The Sea Beach Line (23 page)

“He never stopped believing that he was a pigeon. But he did come to believe that he was a very clever pigeon, and that it was all right for a clever pigeon to run a very successful hat company, making money off the humans. And he acted like he was supposed to. Eventually, he married and took over the family business.”

“Was he happier?” I asked.

“I don't know. He'd been sad when he was a pigeon without any pigeon friends. But I think he was still sad when he was a pigeon in the human world. I think he was happiest when he first made friends with the other man, when he had someone to share his coop with.”

“When he had a friend,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And what happened to his friend?”

“He was just gone, one day,” Rayna said. “The friendship had to end, when the story was done. The Hat King's son became the new Hat King. The store is still there, on Thirteenth Avenue. He had a wife, and human friends. The man wasn't one of them. Sometimes people come into your life. And sometimes people go away. You are grateful, but . . . you don't hold too tight.”

Rayna seemed to be delivering a warning about our situation, but I wasn't clear if she was telling herself or me not to hold on too tight.
Was she saying she expected me to desert her after I'd grown tired of helping? Or was she warning me that she'd be gone one day, with no explanation, when our story was over? Maybe she was just tying up the story, this tale she'd told me to pass the time and avoid talking about herself. Was it just a local legend, or something she'd really observed? She sounded very serious. Either way, every word didn't have meaning to glean.

I poured us each some wine. The police liked to give people a hard time about open containers in the park, especially when they were trying to hit a ticket quota, so we kept the wine bottle in a paper bag, and drank out of coffee cups. We lay in the grass very near each other and sipped our wine. How could I be sure Rayna was real? That we were really here together and the ground itself was solid? I couldn't be sure I wasn't a pigeon or a squirrel who just thought he was a human man. It felt nice to sit in the grass with Rayna and drink wine. I knew that much. After a good night's sleep, a good meal, and a few drinks, Rayna no longer looked so tortured. She looked bright, and alive.

I leaned forward, and tried to kiss her. She pulled back. Her face tightened with pain, and she wrapped her arms around herself. Her skin turned pale.

“I'm sorry!” I told her. “I didn't mean anything by it. You just looked very pretty.” I was afraid that I had broken the spell.

She was very quiet for an unbearably long minute, and then she said, “It's fine. I know you only meant to be nice. But it scared me.” The wind blew her long hair in her face, but she didn't push it away.

“I'll tell you a story, then,” I said. I didn't want us to lapse into silence again. All the stories that came to mind were about Al, so I picked one he told Becca and me as kids. “A story my father told me.”

“Please,” Rayna said, brightening again. Stories were apparently a more comfortable way for us to interact with one another.

“Well, when my father was a little boy he lived in a big new postwar apartment building in Warsaw. A prefab, concrete, communist apartment block. The father of one of his friends was a building engineer, and he told the boys that the cellar of the original apartment building—which had been destroyed by bombs during the war—was still there,
underneath the new basement. All of the boys were interested, and they made plans to go down and explore. Who knew what was down there? Maybe treasure. Maybe rifles the Jewish partisans had buried. Maybe the skeletons of people who were killed by the Germans, or who swallowed poison to avoid capture.” I didn't remember exactly what details Al had given when he told the story, but these sounded right. Rayna seemed interested.

“When they actually opened the cellar door, all the boys were too scared to crawl down into the dark subcellar. They all dared each other to go first, but only my father stepped forward.” Al had in fact grown up in Warsaw, and as far as I knew the story was true so far. As a kid, I'd believed the entire story was true, until Becca convinced me otherwise. But I didn't know at what point the fiction began. Maybe Becca was right, and the whole story was made up. Or maybe she was completely wrong, and the whole story was true. Or maybe it was true, but it was someone else's story Al had taken for his own. “He thought the others would follow him, but they were all scared and ran off. My father found himself alone in the dark cellar.

“All of a sudden, something jumped out at him from the darkness!”

“What was it?” asked Rayna, with genuine concern.

“A devil!”

“Oh no!” She put her hand over her mouth.

“Yes. My father was scared at first too, but then he saw that it was just a little devil, and not a very strong one at that. He was an inch or two taller than my father, but nowhere near as tall as a grown man. He was very, very thin, and his ribs stuck out through his blotchy red skin. My father wrestled at school, so it only took him a couple minutes to overpower the devil and grab him by the toe.

“My father held the devil upside down, and said, ‘I expected more of a fight from a devil!' ‘Well,' the devil said, ‘twenty-five years ago, things would have gone a good bit differently! I can tell you that! But you see, a Jewish devil like me feeds off the fears and doubts of Jews. In the good old days, there was a whole building and a whole courtyard full of religious Jews here. They were full of fear and doubt. The more pious they were, the more doubt. But then, it came to pass that
there were no Jews here at all. I nearly starved to death.'” I had never told the story before and tried to imitate as much of Al's phrasing and delivery as I could, but it had been a long time. I filled in the gaps. My version had more religion in it than Al's.

