The Sky Below (12 page)

Everyone in the office said I looked wan, which was satisfying, and told me to go home early. I still felt like I might have a fever coming on. When I got home to the afternoon quiet of my apartment, the half-formed figurine, like a totem, was lying next to the bloody knife on the kitchen table. She was spattered with blood. And I hadn't even started on her horns yet. I washed the knife, but I didn't wash her. If she wanted blood, she could have it. With this blood offering, she would get me into the show for sure.

It was a strangely exciting day, cuspy and painful. The stitches felt like they might let something in or out, but then it passed. Days like that had become rare. I sensed that my whirlwinds were dying down, slowly unwinding, like a clock whose spring had stretched over the years.

 

Ciao,
I IMed to Sydnee. I checked out the Advances queue, where the very important living were laid out in their finest achievements, ready to meet their Maker and the next day's close. As far as I knew, they were all still dully alive. A familiar melancholy brushed me. I clicked around online for a minute, like May clicking around the kitchen linoleum to the radio after Roy died. I was hungry; my eyes hurt. The gauze on my finger had been replaced by a modest beige Band-Aid. The
cut was taking a while to heal. May, on her way to print, was already fading away, like the Cheshire Cat, leaving just her showgirl smile behind. Her spirit pressed close; I almost thought I could hear her voice, her accent; then it dwindled and disappeared. All her unlived lives, tap-tap-tapping away.

I sometimes thought that I needed a new job. A new life. I had been unusually tired recently, like the air was slowly leaking out of me. My fake job at the fake newspaper was draining my real, vital forces. I looked out the window again. It was dark. The river had disappeared. I quickly logged out and left the office, trotting up Wall Street again. All the cart guys were gone. Like the traders with their badges, the cart guys were a determined bunch. What did I care about? I wished I could walk over and ask the bull. I certainly didn't care about
The Hudson Times,
though I liked hearing the dead people's stories and cropping their pictures. I was finding it increasingly hard to care about my boxes. And, in my most secret heart, I didn't know if I cared that much for Janos, though he cared so much for me.

 

Janos was huffing impatiently at the entrance to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, standing underneath a banner with an enormous image of a ballerina in a feathered tutu, her long neck arcing back, her arms extended midflutter. Next to him was his mother, a tiny, ancient Hungarian woman, straight as an arrow in a silver beaded suit with matching heels, standing up proudly gripping her walker, glittering. Janos was on his cell phone, frowning, but he gestured at me to come on quickly, pulling the tickets out of the breast pocket of his fawn-colored cashmere overcoat.

“Hello, darling,” Janos's mother said to me in her thick accent. “Janos is closing a deal.” She beamed. Despite two hearing aids that were practically bigger than her ears, she was stone-deaf.

“Hello, Margit,” I yelled, kissing her on the cheek.

“You're late!” Janos said, flapping the tickets at me, his accent a faint imprint of his mother's. He snapped the phone shut. “Are those the only shoes you have?”

“The swan dies,” I said. “Let's go get dinner.”

“Very funny.” He led the way through the crowd, my lover, Janos: a short, strong, dark man in his mid-fifties with a rough, irregular face, wearing, under the cashmere overcoat, a white Egyptian cotton shirt open at the neck, suit pants and jacket, no tie. Excellent black shoes. He pushed efficiently through the sparrow-like elderly ladies in sparkling embroidered jackets, the skinny high school girls in too much makeup, the doctors and lawyers who were already bored and looking at their watches as they waited in line at the elegant bar for champagne, the handsome young men with good haircuts. He was like a tugboat steaming through a harbor filled with yachts and bright sailboats, albeit a tugboat draped in cashmere, clearing a path for his mother.

I followed with Margit on her walker. She took a step, glanced to her right, her left, like the Queen Mum, took another step. I pulled off the brown tie, rolled it up in my jacket pocket, unbuttoned my collar. From my other pocket I pulled out the signet ring Janos had given me and put it on. Bulky, heavy, with excessively swirled initials (mine), it fit me perfectly. Did I love him? I wondered, slowly escorting Margit, encased in steel, across the thick carpet. When we had taken our seats (orchestra, fifth row, his mother on the aisle), and he was impatiently flipping through the program with that same feathered, arcing, dying ballerina on the cover as if he were looking for a phone number in the yellow pages, and the murmur of the audience was mixing with the bleats of the oboes, the long notes of the violins tuning up—when we were settled in I turned the heavy ring around on my pinky and wondered, Do I love him? Is he just one more of my kneeling men?

