Want Not (51 page)

Snared within the hulk arms of the security guard, Matty gauged the distance to the glass doors—eight or nine yards, max. A five-second sprint. He thrashed, trying to twist himself out of the guard’s tentacled grip. When that didn’t work he threw a loose and panicked haymaker punch that caught the guard smackdab in the jaw. It was like hitting a cinder block. “You try that again,” the guard seethed, “and I’ll shit down yo throat.” Matty looked again to the doors. By now passersby had stopped to watch, their faces cupped to the glass: bad, meet worse. If he didn’t try it again, however, he knew someone else would be shitting down his throat, and not just metaphorically: whatever comrades of Monya’s were stocked inside Rikers Island. He swung at the guard again, who grabbed his arm in mid-swing and with sumo grace wrenched it behind Matty’s back. Matty watched the polished floor rise up to meet him as he was dumped face down, and felt it cold and grainy against his cheek as the guard bound his wrists with zip-ties and announced, “It’s shit time.”

The 9th Precinct station was on Avenue C at East 8th Street, really just sneaker distance from the squat. Matty had walked or skated by that gray fortress a thousand times—did his laundry at the coin-op across the street from it, in fact, and had spent a multitude of nights with Tal picking through the trash of the Associated Supermarket cater-cornered from it across Avenue C. He and Tal had even bullshitted with some cops who’d been smoking outside the precinct one night, watching them scavenge. “You find any donuts?” one of the cops joked, and when Talmadge replied, “Naw, but we’ll keep an eye out next time,” the other cop noted the accent and asked where they were from. When Tal answered Mississippi they laughed as if he’d made it up, like he’d said Narnia or something. “But me, I’m from Mahwah,” Matty added, without quite knowing why, because he couldn’t possibly care what random cops thought—except maybe he didn’t like being laughed at, or wanted to insert some distance between Talmadge’s current Oscar the Grouch incarnation and himself. But the cops hadn’t cared, they’d just gone on laughing about Mississippi.

No cops were laughing now. This was just the slightest indicator that, as of this morning, everything was different, everything had changed. He’d fucked it up. Rocking back and forth on the bench in his holding cell, Matty was overcome with a strange nostalgia for those early days, him and Tal sneaking off to the roof to get high, or reminiscing about college while poking through trash bags, all those free afternoons he’d filled with solo longboard circuits through the city, even for the dangerous semi-satisfactions of Micah’s dumpster cooking—for those few months before he’d developed an angle. Tracking back through his memory he was able to pinpoint the very moment it went sour: that night after he’d escaped death in the compactor, when Micah snubbed his miraculous delivery of scavenged ribeyes. With that realization a scorching anger burned out the nostalgia. He thought: If that vegan bitch had just said thank you. If she’d said, thanks for almost dying for our fucked-up little eco-movement. If she’d said, thanks for abiding by one of the fifty commandments of our sick-ass, made-up, Amish-y religion. If she’d said, hey, thanks for letting me pussywhip your best friend into an unrecognizable garbage fairy.

A homeless guy with bughouse eyes and scabs all over his face took a seat beside Matty and asked, nonsensically, if he knew where they kept the insulin around here. Matty ignored him, mouth-breathing to avoid the guy’s poisonous odor cloud. He pressed his back to the wall and closed his eyes, listening to the holding cell’s six other inhabitants moaning amongst themselves; turned out everyone had been arrested on the same all-purpose charge, that being “some bullshit.” This was Micah’s fault, he decided. All of it; everything. Him sitting here right now even, inhaling ass. Maybe not
all
her fault, because leaving his ID on the counter was his fucktard move—but a lot of it. Most of it. In his imagination he stabbed her like a voodoo doll.

A middle-aged detective named Meyer oversaw Matty’s transfer to an interview room. The detective skimmed the report, and then, with what sounded like a mystified grunt, dropped it onto the table and said, “What the hell happened at Best Buy, Mr. Cross?”

