Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

The Cousins

MY COUSIN BRANTFORD was named for our grandfather, who had made a fortune from a device used in aircraft navigation. I suppose it saved lives. A bad-tempered man with a scar above his cheekbone, my grandfather believed that the rich were rewarded for their merits and the poor deserved what they got. He did not care for his own grandchildren and referred to my cousin as “the little prince.” In all fairness, he didn’t like me, either.

Brantford had roared through his college fund so rapidly that by the age of twenty-three, he was down to pocket change. One bright spring day when I was visiting New York City and had called him up, he insisted on taking me to lunch at a midtown restaurant where the cost of the entrées was so high that a respectful noonday hush hung over the restaurant’s skeletal postmodern interior. Muttering oligarchs with monogrammed shirt cuffs gazed at entering patrons with a languid alertness. The maître d’ wore one of those dark blue restaurant suits, and the wine list had been printed on velvety pages set in a stainless-steel three-ring binder.

By the time my cousin arrived, I had read the menu four times. He was late. You had to know Brantford to get used to him. A friend of mine said that my cousin looked like the mayor of a ruined city. Appearances mattered a great deal to Brantford, but his own were on a gradual slide. His face had a permanent alcoholic flush. His brownish-blond hair was parted on the right side and was too long by a few millimeters, trailing over his collar. Although he was dressed well, in flannel trousers and cordovan shoes, you could see the telltale food stains on his shirt, and the expression underneath his blond mustache had something subtly wrong with it — he smiled with a strangely discouraged affability.

“Bunny,” he said to me, sitting down with an audible expunging of air. He still used my childhood name. No one else did. He didn’t give me a hug because we don’t do that. “I see you’ve gotten started. You’re having a martini?”

I nodded. “Morning tune-up,” I said.

“Brave choice.” Brantford grinned, simultaneously waving down the server. “Waitress,” he said, pointing at my drink, “I’ll have one of those. Very dry, please, no olive.” The server nodded before giving Brantford a thin professional smile and gliding over to the bar.

We had a kind of solidarity, Brantford and I. I had two decades on him, but we were oddly similar, more like brothers than cousins. I had always seen in him some better qualities than those I actually possessed. For example, he was one of those people who always make you happier the moment you see them.

Before his drink arrived, we caught ourselves up. Brantford’s mother, Aunt Margaret, had by that time been married to several different husbands, including a three-star army general, and she currently resided in a small apartment cluttered with knickknacks near the corner of Ninety-second and Broadway.

Having spent herself in a wild youth and at all times given to manias, Brantford’s mother had started taking a new medication called Elysium-Max, which seemed to be keeping her on a steady course where life was concerned. Brantford instructed me to please phone her while I was in town, and I said I would. As for Brantford’s two half sisters, they were doing fine.

With this information out of the way, I asked Brantford how he was.

“I don’t know. It’s strange. Sometimes at night I have the feeling that I’ve murdered somebody.” He stopped and glanced down at the tableware. “Someone’s dead. Only I don’t know who or what, or when I did it. I must’ve killed somebody. I’m sure of it. Thank you,” he said with his first real smile of the day, as the server placed a martini in front of him.

“Well, that’s just crazy,” I said. “You haven’t killed anyone.”

“Doesn’t matter if I have or haven’t,” he said, “if it feels that way. Maybe I should take a vacation.”

“Brantford,” I said, “you can’t take a vacation. You don’t work.” I waited for a moment. “Do you?”

“Well,” he said, “I’d like to. Besides, I work, in my way,” he claimed, taking a sip of the martini. “And don’t forget that I can be anything I want to be.” This sentence was enunciated carefully and with precise despair, as if it had served as one of those lifelong mottoes that he no longer believed in.

What year was this? 1994? When someone begins to carry on as my cousin did, I’m never sure what to say. Tact is required. As a teenager, Brantford had told me that he aspired to be a concert pianist, and I was the one who had to remind him that he wasn’t a musician and didn’t play the piano. But he had seen a fiery angel somewhere in the sky and thought it might descend on him. I hate those angels. I haven’t always behaved well when people open their hearts to me.

“Well, what about the animals?” I asked. Brantford was always caring for damaged animals and had done so from the time he was a boy. He found them in streets and alleys and nursed them back to health and then let them go. But they tended to fall in with him and to get crushes on him. Wherever he lived you would find recovering cats, mutts, and sparrows barking and chirping and mewling in response to him.

“No, not that,” he said. “I would never make a living off those critters,” he said. “That’s a sideline. I love them too much.”

“Veterinary school?” I asked.

“No, I couldn’t. Absolutely not. I don’t want to practice that kind of medicine with them,” he said, as if he were speaking of family members. “If I made money off those little guys, I’d lose the gift. Besides, I don’t have the discipline to get through another school. Willpower is not my strong suit. The world is made out of willpower,” he said, as if perplexed. He put his head back into his hands. “Willpower! Anyhow, would you please explain to me why it feels as if I’ve committed a murder?”

