The wad of bills my mother had given me the day she closed her front door on my face was long gone and used up, and Nahui’s retablo had been promoted to formal framed display in the apartment, but the rest of the briefcase’s contents remained almost exactly as they’d been the day I left Los Angeles. My father’s dark glasses. His folded-up walking stick. Little pebble worry stone his mother had given him. Two safe deposit keys I’d taken off my keychain and stashed inside the briefcase for safekeeping. A padded manila envelope with
Paquita, Birthday Girl
written on it. And in that envelope: the disintegrating clothbound book whose yellowed pages barely clung together by patches of torn fabric and rotted thread.
A dix ans sur mon pupitre
. Inscribed to my father’s mother. Given to me by my father. Ignored by me for nearly seven years.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
To Nahui, I guess. Maybe a little to my dad and his mother, too. I really was sorry. Nahui’s book deserved to be revered by white-gloved researchers and stored in an archival box somewhere climate-controlled and protected. My lazyass possession of her book was practically sacrilege. Out of guilt and curiosity, I decided finally to read her poems.
Nahui’s book and Nathalie’s pocket-sized Spanish/English dictionary in hand, I cleared off a corner of the kitchen table altar and pulled up a chair. Nahui watched me from the retablo at the center of the table, her serious stare now stern schoolteacher as much as seductive vixen.
Trying not to damage the book any further, I opened it flat on the table and read. Esoteric incantations of cosmic truths and revolution pulsed on page after page. My frequent stops to look things up in the dictionary were welcome breaks. To say the stuff Nahui wrote was convoluted and dense is just the half of it. Her words were overwhelmingly hot and brilliant—something like combining all of Patti Smith’s
Horses
lyrics and Gertrude Stein’s
Tender Buttons
rants and Albert Einstein’s theories into a single condensed form. It fucking rocked. I read for hours but made it only halfway through the book before my brain started to ache.
The sun set outside and the apartment turned dark. I opened the book to the peeling deco plate on the back cover. My eyes strained, I lingered over the inscription written so long ago:
My love,
“
She went through me like a pavement saw.”
Yours as ever for the revolution,Nahui
Wasn’t no way to top that. Exhausted and wired all at once, I couldn’t read anymore. Totally ready to put the book away, but wanting to honor it, at least to protect it somehow, to keep it from falling apart outright, I wrapped it in an old soft T-shirt before gently nestling it back in the briefcase. I was extra careful not to tilt the briefcase as I placed it flat on the closet’s top shelf. Maybe I should have lit some candles on the altar again? Hell, I had no clue. I really wasn’t a natural at these sorts of things. Nathalie would have known what to do, but I didn’t.
Strange voodoo twist, minutes after I’d put the briefcase away, ants invaded the apartment like a heat wave had come. They arrived in drunken groups of three and four. Too frenzied to walk in tidy lines, they stampeded each other in their excitement. I watched as some gathered the dead upon their backs for eventual return to the farm. And inexplicably, the room suddenly smelled of Nathalie—of sugar, cloves, and ginger. Her warm sweet spice self detectable in the air, on my clothes, on my very skin, she was a hypnotizing force even in her absence. It was like the ants had arrived in a mad hunt for Nathalie, our candied queen, our sweet heaven. But armies of ants and traces of Nathalie or not, I remained alone. Well, maybe not entirely.
I turned off the lights and picked up the retablo of Nahui from the altar. Even through the darkness, her stare punctured me to my core. She was mine. Or maybe I was hers. Either way, for better or worse, through thick and thin, Nahui had stayed with me like no one else. Of course, I would have preferred Nathalie’s company instead of a paper ghost. For the moment at least, I took what I could get.
9 November 2002.
I
woke totally buzzed and bright-eyed with a cultlike “I adore life” and “The world is love” sort of optimism. Fuck knows where the burst of energy came from, but I was stoked for the change. For the first time in days, I showered and combed my hair and dressed in clean clothes that weren’t designed to be slept in. Gliding around all giddy with my feet barely touching the ground, I tidied up the apartment. I opened the windows wide for fresh air and leaned out to take in the view.
Hello Gorgeous Autumn Day! And greetings to you, Mr. Bluebird sitting in your tree.
