Nicotine (9 page)

On the second floor, he opens the double doors—each landing has the same layout, with a large room to the left, behind a single set of
double doors, and a smaller room opposite—and says, “This is where Sorry lives.” The room is bright and pretty, with big windows. It continues around the corner of the house, through an archway like the one that connects the dining room to the storage area downstairs. An improvised wooden sofa, covered with attractive textiles, rests on cinder blocks. The walls are hand-lacquered in yellow with a red stenciled border. Silk scarves hang from the lamp shades. There is a very large, pale, moth-eaten Chinese rug.

“It's so big and nice,” Penny remarks.

“That's because this house was never cut up into apartments. It has all the same rooms as when it was built.”

They mount the stairs. The third floor is home to Anka (short for Anne Catherine) on the left and Tony on the right. He doesn't open their doors. He simply says Anka is a talented painter who works at an AIDS magazine, and Tony is a mystery—an older guy, maybe forty, who seems so normal and stable you have to wonder. “What's he doing here?” Rob asks, rhetorically. “Honestly, I don't know.” Anka smokes only lightly, he says, and Tony smokes their housemate Jazz's organic homegrown by the ton, when he can get it.

“She grows her own tobacco? Is that legal?”

“You can have a few plants if you don't do anything creative,” Rob says. “You hang up the leaves to dry for a month. Then you cut it up and smoke it or dip it, or make cigars like Tony does. That's about all. You can't sell it.”

The last flight of stairs is narrow and steep, as if built to replace a ladder, and ends in a wooden lean-to on the roof. As they reach the top he points out bundles of tobacco leaves suspended from the ceiling like sheaves of grain, curing slowly in the still, moist heat.

The top-floor landing has two flimsy doors facing each other. Behind one of them, Rob inhabits a converted attic space with a small window and a skylight. It's indifferently finished, with mismatched pressboard paneling stapled to heavy beams and fiberglass insulation
peeking through the gaps. Penny sees a futon, books, a fan, a space heater, and a straight-backed chair piled with clothes. He says this was the half of the house that wasn't damaged in the fire.

Opposite his room, a dented aluminum storm door opens onto the roof, which is painted silver and walled in on one side by the fake mansard that faces the street. It slopes slightly toward a vertical drop to the backyard. The roof belongs to Jazz, her plants, and the conservatory-slash-penthouse in which she dwells. In winter her glass-walled room is crowded with seedlings in plastic cups. Now the plants are lined up against walls, wherever their roots can get some shade, growing well in the open—three feet tall, with trumpet-like flowers. “Don't touch the leaves unless you want a rash,” Rob advises Penny.

“It's nice up here,” she says. The grid of rooftops stretching to the horizon echoes the sky's crisscrossed condensation trails. Intermittent trees poke up as puffy masses, echoing the natural clouds.

“Jazz was the first person to move in, when I was still doing gut rehab,” Rob says. “She was sixteen. She saw nicotine as a civil rights issue. Her parents were growers. She's Kurdish American. You'll like her. Everybody likes her. She's getting back from Boston tonight.”

Penny looks over the edge into the backyard—into the crook of the L—and sees a thicket filled with trash bags, tires, glass and plastic bottles, and the torn remains of a vinyl aboveground swimming pool. “Is that you guys' yard?” she asks.

“We haven't really gotten around to yard work yet,” he says. On the way down, he pauses on the second-floor landing to indicate the door opposite Sorry's. “That's a really nice room, but I wouldn't advise you to request a viewing. That's where angels fear to tread.”

“Did somebody die in there?”

“You wish.”

“Now I'm curious.”

He pushes the door open. The room has two high windows, both
with the sashes raised and fine-meshed white screens. Obscuring their lower halves is a wall of rubber buckets, the kind stonemasons use for hydrochloric acid, minus their handles, and lined up on smoothly planed birch planks. “Four rows of thirteen buckets,” Rob says. “One for every week of the year.”

“I don't want to know what's in them,” Penny says.

“You definitely don't,” he assures her.

“Where'd they come from?”

