“What you giving away, boy? Ooooh, cool!” one of them exclaimed.
“Plenty more where these came from, ladies,” I said, handing over the last of my flowers.
A driver in a semi stuck behind the Merc was leaning on the horn. I could see Stosh gesturing to me.
“Sorry, gotta run,” I said.
“Bye-bye!” The ladies waved. “Thank you, thank you!”
I climbed in, and we shot away as if propelled by the horn blasts of the enraged trucker.
“You're giving away all the profits, man!” Stosh laughed.
I looked in back. The pile had been diminished. “There's still plenty, and we can go back and get more.”
“I guess a little free advertising never hurt. You probably could have sold them. See what I mean? There was mass orchid madness, an orchid feeding frenzy. I thought they were going to gang-rape you.”
“Hey! I think I might have found my calling: the Orchid Man!”
“All right, Orca Man, let's go get a brew.”
“Yeah, and we better get the rest of these in water.” I could almost feel their thirst. I could visualize them in a vase of cool waterâa tall, clear vase on a bureau beside the bed in Laurel's room. Sunlight filtered through her sheer curtains and the glass of the vase. She'd wake and the flowers would be the first thing she saw. I didn't know how I'd sneak them in there, but she'd rise wondering who left the flowers and go to the mailbox and it would
be full of orchids, too. There'd be orchids fit into the knocker of her door, stuffed in keyholes, scattered over her front steps, clipped like parking tickets under the windshield wipers of her mother's Olds. And if I didn't have enough flowers for all that there were more along the river, growing out of the ooze, surrounded by the drone of insects and songs of birds, still undisturbed, secret.
We were riding down Twenty-sixth, and what was left of the day had come alive. Shoppers whirled from the revolving doors of department stores; mariachi music blared out of bars; at stands under awnings outside groceries, women were breaking bunches of plantains from green stalks; on the corner of Spaulding, a vendor scooped black seeds from freshly sliced papayas. There was the fragrance of tacos and
cabrito
smoldering on spits. The street names were in English, but the rest of Twenty-sixth read like a Spanish lesson:
FruterÃa, Lavadero, Se Habla Español.
I repeated the signs to myself, practicing, and when I noticed the Mayan features of an old woman whom Stosh had stopped to allow to cross the street, it suddenly was clear, in a way it had never been before, that whether I got there or not, Mexico had already come to me.
We parked on Stosh's street in the rubble lot beside his two-flat.
“Tecate!” he said, to the refrain of “Tequila.” He carefully gathered up the remaining orchids from the backseat.
“They keep them in a cooler at the florist,” I said. “You think we should put them in the fridge?”
“I don't know. My old man might think they're a salad and eat them.”
I picked up a couple he'd dropped and did an Orchid Man dance with them down the gangway to the rear of the house.
“Oh no, the fucken Orkin Man is getting carried away again,” Stosh said.
Even before we climbed the back stairs to the kitchen, I could smell the coffee wafting through the screen door and hear the women's voices.
The kitchen was full of women dressed as though it was Sunday. They were sitting around the kitchen table, sipping coffee and nibbling the remains of the devil's food cake that Stosh's mother served on the afternoons when she hosted Tupperware parties. This party looked nearly over: ashtrays piled with lipsticked butts, countertops lined with half-empty Tupperware bowls of dip and chips. All shapes and sizes of Tupperware were displayed on card tables in the dining room, where the formal presentation had been. I recognized a few of the women from the parish: Mrs. Lalecki, whose son, Larry, had dropped out of grade school when Stosh and I went there; Mrs. Sosa, who led the choir at St. Roman and whose son, Hector, had been paralyzed by a bullet in a gang shooting; Mrs. Corea, who got up once during a sermon and denounced the priests as Svengalis after her beautiful daughter, Lima, insisted on joining the Carmelites; Mrs. Martoni, who once, wearing only a slip, was locked out of the house in the dead of winter by her drunken husband. Along with the other women, they'd spent the afternoon at the Tupperware party, and we'd barged in on their confidential conversation.
“Excuse us,” Stosh said, giving me a Groucho look that I knew meant the beer is trapped. He stood there sweaty, shirtless, covered in dried mud, holding the flowers as if delivering a bouquet.
