The red-haired homeless lady was arrested after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her. Just before her mad dash into traffic (who could account for her actions?), she’d accused a black dog on a leash of being the Devil, an assertion that had been strenuously objected to by the dog’s owner. The dog’s name was Major Maybe, and his story was better known in our neighborhood than the red-haired lady’s. The breeder had named the dog Major, and the family that adopted him—our next-door neighbors, the Leavells—tried to call him something similar in order to avoid confusing him. They’d tried Mark and Mason, but the dog would not respond to any name beginning with “M” until the family’s four-year-old daughter, who talked to her dolls a lot—telling them that maybe they would go to Barneys and maybe they would go to the park and maybe they would get a cookie if they were good. . . . As you must have guessed, little Corey Leavell came up with the only new name the dog would accept. Later, it was thought funny to call him Major Maybe.
My roommate during this time was an acting student named Eagle Soars. His father, who was English, had married an American, who claimed that her great-grandmother had had Indian blood. Eagle Soars had been Eddie in school, but his birth certificate really did give his first and middle names as Eagle Soars (his last name, which he later dropped, was Stevens), and by the time he was twenty it had occurred to him that the name might be useful if he intended to act. He made extra money by giving Major Maybe his 4 p.m. walk over to Tenth Avenue, then across either Twenty-first or Twenty-second Street, down Eighth Avenue, and back along Twentieth to home.
In those days, Chelsea was more of a mom-and-pop neighborhood. No art galleries, just a few sex clubs way west. There was a nice florist called Howe. I sometimes bought a single flower to take back to the apartment and add to my little altar on the far-left side of the deep windows that overlooked the back yard, which already included a picture of my mother and father on their wedding day, in a little heart-shaped frame; a photograph of my sister lying on a fur rug, looking dazed, the day they brought her back from the hospital; a badly faded snapshot of my first pet, Doris the cat; inside a Plexiglas box, the dried-up wrist corsage I’d worn to my senior prom; and one of my wisdom teeth, which dangled from a chain around the casement-window handle. I had grouped these things together in solidarity with Eagle Soars, whose own display, on the right-hand side of the windowsill, featured a double photo frame holding both his high-school graduation picture and a snapshot of the boy he had a crush on in high school, with a big bandage across his face after reconstructive surgery on his nose (bicycle accident); a pencil sharpener with a tutu-skirted hippopotamus in second position; a teaspoon stolen from the Plaza; and a framed eviction notice from his previous landlord in Columbus, Ohio. It was an ongoing joke that whenever I had a new flower he’d move it to the right in the middle of the night, and when he was out walking Major Maybe I’d put it back on my side. We split the weekly wine bill, because neither of us drank more than the other. He was more interested in weed, and I was interested in not getting fat. Still, we went through a gallon a week of an Italian white that the wine seller always said he wouldn’t have access to for long (though nothing would have made us spend our money on a whole case of wine). I was working part time as a waitress, and my mother sent a check every month to cover half my rent.
On the day of the incident with the dog and the red-haired lady, Soars and I were out on the little chairs that sat inside the iron fence in front of the brownstone, where a large pink potted hibiscus set out by the guy in the basement apartment added a huge amount of atmosphere. Also, he’d put circular cushions on the chairs, which made them so much easier to sit on. He was a psychologist who specialized in adolescents. They’d arrive and depart with deep scowls, throwing down cigarettes and crushing them, rarely making eye contact with us. The psychologist had told us that it was better not to greet his clients, because there was hardly anything we could say to them that would be correct. We accepted this and ignored their acne eruptions and fanned away their cigarette smoke and basically looked right through them, unless they seemed so desperate to be friendly that we said the word “hello.” Once, an ambulance came to get one of the clients from the basement, who, we later found out (in spite of doctor-patient confidentiality), had been bleeding and had stuffed washcloths in his pants to come to his weekly appointment. The basement was called the “garden apartment.” When the wisteria was in bloom, the psychologist took back his little chairs and added them to others in the yard behind the house and had a real champagne party, to which we were always invited. If he ever sat in the chairs when they were out front, we never saw it. Then again, we were in them a lot, and he was a pleasant, polite man, so maybe he didn’t have much of a chance.
