The Monster of Manhattan

Prologue: SAILING...

Jacque sat on the stoop of his building, calmly watching the boys across the street toss pennies against a wall, each looking to see who could get their penny closer to the wall than the others. Pitching pennies is what it’s all about, Jacque thought. It’s about eking a tiny advantage against your rivals while maintaining your friendship with them. Letting the drift of life’s bad luck roll off your back while still moving one leg in front of the other until a turning point was reached. Each step brings you nearer to your destination. Or farther. Who knew in which direction the coin might bounce? However much you cursed out your friends today, they would play with you tomorrow too.

Sigh! The rituals of friendship were behind him now. The world was changing, and his life might have to change with it. The phone call from his mother and his aunt had been unexpected, like a cry of fire in a crowded theater. They were pleasant, each in her own separate call. That’s what he could say about them, that they were pleasant. His mother was the most pleasant of all! His aunt, though, had an edge on, as he stated to her. She unaccustomedly stuttered and wheezed, with tension in her voice, while uttering the banal pleasantries she went on to subject him to.

It had surprised him when the phone rang. Very few people called him, ever, who were not among the confraternity of female pals and the customers with whom he interacted. And when they did call? It was often a wrong number. But there they were, a veneer of sanity hiding a distinct tension beneath their words. He wasn’t sure why there was that tension. He hadn’t wanted to talk to them. As importunate as they could be, though, he could never ignore their calls. He loved them, the crazy sisters. He loved them, memories of the old country, the Midi region of southern France aside.

His chief concern when they called was that someone died, that perhaps one of his siblings fell down a well or got trampled by a bull or a horse that got free from its moorings. That would have been too much. The need to mourn for his beloved siblings. Or perhaps papa or mama was sick but not telling him? Perhaps they were just reaching out to make contact while hiding something from him, perhaps one of the more accomplished of their children?

Each time he picked up the phone, he never knew what awaited him. There was always his bated breath when the phone rang. The sense that the world could spin out of control and his life, or the lives of those he loved, might spin like a frisbee being tossed by the kids on the street, getting lost beyond recovery, or smashing a window (but how likely was that?), bringing the wrath of The Man, the landlord of the miserable accommodations that surrounded him, down upon his head. The coin again, the coin, hitting the wall, landing on its edge, spinning, and spinning. Which way to land and how far?

There was so much about his life that he regretted. The secrets that he could never tell lest it harm another. Knowing what he knew of what went on across the ocean, the pain he had to bear, there, back home. But even that paled the day he finally answered the phone and heard his aunt cry into it, Your brother, your cousin Pierre, must come to you in New York. Will you take him in? Will you give a home to him? I have been like a mother to you. He has been like a brother. Please help him, he must leave here now, he says, he has things to do. His mother called later to ratify the notion.

With those words through the phone, Jacque knew he could do nothing other than obey the heart that beat in him as it beat in his aunt, in his mother. He’d have to make do with Pierre for at least a little while, till he got set up on his own. The world would change with this, Jacque knew. It would be more complicated. His patience would be tested. As would his courage. I can do no other, Jacque thought. I must help the marauder, invite him into my home, extend an olive branch and let the world begin anew for me. Jacque, tired, fearful, but wanting to help his brethren across the seas, buckled up his courage, poured salt on the tail of his fears to set them to flight, and gave a tearful grunt signifying yes, the object of his hate and fear and love, Pierre, can come.

Chapter 1: THE INGENUE 

Pierre had fled the Carcassone to go to the US when he could. No explanations, but that he must go. In the meantime, crossing over the ocean, he had time to reflect upon the wind driving him west. The sorrows behind him. The sense of failure that ripped at his chest. I had to leave before it was all over. I had to stop myself before the tears fell. In New York, I can be new again. My failures are buried deep in the mountains. I can dry my eyes and rise to meet my pretensions. I can do what I must. The past will not be new again. The departed cannot resurface. There, I will thrive. Arriving in New York, he found refuge with Jacque, the cousin who lived in the Village, per pre-arrangement with their relatives.

