The Man 
Who Collected Souls

A RURAL WINTER LANDSCAPE APPEARS ASLEEP, covered with a milky goose down duvet that bloats with every snowfall. Any attempt at pulling down that coverlet is a startling reminder of the alabaster hardness of it all. The countryside in spring can be a cruel revelation for people with secrets.

The taxi driver, a Somali man—Cheshire-cat grin, dull yellow eyes sunk into a raw-boned, eggplant-colored face— searches Ludmila Leskov’s expression. She’s lashed over the front seat like a Siren, guiding him all the way from the bus station in Freehold, New Jersey, until she urges him forcefully to a stop along Brick House Road.

“Here?” he asks warily.

She nods.

He swivels in the driver’s seat, looks across the road to
posted woodland—a fenced-off danger zone—some kind of military complex. He turns back to the shred of an entrance, just off the main road, that disappears into more forest. There is no mailbox, no sign, nothing. Just the rusted bones of a bicycle on its side, pedals stiff from disuse, like an old horse gone to its reward.

“Don’t pull into the drive. You’ll never get out,” she says. “You sure, Miss?”

“Yes. Yes. Of course I’m sure. I lived here!”

Hurried and vexed, she overtips him. Which makes him
more ill at ease.

“Okay,” he says, popping the trunk. He pockets the bills.

She is out of his cab before the meter spits out a receipt. She yanks her backpack from the trunk and tosses it to the side of the road. The driver emerges halfway from his cab, catches her eye and retreats. She wrestles with the wheels of a zebra- patterned suitcase and slams the trunk closed.

The car speeds away, leaving Ludmila enveloped by the silence she remembers of the place at certain times of the year. It is a mystical stillness, grand in the absence of snow blowers and the whipcrack of a deer hunter’s rifle. On that Monday morning, commuters have already shot through the tolls heading for Manhattan. Soon enough, gardeners, contractors and the weekend roar of the neighbors’ manic obsession with the Rolls Royce of lawn tractors will infiltrate that silence.

Ludmila steps a few feet in from the road, adjusts her backpack, before running her fingers through a boyish crop of auburn curls. She is tall, like her parents, and slender. They called her Lud as a child. She was a tomboy then and still adopts that attitude. Her girlfriend, Carmen, calls her Luddo. Her face is makeup free, her skin translucent. Her cheeks redden naturally in the country air.

The property—some twenty acres—is at the edge of the Pinelands. Sandy soil has its limitations, but seems never to hinder the forest growth of pine and oak. Holly grows everywhere, rooted in prickly insistence. In summer, mountain laurel appears in delicate clusters of pink and white, like miniature cupcakes at a tea party.

Chill morning air makes her shiver. She wears a dun-gray, short-sleeve t-shirt. On the front are two black ravens, heads turned away from each other. There’s a hoodie in the suitcase, but she will wait to unpack in the house. Deer country means ticks. Her black jeans may have been a bad idea, though it’s still early in the season.

The driveway is nothing more than an extended, overripe dump in early April, lashed by the seasons and ruined by unknowable, regretful years. Her memory, still to be disturbed, relies on an inborn compass. Her stance is battle ready, knees slightly bent for lift off. She regards her Doc Martens—her foot armor—and grabs the handle of the suitcase.

Sodden earth gives way as she plunges up the drive, towing the suitcase behind her. Crunching underfoot are metal, glass, and plastic shards reduced to an indecipherable mosaic that will eventually disappear in the undergrowth. The sound is of a broken-toothed maw sucking as hard as it can to slow her down.

A brownish furred lump darts across her path, stopping her. She blurts after the startled groundhog, “He’s dead!”

From where she stands just before the bend in the drive, Ludmila knows the return will be painful. That every memory—like every broken tree branch and every bit of poison ivy, every tick that sucks the lifeblood, every chigger that bites through remorse, every flea that irritates the itch that cannot be reached, and every downed power line lurking in the undergrowth—means there had once been a very different life here.

“I fear there will be zero fucks given,” she grumbles, pounding through the muck.

At the top of the drive, a massive boat blocks her view of the house. The sight of it brings Ludmila up sharply. It appears to be shipwrecked atop a chaotic assembly of iron railings and wood planks. Yellow caution tape, like an inert serpent, is strung around it.

The prow of the yacht soars with the conviction that glory is possible, recalling a demented character who angered the gods in a Werner Herzog film. If there are gods to be appeased, Ludmila is damned if she knows who they are.

A moan escapes her and ricochets off the surrounding forest. “Why me? Why, why, why....”

She ducks to the side of the towering castaway. Behind it stands the house, her father’s house. Its multiple windows— mismatched nearly to a one—peer down at her with schizophrenic disregard for convention. Rough patches cover the exterior in various stages of wear. Orange and gray cinderblocks are exposed in some places. Mortar is frozen mid-ooze between the blocks. There are balconies— constructed from odds and ends, secured to the sides and front of the house—that no sane human being would dare chance. The house looks back at her as if to say, “This is how we Russians do it. We scavenge.”

Ludmila approaches from a narrow tear of dirt, between broken flowerpots and a battered wheelbarrow pooled with stagnant water, slumped in defeat. She skirts an assortment of bicycle wheels and something that looks like an industrial vacuum. She pushes at one of a trio of rusted metal drums that slosh with god-knows-what. Split logs lie like desiccated limbs, piled under a blue tarp. “He had heat at least,” she murmurs.

She drags the suitcase up cement stairs that look like hardened oatmeal, onto broad weathered planks—what passes for a front porch—and stops to peer at two time-darkened windows. A memory flap opens and closes before it can strike a note. She moves clumsily among garden tools barely recognizable in their oxidized state. She steps around coils of razor wire. Plastic buckets of indeterminate material stand like sentries at the front door.

Ludmila forces the front-door lock with a skeleton key. Applying her shoulder to the door, she presses it hard. She chills at the notion that on the other side is memory’s resistance to her return.

The smell hits her right off, pungent, yet still sweet: rotting vegetables, dead animal, mold, cat food and cat piss. Pipe tobacco—the kind her father smoked—evokes caramel and honey and vanilla.

The resistance, it turns out, is a sea of detritus swept up against the front door. Ludmila leaves her suitcase on the porch. She has to pee. Rethinking her bladder, she retreats to the bottom of the porch stairs, slips behind the log pile and lowers her jeans.

Relieved, she steps carefully into a dark entrance hall. The door to the room on the left is nailed shut. A wooden ladder leans against it. The stairway to the floor above is on the right. Cardboard cartons jammed with books, all kinds of picture frames—some empty, some bordering squally seascapes—spill through another doorway into a larger room where computers and keyboards are tossed about as though a dry hurricane has ripped through it. She makes her way, looking for a kitchen table she remembers, and discovers it to be there still. Its surface is piled with camera bodies, video equipment and lenses. More than a dozen tripods—maybe two dozen—crowd around the table, tilted as if laid for a bonfire.

The room she remembers to be the kitchen is in the rear, beyond the table, darkened and crowded with shapes she cannot discern. It is nothing she wants to tackle just yet.

A glance into the main room means she will leave further exploration until later. The atmosphere is muscular and unsound. She needs fresh air, but the windows are blocked by odd bits of furniture, mismatched chairs in a towering display of single-mindedness, and heaps of crockery that will come crashing down with one wrong move. The windows are winterized with bubble wrap, giving the room a hive-like feel.

Holding her breath, Ludmila backtracks through the salvage and heads up to the second floor.

The stairway is narrow, uneven, and steep. She has to step sideways in her graceless boots. The stairs lead to another large room where she skirts a jumbled pile of careworn hats dropped among orphaned and maimed gloves. She kicks aside a disfigured snarl of shoes. She tears bubble wrap from its tape moorings and jerks open a window. Chill terrarium air oozes into the stale-smelling room.

Sliding her backpack from her shoulders, she plants her elbows on the windowsill. From above, the boat looks smaller, meaningless. A token among many tokens she knows exist in the house and around the property. Her father had the monopoly on useless things. That boat below. She’d already passed “go” on the front path when she found the wheelbarrow. She knows there is more. She is sure to unearth an old-style boot. She does not expect to come upon a Scotty dog. Her father loved cats. He was never without cats. With a start she bolts upright, banging her head hard on the window sash.

Ludmila scans the room looking for a cat, any sign that there have been cats. Certainly there is strong evidence of something animal in the stench. She dares not think that her father had been that far gone. But what does she know? She doesn’t have a cat. Maybe it’s a raccoon, or god-knows-what under a hillock of quilts in a gloomy corner of the room.

A far off pinging startles her. Like the sound a black box makes from the plane wreckage at the bottom of the ocean. She stares blankly until she realizes it’s her cell phone. Retrieving it from her backpack, she sees it is her lover, Carmen.

“Hey, babe. I was just thinking about you.”

Carmen snorts. “No, you were not.” She laughs—a deep, tantalizing whoop that conjures strawberry-shortcake martinis and bullet shots of Jameson. “Seriously. Is everything okay? Are you there? How was the flight? What shape is the place in? Have you met—?”

