He hangs up at the end of the call and is about to go back to the mural on Grete’s wall — he is painting in Titus, a giant, at the Gatehouse — when the phone rings and it is Hannah.
Nothing? she says.
No, he says. He imagines his mother. She has lost a great deal of weight: she looks like one of those lean, browned outdoorsy women who hike all day, with their beautiful legs and sunshot hair. But her voice has grown progressively darker. He says, Are you okay, Hannah?
I guess, she says. I think I’m lonely. Drinking too much.
Now he hears the bourbon in the smoky rasp. How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them. Then again, his wine bottle is already empty tonight. He says, Me too.
They sit together in companionable silence. When a garbage truck churns on the street below, Bit says, Hannah, is it worth being lonely just because you’re proud? I mean. You have a choice.
Just because, Hannah says, chewing on her words. Just because I’m proud.
Well, Bit says. That’s why you’re not talking to Abe.
Please. I have better reasons than pride, she says.
There’s more to the story? Bit says. He had assumed it was so simple: money, the universal wedge between people. He hadn’t the energy to imagine more.
Isn’t there always? Hannah says, and Bit understands that, whatever it is, her loyalty to Abe is still too strong to tell.
I miss her, he says, at last.
Oh, honey, says Hannah. And I miss your father, that old bastard on wheels.
Sharon opens the door raw-eyed, her brown hair puffed on her head like a mushroom cap. Grete and Frankie squeeze one another around the neck. Bit says, Bad night? and Sharon shrugs and says, Worse than average. I was served with d-i-v-o-r-c-e papers yesterday.
I’m sorry, Bit says, but he has to settle a twinge of envy; there is an endpoint to Sharon’s grief, at least.
Yesterday, the girl Helle had been was everywhere. In photographs on the walls in the apartment, in the frail wrists of the barista who served him tea at the university café, in the magazine on the coffee table at his dentist’s. These young starlets in Hollywood all seem to want to be who she had been: skinny within layers of clothing, with her clear white face, her vagueness. It is as if the idea of Helle he’d carried around with him for twenty-five years had bloomed external into the world.
He had barely survived his transition from Arcadia to the gritty Outside when he was fourteen. He was lonely. There were ugly urban trees, pigeons, piss caked on walls. He knew nobody and filled his time by walking for hours. The streets of Queens pinched crookedly into other streets; the parks, a mockery of countryside. He felt tender, unshelled. The warp of stories that had always blanketed him, his personal mythology, was invisible, so nobody knew him; no one knew he was the miracle baby, Little Bit of a Hippie, Abe and Hannah’s boy; no one knew about Abe’s fall and Hannah’s legendary strength and the fable of his meeting Verda on a snowy night; they didn’t know the traumas of baby Felipe and the Dartful Codger and Cockaigne Day; they didn’t know anything at all. They took one look at his slight body and tried to put him with the seventh graders; when he showed them his calculus, history, biology, they reluctantly shelved him with the juniors, two years older than he. There he rested, perilously. The other kids were incomprehensible. They fistfought, snapped gum, played sports as bloody as miniature wars. They were cruel. They called Bit Dippie because he was a hippie-dippie; they called him Stinkass because at first he didn’t dare to take more than two baths a week, even though water was free and soap abundant. When he came home from school, it was as if he were dragging a sack of lead.
Even the things he first found good soon made him feel hollow: Cheez Doodles, peanut butter, sodapop, Red Hots, which he ate until he was sick. The flickering sorts of lights they used in supermarkets and schools made even blinking feel like work. The streets were full of dogs, which he had always imagined to be good, peaceful creatures, but these dogs choked on leashes, left shit to rot on the concrete. Summer cooled into autumn, but beyond the softer light, a hint of cold, the season couldn’t come into its own. There were no golds, no blazes, no woodsmoke. The sidewalks only grew sadder until a dirty ice emerged. Worst were the people. There was no care in what they did. The pipes burst one day on the corner, the men in orange came, slapped a patch on the concrete, and within a week, the pipes burst again. People argued with themselves in public and wore their faces savage. Everyone was pale, puffy, unhealthy. At first, he marveled at the grossness, the fatness of everyone, and then one day it struck him that it was not normal to be as brown and scrawny as Arcadians were: it was not normal to see your friends’ ribs through their shirts, for men and women both to work bare-chested all day, equally topless, everything shining back at the sun. At night, the voices that came through the walls were canned, the many inflections of television, or the neighbors’ raised in anger. There were no soft songs, no lullabies. In the hall, he saw a mother hit her baby with a fist.
Even inside the apartment things were bleak: gray linoleum, Goodwill furniture. His parents moved about, faces in grief thick as paint. A silence grew between them and formed into a solid the consistency of wet sponge. Hannah stood at the window, her long hands cupped around her tea until it went cold. Her eyes sagged with winter. When she returned home from work, an administrative job at a social services clinic, silently, they had dinner. They were on the sixth floor, and there was no elevator and Abe could not descend to the street without Hannah and Bit to carry him, so all day he circled the apartment in his new wheelchair bought by welfare. Around and around he went, a thousand times. His wheels chewed tracks into the carpet.
What Bit hated most in all the Outside world, hated with an irrational, puking hatred, was the goldfish in the pet store a street away, its endless dull slide around the glass. When he passed the store on his way to school, he crossed the street. He was afraid of himself, of how badly he wanted to smash his fist through the window, to cradle the fish in his bloody hands and carry it down to the river. There he would dip it to the surface and free it into the terrible cold water. It might have been swallowed in a second, a sudden jagged mouth out of the black. But at least that second it would feel on its body a living sweetness, a water that it hadn’t dirtied with its own dying body.
His friends from Arcadia had scattered and he couldn’t track them down. He didn’t try for Outside friends. He did perfect work in school, so adults would leave him alone. Hannah and Abe wagged their lips at him, and he nodded and turned his back. He slept, later and longer, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was locked in the bathroom. He had liberated a red lightbulb from a photography store and stolen cash from Hannah for the chemicals, and only in the half-light of his improvised darkroom, watching the world emerge on a piece of white paper, did he feel his old self stirring. He could control this world. He could create tiny windows he could fit between his hands and study until he began to understand them.