City of Boys (22 page)

—Can I help it? she said when she left us to marry him. She touched my face with her long dry fingers. —No, she said. —I can’t. Teddy will take care of you.

We visited her only once, and the whole time we were there, she gazed right past us at the aquarium, Smokey in her lap, Stan hovering unhappily behind her chair. When Stan opened the icebox to try to find us something to drink, Teddy didn’t take his eyes away, looking in at all the vials of morphine with a look of concentration so intense that I thought even my mother might notice. It was only later that I realized he was counting them, though for what purpose I couldn’t imagine; perhaps since he started working at the store it had become second nature for him to keep track of inventory, whatever it was. On the train home, Teddy stood staring at the subway map, tracing all the various routes with his finger; he didn’t say a word about Stan or my
mother or the visit, and we have never gone back, but occasionally my mother calls, or Stan calls for her.

—Your mother wants to talk to you, Stan will say, hovering behind her while her mind tries to find its way back to the idea of talking to us. In the silence I can hear him breathing, and I can see my mother’s sad gray face as she holds Smokey in her lap; together she and Smokey watch the blue fish flick across the surface of the aquarium, in and out of the tiny silver castle, behind the deep-sea diver. Their eyes narrow and widen with the glitter of light against the fish. —Honey? she says to me. —Honey? And after a few minutes Stan will take the phone from her hand and her long arms will fall back to her lap. —Goodbye, Stan always says politely. —It was nice talking to you. He watches her stroke Smokey. He worships her white arms and dreams of them at night. She touches Smokey’s soft fur and feels his blood beat through his skin.

—She’s as happy as she can be for now, Teddy always says. —She has everything she needs.

Teddy promises me that someday we will buy a big house in the mountains upstate, and she can come live with us, and Stan, too, if he wants, but for now he will not talk to her on the phone, and when she calls, he lifts his head halfway from his book and stares at the table until it is clear Stan has come on the line with me. —We have to take care of ourselves, Teddy says. —I have to keep an eye on you.

And he does. He keeps careful track of me as I grow older; he sits at the kitchen table and watches suspiciously as I cut away bruises from the discarded fruits and vegetables he brings home from the store; he glances up at me as I look out the window at the men down on the street; they smile at me as he turns each page of his book slowly, unread. There is not a moment I spend that he does not watch, and when he is at work, there is the VCR, keeping track of my day.
When I leave him, he will sit at the table and turn the pages of his book, and every now and then he will look at the couch in front of the window, but I will be gone. I will smile at him from the slick pages of magazines. Men will turn to watch me walk down the street, and I will have many lovers. He watches to see that this does not happen. Sometimes at night with him, I feel as if I am being born all over again, emerging abruptly into the blue light of the television screen and Teddy’s anxious attention.

Downstairs the door slams again. Teddy does not move his thin back; he begins to relax as the Yankees continue to build their lead, and I look at the women in my magazine. Their faces are like the faces of birds, without expression, and I imagine what it would be like to have such red fingernails, how I would go to the grocery store with lips as red as these, how Teddy would look at me if suddenly my hair were to assume such strange shapes.

I go to bed before the catastrophe of the ninth inning. Teddy watches me walk to my room and turns down the television, but I can still hear the confusion when the game begins to slip away.

—Jesus, he says in a dull sigh, then later, again, —Jesus. Downstairs men move quietly through the rooms; I wonder what they read in the eyes of the women who gaze down into their palms.

Teddy stands at the mirror and straightens the black tie that is part of his uniform at the Safeway.

—There, he says, and smiles, then turns to me. —Listen, he says, —I’m taping a game, so don’t use the VCR.

I have never used the VCR, but I nod and when he leaves I watch him walk down the street to work. He walks in the exact center of the sidewalk, not once looking around him.
Downstairs, on the pavement in front of Madame Renalda’s, two men look up at me, brave in the daylight.

—Hey, one of them says. —Hey, girl.

They smile when I look down at them.

—Hey, says the other, —come on down here. You come on down here.

I stare at them, and they grin at each other; but they’re not really smiling. Something hard and frightened waits behind their faces.