When I had first come to New York in the 1970s as an aspiring actor, I rode the subways everywhere, particularly the number 6, which in those days was still the Lexington IRT line. Sitting on that train one afternoon, squeezed between my fellow passengers as I helped one of them, a schoolboy, with a nosebleed, I felt pleased with myself. I had assimilated. Having come to New York from the Midwest, I was anticipating my big break and meanwhile waited tables at a little bistro near Astor Place. Mine was a familiar story, one of those drabby little tales of ideals and artistic high-mindedness that wouldn’t bear repeating if it weren’t for the woman with whom I was then involved.

She had a quietly insubstantial quality. When you looked away from her, you couldn’t be sure that she’d still be there when you looked back again. She knew how to vanish quickly from scenes she didn’t like. Her ability to dematerialize was purposeful and was complicated by her appearance: day and night, she wore dark glasses. She had sensitivity to light, a photophobia, which she had acquired as a result of a corneal infection. In those days, her casual friends thought that the dark glasses constituted a praiseworthy affectation. “She looks very cool,” they would say.

Even her name — Giulietta, spelled in the Italian manner — seemed like an affectation. But Giulietta it was, the name with which, as a Catholic, she had been baptized. We’d met at the bistro where I carried menus and trays laden with food back and forth. Dining alone, cornered under a light fixture, she was reading a book by Bruno Bettelheim, and I deliberately served her a risotto entrée that she hadn’t ordered. I wanted to provoke her to conversation, even if it was hostile. I couldn’t see her eyes behind those dark glasses, but I wanted to. Self-possession in any form attracts me, especially at night, in cities. Anyway, my studied incompetence as a waiter amused her. Eventually she gave me her phone number.

She worked in Brooklyn at a special school for mildly autistic and emotionally impaired little kids. The first time we slept together we had to move the teddy bears and the copies of the New Yorker off her bed. Sophistication and a certain childlike guilelessness lived side by side in her behavior. On Sunday morning she watched cartoons and Meet the Press, and in the afternoon she listened to the Bartók quartets while smoking marijuana, which she claimed was good for her eyesight. In her bathtub was a rubber duck, and in the living room a copy of Anna Karenina, which she had read three times.

We were inventive and energetic in our lovemaking, Giulietta and I, but her eyes stayed hidden no matter how dark it was. From her, I knew nothing of the look of recognition a woman can give to a man. All the same, I was beginning to love her. She comforted me and sustained me by attaching me to ordinary things: reading the Sunday paper in bed, making bad jokes — the rewards of plain everyday life.

One night I took her uptown for a party near Columbia, at the apartment of another actor, Freddy Avery, who also happened to be a poet. Like many actors, Freddy enjoyed performing and was good at mimicry, and his parties tended to be raucous. You could easily commit an error in tone at those parties. You’d expose yourself as a hayseed if you were too sincere about anything. There was an Iron Law of Irony at Freddy’s parties, so I was worried that if Giulietta and I arrived too early, we’d be mocked. No one was ever prompt at Freddy’s parties (they always began at their midpoint, if I could put it that way), so we ducked into a bar to waste a bit of time before going up.

Under a leaded-glass, greenish lamp hanging down over our booth, Giulietta took my hand. “We don’t have to go to this … thing,” she said. “We could just escape to a movie and then head home.”

“No,” I said. “We have to do this. Anyway, all the movies have started.”

“What’s the big deal with this party, Benjamin?” she asked me. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her dark glasses, but I knew they were trained on me. She wore a dark blue blouse, and her hair had been pinned back with a rainbow-colored barrette. The fingers of her hands, now on the table, had a long, aristocratic delicacy, but she bit her nails; the tips of her fingers had a raggedy appearance.

“Oh, interesting people will be there,” I said. “Other actors. And literary types, you know, and dancers. They’ll make you laugh.”

“No,” she said. “They’ll make you laugh.” She took a sip of her beer. She lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Dancers can’t converse anyway. They’re all autoerotic. If we go to this, I’m only doing it because of you. I want you to know that.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Listen, could you do me a favor?”

“Anything,” she nodded.

“Well, it’s one of those parties where the guests …”

“What?”

“It’s like this. Those people are clever. You know, it’s one of those uptown crowds. So what I’m asking is … do you think you could be clever tonight, please? As a favor to me? I know you can be like that. You can be funny; I know you, Giulietta. I’ve seen you sparkle. So could you be amusing? That’s really all I ask.”

This was years ago. Men were still asking women — or telling them — how to behave in public. I flinch, now, thinking about that request, but it didn’t seem like much of anything to me back then. Giulietta leaned back and took her hand away from mine. Then she cleared her throat.

