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“You’re welcome. And Bernie? I had a nice time today.”
“Me too, Doll.”
She reached out a hand, gave mine a squeeze. Either of us could have said something. Neither of us did.
I left, and as I reached the fourth-floor landing I heard her door swing shut.
CHAPTER Fifteen
Once, briefly, there was a Second Avenue subway. Back in the seventies they dug up the street for miles. Then they ran out of money, so they left everything just long enough for most of the retailers to go out of business. Then they filled in all the tu
Which is how I went downtown. A subway would have been quicker and cheaper, but then I’d have missed my chance to tell Hashmat Tuktee how to find Ludlow Street when I wasn’t all that certain myself. He was newly arrived from Tajikistan, was Hashmat Tuktee, and he gri
“Not in a million years.”
“You know my country?”
“I know it when I see it on a map. It’s the one that’s shaped like a rabbit.”
This may not have been the right thing to say, although it’s perfectly true. “We are a proud people,” he said, gri
“An animal of great power and wisdom.”
“Ah,” he said.
I knew Ludlow Street crossed Delancey, so that meant it ran north and south. I figured it probably started or ended at Houston, having ended or started at Canal, but I wasn’t exactly sure—
You don’t have to know all this. We took Second Avenue to Houston and found Ludlow and crept along it until I spotted Café Villanelle, a dim little storefront tucked in between a burned-out building and an empty lot. Hashmat Tuktee beamed at the sight of it.
“Like my city,” he said. “Like Dushanbe.”
“Really?”
“Have fighting there now. Burn buildings, break windows. We are a proud people.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“Great fighters,” he said, showing his teeth. “Fight like rabbits.”
A villanelle, as you probably recall, is an old French verse form in which two lines take turns ending all of the stanzas, and then wind up as the last couplet of the final stanza. (There’s got to be a better way to explain it, but I’m obviously incapable of it.) Dylan Thomas wrote a couple of villanelles, including “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” More recently, Marilyn Hacker has made interesting use of the form.
I didn’t hear any villanelles that night at the eponymous café, or anything with much in the way of traditional form. There were some arresting images (“I’ll paint the roof of your mouth with menstrual blood!”), some noteworthy rhymes (“Mother, your ovaries / Are nothing next to Madame Bovary’s”), and now and then something with a faintly familiar ring to it (‘‘How do I hate you? Let me fucking count…”).
The room itself was small and dark. The walls and ceilings were black, and the sole illumination was provided by black candles set in empty cat food cans. There wasn’t much of a crowd, so I had no trouble finding Patience and getting a seat next to her.
I don’t know how long we were there. I looked at my watch a couple of times. If the light had been better, I might have reached for my wallet and looked at my calendar. Some of the poets recited their work in a deliberately uninflected monotone. Others declaimed and emoted. One fellow with a high forehead and lank shoulder-length hair sang some poems, accompanying himself on the guitar. He only knew a couple of chords, but then he was only using two melodies, ‘‘The Yellow Rose of Texas” and ‘‘Moonlight in Vermont.”
Nothing lasts forever. Eventually the woman who seemed to be in charge of the proceedings a
An empty cab came along just as we cleared the Villanelle’s doorway. God knows what he was doing there. My guess is he was lost. I stuck out a hand and found him, and we got in and Patience gave him her address.
She lived on Twenty-fifth Street between Park and Madison, two flights above a shop that trades in reconditioned sewing machines. We didn’t say much on the way there. She seemed detached, shut down. In her apartment she made a pot of herbal tea and filled two cups. It tasted as though it could cure just about anything.
‘‘I’m sorry, Bernie,” she said, standing at her window and gazing out at a blank wall. ‘‘You were sweet to come, but I never should have dragged you all the way down there. It was awful, wasn’t it?”
‘‘It wasn’t so bad. I thought you were going to read.”
“I didn’t feel up to it. That’s not a great room to read in.”
“Well, black candles.”
“It’s fu
“No.”
“The poems were ghastly, weren’t they?”
“Well—”
“They’re good therapy,” she said. “It’s wonderful that they’re able to bring all that emotion to the surface. And having them perform is a very valuable part of the process. They really put themselves out there that way. Some of those people won’t be the same after a night like this.”
“I can believe it.”
“But the poems themselves,” she said, “are enough to make you weep.”
“They weren’t all that bad. The guy with the guitar—”
“Not all of those poems were his. A lot of them were Emily Dickinson’s. You can sing almost anything of hers to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ And you can sing any and all haiku to ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’ ”
“Really?”
“Sure. ‘Haiku’s such a bore / Sheer pretentious balderdash / Stick it in your hat.’ Try it yourself, Bernie.”
“ ‘Wonder why the Japs / Think they’re writing poetry / They’re just marking time.’ ”
“That’s the idea. Nothing to it, really. ‘Pomp and circumstance / Prairie dogs and cauliflower / Moonlight in Vermont.’ ”
“I kind of like that one, Patience. ‘Prairie dogs and cauliflower.’ ”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should write it down.”
I took a cab home from Patience’s loft. When I got to my door I heard the phone ringing, but by the time I was inside it had stopped. I hung up my blazer. I’d taken off my tie earlier, at the Villanelle, where even without it I’d felt more than a little overdressed. I got it from my pocket and frowned at it, wondering if the wrinkles would hang out. I hung it up to give them a chance and the phone rang.
It was Doll. “Thank God,” she said. “I’ve been calling and calling.”
“What’s the matter?”
“ ‘Film at eleven.’ You must not have seen the news.”
“No.”
“Turn it on now. You have cable, don’t you? Turn it on. Right now, I’ll hold on.”
“What am I supposed to turn on? CNN? Headline News?”
“Cha
“Hold on,” I said.
First I had to watch as a professionally sympathetic reporter interviewed survivors at a tenement fire off Boston Road in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. Then they cut to a light-ski