Love Is the Law (11 page)

I made it back to the apartment, and picked up what needed picking up. It wasn’t that messy after all. We didn’t have much, and my father had taken all he could carry. He probably had had that woman with him, or perhaps even a third person, and a car. One big trip and he took half our belongings. He left the TV, but the remote was missing. I imagined Grandma grabbing it in her claw-like hand and refusing to leave without it. My own overnight bag I’d left in the trunk of Mike’s car, so I was down to a Hefty bag and an oversized purse for packing purposes. I found a jar of peanut butter, unopened, and a tablespoon and packed that as well. Then it was out to the Volkswagen. I smeared some mud over the license plates, then drove through the giant puddles in the Meat Farms parking lot to splash more dirty water along my wheels and the sides of the car. It was all busywork to keep from thinking about what I should have been thinking about—did Bernstein really kill himself? Did he “create” Chelsea on some level, transforming her into someone rather like me . . . or like he had wanted me to be? How long would it take for Dad to get sick of Grandma—I was fucking sick of her—and leave her in an ER somewhere, or even just on the side of the road? I’d been tempted to, but I needed her Social Security check to pay rent.

I am not a very nice person sometimes. I guess I do take after my dad.

I drove to the deli, bought a pack of cigarettes—Pall Mall Gold, like Grandma used to smoke before her dementia made that an arson risk—and dialed the hardcore show hotline from the pay phone outside. Another Abyssal Eyeballs show, but in two nights. I’d have to check that out. Then I drove into Joshua’s development, parked about a block from his house, and walked the rest of the way. I waited for him on his stoop, smoking cigarettes and occasionally repositioning the painting on the step for it to be nonchalantly discovered next to my knees. I should have worn a skirt, but Joshua already had a masturbation problem and I needed his help.

The sun was down, and I had smoked four cigarettes, by the time he pulled up in his driveway. He had a bag of Chinese food with him—enough for three people from the look of it. “Hey,” I said to him, “is it D&D night?”

“What do you want?” he asked, all surly. He stayed by the car, keys in hand. I waved my hand in the air to signal the motion detector porch light, then nodded toward the painting. “I brought something for you to look at.”

Now Joshua was interested. “Where did you get that?”

“Oh, this ol’ thing,” I said. “A few places, actually.”

“The Tower,” Joshua said. He trotted up to the stoop. My stomach growled loudly. I was half-ready to trade the painting for his egg rolls.

“I was wondering if you could help me sell it,” I said. “You must get a lot of freaks—uh, I mean, aficionados—in the store.”

“What’s its provenance?” He put his sack down, extracted from it a little white cardboard box and a plastic fork. No chopsticks for this guy. He ate his chow mein noisily.

“A semifamous occultist painted it.”

“Some longhair’s been looking for you,” Joshua said. “Metalhead kid.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“Nope,” Joshua said. “Do you think I’m crazy? Why would I bother trying to sell some painting for you?”

“Can you afford a home in Port Jefferson on a comic book store clerk’s salary?” I said. “No. You have sidelines. Selling stuff, probably. Porno Japanimation, other things, under the table. To weirdoes.”

“Maybe I inherited this house.”

“You didn’t inherit shit.”

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah—if you had, you would have sold it and moved away. That’s what everyone your age, without kids, does. You know that Long Island is a little turd hanging off the east end of America.”

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “You stay here. Give me the painting.”

“I’ll stay here with the painting.”

Joshua dug his keys out of his pocket, which required some juggling of the chow mein and his bag of food—he held the latter between his fat knees—and muttered, “Excuse me,” like he didn’t hate me and I wasn’t practically trespassing, and headed inside. If he called the cops, I’d jam. If he called anyone else, I’d be eager to see what they had to say for themselves.

I was surprised when, a few minutes later, a dumpy-looking station wagon pulled up behind Joshua’s car. The door behind me swung open and Joshua stepped out. He smelled like food, and the sort of sour sweat typical of him. I was dazzled for a moment when the driver of the station wagon hit her high beams, and then when the lights went out like extinguished matches, out came Aram and Karen both. Karen smiled when she saw me. Aram had a camera with an unwieldy looking flash attachment.

