Authors: David Handler

The Bright Silver Star (38 page)

Des was wide awake herself. Something about being here in his apartment made her feel all wired. She threw on a T-shirt, padded barefoot into the living room and flicked on a lamp, gazing around at his place. She was definitely uneasy here. It was Maisie’s place. He’d tried to scour it of her presence after she died. He had told Des this. But there was still a lot that smacked of
her.
Like the exquisite, matching leather loveseat and club chairs positioned just so. And those vintage brass lamps with green glass shades. And the genuine Stickley library table that he used as a desk. Out on Big Sister, the
man used an old door on sawhorses. Des’s trained eye also caught the small things he had missed, like a fat volume entitled
Simplified Site Engineering
that was shoring up one end of the radiator cover.

Standing there, Des felt a sudden, powerful urge to be somewhere else.

She slipped back into the bedroom for her gym bag. Put on her shorts and running shoes, pocketed Mitch’s spare keys and let herself out the door. It was not quite 6:00 a.m. but the cobblestoned street was awake and active. A half dozen meatpackers were going home after their night’s work, exhausted but rowdy. An executive type in a spotless seersucker suit was walking his Jack Russell terrier and scanning the
Wall Street Journal.
A young Latino man, stripped to the waist, was working under the hood of his parked car, a sheen of sweat on his bare shoulders, a can of Budweiser within arm’s reach. An old lady in the brownstone across the street was watching him from her second-floor window, her arms resting on a cushion on the windowsill, the smoke from her cigarette curling lazily up into the early morning sunlight that slanted low across Gansevoort from the east.

Des found herself lingering there on the stoop of Mitch’s building, staring at that lady, that sunlight, that man working on his car. To her surprise, her pulse began to quicken and her fingertips tingled. This was the same sensation she felt whenever she walked into the studio at the art academy—an overwhelming sense of being in a special, hallowed place. Des had never experienced this while standing outside on a street before. Not anywhere.

She headed out, suddenly giddy with excitement. The Chinese laundry down the street was already open. So was the corner grocery store, where a young boy was hosing down the sidewalk and a milk truck was making a delivery. She bought herself a coffee and sipped it as she began walking through the close-knit neighborhood of family-owned brownstones, her eyes open wide, soaking in every detail. The building super who was out bagging the trash, muttering to himself. The housewife in her bathrobe who was moving her car from the no-parking side of the street before she got ticketed. The
wasted rock ‘n’ rollers in black leather climbing out of a cab from their night out, reeking of cigarette smoke and patchouli.

By now it was nearly seven, and some folks were heading off to work. Des followed them, swept along by their urgency. Found herself on Fourteenth Street at the entrance to the subway. Bought a token. Rode the Number 1 train all the way up to Times Square and back, gazing at all of those faces across the car from her, faces representing ten, twenty, thirty different nations and races and ethnic groups. Young faces and old faces, the hopeful and the homeless, students, laborers, and millionaires, all of them standing there shoulder to shoulder, gripping the handrail, clinging to their own individual dreams.

Des was gone for hours. There was a bagel place near Mitch’s corner where she bought fresh bagels and two more coffees on her way back. Then she went back down Gansevoort to Mitch’s building, the one that had that scrawny London plane tree growing out front in a cutout in the sidewalk. A low iron rail had been positioned around it to keep dogs from peeing on it. It was not an easy life for a tree in the city. As Des started up Mitch’s steps she paused, noticing just how tenaciously the plane tree’s shallow, exposed roots clung to the soil— exactly like the knuckles of those subway riders she’d just seen— fighting for its place, fighting for its life, fighting for its . . .

And that’s when it hit her. Why she hadn’t been able to draw them.

Trees weren’t things made out of twigs and leaves. They were living, breathing creatures. Their trunks and branches weren’t wood, they were muscle and sinew and bone.
That’s
what that poor little cedar had been trying to tell her, the one that had been clinging to the side of the cliff at Chapman Falls—until it died saving their lives up there that night.

Trees weren’t
things.

Breathless, she darted inside for her sketch pad, rushed back out and sat down on the stoop, resting it on her bare knees, graphite stick in hand. She started with quick gesture drawings of the plane tree. Except she wasn’t drawing a tree anymore—she was drawing a nude
figure model who was posed there for her in the morning light, reaching high for the sun. Des drew and she drew, her stick flying across the page.

She barely heard Mitch when he moseyed out and joined her there, yawning and blinking “What time did you get up?”

“Never went to sleep,” she replied, as an old lady went by with a grocery cart.

“Morning, Mrs. Fodera,” Mitch called to her. “Lovely day.”

“Eh,” the old lady grunted, waggling a hand.

He sat next to Des on the stoop and opened a coffee, glancing over her shoulder at her pad, not saying another word.

“Do you ever get tired of being so smart?” she asked him.

“Nope, it stays fresh pretty much all the time,” he replied, biting into a bagel.

“Mitch, I’ve been thinking about something. . . .”

“Uh-oh, this sounds serious.”

“It is. I’d like to start spending more time in New York than I have been.”

“Are you kidding me? I’ve been begging you to.”

“Wait, there’s more,” she warned him, swallowing. “I’d maybe even, you know, keep a few . . . some of my clothes here. Can you handle that?”