Visitation Street (3 page)

As the raft rounds another pier, the Manhattan skyline bursts into view towering over the black hump of Governors Island. The buildings claw the sky as if they are desperate to get out. The girls are pulled forward by the fresh current of Buttermilk Channel. But it seems to them that the city is drawing them in.

“That’s where we belong,” June says. She raises her arms and snaps her fingers. “No more wasting time.”

“Stop it,” Val says. She’s not looking at the city; she’s watching its reflection stretching out into the water in front of them. “Stop.”

Cree stashes his bucket and line and begins to pick his way along the waterfront. He passes underneath the chute of the refinery where sucrose refuse was dumped into the basin. He rounds the Beard Street pier, balancing on the jagged rocks at its short edge along the water. From the far side of the pier he can see the pink raft bobbing in the middle of the bay.

The girls’ voices carry, their laughter electrifying the lonely water. They’re taking over the gloomy basin with their dinky raft, exploring the currents and depths shut off to Cree since his father’s death. He wonders how far they dare to float.

The raft rounds another pier and bobs out of view.

Cree scrambles. He wants to keep the girls in sight. Somewhere out in the bay a foghorn cuts the silence, its low groan rolling across the water like a shudder.

There’s a rocky outcrop between the next two piers. A large warehouse blocks Cree’s view. He stumbles, gashing his knee on a cement pylon. Stagnant water is pooled between the rocks. Cree cups his hand over his wound, trying to avoid the water’s grimy foam.

He’s on the next pier now and can hear the girls again. Their words are indistinct. He catches sight of the raft bobbing in the water heading toward Manhattan. Cree turns and runs toward Valentino Pier, now a promenade for old fishermen and young couples. This late he expects to have it to himself.

He can hear the girls as the raft approaches. He crosses the small park that leads to the pier and hurries to the end of the concrete walkway. The raft is crossing in front of him—the girls, two dark silhouettes against the distant Jersey docks.

And then they are gone.

I
f asked, Jonathan Sprouse might describe his life as a landslide, a series of descents. His best year came at the age of twelve, when he was chosen for the lead in a Broadway musical—a glittery mashup of Grimms fairy tales. The show was a flop, one of those spectacular Great White Way disasters that get front-page coverage for the duration of their blink-and-you’ve-missed-it runs—when the whole city fixates on the spectacle of a show that closes before it opens.

In the year after this almost success, Jonathan went from potential Broadway star to unremarkable chorus member. Later he was demoted from Juilliard to a public high school for performing arts, from Carnegie Hall to fly-by-night practice spaces. After college he moved from the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side, then from Brooklyn Heights to Red Hook—a neighborhood below sea level and sinking.

As a child, he never imagined that he wouldn’t succeed. His father, Donald Sprouse, had enough money to collect houses in all the best sea and ski locations and to scoop up Jonathan’s mother, a respected Broadway star. Eden Farrow couldn’t open a show like Bernadette Peters or Patti LuPone, but no one complained when she stepped into their shoes at the end of their runs.

The Sprouse family fortune and Eden’s moderate fame were enough to guarantee Jonathan attention from conservatories and invitations to important auditions. He had the best vocal coaches and music instructors. He turned up at auditions dressed in a sailor shirt and matching cap that his mother had hand-tailored on Lexington Avenue.

As a teenager, he was known less for his talent than for his parents’ frequent absences and their spacious apartment. The Sprouse-Farrows had a well-stocked bar and fridge and their doorman’s hand was easily greased with a C-note. Liquor for Jonathan’s underage set was delivered through the service entrance. Jonathan was one of those New York kids everyone knows. In with the Upper West elite, the Village kids, even the Harlem hoods from a couple blocks north whom Jonathan invited to the Sprouse penthouse to mix things up.

Although his short-lived Broadway career fizzled, Jonathan continued to audition in his early twenties—classical, jazz, off Broadway. He was an understudy who never got called up. He didn’t make it through conservatory. The auditions stopped. Eden’s agent dropped him. He sat in with a couple of bands, sang and played keyboard. He joined a quartet that got written up in the
New Yorker
. But then Eden died, or because Eden died, the quartet let him go. Jonathan fled from the spotlight that had briefly threatened to illuminate him.