We were doing acting exercises. Soars read his lines, and at some point it was my job to interject something distracting, or to go into a fake coughing spasm, or even to say something hostile, such as “You miserable faggot, you’re no Edward, let alone Lear!” The thought was that anything could happen during a performance, and the actor had to squelch his real-life reaction and keep going without faltering. Soars had only one copy of the script, since it cost money to xerox, so we sat close together. I tried to act, too, to the extent that I didn’t want him to be able to anticipate one of my sneezes or outbursts, which I’d learned he could sense by the way my breathing altered slightly when I was about to speak, or by my moving even the tiniest bit, or by the almost inaudible sound my lips made when parting. My job was to zing him without warning. One time I actually threw myself off my chair and writhed like someone having a seizure. I’d deliberately worn long sleeves and jeans, so the damage was minor, but a delivery person wheeling seltzer bottles into the brownstone next door stopped and ran to my assistance, and it was more than a little embarrassing when we had to explain.
I’m so sentimental. I can hardly believe there was ever such a time. (I’m a doctor now, with a medical group in Portland, Maine; Soars is the divorced father of twins and an avid white-water rafter, who leads trips for a tour company out West, writes articles about the outdoors, and teaches at a community college.)
Here’s an obvious thing that I didn’t think about until recently: Soars and I weren’t just well suited to living together. We were so simpatico we morphed into an old married couple, in speeded-up time. For years, we were playacting the daily routines of marriage, with my sudden, sometimes insane eruptions of temper, our long-standing joke about moving each other’s tchotchkes, our constantly repeated lines (though his, ideally, came from Shakespeare).
While Soars was still in New York, he decided that, except for the big crush he’d had on his high-school friend, he wasn’t gay. He stopped dating men and began to hang out with me and my girlfriends, and then he began dating one of them, whose heart he later broke, but that’s another story; even if he was bi, he chose to marry women.
Anyway, as Soars and I were rehearsing that day, the red-haired lady stood up from where she’d been sitting on the sidewalk and cursed our dog friend, screaming, “Lucifer the Devil! Lu-u-u-u-u-u-ucifer!” and then rushing poor, scared Major Maybe, who’d just lifted a leg to pee against his favorite tree and was humiliated when he had to drop it midstream. She stretched out her arms, meaning perhaps to topple Mr. Leavell, who simply turned sideways and let the wild tornado pass. (Major Maybe, a peaceful fellow, had flattened himself on the ground.) And so she did, twirling crazily from her little bare feet up her thick legs, her long, stained skirt tangling in a way that tripped her, so that when she continued her trajectory between parked cars, into Twentieth Street, howling that once the Devil had appeared there could be no redemption, the fabric coiled around her like cotton candy, and she was flung forward, as if someone really had not enjoyed the treat. A cab screeched to a halt, and the driver jumped out and bent over her like a referee giving the count, his finger scolding; woman down . . . until up she sprang, wrapping her arms around him and trying to squeeze him to death, as a passing seminarian and Mr. Leavell (who was in his fifties) converged and tried to pull her off. Major Maybe was so mortified that his jaw went flaccid, his leash having been tossed over one of the pointy spikes of the iron gate that enclosed the little cement area in front of his home. The leash was too short for him to lie down without being strangled, so he had to sit and watch the spectacle. He’d had an invigorating walk, lifted his leg for a few pees, and experienced some excellent sniffs, and now this: an explosion from a street person sent our way by Fidel Castro, who’d released Cubans from mental hospitals and put them on ships and sent them here to mingle with our own crazy people. On good days, the red-haired lady sang hymns in Spanish, in a beautiful, clear soprano. She felt the breeze blow through her hair. She ate her saltines and did nothing to anyone. On bad days . . . well.
