City of Boys Read online

My only other activity is walking up and down streets, looking for my brother. I don’t even know anymore why I do this, except that somehow I feel it is expected of me; also, things were different before he left, and I suppose I think if he was back, things would be different again, but this is not something I want to tell Mr. Rosenberg, so I finally say, —Nothing.

  —I thought so, he says, dropping his cigarette. —You ought to do something, he says, and wheels over to the wall. He stops under the photograph of his daughter Brenda. She is smiling and her body is split by a wide red sash that reads “Miss Florida.”

  —Be like Brenda, he says. —Do something.

  In the lighted windows of the karate studio across the street, neat rows of children jump up in the air with their legs extended. When they land, their mouths open and close silently. Mr. Rosenberg lights another cigarette.

  —Maybe your mother won’t come home tonight, he says.

  —Who knows? It happens to everybody sooner or later.

  He holds his cigarette to his lips and gazes at me. When I leave, he is still sitting under Brenda’s picture, but I wait on the steps, and after a moment I hear him roll across the floor, then, as I walk downstairs, each lock snapping home.

  I try to turn my locks as quietly as possible, try to move from room to room to room, and get in bed, and turn out the light, all without making a sound, but even so, I’m sure I can hear him follow me; he gives himself away with the tiny whisper of a match, and the slow hiss of wood as the floor burns above my head. I have lived here for a long time, though, and sometimes I’m not sure exactly what I imagine and what is really happening. There is so much that seems real, yet can’t be. Underneath us, the subway passes and the whole building shakes. Mr. Rosenberg wheels away and turns up the volume on his television.

  I lie in bed listening to the blowing leaves rattle against the windows, watching the light change against the smokey glass on the alley, and I plan my dream about New Jersey. For months now, I have been dreaming of New Jersey, where we lived once; it is where my father lives now, with his new family. In my mind, it is all beautiful lawns, trees, grass, and children, but when I told my mother this, she just laughed.

  —New Jersey, she said. —Everybody wants to get out of New Jersey. Why do you think they have so many bridges and tunnels? Just be glad you’re here already and don’t have to make the trip.

  —But we were happy there, I said, and at the moment I believed that we were, although I don’t really remember it. She laughed. —Nobody’s happy in New Jersey, she said. —Don’t you remember? But all I remember is a green lawn, a black dog, and my brother’s bony brown legs as he played in the yard.

  —That part about the dog, my mother said. —You’re making that up. We never had a dog. Your father’s allergic.

  But I could swear I remember it waiting for me in our yard, and I could swear I remember waking up to feel its rough fur, as it slept at the end of my bed. I could swear I remember this.

  In my dream, Mr. Rosenberg sits in a circle of smoldering cigarettes; the building is burning, and my mother is inside, but when the wall crumbles and falls, our window is left standing, and my mother’s image is seared against it, striped with shadows of the iron bars. Behind her, men rise from the ashes and walk toward me. —Honey, my mother whispers, —baby.

  * * *

  The train cuts through my dream and the world trembles every time it passes. When my mother comes home, Mr. Rosenberg rolls restlessly across the floor above us. My door opens a crack and through my closed eyes, I can see my mother in the strip of light. From the bathroom comes the sound of water, a toilet flushing. She closes my door gently, and Mr. Rosenberg follows her trail to bed. —Honey, she whispers, —baby, and Mr. Rosenberg listens for a while until the radiator comes on and the hiss and clatter drown out all other sound. He wheels slowly back across to the windows over my room. I can hear each cigarette butt hit the floor. He sits, staring out the window, smoke rising around him, and when I finally fall asleep, the city is beginning to stir: the horses in the Park stables snort and lift their heads, pigeons flutter around men in doorways, and cabs come out to cruise aimlessly as dawn splits the city open.

  At breakfast the man is gone and my mother’s face is tired and pale. She picks up the newspaper and glances at the headlines.

  —More bad news, she says. —I don’t know why you get this thing.

  —For the puzzle, I say. —It’s got the best one.

