Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories (4 page)

He’d go up when his mother and sister were out. That fall, around the time I had moved to town, he found a half-height door hidden behind moving boxes. The door didn’t have a knob or latch. He opened it by prying with a butter knife—marks on the wood showed how someone had done this before. He found a crawl space inside, and said that it was empty except for a painting leaning against the wall. He pulled out the painting and brought it to the window. It was old, he said, folk art style, but not country, not kitschy. He tried to talk about the painting—a boy with a bird, he said—but digressed into German expressionism, its influence on film, the use of dark, foreboding buildings, the tropes of monsters.

We passed clusters of mobile homes, taking in the flamingos and lawn chairs, the unlit Christmas lights from the year before wrapped along the metal stair railings, the turf carpets lining the stairs. I let him talk on about monsters. With Eli, I had learned to wait, to learn in bits and string them together later. He said that there was something wrong with the painting. That he’d looked at it until he couldn’t hold still anymore, then put it back, scraping his arm against a nail, knocking boxes over, burrowing through until he got to a shoebox of old photographs.

When his mother knocked on the door, the photographs were all over his bed. She wore her work clothes, and wiped stains from her apron with a facecloth. She used her leg to brace the apron while she scrubbed. She said, There’s peas and carrots on the stove, and pizza from last night. Will you make sure to eat something? Then she picked up a picture of the four of them at the commune. In it, she wore a lilac-colored skirt and a loose blouse. Her hair was in a bun, with strands falling around her face. She was holding Paige on her hip. Look at how beautiful you were, she said, look at that.

When she left, he picked up the photograph. It was the one he had been looking for.

When he was ready, he took me up to the attic and balanced the painting on a box below the window. It showed a little boy in green: green pants, a green shirt, a yellow bird on an out-stretched finger. It was painted crudely, two-dimensionally; the background looked like it radiated from the boy. He stared straight ahead, and his eyes looked old, much older than they should have looked at that age.

Eli slid his photograph from the folder. In it, he stood separate from his family. He was six years old. He wore green pants and a green jacket. His ears stuck out from his head.

They were nearly the same boy—not exactly, not aligned feature by feature, but almost. I held a finger to the photograph as if I could touch his cheek.

It’s possible, he said, while sprawled on his bed afterward, that someone just painted it to look like me. Some freak at the commune.

What about Henry? I said. He’d be able to tell you if it’s old or not.

It’s nothing anyway, he said, it’s shitty folk art. I’d rather have something modern.

He had a smirk, but was more serious than I had seen him, more than about movies or art or the kids he gave sandwiches to. I remember the easy way Eli had sat with them, but also his stiff command. He knew how alive he was, and no one could take that away. He always acted like he was waiting for someone to take it away. Where did this come from? He didn’t trust, but then he trusted too fully. In his belief in the sandwiches he bought in wax white bags. In the kids, though he never knew their names.

Instead of going to college, he said, he wanted to travel. I didn’t realize what this meant until the spring, when he said he was going to Europe. So far away? I said.

He went first to Berlin, then to Prague. Any news I got was from my mother. Eli’s sister left home and died of a heroin overdose.
A sister of a classmate of yours?
my mother wrote in a card before tucking the obituary inside. I was at college and didn’t think much about it. I sent Gretchen a card, I hope with more warmth than my mother’s, but still short what should have been there.

Then I graduated and moved to Portland, and my mother sent a card saying Gretchen was moving.
I believe you spent some time there?
Around that time I went to New York with a sometimes lover, Franz, a German man who taught music at the University of Southern Maine, to look at an exhibit of old folk portraits of children. I watched Franz purchase apples on the way to the station, noticing how easy he looked, though he was a large man, how easy he looked with a soft-napped bag over one shoulder. Once we were moving, I picked out an apple, but he took it from me and rubbed it in his shirt before giving it back. The mortality rate was so high back then, I said, the train moving through the leaves as if through a perforated tunnel. One out of every two children died. Sometimes the children were painted after they died. They kept the image of them that way; otherwise there wouldn’t be any trace left.