Jacque’s apartment was a small one-bedroom affair with a kitchenette marred by broken linoleum, cracked yellow and black tiles, and smoke smudges representing unidimensional ceiling clouds. There was also a time-beset couch in the living room. This would be tough on Jacque’s sex life, with Pierre there. Village ladies were still loose and available, but, like women in Carcassone and elsewhere, never quite free. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi no more. He thought, pondering the imposition of familial duty and the extended family’s call.

Jacque met Pierre at the airport, JFK.

Jacque, Pierre said, releasing his embrace of his cousin, how long can I stay with you?

As long as you want, Pierre. It’s a long way from Montsegur. There’s no fortress here to hold you harmless. No ghosts clambering along the rocks. The hidden treasure sits in your hands, called work. This is the land of milk and money! Still, it was early 1990s New York. One had to be careful.

They took busses and trains and TAXI! from JFK Airport to the Village. Steel wheels clattering on the rails; filthy, rattling windows, and wicker seats. Wrappers and beer bottles strewn all about. Ugly streets. A cesspool of litter. Homeless people begging with the dogs. Danger at every corner, but still the home of American self-described creativity. It was more powerful than the financial centers of London and Amsterdam before that. Even Venice’s doges would have been jealous and bitter. That was to come, though. First, the quotidian: Lugging baggage was never easy, even ensconced in a battered taxi. The glass separating passenger and driver, potential victimizer and victim (however measured: front to back or back to front) was pockmarked by bangs. The windowed aperçu on vassal/serf relationships was rendered cloudy by age and limned yellow by the tar of smoke. By bus and train, the trip was torture. The economic situation was severe, by recent American standards, and people were like open wounds, feeling fellow jostlers as grains of salt. Trudging down the block from the corner to ‘home’, Pierre observed city life. A street hustler grabbing the arms of pretty little things, asking: Do you want a date with me, baby? They may have been babes; they may have had babies. It wasn’t likely they were with him. Not Giuliani time, but the G.H.W. Bush wartime surge. While despots internationally might be at risk, there was still a need for caution in the chilly air of that early spring.

Jacque would never have considered living in the East Village. As a soi dis artist, he was still a bit above the run of the mill ils disant creative sort. Pierre was bemused that Jacque would take him in. They had never been close back home. Jacque had never excelled at languages as did Pierre, nor at his studies. Pierre, unlike Jacque, was a brilliant student, a Master of Mathematics and undergraduate-level economics at PRES Université de Toulouse. Jacque could barely countenance adding a column of numbers, leading Pierre to lord it over him on that account, too.

Typically, they had met at church festivals and cousins’ gatherings. Other therefrom-stemming episodes of contact begged not to be recounted. That said, Jacque’s mother and Pierre’s mother were sisters, and both were beloved of their grandmother, Menina. They called her Charlotte d’Azure. Three years older than Pierre, Jacque, twenty-seven, had made his escape to New York two years previously, in late 1989. Church art and over-sentimentalization of Christian history annoyed him. Escape to Paris was possible, but it was too popular among artists. The language was the same, except for the respective peculiarities of the lands of the ‘oc and the ‘oi. Too many people knew him as he was, for what he was. Some, even, had migrated from Carcassone to Paris. He did not want to join their community. But if he went there, how could he not? There were too few people left in the Languedoc for him to evade the company of the refugees who had left. Where would his freedom and individuality be then? How could he avoid being confronted by the trials of dealing with his peers were he to have to be among them? Too many people knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, so there were only three degrees of separation. If so, his chances of salvation from the dead hand of his history were kaput. And so he went west.

