“You're driving me to it. Come on, Gin, I'm sorry,” I said. “I was just making a dumb joke to get a little different perspective on things.”
“What's so goddamn funny about a woman who drowned herself and her baby?”
“We don't even know for sure she did.”
“Yeah, right, it was just an accident. Like she just happened to be going for a walk pregnant and naked, and she fell in.”
“She could have been on a sailboat or something. Accidents happen; so do murders.”
“Oh, like murder makes it less horrible? Don't think that hasn't occurred to me. Maybe the bastard who knocked her up killed her, huh?”
“How should I know? You're the one who says you don't want to talk about it and then gets obsessed with all kinds of theories and scenarios. Why are we arguing about a woman we don't even know, who doesn't have the slightest thing to do with us?”
“I
do
know about her,” you said. “I dream about her.”
“You dream about her?” I repeated, surprised. “Dreams you remember?”
“Sometimes they wake me up. In one I'm at my
nonna'
s cottage in Michigan, swimming for a raft that keeps drifting farther away, until I'm too tired to turn back. Then I notice there's a naked person sunning on the raft and start yelling, âHelp!' and she looks up and offers me a hand, but I'm too afraid to take it even though I'm drowning because it's her.”
“God! Gin, that's creepy.”
“I dreamed you and I are at the beach and you bring us a couple hot dogs but forget the mustard, so you have to go all the way back to the stand for it.”
“Hot dogs, no mustardâa little too Freudian, isn't it?”
“Honest to God, I dreamed it. You go back for mustard and I'm wondering why you're gone so long, then a woman screams that a kid has drowned and everyone stampedes for the water. I'm swept in by the mob and forced under, and I think, This is it, I'm going to drown, but I'm able to hold my breath longer than could ever be possible. It feels like a flying dreamâflying under waterâand then I see this baby down there flying, too, and realize it's the kid everyone thinks has drowned, but he's no more drowned than I am. He looks like Cupid or one of those baby angels that cluster around the face of God.”
“Pretty weird. What do you think all the symbols mean?âhot dogs, water, drowning ⦔
“It means the baby who drowned inside her that night was a
love childâa boyâand his soul was released there to wander through the water.”
“You don't really believe that?”
We argued about the interpretation of dreams, about whether dreams are symbolic or psychic, prophetic or just plain nonsense, until you said, “Look, Dr. Freud, you can believe what you want about your dreams, but keep your nose out of mine, okay?”
We argued about the drowned woman, about whether her death was a suicide or a murder, about whether her appearance that night was an omen or a coincidence which, you argued, is what an omen is anyway: a coincidence that means something. By the end of summer, even if we were no longer arguing about the woman, we had acquired the habit of arguing about everything else. What was better: dogs or cats, rock or jazz, Cubs or Sox, tacos or egg rolls, right or left, night or day?âwe could argue about anything.
It no longer required arguing or necking to summon the drowned woman; everywhere we went she surfaced by her own volition: at Rocky's Italian Beef, at Lindo Mexico, at the House of Dong, our favorite Chinese restaurant, a place we still frequented because when we'd first started seeing each other they had let us sit and talk until late over tiny cups of jasmine tea and broken fortune cookies. We would always kid about going there. “Are you in the mood for Dong tonight?” I'd whisper conspiratorially. It was a dopey joke, meant for you to roll your eyes at its repeated dopiness. Back then, in winter, if one of us ordered the garlic shrimp we would both be sure to eat them so that later our mouths tasted the same when we kissed.
Even when she wasn't mentioned, she was there with her drowned bodyâso dumpy next to yoursâand her sad breasts, with their wrinkled nipples and sour milkâso saggy beside yours, which were still buddingâwith her swollen belly and her
pubic bush colorless in the glare of electric light, with her tangled, slimy hair and her pouting, placid faceâso lifeless beside yoursâand her skin a pallid white, lightning-flash white, flashbulb white, a whiteness that couldn't be duplicated in daylighthow I'd come to hate that pallor, so cold beside the flush of your skin.
