The Sea Beach Line (12 page)

I hadn't seen Alojzy since then. For the first year or so, I received postcards off and on. Then they stopped. He was gone from my life until his most recent postcard brought him back. Now I was being told by Goldov that he was gone for good and I would never see him again. I hoped this wasn't true, that this was just another of Alojzy's disappearances and he was lying low somewhere. Surely he would come back once more, and I'd have a second chance to prove I was a worthy son.

What would my life be like if I'd gone with Alojzy that day? Surely, I'd be stronger and tougher. Not so confused. I would never have wasted time in college and would have seen more of life. Maybe I'd be a hustler myself, in business with Alojzy.

It occurred to me that even though Alojzy wasn't here, I could still go into business with him, selling his books. The cart was just sitting there, waiting for me to come take it out. Goldov's comment about “selling off assets” might have been somewhere in the back of my mind, but I had no intention of giving that man a dime.

I had enjoyed spending the day working with Mendy, and wouldn't mind spending more days on the street. As I spent more time on Alojzy's turf, around people he knew, I would find out more about him. Maybe someone even knew where he was, or could get a message to
him. Maybe that wouldn't end up being necessary. Assuming Alojzy was hiding out somewhere, he was bound to return when things blew over. When he did, he would find me here, working. I would save the money I made from his stock for him, and I would be able to show him that I was capable of taking care of business.

6

I WOKE UP TO
the sounds of street vendors beginning their days. Unoiled wheels creaked as heavy carts rolled over the concrete floors. Carts banged against metal doors. Someone was tossing boxes from a ladder to the ground, and each landed with a heavy thump. People argued in different shades of English and French. Occasionally I heard a burst of Russian, and the same language I hadn't been able to identify at night. It sounded South Asian. Maybe Urdu or Bengali? It hadn't occurred to me that a storage facility would be filled with so much activity. While the upper stories housed regular long-term personal storage, the majority of the ground-floor units were occupied by street vendors.

I took a drink from the plastic water jug, hid the gun under the air mattress, and stumbled over Alojzy's boxes to the door. In the corridor, three Russian girls were arguing over a stack of T-shirts. I recognized one of them as the black-haired girl I'd seen get smacked the night before. If her face had been bruised, her makeup concealed it. A shirt fell to the ground as I passed by, and I picked it up. The shirt had an
image of a woman with her finger to her lips. “
Nee Boltaee
,” she said—no gossiping. Handing it to the girl closest to me, I pictured my father flirting with these girls and wondered if his Polish schoolboy innuendos translated smoothly into Russian, if the girls giggled and blushed. A dreadlocked woman pushing a cart piled high with African wood carvings came up behind me and yelled at me for blocking the aisle.

I used the men's room and bought a Diet Coke from the vending machine in the lobby, then went over to the pay phone to call the number Mendy had given me.

“
Allo
?” demanded a Russian voice. I could hear that the word had been shaped in a square jaw.

“Yes, hello. Is this Timur?”

“No. Is not. Do not call again.” The line went dead. Had I made a mistake? The man didn't say I had a wrong number, he just said he wasn't Timur. The number was all I had so I tried again, afraid the man would just let it ring, but he picked up again.

“Didn't I tell you not to call again? Who the hell are you?”

“Wait!” I said. “Listen. My name is Izzy Edel. I've been looking for my father. I was given this number . . .” The man on the other end of the line was quiet for a moment, but he didn't hang up. Cars pulled in and out of the parking lot.

“You are the son of Alojzy Edel?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get this number?”

“First, I talked to a man named Semyon Goldov, and then I got the number from a man named Mendy. I don't know his last name.”

“I know who they are. Why are you calling?”

“I don't know if you know, but my father's missing . . .” I was hoping this would get some response, but it didn't, so I kept going. “I was told that Mr. Timur had paid the rental bill—but you're not Timur?”

“No. I am not. That person does not speak on the telephone.”

“Oh. So how do I speak to him?”

“You don't. You speak to me. But do not waste my time.”

“Fine. I'll be quick. First of all, I just wanted to touch base about the status of the storage-center bill, to make sure my father's stuff doesn't need to be moved out immediately, or anything like that. But more importantly, I'm trying to locate my father, and I'm trying to talk to anyone who might know where he is or what happened to him.”

“All right. I will call you back on this number in five minutes.”

While I stood waiting next to the phone, a man approached and asked if I was done. I told him no. He picked up the receiver anyway and proceeded to argue in a mixture of French and some West African language for the next six minutes. My father would have made him get off the phone, but I didn't know how to do that. Finally, the guy hung up. I waited another five minutes, but the phone didn't ring. Maybe Timur's man had called back and got a busy signal. But it was also possible that he wasn't ready yet, and would just be annoyed if I called back. He didn't sound like a man I wanted to annoy. After debating for three minutes, I decided to go for it.

“
Allo
?”

“Yeah, this is Izzy—”

“Yes. Edel. I told you I would call you back.”

“I know, but I hadn't heard from you and—”

“That is because you didn't tell me you were calling from a pay phone. Where the hell did you even find a pay phone? No, I can make guess: it's the pay phone at that rotten storage space. Don't you know a pay phone cannot accept incoming calls?”

“No. I didn't know that.” A straggling street vendor rolled out of the door with her cart, and I flattened myself against the wall so she could pass.

“Well, now you are knowing,” the man said. “It's because of the gangbangers and their pagers.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. It was very clever, to make an innovation of technology used only by doctors, so as to facilitate untraceable communication for drug deals.”

“Sure.”

“Still, I do not have time to be calling a phone which will not ring.”

