When You Don't See Me (17 page)

“No. Did Nigel get the account?”

“I think they're signing paperwork now.”

“Good.” She opened a desk drawer and removed two dog leashes. She held them out to me and said, “I need you to walk Ottoman and Tassel.”

“Can Eileen do it? I was hoping to get back to the workshop. Jisella and I were going to—”

“Eileen has more important things to do,” Bailey interjected. “What's your job title?”

“I'm a runner,” I said.

“Right. Now, run along.”

I took the leashes from her and walked away, muttering, “Yes, Morgan.”

“What did you call me?” she asked before I could close the door.

I stuck my head back in and said, “I said, ‘Yes, Bailey.'”

“No, you didn't. You called me Morgan.”

“I did? That's my roommate's name. That was stupid of me. I'm sorry.”

“It's not a big deal. Walk the dogs,” she said in a distracted voice, then pointedly added, “Please.”

 

“She's related to Morgan. I'm sure of it now,” I said to the dogs as they sniffed a mailbox on the corner. If I hadn't been walking two obviously pampered poodles on the Upper East Side, people probably would've thought I was just another New York crazy talking to himself. Few people looked in my direction. Those who did either smiled at the dogs or openly laughed and pointed. I knew how that felt, so I ignored them all.

“Did you see the way she reacted when I called her Morgan?” I asked Tassel, who sniffed Ottoman's butt and then turned away from both of us. “Oh yeah. You weren't there. You guys must know something, right? Why won't you tell me anything?”

Ottoman looked up at me and started to poop.

“That sums it up, I suppose.” I pulled a plastic bag from my pocket and cleaned the mess from the sidewalk. “Fine. Don't tell me. I'll figure it out on my own. Who needs you two, anyway? Stupid poodles.”

“I guess you told him,” said a guy who'd been waiting for the light to change. I wasn't sure if he was talking on a cell phone or to somebody else. The only other person waiting for the light to change was dancing to the beat of whatever was playing through his headphones. The guy who spoke looked familiar. I looked at him again, noticing that his dark hair had some curl to it, and how that helped the strategic messiness of its style. He had blue eyes and a ring in his eyebrow…

“Hey!” I turned with sudden realization. “Keith Haring!”

He looked around quickly and said, “Yeah, but keep it down. Everyone thinks I'm dead.”

“Very funny,” I said, thinking about when I'd seen him a couple of months before at the Pop Shop. Roberto had accused me of flirting with him.

“Well, you thought so,” he answered. The light turned and we stepped off the curb in unison. “So, whatcha got there?”

“Huh? Oh, just walking my boss's dogs. I work at a design firm nearby.”

“Are you a designer? That's cool.”

“Me? No. I'm an artist. Kind of. I mean—I've studied art. Briefly. But I'm not really doing anything now. Other than walking dogs and odd jobs at work.”

“Yeah, but you're artistic. It's in your soul. I can feel it.”

“Yeah? What else can you feel?” We continued to walk down the sidewalk, turning a corner and heading toward Park Avenue.

He smiled and said, “I can feel that you'd like to go out with me tonight.”

I couldn't help but smile back. I was a sucker for cockiness. “Are you sure about that?”

“Oh yeah. You know, nothing fancy. Maybe coffee? Or we could grab something to eat? Maybe just walk, like we're doing now?”

I did my best to play it cool; then I realized I'd been holding a bag of poodle poop the entire time we'd been talking. It smelled, too. I hoped he didn't think it was me. I wanted to discreetly throw it away, but the nearest trash can was at the end of the block. I held the bag behind me and replied, “Sure. That sounds good. I'm Nick, by the way.”

“Nick Bytheway. Interesting name.”

“Ha.”

“I'm Brian. Brian Taylor.”

“Nick Dunhill. I'd shake your hand, but…” I nodded at the dogs, who were winding their leashes around my legs.

“Not a problem. I'll shake it later. How about we meet around seven? Where do you live? What's convenient?”

We exchanged information, agreed on a place to meet, and walked in opposite directions. I tossed the bag of poop in the garbage on the corner, then herded the poodles back toward Wamsley & Wilkes. While I walked, I congratulated myself on following Sheila's advice: I was going with the flow.