Right before the intermission, I leaned over and whispered in Janos's ear, “I have to go.”

He frowned, shook his head.

“I'll call you later. I'm not feeling well.”

“Gabe,” he whispered heatedly. “
Gabriel.
”

I squeezed his hand, quickly kissed it, and turned away.

Margit, transported, smiled radiantly at me as I carefully stepped over her light, gleaming frame and headed up the aisle and into the open air. Outside, the evening was chilly. A line of limos waited on the service road; the drivers stood together in twos and threes, chatting and drinking coffee out of paper cups. With a sigh of relief, I went down to the train station with its colorful mosaics of dancers and musicians, whole and untouched by graffiti, inlaid on the walls.

I turned the heavy ring around on my pinky and again I wondered, Do I love him? Or is it just a daddy thing? I did like to be adored, time expanded deliciously in those moments—though now, waiting for the train, this fantasy felt pale, threadbare. But it wasn't like Janos was a simple man. No grateful construction worker, no guilty married accountant. Not easily dismissed. He was known for his kindness and generosity, but his arms seemed to be slightly longer than his torso and his eyes were quick, black, beneath a firm brow. Those eyes put you on notice that he was someone to reckon with.

That had turned me on at first. He
was
someone to reckon with. As he often remarked at dinner parties, as he'd remarked at the benefit dinner where we'd met, he came from pure Hungarian trash: gypsies, gangsters, drunks, thieves. “One scoundrel more handsome than the next,” he liked to say. “Except me. Not only am I the ugly runt, but I'm honest. An embarrassment to my entire family.” Everyone always laughed, because they knew he was rich and successful, and they hoped, just a little, that he'd stolen or cheated his way into at least part of it. For many years, until I came along, he had been the single man at dinner, the walker, the confidant, the fixer. Silly
boys came and went. He rarely bothered to introduce those boys to his friends. But
We're so glad to meet you,
his old friends had said to me, earnestly pressing my hand.
We're so glad Janos has met someone finally.
They murmured in his ear that I was adorable, charming, and never, ever remarked on the age difference. They always asked me about my art projects. Several of them had bought boxes from me and hung them in their foyers and hallways. I signed the back of each box with a flourish. My work, I said when asked, was mostly in private collections.

Janos had cheated to get rich, of course. But not that much. I knew that I should love him for that. Did I? The train came and I got on it.

Forty minutes later, I was in Williamsburg, pushing open the chain-link gate in Mrs. Wieznowski's yard, which led to Sarah's little crooked rental house behind Mrs. Wieznowski's house. All Sarah's floors tilted away from Mrs. Wieznowski. As I opened the front door, I could hear the strains of “Goodnight, Irene,” Sarah's signature piece, coming from the living room. I paused a minute in the low, musty, water-stained hall to listen. It was beautiful. I never got tired of hearing that one, which worked out well, because Sarah played it often, with variations. Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene: that was our waltz. No swans in tutus in it.

I went in. Sarah was sitting in her straight-backed practice chair, embracing the gleaming accordion. It looked like she was playing an air conditioner, albeit a handsome navy-blue air conditioner with shiny silver fittings. The accordion was the newest, shiniest thing in the tilted house; it made the house look even smaller. With her high, pale forehead and thin, flat fingers and delicate collarbone, Sarah looked as if she could barely lift one of the accordion's heavy buckles, much less play the thing, but by bending all the way into it, she was able to produce quite a sound.

She smiled at me, bathed in the light of the secondhand
green leprechaun lamp. Across the room from the straight-backed wooden chair where she sat was her makeshift sofa: random cushions piled onto plywood on cinderblocks and covered in a vast length of brown fake fur that trailed onto the cold floor. On the bumpy living room wall above the furry sofa was the frilly pink vintage dress she had pinned there for decoration when she moved in eight years ago; the dress was dusty and the lace around the hem was torn. She used to wear that dress, with flip-flops, in Arizona when she went out to bars. Sarah pushed, grimacing, at the keyboard as she leaned into the last, sad notes. The accordion was the right instrument for her, though I was never sure that she was serious about getting famous by playing it. I still liked her eerie ceramics pieces of a few years back. I still liked her stalactites. I still liked her paintings from junior year at Arroyo D'Orado College, for that matter. She played the last note of “Goodnight, Irene.” I clapped. Underneath us, an L train went by, rumbling for our attention, as if it were our pet.

