The Paper Palace(89)

“I’d keep it here. It’s probably worth a fortune by now—a signed first edition of Burke. Jeremy will just want her to sell it.”

On the back cover of the book is a faded black-and-white photo of Dwight Burke in a seersucker jacket and polka-dot bow tie. His face has the same kindly expression I remember from my childhood, a pleasant WASPiness.

“He was a nice man,” I say.

“Such a tragedy,” Mum says.

“He wore penny loafers with nickels in them. I should write to Nancy.”

“Your father always thought he was a homosexual.”

For years after Dwight Burke drowned, there were rumors he had killed himself—that Carter Ashe, the man he had gone to return the book to that spring day when my father and I went to collect his boxes, was Burke’s lover. That Burke, a devout Catholic, was overcome with shame and guilt. My father insisted the rumors weren’t true. Burke’s clothes had been found in a careful pile on the banks of the Hudson, perfectly folded—everything but the boxer shorts he was wearing when they pulled him out of the water. “If he were planning to drown himself,” my father had said, “why keep on his boxers? Dwight would have wanted to go out of the world the same way he came in. He was a poet. He loved symmetry.”

“Author or subject?” Mum says. She’s holding a book about Gandhi. She has moved on to biography.

“Subject. No one really cares who wrote it.” I open the book of poetry in my hand. The poems are alive, odd, buzzing with insects and tender grasses. As I skim through, a verse catches my eye.

    At the crest of the hill two stallions

backs black against a nectar wash

graze on the green-tang clover,

acorns to sniff out.

We lie together beneath the flowering hawthorn,

your white collar unbuttoned.

Once, I heard the sound

of wind under water, breathed in the sea

and survived.



I hope my father was right, that Dwight’s drowning was an accident. I hope he left his lover’s house that morning wanting nothing more than a bracing swim; that he lay on the banks of the Hudson River, listened to the water flowing past, breathed in the crocus blossoms, the sour-tart smell of crabgrass. He stripped down to his underwear and waded out into the muscular water, floated, watched clouds run across the sky, the flocking birds. He turned to swim back, but the landscape had changed. Now he was drifting past an unfamiliar shore, pulled by a current too strong for him to fight.



* * *



—

The doorbell rings twice.

“Anybody home?” Peter calls out.

“We’re back here,” Mum calls. “Don’t let the kitten out. He keeps trying to escape through the front door.”

Peter is carrying an enormous bunch of flowers, daylilies and pale pink garden roses.

“Happy birthday, Wallace,” he says, handing them to my mother. He looks around at the piles of books everywhere, my mother on the stepladder, alphabetizing. “Very festive.”

“I’m too old for birthdays. I’ll change my blouse and then we can go.” She hands me the flowers. “Can you put these in water?”



* * *



—

Most of the streetlights on our block are out, deliberately broken by crackheads, who prefer the shadows. Peter and I walk home from dinner down the center of East Tenth Street, arm in arm, making ourselves a larger, less appealing target. Half the ground-floor apartments have beware of dog signs in their windows, though we rarely see anyone walking a dog.

“Your mother was on excellent form tonight,” Peter says. “She was practically beaming when we put her in the cab.”

“She loves to be pampered. She pretends to scorn it, but take her to an overpriced restaurant and pick up the check? She acts like a delighted little girl who just got a new doll from Daddy. Also, she adores you. You make her feel young.”

“And you?” Peter asks.

“I am young.”

“Do you adore me?”

“Most of the time. Sometimes you’re just irritating.”

He pulls me to him, breathes me in. “You smell good. Lemony.”

“Probably the cheese-clothed lemon wedge they gave me to squeeze on my fish.”

“Eau de Sole. Because every woman has one. I think we could market that.” Peter laughs.

“Not every woman,” I say.

When we open the door to our apartment the air in the room feels charged, staticky. A faint metallic tang in its molecules. The phone is ringing and ringing, unanswered. Next to it, on the bookshelf, a vase of tulips has overturned, water pooling.

“Fucking cat stepped on the answering machine again. I’m going to strangle that damned cat.” I throw my coat on the table and storm into our bedroom. There are two large windows in our bedroom. One on the right, over the bed; the other, which opens onto the fire escape, mostly obscured by heavy metal security bars that can only be opened from the inside, in case we need to make an escape. The window above our bed is now lying across it. Above the bed, a gaping hole, a splintered wooden frame. There’s a man squatting on the windowsill. He grins at me, eyes glazed, seemingly unaware that he is teetering on the edge of a four-story drop. His greasy hair is matted, weeks of unwashed filth webbing the surface, as if spiders have nested in it, their microscopic eggs warmed by his damp, cradle-capped scalp. Somehow the man has managed to climb across the side of the building from the fire escape, span the free fall, and bash in our entire window frame. On the fire escape, outside the unlocked window bars, I can see our TV and VCR, the tangled cords of the answering machine.