In Strange Gardens and Other Stories Read online

  She got the carton with the vibrator and gave it to me.

  “Will you chuck this in a bin somewhere. I don’t want it anywhere around tonight.”

  “What shall I do about the batteries?” I asked. She didn’t answer.

  “Okay,” I said. “I can see myself out.”

  When I turned around at the top of the stairs, Evelyn was still standing in the doorway. I waved, and she smiled and waved back.

  THE TRUE PURE LAND

  When I moved in, the room’s single window was so dirty that the room seemed twilit even in the middle of the day. Even before I unpacked my suitcase, I cleaned the window. When Chris came home in the evening, he laughed and called Eiko.

  He said: “Look and see what our guest has done.”

  “The Swiss are very clean,” said Eiko.

  I laughed. That was in April. I had gone to New York because I was fed up with Switzerland. I was lucky enough to find a job for six months working in a travel agency that belonged to a Swiss woman. But it was so badly paid I could only afford a very cheap room. The building was on the corner of Tieman Street and Claremont Avenue, on the edge of Spanish Harlem. On the other side of the street were tall dilapidated brick buildings inhabited almost entirely by Hispanics.

  The first week I went to some bar or other every night with people from work. On the weekends I was mostly on my own. Chris and Eiko would be visiting friends or somewhere in the city, and the apartment was peaceful and empty.

  One rainy Sunday morning, I set off to explore the area. I headed south down Riverside Drive. The traffic was heavy but there were hardly any pedestrians, and I enjoyed the feeling of being on my own. Somewhere around 100th Street, I saw a bigger than life-size statue of a Buddhist monk in a niche in a house. He was standing barefoot behind a black fence, looking out at the Hudson River. The rain started coming down harder, and I turned back and went home.

  In the store on the ground floor of our building I bought the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and spent the rest of the day reading it. When I sat down on the window seat in the evening to smoke a cigarette, I noticed a window with a red light in the house opposite. I saw the slender form of a woman, leaning down over a lamp to switch it off. Just afterwards, there was a flash at the back of the room. Then the room remained dark.

  I wasn’t thinking about the woman in the house opposite when I sat down in the window again for a smoke a few days later. The room was once again illuminated by the red standard lamp, and once again I saw her. She was moving slowly about the room, as if dancing. Her window was open but I couldn’t hear music, only the sounds of traffic from Broadway and the occasional rumble of the subway on its viaduct. I smoked a second cigarette. The woman stopped dancing. As she shut the window, I had the brief impression that she was looking across at me. But she was about twenty yards away, and I could only make out her outline. She draped a cloth over the lamp, and then she left the part of the room that I could see into.

  Down on the street, some kids were rocking parked cars till their alarms went off. The wail of the sirens mingled with the noise of the city, but no one seemed to pay it any mind. I tossed my butt down on the street, shut the window, and lay down.

  Chris came from Alabama. He had been living in New York for several years. He had studied politics, and had a badly paid job with a church organization. Eiko was still studying. She described herself as a heathen to irritate Chris. She was a Marxist and a feminist.

  “If my mother calls,” Eiko told me once, “you’re not to say anything about Chris. She doesn’t know I have a boyfriend. I told her you’re both gay.”

  Chris laughed, and I laughed as well. “And what if she comes by?” I asked.

  “My parents live out on Long Island,” said Eiko. “They never come to Manhattan.”

  Sometimes I went out for a beer with Chris. Then he would complain about Eiko’s political views and her stubbornness, and the way she had a different view of their relationship from his. He loved her, but he wasn’t sure she loved him back. “She doesn’t believe in anything,” he said, “not even me.”

  I had stopped going out with my colleagues. After work I usually went straight home. Then I would sit in the window and smoke, and sometimes I saw my dancer.

  Summer came, and it got unbearably hot on the streets. Eiko went back to Japan for three months. Before she left, she and Chris invited me to supper.

  “Will you look after Chris for me while I’m away,” said Eiko. “He’s so helpless on his own.”

  We drank Californian wine, and sat up past midnight talking.

  “Chris is really warped,” said Eiko. “He likes country music.”

  Chris was embarrassed. “My parents always used to listen to it. It’s just nostalgia for me. I don’t really like it.”

  “You’ve got to listen to it,” said Eiko. “Home, sweet home.”

  She put in the cassette. Chris protested, but he made no move to take it out.

  “No more from that cottage again will I roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” sang a deep voice. I had never heard Eiko laugh so wholeheartedly. I laughed as well, and finally Chris did too, reluctantly and slightly shamefacedly.

  My head was spinning from the wine and lots of cigarettes and all our talk as I finally turned in at about two in the morning. But I noticed right away that the light was still on in the window opposite. As I smoked a last cigarette, I saw the dancer lean over the lamp and switch it off. I kept watching a while longer, before finally switching off my own light, and going to sleep.

  Eiko left, and Chris often came home late. Sometimes I could tell he’d been drinking. “I miss her,” he said.

  The first of August* was a Monday. My boss was organizing the celebrations for the Swiss Club, and gave us the afternoon off. A group of us went to the beach, which was almost deserted during the week. We swam, and as evening fell we lit a fire behind a sand dune and grilled some steaks. Someone had brought along a tape recorder, and was playing Swiss rock music.

