Rise and Shine (15 page)

“He’s in Tokyo. He and I were both a little shaky on your travel plans. We should have known your mom had it all down.”

“She went to Jamaica alone?”

I nodded. The car veered sharply around a cab on the highway with its hood thrown up and smoke rising from the engine, a man with a white turban kicking its side. A parabola of gray sleet spray rose and fell with a sound like gravel onto Leo’s window.

“Weather sucks here,” he said idly. “How’s Irving?”

I leaned against him, and he put his arm around my shoulder. The rocking of the closed car made me feel sick to my stomach; that, and the dread. I had a little sign I put up during parenting classes:
PARENTS ARE THE BEDROCK ON WHICH A CHILD BUILDS HIS HOUSE.
I also had one that said “God couldn’t be everywhere so he created mothers,” and “Any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Dad.” They all felt like treacly clichés, and they were all true. The women in the class loved them.

I leaned harder into Leo. “Aren’t you cold?” I said. He was still wearing just a T-shirt. Inside it said
FIGHT THE POWER,
but it was turned inside out so he could get a second day of wear out of it.

“Man, I missed New York,” he said as the skyline rose on the other side of the tunnel.

“Yeah, but you’ve got a month more of clean air and green grass to look forward to.”

“Way overrated,” he said.

“Welcome home!” cried Rafael as he reached for the door of the car. But Leo had it open before he did. “Mr. Sanchez,” Leo said. My nephew is a prince. The doormen at expensive New York buildings are ritualistically stripped of their names the moment they put on the ridiculous faux-military coats that go with the job. Like the nannies and the housekeepers, they are reduced to first names, never mind honorifics. But Leo told me once he found that disrespectful.

The apartment occupies the entire eighth floor of the building, with the obligatory umbrella stand, hall mirror, and half-moon table (“The new money girls call it a demilune,” Meghan said) to hold mail and keys and spare change just opposite the elevator. One of the doormen had thoughtfully provided a large basket to hold the mail, which looked as though it had piled up over the course of a year, not a week. Most of it was the usual: catalogs, magazines, engraved invitations to dinners and parties. Mailed, perhaps, before Ben Greenstreet and his surrogate had made the mistake of taking their love story to the unblinking eye of
Rise and Shine.

“I thought Mom just left,” Leo said, looking at the pile of mail, dumping his backpack on the black-and-white tiled floor, and peering at his own face in the mirror.

I opened the door. The place was even stuffier than it had been when I’d packed for my sister, and dust motes glistened in the half-light coming through the windows. I jumped at a faint staccato tapping sound and then realized it had started sleeting and the sharp little shards of ice were hitting the living room window.

Why is it that in horror stories they make a point of having pictures with eyes that follow you around the room? Don’t they all do that? All the faces in all the silver frames filled with Meghan’s utterly charmed life, Meghan and Evan in their wedding clothes, black and white; Meghan and Evan with Leo between them, left and right; Meghan and the princess of Wales, Meghan and the president, Meghan and the Dalai Lama. Meghan holding Leo. Meghan standing behind Leo. Leo standing behind Meghan. I looked out the window at the cars on Central Park West, the faint pinpoints of their headlights blurring in the sleet storm. A hansom-cab horse strained against his bit at the curb as motorists edged around him carelessly. Rafael the doorman stepped off the curb with a whistle in his mouth, and he must have blown it, because a cab veered toward the awning. But there was no sound through the triple-glazed panes except the sleet hitting the glass and falling.

I turned and Leo was gone. I walked down the long corridor to the bedrooms and found him standing by his desk, haphazardly handling things, picking up a book, putting down a pencil. The room of a boy who has left home is a sad and empty place. The pens in the mug are dried out, the clothes left in the drawers those that have been outgrown or never really suited in the first place, the photographs on the bulletin board dull and dusty and curled at the edges. I hoped Meghan stayed away from this corner of the apartment.

