Really, since I wasn’t going to the protest after all, I should have opened the shop for the day. But with Nat suddenly gone, I just didn’t have it in me. Unfortunately—since I was still planning to go to the auction the next day, and I rather doubted Nat would be back to watch the shop—that would mean it would be closed three days straight. Clearly, this wouldn’t exactly be a boon for my already floundering enterprise, but it wouldn’t be my ruin either, would it? At very least, I should have gone to update the sign. I momentarily considered doing that first thing in the morning, but I was already going to have to leave at the fucking crack of dawn in order to arrive at the 9 a.m. start time, so … Sigh.
I figured I might as well get things ready for D.C. Hoping for the off chance Nathalie might actually meet me at the train station, I wanted to look smooth. And if there’s anything that says smooth, it’s a sleek briefcase. Or maybe that just says “uptight,” but whatever, I decided I would take the briefcase with me the next day. I reached up to the closet’s top shelf and felt a forming scab on my chest rip apart and bleed. Fuck. And double-fuck. God-fucking-fuck. I pulled my father’s briefcase down and brought it to the kitchen table. Gold clasps unlocked, I carefully unpacked its stored items, one object at a time, onto the kitchen table.
Briefcase emptied and Nahui’s book sitting on the kitchen table, I remembered the Ash Wednesday when Nathalie had been Nahui. She’d told me I was a handsome devil in a suit. And so, although I hadn’t touched my father’s clothes since that night, I carefully assembled one of his suits and even pressed each item with the iron I found hibernating at the back of the closet. Can you blame me for stressing the details?
When I was done with all my pathetic preparations, I walked over to the nightstand and picked up the cup of bodega coffee I’d bought for Nathalie. I peeled off the plastic lid. A thin layer of congealed soy milk separated from the inside edges of the cup and floated in the center, an island surrounded by a perimeter of tan coffee. I took a sip. Room temperature was a highly unpleasant state of existence for a cup of coffee, and the amount of sugar Nathalie took made my teeth ache. Another sip. The bitter of cheap caffeine hit my tongue from somewhere deep in the mix. It was almost pleasant by the end of the cup.
T
he East Village never wakes until noon on any day, let alone a Sunday. And when that Sunday also happens to be the first day of a blizzard and part of President’s Day weekend, you can pretty much be sure you won’t cross paths with anyone if you’re walking to the subway at 4:30 in the morning. The entire neighborhood was like some sort of post-apocalyptic landscape. Snow tore through the sky in horizontal sheets and sliced at my face. The exposed length of suit from the hem of my coat to my shoes turned soggy. Wind howled through the fedora I’d chosen to wear. Even though the radio had warned that driving conditions would be dangerous and that travelers should expect airport delays, the weather sucked even worse than I’d expected it to. At least I was traveling by train, not driving or taking a plane. I was freezing, but everything would be fine. I marched on.
I reached Houston and was about to take my first step down the stairwell leading to the subway when I slipped on what I hadn’t realized was a snow-dusted sheet of ice. Right there—at the exact steps I’d dragged my suitcases up on my very first day in New York over seven years before—I lost my gravity. My feet flew out sideways from under me and I hit the ground on my right thigh and elbow. I slid the entire width of sidewalk toward Houston and stopped with my feet in the gutter, which was thankfully frozen, but still. My slapstick routine would have made for the most awesome pratfall ever … if it hadn’t been real.
Coat bunched up around my waist and pants practically soaked through with snow, I shivered in what was arguably, even after a rough fall, the world’s nattiest outfit. Tailored layer upon layer—my father’s swankiest suit, matching pocket square, Windsor-knotted tie, fedora—damnit, why was it that on the day I finally decided to wear his clothes out I took a concrete dive?
I took a quick survey of the situation. My neck was pinched something fierce, and my shoulders were jammed. I could feel a considerable bruise forming on my right hip. The palms of both my hands were scraped. And hidden under all my layers of tweed and starched fabric, a soft cotton undershirt rubbed against the weeping tattoo on my chest. The raw skin burned slightly, but that was an expected source of ache. Snot dripped from my nose and instantly froze as I sat on the ground, dazed. How I hadn’t broken any bones was beyond me.
