City of Boys Page 17

  It is early in the baseball season, and this year, as every year, Teddy believes that the Yankees are going to go all the way and recapture their past glory; this year he is so sure of it that he has spent what little money we have on a video recorder, so that he can record all the games he misses while he is at work.

  —Consider it an investment, he said when he took the machine out of the box, —for the future. He untangled wires, bent to attach the VCR to the television, and smiled up at me. —We’ll have all the games on tape, and maybe someday they’ll be worth something. Market and supply, he said, nodding seriously. It didn’t seem to occur to him that anyone at all could record these games; that, in fact, New York was probably full of people who were, at that moment, recording a ball game; and that all of those recordings would be worthless. It also didn’t occur to him to consider the cost of videotapes, and I didn’t remind him of it, but they do cost money, and we have only a couple, so that, instead of recording all the games, he has had to record every new game over an old one; at any one time the most he has is four or five games on tape.

  To me, it is not a wise investment, but I keep this to myself, and I have almost gotten used to the sound of the VCR coming on when Teddy’s at work. I might be reading, or sitting at the kitchen table, or even watching television myself, when suddenly from the machine will come a click, a whirr, and I know that somewhere, at this moment, the Yankees are playing a baseball game, moving like tiny little toys across the neat green square of a baseball field. The VCR is like having another person in the apartment, someone who does things for you that you don’t particularly want done–someone I never see, but who always seems to be around, sneaking by me to turn on the VCR, then, when I look up, disappearing into the walls until the game is over. The game Teddy is watching now was played this afternoon; it has already been lost by the Yankees, and discussed thoroughly by the men who stand around on the sidewalk just below our window. As Teddy watches the Yankees hit and catch and run, the team is already back in New York, resting for tomorrow’s game. At work, Teddy puts his hands over his ears if he thinks anyone is going to talk about a game he’s recording, for fear of hearing the score. His pleasure in watching is lost if he knows the outcome–every hit, every pitch, every play becomes meaningless if Teddy’s presence in front of the television cannot somehow affect what has already happened. He is superstitious in this way, and he takes it almost personally when they lose: he did not cheer enough, he was not paying close enough attention, his mind was wandering. The Yankees lost today’s game by only one run, and Teddy watches patiently as they build up a four-run lead that they will blow in the bottom of the ninth. I skim through an article by a man who writes that his girlfriend never buys him the right present for his birthday; she is always getting him things like pillows for his couch and books of photographs, beautiful things for which, he says, men have no place in their homes. He follows his complaint with a list of appropriate gifts: Super Bowl tickets, a camera, sunglasses for skiing. None of these gifts would be suitable for Teddy, who cares only about our future and the Yankees; otherwise he seems to exist without interests, without desires. For his birthday I plan to buy him more videocassettes, so that he can record more games and have something to watch during the long winter, when he wanders aimlessly through our apartment, waiting for spring training to begin. Winter is a long way off, but when it comes, I seem never to be alone; sometimes Teddy adds an extra shift, and he does spend time studying, but mostly, when we’re together, he is watching me, what I am doing, where I sit, when I go to bed.

  —Hah, he says, and when the game cuts to a commercial, he rewinds the tape to watch the outfielder leap high against the fence to save a run. He rewinds and rewatches every important play; it can take him hours to get through a game, and when I once suggested to him that he advance the tape through the commercials, he smiled and shook his head. —You don’t understand, he said. —That’s part of the game. That’s why it’s so relaxing–but he is always tense and hunched over on the floor as he watches, waiting for his team to lose again.

  Downstairs a door slams; I turn to look out the window, and from the door below us a man emerges out onto the street; he struggles to breathe the summer air and walks uneasily toward the newsstand on the corner, then looks up and down Broadway, tracking the path of each cab that passes, but hailing none. He is coming from Madame Renalda’s, whose business is directly below our apartment. MADAME RENALDA’S, it says on the door, over a large blue eye, and under that: FORTUNES TOLD. PALMS READ. I asked Teddy once if it might be a good idea to visit her and find out what lay ahead for us, but he just laughed.

