Solos (6 page)

“One of these days,” he says, “I'll get a dog.”

“Or a cat.”

“Or a bird.”

They have had this conversation more than once.

When they come to Emily's building, Marcus frees his arm.

Emily says, “Marcus.”

“Emily.”

“Thank you for walking me home.”

“Well, our rapist is out there somewhere.”

“I know. But I still appreciate it. It's so old-fashioned. Isn't it? Walking someone home. Like an old song.”

“I guess.” He looks at her. Her curly hair, her blue eyes, her mouth curving into its smile. “You have to walk Otto now, right?”

“Nope. I walked him before I left. He'll be okay until morning.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

He pauses and looks at her in the light from the street lamp. He doesn't know if she's pretty, or if she just looks exactly the way he thinks people should look. Both, probably. He could go upstairs with her, he knows that. He could say he'd like a cup of tea, would she make him a cup of nice hot tea? He knows her smile means they could do more than drink tea. He tries to imagine something they might do. Instead, he has a sudden memory of one of the word games he used to love when he was a kid.
Mead to Lime
, he thinks, and then, concentrating,
Mead-mend-mind-mine-mime-Lime
. He smiles. “Okay, then. I'll say good night.”

“Good night, Marcus.” She is slightly taller than he, and she leans down, as she always does, to press her lips to his forehead.

He watches while she goes in. Then he puts his cheek to the big metal door so that, against his face, he can feel her key turn in the lock. Then he walks back to his apartment on North Sixth Street near Roebling. Even when he is at his most distraught, Marcus can't walk past Roebling Street without remembering that John Roebling—who invented the steel cable and used it in his design of the Brooklyn Bridge—died of lockjaw. This fact he finds as amazingly ironic as Al Capone's arrest not for racketeering but for income tax evasion. Roebling should have died gloriously, falling from one of the bridge's towers into the depths of the East River, not sadly in his bed. Like Marcus's mother, whose name was Summer but who froze to death in the middle of an upstate winter.

At 222 North Sixth Street, an address that provides a little jolt of pleasure every time he contemplates it, Marcus takes off his clothes, showers for the third time that day, and puts on a pair of clean striped pajamas. What he wants to do is go to bed and have his favorite dream, that he's gone for a walk in the woods and fallen asleep with his head pillowed on his backpack, and gradually the gentle animals of the forest gather in a circle around him. But he's still agitated from seeing Hart, and he knows he won't sleep. He turns on his fifth-hand tape player and puts on a Welsh rock band. He can't understand a word, and the music is now so familiar he doesn't even hear it, which is what he likes.

He makes himself a cup of herbal tea, hoping to settle his stomach, then sits in his favorite chair. On the wall opposite is something Emily gave him: the neatly framed front page of the
Daily News
on a day last June. The big headline,
DOG DAYS FOR DONNA
, is about ex-Mayor Giuliani's almost-ex-wife, who wants but isn't going to get $1,140 a month for the upkeep of their dog, Goalie. The small headline,
SEAMUS IS MY NEW BUDDY
,
SAYS BILL
, is about the new dog ex-President Clinton's wife gave him as a replacement for Buddy, who was killed by a car a year before. The first time in history, Emily said, that two dogs have ever shared billing on the front page of a newspaper. Emily read him the article inside about Seamus. Bill Clinton said Buddy's death was the worst thing that had happened to him since he left office. Emily had said, “I find that deeply affecting.” He had thought of his dog Phoebe and wanted, as always, to tell Emily about her, but didn't.

When he finishes his tea, he takes from his file cabinet a thin folder neatly labeled
MY LIFE
, and removes a fading color photograph. It's a picture of himself and his father and his mother taken in early fall, 1991, when Hart was living with them for the last time. They are standing on the bridge over the Delaware River at Callicoon, New York. Marcus is dressed in a striped T-shirt and baggy knee-length shorts. His skinny legs give him an avian look. Summer is wearing a cotton dress and looks large and pretty, with the aura of strangeness that she never lost, not even during the brief period when she worked at the drugstore in Jeffersonville and wore a maroon blazer and put her hair up in a neat bun. In the photograph, her hair is waist-length and messy, blown back by a breeze that also ruffles Hart's hair, which hangs long and stringy above his shoulders. Hart has his left arm around Summer and his right hand on the shoulder of Marcus, who stands between and a little in front of them. In the background, the river is shirred—blue and sparkly.