“You are so funny.” She wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be evaluating me. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right.” She dug her right index fingernail into the wood of the table, as if making a calculation. “I can be clever if you want me to be.”

After buzzing us up, Freddy Avery met us at the door of his apartment with an expression of jovial melancholy. “Hey hey hey,” he said, ushering us in. “Ah. And this is Giulietta,” he continued, staring at her dark glasses and her rainbow barrette. “Howdy do. You look like that character in the movie where the flowers started singing. Wasn’t that sort of freaky and great?” He didn’t wait for our answer. “It was a special effect. Flowers don’t actually know how to sing. So it was sentimental. Well,” he said, “now that you’re both here, you brave kids should get something to drink. Help yourselves. Welcome, like I said.” Even Freddy’s bad grammar was between quotation marks.

Giulietta drifted away from me, and I found myself near the refrigerator listening to a tall, strikingly attractive brunette. She didn’t introduce herself. With a vaguely French accent, she launched into a little speech. “I have something you must explain,” she said. “I can’t make good sense of who I am now. And so, what am I? First I am a candidate for one me, and then I am another. I am blown about. Just a little leaf — that is my self. What do you think I will be?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I ask, ‘Who am I, Renée?’ I cannot sleep, wondering. Is life like this, in America? Full of such puzzles? Do you believe it is like this?”

I nodded. I said, “That’s a very good accent you have there.” She began to forage around in her purse as if she hadn’t heard me. I hurried toward the living room and found myself in a corner next to another guest, the famous Pulitzer prize — winning poet Burroughs Hammond, who was sitting in the only available chair. Freddy had befriended him, I had heard, at a literary gathering and had taught him how to modulate his voice during readings. At the present moment, Burroughs Hammond was gripping a bottle of ginger ale and was smoking an unfiltered mentholated cigarette. No one seemed to be engaging him in conversation. Apparently, he had intimidated the other guests, all of whom had wandered away from his corner.

I knew who he was. Everyone did. He was built like a linebacker — he had played high-school football in Ohio — but he had a perpetually oversensitive expression on his wide face. “The hothouse flower inside the Mack truck” was one phrase I had heard to describe him. He had survived bouts of alcoholism, two broken marriages, and losing custody of his children, and had finally moved to New York, where he had sobered up. His poems, some of which I knew by heart, typically dealt with the sudden explosion of the inner life in the midst of an almost fatal loneliness. I particularly liked the concluding lines of “Poem with Several Birds,” about a moment of resigned spiritual radiance.

Some god or other must be tracing, now,

its way, this way, and the blossoms

like the god are suspended in midair,

and seeing shivers in the face of all this brilliance.

I had repeated those lines to myself as I waited tables and took orders for salads. The fierce delicacy of Burroughs Hammond’s poetry! On those nights when I had despaired and had waited for a god, any one of them, to arrive, his poetry had kept me sane. So when I spotted him at Freddy Avery’s, I introduced myself and told him that I knew his poems and loved them. Gazing up at me through his thick horn-rim glasses, he asked politely what I did for a living. I said I waited tables, was an unemployed actor, and was working on a screenplay. He asked me what my screenplay was about and what it was called. I told him that it was a horror film and was entitled Planet of Bugs.

My screenplay had little chance of intriguing the poet, and at that moment I remembered something that Lorca had once said to Neruda. I thought it might get Burroughs Hammond’s attention. “ ‘The greatest poet of the age,’ ” I said, “to quote Lorca, ‘is Mickey Mouse.’ So my ambition is to get great poetry up on the screen, just as Walt Disney did. Comic poetry. And horror poetry, too. Horror has a kind of poetry up on the screen. But I think most poets just don’t get it. But you do. I mean, Yeats didn’t understand. He couldn’t even write a single play with actual human beings in it. His Irish peasants—! And T. S. Eliot’s plays! All those Christian zombies. Zombie poetry written for other zombies. They were both such rotten playwrights — they thought they knew the vernacular, but they didn’t. That’s a real failing. Their time is past. You’re a better poet, and when critics in the future start to evaluate—”

“You,” he said. He lifted his right arm and pointed at me. Suddenly I felt that I was in the presence of an Old Testament prophet who wasn’t kidding and had never been kidding about anything. “You are the scum of the earth,” he said calmly. I backed away from him. He continued to point at me. “You are the scum of the earth,” he repeated.

Everyone was looking at him, and when that job had been completed, everyone was looking at me. Some Charles Mingus riffs thudded out of the record player. Then the other guests started laughing at the show of my embarrassment. I glanced around to see if I could detect where Giulietta had gone to, because I needed to make a rapid escape from that party and I needed her to help me demonstrate a certain mindfulness. But she wasn’t anywhere now that I needed her, not in the living room, not in the kitchen, or the hallway, or the bathroom. After searching for her, I descended the stairs from the apartment as quickly as I could and found myself back out on the street.