“Hang on,” Ludmila cries, and then shrugs off annoyance at Carmen’s persistence. Carmen is an army of one, a force to be reckoned with, a fun house on legs and all Mexican heart. Today Ludmila is relieved to hear her voice.

“Luddo? You okay? ¿Qué onda?”

“Nothing much, yet. I’m fine. Well, I just smacked my head. Got here a little while ago. I want to walk over the property while it’s still daylight.” She searches for a light switch. Flips it rapidly on and off. “Cool. The electricity is on.”

“I can fly out any time, babe. Just say the word.”

Ludmila imagines for a few seconds Carmen’s reaction to the scene. “Nah. I’m good. Gotta go. Lots to do.”
“When are you coming home? I miss your monkey arms.” “Soon. Very soon,” Ludmila says.

“Be careful, okay? Watch your head. Love you, Changa—.” “Yup. Will do. Talk tomorrow.”

She needs air. What little comes from the open window at the top of the stairs hardly makes a dent in the sensation that something in that room has died.

Making her way carefully, Ludmila missteps, animating a nest of wind chimes into clangorous objection. Panels lie separated from a white drop-leaf table, abandoned halfway through IHIVKEA instructions. Periodicals and newspapers tower in stacks of oddly configured columns circling what looks like a miniature church. It turns out to be a vintage radio missing its knobs. She manages to get the balcony doors unstuck. A dubious-looking beach chair sits stranded atop tarpaper that curls like wavelets on a winter sea. There is no railing. She is not tempted and retreats into the room, leaving the doors ajar.

Acutely aware of fatigue, she needs to sit. The drive from San Pedro to LAX had followed a lethargic crow; twenty-five miles had become a bloated hour and a half of stalled freeway. Carmen, at the wheel, was happy as a mothering clam— reassuring, and at the same time assuredly foreboding. She has a chimerical gift for sniffing out the tragic wrapped in the ordinary and then cheerily expounding on that. Ludmila has lost count of the hours she’s been in transit—the overnight flight, the subway to Port Authority, then a bus and a cab.

She shoves aside bits of clothing—limp corpses drained of their organs—on a couch pushed up against the stair banister. She unearths a black-and-red plaid wool jacket. It will do for a blanket. She unlaces her boots and kicks them off. Anticipating a restorative nap, she sinks into the funky-smelling cushions. She thinks she hears a gnawing sound.

...

LUDMILA WAKES IN HALF-LIGHT the color of honey, trapped in amber. A fitful dream disappears. She is aware of a walloping in her chest—her heart—a small animal beating against the bars of its cage. The manly scent of the wool jacket, like smelling salts under her nose, brings her back to life. She grips the jacket, her father’s jacket. Maxim. Never called Max. She remembers the light switch and rises stiffly.

There are messages from Carmen on her cell.

Carmen and Ludmila’s relationship—what Carmen thinks is love and what Lud loosely calls extended coupling—has lasted nearly nine months. They are an odd couple. Resourceful ghostwriter. Procrastinating poet. West Coast. East Coast. Short. Tall. Mocha. Vanilla. Hot. Cold. Day. Night. Lesbian. Undecided. Ludmila never had a female lover until Carmen, and she was forty before that happened. Carmen, who was nearing fifty, said she knew the first time she saw Ludmila at the poetry reading in San Pedro that she was the one. Ludmila still does not know.

She’s had only one other extended coupling. Ben was an actor in a big hurry to get out of New York. His friend Gottfried was the artistic director of the Players Workshop in San Miguel de Allende. Ben invited Ludmila to join him in Mexico. He described a charming town in a temperate climate, hidden courtyards and cobblestone streets. Little houses awash in primary colors, the lively sounds in markets and shops. That there was a week-long poetry festival nearly won her over and though she had conflicted feelings about the Beats—loved Ginsburg, hated Kerouac—she was oddly persuaded when Ben told her that Neal Cassady had partied there and then died on the railroad tracks on the outskirts of the town. She liked the sound of expat artist. She would stop wearing black.

Three months later she had had enough of mariachi music, artisan shops and galleries, and watching expat retirees navigate the inescapable cobblestone. Couch surfing played havoc with her back. In a place lousy with writers and poets, she had tried and failed to write anything of worth, or anything at all.

She returned to the city, rootless, on the scent of one roommate wanted situation to another, one hourly-rate job to another. Christopher Street, the now anorexic arm of Greenwich Village, had lost its pulse and its identity. Williamsburg—and the whole Brooklyn enterprise—scared the shit out of her, with its noisome bearded-and-tattooed army barreling through the streets, cheek by jowl alongside hordes of entitled tourists armed with slick designer shopping bags of contempt. Astoria still had no bookstores of any worth.

Ludmila had been considering, for some months, a pressing overture from her mother, Elena, to reclaim her old room uptown, in Columbia University housing where they’d lived after they left Freehold.

At odds with her mother, she felt they had abandoned her father, and that her mother had given up. Elena once thought she’d be the one to tame Maxim. She pursued him until, lathered in white lace, she waltzed up the aisle to a gilded altar in a Russian Cathedral in Howell, New Jersey. She never seemed pained by the breakup and sometimes referred to his girlfriends that had come before her. They were smart, educated, beautiful professionals: a writer, a psychologist, a literature professor, an architect, and a filmmaker. They all enabled Maxim’s eccentricity. Ludmila’s mother never thought of herself as beautiful, but she was strong-willed. She was, in fact, Garbo gorgeous.

Their wedding icon hung in Elena’s bedroom in Morningside Heights: a bearded man with an impassive, hooded gaze, a two-fingered salute raised to his fate. The Virgin eyes the infant on her knee, thinking, “I’m not entirely sure how you got here.” Ludmila’s parents were first cousins. Not that it mattered to their daughter. Ludmila turned out all right.

Elena was employed as a career counselor at Columbia University before retiring on a comfortable pension. There, Ludmila had once had a haphazard relationship with scholarship. Free tuition had done nothing to steady her aimlessness. She bounced from one subject to another. She left before she was asked to leave.
And then her mother died, leaving a respectable inheritance to her only child, but nowhere for her to live. Lud wrote to her father, hearing nothing. She was antsy and needed a change from rewriting the same poem. She shared a birthday with the poet Charles Bukowski, whom she had only lately discovered, and in early August, she flew to Los Angeles to pay homage to the man on whose headstone was engraved: “Don’t Try.”

When she moved in with Carmen, at her lover’s urging she wrote once more to her father.

That pinging sound pricks her again. She rues the iPhone Carmen talked her into, but it’s easier to do the texting thing. Carmen is a talker. She wakes up talking. Ludmila loves the sound of voices, but hates talking on the phone, or anytime, really. She prefers to be on the outside of a conversation, listening in.

She recalls her father’s voice as floatable, yet brimful of sarcasm. When she visited he always seemed surprised that he had a daughter. It had been over five years since the last time. There were fewer and fewer phone conversations, such as they were. He might make sarcastic comments about the interlopers, as he called them: Donald Trump buying the Colts Neck Golf Course or the pizza baron whose newly built mansion looked like a shopping mall. In the next town over, Bruce Springsteen was harvesting his organic garden. In breeding season, the background noise on the phone was deafening. “I can’t move them,” he’d shout, referring to the frogs. 
“They’re protected.” Some calls elicited nothing more from him than, “I think I have a family of wild turkeys I must look out for,” and “Hummingbird in the feeder this morning.”

He accused her once of being captious and she had to look it up. She called him back and asked what he meant by it. He had no idea what she was talking about. In their last conversation, Ludmila was her usual ambivalent self, unwilling to respond to his questions about her writing, her prospects, her love life. “You don’t give a fuck about anything,” he said.

Whatever a genius is, he was that. As a girl, she remembered him and his best friend, Misha, “inventing” things, like the “talking” fax machine. He lost that friendship, but he gained a computer—many computers—and entrance into the vast world of the Internet. Yet he eschewed Skype. He ignored e-mail. He was writing a novel. Or he’d been working on patents that would radically enhance an off-the-grid lifestyle. Once he alluded to having written a program that would revolutionize the stock market. There were hints in their conversations that there was something of value buried on the property.

She unfolds a letter from its padded envelope. It’s been read countless times. A single page, it still has the indentation of the skeleton key that was enclosed.

April 1, 2015
Dear Ludmila Leskov,
You do not know me. I was your father’s friend. I am very sorry to tell you that Maxim Leskov died in the early morning of the first of this year. Your father wanted you to have the house and the property. He took care of things a few years ago. Please come as soon as you can. I will explain everything.

I will explain everything. There is no signature. No return address. She folds the letter back into its envelope.
There is still time for a quick wander around the property. Ludmila wedges her feet back into her boots. The atmosphere is deceptive—humid and cold at the same time. She looks for her leather jacket and remembers it is gone.

