Ten Thousand Saints (13 page)

“Yeah,” Jude admitted.

“She’d get swallowed up by New York. Besides—where would she sleep?”

“Where would
I
sleep?” Jude asked.

“In the loft,” Les said. “Kind of like a bunk bed, with a ladder and everything. Only below you is the living room.”

“Do you have cable?”

“Check,” Les said. “No video games, though. You’ll have to bring yours.”

“Do I have to go to school?”

“ ’Fraid so, champ.”

Champ. After Champlain’s Loch Ness monster. He’d forgotten his dad called him that.

“Forget it, then,” he said. “I’m not going to school.”

Les blew his nose in a napkin, then tossed it across the room at the trash can. He missed. “All right, fine. New York public schools are dreadful, anyway. You’d be safer on the street. But you’ll have to find some kind of gainful employment. And you have to promise not to tell your mother.”

Jude pressed the pause button. “When are we leaving?”

“First thing in the morning. We’ve got to get out of this house. Can you feel the negative vibes in this place? That’s what happens when you get more than one female under one roof. They all start bleeding on the same schedule.” With effort, he stood up from the bean bag chair and stretched. “Get your stuff together. And get a shower and a shave, will you? You look really awful.”

I
n the bathroom, Jude acquainted himself with the things he’d need on his trip, all of the essential items that belonged to him. His retainer case, Noxzema, deodorant. He stepped all the way into the shower this time, letting the warm water pelt his skin until the burning became uniform, sufferable. He shampooed with Prudence’s pink, perfumey bottle, but it did nothing for his hair but work it into a tangled, fragrant nest. Standing in front of the steamy mirror, bath towel wrapped around his waist, he combed at it, knot by knot. Then, with the inside of his wrist, he cleared the steam from the mirror and put his face close to the glass.

He looked, of course, nothing like his father. He had never looked like anyone. That was why it had been such a shock to open the pamphlet his mother had left him—days later, bored out of his mind—and see the faces that looked like his. He had felt as though he were looking at a family photo album, brothers and sisters he didn’t know he had. It had given him a chill. And yet he’d opened it again and again, waking up in the morning, in the middle of the night, brushing a finger over the wide path between his nose and mouth. He did so now, stroking each hair. He looked hard in the mirror. There were a lot of them. Thick, bristly, rust red hairs.

Teddy had started shaving not long before he died, had made a show of walking around with little kernels of bloody toilet paper stuck to his neck. Jude hadn’t had anything to shave. But while he’d been sleeping away the last six weeks, his peach fuzz had gotten fuzzier. He ran a finger over his chin, across his cheeks, between his nipples, under his arms, untucked the towel from his waist—he was hairy as hell. From under the sink, he took one of his sister’s pink plastic razors, and from the shower, he took her shaving cream. This time he didn’t fear the image that came, uninvited, to mind—Prudence standing naked, right here where he stood. Maybe it was because he’d finally caught up with her, or because he already sort of missed her, or because for once, luck had come to him, and not her. He slathered on the cream, uncapped the razor, and went slowly, sensibly about it. When he was done, his face was bleeding in three places, but he liked the burn of the hot water on his skin. His cheeks were as smooth as his sister’s.

And then there was the hair on his head. When he combed at the knots again, tears came to his eyes. Another hunt under the sink and he found the rusty nail scissors, the ones that Prudence had hurled at his face, and with them he snipped away at the most hopeless of the kinks. Before long a heap of hair the size of a small red rodent had amassed in the bottom of the sink. One devil-lock-size clump fell heavily to the bath mat. What was left he lathered with shaving cream, the gel foaming white, his head flowery and cool. He circled the razor around his head in a ring, from his ears to the tip of his quite nicely shaped skull, until there was nothing left but scalp.

Then he stuck his head under the faucet, letting the warm water wash the hair down the drain. He looked in the mirror. He was round and pink, like a baby. A blue vein swam up his neck from his collarbone to his temple. He was tired and sweaty from the steam.

