Nicotine (7 page)

Penny lets that sink in. For a moment she sees her dead grandparents still in their bed, like mummies in a museum, frozen there by
Norm's denial. With relief she recalls that the house is inhabited, at least according to Matt. She says, “Okay. But how can I live there, if other people live there already?”

“They're living there illegally,” he says. “You get rid of them.”

“Oh, so now she's your gentrification shock troops,” Patrick says. “You blow my mind.”

“She's a warm body. You can't make an eviction stick without putting facts on the ground.”

Patrick looks unhappy; Penny, merely confused.

“Whatever, blah, blah,” Amalia says. “That house is a ghetto. Probably you looked at the wrong address.”

Matt says, “Listen up, Amalia. I don't mind giving you a life interest in the place in Morristown, and I don't mind time-sharing our weekend getaway here with the three of you. But Grandma and Grandpa's place isn't Home Sweet Home for any of us. It's free money. And I think it's an ideal project for Penny while she's unemployed. We could pay her some kind of per diem off the top, minus prorated rent, after we sell.”

“I don't know,” Penny says to Matt. “If it's so ghetto, is it safe? What if it's a crack house?”

“What did they teach you at school—raising Labrador puppies for fun and profit? What do you say when someone tries to sell you drugs? ‘No, thank you, sir, I don't need any drugs today.' Then you walk away and call the professional gentrifiers in riot gear.”

Amalia says, “What do you think, Penny?”

“I guess I could look at it.” She takes out her phone. “What's the address?”

“She'll never even find that house,” Patrick says, “because ten to one it's fallen down.”

“What do you know about real estate?” Matt says. “You live in a house made of palm fronds.”

“Location, location, location,” Patrick replies.

WHEN THE FESTIVITIES ARE OVER,
Penny goes home to Morningside Heights.

She lies on her back in her father's old bed, trying to sleep. There is so much to think about, but she can only think of one thing: him.

She turns on her side. Her breathing echoes in the springs of the mattress, reminding her of his last days of life. His labored wheezing in the weeks when he could do nothing else. Each breath more difficult than the one before, while she waited in desperation for his heart to fail.

She turns on the light and sits up against his headboard. She drinks from his water glass. She sees herself surrounded by his furniture.

She smokes a cigarette. She lies flat again. She tries to think about the unfairness of being evicted and under pressure to work for the family instead of moving on with her life, but instead she thinks of Norm's death for two solid hours before she falls asleep.

PENNY MARCHES FROM THE GROVE
Street PATH station in Jersey City toward the home her grandfather set on fire. It is a sunny Tuesday afternoon in mid-June, and a long walk—more of a bus ride, but the weather is so nice, and she hates buses. The low laburnum hedges along the sidewalk are filled with wild bees. She hears a blue jay screech.

The neighborhood soon becomes alarmingly ugly. Clapboard row houses wear crooked aluminum siding in mildewed pastel shades. Concrete front stoops are faced on the sides with orange-hued fake brickwork. Flimsy aluminum railings imitate wrought iron. Blocks of cheap postwar construction alternate with blocks of prefab that could have been put up yesterday. She navigates an industrial block awash in broken glass, populated by delivery vans with flat tires. Low, flat-roofed garages crowd the sidewalk.

She turns into a cross street—a block of larger houses. They have
roofed front porches, with wooden railings turned on lathes and coated in innumerable layers of paint. The paint, in chips, lies under the railings. The houses are high and tall, the sort of brick town houses people call brownstones, with big front windows and broken, crooked venetian blinds. The windows gape black, as though there's nothing inside.

The next block is better. On one side, small row houses, well kept and tidy. One even has several colorful wooden pinwheels jammed into the dirt in the window boxes, like flowers. The other side is brownstones that look lived-in.

The four-story, detached brick house on the next corner takes up three lots. It is shaped like an inverted L, with the front door in the long side. The porch wraps around the corner of the house, paralleling the sidewalk, with ten feet of crabgrass between them. The mansard roof is not entirely convincing. Penny's phone tells her that she has arrived.

