Solos (7 page)

“I really want him,” she said. “Am I crazy?”

“If you're not, it's okay. Harry is.”

Harry had belonged to a textile designer from Greenpoint with the wonderful name of Malaysia Morales—they knew Emily would want to know this—until she moved to Baltimore with her boyfriend, who was allergic to dogs. Malaysia was broken-hearted, but Gaby and Hattie were delighted that she entrusted Harry to them. “We knew he'd be adopted in a week,” Gaby said.

“So how long has he been here?” Emily asked.

“Six months,” Gaby said, and giggled. Then she said, “Just kidding. Four days. We've had lots of inquiries.”

Four days
, Emily thought. What if she hadn't come in? What if someone else had adopted him? Harry was gazing at her with a sort of calculated enthusiasm—comparing her, Emily figured, with his lost Malaysia. Well, who could blame him? Her job was to measure up. He looked like the frisky kind of dog who enjoyed having a ball thrown for him, so she bought a red ball with a bell inside it. She also bought a red leather collar with a brass plate where she could have his name engraved, and a red leash and a box of dog biscuits, size small. She arranged to have a sack of Science Diet (for Older Dogs) delivered. She filled out the adoption forms, wrote a check, and got the name of a veterinarian who could do something about Harry's teeth.

“Good luck,” Gaby said, snapping on the leash. She scratched Harry's head, and Harry closed his eyes and put his ears back in pleasure. “He's pretty needy. If he doesn't drive you nuts, you're going to love him.”

The parrot screeched “Bugsy!” as they left, but Harry never looked back.

DOG
, Emily thought as she and Harry walked down Metropolitan,
BREAD
.
TIME
.
DOG
. “Dog,” she said to Harry, who paid no attention, just kept walking toward the corner, where he turned left as if he had lived on Grand Street all his life.

Luther was happy about Harry, though Daphne the cat wasn't—she skulked under the bed, then moved to the top of the refrigerator, blinking her yellow eyes and hissing. But Stephen, the other sculptor, said, apologetically, “I'm just not a dog person,” and told Emily she'd have to move. She'd just sold two
BREAD
photographs to Dr. Demand for two thousand dollars and a cleaning. She had planned to use the money to travel around Italy, where she had never been, photographing
PANE
and
TEMPO
signs, but the check was also the equivalent of half a year's rent for her own place, provided the place was cheap enough. The loft in Anstice Mullen's building on North Third Street was advertised on a hand-printed flyer attached to the wall outside the natural foods store:

LARGE LOFT FOR RENT
$300.

NO FREAKS
.

PREFER PET-OWNER
.

Emily Lime was twenty-five, she had an old dog named Harry, and she thought she was on her way to being a real photographer, one who could make a living at it. She moved into the loft, which smelled strongly of cinnamon from the spice factory and had an ancient, dangerous freight elevator that required brute strength and extreme bravery to operate. She painted the floors battleship gray and each wall a different color. The ceilings were eighteen feet high, and to paint the upper parts she had to borrow an extension ladder from Anstice and, terrified, lean out and up and down to slap on the paint with a giant brush. It took her most of a week, at the end of which she was exhausted. She spent a whole day sacked out on her mattress with Harry. He didn't smell of pancakes any more, he just smelled of Harry, which was fine with her. Harry slept nicely at her side when she slept, and woke up instantly when she stirred, and began alternately begging for breakfast and looking for his ball. She remembered part of an Ogden Nash poem she had learned as a child:

I envy oft my faithful pup
.

He has no trouble getting up
.

Harry's playfulness energized her, and she felt the exercise of chasing a ball was good for him, at his age. She would throw the ball for him from the mattress end of the loft to the kitchen end where she had a mini-stove and mini-refrigerator. The second she let it go, Harry would let out a joyful yip and take off. Sometimes he would catch it in midair, a dazzlingly graceful maneuver that turned her ridiculous little dog into a ballerina.

She doted on Harry, and within a week he was doting back, not wanting Emily out of his sight, and howling—her neighbors reported to her, sourly, in the elevator—like a soul in hell when she left him alone. She had to leave him alone pretty regularly; within three months, Dr. Demand's money was gone—Harry's teeth alone cost four hundred dollars—and she hadn't sold anything else. She couldn't get a grant or a gallery, or even a spot in a group show in a restaurant in Greenwich Village where she knew one of the waiters, so she took a job working three days a week as the assistant to a gardener named Sophie Lopez.