Matty dunked his forehead toward the table. I’m not a Cross, he wanted to say. I’m a Boone.
As in Daniel Motherfucking Boone, the King of the Wild-Thing Frontier, Slayer of Panther, Bear, and Injun, Capper of Coonskin, the MVP of American History, His Royal Fringe-Coated Badness:
that’s who. What he said instead—nimbly, but in a quaking voice—was: “I don’t wanna go back to prison, okay? I got some shit for a deal. Shit you’ll like.” The detective’s eyebrow curved upward as he leaned back in his chair, preparing himself to be curious. Six hours later, after an assistant district attorney had passed through, followed by an assistant U.S. attorney (peeved to have been called in on a Saturday, barking at the detective, “You told me he was
Russian
”), plus a lackey from the Public Defender’s Office whose sole apparent duty was to conduct a pattern analysis of his necktie, the detective came storming back in, and, as before, dropped the now-thickened report onto the table. This time, however, Meyer was pissed. “If you’re gonna lie to us, this is a waste of time for everyone involved,” he said. The attorneys glanced up in mild alarm. Matty was expressionless. “I just got off the phone with your folks in Mahwah,” the detective said. “The ones you said you been living with? Your mom wants to know when you got back from Oregon.” Matty felt his nostrils flaring, watching the assistant U.S. attorney, his face long and steeled like a garden spade, begin to stack his notepad and file folders. I tried, Matty consoled himself. Tal, dude, I tried. But you’ll be better off this way, man. I swear to fucking God you will. Spreading his fingers on the tabletop, Matty stared up at the detective whose anger wasn’t really anger, he saw, just as the salesman’s helpful cheer hadn’t really been cheer; everyone was just doing his job. So Matty did what he thought was his. He gave up the squat.

The police didn’t make their way there until late the next afternoon. For Talmadge and Micah, Matty’s disappearance had not been cause for distress. The opposite, really: In their unfamiliar twosomeness they stretched and yawned like purring cats, grateful for the unexplained reprieve though not precisely reveling in it. For most of Saturday Micah was desultory and subdued as she struggled with telling Talmadge she’d lost the baby. Fearing the arid delicateness of his reaction, the sudden telltale glow in his eyes exposing his secret relief, she opted to wait; until when, however, she wasn’t sure. They’d nestled themselves into a night so soft and languorous as to verge on the narcotic, taking their letters of Leo and Doris early to bed where Talmadge’s voice wilted away in the midst of a drowsy reading. When Micah raised her head to urge him onward she found him asleep, Leo’s letter beside his head on the pillow like a nerveless lover’s farewell. For her, the day and night felt like old age, or what she thought old age might feel like: the mindlessly fixed routine (scavenge, nap, scavenge again, eat dinner, bathe, Leo and Doris, sleep), the sedate and measured pacing, the long and tender silences that passed between them, but also, perhaps most essentially, a bittersweet impermanence shading every moment with its bluesy pall, a sense of sadness on its way. It might’ve just been Leo and Doris’s letters inspiring these elderly connections, Micah didn’t know. The letters were so brittle in her hand that by merely blowing a stream of air at one she thought she could blast a tear in the paper. Yet the passion they contained was so impregnable, or seemed to be. (They had only made it halfway through the correspondence.) When she finally fell asleep, hours after Talmadge had, she felt more like the paper than what was written upon it: tenuous, fragile, splotched with whorls of dried tears.

Then Sunday. Indian summer in the city: every window ajar to beckon inside those last warm gusts, the retreating summer breezes which the previous night’s chill suggested had already been vanquished. People fled onto the sidewalks in a confusion of garments, some decked in sweaters and others wearing shorts, and the trees reflected this confusion, some having yellowed their leaves for the approach of autumn, others squeezing a final and vivid spurt of green down their branches, loath to surrender. The sky had a music to it, as if in longing to stay current it had expanded into multimedia. Mere color insufficient, it had to sing. And it was singing, or at least it seemed that way to Talmadge and Micah: a song of New York City you can hear only once, and only as young lovers, an evanescent, intoxicating music—parts Gershwin, Charlie Parker, the Ramones, and coffeehouse Dylan, and overlaid with a symphonic veneer of streetsounds: jackhammers and carhorns and keening sirens and the subway’s dragon-grumble and the polyglot chaos of a hundred different languages dispersed into eight million conversations plus the lonesome elegant sawing of that wizened Chinese violinist down below the Times Square station—that causes some people to spend the rest of their lives there, cemented to the city for the chance of hearing it again. It played all through that Sunday morning, as Talmadge and Micah made their regular rounds, roaming the streets the way foragers roam woods. Discovering a sack of bruised apples and half a dozen containers of just-expired Greek yogurt outside the Gourmet Garage on Seventh Avenue, they hauled their find to the river and sat beside the water’s edge, Talmadge slicing the apples with his pocketknife for Micah to dip into the yogurt. They tossed the bruised wedges into the Hudson, wondering if fish would rise to them, and what those fish might look like. The apples lay motionless on the surface, as if thrown into wet concrete, and noting this Micah raised her eyes to survey the whole river, which showed no signs of movement at all, looking as stilled and molten in its passage as Micah felt she was. For this one morning they seemed exempt, the river and her, from the obligations of flow, from the gravitational laws of life. She smiled at Talmadge, and fed him a yogurt-smeared apple.