Now, years later, I no longer remember which one of the nearby subway stops I found that night. I can remember the consoling smell of New York City air, the feeling that perhaps anonymity might provide me with some relief. I shouted at a light pole. I walked a few blocks, brushed against several pedestrians, descended another set of stairs, reached into my pocket, and pulled out a subway token. In my right hand, I discovered that I was still holding on to a plastic cup with beer in it.

Only one other man stood on the subway platform that night. The express came speeding through on the middle tracks. The trains were all spray-painted with graffiti in those days, and they’d rattle into the stations looking like giant multicolored mechanical caterpillars — amusement park rides scrawled over with beautifully creepy hieroglyphs preceded by a tornado-like racket and a blast of salty fetid air.

The other man standing on the platform looked like the winos that Burroughs Hammond had written about in his fragmentary hymns to life following those nights he had spent in the drunk tank. No other life could be as precious to me / as this one, he had written. If only I could experience some kindly feeling for a stranger, I thought, possibly I might find myself redeemed by the fates who were quietly ordering my humiliations, one after the other.

Therefore, I did what you never do on a subway platform. I exchanged a glance with the other man.

He approached me. On his face there appeared for a moment an expression of the deepest lucidity. He raised his eyelids as if flabbergasted by my very existence. I noticed that he was wearing over his torn shirt a leather vest stained with dark red blotches — blood or wine, I suppose now. He wore no socks. For the second time that evening, someone pointed at me. “That’s a beer you have,” he said, his voice burbling up as if through clogged plumbing. “Is there extra?”

I handed over the plastic cup to him. He took a swig. Then, his eyes deep in mad concentration, he yanked down his trousers’ zipper and urinated into the beer. He handed the cup back to me.

I took the cup out of this poor madman’s grasp, put it down on the subway platform, and then I hauled back and slugged him in the face. He fell immediately. My knuckles stung. He began to crawl toward the subway tracks, and I heard distantly the local train rumbling toward the station, approaching us. With the studied calm of an accomplished actor who has had one or two early successes, I left that subway station and ascended the stairs two at a time to the street. Then, conscience-crippled and heartsick, I went back. I couldn’t see the man I had hit. Finally I returned to the street and flagged down a taxi and rode to my apartment.

For the next few days, I checked the newspapers for reports of an accidental death in the subway of a drunk who had crawled into the path of a train, and when I didn’t find any such story, I began to feel as if I had dreamed up the entire evening from start to finish, or, rather, that someone else had dreamed it up for me and put me as the lead actor into it — this cautionary tale whose moral was that I had no gift for the life I’d been leading. I took to bed the way you do when you have to think something out. My identity having overtaken me, I called in sick to the restaurant and didn’t manage to get to an audition I had scheduled. A lethargy thrummed through me, and I dreamed that someone pointed at my body stretched out on the floor and said, “It’s dead.” What frightened me was not my death, but that pronoun. “I” had become an “it.”

There’s no profit in dwelling on the foolishness of one’s youth. Everyone’s past is a mess. And I wouldn’t have thought of my days as an actor if it weren’t for my cousin Brantford’s having told me twenty years later over lunch in an expensive restaurant that he felt as if he had killed someone, and if my cousin and I hadn’t had a kind of solidarity. By that time, Giulietta and I had children of our own, two boys, Elijah and Jacob, and the guttering seediness that was the New York of the 1970s was distant history, and I only came to the city to visit my cousin and my aunt. By then, I was a visitor from Minnesota, where we had moved and where I was a partner in the firm of Wilwersheid and Lampe. I was no longer an inhabitant of New York. I had become a family man and a tourist.

Do I need to prove that I love my wife and children, or that my existence has become terribly precious to me? Once, back then in my twenties, all I wanted to do was to throw my life away. But then, somehow, usually by accident, you experience joy. And the problem with joy is that it binds you to life; it makes you greedy for more happiness. You experience avarice. You hope it will go on forever.

A day or so after having lunch with Brantford, I went up to visit Aunt Margaret. She had started to bend over from the osteoporosis that would cripple her, or maybe it was the calcium-reducing effects of her anti-depressant and the diet of kung pao chicken, vodka, and cigarettes that she lived on. She was terrifyingly lucid, as always. The vodka merely seemed to have sharpened her wits. She was so unblurred, I hoped she wasn’t about to go into one of her tailspins. Copies of Foreign Affairs lay around her apartment near the porcelain figurines. NPR drifted in from a radio on the windowsill. She had been reading Tacitus, she told me. “The Annals of Imperial Rome. Have you ever read it, Benjamin?”

“No,” I said. I sank back on the sofa, irritating one of the cats, who leapt up away from me before taking up a position on the windowsill.

