The Sky Below (10 page)

I wrote, “Goddard retired from the Rockettes in 1943. Her final show was the Christmas Spectacular. She took her last bow dressed as a tin soldier.” Leaning against my cubicle wall was the scratched and fading picture of May, holding her soldier's hat with one hand and swanning with the other, bowing straight-backed from the hips. That May—she'd almost made it to a century. Barely five feet tall, with a strike-up-the-band smile, she had begun her career as “The Little Butterfly,” tossed into the air in pink and purple wings off the upturned feet of her older brother and caught by the upturned feet of her middle brother in the Goddard Family Flyers, a vaudeville act that couldn't get work by the time May was nineteen. So she hoofed it. Became a Rockette, dated a few minor gangsters, married Roy, the owner of a furniture business in Queens, and died in her sleep. Roy went in 1979. I wondered what May did all those years, surrounded by Roy's furniture that slowly, then quickly, aged, just the way Roy had. Tap, tap, tap up the stairs, down the stairs, in her small, echoing house. It wasn't my house; it was May's dream house. I knew how she felt; she died there, in her sleep.

5:11.
Past the close, as usual, I thought, and then the managing editor, Sydnee, IMed me: “gabe come on we need to get goddard to copy hurry up.” Fuck this fucking local rag, I didn't write back to Sydnee, she of the suede miniskirts and sharp little white teeth and talking points. Fuck this fucking bullshit city of the dead for tourists that it was my job to maintain endlessly, like bailing out a leaky boat. Like painting a bridge. Even if I had known what I was doing, I couldn't have kept up. Nobody could. The city of the dead was always expanding, while the circulation of
The Hudson Times
was always shrinking.

The obit section was called, cutely, “Local Heroes,” as if dropping dead were an exceptional act, and I was encouraged, via e-mail from Los Angeles, to cover the passing of “real New York types, Gabe, the kinds of colorful guys and gals that make
your city unique!” I was supposed to churn out two-paragraph sentimental tributes, written at an eighth-grade level, to ghostly Noo Yawkers who had lived in buildings that had long since been torn down, eaten in Automats that had dissolved, held jobs that no longer existed: telephone operator, dance hall girl, coal and ice man. May fit the bill so well that I wondered if I had made her up. Yet there she was, faded but real, bowing in her sequined tin soldier's hat.

I typed, “Goddard ran May Goddard's School of Dance on Elmhurst Avenue until 1971, when it was bought by the Arthur Murray chain.” Even I could write a basic sentence like that, plus the subjects were always dead. It wasn't like they could complain. The light at the tips of the waves lengthened, deepened. Across the dirty river was the open arc of the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, the buildings like enormous stair steps, the dense green trees. It looked like the land of the living, where happy people pushed happy babies in strollers and walked happy dogs on good leather leashes, while where I was felt like the land of the dead. But this land of the dead had brought me to Fleur, and Fleur would get me across that river, sooner or later, and really change my life.

5:13.

I worked in ruins. I don't mean only the literal ruins of the World Trade Center, though they were not so far away and you could still come across that suspiciously thick dust in odd, overlooked places. I mean that as soon as you got off the train down there and began making your way along the winding, close-set streets—as narrow and intimate as streets in old European cities—you found yourself in a kind of ruin, or in a confused, half-remembered dream, of not one but several ancient civilizations. The temperature dropped ten degrees. These blocks were always in shadow, whether it was noon or seven o'clock at night; the sun couldn't find its way in. Once upon a time, the big money guys who made the city believed
they were gods, and they built their enormous banks here, a stone's throw from where their ships came in, in the style of Greek temples, or what they thought Greek temples were. Massive columns and domes modeled on the Pantheon ornamented even more massive stone buildings trying to outdo one another on the serpentine streets: Wall Street, New Street, Beaver Street, Pearl Street, William Street, Ann Street, John Street, Stone Street. The flora and fauna, kings and queens, of another time. Gryphons, myriad Neptune's tridents, the heads of gods, and winged horses were carved on pediments and grand doorway arches. On top of one bank was a seven-story pyramid that could be seen only from the sky. Reigning high above the entrance of the stock exchange was a statue of Integrity, wings sprouting from her head, guarding the kneeling figures of Agriculture and Mining on her left, and Science, Industry, and Invention on her right. All the kneeling guys were cute.