  I ate my steak and walked over the dune, and across the wide beach down to the sea. Sky, sand, and sea were almost indistinguishable now, all a dusty pink or tan color. I took my clothes off, and swam out till I could no longer see land beyond the waves. I felt I could swim on and on, till I got to Europe. Then for the first time since coming here, I wanted to go home. Suddenly I was afraid I might not make it back to land, and I turned and swam back. As I was climbing the dune again, I heard whispering voices. I saw one of my colleagues lying in the sand with his girlfriend. She had just recently come to America to visit him, and the pair of them had been lovey-dovey all evening.

  It was after midnight when I got home. There were no lights on in the apartment, and it was very quiet. There was a whiff of marijuana in the air. Dirty dishes were piled up in the kitchen.

  In the middle of August Chris went away on vacation. He was going to stay with his parents in Alabama.

  “Look after yourself,” I told him.

  He laughed. “My mother will look after me. You’ll see, I’ll have put on ten pounds by the time I’m back.”

  It no longer cooled off at night. The city was swarming with tourists, but the subways were less crowded than usual. In my part of town, you could hear samba and salsa music till late at night. Everywhere people were sitting on their front steps talking. Young men stood around in groups, leaning on cars that weren’t theirs. Young women strolled back and forth in twos and threes and looked around at the men and sometimes called out a few words to them. There were hardly any couples. I hadn’t thought about my dancer for a long time, but now I looked at the women on the street and thought which one of them might be her.

  A postcard came from Eiko. It was addressed to Chris, but I read it anyway. There was nothing in it of a personal nature. She signed off, “Love, Eiko.”

  One evening toward the end of the month, I was sitting in my room in the twilight. Then I heard the wailing of sirens outside closer than I ever
had yet. I looked out the window and saw firetrucks turning into our street. Men in protective clothing leaped out of the trucks, but then they just stood there without doing anything. They took off their black helmets, and wiped the sweat off their brows. They stood there individually posed, like statues. A large crowd had assembled, and some of the firemen blocked off the end of the road. But that was all that happened. After a while, the sirens stopped their wail. I was going to shut the window, and then I saw my dancer standing on the fire escape of the house opposite. It was the first time I had ever seen her completely, though her face was indistinct in the dark. She was leaning on the railing, and looking across at me. As soon as she saw I had noticed her, she turned away. She was slender and not very tall. She had long black hair that fell over one shoulder, because of the way she was leaning on the fire escape. She was wearing a knee-length skirt and a tight top. She was barefoot. When she turned away after a while to climb back through the window into her room, the light from the red lamp caught her face momentarily. I was certain I had never seen her on the street.

  After weeks of incessant heat, it finally started to cool down. The sky was still radiant blue, but at least there was usually a breeze blowing through the city streets now. When I rode out to the beach with friends on the weekends, the extensive parkland behind the dunes was almost deserted. Then we would just lay ourselves flat on the sand to be out of the wind, or else we would walk along the beach in our clothes and watch the gray water scoop up the sand.

  One day, an empty Sunday, I finally decided to pay a visit to my dancer. I hadn’t spoken to anyone for two days, and I felt completely wretched. It was a radiant afternoon as I crossed the street. I stopped in front of the building and lit a cigarette. It began to rain. First a couple of fat drops splashed down on the crooked cement slabs of the sidewalk, and then the heavens opened. I jumped into the little glazed-in porch where the doorbells were, and from where a further, locked door led to the stairwell.

  Outside, the rain was teeming down, and spurting against the panes. There was a smell of drenched asphalt. I peered through the iron grille into the entrance hall, which was dark and silent. There was a mosaic tiled flooring, which had been patched with cement. The walls were ocher. In the background I saw the door of an elevator, and beside it a narrow staircase going up, dimly lit by the light through a grimy window. There was a stroller, and a rusty bike in a corner.

  A woman with a dog emerged from the elevator, and came across the hallway toward me. She opened the door, held it open for me, and said: “This rain. You must have just missed it. Were you on your way to see someone in the building?”

  I said: “I was just sheltering here till the rain stopped.”

  “I was going to walk the dog,” she said, “but with this weather I’m not so sure … Where are you from?”

  “Switzerland,” I said.

  “A beautiful country,” she said, “so clean. I come from Puerto Rico. But I’ve been living here a long time. Years.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “I couldn’t live in Puerto Rico, and I can’t live here either,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m not going out in this. Good luck.”

  She went back to the elevator, dragging her dog after her. I slid my foot in the door, then took it back, and the door crashed shut. Once the rain eased, I ran back across the street. I was shivering. I took a hot shower, but it didn’t do any good. I felt cold and damp in the apartment.

  A week later, Chris came back. We spent a few nice evenings together, eating and talking till late. The day before Eiko was due back, we cleaned the place and listened to country music.

  “Please don’t tell her I’ve been smoking marijuana,” Chris said.

  “Of course I won’t,” I said, “it’s none of my busines.”

