Nothing to Declare Read online

  While Jesse shoveled, Mrs. Folari kept vigil from the window—her black dress moved now and then at the edge of the living room shade. She maintained her distance, however, a matter of propriety Jesse decided not to try to understand.

  It was nearly noon when he set himself to dismantling Marty’s apartment, making and filling and stacking book boxes in a constant flow of movement. Doing the work himself offered a form of exchange for his multimillion-dollar reward, a contribution in kind. In his experience, numbers so large had a habit of turning vague and conceptual. Physical labor lay a shine on the figure Jesse could not ignore.

  He slept at the apartment to conserve energy and time, breaking at midday to scavenge castoff cartons from neighborhood package stores. He liked the solidity of wine boxes—the ones for champagne were the strongest. Marty’s brand was Veuve Clicquot, and Jesse rooted them out, creamy orange containers with a Rococo script and a slick air of celebration. He became well known to the liquor sellers of the community, a subject of jokes.

  Labeled as to contents, the boxes marched along Marty’s living room walls and then in aisles Jesse created by dismantling the shelves. They balanced against each other in stacks that shifted with his footfall, often toppling with a crash that jolted the loose floorboards. Sometimes they fell for no reason, when Jesse was in the kitchen or the bathroom or asleep. Four nights running, Jesse went to bed with the stench of mold and magic marker ink upon his skin. He lay in bed and waited for the sound.

  In the kitchen, nothing escaped the trash: spices, cookware, pantry items, none of it worth saving except an unopened fifth of Blanton’s. Blanton’s, most certainly the best and most expensive bourbon on the market. Jesse rolled a hit on his tongue and a sharp fog collected momentarily behind his eyes.

  Time past, it was scotch, not bourbon, single malt, of rare unpronounceable variety. Marty had demonstrated how it should be taken—neat, in water glasses, standing up. As men. Jesse had not foreseen the bitter taste, and had finished grimly, feeling failure. Now he put the bourbon aside for the trip home. With the fake Rolex and the boots, it was the only thing he wanted.

  By the end of the week, everything had been done but phoning the charities and garbage men to come for their respective shares. Jesse carted his final bundle backward toward the entry, a large lawn and leaf bag full of Marty’s bedroom belongings. He had stuffed the bag too full, thrown the desk lamp in with clothes, and as he shuffled along, half carrying and half dragging, each bump and snag filled the air with dust. Near the door, Jesse’s strength faltered and he let the bag collapse with a rustle and the frail sound of splintering glass. He left it where it fell for the Salvation Army to cart away.

  On the last evening, Mrs. Folari knocked on the upstairs door and led Jesse down to a farewell dinner. Roast capon with fresh rosemary and pancetta—he had not known how to refuse, nor wanted to, he had to admit. He’d spent more time alone than he was used to and missed the talk and lively energy of his restaurant. Missed the family feeling. The landlady listened to music while she cooked, and it took a few moments for Jesse to understand she had chosen the same doleful Beethoven he had heard at Marty’s office. The coincidence worked on him—soon there would be signs and portents, things flying through the air.

  He kept Mrs. Folari company at her kitchen counter and to busy his hands, Jesse took over chopping cherry peppers for the gravy. Helena was capable of producing tiny dice in a bright blur of knife, but he was making a mess of it and pepper essence splattered the nap of his dusty sweater. The small nicks on his chapped hands felt the bite of the juice.

  The old woman smiled as the cello played its lovely line, and then she fussed a brown lump of innards from the capon’s carcass. She muttered an imprecation in Italian as she cleaned herself against her apron. Beneath its muslin bodice Jesse saw the outline of a cross.

  “We used to kill them fresh when I was a girl,” Mrs. Folari announced. “Wring their skinny necks. It’s the supermarket now, everything wrapped in plastic like the chicken’s maybe going to fly away.” She inspected Jesse’s efforts with suspicion and picked up his knife without a word, slashing the remaining peppers into large hunks that she carried in her hands to the stove.

