Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (11 page)

"Maybe you can do something with the hair," Harry suggested.

'"Verdad,
it's nice hair. I can give you something to make it really black and stick straight up. And I can give you a powder. An orange powder to blow on Jimmy."

"What will the powder do?" asked Harry.

"E'cucha,
it will get orange powder all over Jimmy.
¿Qué piensa' tu?
I've got ethics.
Exactamente
like Emma," she said, pointing at the photograph proudly while glaring at Harry "You leave this boy
con-migo.
We can fix him up."

Harry agreed to pay later for whatever they decided, and he and Chow Mein left to talk to Nathan about the flyers. Cristofina led sweet-faced Ruben to the back room.
"Digame, cara duke,
have you ever gotten a tattoo?"

Ruben, who was very tired of all this sweet-faced
cara dulce,
studied the designs on the wall with wide-eyed wonder.

"What do you say, Harry?" asked Chow Mein Vega.
"Cuchifrito
and beer? Consuela makes
gandules
on Saturdays."

"Shabbas,
you know. I have a lot of eating to do with my family. I've just recovered from the brisket, and it's almost kreplach time."

"Just have a le
k
and a
shmek,
Harry,
tu sabe',
just have a little bit," said Chow Mein as he led him to Consuela's for pigeon peas and pork fat.

L
IFE UNFOLDS WAY
— one bad decision can unravel everything. The more Nathan thought about it, the more convinced he became that the mistake he was looking for was called "cocktails." Sonia and he had agreed to meet Maya's parents "for cocktails." Nathan and Sonia never met people for cocktails. This would be a mistake. He was certain of that as he thumbed not quite absentmindedly through the telephone book and confirmed that there was a listed number for a Karoline Moellen.

Xabe walked in with a new ad, interrupting Casals's poetic but flawlessly restrained rendition of a Beethoven trio. Beethoven was aflame in the hands of a man who made even Bach impassioned. Nathan put down the obituary page and looked up at Xabe, who was at most five feet tall, his face barely higher than the counter, so that the paper he was showing Nathan was only inches from his face, as though he were about to eat it. Now the leading East Village artist, he had lost his outlaw standing. Xabe had always had an irrepressible urge to write on buildings. He was even arrested once for writing "Free Transport" on subway cars, accompanied by an illustration of someone hopping a turnstile. The illustrations gradually overtook the messages until they became elaborate spray-paint murals that were mentioned in enough fashionable magazines that it seemed almost everyone who opened a new business in the East Village wanted a Xabe mural on their wall. Xabe promoted this business with flyers that included photographs of his work. These flyers were carefully reproduced at the Meshugaloo Copy Center by Nathan under Xabe's demanding instruction. "Can we be a little less contrasty?" Try again. "The shadows should gray out. Let's try enlarging ten percent." Nathan was known for this kind of patient work. He was also known for not charging much for it.

Patience was the one rule at the Meshugaloo Copy Center. The Nuyorican poet Gilberto Banza, tall and lean with his long hair wrapped up in a red, white, and blue scarf that was the Puerto Rican flag, waited patiently to have three hundred copies of his new poem, "Chingada on Second Street," for immediate distribution. "Nathan,
tu
heard about Rabbinowitz?"

"Yes," said Nathan, struggling with the control buttons on the copier. "Terrible. He was a nice man."

The shop fell silent.

"He still owes me for
un trabajo,"
said Xabe.

"That
cabrón
owes everyone
por aqui,"
said Gilberto Banza.

Nathan thought these were harsh words for a man who had been so unfairly and brutally undone by his destiny.

He had to close early for cocktails, and since Chucho and Harry had been delayed by
gandules
at Consuela's, they missed him. The cocktails had been set in motion by the news of the house in Punim County and the swimming lessons and the preschool, which was all connected to the issue of money, which came back to the $500,000 sellout. No single event stands by itself.

First came the preschool that Maya went to but Sarah didn't. This caused discussions about other schools. Suppose Sarah didn't want to go to the public schools in the neighborhood that Nathan had gone to. The high school he had gone to on Fifteenth Street was famous, said to be the best in New York, but suppose she didn't get in. "She needs options," Sonia kept saying. "And colleges. NYU costs a lot more than when you went there," Sonia said. "And suppose she doesn't want NYU. Suppose she wants to go to Columbia. That's even more expensive." Sonia had gone to Columbia, but Nathan acted as though he had never heard of it.

"Columbia? On a Hundred and Sixteenth Street? It's so far away."

