Ten Thousand Saints

Ten





In the kitchen, Neena was butterflying a leg of lamb, an indelicate procedure that recalled neither lamb nor butterfly, but a bloody approximation of log splitting, diapering, and liposuction. She had learned the method from her grandmother, a billy goat of a woman four and a half feet tall, in the kitchen of the hotel where she worked in Chandigarh. Until she came to America, it was the biggest kitchen Neena had ever seen. This kitchen, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, thirteen stories in the air (it had taken some time to explain to her family back home why the address was the fourteenth floor), had a six-burner gas range, a refrigerator that dispensed ice crushed or cubed, and a wine rack so full that taking a bottle home now and then was like taking a pin from a pin- cushion. The boyfriend (he was not a boy, but he was dressed like one, in sandals and cutoff jeans and an untucked Hawaiian shirt) was opening the second bottle of the evening. He refilled his glass and then Neena’s, spilling a puddle of wine on the counter. “Looking good, girl,” he said with a whistle, at either Neena or the lamb, and, taking the bottle, drunkenly exited the room.

Stepping into the air-conditioned parlor, away from the aromatic, ovened kitchen, Les saw that the guests had arrived and were arranging themselves on various pieces of furniture. Eliza sat on the ottoman beside a pyramid of gifts, Johnny and Jude in the pair of wingback chairs. “Wow,” said Johnny, who was wearing, of all things, a linen sport coat, “your home is really beautiful, Ms. Urbanski.” He took in the claw-foot coffee table, the baby grand posed like an open-jawed shark. He was eyeing the painting hanging over the piano, the backside of a reclining male nude.

“That’s Pierre,” Les explained.

“Thank you, Johnny.” Di draped herself over the divan. She was wearing jeans and ballet slippers and an indigo-colored leotard, which swept low on her very fine back, and she was balancing a wineglass in her many-ringed fingers. This left Les standing at the margin of the room, but he was glad to keep his distance. Di hadn’t looked at him since earlier that afternoon, when she’d sent him out to pick up her order at the bakery.

He was content being her errand boy: that was how he atoned, how he returned to her good graces. He had done his best this afternoon, and now the living room was festooned with the pink wishes of the Upper East Side’s finest merchants—bouquets of balloons; crimped streamers; sixteen frosted cupcakes from Payard, plated in wedding cake tiers and bedecked with silver bullets. It looks like a baby shower, Di had remarked to Eliza. Doesn’t it?

Eliza was shaking one of the gift boxes now. For her birthday dinner, she had belatedly taken Les’s advice and chosen a dress, a strapless, coral-colored dress with a ruffled skirt and pumps to match. Full, but not full enough. She looked as though she’d swallowed one of those big, curvaceous autumn squashes. “Gucci,” she guessed.

“Nope. Go ahead and open it,” said Di. Eliza did, not taking her time. Inside was a silver watch, slender as a bracelet.

“Ooh, Tiffany’s!”

Eliza was a thrift store hound; she was not one to exclaim over costly gifts. Di wasn’t really one to give them, either. They were putting on a sick sort of show, bending over backward to please each other. Eliza leaned over and placed her wrist on Johnny’s knee, and Johnny fastened the watch for her. Then she trotted over to kiss her mother’s cheek. It was unbearable, watching a person who was in the dark, especially when it was you who had put her there.

“Going to check on that lamb,” Les said, mostly to himself, and returned to the kitchen.

Eliza balled up the wrapping paper, tossed it at Jude, and tied the ribbon around Johnny’s thigh. “Thanks,” he said.

“It’s a garter,” she explained.

“Would you boys care for wine?” Di asked, picking up the open bottle that Les had left on the table.

Jude and Johnny declined. “They’re straight edge,” said Eliza in a mock whisper.

“Of course. I forgot. Eliza?” She lifted the bottle. Eliza shook her head, crossed her legs, and stared at her shoes.

“I’m feeling kind of yucky,” she said and patted her belly heartily. At this, Jude could not help but direct a desperate glance at Johnny. What was that about? And what was with the getup? She was nearly five months pregnant.

Di stood up, walked over to her daughter, and held the back of her hand to her forehead. “You don’t have a fever, darling.”

“Something smells good,” Jude said loudly.

“It really does,” Johnny agreed.

“Neena’s doing a lamb,” Di said.

“Mother, you know they’re vegetarian. They don’t eat lamb.”

“Of course. Vegan, isn’t it?”

