“And Dodge?”
“Total human scum, I’ll grant you.”
“So where’s the justice?”
“You don’t win them all. That’s why I have such a clean kitchen floor.”
“Okay, you just lost me.”
“Bella gets down on her hands and knees and she scrubs when she’s upset. You watch old movies about giant bugs-”
“Not always. Sometimes they’re about giant crustaceans.”
“And I draw pictures, or at least I used to. I don’t know what to call the stuff I draw now. Actually, I do-I call it crap. My point is, we all deal in our own way. That’s real life.”
“Well, it sucks,” he grumbled, sipping his wine.
“Sometimes it does. Other times, it can be pretty damned perfect.”
“Like when?”
She put her hand over his and squeezed it. “Like right now.”
The Tavern was on Horatio and Washington, right around the corner from Mitch’s apartment. It had sawdust on the floor and very little in the way of decor. In past days, it had been a saloon favored by the neighborhood’s big burly meatpackers. Now it was filled with bright, boisterous young writers, artists, actors and grad students. A lot of them hadn’t paired off yet and were assembled in groups. A lot of those groups were mixed. Des saw black faces, Asian faces, all sorts of faces.
It was not, repeat not, a proper dance club. But it was a place he liked and it did have a jukebox. Since he’d insisted on buying dinner she got the drinks while he edged his way warily over to the juke, a look of sheer dread on his face.
She was at the bar fetching them two frosty mugs of New Amsterdam draft when she heard that opening blast of horns-the one that belongs to no other song than “Respect,” followed by that slamming guitar riff, and then by the lady herself. And now Aretha was singing about what she needed. And Des was gliding her way across the bar toward Mitch, their eyes locked on to each other, and therewas no one else in that crowded place, just them. She put their beers down on the juke and raised her arms up high into the air, bumping hips with the boy, feeling the music and the wine and… and… Damn, what was he doing with himself? Passing a kidney stone? And where was he going with those two clumsy feet of his? Did he not even feel the beat?
But, hey, he was dancing his dance and no one was staring or caring. And he was so damned cute.
Besides, it wasn’t long before they were back at his place and they were in each other’s arms in his big brass bed. He was still worried about her shoulder but she kept telling him not to be. They made sweet love deep into the night while the sirens and the car alarms serenaded them, and the refrigerator trucks outside the packing houses beep-beep-beeped as they backed up and the cabs went tha-thunk-ker-chunk over the steel plate Con Ed had put over the hole in the street.
And for some strange reason there was a special urgency that had never been there before for either of them. Together, they found something new and even more fantastic that night in Mitch’s bed.
“Now you’ve felt it,” he murmured at her as the early light of dawn approached, Mitch stroking her face gently. Truly, he was the most loving man she’d ever been with.
“Felt what, baby?”
“The energy of the city.”
“I thought that was the energy of you and me.”
“Maybe we had a little something to do with it,” he admitted, immediately falling into a deep sleep with his mouth open.
Des was wide awake herself. Something about being here in his apartment made her feel all wired. She threw on a T-shirt, padded barefoot into the living room and flicked on a lamp, gazing around at his place. She was definitely uneasy here. It was Maisie’s place. He’d tried to scour it of her presence after she died. He had told Des this. But there was still a lot that smacked of her. Like the exquisite, matching leather loveseat and club chairs positioned just so. And those vintage brass lamps with green glass shades. And the genuine Stickley library table that he used as a desk. Out on Big Sister, theman used an old door on sawhorses. Des’s trained eye also caught the small things he had missed, like a fat volume entitled Simplified Site Engineering that was shoring up one end of the radiator cover.
Standing there, Des felt a sudden, powerful urge to be somewhere else.
She slipped back into the bedroom for her gym bag. Put on her shorts and running shoes, pocketed Mitch’s spare keys and let herself out the door. It was not quite 6:00 a.m. but the cobblestoned street was awake and active. A half dozen meatpackers were going home after their night’s work, exhausted but rowdy. An executive type in a spotless seersucker suit was walking his Jack Russell terrier and scanning the Wall Street Journal. A young Latino man, stripped to the waist, was working under the hood of his parked car, a sheen of sweat on his bare shoulders, a can of Budweiser within arm’s reach. An old lady in the brownstone across the street was watching him from her second-floor window, her arms resting on a cushion on the windowsill, the smoke from her cigarette curling lazily up into the early morning sunlight that slanted low across Gansevoort from the east.
Des found herself lingering there on the stoop of Mitch’s building, staring at that lady, that sunlight, that man working on his car. To her surprise, her pulse began to quicken and her fingertips tingled. This was the same sensation she felt whenever she walked into the studio at the art academy-an overwhelming sense of being in a special, hallowed place. Des had never experienced this while standing outside on a street before. Not anywhere.
She headed out, suddenly giddy with excitement. The Chinese laundry down the street was already open. So was the corner grocery store, where a young boy was hosing down the sidewalk and a milk truck was making a delivery. She bought herself a coffee and sipped it as she began walking through the close-knit neighborhood of family-owned brownstones, her eyes open wide, soaking in every detail. The building super who was out bagging the trash, muttering to himself. The housewife in her bathrobe who was moving her car from the no-parking side of the street before she got ticketed. Thewasted rock ‘n’ rollers in black leather climbing out of a cab from their night out, reeking of cigarette smoke and patchouli.
By now it was nearly seven, and some folks were heading off to work. Des followed them, swept along by their urgency. Found herself on Fourteenth Street at the entrance to the subway. Bought a token. Rode the Number 1 train all the way up to Times Square and back, gazing at all of those faces across the car from her, faces representing ten, twenty, thirty different nations and races and ethnic groups. Young faces and old faces, the hopeful and the homeless, students, laborers, and millionaires, all of them standing there shoulder to shoulder, gripping the handrail, clinging to their own individual dreams.
Des was gone for hours. There was a bagel place near Mitch’s corner where she bought fresh bagels and two more coffees on her way back. Then she went back down Gansevoort to Mitch’s building, the one that had that scrawny London plane tree growing out front in a cutout in the sidewalk. A low iron rail had been positioned around it to keep dogs from peeing on it. It was not an easy life for a tree in the city. As Des started up Mitch’s steps she paused, noticing just how tenaciously the plane tree’s shallow, exposed roots clung to the soil- exactly like the knuckles of those subway riders she’d just seen- fighting for its place, fighting for its life, fighting for its…
And that’s when it hit her. Why she hadn’t been able to draw them.
Trees weren’t things made out of twigs and leaves. They were living, breathing creatures. Their trunks and branches weren’t wood, they were muscle and sinew and bone. That’s what that poor little cedar had been trying to tell her, the one that had been clinging to the side of the cliff at Chapman Falls-until it died saving their lives up there that night.
Trees weren’t things.
Breathless, she darted inside for her sketch pad, rushed back out and sat down on the stoop, resting it on her bare knees, graphite stick in hand. She started with quick gesture drawings of the plane tree. Except she wasn’t drawing a tree anymore-she was drawing a nudefigure model who was posed there for her in the morning light, reaching high for the sun. Des drew and she drew, her stick flying across the page.
She barely heard Mitch when he moseyed out and joined her there, yawning and blinking “What time did you get up?”
“Never went to sleep,” she replied, as an old lady went by with a grocery cart.
“Morning, Mrs. Fodera,” Mitch called to her. “Lovely day.”