 

Since Brian and I hadn't discussed dinner and I was starving when I left work about half past six, I grabbed two dogs from a hot dog cart on my way to True Brew, the coffeehouse on the Upper West Side where we'd agreed to meet. The barista gave my food a stern look and shook his head. After a quick glance around to make sure Brian wasn't there, I went back outside. I hurriedly ate my hot dogs while perched on a planter that had little white lights woven into its tree. Then I took a bottle of water and a breath mint from my bag, glad that I'd gotten all that out of the way before Brian arrived.

I needn't have rushed. I watched as couple after couple, and even single after single, went inside True Brew. Several came out right away with various beverages: hot, cold, foamy, steamy, and iced. The drinks were as varied as the people who carried them.

Occasionally, I looked inside again to check whether Brian was already there. Maybe I just hadn't seen him.

“Why are you so late?” he'd ask.

“Late?” I'd respond. “I wasn't late. I've been waiting outside for you the whole time.”

We'd both laugh about what losers we were….

I looked at my watch. Actually, only one of us was a loser: the one who'd been sitting outside a coffee shop for more than an hour, refusing to acknowledge that he'd been stood up.

“Hey, Nick, right?”

I looked around eagerly and tried not to let my face fall when I saw a man who had to be at least forty smiling at me. I had no idea who he was, and it felt creepy that he knew my name.

“You probably don't remember me. I'm Jack.”

I wondered if my face conveyed what I was thinking:
Don't remember you. Don't want to.

“We had a class together at Pratt. I think it was Introduction to Photography.”

“Jack! Right. Sorry I was—how are you? What's up with you?”

“Not too much. Just saw you sitting here and realized I never saw you at school after fall term. Where've you been? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, everything's fine. I just needed to take a break, you know?”

“So you're not in school right now?”

I felt like he was about to give me one of my uncle's lectures. “No, I'm not in school right now.”

“That's too bad. But I understand.”

“You do?” I asked. Since I rarely got that response, I decided to savor the moment.

“Yeah, you seemed a little ragged when I knew you. I worried about you.”

So much for savoring the moment. I knew he was just trying to be nice, but it would be refreshing occasionally not to be treated like I was on the verge of a breakdown. Next he'd be offering to take me to his place, feed me, and fuck me. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but there was no way that was happening.

“I did the same thing,” he was saying. “Dropped out. Only started back last year.”

The last thing I wanted to hear about was some old guy who'd wasted his youth working a string of fast food/grocery clerk/pizza joint jobs to make ends meet. “What'd you do in the meantime?” I feigned interest while trying to figure out how to make my exit.

“I started school when I was your age, but I got tired of being told what to do. I guess I have a bit of an independent streak. I'd been working part-time as a delivery person and thought I could do a better job than the people I was working for. So two other guys who worked there left with me to start our own business. I'm one of the owners of a very successful courier service. Crazy how shit like that works out, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. Now he had my attention.

“So all this time, I've been working. And it's fine, because I did what I wanted to do. Sort of. I mean, it's all cool. It's all for a reason, you know? But I finally thought to myself,
Jack, it's time to go back and revisit that passion for photography.
So I am.” He shrugged. “If you're enjoying what you're doing, you keep doing it. If you're not, it's time to make a change. But you just need to do things on your own schedule, you know? Everything happens when it's supposed to anyway.”

I stared at him and considered the way Sheila and Josh kept themselves flexible, grabbing opportunities as they arose. I'd thought I was doing that with Brian, but maybe he'd only been the means for me to run into Jack. Maybe…

“Oh, hey,” Jack said, looking at a woman who'd just emerged from a cab. She was somewhere between his age and mine and was, as Roberto would say, a honey. She was smiling at Jack like he was Brad Pitt.

“This is Penny,” he said, presenting her to me. “This is Nick. I know him from Pratt.”

“Hi, Nick,” she said, and her smile was warm. The two of them radiated that happy couple thing. I felt like a jerk for all my bad thoughts about Jack, especially my suspicion that he'd been trying to pick me up. “Are you joining us for coffee?”

“Yeah, you should,” Jack said, quickly masking his surprise.