There wasn't a particular night when we finally broke up, just as there wasn't a particular night when we began going together, but it was a night in fall when I guessed that it was over. We were parked in the Rambler at the dead end of the street of factories that had been our lovers' lane, listening to a drizzle of rain and dry leaves sprinkle the hood. As always, rain revitalized the smells of smoked fish and kielbasa in the upholstery. The radio was on too low to hear, the windshield wipers swished at intervals as if we were driving, and the windows were steamed as if we'd been making out. But we'd been arguing, as usual, this time about a woman poet who had committed suicide, whose work you were reading. We were sitting, no longer talking or touching, and I remember thinking that I didn't want to argue with you anymore. I didn't want to sit like this in hurt silence; I wanted to talk excitedly all night as we once had. I wanted to find some way that wasn't corny sounding to tell you how much fun I'd had in your company, how much knowing you had meant to me, and how I had suddenly realized that I'd been so intent on becoming lovers that I'd overlooked how close we'd been as friends. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to like me again.
“It's sad,” I started to say, meaning that I was sorry we had reached the point of silence, but before I could continue you challenged the statement.
“What makes you so sure it's sad?”
“What do you mean, what makes me so sure?” I asked, confused by your question.
You looked at me as if what was sad was that I would never
understand. “For all either one of us knows,” you said, “death could have been her triumph!”
Â
Maybe when it really ended was the night I felt we had just reached the beginning, that one time on the beach in the summer when our bodies rammed so desperately together that for a moment I thought we did it, and maybe in our hearts we did, although for me, then, doing it in one's heart didn't quite count. If it did, I supposed we'd all be Casanovas.
We rode home together on the El train that night, and I felt sick and defeated in a way I was embarrassed to mention. Our mute reflections emerged like negative exposures on the dark, greasy window of the train. Lightning branched over the city, and when the train entered the subway tunnel, the lights inside flickered as if the power was disrupted, though the train continued rocketing beneath the Loop.
When the train emerged again we were on the South Side of the city and it was pouring, a deluge as if the sky had opened to drown the innocent and guilty alike. We hurried from the El station to your house, holding the Navajo blanket over our heads until, soaked, it collapsed. In the dripping doorway of your apartment building, we said good night. You were shivering. Your bikini top showed through the thin blouse plastered to your skin. I swept the wet hair away from your face and kissed you lightly on the lips, then you turned and went inside. I stepped into the rain, and you came back out, calling after me.
“What?” I asked, feeling a surge of gladness to be summoned back into the doorway with you.
“Want an umbrella?”
I didn't. The downpour was letting up. It felt better to walk back to the station feeling the rain rinse the sand out of my hair, off my legs, until the only places where I could still feel its grit
were in the crotch of my cutoffs and each squish of my shoes. A block down the street, I passed a pair of jockey shorts lying in a puddle and realized they were mine, dropped from my back pocket as we ran to your house. I left them behind, wondering if you'd see them and recognize them the next day.
By the time I had climbed the stairs back to the El platform, the rain had stopped. Your scent still hadn't washed from my fingers. The stationâthe entire city it seemedâdripped and steamed. The summer sound of crickets and nighthawks echoed from the drenched neighborhood. Alone, I could admit how sick I felt. For you, it was a night that would haunt your dreams. For me, it was another night when I waited, swollen and aching, for what I had secretly nicknamed the Blue Ball Express.
Literally lovesick, groaning inwardly with each lurch of the train and worried that I was damaged for good, I peered out at the passing yellow-lit stations, where lonely men stood posted before giant advertisements, pictures of glamorous models defaced by graffitiâthe same old scrawled insults and pleas: FUCK You, EAT ME. At this late hour the world seemed given over to men without women, men waiting in abject patience for something indeterminate, the way I waited for our next times. I avoided their eyes so that they wouldn't see the pity in mine, pity for them because I'd just been with you, your scent was still on my hands, and there seemed to be so much future ahead.
For me it was another night like that, and by the time I reached my stop I knew I would be feeling better, recovered enough to walk the dark street home making up poems of longing that I never wrote down. I was the D. H. Lawrence of not doing it, the voice of all the would-be lovers who ached and squirmed. From our contortions in doorways, on stairwells, and in the bucket seats of cars we could have composed a Kama Sutra of interrupted bliss. It must have been that night when I recalled all the other times of walking home after seeing you, so that it
seemed as if I was falling into step behind a parade of my former selvesâmyself walking home on the night we first kissed, myself on the night when I unbuttoned your blouse and kissed your breasts, myself on the night when I lifted your skirt above your thighs and dropped to my kneesâeach succeeding self another step closer to that irrevocable moment for which our lives seemed poised.
