Subway Love

  If his father knew he had stolen all this paint, shoplifted anything at all, he would kill him. His dad had wanted to move for years. Out of the Bronx. To Yonkers, he would say. Westchester somewhere. Or Connecticut. But Max’s mother wouldn’t leave her family. Her mother, Max’s grandmother, was housebound. She needed her family nearby. His mother called him for dinner again.

  Max stuffed the cans he needed into a suitcase, and more into his pockets, to see how many he could carry. Then, carefully, he put them all back, arranged in order according to hue, and locked the closet door.

  “Max,” his mother shouted down the hall. “Did you hear me?”

  He ignored her for a little longer and sat down with his notebook to work out the exact numbers. He had measured the cars, the windows, the doors, everything. He had drawn a grid and sketched out his drawing, square by square. He would need fillers to get it all done in one night, but he knew a couple of younger kids dying to follow him.

  “Max. Now.”

  Max shut his notebook. He was hungry anyway. He would be ready by next weekend. Next weekend. He would be ready.

  SHE wasn’t there — at midnight exactly — at the train station. Spike was there, or whatever his name really was, but no Laura.

  “I’m telling you, man. I can do it. Something’s happened, that’s all. Just be patient.”

  “This is such bullshit,” Jonas told him. They were already on the train, riding uptown, all the way to the end of the line. Never a good idea for a white Jewish boy in the middle of the night. It had been hard enough getting out of the house without arousing suspicion, especially without Nick, who texted him pretty much all night long. It required a series of typed lies, all of which he would probably be caught in tomorrow morning.

  “What’s your real name?” Jonas said. “Just fucking tell me.” They were the only ones in the car. Another bad sign.

  “Max Lowenbein,” he said. “There. You satisfied? Now, will you just take the pictures?”

  “Lowenbein?” Jonas said. “You’re Jewish?”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  Jonas rested his back against the hard plastic seat. The train was littered inside with black graffiti. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed that before. “Nothing. I just thought you were Hispanic.”

  “You think there aren’t any Puerto Rican Jews?”

  Jonas had never heard of that, but of course he knew there were Spanish Jews. He had learned his history — Sephardim, Marranos, the Inquisition — more Hebrew school memories.

  “Cool,” Jonas said. “So am I.”

  “No, duh.”

  “Really?” Jonas asked. It was that obvious?

  “Really.”

  Maybe this was all crazy and Laura certainly wasn’t going to be here, but it was exciting in a way Jonas had never felt before. Scary and different, and he felt very much alive. He had that same feeling of being beyond time, in a space in between. People always talked about how teenagers thought they were immortal, that a part of their brains had not fully developed and they couldn’t understand consequences. Jonas had never been very daring, never got in much trouble, didn’t drink or smoke very much. So maybe this is what daring felt like. Maybe it was about time.

  The train ended its run for the night at the top of the Bronx at Pelham Bay Park. Max told Jonas to stay close. They exited the train with the last few remaining passengers and then slipped down onto the tracks and pressed their backs against the wall.

  “Watch out for the third rail,” Max whispered. “And the rats.”

  “Holy crap.”

  It was darker than any darkness Jonas could remember. His heart was pounding.

  “But if you feel one, don’t scream,” Max said. “Just wait. And keep quiet.”

  They listened as the conductor shouted some instructions. The doors were locked; the train began to move slowly.

  “Grab on.” Max stepped up and grabbed on to the back of the train, holding the bars and perching his feet on the narrow platform that jutted off the end. “Hurry up.”

  In that way, they made their way to the layup and began their work. It turned out that Max had over twenty-five cans of spray paint packed in his suitcase. He wanted Jonas to document the entire project. He wanted it witnessed, recorded. If you don’t tell the story, it might as well never have happened.

  “It’s going to be the biggest piece this city has ever seen,” Max said. He began with an outline — huge, thick black lines. It was clear he had it planned out to the last dot, the last fill. Where he would start, how he would finish.