  —You are so naive, he said. —It’s nothing but hookers. A massage joint. There are a thousand places like that in New York alone. He went back to his book on cost accounting, then held it up to me. —This is our future, he said.

  —But she could read our palms, I told him, and looked down at my own hands. I couldn’t imagine anyone reading a future in the smooth pink surface of my skin. He laughed again.

  —She doesn’t read palms, he said. —No one down there reads palms. There may not even really be such a thing as a palm reader.

  He seemed so sure of himself, but I have seen the men who come out of there looking different from when they went in. When I told him this, he closed his book and looked at me. —It’s sex, he said. —That’s what sex does. That’s what it’s for. It makes you feel different. It makes you feel like somebody else.

  He said this as though he knew, though he is not much older than I, and he is always either at work or here with me. Sometimes since then I have looked at his dark hair slicked back, and his thin eyebrows, and tried to imagine him with a woman, his breath against her skin, his face pressed into her breast, but my mind closes at the thought. That down there, he told me once, was what he was protecting me from, a life in a place like that, which is where he seems to think I would surely have ended up on my own. Somebody has to take care of me, he says, and he guesses it has to be him, and I guess he is right. He is really all I have; he is really all I remember having. Our father I can only vaguely picture, a short dark man who stared at us uncomfortably, an absence in our life for many years more than a presence, and our mother lives in a small apartment on the East Side with her new husband, Stan, her cat Smokey, and a dreamy green aquarium full of tropical fish. They live there in the light of a thousand bright ampules of morphine that Stan keeps in the refrigerator; he brings them home from the hospital where he works, which is why my mother loves him as she does.

  —Can I help it? she said when she left us to marry him. She touched my face with her long dry fingers. —No, she said. —I can’t. Teddy will take care of you.

  We visited her only once, and the whole time we were there, she gazed right past us at the aquarium, Smokey in her lap, Stan hovering unhappily behind her chair. When Stan opened the icebox to try to find us something to drink, Teddy didn’t take his eyes away, looking in at all the vials of morphine with a look of concentration so intense that I thought even my mother might notice. It was only later that I realized he was counting them, though for what purpose I couldn’t imagine; perhaps since he started working at the store it had become second nature for him to keep track of inventory, whatever it was. On the train home, Teddy stood staring at the subway map, tracing all the various routes with his finger; he didn’t say a word about Stan or my mother or the visit, and we have never gone back, but occasionally my mother calls, or Stan calls for her.

  —Your mother wants to talk to you, Stan will say, hovering behind her while her mind tries to find its way back to the idea of talking to us. In the silence I can hear him breathing, and I can see my mother’s sad gray face as she holds Smokey in her lap; together she and Smokey watch the blue fish flick across the surface of the aquarium, in and out of the tiny silver castle, behind the deep-sea diver. Their eyes narrow and widen with the glitter of light against the fish. —Honey? she says to me. —Honey? And after a few minutes St
an will take the phone from her hand and her long arms will fall back to her lap. —Goodbye, Stan always says politely. —It was nice talking to you. He watches her stroke Smokey. He worships her white arms and dreams of them at night. She touches Smokey’s soft fur and feels his blood beat through his skin.

  —She’s as happy as she can be for now, Teddy always says. —She has everything she needs.

  Teddy promises me that someday we will buy a big house in the mountains upstate, and she can come live with us, and Stan, too, if he wants, but for now he will not talk to her on the phone, and when she calls, he lifts his head halfway from his book and stares at the table until it is clear Stan has come on the line with me. —We have to take care of ourselves, Teddy says. —I have to keep an eye on you.

