Like Son (19 page)
“Thanks,” I said.
“Thank
you
,” she said, and licked her lips.
N
at and I eventually crashed around seven that morning. When we finally came to and peeled our dry eyes open again, it was late afternoon and we were wicked hungry.
Hungry
—like if a small child had entered the apartment we just might have Texas-barbequed him and served him up with a side of slaw. In search of comfort food, something soaked in grease and bathed in salt, something that would stick heavily to our insides and ground us, we tugged on clothes and headed out to 2nd Ave Deli. But first we detoured to Avenue B. Of course, the tree and gold-framed love letter were already long gone. Even the pothole was back to its original deep-pit state. In fact, we were only able to find the tiniest tidbit of evidence that Project Evergreen hadn’t been some sort of mutual hallucination. A few gold feathers from the craft-store bird I’d secured to the tree lay wedged in the cracked asphalt near the pothole. As we left, I picked up the feathers and put them in my pocket.
We made it to 2nd Ave Deli and happily suffered customary abuse from the helmet-haired hostess and our probably once-vixen eighty-year-old waitress, Daisy. Buckets of bitter deli coffee and mounds of potato pancakes with applesauce and ketchup later, stuffed to the gills and moving even slower than when we woke, we eventually moseyed back home, hand-in-hand, neither of us in any particular rush. We were on 9th Street, just past First Avenue, when someone called out Nathalie’s name.
We stopped and stared at each other, not sure where the voice had come from.
“Up here, silly!”
We looked up to find the singsong interruption lilting out from a fourth-floor apartment window. A pretty little fag in a striped polo shirt and jeans was posing at the windowsill like the parade had taken a side route and the float had gotten stuck four floors up. Princess kept waving and smiling—so many teeth, such a pearly smile—and I had absolutely no fucking idea who he was.
“Georgie!” Nat squealed up at him.
Georgie?
“Get up here this instant, missy,” he commanded, planting his hands on his hips and scowling.
Nat giggled like a schoolgirl.
“And bring that yummy creature with you,” he purred, peering down at me.
“Nat?” I asked through a polite smile.
“That’s George.”
Uh, okay. And?
“He’s from the ad agency I worked at a couple months ago.”
“Buzz number five!” he called down to us, and disappeared back into his apartment.
“Want to go up?” Nat asked.
“Not really.”
“Ah, come on, he’s really sweet.”
“No thanks.”
“Okay, love. I’ll be home soon.” She gave me a peck on the cheek and skipped off to buzz George’s number five.
I continued onward until, six doors west from Avenue A, on the north side of the street, I saw a red and white rental sign propped in the window of an empty storefront. Instead of heading off to the warmth and comfort of home, I found myself staring in through the empty storefront’s smudged windows. It was one of those moments that will never make sense to anyone else no matter how many times I try to explain it. For some reason, as I stared into that tiny and sad-looking space, it hit me that I was thirty and that I didn’t want to be a temp for stupid fucking corporate America anymore. Maybe Nathalie’s return activated some primal desire to make a life for us. I don’t know, but as sudden and totally illogical as it may have been, I knew I wanted to rent the storefront. I wanted to open a little shop and be my own boss and set my own hours and create a livelihood of my own from the ground up. Yes, just like that. Out of fucking nowhere. Told you it didn’t make sense. But that’s what happened. Some sort of rattling alarm went off inside me, and there was no going back to sleep. I memorized the phone number on the sign and went home.
It wasn’t until later that night that I got up the nerve to call the number. Nathalie was cooking dinner and pretending to not listen as I talked to the property owner.
When I hung up, she waited several minutes before finally asking, “Anything you’d like to tell me?”
“There’s a
For Rent
sign on 9th.”
“A
For Rent
sign?”
“I was thinking maybe I could open a shop.”
“A shop? What kind of shop?”
“I don’t know, like cool vintage stuff or something.”
“Babe, where’s this coming from?”
That was the first time I tried to explain. I could tell from the look on Nathalie’s face that my newfound goal sounded insane.
“Okay, first of all,” she said, “there are already tons of shops like that in the neighborhood.”