Then I moved the tiny television from its depressive-viewer position on the nightstand and put it back on its typing table home near the kitchen.
What a good little television you are, thank you for taking such good care of me.
I picked up dirty clothes off the floor and even dusted some surfaces with a more or less clean sock.
Look at you, you pretty little counter, all nice and shiny!
Careful to not tear it—
Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit
—I peeled the jewel-encrusted altar foil from the wall. I’d just started scraping the nasty food remains from the altar plates into the garbage, when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Frank, I’ll be gone longer than planned,” Nathalie said.
Wait a minute, there was a plan? I didn’t recall being included in any planning. Had Nathalie shown me an itinerary or projected goals or whatever would go into this sort of plan? Just like that, piss on the parade, my fizzy pep burned out.
“I went grocery shopping this morning,” she said, and paused for effect.
By “shopping” she meant that she had wandered up the delivery dock of a health food supermarket and filled her bag with produce and deliveries—she was genius at this, at being so obvious and outrageous that she was beyond reproach.
“So I was shopping,” she continued, “and then I realized this other kid was shopping too …”
I resisted reminding Nathalie she hadn’t qualified for the moniker “kid” in many years.
“… we wandered off in the same direction and started talking. He’s meeting up with some friends tomorrow and they’re headed to Tennessee …”
Just to torture me more, of course the other person had to be a dude.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Nashville,” she added.
Nathalie wouldn’t make it to Tennessee. She’d end up somewhere else and I wouldn’t know where she was. I was beginning to realize this was part of the plan.
“Nat, you realize Thanksgiving is coming up?”
“In two weeks.”
“It’s our seventh anniversary.”
“I know.”
My silent
and?
sat heavily on the line.
“You plan to be home by then?” I finally asked.
“Promise,” she said.
Swing music played in a faint echo through the phone.
“Frank? What’s that?”
“Just the phone,” I said.
“It’s spooky.”
“Not really,” I said.
“I love you.”
“Love you too.”
I kept the phone to my ear long after Nathalie had hung up. And I stared blankly at the retablo on the kitchen table. Nahui had been witness to everything that happened in the apartment. I wished she could speak.
“Come on, can’t you say something? Just one little thing?”
Of course the retablo didn’t respond.
Stuck, unwilling to move quite yet, I continued to hold the phone to my ear. No dial tone or operator came on. Music continued to play faintly over the line, one scratchy classic tune after another. It might have been the result of a cracked telephone wire somewhere picking up the wrong signal, but I was pretty sure that if I listened hard enough, I’d hear it was Nahui doing the singing.
Even though Nathalie wouldn’t be coming home as soon as I’d hoped, I was still showered and dressed and more socially presentable than I’d been in days. And so I headed to the coffee house on 9th Street. Baby steps, you know? At least I’d be out in the world, breathing cool crisp air. In fact, by the time I walked up Avenue B to 9th, I had a slight bounce in my step. And when I walked under the weeping willows at the community garden on Avenue C, long delicate tree tendrils reached down to bless my journey. Determined to stay in my good mood, I even stopped to pet this fat golden retriever tied to the benches outside the coffee house. Inside, I pulled a stool to the clunky wooden bar and said a friendly hello to the cute anarchist-squatter-chic girl working behind the counter. She took my order and brought me a pile of little brown napkins, two sugars, and a wooden stirring stick with my coffee. And she even smiled. Sort of. I mean, as much as an anarchist-squatter-chic girl can smile without blowing her cool.
I sipped my coffee and flipped through a
Village Voice
someone had left lying around. Black ink smearing my fingers, I read my horoscope. Nothing good there. I kept cruising the back pages aimlessly. And that’s when I found the announcement:
Estate Sale!
BUSHWICK, BROOKLYN
Saturday November 9th, 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m.
1938 Gaffer & Sattler stove, 1940s movie magazines and books
and family photos. Sofas, assorted chairs, coffee/end tables,
dining room table, king bed, 6-piece full bedroom set, desk, many
cabinets. Vintage jewelry, furs, linens, TVs, trunks, oils, kitchen
banquet set, refrigerator, washer/dryer, assorted pots/pans/
glassware. Wood working stuff, yard/garage tools, used bricks.
