Bed-Stuy Is Burning Page 13

  But for Aaron, it didn’t go this way. For him the psychological link between gambling and his previous life legitimated the whole thing. If it had just been about the winnings, Aaron thought as he watched the horses wander toward the gate, he could save the money he made at work and be done with it. Or he could work extra hours and get promoted. Or he could lift weights in his exercise room. But after the psychologist pointed out to Aaron that it was about so much more, Aaron understood that his connection to the gambling and what it provided him had to, in some ways, be respected. That it would be disrespectful of the entire first run of his life to suppress the instincts that led him to the track. That without the track, he wouldn’t have the pain of atheism, and he wouldn’t have the decade of studying that made him a rabbi to begin with. He’d just be some stockbroker or consultant or academic. Allowing himself the occasional fall was a way for him to dip back into the man he used to be. It was a way to not go totally insane with the lack of spiritual depth in his life. All he was was a fucking money manager. He couldn’t endure it without some anchor to what he used to be, and to what all men should still want to be at least a little.

  There was another side to the argument, he thought, while leaning on both knees to control their bounce. (His shoes were boots, with stretchy brown fabric on both sides that made them easy to slip on. The leather, the first time he touched it, made him literally gag it was so supple. He’d gagged and paid the nine hundred dollars. They went with all his blue suits.) The argument went: that his brain—the brain that he had trained to become a rabbi—was the brain the investment firm was paying to employ, and that his moral center, his kindness, was the person Amelia had all but committed the rest of her life to. He was the person who would raise his son (and possibly future children, grandchildren) and be a member of the community and dedicate himself to his life moving forward, regardless of his profession, regardless of whether the world saw him as it used to.

  It still didn’t seem enough. There was something calling him back to the track.

  “Who you got in this race?” Aaron, wanting to be cordial, asked the orange eater.

  “Looking for anyone but the favorite,” Oranges said. “But I like the favorite. I think he outclasses everyone else by a mile.”

  “I completely agree. Going to try to win back my losses on the third.”

  “Shit,” Oranges said. “I was wrong about that. You were right. Lost by a nose there. You saw something. But hey—you said Bed-Stuy, right?”

  “Listen,” Aaron said. “Like you said about the oranges at first. I don’t want to be rude. I’m just here for the races.”

  “No. My apologies. Sincerely. I totally get that. I get that. Completely. But have you checked the news. It’s going wild around there.”

  “I mean it,” Aaron said. “No offense, I’m just not looking to talk politics.”

  “No. I mean today. I mean right now. I just saw on my phone I got an alert.”

  Aaron scrambled to free his phone from his jacket. His phone had been on silent. He saw the CNN and Times news alerts first: Riots in Bed-Stuy. Police report neighborhood chaos in central Brooklyn. Aaron saw he had emails and voice mails and tried to call Amelia, but he couldn’t get through, not even to voice mail.

  He bolted out of his seat. The quickest path was up to the landing then down, out of the track. He saw his future self ten paces ahead, down the escalator, bounding to the train or a taxi if one was idling.

  He flinched. The gun had gone off. The horses were running. They were around the first turn, his horse in the lead. He saw it or heard it or just badly wanted it to be true. Ahead at the rail! Aaron had taken twenty steps up to the exit, two at a time. And now he took another ten, one at a time. His neck clenched with fear. Anticipation. His horse was in the lead. He stopped. Snuck a look at his phone. At the track—all the excitement and movement. All that life coming around the second turn. He took another half step towards the exit. He—

  Chapter 33

  Amelia could breathe now that Simon wasn’t in her arms. It was wonderful to be free of him. She could do anything now that she wasn’t responsible for her baby. Now that she wasn’t gasping for breath along with him. Separated from her baby, she was herself again. Amelia heard ambulances but didn’t see them. Or maybe she heard cop cars. Did ambulances and cop cars have the same sirens? She should know. As a journalist, she should know. Amelia looked down from the third-floor window—her bedroom window—through cracks in the shutters, and she didn’t see fire trucks or ambulances or police cars. She heard them but didn’t see them. She heard them but was listening to the floor above her. Amelia was in her bedroom one flight up from her son, Antoinette, and Daniel. She was listening for signs that the girl, one flight above, was making noise in the office. Amelia was holding the gun knowing she wouldn’t use it.

  Peeking through the cracks in the bedroom shutters, she saw a crowd of faces down on the street. At least five hundred faces. She saw the dead body by the stoop, with two women tending to it. A third making her way over with what looked like a pack of clean T-shirts. Was it to make some kind of statement that they were leaving the body there? How was Aaron going to get in? Her guess was that at first he would try to sneak through without being noticed. Then he would reason, negotiate. Then take some kind of crazy risk and become violent. She’d never seen him violent. But she’d felt it in him. She’d never realized that until now. But she’d felt it. She’d known it. It was part of what attracted her to him, his capacity to turn anger into work, into something active.

  Amelia had met Aaron at a birthday party for her cousin’s best friend, Ari. She had been looking forward to going but then nobody had wanted to bowl with her. When Aaron showed up she’d felt a need to take care of him. She’d never felt maternal toward anyone or anything before, and that instinct to care for or about someone so strongly had driven her straight out of her marriage and into this new life.

  She’d always told Kevin she didn’t want to have kids. She was having too much fun with him alone. She liked to travel. She liked to write. She even wrote a much-commented-on piece about it for Slate.com:

  I used to feel like the sole female in existence for whom babies weren’t the end all and be all, but hundreds of like-minded women emailed me after hearing me discuss my happy childlessness on the radio. Celebrities like Cameron Diaz, Chelsea Handler, and Helen Mirren have talked openly about choosing not to have children. Jon Hamm has also made it clear that he isn’t interested in fatherhood—but no one judges him, because he’s a man.