“I'm sorry.” Who was this guy? He was angry that I wasted his time, and yet he had time to give me a history lesson about crack dealers? Or was this a roundabout way of making sure that I knew he was a gangster and should be treated with fear and respect? Well, I didn't think Alojzy's storage space was paid for by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

“Forget it,” the man said. “Now, Timur and I would very much like to speak with you in person about your father. Do you drive a car?”

“No.”

“Fine. Take the Q or B train to Brighton Beach. I will meet you on the southwest corner of Brighton Beach Avenue and Brighton Sixth Street. Six p.m.”

“Okay. Sounds good.”

“Hasta la vista, baby.”

Back in the storage space, I grabbed my backpack, a few of Alojzy's sketchbooks, and a Yankees cap hanging on the wall. The day was sunny, but I also felt awkward walking around visibly wearing my kippah. The kippah had seemed right when I was in my own internal world in Ohio and New Mexico, but in New York City a kippah came with the obligation to talk to religious Jews. I didn't want old men on the train to keep interrogating me about my employment or marital status, or asking me to join their minyans. The kippah also gave a certain sense about me to non-Jewish and non-Orthodox strangers, and I'd look a bit tougher and more street-smart with the cap on. Taking the kippah off altogether would have been easier, but it also would have felt like a renunciation, an erasing of the pages that had brought me to this place. Aher never took off his kippah and talis, even after he'd been excommunicated for heresy.

The street vendors were already out all along Spring Street as I walked across SoHo to catch the 6 train. Several painters displayed canvases not much different from Goldov's work. Artisans wore their own creations: T-shirts covered with sequins and puffy paint, heavy necklaces garnished with dyed feathers. There were T-shirts silk-screened with bootleg Andy Warhol images—Elvis with his pistol
drawn—and there were more T-shirts silk-screened with old Soviet slogans. There were booksellers here too, selling big coffee table books with color plates in them, and smaller, square books about younger artists, which had soft covers, with French flaps to make them feel more substantial. This was the art-book trade Goldov had spoken of.

Up at Becca's place, I took a long, hot shower and put on some clean clothes. Afterward, I laid the sketchbooks out on the coffee table. It was easier to study them in the bright apartment than in the storage space with the dim light of the electric lantern. I spent a good hour drifting through the pages, then went back though to study each book page by page, image by image. There might be practical clues to Alojzy's disappearance in here. On a piece of scrap paper, I tried to write names and descriptions for each repeated figure. “Alojzy.” “Me.” “Becca.” “Ruth.” “Mendy.” “Goldov.” “Man in suit #1.” “Man in suit #2.” “The dead soldier.” “The naked woman with the long dark hair.” “The street.” “The museum.” “Galuth's paintings.” The process was like music-history class, when we listened for the leitmotifs in Wagner's
Ring
cycle. “Sleep.” “Wotan's spear.” “Renunciation of love.”

The phone rang while I was making myself a cup of tea. I was going to let it go on ringing, even after I saw the New Mexico number on the caller ID, but something got the better of me and I picked up.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How do you know it's me?”

“Becca's phone has caller ID.”

“Of course, of course, I always forget about that thing.” Flipping to Alojzy's sketch of her, with wide eyes and mischievous smile, I tried to connect the drawing to the voice.

“How are you, Mom?”

“Oh, I'm all right, I suppose. I've been fighting with your uncle Howard on the phone all morning.”

“About what?” They had fought before, and gone for as long as a year at a time without speaking. Howard had not liked Alojzy, and he and my mother had gotten closer again once my mother was divorced and remarried. But they still had their spats.

“My mother's papercuts. She made these beautiful papercuts. He got all that stuff when they cleaned out Bubbe's apartment.”

“That was, like, six years ago.”

“I know, I know. But I've had so much to deal with. Now, I finally feel like I have the time, and I want to get out those papercuts that your grandmother made and take a look. Maybe do something with them? But your uncle is giving me a hard time, saying he's too busy with work to deal with this.” Her tirade was hypocritical. After Alojzy's latest postcard had arrived in New Mexico, I'd searched the garage for the old postcards he'd sent me in high school. Unable to find them, I asked my mother, who said she'd thrown them out, not realizing I would want those “useless old papers.” She knew what she was doing.

“Howard might be busy,” I said, taking her brother's side out of spite. “He is a lawyer.”

“I know he's a lawyer. I know he works hard. I'm very proud of what he's accomplished. But honestly, this shifty way he's acting, it makes me think he's just thrown everything away and doesn't want to come clean about it.”

“I don't understand what it is you're talking about, exactly. Papercuts?”

“Yes. Papercuts. The intricate art of cutting designs into paper. Don't you know?”

“Like the snowflakes we'd make in grade school?”

“Snowflakes? Like snowflakes? No, not like snowflakes, thank you very much, for Christmastime. Traditional Jewish papercuts I'm talking about here. Like they used to use for ketubot? To frame and hang on the wall?”

“I can't picture them. It's not calligraphy?”

“No. Wouldn't I say ‘calligraphy' if I meant calligraphy? It's papercuts. Cut paper. Carved paper. You go to school and study all this modern art. Then, when you were here, you borrowed books from Bernie about Hasidism and
tzadikim
,
Nineteen Gated Mystics
or whatever, to read when you were stoned from smoking your dope in my house.”

“Mom.” It was true that I smoked a little weed that I bought off her neighbor's boyfriend now and then, but I was sober for the most part, and had stayed away from pills and hallucinogens.

“And yet, you don't even recognize a basic Jewish folk art when it's described to you?”

“Mom.”

“It's okay. I don't really mind about the dope.” This meant she did mind. “I know you were finding yourself. Although, there comes a time when you need to stop finding yourself and start finding a career. But you're thinking about going back to school now, I hear?”