Safekeeping (47 page)

As he circled the dome, hunting for beer, he was reminded of that first night he snorted coke, how he walked around the outside of Bryant Park, back when it was bordered by tall hedges and half its lamps were busted, giving dark cover to streetwalkers and dealers. He must have rounded that block—the massive library and the park behind it—ten times before giving in and buying his first bump. Actually, he didn't buy it: the pusher, a skinny black kid nicknamed Haircut, gave him his first for free, so long as he promised to come back and buy from him if he liked it. Haircut had him rub the dollar bill on his gums. That was 1984, a week short of his sixteenth birthday, two months before his expulsion from Stuy. For a long time he thought if only he had circled the block an eleventh time and gone home to Zayde. But that was ridiculous. If not then, it would have been the next day or the next year. That night, it was the library's stone lions that lacked sympathy, staring out with their pupil-less eyes.

Adam neared some kids standing in a circle and had a feeling about them. Peeking out of the corner of his eye as he passed, he found he was right: a boy with brown skin and bleached yellow hair doled out pills. Adam stopped. “That X?”

“Yeah. From Tokyo.”

“I've never done X.” He edged toward them. “Done everything else, crack, smack, but never ecstasy. Not a huge rave scene in the States.”

The teens nodded as if they met crack smokers all the time. These were the kind of kids who thought cool meant never being impressed.

“You want to try?” A girl extended an arm swathed in friendship bracelets. In her open palm was a yellow pill stamped with a blue butterfly, like
something he might have found at The Sweet Life, the candy store on Hester Street, back when he used to get his fix from Nerds and gummy worms.

“Does it make you hallucinate? I never do anything that makes you hallucinate. I fucking hate hallucinations.” Adam hoped the girl would say yes.

She shook her head. “No. It'll just make you feel good. Really good. You won't fucking believe how good.”

How many hours were left until he was back in his room with the four beers? Five hours? Maybe more. He could crawl into the uncaring wheat and white-knuckle it. That's what he should do.

The girl retracted her hand.

“Okay! I'm in.”

She dropped the yellow butterfly pill in his palm.

“Banzai!” said the platinum blond boy, and they all tossed a pill into their mouths.

Adam pulled out the remnants from his stipend, worried he might not have enough for the pill, but the boy waved him off. “Forget it. It's on us.”

“Aw, man, thanks.”

“Just spreading the joy.”

Adam walked on, waiting for the pill to kick in. He felt bad about taking it, so he hoped it took effect soon, wiping out that guilt, too. He leaned against the silo. Still nothing. The pounding base came through the cement walls. He checked his watch. Ten minutes. He started walking again. Probably an old pill. Or fake. The stupid kid had been ripped off, believing the dealer's bullshit about Tokyo.

He rounded the silo to where the cars were parked, feeling a slight tingling at the base of his ribs. He stopped to concentrate on it. The tingling spread so fast, surging up his spine, blooming in his chest, his head. The wheat and the parked cars and the night sky, they all, just like that, lost their menace. How could he have seen wheat, which fed people—only made them happy—as anything but good? What the hell could be bad about wheat?

He reentered the silo with explosions of joy going off inside him like fireworks. Holy shit, this stuff was good. Smiling, he leaned against the concrete wall and watched the dancing people. Look at them! Human beings—how he loved them, flaws and all. The love didn't come from the
X; no, it merely allowed him to feel the love that was always inside him, buried under the dread. And didn't it feel like the crowd loved him, too? Or rather that each person in it would love him if given the chance? He even had the feeling his grandfather was looking down on him with love. Forgiveness. No. He couldn't bring Zayde into this. Leave Zayde out.

He spotted Ulya talking to an absurdly handsome guy, and he didn't hate him, wasn't jealous. Not one bit. Who cared if he was so tall Ulya had to crane her head to make eye contact? That guy had his own problems. His own heartache. We all had our stories, Adam thought, closing his eyes and concentrating on the electronic beats pulsing under his feet. The beats traveled up his legs and through his groin and out the top of his head like the mild spasms preceding an orgasm, except there was no climax. The currents just kept rolling through him.

