Josie and Jack (21 page)

The three naked women on the videotape were surprised by a workman, presumably there to clean the pool. There was hardly time for introductions before the workman slipped and fell into the crystal blue water, forcing the three women to fish him out and take off all his clothes.

“Classy,” I said.

“Comes free with the room.” Jack and I watched as the three women started to lick at the pool man’s wet body, which was skinny and too pale.

I felt a finger slide up my spine and the TV said, “There, aren’t you glad we got you out of those wet clothes?”

Later Jack and I sat together in a diner booth, our cheeseburgers pushed to one side as we pored over the apartment ads in the free newspaper spread out on the table in front of us.

“Here,” I said. ‘“Beautiful two-bedroom in East Village. High ceilings, great light.’ That sounds okay.”

“Josie. We have no jobs, no friends, and less than a thousand dollars to our collective name. Deduce.”

“No beautiful two-bedroom in the East Village?”

“Clever sister.”

“I thought we had more than that.”

“Hotel room is two-fifty a night,” Jack said absently and turned the page.

“That is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Here.” He slid the paper over to me.

The ad that his finger pointed to said only that there was an apartment available immediately and listed a phone number. No high ceilings, no great light.

“That’s good?”

“Very good.” He dropped a ten on the table to pay for our meal.

Nine hundred and forty, I thought, give or take.

Jack called the number from a pay phone and got the address. During the hourlong walk, I kept expecting to be impressed and excited by New York, and at first I was. We walked through a part of the city where the buildings were tall and beautifully wrought, covered in fine carved stonework or gleaming glass that reflected the clear summer sky. The people around us walked fast; they wore tailored suits and talked into wires that snaked from their ears to the sleek mobile phones they held in their hands. All of it, the buildings and the people and the limousines idling in the street, seemed part of something indefinable yet vitally important. Making my way through the crowds with my brother, I felt blissfully anonymous.

But as we walked, the buildings became smaller and the people slower. The fast walkers were still there, but now they looked overdressed and uncomfortable, and they were interspersed with people who ambled slowly and obliviously along, as if there was nothing in life that was worth hurrying to do. There was too much traffic, and everything was too loud. I kept a tight grip on Jack’s hand. I expected him to complain about it but he never did.

By the time we found the apartment building, the bottoms of my feet were burning and sore. The front door was propped open, so we didn’t bother ringing. The inside of the building was dark and stiflingly hot. The black and white ceramic tiles on the floor, the carved banisters, and the molding near the ceiling were regal in a dingy, exiled sort of way, but the paint was flaking and there was broken glass mixed with the small drifts of mysterious filth collecting in the corners. The apartment was on the fourth floor, the door painted bright blue. When Jack knocked, it was opened immediately by an impossibly tiny girl with tawny skin and a metal stud in the middle of her lower lip.

“Where the hell have you been?” she greeted us, fluttering brightly striped eyelids in consternation. “I expected you to be here, like, half an hour ago. I’m going to be late for work. What did you do,
walk
here from Midtown?”

I felt Jack’s grip on my hand tighten, but he only smiled his winning Jack smile. “Actually, we did.”

“It’s such a nice day,” I said like an idiot, standing in the oven-heat of the hallway in my sweat-soaked clothes.

The girl made a disdainful face and moved back to let us into the apartment. “Yeah, whatever. Here it is.” She made a sweeping gesture with her arm that managed to convey her contempt for the apartment, the world in general, and us in particular. “Look fast. I gotta get to work. ”

While we checked the place out, she dashed around angrily, pulling pieces of clothing from corners and covering her lips with coat after coat of thick red paste. The rug on the floor was worn but brightly patterned; the walls were painted a deep rich red and mostly hidden behind huge canvases with blackish purple bruises smeared across their surfaces. The cabinets in the tiny kitchenette were the same bright sky blue as the door. There was only one window, which opened onto a brick wall and was covered in iron bars. Someone—presumably the artist-girl—had candy-striped the bars with red and sky blue paint and woven a string of white Christmas lights through them.

“Are you on the lease?” Jack asked her.