  “What’s a ‘piece’?” Jonas had his camera out. The lighting was fantastic, an eerie overhead single bulb. They were underground in an area of the tunnels that Jonas had never seen before. Fencing had been erected along the concrete sides. There were no benches, no signs, no ticket booths or turnstiles, just trains resting on their tracks and darkness.

  “My masterpiece, man. My Sistine Chapel. My Birth of Venus. My Twelfth Night. My La Gioconda.”

  “Man, you know your art history.” Jonas checked his meter. He set the aperture as wide as he could and the shutter speed as slow as he could. “Hold it, don’t move so much. Let me get you in the shot with all this paint.”

  Jonas used up one whole roll in the first ten minutes. Max worked fast. Some shots would be blurry, streaks of color and movement. They might come out great. It was exciting.

  Max sprayed with one hand, holding on to the upper bar above the windows and balancing his feet like a professional mountain climber about to rappel from a cliff. Hanging by his arm, he turned to look at Jonas. “Get this. It’s my new tag. You like it?”

  “I can’t read it.” Jonas took a few steps back. He checked his light meter again and knelt down for the shot.

  “Can you read it now?” Max asked. “You’ve got to be able to read it.”

  “Yeah, I see it. Zippo? Like the lighter?”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Did you get it?”

  “Yeah, I got it.” Jonas lifted the camera to his eye. It would be a great photo.

  “So, why is this chick so important?” Max jumped down.

  Jonas was about to say something about Laura. He didn’t know why, why he would ever confide in this kid, but he wanted to talk — about himself, his family, even his father, maybe especially about his father — but he heard someone shouting, a male voice.

  “Oh, shit. Cops! We gotta run.”

  “What?” Jonas snapped on his lens cap. He dropped his camera back into his bag and flung it over his head and across his shoulder.

  “Grab your shit. We gotta get outta here.”

  Lights, like an airport runway, illuminated the layup. Max was about fifty feet ahead already, running down the tracks. The farther away he got, the harder he was to make out in the darkness. Jonas took off running after him. His legs burned as if he had been running for miles already. His heart raced faster than he had ever felt it before. He could hear the police behind them, close enough that to keep running seemed the best option.

  “Where’s the spot? It’s here somewhere. Damn, where’s that hole?” Max was reaching around in the darkness, his hands groping along the chain-link fence. “It’s here. I know there’s a spot you can lift up.”

  Jonas felt the lights getting closer. He considered just giving up, explaining the whole thing.

  “Got it!” Max slipped low to the ground and pushed his way through the fence. “C’mon.”

  Jonas followed, and so did the heavy footsteps, the shouting. “We got you, motherfuckers!”

  Max reached the grate on the ceiling that would bring them to street level and pushed upward. “It’s closed.” He pushed. “It’s jammed! Holy shit. Holy crap.”

  “Jump!” Jonas said. It was high, but they could do it. There was that game machine at the NBA store on Fifth Avenue that Jonas and Nick always used to go to. It measured your standing jump. For one day, Jonas had held the highest jump record for his height. He needed it now.

&n
bsp; “One . . . two . . . three . . .” Jonas called out. Together they leaped up and kind of punched their fists into the grating. Dust and dirt came down on their heads as it gave way, and just as the lights crept up over their feet, they climbed out onto the street. There were a few people standing there as they exited the tunnel, dirty and bleeding from their knuckles, but they didn’t stop.

  Jonas ran like he had never run before in his life. He had no idea which way or where he was going. Ten minutes must have passed before he dared to slow down and stop. He doubled over, leaning on a mailbox. He looked up to see what street he was on — 179th Street and Sedgwick Avenue — and saw that he was alone.

  ZAN asked Laura if she believed in reincarnation.

  “Because my sister does, you know. Karen does. It’s part of all that hippie-Indian-Hindu stuff she’s into. That’s what you’re smelling,” Zan said. “She burns it all the time. It’s incense.”

  “I like it.” They sat on the floor of Zan’s bedroom. It had been four weeks since Laura had gone to visit her dad. There was no real explanation for that, but then again, Laura had learned not to ask too many questions.

