Like Son (23 page)
Eyes watering from the vomit I struggled to keep down, I ran to the back of the station wagon. I saw a blue uniform hat in the trash-cluttered gutter. Zoom in focus, I noticed the hat’s embroidered white eagle patch. And then there was the distinctive cart with two blue canvas saddlebags knocked over in the middle of the street. Letters and throwaway advertisement newsprint fanned out almost too prettily on the asphalt like paper napkins at a fussy cocktail party. George, our neighborhood mailman, was knocked out cold on the pavement under the car’s back fender.
“I thought it was a trashcan, I thought I’d hit a trashcan, I kept going. Fuck, Frank, help me,” Nathalie yelped.
Crying and hyperventilating but unscratched, Nathalie crouched over George all frantic gesticulations and giant eyes. My father’s blind man dark glasses kept sliding down her nose, her face a mess of blotches, dripped snot, and smeared makeup. The glasses. Shit, had she been wearing the glasses when she crashed into George? And what the hell did she mean, she thought she’d hit a trashcan? Nobody in Manhattan actually hauled trashcans into the street anymore. What did she think this was, fucking
Sesame Street
? Damnit, how could she see anything with those glasses on? As it was, she was still sort of sick. What was she doing trying to park a vehicle outside the shop when she should have been home resting? She had no right to be out and about and driving and wearing my dad’s glasses and crashing into innocent people. Again with the useless thoughts. Shit.
“Nat, I’m calling 911. I’ll be right back.”
“No, no, don’t,” she said, still on her knees, arms reaching out to grab me, the sour scent of fear detectable on her sweatslicked hands. “No, Frank, please, no,” she begged.
George hadn’t moved or opened his eyes the entire time I’d been standing there. I thought I could see him breathing, but his lips were starting to turn purple and his face was as pale and green as a dark brown complexion can get. Maybe the sickly hue was just from the cold, but I didn’t want to assume anything. I wouldn’t listen to Nathalie’s pleas. She’d clearly lost her mind.
I sprinted back to the shop and, more nerves than physical exertion, was totally winded once I reached the phone.
“911. What is the emergency?”
How could the operator sound so bored? Other people’s tragedies were a dime a dozen to her; she answered the call like she wanted a coffee break.
I struggled to catch my breath.
“Hello? Caller? This is 911. What is your emergency?”
“Frank!” Nathalie wailed from the street. “Come back. Don’t call. Omigod, Frank!”
Her voice seemed so far away. I could almost tune her out. Almost, but not quite.
H
ere.” I handed Nathalie my father’s dark glasses. Like some sort of weeping statue, silent tears trickled down Nathalie’s stone face. She slid on the glasses and slumped against the shop counter as I wrapped up early and made a sign to hang in the window—
Gone Saturday for Protest. Open Sunday.
Register closed out and door locked behind us, Nathalie hooked her arm in mine and leaned on me as we walked home. When we passed the station wagon I’d parked on Avenue A, she sighed deeply. And when we reached our building’s second-floor landing, she stopped. I pulled on her arm slightly to continue up the stairs, but she wouldn’t budge.
“Where’s Johnny? Have you seen him lately?” she asked, tears streaming from eyes still hidden under oversized glasses.
We were standing directly in front of Johnny’s door. I didn’t like the possibility he might hear us talking about him.
“No, I haven’t seen him recently,” I whispered, and tugged on her arm again.
“Well, where is he?” she asked, too loudly, and held her ground.
“Maybe he’s visiting family,” I replied quietly.
“No, he isn’t. He doesn’t have family. Where is he, Frank?
Where?!
”
I had no idea where Johnny was, but as far as I could remember in that quick moment, the last time I’d crossed paths with him had been when I’d helped him up the stairs on Chinese New Year. He’d come stumbling home just as I was getting back from the shop. It seemed he’d had a particularly long shift on a barstool.
It’s our year, kid, Year of the Black Sheep
, he’d said with a wink, his whiskey-and-beer breath hot on my face, his laugh echoing in the stairwell. Chinese New Year. February 1. Almost two weeks had passed since I’d seen him. Nathalie had a point. Going two weeks without seeing Johnny—at the mailboxes, walking around the neighborhood, whatever—
was
strange. I felt like a shit for not having noticed sooner, but I wasn’t his keeper. Hell, I was having a hard enough time tending to my own life, let alone making sure my neighbors were accounted for. Besides, Nathalie didn’t know if Johnny had family or not. But I wasn’t going to push it. She could just win this one: We hadn’t seen Johnny for a while; I was a jerk for not having noticed earlier. Agreed. Done.
