Yellow Mesquite (32 page)

“Frankie on Franklin,” Harley said. “Might be an omen.”

They skirted a ring of yellow sawhorses roped around a manhole, a Con Edison pipe protruding, spewing steam. On their left, the sidewalk lifted and became a loading ramp with industrial garage doors. A truck was loading at one of the bays. Two men stood huddled in a doorway alongside, sharing a bottle in a brown paper bag.
 

“You sure this isn’t the Bowery?”
 

“That’s a few blocks east of here,” Frankie said. She walked in the street, stepping carefully over the rough paving, searching for the number. “Some of these places will fool you. They don’t look very inviting from the outside, but they can be deceiving.”
 

Maybe, but he wasn’t very hopeful. From what he’d seen, a nice loft cost a lot of money.

“There,” Frankie said, coming toward him from the street. “Number one-fifty.”
 

He turned his collar up and stood back, looking at the building. Frankie drew a strand of windblown hair from her mouth with a gloved finger. “Had you rather not look at it?”

“Sure.” He tried to sound optimistic for her sake, since she had found the place and he didn’t want to appear ungrateful. But he had little hope for this grim-looking prospect.
 

He drew open one side of the double metal doors and they stepped into a foyerlike space with four mailboxes grouped in the wall.
 

“Number three,” Frankie said, and punched the corresponding button in a second wall alongside a second door.
 

After a moment, a metallic voice said, “Yah? Who’zit?”
 

“Frankie Mussette. I called about leasing the loft.”

“Yah, yah. C’mon up.” The door buzzed open to reveal a landing
 
before a freight elevator. An ordinary steel door with a grilled window was visible on the right.

He raised the gate in the freight elevator and Frankie followed him into the cage. He punched the third button on an industrial-grade switch box and the cage rattled up. They rose through the ceiling and the second floor came into view, similar to the ground floor, and then they ascended through to the third floor and the cage stopped. The third floor was much like the other two: A steel door with a wire-imbedded window faced them on the landing. He raised the gate and they stepped out.

He knocked. He was about to knock again when a young woman’s face appeared in the gloom behind the grille. He heard two locks being thrown inside. The door opened a couple of inches. The woman squinted through the crack.

“Frankie Mussette. I called about the loft.”

“Yah.” The woman unhooked the chain latch, then stepped back to let them into what at first looked like a darkened warehouse.
 

The woman was thin, dressed in dirty jeans and a T-shirt with F
UCK
C
ENSORSHIP
printed across the front in block letters. Her head hung forward on her shoulders, a tangle of frizzy blond hair.

“Hi. I’m Frankie. This is Harley Buchanan.”
 

“Jill,” said the girl, squinting through sleep-swollen eyes. “C’mon in, take a look around at da place.”

“Da place” smelled of cigarette smoke and something sour.

It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust. The room was at least fifty feet long and thirty wide. A staircase ascended to a balcony that looked to be fifteen feet wide by thirty long. A forest of multicolored T-shirts hung on wires strung across the balcony.

A kitchen of sorts ran beneath the balcony, dishes piled along the countertop and in the sink. A cluttered Formica dining table and a few mismatched chairs. Two platter-size ashtrays mounded with butts and flattened beer cans rose like volcanoes on a coffee table wedged between a broken-down sofa and a rump-sprung recliner.
 

He took it in with a glance—the dinginess, the dirt, and the fact that everything had been painted black—the floors, the walls, the ceilings—all black. Two Casablanca-style fans hung from the ceiling on six-foot lengths of one-inch conduit pipe.

“Look,” said Frankie, gesturing toward the outside wall. The wall was slotted with a grid of windows from knee-high to within a few feet of the ceiling for the whole length of the loft, all painted black but for the top row of panes, letting in slits of dirt-filtered light.

“You paint all this?” Harley asked.

“Yah, we fixed da place up, put in da fixtures’n stuff.”

“You have a certificate of occupancy?”

“Yah. We got a CO aw’right.”

“What’s all that up there? T-shirts?”

“We do da shirts. Fix ’em up, silkscreen ’em and sell ’em. Stuff like that. You the one what wants the place?”

“I’m looking for a place to live and work. But I’ve got to have light.”

