Kissing in Manhattan (20 page)

“Perfume,” he said.

At the end of a century, in the city of New York, there lived a young man named James Branch. He was slender and quiet, with sleepy blue eyes and straight teeth, and he lived in the Preemption apartment building. James worked on Wall Street, as an accountant for Harrow East, a financial juggernaut stock company. At Harrow East and elsewhere during the day, James spoke to almost nobody. At night, though, James talked to Otis, the elevator in the Preemption. He didn’t talk to any elevator operator or any elevator passengers. He talked to the elevator itself.

Ever since he’d been little, being silent around others had made sense to James. An only child, he’d grown up in northernMinnesota, in a small town called Morris, where his daily options had been hockey or homework. Ruthlessly shy and in possession of a severe stutter, James had chosen his bedroom and his books over the company of his peers. Throughout his childhood he had a succession of private speech tutors—all men, all American—who failed to unlock James’s thickly crippled tongue. Each tutor lasted around six months and was then sent away. James was content to see them go. In high school, while other Morris boys studied beer and sex and fishing, James sat cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, rocking back and forth, mastering calculus and memorizing tax laws so he could help his father with write-offs.

James’s parents lived in a drafty, ramshackle mansion that had once been the country home of a rich Chicago industrialist. By the time the Branches owned it, the mansion was nearly condemnable, with dubious floorboards and poor insulation, but James’s father adored the place, and when he put candles in the windows at Christmastime, the mansion became stately and grand. As for James, he cared little for Christmas or any festivity. What he loved was the mansion’s old but functioning dumbwaiter, which ran from the attic to the cellar, with stops in several rooms, including James’s. Large enough to hold a grown man and operable from the inside, the dumbwaiter served as James’s childhood fort, his cubbyhole for naps, and his stash for racy books. In adolescence, when his stutter put an ever-growing distance between him and any friends, James used the dumbwaiter like a monastic cell. He took a lantern inside with him, pulleyed his way to the attic, and stayed in the dumbwaiter for hours. By lantern light, he pored over his calculus books, loving the numbers that, unlike people or his tongue, could be relied on never to play cruel tricks on him. Sometimes James merely closed his eyes and rocked back and forth, smelling the wood of the dumbwaiter’s walls, telling himself he was happy.

Beginning when he was fourteen, James was obliged, three evenings a week, to meet with a young woman named Anamaria. She was a speech pathologist, hired by James’s parents for her alleged rapport with introverts and for her classically Latin good looks. Mr. and Mrs. Branch hoped, in one swoop, to cure their son of his addled tongue, his seclusion from girls, and his obsession with the rickety dumbwaiter.

To an extent the Branches’ plan worked. Though Venezuelan by heritage, Anamaria spoke clear, lovely English. Unlike James’s male tutors, who’d conducted James’s lessons at the kitchen table or in the living room, Anamaria ushered herself into James’s bedroom and shut the door. She sat cross-legged on the floor while, several yards away, James perched cross-legged in the open door of the dumbwaiter. As Anamaria rounded words out in her mouth or curled them off her tongue, James heard traces of her girlhood, the labor and frustrations she’d endured in learning English. In time James came to trust the sounds that issued from Anamaria’s lips. He emerged from his dumbwaiter and sat on the floor of his bedroom opposite her, his knees touching hers. He concentrated, and breathed the way she wanted him to breathe, and he came to mimic her English so perfectly that he even picked up her foibles: the Spanish lilt of her vowels, the flair of her consonants.

Not surprisingly, James fell in love with Anamaria. She wore open-collar white blouses, and a crucifix necklace, and when she leaned forward, James could smell a light, private heat coming from her charcoal-colored hair. If he spoke just right and pleased her, Anamaria would smile and lay her palm against his cheek and say, “Yes, Señor James. Yes.”