“Vee-gan,” said Jude helpfully. “Vay-gans are from the planet Vega.”

Di returned to the divan, turned sideways so she could stare into the picture window behind her. The sun was sinking over New Jersey. “Listen to you three, with your secret codes.” She sipped her wine. “You’re all very busy together, aren’t you?”

“We’ve been going to the temple a lot,” said Jude.

“When I was sixteen, I was dancing seven days a week. I didn’t have time to run around the city with a couple of boys.”

“Johnny’s eighteen,” Eliza pointed out.

“Oh?” She raised her eyebrows, impressed. “An adult. What do you do, Johnny?”

“I’m a musician.”

“And a tattoo artist,” Eliza added. Jude looked at her with concern, but she waved her hand. “What’s she going to do—call the police? She’s practically married to a drug dealer.”

“We are not married, practically or even remotely,” said Di. “Do you make a decent living with tattoos, Johnny?”

“Getting there,” Johnny said. He was sitting comfortably, legs crossed, nibbling macadamia nuts from a glass bowl he cupped in his hand. “I save money by working out of my apartment.”

“And where is this apartment?”

“Mother, what does it matter?”

“What about college? You don’t live with anyone? Your family?”

“Mother, don’t be rude!”

“I don’t have any family, ma’am.” Every pair of eyes in the room dropped to the floor. Johnny shifted his to the painting above the piano. The man’s back was as smooth and as rippled as a conch.

Di sipped her wine thoughtfully. “I’m awfully sorry about that.”

“I bet this one’s Burberry,” said Eliza, ripping the paper from one of the larger gifts. This time she was right. Inside was a checked wool scarf, feathered at the ends and wide as a shawl. “Oh, I love it!” She whipped it extravagantly around her neck and crossed the room again to Di. This time, she sat down square on her mother’s lap, startling the wine from her glass. “I love it, I love it, I love it!” she said, kissing her mother’s cheek each time. Di went with it, kissing her back. They cuddled; they cooed. Eliza wrapped them both in the scarf. Di buried a hand in Eliza’s side, tickling her. Eliza shrieked, leaning back luxuriously, her shoe balanced precariously on her foot.

At this point, Les returned from the kitchen, balancing three glasses of soda water. In the pocket of his shorts were the two letters, now freckled with red wine: the bill from Mount Sinai Hospital for the balance of services rendered (he’d thought he’d paid the whole thing), and the notice of expulsion from Eliza’s school (We regret to inform you . . . unanswered phone calls . . . take truancy very seriously . . . out-of-town permissions . . . disregard for disciplinary probation . . .). Both had arrived in Di’s mailbox that afternoon, and by the time Les arrived to help with the party, Di had burned through half a pack of cigarettes. For once he’d managed to keep a secret, but after Di confronted him with those letters, he broke down, spilled all the details—the ER, the baby, the father.

“Jeezum Crow,” he said now, clanging the glasses down on the table. “Just tell her.”

Di stopped tickling. Eliza stopped giggling. No one seemed sure which one he was talking to. Les withdrew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, then tossed the pack and lighter on the table. Jude sat frozen. Johnny worked a macadamia nut in his cheek.

“You give me hell about keeping it from you, but now you’re just torturing the girl! And she’s so desperate to tell you, to get an ounce of support from you, she’s got it written on her dress! I didn’t tell her, Eliza, but she found out. And by the way, you’re kicked out of school.”

“I know,” Eliza mumbled, sliding off her mother’s lap.

“You girls are two of a kind.” He looked at Di. “Why do you think she doesn’t tell you anything? Because you control the shit out of any situation you get your hands on! And why do you think she does that, Eliza? Because you’re so goddamn out of control! Three schools you’ve been kicked out of? It’s a good thing your mother’s sending you to one of those Florence Crittenton homes, because at this point no other school would take you.”

Les stopped for a breath. His hands shook as he held the cigarette to his lips. He had never felt entirely at home here, in this apartment bought with Wall Street money. Les was everything Daniel Urbanski was not. He was all the long-haired men Di had given up for marriage. Her downtown man. Mother Nature’s Son. Her joker, her smoker, her midnight toker. “Blessed are the pot sellers, illusion dwellers!” So many nights they’d spent adrift on her waterbed, smoking joints with the windows open, Simon and Garfunkel anointing their unlikely union. But it seemed that the illusion had been his.

“Florence who?” Eliza asked.