“We had this hard-core anarchist living here for a while. This prisoners' rights guy with the Anarchist Black Cross, doing protests against the control units and diesel therapy and so on. He had done hard time and was—um—not fastidious. So when he heard rumors the police were going to run us out, he started saving ammunition. The police never came, and after about a year and a half he got in some kind of trouble, so one day he just comes home and grabs his stuff and leaves. Gone. And there was
nothing
we could do. We tried one time, me and Jazz. We shifted one bucket a quarter of an inch, and it was like the whole wall was going to come down on us. And we said, fuck it, forget it, who cares anyway? It doesn't stink. It's a work of art in perfect equilibrium, and somehow every one of those buckets is sealed. He must have used plumber's toilet wax. So I figure, okay, bring it on. Evict our asses. Whoever occupies this house after we're gone is going to be
very
unpleasantly surprised.”

“If I get rid of the buckets, can I have the room?” Penny asks.

Rob regards her. “
Nobody,
” he says slowly, “could ever get rid of those buckets. I don't know what it would take. It would take direct intervention by God.”

“I'm clever and I'm strong,” Penny says. “And no bodily fluid has ever scared me.” She marches resolutely to the wall of buckets.

She touches one bucket lightly with three fingers, and it wobbles. The plank covering it sways forward and back. The plank below it sways back and forth. The whole thing starts to shimmy from right
to left, and so on down to the bottom. She grasps a plank to calm it, and the entire construction reacts all wrong. It bucks interference, as though it had a consciousness. Somehow it gains kinetic energy even from the soft touch with which she releases her hold.

She rushes to the door, screeching, “Holy fuck!” She turns back to watch it.

“I told you so,” Rob says solemnly. “Those are forever buckets.”

He holds her in his arms and they watch the waves pass and repass through the low wall of buckets. They stand deep in awe, like the last to die in a disaster movie, the couple privileged or condemned to see with its own eyes the day of wrath—the asteroid, the tsunami, the retreat of a glacier—

When the wall stops vibrating, they retreat and close the door.

She sits on the sofa in the kitchen talking to Rob, glancing upward again and again, knowing it is directly above her.

ON FOOT, FROM THE BUS
stop, late in the evening, Jazz returns. The house seems to stretch and open its eyes to meet her. Sorry descends the stairs with her arms held wide to embrace her.

Jazz (short for Jasmine) is a slim young person who never stands up straight. Her head is upright on her shoulders, but her spine flexes like an otter's with every gesture. She limps from her beatings at the hands of the police, but it's hard to tell. Her movements don't follow that kind of regular pattern. She gestures with unforeseeable grace. She rolls cigarettes with her left hand, using the right only to smooth each long, thin ovoid as she lights it. Her nose is crooked, as though broken in a fight or an accident, and her wrists bear old, deep scars from self-harm. Her clothing seems, to Penny, better than any clothing she has ever seen—a red-and-white tunic with a million fine details, pants of old combed cotton, loose and clingy, the couture of a peasant. Her eyes are large. She looks around smiling in a magnetic way.

Penny feels a burning desire to please her. She tells her about facing the monster. Jazz laughs hard enough to slap both hands down on her knees and lose a cigarette ash to the floor. She turns her head toward Sorry, showing Penny her lovely profile.

She tells them a little of what she learned on her trip to Boston—a visit to a women's poetry book collective—and says she is off to take a bath. This she will do, Rob tells Penny, for several hours, in an old galvanized tub on the roof under the stars, in rainwater warmed by admixture from an electric teakettle.

“What are your poems like?” Penny asks before she goes.

She turns and puts both hands on the table. Looking Penny in the eye, she says, “Take my arm, my sister. Follow me to where the shooting stars lie still. I saw them falling, he said, in cascades of living fire. There in the hillside village, they lay where they fell. The dead of Pompeii, cast in blue ice. I cradled a blue ice baby and its cold skin hurt my touch. A jet unzipped the sky, and through the rent yet more abortions fell. Fetuses of old women, young men, old men, and young women. Melting they formed a single sea, all personhood lost. We ran to the top of the city walls. Stop, we commanded heaven. Spare those who have not yet lived! Take us, the free! But that is freedom, heaven said—to fall.” She pauses.

