Helpless (4 page)

He talks to them. “You’ll be fine,” he says. “This is only temporary.” They seem to know better. They’re dead weights.

H
E SELLS THE
Westinghouse the next morning. The fact that it’s only a verbal deal doesn’t worry him, the buyer being a well-known collector who won’t change his mind. With the five thousand dollars as good as in his wallet, he takes all the necessary measurements and drives to Home Depot, where he buys plaster patch, paint, crown moulding, baseboards, quarter round, finishing nails, wood glue, caulking, new faucets, a white shower curtain, and a toilet seat as soft as a cushion. The carpeting—white wall-to-wall, 100 percent pure virgin wool—has to be ordered, but the salesman promises it will be delivered by the end of the week.

He’s driving home when it dawns on him that he hasn’t had a drink since the night before, and he opens the glove compartment to take out the flask, then changes his mind. He doesn’t need it. He’s feeling purposeful and yet pulled along, as you do sometimes in dreams where there’s no clear reason for your urgency. He has a sense of the minutes scrolling out just far enough ahead to allow him to see what needs doing next.

A woman is waiting for him at the shop. Apparently he
told her that her lawn mower would be ready this morning, and to his wonderment it is. On her way out the door she says, “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“How do you mean?” he says with a quiver of apprehension. He is thinking of his work downstairs.

She gestures at the rows of lawn mowers still waiting for repair. “All those.”

“Oh.” he says. “Right. Well, it’s the season.”

He locks the door and drives the van around to the back and unloads from there, out of sight of any other customers who might show up. He wants to get a few hours under his belt.

He starts by tearing off the old baseboards. As he works he finds himself paying attention to the room, what it feels like to be in it. No musty basement smell, thanks to the dehumidifier. He should close off the air conditioning vents, though; it’s too cold. He pauses to look at the windows, triple-paned for weatherproofing and coated with Mylar, which makes them virtually unbreakable. The security bars are bleak but if he paints them white and frosts the glass, they won’t be so noticeable. He looks up at the acoustic-tiled ceiling and wonders about the soundproofing between here and the ground floor. He puts down the crowbar and goes back upstairs.

A couple of days ago a CD player arrived with a complaint about static. He carries down the components, scrapes the corroded wires and sets everything up. There’s a CD inside, ready to go. He presses
PLAY.

On comes the music, static-free. (So it
was
only the wires.) He is about to turn up the volume when he realizes that he knows this piece: “O mio babbino caro.” Puccini.
His mother used to listen to it all the time. In fact, it’s the one piece he can remember her ever having
sat down
to listen to.

He stays bent over with his hands on his thighs. Grief isn’t what he’s feeling; he’s familiar with grief. This is nothingness. He has an impression of his bones hanging in black space, surrounded by the thick wet walls of his flesh. He goes to straighten, and a nauseating dread wallows through him and he has to lean on one of the speakers. He punches the next selection. It’s another aria but not one he recognizes. He turns up the volume and lets the voices roar around inside him until the dread recedes.

Upstairs the singing is faint…and every few seconds is drowned out completely by a truck rumbling by outside.

“What do you think?” he asks Tasha, who watches him from her basket. “If we left a radio on in here,” he says, “nobody would hear a thing.”

He is sobered by how calculating he sounds. He tells himself that the room is a distraction, an idea, that there’s nothing sinister about renovating a basement.

But it isn’t until he picks up the crowbar again that the sensation of moving through a dream returns. When the baseboards are off, he rips up the old carpet, then cuts and bundles the pieces and carries them out behind the house, where the noonday heat seems to be baking all this—the watery, wavering light, his tranced mind, the intermittent, boxing-ring clang of an air hose from Vince’s garage—into permanence.

At one o’clock he breaks for lunch. He wonders about that sickening dread, which seems to have struck him another lifetime ago, when he still had a choice between surrender
and resistance. Whatever he does now, just standing here at the back door chewing his food, feels directed.

It’s a quarter to five before he can bring himself to stop work again. There’s an extension phone in the furnace room, but if it rang he didn’t hear. He looks at the patched walls and painted moulding and allows himself to settle into thankfulness. Wasn’t this what he was hoping for? To be consumed by something other than his craving to see Rachel? He thinks of the risk he’s been taking, following her from school day after day. Teachers are supposed to watch out for men like him; how does he know that he hasn’t already been spotted? Ideally, he should cut back to every other day or to a couple of days off and a couple on. Well, with the basement to occupy him, maybe he’ll be able to.

He eats his supper up the street at Flame Burgers, then works in the shop until sunset. By now his pulse is galloping at the prospect of seeing her lying on her cot.