“You boys want some cake?” Stosh's mother asked. “Stanley, where's your shoe?”
“We could use a Tupperware vase for these,” Stosh said.
“What you have there?” one of the ladies asked.
“Orchids,” Stosh said.
“Orchids don't grow around here,” Mrs. Lalecki said authoritatively.
“Yeah, that's what they all say,” Stosh told her, nodding a look at me and shaking his head condescendingly. “So, what do you call these?”
“Irises,” Mrs. Corea said.
“What do you mean irises?” Stosh said, flushing suddenly the way I'd seen him do in fights. “They're orchids.”
“Stanley, sweetie, they're irises,” his mother said. “I got them growing in the back yard.”
“I like the carnations better for the house,” Mrs. Corea said. “The irises are pretty, but they don't last.”
“Irises,” Stosh repeated, looking at me, then glancing away.
I shrugged, drained for a moment of everything but thirst.
“Let's split,” he said and slammed out of the screen door.
“So long,” I said to his mother and the ladies.
“Stanley!” his mother exclaimed, looking past me out the door. “Oh, honey, don't!”
I heard the hiss against the screen and turned to see the violet blur of his arm sweep down and smash the bouquet off the banister, violet petals exploding, and almost in the same motion their headless green stems scattering out over the yard. In the dazzling afternoon light it seemed as if the arc of an orchid aura hovered around Stosh before I realized the flowers had left a streak when he'd whipped them across the rusted screen of the back door.
By winter I had acquired a table and chair, but that late September I liked the place as bare as I'd found it, and was content to spread my lunch on the white kitchen windowsill and eat while staring out at the street below.
The street was bounded by the El tracks and a neighborhood cathedral, the name of which I didn't know. It was a shadowy street with the amplified quiet of a dead end, except for the occasional clatter of the El and, at noon, the uniformed kids from the Catholic grade school playing during lunchtime recess in the culde-sac. The cross-tipped shadow of the steeple creeping along the pavement seemed to add an eerie dimension of echo, which made the lighthearted banter of their voices sound all the more riotous.
The window I sat propped in had been painted open. White paint slapped over cobwebs still foamed in the corners of the sash. Tiny white worms of paint uncoiled from the hinges of the kitchen cabinets. I'd snapped a butter knife prying at the painted drawers, trying to stash the silverware I'd borrowed, along with a pair of salt and pepper shakers, from a cafeteria.
The entire apartment wore this fresh coat of white, through which the inscriptions that generations of former tenants had left behindâbottle rings, phone numbers, initials carved into the woodworkâslowly reemerged. I wondered who my predecessors were, tried to imagine all that might have happened here,
but there were no ghosts, no history other than what was waiting to happen, merely two unfurnished rooms, empty except for my saxophone case and portable typewriter, and the suitcase, heavy with too many books, that I'd dumped in the center of the floor.
I was living in exile from Little Village, in a place called the Loyola Arms Hotel, although it obviously hadn't operated as a hotel for years. The rusted, burned-out neon sign in front had never been removed. It was my first apartment. The rent was cheap but still beyond my means after my friend Stosh, who was a Trotskyite that year and was to have been my roommate, moved into a place across town, closer to the University of Chicago, at the invitation of a Thai girl he'd been seeing. I didn't blame him.
Had we split the rent as planned, I could have made it to next springâat least by my most optimistic calculationsâstretching out the money I'd managed to save while living with my parents. They'd been uprooted from Chicago, transferred to Memphis, when the plant where my father had worked for thirty years shut down and moved south. My father had managed to get me a job for the summer in the foundry with his company in Memphisâa situation I was desperate to escape.
So I left and came back to Chicago, ostensibly to return to school, and moved in anyway, imagining that I could live off the city like some form of urban wildlifeâalley cat, rat, sparrow. I thought I could slip between the seams like the homeless foreigners who'd roamed through the South Side neighborhood where I'd been raised. I'd grown up studying them: tramps, bag ladies, panhandlers scavenging the alleys in summer like beachcombers; old black hobos fishing along the Sanitary Canal; urban hermits like the bearded mute known only as the DP, who lived in a cave hollowed out under a sidewalk on Twenty-first and Washtenaw, or the Mexican known as the Pigeon Man, who lived with the pigeons in a nest of cardboard cartons that he'd wedged among the girders of the Western Avenue bridge.