“Fuck no.”

“Who is?”

“Like I give a shit. I give my rent to the guy downstairs. Nobody’s ever come to evict me.”

“How much?”

“Six hundred. Look, I’ve got to get to work. You want the place, I’ll be out tomorrow and I’ll tell Louis you’re coming.”

I looked around at the cramped one-room apartment and hoped Jack would say no.

“Yes,” he said.

“Fine,” the girl said. “I’ll throw in the futon for an extra fifty. You want it, pay me now. Otherwise, rent was due on the first, so you’re late.”

“But it’s the eleventh,” I said.

She shrugged. “Louis is a nice enough guy. Plus, we sleep together sometimes. So why pay if I’m moving out?”

That night, Jack wanted to celebrate. He bought a cheap bottle of champagne, which we drank in the hotel room out of plastic hotel cups. We watched another porn video. It was even cruder than the first one had been. We could laugh at it this time.

“I’m glad you came with me,” Jack said, dipping his finger in champagne and tracing our initials lazily on my stomach. “I guess I can be a pretty lousy brother. But I need you. You’re good.”

He bent over me and slowly licked the liquid from my skin. His tongue sliding across me was hot and alive.

If I’d been unenthusiastic about the apartment that first day, I loathed it the following afternoon. Without the paintings, the colorful rug, and the Christmas lights in the security gate on the window, the apartment seemed a lot less bohemian and a lot more like a prison cell decorated by the criminally insane. The mysterious filth in the corners of the hallway outside had escaped from the artist-girl’s rug, I guess, because there were places on the apartment floor where it was an inch thick.

The cheerful blue cabinets were cheerful, all right, but they were also painted shut. When Jack finally managed to cut one of them open with a razor blade (cutting his thumb badly in the process), we were greeted by a burst of hot, stale air, massive quantities of mouse droppings, and two cans of what we guessed was tuna fish. We had to guess, because the labels had been chewed off long ago.

“How long do you think this has been sealed up?” I asked, trying to keep my face out of the stench of the cabinet and sweep mouse droppings into a garbage bag at the same time.

“Don’t ask,” Jack said grimly, sucking on his cut thumb. He threw down the T-shirt he was using as a rag. His face and shoulders were coated with a thick layer of sweat and grime. Last night’s good humor had vanished. He walked over to the window, which was standing open against the heat, and slumped down below it with his head in his hands.

I watched him. I didn’t like what I saw. “It’s not that bad.”

“It is.” Jack rubbed his face hopelessly with both hands. “It absolutely fucking is.”

I scraped the last of the mouse droppings into the garbage with a folded newspaper and sat down next to him, trying not to touch anything, including myself.

“It’ll get better,” I said.

He surveyed the room with revulsion and shook his head. “You know, last night I actually thought the red paint on the walls was kind of sexy.”

“If slaughterhouses turn you on.”

“Christ,” he said. “We’ve got to sleep here tonight.”

I looked at the floor, which was still streaked with dirt after three rounds with the mop we’d bought that afternoon, and shuddered. The artist-girl had taken the futon with her. She’d taken our fifty dollars, too.

By the time we had taken care of the most obvious mess, it was after midnight. Jack managed to convince the man behind the counter at the corner store to reopen the deli counter and make us some sandwiches, which seemed, in my exhausted state, a miracle on a par with the loaves and the fishes.

On our way back into the building, we passed a young, black-haired man with olive skin coming out. We’d seen him earlier that day, on one of our many paper-towel-buying trips. He had stopped in the hall to watch us go by, staring frankly at us out of dark curious eyes. He hadn’t spoken to us and we hadn’t spoken to him, but now he lifted his chin in a sort of half nod.

Jack, noncommittal, said, “Hey.” I said nothing.

Upstairs, we spread the sandwiches out on the floor. Jack only made it through half of his before he was up on his feet, pacing.

Finally he put on a clean shirt. “I’m going out.”

“Where?” I asked, a bit incredulously, through a mouthful of ham and cheese. It wasn’t so much that I thought there was nowhere to go, in this huge city; but with so many places to go, where were you supposed to begin?