“Yikes,” Penny says. “Wow.”

“It's from my Kurdish Goth phase. Now I mostly write erotic poetry.”

“It drives her lovers crazy,” Rob says. “I think it's too explicit. It scares people off.”

“Yeah, it doesn't always go down well with my exes,” Jazz admits.

PENNY SPENDS THE NIGHT WITH
Rob. They kiss chastely, they hug, they sleep. They draw closer together in their sleep than they did awake. She awakens at 4:00
A.M.
needing to pee. She ignores the juice-jar chamber pot in his room and walks down three flights of
creaking stairs to the toilet that shares a plastic curtain with the shower in a back corner of the kitchen. She thinks of the monster and looks up. Outside the first birds begin to sing.

She goes back to bed and lies next to Rob. She remembers the vivisection of Norm, his mute suffering, his misplaced courage
.
She burrows her wet face into Rob's chest and he clasps her tight. He says not one word, and neither does she. She entrusts herself to him. She doesn't fall asleep again. Still, she feels better. It's like being loved with unquestioning love.

SHE SPENDS THE DAY WITH
Rob. He tinkers with a broken mountain bike frame in the garage. “It's not salvageable,” he says. “I was going to turn it into part of a trailer, but I think it's already art.”

“As in garbage?”

He unclamps it from the workbench and carries it to the gap between the garage and the house that gives access to the backyard. Half-swallowed by weeds, a pile of metal debris is rising. “Art as in art,” he says, throwing it on the pile.

“What do you do with these bikes?”

“Fix them.” He surveys the garage and the open space around it and spits. “But right now I'm out of frames. You want to go cruising?” He fetches a pry bar and a hacksaw from the garage. He beckons Penny to join him in the minivan.

They drive deeper into Jersey City, toward the Hackensack River. “Lampposts near the street,” he tells her. “That's where people let a wheel get crushed by some car parking, and then they abandon the bike and it's
mine
.”

Penny scans the curbs but doesn't see any bikes.

He stops before a bridge over a small tributary, and gets out to look down the revetment. “Bike,” he says, pointing. He opens the back doors of the minivan and removes a neatly rolled towing strap. He gives Penny one end so that she can belay him—using a lamppost
as a pulley—and he creeps down the slippery, overgrown riverbank to the bike. He loops the strap around it, and together they drag it back up the incline.

The spokes are grassy and the handlebars rusty, but the chrome-molybdenum frame and stainless steel derailleur still look good. “Not a dream bike,” he says. “The dream is when you see a really good bike with the gel oozing out of the seat and realize some dweeb lost both keys to the U-lock and believes that bullshit about how he'll never get it open. Those puppies will bust with a two-pound hammer.”

That evening, Penny prepares to spend another night with Rob by helping him kick back two forties. They go through seven cigarettes together. Once in bed, he kisses her on the cheek. They snuggle close. He lies on his back and pulls her up on top of him, sighing amiably. “I like feeling your weight,” he says.

She feels happy and very turned on. She is determined to make the transition to being in love. Through tactical wriggling she determines once again that he is not aroused at all. His genitals seem liquid, like raw egg sloshing in a bowl.

She says, “Be honest. Are you gay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I feel like we definitely have a boy-girl thing, but I can't tell how you feel.”

“I should tell you. I'm asexual. I'm not attracted to people in that way.”

“
Asexual?
You are
so
into me
!”

“Just not the way you think. I like you. I'm drawn to you. You're a good person.”

Penny does not take “good person” as a compliment. Having been called “koala” half her life, she knows she has a
cara de buena persona
. She also knows that her body's bootylicious and he's held it for hours on end. She believes he is full of shit. “So you're not attracted to me,” she sums up.

“Wrong. I'm fascinated by you, and I think we'll be close friends.”

“You have potency issues,” she says. “It's the nicotine and alcohol. I'm serious. You need to cut back.”

“Listen to me. I don't respond to people in that way. Maybe you're not familiar with asexuality?”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “That's it. I'm too Bible Belt to see that you're gender-queer.”