he a Yankee titan, a regular Rockefeller, when she got in one of her moods. “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,” she’d sing loudly at him when he tried to defend himself, looking straight in his eyes, aware that he didn’t know the words. “Four hungry children and a crop in the field.” So you know some corny country music, he’d say, quelling the impulse to ask her not to stop, for there was something knowing and hard in the back of her singing voice that wasn’t a joke, that he wanted to keep hearing. You’ve got that over me. Big deal.
They fought.
They recovered, again and again.
They moved in together.
Bruce insisted on paying for a moving truck to gather her from her East Side studio and bring her to his place, though she told him she would have preferred to let friends help her load into cabs, a borrowed car or two, to caravan her crosstown the way she had promised them they could. It’s not a funeral cortege, Bruce had said. Oh, but it is, Charlotte replied, pulling at the short hairs that curled at the nape of his neck. She pulled at his hair until it hurt, though he wouldn’t say so. It’s the beginning of the end, she said.
On the long-ago day Charlotte had moved in, he’d stood in the living room, looking out toward the street. There were fresh flowers on top of the sideboard he had inherited from his mother. Dahlias from the corner deli. It was September. The bathrooms were clean, lit. There was a wet washcloth folded over the kitchen faucet, its sides hanging down and dripping patternlessly into the shiny well of sink. All the windows were open.
He thought that he might hear the moving truck before he saw it. It would have to turn a corner somewhere nearby; his was a one-way street. The truck’s mammoth groan might reach him as it turned. Sound could carry like that on a Saturday, in this neighborhood.
Bruce checked his watch, considered getting himself another glass of water. He was wearing jeans and a freshly laundered shirt. His hair was wet and combed. Below his windows, he watched a black teenage boy surrounded by dogs making his way toward the river. The boy held fistfuls of leash ends in his hands and walked slowly; dogs wove back and forth around him, moving forward in a mass. Bruce counted: one, two, three, five—eight dogs in all. The street was cobbled here; the kid moved right down the center of it. Something few people knew, that he wasn’t even sure if his father remembered, was that his mother had lived for a time on this same street—might have even lived on this block—after college, back when she was part of that population, the good-girl intelligentsia, that worked for lawyers and architects and literary agents, lunched alone over black coffee at Schrafft’s, lived in pairs, iced liters of pinot grigio in the shower before dinner parties. Bruce’s mother used to tell him about it, her face animated with a kind of darting, weary pleasure underneath the scowl she wore when she talked about the indulgence her life had been before she settled down to the true work of raising him. I was Brenda Shapiro, she would say. I painted my fire escape blood orange. I used to sit out there on weekends, doing God knows what. Reading to pigeons, or something. Oh, honey, I was shameless. I was a mother-bleeping cliché.
When Bruce moved back to New York after her death, after school and the few other places that he’d tried on for size before drifting, bewildered, back to the only city he knew, his father gave him the option of moving into their old apartment; it hadn’t sold yet, the furniture was still in it. Bruce could sleep far uptown in the twin bed of his childhood if he wanted to, boil things in the glazed, damaged pots that his parents had received as wedding presents. He could spread out, alone, in any room; Bruce’s father was already living in the Springs by then. No thanks, Dad, Bruce told him, though he had no sense of what else he would do. I’ll find something.
He had crashed on a friend’s floor, then met a woman of indeterminate age at a party and stayed with her while he spent his days going to open houses all over Manhattan, with no criteria to narrow his search other than