“I’m sorry, Lester,” said Di coolly, leaning over to snatch up the cigarettes. “I didn’t know you were so concerned about education. I’m the irresponsible parent. I didn’t notice that my fifteen-year-old daughter is pregnant because she was enrolled in school. I suppose I could have kept better tabs on her if I let her drop out and smoke reefer all day. Maybe I could build a special room for her to have sex in, with a heart-shaped bed and a big mirror on the ceiling.” She lit a cigarette and drew on it forcefully.

“Mom, you don’t smoke anymore.” Eliza crossed her arms over her stomach, gripping her elbows.

“I don’t smoke pot anymore,” pointed out Jude.

“She’s not fifteen anymore,” pointed out Johnny.

“I’m sorry—sixteen.” Di spoke slowly, without anger, clipping each word. “Fully prepared to raise a child.”

“You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not here! I’ve got resources. I’ve got money, a lot more money than a lot of mothers have. When I turn eighteen, I’ll have enough money—”

“Enough money for what, Eliza? What will you do until then? I’ve already got a room set up for you at a facility upstate. I called this afternoon.”

“I’m not going to any f*cking facility!”

“They take your baby,” Jude said, pitching forward. “That’s what a ‘facility’ is.”

“They don’t take it,” Di said. “They don’t sell it into slave labor. They give it to parents that can take care of it properly.”

“Like my dad?” Jude said.

Through the picture window, Manhattan was now curdled a pale twilight blue. No one had moved to turn on a light, and Jude could feel the darkness sifting through the room. He was glad his father’s face was shadowed by his Yankees cap.

“You’re angry that Di found out, but I didn’t tell her,” Les said. “I chose to cover for you.”

“Of course you chose him. Anything to make Jude like you. Anything to be a pal. Leave the fathering to someone who has the time.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Has it occurred to you,” said Di, “that Eliza might not be in this situation if she weren’t desperate for a little attention from a father figure?” Raising his wineglass to his lips, Les momentarily lost his grip. He fumbled it like a football, a red tide rising to find the lapel of his shirt, before he caught it again. No one moved to get a cloth from the kitchen; no one offered the soda water that sat, untouched, on the table.

“You can blame me for f*cking up my own kids,” said Les. “But don’t blame me for f*cking up yours.” He put down his glass, gouged out his cigarette in the ashtray, plucked up a cupcake, and kissed the crown of Eliza’s head. “You’re not f*cked up. I’m just saying.” Eliza sat with her elbows on her knees, hands covering her face. “Happy birthday, sweetheart. I tie-dyed you a Yankees shirt—it’s around here somewhere. You can call me.” His sandals slapped the marble floor as he crossed the room. The door closed noisily behind him.

From behind her hands, Eliza smelled ginger and garlic and cooking meat. She kicked off her shoes. In her bare feet, she stood up and wandered in the direction of the window. She said, “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you, Mother, but I—”

“Darling, no.” Di put down her glass. “I’m not disappointed that you’re pregnant. I’m disappointed that you didn’t tell me. If you’d come to me, we could have done something about it.”

Eliza rested her hands over her belly. “Well, that’s why I didn’t tell you.” Typical of her mother, she thought—who cared whether the problem was school or drugs or boys or a baby, as long as she got to choose the solution?

But Les was right: they were two of a kind. Eliza was as stubborn as her mother. She was halfway through this solution of hers, and yet standing there she was not at all sure whether she’d chosen it because it was what she wanted or because it was what her mother wouldn’t.

Or because it was what Jude and Johnny wanted. She looked at them, two pairs of blue eyes watching her as though she were an afterschool special.

“What are you looking at?” she demanded of them. “Don’t just sit there. I’m doing this for you.”

“What do you mean?” asked Di.

“She means,” said Johnny, standing up, “that I want this baby as much as she does.” He crossed the room, sneakers squeaking against the floor, and pressed a palm to Eliza’s belly. “Right?”

Her stomach fluttered. She could feel each of his fingertips through the layers of taffeta. No one but the ER doctor had touched her pregnant belly, and now, as if the baby had been awoken, she felt a tiny quiver again, like a goldfish swimming against the fishbowl of her belly.

But Johnny didn’t feel it. He was digging in his pocket for something, dropping to his knee, saying, “I’ve got a present for you, too.”

“Oh, mercy,” said her mother.

Annabel Lee was telling her something, but she didn’t know what it was.

“You can’t marry her. She’s sixteen years old! Not without parental consent.”