The anonymity of the new world appealed to Jacque. Yes, there was a Carcassonian community in the City, but the city was so big that he did not need to seek it out, nor they him. He could slip into anonymity and walk his own path. New York girls were not French girls, although they could ‘do’ that when asked. Many were from the suburbs, seeking the life of the mind and freedom from their parents. Out of the house, on their own, self-governing and self-discovering, there was no one to ask whether they changed their underwear in the morning. While the sixties had gone, the urge to recapture the dream of unshackled love remained. Greenwich Village still captured the imagination. Jacque, as Pierre later would, loved the coffee shops and the sidewalk bistros. The tiny bookstores were replete with theosophist, distaff history, revolutionary tracts, and counterculture crockery. Eastern metaphors for Western experience were important as well.

How odd, Jacque told Pierre, that people here seek the solution to the aches of the modern age in the palliatives of the old. Jacque could talk like an intellectual, a philosophe of (limited) sorts. People liked him for that, feeling that in his company they rubbed shoulders and shared tokes with the best. Jacque himself felt he could talk the talk with the best. Could he walk the walk? He felt he could not.

He again reflected on his aunt’s call. She, Pierre’s la mere, had asked in a reaffirming call, one intended to make sure Jacque did not relent, Can you take him in? Let bygones be bygones. What’s that? No, we don’t want him to go. How could you think otherwise? Oh, mais non! Not at all. You misheard! So how are things for you? Eh? Tres mal! But perhaps having Pierre will give you a new lease on things? A new perspective? How did you say in your letters? A spark for reinvention: a better reason to touch the match to the torch and take it to the pyre of your god discovery. Well, Jacque mused, she also said Pierre had to move on, that he had things to do. And so he did.

I am so, so grateful that you took me in, Jacque. Here we can look over old wrongs and begin our lives anew, you and me. The past doesn’t bind in these new lands, Jacque. We can be friends.

Jacque nodded his assent, happy to hear this take on things. Hope leaped that things would be ok.

I will work hard that that be the case, my brother-cousin Pierre. You will see. The new land gives us a new life. Let the dead stay dead.

Pierre, himself, though, didn’t care why Jacque would agree to take him in. He said what he did to achieve a calming effect on his cousin. As to himself? Pierre knew that he was modern. Brilliant. Determined to move forward. Still, he was impecunious now, having spent all the money he could cadge from his parents and his girlfriend et al. to buy his passage across the ocean. None of them understood that in going, he would really be gone. This was final. If his girlfriend wouldn’t terminate the baby, he would terminate its connection to him. He was too young, at 24, to father a child other than in the generative sense.

They had argued and made up. Only to argue again. And again. Like a dog worrying a bone, she persisted. Estelle was a baker’s daughter from Toulouse. Like many a young Catholic girl there, she grew up to trade her favors for a ring. Going to confession in the Church down the cobble-stoned streets in Toulouse was a relief. Feeling cleansed, she could sin again. The object wasn’t purity, but a diminishment of guilt. It made no sense to Pierre, but as long as he got what he wanted, he was in no mood to protest. Pierre was always happy to help her need to confess again, in an eternal cycle of cleanse and corrupt. Until the baby, his nenon!

Still, that wasn’t why Pierre had left. Or lied about his leaving. Other men would come along to service Estelle. Love her. Marry her. Raise the child. Inspirit more. There was no future near the Pyrenees. Manufacturing was dismal. The historic significance of the Cathars was overblown. Their blood had long ago ceased to run through local veins. Tourism paled. Further, there could be no modern education under the stifling thumbs of the Church or State in Modern France. He felt his world-historical significance would be lost in the backwaters of France. There was more to accomplish in the states, and so it had to be for him. His luster should not be dimmed, he felt, by an unwelcome lampshade of geography. So he had gone. That there were reasons hidden deep within his soul, such as it was, no longer mattered. He felt free of the past here. Shed of the termites that gnawed him from within. Reborn. Recused here, he hoped, from things that would come back to life, the buried emerging to haunt him.

