Kissing in Manhattan (8 page)

“Nothing,” snapped Jeremy.

“Hey, Jax,” said Benny Demarco, “don’t step on my tail during the butter dance.”

“I won’t.”

“Well, you did this afternoon.”

“Bullshit,” snapped Jeremy.

Michael Hye popped his head in the door. “Places,” he said.

Jeremy sighed heavily.

“What’s your problem?” said Michael.

“Fourth Angry’s pissed off,” said Benny.

Jeremy gave Benny the finger.

“All right, all right,” said Michael. “Everyone, relax. We’ve got the mayor out there. Places.”

The mice scurried out.

Jeremy moved upstage to the giant cheese grate, took his position behind it.

The curtain rose. The audience applauded. The mice began their story, strutting and fretting upon the stage. Jeremy remained cloaked in darkness. He didn’t appear until twenty minutes into Act One. Most nights, while he stood waiting, he peeked through the cheese grate and scanned the audience for famous people. Tonight he looked for the mayor. What he discovered instead was a young woman in the tenth row with a sickle of hair across her face.

“Freida,” whispered Jeremy.

She wore a crimson gown, and gloves that came up her forearms. Beside her was a handsome man in a tuxedo who had one hand locked around Freida’s wrist. With his free hand, using his fingertips, he stroked her biceps casually, possessively.

Jeremy scowled.
Relax,
he told himself.
Relax, relax.

But he couldn’t relax. Not only had Freida called him stupid, she’d laughed at him, laughed at the immense, sexual, Russian darkness inside him. And now here she was, the lead singer of The Great Unwashed, hiding her awful voice behind her crimson dress and her sickle of hair. Freida was a celebrity, apparently, a healthy Manhattan aesthete out on the town with her lover. It made Jeremy furious.

He rushed into view, two full minutes ahead of cue. The audience exploded with applause. The other seven mice stared at Jeremy.

Michael Hye stood at the back of the Lucas.

“Oh, no,” he whispered.

Jeremy panicked. He squeaked loudly, twice, which was the signal for the butter dance, which wasn’t even part of Act One. Chaos ensued. Half of the mice followed Jeremy’s lead and improvised a makeshift butter dance, while the other mice threw up their paws in protest. The audience laughed.

Benny Demarco, as First Kindly Mouse, leaned close to Jeremy.

“You’re ruining it,” he hissed.

Out of frustration Benny gave Jeremy a kick in the ass. Fourth Angry Mouse responded by shoving Benny into the butter churn.

The audience roared. The playwright, standing beside Michael Hye, seethed and cursed.

First Kindly Mouse began chasing Fourth Angry Mouse. The chase rambled through the butter dancers, over the cheese grate, onto the lower portion of the roof, off of which Jeremy flipped Benny. Benny landed on top of two other mice, collapsing them to the floor.

The crowd was in stitches, even those who’d seen the show before and knew a bungle was under way.

Jeremy stood panting in his mouse outfit, his face—his human face—gone beet-red.

Relax,
he ordered himself.
Relax.

But, even as he thought this, Jeremy caught Freida’s face in the crowd. Her mouth was thrown open, bucking with laughter. Her teeth seemed to eat the air ravenously as she howled. The mouth of her lover was howling too.

Jeremy closed his eyes, hard, hating what he was: a funny man. He was funny in a tense, awful way, a way that infuriated him and delighted others. These others, the audience, were delighted even now. They laughed, pointing at him. He couldn’t bear it. He ran to the top of the roof.

“I have arrived,” hissed Jeremy.

He put his hands to his mousy head, tried to unscrew it. He cuffed at his face, boxed his ears, yanked at his headpiece.

“What’s he doing?” squeaked the mice below.

Michael Hye and the playwright caught their breath.

“Oh God,” whispered Michael.

The audience hushed. Fourth Angry Mouse was clawing at his cheeks, apparently trying to tear his own skull off.

The other mice dashed for the roof.

“Don’t do it,” squealed Third Kindly.

“Wait,” barked Third Angry.

“I have arrived,” warned Jeremy. He swatted stubbornly at his neck, loosening the hinges there.

First Kindly Mouse was only feet away.

“Character,” hissed Benny. “Stay in character.”

“I have arrived,” shouted Fourth Angry Mouse. He popped the final hinge in his neck.

