Ten Thousand Saints (40 page)

“You didn’t have to come with me, Jude. I mean, thanks, but you know, I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Fine. I won’t babysit you anymore. Sorry for being a friend.”

The next stop was Seventy-second Street, and he walked out of the car. On the street, he was greeted by the invigorating freedom of being in a new place, a corner he’d never stood on before. This, along with an irrational empowerment—she hadn’t slept with Johnny!—and his anger at her—why had she attacked him like that?—propelled him down the blistering sidewalk. He didn’t know where he was going. He remembered, now that he thought about it, that both beds in their motel room were sometimes unmade. Jude had assumed that they’d been having such ambitious and nomadic sex that they’d simply traveled from bed to bed. He was walking south, the waves of humidity carrying the smell of taxi exhaust and hose-sprayed sidewalk. And also curiosity—
why
hadn’t they slept together? Who hadn’t slept with whom?

He turned around and began to run. How could he just leave her like that? With the leather pervert eyeing her on the train? What if Di did see her? What if she wasn’t going home at all, but going somewhere to get a fix? He ran all the way to Riverside, then north, but when he got there, she was not standing in front of her building. He stood under the awning next door, catching his breath.

S
he stopped in the median at Broadway and Ninety-first. Neena was standing at the fruit stand across the street, inspecting an apple. Plastic grocery bags were looped over her arm, and nestled inside an Indian print sling, a baby clung to her stomach. Eliza decided that she would wait here on the curb for Neena to see her. She would let her decide. But she didn’t look up. Would she even recognize her, another pregnant girl on a street corner in New York? Eliza flew across the street, in front of a bike messenger and a honking bus, and stood panting before her. She slipped her sunglasses back on her head. “Hi, Neena.”

The honking had stirred the baby, who fussed in its sleep. Neena took in the whole enlarged shape of Eliza. “It’s you. Goodness, you nearly run me over.”

“I saw you across the street. It must be a big shock to see me.”

“Your mother been very worried. Very angry with me for letting you go.” Neena, weighed down by the bags and the baby, did not offer a hug. “Where you been?”

It sent a strangely warm current over her skin, her mother’s familiar worry, her housekeeper’s familiar iciness. “Vermont, Florida. Everywhere. Who’s this?” Eliza nodded at the baby, who was wiggling in its sling. The baby had the same crimson dot on its forehead as Neena, and tiny gold studs in its earlobes.

“Grandchild,” said Neena. “My son’s.”

“It’s a girl?”

“A baby girl. Bala.”

“Bala.” Eliza reached, tentatively at first, and then as though she did it all the time, to stroke the baby’s head. It had as much hair as a full-grown man, and it was as silky and warm as the spun sugar Neena used to make. Her little eyes were closed, and she looked as though she were fighting a difficult battle in her dreams. Eliza had never, ever touched a baby.

Suddenly Neena unleashed the largest smile Eliza had ever seen on her face. “She making relief,” she said, bouncing the baby a little with her hips.

Eliza withdrew her hand.

“When your baby will be born?” Neena asked. Her smile vanished as quickly as it had come.

“September.”

“September when?”

“I’m not sure,” Eliza said.

Neena made a dismissive, horsey sound. “Your mother will be glad you home. I tell her when she calls.”

“No, I don’t want her to know,” Eliza said. “Where is she? She’s not home?”

“She looking for
you
. In Chicago. She call at my son’s house to check if you call. I helping with the baby.”

“She’s still in Chicago? You’re not staying at my mom’s?”

“I just there to cook in the big oven and water the bonsais.”

Now Eliza could see that Neena’s blouse was wet, where the baby had clamped its mouth on one of her breasts. It was hungry. Eliza lifted the keys from the chain between her own breasts.

“No one’s staying there at all?” she asked.