  And he does. He keeps careful track of me as I grow older; he sits at the kitchen table and watches suspiciously as I cut away bruises from the discarded fruits and vegetables he brings home from the store; he glances up at me as I look out the window at the men down on the street; they smile at me as he turns each page of his book slowly, unread. There is not a moment I spend that he does not watch, and when he is at work, there is the VCR, keeping track of my day. When I leave him, he will sit at the table and turn the pages of his book, and every now and then he will look at the couch in front of the window, but I will be gone. I will smile at him from the slick pages of magazines. Men will turn to watch me walk down the street, and I will have many lovers. He watches to see that this does not happen. Sometimes at night with him, I feel as if I am being born all over again, emerging abruptly into the blue light of the television screen and Teddy’s anxious attention.

  Downstairs the door slams again. Teddy does not move his thin back; he begins to relax as the Yankees continue to build their lead, and I look at the women in my magazine. Their faces are like the faces of birds, without expression, and I imagine what it would be like to have such red fingernails, how I would go to the grocery store with lips as red as these, how Teddy would look at me if suddenly my hair were to assume such strange shapes.

  I go to bed before the catastrophe of the ninth inning. Teddy watches me walk to my room and turns down the television, but I can still hear the confusion when the game begins to slip away.

  —Jesus, he says in a dull sigh, then later, again, —Jesus. Downstairs men move quietly through the rooms; I wonder what they read in the eyes of the women who gaze down into their palms.

  Teddy stands at the mirror and straightens the black tie that is part of his uniform at the Safeway.

  —There, he says, and smiles, then turns to me. —Listen, he says, —I’m taping a game, so don’t use the VCR.

  I have never used the VCR, but I nod and when he leaves I watch him walk down the street to work. He walks in the exact center of the sidewalk, not once looking around him. Downstairs, on the pavement in front of Madame Renalda’s, two men look up at me, brave in the daylight.

  —Hey, one of them says. —Hey, girl.

  They smile when I look down at them.

  —Hey, says the other, —come on down here. You come on down here.

  I stare at them, and they grin at each other; but they’re not really smiling. Something hard and frightened waits behind their faces.

  —What’s wrong, honey, one says. —You deaf?

  They laugh at this, and I watch Teddy turn the corner by the newsstand where young couples line up to buy the Saturday-evening edition of the Sunday paper, which they will carry home to spread across their shining wood floors. They will kneel over it and kiss across the fine print.

  I close the window and the men laugh as it goes down. But when they can no longer see me, they lose interest, and look nervously at Madame Renalda’s door.

  I fall asleep in front of the game Teddy is taping, my hand resting on the shiny face of a beautiful woman. As I sleep or as I dream, the men from Madame Renalda’s enter my apartment. They are followed by a herd of boys, jumpy in tight jeans and big sneakers. Slowly the men remove my clothes, slowly take their turns with me, while the boys anxiously watch but do not touch. When they leave, my blood trickles out into the streets behind them. The men pay no attention, but the boys stop and turn; they mix my blood with the sand and grit and glass in the streets to make tiny cakes. As they eat, blood stains their hands, their mouths, and when they finish, they stand in line at Madame Renalda’s, nervously wiping at their red lips with their long red fingers. When I wake, a storm has come up, flapping the loose screen against the window. The game is on, but whether it is the tape of the earlier game, or the game itself, I can’t tell. Teddy is home and I listen as he pours himself a glass of milk. It’s dark, but it could be any time. He comes into the room and smiles at me, a thin line of milk across his mouth, and downstairs a door opens, closes. Men move uneasily through the rooms below, and in the streets young boys cruise up and down, following a fading trail of blood. —So, Teddy says, —why don’t you come to the store tomorrow?

  I nod and walk stiffly to my room. Teddy watches me for a moment, then turns to the baseball game.

  Though it’s only early summer, the heat is already suffocating; I hear the men on the street talking about it constantly, trying to explain to each other what they have not understood from the television news. —It’s this greenhouse thing, they say knowledgeably, —it’s just going to get hotter and hotter, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. They nod and wipe at their necks and faces, trying not to move too much in the airless heat. In the summer here, only insects move freely; they seem to thrive in the heat. Already they are breeding and being born, and the men watch with glazed eyes as insects crawl through their apartments, into their food, across the blank faces of their babies.