Framed on the bureau was a photograph of Meghan and Evan. They were cutting a cake, a five-tier monstrosity with overblown roses made of icing and a cheap plastic bride and groom on the top. In a cloak-and-dagger fashion that he’d obviously enjoyed, Leo had thrown his parents a surprise party two years ago, for their twentieth anniversary. While the customary caterers had produced the food, Leo had insisted we go to an ancient bakery on upper Amsterdam Avenue and get the most flamboyant and old-fashioned wedding cake imaginable, with icing that tasted like sugar and shortening. In the photograph, Meghan and Evan are grinning and holding an ivory-handled knife, her hand atop his. I no longer trusted their smiles. The invitation to the party had had a photo from their wedding, with the line “And they said it wouldn’t last….” above.

“So, okay,” Leo said, not turning around. “My dad is in, what, Japan?”

“Tokyo,” I said. “On business.”

“On business. Right. And my mom is in Jamaica.”

“On vacation.”

“Right. Alone on vacation.”

“At Grosvenor’s Cove.”

“Right.” He turned and looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “What’s going on, Bridey?”

“Things are weird around here, honey.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I got that.” Leo looked back down at his desk. Then he mumbled something. It almost sounded as though he was just clearing his throat.

“What?” I said.

He jammed his hands into his pants pockets without looking up and stared down at the snow globe on his desk, the one he used for a paperweight. Inside was the spiky skyline of New York. He didn’t speak for a long time. I waited, and finally he said, a little louder, “Split?”

“It seems that way, sweetheart. I think you need to talk to your father about it. I feel like I’m as much in the dark as you are. I’m sorry. I don’t get it, either.”

“Oh, Bridey,” he said softly. “You’re too much. There’s nothing to get. It just happens. People are married, then they’re not married. You go away and come back and call a guy to hang out and, it’s like, Oh, different apartment. My mom’s apartment, my dad’s apartment, my mom’s new boyfriend’s apartment. It happens all the time. All the time. Except…except I guess I just thought we were different.” He kicked at the Oriental rug with his big shoes. “Stupid,” he said. “Stupid.”

One by one, tears began to fall on the toes of his walking shoes, staining them. Leo wears these white leather walking shoes, the kind designed for old men. He has about six pairs, and he somehow keeps them very clean. I wrapped my arms around him, and for a moment he shook all over and it was just like holding Meghan except that she is small and Leo is big, bigger than me now. But for both of them it was as though an earthquake was passing through their bodies, as though there had been a seismic shift in the plates of the sternum that protect the heart.

“Bridey, I can’t stay here one more minute,” he finally said.

“That’s okay. Want to go out to eat somewhere?”

“Nah. Nah, let’s go to your house. Is that all right? Maybe get some pizza.”

“What about your paper?” I started to say, and then stopped.

By the time we got back downstairs, the sleet had turned to snow and it was beginning to stick to the tree branches angling across the stone wall from Central Park and to the back of that poor horse, whose driver was smoking a cigarette. But Rafael got us a cab.

“Thanks, Mr. Sanchez,” Leo said as he got in.

“Vaya con Dios, Señor Leo,” Rafael said, and when I looked up into the man’s black eyes, they were so full of affection and sympathy that I shifted sideways in the backseat of the car so Leo would not see it. The door slammed, the windows clouded with condensation, and we drove off with a spray of salted slush.

T
HE MOST COMMON
misconception about New York City is that you can lose yourself there. You can understand why people from Ames, Iowa, or Eugene, Oregon, might think this. There are apartment buildings that hold as many people vertically as many small towns do horizontally, and if you ride the elevators, you often get the sense not only that none of those people have ever spoken to one another but that none of them have ever made eye contact.

But New Yorkers know one another. Some of them know one another in the fashion of a man I once met at a cocktail party, whose sister was married to the younger brother of the first guy I dated when I moved to New York, which I suppose is the way people know one another in Savannah or San Francisco, too. But there is another way in which we know one another as well, as familiar strangers. I know the family who lives in the duplex apartment in the brownstone behind mine. The girl has a desk that looks out the window directly across from mine. She is a studious child who sits reading, taking notes, long after the light has turned from ash to slate gray. Her brother is older, and he pulls his blinds down often now, which probably means he is lying on his bed with the door locked and a skin magazine next to him. Unlike so many people in my neighborhood, the parents actually seem to use their kitchen for cooking on many nights, and sometimes when it is warm enough to have windows open but not warm enough to have the air-conditioning on, I can smell the sharp, savory aroma of a stew drifting from their windows.