After Eden’s death, Jonathan dropped her last name and reverted to Sprouse. He taught at Carnegie Hall where he’d once had lessons. He taught at a private high school in lower Manhattan. He taught spoiled kids in their homes. He taught jazz band at a public school where there weren’t enough instruments to go around.

Ever since he moved to Red Hook, Jonathan has been teaching music appreciation at St. Bernardette’s, a Catholic girls’ school just outside the neighborhood. He also has a steady gig Friday nights at a gay piano bar in the city where he hammers out show tunes accompanied by a drag queen who gets all the tips. From time to time he writes advertising jingles for cut-rate brands. He tells himself he’s a commercial success.

Old acquaintances from as far back as high school, conservatory, and Broadway sometimes come to Jonathan’s apartment. They know that out here dealers stay up late, and Jonathan has their numbers. They hang around his place, waiting for delivery and pretending it’s Jonathan they’ve come to see.

His studio apartment is upstairs from the Dockyard bar, which keeps unwholesome hours. He has a choice of listening to its noise filtered through the loose floorboards or coming downstairs and experiencing it firsthand.

Although Jonathan only meant to stop into the Dockyard for a couple of drinks, he’s slipped from a prime spot in the middle of the bar to a shadowy corner, from top-shelf whiskey to swill. He’s gone from laughing along with the regulars to being laughed at. Lil, the bartender, urges him to shut up. She’s suggested that he go home even though it’s only one
A.M.

Jonathan can’t remember when the evening got away from him. Maybe he insulted Lil’s honky-tonk music. She’s a little too old to be working here. She has a toxic red dye job and faded tattoos that look like bruises. Her gray eyes tighten as the night drags on. By last call they look like the heads of two screws.

Sex with Lil was unremarkable, the kind of late-night mistake Jonathan can’t bring himself to give up. Something about the whole mess reminded him of the racetrack—the clop of Lil’s cowboy boots, the slap of his hand on her ample flank, her exhausted whinnying when the thing was over.

The Dockyard’s walls are covered with buoys and life preservers, grainy photos of steamers and tugboats. There’s coiled rope and collapsed lobster traps, as well as flies and lines, bait and tackle. The mounted trout and bass are missing eyes and shedding scales. The place is supposedly filled with nostalgia for the humming waterfront of yesteryear. But it’s really a shipwreck. Lit by strands of green Christmas lights, the bar looks as if it’s sunk into the grimy basin a couple of streets away. The busted ship’s clock helps the patrons ignore the time and keep on drinking.

Nicknames are big here. It took Jonathan a couple of weeks to sort out the crowd. There’s Guitar Mike and Biker Mike. There’s Whiskey Bill and Pirate Bill, Old Steve and New Steve. None of the women have nicknames.

Everyone calls Jonathan “Maestro,” although he suspects none of them believe he actually writes music. One day he plans to take them by surprise. His head is crammed with riffs composed from neighborhood noise. These are usually suggested by something simple—the howl of the hinges on the door to the Dockyard, the lonely twang of the telephone wires on Van Brunt Street, the uneven, metallic rattle of a bicycle with loose fenders riding over cobblestones.

Days pass in Red Hook like musical compositions. Sometimes they are fugues, sometimes sonatas. The wildest days, when a storm blows in from the Atlantic and water surges down Van Brunt, are certainly symphonies. But Jonathan doesn’t try to explain any of this to the patrons of the bar.

Lil’s playing hard to get, fiddling with her CDs and ignoring Jonathan’s signal.

“I thought you were keeping quiet tonight, Maestro,” she says, not pouring him another. “At least I was hoping.”

“Too hot to head upstairs,” he says. “I thought I’d stick around and pay you to keep me entertained.”

Lil wears a shot glass on a chain around her neck. It bumps against her breasts as she works. Instead of tipping her, patrons can buy her a shot. It’s the best way to get on her good side.

Jonathan grabs the glass. “Let me buy you one.”

Lil’s shirt is wet from wiping down the bar and rinsing glasses. She shakes free. “No thanks, mister.”

“My money’s no good?”

“Leave your money on the bar.”

He pisses Lil off a lot these days, especially when he’s trying to be charming. “I thought no one around here turned away a free drink. Booze keeps you keeping us happy.”

“You talk too much, Jonathan.”

He drops a twenty next to his glass just to show her.