  Jesse took some respite in the living room where the stereo winked its lights from within an old oak cabinet. It was all brushed chrome surfaces and digital read-out and must have set the woman back thousands. The notion struck him that Marty had given Mrs. Folari the stereo—and the quartet it was playing. He saw below the amplifier four shelves of compact discs.

  “I told him not to waste his money on an old woman.”

  Mrs. Folari’s eyeglasses were wet with pasta steam, her fingers hunting for the crucifix that touched her bosom. Thinking to reach out to her, Jesse stepped toward the stove; she looked in need. But he stalled, sensing in his face a vital rush of color. Liar—my need, mine.

  The landlady’s false teeth made a circuit in her mouth. She gave her pan of escarole an assertive shake; cast iron rang against the burner. “Foolishness. I told him he was off his rocker. ‘Let me be crazy,’ he says. ‘I’m good at it.’ Who talks like that? But he won’t let me say no. You know how Marty is.”

  Jesse nodded his head slowly. “Yes,” he said, “I do,” but he was unsure whether it was true. Sighing, the woman opened the oven to baste the roasting bird, releasing into the room a sweet, greasy scent.

  The music had played out and Jesse went back to choose a new disc. The bright plastic cases clicked along his finger as he squinted at the titles. Christ, most of them were still inside their wrappers. He would play the Beethoven once more. Why not? You could listen to it a hundred times and fail to penetrate its depths.

  It started up, and Jesse waited for dinner at the empty table resting his arms upon the cool linen cloth. Behind him, he heard Mrs. Folari’s crooning and the drumming of her wooden spoon inside her skillet. A tender sensation brushed against his legs; the linen fringe listing with the draft. Jesse was crying as steadily as he breathed and his face was lit with surprise. The old woman did not hear and kept on with her singing.

  SIX

  1973

  MARTY WEAVES HIS CAR THROUGH TRAFFIC as though every second saved is the most important second of his life. He cheerleads himself through gear changes, ramming his shifter through the notches—even his lips are in motion, the column of air within his lungs. Settle down, Jesse wants to tell him, can’t you see the party going on two feet beyond your nose? Useless—the man’s a hundred percent destination and zero ride.

  Mild spring temperatures have gathered the residents of Cambridge in all their factions. Jaywalkers and Frisbee players and skateboard lunatics mob a side street in Harvard Square, and strains of Hare Krishna and sidewalk mandolin rise over the sound of the Volvo’s troubled muffler. Jesse rolls down his window to catch a weak vee of sunlight on his elbow. It should be warmer, Marty says. Skylab, he believes, is fucking with the weather.

  A couple sitting on the curb are kissing with great seriousness, and as Jesse turns to face them, they separate and look on one another as though meeting for the first time, then switch into a fresh position, tongues a spot of sunlit pink. That would make a painting, the pink against a granite field. He could knife the colors from the palette, smash pigment on the canvas. If he were painting. Jesse holds upon the lovers until the car turns the corner toward the Charles.

  On the far side of the river, his class has already begun. Being late is a feeling to appreciate—a tug of liberation and foreboding that adds definition to an ordinary day. Jesse tips his head out the window and the soft afternoon breeze feathers his hair against his shoulders. He’ll be lucky if he sees school at all.

  Along the riverbank, three women drowse under the willows, and Jesse examines their easy sleep as though it’s a dance step he might learn. Lately his nights are uncertain and poisoned by unremembered dreams. The burden of an empathetic soul, is Marty’s theory. So long as American warplanes drop bombs on Asian hamlets, slumb
er will be disturbed coast to coast.

  “Hey, I think that’s Caroline.” Marty stands on his brakes. With a glance into the rearview mirror, he tucks his T-shirt into his pants, smooths the image on his chest, a cop performing artificial respiration on a child. “Some Would Call Him Pig,” in typeface underneath.

  “I’m doomed,” Jesse says. “Painting class is waiting.”

  “Life is waiting,” says Marty, already out the door.

  Jesse leans against the hood to soak engine heat into the sore under-muscle of his thigh. They spent the morning shooting baskets, and Marty loves to leave his mark—today the tender impression of a knee. Across the street the sunbathers seem eagerly awake; their pale skin flickers as the wind rustles through the branches. The sound of laughter blends with shuttling leaves.