A tail-stroke, a wing-beat, a slither through the grass.

“I can in New Jersey,” said Johnny, opening the box.

The boyfriend’s boxer shorts were gone, his toothbrush, the glass pipe he kept cinched in a chamois sack at the bottom of the hamper, where he thought no one would look. His crossword puzzles were not in the basket in the master bath; his bottles of beer did not roll in the crisper. Whether these things had been fetched or discarded Neena did not know. She was not particularly sorry to see them go.

The morning after her birthday party, zipping an enormous cowhide suitcase on her bed, Eliza announced that she was leaving. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” her mother had instructed Neena before leaving the apartment herself an hour earlier, but when Eliza threw her arms, quite abruptly, around Neena’s neck, the woman did not feel she could hold her captive. Neena was not confident she could construct a sentence in English adequate to express her confusion, embarrassment, worry, and joy. With gratitude she had several times accepted the girl’s cocaine, which her son had traded a friend for a VCR, an interview suit, and a 1972 Dodge Coronet, but she did not know how to accept a good-bye hug.

Downtown Les was chasing a fly with a flyswatter when the buzzer buzzed. When he opened the door in his undershirt, Eliza was sitting on her suitcase, breathing heavily. “What are you doing, crazy woman? You carry that up the stairs?” Les dragged it through the kitchen and into the living room, where Eliza collapsed on the futon. Then he brought her a glass of water.

“Where’s Jude?” She gulped from her glass.

Les, standing, swatted at the drone that swept by his ear, his hangover indistinguishable from the insect that orbited his head. “Gone somewhere on his skateboard.” With his flyswatter, he indicated the suitcase. “What, are you moving in?”

“Not with you. I’m on my way to Johnny’s. I don’t think he’s home yet.” She placed her glass on the coffee table, lifted her necklace out of her collar, and gently bounced the charms in her hand. “I had to get out of there before my mom came back.”

Les turned the flyswatter on Eliza, fanning her. “Just so you know, it’s a terrible idea.”

“Moving in with Johnny?”

“Marrying him. Jude told me.”

A sticky strand of Eliza’s hair batted in the draft of the fan. “Papa, don’t preach,” she said. “You have any better ideas?”

“You can stay here with me. Sleep in the loft. Jude can sleep in the bathtub. When the baby’s born, we’ll sell it on the black market. I know a guy in Jersey City who can get ten thousand bucks for a white kid.”

“What if it’s not white?”

“Five,” said Les.

Eliza unzipped one side of the suitcase, slipped her hand in, and withdrew a chamois bag, which she tossed to Les. Les caught it against his chest. “She must have junked everything else last night. When I woke up this morning, she was gone.”

Les opened the drawstring and slid out the glass pipe. It was baby-shit brown marbled with streaks of green, squat as a mushroom and smooth as a stone. Not the prettiest thing, but she was reliable. Inside the bowl was an ancient bud, which he dug out like a booger and dropped on the carpet. “Harriet!” he said. “This old girl must be twenty-five years old. My ex’s earliest work. You meet my old lady when you were in Vermont?”

“I didn’t have the pleasure.”

“She’s a piece of work.”

He thought about her while he stroked her namesake, the curve of the woman’s thickened hips not unlike those of the pipe. He thought about the way, back in February, he’d approached her bedroom door—their bedroom door—the five musical knocks he’d played on it. He had intended only to say good night. Instead he’d found himself smelling the patchouli and cigarettes in her hair, the warm mama scent in the crook of her neck, like borax and breast milk and the sawdust of their bygone household, and as he walked her backward to their bed, she had smelled him back.

Now he went instinctively for the cookie jar on the kitchen counter, took out a thimbleful of pot, and packed it in the pipe. They’d been like a couple of teenagers, pawing at each other, up all night, like the teenagers they’d actually been when they’d first smelled the crooks of each other’s necks. He was back on the couch by the time their children, now teenagers, had woken the next morning. And now Eliza was pregnant and her suitcase was packed and out of it snaked the black lace of some undergarment he preferred not to identify.

“What do I call you now? My ex-almost-stepdaughter?”

“Don’t get sappy on me, Lester.”

“Will you still come visit me?”

“I’ll be down the street.”

Les sat down beside her and took a hit on the pipe. It settled him, loosened his bones. It tasted, somehow, like Vermont. “When’s the wedding?”

“Sunday, I hope. Johnny’s out taking care of the details now. It’s going to be at the temple.”

