Spoonwood (13 page)

11

NEW YORK

N
ext morning I sell my boat and truck and just about everything in it for half what it's worth to Critter Jordan. All I have now is a little bit of money, my son, a leaf bag full of spoons, and a backpack with only the basics, plus spoonmaking tools (hatchet, bow saw, mora knife, crooked knife). As I'm going through the truck for the last time I dig out the bottle of Uncle Fred's Vodka, a third full, under the driver's seat. I can't bring myself to dump it. Hardly aware of what I'm doing, I put the bottle in the backpack. It's as if Old Crow himself does the deed.

I'm going to miss fall foliage season on the trust lands, and I'm sad as hell to leave Forgot Farm, but I'm excited too. Critter drives Birch and me the twenty or so miles to Brattleboro, Vermont, and we board the train to New York City. Birch and I are headed for a shop called Kitchen Elan that sells, among other things, wooden spoons. I discovered it in
Functional Arts Magazine
on the rack at the Darby Free Library. First Birch and then I drift off to sleep on the train and wake sweaty but refreshed when it pulls into Penn Station six hours later. We saunter east, then turn south on Madison Avenue; people, apparently
in a hurry, walk by us. No one makes eye contact and yet I have the impression that everyone is here to see and to be seen.

I stop at a window to look at spread rugs on the walls and rolled rugs on the floor. A man behind the counter reads a newspaper in Arabic. An expensive and beautiful rug in a stick house: the mental picture brings me pleasure.

The city is like the forest, full of tall spires for mischief makers to hide behind with the resulting wariness and suspicion among the occupants. It's a haven for raptors, which I see working the air currents between the skyscrapers. The kindly folk of the parks feed the pigeons, and the pigeons feed the hawks. Birch watches the raptors, ignores the pedestrians.

I have the address of Kitchen Elan and I know that New York is pretty easy to find your way in. It's a shoebox-shaped island, with numbered streets running sidewise and avenues lengthwise. My miscalculation has been judging just how big New York is. On the map it seemed like a short distance from the train station to the store. In fact it's a little over an hour's walk.

At Kitchen Elan I pull out one of my spoons in front of a startled clerk. Out of nervousness, I speak bluntly and stupidly. “You want to buy handmade spoons?”

She calls the store manager. The store manager declines to look at my spoons; she says the company is owned by a firm headquartered in Germany, and all decisions regarding stock are made by the U.S. Office Distribution Management Center, which is in midtown, back in the direction I've come from. The store manager says the company's wooden spoons are imported from Africa. By my standards the African spoons are big, clunky, and only marginally useful. It takes me a while, as I inspect various gadgets in the store, to figure out that the African spoons are not supposed to be useful. Nothing in the store is there because it is useful. The spoons are decorator items, emblematic perhaps of tribal life in Africa or anyway somebody's notion thereof, whose purpose is to give an American kitchen a touch of the exotic. I leave in a huff, feeling let down but superior.

After I've been to half a dozen stores and it is getting dark and we have no place to stay, I see a sign, The White Horse, one of the ignition centers of two of my favorite flamed-out writers, Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac.

“Go on in. It's on the historical register,” says Old Crow. “Toss down a beer for the writers who died young.”

“Or maybe twelve,” I say.

“You deserve a beer, Frederick. It won't kill you to have one. One wonderful beer. One should not go gently into the good night.”

Birch twists in my arms the way he does when I talk to myself. No doubt he can feel the tension in me.

I turn away from the White Horse and cross the street into a tiny park designed for kids, with a slippery slide, swings, and a huge sandbox. We have the place to ourselves. Amazing how in a world of concrete, steel, asphalt, and brick, a desperate person can find an outbreak of trees. It's cooler in the shade. Street litter mixes with dead leaves. Pigeons patrol for eats. I'm a little disconcerted because I can't tell what kind of trees I'm looking at. A sign on a tree says Linden. I put Birch down, throw off my backpack and sit on a park bench. Birch runs in ellipses, gradually extending the distance between us, and then he begins a return trip. He staggers, not like a drunk but like a bad actor imitating a drunk.

