The Secret of Lost Things

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“I am sorry, I don’t want to read this in English. Thank you for the book,” she said abruptly, and handed it back to me.

Perhaps reading the hurt on my face, she added, “You keep it. You read it for yourself. Fill up your gaps. I have no need of such things anymore.”

Turning away, she put the television plug back into her ear.

I went to my room feeling rejected. I wanted friends, something I’d never had at home. Mother had discouraged such connections; she was fiercely private and secretive about our life. Although I loved the Arcade and New York, the other side of a teeming city was relentless isolation. There was nothing I had been to anyone, no impression I had made, no one to remember me. People here were tricky, and odd—sometimes deceitful. I needed to be careful. I fingered the green amulet at my throat that Chaps had given me.

The exchange with Lillian reminded me that I really needed to live elsewhere, to properly establish myself. Although I had been managing at the hotel for months, I longed for somewhere that didn’t feel like a place of transition. The dirty park, my bellwether on the way to the Arcade, told me that fall was coming, and I knew little about the real winter that would follow. I wanted my own bathroom, free of grubby ghosts, and a stove to cook on, as well as a window I could open that didn’t tease my hunger with the promise of Indian food I couldn’t afford, despite its designation as cheapest cuisine in the city. The Martha Washington was also paralyzingly quiet, up until late evening. Then, the thump-thump of cars and taxis that failed to spot the large pothole directly outside the building’s entrance began. The synchronized double-banging of the front and then the rear of each car, as its tires sank momentarily up to their hubcaps, was repetitive and deadening.

That evening I lay in bed, in darkness, and measured the thump-thump of passing cars against the more predictable beat of my heart. I needed a place to make my own, and determined to ask around at the Arcade to see if anyone knew of an apartment to rent or to share.

Unable to sleep, I switched on the light and took up the Borges I’d found for Lillian, and which she insisted I keep. Why was Lillian so difficult to befriend? The little volume cheered me up. Lillian was right about Borges filling up gaps; he knew all about the lazy pleasure of useless and out-of-the-way erudition; all about the fertilizing quality of knowledge.

The book was arranged alphabetically, and so I started with Abtu and Anet, the Egyptian life-sized holy fish that swam on the lookout for danger before the prow of the sun god’s ship. Theirs was an eternal journey, sailing across the sky from dawn to dusk, and by night traveling underground in the opposite direction.

I lay reading the short entries with interest, and passed the hardest part of the night forgetting about my larger concerns.

Some creatures were familiar, like the Minotaur, half bull and half man, born from the perverse passion of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, for a pure white bull, and hidden within the Labyrinth because of its monstrousness.

The book’s final entry was the Zaratan, the island that is actually a whale, “skilled in treachery,” drowning sailors once they camped on its back, having mistaken the Zaratan for land.

I finally fell asleep with the book on my chest, my mind full of whales and white bulls, fish-men and girl-lions—a zoology of dreams with a cast made to populate the one I was living.

Arthur Pick was something altogether different. Another foreigner, an Englishman, he adored his Art section and was constantly examining photography books, in particular those that featured naked men, as I had seen him do the day I was hired. Arthur loved paintings as well, but photography was his passion. He gave me a nickname I hated, but he insisted on it, and insisted too that I look at photographs he fancied.

“Hello, my Tasmanian Devil, are you floating today? Are you busy? Come here and look, look at these pictures. Are they not lovely?”

“Well, yes, they’re very, ah, powerful…But I think I prefer the paintings you showed me.”

“Do you? I can’t imagine why.” Arthur turned several pages and my face reddened. I hadn’t seen anything like these men. Ever.

“Don’t you see that the photograph has made them innocent?” Arthur said. The question astonished me.

“They are frozen and unaware that they will change, or die, or even that they live at all,” he went on.

“Innocent?” It was exactly what I thought of Mother’s black-and-white photo, that she was captured in there before her life had overwhelmed her. But innocent? These men were hardly unwitting, they were complicit.

“Innocence is their appeal,” Arthur explained. “Their nakedness is only part of it. I thought you’d see it, my Tasmanian Devil, because that’s a bit like you.”

“But how do you know I’m innocent?” I asked him, my face aflame.

“Ah, now you stretch credibility. It is what everyone here sees in you.”

“I really don’t understand you, Arthur…and I told you, please don’t call me that name anymore.” I knew he was being ironic calling me devilish, but just then I couldn’t laugh it off.

Arthur continued to turn the pages of the large book. “It is my gaze that brings the nude alive. They live in my mind, you see. Isn’t that marvelous?”

“So, will you stop calling me that name?”

“Tasmanian Devil? Of course, as you wish. Would you permit just TD then, for short?”

“But not, I hope, for long,” I returned.

