It’s a little before noon, and I already wasted my morning eating cold leftover vindaloo in front of the TV. But I’m going to make the most of the rest of this rare weekday sans school. So I get off at Astor Place and head toward St. Mark’s. Little hipster bars, tattoo parlors, a taqueria with a sombrero-wearing mannequin out front. Maybe I should get a tattoo.
My dad told me his family settled in the tenements here more than a century ago, a dozen people to a room or something absurd like that. That was the way most Jews fresh off the boat lived then, my dad explained. His family is Lithuanian, and Blumenthal became Blum at Ellis Island, then sometime later, Bloom. Technically, they’re not my ancestors, not by blood, but I say they still count.
My dad’s an only child, and both of his parents died before I was born. A car crash in San Diego, where he grew up. The only real, true, DNA relatives I have are my mom’s sister and her daughter. My aunt is married to a rabbi in Texas. I met her and her husband only once, right after my mom was killed, and I don’t even remember what they look like.
There’s a little bell over the door that rings as I step inside the record shop. A guy with a shaved head and gauge earrings looks up from the counter. The place smells good, like dust and vinyl and ozone. Long rows of low counters loaded with bins run up and down the length of the store.
I take some vinyl out of a few bins: Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, Ellington at Newport. Then I see hands flipping through the bin next to me and follow them up to a body and a face.
It’s the clothes that throw me off. I’m used to him in the Danton uniform of white shirt and striped tie. Today he’s wearing a red turtleneck sweater and khakis with a sharp crease, like he just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren photo shoot. His skin is smooth and dark brown, with a warm glow from inside him, like there’s a lantern in his chest. At Danton, he keeps to himself, eats alone, talks to almost no one. His real name is Terrance, but the other kids call him Scholarship because the story is he got a full ride for computer science.
“Hey,” I say.
Terrance looks up. “Hey,” he says back.
“Terrance, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Gwendolyn.”
“I know.”
For a moment, there’s an awful silence. A silence that’s so awful I remember this is the reason I never talk to guys. Then Terrance smiles. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Three-day suspension for altering attendance records,” he says. “No sense of irony, those people. How about you?”
“One-day suspension,” I say. “For telling Astrid Foogle to go fuck herself.”
He arches an eyebrow as if genuinely impressed. “Brave girl,” he says. “What are you getting?”
I look down dumbly at the album I’m holding and notice my hands are shaking. “Sonny Rollins. But I’m just browsing,” I say.
“Sonny’s cool,” he says. “Charlie Parker is better.”
“Of course he is,” I say. “That’s cheating. Try again.”
He shrugs. “I’ve always been a Coltrane man.”
I smile involuntarily. “I’m a Coltrane man, too.”
He laughs, and my face turns red as his sweater.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to…” His voice trails off. “So—you like jazz. We must be the only two.”
I gesture around the shop.
“At Danton, I mean.” Terrance looks down, adjusts his backpack. “I’m—I’m just hanging out,” he says. “So if you want to—I don’t know what your schedule…”
“Love to,” I say before I can think.
*
Outside the shop we discover the sun is gone, replaced with inky purple clouds that seem to be creeping across the city, over the tops of the buildings. Neither of us has anyplace to be, and that’s good because both of us seem content to be here. We walk along St. Mark’s for two more blocks. Is the city strangely empty today, or have I just not noticed anyone else?
We talk about music we like, books we like, Danton students we hate. He says he thought I was “Greek or something.” No, I tell him. American by passport, but just another diplobrat, same as the others. Cool, he says.
At some point, we cross Avenue A and end up in Tompkins Square Park. We stroll along a paved path beneath a canopy of bare trees. To one side, a homeless guy is sleeping between sheets of cardboard, dirty hands and shoes and bundles of clothing sticking out from the sides like an overstuffed sandwich.
“So—you have a scholarship to Danton?” I ask.
His eyes narrow. “What?”
“Your nickname. The others, they call you Scholarship.”
“They call me Scholarship because I’m black. Ergo…”
“Ergo what?”
“Ergo how else could I get into Danton?” He shakes his head. At them. Maybe at me, too. “Only time I even exist is when they need a weed hookup. But fuck them. I’m not playing that part. My life isn’t their movie.”
My hand accidentally brushes his. “So make your own. You can be whatever part you want.”
A grin flickers as if he likes the idea. “Who do you play, in yours?”
“My movie?” I shrug. “I don’t really have one, I guess. It’s just—random scenes, edited together.”
“Even so,” he says. “You still get to be the hero.”
“The hero?”
“You know. Kicking ass, saving the world, looking fine doing it.” He shadowboxes the air in front of him playfully.
It’s a compliment, kind of: Me, saving the world. Gwendolyn Bloom, looking fine. I give him a thin smile. “Sure,” I say.
But Terrance has stopped and is looking at two boys next to the dog run. They’ve set up a cardboard box and are dealing three-card monte. It’s a street game that’s not really a game at all, but looks like it is and that’s where the con comes in. One of the kids shuffles three playing cards and calls out, “Find the lady, find the lady,” to the passing joggers and office workers on lunch break.
The game used to be all over New York in the old days, my dad told me, but I guess not anymore because Terrance says he’s never seen it. I’ve seen it lots of places, though, all around the world, and used to love watching the dealers fleece the tourists. With the help of some YouTube videos, I even learned to do it myself, practicing on my dad for Monopoly money.
While one of the kids deals, the other makes a big show of winning. He has a fat wad of cash in his hand and seems to be cleaning up.
“You want to try?” Terrance asks.
“It’s a scam,” I say. “You can’t win.”
“The other guy is winning.”
“Because that’s his job,” I say. “He’s called the shill. They’re working together.”
But Terrance is undeterred and sidles up to them anyway. He pulls out a twenty and lays it on the cardboard box. The dealer takes it and shows him the cards, a queen and two jacks bent slightly on the long axis so they’re easier to pick up. Then the dealer flips the cards over and juggles their position, shifting the queen to the left, to the right, to the middle.
It’s easy at first, which is the idea. But the trick, the key, the very core of the con, is to pick up the queen and another card with one hand, then release the second card while making the mark, the person being conned, believe you’ve just released the queen. The dealer is so fast, I don’t even see him do it. Now Terrance is following the wrong card.