The Sunken Cathedral (15 page)

XXII

T
he movie star stands at his expansive kitchen window, wondering if he should have taken the architect’s advice and knocked the brick wall open so the entire thing, the whole room, would be exposed to the back gardens of Chelsea. What the hell do you care, the architect had said. Everyone knows your business.

He had come to hate the architect, the way the architect rolled out his plans with a little snap, his starched shirtsleeves neatly cuffed just below his elbows, his nails buffed. The architect would show him the various schemes he had worked through (on my dime, the movie star never added) before rejecting them for whatever the architect had singularly decided upon, what he would then argue for, invoking Corbusier, Kahn, even Wright, as if a Chelsea brownstone could rival Fallingwater, or that beautiful museum in Texas where once, a thousand years ago, the movie star had wandered unseen, unknown. He had been a student then, not a movie star. He had heard the famous professor’s lecture on Kahn’s genius in the famous class and watched as the large man stood on the stage of the lecture hall, the stained-glass windows bathing him in colored light, this a Gothic place, a vaulted place. The famous professor wept when he got to the part about Kahn’s death alone in a bathroom stall in Pennsylvania Station, pants around his knees. The Last Crap lecture, the students called it.

The movie star had wandered in the art museum thinking of the famous professor and his lecture on Kahn, noting the architecture more than the exhibition, the way the light sluiced through narrow windows set somehow behind the angle of the walls, hidden yet emitting the light.

He had told the architect this when first meeting him, the architect a friend of a friend. Everyone always knew someone. The architect had also heard the Last Crap lecture, though a different year, and the two laughed at the famous professor, dead, one of them knew, a few years back. They walked through the brownstone, beginning in the dirt-floor basement and ending on the roof, where, the architect had said, if one had the right imagination (and a whole lot of cash, thought the movie star) one could build another story, maybe two: a hideout, a meditation room, a room of one’s own. The brownstone hadn’t been touched in sixty years. The possibilities were endless given the right vision, the right imagination, the right et cetera and whatnot (and buckets of cash, thought the movie star). They looked out. The sycamores and white pears that lined the street, the red brick of the seminary, its bell tower and bell that still tolled, on the hour, the cathedral and the beautiful gardens, closed most days to the public since 9/11 and now the site of the soon to be Desmond Tutu Inn and Suites; behind, in the back, the small gardens of the Chelsea brownstones and tenements—some just dog runs, others planted, each a tiny terrarium of hope—this one crisscrossed by Tibetan prayer flags, that one with all the wind chimes and birdbaths.

On one of his earlier visits to the house, the movie star felt moved to tell the architect, he had watched as a hawk landed in that giant mulberry a few gardens down. It had perched on the top branch, camouflaged in the green, a rat in its talons it slowly tore to pieces.

Impressive, the architect said, and it might have been then that the movie star had begun to doubt him.
^I

Most people in the neighborhood recognized him immediately, though the neighborhood had, over the last decade, become the kind of neighborhood where people were used to seeing someone they had already seen ten times their original size on a billboard or the side of a bus or a screen of one sort or another. The people did their part: they did not stare as they ate their red velvet cupcakes, sitting on one of the benches outside the famous cupcake bakery, or their organic ice creams on their way up the steps to walk the High Line, where, inevitably, they waited their turn to look through the telescope out at an installation that meant something they waited in line to read what. If they saw the movie star they walked on, or ground their cigarettes into the sidewalk, or finished the dregs of their coffee looking back at him as he looked at them: blankly.

And who was he, the movie star? A boy whose father took the suitcase down from the hallway closet and buckled its straps, a boy whose father took his hat from the top of the hallway closet and put it on his head. They were in Georgia, or Louisiana, somewhere warm, and outside the daylilies still bloomed and chameleons were black and just beyond, in the bayou, a cottonmouth swallowed a mouse whole. He saw none of it, the boy: he only saw his father leaving as his mother had asked his father to do, only saw the tips of his own filthy sneakers as he sat on the stairs and heard the screen door shut-slam on his father’s way out. His mother said nothing as she sat in the living room waiting for his father to be gone. His father drove to the motel where later the boy would visit and wonder out loud what his father would next do.

