Famous Builder (26 page)

“So now what should we do?” I say.

My boyfriend leans against a stone wall in his leather jacket. He shifts his weight from leg to leg. He holds me entirely in his gaze, brows raised, a hint of mischief in his grin. We know it’s too early to head back to the guest house. We shrug at exactly the same moment, tensing our shoulders, then laugh, nervous but relieved we’ve been thinking alike.

Of course, it shouldn’t come as any shock that we’re strolling past these burnished cherry red boxes (I think of elegant Japanese furniture) inside of which handsome men, in varying degrees of light, lie back with their hands latched behind their heads or on their stomachs. Now that we’ve calmed down—the fingers fill with blood; the pulse slows—we’re tempted to walk downstairs till I’m reminded of my tattooist’s instructions: no steam room, no hot tub. I press my hand to the freshly pierced flesh, bewildered that the crown-capped heart will be on my arm for the rest of my life.

Then my boyfriend’s arm is around my waist.

Just across the hall, inside one of the boxes, sits a man with an amazingly hard chest. A honeyed light shadows the planes of his rough, bearded face. What does he want? Is it just me, or am I simply in the way? Are we, together, two large Americans with our shaven heads, just the ticket for a dreary, lowlit afternoon? We try our best to read him, the flares of interest, the averted eyes, as he shifts inside the frame of the box, soulful and startling: a Vermeer in the flesh.

Only hours ago we stood before a still life in the Rijksmuseum. Tulip, dragonfly, conch shell, lemon peel: all of it entered me, soaking through my skin and bones, like dye. If only for a moment, I stood before the easel, mixing paints. Poppy seed oil, lead, red upon blue—twilight falls, while just outside the window, on the other side of the wall, horseshoes clomp on cobblestone, bakers pound their dough. Time hurries away from me as I try my best to still it, to anchor it within its frame.

We walk around the system of boxes. It takes us but two minutes to find out that our dear Vermeer is gone, his space emptied but for the impression—already disappearing—of his body on the mat. We look at each other and shrug, smile. No matter. Maybe this is what we’d wanted anyway. Without saying a word, I draw my arm over his shoulder and lead him inside the box. It doesn’t take long. The warmth beneath my fingers, the density and heft of his muscles—he feels like gold in my hands as I touch my lips to his neck. His palms press against my skull. Then what: a kick against the wall? We laugh. So many footsteps down these halls, so much longing and release, little cries, and breaths pulled in, while far from the range of our hearing, the car horns beep, the motorboats chug in the canals, cell phones ring, forks chime against the dinner plates of Amsterdam.
“Prinsengracht,”
he rasps.
“Leidesgracht.”

We walk down the street again, arm in arm this time. In two days we’ll be back on the plane, rushing off to meetings, appointments. My feet hurt inside my shoes. But we’ve framed time at least: we’ll travel back inside it, again and again, and beyond.

1.

My father’s robe is made from a lustrous black wool with magenta piping along the hem, pockets, and sleeves. Its belt assures a jaunty fit around the waist. Although a little shopworn, it’s still in decent shape. I never in my life expected to get much use out of it, but believe it or not, I’m wearing it as I write this, almost enjoying the scratch of its seams against my bare shoulders on this frosty May morning in Utah.

But I wasn’t so sanguine about receiving it. Six months ago, visiting our December rental in Key West, my mother gives me my Christmas presents seconds before their departure. Two bright pink boxes from Burdines hold two black shirts, always something I can use. But this third box … what’s inside? It smells faintly of napthalene, Right Guard, of being packed away somewhere. Something aches above my heart. I can’t help but picture my father wearing it in the basement of the Cherry Hill house, which they’ve finally sold after six long years. He’s standing beneath the bare bulb, paging through an engineering magazine, one of the thousands he’s been saving—and promising to get rid of—since 1959.

“You don’t like it,” says my mother.

I look at her. There’s not a trace of irony in her expression. “Oh, no, no— I’m just—”

“We have to go, dear. The boat parade’s at six.” She kisses me faintly on the lips, walks past the peppers and mango trees, and drives home to Pompano Beach with a merry toot of the horn.

