The Garden of Lost and Found (22 page)

“And you’re what? Waiting for him to topple over so you can get his property?”

“Well, not exactly,” K. said again.

“Well,
what
exactly?”

“I bought it from him, but I don’t take possession until he passes away.” We’d done the circuit by then, stood in front of the original painting. “I kept my distance at first, but over time I started spending the weekend with him. Just sometimes. We’ve gotten to be friends, sort of. We go fishing and he tells me stories about the old days, or I mow the grass for him, or mend fence. He’s promised to teach me how to milk a cow the next time I go up.”

I had to stop him there.

“You’re accusing me of a sentimental attachment to No. 1 when you’re knee deep in shit squeezing milk out of an udder? Give me a fucking break.”

Before I could continue a voice interrupted us.

“Nice talk! Very nice talk for a museum!”

I looked down to see a little old woman. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall and despite the heat outside she wore a ratty fox stole wrapped around her neck.

“All this beauty and you have to bring in the gutter! You’re no better than the animals out there! Look!” she said, and at the same time she waved a hand at the paintings and smacked K.’s paper. “
Look!
” she said again. “And you!” She pointed at me. “Put some clothes on!”

I looked at K. then, and he looked at me. We waited until the old lady was out of the room before we let our laughter out and, still laughing, made our way through the network of galleries to the exit. It had been just after noon when we hooked up and now it was just before nightfall, and we started walking, east and south, south and east, when suddenly I realized we were walking toward K.’s apartment, where everything had started in earnest yesterday. My brief euphoria evaporated as I remembered who I was, who K. was, who we were together, and I practically reeled away from him. I stepped into the middle of the street and waved wildly at an approaching cab. K. reached for me and I evaded his grasp.

“James? Where are you going?”

“Claudia.” It was the first thing that popped into my head. “I promised I’d help her pack.” I jumped inside the cab and yanked the door closed before K. could get in, but the window was open and K. stuck his head into the cab.

“I don’t understand you, James.”

Sometimes when people say that what they’re really saying is they
do
understand you, and I looked at K. in the hope that he could explain me to myself. But he was telling the truth. He didn’t understand me, didn’t understand anything at all. He put his hand on my chest—no, not my chest, but on the key hanging there.

“I never accused you of sentimental attachments,” he said, tapping the key lightly. “You accused yourself, remember?”

Blame K. for touching the key. Blame the woman who’d given it to me in the first place. Blame Trucker for giving me the uni-short, blame the social worker at the clinic who’d filled its bib with plastic promises a month ago, blame my attachment to sentimental accusations. But when I bent my head to look down at K.’s hand I saw instead the overlapping sheen of a half dozen foil packages in the pocket over my chest, and all at once I knew what I was going to do. But this much I swear: I didn’t come up with my plan until K.’s finger tapped the condoms in my pocket.

The words fairly flew from my mouth.

“Let’s have lunch tomorrow. No, wait. I have to help Claudia move in. Let’s have dinner.”

“Tomorrow?” K. said.

“Saturday.”

“Tomorrow
is
Saturday. Saturday the thirtieth.”

“
Fine
. I’ll cook you fish for dinner on Saturday the thirtieth.” I looked up from the condoms. Looked K. straight in the eye. “And afterwards you can fuck me.”

Even today I don’t know where the fish came from.

K.’s fingers tightened their grip on the taxi’s door. “Promise me you’ll consider selling the building.”

But I didn’t promise anything except to have sex with him, and when K. finally released the taxi it sprang forward as if he’d been holding it back. But as soon as it turned the corner I told the driver to stop, and I paid two dollars and stepped out of the cab and counted the rest of my money. I had enough for a hot dog or a subway token and…and how do I tell you this? I can’t remember what I spent my money on, but by the time I got home that night both my wallet and my stomach were, once again, empty.

CLAUDIA EXPRESSED NO SURPRISE when I told her she could move in. She didn’t seem very enthused for that matter, merely nodded at her aunt—the door to Nellydean’s apartment stood open when I descended the stairs, and their low voices carried into the stairwell—and then we took the phone downstairs to Nellydean’s office and looked up the name of a moving service in the yellow pages.

