Rust (16 page)

On the way in, she found herself singing the words to “Greensleeves,” which she couldn’t even remember learning. “
Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously
,” she sang to the accompaniment of the music from the truck which still hadn’t moved, though the crowd of children had diminished to just a few stragglers. “. . .
For I have loved you well and long, delighting in your company
.”

That is a very sad song, she thought, as she flopped down on the couch and stretched out. She felt depressed just singing it, perhaps because of the little scene she’d just witnessed between Rico and Rosalita, perhaps because discourtesy weasled its way into all love relationships sooner or later, perhaps because there was always somebody who had loved somebody else, delighted in his or her company, and then got shafted.

Aside from Nick, with whom love had repeatedly blossomed, burst forth like a tropical flower which, despite its beauty, had never been picked, Margaret had experienced true love—the kind seen in movies, twisted with passion and drama, thirst and hunger—only once. And truthfully, when she looked back, which she tried not to do very often, she felt lucky she’d gotten as far as she had with it, given her lack of preparedness for the black chasm of fear that had cracked open inside her, right along with her heart. This man’s name was Harold, and he was a musician, a saxophone player whom she’d met in the Stereophonic Lounge when he came to hear a ragtag blues band that had, shortly afterward, received a lucrative recording contract and vanished forever from the local venues.

He was twenty-seven, two years older than she was, when he sidled up to the bar and ordered a Slow Comfortable Screw, a drink that gained its popularity mainly, she assumed, because people liked to ask for it. It made them feel lawless, which was helpful on a night out in a bar. She worked the bottles like the pro she was, using her stainless steel shaker to mix the ingredients right in front of him. The sloe gin, the Southern Comfort, vodka, and orange juice—it looked like a recipe for trouble as she poured it over the ice and shook it with a suggestion, perhaps, in the shaking, of a hand job just for him. Then she drained it into the glass she had already placed on the coaster, filling it to the brim without even one spare drop left over.

“Hope it’s slow enough for you,” she cooed, as she raised her eyes to his and held them there. For some reason, no doubt associated with the lighting, her eyes looked greener in the dark bar than anywhere else.

“Oh, no,” he sighed, as he gazed into them and simultaneously slid a ten dollar bill across the bar, “I had hoped for something more original from you.”

“Then you should have started with something more original,” she replied, with a little glance toward the drink. “I base my badinage on the line that’s fed me.”

“Badinage?” he said.

“Look it up. Get back to me,” she replied with a sexy little smile in her eyes. Margaret herself had only learned that word a few days before when she read it in a trashy novel that someone had left on the seat in the coffee shop where she frequently had breakfast. When she had read it, she’d thought it referred to some S&M practice. That didn’t fit the context of the story, so she had consulted the dictionary.

“Oh, I know what it means. But I haven’t heard it used in a sentence since the last Merchant-Ivory film.”

Now she smiled. “Please pass the badinage,” she said, and he replied in an assumed British accent, “Sorry, darling, we seem to have run out,” and then they both laughed. That was how they started, a combination of sexual innuendo and merriment, all mixed in with an unusual vocabulary word. Three years later, it ended rather differently.

But those three years! Margaret had felt herself falling through space toward him, right then at the very beginning, and had surreptitiously reached for the edge of the rinsing sink under the bar to steady herself. As for Harold, he had fallen in love with her from the back, before she’d even turned around from the other end of the long bar and noticed him waiting there. Her black hair, which brushed the waistband of her jeans like a curtain that had been pulled closed for privacy, had not prepared him for such pale skin or those eyes which seemed to have the history of Ireland in them. And when she’d moved toward him, her hips had swayed from side to side like a model on a runway ramp in Milan, and Harold got it, what happens when women lead so subtly with their hips. So ordering the Slow Comfortable Screw was truly a wish in search of fulfillment, though it should be said that it was also his favorite drink at the time.

When he had turned on his barstool away from the bar and toward the music, Margaret had studied him carefully in profile. He was olive-skinned and thin with wild curls that spiraled off his head in shades of burnt sienna. He wore a black V-neck sweater, well-fitted, and a complicated watch that looked as if it had better things to do than tell time. He drank slowly, putting away just two drinks over the course of the three hours he spent at the bar. When the band packed up and left and he remained, she knew why.

He waited while she cashed out, and then they went around the corner to a basement after-hours club that she knew about, where they huddled into a back booth and confided secrets as if they were both going to be hung at dawn and just wanted someone, anyone, to know who they had been. This was unusual for Margaret, who, perhaps after watching sloppy drunks spill their stories for years and thinking it was actually quite pathetic, aspired to and practiced self-containment. But there was a warmth in Harold, a quietness and stability, that drew her out, drew her to him, even though they had no reason to think they might fit together. Harold had the pedigree—the degree from Princeton and the parents in the big apartment on Fifth Avenue. He had the trust fund, annual ski vacations in Gstaad, and intense parental expectations, which he was not currently fulfilling as an itinerant saxophone player.

With her vanished parents and dead grandfather, her classes at the School of Visual Arts leading nowhere except deeper and deeper into the paintings, and her tiny tub-inkitchen apartment in Alphabet City—financed largely by the rental scam she’d set up around Donny’s apartment—Margaret seemed to Harold like a character out of a story, perhaps “The Little Match Girl.” He had known other women artists, of course. How could he not at that time and place, when every other young person billed himself or herself as the next Gustav Klimt, minus the syphilis, or the next Charley Parker, minus that pesky heroin addiction? But to Harold, no one had ever seemed as genuine as Margaret or as beautiful or as talented, or, if the truth be known, as tragic, and he had to fight off the impulse to do such things as lay his expensive coat in a puddle for her to step on. By the time they emerged from the after-hours bar into the rush-hour foot traffic on Canal Street, he was a goner, sucked into love like inept flight deck sailors on aircraft carriers get sucked into jet engines; and by the time it was over, he was, like those sailors, shredded. Shredded by love. And so was Margaret.

