How I Started a Family

Grandpa always said a first date should be lunch, like sandwiches and soda, no booze. With that in mind, I took Jill to B’s on Eagle Street. B’s has since closed because their sandwiches were gross, but that’s neither here nor there. So we got a table at B’s and ordered grilled cheeses and got to talking: “Are you single?” she said. “Yes. And you?” “Yes. Very single.” A good start. We ate quickly and split the bill and walked back to her studio. She made tea and we sat on the couch and kissed.  I touched her behind the ear, where some of them like to be touched, and she said, “Before we go any further, I should tell you something.”

“You can tell me anything,” I said.

“I have a son.”

“I love kids. When can I meet him?”

“Today, after we have sex. But before you meet him, you should know that he’s feral.”

I’d never met a feral child before and I’m always game for meeting new people, so this was an exciting turn of events.

“How did you come to be the mother of a feral child?”

She took an index card from her purse and read from it: “This is just so everyone hears the same story. Back in 2001 I was fucking a guy who worked in advertising. He refused to wear condoms or pull out and after I got pregnant he took a job in Portland so he could, quote, spread his shit out. I scheduled an abortion and told him, but he said the world needed our child because we were two magnificent people and our baby would be a genius and if I had the baby he would send me three grand a month to raise it for ten years. It was hush money, he was married. So I had the baby and he started sending money, so much money. I was only 20 at the time so, to me, that money was booze and coke money, not baby money. From 2001 to 2010 I was the happiest woman, and maybe the happiest person, in Lower Manhattan.”

She opened her laptop and showed me scandalous photos of Chloe Sevigny’s Red, Gold and Green-themed birthday party. “I could sell these but I never will. This party was in 2005, my best year. I partied 345 nights that year.”

“How could you party so much with a baby at home?”

“I’m getting to that. You should be more patient.”

“I know.”

“I tied him up in the closet and ignored him. Terrible, I know. I’m going to hell, I know. But I didn’t have any other options, really.”

In reality she had many other options but I didn’t want to tell her because it could’ve been a turn off and this was still a date, after all.

“You kept the baby in your closet for ten years?”

“It’s terrible, I know. I’m a terrible mother.”

“Don’t feel too bad. Some mothers murder their babies. At least you kept yours alive,” I said.

“That makes me feel better. Let’s have sex.” And we did. And it was the gross, prolonged kind of sex, the kind you tell your co-workers about.

Afterwards she went in the bathroom to take a shower. I was back on the couch, drinking cold tea. I heard the shower being turned on, and then I heard a loud thud. I thought it was a big book falling off a high shelf. “You OK in there?” I said. No answer. “Jill?” I walked into the bathroom to find a terrible scene: Jill was sprawled out in the tub, legs bent over the edge. She was bleeding greatly from the head. A book hadn’t fallen off a shelf. Jill had slipped and cracked her skull. I knelt down and checked her neck for a pulse and…dead. I was frightened, but I recovered quickly. As Grandpa would say, if things don’t work out with a girl, move on.

The lunch date had quickly gone from romantic (the kissing), to exciting (the news of the feral child), to gross (the sex), and then to deadly (the dead body). This would’ve been a great “how we met” story to tell our grandkids if Jill hadn’t died.

Call the cops, I thought. That’s what you do when your date dies, when anybody dies. But I used to smoke pot daily and I was more than a little high at the time. The cops would ask questions and I would lose my job (I work at a fashionable hotel called the Hudson) and have to move back to Dayton. So I didn’t call the cops. But I did take the time to close Jill’s eyes and roll her tongue back into her mouth so she wouldn’t look so silly when someone found her later, which was the polite thing to do.

“Lunchable.”

It came from the closet.

“Lunchable.”

Was it a child’s voice? Of course, Jill’s feral child, and he was hungry. I took a Lunchable from the stack of Lunchables in the cupboard, unwrapped it, and slid it through slot in the closet door. He said Lunchable again, but this time it was more like, Thanks for the Lunchable, not Give me a Lunchable. I was also hungry and Lunchables were the only food in the cupboard so I unwrapped one for myself and dug in.

“Hey,” I said. “This Lunchable isn’t half bad, huh. I used to eat these when I was your age. It has all you need: you got your crackers, your ham, your cheddar, and your cookies.”

“Lunchable.”

“Right on. Hey, ever been to Brooklyn?” People who live in Brooklyn are always trying to convince Manhattanites who never leave Manhattan to check out Brooklyn, and I had a feeling this boy was a Manhattanite who never left Manhattan. He didn’t respond, but sometimes you have to take others’ indifference as a Yes. “I’m taking you home,” I said. I opened the closet and untied the ropes around his ankles. He was a skinny, weaselly boy, and he was naked, unfit for the train. I looked in Jill’s drawers and found ratty skinny jeans and a Polo shirt. They fit the boy well. “Thank God the girls dress like boys these days or else you’d be wearing a skirt, buster.”

*

My friend Greg got fired and moved back to Youngstown. He misses Brooklyn bad and likes to keep tabs on what’s going on here. Yesterday when we were chatting online he told me about an art thing he’d read about: “You have to check it out. The artists are going to be lying on the floor naked and you’re supposed to clean their bodies.” I like art sometimes and naked people most of the time, so I said I’d check it out. It was at English Kills Gallery, 114 Forrest St., 7 p.m. I arrived early. There were ten black mats on the floor and ten artists milling about, men and women, taking off bras and socks and what not. Next to each mat was a mason jar filled with water and a stack of linens. “Clean the bodies or lay and be cleaned,” read a small sign on the wall. It was one of those You Can Be In The Art Too things, but I was there to clean bodies, not to be cleaned. A big dude in cut-offs was giving orders: “It is now 6:58. At exactly 7 o’clock you are to be lying down on your mat. Do not move when a viewer cleans you. Do not talk. Your eyes must be open. You are to stay still for exactly one hour. Jeremy. Jeremy! Are you concerned about people taking photos? Let’s hope we don’t get too many pervs this time.”

