An Ocean of Minutes Read online

  Pain came in like an ambulance siren, far away and then everywhere inside her head. She had missed Frank twice. Buffalo was in another country. She had lost five years. So she did what anyone would do in the face of such malicious silence: she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

  Laughter woke her up. It was past midnight, and the lampless dark was full. She heard breathing, as if someone else was in the room.

  She fumbled her way to the weird light switch. But she was still alone. It wasn’t Frank.

  The breathing was outside; it was just loud. There was more laughter. Then a moan. It was coming from next door, or right above. Polly tried to slam the window shut, but the swollen frame denied her. The breathing found its rhythm.

  She pulled the pillows and the blanket and the sheet and then the mattress over her head because the sound of other people’s sex was everywhere, and it was unbearable. The march of goosebumps across his shoulders, his hand in her hair, his toes lacing her ankle, his arm on her waist like a roller coaster bar, her body unlocking, the catch of her heart.

  FEBRUARY 1979

  * * *

  Frank is on his hands and knees in the bushes, a slurry of snow and mud and likely dog piss seeping through his jeans, his forehead almost touching the frost-flecked basement window of Chad’s apartment. Chad is drinking can after can of Schmidt’s in front of the TV, watching The Love Boat. As soon as Chad got home, he hit the head, then the fridge, then the couch. There are no lights but the harsh spray from the bulb in the bathroom. He hasn’t even bothered to take off his coat. He is paunchy, already beginning to bald. Frank almost feels bad for him. But Frank can see Polly’s mother’s things at the edge of the frame. Chad put the dining table on its back, then nestled credenza, nightstands, and ottomans in its underbelly, then piled chairs on top, legs-up so the interlocking seats made a kind of lid, and used cords to keep this tidy little mountain together. There is great spitefulness here: for a slob who doesn’t even bother to take off his snow boots in the toilet to employ such precision. Frank is waiting for Chad to drain beer number three before he makes his move. Get the guy all relaxed, warm, good buzz going, then pounce. Or maybe he should wait for beer number four.

  It’s just that there is a station wagon in the driveway and only one doorbell. Which means this is likely some kind of family home. So Frank should come back in the daytime, when he won’t be waking anyone. But Frank knows it’s now or never. Already this mission has required almost too much premeditation to complete. He had to snoop through Polly’s address book when she wasn’t looking (in vain), he had to bring Chad up casually to find out where he worked so he could follow him home—and it was near impossible to talk about her ex-boyfriend casually—and he had to borrow his brother Johnny’s pickup, sitting only a few feet away at the curb, so tantalizingly near. It would be so simple to get in the cab, blast the heat, and drive away. No one would be the wiser. Polly wouldn’t be disappointed. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt.

  But it was the worst kind of story, the type that made you want to cover your ears, like hearing about a dog being beaten, or that someone had shamed your mother. Polly told him, in the corner of a Chinese restaurant, how Chad had taken the furniture. Frank already knew this: she’d told him early on, laughing, it was such a silly story. He imagined cheap stuff, ugly stuff, shoe box quality. But that day she let go the detail she’d held back: the furniture had been her mother’s. The only matter left of her mother. All Polly had now was a patio table and a love seat. “I’m not crying because I’m upset,” she kept saying. When he tried to take her hand, she put it in her pocket. Chad had forced Polly to admit his badness, life’s badness. He made her give up her belief that things would be all right in the end, that quality in her Frank found most touching, because more than others she had a right not to believe it. Chad made Polly defenseless. Frank couldn’t sleep thinking about it. His Polly, his sweetheart.

  Frank rings the doorbell, and then right away wishes he hadn’t. He could get shot. He makes for the truck, but it’s too late: a light bings on, the door is opening. It’s not a shotgun or a sleepy grandpa: it’s Chad. Chad in real life, not the one through the half window, who Frank just now realizes seemed as real as the characters on his TV. This one is bitter breathed, almost beast-like—though small, Frank reminds himself.

  Might as well get to the point. “Give me Polly’s furniture,” Frank says.

  “Get stuffed,” says Chad, and slams the door.