“Kevin From Heaven.” Claudia’s fingernail drew a wobbly crease under his name. “I like rhymes.”

When we got back with her stuff Claudia attacked my mother’s old apartment with the kind of industry only the truly idle can muster. Away went the silver dress, out came the 50s, a pair of jeans with a fifty-inch waistband Claudia cinched in with a Gucci belt, “’Cause the girl
got
to look good no matter what she doin’.” Over the jeans she wore a faded blue T-shirt, “Reggie’s,” she told me, and at first I thought she meant the shirt but then I saw she was pointing at something that looked suspiciously like a come stain. She tied a do-rag with the knot over her forehead, “Mammy style or gangland style, depending on your point-a reference,” pulled on a pair of yellow rubber gloves, grabbed a mop and declared, “Sistah’s gone do some cleanin’ now. Yassuh, sistah’s gone make this here dust bucket shine like nobody’s bizness.”

I left her then, headed upstairs to get my own apartment ready. But a half hour later I was back. I thought I’d see if Claudia had any pot—thought maybe that would calm the visions that danced before my eyes, or at least give me an excuse for them. But in the sparkling living room I found only a bucket of oily gray water: neither Claudia nor her mop was anywhere to be seen.

“Claudia?” I called, wandering to the back bedrooms. But the only sign of her was the boxes we’d brought in earlier.

I lifted the flaps on a couple. Her clothes smelled faintly of perfume, as did her bed linens, and her own face smiled at me from every one of the pictures she’d brought. Most were of her and someone I assumed was Reggie, but there were a few family shots as well. She was darker than her brothers, I saw, who favored the light-skinned, fragile-looking woman who figured in only one sun-blanched Polaroid. It had been taken in the garden behind the shop, and Nellydean was in the picture as well, as agelessly old then as she was now, a slight scowl on her face. The three teenagers were ranged between the two women like a bulwark, and I had to wonder if the old bag had ever liked anyone besides her niece.

Suddenly my mind flashed on the mantle in Claudia’s father’s study: Claudia had told me both her brothers were dead, but beside her mother’s brass urn there had only been the one other. I looked at the two boys in the picture again, wondered if their ashes were commingled inside it—but no, I remembered, Claudia had said just the one name, touched just the one picture.

Trucker’s watch caught my eye then: 2:30. I tried the hope chest next, but it was locked, so I padded off to the bathroom, and even as I poked through boxes of toiletries and towels I asked myself if on top of everything else I really needed the encumbrance of this woman I hardly knew, pregnant and penniless, and justifying her presence in my life with some cockamamie story about buried treasure.

That’s when I found the map.

It was hidden inside a box of bath salts slotted into a tightly packed milk crate shoved all the way to the back of her vanity behind a laundry bag. A lavender aroma tickled my nose when I opened the box, followed by the weedy scent of what looked like a full eighth of an ounce of pot. There was also a tiny bag of powder that looked a little too dark to be cocaine; but I reached past the drugs for the sheaf of paper hiding next to it. When I unfolded the pages I saw a floor-by-floor map of No. 1: my apartment (labeled simply “J.”), Claudia’s (“G.,” for Ginny I assumed), “N.D.,” and the shop with the office above it and storage rooms below. Claudia must have used some kind of blueprinting program because the map was laid out with crisp architectural precision: swinging arcs for doors, brackets for windows, Xed-out squares to indicate elevator and dumbwaiter; she’d even marked the electrical sockets on the first floor and the mezzanine. I suppose it wasn’t so much a map as a floor plan, but it felt more exotic because of certain gray-shaded areas (the legend declared these places “already searched”), cross-hatched spots (“likely targets”), a few blacked-out rectangles (“complete unknowns”). Although the map was undated, the extent of “already searched” and the withered, food-stained paper, as faded as the photograph of the teenaged Claudia with her teenaged brothers, indicated a long-term effort, and I let out a wolf whistle that echoed Kevin From Heaven’s from earlier in the day.

“Well, go-o-o-olly,” I said to the empty bathroom. “I guess Claudia really
is
looking for Momma’s stash.”
 