I hated seeing Nathalie cry. I really fucking hated it. I knew she was totally torturing herself about crashing into the mailman. And, sure, she needed to take responsibility for what she’d done, but she didn’t need to beat herself up over it. Her guilt hadn’t subsided in the least after the paramedics told her George was fine. Nathalie had seemed almost more horrified when George came to and said the same himself. He’d even told Nathalie she shouldn’t worry, it was an accident, everyone had accidents.
To be honest, I wondered if maybe George had killed someone. It blew me away that he hadn’t wanted Nathalie at least cited for what she’d done to him. But he’d just smiled and waved away her desperate apologies. Maybe he was scared of her. I mean, Nathalie did look pretty fucking wild by the time he’d regained consciousness. If I saw a creature as frantic as Nathalie had been, I think I too would have backed away with my hands up, doing my best to remain even-tempered so as not to agitate the situation further.
I finally persuaded Nathalie to walk up the remaining flight of stairs to our apartment—and so began a restorative day of herbal tea and hot baths and dual comatose naps, all of which seemed to have the added benefit of curing Nathalie of her flu. Her eyes brightened and her sneezes stopped.
I was making us yet another cup of tea when I tried to ask casually, “Nat, why’d you rent the station wagon?”
“It’s Valentine’s Day,” she said.
Her answer clarified nothing. True, we were both sentimental idiots, but from day one Nathalie had threatened that if I ever came home on Valentine’s Day with chalky cheap chocolates and a bunch of genetically modified and scentless red roses, she might just throw them at me. Of course, the idea had been all the more tempting as a result. And there was one year I brought home the forbidden items, along with a crappy little bodega teddy bear, just to make her laugh. But, seeing as we’d never been “do something special on Valentine’s Day” sorts, I couldn’t tell if her explanation for renting the car was sincere or a failed attempt at irony.
Later that night, when we were leaving the apartment to return the station wagon, Nathalie handed me my father’s glasses.
“I don’t want them anymore,” she said, folding the glasses shut and sliding them into my coat pocket.
I pulled the apartment door shut and Nathalie stopped me. She hugged me, harder than maybe ever before. And then she pulled me to her even tighter. The plastic bulk of the glasses dug through my coat and sweater and T-shirt to thin skin and then to bones and bruised us both. Her embrace was a death grip. It was every ounce of her adoration.
“I wanted to get another tree,” she said. “I know, I totally fucked up, but I wanted to surprise you so we could drive to the forest and get another sapling. And when we planted the tree, I thought maybe instead of a glittery bird like you used last time, maybe this time we could put a little plastic dove on the top branch or something. I don’t know, I thought it could be like some sort of eco-anarchist protest and a Valentine all in one. Frank, I’m sorry. I’m so totally lame, right?”
So
not
lame. In fact, Nathalie had just given me thirty seconds of perfection.
W
e were walking home after dropping off the rental car when, practically right outside our building, Nathalie pulled me into Tompkins Square Park. My hand in hers, she led me down one of the park’s circuitous paved paths, past the central bricked area with the two giant elm trees whose trunks were perpetually wrapped in remnants of strung Hare Krishna flowers, and over to the cramped and fenced-in patches of landscaping on the east side of the park.
Nathalie stopped and stood on tiptoe to lean over one of the wrought-iron fences, squinting her eyes to peer into a winter-dead strip of city flower garden.
“Razzle-dazzle,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Razzle-dazzle,” she said again. “That’s what this one’s tag says.”
She pointed to a cluster of tiny rusted botanical identification plates staked in the ground among tragically pruned and barren rosebushes. In all the years I’d walked through the park, I’d never noticed there were rosebushes, let alone that each one was tagged with an official miniature plaque.
“Look at that rose, Frank. I’ve never seen such a luminescent purple,” she continued. “It’s almost electric. Like a Lite-Brite or something.”
“The roses are hibernating, Nathalie.”
Sleeping flowers. Rest in peace. I pictured a funeral wreath made of white roses and baby’s breath propped beside a small open grave, a banner across its middle with
Ángel
embroidered in silk thread.
