“I didn't hear you,” I said.
“I heard
you,
” she said.
She watched me splash cold water on my face. I should have said something jokey to break the silence, but I wasn't up to it.
“I've never been sick at work,” she said.
“Well, don't be,” I said.
“You got some stuff on your dress.”
So I had. I tried to clean myself up by dabbing at the fabric with a wet paper towel. “Shit,” I said “Fuck. Shit.”
“Over there too,” she said. “How'd you get it there?”
I twisted around in front of the mirror. “Anyplace else?” I said.
“Turn around,” she said. I turned, slowly and it was one of the more humiliating pirouettes of my life.
I
TOLD EVERYONE
I had the flu. “Child, you look green,” Rodney, one of the staff people, said. I went home in a jolting taxi whose every bounce hit me in the gut. Now I was frightened about a future where I felt like this most of the time. How could such a thing be? It could be.
The apartment reeked of turpentine when I walked in, and the TV was on, tuned to a soap opera in Spanish. Jason was standing in his underpants, working on a painting.
“What time is it?” he said.
“Early,” I said. “I'm not good.”
Jason looked me over. “I think you should lie down.”
“Will you at least put lids on those open jars of turpentine? Will you?”
“It's not a problem,” he said.
“I can't stand it here. I can't stand the stuff in the air.”
“Hey,” he said. “What's the matter?”
“I have to get out of here,” I said.
I fled (that was the right word for it) down the stairs, bounding away from the fumes, which I had been breathing without complaint for weeks. I meant to go sit on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, but I needed to be nearer to a rest room, so I went to the diner on our corner and sat at a table outside. And I did feel less queasy there. I liked our street at that hour, the Dominican men playing dominoes on a card table they had hauled to the sidewalk and all the teenagers in the neighborhood ambling by in their high-style outfits.
I was dabbing my forehead with cool water from the outside of my beer glass, when someone nudged my arm. It was Jason. He had found meâI wasn't hard to spotâand he said, “Little Miss Two-Day Hangover here.
“You know what you need?” he said. “Hot peppers will drive out the demons. I want to go have dinner at the Jamaican place, get you something you can douse with Pickapeppa sauce.”
“No. I want to go home,” I said. “But I can't, it stinks.” I sounded very whiny.
“Know what you need to do?” Jason said. “Go up on the roof and sleep. Sleep the whole thing off in the open air. Listen to Dr. Jason.”
When we got back to the apartment, he dragged up a sleeping bag to use for a mattress and a fresh sheet for a coverlet. He spread them out in the ell of one of the chimneys, and I lay down at once in the same short cotton dress I had worn to work. “You feel safe?” Jason said. “I think you're safe.”
“I don't even care,” I said. I looked across at the line of roofs along the sky, and I closed my eyes and that was it, I fell down the well of sleep.
When I woke up later, I had been crying in a dream, something about being left alone on a highway. It took me a while to remember where I wasâthere was the smell of soot near my head and I heard the shuttling rhythm of traffic noises from the street below. The air around me was dark. I was thinking how much I would look like a corpse now to an airline pilot overhead or a pigeon flying over the roof.
I'm
sick,
I thought. Why did he put me up here? You don't put a sick person out where she's just a sitting duck for the nearest breaking-and-entering maniac. The fever had shaken me out of my sleep. I whimpered to myself over this, and then I felt dangerously unsettled again in my stomach.
The cramp was like a wave of panic, but I was too weak to want to move. I just wanted to wait (I had a little time)
until I absolutely had to get up and go back down to the apartment. I didn't want to talk to Jason anymore. He had the wrong plan, he was leading me down the wrong path.