To his parents’ chagrin James did not begin speaking more in public. In fact, he spoke less, nodding answers to his teachers, muttering a syllable or two to relatives. By his junior year in high school—his third year with Anamaria—his stutter was all but conquered, but nobody would have known it. James noted the looks of pity on the faces of Morris adults, but he didn’t care. His speech was a secret, an art, an intimate gift he wanted to share only with Anamaria. James was handsome, and there were girls in his school who would gladly have consorted with his quiet blue eyes. But they were simple girls, James thought, girls with nervous giggles and Midwest accents and concerns about their weight. Anamaria was different. She was a woman. She had wonderfully full hips, a nonchalance about her body, and a dark, reverent mood in her glances and in her speech that made James wish to travel with her, to cities far away from Minnesota, where he and Anamaria could pursue a breathless, impossible romance.

Alone in his room at night, many hours after Anamaria had finished tutoring him and left the house, James would rise from bed and crawl into the dumbwaiter, close its door, andsuspend himself between floors of the house. In this utter isolation James would sit cross-legged, hug his arms around himself, rock back and forth, and imagine Anamaria sitting before him. Then James opened his mouth, and with a fluency no one ever suspected of him, he poured out aloud to Anamaria the secret longings of his heart. He whispered jokes to her, too, or bits of gossip from school, or else he thanked her for curing his stutter. Mostly, though, James explained to his phantom beloved how dear she was to him, how the cast of her voice and the curve of her shoulder made him feel like he could scale a cliff or swim in molten lava.

“Or I could just get a job,” James whispered. “I’m good with numbers. I could make money for you and buy you whatever you want. You could have flannel nightgowns and Reese’s peanut butter cups, or else diamonds, or beer and tamales.”

At the height of these confessions James told Anamaria how he wanted to cling to her, naked, and roll across the peaks of the Himalayas—which James’s history teacher, Mr. Fenwick, called the rooftop of the world—and fill her with himself and be filled by her and be so utterly happy and exhausted that neither of them would ever have to speak again.

The week before James’s eighteenth birthday tragedy struck him. Anamaria announced one afternoon that she was moving back to Venezuela. A long-lost boyfriend, Ramón, had emerged from her past and was calling for her hand in marriage, and Anamaria was going home to him. She loved this Ramón. In a happy flush she told James of her excitement at becoming a bride. She told him about love, passionate, soulful love, and about how when it flared up hot between you and another person, you had to follow it and obey it. Inspired by her words, and desperate to keep her in Morris, James confessed to Anamaria his own love for her. Breathing right and fighting off his stutter, he told her about the Himalayas, and the things that were flaring up inside him. Anamaria’s face fell. She laid her palm against James’s cheek, patted it, kissed his forehead once, hard.

“Oh, Señor James,” she said. “Someday it will happen for you too.”

After that day James Branch hid inside his mind for seven years. He attended the Pratt School of Business in Manhattan, graduating summa cum laude in accounting and international economics. Harrow East recruited him straight out of Pratt and paid him lordly sums to keep their money safe from Uncle Sam. By twenty-five James was a recluse of the kind that only New York City can sustain. For breakfast each morning he got coffee and corn muffins from a bodega outside the Harrow East building. He worked alone in a cubicle each day, keeping his head down, skipping lunch. Every evening, he took a cab to Flat Michael’s, a spartan restaurant in the East Village.

To get home to the Preemption, James took the subway. Out the train window he watched secret places rushing by, dark concrete hovels, and portals leading nowhere. As for his fellow passengers, James guessed at the sport and the strength in their bones if their arms brushed against his. What he liked best, though, was these people’s indifference to him, their ignorance of his existence. The men on the train were on their way home from commanding the earth: they wore olive-colored suits and grim expressions. The one exception to them and their brooding silence was a street musician named Morality John, a lanky, black-eyed wraith who rode the same lines as James and sang for money. James gave Morality John a five-dollar bill at least once a week.

Meanwhile, the women on the train wore black clothing all year round, colored scarves, and boots. They were book editors, James decided, women who monitored character. James liked to study these women and imagine against their earlobes the pair of lovely opal earrings that he carried in his pocket the way some people carry rosaries. A strange jeweler had once given these earrings to James, and when he held them in his hand, James recalled Cinderella’s slippers or King Arthur drawing Excalibur from the anvil. In other words, James knew that there was only one woman for whom the opals were meant, and from his shy, quiet heart he watched for her.