I smiled and said, “No, actually I have a date. You two have fun. See you around, Jack. It was nice to meet you, Penny.”

“You, too,” she said. I walked away but just before the door of True Brew closed, I heard her say, “What a polite young man.”

“Yeah, he's great,” Jack said.

I stopped feeling like a jerk.

August 2, 2003

Dear Nicky,

I've done a lot of thinking about things since I saw you a few weeks ago. There are things we never say, and that's probably my fault. I never wanted to treat my sons like friends. I know people who do that, and it seems unfair to their kids.

But I probably went too far in the other direction. Maybe I seemed too aloof or like I didn't care. I'm sorry, because the truth is, I love you, love all my sons, so much. I'm not very good at confiding in people or telling anyone my problems. And don't worry! I'm not going to make you the person I dump on. I just can't forget what you said about feeling distant from your family. If there's emotional distance between you and me, it's my fault. I'll work on it.

Meanwhile, enclosed is one of the perks of my raise and my determination to do a few things that I want to do for a change. The only person who'll ever see the statement for this credit card is me. The account is in my name. This card is in your name. The limit is five thousand. You can get up to a twenty-five-hundred-dollar cash advance. I completely trust you with this. And you know what? I've always trusted you, even when I didn't always understand you. You're a good person, Nicky, and I'm proud to be your mother.

Love,
Mom

“A
re you getting some?”

This question from my occasional Saturday afternoon date didn't really surprise me. I was sure he wasn't expecting a detailed answer. He'd asked the question as an opening for something he wanted to talk about. I doubted that it had anything to do with my sex life.

“Not so much,” I said, hoping this didn't give him a reason to offer me unsolicited advice.

I didn't take my eyes off the backgammon board, where his hand hovered as he tried to decide whether to bear off two checkers and leave a man vulnerable, or keep his man safe in case my next roll was a lucky one.

It didn't bother me to wait. I liked looking at his hands. They were strong, a little veiny, and a lot callused. Workingman's hands, like a man who'd spent most of his life doing roadwork for the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, should have.

That had been Kruger Schmidt's job. He was my cousin Emily's maternal grandfather. I met him when he moved to Manhattan in the winter of 2001. A widower of several years, he'd found that retirement didn't suit him. He got tired of living alone in his three-bedroom house in Harrisburg. Sick of shoveling snow in the winter and mowing a yard in summer. He stored a few of his belongings that might one day have sentimental value to Emily. Then he sold the rest and moved into what would have been the live-in nanny's room next to his granddaughter.

In time, he became something of a babysitter to Emily, although she had a real nanny who came to the apartment every weekday. There was no lack of adults who could take care of her. Wanted to take care of her. But as her grandfather, Kruger had a stronger claim than most.

Emily probably couldn't remember a time when Kruger hadn't been there. I understood the feeling. I'd gotten attached to him and our occasional backgammon games over the past couple years.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are
you
getting some?”

He took a chance and bore off his two men, returning his hands to his knees and sucking in his breath when I rolled my dice. Double sixes, and since I had a man out, and he had his six point blocked, he was safe. I rolled my eyes, and he looked pleased. Kruger took his backgammon seriously.

“I suppose you think I'm too old for all that,” Kruger said. He grimaced as he worked out his possible moves and realized he'd have to leave a man open.

“You're the youngest sixty-five-year-old I know.” I couldn't help but grin when my roll allowed me to bump his exposed man, buying me the time I needed to get back in the game.

“Do animals still fool around after they stop making babies?” Kruger wondered aloud.

“I don't know,” I said. “Don't some of them mate for life? Is mating just about sex? I should have paid more attention in biology.”

He grunted when I blocked all the points on my home board; then he said, “You can learn just as much watching the Discovery channel.”

“That's not much of an endorsement of public education.”

“The best education is life.”

“Yeah, I used that line when I dropped out of Pratt. It didn't go over well.”

He shrugged, scowled at my continued luck with the dice, and said, “You're old enough to make up your own mind about your education. My problem is, I can't pick a girlfriend.”

I won the game, and as we repositioned the checkers for the next one, I asked, “You can't commit?”