"She might want to go even farther. We are supposed to be offering her options in her life."

Nathan knew she was right. Each generation had its obligation. Harry had offered Nathan more than Harry's childhood in Poland had offered, and because of that it was Nathan's responsibility to offer Sarah more than he had.

Much of this would not have come up if the police hadn't insisted on cleaning up the neighborhood. They were slowly driving the squatters out of Tompkins Square Park, attacking in waves like a military assault and tearing down their tent city, only to have the squatters rebuild it in the night among the thick, leafy trees. The one small triumph of the police was in reclaiming a playground area where Sarah played. And that was where she had met her best friend. It was all connected.

"Mira,
Seltzer is going to his
destino,"
Carmela said with a smile warm as a kiss from the fire escape above as Nathan walked out of his shop. Nathan continued to close up his shop. Why was she suddenly talking about d
estinos?
Nathan asked himself.

"No," he shouted up, loving his own ridiculousness, "I am going for
cocktails."
He gave the exact same special emphasis to the word "cocktails" that Carmela had given to
"destino."
Carmela laughed a crude, lovable cackle, and Nathan waved good-bye as he walked away.

Walking up Avenue A, Nathan, Sonia, and Sarah passed several police officers who looked familiar enough to nod at. "Hello," Sarah insisted on saying, and most of them smiled and waved at her. But when they got closer to the park there were hundreds of them, and hard as Sarah tried, there was no smiling or waving.

"You notice something?" Sonia said in a low voice.

"Everyone's dressing like cops this year?" said Nathan.

"Jerk," she said, slapping him playfully in the chest. "No badges."

It was true. None of the police had badges on their shirts.

Nathan had never noticed before, but some of the houses on the north side of Tompkins Square Park, unusual for the neighborhood, were more like houses of the wealthy than tenements. The outside walls had been cleaned on the house that Maya and her parents lived in, and the wooden door frame and windowsills had been refinished. The three stories had tall windows that let in light, mottled by the swaying leaves of the park. Dozens of police were on the sidewalk, preparing for the attack on the park squatters that was a part of summer evenings in the neighborhood. They clubbed everyone in sight, so it was not a good idea to watch. But Maya's family could see everything from their window, like a more refined class that stood above society's frays.

Nathan, Sonia, and Sarah were ushered into the house by Maya's father, a young man with thick red hair and amber glasses frames carefully selected to match, and it was quickly apparent that everything in the house—the clean-lined, dark oak furniture, the brass and copper lamps, the deep colored rugs—was carefully selected to match.

"Arts and Crafts," Maya's father explained.

Sarah, the only Seltzer who looked happy to be there, noted the father's assertion in her notebook with a series of dashes. Sonia did not write in hers.

"And Mission," explained Maya's mother, a tall woman in a flowing dress of tissuelike thinness, and Sonia wondered if this was a rebuke for her failure to take notes.

"Ted got us unbelievable prices on these things."

"I'm an architect," he explained shyly, "so I knew where to get the deals."

Nathan nodded, while contemplating this new concept that architects necessarily know where to get deals. He had always been told that people in garments knew where to get deals, and he had never before thought about architects or what they knew. He kept trying to see what the cops were doing in the park without getting caught peeking out the window. Maya, a merry little spirit of the same size as Sarah, came running out, followed by a dark-skinned Puerto Rican woman in a bright purple dress. Nathan and Sonia both knew her, Rosita, the daughter of Consuela, who owned the
cuchifrito.
Nathan greeted her eagerly, relieved to see someone he knew from the neighborhood. But she was quickly sent away by Maya's mother, who wanted her to take Maya and Sarah off to some nether room of the house to play.

"She was a find," asserted Maya's father. "She is so good with Maya."

At first Nathan thought he was talking about Sarah.

"She's like a member of the family," said Maya's mother. "We wanted her to come to Putnam County with us this summer, but she didn't want to."

"She helps in her mother's restaurant," said Nathan.

"Yes," said Maya's startled father, "that's what she said!" Sonia thought that they were only a few years older than their young babysitter. "Come on, we'll give you the tour," said Maya's father with a gracious, sweeping arm gesture. Nathan stole a last glimpse of the park, which hundreds of uniformed police, clubs in hand, had surrounded, looking like a swarm of blue insects crawling over one another.