—What’s wrong, honey, one says. —You deaf?

They laugh at this, and I watch Teddy turn the corner by the newsstand where young couples line up to buy the Saturday-evening edition of the Sunday paper, which they will carry home to spread across their shining wood floors. They will kneel over it and kiss across the fine print.

I close the window and the men laugh as it goes down. But when they can no longer see me, they lose interest, and look nervously at Madame Renalda’s door.

I fall asleep in front of the game Teddy is taping, my hand resting on the shiny face of a beautiful woman. As I sleep or as I dream, the men from Madame Renalda’s enter my apartment. They are followed by a herd of boys, jumpy in tight jeans and big sneakers. Slowly the men remove my clothes, slowly take their turns with me, while the boys anxiously watch but do not touch. When they leave, my blood trickles out into the streets behind them. The men pay no attention, but the boys stop and turn; they mix my blood with the sand and grit and glass in the streets to make tiny cakes. As they eat, blood stains their hands, their mouths, and when they finish, they stand in line at Madame Renalda’s, nervously wiping at their red lips with their long red fingers. When I wake, a storm has come up, flapping the loose screen against the window. The game is on, but whether it is the tape of the earlier game, or the game itself, I can’t
tell. Teddy is home and I listen as he pours himself a glass of milk. It’s dark, but it could be any time. He comes into the room and smiles at me, a thin line of milk across his mouth, and downstairs a door opens, closes. Men move uneasily through the rooms below, and in the streets young boys cruise up and down, following a fading trail of blood. —So, Teddy says, —why don’t you come to the store tomorrow?

I nod and walk stiffly to my room. Teddy watches me for a moment, then turns to the baseball game.

Though it’s only early summer, the heat is already suffocating; I hear the men on the street talking about it constantly, trying to explain to each other what they have not understood from the television news. —It’s this greenhouse thing, they say knowledgeably, —it’s just going to get hotter and hotter, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. They nod and wipe at their necks and faces, trying not to move too much in the airless heat. In the summer here, only insects move freely; they seem to thrive in the heat. Already they are breeding and being born, and the men watch with glazed eyes as insects crawl through their apartments, into their food, across the blank faces of their babies.

Women sit at windows and on fire escapes, looking down at the men, who are too hot to offer them more than a joyless attention, punctuated by an occasional spasm of anger or interest. Surrounded by the empty face of their future, the men can do no more than what’s expected of them as they wait anxiously at Madame Renalda’s door.

I stay inside most of the summer, reading the magazines Teddy brings me from work, except when he invites me to the store, where I sit in the air conditioning and watch him stack fruit.

Today when I come out of the apartment into the heat, the
men watch me without interest, mouth words without meaning. —Hey, baby, they say. —Hey, girl.

A man stands at the corner, handing out flyers. He flicks them into the faces of people who pass, so they must take one or brush his arm away. —Hey, he says. —Check it out. He winks at me and hands me a flyer.
MADAME RENALDA
, it says;
A TRULY AMAZING PSYCHIC
. —Check it out, the man says again, and smiles a smile not meant for me, but he follows me with his green eyes as I walk to the Safeway. Insects flicker in front of me, across the hot sidewalk; underneath the concrete there is a thin layer of them, moving gently over the surface of the whole world, untouched by the feet of men.

At the Safeway, women roam from line to line, looking for the shortest, though even then there is always something to slow things down, someone who has forgotten her checkbook, or hasn’t brought enough money. As each woman settles finally into a line, she watches the progress of those ahead of her for a while, then pulls down a magazine and becomes lost in the enormous lives of people she does not know: movie stars and rock singers and athletes. For a moment she reads and forgets herself, her cart, her child, and when the time comes to pay, she looks up, startled away from a world she can never inhabit, never even imagine without the magazines to inspire her. She looks at the boxes of cereal and bags of potato chips in her cart, at her child’s dirty face and cheap shoes, already too small, and puts the magazine back, to enter, once again, with a kind of dull surprise, her life.