  “She’s meditating so she can come back as a guru or an elephant or something. That’s the reincarnation thing.”

  Laura knew what she meant. Her mom and Bruce had a series of large, colorful posters in their bedroom. If you didn’t look closely or were far away, at first they almost looked like friendly Saturday-morning cartoon characters. Most were women, with very white, almost dusty-white, skin, wearing yellow or pink or turquoise flowy skirts and bikini tops. Some were half human, half animal, and brightly colored with big eyes. Her mother had explained that each poster was of a different god representing some aspect of the Hindu belief. Laura had learned in school about the Hindu caste system and that Hindus believed in reincarnation as a way to return to earth as a higher incarnation, each time more enlightened.

  “But I think she burns the incense to cover up the smell of the reefer,” Zan went on. “And notice it’s constant.”

  The musk or ylang-ylang or whatever was the undertone to the stronger skunky odor.

  “It’s not working.” Laura laughed. The whole trailer, in fact, reeked.

  “She says getting high helps her when she meditates on her past lives,” Zan said. “So she can become enlightened and come back as John Lennon’s girlfriend. Even though she’s got Dennis Porter in there with her now.”

  According to Hinduism, after the death of the body, souls go either to heaven or hell depending on their deeds on earth, but they do not stay. They go there to either enjoy or suffer, but in both cases, they learn their lessons and return to earth to try living their life over again.

  “All I know is that there was some horrible mistake in letting Bruce come back as a human being,” Laura said.

  Zan smiled. “Bruce will come back as a slug. I’m going to come back as Paul McCartney’s girlfriend.”

  They rested their backs against Zan’s platform bed, their legs stretched out in front, almost touching the wall. The tiny window above Zan’s bed was open, and a small fan was blowing, but it hardly made a difference in the early summer’s stifling heat.

  “So, how about you?” Zan asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you a Paul girl or a John girl? Or a George girl? Because no one is a Ringo girl?” Zan went on. “Oh, are you a Ringo girl?”

  Laura shrugged. She felt bad, not telling Zan she had seen Jonas again, kissed him, in fact. But it was her secret, and if she could keep it to herself, she was more able to believe it was true. No less, no more real than pretending to have one of the Beatles for a boyfriend.

  Lying by omission was easy, though it probably meant a hundred years in Hindu hell and returning as a slug.

  “My dad wants to take Mitchell to Europe with him,” Laura said, changing the subject. “But Mitchell won’t cut his hair. So my dad won’t take him.”

  “Maybe he’ll take you instead.”

  “Maybe,” Laura said. “But I really don’t want to go.”

  They sat quiet for a long while. Then a booming bass from Karen’s room vibrated the walls, thumping steadily.

  “Now she’s screwing Dennis Porter,” Zan said. She tried to keep a straight face, but they both ended up laughing.

  “Hey, wanna do something dumb?” Zan said. “Something dumb and fun? Wanna play Mystery Date?”

  “Oh, God. Really? Sure,” Laura said. “You still have that game?”

  They turned around and scooted back so Zan could slide a drawer out from under her bed. “Somewhere in here.” She rummaged around with her hand. “I think I got it.”

  The box was a little bent, the cover flattened, but there it was, Mystery Date. The girls pictured were on one side of the door, the men on the other, all waiting to be perfectly matched up, as long as you had the right outfit.

  Meet your secret admirer, it said at the bottom of the cover. Laura knew she already had.

  THEN Jonas’s father just showed up.

  Ever since they’d bumped into each other in the subway, he had called every week, sometimes twice, and left messages. Jonas was considering changing his cell phone number, but he wasn’t sure how to do that without his mother finding out, and it would probably cost money anyway. His father had taken to trying to block his number or calling from somewhere else, hoping, Jonas assumed, that his son would answer the call.

