City of Boys Read online

  —So, one of them says, —so where are you going, anyways? —Well, I say. —Well. I was thinking about going to the Bronx Botanical Gardens.

  The Bronx Botanical Gardens is no place I’d ever really want to go, but I feel it’s important to maintain, at least in their eyes, some illusion of destination. If I was a bit more sure of myself, I’d suggest that we take the ferry over to Staten Island and do it in the park there. Then I could think of her.

  When we went to Staten Island, it was cold and gray and windy; we got there and realized that there was nothing really that we wanted to see, that being in Staten Island was really not all that different from being in Manhattan.

  —Or anywhere, she said, looking down a street into a corridor of run-down clothing stores and insurance offices. It was Sunday, so everything was closed up tight and no one was on the street. Finally we found a coffee shop near the ferry station, where we drank Cokes and coffee, and she smoked cigarettes, while we waited for the boat to leave.

  —Lezzes, the counterman said to another man sitting at the counter eating a doughnut. —What do you want to bet they’re lezzes?

  The man eating the doughnut turned and looked us over. —They’re not so hot anyways, he said. —No big waste. She smiled and held her hand to my face for a second; the smoke from her cigarette drifted past my eyes into my hair. —What a moment, she said, —to remember.

  On the way back, I watched the wind whip her face all out of any shape I knew, and when I caught the eyes of some boys on the ferry, she said, not looking at me, not taking her eyes from the concrete ripples of the robe at the feet of the Statue of Liberty just on our left, —What you do is your own business, but don’t expect me to love you forever if you do things like this. I’m not, she said, turning to look me full in the face, —your mother, you know. All I am is your lover, and nothing lasts forever.

  When we got off the ferry, I said: —I don’t expect you to love me forever, and she said I was being promiscuous and quarrelsome, and she lit a cigarette as she walked down into the subway station. I watched her as she walked, and it seemed to me to be the first time I had ever seen her back, walking away from me, trailing a long blue string of smoke.

  Something is going on with the boys, something has changed in the set of their faces, the way they hold their cigarettes, the way they nudge each other. Something changes when the light begins to fade, and one of them says to me: —We have a clubhouse uptown, want to come there with us?

  —What kind of club, I ask, —what do you do there?

  —We drink whisky, they say, —and take drugs and watch television.

  My boy, the one I have picked out of this whole city of boys, stares out the window, chewing at a toothpick he’s got wedged somewhere in the depths of his jaw, and runs his finger over the slick plastic of the steering wheel. I can tell by his refusal to ask that he wants me to come. This, I suppose, is how to get to the center of boys, to go to their club. Boys are like pack creatures, and they always form clubs; it’s as though they cannot help themselves. It’s the single law of human nature that I have observed in my limited exposure to the world, that plays and plays and replays itself out with simple mindless consistency: where there are boys, there are clubs, and anywhere there is a club, it is bound to be full of boys, looking for the good times to be had just by being boys.

  —Can I join? I ask. This is what I will take back to her, cigarettes and a boy’s club. This will keep her for me forever: that I have gone to the center of boys and have come back to her.

  —Well, they say, and smirk and grin and scratch at themselves. —Well, there’s an initiation.

  The oldest of the boys is younger than I, and yet, like boys everywhere, they all think that I don’t know nearly so much as they do, as if being a woman somehow short-circuits my capacity for input. They have a language that they think only boys can understand, but understanding their language is the key to my success, so I smile and say: —I will not fuck you all, separately or together.

  My boy looks over at me and permits himself a cool half-smile, and I am irritated that he now holds me in higher regard because I can speak a language that any idiot could learn.

  Between us there are no small moments; we do not speak at all or we speak everything. Heat bills and toothpaste and dinner and all the dailiness of living are given no language in our time together. I realize that this kind of intensity cannot be sustained over a long period of time and that every small absence in our days signals an end between us. She tells me that I must never leave her, but what I know is that someday she will leave me with a fistful of marriage money to pay the rent as long as rent control lasts in New York, and I will see her wandering down the streets, see her in the arms of another, and I say to her sometimes late at night when she blows smoke rings at my breasts: Don’t leave me. Don’t ever ever leave me.

