His favorite had been a sous chef. Worn down from a nasty divorce, the inhumane hours she spent working at a trendy Village bistro, and months searching for an affordable place, she’d lost any ability to censor herself, and had screamed: “You’re not seriously trying to tell me this ABANDONED ELEVATOR SHAFT is a STUDIO? There’s NO FLOOR. How can you EXPECT me to LIVE with NO FLOOR?” Oliver had handed her a tissue and confessed he hadn’t seen the place before. Obviously they should get out of there.
It was a kick to remember. The perfect part-time job for a grad student: juggling classes around the suck-hole of Tuesday afternoon through Thursday at noon; scheduling all his showings and contract signings during that busy stretch; then spending Friday evening through Sunday schlepping back and forth between computer labs and the Lower East Side. The job may have required attention and hustle, but not much mental energy, which helped on the school front, and he became an early adapter to laptops, switching his focus to swatches of programs while parked in a coffee shop, jumping in and out of assignments, working line by line through programming math and logic. Regular injections of commission money let him take Alice out for fancy meals, actually enjoy life. Friends wondered about the morality of the job, but Oliver was sanguine. Paying off doormen for tips on vacancies wasn’t so bad, because everyone knew the deal and was kind of wink-wink about it. Cold-calling management companies for leads, sucking up to supers who already had their hands out, maybe that left him needing a shower, but again, this was the way of the world. And the verbal gymnastics that convinced a potential renter to give down-payment money weren’t all that different from the raps a single guy in a club might use to ease women out of their underthings. You were just convincing them to do something they already wanted to do.
—
Oliver handed the newsstand guy a pair of quarters, grabbed a pack of fruit Chiclets. He felt sweat bubbling beneath his winter peacoat.
A friend of his cousin, this blond, classically northeastern, establishment-looking guy (with patches on the elbows of his jacket and the whole nine), had clued him in, handing him the yellow business card and explaining how things worked — clean breath wasn’t just polite, it helped stop germs. It had been comforting that someone so prep school had been forthcoming about all this, a nice shot in the arm.
Oliver headed out from beneath the green awning. Side groups of angry young men had started to bulk in anticipation, waiting for the moment the newspaper vendor’s X-Acto knife cut open that virginal bundle, so they could bum-rush the line and grab. In the intermittent distance, towheaded skate rats attempted tricks around the giant cube. A few stragglers headed from the subway toward the set-up beach umbrella across the street, where a guy sold old porn videotapes at a folding table.
At the nearest bank of pay phones, naturally, two people were lined up at each queue, waiting.
—
The realtor had wanted to hire him full-time, even pay for him to get his license, move into commercial properties. But the woman who’d stared at him with those big eyes in that shitty Williamsburg loft party, she’d asked. What did he really want?
Sugar clung, thick on his teeth.
Crossing Fourth brought him toward the delineation point of St. Marks Place, that famous stretch of sagging brownstones and their ground-level kitsch. Oliver ignored the video place where they had all the obscure subtitled shit; and the round-the-clock restaurant offering a perpetual special of fetid rice and a limp, tofu pita burger. Some crazed street artist had plastered, around a streetlamp, pieces of ceramic and mosaic tile segments and shards of mirrored glass, the effect funky and gaudy, signaling a thrum of creative energy — running beneath them, everywhere. Oliver tried not to think about the program that he wasn’t working on. His head stayed down, huddled into his coat; he felt his neck going slick now, wished he had a mirror to check himself, didn’t want to look like shit.
The famed fifties jazz spot whose bartenders routinely chased off an unknown, drunken Jack Kerouac had been turned into a Gap. The egg-cream counter and magazine stand still stood, though, and three fresh-faced foreign-exchange students were outside, replicating the cover photo of the first New York Dolls album.
Just for shits and giggles, he and Alice used to head into one of the music stores — Norman’s, Venus, or Smash — any of them was guaranteed slamming at the right time of evening; tourists and locals, young and old alike, sifting through the racks, checking out jewel cases, album cover art, track listings. The cases were empty, a measure against shoplifting, and when you flipped beyond one, it made this plastic click. Oliver loved that sound, some store thrumming with minor clicks, like a busy typewriter class. Alice happily followed along — a secret music snob herself, she’d spent more than her share of teen hours in record shops. They’d tease each other with the worst covers they could find: a young pensive woman walking along the beach at sunset, her woodwind recorder raised near her lips. It was like a gauntlet thrown down: Top this fat guy in his motorized wheelchair rocking the thumb cymbals.
There’d never been any mystery about how important a kid was to her. She’d told him about it early on, in bed together one night, resting on his chest, the rattle and clank of a radiator in the background. Infants kinda creeped Oliver out, to be honest, always crying and shitting and helpless. But then he didn’t come from a big family or have tons of exposure to little kids.
Still, if he hadn’t said anything in return, he also didn’t need to be told that no man could deny the woman he loved a baby.
—
Oliver hadn’t wanted for anything: sneakers, ten-speed, home computer when he was thirteen, money for tickets to concerts in Sacramento, you name it — but through every suburban moment, he also understood that his bounty came from his old man’s toiclass="underline" six days a week, ten hours a day, pounding dents out of junkers, pickups, and off-road racers. His shop was called the Dent Doctor. Each morning the hulking slab would muss Oliver’s hair at the breakfast table, scarf down eggs and sausage and provide a solid half hour of banter, then kiss Oliver’s mom on the cheek and head off to swing his arsenal of sledgehammers. After sundown, his body dragging and smelling faintly of rye, the Doc would gather enough enthusiasm to enter the house with a hearty hey hey. He’d ask about Oliver’s day at school, check that all homework had been completed, maybe shovel down whatever his wife had cobbled together for dinner. Then the Doc would disappear for a long soak. Later on, he might lumber in and read a bedtime story, ask if the kid wanted to sit next to him on the couch and watch the Giants for a few innings.
When Oliver had grown to where the Doc wasn’t quite able to follow his math and chemistry assignments, the old man had nonetheless remained shrewd enough to understand grading marks, so that when ninth-grade Oliver phoned in one too many assignments, his dad noticed. Taking Oliver’s hand in one of his hard, callused lumps, he’d pulled the boy close. Face red, breath hot and sour with whiskey, Dad insisted: Don’t you know? I’m doing this so you won’t have to.
Oliver had assumed it would be a variant of how he was raised, with Alice the primary caregiver, handling all the heavy lifting: the mommy. The kid in classes most of the day, running around to after-school activities and whatnot. Just like his dad, Oliver would muss hair and do the breakfast table thing. He’d show up for school plays, talk with teachers on parents’ night, and sweep in late for bedtime stories, the occasional heart-to-heart.