  But here is Frank’s plan: to be unrelenting. His foot is already in the doorway, and it doesn’t hurt too much when Chad whacks him in the boot with the door. Chad does this several times, each time expecting a different result but getting the same: Frank still in the way.

  Chad’s hands are revolting: hooked and edged in shit-toned yellow from too many cigarettes. Those hands tangoed in the waves of Polly’s hair, traced that dip at the bottom of her spine where perfect bone gives way to pretty rump. What’d she see in this troll? Maybe, he has some type of Travis Bickle, boring bad-boy thing, maybe, if you like that kind of thing. But while Frank is thinking, Chad stretches one of those horrible hands to its fullest extension and, with fast, full speed, slaps Frank in the ear.

  The pain is searing, white, magnificent. Frank doesn’t give up his spot, but he doubles over, his nose now dangerously close to Chad’s knee. But then it occurs to him he’s in a great position for tackling. He bursts forward, slamming his skull into Chad’s belly. He hears the guy gasp, but shortly Chad has him in a headlock. Now they are bucking in the foyer, Frank trying to get free, Chad trying to choke him out. Frank has the advantage of reach; he manages to get Chad’s hair. He grabs and grabs and hears Chad’s far-off voice calling him a fuckin’ girl. Frank gives up on the pulling and switches to whacking, getting great enjoyment from trying to sock Chad right where his hair is thinning. “I’ll kill you!” Chad shouts. One of his bedroom slippers goes flying and something delicate crashes.

  But now there is another voice. “Bastards!” it cries, and then they both feel the cold and the wet. They separate, stumble back. A woman stands at the top of the stairs, brandishing an empty water glass. In the other arm she carries a toddler with vertical hair and a glazed look. The lady looks to be Chad’s sister.

  “I’m calling the police. This is the last straw. Tomorrow morning you’re out of here.”

  “No, Melissa. We were just horsing around.”

  Melissa glowers. The baby sucks its fist. Chad gives a sickly smile.

  “I oughta put a lock on that basement door.”

  “We’ll go downstairs. Night-night. Night-night, Thomas.” The baby half grins. Chad whacks Frank on the shoulder. “Come on, buddy,” he says. They amble down together, but at the foot of the stairs Chad says, “I’m gonna fucking murder you.”

  “I’m not leaving without that furniture, man.”

  “Then get comfy, dillhole, because I’m not giving it to you.”

  Frank has been in very few physical conflicts in his life. He is also a champion of breaking up bar fights. Neither of these facts are due to physical prowess. Instead, it’s because, one, he has a preternatural ability to comprehend when another man would rather die than lose face, and, two, he never has the need to save face himself. He says he can’t take credit for this. “I was just born this way,” he tells Polly. “Hmph,” she says. “Or it’s the result of a well-loved life.”

  “Listen, pal—”

  “Not your pal.”

  “I work at a bar. You give me the furniture, every time you come in, I’ll give you a Schmidt’s on the house.”

  Chad sets his mouth. But he is in a parka, with one denuded foot.

  “This stuff isn’t even useful,” Frank says. “In fact, it’s downright inconvenient.”

  Frank may have gone too far with that one. He holds his breath.

  “And a whiskey,” Chad says.

  “Huh?”

  “Gimme a beer and a whiskey.”

  “If you’ll
help me get this on my truck.”

  “Old Crow. Reserve,” Chad specifies.

  Together, they are strangely efficient. In fifteen minutes it is all on the truck.

  “You want your cords back?” Frank asks.

  “Nah.”

  Frank gives Chad a matchbook with the bar’s address. He will only come twice, and then Frank will never see him again. Frank will not tell Polly what he’s done. Instead he will festoon his apartment with her mother’s furniture. Ottomans under the coffee table. Kitchen table over the coffee table. Rocking chair wedged in the gap between the couch and the window. Then he’ll invite her over. He will wonder how long it will take her to notice, but she will understand almost before he has the front door all the way open. In fact, she will not come in. She will stand on the threshold. He will not rush her. She will gaze around the room, counting the pieces silently, making sure every one has come home. Finally she will enter. She will laugh. She will go to the rocking chair and rub the knobs at the ends of the arms, shiny from her mother’s palms. Her hair will smell of cold, and she will say it for the first time of millions: “I love you.” It will be one of the best moments of his whole life. To other girls, Frank is a Chad. But Polly will do for him what love can do: it will be as if she has said, Look how strong you are. A hero.