“I don’t know,” his father had said. “I have no idea,” the movie star remembers his father saying as he stands unseen in his Chelsea brownstone, his second wife out with the twins somewhere, in the park with the stone seals, he thinks she said. The swings if he was interested in joining them.

I
. The reason the movie star found himself in this house at all had to do with divorce and custody, with bad breaks and unbelievable luck, a story the tabloids distorted in the recounting—the movie star’s ex-wife looking forlorn even though she was the one to give him the boot, her modeling career as meteoric, her face as famous as his and maybe even more so. She had tactfully kept to no comment and he had done the same. They were not the kind of couple to sell photographs of their firstborn to magazines.

XXIII

T
he waiter wipes their table with his dirty rag. He was Simone’s favorite, Marie remembers: the son, Milo, with his bitten nails and his moods: he had a story to tell, Simone would say.

On the walls the Aegean coast in plastic frames and rows of photographs of models and politicians and actors in black and white, standing with Milo’s uncle, John, or Milo’s father, Demetrios, elegant, illegible signatures scrawled across their faces. Milo’s father works in the kitchen. John’s wife rings the register. The plate-glass walls look out to the corner of Ninth and Twenty-Third and the women watch as other women, other men, cross the avenue or wait to cross the avenue, the younger women in shorter skirts, Barbara’s read, spring fashion. Umbrellas unfurled against the rain though they are useless, umbrellas; the enemy now the weather, someone says.

The skirts have always been above the knee, Franny says.

So, so above? Barbara says. There’s a dot of mayonnaise on her lower lip no one bothers to point out. Her neck sags and a thousand years ago, Marie remembers, Barbara gave Simone quite a run for her money. Oh well. Simone’s dead and now Barbara’s neck sags like a turkey’s and here they are, sleepless and still not exhausted: everyone raring to go when the party is almost over.
^I

Four hours, Franny is saying. Four hours’ sleep is the most I get. I don’t know when it starts to happen. Sixty? Sixty-five? It sneaks up, Franny says. She spears a fry with her fork, cuts her meat patty, and jabs the whole in catsup. “It sneaks up.”

“I’ve read melatonin,” Barbara says, because she’s always reading. “Melatonin regulates.”

“What was that old commercial?” this Jane, the listener. “Regulate, regulate, Metamucil helps you regulate,” she sings, her voice an embarrassment.

Milo appears from nowhere to clear their plates, his black vest stained but otherwise impressive, his white shirt starched. Marie took him for forties but Simone said younger: this kind of work and so forth.

“Ladies,” Milo says.

“And gentlemen,” Barbara says.

“Dessert?” Milo says.

“Rice pudding?” They crane to see the revolving dessert case near the front door, its trays of cakes and pies, shellacked, fly-flecked, as if perhaps something new is in the mix.

“It’s Wednesday,” Milo says.

“I wanted the rice pudding,” Franny says. “I had a craving.”

Milo winks. “I’ll check,” he says. He gathers the menus, huge in their old hands, then disappears again as the busboy descends to refill their waters.

“I’m going to float out to sea,” Franny says, watching him.

“Milo’s looking haggard,” Barbara says, though no one’s paying much attention. They stare out the plate-glass windows thinking of this and that—someone has painted a sprig of holly on the glass for Christmas but it’s spring, already. In the community garden folks are planting peas and uptown, Donna says, in Central Park, the daffodils have started blooming in those great glorious waves, hundreds of them, thousands, and those trees they have the children shouldn’t climb. She’d been there with her grandson, Atlas—who thinks of these names?—and the security had come and said don’t climb and Atlas’s mother, you remember Jenny, no shrinking violet, had said she’d climbed those trees when she was a little girl and what the fuck?

She said that?

To the guy’s face.

“Not since 9/11 do they let you climb trees,” Barbara says. She read it.

No.

Atlas.

Atlas.

So Atlas was grounded.

Donna takes a sip. “Atlas was pissed,” she says.

Outside a siren then a fire truck and then another and then another; a line of police cars follow.

“Someone’s climbing trees,” Barbara says.

