Carnegie Hill, page 27
* * *
The next day, whether he was mopping the lobby floor or wiping down the railings, he could almost feel everyone looking at him like he was some kind of zoo animal, the way they had in his first few days working there. He’d wanted the secret to get out, but it sucked to feel like a piece of gossip. He hadn’t expected that the news of two gay staff members would spread through the building like a brush fire, as if their love were a scandal. Sergei was right about these people. Not that anyone would be fired, of course, just that no one in the building could be trusted with a secret.
Before going home, he knocked on Francis’s door. Over the past week, he’d read about half of The Trial to try to get his mind off Sergei, stopping when he couldn’t take it anymore. It was more paranoid garbage. The protagonist, Josef K., is put on trial without having done anything wrong. As he bumbles around, trying to figure out where his trial will take place, it seems like everyone else knows more about his fate than he does. Caleb saw the parallels Francis had mentioned, between the Chelmsford Arms and the nightmare of the book, but he refused to take that view—of a world without humanity. That was Sergei’s mentality, being afraid of living because he believed the worst in everyone. Maybe Francis’s, too. It didn’t have to be his own.
“Caleb,” Francis said, both welcoming and surprised. “Did you finish the book already?” He walked over to the stove and nudged some scrambled eggs with a spatula. It was a little late in the day for eggs.
Penelope Hunter was sitting at the small, flimsy kitchen table, eating Peanut M&M’s by the handful from a big bag. Bunches of kale and celery stuck out from a canvas tote on the table; she held its handles as though about to pick it up and go. If she had a superhealthy diet, that was news to him: all he’d ever seen her eat was chocolate.
She said hi and waved. He hesitated over confronting Francis, but she probably knew about his relationship, too. Besides, he didn’t want his private life being whispered about in the hallways. Much better to make it public. “Mrs. Cooper knows about me and Sergei.”
Francis looked stricken. “I’m so sorry, Caleb. I shouldn’t have told anyone. Sergei was visibly upset when I talked to him, and I was afraid I had done something very wrong. I asked Birdie for advice. But that was it—I didn’t tell anyone else.”
Caleb couldn’t believe Francis had told Mrs. Hirsch. But he held his anger in: he’d trained himself never to let his anger show, especially in front of people who could have him fired.
“What about you and Sergei?” Mrs. Hunter asked, reaching into the bag for another handful of M&M’s. “Want some?”
“We’re together,” Caleb said, accepting the chocolate, “or at least we were.”
“That’s great!” she said, with the boost of enthusiasm that people usually added when he came out to them. Then the second half of his sentence sunk in. “I mean, I’m sorry.”
Francis’s hand found his heart. “I feel terrible.”
“It was probably for the best.” Even if the words were true, they didn’t resonate as he spoke them. It wasn’t right that something good would hurt so much.
“I really did tell no one but Birdie. Who else knew?”
“Mrs. Cooper and some of the staff. Probably more—I don’t know.”
“Well, I can piece together that chain of events,” Francis said. “Birdie must have told Ardith, and Ardith told Patricia. As to how the staff knew, I’m not sure. Ardith can’t be trusted with a secret, I’m afraid.”
She’s not the only one, Caleb thought.
“She didn’t tell me, and I saw her this morning,” Mrs. Hunter said, seeming hurt. “Wait, Sergei broke it off with you because you told Francis that he’s gay?”
Caleb nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s insane. There are really people who are still embarrassed to be gay in New York City? You can do better.”
Caleb didn’t want to be told whom he should date. “We love each other. At least I do.”
She bit her lip. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be dismissive. It’s a bad habit.”
“Drat!” Francis said, flipping off the stove burner and picking up the smoking pan. He scraped the dried-out eggs onto a plate. “Can I interest either of you in some eggs? I’m afraid they’re a bit burnt.”
“Thanks, but I should probably go,” said Mrs. Hunter, folding the top of the M&M’s bag and putting it in the tote, which she then slung around her shoulder before hugging Francis goodbye. “Bye, Caleb.”
“Bye, Mrs. Hunter.” Caleb bowed his head so that she wouldn’t feel bad about not hugging him too.
“Caleb?” Francis asked, holding out the plate after she had left.
“I just ate,” he lied. “And I should get going, too. I just wanted to tell you, I don’t think I’m going to be able to finish this.” He held out the book. When Francis didn’t take it, he put it on the table.
“You can take your time with it,” Francis said. “I realize you’re busy, and I have another copy.”
“Thank you, but…” He couldn’t think of an excuse. His father would have commanded him to tell the truth: “the only five letters that will set you free.” He stared at the linoleum; he felt terrible for disappointing Francis, who had only been kind to him. “The books you recommend, they’re all so negative. Right now I need to stay positive.”
His face took on an expression Caleb had never seen in him, his eyes pleading and his mouth tense. “Caleb,” he said, with rebuke in his voice, “you’ve got it all backward. Reading an unhappy book doesn’t make you an unhappy person. Would you also say you can’t talk to unhappy people because they’ll rub off on you? I had assumed you were better than that New Age rubbish.”