“I know, but mine would be better.”
“It probably would be, but seriously, since when did you want to open a shop?”
Why did Nathalie have to get so damned sensible all of a sudden?
“I just thought of it today.”
“Maybe you should think about it for a little longer?”
Of course, Nathalie was right. And so, her bewilderment and my own self-doubt combined, I agreed to sit on the idea. But I thought about it constantly—as we ate dinner that night, in my sleep, the entire weekend through, on my walk to work, when I should have been entering data into spreadsheets, all the fucking time. In fact, I even started cruising the Internet and found out which licenses a person needs to open a small business in Manhattan. I downloaded applications and jotted notes about required fees. I grabbed my checkbook and worked out numbers. I drew sketches of business-card logos and window displays and contemplated stupid shit like whether I’d use a cash box and calculator or a register. Night after night, I walked past the storefront on my way home from work, dreaming about all the cool things I wanted to sell. And, as if to keep me torn between hard reality and daydream fantasies, the red rental sign stayed in the window. The shop seemed to be waiting for me to come and take claim of it.
Two weeks from the day I first spotted it, Nat and I were eating dinner when she said, “I saw the rental sign is still in the shop window …”
That was all the encouragement I needed.
Even though it was after office hours on a Friday night, I called the phone number that still blazed brightly in the foreground of my mental Filofax. An old woman answered the phone this time. In the background, I heard what sounded like a football game playing full volume on the television.
“Hello, I’m calling about the property on 9th Street.”
“Hold on just a second, dear … Harold, phone!”
And then the old man said: “Harold speaking.”
The next morning, nine o’clock sharp, I met Harold in person. Luck shining down on me, he was a jovial guy with sparkling, kind eyes.
“Bet you didn’t know this used to be a hardware store, did you?”
And so began the narration of his life story:
Born and raised, he’d lived his whole life downtown. Right out of high school, he’d started working in a hardware shop—this shop, the shop I now wanted to rent. Back in 1949, he’d met his wife in this same shop. She’d come in looking for a rat trap. Little did she know she’d end up with the rat. He nudged me and laughed gently. They married. Started a family. He kept working hard. They saved any money they could. Eventually, the owner sold him the shop. “For practically nothing. He was a good man, that one.” Decades passed, and when it was time to retire, he and his wife decided to rent out the storefront. They moved to New Jersey. “So the grandkids would have a yard to play in,” he said.
He asked me what my plans for the storefront were. I told him. He asked if I had the paperwork in order. No, I confessed, I didn’t. “But my family had a little shop back in California. Running a business is in my blood,” I said, padding the truth. He smiled. He said he liked me, I seemed like a nice kid, I had gumption, just like him when he was young.
“My nephew Sammy, he works at the Department of Consumer Affairs. Over on Broadway. He’ll pull some strings for you.”
I was given the necessary details and instructed to meet with Sammy on Monday morning.
“First and last, and the place is yours. Call me.”
I practically ran home to tell Nathalie.
“No way … seriously?”
“I can’t even tell you how excited I am, Nat.”
“This is totally crazy,” she sort of laughed, but there was a warm glow to her and I could tell she was impressed.
That Sunday night I called in sick at the temp agency. Bright and early Monday morning, I walked over to meet Sammy. He was as nice as his uncle—exactly where do these people come from?—and like his uncle had promised, he helped me with all the necessary forms. As I sat at his desk with a small Styrofoam cup of coffee he’d insisted on getting for me, he made several calls and arranged to put a rush on all my paperwork.
“You’ll be up and running in four weeks, tops,” he said, smiling.
The holidays were little more than a week away. Harold and Sammy would be receiving gift baskets of the nicest dried fruits, chocolates, and peanut brittle that Russ and Daughters’ appetizing shop had to offer.
On the walk home from Broadway, I stopped at the bank and officially drained all my meager savings to obtain a cashier’s check in the amount Howard had specified. The next morning, he met me at the shop, and I signed a one-year lease.
“Now, you can’t sell anything until your license is in order, but you’ve got plenty to do in the meantime,” he said, and handed me keys. “Good luck.”