On their way back home, on a side street near the river, they passed the open door of a restaurant or bar in the early stages of a gutting. Permit notices were splashed across the windows. Micah swiveled back, her intrusive gaze having latched onto a face—in a photograph or painting hanging on a far wall—whose resemblance didn’t fully strike her until she’d already taken several steps past the door into the crosswalk. It was her father. “What are you doing?” Talmadge asked, as she went right inside the restaurant, her footsteps crinkling on the brown paper taped to the floor. The room was barren save for a massive and ornately carved mahogany bar to her left where in the blotched mirror behind it she caught sight of herself passing, momentarily startled. An open bottle was on the bar beside a paper-stuffed clipboard. When Talmadge caught up to her Micah was standing beneath the picture—a lithograph portrait she could tell was ancient, from the subject’s high unfurling collar and wide waistcoat lapels, but whose likeness to her father stopped her breath just the same. “What is it?” Talmadge asked.

Before she could answer him, another question rang out: “Can we, uh, help you?” They looked to the kitchen door, where a thirtyish couple was standing. They were both exquisitely tattooed, the woman’s arms ink-sleeved like Micah’s left arm, purplish foliage overflowing from beneath the man’s shirt. His beard was braided, and his head was capped by a porkpie hat. “We’re not quite open,” the woman said, tittering at the obviousness of this.

Talmadge apologized, and tried pulling Micah by the arm. She asked, “Who is this?”

“Him?” The woman stepped forward, joining Micah beneath the portrait. “We don’t know!” she said, tittering again. “He came with the place. Do you know who he is? He looks so—so mean or something, we thought it’d be bad luck to take him down. At least for now . . .”

Without looking from the portrait Micah said, “I thought I might know him.” Mean wasn’t the word she would’ve used, though she groped through her mind for a replacement. Possessed, maybe. “He looks like—my daddy.”

“Wow,” the woman said, with a black note of sympathy.

“You guys from the neighborhood?” the man asked Talmadge, who with slight exaggeration said yes. “Then welcome to day one. Or I guess it’s day two—right, baby? You’d think I could keep track. We just got the permits Friday. You guys ever come here when it was the Austrian place? No? I guess they just couldn’t keep it together. Not really the right neighborhood for it.”

“We’re hoping to do a little better,” the woman said, establishing her titter as a constant tic.

Micah remained beneath the portrait as Talmadge and the couple talked their way over to the bar. She half listened as the couple (“I’m Joe, this is my wife Donna”) explained their concept—
haute
Jewish cuisine (“like Mario Batali cooking a Seder dinner”)—and recounted all the toils of acquiring the place. “I mean,
you
know what a bitch this neighborhood can be,” Joe said to Talmadge. “We’re still fighting the liquor permit process. Twenty-seven seats with just beer and wine is a tough road. We thought about knocking back into the kitchen, for more front-of-the-house space, but the kitchen’s tiny already. I’ve been in walk-ins bigger than that kitchen.”

“Plus
he’d
have to come down,” Donna said, pointing to the portrait.

“And the curse would befall us,” Joe added, mock-ominously. Jutting his chin toward the bottle on the bar, he asked, “You want some champagne? We just opened it. A neighborly taste of what’s to come.”

“Sure thing,” said Talmadge. Joe fetched two plastic cups from behind the bar, wiggling one toward Micah who with a faint smile declined.

“She’s pregnant,” Talmadge said, and the couple, already in celebratory mode, let out congratulatory whoops.

The whooping forced Micah to join them at the bar, though blankly and off to the side, where with a sulky fingertip she drew squiggles on the bar. The couple had a two-year-old girl, who was back home in Brooklyn with Donna’s mother, and Micah nodded gamely as Donna pelted her with breezy childbirthing advice (“Don’t resist the epidural, seriously”). The men discussed the restaurant business, Talmadge bubbling out a story about a restaurant—“a James Beard Award place,” he noted, piquing the couple’s attention—where he’d briefly worked during college, about the temperamental chef who’d fired him after Talmadge had mistakenly topped a crème brûlée with salt instead of sugar. “No matter how long I torched that thing, it wouldn’t caramelize,” he said. “But you didn’t send it out?” Joe asked. “I sent it out!” Talmadge exclaimed, and everyone screeched in high laughter save for Micah, who wanted to ask what a crème brûlée was. Joe’s confession that he’d once been a temperamental chef drew a smiling rebuke from Donna, who said she’d missed the memo that he’d gone into rehab. (Titter.) Talmadge hooted, tipping his plastic cup toward Joe to accept the offer of a refill.