The altar was elegant in a homemade kitsch sort of way. Nathalie covered one wall with taped-up tinfoil and pasted onto it swirling patterns of bright plastic gemstones she bought at the 99 cent store. We got out our one lace tablecloth—scarred with oxidized maroon wine glass rings and curry stains, but pretty nonetheless—draped it over the kitchen table, and pushed the table up against the sparkling and bejeweled foil wall. On the table edge closest to the wall, we placed our only non-chipped turquoise blue vintage Fiestaware plate. The plate cradled a selection of the best persimmons, pomegranates, and pears from the Union Square farmer’s market. Nathalie set a clunky glass vase next to the fruit and arranged a bouquet of the glittery plastic flowers she usually tucked in her tangled hair. Our makeshift altar glowed with a trillion little tea light candles.
And at the center of the altar table, I placed the retablo of Nahui that Nathalie had framed for our first anniversary—
Happy Paper Anniversary
, Nat had said when she presented me with the gift.
Nahui will stay safe this way
, she’d said. To me it had sort of felt like Nahui was jailed inside the intentionally gaudy gold frame and its thick glass pane, but the gift was given with good intentions, so I took it as such. Not that Nat could have predicted this result six years earlier, but the campy tacky gold frame looked perfect on our altar.
Still, Nat asked: “Isn’t it strange to put her on the altar?”
“I don’t have any pictures of my dad,” I said by way of explanation.
I lit even more candles and added the following to the table: a box of Wheaties, a can of chili beans, stalks of green onion, pints of coffee yogurt, cranberry and grape juice, three scoops of rocky road ice cream in our best jadeite bowl … the favorite foods my father’s cancer belly hadn’t allowed as his final meal.
As I sat admiring the altar, Nathalie went to the closet and came back with what appeared to be a fragment of concrete and a few shards of tinted window glass. With a very delicate and reverent touch, she placed these items on the altar.
“What’s that?” I asked, even though I was sure I knew the answer.
“They’re from South Broadway. Out front of St. Paul’s.”
The broken glass caught candlelight and bounced tiny white prisms of radiant matter throughout the room like shooting stars. Part of me wished Nathalie and I could be under actual stars that night, that we could go to a cemetery with armfuls of bright orange marigolds wrapped in newspaper cones to lay on gravestones, to picnic and drink and play music in distracted celebration of the dead. But, clearly, that was not likely to happen in Manhattan. So Nathalie and I sat on the floor in front of our apartment altar, listened to music on the radio, and ate a Thai takeout dinner.
“This is really nice, Frank,” she said.
I agreed.
But sometimes even when you’ve put forth a great deal of effort to pay your respects and move on, grief sticks with you. I took my sleeping pills before we went to bed. Nathalie woke screaming. I stumbled to the kitchen for glasses of water. I handed Nathalie valerian, and I took more prescription pills.
Two mornings after we’d set up the altar, I awoke a total zombie from the pink sedative I could still feel coursing through my veins. I took a cold shower to try to come back to the land of the living. I was moving so slow that by the time I got dressed, I was already late for work. I grabbed a pear from the altar’s fruit plate to take with me so I wouldn’t starve before lunch. A quick stab of guilt hit, and I felt like maybe I should light the altar’s candles—if for no other reason, then as payment for the pear. I took a match from the box we’d left on the altar, and as I struck it, sulfur spiraled up. My nose stung. My eyes watered.
Through my induced tears, I could practically see the candlelight licking the wall. The whole building would go up in flames before the fire department could respond. And all doped up on hippie sleep-inducers like she was, Nathalie would die in the fire. She wouldn’t even realize she was inhaling smoke. She’d sleep right through flames consuming the bed and turning it all charred box-frame and blackened metal springs. I’d spend the rest of my life in mourning, refusing to love again, refusing to sleep, refusing ever to eat another pear.
Okay, maybe I really
was
Mexican after all.