I spend the rest of the day riding my rented bike down the woeful, palm-shrouded streets of Key West. It’s hard not to be troubled by the gift. Is my father okay? Only three weeks ago I’ve visited them for Thanksgiving to discover he’s developed a swelling, the size of a tea strainer, on his tricep just above his elbow. Although it’s since receded, baffling his doctor, it’s reminded all of us of the nascent terrors of the body, of how fragile we are. Or is this about something no less dire, but protracted? Are they losing it? Thanks to good genes, my parents look quite young for their age, but they’re in their seventies now, struggling with cataracts, arthritis, and high blood pressure. Just last night my father forgot that I’d been teaching every summer for the past three years.

I stand at the beach, watching the winds whipping up the milky green. A squadron of pelicans mimics the fighter planes over the Florida Straits. Maybe I should truly feel honored, grateful that they think I’m worthy enough to inherit my father’s mantle. Yet I can’t stop wondering if the situation were reversed: How would he like it if I boxed my worn Levis and gave them to
him
for Christmas? Would he feel so honored? Or would he only think I was cheap? Actually, it’s quite amusing to think that we’d be able to trade clothing at all, given that I’m six foot two to his five foot seven, a five-length sleeve to his three. The robe
is
a size Large. He used to wear it with the sleeves rolled up. Not once, but twice.

Could it be that he hasn’t any use for wool now that they’ve moved full-time to Florida?

Perhaps I obsess.

When I come back to the house, I walk into the master bedroom to find the black robe lying on the bed as if my father had just stepped out of it. A shroud of sorts. I’m so startled that I lurch out of the room and shut the door behind me. Our dogs, Arden and Beau, look puzzled. They bark and shimmy, demanding that I take them to the White Street Pier.

It’s not till we’re walking past the house with the roosters and the pot-bellied pig out back that I realize what the gift was about: B. Altman. Sewn into the collar is a strip printed with a witty elegant script circa 1968: B. Altman. Of course.

2.

My brothers and I never called it Altman’s. It seemed as crude as calling draperies “drapes” or Provincetown “P-town.” It was always
B.
Altman, actually B. Altman & Co., and the store carried a special distinction in our family, not because we loved the clothes so much (who in South Jersey wore tartans and tattersalls?), but because its single Philadelphia location seemed to embody a faded elegance, a worndown optimism, qualities that made sense to us. Although impeccably neat, the store hadn’t been updated since 1962. It stood alone, unmalled, a white brick building surrounded by circular planters, gracing a lush green knoll in Devon. Already on the way out. Even the logo seemed charmingly passé by the time we made our monthly pilgrimages to it, and it was no surprise to us that the whole chain—including its Fifth Avenue flagship—closed in the early 1990s.

Its Main Line address probably had more allure than we were willing to admit. Like just about everyone else in Cherry Hill, our burgeoning suburb carved out of apple orchards and sandpits, we were eager for what was hard to get. Not that we didn’t have opportunities; there was the Cherry Hill Mall, of course, with Strawbridge & Clothier, Bamberger’s, and enough tropical foliage to resemble Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road. It was one of the first enclosed shopping centers in the country, and our community—formerly the lackluster Delaware Township—was even renamed in its honor after busloads of tourists came to pay their respects from as far away as Baltimore and Boston. But it’s like that old line:
Who wants to belong to any group that would admit you as a member?

(Which makes me think of my friend Lisa Marx’s mother and the way her eyes misted whenever she spoke of her longing to live on the Main Line.)