I've only been walking for a couple of months and I still do not have the hang of steering. I motor just fine, but I'm always smashing into things and falling down. After all the practice I still move like an ant. I am bitterly disappointed. I expected that mobility would give me freedom, control, and joy. However, as best as I can determine, walking is a small improvement over crawling. Just to stay upright is a big enough job. When I do manage to move I find it hard to stop or change directions, and Dad never lets me go very far. The old dream of flying comes back to me now. If only I could focus my mind, I'm sure I could make myself sprout wings and gain perspective from on high. I plop down on my bottom, because I have yet to devise an elegant
way of transitioning from standing to sitting, and I flap my arms like the raptors I saw in the canyons of New York.

It's almost dark in the city of New York when I see a woman out of the corner of my eye. Her head is bobbing from side to side. It takes another moment for me to realize that the woman is miming Birch's antics.

She's in her twenties, snake-slender, with a sprawl of frizzy black hair. She's wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with white lettering that says “Alice Neel Lives.” She has small, pretty lips, troublemaking brown eyes, minimal make-up.

“Hey,” I say sharply, “don't make fun of my kid.”

“I was getting into him, you understand what I'm saying?” she says.

She comes around through the gate and sits down beside me on the park bench. I smell burnt marijuana in her hair. Her exaggerated demeanor of delight tells me she is meditatively stoned. Something I haven't felt in a long time comes over me involuntarily and full of demand. All of a sudden I find myself in a euphoric, rapid-fire flirtation, betraying my “unnecessary conversation” principle.

“What do you think he was doing?” I say.

“You know him better than I do, so why ask me?”

“Because sometimes it helps to have an outside opinion.”

“Look, I wasn't mocking him. He was dancing, and I was dancing with him so I could internalize the motion.”

“So you're a dancer?” I say.

“I'm not sure I want to tell you what I am,” the young woman says.

“That's understandable. Your mother told you not to speak to strange men in the park.”

“I never do what Mother says. What do you think he was doing?” She nods at Birch.

“I think he was working out an idea,” I say.

“He's a little young for that. You were probably projecting your own thing.”

“You think anybody ever really knows anybody?” I ask.

“Never,” she says, and turns to Birch. “What's your name?”

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, so I do what I feel. I smile widely and screech. I learned the screech from birds, a whoop with attitude, very effective in attracting attention, if lacking in profundity. I made the bird-screech my own, so that it sounds like an elephant getting a hot foot.

“His name is Birch,” Dad says.

“Birch—I like it.”

At the sound of my name on the tongue of this new person, I reach for her to be picked up. It seems like the logical thing to do.

She holds out her arms and says to Dad, “May I?”

“Please do.”

She sweeps me up. I like those arms, a different, riskier swing than Dad's; I like the softness of her face; the nook in her bosom. I'm not crazy about her breath, though.

“He smells nice,” she says.

“I just changed him.”

“Birch, you said. Like the tree?”

“Yes, like the tree. He's named after his mother's favorite tree.”

“I never had a favorite tree. I take it his mother's not in the picture.”

“Birch's mother died giving birth to him.”

“I'm sorry. I've spent the better part of my life loathing babies, and now, Birch, I'm looking at you and thinking holy shit, here's looking at you, baby.”

“You've got a way with words,” Dad says.

“Now you're mocking me.”

“I'm sorry. I'm a little antisocial. Well, a lot antisocial.”

“Me, too—sort of. So what are you doing at People Central, because I know you're not from the city?”

“I'm here looking for a market . . .”

Dad reaches into the plastic bag on the ground beside the park bench. He takes out three wooden spoons and holds them up.

The woman takes one in her hand. She shut her eyes. “It's beautiful, and I like the texture against my fingertips.”

“It's designed to fit the hand,” Dad says.