Obviously, some people would have taken a fall of that magnitude as a sign to call it a day. But I didn’t. Seeing as nobody was around to offer a hand, let alone to give a fuck, I forced myself to snap to, get up, and brush myself off. I figured my clothes would dry, and I could buy an aspirin at Penn Station. I gathered the miscellanea of my things scattered on the ground and continued down the subway entrance.
It wasn’t until I sat on the train that I noticed the leather of my briefcase was scuffed. As if that mattered anyway, because, really, by that point there was nothing elegant about my given situation. Cramped body. Chilled flesh. And, like most winter mornings, my fingers were blue at their tips from poorly circulated blood. Thankfully, I continued on from the F to the C toward Penn Station without further incident—though my senses remained piqued. Fight-or-flight adrenaline coursed through me. My hands shook, and there was a detectable jaunty wobble in my stride.
As I exited the subway and entered Penn Station, I was struck by how oddly calm the building seemed. Later in the morning, the station would be filled with travelers, but at that moment, like some deafening calm before the storm, the station was empty. I take that back. A janitor put a yellow cone outside the men’s bathroom before entering to clean; a smattering of National Guardsmen armed with semi-automatic rifles wandered around looking mean; two beat cops drank cups of coffee and talked; four homeless dudes tried to sleep in corners and on stairs; an odd haggard college student or two waited for red-eye connections; and three German tourists wearing enormous backpacks examined a map.
I again contemplated turning back—to crawl into bed, wrap a comforter tight around myself, and sleep. But no matter how tempting the idea was, I knew going home was the exact opposite of what I needed. In fact, maybe I needed never to go home again. Maybe I should have followed Nathalie’s lead. Nathalie, the coolest of the cool kids on the playground, taking dares and climbing up on the high bar to twirl with one bony knee locked on the metal monkey bar, her callused hands pumping momentum as she flipped faster and faster, doing cherry drops, flashing her panties and scrawny belly and knocking out a few teeth with her landing. Thinking of Nathalie made me ashamed of the ways I’d found comfort in being lint and my habits glue.
I want. I want.
I was overwhelmed with a sudden itch to run off and leave all adult responsibility and care behind. Fuck the accumulating debt and gray hairs of trying to run a shop and be a good boyfriend, fuck concerns over whether or not I wanted to be a parent someday, fuck haunting thoughts of Nahui’s dead baby—fuck it all. I wanted to flit off and land somewhere I could drink huge mugs of cheap coffee and do nothing but calmly stare out a window undisturbed. Maybe I could be a roadie for a punk metal band. In Olympia, Seattle, or Portland, somewhere foggy and washed regularly with rain. I wanted to spend mindless days driving a van. I wanted to carry amps and guitars and lassos of tangled extension cords into dank clubs. Dead-end silent pauses in ragged frantic metal riffs would be my meditation. I would be the one who could make even a bad gig seem not so bad, because there I’d be, leaning against the dive bar’s back wall, and, who knows, maybe I’d fall in love with someone who loved me even more than I loved them and together we’d share cartwheel idiot bliss love—yes, I wanted to run off and fall in love with a rocker chick who would most definitely have
F-R-A-N-K
tattooed on the narrow canvases of her knuckles for everyone to watch twitch flicker fire as she hammered her drums up onstage.
I want. I want.
And then there was
I must
.
I headed toward Penn Station’s Amtrak ticketed-passenger lounge—“lounge” being very loosely defined in this instance. Piped-in baroque classical music echoed loudly throughout the 1960s Tomorrowland modern monstrosity of a room. I sat in a rusted-chrome and teal vinyl chair. Circular glasspaneled walls surrounded me. A low partition-board ceiling caged me in from above. The clunky steps up to Madison Square Garden were visible behind me. Challenge that it was, I tried to imagine what the original Penn Station looked like at its grand opening in 1910. There must have been beautiful dark wood benches, wrought-iron staircases, glass vaulted ceilings, and handcrafted crown moldings. The air must have smelled of lemons and roasted chestnuts back then. But now, the air smelled only of dirty mop water and public bathrooms. Fluorescent overhead lights bounced cruel brightness off cracked gray linoleum. Add to this mess the occasional travelers rolling ugly suitcases behind them and the random whiff of the food court’s tragic greasy stink—I died inside. I might as well have been a zombie for how numb I was. I was tempted to go jerk off in a bathroom stall. At least that way I might be able to remind myself I was alive.