The photo was taken at a picnic they'd had with their neighbors, the Estradas—it was his mother's romantic but unrealistic idea. Hart got drunk, as usual, and was sarcastic. Summer took a long walk, came back crying, and didn't really cheer up all afternoon. Marcus and Jessica and Rosie and little Rafaelito, who still drank from a bottle, were all the wrong ages and sexes to play together successfully, and they could sense that their parents weren't having a good time, so they spent the afternoon being crabby.

Marcus remembers wanting to glide down the river in one of the canoes for rent by the bridge, and he asked Hart if they could rent one, and Hart said nastily, sure. They could rent one, he sneered, and the kids could come for a ride. Then he said with a chuckle, “Don't be surprised if I push you all over the side, one by one, at the deepest part of the river.” Jessica Estrada burst into tears. Her father—who was called Big Rafe and didn't like Hart any more than Hart liked him, maybe less—took his daughter on his lap and said, “I don't think that was funny.” Hart said, “Who's joking?” Then Mrs. Estrada said, “Maybe it's time to head home, they said we might get a storm.” They all packed up to go, squinting at the bright, cloudless sky, and then before they left she took pictures. Somehow this one ended up in Marcus's possession. It's the only picture he has from his childhood.

Marcus stares at the photo thinking,
Anyone who didn't know us would think we were a happy family
. The overweight but radiantly blonde mother, and the tall, slightly bohemian father, maybe an artist or musician. Looks like the kind of guy who relocates from the city to the country because it's a more wholesome place to raise a kid. And the kid in question is weedy and knock-kneed but his smile is pretty cute; the tilt of his head and a certain sharpness around his eyes indicate intelligence or at least curiosity.

It's Hart Marcus stares at most particularly, though.

Hart's hand on his shoulder looks imprisoning, not fatherly.

When he looks at his father's face, he tries to fathom what's going on behind the false smile. When he was ten years old he couldn't decide whether Hart was crazy or evil.

It's eleven years later, and he still doesn't know.

5

Swap for a pair of paws

(1991)

Emily moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn because that's where her friend Gene Rae Foster went to be with her boyfriend Kurt. It was only one subway stop across the river from Manhattan, and Gene Rae said the neighborhood was cheap and eccentric and full of artists and other interesting people. So it proved to be: Williamsburg was an urban wilderness of warehouses and factories, desolate streets, and crumbling, asphalt-fronted row houses you could see had been pretty once, with grand cornices and intricate iron fences, but were now ratty little boxes. The streets were almost bare of both the delights of nature and the amenities of civilization. There was the occasional ailanthus, some sycamores, a few linden trees with their starry spring blossoms, and the vast but barren park. There were two delis, a dubious natural foods store, a Polish restaurant and a Polish bakery, a café near the subway entrance, two stores catering to the neighborhood pigeon flyers, and rumors that an art gallery was planning to open on North Ninth. Someday. You wouldn't know you were in New York City if the maddening, magnificent towers of Manhattan hadn't glittered just across the river.

Gene Rae found Emily a place to live, the corner of a cavernous loft on Grand Street, which Emily rented for almost nothing from two gay sculptors, one of whom was Luther in his pre-fame, pre-Lamont days. Emily's space was boxed in with tall bookcases. She had a square of splintery wooden floor, a mattress, one window, access to the kitchen and the startlingly squalid bathroom, and a key to the roof. During that first summer, she would go to the roof in the evenings and photograph the sky and the skyline as the sun went down across the river. It was a scene that, like the Lake District sunsets Dorothy Wordsworth described in her diary in the early 1800s, was never the same no matter how many times she witnessed it. Then she would sit on the warm tar until dark, her arms wrapped around her knees, thinking about, among other things, her words.