We ignored it. I kissed her forehead, helped her out of the heavy accordion.

“Damn,” she said playfully, “maybe I should have gotten one of the littler ones. The fucker is heavy.”

“It sounds great.” I sprawled on the fake fur sofa, kicking off my shoes. “You're a star.”

“Doesn't it? So much richer than that other hunk of junk. It's like playing a whole different instrument.” She bent her head to rub one shoulder. Along the part in her hair, where gray strands had appeared, there was now a streak of magenta. She had recently engineered a way of twisting and braiding her long, dark hair so it looked like topiary, or hair from outer space. She put her armful of wooden bracelets back on. “I just need my own Sherpa to carry it, I guess. How was work?”

“Absurd. I need a new life. Or vitamins or something. I have this cruddy feeling all the time. My joints ache. Maybe I need a new boyfriend. And”—I shook my head—“I think my ears
are ringing.” They were, faintly, as if a large bell, like the Liberty Bell, was ringing far away. “I went to see my house today. It was great.”

Sarah leaned over to push my hair out of my eyes, bracelets clacking. “You're such a freak.” The lines around her eyes were kind. “What you need is a haircut.” She sighed. “I'm sort of cold,” she said. “Aren't you?” It was always drafty in Sarah's house. The cold seasons arrived there first. “Let's have a bath.”

Up the tilting stairs, there were two rooms: the bathroom on the right and Sarah's tiny bedroom on the left. In Sarah's room, a desk filled half of the space and a loft bed took up most of the other half. Under the loft were a few dressers painted different Day-Glo colors. The bathroom, hilariously, was bigger than the bedroom, with an old clawfoot tub and dark wainscoting. It was as if someone had fixed up the bathroom back in 1936 but didn't even try with the rest of the crooked house. And since Mrs. Wieznowski couldn't be bothered to wreck the bathroom with a bad plastic built-in shower and flimsy drywall, that one room had remained great. Sarah indulged in thick, soft towels for it; she kept a shelf of books in there, a low-slung rattan chair with a flowered cushion. You could stay there for hours, decades.

Sarah closed the door, leaned over to turn on the tap, hot, the way we liked it. I leafed through a warped paperback of
The Portrait of a Lady.
I felt panicky. The ringing persisted. Maybe I hadn't been lying when I told Janos I wasn't feeling well and left the ballet. Maybe the age difference between us was shrinking—that happened with men, the younger one seeming to age more quickly than the older one, trying to catch up. While Sarah ran the bath, I thought firmly: It's all right. There's still time. There's plenty of time. I took off my jacket, my shirt. “Oh, hey,” I said. “I brought you a present.” I handed her the picture of May taking her last sequined bow.

Sarah studied the picture. “Look at her! She's beautiful.
Thank you, honey.” She stuck the photo in the corner of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. “Where did you get it?”

I shrugged, winked. She laughed. We got undressed. I unlaced my boots, pulled off my button-down shirt. Sarah took off all her bracelets and rings and put them in the aqua ceramic dish that rested on the windowsill next to the rabbit skull, the rialto with its happy little skeletons playing guitars and an accordion, and a tiny painting she had done of a man she'd loved years ago. The blob of white paint that was the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I added the signet ring to the ceramic dish. The curve of Sarah's long pale back as she stepped into the tub was like the opening note of some song I'd known forever. I knew that mole, too, and the other, lighter one just near it. The stretch mark on her hip.

“Have you lost weight?” Sarah eyed me as she held out her hand. “Come on.”

I climbed in behind her and she lay back against me, splashing the water's heat over us both. Our two sets of legs looked so easy together, so domestic, my rougher ones around her smoother ones, like parentheses. Her back against my chest was warm, firm, and damp. Her topiary hair was like thin, soft ropes.