I called Nathalie, and she promised to meet me at the shop on her way home from work.
When she arrived, she said, “Oh my God, this place is such shit,” and laughed nervously.
It was true. I’d spent the entire day sweeping and mopping and wiping things down, but the storefront was in need of some serious love. Over the next several days, the white on the raised numbers of my credit card began to rub off for how often I used plastic to buy supplies. I had no fucking idea what I was doing really, but, a growing lump of debt all mine, I’d gathered some supplies and was getting down to work. As other people did whatever it is they do at Christmastime, I wore my shittiest jeans and hoody and shivered with the door propped open as I painted the shop.
By New Year’s Eve, the paint had dried and the space was immaculately clean, but still, other than permanent shelves and display counters, the place remained empty. Obviously, that was a problem. A big problem. I was sitting on the floor of the shop, head in hands, wondering what the fuck I’d gotten myself into, a pulsating knot in my chest feeling like it just might expand and become a full-fledged freak-out—when there was a tap on the glass of the shop door: Nathalie, with an immense cheapie bottle of champagne in tow.
“To all good things,” she cheered, then popped the cork.
Champagne splashed on the floor. I cleaned up the spill with paper towels as Nathalie and I took turns drinking from the bottle.
Luckily, my ability to spot vintage kitsch gold amid piles of crap was Superman keen. To get my shop stocked, I made expert use of the thrifting skills I’d refined from adolescence onward. Each day for two weeks I rented a car and tore through every estate sale in the tri-state area. At night I returned to the shop to drop off carefully picked vintage clothes, jewelry, record albums, and other trinkets and enticing oddities.
Sammy called. He had my license ready for pick-up.
The shop was stocked.
All that was left to do was hang a shingle and pass out flyers.
“Nat, which do you like more, Frank’s Finds or Curro’s Curios?”
“What’s a
Curro
?”
“Nickname for Francisco.”
“How do you get
Curro
from
Francisco
?”
“Don’t know. How about
Dick
from
Richard
?”
“Curro’s Curios,” she said. “Definitely, Curro’s Curios.”
And so it was decided.
Nat helped me Xerox flyers announcing the shop’s grand opening—Saturday, January 18, 2003—and then she walked around the neighborhood, looking fabulous and charming people into promising they’d come check out the shop. The night before opening day, she even made batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies and bought tons of brightly colored napkins and plastic cups along with huge cartons of punch and lemonade from the grocery store. She was having a blast preparing to play hostess.
Opening day finally arrived. People trickled in, and slowly, too slowly really to be comforting, I began to sell some stuff. Nat, continuing in her role as the sensible one for the first time in our relationship, kept her temp gigs and offered to try to cover all our basic home expenses until the shop took off. She even threw down most of the second month’s rent and utilities and offered to help out on weekends. For a while at least, I had hope.
13 February 2003.
G
iven that it was smack in the middle of a brutally freezing winter and Nathalie had stayed home with the flu, I was more than a little surprised to come home and find her stark naked but for a rhinestone barrette pulling her bangs off her freshly cleaned face, broom and dustpan at her side. It seemed she’d been “cleaning” the closet—really just rifling through piles of clothes, dusty stacks of record albums and magazines, and, it appeared, my father’s briefcase.
“Nat?”
“Hi, love,” she said, and gave me a quick kiss.
“Shouldn’t you be resting?”
“I did all day. I feel better,” she said, sweetly and almost convincingly. And then: “By the way, you left your wallet this morning.” She pointed to the nightstand.
“Thanks.”
Nathalie responded with distracted nod and a pinched smile.
I found myself wishing she could afford a polite,
How was the shop today?
With meager sales those first few weeks the store was open, she probably figured it better not to ask. But why the strange vibe? She was clearly all worked up over something. Exhausted from yet another stressful day, I didn’t have the energy it would require to get to the source of her bizarreness. Hoping to avoid the topic entirely, I took off my hat, scarf, coat, and shoes, lay down on the bed, and tried to distract myself with opening mail. At one point, Nathalie disappeared into the bathroom—and reappeared wearing something that momentarily stunned me.
