Ten Thousand Saints

Nineteen





After weeks of sleeping in the van and in motels and on Rooster’s floor, moving into the air-conditioned sanctum of Di’s apartment felt like a luxurious crime, as though they were breaking into some movie star’s mansion and were waiting for the police to arrive. It was the size of Tower Records, and had things like a Macintosh computer, a laserdisc player, and a bidet, which Delph and Kram used immediately, reporting the details of their experiences. Delph and Kram took the two single beds in the guest room, and Matthew and Ben took over the living room. Johnny stopped by long enough to drop off his stuff in Neena’s quarters, where he had his own TV and minifridge and telephone line. He said, “I’ll stay at Rooster’s if someone else wants it,” and Eliza said, in front of everyone, “I’m sure you would,” and then Johnny left to meet Rooster at Tompkins to protest the curfew. Evidently the householders no longer cared about keeping up the appearance of sharing a bed. Jude took Di’s room, because no one else wanted to share with him, either, and because no one else wanted the responsibility of staying in the master suite. In the top drawer of Di’s dresser, beneath a layer of silky underwear in metallic hues, was what Jude determined to be a vibrator, which he tested against his wrist, then returned to its drawer. All of these items, along with the thought of his father having sex with Di here, creeped Jude out; nevertheless he was glad for a room of his own. He peeled back the sheets on the king-size waterbed and slept soundly on the cool, silver surface.

At home in her own bed at last, Eliza watched an old tape of Santa Barbara, paged through her Greek textbook (she’d forgotten nearly every word), and ate the banana pudding Neena had left for them. She felt strangely safe here. It was the last place her mother would think to look for her. And if she did: so be it. She was tired of running.

But she still couldn’t sleep. The down mattress pad she had always loved was too soft for her now. Twice she got up to tell Matthew and Ben to turn down the video game they were playing on the computer. Twice she got up to pee. After the second time, she stopped at her mother’s door and knocked on it. Jude answered in another pair of sperm boxers, these red. This time he was shirtless.

“Sorry about before,” she said, sinking into the pool of her mother’s bed. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at Johnny.”

“I tried to find you, but you weren’t standing outside like you said.” His voice was hoarse with sleep. “I didn’t know where you went.”

“You came after me?”

“I was worried.”

“Neena had this little baby, her granddaughter. She was this big.” She cradled an invisible baby in her arms. She wanted to say that she looked like Teddy, but this wasn’t precisely true. She closed her eyes and tried to conjure his face, but his features swam out of her reach. “I can’t remember what Teddy looked like,” she said quietly.

Jude’s eyes were closed, too, his face raised to the ceiling. “He was handsome,” he said. But Eliza could tell that he was seeing something more behind his eyelids, contours sharper than he could describe, or cared to.

She lay down across the sheets, which smelled like the lavender soap Neena laundered them in, and she told Jude that she used to sleep in this bed after her dad died, to keep her mother company. Eliza wanted to sleep in it again, but Jude didn’t lie down beside her. When the baby kicked, he didn’t want to feel it. Eventually she said good night and walked back down the hall to her own room.

That week, they came and went.

Eliza and Jude window-shopped at the baby boutiques on the Upper West Side, where a crib shaped like a sailboat cost a thousand dollars. Delph and Kram played pickup with some guys in Central Park, and Matthew and Ben went to work selling merch at Some Records. They reunited only for an occasional meal, and the show at the Pyramid, which Rooster did book. Delph and Kram left early to go to some club in Brooklyn some girls had invited them to. Di’s dining room table, polished as a pond and the size of a shuffleboard court, was quickly buried by maps and guides, ticket stubs, subway tokens, backpacks, cassettes, Gatorade bottles, granola bars, a jingle jangle of spare keys.