When he reopened his eyes, Ulya was no longer talking to Mr. Handsome but dancing again, swarmed by guys trying to groove near her. He watched her dance close to this one and then that one, never giving any of them too much of her time. Her dancing nirvana was mesmerizing, hips going round, hands in the air, short skirt riding up her thighs. She burned so brightly everyone else seemed to dim and disappear. Soon only she shone in the middle of the silo.

“You guys ready to go?”

Ofir had startled him. “Go? Now?” He pulled a stalk of wheat from Claudette's hair, and she turned in embarrassment.

“It's three a.m.”

“Three a.m.? You're shitting me.” Adam referred to his watch. He couldn't believe it. This drug made an hour pass in a second. It made sense, he supposed, time flying being the downside to happiness. “Okay, I'll get Ulie.”

As he walked toward her, he found it wasn't as if the other dancers had disappeared; they had. Ulya was one of a handful of stragglers still dancing. How long had he been watching her? She must have danced nonstop for hours. When he tapped her on the shoulder, she spun around, hair stringy with sweat, black eyeliner smudged into shiners. He pointed at the exit where Ofir and Claudette stood waiting to go, framed by the tall rectangular doorway like a painting, the wheat and starry sky behind them.

Ulya flapped her green T-shirt for air. She had enjoyed the party, done nothing about the brooch. “I loved dancing.”

Adam smiled. “Yeah, I could tell.”

She stood still—paralyzed, it seemed to Adam. “I loved being young and free.”

“
Love
, not
loved
, my little babushka. You need to work on your verb conjugation.”

Driving away from the silo, along the path of trampled wheat, no one spoke. When they turned onto the country road, Ulya snuggled up to Adam. His high was wearing off but not yet gone, and her head fell onto his chest like a pebble into a pond, setting off concentric ripples of love and horniness. He had heard ecstasy heightened your sense of touch, but hadn't experienced it, since no one had touched him the whole night. No one had touched him, really, in months.

“Can I see that brooch?” Ulya zigzagged her finger across Adam's stomach.

Adam, emboldened by her attentions and the X, said, “You know where it is.”

His stomach tightened as she traced her finger down to the front pocket of his jeans. “Here?”

He nodded and sucked in his breath as she squirmed her hand inside. Her being so close was excruciating. It felt like if she didn't touch him, he would implode, and if she did, same thing. He wheezed. “To the left.”

Ulya knew that wasn't the brooch on the left. Did he have a hard-on? She'd assumed he was too out of it. She bit her lips and thrust her hand deeper. Adam emitted a small groan as she whisked out the brooch.

She held it up to the window. “Wow. It really is amazing.”

Ulya had a theory that sometimes it was best to make a show of having the desired object in your hand. She did it shoplifting all the time, made certain the saleslady noticed her oohing over a dress, trying on a pair of earrings, parading around from one mirror to another with the silk scarf. Sometimes she would even ask if the scarf looked good on her so the saleslady would let down her guard, thinking, well, she can't possibly be planning on stealing it.

Adam pointed. “Those little things are pomegranates.”

Even in the pale light the gold gleamed like something out of a fairy tale and the gemstones were blazing pools of color. On a school trip to Moscow, she and her fellow classmates had pressed their faces against the display cases in the Kremlin, goggling the Romanov jewels—the gold
crowns encrusted with diamonds, the emerald earrings a princess wore shortly before her execution. Sitting on dusty velvet, it all looked so lifeless. What a difference there was between seeing a jewel in a museum cabinet behind a thick pane of glass and holding it in your hand, out in the breathing, sweating, struggling world.

“Can I put it on?”

“Um . . .”

“Come on. For a second.”

“For a second.”

