“But you were pregnant.”
“I forgot. But if I’d remembered it probably wouldn’t have changed things.”
Before I left New York I went to Claudia’s apartment. What I wanted was a catalog. An inventory, a list, not simply of possessions or credentials, but of proofs. The dress and shoes
were gone, of course, but her 50s remained, and the Gucci belt that had held them up, and the white buttondown shirt. Her purse (lipstick, three half-smoked cigarettes, the key to No. 1), her do-rag, slick and richly scented with coconut pomade,
sistah’s gone do some cleanin’ now.
The clipping announcing her brothers’ death, the syringes and the drugs, some meant to kill her, others to keep her alive, and her spiked heels, the one indistinguishable from the other. Aligned like that they added up to
Claudia MacTeer: a Life
, but that subtitle was less explanation than qualifier, because what they didn’t add up to was Claudia MacTeer, alive. No italics, no subtitle, no restrictions. I could stare at them, stroke them, bring them to my nose and sniff their various odors, sweet and spicy, pungent and ripe, I stared and stroked and sniffed and each of those sights and scents and textures called to mind a host of memories, a freeze-frame slideshow of our yearlong cohabitation, but no matter how palpable those memories I still couldn’t animate the objects on the table in front of me, couldn’t cause them to be inhabited by the flesh and blood of the one person who’d actually asked for my help. Well, I suppose I could have, but let’s face it: I didn’t really want a catalog or its attendant fantasies, I wanted my mail-order bride. I wanted Claudia. For just one moment as I looked at Claudia’s remains spread out on her kitchen table I wanted to give in to madness as a drowner gives in, finally, to the undertow. But you can’t will madness. You either fake it or you are it, and I was nothing more than a poser. A tease. Madness was the girl in the corner I’d flirted with but, as with the red deer and calling K. my father and my shallowly slashed wrist, I had no real intention of putting out. I mean, I
had
put out with K., but the truth is that when I fucked K. I was fucking
K
. I might have been using him as a whipping boy for Trucker or Cousin Benny or my father—or my mother, or myself—but it was still K.’s fingers that wiped the sweat from my eyebrows, K.’s stomach I spilled my semen on, K.’s eyes, gray (but not gray like mine), that had looked at me in shock and fear and betrayed trust. Real insanity is a defense and what I did was indefensible.
So.
I waited a day.
Before I left for good. Just a night, really: because the morning after I sold the building I used some of the money I’d taken from Sonny to buy an obituary for Claudia. But when I placed the ad (
to list an apartment press 1; to place a personal press 2; to leave an obituary press 3
) I found out it wouldn’t run until February 12
th
, and so I decided to wait the three days until it ran. Just to be sure. To see it with my own eyes. To remind myself of the difference between intention and accomplishment.
The obituary was the first thing I bought with the money Sonny gave me. The second thing was a new pair of shoes, and the third was a winter coat. Oh yes: and I bought breakfast too, and lunch and dinner, I bought myself three squares a day while I waited for Claudia’s obituary to come out, as if leaving New York were akin to hibernating and I would need to build up a layer of fat to survive. The truth is I bought the food because I was hungry, just as I bought the shoes because my feet were cold, but I bought the coat because I’d decided to return Ellis’s to his father, along with Parker’s urn. I was going to drive Sonny’s van up to Harlem and drop off my packages like the UPS man, then keep going north. It seemed the least I could do—returning the urn, I mean, and maybe the obituary too; it seemed as though I was finally closing off a debt, although I wasn’t sure if that debt was to Claudia or Joseph MacTeer or to history. At any rate Claudia’s printed obituary ran to eight lines, about two column inches, and if you added it to the three inches that had been devoted to her brother’s death they still weren’t as long as the two broken paragraphs I’d found in the garden, weren’t as tall as the headline “The Man Who Saves People” that had been devoted to me.