At 7 Mark said “Begin” and Jeremy removed the lens cap from the video camera and said “Go.” It was time to clean the bodies. I walked over to the prettiest girl. Yes, predictable. I knelt on the floor and dipped a linen into the mason jar. Yes, I was nervous. I wrung out a few drops on her stomach. She didn’t flinch. I cleaned her arms.

And enough of that. I stood up and walked outside. Jeremy was on the sidewalk smoking. You can’t just clean a naked woman’s hands in a gallery and not tell a stupid joke afterward, so I said, “How much for the girl?”

“Are you a serious patron?” Jeremy said.
“Yes, I am serious.”
“Come inside and talk to Mark.”

It’s always nice when someone returns your bullshit, and Jeremy had an expert deadpan. We walked inside and then into the back room and he said, “Have a seat on the couch.” The big dude in cut-offs came in and said his name was Mark. “Thanks for making it out tonight in this weather.”

“Sure thing.”
“So Jeremy tells me you want to take a piece home.”
“I do.”
“Which piece were you interested in?”
“The girl I cleaned, the pretty one in the corner.”
“Ann. Good thing you got here early, she’s the gem of the show. The piece is two thousand dollars.”
“I’ll give you twelve hundred.”
“The piece costs two thousand dollars.”

A guy in a suit walked in the room with his arm around a naked girl. “I left a check with Jeremy,” he said. Mark was disappointed: “Mitchell. You can’t have Bonnie until the show’s over.” Mitchell said fine and Bonnie returned to her mat.

“Are you goofing on me? This is a goof, isn’t it?” I said.

“This is not a goof,” Mark said.

“These people are for sale, for real?”

“They are pieces, not people. And yes, of course they’re for sale. This is a gallery. I don’t make money every time you come here and look at shit on the walls and say, ‘Very good. I feel it. I feel it.’ I sell shit. People give me money for shit artists make and Ann’s an artist kinda. Do you even have two grand?”

I’m not rich, but I’m employed. (I work at a fashionable hotel called the Hudson.) But man, two grand is two grand. Two month’s rent. And with our dirty-diaper economy I can’t be going around town buying people-art. That’d be tacky. So I said thanks but no thanks.

As I stood up to leave, Mike said, “Dude. Ann will be worth twenty times that in five years, I guarantee it. Don’t you know anything?”

“How will she be worth forty grand in five years?”

“Two reasons: One: Bradley Yingling, the artist, is a manic depressive flit who’s bound to hang himself one of these days. I just hope he does it in here. And two: Ann is only twenty. Women improve with age. Well, the good ones do.”

“Is Ann one of the good ones?”

“That’s the gamble.”

“How long would I own her?”

“Until you sell her. Or until someone steals her. Someone could steal her.”

“But what about her expenses, like food?”

“She works at Roberta’s, they feed her and, as her patron, you’ll probably get free food there sometimes.”

I bought Ann. After the show was over she put clothes on and we took the train back to my place. Ann said, “So where do you want me?” I made space next to the aquarium and laid down a beach towel. I filled two cups with water and stacked napkins next to the towel. “All set.”

“So what’s with the kid in the kitchen?” she said.

Jill’s feral child was leaning against the fridge eating an apple. It took some convincing for him to quit Lunchables, but he’ll be better off in the long run.

“Jill’s kid,” I said.
“Who’s Jill?”
“This girl I got with.”
“Why is her kid in your apartment?”
“Because she died yesterday and I wanted to show him around Brooklyn.”
“Oh fun. Where’d you hang?”
“Marlow and Sons, then Habana Outpost. We wanted to hit up Char No. 4 but it was slammed so we got corn at the ball fields.”
“Nice. What’s his name?”
“I’m not sure. Want to give him one?”

Ann named him Ann. “It’s the only name I’m into.” Ann liked my apartment but she said it needed decorations. I said it already had decorations. “A dart board is not decoration.” She brought over her sketches (she draws weathervanes) and taped them to the walls. Each sketch was titled “Weathervane” and then a number, so “Weathervane 60” for example. After sex she would talk about what the weather vane sketches mean (they mean her dad). At first I hated them and we fought about it: “I can’t get any deep thinking done with all these weathervanes on the walls.”

“What deep thinking? We both know you’re just drinking and carrying on until the nukes start flying.”
“I’m opening a hotel someday, and I often think deeply about outer space.”
“Whatever. If you don’t like my art, you don’t like me.”
“I do like your art. I bought you because I like your art.”
“My art is different now.”

She began taking baths and having long talks with Little Ann, and one night as I was eating dinner in the kitchen I could hear her say, “And that’s why he’s angry all the time. I’m not sure he’s worth it.” I said, “You’re not worth it!” and we didn’t have sex for a week. And then another week. I finally gave in and said she could keep the weather vanes on the walls, but only if she agreed to stay home with Little Ann on Wednesdays nights so I could go to trivia at Pete’s. She said yes. She enrolled Little Ann in preschool where he learned more words and soon he was walking around our apartment saying them.