The Sky Below (16 page)

She sighed. Just that: a sigh, the smallest sigh of a child waiting at a gate, a sigh I knew so, so well.

I began to shake. My left hand burned.
FOR SALE BY OWNER
. That bell rang in my ear again, but now, with an almost euphoric blend of sadness and joy, I welcomed it. There should be more bells, a row of bells, all ringing together, to herald the moment when I had glimpsed, at last and unexpectedly, my proper future.
Gabriel, on Pineapple Street, in autumn.
It was here, it had been here all along, waiting for me to recognize it, just across the river. It had pulled me here today, beckoned me to the land of the living. I was going to cross the Hudson to it on a walkway of icy, oblong silver bricks. (When was the last time I had counted them?)

As my hand burned, my life passed before my eyes. I saw it all so clearly: I had sold a box here and there over the years; I had gotten a grant or two; I was in a show called “Boxes.” I had gotten by, hanging on to my day job. But it was as if I had lived not in the apartment on East Seventh Street but in my own boxes all this time, tapping my dwindling stash of Belgian nails into manzanita wood from the inside, arranging found objects artfully around me, looking at the city's washed-out night sky with my head pressing against the top edge of the box and my
feet curled against the bottom edge. And now, all at once, I found that I was reaching up and out toward that dark horizon, that there was no end to my reaching, and it seemed that without knowing it I had been reaching like this always. Manzanita wood splintered around me.

I didn't know how it would happen, but this life that I saw on Pineapple Street was the life I had always wanted, and somehow I was going to get it. The light in the lamppost went on, a joke, but it was all I could do not to weep. How had I ever forgotten?
FOR SALE BY OWNER
: this was my sign, my chance, my past, and my future.

The little girl at the gate was regarding me in her grave way.

I smiled what I hoped was a non-threatening, non-child-kidnapping, invisible, distracted, grown-up sort of smile.

“Hey, are you Mr. Bender?” she called out.

I made a show of stubbing out my cigarette, though it wasn't lit. “Who? I'm just—”

“We're waiting for Mr. Bender,” she said somewhat accusatorily, as if I'd eaten him. “He's my new Latin teacher.” Did they speak Latin in Brooklyn now, on top of everything else? What was this place? On the lighted square of the girl's computer, the intricate design appeared to turn inside out and chuckle.

“No,” I said. “I'm not Mr. Bender. Hey, listen. Who do I talk to about your house?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who are you?”

“My name is Gabe.” I moved to cross the street to the house, then thought better of it. The little girl folded her arms, eyeing me up and down.

“We don't sell to crackers,” she said. “Our house is
nice.
”

I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I'd have to take a look.” I tried to slow my breathing, seem casual.

The little girl didn't care, or notice. She remained at the
gate, kicking one lavender sneaker in the dirt. “Fat chance,” she said. “Dream on.” She kicked the gate. “We're getting a rottweiler when we move.”

“Sounds good. They're good dogs.”

We eyed each other from opposite sides of the street, like gunslingers. The back of my neck began to ache. My vision blurred, resharpened, blurred. I was dizzy, thirsty, beside myself—literally, it felt like I had split into two versions of myself and neither of them was me. I wanted to sing. I wanted to vomit. I desperately hoped I wouldn't pee in my pants.

The front door opened again. The mother, in a business suit, leaned out. “Alice, come in here.”

I had never known what her name was.

Alice gave the gate an aggressive push. It clanged, clashing with the ringing in my ears. “Bye,” she said.

“Bye.”

She walked up the stairs backward, still looking at me. “Don't come back, cracker.”

I shook my head slowly, as if I was appalled by her bad, childish behavior. Then I turned away and plunged down the block, repeating the number on the sign over and over to myself until I had it memorized. I didn't look up or pay attention to where I was going until I realized I had arrived, as if by instinct, at the river.

Dusk was coming in. The peaks of the small gray waves were hooded with light, marching toward me. I held fast to the railing on the Promenade. I needed to focus. I closed my eyes, trying not to cry. I opened my eyes and watched the seagulls squawk at one another over trash: a bit of hot dog bun, a grimy French fry container. A big, dingy gray seagull sat on the rail with the lordly expression of one who had already eaten well. Others wheeled hungrily in the air. The light deepened; the river seemed to flatten out into a long glow. Pulling out my cell phone, I dialed the number. “This is Carl,” said a recorded
voice. “If you're calling about the house, leave a number and I'll call you back.” So the square-faced father's name was Carl. I left my number and folded my phone into my palm with a click.

