Marge and James circle each other in their little house, like animals who haven’t met. James wags for attention, panders; Marge sniffs. Their voices shake when they say certain words: Julian, strawberry, home. Marge could leave at any minute. She doesn’t. Marge will leave when Julian is gone. Or else she won’t. They kiss once, after dinner, when both of them feel like crying. They sleep separately. Julian cries nightly, like a ritual. To fix it, give Julian a pen and paper; he’ll quiet down, then draw forever. James tacks Julian’s drawings up on the wall like substitutes for his paintings, which have been taken down, wrapped in plastic, stacked against the wall by the door. In some ways but not all, it works.
The drawing is just one of the things they’ve learned about Julian from the letter they’d had translated by Mrs. Consuelo the dry cleaner. Other things: he’s almost six years old, with a birthday in February. Smart for his age; no English. His mother’s in trouble. Raul Engales is his only hope.
They have exactly four weeks until Engales is let out of the Rising Sun. James hadn’t wanted to press charges, but Spinoza had called the cops anyway; they’d let him off the hook, with good behavior, if he stayed at the Rising Sun for another month. This knowledge has been obtained via Lupa, who has thought to call James’s house from her own, where, she says almost sadly, she is cooking soup for everyone. For four weeks, though, Julian is theirs.
Movies show at 8:00 P.M. on Sundays. Engales watches romantic comedies, regular comedies, horrors. Another movie plays in his head: his sister standing above a boy. Rewind. His sister standing above a boy. Rewind. His sister standing above a boy. Back in his room, he watches the girl across the street pull off her shirt again, look directly into his eyes. She has found him. He presses his body up against the glass: his hand, his jeans, his tongue.
A group of mothers meets in a badly lit room. There is a wilting balloon in the corner that reads Happy One-Oh. Someone’s brought coffee in a thick thermos, but no one drinks it. They hold their hands like little personal knots in front of them on the table. We still have everywhere east of A, the mother in the red beret says. We’ve been looking for months now, the mother in the black, large-shouldered jacket says. What’s that supposed to mean? says the mother in the emerald terry-cloth robe. She hasn’t taken off the robe since July. She won’t take it off until he’s found, one year and seventeen days from now, crammed into the sideboards of a SoHo basement, his backpack the most alive thing about him.
At the Museum of Natural History, Julian points up to the big blue whale. Marge holds his hand; James can see the tightness of her grip from the other side of the room. The light in the room is as blue as the whale, not because James’s mind is making it so, but only because the museum’s lit it that way: a false oceanic depth.
James thinks about how Leonardo da Vinci painted using aerial perspective, which was based on the idea that the atmosphere absorbed certain colors. Objects that were closer to the painter always had more blue in them. Objects that were farther away, less blue.
It doesn’t matter, he thinks now, whether he’s close or far from the things he loves most in the world. He’s screwed. They all are. Marge has fallen in love with the boy. He can see it in the way she is using her arms. It’s as obvious as the giant mammal that hangs above them. That’s the thing about love, he thinks. There’s nothing to be done about it.
At Part Deux, the abandoned Chinese market on Grand Street where the members of the squat have taken up residence, a line has been drawn. Literally: Selma Saint Regis has drawn a chalk line, in a circle around her body, on the gnarling floorboards. “I’ll sit inside this circle until they force me out,” she says. “And if Reagan wins, I’ll refuse to eat.” She’s practically hysterical, hasn’t eaten anything real in days. “Shhh,” says Toby, who grabs her under the armpits, pulls her up, drags her out of the circle and into their makeshift bed. “It’ll never last,” she says to Toby. “Nothing does,” says Toby. “Not this,” she says. “Us.” Toby nods solemnly. Nothing does, nothing does.
Lucy approaches a tall woman with a name tag that reads: SPINOZA. Spinoza wags a finger that’s as big as the fake dicks in the porn shop under Jamie’s house. “Na ah ah!” Spinoza says: a power tattle. “Nobody sees Raul Engales anymore. Nobody can see that man at this point in time — he’s got a month left at least. The law. And to think I fired one of my best nurses ’cause of him.” Spinoza smacks her jaw. Lucy drifts back out onto East Seventh Street. Across the way, the empty squat complains: I haven’t had any fun in weeks. She knows how it feels. She goes back to Jamie’s, where she’s reassumed her old position as the good girl of the house. She takes a shower, runs her hands over the rusting tiles. Uses a lotion that smells like lavender. Still feels dirty. She hasn’t been the good girl of the house for as long as she can remember. She touches her own hands, thinks of her mother for a long time.
“I’m pretending,” says Marge, to her coffee.
“I know,” says James, to his bleeding eggs. The sky outside is the color of sky.
“That it’s not going to end,” Marge says.
“I know,” James says.
The eggs make James think of Franca, a person he has never met and never will, whose letter Marge had translated by the lady at the Laundromat, whose translation had made him cry.
The sky, when he looks up and out the window, makes him think of the man he was supposed to be but never will.
A truck double-parks on Jane Street, prompts honks from a line of impatient cabbies. Its mouth yawns open in lazy anticipation of a life’s worth of art.
PART SIX
MINUS ANY GOD
If there was such a thing as a mixture of snow and fog, it was what was present on the day of Engales’s release from the Rising Sun: the second Tuesday in December. He had been tucked away, in one brightly colored, airless room or another, for almost two months now, which made the air out here feel even denser with moisture, as if the city itself were one giant cloud. He couldn’t help wondering, as he emerged into the free, chilled universe, if this could perhaps be a dream. Or if all of it had been, his whole life, maybe.
He stood on the stoop of the Rising Sun with a small sack containing things Darcy had given him as parting gifts — a set of playing cards and a poster, rolled up, of an exotic woman in a bikini drinking a bottle of Jim Beam. He was wearing one of Darcy’s suits, which he had won in a breakneck game of Loba de Menos, though Darcy would have given it to him anyway. Darcy had liked Engales from the beginning, and became even more invested in him when he heard the saga of his sister’s son; he’d had a son once himself, Darcy explained, though Engales did not dare ask why he no longer did. “Go find that boy,” Darcy had said when he handed over the obsessively pressed suit: gray, with white pinstripes. “Go find that boy and look good for that boy and tell that boy he’s loved.”
That had been Engales’s plan, not that he had another option. He couldn’t not find Franca’s boy. He couldn’t not take care of him. He had spent every moment of the last month thinking about him: while he attempted alphabets with his left hand — he was fairly competent with it now — and while Debbie kissed his neck in the physical-therapy room, and while he played cards with Darcy during social hour. Thoughts of the boy had become the focus of his very limited universe. What would his hair look like? Would he have Franca’s teeth? Would he be shy and funny, like Franca was? Or bold and brash, like Engales was? Or worst: Would he be spineless and annoying, like Pascal? Engales had played out whole scenes in his head: Franca showing up in New York and the two of them taking the boy to Central Park, or, more realistically and yet less appealing, the same Central Park excursion with Lucy.