It is like the smell of family life, a life I have known mainly secondhand. Our mother didn’t cook, and the black woman who tended house, and us, made casseroles or desserts at her own home and then brought them to our kitchen to be reheated. Our mother and father ate at the club or at restaurants four or five evenings a week. “Now you girls eat something,” our mother would say vaguely, waving a hand with a sapphire ring that looked like a cold blue eye. That’s one of the few things I can remember her saying, that and “I couldn’t be more exhausted,” which she seemed to breathe into the phone no matter who was on the other end. (Later I realized that if that plaint was followed by an irate “You have no idea!” it probably meant she was talking to our aunt Maureen, who worked as a surgical nurse and so knew exactly what real exhaustion felt like.) More often than not, Meghan and I would make peanut butter sandwiches and put the food back in the fridge. “Oh, we went out to eat with our parents,” Meghan said when Nelly asked. Even then she was inventing a facsimile for public consumption, so much better than the original. I learned early to keep quiet about the lies that made us sound like more than we really were.

I know at least a dozen people on my block by sight, and occasionally I will learn enough about them to give them names as well as faces. Not proper names, but classifications. There is the professor at Columbia—every block seems to have one of those—and the poetry editor. There is the mother of the three teenage girls and the mother of the badly behaved boys. There is the old man who is an improbable wizard on the computer and spends his days trading stocks online. And I am an amateur compared with Tequila. Sometimes we walk through the neighborhood around the office and she keeps up a commentary as though she is Thornton Wilder and this is a ghetto version of
Our Town:
this girl getting with a married man from work, that boy going to Bronx Community because he failed the firefighters’ exam, this one pregnant, that one selling dope. “I hear stuff,” she says to explain how she knows the backstory of every life that crosses her path on Mount Morris Avenue. That’s why she’s good at her job, too, because she hears stuff: a family who needs a housekeeper that might hire one of our women, an apartment opening up where one of our families might be able to live. If Tequila lived in Bees Knees, North Dakota, it would be impossible for her to know more about her neighbors than she does just by keeping her ears open while she pushes her cart at the C-Town or stands in line to register her son for the subsidized day camp at Fordham.

But more than that, it is impossible to get lost in New York because, by some defiance of the law of averages, you keep running into people you know on the street, on the subways, and in restaurants. Meghan has a name for this; she calls it the “boomerang effect,” and she always says that it is those you least want to see whom you will run into unexpectedly. “For instance,” she once said, “if I have a terrible assistant and I fire her, she will be in the ladies’ at the University Club when I’m meeting someone for lunch, visiting someone in the same building when I’m going to dinner, or shopping at Saks when I’m on my way to buy a coat.”

“You haven’t been in Saks in years. They send clothes to the house for you.”

“You get what I mean.”

I got what she meant. When I was twenty-five and working as a potter, I began a relationship, if you can call a relationship something that consists of little more than sex and takeout—which is, by the way, the ruling principle of many New York relationships—with a guy named Ken who ran a shop called Potpourri. It was one of eleven unrelated shops in the Manhattan phone book by that name, which should have told me something about Ken’s powers of imagination. He had a beard, which I found increasingly irritating, and a habit of striking yoga poses with no provocation, so that sometimes he would leap from bed and, rather than go to the bathroom, do the Crow or the Heron. A response seemed to be required, and my response, after four weeks, was to tell him that I wanted to move on.

“I think you’ll regret this,” he said. “I want to leave the door open.”

In the weeks that followed, I saw Ken at Shanghai Palace in Chinatown, at a bank in Chelsea, on Eighth Avenue after the theater had let out one night, and at a party given by a friend I didn’t even know knew him. In fact he didn’t; Ken was there with his new girlfriend, a yoga instructor who, for some reason, called him Kenyon. The door was closed.