“I’m guessing you don’t mean Emanu-El.”

“Are you coming?”

Les took her hand in his and examined the ring. The stone was no bigger than a lentil, and almost certainly not a diamond; he knew a guy who sold these on Fourteenth Street. “You really love this kid? This Hare Rama with all the jewelry?”

Eliza withdrew her hand sharply. She took up her necklace again, jogged the charms.

“He appears to be noble,” Les went on. “A stand-up guy. But why marry him? You’re already knocked up. Why not cohabit for a while, play it by ear?”

“That’s what you’d do, isn’t it. Play it by ear.”

“I find it’s the best organ to play by.” He swatted at the fly. “Although I’ve been accused of playing by others.”

Eliza was scrunched down on the futon, her body practically horizontal, her hand absently rubbing the T-shirt stretched over her belly. “What if it was Jude’s kid? Would you and my mom still want me to give it away?”

“If it was Jude’s kid, well, we’d all get married and live in one big incestuous duplex.”

“It would have been better, wouldn’t it,” said Eliza, gazing into space.

Les tried to picture it: a new age sitcom family, the four of them taking turns with the nighttime feedings. A grandfather at the age of forty-three. It was no more outrageous than the idea he’d had, in the early hours of St. Valentine’s Day, his ex-wife catching her breath beside him, of returning to his old life. Not taking any vows—just staying there in that bed. Just playing it by ear. But in the morning Harriet had wordlessly deposited a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him, and then he’d whisked his son away. And now neither of these options was available to him, his old family or his new. The phone rang, and Les got up and went eagerly to it. He found himself hoping it was Jude, the thread that now held his families together.

Instead, he heard the familiar static of a cordless phone.

Les listened to the voice crack through the noise, to the voice and the static and the fly and the door-buzzer peal of his headache. The voices in his head. Had he seen Eliza? He had better tell her if he’d seen Eliza, he had better tell her where that punk lived, if he didn’t want the cops involved, if he didn’t want a drug-sniffing dog at his door, if he knew what was good for him.

Les was not entirely sure that he did.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t hear you very well.” And he placed the phone in its cradle.

“Oh, God. Is she coming over?”

“Hold on.”

“She’s coming to find me, isn’t she?”

“Hold on, girl. I’m thinking.” It was over, he was thinking. It was not the first time he had hung up on Di, or she on him. There had been other fights, accusations, betrayals, the obvious incompatibilities, but now he had crossed a line. He had stepped between Di and her child.

“I wish there was a place we could go. Someplace safe where she won’t find me.” Eliza was sitting up now, leaning over her belly, her face in her hands. “We can’t stay at Johnny’s! He doesn’t even have AC!”

Les picked up the phone and dialed the number that, the dozen or so times he’d dialed it in the last seven years, he was always surprised to remember.

“What are you doing?”

He listened to the dial tone, fanning himself with the flyswatter now, fanning himself as though putting out a fire. He had a wild idea as he waited: that his ex-wife was pregnant with his child, that this child would be the one he wouldn’t screw up, that he could have his old family and his new one under one roof. Honey, he’d say, I’m coming home.

“Is Jude okay?” Harriet asked when they’d said their hellos. She sounded impatient, or maybe just anxious, out of breath, the way she had when he’d admitted to her that yes, he’d told Jude about the kids who’d broken into her studio. She had just run inside from the garden, or upstairs from the basement, where she was doing a load of laundry. She was not a woman longing for her husband to come home. Their children were the players in a business arrangement, and what had happened in their marriage bed was an olfactory fluke. What did you do to him now? said her voice, which might as well have been the voice of the woman he’d just hung up on, the other woman he’d deceived and failed, whose faith he’d neglected to earn.

“He’s fine,” Les said. “More than fine. He’s clean, he’s cured. His rehabilitation is complete.”

What was he saying, Harriet wanted to know.

A dark shape spun in the corner of Les’s eye, and he slammed the flyswatter on the counter. When he lifted it, the fly was stamped to the back, its papery wing still fluttering. He had done it without a thought, and now it seemed a horrible accident. It broke his heart.

“Remember,” he said, “when you asked me for a favor?”