“Ah,” Arthur said, surprised. “The stirrings of wit! Delightful! Perhaps, after all, you are not irreparably Tasmanian.”

One October evening, walking back to the Martha Washington, I first experienced a ritual of American fall. Passing my dirty park, I stood to watch as workers blew leaves into tall piles. Autumn leaves were collected up in colorful mounds of brown and orange, a few yellow edges fluttering out, like the slips of paper presented to Pearl for redemption at the register. Time was passing, heaped up on the path, blown into piles for carting off and burning to ash. I shivered.

Looking up into the trees, I noticed that one still had a few dark leaves clinging to the upper branches. Under my gaze, the leaves became a semé of birds, scattering upward and away in a salutary swoop, leaving only a plastic bag, caught and hanging listlessly in the bare limbs.

I hurried to the Martha Washington.

“I’m paying up for this week,” I told Lillian when I arrived. “But I really want to find an apartment. I think it’s time for me to move.”

I had decided to look in earnest, despite a lack of funds.

“What’s wrong with staying here?” said Lillian. “I keep my eye on you. I see you come and go. I make sure you not imaginary,” she joked. “I see what you become after the lion.”

She moved her hands around her head, simulating my messy mane.

I smiled.

“It’s fine here, Lillian, but I’d like to have a place of my own. I want to cook, and feel more settled. Guests come and go here all the time. I’d like to think I had a home. The weather is changing. It’s time I settled a bit more.”

“I don’t think you should go. Not yet. You are safer here,” Lillian said, dropping her hands and looking fretful.

“People, they disappear,” she said. “You have no idea…”

“What are you talking about, Lillian?” I said. “I’m not going away. Finding a proper place to live is the best way to become permanent. I’m not about disappear.”

Lillian shook her head, but not in disagreement.

“I hear you’re looking for somewhere to live,” Jack muttered to me a few days later as I stood talking with Pearl up front. “I’d be happy to oblige…”

“Do you mean you know somewhere?”

“Me mate’s just shot through, and I know somewhere cheap enough.”

“It’ll have to be cheap, Jack, on what they pay here,” I said. “Is it far?”

“Walking distance,” he answered. “If you’re up for a walk. It’s east of here.” He waved his thick arm wildly, not specifying a direction.

East of the Arcade was a notoriously squalid section of the city; the neighborhood was known for its drug dealers and cold-water flats.

The following week Jack and Rowena took me to look at his friend’s apartment after work. They led me down a block lined with several abandoned buildings, past a garbage-covered vacant lot to a dingy storefront, its windows clouded over with swirls of paint and wooden boards covered with graffiti. A battered-looking door opened on the side of what had once been a small grocery store. Inside the dank hall, I took in the hypodermic needles strewn under the stairwell, and the gray paint on the walls peeling off in damp flakes. The room was on the second floor. Jack had the key. His friend, a fellow musician, had left the apartment empty, although he retained the lease and wanted to sublet for only six months.

The door opened on a long, narrow space like a train carriage, with two dirty windows that faced the street. An oven, sink, and old claw-footed bathtub sat in the center against an exposed brick wall. A slightly narrower alcove with a tiny closet (and the toilet) was in the rear behind a filthy curtain. Worn, dark, wide planks on the floor were covered with the detritus of hasty departure: paper, rags, and lumps of clotted dust. The room was cold. The whole building was without heat.

“The boiler’s out just now,” said Jack, rubbing his hands together against the chill of the room. “Me mate used to turn the oven on and leave the door open when it got really cold in winter. Warm as toast after a while.” He attempted a grizzled smile.

“There’s even some pots under here you can boil up water when you need a bath,” Rowena threw in.

After the Martha Washington, the squalid look of the place didn’t bother me. In fact, in some perverse way it fit my developing ideas about bohemian life, about the requirements of adventure. Besides, I reasoned, I had always lived above a store, and while Mother would have been appalled at the place, something in its aspect reminded me of the flat above Remarkable Hats.

“I collect the rent,” Jack said. “Fifty a week. But I need a deposit as well. Four hundred’ll do up front. That’s including the first month. Right? I’m to mail it to me friend.”

I would need more than four hundred dollars to move in. I had to sleep on something, and clean the place. I didn’t have the money.

“If you can’t manage it, I know someone else who can,” Rowena threatened, sealing the deal.

“I’ll take it,” I told them, wanting to move in right then, and lock the door against Jack and Rowena. Once I was alone I could worry about the fact that the small amount of money I had saved wouldn’t cover what Jack wanted up front.

“Can you give me a few days to get the money together?” I asked.

“Sure, love.” Jack grinned at me crookedly. “Day after tomorrow? So’s we can start with October’s rent.”