Someone other than Pierre might have admitted to a fear of discovery, or revelation, of things he had done back home, rather than just focusing on location. Crimes he had attempted and succeeded at. Or, even, thought to do. Pierre batted away such thoughts, however, figuring he was entitled to his romps and if they made things difficult, dangerous, or deadly for others, that was not his concern. He was incapable of publicly admitting wrong, or even attempting the admission.

I am what I am, Pierre thought, manically filled with the bravado of the unbound. Yeh y Yeh! he snarked with a laugh to himself, feeling no one would catch on to what he meant or how he figured he had to proceed. Yeh y Yeh! (I am what I am.). Still, he had concerns and felt that even in this new world, things from the old—and not just Estelle’s family—might catch up to him. As might, he thought, Sister Mary.

She, Sister Mary, had cried. Wailed. Implored him to stay. Waving her black arms and pointing out the verdant fields, gnarly trees, and rivulets streaming down the mountainsides, she said, And how can you leave this? She didn’t know about the baby, though. Nor his dreams. Even his deeds, many of them.

Several years before, he had sat in on her impromptu presentations on the trivium—Rhetoric, Grammar, and Logic—and had admired all she had to teach. An old nun, but a beautiful one. Consecrated to the Lord in her early teens, and having become a novitiate at sixteen, she had seen little of the world that didn’t sit on the hem of the Pyrenees. Her parents had died in Algeria, colonial fools, thought Pierre. Blown up by Maghreb revolutionaries intent on restoring the rule of the Moor.

Pierre’s uncle had served with the French Foreign Legion in the Sahara. He, like the nun, had seen many die in the internecine war between the nascent settler state and the native population. As did Pierre’s father, he too had emerged scathed. Interestingly, each had lost an arm to bombs. The uncle, the left. Pierre’s paire, his father, on the right. De Gaulle had been the salvation of them both, if only because he pulled the plug on the bloodshed that drained France of its future. On returning from the war, Pierre’s paire, Francois, married Isabelle, ultimately leading to Pierre himself. Half-deaf from explosions, Francois made his way in life as a carpenter. There was much to fix because the physical plant of the region was aging. Few had the money to buy new houses. Instead, they repaired the dregs of centuries.

Sister Mary knew all the old stories, but it was forbidden to recount them. She told Pierre that she would hate to lose her favorite pupil. France needed her. More importantly, the children of Carcassone did. The Languedoc! She could not leave (but he had not asked).

But he was not here. Did not feel needed. Only Pierre’s internal wants registered in his psyche. That circumstance affected his performance as a lover and a friend. Satisfaction is mine alone, he screamed—at least within his head—even as he sought to delve deeper and expand her, whatever her, legs farther, exploring the twin peaks and the third tip of the mountain range with his tongue. Two mountains and a fur-covered hillock, falling like the walls of Jericho beneath his careful exploration, having triggered a convulsion of feeling masking his revulsion at what he had fallen into, but not become. After all, when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman? Not him.

Jacque himself had not been like that, the sweet, sensitive salvation of crude manhood. Not raised with hunting and fishing, tossing spears at the game on the haunted mountains of Monsaalvatsche, he had emulated ancestors of old while living always on the edge of hysteria. Writing ancient script on living stone, with meanings lost to Time Itself yet always on the edge of memory, he had sat in his arboreal retreat, a treehouse, and looked East and West. North and South. Scoping out the sorcery of the stars, the thaumaturgy of the seasons, the drama of life itself just north of where life began, he would write long hours in his commonplace book, speculating about what he saw and where he would go should he escape the strictures of life on the hem of heaven. Pierre, Jacque still thought in contrast, would have it all end in fire.