5:30 a.m. Violin and harpsichord Muzak drilling a hole in my skull, the tweed of my coat scratching my neck, I boarded a D.C.-bound train that smelled of rancid peanut oil from decades of spilled Styrofoam takeout meals gulped in transit. I wished hard for Nathalie to meet me at Union Station. The cabin lights flickered on and off as the train lurched into motion.
I
waited at Union Station for half an hour after my train arrived. And then I waited some more, eyes darting around, hoping to catch sight of Nathalie. I bought a cup of crappy commuter coffee and waited even longer. Three cups of coffee eventually consumed, my stomach was beyond raw. Acid burn. Pain. That was all it came down to. Pain. Heavy heart. Tired eyes. Stomach sour sleepless ache.
Fuck the estate auction. I wanted to call it a day and go to the Vietnam Memorial instead. To visit my dad. True, his name wasn’t included on the wall, but that monument belonged to him just as much as it did to those soldiers actually listed there. In terms of death in the line of duty, the only difference between the boys acknowledged on the memorial and my father was that he hadn’t been a war casualty until decades after his tour of duty was complete. He’d marinated bellydown in Agent Orange swamp mud. War soaked into him, and eventually it turned his cells malignant. A dead soldier is a dead soldier is a dead soldier.
Sorry to be so damned dramatic, but drama is clearly in my bones.
So I waited at Union Station. For my true love. For a girl plenty would have told me to kick to the curb, but for whom I still inexplicably held out hope. And by the time I finally whipped my sentimental sorry ass into shape and got myself on the Metro to the estate auction, I was nearly two hours late.
I almost missed the chance to bid on the damned 1930s Royal typewriters, and those typewriters were the only reason I was at the stupid auction. The rest of the estate didn’t interest me and was way out of my price range, but the six typewriters, listed at a starting bid of forty dollars each, were meant to be mine. Mint condition. Fully functioning. What a private estate had done with six typewriters I had no idea, but I didn’t care either. It seemed everyone at the auction was hunting art deco furniture, fine jewelry, silver, and other snooty goodies. Nobody else bid on the typewriters. Simpletons. Those machines were perfection. They wouldn’t take up much counter space and, if my luck turned good— damn, how I fucking hoped it would soon turn, how I needed it to—I’d be able to sell the typewriters at a crazy mark-up. The East Village aging trust-fund hipsters who I could imagine buying the typewriters from me probably wouldn’t have a fucking clue how to insert paper into the inky metal things, but I was pretty sure that they’d love displaying the vintage lovelies on their loft desks as if they worked on their memoirs and typed correspondences every day. I knew they wouldn’t even blink at throwing down two hundred bucks for the dose of cool factor. The typewriters were golden eggs. I secured my purchase with a credit card that was getting much too close to maxing out, completed all the shipping paperwork, and went back to Union Station.
It was getting late and I had no idea how Nathalie would know where to look for me, but I hoped I didn’t have to start putting such surprises past her. I found a row of bolted-down chairs near the station’s ticket windows. That seemed as good as any place to wait. So I did. I sat and ate my sandwiches and drank my soup, all the while watching the crowds, watching for Nathalie.
The longer I waited, the more clearly a vision of Nathalie on a bus filled my thoughts. I could see her as she stared at her own reflection on the inside of a tinted window. Her beautiful face drawn and tired, other passengers sitting near her would presume she was a stoic victim escaping unspeakable horrors. Really, it would be only guilt and a lack of sleep tugging at her face, drawing down the corners of her mouth. As she sat on the bus, she would play over and over in her mind how she’d tried to convince herself not to leave, how she’d argued with herself, bullied herself even. But still, no matter, there she was, on a bus. Leaving yet again. A day and a half had already passed since her bus pulled out of Port Authority and drove by unlit off-Broadway marquees. Unwilling to deal with reminders of home becoming more and more distant behind her, she’d slept until nightfall, until the bus had reached the unfamiliar and murky rural nowhere between home and wherever it was she’d end up. Whether it was based in some distant reality or was entirely a figment of my imagination, I could see it all so clearly.
I gathered my things, stood in line at the ticket window, and paid fare for the next train home.