Johnny and Rooster went to the Love Feast at the Krishna Temple on Sunday night. On Monday they skated their friend’s half-pipe until Rooster got too tired. On Tuesday they swam at Coney Island, deep in the ocean where no one could see their limbs tangled underwater. On Wednesday they watched another friend paint a train car in Harlem, a city of skyscrapers and lights and highways as intricate as any eight-headed dragon, then watched the police paint over it. They were starting to crack down now. Even in the month Johnny had been gone, the police had begun to multiply all over the city, lifting their rodent heads out of the manholes. You could hardly suck a token anymore.

On Thursday they walked to the West Village, where gay men strolled hand in hand, walking good-looking dogs, licking ice cream cones, wearing shirts or maybe not. Johnny felt that he knew his city, that New York belonged to him, but sometimes he skated into a neighborhood that felt like a foreign country. The gray calm of the Upper East Side, the flamboyant calm of the West Village—he was not certain he was comfortable with either of their customs. On Christopher Street—barely a mile away from Tompkins Square Park, the AIDS center of the city—it seemed possible to forget about spermicide and sterilized needles. Up in their clean, spacious bedrooms, surely men were dying here, too, but on the street it was like Candy Land for fags, all these gorgeous, healthy men snuggling up to their soul mates. Experimentally, Johnny let Rooster lean him up against someone else’s building and kiss him in front of the world, and in Rooster’s mouth Johnny tasted each flavor he’d eaten himself, painfully intensified. For a sun-blinding moment he was not Patient 9602. Then they walked back to Rooster’s.

Alphabet City, the Bowery, the Lower East Side, Loisaida—these were the places where Johnny belonged. In Alphabet City, there were shadows to hide in. Here you didn’t advertise being gay or straight or rich or poor; you just tried not to get your ass kicked. You just tried to get by. This attitude had been evident the past Saturday night, when the neighborhood of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Yippies, skinheads, bohemians, anarchists, artists, musicians, squatters, gutter punks, junkies, and drunks gathered in Tompkins to unite with the homeless against the extravagant monolith of the Christadora House, the sky-high rents of the East Village, against the army of Mayor Koch. Keep Tompkins homeless! This was what Johnny loved about his home: its homelessness. Everyone was displaced, everyone was half-vagrant. $1500 Rent said the Missing Foundation’s graffiti, and the neighborhood said f*ck that. The Missing Foundation were there on Saturday night, and Blind Jack and Froggy and Jones, kids on bongos, maracas, conch shells. Someone threw a bottle against a police van, and Jerry the Peddler got arrested, and the rest of the park’s residents were scattered about the Lower East Side, or who knew where.

As for Blind Jack’s friend Vinnie, he was dead of AIDS—he’d died in the park while Johnny was on the road, Rooster told him. “Jack tried to wake him up one morning, and he wouldn’t budge. Just lay himself down on the ground with a newspaper spread over his face, like he knew it was time.” Johnny would have expected Rooster to deliver this news with spite, to use it to turn the knife of guilt in Johnny’s gut, but he looked too frail to fight. And who else was there to blame, besides the city itself?

Johnny’s beloved slum was under attack, and already the neighborhood was planning a rematch for next weekend. Now these mutineers of the Lower East Side, the miscellaneous f*ck-ups who’d had no one to prey on but one another, had come together to rage against something else. The curfew. They were as pure and as primal as teenagers revolting against their parents.

On Friday morning, Johnny knocked on Eliza’s bedroom door to tell her they had plans. He had made an appointment to see an apartment, and then another to see a doctor. He was wearing his linen jacket and a thin black tie.

“I was going to feed the ducks with Jude,” she said.

“Well, you’ll have to feed the ducks another time.”

In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth, put in her contacts, and put on her makeup. Usually Johnny’s plotting worried her, but she was more relieved than suspicious. She had a picture in her mind of the apartment—it was one of the pictures that she called on to put her to sleep. It would be necessarily small, but it had an eat-in kitchen with a window box of geraniums like Harriet’s, and an exposed brick wall, which she would paint white. Everything in the baby’s room would be white, too (not pink)—the crib, the single teddy bear, the rocking chair she would take from her bedroom at home. She dressed methodically, trying on several items from her own closet before moving on to her mother’s. She settled on a long madras dress and a pair of penny loafers a size too small for her swollen feet. Over one of her shoulder pads, she hung the leather strap of a purse.