  —Life, she always says to me, —is one long leave-taking. Don’t kid yourself, she says. —Kid, and laughs. —Anyways, you are my little sweetheart, and how could I ever leave you, and how could I leave this–soft touch on my skin–and this, and this.

  She knows this kills me every time.

  Their clubhouse is dirty and disorganized and everywhere there are mattresses and empty beer bottles and bags from McDonald’s, and skittering through all of this mess are more roaches than I thought could exist in a single place, more roaches than there are boys in this city, more roaches than there are moments of love in this world.

  The boys walk importantly in. This is their club; they are New York City boys and they take drugs and they have a club, and I watch as they scatter around and sit on mattresses and flip on the television. I hang back in the doorway and reach out to snag the corner of the jacket my boy is wearing. He turns to me without interest.

  —How about some air? I say.

  —Let me just get high first, he says, and he walks over to a chair and sits down and pulls out his works and cooks up his dope and ties up his arm and spends a good two minutes searching out a vein to pop. All over his hands and arms and probably his legs and feet and stomach are signs of collapse and ruin, as if his body has been created for a single purpose, and he has spent a busy and productive life systematically mining it for good places to fix.

  I watch him do this while the other boys do their dope or roll their joints or pop their pills, and he offers me some. I say no, I’d rather keep a clear head, and how about some air? I don’t want him to hit a nod before any of it’s even happened, but this is my experience with junkies, that they exit right out of every situation before it’s even become a situation.

  —Let’s take the car, he says.

  You are my sweetheart, she says, and if you leave me, you will spend all your life coming back to me. With her tongue and her words and the quiet movement of her hand over my skin, she has drawn for me all the limits of my life, and of my love. It is the one love that has created me and will contain me, and if she left me I’d be lonely, and I’d rather sleep in the streets with her hand between my legs forever than be lonely.

  In the car, the boy slides his hand between my legs and then puts it on the steering wheel. A chill in the air, empty streets, and it’s late. Every second takes me farther into the night away from her; every second sends me home. We drive to Inwood Park, and climb the fence so that we are only a few feet away from the Hudson.

  —This is nothing like Ohio, I say to him, and he lights a cigarette.

  —Where’s Ohio?

  —Don’t you go to school? I ask him. —Don’t you take geography?

  —I know what I need to know, he says, and reaches over to unbutton my blouse. The thing about junkies is that they know they don’t have much time, and the thing about boys is that they know how not to waste it.

  —This is very romantic, I say, as his fingers hit my nipples like a piece of ice. —Do you come here often?

  What I like about this boy is that he just puts it right in. He just puts it in as though he does this all the time, a
s though he doesn’t usually have to slide it through his fingers, or between his friends’ rough lips; he just puts it in and comes like wet soap shooting out of a fist, and this is what I wanted. This is what I wanted, I say to myself as I watch the Hudson rolling brownly by over his shoulder. This is what I wanted, but all I think about is the way it is with us; this is what I wanted, but all I see is her face floating down the river, her eyes like pieces of moonlight caught in the water.

  What I think is true doesn’t matter anymore; what I think is false doesn’t matter anymore. What I think at all doesn’t matter anymore, because there is only her; like an image laid over my mind, she is superimposed on every thought I have. She sits by the window and looks out onto the street as though she is waiting for something, waiting for rent control to end, or waiting for something else to begin. She sits by the window waiting for something, and pulls a long string through her fingers. In the light from the window, I can see each of the bones in her hand; they make a delicate pattern that fades into the flesh and bone of her wrist.

  —Don’t ever change, I say to her. —Don’t ever ever change. She smiles and lets the string dangle from her hand.