Sophie lived in Emily's building, two floors down. She was English, tall, blonde, fortyish, and classy, divorced from a Mexican painter. She didn't look like someone who dug in the dirt for a living: She looked like a glossy socialite gotten up in jeans, muddy boots, and knee pads to raise money for the Central Park Conservancy. She specialized in the roof gardens of the wealthy who lived near the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. Emily had almost no gardening experience—as a child, she had, under protest, helped her parents in the yard with weeding and deadheading—but they got along. Emily was strong and willing to learn, and Sophie was easy-going and willing to teach.

It was on a rooftop terrace on Pineapple Street—the kind of immaculately pastoral place where no wildlife ventured, unless it was the family cat—that Emily encountered Izzy. She and Sophie were working at the home of Victor and Tilda Ramsey, doing the fall cleanup and bulb planting on their fourth-floor terrace. The terrace looked out to the river and to Lower Manhattan on the river's other shore, the towers of the World Trade Center rising up from the shimmering village at their feet like the twin spires of a strange cathedral. It was a blue-sky day in November, unexpectedly warm. Emily dug a trench and prepared to set some tulip bulbs. She stuck her shovel into the dirt, turned to scoop a handful of bone meal out of a sack, and there sitting on the sack was a pale yellow bird.

Emily stopped stone-still and stared at it.

It put its head to one side and stared back with its round black eye.

Emily didn't move, but the bird swiveled its head around, first one side and then the other, as if trying to figure her out. Then it said something like “Tk.” Emily replied, gingerly, “Tk.” The bird gave a squawk—“Erk”—and Emily said “Erk” in return. They looked at each other for another half minute, and then Emily, very slowly, raised her arm and stuck out a finger. The bird cocked its head and stared, but when she moved her finger closer to the vicinity of its round ivory breast, it hopped on. Emily stood very quietly with her arm held out straight, making soft “tk” and “erk” noises. The bird's feet on her finger were dry, with sharp claws that dug in and almost but not quite hurt. Gradually, she bent her arm and brought the bird closer. When it was six inches from her face, it flew suddenly to her head and perched there. Emily said, warily, “Sophie.”

Sophie looked up from the rosebushes she was tying and said, “Oh sweet Jesus, what the bloody hell is that on your head?”

“I. Don't. Know.” Emily spoke between clenched teeth. She was afraid to move anything, even her lip muscles.

“I think it's a cockatiel,” Sophie said. “Cockatoo? Whatever. It's certainly cute.”

Emily could feel the little claws on her scalp. She said, “Tk.” The bird didn't answer at first. Then it said, “Tk tk tk tk,” a soft, contented mumble. Carefully, she raised her finger again. The bird hopped on, and Emily, feeling more confident, brought it down to look at. It was a creamy yellow bird and on its head was a tall tuft that went up and came down at random. It had a spot of orange on each cheek and a long, stiff tail. Its legs and feet were pale pink. It looked her in the eye. It said “Tk” again, and “Erk.”

“I wonder whose it is,” Sophie said. “The Ramseys don't have one. Maybe it belongs to a neighbor?”

“It belongs to me,” Emily said.

“I think it crapped on your head,” Sophie said. “It's claimed you for its own.”

Tilda Ramsey gave her a cardboard box with holes punched in it, and it settled in quietly. Tilda didn't know anyone with a cockatiel, but Sophie made Emily put up signs in the neighborhood. On the way home in Sophie's truck, on which was painted:
A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN GARDEN DESIGN SOPHIE LOPEZ
,
PROP
, Emily held Izzy's box on her lap, making noises at it. The bird was quieter, but now and then it would let out a loud “Tk” and once a shrill “Eek.”

“You don't have a cage.”

“I'll get one at Pet Pound.”

“Do you have any money?”

“Sort of.”

Sophie reached into her wallet, pulled out a twenty and handed it to Emily. “Bird seed,” she said. “Cuttle bone. A little mirror with a bell on it. Sandpaper thingies that fit over the perches.”

“Thank you, Sophie.”

“What if someone calls and says it's theirs?”

Emily didn't answer immediately. Then Izzy let out a quiet, pensive “Tk” and Emily shot back a reassuring “Erk.”

“Tough shit,” she said.

6

Live not on evil, madam, live not on evil.