She walks up on the porch. A watermelon cat—that's what Norm used to call tabbies—sleeps on sweaters, a parka, and advertising circulars in a cardboard box labeled
FREE.
In place of a doorbell, there is a contraption screwed to a board, with a label reading:
1. SELECT TUNE BY SETTING SWITCH: JAZZ. TONY. ANKA. ROB. SORRY. 2. PRESS HERE.

A symbol is spray-painted on the bricks to the right of the door: an eighteen-inch circle containing an
N
a foot tall, its first upstroke ending in an arrow pointing down. An anarchist lightning strike. International symbol of squatters. To the right of the
N,
seven small, regular letters are neatly printed in thick black graffiti marker:
i c o t i n e.

Penny sits down on a Windsor chair next to the
FREE
box and offers the cat her fingertips. It purrs. She looks around the quiet midday streets, from which everyone seems to have gone to work, except for a few scattered cars. She hears a clanking sound.

She stands and walks the length of the porch.

On a fourth lot belonging to the property, around the corner to the left, past the short leg of the inverted L, a beat-up white Chrysler minivan is parked on the twin concrete strips in front of an open garage. A man stands in the shade inside the garage, staring at a bicycle frame clamped into a stand.

The man is cute enough to have coasted through high school on looks alone—an academically worthless but benign (not dangerous) high school in the semirural Passaic County community where his father, a one-armed carpenter, survives on public assistance in a trailer in the woods. His mother, who drives a forklift in a tri-modal logistics center in Delaware, feels that he lacks a male role model. That's why she sent him to live with his father when he was thirteen. Also because her husband thinks he's a sassy smart-aleck and tries to bait him into a shoving match whenever they meet up, which is (for ten years now) never.

Penny is about to receive a fateful first impression. She sways, her hands on the railing. Indecision swings her body backward and forward. She calls out, “Hello?”

The man pauses in his diagnosis of a hairline crack in a weld and walks out until he is even with the garage door. He looks her up and down. He is in his late twenties, clean-shaven, tall, with blond hair in a ponytail, blue eyes, brown eyebrows, broad shoulders, narrow hips, and bare feet. He wears a T-shirt made thin by washing, and low-slung, threadbare Lees. Penny observes that he is slim and muscular, with a graceful way of moving, plus this inquisitive yet self-assured dignity-type thing. And he's
working
. Alone on a weekday in the garage of a big house, his own boss, maintaining a human-powered vehicle. A living embodiment of masculine self-reliance.

She thinks a series of hastily jotted firecrackers and red heart shapes, mentally texting friends about her discovery.

He turns his head and spits tobacco juice into a bush.

She thinks again:
redneck, but *CUTE!!!*

Turning back toward her, he says, “Hi there. Can I help you?”

She says, “My name is Penny. Do you live here?”

“Yes,” he says.

“How long?” she asks.

“Since the beginning,” he says. “I was the one who found this place. You want to check it out? Come inside and get the full tour?” He gestures toward the house.

For a moment she wonders why his first reaction is to offer her a tour. Does the house get tourists? —No, but there's no reason a stranger would show up on the doorstep unless she needed a place to stay. Right?

Penny is not sure she wants a tour right this second. She is dressed for mass transit and walking through a bad neighborhood. Now she wishes for clean hair, littler shoes, and something on her ass that is not pants. She's a short brown woman in athletic socks, carrying her purse in a plastic bag. To racists, a higher primate. To lefties, a Person of Color. To absolutely no one, the would-be heiress to the property, here to throw him out. Of course that has advantages. She slumps and squints to heighten her stealth. Maybe when she comes back dressed as herself, he won't know it's her?

Her feeling that she is playing a role and playing it badly—that were he to assess her as poor, pitiable, and false, he would not be wrong—makes her droop even more as she agrees to the tour. Nothing could be more to her sinister purpose than a tour. She'll be able to report back to Matt on the condition of the interior. She dislikes herself heartily.

The man says his name is Rob. He confounds her expectations by assuming she's smart.