Cash only!
**Look for red balloon and signs at L train Montrose exit.**
What a fucking wonky mix of old-school stuff. And it was up for in grabs in the middle of barrio Bushwick? There would be a red balloon? It was all too strange and cool to be true. I left a tip on the bar for the barista and I walked to the L.
A four-year-old whiner sat next to me, squirming and picking his nose the entire ride from First & 14th to Brooklyn. He stared at me. And I stared at him. By the time the train had crossed under the river, it was like we knew each other. I hated that kid. I wanted to bite him. But still, since no other commuters seemed in the mood to be decent, when he and his young mom got off at Montrose Avenue, I took pity on them and helped carry his condo-sized stroller up the stairs to the street. Out on the sidewalk, the kid waved goodbye to me as though we were best friends. And—like suddenly being caught in a little fox trap, the kind that gets your ankle in its metal razor jaw teeth—my flesh ached.
Trust me, it wasn’t that my interaction with that little monster made me long to be a parent. No. Old-fashioned as maple syrup, I craved the consuming thrill of what so often
preceded
the creation of life. I wanted sticky fingers and muddy boots, a reason to slip under the covers when the sun was still shining. Pure and simple, I wanted to tumble with Nathalie. Or with that anarchist chick at the coffee shop. Or Nahui, for God’s sake. But, faithful sort that I am, I took an imaginary cold shower, chilled the fuck out, and looked for a red balloon.
And there it was—there were two balloons actually, but only one was still inflated—on the lamppost nearest the subway exit at the corner of Montrose and Bushwick. A sign was attached to the balloons:
Estate Sale This Way,
with a big arrow pointing up Bushwick. I followed the arrow and eventually found another red balloon and sign tied to a stoop fence:
Buzz #2
.
For a minute I considered that maybe the whole estate sale thing was a hoax. Maybe I was inadvertently about to enter one of those crazy setups you hear about all the time where a crime ring lures a person into a room under false pretenses and then five days later the sucker is found bleeding to death in a bathtub of ice, naked with their kidneys missing. I mean, who the fuck goes off in search of red balloons in Bushwick? I do, that’s who.
And so did other people, apparently. I buzzed the intercom and landed in a dank fifth-floor walk-up three-bedroom apartment amidst a hoard of bargain-hunting vultures. I walked down a narrow hallway made even narrower by stacks of old chocolate tins used for storage and clusters of satinlined hatboxes bursting with ill-fitting contents—a lifetime packed up and priced and ready for purchase. I watched people fight over deathbed linens and wedding bands barely removed from rigor mortis hands. They wanted the goods, but they couldn’t have cared a piss about the corpses they stole from. I did. And so, alone in a corner of the apartment’s dining room, I searched through messy stacks of old yellowed photographs, looking for the dead people’s portraits, for their eyes, for the most beautiful dead girl wherever she might be hiding. The task at hand was not an easy one. There were simply too many choices. And, awesome but unsettling surprise, as I flipped through photos, I swear I started to see Nahui in each and every photo. All the faces started to look like hers in the retablo portrait. Her fiery essence, her scalding stare, her come-hither tease. She was haunting me something good. She was everywhere.
In one black-and-white, a Nahui-wannabe posed on a boardwalk. Gleaming roller coasters behind her, she leaned against a lamppost in a bathing suit and platform esplanades.
Isabella at Coney Island, 1946
. In another photograph, a Nahuiesque woman stood several rows deep in an orchard of sturdy fruit trees, striking a Botticelli pose in an evening gown, her sumptuous arms raised ever so slightly to set shadows in service of her gloriously curved hips.
Tenth Anniversary, Martha’s Vineyard, 1957
. In another photo, coated with the powdered blood of a cutlery case’s disintegrated red felt lining, a poseur Nahui wore a maid uniform and held a sparkling clean baby boy in front of a birthday cake. That one was inscribed across its back with no more hint than
1905
. And then, fate hit hard:
Photographic silver luster fading, the spark of her serious eyes remained vividly present nonetheless. Gleaming pearls the size of kumquats hung from her neck in long strands. She wore a mink stole, short dress, set-wave bob, and a smug smile.