Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (31 page)

They walked in silence. In his entire life, Nathan had never felt so close to his father. He thought that for the first time he might be able to understand who Harry was. He had to ask. "Why is Nusan angry with you?"

"Nusan is angry."

"There is more, though, isn't there?"

Harry shrugged. "He thinks I should have saved him. Saved the whole family."

"Why didn't you?"

"I didn't know that they needed saving. They never said anything. When I went to America, none of them wanted to come. None of them ever said they wanted to come. Then suddenly they were all gone."

"This woman, this Pole, you wanted her so much that you didn't care about anything...."

"Nothing else. It wasn't love. I didn't even love her. I just craved her. A kind of sickness."

"You know..." Nathan began.

Suddenly the street was filled with a throbbing, pounding noise. It was Dolby and his speakers, pedaling his bicycle past. And on the back of the huge, throbbing boxes, almost obscured by the silver and blue duct tape that secured the speakers to the bicycle, was a bumper sticker—BUSH FOR
PRESIDENT.
There, at last, the neighborhood Republican had been identified. By the time Dolby was far enough away so that they could talk again, Harry had dressed himself in the kind of silence that meant he did not want to talk anymore.

D
AYS PASSED
in the cleansing but unexciting spirit of reform, yet Nathan had not taken the last critical step in his program—the visit to Karoline. As he said to his orisha, the
Vocero-
shrouded Oggún, he should have never started with her. He loved his wife and his daughter. Why did he have to get involved with this other person—this other who was so much other? He knew why, but sex was not something he wanted to discuss with an orisha.

By the time he went to Karoline's to tell her all this, Joey Parma had a bruise on his right cheek. This showed a number of things about Mrs. Parma, including the fact that she was left-handed, or else, like a professional, led with her left and had not delivered the finishing blow.

She did not hit him when he came home that night. She was too hurt. But then he infuriated her. He denied the entire affair. When asked to explain why the woman had confessed the whole thing, he did not have an answer. All he could say was, "Who knows why women do things?" That was when she started getting angry. Then he made it worse by telling a preposterous and elaborate story about storing wine at the woman's apartment.

"Don't lie to me, Joey I could see this was a lot more than trading Zinfandellis."

"Zinfandels."

"What?"

Joey walked out and drove to the East Village, attaching the red dome light to his roof and turning on his siren to force his way through traffic jams. In Karoline's apartment, he grabbed the first three cases of his wine that he found, refused to talk to Karoline, who was trying to explain, and drove back to Queens.

He showed his wife the bottles, lovingly extracting a 1981 Chassagne-Montrachet, and read from the label the words "Morgeot premier cru." Then, seeing that she was unmoved, he tried to impress her with a 1982 Bordeaux. "It was a big year for Médoc," he argued as he presented a bottle of Chateau d'Agassac, pointing to the lemon-colored label with the engraving of the castle. She simply turned away in disgust. So he made her go with him to a local wine merchant, who appraised the wines at over $3,000. She glared at him as he drove them home. "What did you think?" said Joey. "Remember that wine when we had the Feguccis over last weekend? You thought that was good, didn't you?" He mimicked her voice in falsetto Queens: " 'Vewy noice, Jowey' Yeah, nice. Chassagne-Montrachet for seventy dollars a bottle!"

She said nothing, but when they got home she asked him how many more cases he had. Joey said,
"Six."

"Six! So this is about ten thousand dollars you spent on wine!" She was a grocer's daughter and tabulated quickly.

"You miss the point. It's an investment. The value goes up. I probably only spent eight thousand." And that was when she hit him. He, holding the stinging side of his face, argued, "Ten years from now, you know what it'll be worth? You're looking at maybe twenty thousand in wine."

"Twenty thousand dollars. In
wine!
And you drink it! And with the Feguccis!" He was lucky she didn't hit him again. She wanted him to sell it. She wanted to see the money in a bank account or in "low-risk, medium-term Treasury bonds."

What kind of bond? Where had she learned to talk like that? Joey wondered. But he went to Karoline's to gather the rest of the wine. He asked her why she had told his wife they were having an affair.

"I didn't know who she was."

"So that's why you said you slept with her husband. When in doubt, confess adultery?"

"I thought she was somebody else."

"Somebody else?"

"Somebody else's wife."

"Ahh, so
you're
allowed to have secrets."

A loud buzzer intruded. She pushed the button. "Karoline," came Nathan's muffled voice from the white plastic box on the wall.