Across the illuminated river, I could just make out the modest, shadowy rectangle, like a headstone, of the building that housed
The Hudson Times
amid the mammoth glass-and-steel buildings that towered over it. I tried to imagine that it was my past and to summon up a rueful tenderness, but instead, just like earlier in the day but in reverse, my spirit seemed to be stuck over there while my body was here on the Promenade. On the shabby eighth floor, the lights were on. The river turned entirely gold, solidified. I could barely see the building now, it had dissolved into the last blaze of light, but I could feel the taut stretching, the hollow in my chest that pulled me toward it. I was suddenly tired. With a sinking feeling, I knew I couldn't stay here, that I was going to have to go back. For now. Before the tug of sleep overtook me altogether and the river went black, I picked up a little stone and put it in my pocket for the journey across the river. Souvenir, theft, ballast, return ticket.

 

Carl, I discovered two days later, had a few threads of gray in his modest beard. He wore a plaid shirt and khakis. Inside the house, the rooms were small, with drop ceilings and wallpaper ornamented with blue and white figures in Colonial dress, walking along country lanes and dancing merrily. The floors were wide-planked, uncarpeted, and buffed to a high sheen. The air smelled of freshly baked cake. Every window was elaborately curtained in several layers of filmy white fabric. We sat in the living room as Carl explained the history of the house, the work he had done on it himself, the copper pipes, the new roof, the double-paned windows, the central heat. On the tour, I had seen the Jacuzzi in the master bathroom, the neat rooms
upstairs, the immaculate attic. The kitchen was old, and the basement was wide, dry, clean-swept. New hot water heater. Sitting in a wingchair, I listened, nodding, imagining in detail how spectacular the house was going to look after I gutted it, ripped down the upstairs ceilings, and punched holes in the roof for three or four cunningly slender skylights.

Carl leaned back. “Do you have any questions, Gabe?” I had told him to call me Gabe, since we were all on a first-name basis now.

“Well. Why are you selling, Carl?”

Carl chuckled. “This house,” he said, “was left to me by my grandmother. I have no mortgage, so my wife and I have decided to move up to Chappaqua with Alice. The schools are wonderful up there. That's why the Clintons moved there. I've been in Brooklyn my entire life—I want to have grass. I want to have trees. I want to see stars at night. And Alice is getting to be quite the rider.” He chuckled again. “Sorry. Long speech. It's just . . . we've had a lot of great interest in the house, and I'm eager to get going. Can't wait.”

“What, um, price did you have in mind?”

Carl put his hands on his knees, making himself into a small, solid, plaid square. “Two point five,” he said forthrightly.

“Two point five?”

“Two point five,” and he added, as if I didn't know what he meant, “million.”

What a greedy bastard. He had to be kidding. “Listen, Carl,” I said. “I'm an artist. I could never afford that much. But this is my house. I've been watching—” I stopped myself. “I love this house. It's very special to me.
Very.
”

“Well now, Gabe, it is a special house, you're right. And that's nice, that art thing. But.” He shrugged. “This is business. And, to be quite frank with you, I don't expect it will stay on the market for long.”

“You're bleeding me,” I blurted out.

He tilted his head. “I don't even know you.” He stood up, held out his hand. “Good luck to you and your art, Gabe. I'll keep an eye out for your name.”

“No, no,” I said. “No.”

“Yes,” said Carl. He gestured toward the door. “I have another appointment coming.”

Shattered, I managed to get to my feet, shake Carl's hand, and stumble down the front steps. Two bearish guys in baseball caps, one with a baby in a Snugli on his chest, were coming up the walk.

“Wow,” said the one who wasn't carrying the baby. The other one waved at me in a friendly way. The baby cooed.

“The rooms are small inside,” I said. “Very small.”

They ignored me, climbing the front stairs with heavy, bearish, big-assed footsteps.

