like the sound of involving the doormen, as most of the guys who worked in the building didn’t care that much for my father, having seen him the worse for drink a few too many times. But I met his eye as blankly as I could until he shrugged and turned away.
xviii.
“¡HOLA, JOSE!”
“¡Bomba!” cried Jose, doing a happy step backward when he saw me on the sidewalk; he was the youngest and most buoyant of the doormen, always trying to sneak away before his shift was over to play soccer in the park. “Theo! ¿Qué lo que, manito?”
His uncomplicated smile threw me back hard to the past. Everything was the same: green awning, sallow shade, same furry brown puddle collecting in the sunken place in the sidewalk. Standing before the art-deco doors—nickel-bright, rayed with abstract sunbursts, doors that urgent news guys in fedoras might push through in a 1930s movie—I remembered all the times I’d stepped inside to find my mother sorting the mail, waiting for the elevator. Fresh from work, heels and briefcase, with the flowers I’d sent for her birthday. Well what do you know. My secret admirer has struck again.
Jose, looking past me, had spotted my father, and Xandra, hanging back slightly. “Hello, Mr. Decker,” he said, in a more formal tone, reaching around me to take my dad’s hand: politely, but no love lost. “Is nice to see you.”
My father, with his Personable Smile, started to answer but I was too nervous and interrupted: “Jose—” I’d been racking my brains for the Spanish on the way over, rehearsing the sentence in my mind—“ mi papá quiere entrar en el apartamento, le necesitamos abrir la puerta.” Then, quickly, I slipped in the question I’d worked out earlier, on the way over: “¿Usted puede subir con nosotros?”
Jose’s eyes went quickly to my father and Xandra. He was a big, handsome guy from the Dominican Republic, something about him reminiscent of the young Muhammad Ali—sweet-tempered, always kidding around, but you didn’t want to mess with him. Once, in a moment of confidence, he had pulled up his uniform jacket and shown me a knife scar on his abdomen, which he said he’d gotten in a street fight in Miami.
“Happy to do it,” he said in English, in an easy voice. He was looking at them but I knew he was talking to me. “I’ll take you up. Everything is okay?”
“Yep, we’re fine,” said my dad curtly. He was the very one who’d insisted that I study Spanish as my foreign language instead of German (“so at least one person in the family can communicate with these fucking doormen”).
Xandra, who I was starting to think was a real dingbat, laughed nervously and said in her stuttery quick voice: “Yeah, we’re fine, but the flight really took it out of us. It’s a long way from Vegas and we’re still a little—” and here she rolled her eyes and waggled her fingers to indicate wooziness.
“Oh yeah?” said Jose. “Today? You flew into LaGuardia?” Like all the doormen he was a genius at small talk, especially if it was about traffic or weather, the best route to the airport at rush hour. “I heard big delays out there today, some problem with the baggage handlers, the union, right?”
All the way up in the elevator, Xandra kept up a steady but agitated stream of chatter: about how dirty New York was compared to Las Vegas (“Yeah, I admit it, everything’s cleaner out west, I guess I’m spoiled”), about her bad turkey sandwich on the airplane and the flight attendant who “forgot” (Xandra, with her fingertips, inserting the quotations manually) to bring Xandra the five dollars change from the wine she ordered.
“Oh, ma’am!” said Jose, stepping in the hallway, wagging his head in the mock-serious way he had. “Airplane food, it’s the worst. These days you’re lucky if they feed you at all. Tell you one thing in New York, though. You going to find you some good food. You got good Vietnamese, good Cuban, good Indian—”
“I don’t like all that spicy stuff.”
“Good whatever you want, then. We got it. Segundito,” he said, holding up a finger as he felt around on the ring for the passkey.
The lock tumbled with a solid clunk, instinctive, blood-deep in its rightness. Though the place was stuffy from being shut up, still I was leveled by the fierce smell of home: books and old rugs and lemon floor cleaner, the dark myrrh-smelling candles she bought at Barney’s.