“I just want a break from it, that’s all. Just until—”
Francis, in full-on teacher mode, interrupted him. Caleb must have triggered his anger. “Pleasure-reading is all well and good, but that has nothing to do with the power of literature. It shows us our lives on the page, interpreted through the author’s insight. We read to feel known, and thereby less lonely.”
“The books you’re giving me don’t make me feel known,” Caleb said, surprised at his boldness. “They’re not about me; they’re about you.”
“They’re about everyone, Caleb.” He looked at the eggs, getting cold on the plate, and Caleb got the feeling he had failed him. “Maybe you could try harder to understand.”
He saw, or maybe had seen from the beginning, that through the books they were discussing, Francis was trying to be known, as powerfully as Sergei was afraid of it. Why Caleb had to be the one to know Francis, he couldn’t guess. Maybe Francis’s neighbors didn’t have the patience for it, and Caleb, in trying to get on the old man’s good side, had been suckered into being his mirror. Not that their get-togethers had been so bad: Francis was the only resident who cared about Caleb’s life, not just about gossip. But Caleb couldn’t keep sacrificing himself for the comfort of others. He had to learn to push back.
“I do understand,” Caleb said. “I just don’t want to dwell on this stuff. I mean, I know life is hard, and people can be mean. But I want to believe the best in people. Because most of the time, people really do try to be good.” His voice was faltering. He hadn’t been good to Sergei at all, and now they might be broken up forever. “Anyway, I appreciate you having me over so much and encouraging me and all. You’ve been very good to me.”
“You can still stop by and have coffee whenever you want,” Francis said. “I didn’t mean to quarrel.”
“Thank you, but I don’t know what people would think if they found out I was coming here. I don’t want to be gossip anymore.”
Francis stared, panicked, into Caleb’s eyes. “I’m sorry I haven’t been as good a role model as I should be. But please don’t let this be the end of our friendship. I don’t have a lot that’s keeping me going.” A few tears fell from Francis’s eyes, though he wasn’t crying, exactly. It was a silent weeping that Caleb recognized as despair.
“That’s not true,” Caleb said, embarrassed to be seeing his employer this way, but honored to know how important he was to Francis. “You have a really nice life. You just have to focus on the positive; it’s all a matter of perspective.”
“You’re very lucky to believe that.”
Caleb didn’t know what else to say, but he couldn’t leave, not with Francis such a wreck. He watched Francis turn toward the small window over the sink that looked out on the cement courtyard.
“I’m dying,” Francis said in a strange, quiet voice, as if talking to himself. He put the plate of scrambled eggs on the Formica counter, and the clank of the porcelain startled Caleb.
“Do you need an ambulance?” he asked, realizing as he said it that Francis did not.
Francis drummed his fingers on the counter, still not looking at Caleb. “I’ve never spoken those words to anyone, not even myself.”
Caleb didn’t think he was the right person to be hearing this; the old man must have known that he couldn’t help him. He thought he should hug Francis but sensed that he shouldn’t touch him, as if Francis were made of blown glass. “What are you dying of?” he managed to ask.
“I always feared I would die from an eruption of the intestines, and I put up every protection against that,” Francis said in that same distant voice. “Now it has come to my attention that it will be an eruption of the heart. And there is absolutely nothing I can do to prevent it.”
An “eruption of the heart” didn’t sound medically possible, but he sensed that Francis needed to speak without interruption. A secret like that could eat you from the inside; you had to purge it completely. At the same time, Caleb knew he would not tell anyone about this.
“Kafka understood this fear, that everything I’ve done will be erased. Everything I’ve fought for, everything I’ve lived for, will die with me. When I die, that’s it: the world will go on as if I never mattered one bit. And I can’t shake the feeling that everyone will be relieved.”
“No, no,” Caleb said, unable to keep silent, hearing this craziness.
“It’s true,” Francis said, turning back to Caleb. “I don’t matter anymore. I don’t matter to anyone. My brother hates me, my friends are sick of me, and my wife is counting down the minutes—”
“It’s okay,” Caleb cut in, afraid to reassure him more specifically or to ask questions, because Francis wasn’t talking in his right mind. “Everything’s going to be okay.” Sometimes Caleb’s mother would say that to him, and it always made him feel better.
They stared at each other a bit longer. Then a key turned in the front doorknob and Francis straightened and said, in a deeper voice than necessary, as if he hadn’t cried or told Caleb any of his secrets, “You’re a good man, Caleb Franklin.”
“You’re a good man, Francis Levy,” Caleb said, also in a deep voice. He smiled; he hoped Francis didn’t think he was mocking him.
Mrs. Levy appeared at the doorway to the kitchen, holding a mostly empty plastic grocery bag. “I got the butter,” she said, raising the bag. “Hi, Caleb.”
“Hi, Mrs. Levy.”
“It’s too late,” Francis said. “I already burned the eggs.”
She put the butter in the fridge and poked at the scrambled eggs. “Yum, crispy.”
It didn’t seem right to leave the minute Francis’s tears dried, but Carol’s presence had silenced him, and the awkwardness between them was getting worse. He thanked Francis for everything and headed into the stairwell through the back door.