Adam pinched her baggy T-shirt and pierced it with the gold pin. As he pushed the stiff pin under the hook, he felt Ulya's breast against his knuckles. When he sat back, Ulya continued her show, leaning forward and tapping Claudette. “Look! Have you ever seen anything so magical?”

Claudette considered the brooch. “The blue stone is very big.”

Ulya scrambled to come up with her next move. Could she open the door and roll onto the road? She could run into the fields before they had a chance to stop the car. She might be too hurt, though, to run, not to mention the damn baby. Maybe she could ask Ofir to pull over so she could pee and then make a break for it. But how could she evade all three of them? Especially barefoot or in five-inch heels? None of them were in great shape—a lush, a disabled boy, and a freak—but still, the odds were against her. What if she pretended to lose the brooch? That was an idea . . . But how? They were stuck in a car. It was a long shot, but her only option was to make Adam forget about the brooch long enough for her to say goodnight and disappear into her room.

Adam moved for the brooch. “Okay, time's up.”

Ulya cupped her hand over it. “Please, Adam. Let me wear it for five more minutes. It makes me feel like a queen.”

Adam sighed. He felt too good, too high, to say no. He would take it back in five minutes.

“Queen Ulya,” she said, slipping her fingers into his thick hair. She scratched the back of his head. With the last vestiges of X, it felt like heaven to him.

Okay, Ulya thought. The show part was over. Time for stage two. From this point on the most important thing was to keep his attention away from the brooch. The radio clock glowed 3:54 a.m. Based on the drive to the rave, they would be back on the kibbutz in fifteen minutes. She could
do this. Seeing how much Adam relished the head scratch—much more than she could have expected—she upped it. She ran her fingers right through his hair, from the base of his skull over his crown and down to his forehead and back again. Adam groaned with pleasure.

She was still fondling his hair when they drove through the front gate of the kibbutz, but Adam wasn't enjoying it anymore. The high had worn off, leaving him lower than he'd started. A lot lower. His brain cried out, starving for whatever the X used up, serotonin, dopamine, he didn't know, but he was lucky he didn't have another one of those fucking butterfly pills. He would have popped it, done anything, to put off this hell for later.

Ofir pulled up to the volunteers' section, and Adam and Ulya climbed out the back. The car drove away with Claudette still in it. Ulya couldn't believe her luck. Adam seemed to have forgotten about the brooch, and her roommate wouldn't even be around to see her fleeing with it. She folded her arms over the jewels, a bit too high on her chest to look natural, and walked ahead, taking the steppingstones as fast as she could without drawing attention.

Adam descended the steps, jerkily. He felt like a broken jug glued back together all wrong, pieces missing. In two hours he had to be in the dishroom, ready to scrub jugs and plates for eight hours. How was he going to do it? He called out to Ulya. “Wait up!”

Ulya looked over her shoulder, readying to give back the brooch.

At the bottom of the stones, Adam paused with his hands on his waist to catch his breath. “So depressing.”

“What?”

“I don't know.”

Ulya walked on, heart going wild. She veered toward her building. “Goodnight, Adam,” she called, trying to sound natural. “See you tomorrow.”

She walked the final stretch toward her door, unzipping her vinyl purse. Oh my God. She had it. She had it! She stuck a trembling key in the lock. As she turned it, she heard: “Ulie.”

Again she looked over her shoulder, careful not to turn her chest to him. “Yes?”

He stood at the end of her path, shoulders hunched, looking miserable. “Can I sleep in your room? I don't mean have sex. I won't touch you. Just sleep. I don't want to be alone right now.”

She tried to think fast. What would be the safer move?

“I don't know, Adam, we only have two hours before work, and Claudette might—”

He turned away, head lowered. “Yeah, I figured.”

She pushed open the door to her room. One hundred thousand dollars—at least. Four hundred thousand shekels. A billion Belarusian rubles! Oh, oh. She could send her mother money, so she could fill her cupboards with tea, buy new boots. All she needed was Adam to not remember the brooch for one more minute. Just one minute. That was all she needed to change her shoes and run.