The Garden of Lost and Found (21 page)

She led me to the kitchen, where the sinkside dishrack was arrayed in pairs: two beautiful blue bowls, hand-thrown, their thin sides whorled with the faint impress of a shaping thumb, two silver spoons whose crest-emblazoned handles were more than an inch wide, two cut crystal goblets. And, I noted, all three of yesterday’s teacups. The teacups were face down but the upright goblets were filled with a froth of dust, and I stared at them for a long time before I said, “Think it was a date?”

“Or a friend,” Claudia said blithely, not hearing or not acknowledging the tightness in my voice. “Think about it. She’s about to go away for who knows how long, but there’s someone she wants to make sure she says goodbye to first.” She tapped one of the bowls with her fingernail and it chimed like a dinner bell. “What do you think she served? Something Asian I bet, like soba, or glass noodles.”

I thought about that, not soba or glass noodles, whatever the hell they might be, but about dinner in general, last suppers and saying goodbye, and felt a hollow spot in my gut. That food should have been
mine
.

Claudia was looking at me with a funny expression. “You haven’t been in here? You’ve lived here how long? A month?” But then she just shook her head and led me to the living room. Clouds of dust flew up when she patted a chair for me to sit on, and I could feel it cling to my skin where I’d sweated off my calamine peel.

“Hey,” I slid to the edge of the cushion and caught one of Claudia’s hands. “How’s your itch ivy?”

She sat across from me in a frumpy wing-backed chair, dust-covered doilies on both armrests. Her shiny dress and the dust motes flickering around her body made her look like a figure enthroned on a cloud. I turned her hand over, but both the pale palm and the darker fine-boned top were clear and smooth.

“Itch…?” She looked at her hand, at mine, and with a start jerked away and wiped her hand on the chair arm, then tried to laugh it off. “You’re a little odd, aren’t you? A dreamer. I like that. I’m a dreamer too.” She paused, as if giving her words time to cement the bond between us, and I could feel them adhering with the dust to my sticky skin. “You want a tissue?”

“What?” Then I saw the sweat coursing down my arms and legs, leaving dust-tinted trails in the film of calamine lotion.

Claudia was looking at me with a wondering expression—her face as wet and dust-saddled as my own—and her hands gripped the arms of her chair so tightly the circular doilies were wadded in her fingers. She laughed again when she saw what I was looking at, smoothed the doilies and folded her arms in front of her stomach, then unfolded them and waved them around as if clearing the air.

“Your mother and
her
hair
.”

I shook my head, then nodded, then shook my head again. “What about her hair?”

“It was so
thin
. She was always trying something to give it more body, henna and hot oil and sheep placenta and all that eighties shit. And the
dye jobs
. You cannot
believe
.”

I thought about that—about the two shampoos and the three conditioners and the letter in the center drawer of the desk downstairs, and I thought of the thick black brush of K.’s hair. I had kissed that hair last night, I had actually licked the hair of the man who might very well be—

“Jamie,” Claudia said, leaning forward and, itch ivy or no, catching both my hands in both of hers. “I want to make a deal with you.”

“A deal.”

“I’ve been coming here all my life, I know every nook and cranny in No. 1 like the back of my hand.”

“The back of your hand.”

“You can keep it. I don’t want it, whatever it is. I just want to live here.”

“You want to live here.”

“Jamie.” Claudia squeezed my hands tightly. “I’m thirty-two years old. I never thought I’d be thirty-two years old. Still living at home, still dating the same deadbeat Reggie Packman, still going out every night to some smoky club and taking a hit off whatever comes round my way.
I am thirty-two years old
. Don’t you think I can do better than that?”

Her voice had taken on a pleading tone, as if she didn’t understand what she was saying and maybe I could explain.

“But Claudia, we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

Claudia smiled slightly. She had heard it too. Not
don’t know
, but
we
.

“Of course we do. We’re looking for buried treasure.” She sat back, settled her hands on her stomach. “I want to keep this baby, Jamie. I thought you of all people would understand that.”

I looked at her until her gaze broke and her hands reached for the doilies and wadded them even more violently than they had before.