  —That’s a lot of bad news for one puzzle, she says, and pokes in her pockets, looks around the table for her cigarettes, then goes into the living room.

  —Damn, she says. —Listen, honey, she calls, and comes back into the kitchen. —Would you go get me some cigarettes? Carl smoked all of mine. There’s money in my purse. She sits down and picks up the paper. —Unless he took that too, she says to herself.

  Just before the door closes behind me, she calls my name and I catch the door with my foot. —Baby, she says. —Get me a bottle of gin, too, would you?

  I don’t ask her about the man. He will come back or he will not come back, and either way, sooner or later, he will be replaced by another. At first, right after my brother left, they stayed awhile, days sometimes, even a week or two. A couple of them even moved in, in a haphazard kind of way. I would come home to see a pair of shoes under the couch and my mother would call me in to meet a man who nodded at me, then looked quickly back at my mother, hardly believing his good fortune at finding a woman so beautiful. Like this they came and went, but each of them had a life somewhere else that waited impatiently for his return, and sooner or later they were routed out by a wife or a girlfriend, or driven home by the sight of a fatherless child on the corner. Now they stay only briefly and never move in, but they still come and go, and they all pay pretty much the same attention to me. I wonder if they remember me when they think back on their time with my mother. Sometimes I see them on the street, and they look away so quickly I can’t tell what they are thinking. My mother sits by the window and waits for them to come back to her; she watches feet pass by and wonders which of them belong to a man she has loved. Every now and then she turns to me where I sit reading a book or working a puzzle, and she looks at me as if she is trying to place me exactly. —I’ve been a good mother to you kids, she says. —Haven’t I? I always nod and she turns back to the window to count the cars, the men, the moments. She is sitting there now, waiting for me to return with her gin and her cigarettes.

  —Well, well, says the boy at the liquor store, and he slicks his hair back before leaning forward into the thick glass partition between us. —It’s my sweetheart. Hi, beautiful, he whispers, then stands up straight. —You busy tonight? he asks. —Me and my friends, we’re having a party. He winks when he says the word “party.”

  —Jimmy, his uncle says from behind him. —Just get the lady her merchandise. We have other customers.

  I look around, but aside from a few drunks scattered across the sidewalk, I am the only person here.

  —So, the boy says, —what will it be today? Champagne? Perhaps a bottle of our finest Chablis?

  —Gin, I say, and he laughs.

  —Your mama sure does get thirsty a lot these days.

  I slide a fifty through the slot, and he picks it up, examines it carefully, holds it to the light. —You don’t got nothing smaller?

  He bags a bottle of gin and slides it partway through the slot, but when I take it, he pulls it back, holding on to the neck.

  —Oh, baby, he says. —What you do to me.

  He turns and raises his eyebrows to his uncle, who laughs.

  —Jimmy, he says, —I think the lady don’t like you.

  —Oh, Jimmy says, —she likes me okay. He turns back to me and presses his damp forehead against the glass.

  —You’re gonna love me, he says. He shrugs. —Who else you gonna love?

  I can hear him laughing as I walk down the block with the gin.

  My mother turns from the window and s
miles when I hand her the bottle. —Well, she says, —I guess it must be cocktail hour.

  Above, Mr. Rosenberg follows her into the kitchen, listens to the rattle of the paper bag and the clink of ice. My mother looks up at the ceiling.

  —That crazy bastard, she says. —Doesn’t he have anything better to do?

  * * *

  When I go out to look for my brother, she is back at the window. The world trembles as a train passes and I say goodbye, but she doesn’t notice me leave.

  My searches for my brother are halfhearted and fruitless, but they give me something to do. When he first left, he moved in with a boy named Tony, whom my mother called his “friend.” After he’d been gone a few months, he brought Tony to meet us.

  —Your brother and his … friend are coming for dinner, my mother said, and we cooked macaroni, peas, chocolate pudding, all of his favorite foods. I expected Tony to be reserved and uninterested in us, but he was friendly and tried to help my mother with the food. My brother’s eyelids were smeared with blue, his cheeks painted a fainter shade of red, perhaps, but otherwise he’d hardly changed in the few months he’d been gone. At dinner he said almost nothing, ate even less.