“Well, hello!” he said. “We meet again. Are you the artist?” Without waiting for an answer he lifted the camera. I lifted the painting and interposed it between the lens and my face, and tried to tuck my knees up behind the canvas as well.

“I’ll hold it,” Karen volunteered. She stepped forward and plucked the painting from my hands without any other comment. She was tiny enough to hide behind the canvas for real, and she expertly kept her fingers off the painted surface. Aram grinned and took three photos. The flash filled the front yard of Joshua’s house like a nightclub strobe light.

“Are you interested in buying this or no? It’s not a tourist attraction.”

“They represent . . .” Joshua said slowly, “a certain interested party.”

“Aram’s a Maugham scholar,” Karen said from behind the paper. I did not know that.

“I’m mostly interested in Maugham’s views of the Brontës, but I have a secondary interest in the Gothic, of course,” Aram said.
Of course
, like I was another graduate student and not a punk kid, genius notwithstanding, who hung around Stony Brook mostly because they had shows there, and a cool radio station, a few real leftists—a short list from which I could now scratch the Red Submarine crew—and some people around my age I didn’t want to brain with a hammer. But I knew enough to ask:

“Ah, so like
The Magician
, W. Somerset Maugham’s book about Crowley.” I instantly hated myself for adding
W. Somerset
to Maugham’s name. It made me sound like I’d just read the name on the cover of the book and knew nothing else about him. Which was true, but to tantalize these people I had to come off as something other than a student. “Have you read much Crowley, actually?” I asked.

Aram smiled. He had so many teeth, it was almost inhuman, and they all appeared to be shaped exactly alike. “Oh no. I flipped through some of it; seemed like the rantings of a madman, which I’m sure Crowley in a lucid moment might admit that they were.”

“Well, that’s part of the charm. So, who are these photos going to?”

“Someone Aram’s working with for his dissertation,” Karen said.

“He might wish to buy the painting. How much are you asking?”

My mind buzzed. What’s a deposit and a month’s rent on a studio apartment around here? How would I even find a studio apartment around here, in prefab town? The East Village, maybe—no, that was a total fantasy. “That’s negotiable,” I said after too long a silence. “I’d have to meet any potential buyer. It’s an occult thing; you wouldn’t understand.”

Aram chuckled and shrugged, like a cartoon bear. “I’m just a humble go-between,” he said. Karen stiffened up though. I stood up and took the painting back. “But perhaps he would like to meet you. He’s the sort of person who likes to . . . ”

“Collect people,” Karen said. She smiled again, this one forced, like a puppet built with posable lips. “In a good way. He’s very wealthy, and occasionally even generous. He likes to have bohemian friends; he probably thinks it puts him in touch with a more authentic self.”

“Something like that, yes. We’ll get him these photos,” Aram said. To Joshua: “We can contact you, yes?”

“I’m brokering any sale, yes,” Joshua said. I put a dumb look on my face. I nodded at Joshua, and even beamed. Yep, just a girl with a ridiculous haircut, needing the comic book store manager’s help to do anything more complicated than tie her shoes or suck a dick. “Bring the painting inside, Dawn,” Joshua said, all nonchalant.

“I need to get it back home,” I said. “I’ll see you later, Josh.” And with that I trotted away from the stoop.

Aram called out, “Can we give you a ride anywhere,” and Karen giggled as I held the painting over my head and squeezed through some shrubbery to cut across a neighbor’s backyard. Joshua just said
Shit!
and loudly.

I got to the car, started it, and was shaking almost too much to drive. There are no coincidences. There are no coincidences. And what did Joshua want with me, inside? Had he called the pigs after all, and let one in through the back door? Was he just going to cold conk me, tie me up, rape me? He’d probably jerk off to that little fantasy once he got over his disappointment, and his inability to chase after me. All men are pigs. I felt like a pig just for imagining Joshua’s fantasies and so transparently getting them right.

I cut through the side streets and found the highway. It occurred to me that I had nowhere to go.