“I've got too many choices.”

“Am I supposed to feel
sorry
for you?” I asked. “You're like James Bond's father. Who are all these women that are after you?”

“There's Miss Goldman.” His tone indicated that I should know who he was talking about, but I was drawing a blank. “At the dry cleaner's.”

“Uncle Blaine's dry cleaner? The woman who does alterations?”

“Yes.”

“I've never heard her say a word,” I admitted. “How did you get to know her?”

“We're both German,” Kruger said. “She suggested we do genealogy together. She's sure we'll find ancestors in common.”

“I've never understood that,” I said. “Why does it matter? It's just names on paper.”

Kruger rolled the dice. I assumed his preoccupied frown came from trying to decide how to move, until he said, “Maybe Miss Goldman would rather research distant generations than think about this life.”

“Maybe Miss Goldman hasn't had much of a life to think about.”

He looked at me over the top of his eyeglasses and said, “She's a Holocaust survivor. She lost her parents and her brother in death camps.”

My stomach churned, and I quickly asked, “Who are your other girlfriends?”

“There's Mrs. DeSalvo,” Kruger said. “She treats me to spicy cooking and invites me to Knights of Columbus senior dances. She loves to talk about her Aldo. They bought their little deli with a loan from their fathers, and it was the center of their lives. They could never afford good help, or wouldn't trust anyone, so they opened the store every morning and closed it at night. Her children did their homework on barrels in the back. That store put five kids through college. They all make a good living, and they wanted their parents to retire to Florida. Aldo and Bella wouldn't even consider it. Leave New York? Leave the store? That was crazy. Then Aldo died in his sleep one night, and Bella had no husband and soon, no store. But I've never heard her complain. She talks about Aldo, wipes her eyes, then dances with me.”

“She sounds fun,” I said. “I think you should pick her.”

“I haven't told you about Mrs. Bostany,” Kruger said. “Her husband was a firefighter. He died on the job back in the eighties, so she's been a widow nearly twenty years and has a half dozen grandchildren, but you'd never know it. She can tell a dirty joke, throw back a few shots of whiskey, and still be every inch the lady who knits scarves and hobnobs with mayors.”

Kruger won the game with a flourish and smiled at me.

“You've got your own League of Nations,” I said. “What country is Mrs. Bostany from?”

“Brooklyn,” Kruger said. When I squinted at him, he said, “Her parents came here from Lebanon. That doesn't matter to you, right, since they'd just be names on paper?”

“We all came from somewhere else,” I said with a shrug. “I happen to think it's the here and now that matters.”

Kruger leaned against the back of his chair, lighting a Camel to let me know we were taking a break from backgammon. I could tell I was about to get a story, so I settled in to listen.

“When I was a kid,” Kruger said, “many of the men in my family went away. World War Two. Some of them fought in the Pacific. Most of them were in Europe. But we were all German, so they were fighting people who'd been their neighbors a generation or two before.”

I watched two Rollerbladers in the distance as Kruger talked. I hadn't skated in years, and I'd never done it with the agility these two were showing. They mirrored each other's movements, like a skater and his shadow. Like twins.

“Our parents told us not to speak German outside our houses. When our mothers walked to the market, people who knew they had German names would cross the street to avoid them. My grandfather's two dogs were poisoned because they were
German
shepherds. People threw red paint on my uncle's bakery or painted swastikas on the brick walls, with slogans like ‘Nazi, go home.'”

“That's horrible,” I said. “Didn't they know you were Jewish?”

“It was a crazy time. We were being persecuted in Germany for being Jewish, and persecuted here for being German. My father was risking his life for
both
his countries.” Kruger shook his head. “When our fathers and uncles and their friends started coming home, they didn't brag about what they'd done. They barely talked about the war at all. Unless they talked about friends they'd made in the ranks. Or places. Not battlefields, but little towns or farms. Castles or great cathedrals.”

The Rollerbladers looked like birds: swooping, dipping, making wide, graceful arcs.

“But the women—they had stories. When Gretchen was little, she'd sit on her
grossmutter's
lap in the kitchen and listen. To what it was like when the men were away. To endure rationing of food and gas. To have a husband or son that never came home. To be treated like dirt because you, or your parents, or your grandparents, had come from Germany. I used to worry that was what turned her into such an angry adult.”