I grab the spoon, surprising the woman—opening her eyes. After a brief tug of war she releases it to me. I wave the spoon like a wand. I'm trying to turn her into you, Mother. Dad laughs, a big roaring laugh I've never heard before; the woman laughs, somewhat less delighted, but amused nonetheless. I laugh theatrically—practice makes perfect.

Her name is Rachel, but she goes by her last name—Bloom. Her father is a Long Island businessman and her mother a real estate agent. Bloom is a couple years out of art school, trying to make a name for herself in the art world.

“You asked me if I was a dancer. Well, I'm more a choreographer of color, light, and shape in two dimensions.”

“A painter.”

She nods in the affirmative. “Am I going to call you Birch's dad or what?” she says.

“My name is . . .” Dad suddenly stops talking, changes the tack of his thought, and says, “I've always hated who I am.”

“This is America; you can be who you want—if you work at it.”

Dad thinks for a long time. Finally, he says, “The name's Latour.”

“Latour—no first name?”

“It's Frederick, but call me Latour.”

“Where are you staying, Latour?”

“This park bench is my home. Isn't it obvious?”

“I have a spare room. But I'd like something in return, permission to do some drawing studies of you and Birch. About a week or ten days' work. They'll be preparations for paintings.”

“This is how you get your models?”

“Actually, yes. I've put up homeless men, bag ladies, drug addicts, aging drag queens, runaway high school boys and girls—you name it. Here's the deal. You pose whenever I want. You leave when you feel like it or I no longer find you interesting.”

“How do you know I'm not dangerous?” Dad says.

“You probably are,” Bloom says. “Look, life's not worth much without some risk, and hey, I'm not stupid. I think the odds of a baby-carrying man being a mad rapist or a murderer are pretty low.”

Bloom's apartment is in the meatpacking district. Trucks are backed up to bays, where men and women in bloody white coats pull carcasses out of the trucks and bring them inside cool spaces. A couple of male prostitutes in drag are getting an early start for the evening by hustling the truckers.

“I like the neighborhood,” I say.

“It keeps an artist stimulated,” Bloom says.

“Stimulation for your paintings—is that why you live here?”

“Should there be another reason?”

The apartment building is the former The Packers Hotel, but most of the letters have fallen off, leaving only ghostly outlines. All that remains of the original relief lettering is the “The,” the “h,” the “o,” and the “t.”

“The Hot,” I say.

“Right—that's what everybody calls it.” She lets us in the front door with a key. The hallway leads to yet another door, requiring yet another key. We walk up three flights of stairs to a large space with tall vaulted tin ceilings, big windows, hardwood floors, a door leading to another room, a ladder climbing to a loft. The studio smells of turpentine. Lying against the wall are paintings of New York street scenes: a homeless woman pushing a shopping cart, a sad man looking in a store window and seeing himself as a woman in the reflection, a middle-aged woman packer in a white apron cutting into the flank of a side of beef. On an easel is a painting in progress of the front of the building, The Hot standing out more boldly than in reality.

“Moody paintings,” I say.

“Thank you—I think. Would you like a drink or whatever?” Bloom asks.

I know that “whatever” is code for marijuana.

“Just water for me. Birch might like some juice.”

Bloom brings me a tall glass of ice water and Birch a small glass of orange juice, which I hold up to his lips as he drinks.

“Excuse me, I have to make a couple of calls.” Bloom climbs the ladder to her bed in the loft, lies supine, and talks in hushed tones. Is she calling the police? I can just see her crossed ankles sticking out of the bed.

I wander into the tiny kitchen alcove. The sink is full of dirty dishes, a jarring sight to one as fastidious as myself. I turn the faucet on. Water pours out. It's a treat just to watch it run, listen to it, feel it tumbling over my hands. For fun I turn the light switch on and off and giggle with the wonder of it all.

When Bloom comes down the ladder I've finished the dishes and I'm on the floor with Birch and a dozen of my spoons, laid out neatly.

“The workmanship is superb. And you want to sell them,” she says.

“Sometimes I want to bury them in a time capsule. Sometimes I just want to hoard them—it's a miserly feeling. I definitely do not want to sell them.”