Rust (13 page)

“They don’t wear green, girls, they wear red!” Margaret would recite, and off they’d go again, into peals of laughter, a far better ritual cleansing than any amount of scrubbing the kitchen or washing the windows.

When Christina returned to school, Margaret fell into a black hole, into the dark night where it was more than she could manage to get out the door once a day to make a grocery run to the corner. She stopped eating. She stopped going to work—and she had a good job for someone inexperienced, as a go-fer in a company that published three different arts and crafts magazines. She also stopped attending her painting classes, which, after a few weeks, brought Nick, her teacher, to her door. She would never forget the look on his face when she answered it.

“Oh my God,” he had said. And she had tumbled into his arms as if he were her best friend, and said, “My grandfather died, Nick,” and then proceeded to faint, something she had never done in her life. It had simply taken everything out of her to say those few words. He had done all the right things: carried her to the couch, wet a washcloth with cool water and pressed it to her forehead, cleaned up the kitchen and made some food from scratch. He had drawn her a bath and made her get in it, collected the dirty clothes from the floor and taken them to the Chinese laundry on the corner. He even contacted the counselor at the School of Visual Arts, begging her to make a house call, even though Margaret—as a part-time student—didn’t actually qualify for her services.

Margaret, even in her fog, had suspected at the time—and later Nick confirmed it—that rescuing her in that moment had almost done him in. He had never before seen anyone who had gone over the edge. He had made a concentrated effort in his own life to stay as far away from the edges as he possibly could; but he forced himself to help Margaret, to pull her gently back. Once she was on her feet again, he took off running, and they barely spoke for over a year, by which time he had married another woman.

It took eight months for the sharp, deep ache of no-Donny to begin to dull, and then Margaret decided that she could not live in the apartment anymore. So she sublet it illegally for close to three times what she paid in rent. The monthly profit subsidized a smaller place in an unimproved building in the flower district, and then one in the East Village, and then a one-bedroom in Queens, and then a studio in Brooklyn, and so on. She held onto Donny’s apartment for nine years before the management company found her out and threatened legal proceedings if she didn’t surrender the keys immediately, which she did. She had stood in front of the building and looked up at the window where, twenty-three years before, she had watched her mother and father wave goodbye and disappear forever. She never returned to the block where she and her grandfather used to walk, hand in hand, back when she had thought that he was a giant, maybe the biggest and strongest man in the whole world.

Margaret shifted the book off her lap and stood up. It was late, past midnight, and the windowpanes looked solid black in the slits where she hadn’t quite closed the curtains. She walked to the kitchen door, Magpie dutifully trailing after her, and went out into the yard. The rusty parts on the cement pad drew her to them, as if they were sending a message that they were impatient to be assembled. They wanted her to breathe life into them, she thought. She had assumed, when the urge to go three-dimensional first overtook her—long before she had the space and time to do it—that she was artistically fed up with a flat surface and needed to break free of it. But now she knew that it was more. It was also about paying close attention to connection, to the mysteries of how to position parts so they were built to withstand all kinds of pressure, so they were built to last.

She picked up an old gear. It looked like a circle with a hole through the middle, some spines connecting that hole to the circumference, with a railroad track around the edge. She wanted to transform it into an ear on a being that was somewhat recognizable, but not quite human. She wanted to find a way to connect it so it seemed suspended in air, barely touching the other parts. And she wanted to bury this being in such a conglomeration of parts that it would take time to find it, even if you knew where to look. She had to admit that she didn’t even know what kind of metal it was, and therefore could not speculate on its melting point or anything else. Margaret had always entered her paintings from a place of not-knowing. She had no plan for them, wouldn’t think of making one, and was constantly surprised and always thrilled when they squirmed out of her control and did what they wanted. She wished, many times, that she could apply that model to her life in more ways than art. In her painting life, she never knew where she was going and she loved it that way. In her other life, her so-called normal life, she tried to manage it, saving money in her coffee cans, trying to dress up whatever apartment she was in to create a passable home, showing up on time for work, and having the integrity—rare in a bartender—not to steal even one dime. There was a wildness in her, but she kept it confined to her art, and sometimes she wondered what would happen if she just took the lid off the rest of her life and let the wildness in there, too. Perhaps that was coming toward her in some way, for suddenly, in her artistic life, she was imagining finished products before she even had the technical mastery to put them together. If her art became more orderly, more predictable in some way, would her other life get wilder, she wondered. Was she ready for that?

She climbed into the hammock and rocked back and forth like a metronome counting out the minutes until it all would unfold.

1985

V
INCENT
STANDS
next to Will at the prison gate to say goodbye to Jean Pierre. They have known each other for ten long, long years. In each one of those years, Jean Pierre’s family has traveled back and forth from Marseilles to India, hired lawyers, offered bribes. Jean Pierre has never given up hope, something Vincent surrendered long ago, but not as long ago as Will did.

Jean Pierre wears clean clothes, brought in a small bundle by his father, who now sits inside the room marked “Processing,” staring out at his son, who will leave with him on this day. Jean Pierre has received a shave and a shampoo. He wears white sneakers.

His hands are shaking.

“I’m not gonna hug you and get you dirty, man,” says Will. “You clean up good.”

Jean Pierre laughs.

“Fuck some mademoiselles for me,” says Will. And then he turns and walks away.

Vincent steps forward. He is overwhelmed with sadness but he manages to say, “I’m happy for you, Jean Pierre,” even as his eyes fill with tears.

“I remember the address,” Jean Pierre says. “429 West 48
^th
Street, New York, New York. I’ll send a letter. Don’t worry.” And then, on an impulse, he reaches up and lifts off the silver chain with the St. Christopher medal he wears around his neck. He places it on Vincent, like a blessing. “I hope you find your way home,
mon ami,”
he says. “I hope you find your wife and little girl.”