The bag from the museum was propped on the floor by the sofa—exactly where I’d left it, how many weeks before? Feeling light-headed, I darted around and inside to grab it as Jose—slightly blocking my irritated father’s path, without quite appearing to—stood just outside the door listening to Xandra, arms folded. The composed but slightly absent-minded look on his face reminded me of the way he’d looked when he’d had to practically carry my dad upstairs one freezing night, my dad so drunk he’d lost his overcoat.—Happens in the best of families, he’d said with an abstract smile, refusing the twenty-dollar bill that my father—incoherent, vomit on his suit jacket, scratched-up and dirty like he’d been rolling on the sidewalk—was trying hard to push into his face.
“Actually, I’m from the East Coast?” Xandra was saying. “From Florida?” Again that nervous laugh—stuttery, sputtering. “West Palm, to be specific.”
“Florida you say?” I heard Jose remark. “Is beautiful down there.”
“Yeah, it’s great. At least in Vegas we’ve got the sunshine—I don’t know if I could take the winters out here, I’d turn into a Popsicle—”
The instant I picked the bag up, I realized it was too light—almost empty. Where the hell was the painting? Though I was nearly blind with panic, I didn’t stop but kept going, down the hallway, on autopilot, back to my bedroom, mind whirring and grinding as I walked—
Suddenly—through my disconnected memories of that night—it came back to me. The bag had been wet. I hadn’t wanted to leave the picture in a wet bag, to mildew or melt or who knew what. Instead—how could I have forgotten?—I’d set it on my mother’s bureau, the first thing she’d see when she came home. Quickly, without stopping, I dropped the bag in the hallway outside the closed door of my bedroom and turned into my mother’s room, light-headed with fear, hoping that my father wasn’t following but too afraid to look back and see.
From the living room, I heard Xandra say: “I bet you see a lot of celebrities on the street here, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. LeBron, Dan Aykroyd, Tara Reid, Jay-Z, Madonna…”
My mother’s bedroom was dark and cool, and the faint, just-detectable smell of her perfume was almost more than I could bear. There sat the painting, propped among silver-framed photographs—her parents, her, me at many ages, horses and dogs galore: her father’s mare Chalkboard, Bruno the Great Dane, her dachshund Poppy who’d died when I was in kindergarten. Steeling myself against her reading glasses on the bureau and her black tights stiff where she’d draped them to dry and her handwriting on her desk calendar and a million other heart-piercing sights, I picked it up and tucked it under my arm and walked quickly into my own room across the hall.
My room—like the kitchen—faced the airshaft, and was dark without the lights on. A dank bath towel lay crumpled where I’d thrown it after my shower that last morning, atop a heap of dirty clothes. I picked it up—wincing at the smell—with the idea of throwing it over the painting while I found a better place to hide it, maybe in the—
“What are you doing?”
My father stood in the doorway, a darkish silhouette with the light shining behind him.
“Nothing.”
He stooped and picked up the bag I’d dropped in the hall. “What’s this out here?”
“My book bag,” I said, after a pause—though the thing was clearly a mom’s collapsible shopping tote, nothing I, or any kid, would ever take to school.
He tossed it in the open door, crinkling his nose at the smell. “Phew,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face, “it smells like old hockey socks in here.” As he reached inside the door and flipped the light switch, I managed with a complex but spasmodic movement to throw the towel over the picture so (I hoped) he couldn’t see it.
“What’s that you’ve got there?”
“A poster.”
“Well look, I hope you’re not planning to haul a lot of junk out to Vegas. No need to pack your winter clothes—you won’t need them, except maybe some ski stuff. You won’t believe the skiing in Tahoe—not like these icy little mountains upstate.”
I felt that I needed to make a reply, especially since it was the longest and friendliest-seeming thing he’d said since he’d shown up, but somehow I couldn’t quite pull my thoughts together.
Abruptly, my father said: “Your mother wasn’t so easy to live with either, you know.” He picked up something that looked like an old math test from my desk, examined it, and then threw it back down. “She played her cards way too close to the vest. You know how she used to do. Clamming up. Freezing me out. Always had to take the high road. It was a power thing, you know—really controlling. Quite honestly, and I really hate to say this, it got to the point where it was hard for me to even be in the same room with her. I mean, I’m not saying she was a bad person. It’s just one minute everything’s fine, and the next, bam, what did I do, the old silent treatment…”
I said nothing—standing there awkwardly with the mildewy towel draped over the painting and the light shining into my eyes, wishing that I were anywhere else (Tibet, Lake Tahoe, the moon) and not trusting myself to reply. What he’d said about my mother was perfectly true: often she was uncommunicative, and when she was upset it was difficult to tell what she was thinking, but I wasn’t interested in a discussion of my mother’s faults and at any rate they seemed like fairly minor faults compared to my father’s.