  “I know this dude who’ll loan you seven paintings for sixty bucks,” Marty tells Jesse a few minutes later as they shoot across the Mass. Ave. Bridge. “His thing is color field, and he likes to go big, spray-paints these giant shapes in monotone acrylic, big black square, big green triangle, big red diamond, nothing but geometry and scale. Maybe that’ll prime your pump, get you back in the studio for real. My guy guarantees a B or money back.”

  “Color field grinds my teeth. If I’m going to lose my cherry, let’s dig up some figurative pieces, Pop or super-realism. Something with flesh tones and sex appeal on the canvas.”

  “You think this is a buyer’s market?”

  “I know what grinds my teeth.”

  Marty strokes his beard. “Color field or nothing, sweetie, flip the coin. Just don’t confuse inertia with higher moral purpose.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” Jesse says. He thumbs the radio buttons, impatient for bounce and melody; he twirls the volume knob as high as it will go. Pink, definitely, he decides. In oil. Layers of pink over a gray ground, but the pink, aglow, aloft. Just floating there, two tongues.

  Not far from the university studios, Marty pulls up at the Back Bay House of Pizza. The afternoon visit is part of their daily schedule, Jesse waiting shotgun in the car while his friend attends to his career. The shop’s domestic qualities are in absentia: a riot grate over the windows, a pocked logo of a half-crazed pizza man above the door, yet by the storefront window Marty buttons on a lambskin vest to clean up his appearance. With his braids flapping against the leather, the man looks about as businesslike as Tonto.

  The entrance produces an immediate yield of noise and movement. Marty and his Uncle Dikran have been feuding for months and it doesn’t take more than hello to bump them into war. Through the window glass, they converge into a unity of waving arms and rising voices.

  Six nights a week their bicycle crews hawk Italian sandwiches the length of B.U.’s dormitory row. Dikran churns out the fresh torpedo bread and the meatballs and sausage, and Marty sees to the schedules and the books and weighs a whip hand, when required, on the labor. They pull four grand a month out of the business and Marty itches to expand. He knows a guy who knows a guy who’ll front a franchise corporation out of Delaware. Success is fated—guaranteed, Marty insists. He sees them nationwide within a year.

  “There are eighteen kinds of insanity,” Uncle D has gone on record. “And nationwide, you better believe, goddamn, is one. I reject your guaranteed.”

  From the back seat, Jesse retrieves a spiral sketchbook and a wand of colored chalk and follows the path of the two men through the shop’s front room. Even in anger, especially in anger, a loving current runs between uncle and nephew; you can imagine a hard and lively smell like ozone. He notches several passes on the paper, trying to lock down the sweep of their connection. After a few minutes, Jesse closes the pad and watches Uncle D take center stage.

  How different from his father’s demeanor—the lean margins of his face, the eyes faintly blue. Louis Kerf, who patrols the aisles of his hardware store in a thin-lapelled suit that shows a trace of shine at knees and cuffs. Who chews each bit of dinner steak a minimum of twenty times. Who greets his customers by shaking hands, his son included, should he drop by.

  A bellow swells out to the street, and the pizzeria’s front door slams open. Dikran has Marty by a foot of braid; their four legs stagger toward the curb. “Get out of my store, you thief, goddamn you.” His speech distends into a string of Armenian curses.

  Marty has elected a Gandhi-like acquiescence and skids backward almost cheerfully, but when they near the car and Marty yanks himself free, Jesse detects the speed with which he drops his grin, the bitter crescents his clenched fingers dig into his palms. Marty drives away without looking back, in a state of composed and earnest reflection. For the first time in memory, his feet forget their restless dance upon the pedals.

  They arrive at Jesse’s class more than twenty minutes late. The studio doors are partway open and the instructor has brought one student to the fore to give her praise. A glimpse of her painting shows through onto the street, a starkly rendered head and body of a horse. “Don’t bother stopping,” Jesse says.

  “You sure?”

  “I don’t want to make an entrance. Let’s cruise.”

  Marty grins. “Sounds good. Sounds delicious. How about nowhere in particular—OK with you?”