Parker’s urn. You hear of some objects that are supposed to be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, but Parker’s urn felt like it weighed more than the materials from which it was constructed. When I first went down to the subbasement I thought it had been stolen again, but then I remembered Claudia dropping it and I found it in a corner behind a moldy misshapen easy chair. When I lifted it I wondered how she’d managed to carry it even as far as she had. The weight of that urn signaled an end to things, but perhaps that’s just me, still interpreting the past in light of future events; still, whatever it was that weighed it down, it was all I could do to drag it up that first flight of stairs, out of my mother’s misassembled house and into the basement of what had once been my house but was now Sonny’s. Then there were the basement’s twists and turns. Around every corner lurked a memory of Claudia and each of those memories added their weight to my burden, so that by the time I made it up the second flight of stairs and stumbled into the shop I nearly knocked over a shelf with my lurching side-to-side gait. The shelf vibrated ominously, a scrim of dust shimmered into the air and rendered everything soft-focus, but then the dust settled back down with a tinkle and everything was solid again.
A tinkle?
The bells rang again, as if to reassure me. Their chime was light as laughter, an inside joke between the door and who? Nellydean? Dutch Street? The city outside? Could it possibly be sharing its joke with me? The bells faded before I could decide and it seemed what I heard then was breathing, a familiar wheezing gasp. And I had heard it: it was my gasping. From the front of the shop came only silence, but gradually that silence was filled by the sound of shuffling footsteps. Floorboards creaked. I’d never heard them creak before and tried to imagine who was large enough to bend them, just a little, just enough to get them to moan in protest.
I should have known.
He’d gained the weight back, lost a little more hair. When he came into view he wasn’t even ten feet away from me. Upright, he looked like I’d imagined he’d look: like a thick stick of unpulled taffy. He stood there, staring at something off to the side, and when I turned I saw the broom-wielding form of Nellydean. How small she looked in relation to Trucker—and how tall he was, standing on two flipper-flat feet. He seemed to careen toward me, impossibly tall Trucker, until I felt a sharp pain in my knees and realized I was falling toward him. The floorboards slapped my kneecaps, Parker’s urn came down hard on my thighs and I dropped it as Claudia had, and when it sprang from my hands it bowled straight for Trucker’s ankles with the same manic energy with which the cat in Johanus Peeke’s story had burned down his house. Trucker’s stomach, that huge heavy pillow I’d cushioned my own body against so many times, sped his fall, but also broke it. There was a cartoon splat and a very real
oof!
and then Trucker lifted his face from the floor and wiped the grit from his lips and said, “I’m not sure this is how he pictured our reunion.”
“Trucker,” I said. “
Trucker?
”
A cloud of fear pinked Trucker’s face, as round and wet as a baby’s. He went to push himself up but I put a hand on his soft round shoulder to hold him down. I preferred the two of us down there, the stability of kneeling, lying flat. I was afraid if we stood we might fall down again, and I heard a faint but familiar clunk and looked up to see Nellydean setting the knob of her inverted broom on the floor. She leaned heavily on the shaft but didn’t say anything.
“Oh, James,” Trucker said in a muted horrified voice. “Look at you. Look what I’ve done to you.”
His voice broke on the last word, and tears leaked onto his cheeks. I looked down to see that the sharp edge of Parker’s urn had ripped through my jeans and a few drops of blood stained my thighs. With fingers thin as pliers I pulled the fabric open along the tear, exposing more and more of my skin-wrapped bone. I could see how you could look at that thinness and be misled—well, Claudia hadn’t been fooled but I had, and I lived in this body—and I reached out and grabbed Trucker’s trembling hand with mine, I stained us both with my harmless blood and I said, “It’s okay, Trucker. You didn’t infect me.”
Some other emotion added itself to the fear on Trucker’s face, but I didn’t recognize it as shame until he spoke. “I know I didn’t. James,” Trucker told me, in the way that your best friend might tell you he’s squandered your life savings on a bad stock tip, “I’m not positive,” he said, and at those words I dropped his hand as I’d dropped Parker’s urn.
“What are you talking about? I saw you, all that weight you lost. The look in your eyes.”
“I know, I know. But all I had was hepatitis. Hepatitis
,
” he repeated, and even though I clearly remembered the jaundice of his skin I still shook my head no. But Trucker nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “I know. I understand. But James, you have to understand me. I was so afraid I was positive I made it real for myself, and, I guess, for you too.” He reached for my hand but I pulled it away. “I screwed around on Edie for more than thirty years, and for the last twenty I’ve lived in mortal fear of getting AIDS even though I never did anything to protect myself. But all I got was hepatitis, James, and that’s all I gave you. I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed for four weeks. I lay in a motel room outside Tulsa and lived on packages of instant oatmeal and refused to be taken to a hospital because even then I couldn’t face the reality of things. I couldn’t bear the thought of a doctor standing there in his white coat and saying, ‘Mr. Nieman, you are gay.’”