It was always words that interested Emily, and so it was words she wanted to photograph. Though she majored in literature in college, only taking photography courses as electives, she became as enthralled with taking pictures as she was with reading English poetry and French novels. Her two passions coexisted very nicely—by day, she roamed the streets taking photographs; by night, she curled up in bed with a book—and she knew, without being able to explain it, that she was a better photographer because she loved words. At first, they were
BREAD
,
MEMORY
, and
TIME
. It wasn't long, though, before she realized not only that
MEMORY
and
TIME
were too closely related, but that
MEMORY
was almost impossible to find.

She narrowed her focus down to
BREAD
and
TIME
.

That was satisfactory for a while, but she knew she had to have three words: she was like a woman with two children who just knows—
knows
—she was meant to have three. She devoted many hours of thought to choosing a new word, but didn't come up with one she liked until, at the combination animal shelter and pet-food store called the Pet Pound on Metropolitan Avenue, she fell in love with Harry.

She had never meant to love a dog, much less own one. Her life was to be devoted to art, not to a pet or a husband or a child or any other living creature. Her life was about her Hasselblad and her Nikon and her two, soon to be three, words. But she would visit the Pet Pound sometimes, the way she visited the Polish bakery or Marta's beauty shop, with no intention of eating the doughy pastries or getting her hair cut, but because she liked to chat. Gaby and Hattie, who ran the Pet Pound, were a long-time couple, friends of Gene Rae's boyfriend, Kurt, who had gotten his dog from them. They also knew Luther—in fact, Hattie introduced Luther and Lamont a few years later when she found out they both had cats named Daphne. Everyone went to the Pet Pound because it was an entertainment—like going to the theater, only it was free and you didn't have to get on the subway. The Doggie Dorm was out in back, with a run attached, but the shop itself was small—too small—and full of what Emily thought of as free-range cats. They perched on windowsills, on the counter, on the stacked bags of litter and kibble, and on top of the cages in which a few of the dogs waited, noisily, to be adopted. One dog, old half-blind Babyface, missing half a tail and most of one ear, had lived there for years, unadopted for obvious reasons, roaming the place by radar, mingling with the cats, who accepted him as they might accept a walking tree stump. A parrot named Bugsy screeched his own name from time to time, and wouldn't stop until someone gave him a piece of celery or scratched his head. For a while they had a miniature goat, and for another while a pot-bellied pig, and one afternoon when Emily stopped in just to check things out they had Harry in a cage with two cats draped across it, asleep.

She wouldn't have noticed the dog, she sometimes thought, if she hadn't stopped to pet the cats, two sleek and beautiful mackerel-tabby brothers in the process of being adopted. The cats didn't wake up when she petted them, just purred and stretched in their sleep. When Emily looked down to see whose cage they were lying on, the sad brown eyes of a true mutt looked back up at her.

“Well, hi there, cutie pie,” she said, and he whined with joy.

Harry was an older dog, with, Gaby told her frankly, bad teeth that needed seeing to. He wasn't pretty: a little foxy fellow with short, rough, tan fur that leapt out in long, inexplicable wisps here and there. He had short ears and a long muzzle and a solid, piggy body.

“He's obviously part terrier,” Hattie said.

“And maybe part toilet brush,” Gaby added. When she opened the cage door, Harry shook himself and emerged. He sat on the floor looking up at Emily with an expectant grin. A black cat came over and sniffed him disdainfully.

“You have to admit he's a really silly-looking dog.”

“For Harry every day is a bad-hair day.”

Gaby and Hattie stood over him, chuckling. They knew they could say anything. They had been in the pet placement business long enough to recognize love at first sight when they saw it.

Emily bent to pet him, and he licked her hand once, politely, then freaked out and tried to lick her face. He smelled good, she thought: He smelled like a dog, with an overlaying smell that reminded her of pancakes. Pancakes? How could a dog smell of pancakes?

“Harry, get down,” Gaby said. “Don't be disgusting.”

Emily found she had the beginning of tears in her eyes. She didn't mind if the dog licked her face. She hugged him, and he quivered all over, then tried to jump up on her again. His head knocked against her chin, jarring her teeth together. How long had it been since she had loved anyone so intensely?