“It’s a Surge,” Marie says. She watches the long line of police cars and fire trucks and motorcycles framed in sprigs of flaking holly or possibly mistletoe through the glass, all the vehicle lights going but no sound at all; the sound nothing, quiet as the quiet before All Clear.
^II

“All thanks to Mr. Kelly,” Franny says.

“Gene?”

“Hah! I wish!” she says.

“I can still remember my first Surge,” Barbara says. “New York. Nineteen sixty-seven.”

“That wasn’t a Surge that was a Police Action. I was there. The gays, right?”

“Felt Surge-ish.”

“Here I am like a chicken with my head cut off. Thought something had happened,” this Donna.

“Nineteen sixty-seven,” Franny says.

“Two thousand two,” Donna says. “My first.”

“That was anthrax,” Franny says.

“And what about anthrax?” Barbara says. “Whatever happened to anthrax?”

But no one seems to know, the Surge endless, police car after police car after police car after fire truck after motorcycle after police car after police car after police car after police car, like a parade with no candy, no spectators, no high school beauties, cheerleaders, or flag twirlers. No one on the sidewalks paying much attention either except the tourists, who have no idea what could possibly be going on below—New York! They stand on the High Line looking down.

Should they run for their lives?

“Where to?” says the guy shaving gourmet shaved ice, kimchi or boysenberry, take your pick.

And back at the Galaxy, among the regulars, Milo appears with a tray of rice pudding. Five cool bowls of white in frosted glass, intended for Friday’s rush, he says, but for certain customers like his favorite Chelsea ladies, Wednesday’s the new Friday.

I
. Sometimes, before, it had felt like they were in a boat, Marie and Simone, Barbara, Donna, Franny, and all the others. More and more friends disappeared. The illness turned Bev Garfield’s face to stone. Ida Pierce lost her mind, first forgetting the word for sugar. Sugar, they had said to her, waving the little white packets.
Sugar
. Trudy, whom they had loved, could no longer walk, and so they had pushed her through the streets of Chelsea, down the pitted, filthy sidewalks, struggling to smooth her way up over the frozen curb and then steady again. They did what they had sworn they would never do: they spoke of their health, they complained of aches and pains. They couldn’t go anywhere fast enough. “Come on,” Trudy would say. “For the love of God, push!”

In their boat the sea turned blue and black and gray; rocked and jostled and crowded in, they were bored though sometimes not bored at all, sometimes someone would tell a story and they would laugh until they had tears in their eyes. They knew the story by heart, and still they would laugh and wipe their eyes with their hands, strangers’ hands, the skin there, the bruises from their too-thin blood, the liver spots, the freckles, their hands mosaics though that made them something else—art—and they were flesh and blood, too. They still were flesh and blood. They stared at their hands. They breathed. They slept. They stood from time to time and stretched. It was eternal, the trip, though they were moving so slowly they might have been going nowhere. Where were they now? Where had they been? More and more Marie saw her family, her other one, far, far away. She could see them but she could not reach them and besides if she breathed, if she said one word, they would disappear. More and more she smelled the apricot smell that sickened her: squashed black fruit, and more and more she heard the loud buzz of bees—there were still bees, impossible; fruit; her mother, her father, her sisters, her brother.

She climbs down, her body stiff from hiding. In other houses lights are bright in the bluing dark. She smells the fresh dirt smell not so far from here where other families live; she smells the sick sweet of apricots, feels the soft, rotten fruit on her bare feet. She smells her cold hands, her stink: onions, horseshit, fear. Someone pulls aside the draperies of St. Claire’s Rectory, second floor, and stares out unseen. The Garmands’ weather vane, a brass pig, looks a shadow in the blue light: late spring and the days longer though still cold, the smell fire, ash.

Her mother’s black shawl hangs on the nail behind the door, her sisters’ work boots, mud-caked, beneath it, as if a body might get warm, dry. The fire is out. She sees her brother has left his spectacles on the kitchen table beside her father’s books. Her brother might have been reading. Or he might have been roughhousing, her mother shushing him to quiet. At least remove your spectacles, she would say,
spectacles
a word she liked to speak out loud, the poetry of it, she said, the word as round as the thing, no? If you listen close everything’s a poem, she had said.