“Tell me one thing, Claudia. No games, just give it to me straight. What would happen to Nellydean if I sold to Sonny?”

“Sold?”

“The building, Claudia, the building.”

Claudia didn’t answer immediately. Then, shrugging, she picked up a circular doily and held it by its center. Folds of lace fell away from her hand in a loose cone and she twirled it in her fingers like a dress. Like Nellydean’s dress.

“I mean, look at her,” she said, twirl-twirl. “The woman is, what…seventy-one? Eighty-one? Sometimes I think there’s nothing holding up that dress but these walls.” Claudia let the doily fall to the arm of the chair, silent and flat. “She doesn’t have any kin but me. No family, no money, nowhere to go. This building is her life.”

“James!”

The voice floated up from Dutch Street, tapping at the window like a lover’s pebble. And I sat in a pool of sweat in a dusty chair looking at Claudia, who sat in her own sweat and dust, and now it seemed as though her shod foot was the maimed one, its high heel tapping the floral carpet like a peg leg, but silently.

“James!” the voice cut in again, more distinct now, distinctly masculine. Claudia sat silently as if she’d lost the conversation’s thread, twirl-twirl, tap-tap, and when the voice came a third time—“Ja-ames!”—she said,

“Are you gonna see who it is?”

I used my hands to sluice swirls of pink and brown sweat down my arms and legs and listened as the drops, unlike her heel, made audible plops as they stained my mother’s carpet.

“I already know who it is.”

“What
ever.
Jesus Christ, you can be so
obscure
sometimes.” Claudia limped to the window on her single shoe and opened it wide. She poked her head out and pulled it back in. “It’s a man.”

“I know that.”

Claudia poked her head out again, pulled it back in again. “He looks kinda cute from here. A little old for you maybe, but cute.”

“Maybe.”

This time she let her head stay out. “He’s got flowers,” she said, then in a louder voice: “He’ll be right down! He’s got to change his clothes!” To me she said, again, “He’s cute. A little old for you, but cute.” She didn’t say
old enough to be your father
, but it didn’t matter. K. had told me that part himself.

Johnson Montgomery Croft’s linen clothes, thick durable things that they were, hadn’t dried yet, which is why I met K. still wearing the uni-short. I looked at him, at his black hair, neatly combed, at his gray eyes, not so neatly focused, at the neat line of his buttondown shirt tucked into his belted khakis, but I didn’t see flowers anywhere. Only the
Times
, coned around the day’s bad news like a megaphone.

“Claudia said you had—”

“Bye, Jamie! I’ll see you tonight!”

I looked up to see her waving from the window, then she disappeared.

When I turned back to K. his face was practically on top of mine, and I jumped back before he could kiss me.

“Why didn’t you come in?”

“That old lady? Nellydean? She said I should just holler.”

We walked north, east, north again. As we walked K. brushed my hand with his, and I had to tell myself it was okay. It was completely chaste I told myself, but when he steered me into a deep alcove in a deserted street and began kissing me the only thing I could tell myself was
Don’t run
. K. stepped back, looked at me funny, and some urge I didn’t examine too closely made me pull him close again. But I steered his face to one side and just held him, my cheek next to his, the double thump of our hearts beating off each other.

Again K. backed away, and this time I saw the pink smears on the arms of his shirt.

“Oh shit. Calamine lotion, sorry.” But K. was still looking at me with a skeptical expression, and I realized it was my outfit he was staring at. I said, “I had to wash my other clothes.” I mustered my best spooky voice: “Violence was in the air on Dutch Street last night.”

K. laughed and shook his head. “What the
hell
are you talking about?”

I could hear it in his tone: confusion of course, but beneath that indignation, possessiveness, protectiveness. K. was playing a role as much as I was. He was playing the man, and I, eager to oblige, played the boy. But even though I threw myself into the part I still gave him an edited version of last night’s events—by which I mean I edited out Justine and told him simply that Sonny Dinadio had left me alone after roughing me up a bit—and from there I ended up giving him an edited version of No. 1’s history, by which I mean I left out my mother’s treasure, real or imaginary, and told him simply that Sonny Dinadio had offered to buy No. 1 and that if I didn’t sell then the building would probably be seized for back taxes, but that if I did sell Nellydean would end up on the street. As I spoke I could sense K.’s protectiveness give way, first to incredulity, then to belief, then to something that was probably just greed. Not avaricious money lust, but the simple if base fascination with the prospect of unearned—undeserved—wealth. By which I mean his first question was:

“How much did he offer?”