At home, in the Preemption, James shared an apartment with Patrick Rigg, a hotshot Harrow East stock trader. They’d met at the cocktail party that had welcomed them both to the company, and they’d both happened to be apartment hunting at the time. James agreed to have a housemate in order to save rent money—the Preemption was ancient, famous, and expensive—and because Patrick, who was obsessed with women, left James entirely alone. It was because of Patrick Rigg, however, that James first began talking to Otis the elevator.

It happened this way. Toward the end of his time at Pratt, when he had a single dorm room, James had once again taken up his old nocturnal habit of rising from sleep, sitting on the floor, and rocking back and forth. Perhaps it was the stress of exams, or the looming threat of having to earn wages in Manhattan, but James found that he needed the comfort of his old ritual, the fixed reliability of it. The difference was that, while James still wanted to speak out the secrets of his heart, no phantom Anamaria appeared—or rather he wouldn’t let her appear—for him to confide in. Also, there was no dumbwaiter to transport him into a warm, dark abeyance, to suspend him between the cracks of everyday life. James tried talking to God, but felt corny and embarrassed. In the end he muttered halfheartedly to himself, severely disappointed with the audience.

All this changed once James got an apartment with Patrick Rigg. For Patrick kept bizarre hours and had even weirder nighttime habits than James. He’d slip into the apartment at eleven o’clock with a smashingly dressed woman on his arm, scuttle her into his bedroom, and shut the door. James eavesdropped sometimes, listened for sex groans or conversation. But he heard nothing, and Patrick’s door always remained closed. An hour or so later the same woman emerged from Patrick’s room wearing sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a look of either great confusion or peace. She left, and then, around midnight, the apartment filled with shady characters: bouncersin muscle shirts, lanky, grinning men with Ziploc bags of hashish, and tall, stunningly dolled-up women. They were associates of Patrick’s, or else his minions, and they stayed for hours, drinking gin and whiskey, whispering in corners. James could never make sense of them. The men were a crew of eccentrics, who did drugs and spoke languages. The women were beautiful to the last, but eerily so. They had dimples or moles or freckles like normal human beings, but they watched Patrick so intently or held their bodies so close to him that James wondered if his roommate wasn’t a pimp or a hero. He’d planned one morning to question Patrick about his personal affairs, but on that very morning the door to Patrick’s room was open just a crack, and through it James saw Patrick crouching naked before his dormer window, polishing a handgun and loading it with bullets. This was enough to make James consider moving out. Somehow he never did, though, perhaps because Patrick was faultlessly cordial with him. On many nights Patrick even invited James to come out and join the dark circus of his parties.

James, however, stayed in his room and slept. When the urge came over him to rise and rock on the floor and talk to himself, he often found that he couldn’t. The action on the other side of the wall was rarely loud, but James could feel its presence. The malice of the men—their little chuckles—and the smell of the women came to James through his door and spoiled his quiet. So James fell into the habit that came to define his nights.

It started very simply on a Wednesday. James awoke in his bed around midnight, ready to rock and address the darkness. He heard the clatter of glasses and laughter through his wall, though, and decided to leave the Preemption and go for a walk. He dressed, slipped out of his room, past the party, and into the hall outside his apartment. He got into the Preemption elevator, intending to ride it down to the lobby and stride off into the city. He put his hand on the lever and was about to push it down to the letter
L,
but he paused. Perhaps because it was late and quiet or perhaps because he was alone, James stood staring at the elevator’s interior, not moving. He’d been living in the Preemption for barely a month at the time, and he’d never been alone enough or calm enough to bother looking at the elevator closely.

It was a wonderful elevator, with dim, solemn lighting. It had a square maroon carpet with just the right amount of pile beneath your feet. It had brass trimmings, and fine mahogany walls, and the floor-selection lever looked like the throttle of an elegant schooner. When you pulled this lever and chose your destination, the elevator sighed softly, once, and set you gliding seamlessly up toward the roof or down toward the earth. Beside the lever was a brass key fitted into the elevator’s wall. The key couldn’t be removed, even by the most stubborn child’s hands, but it could be clicked to the right or the left. If it was clicked to the right, as it usually was, the elevator ran smoothly. But if you clicked the key to the left, the elevator hushed its action and came to an easy, immediate halt, without any grinding or alarms.