But we didn't, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn't see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first loveâbecause of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?âwe made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn't, we didn't, we never did.
My brother, Mick, crossing the country on a Greyhound Ameripass, has stopped in Chicago and stands before the old apartment building on Washtenaw where we grew up. Out in front, lounging on the cracked, concrete steps as we used to, five
chicos
teenagers wearing gang colorsâstare in his direction. Maybe they're Satan Disciples, maybe Two-Twos, maybe La Raza; the gangs in this neighborhood come and go, leaving the RIP of graffiti behind.
“Qué tú quieres?”
âWhat do
you
want?âone of the Disciples asks him.
Â
Mick is on his roundabout way to Memphis, where our father, who has never missed a day of work to illness, is scheduled to have exploratory surgery. That's what they're calling it, but the doctor took me aside to say, “Be prepared, because, frankly, we're not sure what we're going to find when we open him up.”
Mick says he wants to be there when Sir wakes from the anesthetic, to be by his side in case the doctor's diagnosis sounds more like a sentence.
But Mick also wants to take advantage of the Ameripass that he purchased with what should have been the rent money for his bath-down-the-hall flop in a rooming house for men only. It's
across from a block of porno places in Hell's Kitchen, and it's where he's been living since a fire totaled his apartment on Delancey Street.
“Who needs a fucking rip-off dump? I can live on buses,” he told me.
Mick has decided that as long as he is, so to speak, traveling back in time to visit our father, he might as well “visit other shrines of memory”âhis phrase, irony intended.
On this trip, he's already stopped in D.C., where he once camped in a tent city of civil-rights activists and was twice arrested protesting the war in Vietnam. From D.C. he rode to Pittsburgh, where he was hoping to find Joy, a Cambodian woman to whom he was married for a monthâin fact, she's still legally his wife; they never bothered with a divorce. That was years ago, in New Orleans, when, as a favor to a friend, Mick married Joy to get her past Immigration. Mick was living with another woman at the time and, after a month, Joy moved on as planned to stay with relatives in Houston. After she'd gone, Mick realized that she haunted him, that though he'd never touched her, he'd fallen in love with her. He's been looking for Joy off and on ever since, and whenever he does, I know something isn't right in his life. Over the years he'd heard that she was in San Diego, in Portland, in Denver, but this time he had an address for her on Kish Way in Pittsburgh. He couldn't make out any of the names scribbled under the mailboxes when he found the apartment building, but the hallways smelled like Asia. He began knocking at doors. Behind some of them, people shouted back, but the doors didn't open; other doors remained silent. Finally, he jotted a note saying he loved her on the back of one of the Chinese take-out menus piled in a corner, and slipped it beneath a silent door, the one that a flash of intuition told him was hers, then got back on the Greyhound.
Mick's plan is to visit our father in Memphis, then to continue on to New Orleans, a city where he lived for seven years before moving to New Yorkâyears of working on the barges that travel the Gulf Coast, of tending bar, waiting tables, becoming an actor. New Orleans is another place where he's seen the inside of a prison.
But now Mick is back in Chicago, the city where he was born. He left it when he was fourteen, at the end of his freshman year in high school, when our father got transferred to Memphis. For me that had been an opportunity to move out and stay behind on my own; Mick had no choice but to transfer to Memphis, too. In Memphis, they lived in a ranch house, not an apartment building, and Mick slept alone in a bedroom furnished with our set of twin beds from the flat on Washtenaw. He piled the bed that had been mine with the books in which he'd lose himselfâDostoyevsky, Proust, Kafka, Jung. At school, he was getting into fights and failing most of his classes. I remember Moms, whom we'd rechristened Mammy after the move south, telling me how sometimes she'd check on Mick at night and find him poring over a Chicago street map spread open on his desk.
