Madeleine's Ghost (18 page)

Somewhere along the way she dropped Dothan. We never talk
about it. She is unmarried and not dating anyone seriously at the moment; of course, I get the impression that there are always plenty of men around. I am in love with her still, but that is no matter. This is a world in which the heart's desire, once achieved, can become bitter and sad and ugly. I have my life. There have been other women. One day I will finish my thesis and find someone else. New York is a city made up of lonely people like me. They are its bricks and its mortar.

Now, on these empty red evenings in Brooklyn, power plant bristling across the street, rank odor of the emulsion factory wafting through the window, broken glass on the pavement reflecting the last light over the island, I think Antoinette is better like that. As a memory. As a dream of her city, New Orleans, asleep and surrounded by its bayous between the river and the lake, beneath the green skies of the past.

A
FAINT PARROT
flush of green shows in the sky over Brooklyn this afternoon, and now a congenial breeze from the south reminds me of New Orleans and better days, so I decide on a solitary barbecue in the crumbling pit at the back of the garden. Every summer I try to barbecue a few times down there, because it is a shame to let a garden go to waste in New York, no matter how tangled and abandoned, but so far this summer I have not had the chance. Mary and Todd, the vegetarian couple in the first floor apartment, have taken over the garden for their nude meditation.

Most afternoons since the beginning of June I've seen them squatting in the lotus position on a blanket in the weeds, faced off in their nakedness, searching for nirvana in each other's eyes. The first time I stopped and got an eyeful from the dusty window on the landing, but now the sight of them is nothing new. And if I may say, they are two rather unremarkable, vegetable-skinny human specimens. Todd is all elbows and ribs and stringy hippie hair, his penis thin as a finger hidden in the pale tangle between his legs. Mary is brown-nippled and stoop-shouldered and has the kind of long hippie-girl horse face that appeared on album covers in the sixties. These last few days they have taken to playing a sort of Tibetan gong music from their tape box during meditation and burning joss sticks stuck in the old flower bed. The smell of this stuff reaches my apartment in nauseating cinnamon gusts, mixing in with the foul wind from the emulsion factory around the corner.

They are out there now, naked as ever, their long hair tied back with identical headbands covered in Chinese characters, but I do not intend to
let them stop me. Not today. I've got a couple of quarts of Pete's Wicked Ale in the fridge, a nice piece of meat from Key Food marinating in a bowl, and fixings for a salad and home fries. I am standing at the stove in the kitchen, drinking one of the beers and cooking up the home fries, when the Tibetan gong music from the backyard gives way unexpectedly to a woman's voice raised in song. This is surprising. I have never known my neighbors to sing before. It is a pleasant old tune that I can't quite place because I can't hear the words, so I walk over to the window to take a look.

Now I can't make out the hippies downstairs, because their blanket lies just below my kitchen, which juts out over the yard, but I see they have been joined by a friend, and it is she who is singing. In the center of the weedy square of garden a young woman nude to the waist is washing her hair in a wooden tub. Her back is bent away from me, but I can see that she is made of different stuff from Mary and Todd. Her arms are fleshy and supple; her breasts hang, faint heavy globes in the shadow her body makes on the grass. Her skin gleams white, almost incandescent, as if she never goes out into the sun. And her hair is amazing. Thick and black, there must be enough of it to reach to her waist. She leans down over the tub, washing vigorously; she flips up to wring it out with both hands, twisting the hair into a thick black rope. Her chemise and corset lie strewn about her in the grass.

Of course, there are bathrooms for such activities, but this is truly a charming scene, and I watch for a while entranced, as the woman washes and wrings again, sometimes singing, sometimes humming this soft, familiar tune. I hope that she will turn her head so I can see her face in the sunlight and maybe catch a better view of her breasts, but she does not. Then a burning smell calls me back to the stove, and I must tend to the home fries before they are ruined. At last I gather my meat and salad and fries together and lug a bag of charcoal out of the basement. Todd and Mary look up, cow-eyed, when I step out the steel door into the brightness of the garden.

“Hello,” I say, and pass quickly to the barbecue pit. I am already
spreading out the coals when Todd pads up behind, naked and rubbery-skinned as a chicken.

“Uh, excuse me, man,” he says. “Like, what are you doing?” His voice has the kind of California drawl associated with skateboard punks and surfers that a certain class of bohemian has been affecting of late, as if they all had picked it up at the same commune in Oregon.

“I'm barbecuing, Todd,” I say. “That's what I'm doing,” and I go back to spreading the coals.

“Look, we're meditating out here, O.K.?” he says. “If you could come back later and cook your dead meat some other time?”

I swing toward him angrily and poke the air between us with the barbecue fork. Todd steps back alarmed.

“You people have monopolized this garden all summer with your meditation and your nudity,” I say, my voice rising an octave. “The garden doesn't belong to you; it belongs to the house. Half the summer is gone, and I haven't barbecued once! And if you want to have a conversation with me, put on some goddamned clothes!”

He blinks, his eyes an indeterminate sandy color, and appears to hesitate. But there is the barbecue fork and the fact that he is naked. “Man, you are really uptight,” he says at last, and retreats to the blanket for more meditation.

Later the smell of cooking meat proves too much for them, and wrapped in their blanket like two Indians, they come to sit across from me at the warped old picnic table beneath the fig tree to watch me eat.

“Is that good?” Todd says, nodding at my steak.

“What do you think?” I say, chewing with gusto.

“No, seriously, we haven't eaten steak in ten years,” Mary says. “We've totally forgotten what it tastes like.”

“It's very good,” I say, mouth full. “Excellent, in fact.”