I'd begun to raise myself off my elbows when I heard a noise at the end of the roof near the ladder, a rustling motion. My body, half unfolded, went stiff with fright. There were footfalls on the tar paper; the feet made a brushing, sandy sound. It could have been someone from the building, just cooling off. The Li twins' mother, say. When he coughed, it sounded like a man, but how did I know that? I heard what was either his breathing or the distant rush of noises from the street. I kept thinking maybe I didn't hear anything at all, but I never thought any menace was realâwhat a slow learner I was. He walked around and stopped near the edge, where I could see his outline next to one of the giant sunflowers the Glowackis's grandmother had planted in coffee tins. He took a plant under his arm, its big stem bowing in front of him, and he walked off the roof with it and down the ladder.
Another time I might have thought it was funny that I had been so badly frightened by a plant thief. I thought I should wait to make sure he wasn't coming back for anything else. But I really did have to go down to the bathroom at once.
And then my bowels loosened all by themselves, nothing could have stopped them, and I was lying in a pool of my own shit. I was a broken bag, a disgusting mess, a river of foul smell.
My nice little cotton sundress, a print of hibiscus flowers, was a rag over a flood of shit. I had not expected this so soonâI thought I had years before it happenedâthis fieldmark of my illness. I wasn't ready for it. But people always think that about everything. I was glad that I was alone, that no one else was around to see me this way. I'm not
used
to this, I thought. Me of all people.
Cute young thing awash in her own waste. I was crying a little and my nose ran and I thought, if I start to throw up and I drool too we'll have almost all the bodily fluids running at once, won't we? Maybe I can arrange to pee and bleed at the same time.
One thing I knew: all my pretty-girl nerve was going to be no help at all here. Good-bye to all that. All the particulars of my face and shape and age and smartness were beside the point here, not interesting at all. I was going to have to
get over myself
. Slip out of what I thought I was, like an outfit, that didn't, as my mother would say, do anything for me.
I knew this was not exactly possible, not in that easy way, but nothing like this had occurred to me before, and
for a moment I felt very easy and light. I was like an old person, in my indifference, and I couldn't imagine why I had been afraid. I had lost Elisa and become something airier and without form. It was only for a moment that I felt this lightness, but I did have it to remember later.
S
O
I
GOT
to my feet and I wrapped the sheet around me. I took the stinking hulk of me through the hall back to Jason's apartment. The sleeping bag was going to have to go in the washing machine too.
“What?” Jason said, when he got wind of me coming through the door. “Jesus. Holy fucking Christ.”
“I didn't like the roof,” I said.
I threw the bedding on the bathroom floor and I took off my clothes and I got under the shower. For a second the hot water made the smell stronger, and then it turned into the great sought-after solution, the wetness without taste or odor or color. While I was under the water I was really quite happy.
In all the long hours I spent missing Elisa, I had more time than I needed to think about my life and
what didn't happen in it
.
1. If I'd Never Hired Steve
I went to high school with Steve but I never liked him all that much. Why did I hire him? If I hadn't, I might have kept on as I was, making steady money as a dealer, getting older.
I was always good at saving money. In the life I never got to have, people wanted me to invest in their leather clothing stores, their juice bars, but these ideas had no
appeal for me. I lent money to my brothers, but otherwise I didn't spend much.
Every few weeks I went to the bank to put my cash in a safe deposit box. I was a little coarsened by the money, after so many years as a dealer. I walked around in my thousand-dollar sports jacket and I expected people to listen to me; I expected that any inconvenience wasn't going to be mine.
On my thirtieth birthday I took all my friends and subcontractors out to a restaurant. Lobster and sangria, a hip menu at the time. At the end of the night, people thanked me lavishly and I went home in a glow of pride and vague lonesomeness.
The next day I got a phone call saying that my father was in the hospital, he'd had a stroke. He was all hooked up to machines when I got there, and one side of his face was slack and unmoored; he blinked at me miserably from the pillow. My mother was talking in a loud and useless way to my brothers, who were nodding dumbly, and I saw that I was going to have to do everything. I had a talk with the nurses, who found me the doctor, whom I cornered into answering our questions. I did the things that had to be done.