Cousins. Cousins. More like brothers, like Cain and Abel. Seemingly, there had never been conflict between them. But there was always something, something lying just beneath the surface, seeking expression in glances and groping at an invisible skein of meaning that tied the two. But what was it? A bond as old as time, as thick as blood. Yet neither knew whence it had come, nor what it would drag them to. There was no here there, nor there here. Time they knew, as la grandmere had taught, had its own ineluctable force and would reveal itself as it unfolded. And not just in the dreams that rent Jacque’s nights, dreams of things that may not have been. May not. If there was meaning among the planets, words to the music of the spheres, facts behind the phantasms of the mind, the truth would surface. If only they would, Pierre thought, imagining what the memories, the truth, would do to Jacque. Jacque, ashen-faced and periodically palsied with fear, hoped any such truths, such possible feared rememberings, the things that may have happened that he had told himself could not have been, the horrors, would not resurface.

A day had passed. Two days. Three...

Jacque was bored and guilty at the same time. He could not work with his cousin there. Jacque felt he dare not leave the room they shared, except to crap and piss down the hall. He felt that he was letting his cousin down. All Pierre seemed to want to do was sleep, pace the floor, and sleep more.

Is something bothering you, Pierre, mon frere? Can I help? asked Jacque. Do you miss home, our family? The phone calls from the aunts/mothers had occurred just once since Pierre had arrived. With hearty words and verbal backslaps to the feigned comity between the newly bound boys, the brothers/cousins, the mothers/aunts were heartened and hung up. Never to call again. Best to sleep with good news than to ponder the hell that may erupt down the line.

Pierre glared at Jacque briefly, then the glare melted like chocolate in the noonday sun. I am ok, Jacque. Jet lag. You know it?

Jacque considered this, still noting that Pierre seemed at once disconsolate and dyspeptic. An indication of his humanity, or a reflection of jet lag? Jacque could not tell. But he did care. It was important to him to savor every moment of his aunt’s happiness at his, Jacque’s, taking care of his younger cousin. Jacque had younger siblings ‘back home,’ seven of them. Four brothers, three sisters, his sorres. The latter were so cute as they raced through the underbrush in crumpled, tie-dyed woolen shifts worn to protect them from the biting wind. Golds and pinks and tinctures of blue. Remnants of sheep that had ranged free, of sorts, over the hillsides with as much consciousness of constraint as sheep can ever have, led mindfully by the dogs’ masters to destinations of commercial choice, had dirtied then enriched the soil upon which the droppings fell and to the beauty of which the sisters sang.

They had chased butterflies, the three of them. Anna, Catherine, and Isabelle raced across the grass and shrubs, sharing their joy recklessly with the world. Had butterflies been free, they would have been butterflies, grandmere had said. Butterflies were souls left to wander this world, in search of a home that was hopscotch beyond the stars. Despite the natural beauty of the streams, the lakes, and the open and wooded fields of the Languedoc, it could never be a home for them.

One of Jacque’s two youngest brothers, Etienne, Stephen, twin of Marcel, had joined in the races over the range. Instead of a cupped hand, he used a leafy branch to whip up the air to daze the butterflies and drain them of their energies. Then, suitably weary, the idea was to let the weary insects fall within easy grasp of the girls who would scoop them up and deposit them in a preserves bottle. Just as sheep had had shepherds, these children had had him. Marcel, Etienne’s twin, would not come with them. Intense, freckled with light red hair, he remained bottled up within himself since birth. A mystery wrapped in an enigma; a communicant only with the gods. As for the others, dolefully, mirthlessly, Jacque would track their movements across the foothill the children had besieged that day. Then, when gravity dragged them to a STOP, he would hustle them home.

Reverie broke; Jacque returned to his current earth.

Do you like any music, Pierre? We can go to such a place tonight, or tomorrow, or en fin de semaine. What would you like, cousin? Son of my aunt, you are as dear to me as she, said Jacque.

Jacque, my brother, thank you. I have, how do you say, a ‘tin ear’ to it.  Food though. Let’s go eat! Paiella is good, no?

Paiella is good and not too far, across the river. We can eat as if we were home. Newark has many restaurants: Portuguese and Spanish. We can go take the tubes under the Hudson and visit there. Much to eat, while hearing our home speech clattering around us like forks spilling on concrete. You will like it. Fine dining, as the commercials say. Good octopus, good rice. You’ll soon be in the arms of heaven.