He took another shower, scouring himself with the fresh bar his mother had stocked in the soap dish. He remembered all the ways she’d looked after him—bringing him meals, folding his laundry, the pairs of socks curled up like snails. His father had never done those things for him. That was what was so strange about imagining Les with Johnny McNicholas, comforting him after Teddy died. Until now, clean and clearheaded, Jude hadn’t thought that someone else might have needed taking care of.

Six

T
he classrooms were cold, the buildings square, the grounds skirted by leafless bushes as stiff as coral. The teachers were overdressed. The kids were gloomy and skittish, with poor posture, aggrieved by their low PSAT scores. Eliza decided if she heard one more person say “I’m just not good at taking tests,” she would hang herself. Every weekend she could, she took the train from Jersey an hour back to her mom’s place in New York.

Perhaps because the curators of the school were accustomed to this breed of luckless, moneyed offspring—those plagued by attention deficit disorders and indiscreet drug habits—they were as surprised as Eliza herself that she was,
when she applied herself,
good at taking tests. She was good at reports and papers and presentations, a diorama of the Globe Theatre, with a square of tissue paper for each window, canary yellow. To say that she had lost herself in her studies would imply a surrender, an accident; she was lost, but she had lost herself willfully, as one does when being chased. Into each fluorescent classroom she leapt sharpened pencil first, into Western Civ and British Lit and Algebra II and Attic Greek, into the labyrinth of protasis and apodosis and second aorist subjunctive active and her favorite, the optative of wish:

May we be killing / kill the goat.

If only we may be killing / kill the goat.

I wish that we may be killing / kill the goat.

Cocaine had been until then purely recreational; only now did she understand its functional power. She stayed up late, long after lights-out, listening to the Buzzcocks on her headphones and studying flashcards by flashlight until her contacts burned her eyes; she woke early, read
The Canterbury Tales
in the dining hall over breakfast: a cinnamon-raisin bagel, dry. It was all she could get down. For her intramural, she swam lap after lap. That she had no friends was of help. She didn’t bother making any. She was glad enough to be rid of the old ones. She sniffed around only enough to find some Izod who sold coke, which she cut in her dorm room on a Bakelite hand mirror while her roommate Shelby Divine was at squash practice or in the bathroom, or behind the sheet Shelby had hung on a clothesline between their beds, for privacy. The most skin Eliza had seen on Shelby was her wrists. “I’m not a lezzy, you know,” Eliza said, the first time Shelby had disappeared behind the sheet in her bathrobe. “Oh, I know,” Shelby had apologized. Shelby was from Charleston. She had a voice like sweet tea.

One evening late in January, as the two of them lay belly-down on their beds, the curtain drawn back, textbooks spread before them, Shelby asked, “Who’s T.M.?”

On the front of her chem folder, Eliza had drawn a pulpy heart, stabbed with an arrow, Teddy’s initials bleeding fatly inside. She slipped off her headphones. “Teddy,” she said, surprising herself. “Teddy McNicholas.” She hadn’t spoken his name aloud before, and the peal it produced was more solid than the hollow sound that had tolled and tolled in her head.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

Shelby was wearing an ankle-length nightgown of virginal white and a spotless pair of socks. Eliza pressed her pencil into the seam of her open book. “Not exactly.”

“Was he your first love?”

“Not exactly.”

Shelby turned on her side. The bedsprings creaked. “Well, who is he?”

Eliza wished she had a cigarette to take a drag from now. She would send a cloud of smoke out into the black-and-white night, dense and full of meaning, interpretable.

“He’s a boy who died,” she said flatly, picking up her pencil, but there were real tears in her eyes, for she wasn’t selfish, she wasn’t unfeeling, she wasn’t. But were the tears for Teddy, or for her? Were they for what she’d lost, or what she’d done?

She hadn’t given a thought to the cocaine. She’d nearly forgotten about it—barely two lines apiece!—until the look Johnny had given her there at the edge of the park, the phone hanging limply in his hand, her nostrils burning in the cold.

Teddy was a big boy, she told herself. He could have said no.

If only he’d gotten on that train with her!

She had wanted to make something happen; she had asked for heartbreak and she’d gotten it. And it was bigger than anything in her life. She wanted to forget Teddy, and she wanted something to remember him by.

