Groundwork, p.44
Groundwork, page 44
18. 153 Carroll Street; Brooklyn. A railroad flat on the third floor of a four-story building near Henry Street. Age 33 to 34. Three rooms, sit-down kitchen, and bathroom. The bedroom, overlooking the street in front, was large enough to fit in a double bed for yourself and a single bed for your son (the same sofa-bed you had used as a child and which you had now reclaimed after the sale of the house in Stanfordville). Two middle rooms, one without windows, which you converted into a makeshift study, the other the living room (one window overlooking the garden), followed by the kitchen (one window) and the bathroom in back—tawdry and run-down, yes, but a big step up from where you had been living before. You lost the place on Varick Street in January 1980 (the artist was giving up his loft), and when Manhattan rents proved to be too steep for an apartment that could accommodate both you and your two-and-a-half-year-old son (who spent three days a week with you), you crossed the East River and began searching in Brooklyn. Why hadn’t you thought of this in 1976? you wondered. Surely this was a better solution than trekking one hundred miles to the north and buying a haunted house in Dutchess County, but the fact was that Brooklyn had never even crossed your mind back then, for New York was Manhattan and Manhattan only, and the outer boroughs were as alien to you as the distant countries of Oceania or the Arctic Circle. You wound up in Carroll Gardens, a self-enclosed Italian neighborhood where most people went out of their way to make you feel unwelcome, treating you with suspicion and silent stares, as if you were an intruder in their midst, an estranger, even if you could have passed for Italian yourself, but no doubt there was something wrong with you, the way you dressed, perhaps, or the way you moved, or simply the look in your eyes. Again and again for almost two years, walking down Carroll Street on the way to your apartment with the old women sitting on the stoops of their houses, cutting off their conversations when you were within earshot of them, watching you pass without a word, and the men standing around with nothing in their eyes, or else looking under the hoods of their cars, examining the engines of those cars with such persistence and dedication that they reminded you of philosophers in search of some ultimate truth about human existence, and the only time you ever received a nod from the women was when you were walking down that street with your son, your little blond-haired son, but otherwise you were a phantom, a man who was not there because he had no business being there. Fortunately, the owners of your building, John and Jackie Caramello, a couple in their early thirties who lived in the garden apartment on the bottom floor, were affable and friendly and never displayed the slightest resentment toward you, but they were your contemporaries, and they were no longer grinding the axes of their parents’ generation. Joey Gallo’s aunt lived on your block, there were the social clubs around the corner on Henry Street where the old-timers hung out during the day, and if Carroll Gardens was known as the safest neighborhood in the city, it was because it was ruled by an undercurrent of violence, the retaliatory violence and ethics of the mob. Black people steered clear of this well-guarded enclave, knowing they would be risking danger if they set foot within its borders, an unwritten law you might not have understood if you hadn’t seen it executed with your own eyes, walking down Court Street one day in the brightness of an autumn afternoon, when a rangy black kid carrying a boom box on the other side of the street was jumped by three or four white teenagers, who pummeled him, bloodied him, and smashed his radio against the sidewalk, and before you could intervene the black kid was staggering away, stumbling forward, and then starting to run as the white kids shouted nigger at him and warned him never to come back. Another time, you did have a chance to intervene. A Sunday afternoon in late spring, walking down Carroll Street toward the subway station on Smith, when you stopped for a couple of minutes to watch a roller-skate hockey game being played on the asphalt surface of Carroll Park and saw, hanging on the chain-link fence that surrounded the park, a large red, white, and black Nazi banner. You went into the park, found the sixteen-year-old boy who had put it up (the equipment manager of one of the teams), and told him to take it down. Perplexed, not at all understanding why you would ask him to do such a thing, he listened to you explain what the banner represented, and when he heard you talk about the evils of Hitler and the slaughter of innocent millions, he looked genuinely embarrassed. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I just thought it looked cool.” Rather than ask him where he had been all his life, you waited until he had removed the banner and then continued walking to the subway. Still, Carroll Gardens was not without its advantages, the food in particular, the bakeries, the pork stores, the watermelon man riding through the neighborhood with his horse-drawn wagon in the summer, the coffee roasted on-site at D’Amico’s and the blast of sharp, beautiful smells that assaulted you whenever you walked into that shop, but Carroll Gardens was also the place where you asked the single most stupid question of your adult life. You were upstairs in your apartment one afternoon, at work on the second half of The Invention of Solitude in your windowless study, when a great clamor of voices rose up from the street outside. You went downstairs to see what was going on, and the whole block was out in force, clusters of men and women were standing in front of their houses, twenty excited conversations were going on at once, and there was your landlord, the burly John Caramello, parked on the stoop of the building where you both lived, calmly surveying the commotion. You asked him what was wrong, and he told you that a man who had just been let out of prison had been breaking into empty houses and apartments along the block and stealing things—jewelry, silverware, anything of value he could put his hands on—but he had been caught before he could get away. That was when you asked your question, uttering the famous words that proved you were an out-and-out dunce who still understood nothing about the little world in which you happened to be living. “Did