“Jeezum,” said Kram, who was standing in the kitchen, eating breakfast. His hand was stuffed into a box of cereal as if into a mitten. “Where are you guys going?”

In the subway station, rather than jumping over the turnstile, Johnny deposited a token for her, and then another for himself. She didn’t mind that, on the train, instead of talking to her as Jude would, he read a discarded copy of the Post. They appeared as ordinary as any other young couple on the subway—the husband looking sternly at his newspaper, the pregnant wife beside him peering into her compact. One of the ads at the top of the subway car was for a women’s hospital. In it, a woman with her eyes closed held a newborn to her shoulder. The mother looked wise and serene, as though she’d been injected with some celestial barbiturate. Eliza wondered if Johnny had chosen a doctor from this hospital and hoped he had.

By the time they got out at Astor and climbed the stairs to the street, Eliza was exhausted. On the walk east across St. Mark’s, she had to stop to rest in the shade. They passed a police car parked on the street, and on the next block, two more. At Avenue A, police vans and trucks blocked the entrance to Tompkins. Beyond them, a herd of cops milled inside the otherwise empty park.

“Where are all the homeless people?” Eliza asked.

“Where do you think? They kicked them out.”

They continued walking across Seventh Street now, past the other people who’d stopped to see what was going on. Some of them were trying to get the cops’ attention; two men hanging over the fence were chanting, “Pigs out of the park!”

“You guys going to be here tomorrow night?” Johnny asked them.

“You know it, Mr. Clean.”

“What’s going on tomorrow night?” Eliza asked, her shoes pinching her feet.

“We’re demonstrating. I want you to steer clear.”

“What are you demonstrating against?”

She stopped to catch her breath, and after a few steps Johnny turned around. “Eliza, this park is home to a lot of people. They just got kicked out of it.”

“But they’re not supposed to be there.”

Johnny spit out a laugh. He looked at the park and shook his head. “Where are they supposed to be?”

They said nothing else as they finished their walk. Twice, Eliza slowed in front of one of the more attractive buildings on the street, one with scrollwork or arched windows, hoping this was it. The building they finally stopped at was between C and D, around the corner from Johnny’s old place. The plywood in the two first-floor windows gave the building a sleepy expression. Across one of its closed eyelids, red letters spelled HOME SWEET HOME. Johnny did not smile at this as he nudged a toppled bicycle out of their way with his shoe. They climbed all five flights of stairs.

“You weren’t kidding,” said the landlord who buzzed them in. “This girl’s got one in the oven.”

For the first few minutes in the apartment, Eliza’s imagination worked hard to transform it into an acceptable place to live. It was an airy, tall-ceilinged space, probably a factory converted at some point into a loft. The walls were indeed brick, and the graffiti could be painted. The broken windows could be replaced. She tried to picture herself with a broom, and Johnny with a hammer, the two of them building a home here. In the kitchen, the cabinet doors and drawers had been removed, and Eliza found their blackened remains in the middle of the charred floor, beside a bare mattress and a single spoon.

Johnny came up behind her and put a hand on her waist. “A little scummy, you think?” he said into her ear. His voice, and the way he leaned close, were conspiratorial, creating for a moment a private space between their bodies. She gave him a thin smile, relieved somewhat, her heart quickening at the same time.

“You ain’t going to find lower rent in Alphabet City,” said the landlord, hitching up his pants.

Johnny asked, “You got electricity in this place? Hot water?”

“Hell you think?” said the landlord. “My brother let the place go off the grid, but now that I been taking over, this place is certified.”

“Richie go back to Rikers, or what?”

“I don’t know where he is, tell the truth.”

Johnny said he was sorry to hear that.