The bar is full even in this heat wave. There are a few leftover locals—salty types and retired detectives. But mostly it’s a new crowd—artists, chefs, and odd craftsmen. Men in baseball caps for losing teams. Women in clogs or cowboy boots. Lots of women tonight. It’s the dead of summer, and they still wear cowboy boots. It makes Jonathan feel old watching them and he’s not even thirty.

Earlier, Jonathan tried talking to a few of these women. But now they’re keeping their distance. He’s not sure what went wrong. Maybe they were offended when he bought them a round of drinks and said that women only drink whiskey to impress men. Now they make a point of not looking his way. He’s spent a year watching, noticing their short, choppy haircuts and new tattoos. He’s watched them drink more, sleep less, and try on the tough postures of the old waterfront.

The women grow grungier and sexier the later it gets. Soon they bear no resemblance to the morning commuters who will tuck themselves into bus shelters along Van Brunt on Monday, polished and brushed and reasonably presentable to the world outside Red Hook. Nighttime abrades them, tangles their hair and chips their nails. Colors their speech. At night, the hundreds of nights they’ve passed the same way begin to show, revealed in their hollowed cheeks and rapid speech. Jonathan wonders how long it takes for their costumes to become their clothes, their tattoos their birthmarks. When will they let the outside world slip away and forget to retrieve it?

The new drink hits his stomach fast, a sign that he’s had enough. He takes a walk around the bar to sober up. There are two drunks in the booth in the back. One has been passed out since happy hour. The regulars are taking turns decorating his face and clothes with Magic Marker. Someone is opening his shirt and drawing a pair of claw marks above his nipples.

“Got a song for us, Maestro?” a woman asks. She turns away before he can reply.

He drops to one knee and takes her hand. She tries to wriggle free, but he’s got her tight. The song that comes into his head is Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” The crowd is laughing at him, but Jonathan doesn’t care. He sings loud, louder than the rockabilly pouring out of the speakers. He flings his free arm back and knocks a woman in the stomach. Lil wraps a calloused hand around Jonathan’s wrist. Her strong grip feels good. “Out,” she says.

Lil sees him to his door, only a few feet from the Dockyard’s entrance, and makes sure he goes inside. Jonathan lingers in the doorway, listening to her cowboy boots beat time on the pavement—
Too Hot. Too Late
.

Upstairs, he opens the window, letting out the stale cigarette air and letting in more heat along with the night sounds. The storyboards for a new commercial are scattered on the floor—black-and-white drawings of dancing soda cans waiting for a tune.

He lights a cigarette and props his elbow on the sill, exhaling into the thick air. A few days ago at the piano bar in the West Village, he’d had an idea for this jingle. The blunt way his drag queen partner Dawn Perignon outlined her lips in cola-colored pencil then filled them in with cherry gloss inspired the first bars. He scribbled some notes on a napkin and shoved it into his pocket.

Since Jonathan only wears black jeans, locating the pair from that night is difficult. He turns out the pockets of his entire wardrobe. He finds matchbooks, phone numbers of women he doesn’t want to call. He finds a few crumpled napkins from Cock ’n Bulls, but they only have doodles on them.

He lies on the couch staring at the storyboards. The only thing they bring to mind is merry-go-round music from a state fair.

He picks up his phone and calls Dawn, hoping her voice will suggest whatever it was her two-toned lips inspired.

She picks up after the third ring, house music blaring in the background.

“Hello?”

It always catches Jonathan by surprise that offstage Dawn talks like any other guy from Jersey. She has a deep voice, filled with guttural sounds and heavy consonants that are at odds with her lilting onstage inflection.

“Hello? You going to say something or what?” Dawn barks before switching to her stage voice. “Jonathan, baby? Cat got your tongue?”

“Forget it, Dawn. I had a question. It’s not important.”

“Don’t tell me this is a booty call after all these years. You lonely tonight?”

“Screw you.”

“With pleasure.”

Jonathan hangs up. He’s always wondered if Dawn is a little sweet on him.

He looks across the street to the Lebanese-owned bodega. If it were open, he’d head over. Instead Jonathan extinguishes his cigarette and flicks it into the street. He takes two Tylenol PM and chases them with whiskey. Then he puts on a recording of calypso music in case the tropical rhythms inspire the dancing cans.