Carmen knew the jacket was Lud’s favorite article of clothing, her security blanket. “Take this,” Carmen said. “Looks like a late spring in New York. Gonna be chilly, Luddo.” She always laughingly pronounced the city in an exaggerated imitation of a native. “Noo Yawk,” she’d say.

When she was a girl, Ludmila had found the jacket in the attic of the house in Freehold. Her father told her it was German-made. Late forties, he thought. He wasn’t sure whose it had been. The jacket hung to her seven-year-old ankles. It was double breasted and had a neat diagonal zipper pocket on the chest. She lovingly caressed the belted cuffs and leather buttons. Later it draped her lean adult frame like a second skin. The removable wool lining had long since disappeared. Her mother hated it. They left Freehold and her father that summer.

Ludmila had forgotten how stuffy it was underground in New York. On the subway ride from the airport she slipped out of the jacket. Now she pictures it in forlorn abandon, left behind on a seat on the A train.

She hurries downstairs. She kicks a little path to the front door and tugs at a string that lights a bare bulb above the entranceway.

In a space under the stairs are makeshift shelves crammed with the stuff of preppers: a hand-cranked radio, loads of batteries of all sorts, a first aid kit—a few of them–gardening shears, sun hats, thickly coiled rope and a tool belt. There are compasses and packets of iodine pills. Maps crammed into an open tin box. She grabs a flashlight, checking that it works. On the porch, she pulls up the collar of her father’s jacket and starts down the steps. She reconsiders and shoves the suitcase inside the front door.

With the fast-disappearing light the air chills markedly. Ludmilla is grateful for her wool cocoon. Making her way carefully, she heads down a ragged path, swinging the flashlight like a klieg at a Hollywood premiere, under the great unfolding canopy of night. The air is dense. Like a sponge it sucks what little pluck she has left.

She rounds a trampoline covered with a toupee of dead leaves and sets off for the woods surrounding the house. She remembers there were a few outbuildings on the property and tries to situate them in her head. In the lowering gloom she recognizes the closest bungalow, where her fiercely tenacious great-grandmother lived with her schizophrenic daughter. Ludmila approaches, catching her breath.

She peers through a window coated thickly with erstwhile grit. Tree branches have punctured other windows. Cracks have grown outward from the impact, like veins on the face of a wizened ancestor.

Night falls swiftly, the curtain on a staged denouement. What she sees spooks her. What she hears in the now-dark forest sends her scurrying back to the main house.

Ludmila taps out a message to Carmen on her cell: Are you there?

Carmen rings her immediately. She hollers over top-down traffic where it is still light. “Just left a client. Everything okay, babe?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ludmila barks. “Get off the phone while you’re driving, for crissakes. Talk later.” She ignores the incoming text from Carmen.

Closing the balcony doors, she heads for the couch. Hungry and tired, she slumps against the cushions. It is not yet eight o’clock. “This is ridiculous,” she mutters, forcing herself upright. She has a lot to do, though unsure of what that is exactly. The room burns brightly from the overhead fixture and the lamps scattered about. It’s as if she cannot get enough light. She managed earlier to drag her suitcase upstairs, and the sight of its zebra striping is oddly reassuring. Carmen gave it to her. You’ll spot it easily, she said. There are provisions in the case: coffee, tea bags, a jar of peanut butter, boxes of crackers, some energy bars, a few cans of tuna and bags of trail mix. There is a spoon and a fork and bottled water. Ludmila has packed a hoodie. There are few other items of clothing because she does not expect to be in Freehold for very long. She retrieves a pair of clogs, the hoodie, bottled water and a couple of energy bars. She needs to close her eyes, just for a bit.

...

IN THE MORNING, LUDMILA ROUSES slowly in a kind of passive resistance to circumstance. She remains perfectly still. Her eyes are slits. It’s just before seven. Her phone warns her of half a dozen missed messages. First thing, she turns off all the lights. Then she wolfs down nearly half of the crackers she’s spread thickly with peanut butter. She chugs from a bottle of water, making her way across the main room, looking for the bathroom. The sink is stained with rust-colored flume. The toilet flushes. There is an absence of toilet roll. Rags and newspapers are wedged under the sink. The tap allows a weak stream of water. She imagines being in an abandoned asylum. Tiles on the walls are broken or missing. On the floor is a sizable sinkhole of neglect. There is a small patch of window out of reach, darkened by vines. A bathtub is crowded with things that don’t belong there: an engine of some sort, paintbrushes stiff with resentment and moldy volumes of hardcover books.
To the left of the bathroom is her father’s bedroom. The back of the house is in forest shade. Old-fashioned boots peek from under the bed. Swathes of bed sheets lie dune-like on top of the mattress in the darkened room. Her bedroom had been an enclosed porch on the ground floor at the front of the house, converted for privacy and warmth.

Outdoors, the chill revives her.

Ludmila looks back at the house, as if someone has called her. To the left of the front door are two oblong rectangles, windows with shades half drawn that appear to recognize her from hooded eyes. She imagines her small face, her expression tight with indifference, peering from those bedroom windows.

She lived among men and women she called uncles and aunties—Russians in various stages of aging, disrepair and alcoholism—sitting around a kitchen table covered in oilcloth. Shouting was the norm.

They lived frugally, though a ceramic bowl filled with cherries the color of garnets always sat alongside freshly baked black bread or potato bread. Yogurt was made weekly. Glass jars of newly made yogurt were removed from an overnight stay in an unlit oven to the kitchen counter. A confluent haze from pipes and cigarettes hovered above the scent of fresh dill. The property was home to hens and roosters, a communal garden that gave them tomatoes and radishes and nearly all of the produce that came to the table. There was a bathhouse and a bunker-like building that she was warned to steer clear of. A hulking jerry-built garage housed tractors and pickup trucks. The uncles clamored over engines, wielding tools in damaged fingers, creating a metallic symphony that rang through the forest. In the fall, they caulked windows. The basement was filled with canned fruit, jars of boiled cabbage and beets, and dusty bottles of weird alcohol.

Ludmila was the only child.

She senses she is being watched. Gripped by the woodland hush, she looks back, stifling a gasp. A young buck eyes her from a distance. He sniffs the air with his hockey-puck nose. His antlers are not fully regrown. He resembles a doe-eyed Carmen Miranda more than Bambi’s majestic father.

They step cautiously from each other. The angriest she ever saw her father was when her mother called in hunters to decrease the deer population. Maxim moved out of the house. He took up residence in the Airstream trailer at the back of the property, where he stayed until his wife and daughter moved to New York. Lud’s mother claimed they left before the authorities intervened, to get Ludmila registered in a real school.

Everywhere she walks, Ludmila must do so carefully. Panes of glass tip against tree trunks and layer like ice floes in the undergrowth. China plates and cups stack in unlikely places under trees, beside a cement mixer, in the pickup of an old truck, proof that the party never happened. Cables drip from trees. She can make out the orange striping around her father’s old trailer. Thick underbrush has already claimed the front end of it.
At the cottage where she was spooked last night, a massive tree has tipped into the roof like a drunken giant. She peers through the window into the kitchen. Curtains hang like old, dried tears. Spider webs knit into corners of the room. The table is set. There is the ironing board upon which her great grandmother slept. Having lived through a time of great deprivation—hiding in dense forests before they could escape to America—she’d felt undeserving of the comfort of a bed. The only person who thought this was nuts was Ludmila’s mother. Scattered around the floor are record albums of classical music and opera. The door to a small oven is open.

Ludmila ventures further into the woods, ducking under a clock face hanging on a chain from a tree limb. She stops for a moment at a bruised-cherry red pickup truck. Windshield wipers lie powerless under composted leaves. There is a classic blue-and-white diner coffee cup on the dashboard. Ludmila circles the vehicle. The truck bed is crammed with doors never to be opened into inviting rooms.

Another cottage, this one an exhausted wreck, has shed most of its shingles. The front door hangs from one hinge. Windows and more doors lie about in sepulchral disorder, lacerated by unyielding vines. She peers into the gloom and makes out what looks like a pyre of bicycles. She can’t recall who lived in this cottage. Stacked against a still-standing side of the house are stereo speakers, nine or ten of them. The speakers, with their black holes, are apparitions caught in a silent chorus of alarm. Birds have left nests in some of them, adding to the grim feel of remains in empty sockets.

The chicken coop that was behind the cottage is a weedy foundation fending off encroaching forest. Ludmila bends at the waist, imagines plucking an egg and forgets that chickens make her anxious. She looks up and sees a pale blue water heater on its side and rusted in spots, like the carcass of a pinto pony.

Behind that is a sizeable mound of earth—as tall as she is—which she has never recalled seeing before. Two slender black locusts shoot up from the mound, looking like chopsticks stuck in brown rice. There is another mound, free standing, bigger than the first. It reminds her of something ancient, something sacred.

She starts back. Gingerly at first, then picking up speed. Spongy earth barely gives underfoot, like the footprint of a ghost.

Ludmila remembers a conversation with her father when he was, finally, the lone occupant. She stood with Maxim on the balcony outside his bedroom. They were all gone, starting with his fragile mother who was followed by his grandmother and the aunts and uncles. There was never a funeral, or at least none that she knew about. Why were there no photographs?

