We Could Be Beautiful (32 page)

31

S
outh Portland Street was the West Village on steroids: the trees were bigger, the buildings were higher. Moms and dads pushed strollers toward the park at the end of the block. Number 79 was a tall brownstone like the others, with tattered Chinese take-out menus and bits of newspaper littering the front. The doorbell set off a familiar tune inside. It sounded like the background music from Pac-Man. Someone shouted “Door!” and then there was the sound of tramping down stairs.

I might have been holding my breath as the huge door opened with a creak. “Kitty Cat!” said a dismembered voice, and then she was there: Mae Simon, my overweight hippie ex-nanny. Her round body and her twinkling fingers—she reminded me of a fairy godmother. Glasses with Glinda-pink lenses, a dress with Andy Warhol’s face on it, which was so short I wondered if it was actually supposed to be a long shirt, and dirty bare feet. Her toenails were painted a shimmering purple. She threw her arms around me before I could say anything. “I’m so glad you’re here! Oh my God! Your hair! It’s so long!” She smelled like garden mulch, especially near her neck. In the mornings Mae Simon probably dabbed her neck with garden mulch oil.

“Let me look at your face,” she said, and squeezed both my arms as she looked me over. “Yep, wow, it’s definitely you.” She had gray-blue eyes and gray-yellow hair, colors wrapped in a smooth fog that dulled them. Her skin was luminous like pearls, and dewy. “This is unreal. Just a second ago I was thinking, It’s not going to be her, it’s going to be someone else. But no, it’s you. Do you remember me?”

There was something familiar about her presence, maybe, but she didn’t look familiar. “I’m not sure.”

“It’s fine if you don’t. You had so many people in that house all the time, it would be a trip if you remembered me.”

“Yeah.” I pulled my sweater tighter around me—something to do with my hands.

“Come in, come in.” She backed away and held the door open. “Careful of the bike,” she said about the bike that was hanging above the doorway. “Let’s go down to the kitchen first. I’m making bunnies! And then we can talk upstairs.”

“Great,” I said, stepping into the big old house, which smelled deeply of yellow curry. A bookshelf was stuffed full of shoes—girly flip-flops and big construction boots—and then there were hats, too, and belts, crammed in and spilling out onto the rugs. Rugs of all different sizes and colors covered the wooden floors. Some were actual rugs. Some were just oversized pieces of felt.

Through an open door—the doors must have been ten feet tall—a huge mirror reflected a chandelier that had been strangled in a flurry of Tibetan prayer flags. The ceiling was covered with them; they’d been strung from different points along the wall to meet at the chandelier in the center. In a gallery with a price tag, this might have been called artistic genius, but here, in the dense curry air, it seemed more like the work of a stoner on an ill-advised mission.

“This house was built in 1892,” Mae said. “Everything’s original.”

“Is it yours?”

“I wish.” Mae laughed. “This is Philip’s house. He’s at work right now.”

It was cooler in the kitchen, and dark. Pots and pans hung from a makeshift beam that was tied to the ceiling with thick, dirty ropes. At a large wooden table, two long-haired young men looked up from their tiny game of travel chess. The pieces were as small as fingernails.

“Catherine, this is Carlo.” She pointed to the small one, whose spotty facial hair looked like continents on a map. “And this is Logan.”

“What’s up?” Logan had a full beard and a full head of hair tucked beneath his beanie. There was a tennis ball–sized hole at the elbow of his flea-market sweater.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

Above them was a large piece of loosely hung cloth that said, in bubbly letters,
Free Education for Everyone!

“Come here, Kitty,” Mae said, waving me over to the kitchen island. “Do you remember these?”

On a chipped dandelion-print plate were two pieces of toast cut into bunny shapes. Mae had spread them with peanut butter and covered them in banana slices.

“Oh my gosh, I kind of do remember these.” I was pretty sure I was telling the truth, but the feeling of remembering them was so vague, I couldn’t be sure.

“Groovy,” Mae said. “Take one.”

I did and bit into it. Exactly what I thought: peanut butter and banana. But it did taste better because of the care Mae had taken in preparing it.

“Mmm,” I said. Some peanut butter got onto my chin. Mae held out a smelly rag. I hesitated.