 

Back home, I took all the money out of the freezer and heaped it up on the floor in a glittering, melting silver pile. I unwrapped one of the bundles and counted the chilled cash inside: $300, just like the first one Fleur had given me. The plastic Gristede's bag was clammy; the aluminum foil, like a carapace, lay stiff, wet, and empty on the floor. I tapped the rest of the bundles, but none were light, and then I counted how many bundles there were. More than I had thought: $25,520. I stepped over the pile and opened the small filing cabinet in my bedroom. I found a relatively recent 401 (k) statement from
The Hudson Times:
I had another $7,863.29 in there. So, altogether, that was about $33,000. I glanced at the trinkets on my windowsill—the cut-glass pineapple, the antique copper Buddha, the Steuben starfish, the gold-handled grape shears, etc.: $3,500, perhaps. $5,000? $8,000?

It didn't matter. It was nowhere near enough.

I sat down on the floor next to the melting heap of money, fighting despair. What would the
Stolen
girls do? They would be clever. They would be resourceful. In miniskirts, tied up
with clothesline. Like the scrappy working gals they were, they would find a way where there seemed to be no way. I wondered what that way could be. Because it just wasn't fair. The market was so horrible! How were middle-class folks like me, working artists, strivers, people with families, ever supposed to get a toehold? The city had been ruined by September 11, sure, but hadn't it been just as thoroughly, if more slowly, destroyed by its hyperinflated real estate market? Eaten away from the inside, co-op by co-op, condo by condo, thousands of dollars a square foot, even a square foot of air. I didn't exactly blame Carl, but what he was profiting from was evil, and he was turning a blind eye to that fact. What if I had been a
black
artist? Would Carl have lowered his price? My instincts said no. So that was on Carl, too: all he cared about was getting his, the rest of the race be damned. Had that been his grandmother's intention when she left him the house she'd probably worked her whole life to pay off ? That he would sell it to move to some white suburb?

I doubted it. I doubted it very much. My face burned; my fever seemed to be coming back, or maybe it was the fire of indignation. My joints ached. On the kitchen table above me, the figurine, which had one good horn now and the thick beginnings of another, sat serene, eyeless, blood-stained. Methodically, I rewrapped the money I had unwrapped, and stacked all the silver bricks back in the freezer, fitting them neatly on top of one another, making room for more. I knew I was defeated, for now. But the
Stolen
girls knew how to bide their time and plan. I would figure it out. I sat down at my rickety kitchen table, turned on my father's transistor radio, and began whittling the figurine some eyes. Three, I thought. Three eyes for her, all in a row, all open.

 

The odd thing was that it began to look, evening lamppost after evening lamppost, as if Carl had been wrong. The market wasn't flowing in his favor after all. Three weeks after I had
first seen it, the
FOR SALE BY OWNER
sign was still taped to the window. I tried the number, and the same outgoing message answered.

As if in response to my unrequited longing for the house, the patch in the crook of my right arm grew, turned scaly, circled around my elbow to meet itself, like a rough red bracelet. I put cortisone cream on it, but it stubbornly remained, as if someone had tied a piece of twine very tightly there. The tether of my love.

But one day, as I took my usual place against the lamppost, I saw that the house was completely covered in grayish-white fabric, or perhaps it was thick plastic, wrapped up like a Christo installation, even over the widow's walk, which threatened to poke through the wrapping. Since Carl and his family couldn't possibly be inside unless they were mummified (I didn't go so far as to wish for that, not yet, anyway), I left the lamppost and walked up to the house, pausing at the gate in the manner of a curious passerby. The vine was a twisted stick now, the blue flowers gone underground for the winter. The house was mute, blind, cold, wrapped in its grayish-white shroud. I thought I could smell it from where I stood—the scent of baking cake, the floor polish, the heat rising through the vents. But I knew that wasn't true. There was no scent at all coming from the house, though there was a low hum, like the sound of a fan. Around the perimeter of the house was a series of signs, spaced about six feet apart, and on each sign it said the same thing in large red letters:
WARNING PELIGROSO DO NOT ENTER NO ENTRAR FUMIGATION IN PROGRESS FUMIGACIÓN EN DESARROLLO STAY BACK ALEJATE KING EXTERMINATION
.