They hug, as if one of them is going to the gallows.

Then Jean Pierre disappears through the door, and Vincent is left standing in the hot sun, staring into the window of the “Processing” room, where men in khaki uniforms block his last glimpse of Jean Pierre.

He hears two days later, though he never knows for certain if it’s true, about the accident, the collision of a battered taxi carrying two foreign passengers and a bus on the winding road to Siruguppa. His hand moves to his throat, to the St. Christopher medal, and he wishes Jean Pierre, who believed in it so completely, had kept it.

He wants to give it back, to give it away.

But he is afraid to take it off.

R
ICO
ARRIVED
at the garage the next morning in a black mood. And the fact that he knew he should be feeling good, maybe even happy, only made him angrier. His life had been out of control in one way, and now it was just as out of control in another. Before last night, he had felt blocked out of something important. He had felt rejected and confused and, at times, very lonely. Now he felt enraged.

The ice between Rico and Rosalita had been officially broken. She had responded to him in a way that seemed genuine, and while he held her in his arms, as she moaned quietly into his chest—trying to muffle her own sounds because all the girls were home and sitting in the living room not very far from their bedroom door—he felt a deep and powerful love flow between them. This love asked for no explanations. It stood outside the perimeter of the last four years as if time had no relevance whatsoever. It knew that forms came and went, including the many forms of relationship and love, sex and marriage. They had been in one phase. It had ended, and now another had begun. Why ask questions?

And Rico hadn’t really asked any last night, just the “Where have you been, Rosalita?” that he repeated twice before he fell into her and got lost. She had not answered anyway, except to say, “Waiting for you to come get me,” which, at the time, had a sexy edge because he was already on top of her at that point, and she had already opened her thighs to him, wrapped her legs around his hips and made it more than clear that the waiting, four years’ worth, was over. Rico had felt himself bear down and lift off at the same time, and after that he had felt as if he’d been sucked into outer space.

But later, after Rosalita had fallen asleep, her face pressed into his chest and her hand low on his stomach, so low that her ring and pinky fingers rested at the edge of his patch of pubic hair, Rico had begun to feel something else, and it wasn’t good. He had imagined this moment for four years, the moment when Rosalita’s winter would turn to spring, and everything between them would at last come back together. He had thought he would feel very good when it happened, but now that it had, Rico felt violated, used by Rosalita, as if she thought it was a fine thing to end her ice age and melt in his arms, offering no apology for all those cold years and acting like nothing had changed in the meantime.

But something had changed, Rico thought. Him. He had changed, moved away from her, perhaps as far as she had moved away from him, though he had been so preoccupied with his own feeling of rejection and felt so much the victim that he had not noticed how far he himself had traveled. Last night had been a point of honor for him; he’d made his last and final attempt to reach her, to pull her back. He’d done it as a gesture of respect for his wife, one last attempt to salvage what they’d had together for nineteen years before he let her go once and for all. But he had never once asked himself if he still wanted her. Rosalita, herself. Now, based on this ice blue anger that made him cold, made him reach for the summer bedspread and pull it up across his chest, hiding that hand on his stomach, he had to face the truth: maybe he didn’t want her anymore. Maybe it was just too late.

He barely slept.

Beside him, Rosalita was peaceful, her chest rising and falling, and her arm folded under her head to form a little pillow. Rico wanted to shake her awake and demand an accounting of the last four years. He felt as if she’d been traveling in some foreign country and had arrived unannounced back at his door last night. She came in and acted as if she’d never been gone.

Rico felt he had a right to a lengthy explanation, an apology, a play by play that would take the sting out of all the nights he’d been turned away by her, all the nights she’d clung to the edge of her side of their bed, where there was no likelihood of a chance brushing up against each other. He tossed, he turned, he got up three times for a glass of water, but he never settled down to sleep—though he did pretend to be off in dreamland when Rosalita got up at five-thirty for work. She had never put her nightgown back on, and now she pranced around the bedroom nude as Rico watched out of the slit in his eye. And she looked good too, a curvy woman with shapely legs and an ass that could still inspire a little loving slap or two. She collected her work clothes and shoes and left the room, closing the door behind her with a soft click. That was when Rico opened his eyes fully and took to staring at the cracks in the ceiling plaster.

When he heard her car start up, heard her open and close the driveway gate, and take off up Riverside Drive, he finally got out of bed. He took a quick shower and put on his clothes, very aware of the pressure in his chest. If he were a tire, he would’ve been inflated far past the optimum amount, he thought, though there was no release valve that he knew of for the human heart. It was just ten after six when he heard Jessica calling to her mother, and he knew they would appear in the kitchen within a few minutes to begin the new day, just the same as all the rest. Today, though, he did not feel up to facing Lucy’s morning grumpiness or Jessica’s babyish exuberance. Quietly, he let himself out the door and got into his truck. He had two hours to kill before he opened the shop.

Before he even knew what he was doing, he turned into the driveway of Albuquerque High School, and swung around the back to the kitchen where Rosalita had just begun her work day. The double doors to the service entrance were wide open and he could see several of the food service workers inside, all in their white uniforms complete with paper hats that looked like cheap French berets covering their hair. Rosalita was one of them. She stood at a long stainless steel prep sink washing a thousand juicy red tomatoes. Beside her stood her friend Sonia, who had worked for the school as long as Rosalita had. It was Sonia who noticed Rico as he came through the door and said a few words to Rosalita that made her look up in surprise, dry her hands and come toward him.