“It’s clean, don’t worry,” she said.

I wiped my chin quickly because she was waiting.

“Did you make us bunnies?” Carlo said.

“Yes!” Mae said. “There are more in the fridge.”

“That is so thoughtful of you, Mae. You’re the best.” He looked at me. “Mae is the best.”

“You guys!” Mae said, pulling out a chair at the table. “Come,” she said, “sit.”

I sat. Logan retrieved the other plate of bunnies from the fridge.

“So what do you do?” Carlo asked. A banana slice fell off his bunny onto the table. He picked it up and wiped the peanut butter residue from the table with his finger and licked it.

“I owned a shop for a long time. We sold cards. Well, it was art in the form of greeting cards.”

“Cool,” Logan said.

“Catherine was a very creative child.”

“I was?”

“Are you kidding? You loved to draw. And you loved glue. You were obsessed with gluing things together.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I thought you might have been getting high sometimes.”

I laughed.

“But not really.”

“How do you guys know each other?” Logan asked.

“I was Catherine’s nanny when I was twenty.”

“Incredible,” Carlo said. “That is the most amazing thing I have ever heard. Even though working as a nanny can be very difficult. My mother used to work as a nanny. Now she cleans houses in Florida. It’s very limited when you don’t have papers.”

“Right,” I said. “How do you guys know each other?”

“We all live here,” Logan said.

“It’s a cooperative house,” Mae said. “There are seven of us. We cook for each other and do chores. It’s a community.”

“It rocks.” Logan was smiling. Actually, he’d been smiling the whole time. He never stopped smiling. He was probably stoned.

“Does everyone have their own room?”

“Of course,” Carlo said.

“Where do you live?” Logan asked.

“The Village.”

“If I were going to live in Manhattan, I would prefer to live in the Village,” Carlo said, stroking the continents on his face.

“What do you guys do?”

“We’re artists,” Carlo said.

“And Carlo is a great writer. He just hasn’t accepted it yet,” Mae said.

“Mae is great paintress,” Carlo said.

“Aw, thanks, Carlo,” Mae said to him. And then to me, “I’ll show you some of my paintings. Let’s go upstairs.”

“Sure.”

“Oh, and Catherine, you should come back next week. We’re doing Fifteen Minutes of Doing Something Now in the living room,” Carlo said.

“You can do whatever you want for fifteen minutes, or you can just watch.” Logan was still smiling.

“Anything,” Carlo said, a serious look on his face. “You can do anything you want.”

“You can even get naked,” Logan said.

“Oh, please don’t scare her. Come on, Catherine, come with me.”

Who were these friendly semidegenerates? And what were they talking about? Fifteen minutes of what? And it was three o’clock on a Wednesday and no one was at work? And this owner person, Philip—what was he getting in return for letting these people live in his huge, gorgeous, falling-apart house? And why was he letting it fall apart? As I followed Mae up three long flights of stairs, I made an extensive list of improvement projects for this house, starting with the stairs themselves. They made so much noise: we sounded like a wooden roller coaster going up them.

“This is my room.” I followed Mae through the open door. The room was huge. It was the same size as mine. There was her bed, and couches, and an alcove where she’d laid out brightly colored afghans beside three tall white drippy candles and a well-used purple yoga mat. There was even a fireplace lined with Russian dolls, tallest to shortest, and Mae’s own personal chandelier, which was missing half its bulbs. I was skeptical of the rock crystals on the mantel.

The room was painted bright green on one side and white on the other. In the yoga alcove was a big collage of the Buddha. “I made that out of cutouts from
Yoga Journal
,” Mae said. I thought that was clever. It also looked pretty good.

“This is a gorgeous space,” I said.

“Thanks. I love it here.” Mae Simon, overweight and wearing a shirt as a dress, did not seem bothered that she was almost sixty and lived in a commune with people who were obviously much younger than she was. She seemed content, humming as she opened the shutters to let more light in. Too content, maybe. Was she stoned, too? The pink lenses of her glasses and her lack of pants were not helping my efforts to take her seriously.