“Enough,” I said, waving the question away, although for the first time I found myself wondering how much he
had
offered.

“But James, this sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime. You could sell the building, get yourself out of the city. The lot alone must be worth millions.”

“I just got here.”

“And look where it’s gotten you.”

“To a dingy alley with some dirty old man pawing at me?”

K. laughed a little, but uneasily, and he neatened the line of his trousers as we started walking again. “It must seem fascinating.” He tapped his paper. “Fun City: murder, thugs, and of course your own proclivities toward adventure. But I’m telling you, James. New York is a cut flower. Its days are numbered. You should really consider this offer seriously.”

“Didn’t you say you were thinking of moving away?”

“I am thinking about moving away.”

“You’re also painting your apartment.”

“I am also painting my apartment. What do you think of something brown for the bedroom?”

I thought it sounded like shit but I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “Millions?”

K. actually licked his lips. “I’m not a broker or anything, but I’d say at least five. Probably a lot more.”

I saw then that we’d come to another bridge: the Manhattan, here and there blue or gray but mostly rusty brown, and as we looked at one of the city’s emergency exits I said, “Where would you go? If you left?”

“Not that way. Long Island’s a fishbowl like Manhattan. It’s just a little bigger.” K. turned and pointed with a finger whose line curved over the city like a shooting star. “Up there. Upstate.”

“That’s still New York, right? Just further up the Hudson?”

K. looked at me. “Are you kidding?” But he saw I wasn’t, and he said, “Can I show you something?”

“Sure,” I said, and some time passed, and we were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at a painting by someone called Sanford Gifford. It was all blues and grays and browns, some green, some gold, some red too, but mostly blues and grays and browns. It was trees under a big sky, a little white house under the trees, a mountain in the background that looked a lot like God. It was about ten inches wide and six inches tall, and it was so real it was hard to believe in—so real I wanted to stand in it, to test the truth of what it depicted. And of course it was the same colors as K.’s apartment, the same colors as the Manhattan Bridge, and I wanted to know which of those associations was real too.

“Let me tell you something,” K. said in the Met’s gallery of the Hudson River School, paintings stuck to its curved walls like barnacles on the side of a ship. “This city was an afterthought. When the Europeans first got here they sailed all the way up the Hudson, and when they got there they found this.”

“A little house in the woods?”

“They built the house, okay. But everything else was as you see it.” He took me from painting to painting, more Gifford, and Frederic Church, and Thomas Cole. My sense of the paintings’ saturated hues was that an impressionist had focused his camera, but K.’s story was blurry as a Monet.

He’d just gone up weekends at first, he said, like everyone else. He was dating a guy named Rafael then—in New York, he said, everyone had a Rafael at some point—but after they broke up he continued to go alone, staying at one friend’s house or another’s, then one weekend he had no place to stay but he went up anyway. He slept in his car. Not because he had to, he said, God knows there are plenty of Jewish hacienda motels Upstate (he didn’t explain that one either) but because he wanted to spend as much time on the road as possible. He drove all weekend, he said, said he didn’t know what he was looking for until he found it: a little white house at the terminal tip of a dead end road called Old Snake. Old Snake curved along the edge of a creek also called Old Snake, and creek and road ran in the low place between two hills, it was too shallow to be called a valley, K. said. He said the house at the end of the road was little and white and had settled under its weight but still stood in its shaded glen, and high up under the peaked eaves was a faded date: 1792.

“And you bought it?”

“Not exactly,” K. said.

“Not exactly?”

“Someone already lives there. His name’s Johanus Peeke.”

“He sounds prehistoric.”

“He’s a very old man who’s had the great misfortune to outlive his children.”