No, prayed Michael Hye, but it was too late. In a beheading that shocked the masses, Jeremy Jax revealed his feeble self.

James Branch discovered the opals in Manhattan, underground. He came upon them in a charmed, perhaps fated manner. It happened like this:

James was twenty-five, single and shy, with sleepy blue eyes and straight teeth. He worked as an accountant on Wall Street and he lived in the Preemption apartment building. Every evening after work, before taking the train north, James caught a cab to Flat Michael’s, an East Village restaurant where he ate dishes called Bison, or Snipe, or the chef’s specialty, a strange concoction known simply as Vittles.

Dinner was the one flavorful hour of James’s day. After crunching and tallying numbers from eight to six, he abandoned the abstract and indulged his senses. He was not a talker, a drinker, a clubgoer, or an athlete, so his indulgences almost exclusively were meals, and James loved the unpredictable offerings at Flat Michael’s. In the last year he’d feasted there on Possum, Gilthead, Rarebit, Neck, and Rattler. He savored the names of these dishes almost as much as the dishes themselves. For James was a lover of simple detail, a fan of wrought-iron fences and haiku. He felt that the dishes served at Flat Michael’s—in their ingredients and in their names—possessed an Old World, elemental quality of romance, as if some medieval knight-errant had gone hunting and laid the spoils on James’s table. James was also a recovering stutterer, and between the ordering of his meal and its arrival, he would practice his skills.

“Langostino. Langostino.” Each night, James whispered the title of his forthcoming entrée as if it were an incantation or the name of a woman he hoped might join him.

“Souvlaki,” whispered James. “Calamari.”

This quiet habit gave James great satisfaction and, somehow, comfort. It gave an order and a voice to his day, and it lent him a place among the patrons of Flat Michael’s. The restaurant catered to the eccentric and lonesome, so the tables filled quickly each evening, and James tried always to arrive by six. One October night he worked late and reached the restaurant after seven.

“One-hour wait, so sorry,” said Juan at the door. Juan was James’s favorite waiter.

“A little purgatory,” chuckled Juan. He was foreign and religious. Purgatory was a word he could pronounce.

“Even for a regular?” whispered James.

Juan sighed sadly. “One-hour purgatory, Mr. James. So sorry.”

James went back outside, wandered the neighborhood. He was a creature of ritual, uninterested in other eateries, so he decided to while an hour strolling. On one corner he listened to a vagrant street singer he knew from the subways, a lanky,black-eyed guitarist named Morality John. Walking on, peering through glass windows, James studied the ferrets at Tandy’sPets, the pastries at Let Them Eat Cake, the leather boxer shorts at Barby’s Bondage. James had never entered this latter establishment, but he stopped before its open doorway to blush at some chain-mail brassieres on a rack inside. It was the kind of store, James guessed, that his housemate, Patrick Rigg, might frequent.

“You like?”

James whirled. Beside him stood a red-haired woman in skimpy silver bikini armor and black battle boots, smoking a cigarette. She had goose bumps on her naked arms and thighs, and cemented onto her smiling front teeth were the golden letters B-A-R-B-Y.

“Um . . . I,” sputtered James.

“I was on my smoke break.” Barby dropped her cigarette, ground it under a heel.

“Well, sure,” said James.

Barby danced playfully toward James, swaying her hips, making James stumble back into the store. Barby sashayed inside too. She pulled the door shut behind her.

“Whew,” she said. “Cold out.”

“Um,” said James.

Barby kept herself between James and the door. She turned a pirouette, tapped her chrome panties. “Pretty cool, huh? We’re having a sale. The theme is ‘The holidays are coming, so you should too.’ “

James’s cheeks flushed. “I . . . wasn’t really shopping.”

“Balls and chains are marked down,” explained Barby. “So are nipple clamps.”

James glanced around nervously. The walls were covered with masks and gags and dangerous-looking whips.

“I just need a rest room,” lied James.

“Sure. Long as you buy something.” Barby yawned and pointed. “See that shelf labeled Orifice Fucktoys?”

A squeak came out of James’s mouth.

“You all right?” said Barby.

“I just . . . swallowed my gum.”

“Anyway, past the Fucktoys there’s a stairwell. Bathroom’s one floor down.”

James sprinted for the stairs, hurried underground. At the base of the stairs he caught his breath, wiped perspiration from his temple.