All my silky resolve and my practice in not being crossed were good here. I got my father more attention, a
different doctor. I paid for a private room. The nurses, whom I always tried to be nice to, started calling me the sweetheart son, although my brothers are both much better looking. Even in my unled life, I wasn't a handsome man.
I had just stopped seeing a woman named Lois, a daffy, pretty girl who got sharp-tongued when she drank. The first night I went home from the hospital, Lois called and said she wanted to meet me for a talk. What kind of talk? She was pregnant, she said, and maybe we needed more than one talk.
Although I was probably not in love with Lois just then, the glory of rising to the occasion was on me. “Shocking news,” I said. “Great news.” I was full of strength and loftiness. Lois was hugely surprised.
If my parents knew where my money came from, they never said, and I covered my father's home care when he got out. He lived for another six years. I took the rest of the money and went off with Lois, who had always been smart and interesting and who softened considerably through motherhood, and we moved to Vermont, where Lois had friends. The first summer, I biked around the roads and helped with the baby and I thought it was not so bad around there. I set myself up in a bicycle store, which took a while to take off but did very well after a
year or two. In winter I closed down the store and spent the days indoors reading, like a gentleman farmer in the cold months.
We built our own house, with a deck and a view and a garden the size of a football field. When our second son, Francesco, was in junior high, we were involved in a local battle about asbestos in the walls of the school, and before I knew it I was running for mayor. It wasn't that hard to get elected. My family in Brooklyn thought this was a riot, but I sort of liked the job. My oldest son, Lorenzo, said, “You're the earl of the peaceable kingdom.”
2. If I'd Gone Back to School
In the years after I got out of prison, I got involved with two perfectly nice women, first Judy and then Yvonne. Yvonne had the idea that before it was too late, I should go back to school. I was selling futon sleep sofas at the time. “Your mind is going to turn to kapok stuffing,” she said.
I had never gone further than the first semester of college, so there I was, a full-grown man in his thirties, taking out loans to cover my night studies at Hunter with classes full of girls in Farrah Fawcett hairdos and platform shoes. I overcame my embarrassment by saying nothing
in class.
And a lot of it was horseshitâmentally dowdy professors trying to be bright and sparkling. My freshman comp teacher thought I was a genius, my poli sci teacher thought I was a misguided toad. In my second year I wrote a paper on the Pantheon in Rome, and from this I understood that what I wanted to be was an architectural historian.
Meanwhile my loans were piling up. But I had a mentor, for the first time in my life, a brisk and motherly art historian who, in the end, got me funding in a graduate program in the coldest state of the Midwest. Yvonne refused to go with me and I was lonely as a stray dog but I worked long hours, in a trance of eyestrained rapture, in my icy carrel in the library. I lived as the pale and under-aired troll my family always thought I was.
My one romance, with a smart nineteen-year-old, almost cost me my fellowship, but to everyone's surprise I got picked for a prize to study for a year in Italy. I could not believe how Rome looked when the plane landed in the morningâthe umbrella pines in the distance, the toasty skies. The ugly modern housing on the train into town did not take away my amazement, which was later tinged with a familiarity and vexation quite sweet in itself. I fell in love with Pina, a beautiful and lively art restorer,
and I married her in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, in front of the mosaics of the life of the Virgin. I never left Rome, much to the delight of Pina's family. At first I scraped by, leading student groups on tours, and then I wrote a book and got a job teaching in an American college program in the city. I wrote three more books, all pretty good, and then a very fine one on Bramante in which I was almost able to say what I meant about the religious properties of space. Our two boys, Francesco and Lorenzo, grew up bilingual, feverish soccer fans and propagandists for hip-hop music to their Euro schoolmates.
3. If I'd Stayed in Prison Longer
I might have gone to prison for a much longer time. If I'd had a meaner judgeâsomeone who hated my quiet manners and my nice suit, who thought my composure was an affront. Or if the laws had changed for the worse a little sooner. With a longer sentence, I would have been sent somewhere entirely different, a medium- or a maximum-security prison.