My father was saying: “… because I’ve got nothing to prove, see? Every game has two sides. It’s not an issue of who’s right and who’s wrong. And sure, I’ll admit, I’m to blame for some of it too, although I’ll say this, and I’m sure you know it too, she sure did have a way of re-writing history in her own favor.” It was strange to be in the room with him again, especially as he was so different: he gave off a different smell almost, and there was a different heaviness and weight to him, a sleekness, as though he were padded all over with a smooth half-inch of fat. “I guess a lot of marriages run into problems like ours—she’d just gotten so bitter, you know? And withholding? Honestly, I just didn’t feel like I could live with her any longer, though God knows she didn’t deserve this.…”
She sure didn’t, I thought.
“Because you know what this was really about, don’t you?” said my dad, leaning on the door frame with one elbow and looking at me shrewdly. “Me leaving? I had to withdraw some money from our bank account to pay taxes and she flipped her lid, like I’d stolen it.” He was watching me very carefully, looking for my response. “Our joint bank account. I mean basically, when the chips were down, she didn’t trust me. Her own husband.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was the first I’d heard about the taxes, although it was certainly no secret that my mother didn’t trust my dad where money was concerned.
“God, but she could hold on to a grievance,” he said, with a half-humorous wince, wiping his hand down the front of his face. “Tit for tat. Always looking to even the score. Because, I mean it—she never forgot anything. If she had to wait twenty years, she was going to get you back. And sure, I’m the one who always looks like the bad guy and maybe I am the bad guy…”
The painting, though small, was getting heavy, and my face felt frozen with the effort of concealing my discomfort. In order to block his voice out I started counting to myself in Spanish. Uno dos tres, cuatro cinco seis…
By the time I reached twenty-nine, Xandra had appeared.
“Larry,” she said, “you and your wife had a really nice place here.” The way she said it made me feel bad for her without liking her any better.
My dad put his arm around her waist and drew her to him with a sort of kneading motion that made me sick. “Well,” he said modestly, “it’s really more hers than mine.”
You can say that again, I thought.
“Come in here,” said my dad, catching her by the hand and leading her away towards my mother’s bedroom, all thought of me forgotten. “I want you to see something.” I turned and watched them go, queasy at the prospect of Xandra and my father pawing through my mother’s things but so glad to see them go I didn’t care.
With one eye on the empty doorway, I walked around to the far side of my bed and placed the painting out of sight. An old New York Post lay on the floor—the same newspaper that she’d thrown in to me, in a flap, on our last Saturday together. Here, kiddo, she’d said, sticking her head in at the door, pick a movie. Though there were several movies we both would have liked, I’d chosen a matinee at the Boris Karloff film festival: The Body Snatcher. She had accepted my choice without a word of complaint; we’d gone down to Film Forum, watched the movie, and after it was over walked to Moondance Diner for a hamburger—a perfectly pleasant Saturday afternoon, apart from the fact that it was her last on Earth, and now I felt rotten whenever I thought about it, since (thanks to me) the last movie she’d ever seen was a corny old horror flick about corpses and grave-robbing. (If I’d picked the movie I knew she wanted to see—the well-reviewed one about Parisian children during World War I—might she have lived, somehow? My thoughts often ran along such dark, superstitious faultlines.)
Though the newspaper felt sacrosanct, an historical document, I turned it to the middle and took it apart. Grimly, I wrapped the painting, sheet by sheet, and taped it up with the same tape I’d used a few months before to wrap my mother’s Christmas present. Perfect! she’d said, in a storm of colored paper, leaning in her bathrobe to kiss me: a watercolor set she would never be carrying to the park, on Saturday mornings in summer she would never see.
