When You Don't See Me (4 page)

I never made the mistake of thinking he was flirting with me. Fred was my friend the same way Roberto was. I'd never tell Fred or anyone else how much time I spent thinking about the way his hair sort of curled against the back of his neck when he needed a haircut. Or how sexy I thought it was when he was mixing a Venti-whatever-latte and bit the tip of his tongue in concentration. Or that I once lied for three weeks and said I couldn't find a jacket he left at Uncle Blaine's apartment. I liked having it in the room with me. Maybe that was obsessive, but it was my little secret, and it hurt no one.

After the day Sister Divine accosted Fred, she seemed to pop up everywhere. I saw her outside Lincoln Center. At Seventy-ninth and Broadway. Skirting Columbus Circle. I wasn't sure whether or not Sister Divine was homeless. Maybe she was just crazy. Whenever I saw her, she was skulking along, the same layers of black cloth shifting and settling around her. Until she'd go rigid and fix her gaze on some unwary tourist. Or anyone moving slowly—like a predator assessing the weakest potential prey. Then it would happen.

“Forty-two generals and six thousand lieutenants of Satan are in your body…. two hundred field generals…. five hundred captains…Repent! Cast out your demons! Do God's work!”

Most people ignored her. I regarded her with affection, because she gave me a reason to call Fred. He enjoyed the Sister Divine updates. He'd picked up a transit map and map pins to mark my Sister Divine sightings, sure that a pattern would eventually emerge. Friends began placing bets on it. So far, the face of Jesus was losing to the face of Donald Rumsfeld two to one.

I was a few blocks from Mark's when I saw Sister Divine. Or worse, when she saw me. She stopped, pointed at me, and shouted, “Legions of demons inhabit your body! Drive them out! Find the silver cord. Get inside yourself before it's too late. Do God's work!”

No one paid any attention to her, and I whipped out my cell so I could brag to Fred that I was possessed by more demons than he was.

“Oh, good,” he said. “I was starting to worry about her. Where are you?”

“I don't know. Somewhere near Murray Hill.”

“Wow, she's spreading faster than West Nile virus,” Fred said.

“She's not that far from the first place we ever saw her.”

“What are you talking about? She's practically—” He cut himself off with a sigh. “You said Murray Hill. What address?”

I looked around and said, “I don't know. Somewhere near 119th and—”

“Never mind. Right letters, wrong neighborhood. Morningside Heights, Nick. It frightens me how little geography you know after almost three years here.”

“At least I know Harlem,” I muttered. “How many New Yorkers can say that?”

“Everyone. Harlem's the old
and
the new black. You can't swing a gold chain in Harlem without hitting a once or future president. And you do realize that Morningside—never mind. Where are you going now?”

“Home.”

“Good. Hook up with the roommates of your choice and meet us out later.”

“Who is us, and where is out?”

He rattled off a list of people from our recurring cast of friends, then said, “Cutter's. Between nine and ten.” When I didn't answer, he said, “Oh. It's been so long that I forgot. Maybe Cookie forgot, too.”

Cutter's was a dive on the Lower East Side. It was owned and operated by a retired Marine named John Cutter. Everybody called him Cookie.

Even though Cutter's was quite a distance from the Hell's Kitchen apartment where I'd lived with my uncle, I started going there with my friend Blythe not long after I moved to New York. She'd once lived in the neighborhood, so she knew the bar. Blythe was over twenty-one, and although I was only seventeen at the time, I never drank, so it wasn't a big deal. When I started drinking, it still wasn't a big deal. Cookie could barely be bothered to wipe down the bar or keep the toilet working, so he wasn't exactly conscientious about checking an ID. Since several of my friends were underage like me, it was a good place for us.

Most of Cutter's patrons were rough around the edges. Vets. Aging policemen. Ironworkers. We didn't mingle with them, and they didn't pay attention to us. We weren't spoiled college kids. We didn't make a lot of noise. No one got drunk or rowdy. We didn't act like we were slumming. We were grateful to stay at our long table in the corner and shoot the shit. The working men stuck together at the bar or around the pool tables. We maintained a peaceful coexistence.

Blythe was the only person I knew who moved comfortably between the two groups. Blythe was an artist—an actual working painter whose work got shown and made money for her. She was our bohemian fairy godmother. Sometimes people didn't take her seriously because she was around five feet tall and probably weighed ninety pounds. That was a mistake. Blythe had a take-no-prisoners disposition, and you crossed her at your own risk.

Something about Blythe endeared her to Cutter's burly clientele. They looked out for her, but she had a way of looking out for them, too. Like Dennis Fagan, who was part of the reason I'd been kicked out of Cutter's a few weeks before.

“What does that mean?” Kendra asked later, after I told her about Fred's invitation. “Are we going, or aren't we?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'd feel better if Roberto was with us. He's bigger than me. He commands respect from the blue collars.”

She shrugged and said, “I haven't seen him today. He's probably at his mother's.” She slapped at my hand when I started chewing a hangnail. “What did you do? Get in a fight with this Dennis guy?”

“Um, no,” I said. “Do I look dead?”

“So why'd you get kicked out?”

“It wasn't my fault.”

“It never is.”

“Some guy was running his mouth about us. He was probably drunk. He made a couple comments that bothered me. I said something back. He called me a name, and Dennis clocked him.”

“Seems like the drunk guy and Dennis should have been the ones kicked out. Not you. I must be missing a lot of details.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “I haven't been back since. I don't know if I'm banned for life.”

We stopped talking as Morgan walked through on her way to the kitchen. Roberto and I had gotten tired of our lack of privacy in Chez Snake Pit. While I'd been out, he'd finished installing walls made of sheets. Kendra had left me exposed by pulling back a sheet when she came in.