It is a shock, therefore, to walk past her house and find the basement windows covered with blinds. He pulls Tasha around to the back and looks through the rails of the wrought-iron fence. No basement windows at all along that side. His anxiety, which he has kept at bay for almost twenty-four hours now, rears up—he has a few moments of panic, picturing her down there with the landlord. To steady himself he pictures
his
basement room. A safe place, a sanctuary, that’s how he sees it. He wonders if he should hang blinds. No, he thinks: curtains. Curtains are more cheerful. Just because the windows will be frosted doesn’t mean there can’t be curtains.

The idea absorbs him. He returns to his van, drives home, and starts searching through the boxes where the drapes from
his parents’ house have been tucked away all these years. It’s the green-and-white-striped curtains that he’s looking for, and when he finds them he takes them downstairs for dropping off at the dry cleaners. Then he pours himself a drink and goes and sits in the living room. On the coffee table is the book he was finding so riveting only a few weeks ago:
Tanks Combat in North Africa.
He picks it up and leafs unseeing through the pages. The basement apartment is directly beneath this part of the house, and before he can stop himself he is fantasizing about Rachel down there, asleep. He begins to shake. Rye splashes out of the glass. He tosses the book on the floor and fixes his mind on what he plans to do tomorrow—sand and paint the walls, caulk around the bathtub—and after a few minutes he succeeds in bringing himself to that near-stupefied state of calm. He falls asleep.

When he wakes up, Nancy is standing in front of him.

“What time is it?” he says. He forgot that she was coming over.

She takes his hands and tugs. “Come on,” she says. “Come on.”

“What?”

“Let’s go upstairs.”

Afterwards, she turns her face into the pillow and cries.

“Hey,” he says. “We’re doing all right.”

He rubs her back until she goes still. He hopes that’s the end of it, but she says, “I thought you didn’t want me anymore. I thought…you know…because we weren’t having sex, you must be seeing someone else.”

“Well,” he says, reaching for his glass of rye. “I’m not.”

“I had her”—a hopeless laugh—“I had her pregnant.”

“I’ve no intention of getting anyone pregnant.”

“You want kids, though, right?”

He empties his drink. His thoughts drift. And then he hears himself say, “There’s always adoption.”

She twists around. “What?”

Her astonishment triggers his own. “I’m just pointing out,” he says, “that you don’t have to get anyone pregnant to have a kid.”

“But…” She comes up on her elbow. “Would
you
adopt?”

“I might,” he says cautiously.

“By yourself?”

“I wouldn’t do it by myself.” Wouldn’t he? Why is he saying this? The effect he is having on her, the shifting of emotion across her face, holds his interest.

“Would you do it with me?”

“Why not?”

“Really?”

“You’re the woman in my life.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this.” She sinks onto his chest. “We’d have to get married, wouldn’t we?”

“Maybe not.”

Silence. He can feel her deciding to let that go for now.

“A boy or a girl?” she asks.

“A girl, I think.”

“A newborn?”

“They don’t have any problems finding homes.”

“So, how old?”

“Seven,” he says. “Eight.”

“That old?”

“It’s just a thought.”

A thought about bringing a woman into the picture. A
mother figure, who will provide a type of comfort he can’t. It’s a surprising turn of events, but here it is, and it must attest to the fact that all along he has been motivated by the better part of his love.

For a moment he sees himself in this virtuous light. And then he begins to grasp what it is he’ll be sacrificing and he’s resentful and confused and he gets out of bed, saying he forgot to lock the basement door.

Down in the apartment he paces himself into a more composed frame of mind. He doesn’t want to do harm. He wants to rescue, to protect. Nancy will help him. He’s not above admitting to himself that he needs her help. Should he let her see what he has done so far? He looks around. Why not? But she can’t tell anyone. He goes tense with fear. What if right now she’s on the phone to one of her sisters or to that evil-minded Angie? He leaves the apartment and blunders back up the stairs.

S
ATURDAY MORNING IS
when Celia gives piano lessons, first to Rachel, then, in exchange for discounted cigarettes, to Leonard Wong’s mother, and then to Leonard. Today, however, the Wongs are attending some family function, and Celia has decided that rather than suffer in the stifling apartment she and Rachel will finally get pedicures at Angie’s Nails, something Celia’s friend Laura has been urging them to do for a couple of years now.

According to Laura, Angie used to be a plus-size model before being set up in business by her mafioso boyfriend, who, Laura likes to imagine, supplied the real-looking hands and feet featured in the window display. She says that the beauticians are Cambodian girls with hardly any English and so you have to figure that they’re working for slave wages and you should give them big tips. The customers are everybody: single mothers, prostitutes, rich housewives, business women, gay men, Middle Eastern men. “Typical Cabbagetown,” Laura says.

