“I’m moving to Montana,” N.J. says over the phone, his voice tinny and thin like he’s calling from there. It’s ten p.m. After their talk, Seymour went to bed, his energies exhausted. Just living, it seemed, took Pyrrhic effort.
“Montana?” Morris asks N.J., standing in the kitchen. It needs cleaning.
“Montana, man.”
“What’s in Montana?”
“Me, man, or soon I’ll be,” N.J. says. “Or rather, us. I’m in love.”
“In love,” Morris says, switching the phone to his other ear. He picks up a damp dishrag, runs it over the kitchen counter then drops it in the sink. “Who are you in love with now?”
“Now?” N.J. says, his voice fading then gaining strength. “Hattie,” he says. “It’s always been Hattie.”
“The woman from downstairs?” Morris asks, shifting some items about, the salt-shaker, a cutting board, then shifting them back. He can’t think of what she looks like, can’t recall ever seeing her in the building. “You mean the woman you met last night?”
“Montana,” he says. “We leave Tuesday.”
“Tuesday? Like in tomorrow?” Morris pinches the phone between his shoulder and ear. “What are you going to do, hunt down fugitive buffalos?”
“Buffali,” N.J. says. “The plural of buffalo is buffali, man. And no, man. I’m not hunting them down. I’ll be ranching them.”
“Ranching them?”
“Yeah, man, raising them on a ranch. Just Hattie and I.”
“That’s great,” Morris says. Like N.J.’s other ideas, it’s all banter. N.J.’s gone everywhere without ever having left. And I’ve gone nowhere while always planning to leave, Morris thinks damply. “Listen, N.J.,” he says, wanting to clean up a bit, “I’ve got to go. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“I’m coming over,” N.J. says.
“Why?”
“I’m coming over,” he repeats, then rings off.
Morris drops the phone on the hand rest.
The door buzzes, startling Morris. “Yeah?” he asks, pressing the talk button. He hits the listen button.
“N.J., man,” N.J. replies.
“How did you get here so fast?” Morris asks, speaking into the intercom. He toggles between the talk and listen button.
“—at?”
“How did you get here so fast?” he repeats, not understanding.
“—ike I said, man. What did I say, man?”
“I asked,” Morris says, then gives up, hits the door button, letting N.J. in.
There is a knock at the door a moment later. Morris opens the door. “How’d you get here so quick?”
“What are you talking about, man? I said I was coming over. I’m over,” he says, then, “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Who is that?” Seymour calls from his room.
“It’s N.J., Da—” He pulls up short, nearly saying Daddy. “N.J., Dad,” he says.
“Good evening Mr. Bliss,” N.J. calls. “How are you doing this evening? I was just telling Mo—”
“Shut up in there. The both of you,” Seymour yells. “I’m sleeping.”
“Good night,” N.J. calls, then quietly says to Morris, “Got to show you something.”
“It’s late. Show me tomorrow,” he says.
“I’m gone after tomorrow,” N.J. said.
“Gone?” Morris asks, already having forgotten. “Where?” N.J. talks so much heat that his words are steam; they instantly dissipate, leave no stain of what was said.
“Montana, man. I told you, on the phone.”
“Right, Montana,” Morris says, his voice flat. “To raise buffalos with this Mattie woman.”
“Buffali,” N.J. says. “And her name’s Hattie, not Mattie. She’s the one who showed me.”
“Showed you what?”
“The signs, man. They’re everywhere, hidden notes and symbols saying things to the people who know what to look for. It’s like a whole world of Masonic handshakes and backroom deals brokered by guys who shave all their body hair.”
Morris glances about the kitchen. He doesn’t feel like cleaning. “All right.” He relents. The evening’s pleasant. He’d enjoy a walk. “Show me,” he says, grabbing his keys.
N.J. leads him south, toward Houston Street. After a ten-minute walk, the entire time of which N.J. talks of the West, the rolling hills, his plans for the ranch, they stop at the corner of Rivington Street and Essex. “There,” N.J. says, motioning to the Essex Street Retail Market building. “That’s it.”
Morris looks at the dirty, mustard yellow building with dragon red doors. He’d only been in the building once, and found all the stands, all the stalls, selling useless items at an inflated price. The butcher shops’ meats looked fouled and old, like they’d been left in the sun for an afternoon. There was a kosher wine shop inside that was offering a sample taste of their product. Morris tried a small glass, which he struggled to keep down. “How do you like?” the Hasidic owner asked. His side locks were long, longer than Morris had ever seen, reaching to the middle of his chest.
“Well,” Morris said, setting the plastic cup down. “In all honesty, it’s bad.”
“You don’t like it?” the owner asked. “You don’t like?”