  Instead, Jonas let any restricted number or number he didn’t recognize go to voice mail. Sometimes he listened to the message; sometimes he just deleted it without listening. So Jonas was totally unprepared to find his father waiting for him outside his mom’s apartment the following Saturday night on his way to the subway. It had been a month since he had last seen Laura, though he had made many trips to the underground and had lots of undeveloped film to prove it. Tonight, Max promised.

  Yes. No, this was the worst possible timing.

  It wasn’t that Max hadn’t promised every weekend for a month that she’d be there. Jonas had long since figured out that Max really had no clue whatsoever but tonight Jonas had a feeling. It was kind of funny when he thought about it. Jonas had had a crush on a girl a few years ago, in seventh grade, Sarah Metcalf. She was taller than he was, but it hadn’t stopped him from dreaming. Jonas went online and searched everything he could about her, about her family, to find any bit of information that would stand in for spending actual time with her, since that seemed far out of his reach. He read about her father, who worked on Wall Street. There was an article published in 2009 about some shady dealings that did or did not occur. He read her name in an article about her third-grade travel soccer team, when they played in Central Park on some historic field on some historic day. He even Google-mapped her neighborhood on the East Side for no reason at all except that it made him feel like he was doing something toward getting to know her.

  He knew nothing about Laura, not even her last name, and yet he felt more connected to her than to his own family. She had already entered his dreams, speaking to him, spending time with him, leaving an imprint like a memory. Of course Jonas had dreams about his mother and father and Lily, but not even Nick showed up in his dreams, and they had been friends for nearly eight years. And now here was his father coming out of nowhere just when Jonas had somewhere to go.

  “Son?”

  Jonas stopped. He hadn’t even seen his dad coming. He must have been across the street, waiting, and hurried over when he saw Jonas leaving the apartment. It was 11:46. Jonas was in a rush.

  Son? Was he kidding? Jonas’s father never called him son. Nobody called their son son, except on those old shows that aired on TV Land that he and Nick liked to watch when they were stoned.

  “I can’t talk, Dad,” Jonas said.

  His father touched his arm. “It’s late. You shouldn’t be out. Nothing good goes on after midnight in New York. Does your mother know you’ve left the apartment?”

  He knew what his father was thinking:
drugs, clubbing, drinking, boosting cars, getting into fights, all bad things he had read somewhere that teenage boys might be involved in. It would never occur to him to ask, to ask and find out. To care.

  “I don’t have time for this.” Jonas pulled his arm back. It scared him, actually, to have so much power, or rather to see his father with none.

  When had this happened?

  “You do and you will,” his father said. “I’ve been calling you. I decided to just come over. I deserve some answers.”

  His father must have realized that was the wrong thing to say, but it was too late.

  Jonas snorted. Without being totally aware of it, he lifted his chest and stuck out his chin.

  “You deserve shit.”

  His father backed down, but he didn’t give up. “All right. You want to be a man. I deserve shit, but what do you deserve? You think your mother needed to see those e-mails? You think that was brave? You think that was tough?”

  Jonas felt a knife pierce his stomach, his heart, his eyes, his brain, all at the same moment, a million little cuts throughout his body.

  “You don’t know anything about life. You’re a kid,” his father went on. “I’m not saying I was right, and I’m not saying you were wrong. But there are many shades of gray in life, and you won’t last long believing in the black and white.”

  Jonas couldn’t think of what to say. He just wanted out of there. He wanted to find Laura before everything he had inside leaked out from those millions of tiny wounds.

  “Screw you, Dad.”

  THE crafts fair lasted all weekend, and Laura’s mother wanted everyone to go — Mitchell, Laura, and Bruce — to help man their table. They were trying to sell thick ceramic peace signs, tied with a bulky leather cord, meant to be worn as necklaces. They were Bruce’s contribution, their ticket into the capitalist industrial complex. The rest of their wares were from a store in town called Hapiglob where Laura’s mother worked. It sold leather clothing, leather accessories, and leather jewelry. She often brought home vests, pants, shirts, and jackets that still needed colored-glass beads threaded onto each piece of fringe. Laura’s mother was being paid to sell at the fair and she also got a percentage of everything the store sold.