Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (16 page)

A woman laughed loudly at the spectacle, her stilettos clicking against the ground as she walked. She walked confidently, her hips swinging, her hair tossing backward in soft curls. There was a baby in her arms; it bounced with the rhythm of her walking. Everything about her seemed musical. Beneath the apartment building’s front awning, she paused, shifting the baby and fumbling for her keys. The orange light above her made her look alien, but still pretty. She turned and called behind her, “Carlos!”

At the other end of the sidewalk, two men obscured by shadows looked up at the sound of her voice. I looked in their direction, waiting to see who responded. Neither of them looked anything like the Carlos Aguilar in the picture we’d seen in the paper. He’d been much darker than either of the men I was looking at; his features, even as a kid, had been sharper. I watched the men carefully anyway. I wondered which of them would hug the woman, and which of them would hold the baby, and what the woman and the baby would smell like up close, feel like to touch. I wondered if either of the men had what he wanted, if either of them could have been me in another life.

“Let’s go home,” I said to Liddie, who was watching the woman intently.

“Yeah,” she said.

I knew she’d understood me when I turned south toward Virginia, instead of north toward Boston, and she didn’t register any surprise. She played with the car CD player until Mingus wailed sadly in the background. I stopped at a Chinese take-out place and ordered dinner. Walking back to the parking lot, with the warm bag of food in my arms, I saw Liddie sitting in the car, the sideways light of the setting sun making her scar glow. We were what we had in life, I thought, and I was not sad about it or apologetic for its corniness. We drove the last five minutes home, where both of our parents’ cars were in the driveway but the blinds were drawn. I pictured my parents as I knew we’d find them, alone in the quickly darkening house, sitting next to each other on the couch and imagining everyone else’s family while the television lied to them. I pictured them being lonely without us on one of the few days a year we were promised to them. Liddie and I got out of the car and stood on the front porch, bracing ourselves for the sound of the doorbell.

T
he roof of William’s Harlem apartment building fell in on a Wednesday, three weeks before he was due to renew his lease. Everyone seemed to think it was a sign of something. Janice in 2F thought the landlord caved the roof in on purpose, to chase out the last of the rent-controlled tenants. Ed, the eighty-something widower two flights down, thought it was an accident on the part of the city, something gone wrong while they were covertly practicing riot-control tactics. The kids next door pasted fliers around the block, claiming the damage was the result of a minor earthquake caused by global warming. Phil, the landlord, said it was a pipe bursting in the empty apartment beside William’s, but in any case, when the wall went, it took the chunk of roof directly above William’s living room with it, leaving a large pile of rubble atop the remnants of his glass coffee table and a thin film of white dust over all of his belongings. He barely had time to get home from the office and survey the damage before the city showed up and declared the whole building structurally unsound and an asbestos hazard. He was given forty-eight hours to take what he could and be elsewhere before they sealed most of his life behind yellow tape. After turning down Phil’s offer of a temporary basement apartment ten blocks uptown, William broke out his emergency credit card, relocated himself to a midtown hotel, and reluctantly called a broker about a new apartment.

“I don’t know why you didn’t move a long time ago,” said his ex-wife, Debra, when he called to tell her about it. “It’s a wonder it’s only now falling down. That rat trap was only supposed to be temporary when you moved in twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years ago, I was still under the impression that
our marriage
was
not
supposed to be temporary,” he snapped back. “Besides, welcome to the new Harlem. I’ve lived here so long that everyone
wants
to live in my neighborhood again.”

“Not without roofs, they don’t,” said Debra, and after a week of stubborn resistance to everything the broker showed him, William was forced to concede the point.

 

 

Two weeks after
her father’s roof fell in, Eva woke up to the blaring alarm of her cell phone, reminding her of the lunch date she’d programmed into her phone a few days earlier. She blinked at a crack in the ceiling, momentarily worried that her own roof was caving in out of solidarity, before rubbing the sleep from her eyes. It was not her ceiling she was looking at, she realized. It was not her bed that she was in, and it hadn’t been her apartment in over a year. Cheese was still asleep, and though it occurred to her to wake him so he wouldn’t be late for his shift at the coffee shop, she tiptoed to the shower instead, hoping to be ready to leave by the time he woke up so they wouldn’t have to talk about what she was doing there for the third time this week. After a few minutes of futilely turning the shower dials in search of heat or water pressure, Eva stumbled out smelling like another woman’s grapefruit and lily soap. Her damp curls made her grateful, at least, that she hadn’t bothered straightening her hair for her father’s benefit.