In the produce department, Teddy arranges fruit in colorful piles, stacking light green apples next to yellow ones, high
in a slant toward the mirror. His thin arms move smoothly from the boxes to the neat banks of apples. His apron is bright white, and his face looks tired and old under the glare of the supermarket lights; fruits and vegetables rise neatly around him. Suddenly a hand appears in front of my face, holding a large red apple. I turn, and it is Donny, Teddy’s manager in the produce department. He smiles.

—Here, he says. —For you.

Donny and Teddy had been, for a brief while, a kind of friends. Donny came over once or twice to watch ball games, but he was a Mets fan, and seemed to take special pleasure in every Yankee loss. As abruptly as he had begun to come, he stopped; when I asked Teddy about it, he only said that he didn’t really like Donny’s kind of person. —No ambition, he said, —he doesn’t want to
be
anything. And besides, he talks too much. This was true; the times he came over, he sat on the couch and drank beer and talked all the way through every game while Teddy stared straight ahead at the television. Now he stands right in front of me, so close I can smell something damp and fruity on his breath. Teddy turns slightly, and in the mirror I can see him watching us. —So, Donny says. —When did you get to be so cute?

His eyes close and open in a slow blink. I can see the outline of a contact lens in the white of his eye, and when his lids rise, the lenses shift, slipping around until they settle again. —Huh? he says, and this is what I remember most about his visits to our house, that he said —Huh? all the time.

—How about that Gooden, he’d say, —he’s got any Yankee pitcher all beat to hell, huh? And Teddy would crouch closer to the screen. —Huh? Donny would say again. —How about him?

—I don’t remember you being so cute, he says now. —How did that happen?

—I don’t know, I say. —I guess it just did. I bring my hand to my throat and leave it there, a gesture I have seen on models in my magazines.

—Well, he says, —maybe I’ll just have to come by sometime. He looks over at Teddy, then down at my hand against my throat. —How about that? he says. —Huh?

—I don’t know, I say. Teddy has gone back to putting apples in neat rows, but in the mirror his eyes meet mine. Donny watches him for a moment, then smiles at me.

—Here, he says, and hands me the apple. It is perfect, without a bruise.

As Donny walks away, Teddy’s eyes follow, his hand resting on a bank of pale yellow apples.

—So, he says, —what were you talking to Donny about?

—Nothing, I say, and he wipes his hands on his white apron.

—What’s wrong with your neck? he asks. —I saw you rubbing your neck.

—Nothing, I say. —It itches.

—Well, he says, —okay. Here. He hands me one of the apples he has arranged. —These green ones are better than the red. They’re not so big but they taste better.

Donny looks at me from his corner by the avocados, and as I leave, I can feel his eyes on me all the way out of the store.

—Look, Teddy says when he comes home, and he pulls from his grocery bag a loaf of store bread, a few spotted bananas, and finally, carefully, an avocado. He smiles.

—We can have this for dinner, he says, —in a salad or something. The avocado is perfectly ripe and green, and we eat it with salt.

—When I’m promoted, Teddy says, —we’ll eat like this all the time. As he gently peels the skin away from a piece of avocado, the buzzer rings. We look at each other and at the
door; finally Teddy puts down his avocado and answers the door. It is Donny, smiling, holding a six-pack of beer.

—Hey, he says, and looks past Teddy at me. —Hey, he says to me.

—We’re eating, Teddy says. —We just started eating.

—Oh, Donny says, and looks past Teddy again, at the table. —And eating pretty well, too, he says, —huh? He winks at me, and Teddy turns to look at the avocado.

—Well, Donny says, —I was just in the neighborhood, and I thought I’d come by to, you know, watch the game.

—It’s over, Teddy says. —They played this afternoon.

Donny steps forward. —I thought you recorded all the games.

—No, Teddy says. —Not all of them. He backs up a step, starts to smooth his hands down the front of his shirt, then looks down at his green fingers and stops.

—Well, says Donny, —okay. I was just in the neighborhood. Anyways, he adds, —they lost. He winks at me again. —See
you
later, he says, and turns.

Teddy locks the door behind him and pulls the chain across, even though it is not yet fully dark out. He sits down and gazes at the avocado on his plate.

—You know, he says. —I don’t really like him.