Joey and Karoline examined each other. "No, I don't get to have them either," said Karoline with a sad smile as she pushed the buzzer button. Then she opened the door wide and stepped back so that Nathan would see Joey.

"I think you know each other."

"Yes, how are you?"

"How you doin'?"

Nathan could not dismiss the impression that Joey Parma was— was
leering
at him. "You look like someone smacked you," Nathan observed.

"Naw. It was a door. A swinging door."

"They always say that," said Nathan, but he saw that no one was amused, so maybe he was right.

"Well," said Joey. "The last of it. Thanks, Karoline."

"Sure, Joey Sorry it—"

"Forget about it," he said, picking up two cases of wine with surprising ease and walking out. "See ya, Nathan."

Nathan and Karoline did not move as they listened to Joey's footsteps, almost counting them. They both had the same thought: I am not going to start this speech I have been practicing until Joey is gone. Once the door downstairs was heard closing, Nathan began first.

"I have to talk to—"

"Don't you ever call first?"

"I'm sorry. Listen, I have to—" But the next words out of his mouth were not the ones he had been planning. "We were using his handcuffs, weren't we."

"What?"

"The handcuffs. They were Joey Parma's handcuffs. You had used them with him."

Karoline took her hand with the strong, skilled fingers and covered her mouth, attempting to conceal the fact that she was laughing.

"It's funny? It's funny? Why is it funny? Why do you always laugh at me? Am I that comic?" But it was a rhetorical question. Nathan knew the answer.

"There are three things you need to know here," said Karoline, extending three fine fingers in front of her face. "The first is for general release. Please tell the world. I am not now, nor have I ever been, involved with Joey Parma." Then she muttered, "Not my type. You're my type. I'm sick of my type." Then she resumed in full voice, "Number two: The handcuffs were given to me years ago as a joke, and you are the only one I ever used them with. And number three"—she walked over and opened the door—"number three is I'm getting married. I'm marrying Dickie, and I want you to go away and stop ruining my life. Good-bye, good luck, regards to the wife and kid."

Nathan looked at her in disbelief. How had she turned this around? Now she was sending him away? Why did she always have an advantage over him? He imagined the voice of Ira Katz: "Because you're married, stupid."

He walked to the door. Should he kiss her? Shake her hand? He could not look at her without aching to touch her. His nose filled his head with her buttery scent. Their noses filled with each other's scents. If they had been alone in a room with no God watching, they could have spent an hour just sniffing each other like dogs.

"Just one last time for good-bye?" Nathan suggested. With no more spoken, they were in her wide bed, the lumpy mattress on the wooden base of drawers full of pastry equipment.

He walked home hours later, still having said nothing but knowing that they had said good-bye. He told himself that he felt relieved and ignored the dryness in his throat, the aching in his face, the uneasy feeling in his stomach.

When he got back to the building, a new tenant was moving in. Birdie Nagel had left and Harry had run an ad in the
Voice,
and it was answered so quickly that he barely had time to clean and paint the apartment, which had been neither cleaned nor painted in decades, and Birdie had left behind stacks of twenty-pound bags of birdseed that had to be disposed of.

Most of the landlords in the neighborhood were trying to turn over apartments quickly. The apartments were rent stabilized, and only by changing hands frequently could the rents be brought up to the extravagant prices new tenants were ready to pay. The traditional alternative had been to set the building on fire. Fires usually broke out in buildings that were occupied by squatters. A fairly minor fire could get the building condemned and the squatters removed. Some buildings with paying tenants had rents so low that fire insurance was still the landlord's most lucrative choice. With people now willing to pay undreamed-of rents to live in the East Village, only the Seltzers were ever sorry to see a tenant leave.

So the cleaners and painters in the neighborhood had learned to work fast. And now the new tenant was moving in, a girl from Virginia with short, reddish blond hair and brown leather luggage. She had just graduated from somewhere and was very excited about her first job in New York. Nathan confessed to himself that most people he knew had yet to land their first job in New York.

"Hello, I'm Catherine."

"Hello, Catherine."

"Can I ask you a question? What's this?" She was pointing at a mezuzah on the doorpost, a simple tube buried in so many layers of paint that the Hebrew letter
shin,
the first letter of the prayer on the tiny scroll inside, a letter that looked like a
w,
was looking more like a
u.
It had been there even before Birdie Nagel. All the doorways in the building had them.

"It's a mezuzah. It's a Jewish ornament."

"What does it mean?" Catherine asked, wrinkling her nose.

"It means ... It is a sign. It means that a Jewish family lives there."