“That’s one of mine,” she said, gesturing to a small painting between the windows. A hyperrealistic spider in an intricate web. I didn’t buy this kind of stuff for myself but appreciated the painstaking work that went into it. It suggested an immense amount of patience. Or drug use.

“Wow,” I said. “How long did that take you?”

“Two months.”

The painting was tiny. It was the size of my hand. Mae Simon was a person who spent two months on something for which she earned no money. Besides those pink glasses and her outfit, she did have the air of someone you would trust with a child—she was matronly, warm. I could see why my mother had hired her. She also fit the bill for what my mother called an “alternative assistant,” which basically meant that she was white. My mother prided herself on having white people work for her, especially the nannies. She actually once said that they were “easier to find in a playground full of Jamaicans.”

Tacked on the wall near Mae’s closet were a bunch of curling pictures, all of cats. “Those I saved from the street and brought to the Humane Society. They’re strays.” She said this with an overcompensating bashfulness, which didn’t ring true. She was obviously very proud of her saved cats.

“There are so many.” I quickly counted four across and ten down. “Where do you find them?”

“Everywhere. Mostly Bushwick.”

This was odd. Mae Simon did a lot of jobs for which she earned no money.

“Please, sit.” She motioned to the greasy corduroy couch. It was a burnt-sienna color, and the thin canals between the corduroy lines were embedded with grime. On the upside-down wooden storage crate in front of me, which Mae had painted black and was now using as a coffee table, there was a check she had written to herself for $1 million (“It’s a law-of-attraction thing,” she explained) and a Polaroid, which peeled off the sticky wood with a sound.

There I was in the photo, on Mae’s lap, my legs dangling. I wore saddle shoes and a pink dress and an expression of surprise, my mouth open. Mae had her arms around my stomach and her head on my shoulder and she looked very loving. We were at home on Eighty-Fourth. It looked like there was a party going on. There were some figures milling in the background, and the table in the foreground was scattered with half-finished drinks.

“Aren’t we adorable?” Mae sat down, way too close to me, so that our asses were pressed up against each other. She had no problem entering my personal space. Looking at this photo, though, that made sense. Mae had been very close to me for a whole year of my life. Still, it made me nervous. I scooted away.

“Oh, sorry, am I too close?” Her eyes looked worried through her pink lenses.

“It’s fine.” I coughed.

But she was too close. And why was she being so nice? What did she want? I didn’t trust it. Had she written back finally because I’d said I would pay her to?

“You know, I’m happy to pay you for meeting with me today,” I said. “I know your time must be valuable.”

“What?” She looked offended. “Kitty, I am so happy you wrote me, you have no idea. I have thought about you every day since I left.”

“You have?”

“Yes! You were so special to me. I was so fucking sad to lose that job.”

“What happened?”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Okay.” She closed her eyes and breathed like she was in a yoga class, finding her intention. Then she covered her mouth with both hands. Her hands looked young still. She wore cheap bulky silver rings on almost every finger. One was a skull. “Can I ask you first why you got in touch with me?”

“I found this letter.”

Mae deep-breathed again. “That’s what I thought.” Another long moment. She was just looking at me. It smelled like curry in here, too, and also like the incense Mae burned, maybe to get rid of the curry smell. “Did you ask your mother about it? What did she say?”

“I didn’t ask her about it. She’s pretty out of it these days. She has Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh God.” She rolled her eyes as if she knew all about what a pain in the ass Alzheimer’s was, and slapped her naked knee. “That is devastating. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s really hard. And my dad died—I don’t know if you knew.”

“Oh, Kitty.” Mae put a gentle hand on my back.

“So, what did you mean in the letter about not being there for me?”

“Kitty.” She inhaled again. “I have to tell you. This might be upsetting to hear.”

“Okay.” I still half thought she was going to tell me something totally benign, or something totally expected, like that my mother had fired her for leaving me alone for two minutes while she went to the bathroom. “Whatever it is, I want to know.”

Mae took her hand off my back. Her gray-blue eyes were focused. She looked at the rock crystals on the mantel, maybe to gather their power. Then she got up, went to the crystals, and chose two, one pink and one white. “You probably think this is bogus, but do me a favor and just hold this.” She pressed the pink one into my hand in a way that felt like it was supposed to really mean something.