The Sea Beach Line (7 page)

“This okay?” he asked.

“Fine by me.”

We watched for a little while until Becca came in the door. She looked tired, but she smiled when she saw us sitting together on the couch.

“I see how it is,” she teased. “The boys were sitting around drinking beer while I was slaving away at the office.”

“Nah, babe,” Andrew said, grinning and standing up to give her a kiss. “I just got in myself. Kicking back with a cold one after a long day. I'm gonna grab another. You want one?”

“No,” she said, “I'm okay.” She wasn't much of a drinker.

“Edel?”

“No, thanks. I'm actually going to hit the hay in a minute.” Drinking five or six more beers sounded good, actually, but I wanted Becca to see I was being responsible and doing my best to stay sober and sane. I couldn't keep going around in circles. I took my empty bottle and teacup into the kitchen and rinsed them out. “I have an early morning.” There was no way of knowing when Mendy would be on the street, but I figured I should get down as early as I could.

“Oh yeah?” Becca said. “You have a job interview?” I had considered telling Becca about my encounter with Goldov, and the few things I'd learned about Alojzy, but I decided to keep them to myself until I knew what it all meant. Becca would probably just tell me that Goldov sounded shady, and I should stay away from people like that.

“Yeah. Something like that. An appointment, actually; I'm going to talk to a guy down by NYU.”

“Okay.” Becca looked skeptical, but didn't press it.

“Knock 'em dead, kid.” Andrew said.

“Thanks. Night, guys.”

I headed into the alcove where I slept beside Becca's elliptical machine. She'd offered me the couch when I arrived, but it was too soft for me. I also didn't want to force myself into the middle of Becca's space. It was better to be tucked out of the way in my sleeping bag, on the hardwood floor, braced between the walls.

When you smoke weed every day, you don't dream. Sober now, my head filled with stories and dancing images every night. I closed my eyes and waited for them to come. That night the freighter from Alojzy's last postcard appeared. It came unmoored from the paper, and began to float off. The lines that Alojzy had used to draw the waves rearranged themselves into letters. Latin letters, Hebrew letters, Cyrillic letters. Diacritic marks. The ship sailed away from me, and I found myself pitched forward, thrashing in this Sea of Babble, struggling toward a life raft up ahead.

The sounds of Becca and Andrew getting ready for work woke me up at seven thirty the next morning. The pressure in my bladder was uncomfortable, but I would rather suffer a little discomfort than face my sister's wrath if I got in the way in the morning. It was wisest to stay hidden as they put on their war paint and chomped their energy bars.

Finally, I heard Becca's exasperated, “Are you coming or not? I'm late. I can't wait,” and the answer of Andrew's galloping loafers. I gave it a minute after the door slammed to make sure they weren't coming back for anything, then made my way to the bathroom. Religious Jews said some prayer about being glad that all your pipes were in working order. I didn't know the words, but was thankful I had been given another day on earth and eager to make the most of it. I was not great at making the most of my days. But now I had a purpose.

I looked out my sister's huge living room windows, at the newly risen sun over the East River. It had been sunny for days. The booksellers would probably be getting out on the street around now. I was not up and out as early as the booksellers, or Becca for that matter.
She had inherited more of Alojzy's hustle than I had. It was something I needed to work on, to cultivate.

I wanted to lie down on the couch and sleep some more. After I stopped going to classes, I'd gotten into the habit of sleeping until noon or later. My time in New Mexico had helped break that habit. Even Solomon was rebuked for sleeping late, with the key to the Great Temple under his pillow.

Some Adderall or Dexedrine would have provided a good jump-start, but I was relying on myself now, on my own will and motivation. I put the teakettle on the stove to boil, and turned on the TV with no sound. The movement of the colors on the screen helped get me into a more mobile mind-set. I drank my tea and headed downtown.

4

AS SOON AS I
turned the corner from Broadway onto West Fourth Street, I saw the booksellers. They were a feral element in the landscape, contrasting with the purple New York University flags and the attendant crowds of clean students. The booksellers were a black mold growing through the new paint. I admired the defiant role they played in the cityscape. Unlike all the people rushing off to offices—Becca and Andrew, for instance—these street vendors interacted with the metropolis on their own terms.

At the first table, a man wearing an old military jacket and a black beret was taking science-fiction paperbacks out of a Poland Spring box and arranging them on the edge of an already crowded card table. He lined the books up evenly with each other, letting as much of each one hang off the edge as he could without it falling onto the sidewalk.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up and shook his head. “No,” I said, “I just wanted to—” The man shook his head again, and pointed to another man, who had long black dreadlocks with pieces of seashell and wire tied into them, and wore a long coat that seemed too heavy
for the tail end of a warm winter. He leaned against a large cement planter in which nothing grew, bent over in a halfhearted attempt to hide the wad of cash he was counting. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, but he neither drew nor ashed, and I waited to see if his bouncing dreadlocks would catch on fire. As I watched, a gust of wind dispersed the quarter inch of gray ash into the air.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Yeah? Could I help you? Could I?” His pupils—bits of charcoal floating in a glass of dirty water—darted up toward me for a moment before he resumed counting his money. It wasn't a huge sum of money, but he kept getting confused and starting over.

“I was just wondering if you knew if there was a bookseller around here named Mendy?” The man stopped counting and looked up.

