Marine Park(47)
It wasn’t long before Amanda started seeing Robert Dillon, who was working at her office in Manhattan. He was an outside hire whose contract was with a PR firm, but he was working with the regional VP to rewrite the copy on the Pfizer website. They sat in the VP’s corner office for hours while the VP brainstormed on and on about what Pfizer stood for, what communities they were looking to help and be a part of, what the essence of their business was. Robert took dutiful notes and asked pointed questions. Some of them verged on the very personal. Sometimes the VP would ask Robert for a line from literature that he could then riff off: We beat on, boats against the current, medical advancements moving up. Robert told Amanda this in her home. Soon Robert and Amanda were commuting together on the B2. The Pfizer contract was long-term and open.
Amanda’s favorite time of the day was early morning, when she woke up without an alarm so as not to disturb Robert, and dressed silently in the running clothes she’d laid out for herself the night before—an old basketball T-shirt, formfitting nylon shorts. When she had lived in San Francisco, she would wake up early and run the hills above the Castro, where every once in a while she would get a peek at the water. It had seemed sunny then, even in winter. But back home in Marine Park, sometimes she’d start her run in the dark, and her route was dictated by which streetlamps would still be on, on the outer rim of the park. With the sun coming up behind her she raced her streetlamp shadow to the next light, until, on her third mile or so, the sun was up enough. Then she crossed Avenue U and went over to the salt marsh, where she could run by the water like she used to—except there were no hills here, none at all. This wasn’t a problem for running, really. It had been for sledding when she was five, before basketball took over the winter. But now, grown up, hills seemed superfluous. On flat ground, she could run effortlessly and focus on nothingness; not pain in her legs, not the heavy pull of her breath; not her father. By the time she got back and was out of the shower Robert would just be stirring.
Robert had grown up in Brooklyn but not in Marine Park. He’d been to a liberal arts college where he studied literature and media, and his favorite bars were in the Village. He’d never met anyone quite like Martin, or when he thought carefully about it, he guessed he’d just never been in such close proximity to someone like him before. It’s got nothing to do with Marine Park, Amanda said indignantly. The guy is touched as shit. But Martin had been around so long that the neighbors were superbly used to him by then, and that was a palpable feeling. Some evenings, when Amanda was in the shower or on business calls, Robert would sit outside with Martin. They’d each be on their own stoop, of course, the day stumbling to an end around them. Martin explained about palming once, but other than that he didn’t have much to say. He said, It’s how I stay warm inside. He wasn’t embarrassed.
Can you try it on me? asked Robert then. Can I see what you mean? And so Martin stood up, and reached over the fencing separating the stoops, and put his hand down on Robert’s head. Robert closed his eyes. Martin’s hand reached in deep, through his thick hair, the tabs of all his fingers pulsing. Robert sat strangely like that, Martin’s fingers moving above him. He waited for something to happen, for the message to hit him like experience, but it didn’t. Robert thought that Martin seemed disappointed. Try me, Martin said, and sat down and took his headphones off. Robert extended his hand, but couldn’t bring himself to touch Martin’s head. He looked around him at the cold, quiet street. It’s OK, he said. It is OK, said Martin. Martin put his headphones back on and listened to his music quietly.
• • •
The oldest Braiker boy was used to being on the rooftop. From there, either on his family’s side or Martin’s, he could see the long line of houses on R, and Fillmore and Quentin on either side. There was the large, imposing structure of PS 222, the local public school that he had gone to. When he was a student there he’d been convinced that the building had once been a rich man’s mansion, and that’s why the names of the rooms were so particular and color oriented. The Green Room, now the gym. The Blue Room, which still smelled like chlorine, on the first floor—now the cafeteria. The detail that clinched it was his discovery, in fifth grade, of a dumbwaiter, at the back of his fifth-floor classroom. He stuck his head inside during independent reading and the teacher ran over and held his legs while she screamed for the teacher’s aid to go get help.