Losing Charlotte (9 page)

Jinkha hung a hard left, a hard right. They moved into the East Village. They had to slow down for the bar goers who leaped from curbs and crossed Ninth Street in pairs, holding hands as they walked or ran in front of the cab. One skinny-looking girl slapped the hood as she moved past it, the sleeve of her sweater so long it obscured her hand and furled upward like a ribbon before coming down again. She wore a leather choker and mouthed something at Jinkha through the windshield. At a stoplight, Charlotte rolled down her window, laid her head against the seat, and turned away from him. He watched air brush against her hair and clothes as the cab started moving again and taunted himself with the impossibility of reaching out to touch the hollow place where her throat met her collarbone. He liked it that she didn’t need to speak, felt proud that he didn’t seem to, either.

They reached Avenue A, at which point Jinkha screamed into his phone, snapped it shut, hit the brakes, and turned around in his seat.

“Kitty cat?” he barked. From behind the shield he sounded as if he were speaking to them from under a layer of water. Bruce stared at him. He wanted nothing but to keep moving through space. He had no idea how to respond to the bit of nonsense that had just emerged from Jinkha’s mouth.

“This is it,” Charlotte said. “Thanks.” She produced a worn change purse from her coat pocket, unzipped it, and began to fumble inside it. She held it close to her face, trying to see its contents by the light of the neon sign outside.

“Oh,” Bruce said. “The Kitty Kat Lounge.”

Charlotte turned to him. “I don’t have any cash. I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh,” said Bruce. “No. This is mine.” He reached for his wallet, glad for the chance to feel necessary.

“You’re going to think I used you for cab fare,” she said, half frowning, half smiling, as she opened the car door, bathing them in harsh yellow light.

“Never,” Bruce said, pushing ones at Jinkha through a metal slot. He felt good. He felt great—more naturally himself on this block, with this girl, than he felt in his own life, at his office, with his friends, walking west on Bank Street toward his apartment. Why was that? He wouldn’t question it. He would only take Charlotte’s hand, let himself be lifted onto the curb and through a door. A waifish guy working the club entrance nodded at Charlotte and waved them both past his change table. They pushed through a velvet curtain, into the dark. Into people, smoke, hard music, sweat, ammoniacal wafts of alcohol, and the beery grit under everyone’s feet. Charlotte led him to a chest-high table by the stage, told him to wait there. She disappeared back into the crowd. Bruce stood against the wall, watching the redhead on the stage twist at the hem of her baby-doll dress as she bleated lyrics into a standing mike, then turned away from it dramatically, as if it had hurt her feelings. She did this over and over, then began to jump in place while the lead guitarist built up chords one by one. At last the chorus exploded, and the redhead launched into a spooky dance, her arms rising above her head. Bruce thought of wings.

Charlotte reappeared, holding a beer in one hand and what looked like a glass of water in the other. She set both on the table.

“There’s the drink you wanted from me earlier,” she said. Then: “You’re carrying this off rather well.” She grinned, gesturing at him.

Bruce looked down. He had forgotten he was wearing a tuxedo.

“Did you need me to pay for the beer? I thought you didn’t have money,” he said, looking up.

“No. I used to work here. The only possible perk that could come from that is free beers for the rest of my life.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. You deserve it.”

“Why,” Bruce asked. He immediately wished he could push the word, with its desperate sound, back into his mouth.

Charlotte looked at him. She looked at him for so long that he doubted she would answer at all. “I’m not sure,” she said finally. “But there’s some reason.”

“Mmm,” Bruce said, hoping he sounded skeptical. Amused. He tapped against the side of his beer bottle in time with the drumbeat from the stage. He felt that anything might be possible, as long as he watched the redheaded singer and didn’t do what he wanted to do now, which was put his arms around this girl, this waitress, and weep with relief.

