Quarantine: Stories (13 page)

The next time Don came home from meeting Antwon (Dick’s: draft), he didn’t say if Antwon mentioned the reading or if he mentioned me, and I didn’t allow myself to ask.

3.

W
hen I arrived at Don’s house, climbed the back stairs, opened the door with my extra key, the first person I saw was Antwon, standing at the stove stirring soup. He was shirtless, the hair on his chest shot through with gray. He and Don must have just come from the studio. They were sweaty and seemed hungry. Antwon was cooking from the vegetarian cookbook he gave Don and me as a housewarming gift five years ago when we first moved in together in Crown Heights. It lay next to the stove, open to the recipe for mulligatawny soup, a dish I had been eating my whole life and didn’t need a recipe to make.

“Taste,” he said, and scooped up a spoonful. He blew on it, cupped a hand beneath, and held it out to Don, who was also shirtless, sitting at a small table.

I watched as Don let himself be fed.

The previous fall, Don and I had moved to upstate New York, just a few hours from New York City, but a world away. It was my idea; I wanted to go to grad school for creative writing. I told Don I couldn’t do it in the city; it was too distracting. He was reluctant to move, but he eventually conceded. He found a graduate program in dance. Our schools were two hours apart, and we took turns visiting each other on weekends.

Don was renting the upstairs apartment in a small house a block from campus. His landlord was a farmer who lived in the next town over. When he showed us the apartment, he was wearing jeans and work boots caked in mud. He didn’t remove them before walking all over the carpet. He also didn’t say anything about the downstairs neighbors.

Several days after Don had moved into his apartment and I had moved into mine, Don told me he still hadn’t met them or even seen them. But he’d
heard
them. He said during the day, their blinds were closed, their windows and doors shut. But several nights a week, around two or three in the morning, Don woke to the
thump thump thump
of their stereo blasting techno music. He said he could feel it pulsating through the thin floor. After a few weeks, one night when I was sleeping over and hearing the din for myself, Don said, “Enough,” threw back the covers, splashed water on his face, and padded downstairs to talk to them. When he returned, the volume was maybe microscopically lower, maybe not. “What happened?” I asked. He said, “I don’t know what those boys are on—coke, speed, crystal meth. Their eyes were like Frisbees. I’m not going back down there.”

It had been a difficult year. We weren’t prepared for the cold, gray winter that seemed like it would never end. It was particularly difficult for Don, because he didn’t like his program, which was reputable but stale. The best-known faculty member choreographed Broadway musicals. Don’s work, by contrast, was experimental. In so many ways, he felt like an alien.

That was why he had invited Antwon, why he had spent so much time convincing the other members of the visiting guest artist committee that Antwon would be perfect for a one-week residency. Don was frustrated and craved the creative boost that would accompany Antwon’s visit. He also hoped that, as a byproduct of meeting Antwon, the students and faculty would have a greater understanding and appreciation for Don’s own edgy work.

When he first told me he was thinking about bringing Antwon, I thought about saying no. Antwon had been out of our lives, more or less, for almost a year, and I was grateful. But I held my tongue, thinking,
Don needs this.
And now here he was, feeding Don soup. He’d been here all week teaching classes; these were the last two days.

To cap off the residency, Antwon was planning to perform one of his own pieces at an informal student concert that night and the next. I’d never seen his work and wasn’t quite sure what to expect, though I knew, of course, Don loved it.

Antwon’s piece was titled
Yours
. He described it as an exercise in “relinquishing control” and “surrendering to the desires of others.” The performance worked like this. Antwon would pick three people from the audience and ask them to stand on the side of the stage. They would each be responsible for a body part, controlling whether he saw, spoke or moved by saying
eyes
,
mouth
, or
body
. Then Antwon would pick someone else to stand at the other edge of the stage with six large cards numbered five through zero in descending order. The audience would determine the length of the performance because whenever anyone got bored that person could call out the number on the card—
five!
—which the person holding the cards would then drop, revealing the next number in descending order. The numbers would get called one by one until the audience reached zero and the dance was over. Anyone from the audience could call out a number whenever he or she got bored. It was perfectly democratic.

The first night, the performance didn’t last long. The audience wasn’t interested in Antwon. Most of the other dances featured pretty girls and MTV choreography or classical ballet, and when the girls performed, their parents and boyfriends cheered and whistled and snapped photos. When Antwon performed, they read their programs and looked at their watches, wondering if they’d get home in time to watch their favorite television shows. They called out numbers five to zero quick as a space-shuttle countdown.

At home that night, Antwon was demoralized. “That was one of the worst concerts and worst audiences I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve been performing a long time.”

“Actually, I kind of liked the routine to Britney’s ‘Stronger,’ ” I said, “especially the part where the girl jumped off the ballet barre.” I was partly joking, partly not—a tone Don was familiar with by now.

Don and Antwon were sitting close to each other on the couch. Don leaned over to him and said, “See what I’ve been dealing with.” I assumed he was responding to what Antwon had said about the crappy concert and the unappreciative audience, not to my comment about liking the Britney routine, though I couldn’t be sure. They continued grumbling among themselves and popping caps off beer after beer, and after a while I got tired. I disappeared into the bedroom without anyone noticing or saying goodnight.

T
he next morning Antwon said he wanted to see Niagara Falls. We were only a couple of hours away. “This is probably the closest I’ll ever get, so I might as well.” Neither Don nor I had seen the Falls either.

“I don’t have my passport,” I said. Don and Antwon both had theirs: Don because we were in his apartment and Antwon because he didn’t have a driver’s license, so it was his main form of ID. My passport was in my own apartment, two hours away.

