went to elementary school …
She lowered her head. Lowered her eyes from the Broadway rooftop. Her mouth open, she scanned the park aimlessly, as if looking for the answ
er. She scanned the benches across the way. The dark bundle shapes of the homeless men, the hot eyes glaring out of them: Her gaze passed over them unseeing. She shook her head, as if to jog the answer loose.
I went to elementary school at …
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t remember. Nothing came. She could not remember where she had gone to elementary school.
God, that’s weird. That’s so weird.
It made her skin go cold. She tried to think back to it, picture it in her mind. A long brick building. Children filing in through the glass doors. No. No, that wasn’t it. There was no connection. She felt the small bumps rising on her arms.
You’re not Nancy Kincaid.
And the chill radiated out from the cold core of her. Sweat gathered under her tam, under her hairline. It rolled down her temple, down the back of her neck.
Oh, this is ridiculous, she thought angrily. This is stupid. I know who I am. I can prove who I …
She stopped. She wiped her lips with her palm. She looked down at the purse on the bench beside her. A big purse of black leather. She swallowed hard. Of course she could. She could prove who she was. She could prove who she was to anyone.
Idiot. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Up there, in the Woodlawn offices, with those unwavering gazes melting her knees. Why hadn’t she just taken her wallet out? Shown them her identification, the picture on her driver’s license? I’m not Nancy Kincaid, huh? Well, who’s that, clown? Meryl Streep?
With an exasperated shake of her head, she brought the purse onto her lap. She unzipped it. At the same moment, she saw something move. She caught it out of the corner of her eye. She glanced up.
It was one of the homeless men. On one of the benches just across the path. Opening her purse must have attracted him. He was stealing a look at her under his brows. He was a slack-faced white, with long hair hanging in filthy, yellow knots. His scabby lips hung open. His eyes were half closed. Now, she saw, he was pushing off the bench, working to his feet.
Damn, she thought. She ought to get out of here, do this someplace else.