He's bought our father a present, a souvenir of Chicagoâa kielbasa. That was the first thing Mick did after finding his way from the Greyhound station back to our old neighborhood: buy two long links of smoked Polish sausage from Slotkowski's, which, Mick unerringly recalls, was our father's favorite butcher shop. Mick prides himself on having a photographic memory. He claims he can remember actually being born. Mick has become a devotee of Santeria, and his santero in the Bronx has encouraged him to recall his childhood through dreams. Each night Mick sets a half-full water glass beside his bedâit's a charm that promotes significant dreams. He is seeking a moment in childhood that will explain the shape his life has taken. He dreams of our old cold-water
flat on Eighteenth Street, where his crib stood in the dining room; he remembers me staring in at him through the wooden bars, whispering, “Shut up, crybaby”; he remembers our father lifting him from the crib, rocking Mick in his arms over to the open fourth-story window, and holding him out beyond the ledge, still rocking him, perhaps considering whether to throw him out or maybe just soothing his diaper rash in the night breeze. There's something about our father Mick is trying to summon up. Maybe it resides in the recurring dream in which Sir stands above the crib at midnight when the household is asleep, striking sulfurous blue-tipped stick matches and holding the flame close to Mick's face, while Mick, awake in the dark, stares up in silence. In the dream, he knows he must remain silent. His life depends on it.
“That never happened, Dad wouldn't stand there wasting matches,” I said when Mick implied that at some point Sir wanted to kill him.
“How would you know?”
“Hey, he's only my father, too.”
“Yeah, and don't you think it's a little weird that you, the firstborn, get Anglicized to Perry like you're some fucking admiral, and I get named after our crazy DP grandfather who they left to rot in the state madhouse.”
Even before his conversion to Santeria, Mick and I often disagreed about which of us more accurately recalled the past. He'd tell me about Sir dangling him in outer space above Eighteenth Street, and I'd remember the fire escape under the window. I'd recall a family vacation at Eagle Lake, a weedy little Michigan lake with a mud beach and leeches in the reedsâbloodsuckers, we called them. We called Mick the Lifeguard of Eagle Lake for the way he'd windmill his arms as he bounded through chest-deep water, convinced he was swimming. But what Mick remembers is
Sir burning leeches off our bodies with a cigarette, a scene that I think we actually both saw in a movie about explorers in the jungles of Borneo.
“That never happened,” I'd insist. “You always make it out more dramatic than it was.”
Mick would look at me, shake his head condescendingly, and give me the Sir salute, a dismissive wave of the hand our father used whenever he felt someone was trying to gyp him. “By any chance you familiar with the term ârepressed memory'?” Mick would ask.
“You're not talking about memory. You're talking about half-empty water glasses and dreams.”
“You don't think dreaming is a kind of remembering? And if it is, then why wouldn't memory be a kind of dream?”
Where we've never disagreed is over our memories of food. We can recite every detail of meals we shared growing up, like those meatless Friday dinners: fried frog legs Sir brought home from the fish house beside the Sanitary Canalâwe joked that the frogs came out of the canalâor potato pancakes with applesauce; or one of Sir's favorite dishes, potatoes mashed with browned onion and served steaming in a bowl of cold buttermilk. We both remember our father cooking his special Sunday breakfast, slices of smoked kielbasa scrambled with eggs, peppers, potatoes. Mick would pile a huge portion between slices of toasted rye slathered with catsup, a creation known as the Stufff a-Mouth Delight. The Polish sausage that Mick carries now is wrapped in brown butcher paper. From where they're sitting, the gang bangers probably can't smell the strong aroma of garlic or see how fat has seeped through the natural casing and left glistening spots on the butcher paper. For all they know, Mick might have a weapon wrapped in brown paper, a jumbo lead-cored sap.
“Qué tú quieres,”
the kid asks my brother again, then lights a
cigarette with a lighter snapped open like a switchblade, and blows the smoke in Mick's direction.
Â
Mick shrugs: Ho to explain to guys who've probably never been out of the hood why someone would come back for a look? They're all lighting up and Mick wouldn't mind a smoke. In fact, he's dying for one, but something tells him now is not the time to ask. He's given up smoking since he burned down the apartment in New York he'd shared with Mirza.