Don said, “American citizens don’t need passports to cross into Canada.”

“True,” I said, “if you’re
white
.” I looked at Antwon, expecting him to back me up, but he didn’t say anything.

Don said, “Stop playing the race card.”

I told them the story of my one failed attempt to see the Falls.

“My cousin’s grandmother was visiting from India, and we agreed to take her. My cousin and I were both eighteen or so. We drove in my uncle’s car all the way from Poughkeepsie, seven hours away, and when we reached the border we were denied entry. Well, my cousin and I were denied entry. My cousin’s grandmother was fine; she had her passport, a visa, everything. But we only had driver’s licenses. ‘Anyone can get a driver’s license,’ the guard insisted. My cousin said, ‘Our car has New York plates.’ I said, ‘We’re driving a Mercedes.’ But the guard was unmoved. So we found a tour bus in Buffalo that would take my cousin’s grandmother across the border, and my cousin and I waited for three hours in a Friendly’s parking lot, smoking cigarettes. But it was worth it. She loved it, and talked about it the whole way home. My cousin said she was still talking about it when she called him from India two months later.”

“You could have seen the Falls from the American side,” Don said. “You didn’t have to sit in a parking lot.”

“The American side isn’t as good. You only get one first time, and a girl wants hers to be special.” I made doe eyes at him and batted my eyelashes, which he didn’t seem to notice, but Antwon winked at me.

“I don’t want to ruin it for everyone,” I said. “You guys should go on your own.”

Don and Antwon exchanged glances. I imagined them hopping into the car—
my
car, probably, since it was the more reliable of the two—and peeling out of the driveway, all too happy to be sailing away without me. Sailors at sea, where anything could happen. I’d be alone in Don’s apartment, scrubbing the breakfast dishes. I suddenly felt sick.

“Don’t be silly,” Don said. “You’re coming.”

“What if they don’t let me in? I’m not spending another three hours in the parking lot of Friendly’s.”

“They will,” Don said. “If they don’t, we’ll come back. It’s a nice day for a drive.”

It was true. It was a beautiful spring day, the first after a long, difficult winter.

When we arrived at the border, the guard asked our citizenship. He asked where we were going. He asked if we were carrying fruits or vegetables or firearms. He asked to see what was in our trunk (jumper cables; tools; a bag of old clothes for the Salvation Army, which had been there since we packed up our Crown Heights apartment the previous August). Then he waved us through.

“Toldja,” Don said from the driver’s seat. He pecked me on the cheek, and I found myself half-wishing we had been turned away, just to have been right.

A few minutes later and we were at the Falls. As we walked toward them, I was unimpressed. “I thought they’d be bigger.” I was distracted by the hordes of tourists: fat Americans; endless busloads of Chinese; Indian aunties—not unlike my own cousin’s grandmother—in saris and cardigans and chappals and thick wool socks. It was nothing like I had imagined.

Don and Antwon, on the other hand, were mesmerized. The three of us walked up close, eventually leaning over the railing of the platform that hovered above the Falls. Antwon tried to say something to me, but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of the water. And for a moment it was nice to stand there, sandwiched between Don and Antwon, the mist on my face, the crashing water so loud it drowned out everything else. Nothing else existed. The world fell away. I had the most pleasant sensation of being both there and not there. I wondered if that was how the boys downstairs felt when they blasted their music.

Later, in the pavilion, as we were eating our veggie burgers, I asked Antwon what he was trying to tell me at the Falls.

“Forget it,” he said.

“No,” Don said, in a mock-jealous voice, “what were you two whispering about?”

“As if anyone could have been whispering and still be heard,” I said.

Antwon said, “I was just thinking: people must die here all the time. Personally, I always have the urge to jump. Not that I want to die. My mind never even gets that far. It’s not about dying. It’s about wanting to know what it feels like to float, or fly, or fall, or whatever it feels like. It’s about wanting to feel free. Haven’t you guys ever had that urge?”

Don said, “Yes, always. Leaning over the Falls, the edge of a cliff, the railing at the Empire State Building.”

“What about you?” Antwon asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess I have.”

“If you’re not sure, then you haven’t,” Antwon said.

I tried to picture it—climbing over the railing, leaping outward. Maybe I’d do it farther upstream, diving into the river, letting myself get swept away toward the Falls. Would I try to grab onto something at the last minute? Or would I let it happen?

Later, driving home, Don said, “Someone from our school recently died here.”

“Someone I knew?” I asked.

“No. He was a video artist. Not much older than I am. Last summer, his baby had a high fever, and he and his wife took her to the emergency room. After a couple of hours, the hospital staff started asking them questions that had nothing to do with the fever. The hospital told them they would have to leave their baby, she was being held overnight until the fever subsided, and then she would be released into the custody of Child Welfare.

“According to the rumor mill, the authorities thought the couple was abusing the child, but no one seems to know what made the authorities think that or specifically what they think the couple did. The couple spent the next several months racking up legal bills they couldn’t pay, trying to get their baby back. Then one day, the husband got in his car, drove to the Falls, and threw himself in. No warning. No note. At his funeral, the wife showed some of his recent video work, which he had been shooting for months, and which consisted mostly of slow-motion, black-and-white videos of the Falls, mostly in winter. Everyone cried, even the people who barely knew him.”

We continued driving. I was in the passenger seat and had taken control of the radio. When the new Janet Jackson song came on, I danced in my seat. From the highway, I could see the tacky yellow sign of a regional discount chain, and I asked Don if we could stop. I wanted to buy the CD. Antwon said he had to pee.