Olga Dies Dreaming(29)
Days passed before someone named Derek came to his D.C. office to see him. Thinking it a constituent, Prieto gladly said to show him in, but when he recognized Derek as a john he used to see several years before, he threw him out, canceled his next slate of meetings, and sat at his desk and sobbed. He felt he would never be free.
* * *
NOW, PRIETO FOUND himself heading southbound on the West Side of Manhattan, pulling off the highway near the Highline, and meandering his way down to the Village. It all had changed. Everything was shiny or under construction. Gone were the street urchins and young hustlers who populated the pier that night when his teenage self found the courage to see what this world was really about. Of course, he wasn’t dumb enough to cruise, even if the opportunity was still there. But he liked to come down here, look at the water, and remember the nights when he was allowed to be completely whole, nights before anyone knew who he was. He tried to calculate if his total good done was greater than the sum of harm facilitated during his time in public office, and he wasn’t sure of the equation’s sum.
Tonight, when he arrived at Arthur Selby’s apartment, he’d been surprised to find they were not alone, as was custom. Around the table sat a bevy of men, some he recognized from the financial news, others he did not. Curiously, their agenda had nothing to do with upcoming legislation, his district, or even New York. Instead, they were “deeply invested” in the PROMESA oversight hearing he’d called for, as head of the Hispanic Caucus and member of the House Committee on Natural Resources. Deeply invested in it not happening. Though he couldn’t pinpoint why blocking such a banal procedural hearing could be of such import to this group, he sadly knew that this many white men so laser focused on Puerto Rico could mean nothing good. His Papi had always told him that the United States made Puerto Rico’s handcuffs, but it was other Puerto Ricans who helped put them on. He didn’t quite get what Papi meant until now.
FIVE STOPS
It was the tail end of summer, but the crisp of fall was already in the air when Olga walked out of her posh lobby—soulless, Matteo had called it—and onto the street. This was her favorite time of year. One of the perks of working with the wealthy was that they had better things to do in the heart of summer than to get married. So, while they holidayed in Nantucket or Maine or Europe, she could usually string together three or four weekends in a row for herself.
Her greatest occupational hazard was that her daily priorities were, first and foremost, the priorities of the families who paid her. As such, she often neglected her own. She cringed thinking of how many weeks it had been since she’d seen her niece Lourdes, her waking hours chock full of other people’s lives.
As she made her way to the Atlantic Terminal, she couldn’t help but marvel at the neighborhood transformation that had happened literally under her nose, while she was flying here and there, getting home drunk, leaving for the office early. Even as a younger woman, Olga never had a desire to live in Manhattan, put off by its nonstop pace and posturing. No one could ever just “be” there. It required trying, at all times, to be something else. Richer, thinner, more famous, more popular, more powerful, more in the know. For all of her ambition, at the end of the day, Olga wanted to shut it all off. Yet she’d recognized, as a practical matter, that being closer to “the city,” as Brooklynites referred to it, would be an asset as she launched a business catering expressly to those trying to be more. So, she moved out of her grandma’s house on Fifty-third Street and into a floor-through of a brownstone on a tree-lined street just a stone’s throw from Fort Greene Park, one quick subway ride to Manhattan. Here, a utopia of creatives, mostly Black and Latino, all strivers by day, surrounded her, eager to let their hair down at night, to drink, laugh, and dance off the weight of a day spent trying to live up to a notion of White Success in this impossible city.
But eventually Manhattan’s architecture and its sensibilities had begun to encroach on this corner of the world. First slowly and then fast. It started with the stadium, of course. Then, the first high-rise went up. It seemed so novel that Olga and several of her neighbors took leases there, tickled by the idea of a doorman and a roof deck just steps from their usual stomping grounds. Then, there was a second, double the height of the first. Now, there were so many tall gleaming towers, they had altered the wind patterns and created shadowy canyons on streets once flooded with light. The residents of these towers were different. They didn’t run home to Brooklyn to escape, they ran back to continue their efforts of trying to be cool, edgy, artisanal, “low-key.” Like milk in coffee, the potency of the neighborhood was diluted with each shining new edifice. As with all forms of white conquest, Olga knew that by the time acquisition was complete, the soul of whatever they were after would have already been destroyed.
The beige stones of the Clocktower Building gleamed white in the bright morning sun, the haze of summer already burned off the sky, leaving behind a rich blue backdrop for it all. For generations of Brooklynites, the Clocktower was a landmark—the tallest building in Brooklyn, by design. Now it was dwarfed in the cluttered downtown skyline. For decades it had been a bank where Olga’s grandmother kept her accounts. Until recently, when the conversion to condos was complete, Olga had used its grand bones as the backdrop for lavish parties, guests dancing on the beautifully mosaicked floors, the teller windows serving as bars. The parties had bothered the residents though, and now, like much of the retail space downtown, the former bank sat empty, luxury apartments stacked on top of it. A precarious Jenga game. In fact, the only reason anyone noticed the bank at all was because it contained an entrance to the subway, where Olga now ducked belowground.