Maya's parents took Nathan and Sonia through every room in the house, and they could not find one trace of the normal disorder of life—except through the tall windows of the front rooms, where Nathan noticed the attack in progress. They had been in a back room when the assault began, and a great collective shriek could be heard. Nathan wanted to run to the front to see. He looked at Sonia. She had heard it, too, but had a look that said "Don't you dare move." Maya's parents did not seem to hear anything.

Maya's father showed them their workout room full of bright white and shiny chrome machines. "How do you stay so nice and trim?" Maya's trim young father asked Sonia.

"I don't like his mother's cooking," Sonia quipped, and Nathan laughed, while worrying that his own tellas were showing. Maya's parents looked at them quizzically.

"Let's have some drinks," said Maya's father, steering them back to the oaken living room. "What would you like?"

"A beer would be great," said Nathan. Sonia asked for white wine. People were running on the sidewalks with wet, fresh blood dripping from their heads, and police, clubs high, were chasing them. The sound was muffled under the rumble of air conditioners and behind the newly installed, tightly closed windows.

"Let's have martinis," said Maya's father as though they had not answered.

"Do you know Sagittarius, the new place on Third and First? Ted knows the owner. They make
colored
martinis. And they taught Ted."

"What color do you want? What holiday is coming up? Fourth of July Red, white, and blue! You want a blue martini or a pink one?"

"Pink," Nathan said ambiguously, all the while wondering if these people were Jewish. Their name was Kaplan. He had assumed they were, but there didn't seem to be anything Jewish about them. Sonia also reluctantly agreed to a pink martini.

A woman on her knees on the sidewalk—had she fallen, or had she been clubbed into that position?—looked up at a police officer who was about to hit her again and let out a wail so loud that it could not be ignored even in the living room.

"My God," said Sonia, "what are they doing?"

"It's just the East Village," said Maya's father. "It's pretty noisy down here now. But that will change." He closed the oak shutters so that his guests would not be further disturbed and turned to his mixology with a glass shaker and a stirrer.

"Linda can't have one," Ted asserted happily

Is she too young? Nathan asked himself, but Sonia immediately knew the real reason. She was pregnant. Sonia politely congratulated her and noted that she was not showing. But she suspected that she was the type who didn't show until labor, which would be painless. She could have two children, even more, and still do the things she wanted in life because she had money. Money for preschool. Emma often said that women who wanted children but did not want to spend all their time in child rearing should send them off to schools to be cared for by women who wanted to do that. But Emma Goldman did not know what preschool would cost. Sonia was not going to give this woman the satisfaction of asking what month she was in. But of course, Nathan, genuinely excited by the news, did. "When are you due?"

"November," she said. "Are you going to make a playmate for Sarah?"

A playmate for Sarah was an uncomfortable subject.

Ted produced three drinks, one blue and two pink, in long-stemmed glasses looking enough like designer crystal to make Nathan afraid to hold one.

There was a house, now an apartment building, on Thirteenth Street, whose brick facade with brownstone trim was like that of many other buildings in the neighborhood. From 1864 to 1867, while her husband, Benito Juarez, was freeing Mexico from the French, the highborn Margarita Maza lived alone in this house. From 1903 to 1913, Emma Goldman, the Russian-born anarchist, lived there. Margarita had been devoted to her husband, and they wrote letters to each other about how deeply they missed each other. Emma had a long relationship with Alexander Berkman, with whom she had unsuccessfully plotted the murder of an industrialist before they renounced violence. But Emma did not believe in marriage, was politically opposed to it. Also, Emma was at home in New York and later driven into political exile in Russia, whereas Margarita was in exile in New York and later went home to Mexico. They never met each other. Emma was born two years after Margarita moved back to Mexico.

It is probably for these reasons that the house had never attracted much attention, in spite of the fact that it is marked with plaques. Nathan had walked by the house his entire life without reflection until the day he saw a lean woman with curly, ginger hair standing in front of the fluted stone pillars that framed the steps and doorway, seemingly transfixed. What was she looking at? He read the plaques.

"Remarkable, isn't it?" she said.

Nathan turned and looked at her. She unfurled her left hand. "Emma," and then her right, "and Margarita. Emma Goldman and Margarita Maza de Juárez." When she said Emma Goldman she sounded American, but she said Juárez—Hwaah-rdace—like a Latina. He failed to see the significance of these two women. But what struck him most was the two unfurling hands. He thought that the most graceful gesture he had ever seen. What beautiful hands. He was in love with this woman's hands before he even knew her name.

And she looked Jewish! Except for when she said Bay-needo Hwaah-rdace. "Two very different women with different ideas about the same problem."

"What's the problem?"