  “We’re friends,” said Chris. “We men need to stick together.”

  “Stick together against who?” I asked, and thought: we’re not friends.

  Chris laughed. “I used to smoke a lot more. But since I met Eiko, I’ve almost given up. She doesn’t approve. And I don’t need it when I’ve got her.”

  Then Eiko came back, and Chris didn’t have any time for me anymore. The two of them often invited their friends over, and I took myself to the movies, and when I was home I generally stayed in my room. On the weekends I would sometimes spend whole days reading, and only go out to buy beer or to pick up Chinese take-out. My interest in the dancer had faded. I tried not to think about her. Sometimes I still saw her. She was now often sitting at the back of her room, where I could only dimly make her out.

  One evening, when I was sitting by the window smoking, someone called up to me from the street. I looked down and saw a young woman standing on the sidewalk with a poodle. She waved up at me.

  “I’ve come on behalf of my friend,” she called. “She lives opposite, and always sees you in the window.”

  “Yes,” I called back, “I see her too.”

  “She would like to meet you,” the woman called up, as if to stick up for her friend. “She didn’t want me to tell you.”

  “Right,” I called. I felt paralyzed. For a moment, neither of us spoke.

  Then the woman said: “She’s called Margarita. Do you want her number?”

  She gave me the number and told me once more: “She didn’t want me to tell you.”

  “Sure,” I said, “it’s nice that you came and told me anyway.”

  I looked across at the window with the red light, but I couldn’t see the dancer. I sat down on my bed, and took a few deep breaths. Then I picked up the phone from the bedside table, and dialed the number.

  “Hallo,” I heard a warm woman’s voice.

  “Hallo,” I said, “I’m the man in the window opposite.”

  The girl laughed in embarrassment.

  “Your friend gave me your number.”

  “I didn’t want her to,” she said softly.

  “Would you like to meet?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “My name’s Margarita.”

  “I know,” I said, “what about right away?”

  “Sure,” she said. Her English wasn’t very good.

  “We could go for a beer.”

  She hesitated. Then she said: “Tomorrow.”

  “Okay, I’ll be outside your house at eight o’clock,” I said. “Is that good?”

  “Yes. That’s good.”

  “Goodnight, Margarita.”

  “Goodnight,” she said.

  I was nervous all the next day, and wondered whether I should turn up at all. At eight I was waiting outside Margarita’s house, but she wasn’t there. I waited for a quarter of an hour, then I went up to my room and called her number. I stood by the window, and kept my eyes on the street.

  Margarita answered. “Hallo,” she said.

  “Hallo,” I said. “I thought we were going to go out for a beer.”

  “Now?” she asked in surprise.

  “It’s eight o’clock.”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you at your window?” she asked. “Hang on, I’ll wave.”

  I looked across at the dancer’s room, but all I could see was the faint outline of the standard lamp. Then I heard Margarita’s voice on the phone again.

  “Did you see me?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Top floor,” she said, “middle apartment. Wait, I’ll go out again.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said in alarm.

  I looked up at the top floor of the opposite building, but I still couldn’t see anyone. Finally, two buildings along I spotted someone standing by the window, and waving both arms.

  “Did you see me that time?” asked Margarita shortly after.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m coming down now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”

  Margarita was pretty and quite small. She was wearing jeans and a brightly colored blouse. I can’t say I didn
’t like her, but she wasn’t who I expected. She wasn’t the woman I thought I’d known for months. We walked down the street together. As we turned into Broadway, I saw Chris coming the other way. There was nothing else to do but to introduce them to each other. Chris smiled and wished us a pleasant evening.

  We went into the nearest bar, and sat down at a table. It was noisy. Margarita didn’t understand much English. She said she came from Costa Rica, and had been in the States for a couple of months. She was living with her sister and brother-in-law. They both worked, and she was alone in the apartment all day. She was very bored. When I asked her if she was looking for a job, she became suspicious, and said she was here on vacation.

  “What do you do with yourself all day?” I asked.

  “I go to the beach,” she said. “In Costa Rica there are very beautiful beaches.”

  “New York has some beautiful beaches as well,” I said.

  She laughed and shook her head in disbelief. “Palms,” she said, “in Costa Rica. And the sand is so white.”

  I asked her how long she planned on staying, and she said she didn’t know. I told her I came from Switzerland, but she didn’t know where that was. The conversation was sticky, and we sat and looked at each other in silence, and drank our beers. Once, I picked up Margarita’s hand, but then I let it drop again. She smiled at me, and I smiled back.

  We said goodbye outside her building. I was going back to Switzerland soon, I explained, it was too bad. Margarita smiled. She seemed to understand.

  “Thanks for the beer,” she said.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  For the next few days, I avoided the window. When I felt like a smoke, I went outside to Riverside Park. If it was raining, I sheltered at the tomb of General Grant. Sometimes I went as far as 100th Street, and spent a long time in front of the statue of the Buddhist monk. The bronze plaque on the statue said it was a depiction of Shinran Shonin, the founder of the sect of the true pure land. It came from Hiroshima, where it had survived the first atom bomb. That evening, I asked Eiko about the sect of the true pure land.