The L train rushed past.

Chapter 2: DINNER AND SALT IN THE WOUND

They had an uneventful trip under the Hudson, landing feet first at Penn Station in Newark. Walking eastward, the scents of their region’s cuisine assaulted them, melting their resistance to overindulgence—financial as well as gastronomic. The thought of poularde à la Toulouse for Jacque and pâté de fois gras made for Pierre. Wine would be the preface, accompaniment, and chaser. The longing for home drowned Jacque’s thoughts, but he would not go there. Best to turn these ideas away. You can’t go home again. Not even with the Wolf at the door, I suspect. But the wolf wasn’t at the door yet. Not even with Pierre there, eye ever roving, visually groping the breasts and buttocks of any twenty-something female that chanced past. Pierre was Pierre, foremost. But who could not be for Pierre, supportive of Pierre? He had to be. Brilliant and clever in an academic sense, he was a wily witness to the decline of his times. No wonder he had sought to escape. But was that it? Was he, Jacque, presuming too much? Was not an enceinte girlfriend enough reason to decamp from one’s home and head west? Or was there more? Ambition? Pierre was ambitious, but so were we all. His mother had said that he wanted to move on. Jacque’s paranoia was working full time. What didn’t he know now?

Jacque! Jacque! Come back to me.

Wha....

You seemed lost, and if you are, then so am I. Where to go for dinner? So many choices, so little time. Pierre said, consciously mocking a t-shirt description of one’s place in the world with so many women... A shirt worn by a woman. There was too little time to tamper with the women. Clouds gathered overhead, with the first drops of a slight rain kissing their foreheads. Cars moved fitfully through the narrow, crowded streets. There were no crowds, per se. Instead, there was a steady flow of colorfully dressed people spouting many romance languages. Some words were familiar to Pierre’s and Jacque’s ears, others were not. Other things drowned in a cascade of unfamiliar dialects, vocabularies, and inflections. No need to hear it all, Pierre thought. They won’t find me here: to be so close to home, while so far from home? Not an excellent strategy. But I’m safe.

We’ll stop here then, Pierre. La Placa d’Nord est Epagne, read the sign. The restaurant was a hole in the wall, of sorts. Not the place where fine people gathered. The smells of sizzling bird flesh that emerged, though, distinguished it from the seafood emporia that dressed the neighborhood.

Fine, cousin. Let it be here. The ripped green awning flapped ceaselessly overhead as Jacque rushed forward to grasp the brass door handle. He pulled it forward swiftly as he, himself, melted to the side, allowing Pierre to enter first. The last of the daylight, however marred by clouds and drips from a leak in the sky, followed them in before making excuses. But they were not alone for long. The hostess quickly emerged from behind a mahogany lectern topped with a green guest book and a brass lighting fixture to greet them. Jacque and Pierre declined to sign the aging yellow pages. No matter.

From the bowels of the establishment, help arrived. Who? It was Marie. Marie was a cute brunette with flashing black eyes, clad in a vermillion miniskirt, a frilly white blouse, a black bowtie, and a winsome smile. Had she been dressed in the bowtie alone, Pierre thought, that would have been enough. But she was not. She paraded them to a table near the plate-glass window. They lingered there long enough for Pierre to notice the flaking gold filigree that wended its way around the window’s edges before fading to unobservability.

Pierre was torn between wanting to placate the young lady and removing himself from sight. He opted for a new habit and asked that they be moved to a table at the far corner from the door, a seating that promised them intermittent anonymity as the kitchen door opened and slammed shut, whilst the two aged waiters in formal red jackets hustled dinner for the patrons. And there were other patrons. Several. Pierre was struck by how old they seemed. 70’s. 80’s. 90’s? Perhaps not the last. One old woman seemed decked out as if she was to rise to glory that evening. Gems. Fine outfit. A