“You should. I can’t read the Latin anymore, but I can read it in English. Frighteningly relevant. During the reign of Tiberius, Sejanus’s daughter is arrested and led away. ‘What did I do? Where are you taking me? I won’t do it again,’ this girl says. My God. Think of all the thousands who have said those very words in this century. I’ve said them myself. I used to say them to my father.”

“Your father?”

“Of course. He could be cruel. He would lead me away, and he punished me. He probably had his reasons. He knew me. Well, I was a terrible girl,” she said dreamily. “I was willful. Always getting into situations. I was … forward. There’s an antiquated adjective. Well. These days, if I were young again, I could come into my own, no one would even be paying the slightest attention to me. I’d go from boy to boy like a bee sampling flowers, but in those days, they called us ‘wild’ and they hid us away. Thank god for progress. Have you seen Brantford, by the way?”

I told her that I had had lunch with him and that he had said that he felt as if he had killed somebody.

“Really. I wonder what he’s thinking. He must be all worn out. Is he still drinking? Did he tell you about his girlfriend? That child of his?”

“What child? No, he didn’t tell me. Who’s this?”

“Funny that he didn’t tell you.” She stood up and went over to a miniature grandfather clock, only eight inches high, on the mantel. “Heavens,” she said, “where are my manners? I should offer you some tea. Or maybe a sandwich.” This customary politeness sounded odd coming from her.

“No, thank you.” I shook my head. “Aunt Margaret, what child are you talking about?”

“It’s not a baby, not yet. Don’t misunderstand me. They haven’t had a baby, those two. But Brantford’s found a girlfriend, and she might as well be a baby, she’s so young. Eighteen years old, for heaven’s sake. He discovered her in a department store, selling clothes behind the counter. Shirts and things. She’s another one of his strays. And of course he doesn’t have a dime to his name anymore, and he takes her everywhere on his credit cards when he’s not living off of her, and he still doesn’t have a clue what to do with himself. Animals all over the place, but no job. He spends all day teaching dogs how to walk and birds how to fly. I suppose it’s my fault. They’ll blame me. They blame me for everything.”

“What’s her name? This girl?” I asked. “He didn’t mention her to me.”

“Camille,” Aunt Margaret told me. “And of course she’s beautiful — they all are, at that age — but so what? A nineteenth-century name and a beautiful face and figure and no personality at all and no money. They think love is everything, and they get sentimental, but love really isn’t much. Just a little girl, this Camille. She likes the animals, of course, but she doesn’t know what she’s getting into with him.” She looked at me slyly. “Do you still envy him? You mustn’t envy or pity him, you know. And how is Giulietta?” Aunt Margaret had never approved of Giulietta and thought my marriage to her had been ill-advised. “And your darling children? Those boys? How are they, Benjamin?”

Aunt Margaret turned out to be wrong about Camille, who was not a sentimentalist after all. I met her for the first time at the memorial service five years after she and my cousin Brantford had become a couple. By then, she and Brantford had had a son, Robert, and my cousin had ended his life by stepping out into an intersection into the path of an oncoming taxi at the corner of Park Avenue and Eighty-second Street. If he couldn’t live in that neighborhood, he could at least die there. He suffered a ruptured spleen, and his heart stopped before they admitted him to the ER. He had entered that intersection against a red light — it was unclear whether he had been careless or suicidal, but it was midday and my cousin was accustomed to city traffic. Well. You always want to reserve judgment, but the blood analysis showed that he had been sober. I wish he had been drunk. We could have blamed it on that, and it would have been a kind of consolation.

One witness reported that Brantford had rushed onto Park Avenue to rescue a dog that had been running south. Maybe that was it.

In the months before his death, he had found a job working in the produce department at a grocery. When he couldn’t manage the tasks that he considered beneath him — stacking the pears and lining up the tomatoes — he took a position as a clerk behind the counter at a pet food store on Avenue B. A name tag dangled from his shirt. He told me by telephone that he hated that anyone coming into the store could find out his first name and then use it. That offended him. But he loved that store and could have worked there forever if it hadn’t gone out of business. After that, he worked briefly at a collection agency making phone calls to deadbeats. He edited one issue of a humorous Web literary magazine entitled The Potboiler. What Brantford had expected from life and what it had actually given him must have been so distinct and so dissonant that he probably felt his dignity dropping away little by little until he simply wasn’t himself anymore. He didn’t seem to be anybody and he had no resources of humility to turn that nothingness into a refuge. He and Camille lived in a cluttered little walk-up in Brooklyn. I think he must have felt quietly panic-stricken, him and his animals. Time was going to run out on all of them. There would be no more fixes.

I wanted to help him — he was almost a model for me, but not quite — but I didn’t know how to exercise compassion with him, or how to express the pity that Aunt Margaret said I shouldn’t feel. I think my example sometimes goaded him into despair, as did his furred and feathered patients, who couldn’t stand life without him.