Every time Hart returned, Summer believed against all odds that this time they were going to settle down and be a family, like the Estradas next door. The year Marcus turned ten his father came to live with them again. Hart had left two years before, claiming he couldn't compete with Zeus and Apollo. “It's all Greek to me!” he'd said at the door. No one laughed. Outside, his friend Joe Whack had waited in a car with the motor running. Summer was weeping, and Marcus, who was eight and had never gotten used to seeing his mother's tears, was staring down at his shoes, afraid that if he looked at his father he would have to kick him.

Marcus understood the joke: Summer was too weird and fat and out of it for Hart.

But Summer took Hart's words literally, and renounced her beloved pantheon of gods and goddesses in favor of a milder form of nature worship. Her new religion didn't involve much more than putting in a vegetable garden—beans and lettuce that were mostly eaten by the raccoons and rabbits—and occasionally dancing on the lawn in her bare feet. She sent weekly letters to Hart at his apartment on West 196th Street, reporting on the progress of the garden, her latest cooking triumphs, and Marcus. The address seemed phony to Marcus; even a big city like New York couldn't really have 196 streets. Hart seldom answered the letters, but after two years he called to say he missed them both and was returning.

Summer's friend Tamarind said that, more likely, whatever scam he had going in the city was dried up.

Summer said she didn't care. She loved him, and—here her voice got hard and stubborn—the important thing was they'd all be together again. Like the Huxtables on TV. “Okay, he's not perfect, but he's Marcus's father, and we need him,” she said to Tamarind. Marcus couldn't comprehend the third part of her statement: They needed him for
what?
Another time he heard her say, “This time I think we're actually going to get married,” her voice wobbly with excitement, which is how he'd found out his parents weren't married. But the
needing
part was the bigger mystery, because Marcus knew that Hart had nothing to do with their lives in any practical way, and that it was his grandmother who supported them.

Grandma Mead was the widow of a long-dead man who had been a minor official on the New York Central Railroad. The tracks of an ancient branch line ran east and west behind the old farmhouse outside Rochester, where the old lady lived modestly on her husband's pension. Every month she sent Summer, her only child, a check made out to Janet Parsons Mead, which was Summer's name before she changed it during her freshman year in college.

Their little gray house at the edge of Honesdale had been built by Grandma Mead's parents in 1912, and Great-Grandma Parsons had died there at the age of ninety-six, leaving the house conveniently available for Summer to move into when she became pregnant with Marcus and quit college. Marcus was born there in the upstairs back bedroom, an event at which Tamarind and a woman named Songbird were present. They had invoked the Roman goddesses of childbirth, Hera and Artemis (and their lesser counterparts Cynosura and Adamanthea), to encourage Marcus's emergence from the womb. Where Hart had been, Marcus never learned, though he once heard Grandma Mead say, “Leave it to the weasel to slink off the day his son is born.” His grandmother routinely called his father “the weasel,” so he figured Hart's record of disappearing from their lives without warning had begun with his own birth.

After Hart called to say he was coming back—
coming home
, Summer called it, though Hart never did—she cooked and baked for days. There were two pies and Hart's favorite fig tart lined up on the kitchen counter, a coconut cake on a stand, and two kinds of homemade ice cream in the freezer—and those were only the desserts. She also made guacamole and a Provençal beef stew and a big kettle of a soup that always charmed Marcus: a rich broth with fluffy little dumplings in it, each one wrapped neatly around a crouton. When she was finished with all this, she had some time left, so she roasted a pork loin and made a batch of mango-lemon chutney and a loaf of potato bread. What Summer cooked didn't always go together, but it was always good.

Hart arrived in his own car this time, a beat-up Volvo wagon, and he was hungry, which pleased Summer. He looked handsome as ever, but skinny and haunted. He carried one suitcase, his computer in a leather case, and a shopping bag with
BARNEY'S NEW YORK
printed on it. From the suitcase, in addition to his usual collection of natty shirts and Italian shoes, he pulled a gray pin-striped Armani suit. He called it his art-dealer costume as he shook it out and hung it up in the closet. In the shopping bag there were presents. For Summer, a large box of Godiva chocolates and a painting done by Hart's friend Joe Whack: a still life of a broken cup, a piece of burned toast, and a safety pin. “Joe's new direction,” Hart commented, and said he'd chosen it because it was the only painting that was food-related. For Marcus, he brought a book of
New York Times
crossword puzzles and a Manhattan phone book containing a zip-code map of the city confirming that New York had many, many more than 196 streets. These were perfect presents.