Mental note made to give Nat a call when I got to work, to ask her to blow out the candles before she went anywhere, I tiptoed back to our bed. Clumsy puppy paw hands, I pulled the covers up around Nat’s shoulders as gently as I knew how. I leaned over and kissed her forehead. The crease between her brows—a deep ridge that had etched itself into the permanent composition of her face the day the sky fell and had deepened progressively ever since—relaxed. Nathalie, still sound asleep, sighed, shifted slightly, and dug her head deeper into her pillow. And then her frown returned. She nearly scowled as she continued dreaming. I plumped my pillow and wedged it behind her back so she’d have something to lean on even though I wasn’t there. I did these things, but if I’d realized what would unfold later that same morning, I would have done more. I would have climbed back in bed with Nathalie, and I would have wrapped my arms around her. Tight. As tight as I could without hurting her.
T
hat night, I stopped at the bodega on Avenue A between 6th and 7th, the one with the really nice flowers, to get a fancy bouquet for Nathalie. Actually, I ended up buying a dozen cheapie marigolds, but those deep orange flowers were absolute pristine perfection. I knew Nathalie would love them and, bonus, she could even add them to the altar if she wanted.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it was disrespectful to add stuff to the altar two days
after
the Day of the Dead—I mean, was it rude somehow, like you’re emotionally manipulating the dead into hanging around when they just want to rest in peace again after partying so hard? I figured Nat would know. In our nearly seven years of being together, I’d come to realize she knew pretty much everything a person would ever want to know. And if she didn’t already know something, she knew how to find out. So I’d just ask her. She’d be home; she always got home from work before me, and she’d probably be in the midst of cooking some fabulous meal for dinner, looking beautiful as always. Flowers in hand, I opened the door to our apartment.
“Nat, is it okay to put stuff …”
Are you familiar with the confusion and embarrassment that accompanies speaking aloud and then finding that nobody is there to hear you? That feeling, a warm and tingling sensation along the neck and ears, flirted at me as I realized the apartment was too quiet. The room was empty. And dark. I flipped on the light switch closest to the front door. A silver envelope on the kitchen table, propped up against the plate of fruit in the midst of the altar, caught the overhead light and glimmered. I closed the door behind me, walked over to the table, put the cellophane-wrapped marigolds down on top of the altar’s unlit votives, and picked up the silver envelope. It contained a note, written on matching silvertinted cardstock.
Sweetness,
I need to go. Don’t know for how long exactly.
Please, please forgive me.
I’ll call soon. I love you. Endlessly.
Your girl,
N.
Maybe I’m hopelessly dense, but at first I couldn’t comprehend the note. I mean, who ever comes home prepared to find a Dear John “I’m leaving you—well, at least for a while” letter? I really just figured Nathalie meant she needed to run some errands or something. Like she wasn’t sure if she’d make it back by the time we usually ate dinner. But three hours later, no call to ask if I needed anything on the way home, no keys jangling at the front door, reality sunk in. Snap to, knucklehead. Your girl is gone. Like
gone
gone.
And I thought:
So, Dad, it’s like this, is it?
I stood alone, Nathalie’s heliotrope perfumed letter in hand, holding what felt to be the final remaining brick of our fantasy fort. I had no clue where she might have gone, but the urge to search for her was maddening. Out of what I suddenly considered a totally lame and misguided neo-Luddite rebel stance, she’d—same as me—always refused to own a cell phone. There was absolutely no fucking way for me to reach her. Frustration, sadness, anger, longing, fear, and loneliness crashed against my skin from the inside. No fucking way was I going to sit alone in that murky mess of emotions. I pulled on a jacket, and I walked.
The night sky was crisp and clear, evidence of winter knocking on the door but not quite at the party yet. Cold air pinking my face, I walked at a frantic pace with no clear destination in mind. Clammy sweat bunched my socks and slicked my skin. My shins felt like they might splinter into shards, and my heels ached from how hard I hit the pavement with each step. The constantly changing sidewalk landscape became heaven-sent preoccupation—
watch out for that dog shit, avoid the puddle, there’s a piece of gum, extinguish the cigarette that jerk who’s been walking in front of you for five blocks just flicked back toward you.
I headed west and eventually up toward Union Square.
Winded from speed-walking block after block, I stopped at the rolling bookshelves outside the Strand Bookstore to catch my breath. The Strand. It was a place I knew very well. The first time I’d been there was on a bookstore date with Nat early in our relationship. She had suggested we go to the Strand, and I replied: “A bookstore on a Friday night? Ha-ha. So, really, where do you want to go
?”