A partition had been built out from the wall near one end of the kitchen area to hide the john, but the bathtub stood in plain view. A folding screen zigzagged out from the wall near the tub and the corner of a mattress was visible on the floor behind. A woman’s leg tangled in a wrap of sheet stuck partway out.

Jill dragged a flattened pack of Camels out of her back pocket, pried one out and lit up. Through a haze of smoke, she said, “You a ottist?”
 

“Excuse me?”

“Ottist. You know, drawr pitchers. Paint’n stuff.”
 

“Oh… Yeah, right. Uh, what kind of paint did you use on the windows? Oil Based? Latex?”

Jill frowned at the windows. A thin ribbon of smoke trailed from between her lips and up into her nostrils. “Jeez, I dunno. Paint. Latex maybe?”

He saw now that the half-hidden leg behind the folding screen belonged to a naked woman untangling herself from the sheets. He felt himself coloring at the sound behind the screen as she peed in the toilet and then flushed.

“How long you think it’d take to get all that paint off with remover?” he said to Frankie, mostly for something to say, trying to keep his eyes off the flaming triangle of orange pubic hair on the young woman stepping from behind the screen, pulling on a pair of jeans without the bother of underpants.

“I’ve no idea,” Frankie said. Her color was up a little, a humorous glint in her eye. “But I should think it would be as bright as day in here with those windows cleaned.”
 

“Yah. It was bright before we fixed da place up.”

The toilet girl came forward, tucking in her T-shirt. The tangle of hair on her head blazed orange, crackling out over her shoulders, down over her low forehead. Her blue eyes were heavily outlined in smears of black. She had a large nose with large nostrils and freckles like rust over the creamy skin of her face and arms.
 

“Too fucking bright,” she said without benefit of introduction, giving them a sideways glance as she went past and began digging around in a pile of clothes on the sofa. “I mean, man, you couldn’t see nuttin’ in all that light. Know what I mean?”

“Lottie don’t like it too bright,” said Jill, a wry grin twisted around the Camel pinched between her lips.

The girl, Lottie, gave up on the clothes, felt both hands over her back pockets and turned to Jill. “You got the butts?”
 

Jill rolled her eyes, but dug the pack out of her back pocket and handed it over.

“They’re in-trested in da place. They maybe wanna lease it.”
 

“Yeah? Jesus, I need some coffee. Nobody make coffee?” Lottie stopped and frowned at the cigarette. “Jesus. Camels. Now I ask you, who the fuck smokes Camels?”
 

Jill yawned and stretched. “You don’t want it, gimme it back.”

Lottie poked about in the dishes. “Jesus, who hid the coffeepot?”

“Fill da kettle,” Jill said. She screwed her cigarette out in an empty tuna can. She looked toward the loft. “David hear? He come in last night?”

“How do I know if he came in or not. Where’s all the cups?”

“Where you left ’em, praw’bly.”

“And the kettle. Jesus.”

Jill rolled her eyes. “Go on and look around at da place. I’m gonna make kaka brain some coffee.”

“Fuck you. You’re a kaka brain yourself.”

Jill dug a red-enameled kettle out of the sink and began running water into it.

Harley wandered with Frankie down toward the opposite end of the loft.

“What do you think?” he asked, out of earshot.
 

She smiled her moist Vermeer smile. “Between your accent and theirs? I don’t know how either of you knows what the other is saying.”

“White,” he said. “I’d want everything off-white. Walls and ceilings. All white. And look at this floor. Oak. I bet it could be refinished pretty nice.”
 

The place was black as a tomb, but he could picture it fixed up exactly as he’d imagined the perfect living and working space.
 

Frankie nodded. “Do you think your wife… Will Sherylynne like it?”
 

“Yeah… I don’t know. I think she’d like it if it were fixed up.” But he wasn’t so sure. It was hard to visualize Sherylynne in this place, even if it was fixed up. Only a couple of weeks ago he’d have known for sure whether she would have liked it or not. But a few weeks ago they shared common experiences. Too, matters of one’s living style back home were pretty much cut and dried: You lived in a house or you lived in an apartment. Or a trailer. You lived in a good neighborhood or a bad one. You had hand-me-down furniture or something vinyl-covered from Sears—unless you were the Whiteheads, in which case you had something in Italian leather from Neiman Marcus.
 