“No,” Morris said. “It’s pretty sour.”
The owner’s face blossomed into a smile. He relaxed. “Pretty sour?” he said, sounding pleased. “Good. I’m glad to hear. All my Jewish customers tell me that. But I’m glad to hear a Gentile tell me that, too.”
“Good?” Morris asked. “You want it to taste bad?”
“Yes,” he said, then placed a kind hand on Morris’s shoulder. “A secret,” he said, stepping near. He smelled of basil and old wool, a smell Morris found comforting. “It tastes sour,” he tells Morris, “so you drink only a little. If it tasted better, you’d drink more.” He explains. “My customers are my people, Jews. Only Jews buy kosher wine, and yes, I want them to drink my wine, but not drink too much, you see?”
“No,” Morris said. “I don’t.”
“Winos don’t drink kosher wine, do they?” he asks. “Have you ever seen one of my people drunk? Have you ever heard of an alcoholic Hasid?”
Morris thought. “No,” he said, “I haven’t.”
The owner patted his shoulder. “Then you see. No one can become an alcoholic off kosher wine. It’s too sour.”
Staring at the closed market, Morris asks N.J., “So, what are you showing me?”
“By all appearances, a nice, little market, man. It’s not.”
“It’s not?”
N.J. takes Morris by the arm, leads him halfway down the block. They stop at a streetlamp. “What is this?” N.J. says, tapping on the metal pole of the lamp.
“A streetlight.” Different from the other streetlamps, it’s cast iron, ornate, like those from the early twentieth century. The only one of its kind on the block, it pours its buttery glow over the sidewalk, the street.
“Exactly, man. And what do lamps do?” N.J. asks, patronizingly.
“They light up,” Morris says, growing tired of the game. “Show me what you want to show me. I’ve got things to do,” he says.
“They illuminate, man,” N.J. says.
Morris lifts his hands, acquiescing. “Okay, great,” he says. “They illuminate. What does this particular streetlight illuminate?”
“The truth, man. The truth.”
“Which is?”
“Sometimes showing the obvious, man. Know what I’m saying?”
“No.”
“Stand right here,” he says, placing Morris right in front of the pole. “Okay, man,” N.J. says. “What’s that sign say there across the street?” He points to the market. On the building, embossed on the concrete wall, read the words:
ESSEX STREET
RETAIL MARKET
“Essex street retail market,” Morris says, his view partially blocked by the pole.
“That’s not what you see, man,” N.J. says, disapp
ointed. “You’re seeing what you think you should see, man. You’re not seeing what you’re really seeing.”
“I’m seeing what I’m seeing,” Morris says, annoyed. “Tell me what I’m not seeing?”
“Look at it again, man.”
Morris stands less than a foot from the pole and looks up at the sign across the street. “Essex—”
“No,” N.J. says. “Not Essex. That’s not what you’re seeing.”
Then Morris sees. With the view blocked by the streetlamp, the sign no longer reads:
ESSEX STREET
RETAIL MARKET
but
SEX STREET
TAIL MARKET
Morris says it out loud. “That,” he says, “is just stupid.”
“To the layman, man, yeah. I thought it was stupid, too, when Hattie was showing me. But check this out, man,” N.J. says, then bends down and points to a symbol tooled into the base of the streetlamp. Made of a metal that looks like rose gold, the symbol is a looped rope, its ends pointing skyward.
“What’s that?” Morris asks. “A tapeworm?”
“A sign, man. A sign.”
“Okay, so…you stand here at the light pole with a little—I don’t know—thing, and then the sign reads Sex Street Tail Market. You dragged me down here for that?”
“It’s a Red Thread, man,” N.J. says. “And this place happens to be the biggest sex bazaar on the east coast, man. They bring girls in from all over, Asia, the Middle East, Alabama—”
“Alabama?”
“It’s a clearinghouse for sex, man.”
“I’ve been in there,” Morris says. “There’s no sex going on. All there is in there are overpriced stores and stuff people don’t want to buy. And who are ‘they’?”
“They, man. The Red Thread. The secret cartel. The people who run the world. The Red Thread runs through everything, man. Businesses on Wall Street, Dakar, Gillette, Wyoming—”
“Why Gillette?”
“Coal, man. Fuel. Power.”
“I’m heading home,” Morris says.
“Tell me, man, how can a market that sells stuff no one buys stay open?”
“I don’t know,” Morris says. “Don’t care, either.” Then he says, “Someone must sell something in there.” He thinks of the Hasid with the foul wine, how proud he was to make it taste awful.
“Oh, they sell something in there, man,” N.J. says. “They sell sex.”
Chapter 33