“But what does it taste like?” Mary insists.

“Like meat,” I say.

“Oh.”

They look hungry, so I break down and offer some of the home fries, which they eat off my plate with their fingers.

“Look, man,” Todd says, “we didn't mean to monopolize the garden. It's just that we're really trying to practice our meditation skills. We're getting ready to go to this ashram in Colorado for a month, and we want to be ready.”

“Yeah?” I say, trying to sound interested. “How did you pick Colorado?”

“It's a kind of vacation,” Mary says. “There's this travel agent in the Village puts together these meditation packages. You can meditate anywhere in the world.”

“Even in Paris?” I say.

“Why not?” Todd says.

Then, though I do not want them to know I was watching out the window, curiosity gets the better of me.

“So who was your friend?” I say.

“Friend?”

“The woman out here washing her hair.”

“When?”

“Oh, a half hour ago.”

They look at each other puzzled.

“Yeah,” I say. “She had long black hair and she—”

“Sorry, man.” Todd shakes his head patiently. “Just us, all day. We've been out here alone.”

Mary wags her head in agreement. “Better to meditate when there's no one else around. It's a vibe thing.”

I have a hard time swallowing the piece of meat in my mouth.

“All day, alone,” I say in a small voice. “Are you sure?”

I give them the remainder of the home fries and salad and toss what is left of the steak over the yard for the vicious guard dogs that patrol the neighbor's backyard. Then I take my quart of Pete's in hand and go upstairs to the apartment and collapse shivering on my bed, despite the heat of the afternoon.

Something has happened. An escalation. I have seen the ghost.

T
HE TRAINS
are full, the taxis four deep on Second Avenue, streaming downtown. The bars of the East Village already reek of cigarette smoke as the last sun glints red off the million windows of the financial district. It is Saturday night, and the city vibrates like an engine at full throttle.

I board the crowded Manhattan bound F at Knox and find a seat at the back of the car. If the color range is from mocha to deep chocolate here, I am the single dollop of whipped cream on the side. This is common on the subway, especially in the hottest months of summer, when the city stinks like an old mattress and white flight to the beaches is at its peak. Across from me now a group of Latin youths and their dates chatter and squawk in a mixture of Spanish and English that will probably become the American idiom of the twenty-first century. The boys have perfectly slicked-back hair with the sides shaved in zigzag patterns, and the girls wear gluey, stiff pompadours matched by thick red lipstick and huge, barbaric-looking gold earrings.

Then I change at Delancey to the Essex ? and step into a car filled with Chinese families. The air is thick with the smell of ginger. I hear the sound of several dialects and the complaint of babies crying. When we stop in the tunnel for a few minutes between Canal and Chambers, a Korean man comes through with a shopping bag full of cheap plastic toys for sale. He squats in the middle of the car and demonstrates. He has a top that plays “The Yellow Rose of Texas” when you spin it, illuminated pumpkin globe headbands left over from Halloween, and a cute windup dog that arfs and somersaults when you set it on the floor. The Korean winds up one of the dogs and puts it down to do the backflip. This is the demonstrator model, its white paws black from the grime of a hundred subway cars. An elderly Chinese woman to my right buys a half dozen illuminated pumpkin headbands, a young mother buys a top to quiet her child, and on a whim I buy one of the somersaulting dogs for eight dollars.

Later, pushing my way through the crowds of Chinatown past hot duck and dumpling stands, I feel rather foolish carrying the dog, which will not fit in my pocket. It is a gift for Chase, a peace offering. We have not spoken since her dinner party, when I said or did something that caused her to write me off. Of course, she is always writing people off, then writing them back on again. We have negotiated through answering machines, and tonight she is waiting for me at the bar at Le Hibou.

L
E HIBOU
is one of the strangest clubs in Manhattan. It is tucked away two blocks from Confucius Place in the dark angle of Doyers Street, which was the scene of many lurid murders during the tong wars of the 1920s. This is the traditional heart of Chinatown, more like Shanghai than New York, but in the last few years Albanian Gypsies have begun moving into the neighborhood. Now in Doyers Street, side by side with dim sum parlors and cheap Asian gift shops, there are Gypsy palm-reading salons and a few greasy holes in the wall that serve Albanian and Bulgarian cuisine. Le Hibou sits at the middle of the block, a weird light showing through windows stenciled with golden owls.

The place was originally opened as a country-French restaurant by an Albanian Gypsy who had once worked as a sous chef at the Crillon in Paris. Inside, it is still set up with plastic vine leaves, maps of the Auvergne, and posters for Edith Piaf at the Olympia. But who in their right minds would look for French food in Chinatown? The restaurant failed, the Albanian' had taken out the wrong loans from the wrong people, was found in a Dumpster with his throat cut, and the place immediately reopened as a Gypsy club without a single change in decor. Now it is notorious, a hangout for Gypsy cabdrivers, hoodlums, and hustlers of various sorts, a place where tribal disputes are settled with a quick thrust of the knife and women are bought and sold for a handful of C notes on the dance floor.

Chase is sitting at the far end of the bar over a snifter of blood-colored liquor when I come up. I wind the dog and set it down at her elbow, and it arfs cheerfully and does a neat somersault on the sticky counter.

“Hey, that's a pretty cute doggy,” Jamal, the bartender, says. “Where did you get it?”

“On the ? train,” I say.

He is not surprised. Almost anything can be had on the subway, he says. Once, on the 3, he saw a man in a dirty butcher coat and a white hard hat selling raw steaks wrapped in plastic.

“Wow,” I say. “On the West Side.”