At the memorial service, Camille carried the baby in a front pack, and she walked through the doors of the church in a blast of sunlight that seemed to cascade around her and then to advance before her as she proceeded up the aisle. Sunlight from the stained-glass windows caught her in momentary droplets and parallelograms of blues and reds. When she reached the first pew, she projected the tender, brave dignity of a woman on whom too many burdens have been placed too quickly.

Afterward, following the eulogies and the hymns, Camille and I stood out on the lawn. Aunt Margaret, with whom I had been sitting, had gone back to her apartment in a hired car. Camille had seemed surprised by me and had given me an astonished look when I approached her, my hand out.

“Ah, it’s you,” she said. “The cousin. I wondered if you’d come.”

I gave her a hug.

“Sorry,” she said, tearfully grinning. “You startled me. You’re family, and your face is a little like Branty’s. You have the same cheerful scowl, you two.” She lifted baby Robert, who had been crying, out of the front pack, opened her blouse, drew back her bra, and set the baby there to nurse. “Why didn’t you ever come to see us?” she asked me, fixing me with a steady expression of wonderment as she nursed the baby. “He loved you. He said so. He called you Bunny. Just like one of his animals.”

“Yes. I didn’t think … I don’t think that Brantford wanted me to see him,” I said. “And it was always like a zoo, wherever he was.”

“That’s unkind. We had to give the animals away, back to the official rescuers. It was not like a zoo. Zoos are noisy. The inmates don’t want to be there. Brantford’s creatures loved him and kept still if he wanted them to be. Why’d you say that? I’m sure he invited you over whenever you were in town.”

She looked at me with an expression of honesty, solemn and accusing. I said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

“Yes. It’s always a beautiful day. That’s not the subject.”

I had the feeling that I would never have a normal conversation with this woman. “You were so good for him,” I blurted out, and her expression did not change. “But you should have seen through him. He must have wanted to keep you for himself and his birds and cats and dogs. You were his last precious possession. And, no, he really didn’t invite me to meet you. Something happened to him,” I said, a bit manically. “He turned into something he hadn’t been. Maybe that was it. Being poor.”

“Oh,” she said, after turning back toward me and sizing me up, “poor. Well. We liked being poor. It was sort of Buddhist. It was harder for him than for me. We lived as a family, I’ll say that. And I loved him. He was a sweetie, and very devoted to me and Robert and his animals.” She hoisted the baby and burped him. “He had a very old soul. He wasn’t a suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you all right?”

“Why?”

“You look like you’re going to faint.”

“Oh, I’m managing,” I said. In truth, my head felt as if the late-afternoon sunlight were going right through the skull bones with ease, soaking the gray matter with photons. “Listen,” I asked her, “do you want to go for a drink?”

“I can’t drink,” she said. “I’m nursing. And you’re married, and you have children.” How old-fashioned she was! I decided to press forward anyway.

“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s have coffee.”

There is a peculiar lull that takes over New York in early afternoon, around two thirty. In the neighborhood coffee shops, the city’s initial morning energy drains out and a pleasant tedium, a trance, holds sway for a few minutes. In any other civilized urban setting, the people would be taking siestas. Here, voices grow subdued and gestures remain incomplete. You lean back in your chair to watch the vapor trails aimed toward LaGuardia or Newark, and for once no one calls you, there is nothing to do. Radios are tuned to baseball, and conversations stop as you drift off to imagine the runner on second, edging toward third. Camille and I went into a little greasy spoon called Here to Eat and sat down at a table near the front window. The cook stared out at the blurring sidewalk, his eyelids heavy. He seemed massively indifferent to our presence and our general needs. The server barely noticed that we were there. She sat at one of the counter stools working on a crossword. No one even looked up.

Eventually the server brought us two cups of stale, burned coffee.

“At last,” I said. “I thought it’d never come.”

The baby was asleep in the crook of Camille’s right arm. After a few minutes of pleasantries, Camille asked me, “So. Why are you here?”

“Why am I here? I’m here because of Brantford. For his memory. We were always close.”

“You were?” she said.

“I thought so,” I replied.

Her face, I now noticed, had the roundedness that women’s faces acquire after childbirth. Errant bangs fell over her forehead, and she blew a stream of air upward toward them. She gave me a straight look. “He talked about you as his long-lost brother, the one who never came to see him.”

“Please. I—”

She wasn’t finished. “You look alike,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean that you were close. You could have been his identical twin and you wouldn’t have been any closer to him than you are now. Anyway, what was I asking? Oh, yes. Why are you here? With me? Now.”

“For coffee. To talk. To get to know you.” I straightened my necktie. “After all, he was my cousin.” I thought for a moment. “I loved him. He was better than me. I need to talk about him, and you didn’t plan a reception. Isn’t that unusual?”

“No, it isn’t. You wanted to get to know me?” She leaned back and licked her chapped lips.

“Yes.”