“I am still surrounded by them,” he said. “Nature has its own memory.” He bit down on his pipe stem. “This is Rupert Sheldrake’s theory, of course, but it makes sense.” He pointed to a squirrel on a tree limb, staring back at them, undecided. “His memory is the memory of all the squirrels that have come before him.”

She remembers the silence, staring into the lowering dark. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Footprints,” he said.

“Right. There’s nothing down there.”

“Keep looking,” he said.

She wants to talk to Carmen. She needs to talk to Carmen. “Babe, you don’t do emotion. What’s up?”
“I just wanted to hear your voice. Sorry about the missed
calls. I’m—.”

“S’okay. Want to hear about the widow?”

“Sure. What are you eating?”


“Some warm Indian dough balls.”

“Tell me more,” says Ludmila.

“M-m-m. Fried dough balls in rose syrup. Tastes like the most divine doughnuts drenched in yes.” “I’m starving.”

“If you were here, changa, I’d share.” “You’ll get fat.”

“Hips. That's what holds yer pants up, kid. Ha ha. My hips could hold up the fuckin’ planet!”

Ludmila laughs, relieved.

“There should be an “opt out” clause for women who don’t have the chillins. Boobs and hips, want to keep them or not?”

“I’m gonna hang around for a while,” Ludmila says.

“I hate you. How while?”

“Dunno. Until the daylilies bloom or the mystery neighbor shows up?”

“I hate you even more,” Carmen retorts.

Ludmila is silent.

“OK. I don't hate you.”

“How’s the book coming?”

“I interviewed her today, the grieving widow. Um, excuse me, the poet’s widow. She talked a lot about Sean Penn and Bono and how they don’t return her calls. We sat in her garden smoking a joint. Very unprofessional, I know. I know. That garden cost a mil, at least. Little Buddha heads everywhere. Paid for by the Japanese translations.”

“But you’ll do it?”

“I’m a ghostwriter. Of course I will,” Carmen replies. “I’m a ghost...I gotta go.”

“You know what the old man says, Changa?” “What?”

“Hold.”

...

SHE WAKES AGAIN IN A BRIGHTLY LIT ROOM, in her father’s bed, to the sound of a dull motor. The strapping ginger cat on her chest breathes hotly into her face, purring loudly. The cat kneads Ludmila’s shoulder with muffin-sized paws. She lowers her hand, gently stroking its back. “Well, hello. Where did you come from?” Her phone says nearly 2:00 a.m. No messages. Moths flit around in undecided suicide mode.

She addresses the cat. “Are you hungry?” She swings her legs and rises stiffly. “Let’s get you something to eat.”
Ludmila steps out on the balcony, testing its backbone. She pulls a tab and drops the opened can of tuna. She stands for a while looking up at the stars, chewing an energy bar. Night is pitch dark here. Stars are like chalk scratches on a blackboard. The boat glows from below in reflected light. Everything beyond has disappeared for a comforting while. The cat slurps the fish, punching the can with its nose.

“Night, night, big orange cat,” she says. And then giving him a once over she adds, “Night, night, Bricks. See you in the morning.”

It takes a long time to grow an old friend. ~John Leonard

A SPANIARD IN THE WORKS

Nearly eight years ago I was given a virtual introduction to a woman writer from Barcelona through our mutual friend in Paris, also a writer.

At the time I was recovering from the shock of freedom one gets in the jarring sunlight of unemployment after many years in the dark belly of the corporate beast. My great passion had been as a painter until the jailers at Hachette put me on paid lockdown and for years I struggled to maintain my creative spirit (i.e., individuality) among mostly alien coworkers during long hours in the day job. I was too often drained and left gasping for turpentine. When I was deemed replaceable by younger, cheaper fodder for the corporate mill they cut me loose. I returned to the oils and turps, painting portraits with the intensity of a newly freed prisoner who has been deprived of the sensual pleasures for too long.

But what I needed most was change. I put the brushes down and began writing. The Mister and I had already started down a songwriting path. I endured being told by the musician in the marriage that I had to learn to make the lyrics scan, but I did. And we have carried on to a comfortable and productive joy in the songwriting. But I needed some creative outlet of my own. At first there was a screenplay—oh, the cliché—but as I wasn’t quite sure of my newly acquired solitude I joined forces with an ex-coworker in an effort to help another along to his creative dreams. Collaboration is only good when you—you know—collaborate. But apart from too many dips into the Department of Missing the Point, the experience was not a total loss as the idea for the screenplay was mine and while we struggled with personal foibles I began to write the story as a novel.

When Isabel first communicated to me from Barcelona via e-mail this was the sum total of my writing experience, apart from the journals I had kept and letters I wrote as a young woman. Both she and our Parisian friend were seasoned writers and I would come to know Bel—as she is called by friends—as not only a journalist and politically astute writer but the creator of the most hauntingly beautiful short stories, delicately yet precisely mined from her personal history.

In a time of sound bites, abbreviated e-mails and truncated twitter messages we wrote lengthily, and a lot of the time passionately, about our lives, our dreams, then more intimate thoughts and comfortable complaint. We had never heard each other’s voice though she imagined my laugh. We sent little presents through the mail. We clicked.

It was she who inspired me early on to begin writing short stories, telling me my messages to her were like stories and should be expanded. I have not stopped writing since.

Bel had been contemplating a trip to New York. It was nearly eight years since she had been here with her teenage son and she was dreaming of a trip on her own. It would mean dealing with the nightmare of travel in a post 9/11 era, a tricky minefield for a politically aware person who refuses the mantle of the sheep’s skin. But the photos I kept sending her of Central Park, the small daily stories I write describing my city, and our shared political ground, finally persuaded her.

The Mister and I arrived home last Thursday evening having attended a delightful recital at the Third Street Music School where our young friend Ella, with feet firmly planted on the ground, elbows raised and her flute to her lips with the kind of confidence only a nine-year-old girl can muster, played excerpts from Thomas Haynes Bayly: “Gaily the Troubador” and “Long, Long Ago.” Bel had arrived at our apartment earlier and following my instructions made herself at home. We found her with a glass of wine and a book, curled into the wicker chair, our cats eyeing her with curiosity. It was like I had always known her.

We had, literally, a whirlwind week flying around the city with The Mister who took a week off from the day job so he too could be an accidental tourist in his adopted hometown. But that night Isabel’s introduction to my city was a walk down Fifth Avenue from our apartment on the upper eastside and then into Central Park for the glorious late night view of Manhattan from the reservoir. The trees around us rustled with expectation at her arrival; she who had fought the good fight in Barcelona to save the trees along Diagonal Avenue and who would, upon returning to Barcelona, find she had won! In fact, the oddest thing occurred. As we walked back uptown along the path at the top of the reservoir, the street lamps went dark, each as we passed. We made our way home in the pitch-blackness, unnerved, and strangely elated at the same time. Surely it was a sign. My own trees paying their respects to the visitor from Barcelona; the Great Defender Of Trees. We returned to our apartment to open the little presents she had brought for us, cooing like sleepy indulged children over exotic teas and a crazy kitchen apron, which The Mister has appropriated.

Trees were the focal point, for sure, during our weeklong excursions. We walked Bel through the beautiful North End of Central Park, pointing out the areas that had been devastated by the storm of August 2009 and are now populated with skinny saplings, digging in with their young roots and already forming a recognizable memory for those younger people among us who will see them reach a powerful old age.

We walked down through Central Park on the west side on Bel’s first day, stopping at Strawberry Fields for the obligatory photograph at that iconic symbol of John Lennon, the IMAGINE mosaic. We dropped in our contribution to the smiling man’s hat on a bench nearby whose hand-lettered sign read: “WHY LIE? I NEED A BEER AND PEACE AND LOVE AND LOTS OF HUGS.” Having read of Bel’s protest to save the trees for so long it was impossible not to notice what a leafy place Manhattan is. Trees are being planted everywhere and recently many have been added to my neighborhood. If only our power-mad mayor would open himself up to the notion that our students in the public schools are like these tender saplings and need nourishment and attention to grow into strong contributors to the well being of our city. If only he saw the connection and didn’t resort to mind-numblingly mean attempts to derail that growth like a plan to revoke the free pass on city transit for school children.

We began our museum adventure at the Rubin Museum in Chelsea with an exhibition titled: REMEMBER THAT YOU WILL DIE, which was a surprisingly upbeat overview of cultural references to death. The highlight of the exhibition, though, was a stunningly evocative piece by Bill Viola and we stood transfixed at the moving imagery of three females of differing age stepping back into life from the other side for one last look before leaving forever. We, the living, had a fresh and delightfully prepared vegetarian lunch in the museum’s café.