In the city, homeless kids group together and live in squats, or in the park, or wander the seemingly endless labyrinth of the subway system. In the city, there are public bathrooms everywhere if you know which restaurants and bars to patronize, and there are tons of free food for the salvaging if you don’t mind stale bagels and the occasional tussle with a rat. In the city, people don’t lock their doors and call the cops when they see someone they don’t like walk down their block. The entire system of telephony would collapse into a flaming wreck, sparks raining from every transformer on every telephone pole in the five boroughs.

But Long Island was not the city. It was where people went to escape the city, to free themselves from their kin and fellow ethnics, to play lord of the manor over their quarter-acre backyards. When Robert Moses had the Northern and Southern State Parkways built—the so-called “Master Builder” did not “build” them as historians and journalists would have it;workers build things, labor does—he kept the overpasses low to keep city buses, and blacks and Latinos, out of his island and off his precious Jones Beach.

Bernstein had had a great rant about Robert Moses, and made me read
The Power Broker
. “Unelected power, entirely occulted, and I mean that in both senses of the word, Amaranth!” he said as he handed it to me. He’d still occasionally call me Amaranth when excited, though by then he knew my name was Dawn. His other nickname for me was
Golden
Dawn, which amused us both, but him much more. Robert Moses, despite his Jewish background, was a Freemason and had an abject fascination with the Aryan race. With Long Island as a mystic laboratory, Bernstein said, Moses wanted to bring a new people to a new promised land—WASPs. And he wanted to seal them off from the rest of the state of New York, in the hope that the lily-white Methodists and Presbyterians would, like millions of churning spermatozoa, alchemically and spontaneously generate a “social homunculus” that would have all the attributes of Adolf Hitler, save one: a human body. The body was the role of the mother, and in Moses’s formulation, the phallic island had no yonic counterpart. And it happened too! Despite Nassau County having plenty of Jews, and Suffolk a huge Italian American population, the social homunculus was alive and helping drag the state of New York, and by extension all of America, to the right. “By the dawn of the new millennium,” Bernstein told me, “fucking
Ayn Rand
will be considered a serious philosopher. Democrats will be pulling off shit that Ronny Ray-gun wets the bed dreaming of—slave labor for welfare mothers, permanent military bases all over the Middle East, torture chambers deep underground, bugs in every phone and office fax machine, computer chips in everything else, and robotic stealth bombers doing all the dirty work. And that will be the
liberalism
of the epoch. What Robert Moses summoned cannot ever be banished, not now that the Eastern bloc is in disarray, with the blood sacrifices in Tiananmen Square. There’s some Taoist alchemy for you.”

Bernstein rarely drank anything but water and Coca-Cola, and he finished a half-full two-liter bottle in an extended guzzle. Some trickled down his chest and belly. It had been a hot night, that one, and we were both sweating out our lusts for one another, in bed, me between his thighs as he declaimed. His balls tasted like sugar. Then he said, “Plus that fucker Moses chased the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. I’ll never forgive him for that shit.”

The Dodgers reminded me of an old 1010 WINS radio commercial. “Are the Dodgers coming back to Brooklyn?” the excited voice-over artist would shout, and the camera itself would zoom toward a clock radio. And WINS, a news station, reminded me of the newspaper, and that Dad used to buy
Newsday
for me to flip through when we went to the diner, even though we already had home delivery. There was a diner out in Hauppauge, open twenty-four hours a day. The Pioneer. I headed west, pleased to stop short of the city.
Wir bleiben hier
.

I got a booth in the back—the hostess was happy to oblige, given my looks—and bought a coffee. Bernstein had trained me to sit with my back to the wall whenever in a restaurant and to keep an eye on the entrance and windows. On the rare occasions when we went out to eat together, we’d share the same side of the booth. Waitresses often assumed that we were just high, or retarded. Once, I complained to Bernstein and he said, “Well, if that’s what they think, they’re half right.”

I ordered a plate of fries, and read yesterday’s paper, which someone had left behind in the booth some hours earlier. More enthusiasm for the crumbling of the Eastern bloc. Honecker was cornered by his party’s own youth brigades, who chanted, “Gorby, help us! Gorby, save us!” What a pair of slogans—as if Gorby would do anything for those kids but hand them over to the West Germans so they could compete against Turkish immigrants for the lowest-paid work. We can only ever save ourselves, either as a class or as individuals.