By which she means that in Cabbagetown nothing is typical. Dandelion seeds from the derelict yard of a rooming
house sail over a hedge to land on the perfect grass of a mansion. Dollar stores share a wall with four-star restaurants. Along the section of Gerrard Street where Angie’s Nails is, there’s a drug-dealer hangout posing as a donut shop, a West Indian grocery store, a Tamil restaurant, a Chinese herbalist, a cosmetic surgeon’s office advertising Botox injections, and a mysterious, always closed store called Belinda’s, whose grimy window display of dolls, wigs, majorette batons, and stiff, frilly dresses for little girls never changes.

Angie’s window is empty, the hands and feet gone. As soon as Rachel is through the door she asks the large, glamorous woman at the front desk—Angie, presumably—what happened to them.

“I had to take them down,” Angie says. “It’s so hot there, they were all melting.”

“Are they wax?” Celia asks.

“Nope, real.” She laughs at the look on Rachel’s face. “I don’t know what they are. Wax…plastic. So what’ll it be today, ladies?”

“Just pedicures,” Celia says.

“We play the piano so we cut our own nails,” Rachel says.

“Gotcha.”

They pick their colours (Celia goes for plum, Rachel for pale pink), then follow Angie’s clicking high-heeled sandals and big, swaying rear end past the manicure tables to the back of the store. It’s not so busy here. Only two of the many leather recliners are occupied: one by a black woman who looks to be in her late forties, the other by a dark, bearded man wearing a turban. Angie indicates where Celia and Rachel should sit, then says to the man, “She taking good care of you, Feroze, honey?”

He pulls his eyes away from the muted TV, which is mounted in a corner up near the ceiling, and gives Angie his full and serious attention. “No complaints,” he says.

Celia and Rachel remove their shoes and stick their feet in the footbaths. “Long toes,” Rachel’s pedicurist says to her. She’s smiling. She intends it as a compliment. “And pretty—” She touches her own hair.

“Thank you,” Rachel murmurs. She accepts compliments graciously but a little sadly, as another child might accept a gift she already has.

“Women pay a lot of money to get that colour,” the black woman volunteers. She’s sitting directly across from Celia and Rachel. “That honey blond.”

“She wants purple streaks,” Celia says.

“Oh, no, no!” the woman cries.

“Not anymore I don’t,” Rachel says, flashing Celia an incensed look.

“No, you leave it just as it is,” the woman says.

The woman’s hair is a youthful mass of shiny reddish brown spirals like mahogany wood shavings. She’s wearing a purple-and-yellow-striped shift and lots of gold bands on her wrists. If she hadn’t spoken, Celia would have said she was from the West Indies—almost all of the older black people you meet are, originally—but her accent is American: New York or New Jersey. By the attentive tilt of Rachel’s head, Celia can tell that she, too, has placed the woman as American. Oh, God, Celia thinks. She’s going to ask her if she’s from New York City and knows a black architect named Robert Smith.

And so she does, though not that directly. “Are you American?” she starts out.

The woman laughs. “Is it obvious?”

“Not
obvious,”
Rachel says.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I am.” Her smile shifts to Celia. “My daughter had to have surgery, a hip replacement. I came up to help with the kids.” She nods toward the reception area, where a child around ten years old shakes a rag doll at a baby in a stroller. “They’re staying close to the bowl of free mints,” the woman says.

Rachel has dutifully craned to look. Now it’s back to the interrogation. “You don’t happen to be from New York City, do you?”

“How’d you know that?”

Rachel clutches her armrests. Since there’s no stopping her, Celia decides to help her along. “Her father lives in New York,” she says but feels unexpectedly ashamed, as if the woman must know it’s a fabrication. “At least we think he does,” she amends.

“He
does,”
Rachel says.

“Okay,” Celia says.

“He
does.
You don’t
know.”

The implications of this exchange float out over the salon, over the bent heads of the pedicurists.

“Once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker,” the black woman says genially.

The man in the turban is finished, his still rather longish toenails having been painted a clear gloss. The pedicurist slips a pair of rubber sandals on his feet and walks him to the drying table up at the front.

“He doesn’t know about me,” Rachel says, “that’s why.” That’s why her father lives in New York, she means.

“I see,” the woman says, evidently following.

“He’s black,” Rachel says.

The woman pretends surprise. “Is he?”

“He’s Robert Smith. The architect.”

“He’s an architect!”

“Yes.”

“Well,” the woman says, “that’s an interesting job.” She looks down at her toes, which are being painted the same purple as the stripes in her dress.

Rachel keeps staring at her and then she shrugs and says, “I suppose so,” and leans over to investigate her own toes. Just like that, she shakes off her disappointment that the woman hasn’t heard of him.

