Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (29 page)

But old guy does not. A few months ago, not long after I moved in, I came down the stairs and found homo couple and compulsive recycler talking about how they couldn’t believe he was eighty-one and how he looked like an older Jimmy Stewart. When they started speculating on what kind of fitness routine he must follow to stay in such good shape, I got nauseated and left the building.

Soggy copies of the
Times
, the
Post
, and the
Daily News
stick out of the faded canvas Planned Parenthood bag that hangs from his arm. He’s either oblivious or indifferent to the slippery-when-wet spot spreading out in all directions from his New York Public Library umbrella that lies on the tile floor, shedding enough water to irrigate the Sudan.

Pro-choice/anti-neighbor seems to be old guy’s platform, because he’s bent at a right angle in the narrow vestibule, completely blocking my entry into our building. Either he moves or I knock him down and step over him.

“Look, I’m cold and wet and I live on the fifth floor, so I’ve got miles to go before I sleep,” I say in my last attempt at quasi-friendly banter.

“Frost. I’m impressed,” old guy says, not looking up. “But I figured you more for the ‘Good fences make good neighbors type.”

“And you’d be right.”

“Ahhh,” he says, straightening up and looking at me with a kind of wild-eyed fervor almost never evoked by Robert Frost. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he booms. “That wants it down.”

When he leans in and whispers conspiratorially, I can see little flecks of foam in the corners of his mouth. He smells strongly of the same mentholated cough drops my grandfather used to suck on. I always hated those.

“I could say ‘Elves’ to him,” the old guy says in a stage whisper and goes back to jabbing at the lock. “But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather …”

I grab the little key out of the old guy’s hand. “You ever think maybe it’s time for reading glasses?”

I open mailbox 3c, pull out the underwhelming contents, and lock it up again. I slap the key into his palm and try to get around him, but he’s not budging.

“I can read fine, Mr. 5c.” He grabs his mail and pokes me in the chest with his key. “I’m just a little too stoned to get the teeny-tiny key into the teeny-tiny lock.”

He turns and unsteadily starts toward the narrow staircase.

“Excellent shit, too,” he says without turning around.

This unexpected revelation knocks me off my game and now I am stuck behind him. I feel like a Porsche following a tractor on a one-lane highway.

Somewhere between the first and second floor, he stops to admire the tacky Sears light fixture on the ceiling.

“Now that is beautiful workmanship. I’m guessing belle epoque. But probably a reproduction,” he says, bending his head back so far he almost tumbles backward down the stairs. He doesn’t say anything when I put my hand on his back to prop him back up. A few steps later he stops to pet the polished wood banister. “No seam. All one piece. You don’t see carpentry like that anymore.” And a few steps later, to appreciate the dark red paint on all the second-floor apartment doors. “Have those always been that color? What would you call it?”

“Red.”

He turns around and, without actually focusing his eyes, gives me a dirty look.

“Philistine.” He stares at one of the doors, tilting his head from side to side as if he were looking at one of those blinking Jesus holograms. Fuck, I am never getting home tonight.

“Okay, fine,” I say. “What would you call it?”

“Burgundy maybe? No, more of a Chianti or—I know, claret.”

“So really any shade of red with an alcohol content of fourteen percent.”

“Claret, definitely.”

“I don’t know about you, but I was fuckin’ terrified we weren’t gonna solve that one. Can we move
on
, please?”

Lucky for me, the numbered floors start at street level. One more and we’d be camping out on the landing overnight. When we reach three—approximately twenty minutes after completing the thirty-minute mail retrieval mission—he stops in front of the apartment at the top of the stairs. He keeps his back to me while he fumbles with his keys.

“I don’t put out on the first date,” he says over his shoulder.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I like ’em a little higher up the actuarial table. I just wanted to make sure you could get in.”

“Bullshit. You want to smoke.”

“What? No!”

The plan is to protest, but not so much that he can’t actually see right through me.

“I mean I might. You know, once in a while. But I’m not going to smoke yours. You probably need it for your … and don’t they ration you?

“My what?”

“Your—well, don’t you have …”

“Cancer? Do I look like I have cancer?”

Old guy, thinning hair, getting high regularly? Pardon me for jumping to conclusions. I shrug.