The diner was mostly empty, but amazingly I saw someone I knew from Port Jefferson. It was the old Greek lady, with the cats. She was sitting at the counter, her legs not even touching the floor, and chatting amiably, in Greek, with the counterman. I had a reason to drive twelve miles, and past two or three other diners that actually close at one in the morning, but what would she be doing here? I studied her closely. She wasn’t smiling. Both she and the counterman were Greek, but outside of a passing physical resemblance there was no sign that they were related. She was easily thirty years older than he, and wearing widow’s black, so I wasn’t witnessing a flirtation despite the occasional shoulder squeeze and loud laugh. She was old enough to be free of the tyranny of men. When was the last time I talked to a man who didn’t want to fuck me, and the last time I talked to a woman about a subject other than men? Years, probably.

I inhaled deeply and concentrated. I raised my own feet from the floor, crossed my legs, shifted my weight onto my left side like the old woman did. I held my mouth like she did, drank the bitter remains of my coffee to match the tiny cup of the Turkish stuff she had before her. It was both sympathetic magic and basic materialism—by somatically emulating the woman I could gain entrée to her thought processes. I’d be her doppelgänger.

She was lonely. She was attempting to be an enthusiast to keep the man’s attention. She knew that a tangle of ethnic, generational, and gendered obligations would keep him rooted on the spot, here and now without the excuse of other customers, chatting with her. That’s why she drove twelve miles for a cup of midnight coffee. The alternative was home, and the cats, and a television full of people rapidly communicating in a language she still wasn’t comfortable with. She liked feeling intelligent and rarely had the opportunity anymore. Once or twice in just a few minutes she corrected the pronunciation of something the counterman said—his Greek wasn’t native; the accent didn’t sing. The counterman would have greatly preferred to speak in English, and she knew it, so exercised her power over him by sticking to Greek.

And I became her. I was lonely too. There was no place for me to go; I had no connections with anyone anymore, other than those I made by force. I felt like a tiny brain floating within a disobedient blob of a body, my protoplasm smeared against a corner of the Earth’s rocky crust. But don’t two smears grow closer and closer under the light of the sun, and finally become one? It was night out, but the moon was full and something quaked in my body and I decided to go for it. She would have something to teach me, this woman.

Finally, the counterman made his excuses and left his position. She held her posture and watched him slip into the kitchen, then immediately deflated. I took my coffee and walked up to her and said hello. I did it in that nonthreatening way people around here often do: “Hullo.”

“Hello,” she said. “Are you a clown?” There was no venom in her voice. She even smiled. She had a gold incisor. Total rock star. But she thought I might work at the circus, which might be in town, and after a long night of spritzing myself with seltzer I came to the diner for a late-night meal.

“No, I just like this look,” I said.

She glanced up at the sides of my head. “Don’t you get cold? Winter is coming?”

“I have a hat,” and I produced my longshoreman’s cap from the pocket of my jacket.

“Good, good,” she said. “If your head is cold, everything is cold!” Then she said something in Greek. It sounded like
cot-zseh
. Then she said, “Sit, sit,” and patted the stool next to hers. So I sat, and made a promise to myself not to speak of men. Of course, as the only thing I could think to ask about was the counterman who had just left, I had efficiently rendered myself a mute. The scars on my stomach tingled. There was no need to worry, however. The woman was full of conversation. She didn’t even ask me my name, but offered hers. She was Chrysoula. She said it meant “golden treasure” and even tapped a fingernail against her tooth. Chrysoula had a younger sister whose name I’ve forgotten, but it meant “silver,” and the economics of it all really tickled Chrysoula. She said that she had seen me around Port Jefferson, and was surprised to see me all the way out here, but she didn’t ask me what brought me to this diner, and didn’t offer a reason for her own patronage, except that the Lite-Haus Diner, in Port Jeff, was disgusting and full of roaches. I mentioned that my grandmother had once said the same thing, having seen a roach there twenty-five years ago, before I was even born. Then she launched into a long history of that diner and its various owners, and their battles with both rats and health inspectors. They had not acquitted themselves well against either foe.

Here is the important thing that she said: “Watch out for your family.”