“Wait, Caleb,” Francis said, standing in the doorway. “I just had a thought. I’ve been giving you books that speak to me. Maybe we could read some books that speak to you. Have you read much of James Baldwin?”
He’d read a few short essays in high school and had liked them—but he was ashamed to admit that he hadn’t read more. He knew his father wished he would.
“Would you be open to trying that?” Francis asked.
Though he’d just vowed to stop sacrificing himself for the comfort of white people, Caleb decided to make an exception. He could try this new arrangement and see how it felt.
* * *
In the morning, Caleb asked Thomas to alert him when he saw Mrs. Cooper going out. He promised he wasn’t going to break any rule; he just wanted to talk to Letitia alone. In the past, they’d sometimes make small talk in the lobby or at Mrs. Cooper’s service door. He needed a good listener about now, someone who didn’t need him to be a certain way for their comfort.
She greeted him in a faded pink housedress and fuzzy socks. “Hello, Caleb.”
“Are you busy? Can we talk?”
“Sure. What’s going on in your neck of the woods?” He stood in the gray, fluorescent-lit service stairwell, and she made no move to let him inside. He might be fired if Mrs. Cooper found him in her apartment.
“I’m guessing you’ve heard about me and Sergei?”
She shrugged. “News travels fast in these parts.”
“He broke up with me. I just miss him, that’s all, and I think I just needed to talk to someone about it.” When he said it aloud, he was pulled down anew by the weight of Sergei’s absence. “I’m sorry,” he said, drying the corners of his eyes with his knuckles.
“You don’t have to be. You miss him.” She didn’t touch him, but her calm presence felt like an embrace.
He nodded, sniffling. “I feel like I messed up the best thing I’ve ever had, because I couldn’t be patient with him. I did the one thing he made me promise not to do. And it’s like, of all the people who could understand someone’s need to be in the closet, it’s me. I was the one person who could love him the way he is, and I betrayed him.”
She gazed at him sadly. “It’s hard to love people who are limited. You want to fix them more than anything, and all you can do is honor their limitations. I gave up trying to change people a long time ago.” She smiled to herself.
“Who did you want to change?”
“Oh, my husband, of course. When he had the slightest bit of liquor, he was something else entirely.” She motioned behind her into the apartment. “And that one. I’ve never met anyone—man or woman—with so much pride.”
“Mrs. Cooper?” It seemed insubordinate to talk about her employer that way. “What do you mean?”
“It’s been two years now since I retired. But she don’t want anybody to know that. And I keep her secret. I don’t tell anyone that I pay her maintenance, either.”
He grinned: she wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping these secrets. “If you don’t work for her, why do you … can’t you live anywhere you want?”
She sighed. “I’ve worked for Mr. and Mrs. Cooper my whole life, and I’ve lived here since my husband died. It’s my home. I like Carnegie Hill. And I like Patricia—she makes me laugh. I feel sorry for her, too. She’s the most fragile woman I’ve ever met, and there are a lot of fragile people in this building.”
So she was lying to protect Patricia. It still didn’t seem right, but it made him feel understood: she was in the closet, too. “White people,” Caleb said with a grin.
Letitia laughed in a velvety, comforting way. “Oh, Lord, don’t get me started. Sometimes I could strangle that woman.”
“You’re not … Are you and Mrs. Cooper … together?”
Her laugh peaked again. “Oh, no. Not like that. Just friends. Just old friends.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest…”
“No explanation necessary.”
“Thanks for hearing me out. I feel a lot better.”
“Try to forgive him,” she said. “It helps.”
He’d assumed Sergei was the one who had to forgive him, but he saw that the forgiveness had to go both ways. He hoped it wasn’t too late.
* * *
Caleb still had a long day of cleaning ahead of him, but he grabbed his cell phone from his locker and closed himself inside the janitor’s closet off the lobby, where the cell service wasn’t terrible and where staff members often made illicit calls. It was dark except for the horizontal bar of light under the door and the glow of his phone screen, and quiet except for the slow drip of the mop sink. He dialed Sergei’s number. When he heard his boyfriend’s sweet, sticky voice on the greeting, he felt pillaged by desire.
“Hey, it’s me,” Caleb began, breathing through his mouth to keep from smelling the sweet, nauseating cleaning fluid. “I just wanted to say that I’m really, really sorry for outing you. I promise I won’t try to change you anymore. You can stay in the closet as long as you need to, and I’ll respect that. But please, please call me. Because I miss you, and I really don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”
He hung up and leaned against the mop sink in the cramped, dark space, letting the pain of missing Sergei gnaw at him, a throbbing ache that stretched from his throat to the bottom of his rib cage. It was unbearable to feel this way, and he didn’t want it to stop.
* * *
Sergei was waiting at the front gate of the Lenox Manor when Caleb got home at four thirty that afternoon, as the calm gray sky was darkening into a freezing night. “Hey, you,” Sergei said.
It was strange to see Sergei at Caleb’s childhood home, like seeing your barber in the line at the post office or your teacher on a date in a restaurant. His week of anger and grief evaporated when he saw his lover’s rosy cheeks and nose boxed in by his wool hat and scarf, leaving him with a mix of relief and regret.