“No, I do not have cancer. Shit, I look a helluva lot better than you. I work out, you know. Weights.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“You don’t believe it.”

“Sure I do. I bet you can bench-press your own weight.”

“Asshole.”

The old guy picks up the stroller parked outside the apartment next door and hoists it over his head. A shower of Goldfish crumbs, petrified Cheerios, and animal cracker amputees rains down on him. He stumbles backward a few steps, loses his grip on the stroller, and it goes bouncing down the stairs. Most of it comes to a stop on the landing, but one wheel continues down to the first floor.

The old guy stares over the railing at it. I stare at the apartment that belonged to the stroller.

“Depressed single mother?” I ask.

“Uh-huh.”

“Leave her a note. I’ll take care of it.”

He’s still staring into the abyss when I notice that his Planned Parenthood bag, deflated and empty, is hanging limply from his wrist, one strap dragging on the floor. The contents—more than just a bunch of soggy tabloids—have spilled out and there must be a dozen little plastic containers of weed, all neatly labeled, scattered across the hallway floor.

I bend over to start picking them up and suddenly the old guy whips around, knocks me out of the way, and snatches up every one. He readjusts his bag onto his shoulder and looks at me bashfully.

“I just had lunch with my dealer.”

“You do lunch with your dealer.”

“We’re very tight.”

“You know,” I say, “I don’t think we’ve ever been formally introduced. I’m Greyson Todd.”

“Walt Fischer,” he says, shaking my hand. “Wanna get wasted?”

I know exactly what to expect when I enter Walt’s apartment. Cabbage boiling on the stove, plastic runners to protect the high-traffic areas of his beige wall-to-wall carpeting, econo-size tube of Preparation H on the bathroom counter.

But I am wrong. Very. True, the peeling paint and ceiling cracks are just where I thought they’d be, and the wood is stained on the floorboards around the radiators. But repairing those obvious signs of wear and tear would be a mistake. Apparently, our landlord agrees.

Wear and tear is the foundation upon which Walt has built his castle. Through the doorways of the railroad apartment, I can see that room after room is filled with what are either family heirlooms or, more likely, carefully sought-out treasures picked up for nothing over years of dedicated flea-marketing.

I do not expect to be invited into someone’s home. It has been a long time and I am unprepared. I am searching for feelings I cannot name. Like trying to identify the spices in a new version of an old recipe.

Walt peels my coat off without asking me and hangs it carefully on a brass coatrack. He tosses his keys and mail on an old silver tray monogrammed with someone else’s initials and then bends to squint at an invisible spot on the narrow oak table it sits on. I smile for the first time today when he licks his thumb, rubs the spot, and then polishes it with the hem of his sweater.

I wander around Walt’s living room: grandfather clock, well-worn kilim rugs, antique mirrors, rolltop desk, velvet armchair, faded leather sofa. The combined alchemy of these objects gives off the warmth and peace of mind Beverly Hills decorators have struggled for centuries to replicate.

Beyond the living room, a streetlight shines into Walt’s bedroom, illuminating a collection of little colored glass bottles on the window-sill. Those bottles. Something about them makes me want to put my arms around Walt and hold on very tight. Because old guys don’t have little glass bottle collections. Teenage girls do. Willa does. Probably.

I am in Walt’s house, looking into Willa’s room. I am in Walt’s house, standing in my house, looking into Willa’s room from my living room with the grandfather clock for which we overpaid because Ellen fell in love with it at the Santa Monica Antique Show. I fell in love with the deep reverberating sounds it filled the house with every fifteen minutes. The chiming that eventually made Ellen regret we’d ever bought it in the first place.

I taste home. And for that, I love Walt.

But I think I will save the hug for another time.

“Pretty swingin’ bachelor pad, huh?”

“You’ve got quite an eye, Walt.”

He walks over to an antique wooden icebox—the kind that used actual ice to keep the food cold. “Had one just like this when I was a kid.”

The advent of Freon has freed up Walt’s icebox to accommodate his large and varied selection of booze. He pulls out an excellent bottle of Hennessy and two old-fashioned-looking snifters.

“Are you sure you’re not a gay man from West Hollywood?”

“This,” he says with a sweeping gesture, “was a hobby born of necessity.”

“Fire or divorce?”