“Kind of belated, isn’t it?” She sipped the hot coffee and then set it down. “The mom. A little chitchat over coffee with the mom.”

“Belated?”

“It’s a bit sudden, isn’t it? That desire? Given the circumstances?” She gazed out the window, then lifted the baby to her shoulder again. “For the personal intimacies? For the details?” Her sudden modulation in tone was very pure. So was her irony. She had a kind of emotional Puritanism that despised the parade of shadows on the wall, of which I was the current one.

“Okay. Why do you think I’m here?” I asked her, taken aback by her behavior. The inside of my mouth had turned to cotton; rudeness does that to me.

“You’re here to exercise your compassion,” she said quickly. “And to serve up some awful belated charity. And, finally, to patronize me.” She smiled at me. “La belle pauvre. How’s that? Think that sounds about right?”

“You’re a tough one,” I said. “I wasn’t going to patronize you at all.”

She squirmed in the booth as if her physical discomfort could be shed from her skin and dropped on the floor. “Well, you probably weren’t planning on it, I’ll give you credit for that.” She poured more cream into her coffee. My heart was thumping away in my chest. “Look at you,” she said. “God damn it, you have a crush on me. I can tell. I can always tell about things like that.” She started humming “In a Sentimental Mood.” After a moment, she said, “You men. You’re really something, you guys.” She bit at a fingernail. “At least Branty had his animals. They’ll escort him into heaven.”

“I don’t know why you’re talking this way to me,” I said. “You’re being unnecessarily cruel.”

“It’s my generation,” she said. “We get to the point. But I went a bit too far. It’s been a hard day. I was crying all morning. I can’t think straight. My apologies.”

“Actually,” I said, “I don’t get you at all.” This wasn’t quite true.

“Good. At last.”

We sat there for a while.

“You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. She stirred her coffee. Her spoon clicked against the cup.

“Big firm?”

“Yes.” Outside the diner, traffic passed on Lexington. The moon was visible in the sky. I could see it.

“Well, do me a favor, all right? Don’t ask me about Brantford’s debts.” She settled back in the booth, while the server came and poured more burned coffee into her cup. “I don’t need any professional advice just now.”

I stared at her.

“Actually,” she said, “I could use some money. To tide me over, et cetera. Your aunt Margaret said that you would generously donate something for the cause.” She gave me a vague look. “ ‘Benjamin will come to your aid,’ she said. And, yes, I can see that you will.” She smiled. “Think of me as a wounded bird.”

“How much do you need?” I asked.

“You really love this, don’t you?” She gave me another careless smile. “You’re in your element.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had a conversation like this before.”

“Well, you’ve had it now. Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you what. You have my address. Send me a check. You’ll enjoy sending the check, and then more checks after that. So that’s your assignment. You’re one of those guys who loves to exercise his pity, his empathy. You’re one of those rare, sensitive men with a big bank account. Just send that check.”

“And in return?”

“In return,” she said, “I’ll like you. I’ll have a nice meal with you whenever you’re in town. I’ll give you a grateful little kiss on the cheek.” She began to cry and then, abruptly, stopped. She pulled out a handkerchief from her purse and blew her nose.

“No, you won’t. Why on earth do you say that?”

“You’re absolutely right, I won’t. I wanted to see how you’d react. I thought I’d rattle your cage. I’m grief-stricken. And I’m giddy.” She laughed merrily, and the baby startled and lifted his little hands. “Poor guy, you’ll never figure out any of this.”

“Exactly right,” I said. “You think I’m oblivious to things, don’t you?”

“I have no idea, but if I do think so,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ll let you know. I didn’t fifteen minutes ago.”

“It seems,” I said, “that you want to keep me in a posture of perpetual contrition.” I was suddenly proud of that phrase. It summed everything up.

“Ha. ‘Perpetual contrition.’ Well, that’d be a start. You really don’t know what Brantford thought of you, do you? Look: call your wife. Tell her about me. It’d be good for you, good for you both. Because you’re …”

I reached out and took her hand before she could pronounce the condemning adjective or the noun she had picked out. It was a preemptive move. “That’s quite enough,” I said. I held on to her hand for dear life. The skin was warm and damp, and she didn’t pull it away. For five minutes we sat there holding hands in silence. Then I dropped some money on the table for the coffee. Her baby began to cry. I identified with that sound. As I stood up, she said, “You shouldn’t have been afraid.”

She was capable of therapeutic misrepresentation. I knew I would indeed start sending her those checks before very long — thousands of dollars every year. It would go on and on. I would be paying this particular bill forever. I owed them that.

“I’m a storm at sea,” she said. “A basket case. Who knows? We might become friends after all.” She laughed again, inappropriately (I thought), and I saw on her arm a tattoo of a chickadee, and on the other arm, a tattoo of a smiling dog.

Back in the hotel, I called Giulietta, and I told her everything that Camille had ordered me to say.

