D. Nurkse

We communicated by cheeses, unwrapping them gingerly, parting the crust with a fork, tasting dew, must, salt, raising an eyebrow, or we let chianti talk for us, rolling it in the glass, staring—it was dark and shiny as the pupil, and stared back— or we undressed each other; we took long walks hand in hand in the vineyards, the pastures, resenting each other bitterly for our happiness that excluded us as surely as the world did, mountain after mountain.

After death, my father practices meticulously until the Bach is seamless, spun glass in a dream, you can no longer tell where the modulations are, or the pedal shifts or the split fingerings . . . if he rests it’s to wind the metronome or sip his cup of ice . . . but who is the other old man in the identical flannel gown, head cocked, listening ever more critically, deeper in the empty room?

We brought that newborn home from Maimonides and showed her nine blue glittering streets. Would she like the semis with hoods of snow? The precinct? Bohack’s? A lit diner? Her eyes were huge and her gaze tilted like milk in a pan, toward shadow. Would she like the tenement, three dim flights, her crib that smelled of Lemon Pledge? We slept beside her in our long coats, rigid with fatigue in the unmade bed. Her breath woke us with its slight catch. Would she approve of gray winter dawn? We showed her daylight in our cupped hands. Then the high clocks began booming in this city and the next, we counted for her, but just the strokes, not the laggards or the tinny echoes, and we taught her how to wait, how to watch, how to be held, in that icy room, until our own alarm chimed.

The child’s assignment: “What is a city?” All dusk she sucks her pencil while cars swish by like ghosts, neighbors’ radios forecast rain, high clouds, diminishing winds: at last she writes: “The city is everyone.” Now it’s time for math, borrowing and exchanging, the long discipleship to zero, the stranger, the force that makes us what we study: father and child, writing in separate books, infinite and alone.

They pay us time and a half and don’t dare catch us drinking: we don’t insist, don’t pass a bottle, but each sips a private pint, all sitting in the narrow room with our backs to the center, each facing his work—router, stain tray, buffing wheel, drill press— and with that sweet taste echoing in our bones, we watch our hands make what they always made —rosewood handles—but now we smile in delighted surprise and Marchesi brings envelopes that record a full day’s work though it’s still noon, processions still fill the streets, choirs, loudspeakers bellowing Hallelujah: and we change into our finest clothes in the locker room, admiring each other’s hat brims, passing bottles freely until all are empty, and at last we separate in the brilliant street, each in the direction of a different tolling bell.

I asked my father, “would you rather die of cancer or a heart attack? Would you rather be executed or put in jail for life? Which would you rather be— a spy or a sentinel?” And he tried to answer honestly, combing his thinning hair with his fingers, thinking of something else. At last he fell silent. I ran out to savor the dregs of dusk playing with my friends in the road that led to the highway. The ball flew up toward day and landed in night. We chanted. Every other minute a truck, summoned by our warnings, brushed past in a gust of light, the driver’s curses muffled by distance: the oncoming wheels were the point of the game, like the scores in chalk or the blood from scuffed knees that we smeared across our faces: so when my mother called, her voice was quaint and stymied and I took all the time in the world trotting home past tarped barbecue pits, past names of lovers filling with sap, past tentative wind from sprinklers: then I was stunned to see my golden window where all faces, hanging plants, dangling pots were framed by night and dwarfed by a ravenous inward-turning light.

It is the great arguments we are proud of, over a nibbled peach, hair in the comb, a faulty lube job; the reconciliations were always naked in borrowed rooms, sometimes in Queens or Staten Island, we touched each other shyly—we reminded each other of loneliness and funk and beautiful pigeons with oil-slick necks, cooing bitterly— but there we lost each other in forgiveness; keeping score, being wounded even in triumph, walking home down leafy avenues etched with the faint double line of extinct trolleys, caressing carved hearts under a sheen of sap with a ragged nail, sleeping alone, choosing the dream of betrayal, entering by the wide door and waking dead—there we were superb. In Brooklyn we held our own.

When death stands in your doorway, you must show no weakness. If he points at his watch, answer “in five minutes.” If he insists, murmur “just a minute.” When he bridles, whisper “half a minute,” 
“a second,” “half a sec,” “one moment.” You mustn’t look him in the eye. But don’t avert your gaze. Glance decisively at the bridge of the nose or the moist place right below 
the lips. If he unfolds a map, please don’t express a preference for the seashore or the mountains. Betray no longing or anxiety. You might tap the margin nonchalantly, if there is a margin. There’s an old superstition that death is a healer, he brings peace, 
escape from corruption. On the contrary: he is not a person, an animal, an insect, not even a pebble. Not even a name. Not an event. Not a whiff of night air. So why, ask yourself, does he fidget there, with that peevish “can’t we meet each other halfway” expression, in those absurd Goodwill clothes, baggy corduroy suit, pants and jacket the same color but different wales, so often folded the seams are white as chalk lines, fat two-tone white-and-beige golf shoes with cleats, nylon argyle socks, like someone’s idea of an encyclopedia salesman from the nineteen thirties? And why is the street behind him so fascinating, empty as a stage set, a few vans double-parked, a cat hiding under one, sometimes the flicker of the tip of a tail, sometimes the glint of the eye itself, 
voracious, ecstatic?

2001 Sadness of just-painted rooms. We clean our tools meticulously, as if currying horses: the little nervous sash brush to be combed and primped, the fat old four-inchers that lap up space to be wrapped and groomed, the ceiling rollers, the little pencils that cover nailheads with oak gloss, to be counted and packed: camped on our dropsheets we stare across gleaming floors at the door and beyond it the old city full of old rumors of conspiracies, gunshots, market crashes: with a little mallet we tap our lids closed, holding our breath, holding our lives in suspension for a moment: an extra drop will ruin everything.