Where were the police? Where were the police? This was a time before cell phones. When the police arrived, they handled the red-haired lady roughly, so much so that the seminarian took issue. (It did no good.) Her wrists were cuffed and a policeman dunked her head into the police car like a basketball player sinking a one-handed shot. Easy. Nothing to it. Fast resumption of the game.
Our rehearsal was suspended. Mr. Leavell picked up the dog’s leash and marched up the steps into his house. Soars and I went upstairs and broke out the bottle of Italian white and sat in our director’s chairs for a while—they were cheap, and practically the only furniture we had. I didn’t worry about Soars stealing my flower to his side. It was a rubrum lily that day, dropping its pollen onto the floor beneath the window, a giant’s yellow dandruff. Outside, the wisteria vine was thick and green, curlicues and pointing pale-green shoots, like witch’s fingers, that would continue to quickly unfurl, though it was no longer in bloom. We took a walk. We discussed our futures. We wondered if we were going to fail, just simply fail: if he’d ever get a decent role, if I’d ever figure out what I wanted to do in life. We wondered if AIDS would sweep through the city, if the red-haired lady was sane enough to be scared at the police station, how long Major Maybe would live.
Soars reached for my hand. We never held hands, because, of course, we weren’t a couple. We laced our fingers, and I was astonished at how bony his hand felt. His palm was sweaty. Then we did what so many people do on someone else’s wedding day, or after someone else’s funeral, though in this case it was on the day that some street person got carted off to the police station. We went back to our apartment and fucked. We had a good time doing it, but the only thing that changed afterward was that, for some reason, neither of us continued to play the game of Steal the Flower. I soon stopped buying them. I used the money to buy other little luxuries, like mascara. Soars went on dating my friend.
I met the man I married at a wedding I attended in Cape Neddick, Maine, that December (the bridesmaids carried white rabbit-fur muffs), though it took us eight years to get around to marrying. First, I wasn’t sure about leaving New York City. Then I decided on medical school, but I wasn’t accepted at any school in New York, so the decision about leaving was made for me.
If you were in New York in the eighties, you wonder now where everybody went, and then you remind yourself that quite a few of the people who made up the neighborhood owned their property and dug in their heels, and eventually died. Some died of AIDS. Some moved to Brooklyn. Or to the West, or to Atlanta. After 9/11, quite a lot of young people made an exodus from New York City to Portland, Maine, where the big waterfront buildings were already being turned into artists’ studios and condos with ground-floor boutiques. Cool Portland, with its summertime tourists boarding boats and hoping to see seals as they cruise out to one of the islands. Back on land, the time-warp hippies cross paths with people who live in brownstones and don’t have to think about money. There’s street art, and folding chairs are set up in music clubs. Used-book stores are still in business. If you’re a certain age, Portland more or less exists in ironic quotation marks (though, of course, no hipster would dare scratch them in the air).
Recently, on Airbnb, I saw my old apartment. There was even a picture taken out the window, someone having pulled down enough of the wisteria vine to allow a view. A kitchen had been created out of part of the hallway and what used to be the coat closet. It looked as though the floor had been painted black, with an Oriental rug placed on it. The photographs were taken with a fish-eye lens. It was a small apartment, under the pitch of the roof, so that you couldn’t even stand up in parts of the bedroom. But it’s all deception, right? You understand that the picture shows more space than actually exists. You fall for the vase of fresh flowers on the nightstand that in real life probably has the circumference of a pie pan.
A whole vase of flowers in the photograph. So lavish, its extravagance conveying more than a sense of romance or the idea of a luxurious life inside a welcoming apartment. Flowers that would be whisked away after the shot, as the curtains were pulled together to block the daylight that would fade the rug. Close down the set, bring on the travellers, light it up again.
Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor. ♦