After fumbling through her backpack for something that wasn’t dirty, flecked with clay from her studio, or otherwise likely to offend her father, she gave up. Eva started on Cheese’s wardrobe, looking for something that didn’t scream that she’d spent the night at her ex-boyfriend’s apartment. When that didn’t work, she reminded herself that Cheese’s current girlfriend was in another state, ostensibly working up the energy to break up with him, and went through what was left on the girlfriend’s side of the closet, finally finding a button-down dress that was clean and high-collared and respectable. She noted, with equal parts contempt and admiration, that Cheese’s latest girlfriend was the sort of girl who ironed and kept things creased where they were supposed to be. She noted also, while buttoning, how easily the dress slipped over her hips. There had been a note of genuine concern in Cheese’s voice when he pointed out how thin she’d gotten and asked her if she was still eating OK. She told him that she was, a mostly honest answer: she was eating less lately only because living alone made the awkwardness of keeping to regular mealtimes almost unbearable. The soft worry of his voice when he’d asked was at odds with the present. Cheese, now awake, was demanding to know why Eva was wearing Kate’s dress.

“Oh, come on,” she said, turning around to stare pointedly at his bare chest above the white bedsheet, the faint red tooth marks she’d left beneath his collarbone last night.

“You can’t take her dress,” he said.

“I’m not taking it, I’m borrowing. And I’m running late. You can yell at me later.”

“Is there going to be a later?” he asked. He climbed out of bed, stopping to pick up the armful of bangle bracelets she’d left on the nightstand and hand them to her. “And what are you in such a hurry for, anyway? I thought you said your dad was always late.”

It was true, she had said that. Her father was never where he said he’d be when he said he’d be there. When she was small, she would wait on her mother’s kitchen windowsill for hours on visiting days, nose pressed against the glass. Her mother would linger in the kitchen looking disapproving, reminding her that it could be hours. It was before everyone carried a cell phone and was always and every minute reachable, and even now Eva hesitated to call her father when she couldn’t find him. She preferred when he materialized without preface. Back then she’d leave the windowsill before he arrived, partly out of embarrassment and partly because she knew it would make him sad to see her there, waiting. Once she’d curled up in the window and slept there, intent upon looking pitiful when he arrived, a day later than he had said. When the yellow cab pulled up the next morning, she watched her father exiting the car, saw the genuine smile on his face as he approached the house, and abandoned the operation. She told Cheese this story while she pulled her hair back into some semblance of order and dabbed herself with the perfume vial in her purse, noting that it clashed with the lingering lily scent of soap.

“You sound like me the week after you left me the first time,” said Cheese. “I thought every woman walking beneath the window was you.”

“Well,” said Eva. “Here I am.”

“You are,” said Cheese. “And I’m sure your father will be there on time today. You said he really wanted to see you, right?”

The worried tone of his question made her want to kiss him, and then to laugh at him, but mostly it made her want to call Maya, the woman for whom she’d left him. It had been two weeks since she’d gotten the last of her belongings from the apartment she and Maya had shared, and they hadn’t spoken since. Cheese’s tolerance exhausted Eva sometimes. She knew Maya would tell her when she was full of shit.
Avoiding confrontation because you’d rather take shit than deal with it doesn’t make you a martyr,
Maya had said to her once, and probably would have said to her again if Eva had tried that windowsill story on her. But Eva didn’t bother trying to explain her childhood to Maya; it hadn’t been happy exactly, but it hadn’t been sad in any way Maya would have understood. On Maya’s scale of childhood tragedy, Eva didn’t register.

Usually, Eva thought of herself as a good person. She stayed up at night worrying about the human condition in vague and specific incarnations. She made herself available to the people whom she loved, and some whom she didn’t. She gave money to every other homeless person and stopped to let stray kids remind her how much Jesus and the Hare Krishnas loved her, more for the benefit of their souls than hers. Still, she wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself. Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.