The odd part was that, even at the end, neither blamed the other. Each felt totally responsible, as if every problem arose like a black tornado from one psyche only, and trapped them with no hope of escape and no way to save themselves.

But for a while, a few years, they were patched together like a crazy quilt, as if Harold’s privilege and Margaret’s lack were meant to even out for the benefit of both. Without feeling that it diminished her to say yes, she found it possible to accept his many gifts, such as a new winter coat, or sable paintbrushes that retailed for twenty-five dollars each, or a weekend in Montreal at the jazz-fest; while Harold experienced a frenzy of commitment to the artistic life just through exposure to Margaret and her passion for painting. This took precedence over everything, including him. He delighted in being ignored while she spent hours in the tiny airless studio she had kept on the Bowery since she was nineteen, not much more than a large storage closet really, in the back of a restaurant supply warehouse owned by a lifelong friend of Donny’s from the old country. It cost her $250 a month, a sum which was often hard to come up with, but she managed it.

In the corner of her living room on Avenue B, Margaret had a six-inch slab of high-density foam, which served as both a bed and a couch of sorts. When she and Harold were in the apartment together, they rarely left it, as if it were a raft floating in the open sea a thousand miles from the nearest port. It was there that they pushed into each other, farther and farther, past anything healthy after a while, which is when it got dicey.

Harold compared the place they arrived at in their love affair to the molten core of the earth. Buried deep, hidden, burning at ten thousand degrees, it was simply not survivable. It should have been the place where they abandoned themselves, fusing into some other unit, a two-headed chimera that could take on anything, but to do that took courage, a sense of destiny, or a willingness to give up their previous lives. Neither knew how to do it. Margaret’s core was fragile and fearful, certain she would never be safe, petrified, really, of being abandoned yet again by love. When she should have trusted Harold, she withdrew instead, tightened inward to steel herself for the next loss, a defensive move she did not even recognize for what it was. And as she withdrew, Harold stood helplessly by, dying more each day as his muse and his strength retreated. He knew that, without her, he was headed for graduate school—an MBA most likely—and a Wall Street future in his father’s investment firm, where he would always be the son of the boss and never have to make his own way, like Margaret had to. He should have hung on to her, wrapped his arms around her waist and locked his fingers together in front of her heart for life. He should have wailed, screamed like a banshee, or howled like a lonely wolf, but he could not because he was paralyzed with the shame of the privileged.

In the end, each of their dreads came true. Harold disappeared down the stairs of her building on Avenue B. Margaret, her back pressed against the wall, let him go. A moment later, the phone rang. She answered it.

“Margaret, please,” he said, “it’s like you’re all wadded up inside, tangled up in things you don’t need to be afraid of with me. I love you. Can’t you understand that? I don’t want us to end.”

“And yet you just walked out and slammed the door,” she replied icily. She could hear the traffic on the street in stereo—through her window and in the phone. She could feel her breath burning in her throat.

Harold was silent for a few seconds. Then he whispered, “Margaret, please let me help unravel the wad you use to get through life. Please.”

It felt like a knife shoved into her chest. “It’s too late, Harold. Go home to your trust fund,” she said.

She unplugged the phone, curled into the foam mattress, and barely moved for two days and nights. She lost the last of her hope and moved through her life as a woman who could not be reached. And Harold, though Margaret never knew it, developed a drinking problem, one that put him in rehab twice before he even finished his master’s degree and stepped into the executive suite waiting for him just two blocks away from the New York Stock Exchange.

Through all of that, neither had ever resorted to stingrays.

Margaret finished one full rendition of “Greensleeves” before the truck pulled away from the curb, and the music faded in the distance. Memories of Harold lurked in the shadows of the words of the song, but Margaret was adept at keeping them there, in the dark. Besides, she had something more important on her mind: welding. Like a wizard, she raised her arms. “I dissolve all stingrays that want to come between me and my welding lessons,” she said out loud, spreading her fingers wide, as if sparks were shooting from them.

After a little while, she fell into a deep sleep on the futon couch with Magpie on the floor beside her, and she didn’t awaken until a beam of intense western sun enveloped her, nudging her awake with its relentless heat.

1989

T
HEY
FELL
into a friendship, Vincent and Thomas.

“I’ll teach you how to jail,” Vincent had said, smiling a bit as he used the new verb. “And you can tell me about the world out there, if it’s still out there.”

“It’s out there, worse than ever,” Thomas replied.

“Not worse than in here,” Vincent responded.

Thomas looked around. His eyes passed over the filth, the men in rags, crowded everywhere, the din and the dust and the relentless nothing, and he said, “That depends on where you are. I’ve seen worse.”

“This is the worst I’ve seen,” replied Vincent, “but I’m used to it.”

“There’s worse,” said Thomas.

Vincent had looked into Thomas’ brown eyes and known that what he had said was true.

Eight months later, he looks into those eyes again, deeply, as he wipes fever-sweat off Thomas’ forehead with a rag that he keeps as clean as possible, given the circumstances. Thomas had sliced his foot open on a sliver of tin, the top of a can that had been buried in the dirt of the yard. It became infected. There was no medicine, no one to help. It went septic.