  He gets a few blocks from Chad’s before it hits him: he pulled it off. He turns on the radio, cranks it, looking for a manful anthem. Instead he gets Dionne Warwick, singing “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.”

  But when the piano booms like a drum and her voice storms the chorus, Dionne is epic, warlike. “Yes!” Frank shouts. He winds down the window. He shouts at the night like a loon: “I’m going to marry this girl.”

  GOOD MORNING! IT IS 0645 HOURS AND TODAY IS MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1998! THE TEMPERATURE IS 86 AND RISING, SO GET OUT YOUR SUN HATS AND SANDALS! THE ASSIGNMENT FOR POLLY NADER TODAY IS: REPORT TO HENRY BAIRD AT HOTEL GALVEZ. YOUR SCHEDULE IS: AT 0730 HOURS, PROCEED TO THE LOBBY FOR PICKUP.”

  On Sunday she’d been unable to leave her room, for opening the door would have been to admit this was really happening. She’d pulled her bed away from the window so she could sit on the edge of the mattress and look out. She’d tried to examine what she saw with detachment—blocks of houses with trees growing out of their roofs, roads mutating into woods—as if she was only a visitor to this place, because she was. In no time at all, she would be out of here.

  At the day’s end, she discovered that, if she lay in bed with her head at the foot, she could watch the sun go down. She wrestled the window open, and she could hear music playing somewhere down the line of rooms. One song played all day, an electric guitar descending the saddest scales as Bobby Womack and a chorus of soul singers chanted its title again and again: “If You Think You’re Lonely Now.” She had let all the imaginings she’d kept out come in: the earflaps of a woolly hat, buttoned under the chin; Springsteen whistled out of tune; the only way to slice a lemon; arms wide for a hug as he walked towards her, crossing the street.

  By the time the sky was dark, she’d cried enough to give herself a headache. She felt ashamed, though she was her only witness.

  In the morning she decided she wouldn’t indulge this nonsense anymore. She took a grim look in the mirror, a small square that contained only her face and a slice of shoulder. Everything was as it had always been: moon face, crooked teeth, snub nose. Exhaustion had turned her lips bright pink. In another life she had dyed her hair mahogany, but now it was long and ragged, back to no-color brown. She had brought some makeup with her, but wearing it with coveralls would look bizarre. For a moment the room darkened. Without the physical trappings of her identity—her own clothes, her scent, her blusher—how could she look like herself?

  She couldn’t think like this. She was in the grip of the peculiar but popular idea that if she lacked hope, the cosmic powers would shun her. Believing this was more pleasant than realizing that the cosmos has no preference.

  She waited until 0720 to go downstairs, to be sure she wouldn’t mix up the buses. Vacant minutes before, the lobby was now so full of Journeymen that bodies were backed into the stairwell. Norberto was shepherding people through, pointing the way with a miniature dustpan. When he saw Polly, he strode through the crowd.

  “How are you settling in?”

  “Did you find out anything about the contact form?” She’d wanted to be cooler, more safely indifferent, but the question sloshed out.

  His face didn’t change. The skin was cratered along his jawbone, the scars of adolescence.

  “I asked you if the person expecting me in 1993 received my emergency contact form?”

  “I can place a call to a friend.”

  “Really?”

  “Check in with me later.”

  Of course, he might have been just saying what she wanted to hear, but she felt so cheerful anyway that she smiled at everyone on the bus. This time she paid attention to the route. She wanted to be able to find her way to the Flagship Hotel without asking anyone. But the road had few distinguishing marks. That juniper hedge closed off street after street, and without exits they were no longer streets but nameless earth. They turned left, passed a sign that said Service Road—Authorized Vehicles Only, and they drove past the container homes. Here there were no junipers, the ruins on display. Empty plots had a bald, startled look, still bearing the footprints of a house: a moat of grass around a singed rectangle where somebody once made lunch and watched TV. At the corner of Avenue K, two men on either end of a tree saw were in a back-and-forth dance with a stump. Polly looked to see if one of them might be Frank, the silly clench of her heart. But they were old men with scarlet faces streaked with dirt.