  —Nothing ever stays the same, she says. —You’re old enough to know that, aren’t you, sweetheart? Permanence, she says, —is nothing more than a desire for things to stay the same.

  I know this.

  —Life is hard for me, the boy says. —What am I going to do with my life? I just hang around all day or drive my mother’s car. Life is so hard. Everything will always be the same for me here in this city. It’s going to eat me up and spit me out, and I might as well never have been born.

  He looks poetically out over the river.

  —I wanted a boy, I say, —not a poet.

  —I’m not a poet, he says. —I’m just a junkie, and you’re nothing but a slut. You can get yourself home tonight.

  I say nothing and watch the Hudson roll by.

  —I’m sorry, he says. —So what? So I’m a junkie and you’re a slut, so what. Nothing ever changes. Besides, he says, —my teacher wants me to be a track star because I can run faster than anyone else in gym class. That’s what he says.

  —Well, that sounds like a promising career, I say, although I can imagine the teacher in his baggy sweatpants, his excitement rising as he stares at my boy and suggests after-school workouts. —Why don’t you do that?

  —I’d have to give up smoking, he says. —And dope.

  Together we watch the river, and finally he says, —Well. It’s about time I was getting my mother’s car home.

  —This is it? I ask him.

  —What were you expecting? he says. —I’m only a junkie. In two years I probably won’t even be able to get it up anymore.

  —Look, I say, coming in and walking over to where she sits by the window. —Look. I am a marked woman. There is blood between my legs and it isn’t yours.

  She looks at me, then looks back at what she was doing before I came in, blowing smoke rings that flatten against the dirty window. —Did you bring me some cigarettes? she asks, putting hers out in the ashtray that rests on the windowsill.

  —A marked woman, I say. —Can’t you see the blood?

  —I can’t see anything, she says, —and I won’t look until I have a cigarette.

  I give her the cigarettes I bought earlier. Even in the midst of becoming a woman, I have remembered the small things that please her. She lights one and inhales the smoke, then lets it slowly out through her nose and her mouth at the same time. She knows this kills me.

  —Don’t you see it? I ask.

  —I don’t see anything, she says. —I don’t see why you had to do this.

  She gets up and says, —I’m going to bed now. I’ve been up all day and all night, and I’m tired and I want to go to sleep before the sun comes up.

  —I am a marked woman, I say, lying beside her. —Don’t you feel it?

  —I don’t feel anything, she says, but she holds me, and together we wait patiently for the light. She is everything to me. In the stiff morning before the full gloom of city light falls on us, I turn to her face full of shadows.

  —I am a marked woman, I say. —I am.

  —Quiet, she says, and puts her dark hand gently over my mouth, then moves it over my throat onto the rise of my chest. Across town, no one notices when she does this. Nothing is changed anywhere when she does this.

  —Quiet, she says again. She presses her hand against my heart, and touches her face to mine and takes me with her into the motherless turning night. All moments stop here; this is the first and the last, and the only flesh is hers, the only touch her hand. Nothing else is, and together we turn under the stroke of the moon and the hiss of the stars; she is everything I will become, and together we become every memory that has ever been known.

  Cocktail Hour

  My mother pulls the kitchen curtains closed and the room goes from a kind of dull whitish to a dim yellow.

  —Jesus, she says, and sits at the table. —Jesus Jesus Jesus. I really am going to die this time. She puts her hand to her forehead. —Jesus, she says again.

  My father watches her from the stove, where he is scrambling eggs. —You know, he finally says, —if you wouldn’t smoke so much, you wouldn’t get such bad hangovers. Look at me, he says, —I never get hangovers. And why?

  He pauses as if he expects her to answer, though they have this same conversation on the average of twice a week. My mother reaches in the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. —Because, my father says triumphantly, —because I don’t smoke. He smiles and my mother lights her cigarette.

  —Is there any coffee? she says. My father puts his spatula down and pours her a cup of coffee; when he brings it to her, they look at each other for a moment as she takes it from his hand.