My plan was to live on Cheerios and baked potatoes. How much money did one really need, after all? Supermarkets offered free samples and bruised fruit. There were books and records in libraries, paper and pens in banks, toilet paper and paper towels in public rest rooms, soap and socks left in Laundromats. There was Army Surplus and Goodwill. It was September in America, days hazed in gold, streets lined with the largesse of produce stands and flower stalls; the city, to quote Stosh, loaded with bargains at the world's expense. “In this country,” he said, “what amounts to merely surviving off the crumbs would be a life of privilege most anywhere else on earth.”
But my lunches were becoming extravagant. Picnics on a windowsill: braunschweiger, Jewish rye, mayonnaise, raw onion, potato salad blushing with paprika, a cold beer, an enormous garlicky sea green pickle tonged just minutes before at the corner deli by a young woman with high cheekbones and a Slavic accent, her golden hair stranding from turquoise combs that could hardly contain the weight of curls, ample breasts so loose they had to be bare in the sleeveless blue sundress she wore, and the blond hair growing profusely under her arms flashing as she dipped into a huge glass crock where a school of kosher pickles darted away and tried to hide amidst the dillweed, roiled seeds, and wheeling peppercorns.
Did she realize, looking at me when she seized a pickle and, raising it victoriously, smiled, that there are times in a life when a flash of the natural, humble hair beneath a woman's arms can seem like a forbidden glimpse, a promise, of further mystery?
I'd walk back to the hotel, my lunch tightly wrapped in white butcher paper sealed with the strip of brown tape she'd licked. It was windy that fall, and the neighborhood smelled of whitecaps off the lake. The echo of noon bells from the church-locked street swirled in the vortex of doorways and mingled with the rasp of leaves and dust; pigeons and sheets of newspaper kited over the
wooden platform of the Loyola station. The blind accordion player in an abandoned newsstand caught my arm as I passed, saying he smelled garlic.
“Take me to the turnstiles,” he said. “It's so windy I can't hear where I'm going.” And when I left him at the entrance to the El, he started pumping notes just as the northbound train slammed overhead like a part of the song catching up.
Late at night, through the painted-open window, I could hear the El train, stations away, rocking over the hollow viaducts of the North SideâArgyle, Thorndale, Granville, stops with names like English butlersâas I lay on the twangy, flop-out Murphy bed that a girlfriend once referred to as “the debilitated bicep of the Loyola Arms.”
Well, not a girlfriend exactly. She was the same girl who told me that she'd faithfully kept a diary from the time she was a child but that now she wrote down nothing, because recording things as they happenâexactly as they areâmeans that one is merely a journalist, and she was living her life like a novel.
“The Great American Novel?” I asked, but before she could answer I guessed that no, it was probably a Russian novelâpages of drifting snow, suffering, endless vodka-addled philosophical arguments, and at the end an appendix with a family tree that was necessary in order to follow the generations of characters with their unpronounceable names, names that required you to move your lips while reading.
She said she didn't know what kind of novel it was, because sheâthen she changed that to
we
âwere only on Chapter One.
She said that without the least bit of irony, and though that frightened me a little, I liked her all the more for it.
“You may have noticed we have different thought processes,” she said.
“How so?”
“I love the connections, the overview of novels. And you â¦
you think that life is a Great Moments collection. Look at all these undernourished-looking books of poetry,” she said, gesturing to where my typewriter sat on the platform I'd erected on the worn carpet from a stack of library books. “How can you type sitting on the floor, anyway?”
“I'm living my life like a haiku,” I said. “Syllable by syllable.”
“The best teacher I ever had in high school once wrote on one of my papers âSarcasm is the final defense of the weak.' And this saxophoneâdo you ever play it or is it just for decor?”
“I'm practicing to be a musician of silence,” I told her, quoting a line I'd read just the night before in a book of translations of Mallarmé.
She merely gave me one of those looks that says if there's one thing more tedious than being a bore it's being a pretentious asshole.
I knew she was impressed.