you call the police?” John smiled. “Of course not,” he said. “The boys beat the shit out of him, broke his legs with baseball bats, and threw him into a taxi. He won’t be back in this neighborhood again—not if he wants to go on breathing.” So much for your early days in Brooklyn, where you have been living for thirty-one years now, and in that transitional period of your life, beginning with the breakup of your marriage and your father’s death, the nine months on Varick Street and the first eleven months in Carroll Gardens, a time marked by nightmares and inner struggle, alternating between fits of hope and no hope, tumbling into the beds of various women, women you tried to love and almost loved but couldn’t, certain you would never marry again, working on your book, on your translations of Joubert and Mallarmé, on your mammoth anthology of twentieth-century French poetry, taking care of your confused and sometimes embattled three-year-old son, and with so many things happening to you at once, which included the near-fatal cardiac arrest of your mother’s second husband just ten days after your father’s funeral, the vigils in the hospital six months later as you watched over your grandfather’s rapid decline and death, it was probably inevitable that your body should go haywire again, this time with a pounding heart, an irregular heart that would suddenly and inexplicably speed up inside your chest, the bouts of tachycardia that would take hold of you at night just as you were falling asleep, or wake you up just after you had fallen asleep, either alone in the room with your son or lying next to the sleeping bodies of Ann or Françoise or Ruby, the frantically beating heart that would echo inside your head with a percussiveness so loud and insistent you thought the noises were coming from somewhere in the room, a thyroid condition as you eventually found out, which had thrown your system entirely out of whack and for which you had to take pills for two or three years. Then, on February 23, 1981, twenty days after your thirty-fourth birthday, just four days after her twenty-sixth birthday, you met her, you found yourself being introduced to the One, the woman who has been with you ever since that night thirty years ago, your wife, the grand love that ambushed you when you were least expecting it, and in the first weeks you were together, when much of your time was spent in bed, you developed a ritual of reading fairy tales to each other, something you went on doing until your daughter was born six years later, and not long after you discovered the intimate pleasures of reading to each other in this way, your wife wrote a long prose poem entitled Reading to You, the fourteenth and last part of which evokes the erratic beating of your heart and is set in the bedroom of your third-floor apartment at 153 Carroll Street: The cruel father sends the stupid boy into the woods to be killed, but the murderer cannot do it and lets him go, bringing back a deer’s heart to the father instead, and this boy speaks to the dogs and the frogs and the birds and in the end the doves whisper into his ears, the words of the mass, the repetitions over and over into his ears, and somewhere else I whisper into your ears, messages, messages from me to you, about the back of your knees and the inside of your elbows and the impression above your upper lip, from me to you even if you are now away. I whisper like the birds in the story I read to you, repetitions in the room where you took me. The parts are the same, but changing, always in movement, altering imperceptibly like the expression on your face from a smile to seriousness leaning over me in the thin light. So I wish you a story in the reading of it, in the writing of it. We inherit stories, too, conditions, faces, hearts, bladders, weak and stricken. His heart has water around it, drowning, the sick heart, the heart sick, the stricken part, the beat measured in you that is sometimes too fast so you take pills to make it slower, to make it right and rhythmic, not random and slipping like other things. I wish you a story in bed where they hang the moon after the old men die so it shines forever on top of you, and will not stop even if it does not have its own light, but is borrowed and cyclic. I will take the moon, the borrowing and stealing and changing from large to small. The tiniest moon, thin and weak behind a cloud in winter is the view I choose.
19. 18 Tompkins Place; Brooklyn. The top two floors of a four-story brownstone on a one-block street of nearly identical row houses in Cobble Hill, the neighborhood between Carroll Gardens and Brooklyn Heights. Age 34 to 39. Less than half a mile from 153 Carroll Street, but an altogether different world, with a population more mixed and various than the ethnic compound you had lived in for the past twenty-one months. Not a duplex shut off from the lower half of the house but two independent floors, the low-ceilinged one on top with a nook-sized kitchen, an ample dining area and unpartitioned living room beyond it, as well as a small study for your wife; on the higher-ceilinged floor below: a compact master bedroom, a larger bedroom/playroom for your son, and a study for you, identical in size to your wife’s above. A bit ramshackle in overall design, but larger than any apartment you had ever rented and located on a block of great architectural beauty: every house constructed in the 1860s, gas lamps burning at night in front of every door, and when the snow covered the ground in winter, you felt that you had traveled back to the nineteenth century, that if you shut your eyes and listened closely enough, you would hear the sound of horses in the street. You were married in that apartment on a sultry day in mid-June, one of those hot, overcast days in early summer with storms building slowly at the far edge of the horizon, the sky darkening imperceptibly as the hours advanced, and an instant after you were declared man and wife, at the very instant you took your wife in your arms and kissed her, the storm finally broke, a tremendous clap of thunder ripped through the air directly above you, rattling the windows of the house, shaking the floor under your feet, and as the people in the room gasped, it was as if the heavens were announcing your marriage to the world. An uncanny bit of dramatic timing, which meant nothing and yet seemed to mean everything, and for the first time in your life, you felt that you were taking part in a cosmic event.