It was a moment before I said anything. At first I thought I’d say that I’d only been sick for a week and then I thought I’d say I was still sick, but in the end all I said was, “Mr. Nieman?”
“Colin Nieman?” There was a question in his voice. “Didn’t you find the card?”
Call me Noman
, I thought then: Colin Nieman. I shook my head to clear it. “And…Edie? Not Judy?”
Colin shook his head as well. “Edie. Edith.”
“And did she? I mean, is she?”
“Dead? No, James, not all women die.”
There was another clunk then, from Nellydean’s broom, and I looked up at her but she refused to meet my eyes.
“Some women just leave. Edie left me when she finally put it all together.”
“She left you for being gay?”
“No, she left me for being dishonest and unfaithful and for giving her hepatitis like I gave it to you and a couple of other boys in a couple of other states. My homosexuality was incidental to all that.”
I took a deep breath. “You’re not positive.”
Colin unfolded one of his plump arms from his side and put it on my knee and this time I let it stay. “I’m not positive, James. And neither are you.”
There was another clunk but Nellydean still didn’t speak, although when I glanced at her I couldn’t tell if she didn’t know what to say or if, after everything that had happened in the past eight months, she was past speaking.
Colin looked between me and Nellydean, and I looked between Nellydean and Colin. “Trucker. Colin. What—what are you
doing
here?” Colin looked back and forth between my face and my knees, which were starting to throb, just a little, not from my cuts but from the grip of his hand. I pried his fingers from my knee but didn’t let go of them. “Why did you come back?”
“I didn’t…I couldn’t face myself,” Colin said, “let alone you. I wouldn’t have come here if he hadn’t made me.”
The floorboards creaked then. Creaked again. And my eyes traveled in stages, like a cross-country railroad journey.
A train leaves Kansas.
One line, the seam between two floorboards, led to his leg, the crease in his pants led up to his waist, the neat placket of his buttondown led all the way to his chin.
A train leaves New York City.
From there they had to walk, circumnavigating shadow-stubbled cheeks and a nose as fine and straight as the tip of a pool cue, but finally my gray eyes found his, and they lingered for a moment before I was able to take in the whole of him.
How long before they collide?
He’d let his hair grow, I saw, and their curled ends licked the collar of his white shirt where it poked out of his leather jacket.
“
I
came back, James,” K. said. “This one”—he jerked his left hand at Colin—“I had to drag here.” When he pointed at Colin I saw that his hand held a piece of paper, and when K. saw me looking at it he showed it to me.
It was the obituary of Claudia MacTeer.
Of No. 1 Dutch Street.
Formerly 137
th
Street.
Now deceased.
Survived by her father, Joseph MacTeer, her son, Reginald Packman MacTeer, her aunt, Ellen Dean, and her sometime companion, James Ramsay.
There was a piece of paper in K.’s right hand as well.
“K.,” I said then, and we both shook our heads at the same time. “Knute,” I said, because it was a day for real names. “I was coming to find you. I sold the building.” I listened, but there was no clunk behind me. “I sold it like you did.”
“Like I did?”
“Your farm? Upstate? I sold it on time.” I turned to Nellydean; she still leaned on her broom but her features had gone as hard as its handle. “You and Divine can live here as long as you want. Sonny will pay the taxes and give you whatever money you need until, until…”
“Until I die,” Nellydean said in a voice so flat it might not even have been reproachful.
“It’s the best I could do,” I said, but Nellydean didn’t say anything else.
I turned back to Knute. Oh, the weight of words, the weightlessness: not just the ones that are spoken and left to settle on memory’s floor, but the ones written down. So many scraps of paper had been thrown around during the past nine months, from my mother’s letters to Claudia’s maps to the millions of sheets that had blown across half a city to these, Knute’s final offerings, but even now I couldn’t tell you if I was being tarred and feathered or given wings. So I asked.