Later we met up with our Fairy Godfather—FGF—and celebrated his birthday at Arturo’s, a fave old-timey hangout where live jazz is still affordable just above the SOHO border. We introduced Bel to real brick oven pizza before she stumbled mistakenly into a god awful Dominoes or any one of the battling Ray’s, each more famous than the next. After we saw FGF back home the three of us, rejuvenated by fresh arugula salad, crisply perfect pizza and, oh yeah red wine, set off for DUMBO in Brooklyn. The intent was for Isabel to have that thrill we afford all of our guests of crossing the majestic Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. It never, ever fails to impress no matter the time of day or night, whatever season in whatever weather. And after a tour over cobblestone streets of the picture book neighborhood of Vinegar Hill that is featured in my novel, poking our heads into a hangar-sized collection of antiquated Asian eccentricities, strolling under the bridges in the little riverside park and enjoying home made ice cream on a pier bordered with the words of Brooklyn’s famous son, Walt Whitman, we made our way across the famous bridge. It is a walk The Mister and I have made many, many times at all hours of the day and night and it never ever feels anything less than thrilling.

On a day we had planned to trek out to Long Island City and visit the studio of a sculptor friend inclement weather forced our hand and we had to forgo the pleasure. Later at the first sign of a break in the clouds, I marshaled us back onto the subway for the long ride out to Brighton Beach. Under the zippered light through the tracks above the main thoroughfare we explored the shops in this Russian community, laughing at the traditional nesting dolls revamped in the image of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Liquor stores displayed the oddest packaging of alcoholic products we’d ever seen: penis shaped bottles of tequila; a glass semi-automatic weapon containing god knows what kind of alcohol. We settled into our favorite café for herring and potatoes, eggplant caviar and sweet puffs of crepe stuffed with cheese and cherries.

Refreshed, we made our way along the windy beach in the direction of Coney Island. Soon we were swallowed up by a fierce sandstorm, thwarting even the most determined kite flyer, and after we’d dumped a few tons of sand from our shoes we walked the rest of the way to Coney on the boardwalk. We detoured into the Coney Island Aquarium to see the historic bathysphere that appears in my short story “Wild Life.” We made our way through dark tunnels lighted by tanks of captive sharks. It’s a bit of a sad place now, waiting for the multi-million dollar renovation scheduled. Workers wages are frozen, many have been laid off but the whales and dolphins will be back performing for an audience of cheering children and their parents who don’t really get that Nature is not our personal entertainer. After oohing and ahhhing over the the schools of silvery fish in the lighted tanks one can choose to have the fried version between a bun in the cafeteria and no one bats an eye. Cute little seahorses on the menu would be more likely to bring protest.

Hanging on to each other we braved the gusts out to the end of the pier over a swollen Atlantic Ocean. Later, we stopped to see a couple gleefully raising air rifles to “Shoot the Freak” with paintballs. After a rollicking ride on The Wonder Wheel, which Bel declined, we three crammed into a photo booth and fell out like clowns in a car to the amused couples waiting their turn. We had our fortunes told by the Grandmother in the booth and I’m happy to say all of our worries are over. Finally, we wandered into the Coney Island sideshow. We laughed hysterically, recoiled in horror, gagged a few times and were generally enormously entertained by Carney characters who hammered nails up their nose; danced seductively with a scaley, undulating reptilian partner—kissing its nervously flicking forked tongue for emphasis; squealed as a completely tattooed barefoot girl stepped gingerly up a razor sharp ladder of swords and cheered when the beautiful damsel swallowed fire. Before boarding the subway I made my unavoidable pilgrimage to Nathan’s Famous and ordered the obligatory yellow bag of crinkle cut fries I knew was a bad idea and ate them anyway. The tummy upset took my mind off of the blisters nearly crippling me.

We met Beats at Pearl River the following morning, a gigantic department store of Asian products on Broadway and Grand and set out on our personal quests. I found the spoon rest I required, Beats her soap. Isabel bought a lovely black and white kimono and seductively beautiful black silk pajamas. The Mister scored a bright red flashlight. I was temporarily saved by Beats who carries a supply of blister bandages. She is Swiss and like the army knife is prepared for every situation. Before I tucked into fabulous rounds of traditional dim sum in Chinatown, which is presented on little plates in rolling carts pushed by smiling women who haven’t a clue when you ask about a dish, I slipped into the bathroom and bound my pitiful feet.

After leaving Bel to peruse the miles of books at Strand The Mister and I waited in a coffee shop up the block watching celebrities like Maggie Gyllenhal cruise by the window, talking on her cell phone like every other New Yorker. When Bel returned she presented me with two wonderful slim volumes: Joseph Brodsky’s “The Watermark” and Robert Bolaño’s “Antwerp.”

Besides trees, Bel was most taken with the sound of the city and the cacophonous orchestration of so many instruments both mechanical and human. She listened with delight for the sing song of Asian children in the streets of Chinatown and once we stopped in Chelsea outside of the old timey MacManus Bar, eavesdropping on a native New Yorker’s cell phone conversation:

“Yew don unnerstan. You thought I assed diju need anything. I said, diju eat anything. You’re crazy. You needa vacation.”

One day during her visit—Mother’s Day—Isabel took off on her own for museums like The Frick and The Metropolitan as we live just off Museum Mile on upper Fifth Avenue. She also got to MOMA, which exhibitions we had already seen. We did join her on her last day and also met up with our friend Beatrice at the Whitney Museum for its Biennial exhibition. Beatrice (Beats as she is known to friends) and I were good friends at Hachette until circumstances and the poisonous atmosphere in those offices drove us apart. Reconnecting only recently—on facebook, it’s true—we have renewed our friendship with the vigor of those who know what they lost and are overjoyed at finding it again. Beatrice had been introduced to Bel earlier in the visit when we trawled around Chinatown together. At the Whitney show Beats delivered Bel’s order of the charming hand made cat toys she creates. In the galleries of the Whitney we each—The Mister, Bel, Beats and me—delivered appropriately acerbic comments to installations with less romantic appeal than construction sites but more detritus. Apart from a somewhat moving video projected on the windscreen of a vintage ambulance nearly every other piece on exhibition could fall under the title: KNEE PADS IN ART SCHOOL ACADEMIA.

But on that Sunday the Mister and I remained at home. I soaked my tortured feet and we worked on a new song we are writing. It is, of course, a love song, and appropriately called “Wonder Wheel.”

Monday night was a regular jam session at the Lenox Lounge in Harlem and not to be missed. The featured band was the Sugar Hill Quartet and though a little round-healed in their delivery they played a fine set. I caught a poignant note in the bass player’s voice as he mumbled to the sax that, “…ol Lena is gone….” This isn’t the atmosphere I recall as a much younger woman when often I was one of very few white people in the audience and the jazz was tighter. You didn’t see the sax player look out over an audience of whites and Asians and hear him say, with some tiredness, “The more you drink the better we sound.” You never saw a conga line of Japanese tourists leave mid-set and each one bow comically to the bemused band members before they made their way to the idling tour bus on 125^th Street. The club itself is a beautiful space, its walls covered with an exotic black-and-white zebra design, authentically restored when Spike Lee filmed scenes for Malcolm X. I kinda miss the days when the bandleader did not have to instruct an audience how to clap on the downbeat, “…if you gotta clap. Let's see if we have any rhythmically-challenged people out there!” We left after the set as Patience Higgins, the sax player, chided us to, “…get offa them computers—like Alice down the rabbit hole…” which made Bel smile.

Tuesday morning found us nursing hangovers from a post-Harlem jam session back at the apartment, which we mostly don’t recall anything of but listening to Coltrane and laughing. A lot. Then there was a mad flurry of facebook postings between the three of us, making us laugh even harder. We managed an afternoon stroll to the North End of Central Park, our preferred terrain, ambling through the Conservatory Gardens and then taking in the view high above the Harlem Meer, watching the little kids gripping their fishing poles with concentrated expectation. We shepherded Isabel along the winding paths we know well, under the great stone arch and up the rocky outcropping along the waterfall to the placid lake bordered by giant willow trees.

At our favorite spot we came upon a man who was fly casting into the lake. In no time he commandeered me and I was his accidental assistant helping him to photograph the dos and donts of fly casting for a magazine article he was writing.

My job done, we carried on north to end up at The Hungarian Pastry Shop for a much-anticipated latte and cherry strudel. At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine we were rewarded with a superb musical concert by a chamber orchestra from Berklee College of Music. Columbia University was gearing up for graduation and the stately beauty of the campus was lost somewhat under the white tents and trucks parked for the upcoming occasion.

Wandering down Broadway I was struck by the absence of bookstores I had ardently frequented when I lived in that neighborhood in my early twenties. The rickety sidewalk tables of books manned by endearing eccentrics were still there. Shakespeare was gone. Barnes & Noble an unwelcome sight. We had the obligatory photo op in front of Tom’s Coffee Shop on the corner of the block where I used to live. I would head home in a beery haze from The Gold Rail eyeing the huge sign painted on a wall high above Broadway that declared the wages of sin to be death before turning down my street on 112^th. Confronted by the ghostly presence of St. John the Divine rising from the mist at the end of the block I swore every time that I had had my last beer. Every time.