He found out that she had come from Kentucky, had worked her way north, to New York, via one boarding school and two colleges—one of which was too small to contain her and the other from which she graduated only after cobbling together credits from her sporadically attended classes, a summer volunteering for a relief organization in Portugal (Bruce, lamely: “They need relief, in Portugal?”), and the plays and student films that she had been able to characterize as independent projects and apply toward a drama major. He found out that she had worked as an actress, an assistant to a floral designer, a bartender, an assistant to a photographer, and, now, as an assistant to a caterer (a friend of hers)—which sometimes required waitressing at events. He found out that she had one sister, one brother (both younger), two parents, many past boyfriends, no current ones. She lived on East Seventeenth. She voted Democratic. She had been bulimic briefly, a long time ago. Her favorite writer was Flaubert. Favorite movie,
Delicatessen
. She could be self-aggrandizing when she talked—but, Bruce thought, adorably so. Understandably so. She was twenty-eight years old. She had once been photographed kissing Susan Sarandon in a bar, on a bet. She had been flown to Brazil by a philanthropist, on the pretense of being hired to videotape a round-table on the environment. The philanthropist had wanted her in his bed, reserved only one room, of course, of course. There were other stories. She did drink—eventually had a beer herself—she just didn’t like to. It was implied that she had to be with someone
she trusted in order to drink. After the beer, and the next, Bruce thought he could hear something of Kentucky in her voice, in the way it started to slide wetly along the vowels.

At three o’clock in the morning they found themselves in the Duane Reade on Charlotte’s corner, rifling through a two-dollar bin full of health and beauty supplies. Charlotte, who had insisted, laughing, that she would need vitamin B to stave off the next morning’s hangover (she had trusted him, after all), had gotten distracted by the bin on her way to the checkout counter and was now enlisting Bruce’s opinion of press-on nails, rouge colors, false eyelashes, rash ointments. They leaned over the bin, and a woman moved toward them. Her head was wreathed in white shocks of hair that floated around her face as if independent from it, held near it by tenuous magnetic force rather than skin and follicles. She was stooped and overly, messily lipsticked. She said, “Fuck fuck fuck, hold on, hold on, fuck, you fuck,” to an apparition she perceived somewhere beyond Bruce’s head. She made as if to rush it, then, just as she drew abreast of Charlotte, turned to her and, stepping hesitantly past, said, “Excuse me, honey,” her eyes as lucid and kind as they were clouded with hostile confusion the moment she turned away from Charlotte and snapped “Fuck you goddamn fuck” again, at nothing, and moved away.

Bruce saw it. He saw that Charlotte was charmed. In a dangerous, dangerous world (in which people succumbed, despaired, got lost) she would sneak through, untouched. No—she wouldn’t have to sneak. People let her through. The universe let her through. It excused itself and stepped aside, afraid to muss her as she stood, her eyes popping at him in mirth and wonder, wrapped up in a glowing corona of Duane Reade twenty-four-hour fluorescence.

He would bide his time for as long as he could. Then, an eternal six months later, he would ask her to marry him.

B
RUCE AND
K
NOX

W
E WERE SNOTS
, he would say to Charlotte later when he talked of his friends, his childhood. Little preppy shits.
Were?
Charlotte might say, and grin. She liked to lord what she saw as Bruce’s WASP privilege over him, ignoring the fact that her own family was rich, that for several years running he had attended school on scholarship, that his mother was Jewish and required him to purchase things like Stan Smiths himself, due to her refusal to kowtow to the great American marketing machine. It was as if Charlotte were a sharecropper’s daughter and he a Yankee titan, a regular Rockefeller, when she got in one of her moods. “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,” she’d sing loudly at him when he tried to defend himself, looking straight in his eyes, aware that he didn’t know the words. “Four hungry children and a crop in the field.” So you know some corny country music, he’d say, quelling the impulse to ask her not to stop, for there was something knowing and hard in the back of her singing voice that wasn’t a joke, that he wanted to keep hearing. You’ve got that over me. Big deal.

They fought.

They recovered, again and again.

They moved in together.

Bruce insisted on paying for a moving truck to gather her from her East Side studio and bring her to his place, though she told him she would have preferred to let friends help her load into cabs, a borrowed car or two, to caravan her crosstown the way she had promised them they could. It’s not a funeral cortege, Bruce had said. Oh, but it is, Charlotte replied, pulling at the short hairs that curled at the nape of his neck. She pulled at his hair until it hurt, though he wouldn’t say so. It’s the beginning of the end, she said.

On the long-ago day Charlotte had moved in, he’d stood in the living room, looking out toward the street. There were fresh flowers on top of the sideboard he had inherited from his mother. Dahlias from the corner deli. It was September. The bathrooms were clean, lit. There was a wet washcloth folded over the kitchen faucet, its sides hanging down and dripping patternlessly into the shiny well of sink. All the windows were open.

He thought that he might hear the moving truck before he saw it. It would have to turn a corner somewhere nearby; his was a one-way street. The truck’s mammoth groan might reach him as it turned. Sound could carry like that on a Saturday, in this neighborhood.