  —Your eggs are burning, she says, and he turns and looks at the stove. My mother watches him as he pushes the eggs around in the pan.

  —I don’t know, he says, —these eggs look bad. He holds the pan up to his nose and sniffs. —I think these eggs are bad, he says.

  My mother leans back in her chair and pulls the newspaper toward her as my father brings the pan of eggs to her.

  —What do you think? he says. —Do you think these eggs are bad?

  My mother looks at the eggs, then away. —I don’t know, she says. —Don’t show me any food.

  My father holds the eggs out to me. They look a little odd, separated into shiny yellow clumps and pale liquid, but before I can say anything, he scrapes them into the garbage.

  —There, he says. —I think those eggs were bad. You’ll have to have cereal, he tells me. —If we have any.

  —Honey, my mother says to me. —Be an angel and see if one of the neighbors has a Pepsi for my hangover.

  It’s a Sunday today, in a world before stores are open all the time, and my parents know how to depend on neighbors–especially new ones.

  —See if they have some eggs too, my father says.

  —Jesus, says my mother, and bends her cigarette into the ashtray. —Don’t worry about the eggs, honey. Just get the Pepsi.

  My father sits down at the table and she lights another cigarette. They both watch her smoke drift through the dusty light.

  I stand outside the kitchen window, to decide which neighbor to try and to hear if they say anything about me when I am gone. My parents have only a few topics of conversation: the cocktail party they have most recently hosted or attended; my father’s career; my mother’s smoking; and, less frequently, me. I know each conversation by heart.

  —You know, my mother says. —You shouldn’t have her asking all over for eggs. She hasn’t even made any friends yet.

  —Well, my father says after a while, —I don’t see how that’s our fault.

  The conversation dies here for a moment, and I imagine my mother turning her neck to look at the crossword puzzle in the paper, my father gazing at the table.

  —Well, my mother says finally, —she is
at that delicate age. Maybe this move wasn’t such a good idea.

  My father is silent, considering which of his many counterarguments to use here. Whenever they have this particular conversation, I feel as if I am standing at the edge of a wood, facing a dark wall of trees, but when I turn to go back, there are trees behind me as well, and on either side. I am aware of being at that delicate age, though it seems to me that there has been no age at which I have not felt delicate, and no time at which a move did seem like a good idea. It is possible, perhaps, that when I was a baby, it mattered less. When I go through our boxes of snapshots, I see pictures of myself, an unfamiliar baby held awkwardly in unfamiliar arms, or an older, uneasy-looking child, in front of unfamiliar houses, in the company of children whose names I have forgotten. I try to remember a single place of origin, one place that seems like home, but all I can see are my parents in lawn chairs, smiling into the sun, or at cocktail parties, raising their glasses happily, with shining eyes. These are the images of my history, and they transfer easily from state to state, as do we, with hardly a jarring note.

  The neighborhoods we live in are all alike: neat, nearly new houses with driveways; inside they are all the same, too, with pale walls and light, hollow doors. Any bedroom I have had looks like any other bedroom I have had, and sometimes the things I own or wear or love seem to me to be as much a part of the houses we have lived in as things that are actually mine. The companies my father works for always move everything for us, so that on moving day, whole rooms are suddenly disassembled and disappear, reappearing in much the same arrangement in the new house. A doll I have had since childhood precedes me, carefully lifted from, then laid again upon the pillow of my bed, carried by whichever of the movers has a small daughter at home. Whenever I enter a new bedroom, she is already there, staring at the doorway with blank doll eyes, her blond hair stiff and clean.

  In my new schools, my teachers sometimes ask me to tell the class interesting things about my travels, and I try to think of some, but in fact the America I have seen is exactly like itself: Franklin, New Jersey, differs, from my perspective, not at all from Arlington, Virginia, or Syracuse, New York. The houses and the neighbors and the streets are all just exactly alike, without difference enough even to help me make something up.