“When I was at Art School,” she said, “I remember an instructor of mine saying that it was only on days like you have here that you know the true color of anything. The whole city, all of Bellona, it’s under perpetual north light.”
“Mmm,” he said.
What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head.
“You…” he said, suddenly. It was dark. “Are you happy, I mean, living like this?”
“Me?” She breathed a long breath. “Let me see…before I came here, I was teaching English to Cantonese children who’d just arrived in New York’s Chinatown. Before that, I was managing a pornographic bookstore on 42nd Street. And before that, for quite a while, I was a self-taught tape-jockey at WBAI-FM, in New York, and before that, I was doing a stint at her sister station KPFA, in Berkeley, Cal. Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.” And suddenly, in the dark, she rolled against him.
“Gotta run.” Click. The tie knot rose.
“Hey, Mr. Richards?” Kid put down his own cup.
“Yes, Kidd?” Mr. Richards, already in the doorway, turned back. “What do you want?”
Bobby spooned at his frosted cereal. There was no milk. June traced a column in the Friday, October 24, 1985 Times with her forefinger. It was several weeks old.
“I want to know about my money.”
“You need some more? I’ll have some for you when I get home this evening.”
“I want to know how much I’m getting.”
“Hm? Oh. Well, we’ll have to figure that out. Have you been keeping track of how long you’ve been working each day?”
“More or less,” Kidd said. “Madame Brown told me you were going to give me five bucks an hour.”
Mr. Richards took the door knob. “That’s pretty high wages.” He shook his head, thoughtfully.
“Is that what you told her?”
The knob turned. “We better talk about it later on this evening.” The door closed on his smile.
Kidd turned back to Mrs. Richards.
She sipped, eyes flickering above the china rim.
“I mean that’s what you told her, isn’t it?”
“Five dollars an hour is quite high. For unskilled labor.” The cup lowered to her chin.
“Yeah, but not for furniture movers. Look, let me go downstairs and finish bringing up the rugs and the clothes. It’s only going to take another half-dozen trips. I’ll be through before you get started on lunch.” Kidd got up too noisily and went to the door.
Bobby’s spoon, silent the exchange, crunched again.
June’s eyes had stayed down, but once more her finger moved.
From the doorway Kidd glanced back at her (as moments before her father had glanced back at him) and tried to set her against George’s and Lanya’s conversation of the previous afternoon. But, with blonde head and pink reflection fuzzed in the polish, she seemed wholly at home among the fluted, white china cups, the brass pots of plants, the green mats, the blue flowered drapes, her mother, her brother, the wide windows, or the green wallpaper with its paler green florals.
Down on seventeen, he came into the apartment (unchained, unlocked) and thought: Why didn’t we take the rugs up first? That was silly, not to have taken the rugs up. Like mottled eels (the underpad, a smaller darker eel, printed with a design that, till now, he’d only seen on corrugated ceilings) the rugs lay against the living room wall. Outside the window, pale leviathans swam. Piles of books sat on the floor.
Pilgrimage was on top of one.
For the third—or was it the fourth? Or the fifth?—time he picked it up, read at random pages, waiting to be caught and driven into the work. But the receptivity he tried to bring was again and again hooked away by some pattern of shadow on the bare vinyl tile, some sound in the apartment below, some itch on his own body: and there went all his attention. Though his eye moved over the print, his place and the print’s sense were lost: At last he lay the book back on the pile, and put a book from another pile on top, as though—and wondered why he thought of it this way—the first book were his own.
He stood up—he had been squatting—and gazed around: still to be moved were bridge tables from the back storage closet, folding chairs with scrolled arms, green cushions, and black metal hinges; and toys from Bobby’s room, scattered among them. A set of four nest tables was crowded with small, bright breakables.
He wandered down the hall (there was the carton of papers from Mr. Richards’ den) and turned into Bobby’s room. Most of what was left was evidence of the older brother who’d once shared it: a handkerchief that had fallen out of a bureau drawer yesterday, showing the monogram: EGR; propping the closet door were three small cartons with Eddy written across them in magic marker; on the floor was the Bellona High School Yearbook. Kidd picked it up and paged through: Edward Garry Richards (Soccer team, G.O. Volunteer, “The Cafeteria Staff’s favorite two years running…”) was Camera Shy.
He lay the book down on the boxes, wandered across the hall into June’s room: On the windowsill was the tepee of an empty matchbook and a white plastic flower pot still filled with earth which, June had told him yesterday, had once grown a begonia her aunt Marianne had given her two Easters ago.
In memory he refurnished the space with the pieces he’d taken upstairs the previous day and tried to pull back, also from memory, the image of June that had come to him in George’s overheard converse. Memory failed at a sound outside.
Kidd stepped back into the hall as Bobby came from the living room; he grunted, over an armful of books, “I’m taking these upstairs.”
“Why don’t you take about half of them?”
“Maybe—” two books fell—“I better.”
June came in: “Oh, hey, I’ll take some of those…” They divided the stack, left.
Where, he wondered as the door closed (the unlatched chain swung and swung over green paint), is my notebook? Of course; down the hall in what had been the back bedroom, from when he’d stopped in this apartment out of habit when he’d first come in the morning: He had momentarily forgotten that the Richards were living on nineteen now.
In the back bedroom another file box stood off center in the middle of the floor.
The notebook was on the windowsill. Kidd walked up to it, looked at the worn, smeared cardboard. Outside, small darknesses moved below the mist. What, he thought, should I say to Mr. Richards about my money? Suppose Mr. Richards comes back this evening and doesn’t bring up the subject? Kidd considered writing down alternative opening lines and rehearsing them for Mr. Richards’ return. No. No, that’s exactly the wrong way! It’s almost nine o’clock, he thought, and too smoky to tell people from shadows at seventeen stories.
Something thumped; a girl cried out. A second thump, and her pitch changed. A third—it sounded like toppling furniture—and her cry swooped. A fourth ended it.