She was aware of this paradox in a subliminal way, and of Johnny’s and Jude’s part in it. She wanted to know them, too; she wanted to forget them. She tried hard to drown them out. She ignored the blank page of her underwear, didn’t count the days, thought past and around and through them. If she occupied her brain—
If only we may be killing / kill the goat!
—she could think herself out of it. Because she couldn’t be. There was no fucking way.

T
he thing was, no one in New York knew Teddy was dead, because no one in New York had known Teddy existed. New York was its own solar system. Maybe once Sid or Kevin had seen a letter hanging around, had said, “Hey, who’s this from?” and Johnny’d said, “My kid brother.” Maybe not. Maybe someone had said, “Hey, Johnny, you got any family?” And maybe Johnny, keeping it simple, had said, “Not really.” He’d left Teddy with his mom so he could live with his dad, and after his dad went to jail, Johnny didn’t go home. He was doing his own thing. He’d send Teddy a mix tape now and then, a subway token with the center cut out. Now the subway token was gone, who knew where.

Through January, into February, in Chuck Taylors and undershirt, over cracked sidewalks, under claws of elms, Johnny skated. He tried to get lost, make a maze of the city, turned north, then left, then right, then west, chased a bumper sticker, a blue jay, turned up the volume on his Walkman. Through both sides of Minor Threat’s
Out of Step
and through both sides again, through paradise and slum, past falafel cart and flower shop and carriage ride, over cobblestone and manhole, past brownstone and mirrored steel, past Les Keffy’s lavender Dodge van, on a different block each week, the parking tickets on the windshield faded and dried like autumn leaves, past the vacant, piss-stinking newsstand, past one building that had burned down, past another, past the dealers and the crackheads and the squeegee men, past every bum who knew his name, past every thug who’d stared him down,
Go ahead, asshole, kill me,
but no one did, and always when he stopped, lungs packed full, expelling white breath into the air, there would be the city, inexorable and vast, and a subway station that threatened to lead him home.

He skated to the river, to the bodega, to Venus or Sounds or Some Records or Bleecker Bob’s, or Angelica Kitchen, or across the Williamsburg Bridge to the Hare Krishna temple in Brooklyn, to shows at CBGB, the Ritz, the Pyramid, the Limelight, Irving Plaza,
ABC
No Rio, Wetlands, Tramps, skating home in the dark bruised and frosty with sweat, standing under the showerhead until the water went cold. He did push-ups and sit-ups and chin-ups—up! up! up!—cleaned the minifridge, fed the cats, made the bed, made a pot of chamomile tea, teapot whistling on the hot plate, the space heater and the stereo and the tattoo machine, the mouth of the guy he was tattooing, staring down the needle for hours, at hair follicle and inky vein, busy busy busy, and the mouths of all the guys in his band, and all their amplifiers, as much noise as electronically possible without blowing the circuits, that was the trick.

Sometimes his skateboard would take him to the southern point of Manhattan, and he’d look out over the bay past the dollar-green Lady Liberty to the distant biscuit of Staten Island. Somewhere over there was the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, where his father and uncle lived. Now that his mother had disappeared and his brother was dead, they were the only family he had left, but his father was dead to him, too, as dead as his mother had told him he was in the first place.

For his antiseptic lifestyle, plus the white T-shirt, bald head, and gold hoops, Johnny had been dubbed by his friends Mr. Clean. He hadn’t had a drink or eaten meat or smoked a cigarette in almost two years. There was no reason to start now. The sannyasis at the Hare Krishna temple promised that renunciation of desires brought peace.

S
he chose a New Jersey town she’d never set foot in before, whose name she’d heard uttered only by the train conductor. Cissy’s older sister had had one, and Eliza’s own mother had had two. You called; you made an appointment. Eliza made the call from the hall phone in the dorm, cut swimming that afternoon, and walked from the station to a clinic in the corner lot of a Grand Union shopping center, next door to a travel agency. One of the clinic’s store windows was shuttered with plywood; the miniblinds in the other were shut tight.