Â
We'd met in the New World, a socialist bookstore that had just moved up to Rogers Park after a mail bomb had blown out the windows in its former downtown location. Stosh, who frequented the place, had told me that the owner, Lew Merskin, had fought in the Spanish Civil War. I'd wandered in on the evening of the first day I'd moved back to the city, and meeting her there seemed like a good omen.
Her name was Melodyâbut after our discussion about life as a Russian novel, I began calling her Natasha, a name she seemed fond of. She had the soulful eyes to carry it off, though that quality might have been enhanced by her violet eye shadow. Her face was framed by dark hair, wisps of which she constantly brushed away from her eyes and away from our mouths when we kissed.
I didn't have a phone and would never know when she was coming over, or if she was coming at all. The day we'd met I'd
told her where I was living, never expecting her to drop by, especially when she didn't even offer her phone number. All she'd told me was that she lived in Evanston.
Later, she mentioned that she was attending Northwestern, which I'd assumed, somehow, but I never found out where she was living, whether alone or with a boyfriend, in a dorm, or at a sorority house she was embarrassed about. Or was she slumming and didn't want her friends to know? Once, when I asked her how I could get in touch, she said, “Let's just leave it this way for a whileâboth free, okay?”
“Fine by me,” I said.
The lobby buzzer didn't work. I lived on the top floor, down a dingy corridor dark with burned-out overhead bulbs. There'd be a knock at my doorâI never quite learned to recognize her knockâand a chemical change too immediate to control would surge through me. If it turned out to be merely one of my friends, Stosh or Doolin, I'd feel foolish standing there at the door with a pounding heart. But sometimes, usually in midafternoon when she'd cut class and take the train from Evanston, it would be Melody, looking Natasha-like in the black raincoat she wore whether it was raining or not. Jeans or a denim skirt, blouse opened at the throat, and underneath a colored braâviolet, ivory, mint, smoke, rose, Capri. A bra from what she referred to as her Italian underwear hobby, which she blamed on the corrupting childhood experience of collecting wardrobes for her Barbie. Whatever the color of the day, she took to dangling her bras from my saxophone as if it was a coatrack, not a horn.
When the flop-out bed would begin twanging melodiously beneath us, the old woman in the apartment below would beat the ceiling with what I guessed was the handle of a broom.
“I wonder what chapter she's on?” I said.
“That's sad, not funny,” Natasha said.
“At least my typing late at night never seems to bother her.”
“And what is it that you're typing so late?”
“Maybe
my
diary.”
“Oh really, and do you write about us? About this? How do you describe it?”
“Well, I usually start out, âDear Diary â¦'”
“I wouldn't know what words to use,” she said. “Certainly not the clinical ones, but not the dirty ones either. And certainly not the bodice rippers.
Throb
or
tumescentâ
God, that's truly disgusting.”
“I thought diaries were supposed to be private, like confession.”
“No fair. I share my stories with you.”
It was true, she'd tell me storiesâstrange, amazing stories like the one about her first real sexual experience, when she was a freshman in high school, in a suburb outside Cleveland. It happened with a young man named Armando, who was painting the condo where she lived with her family. Not that she and Armando actually did anything much but talk, she explained, but the things they talked about were a sin. Simply talking with Armando was more intensely erotic than what she called mashing, which came later with high school boys. He was the first man who made her realize that men could be beautiful, and once she saw that, Armando was all she could think about.
He'd tease her, refer to her as Lolita or Ms. Jailbait, and then his voice would drop and he'd begin a litany of what he'd like to do if she were legal. Once, when he was painting the inside hallway, she brought him an ice-cold Coke and he climbed down from his ladderâthe way she described it made it sound like Michelangelo descending from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapelâand took a long swig, then kissed her with his ice-cold lips. It was the first kiss for which she opened her mouth. Lips still cool, he kissed her throat and down her body. It was summer, she was dressed in a halter top and shorts.
“If you were a woman, this is how I'd kiss your breasts,” Armando said, kissing gently through her clothes. “And this is how I'd kiss you here,” he said, sliding to his knees.
“Jeez, what a pervert,” I said.
There was more. She woke the last morning the painters were there to find that Armando had lowered the scaffold outside to the level of her bedroom window. He perched there, five stories up, looking in. “I was watching you sleep,” he said. She remembered that she was wearing shorty pajamas of a nearly transparent cotton.