I shouldn’t get so worked up, Celia thinks. But it’s distressing how Rachel persists in believing that she’s going to run into a black person from New York City who, simply because he or she is black, will know her father. The odds, as Celia has told her, are a million to one (more like a billion to one considering that his last name might not be Smith and it’s anybody’s guess where he lives, let alone what he does). The odds of their meeting a black New Yorker
at all are
high enough. Why does the intermediary have to be black, anyway? And why won’t Rachel entertain the possibility that after all these years her father might be living someplace else? “I have
a feeling,”
is all Rachel will say. And yet between encounters with black New Yorkers her interest in his whereabouts seems to dwindle to nothing. She never asks about him, and the one time Celia sounded her out as to whether or not she missed having a father, she reflected for a moment and then said, “How should I know?”

“They must have run out of mints,” the woman chuckles as her grandchild approaches, pushing the stroller.

“The lady said we could come back,” the child says shyly.

“I’m done here, I think,” the woman says. “Hi, honey,” she says to the baby, who is clapping. “Say hi to the lady. See? Over there.”

The baby stops clapping and gazes at Celia with large, gentle eyes.

“Hi, darling,” Celia says to the baby. “Aren’t you lucky to have your big sister to look after you.”

“Big brother,” the woman says.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Celia says.

The child—the boy—studies the rag doll in his hands. The woman slips on a pair of sandals and comes to her feet. “Nice to meet you,” she says cheerfully.

“Yes!” Celia says too loudly. “Nice to meet you, too!”

The moment they’re out of earshot Rachel hisses, “That was so embarrassing.”

“I know,” Celia says.

Rachel frowns up at the television. Celia takes a magazine from the table beside her and flips through the pages. This was supposed to be a treat, their first professional pedicures, which Rachel will now remember as the day her mother more or less announced that, when it comes to black children, she can’t tell the boys from the girls. It wasn’t his blackness, though. It was his red shorts and sweet, round face and his attentiveness to the baby. She wonders how Rachel knew. Or maybe she didn’t know and simply had the sense to keep her mouth shut. Rachel has a social canniness far beyond her years. That this should be so strikes Celia with fresh pleasure and amazement. “I’m sorry,” she says. Rachel sighs. Celia leaves her alone until they’re both putting on the rubber sandals, and then she says, “That pink is perfect for you.”

More sighing.

“Seashell pink,” Rachel’s pedicurist offers.

“Yes, my favourite pink,” Rachel says in an unnaturally friendly voice intended to ostracize Celia further. “I have a lot of clothes this colour.”

The black woman has left. Celia and Rachel are placed on the same side of the drying table, the side facing the reception area. As soon as their feet are under the light panel Rachel picks up a tabloid and pretends to be immersed.

Celia watches the action. It has gotten quite busy. The customers coming in all exclaim at how hot it is out there. A woman arrives with a box of chocolates she worries might be melted. They’re for Angie, a belated birthday gift, but Angie says, “I need those like a hole in the head,” and tells the woman to offer them around. The woman seems unoffended. She’s freckled and small, with a face that’s both childlike and weathered. She opens the box, declares the contents “kind of squished, not bad,” and extends it to a couple of teenaged girls who are choosing their nail colours. “Get them while they’re hot,” she says. The girls each take one. The woman turns to Celia and Rachel. “Pot of Gold,” she says, and then lets out a cry as her leg buckles. The box drops to the floor. The woman teeters. Celia, jumping to her feet, catches her by the wrist.

“Oh, jeez,” the woman gasps. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you all right?” Celia says.

“Yeah, I’m good. Thanks a lot.”

Angie has come over. She puts an arm around the woman’s waist and leads her to a bench. “Honey, why aren’t you using that cane I bought you?”

“I left it somewhere,” the woman mutters.

“Yeah, sure you did.”

“Only one fell out,” Rachel says. She has retrieved the box and is offering it to the woman.

“Oh, thanks, sweetie. Leave it there.” She waves at the table. “Help yourself to as many as you want.”

“You can have one,” Celia says.

“Two?” Rachel says in a small, pleading voice, holding up two fingers.

So Celia is back in her good graces. “Okay,” she says.

“Three?” Rachel tries.

“Three. That’s it.”

“I get these leg spasms,” the woman informs Celia. “It’s like somebody stuck a knife in you. Seriously. I’ve never had one this bad, though.”

“That sounds awful,” Celia says. She watches Rachel wiggle her fingers above the box. I’m a bad mother, she thinks. I’m a pushover.

Angie crouches in front of Celia and presses her big toe. “You’re done,” she says. “Unless you want to hang around and save more lives.”