"Oh! You mean it gives good luck!"

"Sometimes."

Arnie had run out of luck. With shops and restaurants opening all around him, the owner of the storefront by Arnie's new sidewalk spot realized that before he could rent the space, he had to get the homeless person off the sidewalk in front. The owner tried to talk to him but discovered him so sick that he could barely speak. He called the police and Arnie was taken away. Arnie regained consciousness only once. He found himself in a bed. A bed. He had decided some time before that he was to die on the street, and now for some reason he was in a bed. He never found out why.

People in the neighborhood went to his spot and lit candles and stood, some sat, and told stories remembering Arnie. Xabe, the former neighborhood graffiti felon and current mural artist, did a mural on the wall, the first nonpaid work he had done in years—a fuzzy likeness of Arnie in his beret with wings and his right hand clenched. In large orange letters across the top, as though written in a cloud, it said, "Viva la huelga, Arnie!"

Someone taped a sign to the wall saying: "On this spot died Arnie Johnson, killed by the landlords of New York." No one had known Arnie's last name, and it was one of those landlords of New York, the one who had evicted him in the first place, who furnished the name. Nathan was surprised. Johnson. Everyone had always thought of Arnie as Jewish.

"También,"
said Panista, tapping out an idea on a lamppost. "I guess it was just that he read a lot."

In the evening, neighborhood friends sat vigil on the spot, and Nathan, who had joined them, found his brother already positioned on the concrete.

"Mordy!"

Mordy patted the sidewalk next to him as though fluffing a pillow for his brother. "Have a seat, bro'."

Nathan sat on the sidewalk next to him. "Where's Priscilla?"

Mordy, in his best John Kennedy impression, said, "Ah, let me say this about that. Ah. I left her on Hyannis."

"What happened?"

"The ducks. I couldn't take the ducks. They had ducks everywhere. These painted wooden ducks like deities for some ceremony. And they had pictures of ducks on the walls. There were ducks painted on their mailbox. They wore duck ties. They had duck belt buckles. Now, here's the weird part. They hate ducks. They want to kill them all. They are spending all summer caressing this arsenal of weapons just so they can go out in the fall and kill every duck in Massachusetts. Even their dogs want to kill ducks. So one day I said to the father, 'What's with the ducks?' Just like that. 'What's with the ducks? If you hate them so much you want to kill them, why do you put their pictures up all over the place?' "

"And?"

"And they asked me to leave. I may be skipping some steps, but that's basically it. Priscilla said I thought I was better than them. I think that may be an anti-Semitic observation. We should ask Dad."

For more than a week, people sat vigil, remembering Arnie. The owner of the coming Mexican restaurant, a man from New Jersey who was not at all Mexican and did not know what
Viva la huelga
meant, was glad that the writing was in Spanish, because he feared being blamed for Arnie's death and he understood that in order to be accepted in the neighborhood, he was going to have to keep this mural as part of the design of the exterior of his Mexican restaurant. He felt that the Spanish message made it seem more authentic and was pleased to learn that it was actually a Mexican slogan or Mexican American or somehow Mexican. In fact, he decided, in a fit of public relations genius, to name the restaurant Viva la Huelga!

Palo, Panista, and some of the other Puerto Ricans thought this might be their chance for a job. The Japanese were certainly showing no interest. And this was a gringo. They started speaking Spanish in a slow, nasal singsong in the hopes of passing for Mexicans. But the gringo brought in his own Mexicans from his other restaurant on the Upper East Side. The joke to the Puerto Ricans was that his Mexicans weren't Mexican, either, but an assortment of Salvadorans and Guatemalans.

Nathan found the seersucker
fardarter
sitting on a curb in front of Arnie's memorial, clutching himself, his body heaving great sobs. Nathan was moved by the idea that even this
fardarter
smart mourned Arnie. He put his hand on the smart's seersucker shoulder, somehow conveying kinship.

"Oh God!" moaned
the fardarter.

"Look," said Nathan, sitting next to him on the curb. "Look, Arnie was an original."

"Who? Oh God. Arnie? Is that the owner? I'm going to sue the son of a bitch." The face of the
fardarter
was the color of the blue stripes of his seersucker. He doubled over on the curb, the drainage gutter, an unsavory place littered with little green caps from crack vials, a used condom, and a dead pigeon that had probably died because Birdie Nagel wasn't here with her birdseed.

"Fucking sushi," groaned
the fardarter.

"You've been eating sushi?"

The fardarter
nodded in the affirmative.