“You got electricity in this place? Hot water?”
“Hell you think?” said the landlord. “My brother let the place go off the grid, but now that I been taking over, this place is certified.”
“Richie go back to Rikers, or what?”
“I don’t know where he is, tell the truth.”
Johnny said he was sorry to hear that.
“You’re the kind of kid I want to get in here, Mr. Clean. We need to clean this neighborhood up.”
“I don’t know about that,” Johnny said. “I kind of like it the way it is. What’s the rent again?”
Eliza stood still while her husband negotiated, unable to articulate her state of disgust, betrayal, and now boredom. Was he really agreeing to take this place? They were talking about a deposit, keys. “I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said and walked down the five flights without stopping.
Outside she sat down on the steps. In the bright daylight, Eliza could see a spiderweb strung across the bent spokes of the bicycle, and a tortoiseshell spider tightroping across it. She was studying it so raptly that she didn’t see the woman running down the street until she was quite close. It was a homeless woman she recognized from Les’s neighborhood, red-haired, emaciated, and naked. She ran in a shuffling sort of way, as if her ankles were shackled, and on her face was a look of not fear or desperation but the benign concentration of any New York jogger. Not until she passed, revealing her profile, was it clear that she was pregnant.
There’s no lease,” Johnny told her as they walked to their next appointment. “We could just stay there month to month, until we find a better place.”
“I don’t know why we can’t just stay at Les’s.”
“Because we’re not taking any more handouts from Jude’s parents, that’s why.”
Eliza said nothing. Her feet were killing her.
“I didn’t sign anything. If you want, we can look some more.” She thought he said this with some resentment. She stopped on the corner of East Sixth, removed one shoe, then the other, and handed them both to Johnny. The sidewalk was hot, but it was a miracle on her feet. If she was going to live in that apartment, what did it matter if she walked barefoot through Alphabet City?
“Where’s the doctor’s office?” Eliza asked, following him around a corner. She wanted to be in a clean, cool exam room, in a paper gown, the reassuring hands of a doctor on her belly.
“It’s close. Bleecker and Mott.”
“It’s a real doctor, right? Not some guy you know?”
They slowed as they neared Johnny’s old apartment. Eliza barely recognized it. The building was covered with scaffolding, and a pair of trucks was parked at the curb. From inside came the sound of hammers, a saw; two men in hard hats hauled a bundle of two-by-fours into the third-floor window. Johnny watched them with what looked like regret.
“Your old place was better than that dump,” she said. She couldn’t help herself.
Johnny kept walking, and Eliza followed. “Maybe I can see about getting it back. Now that it’s going to be a luxury condo, it might be good enough for you.”
“Luxury condo? I doubt it.”
“What do you want, Eliza? The Christadora? You want a doorman?”
“I don’t want a doorman. I just don’t want a crack house.”
“Just because some squatters lived there doesn’t mean it was a crack house.”
Eliza’s bare feet slapped the sidewalk. “Do you know how hypocritical you are? You call yourself straight edge, you call yourself Mr. Clean, and you’re friends with a bunch of junkies and drunks? Who live in that filth?”
“So I should turn my back on them? We should just throw them out of the neighborhood like trash?”
“Don’t blame me. I didn’t make up the fucking curfew. I just don’t want my kid playing in a sandbox full of human turds.”
They were walking briskly, not looking at each other. “You worried you’re going to catch the cooties, Eliza?”
“It’s called AIDS, Johnny.”
What were they even talking about? Eliza had only a vague sense, picked up from slivers of the news, from dinner parties with her mother’s friends, that AIDS was seething in the lower quadrants of her city—the gay neighborhoods, the junkie neighborhoods, those unshaved regions of New York’s anatomy that she didn’t quite care to inspect. She couldn’t help that it didn’t concern her, and she was not prepared for the intensity of loathing on Johnny’s face. He walked on, even more briskly now, swinging her shoes.
“Do you even know anyone with AIDS, Eliza?”
“No.”