Marine Park(36)

            You hold your breath until she picks up. You haven’t talked in a while. Hello? she says. Hello? Eamon, she says, and that lets you speak.

            Hello, you say. I missed you. I missed you tonight. She sighs into the speaker, and says that she missed you too. The phone connection isn’t enough for you, and you ask her if she has her computer nearby, and you connect to the Internet, and through the magic of machines and cameras she is in front of you, in pajamas, her hair tied on top of her head.

            You can’t say anything. You don’t. You don’t want to talk about anything at all anymore. You don’t tell her about David or Andreo or the sweet smell or the car that took Isabella away. That is all over now, like another lifetime, and the waiters fade to nothing in your head.

            Are you OK? she asks you, and you shake your head, one way and then the other. You’re making me upset, she tells you. And because you don’t know what else to do, and you don’t want to make her upset, you reach a hand out toward the computer screen, even though you know it can’t do anything. You reach a hand to where her hand is on her computer screen, as if to hold it. You hold nothing but the hot section of the screen itself, the energy of keeping your pictures alive pumping up out of it, like a stove. You watch her, your hands almost touching, the swirls in her palm visible on the high-definition screen, and it is as close as you can come, or as much as she can give you, for you.





HAIRCUT





In the afternoon, Andrew went to Marine Park to get a haircut. He’d been at an interview in the morning, for a job that would make him not rich but comfortable, more comfortable than now—with the possibility of riches, of an extra house in the Hamptons, if you followed the curve of the borough out into the Atlantic. At the interview, one partner at the firm had asked if he could tell a little about himself, his fingers hanging from the résumé like bangs, the paper resting on the crook of his arm. Well, Andrew said, I grew up in Brooklyn. Marine Park, he said. The partners nodded. I’ve been working in the city mostly since college. The résumé partner stopped him. That’s funny, he said. How so? Andrew asked. Only a true Brooklynite would say going into the city. The partners grinned together, as if their grins connected into one grin. It’s true, Andrew said.

            The barber’s was nearly empty this late in the afternoon. Andrew had come after work, had driven down Ocean Parkway, past the Q train at Kings Highway, Quentin Road for the last few blocks. He hadn’t told anyone he’d be coming. At the barber’s, Javi, who had been cutting his hair since he was a child, was looking at the sports cycle on the television bolted into the wall above his chair. He was scrolling through his phone. Hey, Andrew said. My friend, said Javi. Have a seat. I have no one. Andrew sat and Javi wrapped the light black tarpaulin of a smock around him. Underneath Andrew felt cool and dry, while Javi went to work, without talking, on his head.

             • • •

Before Andrew got contacts, he had relished the surprise that came after taking off his glasses at the beginning and staring blankly, unseeingly, at the mirror while Javi worked. The clip of Javi’s scissors vibrated from one ear to another—ever since Andrew had decided that he didn’t want just a buzz cut, that he was looking for something more sophisticated. Buzz cuts had been summer haircuts, for when he and his friends were playing the St. Thomas Aquinas basketball camp near Flatbush, run by Chris Mullen, the archetype of the neighborhood, who’d gotten out in a big way. He’d played for Xaverian, starred there, was a white kid in an era when there were few. He played in a white way, as far as Andrew could remember, even when he was teaching the clinics—jump shots, dribbling drills. Nothing much like inspiration. What Andrew had liked better were the nuns peering over the hedges at the outdoor basketball hoops they set up for those months. While the boys ran bare-chested up and down the asphalt, shouting for the ball, skinning knees, the nuns sat in plastic chairs propped against the thin fences, watching, or continuing their circumnavigations around the garden. The garden looked cool and inviting to Andrew, surrounded by trees, without the heat echo of the basketball courts.

            When he was older, after college, before the time when he returned home to the city, he lived near a lake in New England where he thought about that sort of thing. He had found a job as an executive assistant in the office of an insurance company, next to the lake. In the afternoons, after work, during which he sat mindlessly in the office shuttling emails from one person to another, looking out the window; after that, he’d go to the basketball court, get in as many five-on-fives as he could. The competition wasn’t as good as New York, but it was something. His jump shot, which had never been his strong suit, was back with a vengeance during that time. He found that he could roll off picks, create just the smallest of spaces between him and the defender, make the shot. Midrange Mac is here, some of the regulars said when he showed up in his Camry. Keep him out past the three-point line.