My bed—a brass camp bed from the flea market, soldierly and reassuring—had always seemed like the safest place in the world to hide something. But now, looking around (beat-up desk, Japanese Godzilla poster, the penguin mug from the zoo that I used as a pencil cup), I felt the impermanence of it all strike me hard; and it made me dizzy to think of all our things flying out of the apartment, furniture and silver and all my mother’s clothes: sample-sale dresses with the tags still on them, all those colored ballet slippers and tailored shirts with her initials on the cuffs. Chairs and Chinese lamps, old jazz records on vinyl that she’d bought down in the Village, jars of marmalade and olives and sharp German mustard in the refrigerator. In the bathroom, a bewilderment of perfumed oils and moisturizers, colored bubble bath, half-empty bottles of overpriced shampoo crowded on the side of the tub (Kiehl’s, Klorane, Kérastase, my mother always had five or six kinds going). How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniform?
When I walked into the living room, I was confronted by a sweater of my mother’s lying across the chair where she’d left it, a sky-blue ghost of her. Shells we’d picked up on the beach at Wellfleet. Hyacinths, which she’d bought at the Korean market a few days before she died, with the stems draped dead-black and rotten over the side of the pot. In the wastebasket: catalogues from Dover Books, Belgian Shoes; a wrapper from a pack of Necco Wafers, which had been her favorite candy. I picked it up and sniffed it. The sweater—I knew—would smell of her too if I picked it up and put it to my face, yet even the sight of it was unendurable.
I went back in my bedroom and stood on my desk chair and got down my suitcase—which was soft-sided and not too big—and packed it full of clean underwear, clean school clothes, and folded shirts from the laundry. Then I put in the painting, with another layer of clothes on top.
I zipped the suitcase—no lock, but it was only canvas—and stood very still. Then I went out into the hall. I could hear drawers opening and shutting in my mother’s bedroom. A giggle.
“Dad,” I said in a loud voice, “I’m going downstairs and talk to Jose.”
Their voices went dead silent.
“You bet,” said my father, through the closed door, in an unnaturally cordial tone.
I went back and got the suitcase and walked out of the apartment with it, leaving the front door cracked so I could get in again. Then I rode the elevator down, staring into the mirror that faced me, trying hard not to think about Xandra in my mother’s bedroom pawing through her clothes. Had he been seeing her before he left home? Didn’t he feel even a bit creepy about permitting her to root around in my mother’s things?
I was walking to the front door where Jose was on duty when a voice called: “Wait a sec!”
Turning, I saw Goldie, hurrying from the package room.
“Theo, my God, I’m sorry,” he said. We stood looking at each other for an uncertain moment and then—in an impulsive, what-the-hell movement, so awkward it was almost funny, he reached around and hugged me.
“So sorry,” he repeated, shaking his head. “My God, what a thing.” Goldie, since his divorce, often worked nights and holidays, standing at the doors with his gloves off and an unlit cigarette in his hand, looking out at the street. My mother had sometimes sent me down with coffee and doughnuts for him when he was in the lobby by himself, no company but the lighted tree and the electric menorah, sorting out the newspapers by himself at 5:00 a.m. on Christmas Day, and the expression on his face reminded me of those dead holiday mornings, empty-looking stare, his face ashy and uncertain, in the unguarded moment before he saw me and put on his best hi kid smile.
“I been thinking about you and your mother so much,” he said, wiping his brow. “Ay bendito. I can’t—I don’t even know what you must be going through.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking away, “it’s been hard”—which was for whatever reason the phrase I constantly fell back upon when people told me how sorry they were. I’d had to say it so much that it was starting to come out sounding glib and a bit phony.
“I’m glad you stopped by,” said Goldie. “That morning—I was on duty, you remember? Right out front there?”
“Sure I do,” I said, wondering at his urgency, as if he thought I might not remember.
“Oh, my God.” He passed his hand over his forehead, a little wild-looking, as if he himself had suffered only a narrow escape. “I think about it every single day. I still see her face, you know, getting into that cab? Waving goodbye, so happy.”
Confidentially, he leaned forward. “When I heard she died?” he said, as if telling me a big secret. “I called up my ex-wife, that’s how upset I was.” He pulled back and looked at me with raised eyebrows, as if he didn’t expect me to believe him. Goldie’s battles with his ex-wife were epic.
“I mean, we hardly talk,” he said, “but who I’m gonna tell? I gotta tell somebody, you know? So I called her up and told her: ‘Rosa, you can’t believe it. We lost such a beautiful lady from the building.’ ”
Jose—spotting me—had strolled back from the front door to join our conversation, in his distinctive springy walk. “Mrs. Decker,” he said—shaking his head fondly, as if there had never been anyone like her. “Always say hello, always such a nice smile. Considerate, you know.”