Tuesday was the 21^st wedding anniversary for The Mister and me and Bel treated us to a sumptuous Indian meal at another fave restaurant, which is called Tiffin Wallah on east 28^th street. It is a sparklingly clean atmosphere and serves deliciously traditional southern Indian vegetarian fare. Bel was suitably impressed and we ate like royalty for reasonable dosh. She headed downtown to Tribeca after dinner to meet up with an artist acquaintance and The Mister and I went back to the apartment to ‘celebrate’ our anniversary.

In all this time the conversation rolled easily among the three of us. Bel liked The Mister’s sense of humor, “…very Brit.” She said she felt like Cinderella the whole time, being escorted all over the city by real New Yorkers. The Mister set her up with a laptop at one end of my desk and often in the mornings and later at night when we were home we pecked at the keys in sync. The expected insecurities arose now and again; I am quiet in the mornings and take some time before I embrace the ‘reality’ of the day and I missed my morning run around the reservoir and the bout of exercise and stretching on a park bench that helps me fall into the day. Most of the time, when The Mister is working, I am on my own and have come to embrace the solitude like a friend who has finally returned to me and whom I now understand more fully what they were trying to tell me. But to upset one’s routine is sometimes necessary and sometimes a good thing. A very good thing. With Bel, I felt as if I had known her for a very long time; that this could not, in fact, have been the only time we met. So many of our respective jaunts have included photographs taken of our feet to tell the other where we have been and that we have been thinking of each other. Our e-mails to each other are now rounded out with the physical presence of the writer and the reader.

Our last night together the three of us went to see Fela on Broadway. The house was packed and not with the usual theater going crowd who prefer the likes of Mary Poppins. Fela Kuti was no Mary Poppins, to be sure. The theater rocked with the story of this Nigerian activist, the Afro Beat music and a political pulse that never stopped pounding, even when sly comedy slipped between the cracks. The audience went wild; stately African American grandmas in traditional dress, black teenage girls in spangled t-shirts, broad shouldered black men with long dreads and me and The Mister and Bel who loved every poignant, comic, musical, throbbing minute of it. The unassuming tribute to Sean bell at the musical’s close was heartrending.

We left the theater and entered the evolution of the police state of my city, hundreds of uniformed officers and endless rows of cop cars and tourists who seemed nonplussed by the whole thing. A quick stop at the top of 42^nd Street for Bel and then we got the hell out of there.

Over moules et frites at the 24-hour French Roast on upper Broadway we lifted wine glasses to our friendship, also an evolution of sorts. The Mister and I—normally early diners—marveled that we were eating and drinking in the late hour of the Spanish. Bel had perfected a signature New York slang and now barked like a native: “Fuck you, Jack!” We had crossed over into each other’s hearts. And that was just fine.

Breath Visible

At an ungodly hour on Christmas eve morning in an Upper East Side building, Dora Bauer waved off the doorman on her way out, startling him from his drowse. 

It was well past two in the morning when she’d left her studio earlier. She had indulged, possibly too freely, in a bottle of Maker’s Mark as she applied the finishing touches to a canvas. Mindful of a boozy brume she biked with care up a ploughed route on Park Avenue. Back at the apartment there was only time for a shower and a quick change. She’d had to scramble to pack her bag with the essentials: her journal, a thick volume of Proust and a few slimmer paperbacks of poetry. She had pens, yellow legal pads, an extra sweater, woolen socks, an unopened bottle of bourbon and a pack of Dunhill Reds. Folded into underwear less sexy and more functional were a couple of freshly rolled joints.

She headed to Fifth Avenue in the winter darkness and hailed a cab. Dora’s spontaneous friendliness belied a cynical nature. New York cab drivers saw through that. Strange men often did. 

The driver sped down the deserted avenue along a route of moneyed cliff dwellers and bare trees abstractly silhouetted along Central Park. They passed holiday displays in darkened department store windows. He talked about President Ford’s message to their bankrupt city. “We got the bailout awright,” he said, “but that guy’s goose is cooked fer shuah.” As native New Yorkers he and his passenger shared a certain laissez-faire attitude and they laughingly agreed that being told to drop dead sort of came with the territory.

Until they swept past the towering illuminated evergreen in Rockefeller Center, their chatter remained impersonal. He informed Dora that she was lucky; usually the lights were off by midnight. Except for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Then they were kept on for a straight forty-eight hours. She told him of her Atlantic City getaway and the reasons for it. He steered through Times Square and dropped her off on Eighth Avenue amidst swirling trash and the few vagrants huddled inside the entrance to Port Authority. The famously sordid strip along Forty-Second Street looked more than usually ominous in the freezing pre-dawn chasm.

“Take care yaself, okay?” he admonished. “There’s a lotta lunatics out there.”

Lowering a bulky floral-patterned carpetbag from her shoulder, Dora balanced it on the tips of her Timberland boots, avoiding contact with the grimy cement floor scabbed with spent chewing gum and sadly recognizable fluids. She jammed bare, raw-knuckled hands into the deep pockets of her pea coat, and buried her nose into a knitted multicolored scarf—a thrift shop find. The Port Authority bus terminal, at that hour—at any hour—was like a tomb. She made her way to the Greyhound gate and waited for the hound from hell.

She’d lied to her old aunt, saying she had been invited to stay with friends in the country, knowing full well she could never be rusticated. She had told neither her friends nor disparate lovers of her plans. They would have tried to talk her out of such a gloomy escapade, coax her to their overwrought dinners, or guilt her into joining a lonesome drunken despair in Greenwich Village, on a barstool in Julius’ alongside a bereft handful of gay patrons, where she would be even more conspicuous than usual. Worse, some might not have made any overture at all. She would be poor Dora, newly divorced and alone at the holiday. They would cry, “Oh, such a desolate place! Atlantic City in the winter?” And they would be right. She’d bought her ticket two weeks ago so as not to change her mind. Dora wanted desolation.

Dora chose the seat nearest the driver. To move back any closer to the one grizzled passenger hacking into a yellowed handkerchief would have been foolish. The bus looped along the exit ramp toward a sliver of light beneath the darkness. It reeked of stale reminders of previous passengers and synthetic air freshener. Two days of seaside ahead of her. She had two and a half hours to catch some sleep.

A mechanical squeal and then the wheezing exhale of brakes shot through Dora like a threat. She woke and rose sharply, hitting her head on the overhead storage. Bleary-eyed, she exited the bus and stumbled into the terminal at Atlantic City. Poking her head into a foul-smelling restroom, she thought better of tramping over a waterlogged floor and, hiking the cumbersome carpetbag over her shoulder, hurried out to the main drag.

She scoured Atlantic Avenue. It was too damned early. The big round face of the clock inside the jeweler’s shone through a bracing drizzle. It was not yet nine in the morning. Shops that weren’t boarded up offered nothing in the way of breakfast, and besides, nothing was open. There was an old-fashioned hardware store. There was a dress shop with a window display of bewigged mannequins teetering shoeless on stands, like levitated drunks. Next door was an income tax preparer and then the last resort of the desperate, the pawnbroker. She squeezed between boat-sized cars with tail fins like sharks and crossed an oily tarmac streaked with slush. A blue and gray bubble—a dwarfish bus—rolled up to her but she waved the jitney driver on. Her head throbbed. Her face was frozen. She was desperate for coffee. She started for the boardwalk and her spirits revived. Anything could be had there, from what she remembered. She had her heart set on a room at the grand Marlborough-Blenheim hotel.

Dora crossed Pacific Avenue, the main thoroughfare, parallel to the Atlantic Ocean and at that hour nearly devoid of traffic. Her attention was drawn to decrepit buildings, vacant lots hemorrhaging sodden debris and shops that may or may not be open on an otherwise abandoned strip. Memories of a lively summer crowd carrying kitschy treasure from souvenir shops belied reality. It looked like the kind of place rope-necked thugs could shake down a cowed shop owner. Dora, rattled, hurried along.

Once on the boardwalk she was buoyed at the sight of a familiar image on a bright yellow billboard, an unexpected window in a dull winter sky. The incongruity of a half-naked, curly blonde moppet with a Coppertone tan alongside her mischievous puppy was not lost on Dora, shivering in the raw dampness. “Get more from the sun.” She recognized the domed, architecturally ornate Moorish structure ahead—something out of an Arabian dream—rising above the boardwalk, bigger even than she remembered. Another gargantuan hotel loomed nearby like an asylum. But in the freezing mist, the chimneys of the Marlborough-Blenheim conjured mystery, maybe even danger, and not the welcoming sunbaked hotel she remembered. 

Early on in her marriage—nearly seven years ago—Dora had been determined to live up to her husband’s single-minded whirlwind courtship and had accompanied him on an overnight to Atlantic City. She’d sat raptly attentive in an audience of scientists as he delivered a paper—incomprehensible to her—which she only knew had something to do with toad bladders.