“You’re the kind of kid I want to get in here, Mr. Clean. We need to clean this neighborhood up.”

“I don’t know about that,” Johnny said. “I kind of like it the way it is. What’s the rent again?”

Eliza stood still while her husband negotiated, unable to articulate her state of disgust, betrayal, and now boredom. Was he really agreeing to take this place? They were talking about a deposit, keys. “I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said and walked down the five flights without stopping.

Outside she sat down on the steps. In the bright daylight, Eliza could see a spiderweb strung across the bent spokes of the bicycle, and a tortoiseshell spider tightroping across it. She was studying it so raptly that she didn’t see the woman running down the street until she was quite close. It was a homeless woman she recognized from Les’s neighborhood, red-haired, emaciated, and naked. She ran in a shuffling sort of way, as if her ankles were shackled, and on her face was a look of not fear or desperation but the benign concentration of any New York jogger. Not until she passed, revealing her profile, was it clear that she was pregnant.

There’s no lease,” Johnny told her as they walked to their next appointment. “We could just stay there month to month, until we find a better place.”

“I don’t know why we can’t just stay at Les’s.”

“Because we’re not taking any more handouts from Jude’s parents, that’s why.”

Eliza said nothing. Her feet were killing her.

“I didn’t sign anything. If you want, we can look some more.” She thought he said this with some resentment. She stopped on the corner of East Sixth, removed one shoe, then the other, and handed them both to Johnny. The sidewalk was hot, but it was a miracle on her feet. If she was going to live in that apartment, what did it matter if she walked barefoot through Alphabet City?

“Where’s the doctor’s office?” Eliza asked, following him around a corner. She wanted to be in a clean, cool exam room, in a paper gown, the reassuring hands of a doctor on her belly.

“It’s close. Bleecker and Mott.”

“It’s a real doctor, right? Not some guy you know?”

They slowed as they neared Johnny’s old apartment. Eliza barely recognized it. The building was covered with scaffolding, and a pair of trucks was parked at the curb. From inside came the sound of hammers, a saw; two men in hard hats hauled a bundle of two-by-fours into the third-floor window. Johnny watched them with what looked like regret.

“Your old place was better than that dump,” she said. She couldn’t help herself.

Johnny kept walking, and Eliza followed. “Maybe I can see about getting it back. Now that it’s going to be a luxury condo, it might be good enough for you.”

“Luxury condo? I doubt it.”

“What do you want, Eliza? The Christadora? You want a doorman?”

“I don’t want a doorman. I just don’t want a crack house.”

“Just because some squatters lived there doesn’t mean it was a crack house.”

Eliza’s bare feet slapped the sidewalk. “Do you know how hypocritical you are? You call yourself straight edge, you call yourself Mr. Clean, and you’re friends with a bunch of junkies and drunks? Who live in that filth?”

“So I should turn my back on them? We should just throw them out of the neighborhood like trash?”

“Don’t blame me. I didn’t make up the f*cking curfew. I just don’t want my kid playing in a sandbox full of human turds.”

They were walking briskly, not looking at each other. “You worried you’re going to catch the cooties, Eliza?”

“It’s called AIDS, Johnny.”

What were they even talking about? Eliza had only a vague sense, picked up from slivers of the news, from dinner parties with her mother’s friends, that AIDS was seething in the lower quadrants of her city—the gay neighborhoods, the junkie neighborhoods, those unshaved regions of New York’s anatomy that she didn’t quite care to inspect. She couldn’t help that it didn’t concern her, and she was not prepared for the intensity of loathing on Johnny’s face. He walked on, even more briskly now, swinging her shoes.

“Do you even know anyone with AIDS, Eliza?”

“No.” It hadn’t occurred to her that this was something to be ashamed of. Or that Johnny himself might know people with AIDS. “What, you want a medal for every friend with AIDS?”

Now Johnny stopped in the middle of the street. First Street and First Avenue. She’d never been on this corner before. It felt like the nerve center of the city. The muscle in Johnny’s jaw hardened, and his hands tightened around her shoes. For a moment, she expected him to hit her with one of them. She almost welcomed it.