After seeing him in the market buying apples, I found that I wanted to tell him how I had cared for this person Eli, who had shown me a painting but had disappeared. About how lonely I had been in Jonesport. Saying it simply so that he would understand. Yes, he said from time to time, I see.

Really, I said, it was difficult for me. It became less difficult the day I saw the painting. I had felt, sometimes, like a bird in between windows, not able to get out, and not understanding why. Yes, Franz said, that’s something I can understand. I said, In Eli’s painting, the bird stood on the boy’s finger. The bird means soul, mortality. If it’s on the finger, then the person is alive, but if it lifts … it’s not really an explicit symbol for mortality, like a red light means stop and a green light means go, but a symbol of fragility, a reminder that at any moment this beautiful thing can fly away. And the beautiful thing isn’t the child itself—there wasn’t that perception of children back then—and not life either, but something possessed by … belonging to God.

After a time he wasn’t listening to the words, but watching the way my hands came off my lap and moved through the light.

In the museum, he checked the coats, then found me in a room filled with canvases of children. I sat on a bench near the center. There were windows on one end, with a transparent film over them. He sat on a bench next to mine. The children stared without making eye contact. There was a quality of suppressed noise, as if I felt noise but I couldn’t find it. I went to the window. For a while I stared at the rooftops. Then the light brought me into just the light. I felt that these things—the paintings and light—were doors not entirely made.

I’m trying to guess how it went by watching you, Franz said afterward, but I’m finding I can’t tell.

Oh, yes. Sorry. I forgot. Yes, these were like Eli’s.

He reached into his bag and gave me an apple wrapped in a napkin. The train was coming and he looked as if he wanted to give me something besides apples, but that was all he could think of, so he reached in his bag and took out another one.

Over the phone, I told Gretchen that I wanted to take measurements of her building before she left. I told her it was for my research. She didn’t seem to know who I was. I’m so sorry about Paige. I always wanted to tell you that.

Yes, she said, there were so many cards.

She peered through the crack in the door. Oh, she said, it’s you. Her hair had grown out and the ends were brittle, curling and lifting from her back. It made her look less in control, but also prettier. Her face was like that, too. Some skin had sunk a little, making her look more exposed. Come in, she said, no sense memorizing the hall.

She led me to the sofa, which was nearly obscured by boxes, then hollered from the kitchen. I only have Folgers, is that okay? I always drink the coffee at the restaurant.

That’s fine.

He’s doing well, you know. Eli—he’s really doing well. He’s working at a gallery, and they have him doing the photography for the promotional stuff.

In the kitchen, she was flipping through a pile of mail. There
was
a postcard, she said, that he sent. The art is so strange, but that’s what they’re doing these days, he tells me, millions of dollars people spend on that stuff. It’s of all these heads projected against a wall. Things I see in my dreams that I don’t want to be seeing. Spend a million dollars to see something like that all the time, no way.

I miss him, I said.

Yes, well, he sent a postcard. The refrigerator, you’ve noticed, is unplugged. I don’t know, I got a head start on defrosting it. She pointed to a towel wadded on the floor. And the pickles can’t possibly be good anymore, she said, except they’re preserved, so they must be okay.

Standing at the bay window, I waited for her to appear below and round the corner toward the restaurant. I lifted the cigarette she had left burning in the ashtray. There was a peach smudge at the tip. I put it back, and then locked the door and took a butter knife from the drawer.

Eli’s room was empty. I climbed the ladder in the closet, only to find the attic cleared out, too. I had expected to find it the way it had been, with the macramé, the open boxes.

Inside the crawl space, the painting was gone. I reached around but didn’t find it. At the end of the space I saw another door, similar to the one I had just gone through. It also had knife marks. This door opened onto a staircase going down. At the bottom, a door opened inside a cabinet. I climbed through and found myself in the back of the antiques shop.

At first, I thought it was just a secret stairway, and that everything else was ordinary, but the light was different. It had been overcast when I watched Gretchen leave, but now light diffused through the room, as if the building had been covered in opaque plastic sheets.