Nineteen

A
fter weeks of sleeping in the van and in motels and on Rooster’s floor, moving into the air-conditioned sanctum of Di’s apartment felt like a luxurious crime, as though they were breaking into some movie star’s mansion and were waiting for the police to arrive. It was the size of Tower Records, and had things like a Macintosh computer, a laserdisc player, and a bidet, which Delph and Kram used immediately, reporting the details of their experiences. Delph and Kram took the two single beds in the guest room, and Matthew and Ben took over the living room. Johnny stopped by long enough to drop off his stuff in Neena’s quarters, where he had his own TV and minifridge and telephone line. He said, “I’ll stay at Rooster’s if someone else wants it,” and Eliza said, in front of everyone, “I’m sure you would,” and then Johnny left to meet Rooster at Tompkins to protest the curfew. Evidently the householders no longer cared about keeping up the appearance of sharing a bed. Jude took Di’s room, because no one else wanted to share with him, either, and because no one else wanted the responsibility of staying in the master suite. In the top drawer of Di’s dresser, beneath a layer of silky underwear in metallic hues, was what Jude determined to be a vibrator, which he tested against his wrist, then returned to its drawer. All of these items, along with the thought of his father having sex with Di here, creeped Jude out; nevertheless he was glad for a room of his own. He peeled back the sheets on the king-size waterbed and slept soundly on the cool, silver surface.

At home in her own bed at last, Eliza watched an old tape of
Santa Barbara,
paged through her Greek textbook (she’d forgotten nearly every word), and ate the banana pudding Neena had left for them. She felt strangely safe here. It was the last place her mother would think to look for her. And if she did: so be it. She was tired of running.

But she still couldn’t sleep. The down mattress pad she had always loved was too soft for her now. Twice she got up to tell Matthew and Ben to turn down the video game they were playing on the computer. Twice she got up to pee. After the second time, she stopped at her mother’s door and knocked on it. Jude answered in another pair of sperm boxers, these red. This time he was shirtless.

“Sorry about before,” she said, sinking into the pool of her mother’s bed. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at Johnny.”

“I tried to find you, but you weren’t standing outside like you said.” His voice was hoarse with sleep. “I didn’t know where you went.”

“You came after me?”

“I was worried.”

“Neena had this little baby, her granddaughter. She was
this big
.” She cradled an invisible baby in her arms. She wanted to say that she looked like Teddy, but this wasn’t precisely true. She closed her eyes and tried to conjure his face, but his features swam out of her reach. “I can’t remember what Teddy looked like,” she said quietly.

Jude’s eyes were closed, too, his face raised to the ceiling. “He was handsome,” he said. But Eliza could tell that he was seeing something more behind his eyelids, contours sharper than he could describe, or cared to.

She lay down across the sheets, which smelled like the lavender soap Neena laundered them in, and she told Jude that she used to sleep in this bed after her dad died, to keep her mother company. Eliza wanted to sleep in it again, but Jude didn’t lie down beside her. When the baby kicked, he didn’t want to feel it. Eventually she said good night and walked back down the hall to her own room.

T
hat week, they came and went.

Eliza and Jude window-shopped at the baby boutiques on the Upper West Side, where a crib shaped like a sailboat cost a thousand dollars. Delph and Kram played pickup with some guys in Central Park, and Matthew and Ben went to work selling merch at Some Records. They reunited only for an occasional meal, and the show at the Pyramid, which Rooster did book. Delph and Kram left early to go to some club in Brooklyn some girls had invited them to. Di’s dining room table, polished as a pond and the size of a shuffleboard court, was quickly buried by maps and guides, ticket stubs, subway tokens, backpacks, cassettes, Gatorade bottles, granola bars, a jingle jangle of spare keys.

Johnny and Rooster went to the Love Feast at the Krishna Temple on Sunday night. On Monday they skated their friend’s half-pipe until Rooster got too tired. On Tuesday they swam at Coney Island, deep in the ocean where no one could see their limbs tangled underwater. On Wednesday they watched another friend paint a train car in Harlem, a city of skyscrapers and lights and highways as intricate as any eight-headed dragon, then watched the police paint over it. They were starting to crack down now. Even in the month Johnny had been gone, the police had begun to multiply all over the city, lifting their rodent heads out of the manholes. You could hardly suck a token anymore.