“You’re a stupid girl,” he said quietly, looking her in the eye. “You don’t know one goddamn thing.” Then he turned and crossed to the sidewalk. Eliza trotted after him.

“I don’t need this shit!” she said, catching up. “I don’t need your help.”

“Fine, Eliza. I have other things to worry about. If you don’t need my help, go home and call your mom.”

“Maybe I will.” Why not? He was the one who said her mother couldn’t force her to give up the baby.

“Wonderful. Enjoy your trust fund. I hope you sleep tight in your eight-million thread count, Egyptian cotton—”

“I haven’t slept since I was fifteen.”

“What does—”

“If you haven’t noticed, I’m pregnant! I can’t sleep.” She stopped walking, exhausted. “I just lie there.” Her voice was small. She grabbed two fistfuls of sweaty hair. She wanted to pull it out at the root. “I just lie there, thinking . . .”

“Put your shoes on.”

“I can’t,” she moaned. “My feet are the size of—”

“Put your shoes on, Eliza.” He dropped her loafers on the sidewalk. “We’re here.”

She looked up at the yellow brick building in front of them. The small sign that hung beside the entrance said PLANNED PARENTHOOD MARGARET SANGER CENTER.

“This is it?”

Still barefoot, she padded over to the door and peeked in. The glass was cool on her hands. Inside were the same front desk, the same metal detector.

Your handbag, miss.

It seemed like a long time ago. On the way to the clinic in New Jersey, she had been sick in the bathroom on the train. What was growing inside her had made her sick. Or what she was about to do had made her sick. If she had handed over her bag, if she had walked through the metal detector.

“Don’t tell me you’re too good for Planned Parenthood.”

“I’m not going in. Not here.” She spoke quietly, and Johnny matched his voice to hers.

“Eliza, I know you’ve been doing drugs, and I don’t want to know how much, or what kind. You’ll be lucky if that baby doesn’t have brain damage. You are going inside.”

They were standing very close. Eliza could see the beads of sweat above his lip. Then the door to the clinic opened, and they stepped out of the way. Johnny hurried to hold it while a girl stepped out. She was alone, not visibly pregnant. Johnny and Eliza watched as she walked to the curb, put on a set of headphones, and lit a cigarette. Perhaps she was waiting for a ride.

To Johnny, Eliza said, “I was going to get an abortion. I could have.”

This did not seem to surprise him. But saying it aloud brought the nausea rushing back. Her body was boiling hot, but her arms were trembling with goose bumps. Johnny was still holding open the door, and the air-conditioning rushed out at them.

“Do you know why I didn’t?”

He let the door fall closed. His face was drawn. He already knew, but he didn’t want to hear her say it.

“The same reason you married me. Because your brother’s dead.”

“Eliza—”

“If he was alive, I wouldn’t be stuck with this baby, and you wouldn’t be stuck with me.”

She turned and walked to the curb, where the other girl was waiting. A taxi passed by, and Eliza raised her arm, but it kept driving.

“Eliza, where are you going?”

Another taxi approached, and this one slowed for her.

“Take your shoes!” Johnny rushed over and held out the loafers, one forefinger hooked inside each heel. She didn’t want them. She didn’t want anything from him.

“Give them to one of your friends,” she said, and got into the car.

Johnny walked south.

He dropped the shoes in a trash can and kept walking until the island ended and the water opened before him. It was blindingly white. Far across it, the ferry floated on its surface, life jacket orange. Now he wished he’d kept the shoes so he could throw them into the water. He wanted to throw something into the water, but he had nothing to throw.

All he had in his pocket were a few copied keys and his wallet, heavy with Ravi’s cash. He had waited outside the bank in Miami while Ravi had withdrawn the money from the teller. He had not spent a dollar, and he had told no one but Rooster about it. Watching the ferry sail away, untethered and bright, Johnny couldn’t help thinking that it could buy him and Rooster two tickets out of New York, out of his marriage. Maybe it could buy Rooster some time, a dose or two of meds.

