Solos (18 page)

“‘Margaret, are you grieving,'” Gene Rae quotes, “‘Over goldengrove unleaving?'” They were literature majors together.

“I am, Genie. I'm getting old.”

“If you are, then I am, and I'm not, so neither are you.”

“That seems reasonable, I admit, but still—I've been feeling sort of over the hill lately.” Emily reaches for a Mallomar. Gene Rae brought the cocoa, milk, and cookies with her, knowing Emily's slender larder can't support the nutritional demands of pregnancy. Mallomars sit proudly at the tip of the Personal Food Pyramid Emily and Gene Rae concocted long ago, just above apples, poached eggs, chicken peanut curry, tomato sandwiches on toasted Wonder bread, Cherry Garcia ice cream, and celery stuffed with cream cheese. “These are
so
fabulous.”

“They're great when you're pregnant, because they like being washed down with lots of milk.”

“My mother has a new boyfriend,” Emily says.

“Your mother is so completely cool for her age.” They are silent again, reading each other's minds, and then Gene Rae adds, “I often think you and St. Francis of Assisi would be perfect for each other.”

Emily's heart lurches. St. Francis of Assisi is what Gene Rae calls Marcus.

“If only he weren't young enough to be your son.”

“He could only be my son if I'd been a teenage slut.”

“You were a teenage slut,” Gene Rae reminds her.

“Okay, if I'd been an unlucky teenage slut.” Emily sees herself with a little mound under her sweater, and inside it is Marcus. “I wasn't really a slut anyway. It was just Jeffrey Norris and Neil Saltzman. Mostly.”

“Mostly.”

“Those were the days,” Emily says, but the remark is ironic, non-nostalgic. High school was the low point of their existence. Emily is happy to be a grown-up.

But she's still thinking about Marcus.

He told her a few days ago about the paper route he had as a kid, how he used to go out on his bicycle in the misty early mornings, when it was still nearly dark, with his canvas bag of papers slung over his shoulder. No one would be out but him and the deer, who'd stand on the roadside in clumps, staring at him, and then, quick as a blink, vanish into the trees. Marcus is not very communicative about his life, and Emily hoards stories like this one, typing them into a secret file on her computer titled SCARUM. The image haunts her: young Marcus bicycling down a country road in his corduroy jacket and little cap—though she's had to invent the jacket and cap, Marcus couldn't remember what he used to wear when he delivered papers. The image seems emblematic of Marcus: his work ethic, his aloneness, his feeling for animals, and his ineffable cuteness.

“So who's your mom's new squeeze?”

“One of the attorneys at Foley, Levine, & Kirk. His name is Enrico. His wife died a couple of years ago. Mom says he's got the most beautiful curly gray hair she's ever seen.”

“Sounds adorable.”

“And he has two cats and a new puppy.”

“I hope she snaps him up!”

“It would be hard,” Emily confesses, “to go to my mother's wedding before she comes to mine.”

Gene Rae looks at her sympathetically, one hand spread across Roland. Emily's inability to find Mr. Right is an old story. “Realistically speaking, Em, it is sort of hard to imagine you and Marcus walking down an aisle somewhere. Everybody would think he was the ring-bearer.” Gene Rae makes her voice high and squeaky, the voice of an imaginary crowd. “Where's the groom? Where's the groom?” She finishes her cookie, takes another. “Still, it's a shame. In a weird kind of way, you guys seem like soulmates.”

After Gene Rae leaves, Emily gives in to the urge to get out of her apartment and into the streets with her camera, while the light lasts. She walks up Berry Street, past the tavern Mae West used to live upstairs from, past the brewery, to Greenpoint, the Polish neighborhood that, if you walk far enough down Manhattan Avenue, evolves into a Hispanic one, places where it's rare to hear English. This is one of Emily's favorite walks, and she has already scoured these streets for
BREAD
,
DOG
, and
TIME
. She knows she won't turn up any new ones, but she's hoping to find something else. She has decided recently to expand what she is embarrassed to call her
artistic vision
by taking photographs of the neighborhood itself—fast, unstudied photos of Brooklyn's joyful jumble. She hasn't told anyone about it because it sounds so supremely uninteresting, but she finds herself getting excited as she walks along—not quite ready to shoot yet, just window-shopping.