That night, I walked down a few blocks to a small neighborhood market, where I stole a Gala apple — I put it into my jacket pocket — and a bunch of flowers, which I carried out onto the street, holding them ostentatiously in front of me. If you have the right expression on your face, you can shoplift anything. I had learned that from my acting classes. More than enough money resided in my wallet for purchases, but shoplifting apparently was called for. It was an emotional necessity. I packed the apple in my suitcase and took the flowers into the hotel bathroom and put them into the sink before filling the sink with water. But I realized belatedly that there was no way I would be able to get them back home before they wilted.

So after I had arrived in the Minneapolis airport the next day, I bought another spray of flowers from one of those airport florists. Out on the street, I found a cab.

The driver smiled at the flowers I was carrying. “Very nice. You are surely a gentleman,” he said, with a clear, clipped accent. I asked him where he was from, and he said he was Ethiopian. I told him that at first I had thought that perhaps he was a Somali, since so many cabdrivers in Minneapolis were from there.

He made an odd guttural noise. “Oh, no, not Somali,” he said. “Extremely not. I am Ethiopian … very different,” he said. “We do not look the same, either,” he said crossly.

I complimented him on his excellent English. “Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, wanting to get back to the subject of Ethiopians and Somalis. “We Ethiopians went into their country, you know. Americans do not always realize this. The Somalis should have been grateful to us, but they were not. They never are. We made an effort to stop their civil war. But they like war, the Somalis. And they do not respect the law, so it is all war, to them. A Somali does not respect the law. He does not have it in him.”

I said that I didn’t know that.

“For who are those flowers?” he asked. “Your wife?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“They are pretty except for the lilies.” He drove onto the entry ramp on the freeway. The turn signal in the cab sounded like a heart monitor. “Myself, I do not care for lilies. Do you know what we say about Somalis, what we Ethiopians say? We say, ‘The Somali has nine hearts.’ This means: a Somali will not reveal his heart to you. He will reveal a false heart, not his true one. But you get past that, in time, and you get to the second heart. This heart is also and once again false. In repetition you will be shown and told the thing which is not. You will never get to the ninth heart, which is the true one, the door to the soul. The Somali keeps that heart to himself.”

“The thing which is not?” I asked him. Outside, the sun had set.

“You do not understand this?” He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “This very important matter?”

“Well, maybe I do,” I said. “You know, my wife works with Somali children.”

The cabdriver did not say anything, but he tugged at his ear.

“Somali children in Minneapolis have a very high rate of autism,” I said. “It’s strange. No one seems to knows why. Some say it’s the diet, some say that they don’t get enough sunlight. Anyway, my wife works with Somali children.”

“Trying to make them normal?” the cabdriver asked. “Oh, well. You are a good man, to give her flowers.” He gazed out at the night. “Look at this dark air,” he said. “It will snow soon.”

With my suitcase, my apple, and my flowers, I stood waiting on the front porch of our house. Instead of unlocking the door as I normally would have, I thought I would ring the bell just as a stranger might, someone hoping to be welcomed and taken in. I always enjoyed surprising Giulietta and the boys whenever I returned from trips, and with that male pride in homecoming from a battle, large or small, I was eager to tell them tales about where I had been and what I had done and whom I had defeated and the trophies with which I had returned. Standing on the welcome mat, I looked inside through the windows into the entryway and beyond into the living room, and I saw my son Jacob lying on the floor reading from his history textbook. His class had been studying the American Revolution. He ran his hand through his hair. He needed a haircut. He had a sweet, studious look on his face, and I felt proud of him beyond measure. I rang the bell. They would all rush to greet me.

The bell apparently wasn’t working, and Jacob didn’t move from his settled position. I would have to fix that bell. Again I rang and again no one answered. If it had made a noise, I couldn’t hear it. So I went around to the back, brushing past the hateful peonies, stepping over a broken sidewalk stone, and I took up a spot in the grassy yard, still carrying my spray of flowers. Behind me, I could smell a skunk, and I heard a car alarm in the distance. If I had been Brantford, all the yard animals would have approached me. But if I had been Brantford, I wouldn’t be living in this house. I wouldn’t be here.

Giulietta sat in the back den. I could see her through the windows. She was home-tutoring a little Somali girl along a floor balance beam, and when that task was finished, they began to toss a beanbag back and forth to each other, practicing midline exercises. Her parents sat on two chairs by the wall, watching her, the mother dressed in a flowing robe.

I felt the presence of my cousin next to me out there in the yard, and in that contagious silence I was reminded of my beautiful wife and children who were stubbornly not coming to the door in response to my little joke with the doorbell. So I rapped on the window, expecting to startle Giulietta, but when she looked up, I could not see through her dark glasses to where she was looking, nor could I tell whether she saw me.

I have loved this life so much. I was prepared to wait out there forever.