“Jesus Christ,” whispered James. He stifled an impulse to laugh at himself, at his prudish embarrassment. Looking around, he was surprised to find himself in a dank concrete hallway of some length, with several doors leading off of it. The doors were pink and each bore a word or phrase in neat black paint. One said BARBY’S, another said FOR SLEEPING, a third said LAV, and a fourth said PRIVATE. At the far end of the hall opposite James stood a closed black fire door, hinged on a track. Scrawled across it in drippy pink letters were the words JOHN CASTLE’S NOMADIC.

James glanced back up the stairs. Barby wasn’t in view and there weren’t any other patrons around. James wasn’t normally an adventurous fellow—at this hour he was usually sipping ginseng tea and paying his Flat Michael’s check—but something inspired him now to tiptoe to each door and put his ear to it. He heard nothing through any of them except the last, the fire door. There seemed to be some clanging going on behind it, some meeting of metals, as if swords were being smithed. Also, the closer he stood to the door, the more he sensed that a warmth—perhaps a literal fire—was alive on the other side.

James stepped back. The fire door was crude, thick, and ancient. It was made of steel and iron, and for some reason it reminded James of the antique but operable Otis elevator in the Preemption. He would have guessed that the fire door hadn’t been opened in decades except that the pink painted letters on its surface looked fresh.

“John Castle’s Nomadic,” read James. “John Castle’s Nomadic.”

He stared at these words, whispered them over and over. He couldn’t make sense of them, but the rhythm of their syllables in his mouth and the ping and tong of whatever metalwork was under way behind the door proved too much to resist. James grabbed the handle hook on the door and put his weight to it. The door slid easily aside on its hinges.

What he saw inside looked half like a blacksmith’s shop and half like a storage cellar. It was a large room mostly in shadow, with a glowing orange kiln and small furnace against the far wall. Beside the kiln stood a tall bookshelf, two stools, and a wooden table. The ground was concrete. The thirty yards of floor space between James and the kiln were crammed with weathered cargo trunks. A path that stretched from the fire door to the kiln had been cleared between these trunks, like a church aisle leading to an altar. As James stepped down this aisle, a scented steam rose from the furnace, and the kiln fire flickered like a great, quiet candle. Also, the clanging had ceased as soon as James opened the door.

“Hello?” called James.

As his eyes grew sure in the darkness, he stopped walking. The beaten cargo trunks around him were opened and turned toward the aisle like display cases. Within them, on beds of black velvet, lay the most stunning, prodigious collection of gems that James had ever seen. There were diamonds, fat as fists, and inch-thick emeralds cut in squares, like portions of some sweet, gelatinous dessert. There were amber stones, mica-thin but pancake-wide, set on golden saucers. The facet of a ruby, shining in the kiln light, showed James the entire glimpse of his profile.

“Whoa,” whispered James.

“Who sent you?” boomed a man’s voice.

James jumped in place. “Whoa,” he said again.

“Who sent you?”

James turned one revolution, scanning the darkness for the speaker. “N-nobody sent me. I just . . . wandered in.”

“No one just wanders in. People are sent.”

James heard a scrape behind the bookshelf. “Where are you?” he asked.

A severe-looking man appeared from behind the stacks. He had a full head of shock white hair, but stood with such firm, healthy carriage that James couldn’t say he was elderly. Also, the man wore a black tuxedo with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, as if he’d been engaged in some physical labor. In fact, he held an enormous hammer in one hand and a thin gold necklace in the other, and James surmised that the recent clanging had been the work of the hammer.

“I—I’m sorry if I disturbed you. Are you John Castle?”

“Never mind about that. Come over here.”

The man’s voice had a resounding quality, as if he were calling out within a cave. James moved closer to the kiln, inside which he could see white-hot rocks or embers. He could also see clearly now the eyes of the white-haired man. They were brown eyes, rich and earthy like soil after rain, and they were watching him closely.

“Hmm.” The man set his hammer and necklace on the table. He took James’s right hand, inspected the palm.

“Oh,” said James. “Well. Hello.”

The man dropped James’s hand. He sniffed the air, as if to place where he might have smelled James before.

“Hmm,” said the man. “Who’d you say sent you?”

“Nobody. I don’t know. Barby?”

The man shook his head. He situated himself on one stool, nodded at the other.