I sat at the piano, and played as I had in high school. Then I stopped playing, and wandered through the aisles of furniture. At the end of one I saw a painting: another child done in the same manner, this time a little girl in a white dress. She looked like me as a child. Her hair was like a bird’s, chestnut colored, spare at the temples. Everything had been painted still and flat except the eyes. They were brown and filled with worry. I sat on the floor near the painting, feeling close and knowing I wouldn’t get any closer.

When Eli finally came back to Portland, I told him what I had found. He asked me which way I’d left the shop. The way I came in, I said. It hadn’t occurred to me there was another way to leave.

He shook his head. He had gone a different way—out the front door and up the steps. It was a mistake, he said. He explained that he moved forward in a way that he wasn’t meant to.

He asked about the apartment: When I got back in after being in the shop, what did I see there? I mentioned the ashtray where I had put Gretchen’s cigarette. He said little things like that were going wrong. The cigarette would still be burning. He said he had tried to thread back, going through the cabinet, up the secret stairs to the attic, and down into his closet. But then he no longer understood which way he should go to undo what he had done. When he realized this, that he was lost in a way he couldn’t understand, he threw a book against the wall. Later, the dent was gone.

I could have walked out the front door, but I didn’t. I left the painting in the shop and climbed the stairs, went through the attic, down to his room, through the hall, down the stairs, back to the street, threading through the house the only way I knew how. I ended up in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the shop I’d just been in. Henry stood outside, setting out a chair. He waved me over.

His face looked softer, like worn cotton. When I asked if he remembered the piano, he said, You were hardly Mozart.

You remember.

He sank into the chair. You weren’t Mozart, Eli wasn’t Ansel Adams. Then he waved his hands. What does it matter, Mozart and Ansel Adams, the way you guys were back then. Better than Mozart. I should have kept the piano. I sold it to a couple in Acadia and I kept, what, probably something pewter. I don’t even know what I kept.

Does that answer it? he said. Did you find what you needed to? I would have kept you, too, as it were.

Kind old man, Eli said. Sometimes I think he was put there just for me. And what good did it do?

Eli had been back in Portland a few months. I had seen him working in an open kitchen and drinking at bars with friends, but this time I arrived to find him drinking by himself. We sat at a table near a window covered with a brocade curtain. The window looked over a grassy triangle; the paths were lit with lamps.

When I told him about going into the building, he leaned back in his chair and traced the top of his glass. He nodded, asked questions, circling the glass the whole time, but his composure began to break when he asked which way I had gone back. Then he sounded like a child asking and aware of that; another part of him sat there watching the vulnerability from a distance. Once, when we were in high school, he had walked in on my mother standing over the dining room table, yelling. My little brother and I sat there, quiet. There was a dish of peas with pearled onions at the center of the table. Butter was melting over the top. One of our tarnished spoons stuck out of it. I reached for the spoon and my mother threw the bowl against the wall. Then she turned to Eli and asked what he was looking at. Most people, when anger is directed at them, will shift in response to the anger, but Eli stayed with me, that same look on his face.

He said, I made so many mistakes. It was as if I was a different person watching myself make mistake after mistake.

We went out to the green across the street, as if the space—the low light, the fog, the shelter of the trees—made us invisible. We walked past a statue of a man on a horse. Eli sat on the top of a bench and got out a cigarette. I leaned against his legs and said, Henry still keeps camera parts for you.

In high school, things changed, he said. I needed money to get somewhere. So I went down and took a few things, small things, and sold them in New York.

No, he said. Many things,
I took many things.
Not from Henry’s shop. I never stole from Henry. But the other shop. I kept taking things.

Mostly Henry dealt with reputable vendors, but sometimes he had to deal with other people. Eli went through Henry’s records until he found one of these people. He called him, said that his grandmother had died and he had some jewelry. His mother was waitressing that night, and his sister hadn’t left her room. He took an empty backpack, went up to the attic then down to the shop. From under a glass display, he lifted hundreds of dollars worth of jewelry.