On Thursday they walked to the West Village, where gay men strolled hand in hand, walking good-looking dogs, licking ice cream cones, wearing shirts or maybe not. Johnny felt that he knew his city, that New York belonged to him, but sometimes he skated into a neighborhood that felt like a foreign country. The gray calm of the Upper East Side, the flamboyant calm of the West Village—he was not certain he was comfortable with either of their customs. On Christopher Street—barely a mile away from Tompkins Square Park, the AIDS center of the city—it seemed possible to forget about spermicide and sterilized needles. Up in their clean, spacious bedrooms, surely men were dying here, too, but on the street it was like Candy Land for fags, all these gorgeous, healthy men snuggling up to their soul mates. Experimentally, Johnny let Rooster lean him up against someone else’s building and kiss him in front of the world, and in Rooster’s mouth Johnny tasted each flavor he’d eaten himself, painfully intensified. For a sun-blinding moment he was not Patient 9602. Then they walked back to Rooster’s.

Alphabet City, the Bowery, the Lower East Side, Loisaida—these were the places where Johnny belonged. In Alphabet City, there were shadows to hide in. Here you didn’t advertise being gay or straight or rich or poor; you just tried not to get your ass kicked. You just tried to get by. This attitude had been evident the past Saturday night, when the neighborhood of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Yippies, skinheads, bohemians, anarchists, artists, musicians, squatters, gutter punks, junkies, and drunks gathered in Tompkins to unite with the homeless against the extravagant monolith of the Christadora House, the sky-high rents of the East Village, against the army of Mayor Koch. Keep Tompkins homeless! This was what Johnny loved about his home: its homelessness. Everyone was displaced, everyone was half-vagrant.
$1500 Rent
said the Missing Foundation’s graffiti, and the neighborhood said fuck that. The Missing Foundation were there on Saturday night, and Blind Jack and Froggy and Jones, kids on bongos, maracas, conch shells. Someone threw a bottle against a police van, and Jerry the Peddler got arrested, and the rest of the park’s residents were scattered about the Lower East Side, or who knew where.

As for Blind Jack’s friend Vinnie, he was dead of AIDS—he’d died in the park while Johnny was on the road, Rooster told him. “Jack tried to wake him up one morning, and he wouldn’t budge. Just lay himself down on the ground with a newspaper spread over his face, like he knew it was time.” Johnny would have expected Rooster to deliver this news with spite, to use it to turn the knife of guilt in Johnny’s gut, but he looked too frail to fight. And who else was there to blame, besides the city itself?

Johnny’s beloved slum was under attack, and already the neighborhood was planning a rematch for next weekend. Now these mutineers of the Lower East Side, the miscellaneous fuck-ups who’d had no one to prey on but one another, had come together to rage against something else. The curfew. They were as pure and as primal as teenagers revolting against their parents.

O
n Friday morning, Johnny knocked on Eliza’s bedroom door to tell her they had plans. He had made an appointment to see an apartment, and then another to see a doctor. He was wearing his linen jacket and a thin black tie.

“I was going to feed the ducks with Jude,” she said.

“Well, you’ll have to feed the ducks another time.”

In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth, put in her contacts, and put on her makeup. Usually Johnny’s plotting worried her, but she was more relieved than suspicious. She had a picture in her mind of the apartment—it was one of the pictures that she called on to put her to sleep. It would be necessarily small, but it had an eat-in kitchen with a window box of geraniums like Harriet’s, and an exposed brick wall, which she would paint white. Everything in the baby’s room would be white, too (not pink)—the crib, the single teddy bear, the rocking chair she would take from her bedroom at home. She dressed methodically, trying on several items from her own closet before moving on to her mother’s. She settled on a long madras dress and a pair of penny loafers a size too small for her swollen feet. Over one of her shoulder pads, she hung the leather strap of a purse.