20. 458 Third Street, Apartment 3R; Brooklyn. A long, narrow apartment that took up one half of the third floor of a four-story building in Park Slope. Living room overlooking the street in front, dining room and galley kitchen in the middle, flanked by a book-lined hallway that led to three small bedrooms in the back. Age 40 to 45. When you moved to your previous apartment on Tompkins Place, your landlord, who also happened to be your downstairs neighbor, warned you that you could not live there forever, that eventually he and his family would be taking over the entire house. You must have understood this at the time, but after living there for five years and one month, your longest stint in any dwelling since your boyhood days on Irving Avenue, you had little by little pushed the thought of involuntary departure out of your mind, and because the years on Tompkins Place had been the happiest, most fulfilling period of your life so far, you simply refused to face the facts. Then, in November 1986—just one week after your wife discovered she was pregnant—the landlord politely informed you that time was up and he would not be renewing your lease. His announcement came as a jolt, and because you never wanted to be in such a position again, could not bear the idea of being thrown out of yet another place at some point in the future, you and your wife began searching for a place to buy, a co-op apartment that would belong to you and thereafter protect you from the whims of other people. The Wall Street crash of 1987 was still eleven months off, and the New York real estate frenzy was surging out of control, prices were going up every week, every day, every minute of every day, and because you had only so much money to spend on a down payment, you had to settle for something that did not quite measure up to your needs. The apartment on Third Street was attractive, hands down the most attractive of the many places you had visited on your search, but it was too small for four people, especially when two of the people were writers, who not only had to live in that space but work there as well. All three bedrooms were accounted for: one for you and your wife, one for your son (who continued to live with you half the time), and one for your infant daughter, and even the largest of the three, the so-called master bedroom, was too tightly proportioned to accommodate a desk. Your wife volunteered to set up her work space in a corner of the living room, and you went out and found yourself a tiny studio in an apartment building on Eighth Avenue, a block and a half from 458 Third Street (see entry 20A). Too cramped, then, a less than ideal arrangement, but your circumstances were far from tragic. You and your wife both preferred the animation of Park Slope to the quiet streets of Cobble Hill, and when you started spending the summers in southern Vermont (three months for five consecutive years—see entry 20B), there was little or nothing to complain about, especially when you considered some of the wretched places you had inhabited in the past. Living in a co-op put you in more intimate contact with your neighbors than at any time before or since, something you initially faced with a certain amount of dread, but there were no Madame Rubinsteins in your building, no festering conflicts developed on any front, and the co-op meetings you were obliged to attend were relatively short, easygoing affairs. Six families were involved, four of them with small children, and with an architect, a contractor, and a lawyer among the members of the board, your neighbors were conscientious about maintaining the physical and financial health of the building. Your wife, who served as recording secretary for the five years you lived there, wrote up the minutes after each board meeting—entertaining, tongue-in-cheek reports that were warmly appreciated by everyone involved. Some excerpts:
10/19/87. BUGS: This highly unpleasant subject was addressed by the assembled company with utmost delicacy. The euphemism “problem” was used by at least one member. Marguerite went so far as to speak of “hundreds of babies.” Dick recommended a product called COMBAT. Siri echoed the recommendation. It was also suggested that the exterminator be told to change his poison. Then, with a sigh of relief, the members turned to another subject.
3/7/88. THE FENCE: Theo was given a price of $500 for the fence by his students. Certain members felt this was exorbitant; others didn’t. There was a faint agreement—that is, an agreement so vague, so slim, it might not be called an agreement at all—that if these students of Theo promised to do a good job, they could have their $500. But this is not certain …
10/18/88. OLD BUSINESS: There was a moment of hesitation. Would the members be able to reach into the past and recall just what our old business was? The president came to the rescue with a copy of the old minutes.
2/22/90. CEILING IN 3R: Paul announces to the group that the ceiling in #3R is about to collapse. Expressions of alarm can be seen on the faces of his fellow co-opers. His wife, otherwise known as the secretary, attempts to assuage the others by noting her husband’s tendency to exaggerate. The man’s bread and butter, after all, is in the making of fictions, and occasionally this submersion in the world of the imagination colors that other world, known for lack of a better expression as the Real World. Let it stand for the record that the ceiling in 3R is not about to collapse and that its occupants have taken appropriate action to make certain that this will not happen. The plasterers and painters shall take care of our slight sag …