Johnny felt the spirits of the city howling for his attention—not the dead but the waiting to die and the waiting to be born. Yama, the god of the dead, was the one who decided which souls would be sent to the heavenly realm and which would be cast into new bodies on earth. Johnny had appealed to him to bring Teddy back, but he wondered now if reincarnation really was a curse, if his brother would be better off in the afterlife, floating as free as the ferry on the water. He wondered if the baby would be better off with someone else’s past lives instead.

Across the water was the graveyard skyline of Staten Island. Were they still over there, his father and his uncle, living in the same cell, sharing a bunk bed, like brothers were supposed to? Eating breakfast together, playing poker, saying good night? If Johnny saw them on the street, he wasn’t sure he could tell them apart, but he wasn’t sure it mattered. They were one and the same. Max and Marshall. His father’s betrayal was his uncle’s. His uncle had abandoned him as his father had, left him out in the cold. Johnny would never do that to Teddy’s baby. He would never do that.

But maybe there was a way to leave a baby without leaving it in the cold. He imagined, for the first time, Eliza handing the baby to someone else, someone who could care for it. As Harriet must have cared for Jude, rocking and bathing and feeding him as though he were her own.

Who was that?” Jude asked his mother.

“Who?”

“That voice. Some guy’s voice.”

“I didn’t hear it.”

Di’s cordless phone was known to play tricks on the ear, to abduct the voices of other callers, but he was sure he’d heard a man say something to his mother, and then his mother, putting her hand over the receiver, say something to him. It was late, close to eleven. Past his mother’s bedtime.

“You’re in one piece? You’re not calling from the ER?”

“I’m at Eliza’s. We’re staying here.”

Harriet paused. “Is her mother there with you?”

“No. That’s why I’m calling. Now we can’t find her.”

Jude was lying on Di’s waterbed. From the living room, he could hear the moaning saxophone of the Playboy Channel.

He’d been sitting out there yesterday, watching TV, when Eliza had walked in the door. Although he’d been waiting for her for some time, he had not expected her home so soon, and he had not expected her to return alone. “I want my mother,” she’d said. She had not been wearing shoes.

“She wants her mom to come home,” Jude explained.

Harriet said, “Well, I think that’s wise.”

“But Di’s not answering her car phone. We need to find her. Is she still in Chicago?”

Jude could hear the muffled voice again, then his mother’s sigh.

“I knew that was a bad idea, throwing her off. And a lot of good it did—now you want her to know where you are. Do you have a pen?”

The front door of the apartment slammed shut. Jude hung his head into the hallway long enough to see Johnny storm into Neena’s room. Then that door slammed, too.

“Uh-oh,” Jude said.

“What’s going on, Jude?”

“I think Johnny and Eliza got in a fight. I think he just came back for his stuff. He didn’t sleep here last night. I don’t know.”

“You’re too young for this,” said Harriet. “You’re all too young.”

“Mom, how easy is it to get a divorce?”

For months the sharp little word had been residing quietly in his head. Yesterday it had loosened, like a kernel of food from his retainer, and now it was out of his mouth, free.

“Oh, don’t tell me.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll make up.”

“She needs her mother,” said Harriet. “This is ridiculous. We should be arrested. I should—”

“Hey, baby.”

The words were as clear as if they had been spoken at Jude’s side.

“What?” he said.

“What?” said Harriet.

“Everything but my toothbrush. Did I leave it there?”

“Hold on,” Jude whispered to his mother, although it was clear that the voice hadn’t heard them, and she hadn’t heard it. It was not the same voice he had heard before. It was Johnny’s. It was one side of a conversation, transmitted from Neena’s phone line.

“I’ll be home soon,” said Johnny.

“Come home, Jude,” said his mother. “For Christ’s sake, just come home.”