The fire happened only a few weeks after she'd packed a suitcase of her stuff and moved to her mother's in Astoria. He still thought then that she might be coming back. True, she'd taken their borzoi, Diablo, but undergarments that retained her scent of gardenias were left in the laundry bag, her leather winter coat still hung in the closet above rows of high heels, and the tapes of music to which she practiced dance routines were stacked beside a boom box. She wouldn't leave for good without taking her music or her shoes. Mick was counting on that. Those abandoned, beautiful shoes for which she'd shopped compulsively became his altar of hope.
Mick had worked a double at the mob-owned clam bar in midtown where he waited tables and had come home drunk to his fifth-floor walk-up on Delancey. Head pillowed by the shirt and trousers he'd removed, he lay on the bare kitchen table, the table they'd swept clean and then made love on the night before she left. He hadn't known that she was fucking him goodbye. He covered his face with a slip she'd left behind and inhaled the oils of her skin. The pearly fabric brought back winter nights when her bare skin made him feel feverishâthey'd cling so tightly together that he couldn't tell which one of them was tremblingâand he remembered how the room would fill with the scent of gardenias the way it's said the attar of flowers precedes stigmata.
With an ashtray balanced on his stomach, and the slip veiling his eyes against the streetlight, Mick drowsed off to the reverberation of the boom box dialed to the Latin station: Tito Puente. He woke choking, blinded by smoke, rolled off the table and crawled along the floor between boxes of their belongings that were shooting up flames. His pillars of books were burning, and it seemed as if the ideas he'd lived by were burning, too. The scent of gardenias from the laundry was burning, not simply her underclothes but the fragrance itself fuming into toxic smoke. He could hear their possessions popping in the fire and thought of her shoes shriveling into ash as he felt along the wall for the doorâthe metal doorknob hot to the touchâand staggered out onto the stairwell in his underwear. His lungs felt scorched. He knelt, his eyes tearing as he gagged on his own sooty breath. Between spasms of dry heaves, he heard sirens and screams and suddenly realized the screaming was Leon, his cat, holed up somewhere in the apartment. He tried to go back in after the cat, but the smoke was too thick, the heat intense. “Leon! Leon!” he shouted to guide his cat through the smoke, then remembered the cat was deaf. From inside the apartment he could hear the radio still blaring, and even recognized the song “Hojas Blancas,” a song Mirza loved. She had the tape by El Gran Combo, a tape that was melting into lethal fumes of acetate. He could hear the jazzy, lilting chorus.
“Están cayendo hojas blancas en mi cabello”:
white leaves are falling on my hair. He heard Leon and shouted back, but only the Spanish lyrics answeredâmaybe he only imagined them mixed with the furious crackle of fire:
There arrives a moment in which I feel very happy
for the good I have done in my life,
and then there comes a moment of grand repentance
for all the errors I have committed.
“You know that expression, tearing your hair out?” Mick asked when he told me the story. “Well, it ain't just an expression. I didn't know that was what I was doing till a fireman pulled me away and told me to take it easy.”
I'd met Leon, a blue-eyed, white male Persian, when I visited Mick for a weekend after he moved to New York to study acting. I rode a train from Chicago, got in on Friday night, and Mick, who'd taken the weekend off from work, was waiting at Penn Station. We walked down Broadway, him toting my backpack and telling me how he'd found Leon at three a.m. on the tracks in a downtown subway station. Mick loved cats; we both did, as did our father. Sir never let us have a dog, but we'd had cats.
“Cats, swimming, getting a bargain, and foodâthe man loves to chow down,” Mick said, totaling up Sir's favorite things. “I think that about covers it.”
“He loves to sing.”
“Oh yeah, there's that.”
We simultaneously launched into a chorus of “Memphis, Memphis, Memphis,” a song Sir composed when Harvester, where he'd worked most of his life, closed its Chicago plant. He was fifty at the time, and moving to Tennessee must have seemed like salvation next to the alternative of being out on the streetâthe fate of most of his co-workers. Sir sang the song adding a blat of Al Jolson to his baritone voice, his idea of a Southern accent. The lyrics went “Oh, Memphis, Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee â¦,” repeated ad infinitum.