  “All manual.” The girl in front of Polly had twisted around. Her perfectly styled red bob curled around her jaw. How had she managed to get it that way? “No motor-operated machinery. No fumes. It’s better for everyone.”

  Past a row of houses, clobbered into one single lump, was a line of laundry and a ladder.

  “Do people live here?” Polly asked.

  “God. No one could live there.”

  Then the road humped up, as if the land were taking a deep breath. Over the ridge came the sea, every wave crested by a tiny sun. Polly was jolted by the delight of recognition. The sea was still the same.

  The driver called out, “Hotel Galvez!” A quarter of the building was new. So white, it hurt to look. As for the other three-quarters, stories had collapsed on the ones below, cathedral windows and balconettes like faces with their bones removed.

  An official in a guardhouse took Polly’s ID and matched her name against a list the width of his desk.

  “To the back and through,” he commanded. Polly looked but did not see an entrance. “Go on. ¡Anda!” He carried on shouting at her from across the courtyard. “¡Más! ¡Más! To the back!”

  A staircase, hidden by a small stacked mountain of black tiles, led to a third-floor chamber. The hall was unfinished, all the beams in the ceiling bared like one hundred ribs, urine-hued insulation wadded between each plank. Queen Anne banquet chairs tied together formed an unnerving pile of carved feet. Fan chairs were trussed back-to-back like hostages.

  “Over here!” Baird was at a drafting table, placed randomly in the middle. He shoved a coffee-table book her way. “This room will look like this one day.” A glossy photo showed a lushly carpeted ballroom with a blue, glowing ceiling. “The Starlight Roof at the Waldorf Astoria. You’ve been?”

  “Not sure,” Polly said. She had never been to the Waldorf.

  “It’s going to be the cornerstone of Galveston. I won the bidding war for redesign, because I had the best idea. We’re not just restoring the Hotel Galvez but all the lost hotels. Each suite in the vein of one of the greats. The Plaza, the Savoy, the Mauna Kea, the Shangri-La.

  “I was decorator at the Waldorf. Used to party with the Beatles and Lauren Bacall. Then we went to visit my mother in Palm Beach and got stuck below the border. A
nd now I’m here, in overalls. Dressed like a Journeyman, right?” He waggled his eyebrows.

  Something was off about him. He was different from before. His face was red and his eyes were wet and beady. Maybe it was just a good mood.

  “Start with the brocade cushions from the MGM Grand. Count them and process them for cleaning and repairs. There are targets to hit to stay in business, so work smart. This way.”

  She followed him behind a plastic curtain, and she passed through a wormhole, back into the world she knew. There was the lathe and the band saw and the sanding station, in whose languages she was fluent. There were the coils of reed spline, fiber rush, and seagrass, as identical to the lay as homophones to a foreigner. There was the shelf of half-pint cans of wood stain, their names like the names of old friends. Polly could cry. She weighed a mallet in her hand. Stamped on its handle was TimeRaiser. She put it back, name-side down, but the brand was on both sides. The wormhole spat her out.

  “Those wicker thrones are from the Flamingo. The gentlemen’s valets are from the Golden Nugget. We scavenged Vegas. None of this is really from the Great Hotels. Vacationers won’t know the difference. The real reason they picked me? I can repurpose junk. I’m cheap.”

  “Who scavenges it?”

  “TimeRaiser workers. Like monkeys. Shinnying up the rubble. Dangerous, though. These are my pride and joy.” He showed her a set of Sheraton-style mahogany side chairs, oval backed with ribbon-form splats and green leather seats. “These four are from the actual Starlight Roof.”

  “How did you get them from New York?” Was it easy to cross the border? If Frank had wound up back in Buffalo, could he get to Galveston for Saturday? But he never would have left Texas without her.

  But he didn’t answer her question. He pointed to a pine box the size of a small room, saying, “And that’s the blood closet.” She awaited further explanation, but one of the brass studs on a Starlight Roof chair had come loose, and he bent to examine it.