“Interesting portiere,” Morgan said, looking up at the aluminum poles that were suspended by chains from the ceiling. She fingered the sheets and said, “Not cheap. And not floral, thank the god of your choice. Are these from Drayden's?”

When we were in school, Roberto's financial contribution to the Mirones family had come from retail jobs—first at Lord & Taylor, then at Macy's. His experience had helped him get his most recent job on the Visuals staff at Drayden's, a newcomer to the department stores on Fifth Avenue.

“We can't afford sheets from Drayden's,” I said. “His mother got these from the hotel. And what's a porter ray?”

“Portiere,” Morgan corrected. “It's fancy talk for something hanging in a doorway. Roberto's mother steals sheets from Four Seasons?”

Kendra said, “That sounds like
she sells seashells at—”

“Of course she doesn't,” I said. “They probably let the housekeeping staff buy old sheets or stuff that needs mending. I don't know. Ask Roberto.”

“You should go out with us tonight,” Kendra said and gave Morgan one of her encouraging smiles. I imagined a force field of evil around Morgan that would deflect Kendra's goodness and send it shrieking into the night, like a tranny prostitute with VD. “Nick was just telling me the story of steelworker Butch—”

“He's an ironworker, and his name is Dennis.”

“—Cassidy and the Sunflower Kid,” Kendra finished. The expression on her face rattled me. Sometimes she seemed more passive-aggressive princess than dumb blonde. “C'mon. It'll be fun!”

“Gosh, I don't know,” Morgan said with exaggerated enthusiasm. “I'd go, but I don't have anything to wear!” She pretended to flip back her hair with her hand and a toss of the head. Then she resumed her mask of Satan in human form and went into the kitchen.

“Do you think that means she's not going?”

I looked at Kendra, trying to figure out if she was kidding. Although it was one of the most social exchanges I'd had with Morgan, there was no mistaking her message.

“Yeah. I think that's what it means.”

“She can be such a buzz kill sometimes.” Kendra unfolded her legs and dramatically flung herself onto the futon. Then she started talking about her hair.

Even if we missed Roberto, we had to get out of there before Kendra turned my night into a slumber party.

 

It wasn't really cold out, but Kendra and I were both dressed in heavier coats than most of the people we passed. I was trying to avoid a relapse, and Kendra said she needed a heavy coat to go with her outfit. Which made no sense. Nobody could see what she was wearing beneath it. And Cutter's was always warm to the point of tropical, so she'd ditch it as soon as we were inside. Maybe she only had the one coat. Or maybe she felt the need to be buttoned up from head to toe.

“Do you get nervous walking through the barrio?” I asked.

“You make it sound like we live in a Santana video. No, of course I don't get nervous,” she said with an anxious glance around. “You know it's longer between buses on Sunday, right? I hate waiting for a bus.”

I decided to make a concession for the sake of her mental health. “If you're that worried about it, we can take the subway. What's the problem? Do you think you stand out because you're so blond? So white? So walking like you're spastic?”

“It's the rats,” she said, doing another sidestep, although there wasn't a rat in sight. “Anything above Ninety-fifth is rats, rats, rats.”

“Rats are everywhere. All you have to do is pay attention and don't take stupid risks.”

“You're being naive. We're in Harlem. There's gang graffiti—”

“Street art.”

“Trash on the streets—”

“Every street in the city has trash,” I protested.

“To be collected. Not to be blown down the sidewalks. Then again, I understand why people don't use their trash cans. Yesterday I saw a chicken scratching around ours.”

I laughed and said, “It's winter. No place in the city looks decent until spring. When Harlem thaws, you'll change your mind. Roberto tells me there are block parties. Street festivals. Sometimes they close off streets for kids to play—”

“Yeah, that's another thing,” Kendra said. “You don't see so many kids anywhere else. The city is a lousy place to have a family. Families should live in Connecticut or Pennsylvania.”

I wanted to ask if her family was Republican. Or I could have told her that the only time I'd been mugged, I'd been outside an art gallery in the Village, which was probably Kendra's idea of a safe neighborhood.

“Why are you so quiet? You artistic types are always brooding,” Kendra said.

“Brooding? Who uses that word in real life? I'm thinking.”

“You artistic types are always thinking,” she amended.

“You do know this isn't a club we're going to, right? We're not having some
Sex and the City
moment. We're not tweakers or club kids. Or even a bunch of overwrought, emo poets—”

“Disliking rats, free-range chickens who live in trash cans, and drive-bys doesn't make me a snob,” Kendra said.

I put my arm around her as we walked. Regardless of what Kendra thought, anyone who paid attention to us at all seemed friendly. Older people even smiled, maybe mistaking us for a couple.

“I'm a reverse snob,” I said. “I'd rather walk these streets than walk into a loft in SoHo. Or a shop on Park Avenue. Talk about brutal people.”

“You don't have to be rich to live where you don't see homeless people sleeping on stoops,” Kendra said and pointed.

“You get what you pay—does she have clones? The bitch is everywhere.”

“Who?”

Sister Divine was sound asleep, and I couldn't stop myself from checking out how she looked when she wasn't screaming about demons. Without the intensity of her waking hours, the creases on her forehead and around her eyes weren't as visible. She looked like a filthy fallen angel at rest.

As I stared at her, Kendra and the neighborhood around me faded. I remembered how I'd felt when I first moved to New York. The city had seemed magical. The crowded sidewalks, the rumble of the trains beneath the surface, the streets jammed with cars, cabs, and buses going places. I was always outside, always carrying my sketchbook. Even though I rarely left Midtown, there was inevitably something—an iron fence, a hidden garden, a bodega, or building masonry and adornments—with details that I couldn't wait to get on paper. And the faces. After the sameness of people in the Midwest—or maybe I was just accustomed to them—I couldn't get enough of the variety.