  —Honey, my mother said, —aren’t you hungry?

  He looked straight at her for a moment, beating his long lashes as he blinked, then shook his head.

  —No, he said, and held out his hand. —Look at this. He circled one thin wrist with his fingers. —I’ve gained weight since I moved in with Tony.

  Tony shifted uncomfortably. —You should have seen him when I met him, he said. —Skin and bones. He shrugged.

  —I’m Italian. I tell him to eat. He doesn’t eat.

  When my brother finally left him, Tony called us. He had gone back to Buffalo, where he was from, and wondered if my brother had come back home.

  —He probably found a nice girl, my mother said when she hung up. —He’ll bring her home to meet us and everything will be fine. Like before, she said. —Remember?

  But all I remembered of him before he left were the glances exchanged between the liquor-store boy and his friends behind my brother’s back as he walked bravely down the street, his eyes and cheeks painted impossible colors.

  —Faggot, one of them would call out sooner or later.

  —Little faggot, and a strange small smile would cross my brother’s face as they threw names at his back.

  For a while after he left, I used to see him around, standing on some street corner talking to a boy as beautiful as himself, or I’d catch sight of him through the window of a coffee shop, always talking, always moving his thin hands, opening and closing his black eyes. The last time I saw him–in the spring, I think–he took me to his apartment. On the way there I imagined a thousand different, tastefully decorated rooms, but his place was a tiny box at the top of five curving flights of stairs. I could hear his breath shorten as we rose, and I concentrated on the wallpaper as I climbed behind him, running my hand over the bumpy yellow pattern.

  His apartment was the shade of twilight. He had hung blankets and towels over all the windows, and only bright bits of light poked through holes here and there.

  —The sun keeps me up, he said, reaching for the light switch. —Close your eyes. But I kept them open, and when the light came on, cockroaches scattered across all the surfaces, scrabbling into holes, ledges, dark spaces. My brother smiled sadly as one rushed across the sink. —When I lived with Tony, we didn’t have any cockroaches. I don’t know why. Maybe he did something special.

  He turned the water on, but the roach darted safely up over the side of the sink. —I wish now I’d paid attention, he said. The light in his apartment wasn’t good to him; it turned his skin a kind of flat orange, and he looked weary and bored, but when the phone rang, a sharp little light came into his eyes, and his smile, as he talked, seemed genuine.

  —Darling, he said. —Of course I’m free.

  When I left, he was leaning into the bathroom mirror, painting blue lines around his eyes, one eye at a time. —Keep in touch, he said, turning to look at me with one dark eye, the other as light as the sky, surrounded by pale, blind skin.

  After I hadn’t seen him for a while, I went back to the building, and climbed up to his apartment, but the door opened with a harsh bright glare, and the ratty-looking man who peered out at me was no one my brother would ever live with. I asked about him anyways, and the man shook his head.

  —How the hell should I know who lived here before me? he asked. He came out on the landing and watched me walk down the curving stairs. —How the hell should I know? he shouted down at me; he was still standing up there when I left the building.

  Every so often I come back to this neighborhood, and make wide circles around the building, just in case; my brother looks out at me from the face of every young man who walks along, eyes darting as he searches out, yet turns away from his own desperation. They are all made old with that ravaged, too soon sense of their own ends, and as they walk on, they drag their gazes behind them, laying them like a net across the city. I watch them turn and stroll with a fevered weariness, exhausted by each stroke of time, each beat of the heart that moves them, until, tired of watching, I leave for home.

  —Darling, I hear behind me, but it’s not meant for me and I don’t even bother to look back. A scarf flicks through the air across the street, a blue-and-orange splash, but it’s caught in the hand of another man, and I walk on.

  * * *

  —Honey, my mother says, —say hello to your Uncle Nicky, and the man she is with turns to me, a shady smile on his broad face.