But who the hell ever heard of Integrity? Why were there wings on her head? The Roman Forum had nothing on Wall Street when it came to being history's junk heap; antiquity was an odd-lot jumble in the penumbral gloom down here, mixed and matched with impunity, half of it now covered in scaffolding as the bankers' temples were being converted into luxury hotels and condos, much of it barricaded against terrorists by wrought-iron fences. Armed guards and soldiers in blue uniforms with
Special Ops
embroidered on their collars stood, bored, in the spaces between the Ionic/Corinthian/Beaux Arts/Art Deco columns. And all along the face of one nineteenth-century structure, in gigantic, television-ready lettering, gold as a stripper's tassels:
THE TRUMP BUILDING
.

The perpetual chill, the stone, the cheap gold, the chipped winged horses and old tridents and temples scattered helter-skelter everywhere: it was a tumbled mausoleum before the towers went down, and it was a tumbled mausoleum where the
dead burned for weeks afterward. The smell was terrible. A few years later, in the time that I'm writing about, the sound of jackhammers was constant and construction workers vied for sidewalk space with tourists speaking German or Chinese or Dutch and the floor traders in their blue smocks, numbered badges hanging askew, loosely pinned near their hearts.

I didn't know why I was here, and I hated it, but sometimes I wondered if there had been unforeseen luck to it. Because, after all, this shadowy, jumbled place where two rivers met was the home of the money. Short, crooked, and cobblestoned, Wall Street was filled with secret entrances to the money. It's a small street, no more than a five-minute walk from end to end, and day and night it had a peculiarly hushed, suspended, inward-looking atmosphere. It was populated by men at work on two kinds of things: the buildings, which you could see, and the money, which you couldn't. Money was the aquifer. Since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the New York Stock Exchange was closed to the public, but none of the temples down there had ever really been open to the uninitiated.

For years, I saw the men (and they were, still, almost all men) from these temples smoking, hurrying, eating salad out of plastic bowls on the Federal Hall steps, wearing Bluetooth earpieces, getting into helicopters at the heliport or disappearing into the subway, but they didn't really see me. When I went down to Wall Street at lunchtime, guys my age in shirtsleeves and ties stood in line at the hot dog carts or fruit carts or pizza carts, punching at their BlackBerrys, talking on their cell phones or to one another, saying things like, “It was a motherfucker to put something in place to make the transaction,” or, contemptuously, “Twenty-five million, forty-five, sixty—whatever.” I stood next to them, listening, trying to figure out what was going on. I almost could be one of them, but I wasn't quite, and sometimes when they noticed me listening they dropped their voices and turned away. It was like they knew I was still a bartender underneath.

Sydnee IMed again:
what the hell are you doing move it.

5:20.
The river brightened. My heart beat faster.

I had tried to blend in. When I got Skip's job, I went to Brooks Brothers the very same day and bought a tie: brown, with a discreet black stripe. The next morning, I put the tie on for the first time. I wasn't sure that I'd tied it right, it had been so long, but immediately I liked the feel of it. In the tie, I was a different man. It made me want to smoke and drink at lunch and call women “skirts.” The tie snapped things into focus: it translated reality into the most linear, boring terms. I began wearing the tie to work every day as sort of an homage to Skip, sort of a joke, sort of my cover. It became my signature, because none of the other guys at the paper wore one. To the outside world, the striped tie was a sign of respect, even deference, but to me it was so excessively normal that it meant (secretly)
I'm just kidding. Psych.

None of the shiny pods on the new corporate management team got the joke. The suspiciously, egregiously normal tie; my slightly too long hair with the retro-ironic
Teen Beat
–esque red waves that I firmed up every morning with the help of a peculiarly effective product called Bedhead Manipulator; the slouchy way I wore my belt, my low-slung jeans reminded me whenever I looked in the mirror in the men's washroom that this wasn't really me, this wasn't my real life. My life, as such, hadn't started yet. I thought it had, but I'd been wrong. I still looked like an artist; like a bartender (and there were days when I missed that job, the thick roll of cash in my pocket at 3
A.M.
); like a guy in a band, though I'd never been in a band; like a guy you'd meet in a graduate seminar in philosophy, or on the plane to Goa, though I'd never been to either of those places.