She knows every store by heart on Manhattan Avenue: the notions shop with its window of scissors and thread, the God Bless Deli, the Polish Wicca shop, the fishing tackle store, the store selling Eastern European housedresses. The tiny place called White Dream that features only white clothing. The beauty shops named by people with an imperfect command of English—Hair Crazy, Hair Fever, and her favorite, Beautiful Again, with its implication that everyone was once beautiful and will return to that state as soon as those split ends are taken care of. She walks by the market; canned salmon is on sale, and she makes a note to stop in on her way home. Canned salmon isn't anywhere near the top of her food pyramid, but it's cheap and good for you and tastes okay tossed in mayo with pickles à la Mrs. Buzik. Old Mr. Suarez waves to her from where he waits in line at the outdoor can redeemer with Eddie the Chihuahua. She passes the bad drugstore (large, chain, rude) and the good drugstore (small, Polish, polite), Mrs. Ronnie the Psychic, the gift shop with the handmade straw hens from Czechoslovakia in the window, and the produce markets with their outdoor bins overflowing with peppers and apples and cukes. Through the window of Dee & Dee she spots Hattie of the Pet Pound browsing through a rack of flannel shirts. Then, glancing down a side street, she sees the brown leather jacket and greased buzz-cut of Elliot C. going into the gym, and she turns away.

Even a quick glimpse of Elliot casts a strange pall over the neighborhood.

But then, when she crosses Greenpoint Avenue, she looks through her camera and is mesmerized by the beauty of it: Manhattan Avenue, stretching north to Queens, its colorful, improbable, crazy quilt of shops just touched with gold by the fading light. She snaps pictures from several vantage points until the light falls and fades, and tells herself that if she takes no other pictures today, this will have been worth it.

Luther comes out of the liquor store, which is famous for its handsome Polish clerks and its dozens of brands of vodka. “Russian Vodka,” Luther says, opening the bag. “Something called Youri Dolgaruki. They were out of Krolewska. I'm going to make Cajun Kamikazes tonight. Why don't you drop over? Around nine? But bring Otto. Or get Marcus to walk you over. No going out alone, missy.”

“I can't bring Otto.” She has brought Otto over to Luther and Lamont's place in the past, and his attempts to play with the affronted Daphnes always break her heart. Last time, orange Daphne swiped his nose, drawing blood. She can still see Otto's hurt, baffled face.

“Then bring Marcus. The cats love him.” Luther chuckles. “Maybe because he's not always trying to sniff their butts.”

It's too dark for more pictures. The magic light is gone. How fast it fades! Emily and Luther walk back along the avenue, toward home. “How's everything?” Emily asks him. “How's Lamont?”

“Lamont. Lamont? Oh—La-
mont
. He's fine, I hear. I don't see that much of him nowadays. He has a new friend.”

“Oh, Luther.” Emily knows he means Elliot C. “I'm sorry. I'm sure it's nothing. I'm sure he'll get over it.”

“I'm not sure of any of those things, Emily.” Luther takes her arm. “But I'll tell you what. Let's not fuck up a beautiful evening by talking about it.”

They're turning onto Lorimer Street when Luther says, “So what's this about Marcus moving out of town?”

Emily stops dead. “Moving out of town? Where did you hear this?”

“I ran into him at the bank this morning. We're just chatting, you know, and I say to him, ‘Hey Marcus, you ever thought of buying yourself a little house here in the hood? Because I heard Mrs. Buzik's place over by the park might be available soon, she's thinking of moving in with her daughter out in Mineola.'”

“She is?”

“Yeah, she's not doing so well. Going in the hospital next week to have a toe amputated. And she's talking about unloading the place.”

“What about Trix?”

“Going with her, of course. Can't you just see Mrs. Buzik and Trix out in the burbs? Sitting by the pool, soaking up the sun? Trix can do her business on a lawn that has one of those
FED BY CHEMICALS AND PROUD
signs on it.”