“Angry?” I asked. That didn't sound like the Gretchen I knew, who was always laughing or celebrating something.

“She was so serious all the time. I expected her to turn into a boy-crazy teenager, but instead, she was always signing petitions or organizing something.” Kruger lit another Camel and grinned at whatever memories were playing through his head. “It seemed her mother and I were to blame for everything. Vietnam. Watergate. Race riots. Discrimination against women. She turned our dinner table into a battlefield. She and I were on opposite sides, with her mother in the middle trying to make peace between us. But even Miriam gave up when Gretchen told us she was a lesbian.”

“Did you think she was telling you that just to get your attention?” I asked. “That's what I got accused of.”

“I thought it was a phase,” Kruger admitted. “By then, she was putting herself through college. Then she started working here in New York, making money hand over fist. She seemed nothing like that little girl who used to listen to the women's stories in the kitchen. She stopped going to Pennsylvania, even on holidays. It was too much of a strain for all of us to be together.”

“How did things get worked out?”

“Miriam was diagnosed with cancer. I was almost afraid to tell Gretchen. I didn't want her to break her mother's heart again. What if she wouldn't come home? What if she stayed mad at us?”

I didn't have to ask how Gretchen had reacted. I knew she'd never disappoint anyone who needed her.

Kruger briefly talked about the progression of his wife's disease, and how their daughter came home as often as she could. “Gretchen was standing next to me at her mother's hospital bed when Miriam died. I wanted to comfort her. Instead, she hugged me and repeated a saying of my mother's. ‘With faith, there is love. With love, there is peace. With peace, there is blessing.' It was weeks later before I realized that Gretchen had said it in German. She hadn't turned her back on her family after all.”

“It's not fair how much you've lost,” I said after a pause.

“That's not the point,” Kruger said, grinding out his Camel. “When I was first widowed, I thought I'd spend the rest of my life lonely. I'd have my daughter and later, my granddaughter, but romance was for young men.”

“And now you've got too many girlfriends.”

I watched as he repositioned the game pieces on the board for another match. We were quiet for a while, concentrating on our strategy.

“I moved to New York, and life started over,” Kruger finally said. “I made a new family, but that doesn't mean my other family was less important.”

I glanced up as he rolled the dice. I understood the little smile that vanished almost before I saw it. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was winning our game. I'd been tricked. He wasn't talking about himself after all.

It was dusk by the time I closed the backgammon board while he threw away our coffee cups and his little pile of Camel butts. His hug was brief but heartfelt.

“Same time in a couple of weeks?” he asked, taking the game from me.

“If you don't elope with Mrs. DeSalvo.”

I stopped at Bethesda Terrace on my way out of the park. I stared at the fountain and thought about families. When Chuck and I had turned fifteen, my mother wanted to have a family portrait done. She made an appointment at a local studio. The plan was that we'd all dress up, get the photo taken, then have our birthday dinner at Fisher's White House, a restaurant in Eau Claire. My mother wore a black dress and her pearls. Like my father, Tony and Chuck dressed in blazers, but instead of ties, they kept their collars open. They looked like the healthy young animals they were.

When I came downstairs, I was wearing jeans with a thrift store black leather jacket over a black T-shirt. My father hit the roof.

“Why do you always have to ruin everything? Let your mother have one goddamn picture of us looking like a normal family.”

Before I could answer, Tony said, “He can't, 'cause he's not normal. He's a freak.”

When my father told me to change clothes, my mother said, “We'll be late. In twenty years, when I look at the picture, I'd rather see him dressed this way than remember everybody fighting. Let's just go.”

It didn't matter that I hadn't done it to piss them off. I'd had a different opinion of what made a picture-perfect family. They wanted to look like something out of a catalog. I thought we were supposed to look like who we really were. Later, at the restaurant, when the waiters sang “Happy Birthday,” they put the cake in front of Chuck. The glow of the candles made him look like Mr. Golden Boy. No one in my family bothered to mention that it was my birthday, too. My leather jacket made me invisible.