  —Hiya, kid, he says, and his eyes pass from my face to my feet and right back up again. —Cute little thing, arntcha?

  —You have food on your tie, I say, which is true.

  He looks down at his tie and glances nervously at my mother, his face reddening. —Shouldn’t you be in school? he asks me. —How old are you anyways?

  My mother smiles cautiously at him, her eyes darting to the greenish stain on his tie, then back to his yellow eyes.

  —Back so soon, says the boy at the liquor store. —I knew you couldn’t stay away from me.

  I pass the money through, take the bottle, and turn away.

  —Hey, he says. —No kiss from my sweetheart?

  —I’m not your sweetheart, I say.

  —What? he says. —You don’t like me? Maybe I’m not pretty enough? Like your brother? You like your boys pretty?

  —You’re pretty enough, I say, and he is, dark skin and dark eyes over a gleaming white T-shirt. He’s pretty like all his friends, who stand on the corner, waiting for him to get off work. In the winter they wear black leather over their white shirts, but they always look the same, and they are never in a group of less than three. The years will pass quickly for them, but now they are young, and they have big plans; today they gaze at a bundle of rags dozing on the sidewalk across the street. As Christmas comes closer, the winos and junkies get bigger handouts, and the boys have had their eyes on this one for a while. They lean against the wall and wait for the man’s hand to slip, and his green bottle to go rolling across the pavement. Sooner or later, one of the boys will cross the street, take what’s in the man’s pockets, and spend it on a new pair of bright white sneakers.

  It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, but big red bows are tacked onto the telephone poles, and nearly every tree that struggles up out of the sidewalk is draped with a string of lights. If Christmas comes and goes, it will be the first we have had without even a visit from my brother. Although we do not really celebrate holidays, they seem a convenient way to keep track of time. Things are always happening here, but they are always the same things: children scuttle in and out of alleyways until they finally settle, tired and confused, against a wall; boys become men, who drift along until something catches their attention; women put their hands to their mouths and call their children home. Something is always happening here, but it’s never exactly what we were waiting for, so we just
go on with our lives, and what occupies us right now is waiting for my brother. My mother grows nervous as the days cool and the nights turn cold.

  —He’s going to get the flu, she says. —He’s going to freeze to death in those awful apartments down there.

  She shakes her head and looks out at the chilly street.

  —What could I do? she says, turning to me. —I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be a good mother to you kids.

  The sun is going down, and behind her the building across the street glows pink in the dying light. Above her, Mr. Rosenberg wheels back and forth over a little worn square of floor, thinking of his daughter Brenda.

  —Honey, my mother says. —Kiss your Uncle Nicky hello. He stares at her with no expression at all on his face.

  —Nick, she says abruptly. —Your Uncle Nick. His thin blond hair is combed straight back; the skin on his head is the same pinkish yellow color as his hair, and his eyes are like stains in the middle of his face.

  —Well, he says. —That’s right. He smiles down at me.

  —That’s right, he says again. —Kiss your Uncle Nick. You can call me Nicky, he says, and my mother watches him, twisting her scarf around and around in her hands.

  When they come home, I bury my head under my pillow. I don’t hear them, but Mr. Rosenberg creeps quietly across the floor and listens as I sleep.

  In the middle of the night, I open my eyes and Nick is standing in my doorway. He does not move, does not breathe; he simply stands and watches me. I can’t see his eyes. He could be anyone. Above us, in his excitement, Mr. Rosenberg lights cigarette after cigarette, throwing each to the floor unsmoked. After a while my door closes, then my mother’s. Mr. Rosenberg sighs deeply and wonders if he should pick up the smoldering cigarettes, or leave them to burn long snaky scars in the wood, until finally he drifts off into a dream of sleep.

  Sometime before morning I hear a rustle of bodies and voices.

  —Goddamnit, my mother says, and a sharp crack of skin on skin follows.

  Mr. Rosenberg jerks his head up, startled awake by the sound; he peers into the shadows of his room until, satisfied that nothing is there, he slips away again. I close my eyes and try to remember whether or not I had been sleeping.