Bruce checked his watch, considered getting himself another glass of water. He was wearing jeans and a freshly laundered shirt. His hair was wet and combed. Below his windows, he watched a black teenage boy surrounded by dogs making his way toward the river. The boy held fistfuls of leash ends in his hands and walked slowly; dogs wove back and forth around him, moving forward in a mass. Bruce counted: one, two, three, five—eight dogs in all. The street was cobbled here; the kid moved right down the center of it. Something few people knew, that he wasn’t even sure if his father remembered, was that his mother had lived for a time on this same street—might have even lived on this block—after college, back when she was part of that population, the good-girl intelligentsia, that worked for lawyers and architects and literary
agents, lunched alone over black coffee at Schrafft’s, lived in pairs, iced liters of pinot grigio in the shower before dinner parties. Bruce’s mother used to tell him about it, her face animated with a kind of darting, weary pleasure underneath the scowl she wore when she talked about the indulgence her life had been before she settled down to the true work of raising him. I was Brenda Shapiro, she would say. I painted my fire escape blood orange. I used to sit out there on weekends, doing God knows what. Reading to pigeons, or something. Oh, honey, I was shameless. I was a mother-bleeping cliché.

When Bruce moved back to New York after her death, after school and the few other places that he’d tried on for size before drifting, bewildered, back to the only city he knew, his father gave him the option of moving into their old apartment; it hadn’t sold yet, the furniture was still in it. Bruce could sleep far uptown in the twin bed of his childhood if he wanted to, boil things in the glazed, damaged pots that his parents had received as wedding presents. He could spread out, alone, in any room; Bruce’s father was already living in the Springs by then. No thanks, Dad, Bruce told him, though he had no sense of what else he would do. I’ll find something.

He had crashed on a friend’s floor, then met a woman of indeterminate age at a party and stayed with her while he spent his days going to open houses all over Manhattan, with no criteria to narrow his search other than a vague feeling that he would know where he was supposed to live when he saw it, based on an impression, on some distinguishing feature: hand-built bookshelves, a bike rack in the vestibule, a bit of graffiti on an outside wall that he would have no choice but to read as significant. He would spend his whole inheritance, plus the little he had saved in his own bank account, on the rooms where he now lived, stacked three over three, like the layers of a cake. The front door of the building opened into a brief entry hall that disappeared up a carpeted staircase. To its left was a numbered door that opened to reveal the first floor of the house, the bottom layer, which was empty when he’d moved in except for stacks and stacks of newspapers, short
and tall stacks, leaning at angles, striated yellow, white, gray, like hacked-out cross sections of earth—stacks in the living room fireplace, on the deep windowsills, the kitchen that overlooked a dried-up back garden. The upper floor had once been a separate apartment; the Realtor had told him the previous owner had occupied both at once, without ever taking the time to integrate them. Bruce often wondered about the man who had lived in this place, his life divided onto two floors. The upstairs door was still numbered; the place where the guy had slept was at a different address than the place where he had made himself breakfast. He must have run up and down the house staircase twenty times a day, or maybe preferred to camp for periods of time in one or another of his apartments, to effect that kind of temporary vacation from his life.

Bruce didn’t feel young. The last time he had seen his father, his father had taken him drinking, something they had never done together. They had sat in a hotel bar on Fifty-ninth; his father had sipped at a beer and, in his way, urged Bruce to get drunk. Bruce accepted the first shot of whiskey out of politeness, or maybe fear: his father was too giddy, the bar too expensive. Bruce had just returned from a trip to Asia, having accepted the invitation of a classmate who had moved to Hong Kong to work for the AP—he answered each of his father’s questions about the boat they had taken into China, the terrifying airport landing, the floodlit racetrack in Happy Valley. Another round, his father would call, just as Bruce had reached the middle of an answer or explanation, and Bruce would have to shake his head no at the waitress, or let her set another shot in front of him and leave it brimming there, untouched. His father’s nails were bitten down; it took Bruce moments to remember that they had always been that way, that his pants had always been stained here and there with ink marks. He both loved and dreaded his father for trying to give him the gift of blankness that night, to narrow his focus to a set of empty glasses, a bed to tumble into gratefully at the end of the night. Though his father wasn’t a drinker himself, Bruce knew that these were the things he wanted for both of them: strong physical sensations, and
escape. The things that he had not had to think to rely on when mathematics and his wife were still wholly alive to him.