Although I hadn’t given it much thought—for a change—I guess I’d assumed that Nellydean had put Claudia up to her story, presumably as a way to keep me from selling No. 1. But now my mind flashed back to a few days ago, to the night I stood on the mezzanine outside my mother’s office after calling Trucker’s answering service. I mean, No. 1 really
was
a huge building, its basement and shop cram-packed with thousands upon thousands of boxes and crates and chests and piles upon piles of who knew what. Then there was the garden out back: who could say what secrets it contained? And of course the key hanging from my neck: surely there was a promise there. But even as I thought of actually searching each shelf, each box, tap-tap-tapping on every wall and digging in the dark places between the roots of the great old lindens and oaks and ailanthus trees, it seemed to me that the building rumbled beneath my feet, and when I looked down Trucker’s watch caught my eye. Nearly three. K. would be here before I knew it.

K.

All of a sudden I wondered if Claudia might be just as good as K. for whatever it was that ailed me. If, instead of digging my own rabbit hole, I could simply join Claudia in hers. But even as this thought wandered half formed through my brain a different sign made itself manifest on my body. Because when I thought of K. my dick got hard, just as Divine’s had gotten hard when he’d fallen on his knees to show me his appreciation.

I snapped a couple of buds from her pot supply, then went ahead and pocketed the bag of powder as well. I put everything else the way it had been: folded the map and slipped it in the box of bath salts and fit the box back in the milk crate. My fingers left four conspicuous prints on the dusty lid but I wasn’t bothered. This was a bona fide treasure hunt now. The leaving of clues was de rigueur. I pushed the crate to the back of the vanity and heaped the laundry bag in front of it and slipped out of Claudia’s apartment, tiptoeing down the hallway and looking both ways before I snuck out her front door.

When I got back from shopping I slunk up to my mother’s office and locked the door. I stared at the orange penny caroming across the dark expanse of my computer screen until, sighing aloud, I pulled the pot from my pocket, pulled also an empty can of pop from the trash basket and the package of needles from the deli bag. I flattened one side of the can, used a needle to poke a few holes there, then positioned the buds on the pinholes and went ahead and sprinkled the tiniest bit of junk over them, then flicked the lighter and held the flame over the little pile, drew in hot smoke through the mouth of the can and held it in my lungs as long as I could.

Stale cola added its own aftertaste to the harsh fumes, and three tiny hits was all I could manage. While I waited for the high to kick in I unlocked the desk and pulled out the letter from my mother I’d found on my first day here. In the flickering orange light of my bouncing penny I read: “I met your father in the dunes behind Jones Beach. He was one of three black-haired boys.” I stopped when it occurred to me there was no longer any point in reading further, used the lighter to set the sheets of paper on fire, held them until my fingers began to sting then dropped them on the marble surface of the desk and let them burn out there. When the flames were spent I noticed that the penny on my computer had acquired a comet’s tale as it bounced around the screen. I watched it, trying to see if it traced out a message to me less enigmatic than the name Claudia had traced in the dumbwaiter an hour earlier. But the message, suitably for The Garden, came in the form of a riddle:

A train leaves Selden, Kansas traveling east at fifty miles an hour. A train leaves New York City, traveling west at sixty miles an hour. If Selden, KS and New York, NY are one thousand five hundred seventy-eight miles from each other, how long will it be before they collide?

I remembered then: they weren’t called riddles. They were called story problems.

A-ha, I thought. I’m stoned.

I squinted to make the numbers on Trucker’s watch come into focus: 8:17.

Up two flights of pitch black stairs to Claudia’s apartment. No light seeped from under the door, and I pushed it open quietly.

“Claudia?”

Silence. I snuck down the hall to the bathroom. There was no reason for me to return the heroin now, and even through the fog of drugs I knew I was only doing it in the hope that she’d catch me. But Claudia’s apartment was silent as the grave.

On the way out I passed the crib we’d taken from her father’s apartment yesterday. It stood in the hall and I stared at it dumbly, wondering why Claudia had pushed it back out here. Then I realized it wasn’t the same crib. The paint from the one we’d brought downtown had been stripped at one point, leaving it a pale veiny brown, and this one was white, and I realized Nellydean must have dug it out for Claudia. I wondered if she’d just slipped it in the door, or if she’d seen the one we’d brought and left it here anyway, as a reminder—a reproach—that The Garden could provide for all our needs.