“Mendy? Mendy, Mendy. Mendy? There might be.” He turned and shouted at the man with the beret. “He wants to know is there a Mendy around here?” The man with the beret smiled warily, and clutched his box of books tighter. “Yeah, there's a Mendy around here. What do you want with that asshole?”

“Nothing, it's just that somebody told me I should talk to him.”

“Okay, okay.” He put his money in his pocket so he could gesture with his hands. “But look: if you got some textbooks to sell, you might as well go ahead and bring them to me first. Because I, frankly, will give you a better deal than that bastard.”

“No,” I said. “I don't think . . .”

“What do you mean, ‘no'? You can ask anybody out here on this street. It's the truth. I can give you a better deal on your books. Don't get me wrong, I can't make you rich. Used books are worth very little. But compared to that stinker down there, well, let's just say that he will not treat you so good as I will treat you.”

“No. I mean, I'll keep that in mind.” I held out my empty hands, to show I didn't have anything to sell. “It's not about books, though, it's about something personal.”

“Aw, hell. I don't care about nothing like that. Mendy's down that way.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. This man was a hustler, and if I wasn't buying or selling, he had no use for me.

“Where?” I asked.

“Down there at the corner where the park starts. Old guy with a beard. That is to say, older than me, with a bigger beard than mine.” Our interview concluded, he went back to peering at his bills through his thick glasses.

I passed two more tables before I came to Mendy's. His setup was by far the most expansive on the block, stretching along the sidewalk for a good twenty feet. Sheets of plywood spanned several card tables, and on top of them the books were packed tight in long, snaky rows, held at the end by the T-shaped metal bookends librarians use. Between the rows, other books stood upright, some encased in plastic slipcovers.

Debris was strewn underneath and behind the tables. Empty water boxes. The red-and-white woven plastic bags sold in Chinatown, weighted down with two-by-fours. A box of tissues. A shiny handcart. Stacks of books. Always, more books.

The whole setup gave me the impression of a kid's clubhouse. I peeked, half expecting to find a twelve-year-old sneaking a smoke under the table. Someone was indeed hiding there, but he was a grown man well into his sixties. Though he was hunched down, busily cleaning book covers with rubbing alcohol and tissues, I had a clear profile view. There was something Hasidic in his lean face and long cloudy beard, but his soiled wifebeater and sinewy arms—surprisingly muscled for so old a man—betrayed more than a passing familiarity with the material world. He caught me staring and rose to an upright position. His eyes stayed locked on mine, as if he'd just discovered me inside his house, and couldn't decide if I was a harmless sleepwalker or a burglar.

“Were you looking for something particular? Something I could maybe help you with?” Each word was a testing jab.

“No, I'm not looking for . . . I'm just looking.”

I picked up a thin book called
The ABC of Anarchism
and made myself read a few pages. The author was trying to convince somebody about something.

“The guy who wrote that”—he gestured at the book in my hand with the one he held in his—“Berkman. He's the one who shot Frick.”
I didn't know who Frick was, but the old graybeard sounded like he was happy Frick got shot. “During the Carnegie Steel strike. He was Emma Goldman's lover.”

“Yeah.”

“You're familiar?”

“Not really.” My ex-girlfriend, Mariam, had sewn an Emma Goldman patch on her messenger bag, but that was the extent of my knowledge. “Is your name Mendy?”

“Yeah. It is. So?”

“My name is Izzy. Izzy Edel. I'm Alojzy Edel's son.”

“Oh, I see. Jesus.” He took off his glasses, and rubbed his palm over his eyes and face and beard. “Ally, Ally, Ally. I didn't even know he had a son. A daughter he'd mentioned, a few times . . .”

“Yeah, that's my sister. Becca.”

“Sure. Right. Hey. Listen.” He put his glasses back on and stuck out his hand. “It's nice to meet you . . . Izzy, was it?” We shook hands. His grip was very strong.

“I heard that he died. I'm very sorry. For whatever that's worth.”

“Thank you for your concern, but . . . I'm not sure if he's dead or not. It's not been confirmed yet.”

“Oh. I see. I'm not optimistic, but of course I hope you're right. We could sit and talk a minute, if you'd like?” He led me across the wide sidewalk to a short stone ledge extended off the NYU library.

“Had you been in touch?” he asked me once we'd sat down. “With your father?”

“No. Not in a long time. Years.”

“I can't say that surprises me. He never struck me as a family man. So how did you find your way here, then, if you don't mind me asking?”

“We only found out about my father's . . . disappearance because we got a note from a man named Goldov. I met him yesterday. He mentioned your name.”

“Goldov? Sure. Sure. Excuse me.” Mendy turned to shout to a potential customer holding up a volume of Greek myths. “The price is on the front page. No, that's the cover. I said the front page. That's
right. There. What it says. Three dollars.” The customer came over with a ten-dollar bill, and Mendy made change from the fanny pack around his waist.

“When my own father died,” he said to me, “I felt him around. I kept thinking he was just in the next room. Which was sort of funny, because it was not like I was used to him being around, ever actually being in the next room. I mean, there were years, as an adult, where I hardly saw my parents at all. It was mostly like that, more years that were like that than not. I always would think of him, but in a distanced way. Then he died, and all of a sudden, and for months, I kept thinking of him, in a much closer way. Like death made him more present.” It was true that Alojzy felt more present to me recently, but I didn't think that was because he was dead. I thought it was because he had reached out to me. If I sensed him in the world, it was because he
was
in the world. Mendy saw the skepticism on my face.