“For a walk. I’ll be right back,” he said and left.

Along with the sandwiches, Jack had bought an incomplete Sunday paper at half price. I spread it out in a thin mat on the grungy floor and covered the mat with the one blanket that we owned. Then I lay down. Our clothes were in plastic shopping bags, piled in the corner. Staring at them, I had a mental image of the artist-girl getting ready for work and tearing through piles of clothing. I had thought it was bohemian eccentricity. I’d been wrong. No closets.

It took me an hour of puttering around the apartment to realize that Jack wasn’t going to be right back, a conclusion I accepted with more calm than I would have thought possible a year before. He had only one shirt and not very much money, so I knew he’d be back eventually. There was nothing in the apartment that I hadn’t already tried to clean that day, so I folded back the blanket and read the newspaper. In the science section, I found a headline that read, “Dying star gives space telescope a chance to shine.” The article said, “A recent supernova, discovered at the Palomar Observatory in southern California, is expected to provide scientists with some of the most detailed photographs ever taken of the death of a star.” And, buried deep in the article: “The supernova is not expected to pose any danger to Earth. ‘Earth is in constant danger from interstellar objects and events—like asteroids and supernovas and solar flares—but the chance of a catastrophic event actually occurring during the span of human life on earth is infini-tesimally small,’ said one leading scientist. ‘In interstellar time, it would be like a blip within a blip.’ ”

I turned the page.

By the third hour I was hungry again. I ate the other half of Jack’s sandwich, but it didn’t help for long. I had Jack’s bankroll, so there was really nothing to stop me from walking down to the corner store and buying a loaf of bread or a can of soup. Considering this fully, with all of its various ramifications, took another half-hour or so. Once I even put my sandals on and stood up to leave, but I kicked them off at the door. I didn’t have keys, I told myself, which would mean leaving the apartment unlocked, which couldn’t be a very good idea. Besides, just because the outside door had been propped open all day didn’t mean it would stay that way all night. What if I went to the store and in the meantime somebody came along and closed the door? Better to stay and wait. Jack would be home soon, I told myself. By morning, anyway.

Sometime near dawn, the scratchy wool blanket pushed to the side and the newspaper thoroughly perused, I fell into a sort of half-sleep and dreamed that I was reading the comics in color but all of the colors were wrong and I couldn’t figure out what went where. The sounds of the street outside wove in and out of the dream like the artist-girl’s Christmas lights in the barred window. Someone was singing, in Greek, on the sidewalk, and the dream shifted. Raeburn was reading Euclid aloud, which he had done a lot that summer when I was six. Then he made toast for me, which, as far as I could remember, was something that he had never done.

September came and went in a hot, disoriented blur. The headlines at the newsstands screamed
BAKED APPLE!
and
HOT HOT HOT!
Even now I can only remember flashes of that month, like a slide show, and I can see the images but it’s hard for me to believe that I was actually there, acting and being and doing. And time must have passed, because one day I reached up to touch my collarbone and discovered that its edge stood out more than I remembered, as if I’d spent that month eroding.

One afternoon, when the humidity was obscene and being in New York was like being in a diseased lung, we spent two hours in the rainforest enclosure at the Central Park Zoo, where the automatic misters made the air dewy and cool. The park, with its wide green lawns and tree-lined avenues, was the only part of the city that didn’t make me feel desperate and alone. When we emerged, Jack’s shirt was clinging to his shoulders and my hair was curling and damp at the ends. In no particular rush, we made our way slowly across Central Park South, which was choked with people going home from work and movies and sightseeing. Jack took my hand so we wouldn’t be separated. I felt distinct from the rest of the world, as though I’d come from another time. I could see and hear and feel every detail with startling clarity: the heat in the air, the cool clamminess of the ersatz rainforest still clinging to our clothes, the way the thick silver chain that Jack wore lay against his throat, the sun going down, the musicians and street performers, the carriage drivers sweating in top hats, telling me that I should make my fella take me for a ride through the park, love. Everything fell into place like cards in a shuffled deck, making perfect and profound sense.