Somewhere they sold vinyl, an old movie house—those places made sense to me. But a bookstore? Lame.
“Have you ever been to the Strand?” she asked.
“You’re serious?”
“The Strand is super cool. Trust me.”
And so I’d gone with her. Reluctantly. At worst, I figured it’d be a super-sized mall-style store with a café, and at best it would be a boring little place stocked with antique books. Instead, as Nat walked me through floor after floor of warehouse-tall stacks, the store’s motto promising miles and miles of books ceased seeming like pumped-up hype. The place was like a fucking labyrinth of books in endless categories:
Literature, Film, Science, Architecture, Religion, Americana,
and on and on. So, yeah, the selection was impressive, and I guess arguably “cool,” as Nathalie had promised, but it wasn’t until we went to the furthest southeast corner of the basement that I found what was truly awesome about the Strand.
Yes, the less-than-a-dollar pre-publication book galleys they kept there were pretty great, but what I dug was how desolate that dimly lit and slightly musty corner of the bookstore was. It was like finding an old bomb shelter in your neighbor’s backyard. Better yet, it was like finding the bomb shelter with your foxy neighbor girl in tow. Nat and I made out in that basement corner for a very long time. Every now and then a weirdo book-freak with duct-taped glasses or really greasy hair would wander back there and try to ignore us as he scanned whichever shelves we weren’t leaned up against and knocking askew with our fun. But other than that, nobody bothered us or told us to stop or really seemed to mind our bookstore recreation. The smell of old books has been a turn-on for me ever since.
Clearly, I was converted. Now I fucking loved bookstores. Over the years the Strand became a habit for us, a favorite place to go on a date. Lately, we’d started heading over to the pommes frites place on Second Avenue afterward, and Nat would order a huge paper cone of thick fries and we’d sprinkle vinegar over them and eat them as we walked home.
So, considering the Strand was one of
our
places, stopping there the night Nathalie took off probably wasn’t the best idea. The crap pulp novels and science textbooks on the discounted shelves outside the store cleared my head for a few minutes, but too quickly my hurt and confusion caught up with me and swelled in huge giant waves and crested bigger and bigger in my chest, pushing up against my lungs, compressing my breath, making my heart pump too much blood. I thought about Nathalie and how she was gone and fuck, I was so goddamned pissed at her, how could she just up and leave like that … Total contradiction, I practically ran inside our bookstore in search of distraction.
For a good hour I walked the towering stacks—up and down one aisle after another, from the west wall to the east and then up and down aisles back to the west wall again, my fingers dragging along the shelves—just to keep moving. I felt totally catatonic, undead really. I was just about to go off in search of a pretty little virgin whose blood I could suck to stay alive—a legal and willing virgin, of course; I wasn’t some sort of monster, for God’s sake—but then I remembered that one scene in Warhol’s flick
Blood for Dracula
where the Count hooks up with that hottie chick who swears she’s a virgin but then, when Dracula sinks his teeth into her neck, he heaves like he’s shot up some crazy-bad junk. Obviously she wasn’t a virgin. I mean, that movie took place in the 1970s, what was he thinking? But still, poor dude. Sad and scared that I too might be love-hungry for all eternity to come, craving the strange funk cryptlike comfort of dank, dusty, recycled air, I went down to the basement. I leaned in the southeast corner, our corner, and willed tears to come, but fuck if anything could go the way I wanted. So I stood there mopey-faced and bummed and hurting and totally dry-eyed.
Eventually, I walked up two flights of stairs to the art section. If I couldn’t have Nat or some yum-blood virgin, maybe at least Nahui would be seen in public with me. I was looking for a Weston monograph, scanning rows of oversized books with my fingertip, eyes focused on titles, when I stepped on a small hard book. A hot pain shot up my leg to my lower back. My spine ached momentarily. That may have been one of the first times I cognitively realized I wasn’t a kid anymore. I mean, it used to be that I could stay up and party and do whatever the fuck I wanted all night long and wake after barely any sleep, and I wouldn’t feel pain, not then, not the next day, not ever. Now, simply pounding pavement hard for twenty minutes—just fast walking, really—had left my body sore.