I couldn’t ask Chaps for money. It would have taken too long to arrive, for one thing; and she’d done too much for me already, and asking would only worry her. The day after I saw the apartment I discussed it, and my lack of funds, with Oscar.

“I’m not sure you want someone like Jack as a landlord,” he warned. “How can you be sure he’s honest?”

“But I haven’t found anything else, and really, Oscar, it’s perfect for me. I’ll fix it up. I just have to figure out how to get the money.”

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but I have known, on rare occasions, of Walter Geist pressing Pike for an advance on behalf of an employee in need. You know, a small sum, a loan against future wages. You have to sign an agreement, and the amount is deducted in small increments on a weekly basis. Pike, of course, adds interest: ten percent of the loan, spread over the length of time the amount is to be paid.”

Oscar sounded very familiar with what he had described as a rare practice. I suspect he was himself indentured by debt to Pike.

“I can’t ask Mr. Geist for a loan,” I said, loath to appeal to the store manager. But without a loan I couldn’t leave the Martha Washington for several more months, and by that time the apartment would be gone.

That afternoon, I came upon Walter Geist reading in Oscar’s section. He stood holding a book no more than an inch from his face. Watching him, I thought he brought a certain amount of dignity to this close inspection. His dreadful eyesight made him appear momentarily vulnerable and, with his swimming eyes, peculiarly appealing.

He must have sensed he was being watched, for he closed the book with a thud, peered around nervously, and assumed his ill-favored demeanor. He hadn’t seen me, but I had a fleeting glimpse of the expression on his face. He had the look of a child braced for a slap. Was it Pike who’d etched this expression on Geist’s face, in the way a volatile parent draws pain as plainly as if with a crayon? Theirs was an intense relationship, often conducted in stage whispers and emphatic sentences. I couldn’t have guessed at their bond, but knew that whatever held them, it was a fierce allegiance.

But in catching Walter Geist unawares, I had also seen something of his terrible defenselessness. His albinism, of course, meant that he was subject to all manner of vulnerability. He was trapped within a skin that appalled by its very perfection, but he was not without a strange draw. It was beneath another’s gaze that distortion occurred. Contempt becomes stronger by becoming more precise, and Geist’s whiteness served as a nexus for those that despised the strange.

My own experience with marginality didn’t give me any insight into what Geist suffered. I was a willing émigré to New York, after all, whereas he was marked by birth to always be an exile. Like much of my understanding, it was through fiction that I gained a sense of his truth. And it was Herman Melville, in particular, that gave me an intimation of Geist’s terrible distinction, and the abhorrence it evoked in others.

PART TWO (#ulink_9ef04e5c-5dd0-5b4d-bb13-4021039cee2a)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_45ba75a4-a972-59ec-9fdb-d1f8d1be3412)

They’re a peculiar pair, Oscar, don’t you think?” I asked after watching Geist, and puzzling over him. “Pike and Geist. A strange couple of fellows.”

“Oh, Rosemary, d’you think they’re any more peculiar than anyone else who works here? What’s strange anyway?” Oscar asked rhetorically. “Perhaps it’s all just strange to you because you’re a stranger—in New York, I mean. To some people a young girl with wild red hair from Tasmania, with no parents, who lived above a hat shop her whole life, is unusual.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But I don’t seem the least bit unusual to myself.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, of course. Any more than I seem odd to myself, or even Walter seems to himself. Really, though,” Oscar conceded, “I suppose Walter truly is unusual. Can’t help but be.”

“I saw him in your section, reading with a book inches from his face,” I said. “I thought I might ask him, you know, about the loan. But he seemed so intent, and so…well, vulnerable, I didn’t want to disturb him. It occurred to me he needed privacy.”

What I didn’t tell Oscar was that I saw something in him revealed, as if I’d seen him naked.

“He’s often in my section,” Oscar confirmed. “But I can’t help him much with the books he’s after. I don’t have much that’s current on the brain, or neurology. He also wants books on anthropology, but anything current just doesn’t come into a place like the Arcade. I have something intriguing on phrenology, but of course that’s very out of date, although not without interest…”

His voice trailed off as if his mind was following another, more interesting thought, and his hand stroked his own head, perhaps attempting to read his prominent occipital bone. Was he feeling for indications of adhesiveness?

“How long has Mr. Geist been here, Oscar?” I asked, trying to bring him back to the subject.

Oscar didn’t know exactly how long Geist had worked at the Arcade; but having spent his own adolescence in correspondence with either Pike or Mr. Mitchell, searching for books to satisfy his peculiar interests, he assumed Walter Geist was older than he was. Geist was actually not much past forty, despite the quaint figure he cut, which gave him an eternally aged aspect.