“So Andrew,” I said finally. “I’m in New York.”
“New York! No kidding!”
“Yeah…I was sort of hoping we could get together. You and me and Lindy.”
“Rose, you mean.”
If I’d made that slip to Rose personally, I would have been listening to a dial tone now. “Jeez, right, Rose,” I said.
“Uh, well, she’s not in…” He was stalling, and was bad at it. I pounced.
“Look, I’ll just come over, what do you say? Because my bus just got here, and I’ve gotta do something in New York all day.”
“Oh, sure, all right…”
“I’ll just come right over, okay?”
“Yeah, come over. Come on over.”
I took a cab uptown. Andrew and Rose lived on 110th Street, in what I’d heard her refer to as “a decent building,” in a tone that encompassed both condemnation and compliment. It looked like any other to me, large, grim and slightly foreboding. A tired, filthy man wearing a ball cap sat at its base, surrounded by garbage. But the neighborhood in general was clean, and people walked along the street, talking and laughing. I found their number on the mailboxes, took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, and knocked on a freshly painted green door with a sprig of dried eucalyptus hanging over the eyehole. I heard steps, and Andrew appeared.
He looked exuberantly comfortable: baggy wrinkled shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of wool socks in the early stages of falling off. He grinned. “Hey!” he said, as if again surprised, and embraced me. I hugged back, stunned myself. He smelled like old-growth pine forest. Behind him brilliant light filled the room, doubling itself on the polished floor.
He let me go. “She’s not home yet. Come on in.”
I did. It was a spectacular loft apartment. I was filled with envy. The windows were enormous, consuming most of the back wall, and all the furniture, the decor, was chosen to acknowledge and defer to the light: the bookshelves were wooden planks set in rough iron frames that let the light stream through; a hardwood table standing on thin legs was surrounded by metal-tube chairs with vinyl seats. There was glass everywhere, translucent dishes and food stored in decanters. The whole thing had the look of long planning, of fulfilled desires: they had the place they wanted. I considered this an accomplishment, simply knowing what they wanted.
“Wow,” I said. “Did you put all this together?”
“Rose, mostly.”
“I didn’t know she was such an…aesthete.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“I mean that respectfully,” I said. And I did. Perhaps my greatest failing as an artist had been that I had no confidence in my own aesthetic judgment. My pieces all looked like I expected them to; it was my expectation that always proved inadequate.
“I thought you did. Do you want to sit down? Can I get you something? Juice, maybe?”
“Yes on all counts.”
I sat on a lumpy tan sofa and Andrew brought me a tall orange juice, which the light claimed before I could lay a lip on it. It tasted like good air.
“So,” he said, taking one of the metal chairs. “You haven’t told me what brought you here.”
I shrugged. “A sort of inner mumbling.”
He nodded solemnly, as if this made sense. “How’s your brother?”
“Better,” I said. “I think. He doesn’t seem…taken in by his worries so much lately. Not to say they don’t bother him.”
“No.”
“But our mother…”
“She’s not good.” He was sitting on his chair backwards, his legs manfully spread, his face deeply focused on the conversation. Andrew was a listener, which I supposed was what Rose needed.
“Yeah,” I said. Then, delicately, “So Rose has been going down there?”
“Once a week, really early in the morning, when she thinks none of you will be there.” He gulped his juice, finishing off the entire half-glass in the process.
I was floored by the sheer physical presence of him, the sense of him in the apartment. He was less a man in his castle than a physicist in his lab. He gave me a look.
“What?” I said.
“You know that whatever you say is going to piss her off.”
“I don’t exactly know what I have to say,” I admitted. “I sort of came by accident.”
He raised his eyebrows. “There are no accidents.” And as if on cue the door opened.
Rose swept in carrying a paper bag. “They were out of the everythings, so I got a couple onions and some salts…oh.”
We gaped at one another across the dazzling floor. I smiled, or tried to. Rose didn’t. She was much taller than she looked elsewhere, and I marveled at the poise and dignity she managed standing there, perfectly flummoxed at my presence. “Hi,” I said.
“Well.” She set the bag down on the kitchen table. Andrew reached greedily into it and pulled out a thick bagel. “We were just going to have a little brunch.”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Do you want a bagel, Tim?” Andrew asked me, and Rose’s contemptuous restraint gave way to resignation and she pulled up a chair.
“We have onion and salt,” she said.
“I heard. Can I have a salt?”
She handed me the bagel. They bit right into theirs, without applying cream cheese or anything else, so I did the same. We ate. Halfway through his bagel, Andrew seemed to deflate. He got up. “Okay, well, I’m out for a walk,” he said. He snatched the keys from the table and hustled out the door, cracking his knuckles. Rose and I finished eating, then she crossed her legs at the thigh and folded her hands over her knee, as if praying for me to leave.
“So,” she said.
“So!”
“You want to talk about Mom?” she said. I nodded, relinquishing all hope of some pleasant conversation before we got down to brass tacks. I had come here to postpone groveling to Susan, but falling to my knees and begging for forgiveness seemed a refreshing diversion from the present situation. Rose came to the sofa and sat at the other end, as far from me as possible. It was the most affection she’d ever shown me.
“We can’t have her here,” she said. She was facing the windows as if speaking through them out into the city, to Andrew. “We talked about it, but really, we‘re so high up, and the elevator is unreliable, and this neighborhood…I know you’re thinking, she’s so selfish, they could move downstairs or out to the suburbs, but Tim, and I know you’re going to think I’m a shit but so be it, I’ve come so far. I’ve made the life for myself I wanted, and it was hard. I don’t think you can understand that.”
“Rose…”
She turned to me finally, a brazen, tearful flash in her eyes, and tugged spastically on her earlobe. “I think she ought to be at home. In Riverbank.”
“Mixville,” I said.
“What?”
“At FunnyFest. They changed the name.”
Her mouth hung open a moment, and then she coughed out a single, near-hysterical laugh, and began to cry. She covered her face. I moved to comfort her but couldn’t reach, and I feared that moving farther would make her get up, and then I would leave and we would never have this conversation. So I said, “I think you’re right. Pierce wants her at home, actually. I didn’t tell him yes right away myself, and he got mad at me, but really he’s right.”
She produced a kleenex and honked into it, then crushed it in her fist. She looked up. “You’re going to do that? Bring her home?”
“I think when I get the strip, this fall. I just can’t do it before then.”
“Right, of course.”
“If you feel bad about it, help us. Come down and take care of her.” Rose blinked, peering into this future with what looked like real apprehension. “Andrew said you come down every week anyway,” I said. “It’ll be like that. Just stay all day or something. I’m sure Bitty will do a day too.”