Three and a half blocks east, in the building Jude was passing on his skateboard, Johnny was eating a green apple in Rooster’s apartment. The previous phase of the eight-headed dragon had not had time to heal; Johnny had not brought his equipment with him. From the pillow where his head lay, he could see the edge of the dark, drawn curtains, into the bright morning. This sheltered calm reminded him of the motels he’d frequented during his nomadic childhood, moving from city to city with his brother and his mother, all their possessions in the hatch of their sun-roasted car. He remembered playing Marco Polo in a motel pool, a scrape on his cheek from grazing the fiberglass floor. He remembered jumping on the motel beds with Teddy. He remembered Teddy, when he was still a baby, sleeping in an open suitcase Queen Bea had lined with a towel on the floor, and now Johnny imagined carrying Teddy around in that suitcase, safe inside in the dark. He felt its handle in his palm. Now Teddy really could fit in that suitcase again. He was a few pounds of ashes in a kitchen canister he kept on his closet floor.

He did not share these things with Rooster. Rooster, unlike the rest of New York, knew Teddy had existed, and knew he was the one who had knocked up the girl Johnny would marry on Sunday. But today Johnny didn’t feel like talking about the past. “You ever been to California?” He took a crisp bite of his apple.

“I wish,” Rooster said.

“You think it’s a good place to raise a kid?”

“You ain’t movin’ to California. Not without me.”

Johnny didn’t say anything.

“I see. That’s why you gotta leave. Because I tempt you to the dark side.”

“I told you. I can’t do it anymore.”

Rooster raised his head from his pillow. His jaw, still bruised a mealy blue from a rough day in the pit, tightened. “This ain’t Vermont, baby. This is New York. Fags don’t jump off tall buildings here. They don’t have to meet in dark rooms. Here we have parades.”

Johnny chewed the tart meat of his apple. Of course they still met in dark rooms. Down in the park, a few hundred feet away, they were meeting right now. Rafael, the kid who’d been gangbanged in the comfort station, was not appearing in any parades.

A truck hit a pothole in the street outside. Johnny’s clothes were folded on the stool beside the bed, the Chuck Taylors posed on top emanating the subtlest locker-room stench. “When I finish this apple, I’m going to take a shower, and then I’m going to get dressed, and then I’m going home.”

“And what about the band? You’re sure you’re not quittin’ ’cause a me?”

“Don’t get a big head, Rooster. I’m getting married.”

“You’re sure you’re not gettin’ married ’cause a me?”

“You can pick up your drums whenever. You don’t need me.”

Rooster, lying on his stomach, tapped a single, solemn drumstick against the floor. “So you’re gonna shack up together, you and Yoko Ono and this baby.”

“Look, lots of cultures do it, okay? The Jews, the Mongols. I’ve been reading about it. When a man dies, his brother steps in to marry his wife. It’s in the Bible. It’s called levirate marriage. In Africa, they call it widow inheritance.”

“That’s goddamn romantic.”

“There’s even something like it in The Laws of Manu. If a guy can’t procreate, his wife takes up with his brother so they can have a kid.”

“There’s a word for that, baby, but it ain’t widow inheritance. It’s called livin’ in the closet. Fags have been doin’ that for thousands of years, too.”

Johnny had finished his apple. The core was browning in his hand. “The Laws of Manu says after the baby is born the woman and the brother can go back to being how they were. Platonic.”

“So you’re gonna be happily married to your platonic widow wife. You’ll still be kissin’ her every morning and every night, in fifty, sixty years.”

Johnny didn’t know what would happen after the baby was born. Maybe he’d love the baby so much he’d figure out how to love Eliza, too. Maybe they’d all move to California and live in a tent on an ocean cliff, and he’d walk Teddy’s baby on the beach.

Rooster added, “Unless we’re both dead of AIDS.”

Johnny looked up. Rooster had his back to him, the defeated mass of his body still collapsed facedown. They’d never said it aloud, not to each other. They talked about the people they knew who were wasting away, the bums and junkies and squatters, people whose own families refused to visit them in the hospital, and in their obituaries—if they even got obituaries, let alone funerals—were listing the cause of death as pneumonia, cancer. Cancer! Together Johnny and Rooster shook their heads at the injustice.

But wasn’t Johnny as cowardly as everyone else? In the hushed alleys of their neighborhood, where the virus glinted like the silver needles left on the sidewalk, it was easy for him to pretend that it was a junkie disease. He never talked about the possibility that one day it might catch him, too. He and Rooster were careful, always scrupulously careful, and yet it was Johnny’s unvoiced fear that this was how he’d be found out: one day he’d get sick, and even though no one would say it everyone would know why.