“These are the most gorgeous roses I’ve ever seen,” Nathalie said, thankfully snapping me out of my unpleasant distraction. She smiled calmly. “They have magnificent noses. Don’t you think?”
Ah, I got it. Invitation accepted, I joined her game and leaned forward to where, come spring, roses would flourish. I inhaled deeply. The air was chilled damp oxygen. A blue scent. Icy crisp.
“Exquisite,” I said.
“My sentiments precisely,” she said, and took my hand.
We continued on our detour trip through the park, stopping at each fenced-in patch of dead plants. Nathalie described in elaborate detail the nonexistent blooms on every sleeping rosebush. I wanted to live there in that moment with Nathalie. Forever.
“I love you,” she said before we headed home.
“Thank you.”
“For saying I love you?”
“That too.”
Dinner that night consisted of ridiculously huge slices of frosted instant pink cake. Nathalie served it on her ornate Wedgwood Valentine “collectibles”—
Ladies Home Journal
gaudy pink dishware circa 1983. Each plate featured a faux-china relief of a bewigged dude dressed in knickers and holding a rose up to a bodice-and-wig-wearing chick who sat on a swing that hung from a flowered bough. I hated those plates. But Nathalie adored her tacky collection, and she swore the plates were safe even though
For decorative purposes only, not for use with food
was written clearly on the back of each one. Whatever, the plates made her happy. Nathalie turned on the radio and brought us cake to eat in bed.
“Almonds?” I sniffed the air as she sat beside me.
“Yes, dear,” she said.
The girl must have palmed a small puddle of almond extract into her hair when she was in the kitchen. She smelled like old-fashioned marzipan candy, like some hand-painted little pear. I wanted to consume her. But, marzipan being named for the god of war, I knew damn well the prospect wouldn’t be without complications. Pink plates of pink cake balanced on our laps, we sat in bed and listened to the news crackling from our stereo’s ancient and disintegrating blackfoam speakers.
An international research team of astrophysicists took the mic. One two, one two, this was not a test. The scientists made their announcement:
The speed of light had evolved. A nasal-voiced nerdy scientist explained:
Given that the speed of light can no longer be considered a definite fixed constant, nothing, not even the equations used to calculate the characteristics of nothing itself, nothing, absolutely nothing remains as we had previously understood.
Tell me, who wants news like that?
Another astrophysicist, not of the aforementioned team, was interviewed. When asked for his professional two cents, he responded:
Exceptional results deserve extraordinary evidence.
The evening music program began. Nathalie disappeared into the closet for a few minutes, then reappeared with the scarf she’d knitted for me and began searching through the kitchen junk drawer. She came back to bed with a huge pair of scissors and cut off several inches of that totally gorgeous soft handmade scarf—she just fucking lopped off a good chunk like it was nobody’s business. Horrified, I watched her pull back row after row of the knitting until barely a few inches were left. She took a knitting needle and tried to slide the scarf back onto it, one stitch at a time. I knew nothing about knitting, but it was clear the corrective surgery had gone awry.
“Can I help?”
“Thank you, but you don’t know how,” she said.
Hunched over, focused stare, tense jaw, strands of yarn covering her lap and an unraveling scarf tangled on her knitting needles, Nathalie started to cry.
“I thought I knew how to fix it.”
“Maybe it’d be better to start over …”
“No,” she snapped. And I mean
snapped
.
Fuck.
I didn’t know what to do. There was so much we weren’t saying. I wanted to tell Nathalie I understood, that I didn’t want to start over either, that I had endless love for her, and that even with the horrible story about Nahui’s baby still in my thoughts, I could actually foresee planning for a baby someday—but I wanted to remind Nathalie, it wasn’t me who’d bailed, who’d wanted to play blind, who’d mowed down the mailman, who needed everything to be a big grand production all the time. So could she please try to quit being so easily pissed off at me already? If either of us had any right to scream for sweets, it was me. Fuck slices of pink cake or even marzipan for that matter, I wanted Nathalie to tell me under no uncertain terms that she loved me, that she was happy with our life, that she wanted to be my girl forever and ever. Instead, I just sat there as she, frustrated and unapproachable, ate what was left of her slice of pink cake. The sound of her chewing nearly set me to tears—disgusted, revolted, scared-shitless tears.