“The first thing, before anything else,” Frankie said with a mischievous smile, “is to wall in the bathroom.”
 

He laughed and felt himself coloring a little.
 

He glanced again at the windows. “Why in the world would anybody want to shut out all the light like that?”

“I can’t imagine. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about it.”

“The light in here’s something like inside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”

She gave him a doubtful look.

“Louise Nevelson would think so,” he said.

“Louise Nevelson would clean this place up.”

Jill rinsed cups under the tap. The kettle began to whistle.
 

“I don’t mind the rent,” he said to Frankie. “It’s the fifteen hundred fixture money that gets me.” He had already learned that tenants who improved lofts in New York demanded the cost of that improvement—often padded, and often when there had been no improvement at all—when selling or subleasing.
 

“Welcome to New York,” Frankie said.

Jill spooned instant coffee into a couple of cups. “You guys want coffee?” she called.

“No, thanks. Not for me,” Harley said.

Frankie smiled. “No, thank you.”
 

Lottie sat at the table pinching marijuana from a thirty-five-millimeter film can, carefully crumbling it into the cupped V of a Target cigarette paper.

“We take a look upstairs?”

“Sure. Go on up.”

Frankie followed him up the built-in staircase.

Lottie struck a match to the twist clamped between her lips. “It’s kinda messy up there, y’know?”
 

“ ’At’s where we do da shirts, all ’at kinda stuff.” Jill poked out another Camel butt in a mound of ashes and stood to follow them up.

Paint cans stood along the walls. Silkscreen frames were piled on the floor and propped against the wall. There were rolls of film, squeegees. A sink hung on the wall with ribbons of color dried down its sides.

“We do da shirts up there,” Jill said again.

Frankie followed Harley back downstairs.

“Fifteen’s too much,” he said. “I’ll give you a thousand.”

“Nah,” Lottie said. “We done put way too much in the place for that.”

“Sorry. Too rich for my blood.” He ushered Frankie toward the entrance.
 

Lottie hesitated, then let them out. “Change your mind let me know.”

Icy wind wafted up through he freight elevator.

“That place had real potential,” Frankie said. He could hear the disappointment in her voice.

Outside the wind was even colder, snapping papers and trash in the gutters.
 

“Let’s go somewhere and get coffee,” Frankie said.

They were almost to Varick when he heard yelling above the wind. They turned to see Jill running toward them, pulling a sweater on over the “Censorship” T-shirt.

“Okay, okay,” she huffed, out of breath. “It’s a deal.”
 

Harley paused. “A deal? You’ll take a thousand?”

“Yah, yah. A thousan’ll do.”

“I have to get a cashiers check from the bank. You want me to come back to your place tomorrow?”

“Sure. That’ll work.”

“I’ll have a cashier’s check made out for a thousand dollars. You make out a receipt that it’s fixture money. Okay?”

Jill nodded, shivering in the cold. “Yah, yah. At’s good.”

“Here, write down the name you want the check made out to. One more thing; how long before you can be out?”

Jill wrapped her arms around herself, huddled against the wind. “I dunno…”

“How about the first of January? That’s almost two weeks. Can you be out by the first?”

“Why not? We got nuttin’ to move mostly but da shirts.”

“Okay, I’m gonna draw up a paper that states you’ll be out by the first. Otherwise, the deal’s off.”

“Sure. Why not.”

Harley held out his hand. “Then I’ll see you in the morning at eleven. I’ll have everything ready.”

Jill looked at his hand, took it briefly and let go. “We’ll be there.”
 

She shivered against the cold and ran back along the wall, knees in, throwing her feet out in the way some women had of running.

Chapter 35

Thanksgiving Dreams

T
HE TWO WOMEN
, Jill and Lottie, vacated the loft almost overnight. As they had gotten out so quickly, he decided to send for Sherylynne and Leah in early January. But it was hectic, still learning a new job and trying to get the loft in shape, too. Where to begin? He remained in the Belmore, but had the utilities turned on and a phone installed in the loft.