“Silence=Death,” the new AIDS posters went. The triangle symbol was as ominous as the Missing Foundation’s toppled martini glass.

Maybe, if things were different, Johnny could say the word back to Rooster now. AIDS. He could tell Rooster how scared he was. They’d go get tests, and put it behind them, and together they could sail down Fifth Avenue on a parade float, throwing confetti into the wind.

But now? If he was found out, no one would let him raise Teddy’s baby. And if he got sick, he wouldn’t be around long enough to raise the baby. Before long, he’d be wherever Teddy was. Gone. And he wanted to be alive.

Johnny sat up, but Rooster didn’t move. He didn’t show Johnny his face. Rooster was a big man, but for the first time, his body now looked like a brittle thing, each knuckle of his spine visible. What Johnny would remember was that ink-ruined plane of his back in the dim room, Johnny’s imperfect work branded forever in his pores.

“Just take your f*ckin’ shower,” Rooster said.

To the wedding of his best friends, the first wedding he had ever attended, Jude wore the same clothes he’d worn to Teddy’s funeral. Johnny had wanted him to wear a robe, maybe in yellow or gold (Johnny’s was white), but Jude had grown tired of the details Johnny had planned—the vermilion powder he would dab on the part of Eliza’s hair, the firmness of the eggplants for the fire sacrifice. He had sent Jude out to buy six bouquets of roses, which Jude had then disassembled, petal by petal, for the guests to toss at the bride and groom—the householders, Hindus called them—while Johnny and Eliza had taken the PATH to Hoboken to apply for a marriage license. So Jude stood firm on his choice of attire, the one act of disobedience he could muster. Les, for his part, wore the suit he had worn to his own wedding in 1969, chocolate brown, with a vest that could not be buttoned.

The rest of his clothes, along with the handful of possessions with which he preferred not to part, Les had packed into his trunk. After arranging with Harriet the details of the children’s arrival, he’d placed a call to a friend in Chinatown, and thirty minutes later two guys had arrived with a truck and a dolly and four empty refrigerator boxes, which they filled with his plants, wrapped in cellophane, and carted out of Les’s apartment into the bright of day. The cash would cover a ticket to anywhere in the world, but he hadn’t bought one yet. He’d go to the airport and pick a city he couldn’t pronounce. He gave the keys to his camper van to Jude, along with McQueen, who would not pass through airport security. The keys to his apartment he left to his friend Davis, who was in need of a sublet, having been evicted from his own studio for failure to pay the rent. Jude had witnessed all of this with the dejected respect one had for people with destructive talents, like winning hamburger-eating contests. He should have known his father was exceptionally good at leaving, at transforming a crisis into an efficient and practiced good-bye. Finally, his father gave him five hundred-dollar bills, for the “reimbursement” of Jude’s dealer. “Be nice to he who keeps you in weed.” It was the one lesson he left Jude with, and Harriet’s one condition for allowing Jude to return to Vermont with his friends. She could not keep him padlocked in his room forever, and she couldn’t afford to lose any more glass. Hippie would have to be paid.

For the week preceding the wedding, to protect her from her mother, Les had established Eliza in a room at the St. Marks Hotel. To protect her from the St. Marks Hotel, he’d established Johnny there with her, in a single room with a double bed, because it was the cheapest. He said to Jude, “They can’t get into any more trouble than they already have.” They didn’t see her until Sunday evening, when she appeared at the temple in her sari, her palms and bare feet covered with henna tattoos.

At the wedding, while the priest chanted and waved his incense and spoke of sacrifice, while Johnny and Eliza exchanged flower garlands instead of rings and tied their shawls in a knot to symbolize their union, while the fire pit raged so hot that Jude’s eyes stung with the sweat from his brow, he kept his eyes on Eliza’s feet, on her ankles, her heels, the space between her toes, on each spike and whorl of ink, and imagined them in Johnny’s hands while he applied the ink to her skin.

After the vegetarian feast, Jude drove his father’s van around to the front of the building (already packed with their bags, equipment, record crates, and the three cats—Johnny’s single caveat) and held open the door while Johnny, carrying a laughing Eliza, piled into the back. The sun had set over Brooklyn, and Jude fumbled a moment to find the headlights. In the darkness of the van the rearview mirror reflected only the dimmest of shapes—the happy members of the temple waving from the curb, Jude’s father already hailing a taxi, and the profiles of the newlyweds it was his duty to chauffeur home, one indistinguishable from the other.