  Women sit at windows and on fire escapes, looking down at the men, who are too hot to offer them more than a joyless attention, punctuated by an occasional spasm of anger or interest. Surrounded by the empty face of their future, the men can do no more than what’s expected of them as they wait anxiously at Madame Renalda’s door.

  I stay inside most of the summer, reading the magazines Teddy brings me from work, except when he invites me to the store, where I sit in the air conditioning and watch him stack fruit.

  Today when I come out of the apartment into the heat, the men watch me without interest, mouth words without meaning. —Hey, baby, they say. —Hey, girl.

  A man stands at the corner, handing out flyers. He flicks them into the faces of people who pass, so they must take one or brush his arm away. —Hey, he says. —Check it out. He winks at me and hands me a flyer. MADAME RENALDA, it says; A TRULY AMAZING PSYCHIC. —Check it out, the man says again, and smiles a smile not meant for me, but he follows me with his green eyes as I walk to the Safeway. Insects flicker in front of me, across the hot sidewalk; underneath the concrete there is a thin layer of them, moving gently over the surface of the whole world, untouched by the feet of men.

  At the Safeway, women roam from line to line, looking for the shortest, though even then there is always something to slow things down, someone who has forgotten her checkbook, or hasn’t brought enough money. As each woman settles finally into a line, she watches the progress of those ahead of her for a while, then pulls down a magazine and becomes lost in the enormous lives of people she does not know: movie stars and rock singers and athletes. For a moment she reads and forgets herself, her cart, her child, and when the time comes to pay, she looks up, startled away from a world she can never inhabit, never even imagine without the magazines to inspire her. She looks at the boxes of cereal and bags of potato chips in her cart, at her child’s dirty face and cheap shoes, already too small, and puts the magazine back, to enter, once again, with a kind of dull surprise, her life.

  In the produce department, Teddy arranges fruit in colorful piles, stacking light green apples next to yellow ones, high in a slant toward the mirror. His thin arms move smoothly from the boxes to the neat banks of apples. His apron is bright white, and his face looks tired and old under
the glare of the supermarket lights; fruits and vegetables rise neatly around him. Suddenly a hand appears in front of my face, holding a large red apple. I turn, and it is Donny, Teddy’s manager in the produce department. He smiles.

  —Here, he says. —For you.

  Donny and Teddy had been, for a brief while, a kind of friends. Donny came over once or twice to watch ball games, but he was a Mets fan, and seemed to take special pleasure in every Yankee loss. As abruptly as he had begun to come, he stopped; when I asked Teddy about it, he only said that he didn’t really like Donny’s kind of person. —No ambition, he said, —he doesn’t want to be anything. And besides, he talks too much. This was true; the times he came over, he sat on the couch and drank beer and talked all the way through every game while Teddy stared straight ahead at the television. Now he stands right in front of me, so close I can smell something damp and fruity on his breath. Teddy turns slightly, and in the mirror I can see him watching us. —So, Donny says. —When did you get to be so cute?

  His eyes close and open in a slow blink. I can see the outline of a contact lens in the white of his eye, and when his lids rise, the lenses shift, slipping around until they settle again. —Huh? he says, and this is what I remember most about his visits to our house, that he said —Huh? all the time.

  —How about that Gooden, he’d say, —he’s got any Yankee pitcher all beat to hell, huh? And Teddy would crouch closer to the screen. —Huh? Donny would say again. —How about him?

  —I don’t remember you being so cute, he says now. —How did that happen?

  —I don’t know, I say. —I guess it just did. I bring my hand to my throat and leave it there, a gesture I have seen on models in my magazines.

  —Well, he says, —maybe I’ll just have to come by sometime. He looks over at Teddy, then down at my hand against my throat. —How about that? he says. —Huh?