“‘I am very grateful for this new housing project the government has made. There are no religious people left, but there are a few Jews tucked here and there, in one apartment or another, even if they don't all know they are Jews, and there are bits of faith—and bits of doubt—tucked in all of their hearts. There is enough sustenance for me to survive, at least.'

“‘Now,' said the devil, ‘how about letting me go?'

“‘What's in it for me?' asked my father.

“‘If you set me free,' said the devil, ‘then I'll be your slave and do your bidding. I will do all your chores and all of your homework for three years.' So my father set the devil free, and never had to do one page of homework, or carry any trash or coal, the rest of the time he was in grammar school.”

“Your father is a man who consorts and makes deals with devils?” Rayna asked me, frightened.

“Yes, but only little ones,” I said, though I didn't really know what kind of devils my father might have made deals with. I didn't know what he was involved in, what kinds of deals he'd made, or how far into darkness he'd descended. For that matter, I wondered what kind of devils I was prepared to make deals with.

I never asked Rayna to move into the storage unit, and she never asked if she could. We both just understood she would stay. She came home with me from the park that afternoon, and she went out on the street with me Sunday morning. We weren't together every minute; she went on walks by herself almost every day, but she always came back to the storage space. It was difficult to remember that I'd had an ulterior motive in befriending Rayna. My whole life I'd just been trying to move forward, toward something else, toward some goal.
With Rayna living with me, I was enjoying the present. The days on the calendar followed one after the other, but I felt like I was floating, suspended in time, enchanted.

Rayna didn't have anywhere else to go, but she also seemed happy to spend her days with me. We'd both been lonely. To my surprise, I completely stopped longing for drugs, partly because of my bad experience with Malachi's weed but partly because Rayna was herself intoxicating.

At first, I considered telling Roman and Timur that Rayna was staying in the space, but it was my life and my home, not theirs. Zoya and her girls could tell Timur, if they cared to. When I called Roman again to check in, I didn't mention Rayna, and he had nothing to report about Al. Maybe he and Timur didn't know much more about Al than I did. Maybe no one knew what had happened to him.

Because of what happened in the park, I was nervous to try to kiss Rayna again. But after a few days, when we were settled and Rayna was more comfortable, she started giving me little kisses on the cheek when we were alone in storage. I would kiss her back, but didn't push things further than that because I didn't want to make her uncomfortable again. The outer world was a scary place for her already. I was content holding hands, trading kisses, and sharing my little world with her.

The only woman I'd ever spent so much time with was my ex-girlfriend, Mariam. I was crazy about Mariam, but it was just a schoolkid romance. Just a game: let's play at being lovers. Nothing was really at stake. Though I hadn't known Rayna long, and we weren't as physically intimate, our connection felt much more serious. Our lives were in each other's hands. We needed each other.

Aside from what I got from Rayna's presence personally, she became a big help to me in the business. The books and the money were hard to keep track of on my own, and she was good with figures. Her practicality made her seem less otherworldly.

Still, as much as I enjoyed Rayna's presence, I couldn't ignore the question of her origins, and appearance in the sketchbook. She had the right to a new story for herself, just like anyone else, but if she had some connection to Al, I had to discover it.

“Rayna,” I finally said, after she'd been with me for four or five days, “I need to show you something.” Taking out the notebook that focused on the Galuth Museum, I turned to the study in question. “Look. I saw this picture first, in my father's sketchbook, and I didn't know what to make of it when I met you.” She studied the picture in silence for a minute or so.

“What do you mean?” she asked. I'd expected shock, not indifference.

“Don't you think the woman in the picture looks like you?” I looked from the image in the book to the woman in front of me. There was no question about it. They were one and the same.

“Like me?” She bit her lip as she considered the proposition but had no explanation. Whatever Rayna's connection to the Galuth painting, it was apparently a mystery to her as well. “I don't know. I suppose. I don't look in mirrors often.” I pictured mirrors covered during shiva. “She is familiar to me in some way, but she looks more like one of my older sisters than like me.”

“Are you close with your sisters, Rayna?” I asked, trying to draw out any thread of information.

“Maybe when I was younger. But they are all married now, and busy with their children. My family was making plans to marry me away too. I had no say. I would be forced.” She became quiet. I didn't know what to say about this arranged marriage she had apparently escaped. For a moment, I thought she would cry, but she forced the pain away and began speaking. “This picture also resembles my youngest aunt. More so than any of my sisters, actually. But lots of girls look like this . . .” She seemed more interested in the sketchbook itself than in her own picture, and flipped forward through the pages. She stopped on a picture of Goldov, Roman, and Timur.

“Do you know those men?” I asked.

“This one looks familiar, maybe.” She pointed to Goldov. “But it's hard to say. So many men come to visit my father.” I wanted to ask more about her father, but she quickly turned the question around. “Is there a self-portrait of your father in here?” she asked. “You talk of him often, I want to know what he looks like. Does he look like you?”

“No,” I said. “There's no picture of Alojzy.”

I tried to ask Rayna about recognizing Goldov's picture again a few times over the next couple days, but any discussion upset her. She would change the subject, or not say anything. I didn't press the issue very hard. As much as I wanted to learn more about my own father and the men in his world, nothing was worth hurting Rayna.