The charm of B. Altman, no doubt, shaped my youngest brother, Michael, who’s been drawn to fading and unusual department stores for as long as I can remember. Three months short of six, he opened his own personal branch of the chain in our summerhouse living room in which he sold my mother Scotch tape and Russell Stover chocolates. He’s one of the few people I know who will actually buy his clothes solely on the basis of the store’s label, no matter how inappropriate the piece. (“Get me a tie from Porteous,” he says, when he hears I’m spending the weekend in Vermont.) He can recite lists of defunct chains with all the solemnity of the Kaddish: Ivey’s. Hutzler’s. Steinbach. Sakowitz. S. Klein. Pomeroys. Lit Brothers. Gimbels. John Wanamaker. The names of the dead are endless. He deplores the globalized market, any systemized effort to eliminate the regional, the quirky, the specialized. Lately, when he has time off (in between playing oboe for the Richmond Symphony and traveling with his wife, Sandy, to the regional pageants of the Miss America “scholarship program,” another hobby), he travels across the country and photographs individual stores that he thinks are on the brink of closing. (Even their daughter, Jordan, is named in honor of a lost scion of American retail: Jordan Marsh.) Ninety percent of the time his speculations are correct. Only a couple of years ago, he made a point of making the final purchase at Thalhimers in downtown Richmond on its final day of operation. He stood in line to buy a violet blouse, of all things, so he could hold the cherished title forevermore. (“There wasn’t any men’s stuff left.”) The local newspaper even interviewed him upon his departure. “I loved this store,” he said, shook the blouse in the air, then walked out to his car.

3.

I’m less drawn to department stores these days than to a sale. Although Michael thinks this deplorable (the reason behind the demise of so many smaller chains), he’s forgiving enough—at least for the moment—not to call me on it. Today we drive to a huge outlet mall in western Broward County. It’s one of my favorite things to do when I visit my parents, whose high-rise is ten miles to the east. And though I’m appalled by the location of the place—it’s located quite literally across the street from the Everglades—I’m breaking into a cold sweat as we spot it on the horizon. Its parking lot shimmers beneath bronzed cabbage palms and glary subtropical clouds.

We park beneath a post that says UU, which we always do just in case someone gets lost. The place is enormous, arranged in arcing semicircles, almost a mile from one end to the other. (How many times have we seen lost tourists, separated from their loved ones, on the verge of sobbing, after they’ve fallen under the spell of all those good buys?) But that doesn’t stop us. I walk faster. From ten years back, I hear the sad, giddy laugh of B., an old acquaintance from grad school. She kids me about my third new shirt in as many days, wondering aloud about the state of my character. I laugh along with her, though it’s hard not to be miffed. When I admire a visiting writer’s outfit, she says later, “I expected more from you.” I can still see B. slumped at a conference table with a cup of tea, her sweatsuit the outward expression of her inner gloom.

I know exactly what I want. My shirt must be gray, collared, both casual and formal at once, bridging the elusive gap between nightclub and poetry reading. My project takes all of twenty minutes. When I’m finished, I walk to the checkout line with two pairs of shoes, a gleaming windbreaker, and a nubby gray shirt with blue stitching around the placket.

Michael, on the other hand, has turned his attentions toward Sandy, who’s asked him to buy something for her. The blackberry-dyed snakeskin vest (now where are his politics?) he brings to the register is both hideous and fabulous at once, marked down to $75 from $1,750.

I stand outside the store window. I step right, left, then right again, shuffling in place as Michael disappears beneath the moist inky foliage to find the rest room. My shirt is wet beneath the underarms; my nervous system revs with a blend of accomplishment and guilt. I reach into my bag and rub the soft gray fabric. Within minutes—is that B. pulling up a chair in my brain?—I hear engines chuffing, supervisors yelling. A lethally sharp knife slices through fabric. And a seventeen-year-old girl from Beijing guides the yoke beneath the focused light of the sewing machine. She’s bored, yet careful (see the lines already around her eyes?) to keep the needle from piercing her finger. The factory is too hot. Coins clink in her pocket at the end of the twelve-hour day. And at the same time, on the other side of the world, cotton bales roll in on trucks or trains, once warm from the workers’ hands, now glowing with grease, seed, spray, and dark red drops of human blood.

I blink myself awake. My palate is dry. In front of me, beneath the moist inky palms, a single mother walks by in a nylon track suit. She’s carrying a baby over her left hip. He turns and twists; he won’t stop crying, screaming into the well of her collar socket. Another hard life. No decent apartment, no sturdy lock on the door. The refrigerator broke down last week, spoiling all the food on the shelves, and the management will get to it only after chasing out the drug dealers in the courtyard. Car alarms whoop throughout the night. And, despite everyone’s efforts to clean up the place, the apartment next door is filled ankle-deep with broken bottles, used syringes, and wadded sheets of newspaper.