“This house we call Nicotine is one of a group of properties administered by Community Housing Action as housing for political activists,” he says. “CHA serves as an umbrella organization for housing co-ops located all over North Jersey. The requirement to
live in them is that activism be your main occupation, but it's from all over the progressive spectrum. The houses all have themes. Some are pretty trivial—bicycle activists like me, tree tenders, you know, small-time BS—and some are big mainstream political issues like environmental stuff, disarmament, different health issues, AIDS and TB and whatever. This house has a slightly different genesis, because we don't actually share an issue—”

“Except nicotine, I guess. I saw you spitting tobacco juice.”

“I noticed you didn't take it too hard.”

“If you'd seen the stuff I've seen lately. Oh man! Also, I'm a smoker, not that I can afford it.”

“Then welcome to Nicotine. Come on in.”

He opens the front door to a hallway cluttered with winter boots. A narrow staircase mounts straight ahead. At the end of the hall, the barred transom of an overgrown and inaccessible back door filters greenish light through young trees that press against it from outside. To the left are carved wooden double doors, presumably leading to a living and dining area. The door to the right opens into a large, airy kitchen, with bay windows in two directions. He points the way there.

A chubby woman, older and taller than Penny, stands at the counter in basketball shoes, peeling carrots. She wears a tiered skirt made of orange canvas with an elastic waistband, and a faded pink T-shirt with an iron-on image of a wolf. To Penny her clothing is thoroughly ridiculous. Her ears poke out through her long black hair. She faces Rob and grins, pushing its greasy strands back behind her ears without putting down the peeler.

“Hey, Sorry,” he says. “We have a visitor.”

“My name is Penny,” Penny says. “I like your house!”

Rob picks up a bright red coffee cup promoting the anticholesterol drug Lipitor and spits in it. Sorry winces and shakes her head. She discards her carrot and peeler and asks Penny whether she
would like some Turkish coffee. Penny says yes, please, and Sorry requests that she and Rob take seats in the dining room, back across the hall and through the double doors.

“This room looks like you never use it,” Penny says to him. They sit down at a long wooden table that could easily seat fourteen. The veneer bubbles upward as though it had been left out in the rain. What once was a cut-glass chandelier, now missing all its glass elements, hangs overhead, three mismatched bulbs in its six sockets. The wallpaper is greenish, marbled in silver that echoes the black marbling on the smoked-glass mirror over the empty fireplace. On the mantelpiece are two statues: the Blessed Virgin Mary in latex (a fund-raising dildo for a feminist collective in Chicago, Rob tells her) and a similarly pliant My Little Pony in yellow with dirty hair. On the wall is a curling black poster: T
EST
D
EPT
. Beyond a broad archway that leads around the corner of the house, the room is dedicated to storage, filled with cardboard boxes, plastic containers, newspapers and magazines, and bicycles.

On the table, a pack of American Spirit cigarettes—a British American Tobacco brand boasting all-natural poisonous alkaloids—lies next to a thirties-vintage tabletop lighter and matching ashtray.

Sorry joins them, carrying a hanging brass tray with the coffee cups, Turkish-style. She takes a cigarette and taps it on the table many times. She leans forward to light it, inhaling deeply. The stoner-like concentration with which she does this impresses Penny.

Like her housemate, she seems to assume their visitor is bright and curious. On exhaling, she says, “Here's why I live at Nicotine. I got fucked over in my first drug trial. It was an antihistamine-SSRI phase one interaction thing supposed to run a month and pay eight thousand dollars. They had to let me go after
four days
. They gave me the whole eight thousand, but I was never the same. The drug interaction caused what you might call the onset of mania.”

“She was clinical,” Rob says. “She was living at this feminist house,
Stayfree, and let's just say they're not heavy into command and control, so they didn't know how to deal with it. They called the cops. That was their creative way of getting her back into medical custody.”

“First and last trial I ever did,” Sorry says. “Never again.”

“I never did a drug trial, but I heard about them,” Penny says. “It's supposed to be easy money.”

“Massively easy,” Sorry says. “I left the ER and spent the night skulking around this vacant lot like I was in the partisan resistance. In the morning I took all my money out of the bank to go to Afghanistan. I know exactly what I was thinking, too. I was going to lead the revolution in Afghanistan. But thank
God,
I didn't have a visa, so I got stuck at the airport and ended up back in the hospital. I came
this close
to being deported to Jordan.”