He also approved of Jamie Quinn, who had visited his house tonight. Had he been planning ever to create another work, he might have stolen a line of elegance from Jamie’s face and another from the body and then incorporated the man into something of marble. Only marble would suit the critic’s cool, smooth, graceful exterior. There were no cracks or seams through which the uninvited might intrude on him.
An hour ago, Gilette had listened as his brother-in-law explained the purpose for his visit, as he described the Public Works Committee’s choice of art for the plaza. Gilette had listened, but he had not believed. What kind of an animal would do such a thing?
Emma Sue Hollaran. A dumb, slow-witted animal, Jamie Quinn had gently explained. The artist was Gillian, the vandal.
Gilette had come to the plaza to see for himself. Heavily veined hands reached out for the first tarpaulin and ripped it from the mooring pins with ferocity, and then the next and the next, until the floor of the plaza was covered with the white canvas. He stood by the fountain at the center of the plaza, taking it all in. And now he believed.
A fifteen-year-old boy, with the aimless walk of a vagrant, was making his way down the sidewalk, past the wooden fencing, adjusting the straps of his knapsack as he walked. The sack was heavy with the weight of his best pair of jeans and all the rest of his possessions.
When he came to the small pile of boards on the sidewalk, he turned to see the splintered opening in the fence. He stepped lightly over the remnants of the wooden door and slipped quietly through the hole, wondering if this might be a good place to spend the night, perhaps to sleep through until morning without the rude awakening of a cop kicking him in the side to move him along. He was sick, flesh hanging on his bones, and he could not afford another injury. It took so long to heal now.
Once he was through the fence, his eyes became accustomed to the poor light leaking through the hole, and the pale light of the moon overhead. He moved cautiously under the high marble arch and into the plaza.
Someone else was there ahead of him. It was an old man with a bowed back. The boy held his breath as the old man settled wearily to a bench that had been cracked and smeared with paint.
Now the boy’s gaze traveled up the length of the walls to see the crude paintings of muggers and subway trains, and the big red blob in the center of it. Painted across the stone face of the building were the words “Welcome to the Big Apple.”
The fountain was also smeared with paint and gouged with something that had left tracks of rust in the wounds. The vandal had gone too far. A delicate arm of the fountain had been broken off and lay in the water like a severed limb.
Again, the boy read the writing on the wall. “The Big Apple.” That was what his mother called New York City, the Big Apple. And what he saw in this wreckage was so New York. It was his mother’s building one block from a soup kitchen. It was the dark man on the corner who sang, “Come kiddy come. I got crack and I got smoke, and come kiddy come kiddy come.” It was the flowers that his mother could never put in the first-floor window box without seeing them broken-stalked and stolen by the day’s end.
He could not get out of this town fast enough.
The old man was rising unsteadily to his feet. The boy, sensing some remainder of authority here, melted back into the dark of the broken ash trees as the old man quit the plaza.
The boy walked over to the pile of rubble and old paint cans at the base of the wall. He knelt down and selected a can of red. He made a tentative squirt in the air, and then he froze.
A shadow loomed on the wall alongside his own, and it was growing larger.
He looked up to see the face of an old woman. She never spoke to him, but only extended her hand to the paint can. She wanted it and there was a look in her eyes that said, Don ‘t fool with me, boy, just give it to me.
He had seen that look so many times. Now it was a reflex action to surrender whatever he had in his hands. He gave her the can of spray paint and stepped back.
She turned away from him and pressed the nozzle close to the ruined wall. She walked along the stone facade, writing in a giant scrawl of red paint, “Apple, Apple, in the river, all you do is make me shiver.”
The boy read the line and said, “Amen.”
Gregor Gilette left the after-hours bar with a weaving walk and wandered down the street, hearing nothing, seeing only the pavement before his shoes, until he passed by another man who was walking in the opposite direction. The other man had ragged clothes draped on a stick-figure body. His arms made wide circular motions in the air, arm over arm, swimming to Fifty-seventh Street.
This was madness Gregor felt more comfortable with. His mind did not stray back to the wreckage of the plaza, for that was dangerous ground tonight.
Now he thought to look for a cab, but the street was deserted and it had begun to rain. He stared at the open mouth of the subway. He and Sabra had come a long way since the days when they rode the underground, unable to afford a taxi during the young years of the struggle to make it here.
He descended into the darkness beyond the shattered bulb intended to light his way. He bought a subway token from the man behind the glass of the booth and barely registered the fact that the cost of his token had gone up 500 percent. He passed through the turnstile to stand on the platform and wait through the dregs of night ending, a drunk slowly sobering, waiting for the train which takes its own time.
An announcement was being made on the public address system.
Even a native New Yorker could not actually understand the individual words that came out of the subway speakers, but he knew the words would only be a variation on the same theme: Your train will never come, so go away now.
Two stragglers on Gregor’s side of the tracks took this message to heart and exited through the turnstiles. The platform on the other side of the tracks had also emptied. One overhead bulb spread a pool of light on the far platform, creating the illusion of an abandoned stage.
Gregor was stubborn. He would stay. He would wait to see if the announcer lied. In the old days, half the time they lied.
He shrugged against the post and sluggishly meditated on the upside-downness of drinking through the nights and sleeping through the days, eking light and warmth from electric bulbs. He pushed cigarette stubs and wrappers with the toe of his shoe, looking for friendly omens in the dirt tracks and the trash.
He stared over the side of the platform at the tracks below. A small brown shape scurried between the rails. Gregor remembered Sabra’s old game of making a wish on the first rat of the evening. His footing was a bit unsure; tipsy still, he moved back to sag against the tiled wall.
He was not alone anymore. Someone spoke to him. Sabra’s voice? A hoarse, hollered whisper, calling his name. From where?
There-across the tracks, waiting for the train that goes the other way. She was peeking at him from behind a post, coming out now, walking into the pool of light. Her wide eyes were smiling and not. Then, a grotesque, clown-face smile split her face.
But it was not Sabra-only an old hag, almost spectral in her long rags. One hand clutched a tin and the other held on to the handle of a wire cart.
A train passed between them on the middle rails. He stared through the lighted square windows of the cars. There were no passengers. It was a ghost train, traveling empty to some maintenance depot. It passed on, and he could see the woman once more. Poor, pathetic, broken thing. How could he have taken her for Sabra?