CHAPTER TWO
The car turned right on 67th Street, and stopped in front of number 24, not far from the Queensboro Bridge. It was a neighbourhood of everlasting middle class, with small, uniform brick Tudors perfectly aligned to form an urban, polite kind of poverty. The houses exuded the stale weary appearance of three generations, this last fact being their only asset. In front, tiny manicured lawns, neatly trimmed hedges, and various flower pots preceded the entries to achieve that sort of dressed up frugality that only Soviet fugitives are capable of. Across the street a television flickered, a man released a large, unhealthy stomach from its shirt, and a woman washed the dishes. Daily life is filled with sneaky, repetitive, incurable tragedies. One minute you’re sorting the garbage, the next you fall dead.
Vivienne, my father’s estranged cousin, waited in the doorway, her face in part illuminated by the porch light. She seemed well-intentioned, with a touch of fraud. I had received her call a couple of weeks earlier. She’d heard I was coming to New York and wished to extend her invitation. I thought she sounded like one of those airplane announcements – deceptively jolly, as if to hide a looming threat. At seventy years old, there was a remarkable juvenility about Vivienne, owing to her thin frame and a shiny tousled bob that made up for her sagging jowls. She smiled with a nervy sympathetic face as we exchanged our greetings, followed by an affected conspirational laugh at something I could not identify. I laughed back in polite concern, and then stepped into the house.
Not so much a house this was, but a display of bargain extravagance. Full of good taste and collectables, cozy and clean and exhaustively curated. I did not know she painted. Her walls were saturated with pastoral nature. She had stuffed the place with tea sets, and oriental trinkets, rich fabrics, snuffboxes, and velvet furniture in a worthy shade of burgundy. It was choked, neurotic, but organised. Enveloping the sitting room, was a vintage Japanese landscape with a cherry blossom on the right, a temple cloaked in mist, and three cranes soaring to the left. In the middle of the room, a Moroccan coffee table, vaunting a tidy collection of literary journals and diligent word puzzles. And, on top, was an open book on totalitarianism, with a tiny notepad that scribbled: glycerin suppositories, sleeping pills, disinfectant, order food. What a lovely palace of clichés this was, intruded only by an odour that heightened as I neared the kitchenette. There, in unassuming repose, two brown bags spilled forth, their contents partly revealed: mongolian beef and stir-fried broccoli. Alas, American convenience can murder, in just under two minutes, an entire dream.
"I thought you might be starving."
I was not, nor had I ever held a plastic fork in my life, and shivered at the thought of a foreign cow in my mouth.
"I am, thank you, how kind", and I started eating the thing half-smiling, half-gagging.
Whilst I ate, Vivienne studied me with the condescending fascination that only a queen feeding a beggar knows. I looked then like what can only be described as a swan stuck in a mud puddle, ghastly white with startled brown eyes that were rounder than usual, thin and tall, with damp dark hair, and fleshy downturned lips. I have never revealed my true age. My face bears to this day its childish fullness. This is mostly due to a soft jawline that lends me a certain juvenile grumpy look, as well as the ability to remain deceptively apathetic in most situations. My aunt, on the other hand, was the opposite, angular and bony, with protruding cheekbones and a stretched, well-kept face that made her look simultaneously regal and insane. There was a well-contained hysteria about her, like she could crack any minute, but wore it with ease and confidence. I liked her instantly.
"I’m sorry for what happened, but it’s for the greater good."
I nodded. There is nothing quite like the inhibited joy of a lonesome old woman on the disaster of her younger counterpart. She tried suppressing it, but to no end.
"I know that you don't believe it, but you will live it down in time."
"Are you talking about —"
"Oh, never mind, come here, embrace me!" And she nearly surged across the dinner table, opening her arms with a theatrical silly exaggeration. "You don’t remember me, do you?"
"No, I was quite yo —"
"Let me look at you. You look just like your mother. A dolly! And you have your father’s forehead. Big, like an alien. Ha!"
At this point, I don’t know if the stress of the journey had caught up, or the finality of the arrival had dawned. Perhaps I was just homesick, or my memory provoked it, but tears burst through my eyes.
"I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t mean it. Why are you crying?"
"He’s gone."
"Yes, I heard. But how? What happened?"
There was a malign streak to her curiosity. She yearned to indulge in tragedy. The tragedy of those more fortunate than you is particularly zesty.
"They took him."
"Who did?"
"He was a wasteful, obnoxious man, it’s true, but he didn’t deserve – no one deserves –"
"Of course not.’ ‘Who took him?"
"There were so many of them, they tied him and – and they destroyed everything, the house is all shattered!" I cried in a bout of intemperance which I tried to contain, unfortunately to no success.
"My goodness! What for?!"
"I don’t know..."
"What do you mean you don’t know?!" she asked with uninhibited annoyance.
"I don’t know. Something about a debt. I don’t know. They destroyed everything!"
"What a tragedy!’ ‘Is your mother all right?"
"She’s in the hospital, she suffered a shock. She’ll be fine."
A long silence came between us, the sort that happens before a violent bout of laughter. Finally, she added in a toneless voice:
"God have mercy. Everything will be all right."
Then ensued a torrent of advice that obliterated any preexisting boundaries between the mundane and profound. I learned that night she had come to New York in the late eighties, right before the Revolution of 1989. She’d boarded a cattle train that left Bucharest in the middle of the night, and found herself in Warsaw, after which the passage was clear. Vivienne had one child, a son, a rough ex-husband, and a string of failed affairs. She had wanted to be a dancer, but became a tax officer. After thirty hours of transit, I felt each word like a brain explosion.
Still rosy in the cheeks, she swallowed two pills with her tea, and shortly showed me to my room. It was a modest room, small and cosy like a hospital salon, with white walls and no paintings. The bed was flawless, with a pale blue silk spread floating perfectly above the carpet, next to which stood a nightstand and a chair. The whole thing panted the flat horror of death. It was brief, and lifeless, and unchangeable. As I fell asleep I thought about Vivienne. She possessed a rather paradoxical charm that instantly absolved her tactlessness. This was due partly to her exaggerated nature, akin to a caricature. Outside I heard a string of sirens, and a gunshot, and a scream that happened one after the other, in that order, but I am certain were uncorrelated.
The last thought I had was of my father being dragged with an extension cord by a man who looked, whilst doing this, as natural and uninhibited as a gorilla at the zoo. Then I saw my mother fainting bonelessly. My mother is rather dramatic. Barely three weeks had elapsed since these developments, yet already they bore an unmistakable, established familiarity. It is unsettling how quickly we adapt to our misfortunes, how we elaborate patterns of sense out of the most unexpected, most preposterous events. How we close our eyes and sleep at night.
I awoke the next morning with a delirious confidence that brought the world closer, and distorted all the principles of time. I was ready, ready as I’d ever been, to embark upon this glorious new undertaking with dignity and determination. The Velvet Underground sung as the coffee brewed, and for the first time in my tender existence, I felt like a heroine.
Shortly after, the microwave exploded.