“My family?” I hadn’t realized we had been talking about family.

“The family is the problem,” she said. “They’re always close. Too close.” The counterman came back with a small plate of greens, and two slices of lemon. Chrysoula dug in without a word to him or me. “I am old, so nobody young pays attention to me. A woman, so no man pays me attention neither. Not American, so the Americans don’t see me. But I see all of them, you see?”

“I do see,” I said. “So, you’ve seen me around? My family?”

“I see everything,” she said. “I know your father. He walks around the town on drugs.” I instantly wanted to vomit. I was tempted to ask if she had seen a lady even older than her wandering the streets of downtown Port Jeff in a pink housecoat, but thought the better of it. I liked this woman. She reminded me of me. “You come all the way here from Port Jefferson like me. You want to hide, but you are too crazy looking. Who are you hiding from? Where is your family, that you come to the diner so late at night and don’t eat nothing?”

“So,” I said, remembering my vow and nodding toward the little plate before her. “What you got there?” Talking about family would mean talking about men, necessarily.

Her mouth half-full, Chrysoula bared her teeth and said, “
Vleeta
.”

The counterman said, “It’s amaranth. Greeks eat it. Sometimes hippie weirdoes do too.” He shrugged. “It’s just a normal green. Has sort of a sharp flavor.” Bernstein used to call me Amaranth. There are no coincidences. I realized where my grandmother might be.

It wasn’t a long drive back to Mount Sinai, but it felt like I was crawling along the asphalt instead of riding in my car. Every traffic light was against me, and I was at war with myself, as usual. Not just between the poles of attraction of Marxism and magick, but between my affection for my grandmother, my hatred of my father, and the fact that the old Greek lady was absolutely right. For all my posing, I was still a slave to my family and their demands. Bernstein was a respite from all that, or so I’d thought, but he was somehow attached to my father. My grandmother even had a nickname for him, one that she remembered. The fucking bat had been slipping up and calling me by my mother’s name occasionally for the last six months. We had never looked alike, my mother and I, even before the Mohawk and the nose ring. But Bernstein she remembered.

I cut the lights and drove the car onto the side street and then onto the grass by the edge of the woods. I was pleased to have a tiny Rabbit, and found some shrubs behind which to park it.
Please please please
, I said to myself, my brain a big empty echo chamber. If there was no God, and there is no God, who was I saying please to? Molecules in motion, who had no interest in me. My Holy Guardian Angel, whom I’d never really heard from. To myself, hoping that I’d be wrong.

I grabbed my flashlight from the glove box and set off toward the ruins of Bernstein’s house. It was getting cold these nights, and I couldn’t imagine Dad really taking care of Grandma effectively. He might have just dumped the body there—
please please please
I said again, and then comforted myself by saying that I only didn’t want to have to encounter a corpse and get mixed up with the police again—or left her there shivering and pissing in a corner. I left my flashlight off; I wanted the advantage of surprise.
Please please please
I wanted to be wrong about the whole thing.

There aren’t many animals left on Long Island. The occasional deer, rabbits, sometimes a skunk or a raccoon, and those last always seemed surprisingly huge. Bernstein told me once that he had encountered a fox. There were certainly no predators worth worrying about, but when I heard a rustling amidst the trees, I flipped my flashlight on and gave it an arc-like swing. My father, a cop, the satyr even.

It was huge and white and reached out for me and screamed, limbs thrashing and blind. The air smelled like shit and rotten teeth and then it was on top of me, twigs gnarled up in its hair.

“Grandma!” I said. She slapped at my face, jammed a finger up my nose somehow. “Enough!” I managed to get my arms around her and then we both tumbled to the ground. I rolled over to pin her, and she cried and wailed. I grabbed a handful of leaves and shoved them in her mouth to keep her quiet. She tried to bite me, but her dentures were gone, so it was just a gross gumming. I balled up a fist and raised it high, but realized that I was thinking like a movie. Knocking someone out is never so clean in the real world. Nobody else seemed to be coming from the trees, and after a moment Grandma quieted down. I petted her cheek and even put my thumb back into her mouth to dig out the leaves. Her breathing was shallow, but steady.