“Not like some of these people in the building,” said Goldie, glancing over his shoulder. “You know—” he leaned closer, and mouthed the word—“snobby. The kind of person stands there empty-handed with no packages or nothing and waits for you to open the door, is what I’m saying.”
“She wasn’t like that,” said Jose, still shaking his head—big head movements, like a somber child saying no. “Mrs. Decker was Class A.”
“Say, will you wait here a second?” Goldie said, holding up his hand. “I’ll be right back. Don’t leave. Don’t let him leave,” he said to Jose.
“You want me to get you a cab, manito?” said Jose, eyeing the suitcase.
“No,” I said, glancing back at the elevator. “Listen, Jose, will you keep this for me until I come back and get it?”
“Sure,” he said, picking it up and hefting it. “Happy to.”
“I’ll come back for it myself, okay? Don’t let anybody else have it.”
“Sure, I get it,” said Jose pleasantly. I followed him into the package room, where he tagged the bag and hoisted it onto a top shelf.
“You see?” he said. “Out of the way, baby. We don’t keep nothing up high there except some packages people got to sign for and our own personal stuff. Nobody’s going to release that bag to you without your personal signature, you understand? Not to your uncle, your cousin, nobody. And I’ll tell Carlos and Goldie and the other guys, don’t give that bag to nobody but you. Okay?”
I was nodding, about to thank him, when Jose cleared his throat. “Listen,” he said, in a lowered voice. “I don’t want to worry you or nothing but there’ve been some guys coming around lately asking after your dad.”
“Guys?” I said, after a disjointed silence. “Guys,” coming from Jose, meant only one thing: men that my dad owed money to.
“Don’t worry. We told them nothing. I mean, your dad’s been gone for what, like a year? Carlos told them none of you lived here no more and they aint been back. But—” he glanced at the elevator—“maybe your dad there, he don’t want to be spending a lot of time in the building just now, you know what I’m saying?”
I was thanking him when Goldie returned with what looked to me like a gigantic wad of cash. “This is for you,” he said, a bit melodramatically.
For a minute I thought I’d heard him wrong. Jose coughed and looked away. On the package room’s tiny black and white television (its screen no bigger than a CD case) a glamorous woman in long jangling earrings brandished her fists and shouted abusive Spanish at a cowering priest.
“What’s going on?” I said to Goldie, who was still holding the money out.
“Your mother, she didn’t tell you?”
I was mystified. “Tell me what?”
It seemed that—one day shortly before Christmas—Goldie had ordered a computer and had it delivered to the building. The computer was for Goldie’s son, who needed it for school, but (Goldie was hazy about this part) Goldie hadn’t actually paid for it, or had only paid for part of it, or his ex-wife had been supposed to pay for it instead of him. At any rate, the delivery people were hauling the computer out the door again and loading it back into their van when my mother happened to come downstairs and see what was going on.
“And she paid herself, that beautiful lady,” Goldie said. “She saw what was happening, and she opened her bag and she took out her checkbook. She said to me, ‘Goldie, I know your son needs this computer for his schoolwork. Please let me do this thing for you, my friend, and you pay me when you can.’ ”
“You see?” said Jose, unexpectedly fierce, glancing back from the television, where the woman was standing in a graveyard now, arguing with a tycoon-looking guy in sunglasses. “That’s your mother that did that.” He nodded at the money, almost angrily. “Sí, es verdad, she was Class A. She cared about people you know? Most women? They spend that money on gold earrings or perfume or some things for themselves like that.”
I felt strange taking the money, for all sorts of reasons. Even in my shock, something about the story felt dodgy (what kind of store would deliver a computer that wasn’t paid for?). Later, I wondered: did I look that destitute, that the doormen had taken up a collection for me? I still don’t know where the money came from; and I wish I had asked more questions, but I was so stunned by everything that had happened that day (and more than anything by the sudden appearance of my dad, and Xandra) that if Goldie had confronted me and tried to give me a piece of old chewing gum he’d scraped off the floor I would have held out my hand and taken it just as obediently.
“None of my business, you know,” Jose said, looking over my head as he said it, “but if I was you, I wouldn’t tell anybody about that money. You know what I’m saying?”