She’d been dazzled by his determination, his education and radical political views, his family’s Park Avenue residence. She hadn’t so much accepted the marriage proposal as offered little resistance. His parents, as far as she knew, were not aware of her existence until after they married. Visits to the sprawling art-filled apartment, pre-marriage, were made sporadically, when the doctor and his wife were absent. The young couple’s late-night presence among the Eames chairs and the antique marble and gold leaf, a small but not insignificant collection of Italian master drawings, decorative kilim rugs and the abundant examples of his mother’s cloisonné handiwork was noticed only by the live-in housekeeper, who noiselessly interrupted amorous fondling to ask if he—not Dora—needed anything before retiring for the night.

Dora should have suspected his insistence on eloping was less a nod to anti-establishment and more of what was to come. She couldn’t make the rent and he sent bad checks. Stamping her feet on the boardwalk, Dora pulled the knitted scarf over her nose and muttered under her breath, “Bastard.”

She caught sight of a gray-faced man behind the glass door of an outmoded luncheonette. He flipped a sign on the door to Open. A cluster of determined women wrapped in homely cloth coats pushed past the man. He wore a depressed, not-so-white apron, tiny black bow tie and a white fountain cap with red piping—a weary nod to authenticity.

Dora followed the women to the counter and lowered her carpetbag between her feet. She ordered a cup of coffee—steaming hot coffee that the obliging man kept pouring. Oddly, her hunger had abated. She tapped a cigarette from its red and gold box. Neither she nor the women removed their coats in the unheated shop. They kept scarves securely tied around wooly hats. Dora flipped the collar of her dark blue pea coat. She didn’t have a hat. Seated next to her was a woman in a coat with a rabbit fur collar. A cheaply jeweled snowman was pinned to it, its tiny red nose alight.

Later, Dora stood outside the Marlborough-Blenheim hotel and weighed her options. There were really only two. She could head back to the station and board the next bus home or she could take the desk clerk’s suggestion and seek out his cousin’s motel. Hesitancy in the man’s voice was something to consider. He’d told her there were no rooms available in the hotel because it was out of season. When Dora pressed, he said there were no rooms in any of the hotels on the boardwalk. She saw evidence, albeit slim, of guests slumped in tatty upholstered wing chairs or slowly wheeling their walkers over the oriental carpet. An aging bellboy in a dark blue uniform shiny with regret, his too-short pants exposing white tube socks and black lace-up orthopedic shoes, stared dumbly at the quiet bank of elevators. Gift shops in the lengthy hotel corridor displayed crystal sailing ships and cast iron statuettes of baseball players. Sensing her confusion, the clerk admitted that a few residents remained, but the hotel was no longer taking guests. He’d shrugged and said it would all be torn down anyway.

Dora, undeterred, had taken a second glance around the circular lobby, as if to challenge his news. Little white letters were missing from summer convention schedules still tacked to a ribbed black board: As ury P k, Ca den. There were almost no gaps where room keys hung like skeletal fingers. Darkened pigeonholes behind the desk held no mail. The fireplaces were unlit. Walls and curtains had faded to the same aquatic shade: more poorly maintained pool than surging ocean. Another peek at the floor suggested her carpetbag was in better shape than the rug. 

The clerk’s parting words rang in her ears: “It’s gonna be the only room you’ll get around here if you insist on staying.” He’d directed her further down the boardwalk, much further. Dora stared ahead at the choppy slate-colored ocean, looking for a natural resolution to her dilemma. Naïve bravery directed her, the heaving Atlantic Ocean on her right and crumbling dreams on her left, until she found the place. Paint peeled like sunburn from its pink exterior. She knew it was cheap. She also had a vague suspicion that guests booked rooms by the hour.

Dora Bauer stood before the man at the desk, who appeared to be taken aback by her presence until she explained who had sent her there. Her long, honey-blond hair hung in damp plaits over her shoulders. Her cheeks shone brightly from winter’s vigorous and salty caress. He watched as she unwound a ridiculously long scarf from her neck, unbuttoned the pea coat and revealed a red plaid flannel shirt. His gaze went first to her snug blue jeans, and then dropped to the bulging carpetbag alongside her sturdy Timberland boots mustached with salt. She was twenty-eight. She assured him she wanted a room for two nights and handed him the cash. When she spotted a manual typewriter atop a pile of damp-cured telephone books and asked if she could borrow it while she was there, he was too stunned to say no. She shouldered the bag and he hoisted the typewriter into her waiting arms.

The room was dark. On impulse, Dora reached for the drapes. At the rear of the motel trashcans crowded, choked with empty liquor bottles. She dropped her hand and quickly returned to the light switch by the door. A moribund space heater in the bathroom doorway was the first thing she noticed in the stark yellow light. A cautious peek revealed a shower she was certain never to set foot in. The sink was stained from forgettable stories and the toilet covered with a wrinkled paper strap, dubious reassurance. A utilitarian blonde-wood table and chair reminded her of her own little desk when she was a girl. There was no sign of a television. No mirror in the room. Hanging above the bed was a dime store seascape, almost a boast.

Music came from somewhere—from a radio or perhaps a cassette recorder in another room. “You got your demons. You got desires. Well, I got a few of my own.” Recognizing the Eagles song, Dora smiled and began emptying the contents of her bag onto the flimsy chenille bedspread. She unscrewed the cap on the bourbon bottle and thought better of it. Suddenly she was ravenous.

Back at the luncheonette, Dora ordered from the younger man behind the counter. He was a boy, really, his hairless face scarred by acne. It was too late for the breakfast special, he told her and she, big spender, waved off his concern. Where was she from, he asked and she told him, New York. “Goin’ back home tonight then?” he asked. Dora shook her head. He frowned. “Not goin’ home for Christmas?”

On the wall behind him was a decorative serving tray illustrated with an apple-cheeked Santa raising a bottle of Coca Cola to his full, pursed lips, buttoned into a foamy froth of beard. As if she needed to be reminded of the holiday. Her prospects were dashed when he revealed that the luncheonette would be closed on Christmas Day. He promised that she could still get dinner that night if she was back there by five o’clock, maybe earlier, depending on the customers. Dora lowered her head over the plate and, avoiding what she imagined was barefaced appraisal, she wolfed down bacon and eggs. She tipped the young man and said she’d see him later.

By the third sighting of the massive Convention Center, her sign to turn around and head back toward the motel, Dora knew that strip of the boardwalk: Fralinger’s salt water taffy, Planter’s Peanuts, a deserted pier. It was, after all, the longest boardwalk in the country—maybe even the world—and Dora figured though she had not gone the actual full length of it, she had already walked at least that far in her determined circumnavigation. By the fifth go-around she was nodding slightly to some of the same people doing the same thing: walking, walking and more walking.

The old women walked slowly in pairs, some as trios, their arms interlocked. Perhaps they feared falling. A newcomer was advised what things she’d need in the summer. Some of the men, also seniors, strolled in pairs. Others walked alone, but a modest show of recognition was made in passing. One couple of indeterminate gender eyed Dora with curiosity. She tried to imagine the place heaving with vacationers, children with broiled shoulders, the smell of suntan lotion hanging heavily on salty breezes sweetened with cotton candy. 

But the air was frigid and smelled only of churning sea. The auctions were silenced: no sign of a toaster, clock radio, blender or iron. Street lamps arched over the boardwalk like skeletal giants with humps. The gray-green of the sky fell into the sea. Waves broke loudly, a never-ending accompaniment to her footfalls. The fire-engine-red façade of Banko Games shocked the colorless canvas of winter.

Dora paused on the boardwalk at a row of wooden benches backed by the sea. She decided to sit for a moment. Like a seagull eyeing a scrap of food, she let her mind alight on why she’d come here. She was done thinking about her marriage—that sinister lie. She was an artist again, a painter, and it was time to find a way to sustain that reality. Perhaps a recent proposal was a way out for her.

Dr. Jack O’Hanlon. It was not hard to reconcile the Catholic schoolboy—a taut equivocal teenager managed by priests—with the meticulously and expensively dressed man. Jack had been Dora’s first serious boyfriend. When she’d dumped him after high school he’d been distraught. She moved on. He chose the psychiatric profession. In a drugstore near the hospital complex where her husband had a lab she overheard the pharmacist address a familiar-looking red-haired man in front of her as Dr. O’Hanlon. After a discomfited fumble with pat phrases about looking well and not having changed a bit, they exchanged phone numbers. He called. She was already separated. Could he see her? And pretty soon he was in her studio, listening to her as she prattled on about her misconceived marriage, her passionate commitment to her art, her lack of money. He had money. He made her an offer. 

Dora stretched her legs and rose with a start. She had no watch. The sudden dark hurried her back to the luncheonette.

Inside it was warmer than it had been that morning. Elderly patrons, slouched over the counter spooning soup, took up all but one of the stools. It was like a meeting of gnarled victims of osteoporosis, replete with the smokers’ cloud. She slid onto the vacant seat. The same young man hurried to her, barely able to suppress his elation. He was maybe fifteen or sixteen, a tall drink of water, as her uncle would say. His white coat was unbuttoned, revealing a blue and green paisley shirt, top three buttons undone. A ponderous medallion shone from his hairless chest. She stared at the balance scales engraved on the medallion.