I let the tie take care of things. The tie could float to work in my place and probably no one would notice. Probably the tie would do a better job. The tie would care. The slouchy belt, the retro-ironic hair full of Bedhead Manipulator: they laughed at
the tie. I always wore my heavy black Doc Martens—the same ones I'd worn ten years before to clubs where I head-banged all night—with my work clothes. Still, I admit that after I got Skip's job, when I walked down Wall Street, passing the men on cell phones, the men in construction helmets, the men with
Special Ops
embroidered on their collars, the men with guns, the men getting into limos, and the men with numbers pinned sideways, as if carelessly, on their smocks, I led with the tie. I conspicuously loosened it as I walked along, as if to say,
Hard day. It was a motherfucker to put something in place to make the transaction. Twenty-five million, forty-five, sixty—whatever.
But the guys in shirtsleeves and ties standing in line at the carts still kept their voices down, murmuring numbers to one another.

Wall Street ended at the East River. At the top of the block, the street was capped by the busy, democratic push of Broadway. There, Trinity Church, straight-backed, offered its blessing, raising its delicate spires to the sky, but the spires were dwarfed by the enormous office buildings shoving in, around, and over the top of them to get close to the money. The real soul and presiding deity of this entire zone was the huge bronze bull that tossed its horns and pawed the ground on Bowling Green. Last summer, a prankster had covered the bull's head with a papier-mâché bear's head; the cops tore it off. I felt like that bull: frozen in motion. Here and not here. Perpetually ready to charge, and unable to move.

5:27.
Finally. From the small, dirty window where Skip used to hold his cigarette aloft eight stories up, I watched the river turn to gold. It was that sliver of time between day and evening when the river lit up and looked like something scalloped but solid, like you could walk right across to Brooklyn on it. I couldn't see anything on the Promenade, but it seemed that there could be a big white dog there, and a man leaning against the railing holding the dog's leash. My dog would be a small spotted dog named Chester; he would have an expressive face
and be quick and light on his feet. When we walked along the Promenade, he would jump up to put his paws on the rail and bark madly at the air.

As if that bark had woken me up, unfrozen me, I grabbed my jacket and knapsack and ran out of the building. It was Tuesday, how had I forgotten? Visiting day. “Coffee!” I yelled into Sydnee's office on the way out. I hurled myself into the elevator and up the darkening curve of Wall Street, past the benevolent figure of George Washington, past the exchange, past the earnest, lacy church. The carts were folding themselves up for the day, getting ready to drive off. Though everything was cleaned up these days, though the ash from the attack was gone, the windows replaced, the smell long since dissipated, I felt as if I was being watched by the dead, that they clung to the corners of the buildings, sought in vain for their own reflections in store windows. They liked sweat; their presence was thicker in the summer. It made me glad winter was coming. The wind ruffled my hair; I chased it down the subway, where wind from an oncoming train rushed up. The wind that came to meet me was surprisingly warm, intimate, like a baby giant's breath. Almost a whirl, but not really.

I pushed onto the train, one of the new silver ones with the narrow blue seats. A woman in a pink pashmina shawl jumped out of her seat as I was getting on, so I nabbed it. A few stops later, the train lurched and puffed to a stop under the river. In the silence, a fat man resolutely read his
New York Post,
legs spread, taking up two or three of the concave blue spaces. A baby slept in a stroller; a young Hispanic woman standing by a pole in the middle of the car held the stroller's handles, glaring at the fat man, who pretended not to notice. Above their heads were oblong cardboard advertisements for bunion surgery and English lessons, a flyer offering the services of a psychic named Teresa, a poem by Ezra Pound, a photo of a glamorous Scotch bottle, and an ad trumpeting the most recent book
in the wildly best-selling
Stolen
series by Fleur Girard; this one was
Stolen Blossoms.
Miranda, Leah, Natasha, Anna: each young woman's face was embedded in a holographic flower. Together they formed a shimmering constellation, a sisterhood of abuse and victory, hovering near the ceiling of the N train. I smiled to myself, knowing my smile was inscrutable to anyone else on the train. They couldn't see my money spring, although it was right there in plain sight.