  They enter the turnpike heading west, pushing the Volvo far past its comfortable limits. The car’s suspension bounces Jesse half an inch above his seat, but he hitches the back to its most suitable angle and settles in for the journey. Marty twirls one finger lightly on the wheel and scrounges in the glove compartment for his Ray-Bans and a candy bar. Voice thick with nougat, he points them toward the horizon and talks.

  His subject is Uncle D’s scar. One afternoon in 1917 the Turkish Army paid a visit to Dikran’s village and rounded up most of the inhabitants and put them to the bayonet. Late in the night, his uncle came down from mountain pastureland and found the corpses of his parents and his brother among a hundred others in the center of town. Laid out head to toe, D told him, like sticks of firewood.

  Three uniformed stragglers were drinking coffee in the Balakian kitchen and they beat D with their hands and rifle butts, split the soles of his bare feet. His sister’s photograph was on the mantelpiece—where was she hiding? For inspiration they laid his uncle face down on the floor, a bayonet against his neck. It made no difference—he wouldn’t talk.

  “He was fourteen,” Marty says. “When I was a kid, he liked to show the scar when he was juiced on raki. Inch and a half long and red as a flare. Christ, that must have been something.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That first moment, when the blood began to trickle down his neck—what was it, a couple of seconds? When he had to decide.”

  Ahead of them, the sun rides at tree level and light hits the glass in rapid, colorless bursts. Jesse has the airy sensation of being in perfect flight, of Marty guiding them solely by clarity of thought.

  “Dikran thinks that I’ve been skimming,” Marty says. “Doesn’t matter what I say or how. He’s got his temper, and he knows only what he knows—do not attempt to fix the vertical, do not attempt to fix the horizontal. I see it as a kind of primal beauty, especially at close range. The snake-brain acts without regard to reason.”

  They’re going faster, ninety, ninety-five, and the Volvo’s rattle intensifies, pitching octaves upward. Jesse braces a hand on the door. “You want to take it easy? You’re making me nervous.”

  Marty yanks the wheel and they fishtail onto the berm, trees whipping by, gravel streaming against the hood. The landscape blurs. In his throat Jesse feels an exquisite bubble—they’re going to spin, how strange, but Marty taps on the brakes and all they do is stall.

  “That better?”

  Jesse licks his lips, a rusty taste of dirt and bile. “You’re out of your gourd, you know.”

  “Most likely.”

  Marty rolls the car back onto the highway and within a few moments, they are back at speed.

  “Where now?” Jesse asks.

  His friend�
��s aviator lenses reflect a dark strip of road. “I say we stop when we hit California. My nickel.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Dead serious. I’m curious about earthquakes, aren’t you? The big ones, they say, the ground travels in a wave like ocean water. California, Jess. The Land of Sunshine.”

  Jesse reaches past his ankles for Marty’s fallen Milky Way and holds it for inspection. “I’ve got one question,” he says as he brushes off the dust.

  “Yeah?”

  “Were you skimming?”

  Marty exhales thoughtfully. “Somewhat.”

  The candy is sticky from the heat of Jesse’s hand, but sweet and comforting against his tongue. “Pull over,” he says. “I want to drive.”

  SEVEN

  THE DAY THEY ARRIVE IN SANTA CRUZ, Jesse waits at a beach south of downtown while Marty cruises off to check on a friend of a friend who might have a place where they can stay. Jesse has always been indifferent to the ocean, but standing by the edge of the Pacific he feels a hammering of affection and possibility. It may be the unfamiliar weather, a dry wind that eddies the sand and drifts a scent of redwood onto his body. He rolls up his blue jean cuffs and plants his heels against the rocking of the water. California—absolutely. Where these waves began their ride it is already tomorrow.

  Up the coast there is an amusement park, and Jesse can pick out carousel music, a melody fractured by the wind as though the organist is drunk. The performance lays on a shabby welcome that makes Jesse laugh and strip off his sodden shirt and dive under the next waist-high roller. Spitting water, he lurches to the shore where he sits at the cool, wet boundary of the ocean.