 

 

William was uptown,
arguing with Phil about a blender. William had known Phil since moving back to the city in the eighties. Back then, his had been the only building Phil owned, and Phil had lived downstairs and done most of the maintenance himself, but the rapidly rising rents over the past decade, the slick face-lift of 125th Street, and the influx of people no longer scared to live north of it, had made it possible for Phil to expand his operations. He now owned a few older buildings on Convent Avenue, and one on St. Nick; he had moved himself to a brownstone and grown a belly, now that he no longer climbed the stairs to respond to tenants’ complaints. William liked Phil, always had. After all those times going to see an available apartment, only to be told the second the owner saw his face that it was suddenly rented, it had been a relief to have a black landlord. Over the years, he and Phil had developed a friendly rapport, met for a drink from time to time even after Phil moved. But now, as Phil stubbornly refused to let him back into the old building to get the blender he’d left unopened in a box in a closet, William was reminded of what Phil had said about the black contractor who’d ripped him off once:
Used to be you could at least count on your own people.

“I understand,” Phil was saying, which of course he did not. “I’d let you in if I could, but it’s not up to me. Right now, the city says,
Jump,
I say,
How high?
And the city says,
Nobody goes into that building, and nobody takes anything out,
and I don’t take that padlock off the door. Structurally unsound. Breathing hazard. You name it. I start handing out keys because people want to get in and get stuff, next thing you know, the rest of the roof’s collapsing or people are squatting in their old apartments, and then the city’s shutting down everything else I own.”

“Phil,” William said, “that’s nonsense. You know I’m not moving in. What I just paid for the deposit on my new place, they’ll have to bury me there. I just want my stuff. Just the little stuff. I’m late for lunch with my daughter.

“I forgot you had a daughter,” said Phil. “I remember her now. Pretty girl.”

 

 

Eva had not
been running late for lunch, so much as running away from Cheese. She knew her father would be at least twenty minutes late, but her arrival at the restaurant fifteen minutes early gave her time to order a gin and tonic. The waiter was young and aggressively charming. Eva asked for extra lemon for her water; he brought her a dish of lemons, and a fresh mint leaf, along with her drink. He hovered. Eva envied his eyelashes. It was not quite lunchtime, and the restaurant was quiet and near empty. It had been a favorite of her father’s when he worked nearby, before he’d left his job at the downtown EEOC office for work with a private firm. It would have been easier to meet in midtown, but even after winning several big cases her father didn’t seem quite comfortable in his new office, with its smooth burgundy leather and gold-plated doors. He’d liked it better downtown. He used to bring her to this restaurant on visiting days. Eva remembered tapping her Mary Janes against the hardwood floor, getting free Shirley Temples from the old owner. The name of the place was the same now, but the menu had changed from solidly Greek to vaguely Mediterranean, and when Eva asked the waiter how the old owner was doing, he seemed apologetically confused by the fact that the restaurant had ever been anything different.

As he walked away, Eva emptied the contents of a sugar packet onto her teaspoon and swallowed. She assumed this was only rude when someone was watching. Her father was not watching, because he was, according to her intuition and the metallic clock on the wall, still a good fifteen minutes away. She sipped her drink and studied the salad page. A woman in heels walked into the restaurant.
Click, click, click
. The sound of her reminded Eva of Maya, who thought herself short and wore heels even in her own apartment. Maya, whose steps had a perfectly measured rhythm to them. That was what Eva had first noticed when they’d met in the bookstore: the sound of her walking. Maya was brilliant, had a dot-shaped birthmark in the center of her forehead, and was one of the few people Eva knew who still believed in anything, but Eva would have loved her on the basis of sound alone. She instinctively looked up from her table when the woman entered, but only the sound of her was familiar. This woman was skinny and mousy, where Maya was all curve and bravado. The woman sat at the bar and whispered something to the bartender, who seemed to know her. There was a television at the bar, tuned to CNN. A man in a lab coat stood over a kitten, who chased the string he dangled. The kitten was calico and unnaturally small. Eva squinted at the caption.