“So she's selling her place,” Emily says. She can't let Luther get off on one of his suburban-living riffs. “And so you said to Marcus—”

“Well, of course, the trouble is, the building is such a wreck she's not going to get much for it. But that's where I figure somebody like Marcus comes in. He's got his little nest egg going—he was depositing a fistful of cash this morning. Let me tell you, the kid is no slouch. He's smart, he's handy, he's personable, he'd be a cool landlord, even at his age. But then he tells me he already owns a place, in the boonies somewhere—I think he said Pennsylvania—his mother's place.”

“Honesdale, Pennsylvania,” Emily says, her heart sinking.

“That's it. Honesdale. Just south of Doohickey Falls and west of Bumfuck Center.”

“I didn't know.” Emily starts walking again, but her legs are rubbery. Marcus has told her about the little gray farmhouse, the pretty Victorian town. “I didn't know he owned the house.”

“Sounds like there was nobody else to inherit it.”

Why hasn't she realized that? Why hasn't she ever asked him what became of the house? Why hasn't she ever asked him the million questions she doesn't know the answers to? She has no idea what he wants, why he wants it, who he is. Marcus Mead. His mother's name was Summer, and she is dead, though Marcus doesn't talk about what she died of. His father left when he was ten. Marcus had a paper route and a long period of no formal schooling. He had a dog named Phoebe. There's a picture of him from 1991, with phone book and number 7 sweatshirt, squinting into the camera. He used to live alone in an unheated cabin. He's the son of her ex-husband, he's her dog-walker, he's somebody Luther ran into in the bank, he has strange green eyes, he is fond of avocados and Trollope and numbers and words, and he doesn't share her taste for Mallomars.

He's a cat, he's a bird, he's the crow who has learned to use a tool to get food
.…

“So I asked him why he never goes down there, and he said, well, one of these days he might, he'd like to set himself up with a truck and get down there from time to time and maybe even move there for good one of these days.”

Emily stops again. “Marcus said that?”

Luther gives her a strange look. “Well, yeah,” he says. “But just in a general kind of way. I mean, I don't think he has any plans to do it any time soon.”

“Oh.”

“It's like—hey, who doesn't get the urge to move to the country every once in a while?”

“Yeah.”

“He's not going to find too many dogs to walk in a place like that. Sounds like the kind of place where they keep the dog in the yard and name it Bubba and only let it off the chain during deer-hunting season.”

They turn onto Berry Street. Luther chats on about city life versus country life. Emily is silent. Why is she just realizing now that Marcus is an immense, panoramic, teeming, epic novel, stuffed with events and thoughts and feelings, and all she has of him is her pathetic, lovesick little SCARUM file: everything he's let her know about himself packed into—what?—fifty lousy kilobytes on her hard drive. Readers Digest Condensed Marcus.

She gives a little moan, and stumbles. Luther catches her arm. “Hey—you okay, Emily?”

She leans against him, and he puts his arms around her—the vodka bottle bangs against her back—and the two of them stand on the corner behind the automotive high school, while Emily lets herself weep over Marcus Mead, who is someone she has absolutely no claim on. She is nothing to him but a temporary friend. He would leave her in a minute for a house in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. This is the hard truth. Marcus was all she had, and soon she won't have Marcus.

She searches in her pocket, finds an old tissue, and blows her nose while Luther stands there patting her back. Then she heaves a huge sigh. “Oh, Luther.”

He tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear. “It's a bitch, ain't it, babe?”

They walk on. Berry Street is just Berry Street, and the river when she glimpses it is aluminum gray, flat and dull. In the brewery yard, she sees half a dozen of the scrawny stray cats who live there, foraging in Dumpsters and sleeping in the open and producing endless litters, and Emily thinks she has never seen anything sadder or more hopeless.
Brooklyn
, she misquotes slightly,

which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams
,

So various, so beautiful, so new
,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light
,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain …

When they get to her door, Luther looks into her eyes and says, “We don't ever need to say another word about this if you don't want.”

“Thank you, Luther.”

“But on the other hand, if you ever want to talk about it, you can talk to me.”

Emily nods, a lump in her throat.

Luther holds up the bag from the liquor store. “Come on over later.”

“Thanks, but no, I don't think I will,” she says. “I have to work tomorrow.”