“Libra?” she asked.

“Yes!” He said he was really good with people, able to see both sides of a situation. “What about you?” he asked.

She told him she was a Leo, and without quite knowing why, she added, smiling, “It gets me into trouble.”

He frowned a little at that. “What’ll you have?”

Dora asked for a grilled cheese and a coke.

“Just plain?” he asked. “How about some bacon or a tomato?”

“Nope. Just plain grilled cheese.”

When he returned with an embellished sandwich he placed it before her and said, “It’s Christmas Eve. You should at least have a tomato.” He winked. “On me.”

She left with a bagful of snacks: potato chips, pretzels, a toy sand pail filled with salt water taffy, and a small carton of milk. Dora was touched that he’d remembered their earlier conversation, such as it was. She felt looked after. Heartened, she decided to call her aunt. She had a pocketful of coins he’d changed for her. The pay phone was just outside the motel. 

“Uncle Frank. It’s me, Dora.”

After the first tentative hello from him there was silence. He was forgetful and prone to staring blankly. It drove her aunt crazy.

“Uncle…?”

“Hey, Dorrie,” he croaked. “How’s my girl? Your aunt is at mass, I think. Where are you, hon?”

She said she was in Atlantic City and before he could ask she told him she just wanted to be on her own. She was okay. Fine, really. 

“Hey, Uncle Frank. Listen to this.” She held the receiver in the air, facing the sea. “Can you hear it? It’s the Atlantic ocean!”

He said he could. Where was she again?

Back in her room, Dora hunched over the typewriter. She peeled a sheet of yellow legal paper from the machine and added it to the jumble beside her. She’d dragged the little table to the bottom of the bed. Proust had been abandoned because she could not ignore the rather less refined drama outside her door. Rimbaud and Baudelaire met the same fate. The unread paperbacks lay among the contents of her bag, strewn across the bed. She took another swig of bourbon, left the bottle uncapped and lit up a Dunhill. Warmed by the alcohol, she was finally able to discard the woolen scarf.

The noise outside her room was getting louder. Doors slammed. Shouting that sounded like argument or joviality—she couldn’t tell half the time—was ceaseless. Sometimes it seemed as if voices changed sooner than hourly. Barry White’s steamy bass oozed through the thin walls. Earlier there had been vigorous banging on her door. A man’s voice hollered to let him in. She ignored it and carefully wedged the only chair under the doorknob. “Sheila!” he yelled. “You ain’t changed your mind?” Dora hollered forcefully, “Wrong room!” He was instantly pacified and mumbled an apology. A few seconds later she heard him further down the corridor, banging on another door, looking for Sheila.

Dora was getting nowhere with the letter to her potential benefactor. Myriad versions rolled through the typewriter. She argued with herself over the letter’s tone; should she be warmly appreciative or coolly nonchalant? He could be playing with her, all that history. And how to make perfectly clear this would be strictly a business arrangement. Jack had taken her to dinner a few times to a few different places, all intimately expensive venues. He’d enjoyed her surprise when waiters deferred to him, and he’d quietly boasted that he owned those restaurants in addition to a thriving practice. But evening’s end brought a rebuff from her when he suggested more. She told him she wasn’t ready yet. The divorce. It was too soon.

But, in fact, Dora had been game for lovers the moment she’d decided that her marriage was over.

In the freezing bathroom she inhaled on a joint. Not that she imagined anyone on the other side of the door would notice. The pungent aroma had been hanging around all night. She was only adding to it. Stoned, she settled on the bed against an anemic pillow, reluctant to discover what lurked between the sheets. She remained dressed, bundled in a thick, ribbed fisherman sweater, removing only her boots. She’d added a second pair of socks and draped her coat across her lap. Oh, she’d had and still had lovers; made up for lost time all right. She debated reopening the bourbon bottle. Popping a pretzel into her mouth, she rolled the salty nugget with her tongue.

Maybe that was the problem. Despite his offer to bankroll her artistic pursuit, Jack did not seem to get the new work. He’d even admitted to it, finding it odd that she, a self-professed painter, was using only graphite on primed linen canvas. He thought the draftsmanship—was that the word?—superb, but why no color? He was only a little less bemused when she’d explained the point of the series. It was called Tagasode. Some sixteenth-century Japanese panels exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum had inspired her. Paintings of lavish kimonos, heedlessly left behind, evoked a stronger image of the person than the owner’s actual presence. Tagasode translated as “Whose sleeves?”

He’d asked her to describe each canvas—what, or more specifically whom, the articles of clothing represented—but she’d put him off. “Well,” Jack quipped, “it’s certainly a departure from your dead flowers.”

When he first viewed her work, he bluntly asked what she was afraid of. At the time, off-putting as his question was, she attributed the remark to his role as a psychiatrist. He probably couldn’t help himself. But the question haunted her. Was she afraid? And if she was, what was she afraid of? She was on her own in Atlantic City, wasn’t she? Her list of lovers was long and varied, some might even say indiscriminate. Perhaps the monochromatic drawings of dead flowers—blown-up images on canvases as large as six feet square—were a bit on the gothic side. Thorny roses and velvet-soft gardenias, with titles like Misgivings and Things Past.

An artist works through pain. Left behind freely or mistakenly, the articles of clothing that had been immortalized were proof that she had triumphed over romanticized love. She was in control, free of the messy color of relationships. Each canvas was simply titled with an initial.

D graced her with his Burberry raincoat, explaining to his long-term girlfriend that he had left it in a bar somewhere. Fragile and aristocratic and so enthralled was he with Dora’s streetwise nature, her humble origins, that he allowed her to portray their secret affair.

K was his unsuspecting roommate who, while never imagining Dora was monogamous, would have been crushed to learn of her affair with D. He loaned her a tattered sweater, which he felt represented his life as a penurious philosopher.

The leather bomber jacket came from T. Irish journalist, bisexual. He was mad about Dora. She rivaled his passion, his energy and his devotion to craft. She held her own in any topical argument and matched him drink for drink.

C was another painter, a handsome black man who was wildly talented and given to stylish dress. He was married to a woman Dora adored. He was going to leave her. He left Dora with a white linen handkerchief.

She met A in St. Mark’s Bookshop, in the poetry section. After some hours of marvelously convoluted conversation at the bar in the Lion’s Head, they spent one drunken night together. The Argentine student left his paisley scarf behind.

J—a woman—was probably not speaking to her. Dora would heal that breach at some point, but meanwhile J had left her cashmere scarf behind and that would do.

P was her ex-husband’s best friend. Dora’s cross-country getaway happened in the unraveling year before their separation. At her husband’s suggestion she stayed with P in Laguna Beach. Her husband thought the trip would be good for her. She knew her absence would be good for him. Out of revenge, she’d slept with P. His tagasode was the only departure: a roach clip she’d filched from an ashtray.

Another C was a comedy writer. He was the only cynic among her lovers and he’d fallen in love with the unattainable Dora. She had just finished rendering his prized Chicago Cubs t-shirt.

Dora jerked awake. Her limbs were stiff, her mouth a dank cave of dry patches. Dazed, she looked around and gauged her surroundings. A chink of light split the exhausted drapes. She had no idea what time it was. The last thing she remembered was that the hallway ruckus had quieted down and she’d closed her eyes to Elton John singing “Someone saved my life tonight….”

A low, blustery sky beyond the pier in the distance—a scene not airy enough to be Turner—reminded her more of the Dutch masters’ dense, sardonic clouds. She stood at the edge of the ocean where the tide lapped the tips of her boots. The sleepy stranger at the desk had only nodded when she said she’d be back in a bit. Just going for a walk, she told him, waving her key.

The gritty beach was the same color as the squealing dirty gulls, reprimanding her for coming empty-handed. The sun was already quite low in the sky. Dora dragged her boot in the hard sand, forming Jack’s initials, the natural resolution she looked for when all else failed.

The wallop of the incoming tide caused her to jump back. The initials were washed away. It was fucking freezing and Dora laughed out loud. Her breath hung before her like an illusory curtain to be parted and stepped through.

At the motel she stopped to call her aunt again.

“Where are you?” her aunt demanded.

“I’m in Atlantic City. Didn’t Uncle Frank tell you?”

“Oh, my Lord,” her aunt moaned. “Frankie did tell me. I thought he was crazy and I yelled at him.”

Dora laughed and soon they were both laughing.

“When are you coming home, hon?”

“Soon, Aunt Fran,” she replied. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Wait!” her aunt cried. “I want to hear the ocean too.” 

The milk carton was gone from the windowsill where she’d left it to keep cold. Dora still had an unopened bag of chips. That would do until she got home. She left the unfinished bottle of bourbon on the table. The pail of taffy would delight her aunt. She dropped the typewriter on the counter before the bewildered clerk. Adjusting a lighter bag on her shoulder, Dora Bauer waved good-bye. She’d wait at the bus station for the next bus home. She had plenty to read.