“My ex-wife got every fucking stick of furniture,” he says, handing me my drink.

“If I didn’t hate her so much, I’d thank her. I didn’t realize how ugly that shit was. It was kind of a toss-up which one of ’em I was happier to get rid of.”

Walt unlatches the old pipe rack that’s sitting on the coffee table, and as soon as he cracks the lid, the thick aroma of fresh, sticky pot leaks out.

“Give yourself a tour while I roll us a joint.”

The kitchen is narrow with doorways at both ends and the appliances are ancient—the downside of living in a rent-controlled apartment. Walt’s refrigerator door is covered with photos: a boy around seven and a girl of nine or ten. In one, the children are younger. They sit together on Walt’s lap eating ice cream cones, dripping chocolate and strawberry all over Walt, whose head is thrown back midlaugh. I lift the corner to look at the photo underneath it. A much younger Walt—probably in his forties—stands with his arm around a young man in a cap and gown. A pretty, young woman stands on the other side of him smiling.

I am halfway out of the kitchen before Walt’s art collection catches my eye. Layer upon layer of crayon drawings, macaroni collages, and construction paper snowmen are taped to the side of the fridge facing the wall. Secreted away like treasure. These I remember. These I know. Our Sub-Zero was Willa’s private gallery. The exhibits changed, but Ellen kept them all. All of the fall leaves pressed in wax paper, all of the cotton-ball bunnies, all of the four-fingered, pickle-nosed self-portraits.

I feel tiny beads of sweat form on my forehead. My heart is racing.

Why didn’t I take one with me? How stupid. Just one to tape on the side of my refrigerator. I am convinced that everything would be different if I had slid a crayon landscape with a rainbow out from under the Pepsi bottle magnet. Or taken one of her early works from the giant plastic storage box Ellen kept them in under her bed.

I can’t stop it. I press both hands over my mouth to muffle the unplanned sob that escapes. Just one. I wipe the tears away with a dishtowel. I’m fine.

“I didn’t realize my kitchen was so interesting,” Walt yells from the living room.

My first impulse is to run. I’ve been caught standing in Walt’s kitchen staring at his grandchildren’s artwork like it’s porn.

I remind myself that it’s possible I’m being paranoid. That most likely Walt has no idea what I’ve been doing in here. I stick my head out the door so I can see Walt.

“Those your grandkids?”

“No, I just like to hang out near playgrounds with a telephoto lens.”

I can see the little glass bottles. Just over Walt’s shoulder. In Willa’s room. I’m sure there is a plastic storage box under the bed filled with her artwork. I look at the art on the fridge again. I’m sure it’s just like what’s in the box under her bed in her room.

So I take one. A macaroni-and-lentil collage in the shape of a heart.

“And your daughter and son?”

I roll it up very carefully and walk to the other side of the kitchen, which opens onto the entry hall.

“Uh-huh. She’s an astrophysicist at Cal Tech. He’s … a Republican.”

I gently slide my heart into the sleeve of my jacket.

“Makes me sick. But Richard, my son, lives in Westport, so the upside is I get to see my grandkids. I read to them from
The Communist Manifesto
when they come to visit.”

I sneak back into the kitchen and walk out through the other side into the living room, where Walt is carefully licking the edge of the paper on a perfectly rolled joint.

“Soup’s on,” Walt says, handing me the joint and a sterling silver cigarette lighter circa 1940.

I am still stoned when I leave Walt’s and walk down the street to the twenty-four-hour drugstore on the corner. I am cradling my jacket as gently as I can. When I get back upstairs to my apartment, I spread the jacket out on the kitchen counter and gently work the collage out of my sleeve.

Then I take out the Elmer’s I bought at the drugstore and carefully reglue the macaroni pieces that broke off.

New York, 1994
. I wake up feeling lost, empty, as if I have given too much blood. Or all of it. But Glenda is there to cheer me up. To make me forget what I can’t remember.

The day after Glenda’s cinematic come-on, I more or less invited her to watch me jerk off—an invitation some girls might actually balk at. Dragging my blanket behind me, I came into the dayroom, lay down on one of the couches, and, making sure she could see, put my hand down my pants. While the other patients watched
Jaws
, Glenda pulled up a chair and watched me. We went on like that for days, eventually getting each other off under the table at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.