  Even as a young girl, when I fantasized about my adult life, children weren’t in the picture. Some females—some people—simply aren’t wired that way. And I’m part of a rapidly growing subset of American women. According to a recent Pew study, one in five of us survives fertility without having given birth, which is a 200 percent increase from 1974. And half of the women who filled out the same survey answered that it “makes no difference” whether a woman becomes a mother. The numbers are even higher across Europe. With seven billion people already on the planet, unless I desperately wanted a son or daughter, why would I make myself—or the world—care for another life?

  And without kids, she could live anywhere. She and Kevin could take off and spend a year anywhere—they’d just gotten back from France three weeks before that bowling party—and kids wouldn’t allow that. With kids, they’d have to think about money and stability. Amelia had grown up without stability, and it hadn’t been fair. She didn’t want to subject her children to the same slack mothering she’d received. And Kevin had never seen stability as worthwhile.

  Kevin worked in the restaurant business. Just as she could write anywhere, he could manage a restaurant anywhere. He had contacts in Bordeaux, and so they lived in a vineyard for a month. He learned about vintages, she wrote an article for Wine Spectator.

  Whom she fantasized about sleeping with: the owner of the vineyard, the workers in the vineyard, the chef at the vineyard, the server
of food, the cleaner-up of food, the baker in town, the teenagers who hung around looking for work. Whom she slept with: her husband. She liked waking up with the white, useless curtains letting the sun into their room.

  It was a strange autumn month in Bordeaux in the middle of a strange year. Whenever she reminded herself that she was living in France, she felt a rush of pleasure and loneliness that reminded her of being a teenager. Days were interminable and important. Meals were gluttonous and difficult. She felt lonely when she was with Kevin, but when she took long solitary walks in the afternoon she felt excited to be married to him and living this life. They drank a lot. It was very different from what she’d expected marriage to be like. She’d expected to be busy during the day and tired at night but warmed by her husband. But as a teenager, then college student, then single twenty-something, then married woman, she’d never met the man who fulfilled that gnawing, wombish childhood fantasy. She was lonely with her husband in the exact same way she had been lonely with her mother.

  Until Kevin said he didn’t want to go to her cousin’s friend’s bowling party, so Amelia dressed up as she used to when she was single and in her midtwenties, new to New York, living with a roommate in Williamsburg, freelancing and bartending. She wore the dress she used to wear when she wanted to have a night out that was different from the usual night out. Kevin saw her in the dress, said, “What, no lipstick and earrings, too?” so she put on the whole outfit, and then when there was no one to bowl with she felt she’d deserved what she’d gotten: a lonely night as a married woman dressed up like she was still a teenager. She’d go home and read a magazine next to her husband in bed.

  And then Aaron. When she saw him, he looked like an Alice in Wonderland version of her high school history teacher all shrunken down and younger, except that wasn’t right at all, it was just that they were all older. He was probably the same age her high school history teacher had been back then. And she’d loved her high school history teacher. Aaron wore the same polo shirt and the same khaki pants. They started bowling. They talked about their parents, and when Aaron told her that his father relied on him through chronic pain and that his mother was dead, it took everything Amelia had inside her not to break down crying and hug Aaron right there in front of Ari and all his asshole bowling friends. She kept on thinking the entire night that the whole thing was just to get back at Kevin—that Aaron was so soft where Kevin was hard, or so eager for contact where Kevin was repellant of it. But when they went to a bar afterward and Aaron built up to telling her his biggest secret in the world and that secret was that he was a successful financial consultant, again Amelia had to physically fight the urge to break down crying and hug Aaron in the middle of the bar.

  That moment after they’d slept together for the first time. Aaron told her about the stolen money. She was crushed. Before he’d told her, it had been a fantasy. Everything she’d wanted from Kevin, Aaron was offering her. Now she had to decide. But she couldn’t. She would have to give Aaron up right after giving up Kevin. It was too much loss. She wouldn’t do it. She wanted to save her own life. And Aaron’s. She wanted to care for him in a way she’d never cared for anyone. To give him what she’d never received from anyone. And, mostly, she wanted to create something with Aaron. Her life with Kevin had been playacting at the life she’d thought she’d wanted when she actually wanted roots and purpose and a home. She was willing to risk being bored if that meant no longer being lonely.

  The immediate tenderness Amelia felt for Simon—the reason she was so prepared for it was because she felt that same tenderness for Aaron.

  And when she learned more about Aaron—that he’d been the valedictorian of his high school class; that even before his father’s physical pain, even when Aaron was little, his father had insisted on constant check-ins, evaluations, and assessments; that every day for Aaron was a fight with a destructive part of himself—the tenderness she felt for him was not only a new component of love that she’d never before experienced, it was itself a new kind of love.

  And somewhere along the line she realized she could, in addition to expanding this love, make more of it. She could have a child, a child with Aaron—Aaron’s child—and manufacture this love.

  She’d been marking time while with Kevin—relishing the loneliness to trick herself into craving him in a certain way that turned her on and approximated what she’d always thought of as love. Now she’d found not necessarily a permanent enduring passion, but something that broke her brain and chest open and made itself so much more important than Kevin had ever been. There were problems with Aaron. Of course there were. They stemmed from that destructive part of him, from a lack of sexual compatibility sometimes, from Aaron’s lack of professional fulfillment, and, relatedly, from Aaron’s comparing himself to what he imagined Kevin must have been like. If Amelia was honest with herself, the latter was an issue for her, too. She caught herself comparing Aaron in certain moments to Kevin—Kevin’s willingness to just drop life and go. Kevin’s flash of charisma when charisma was what was needed. His sudden warmth or inspired idea. But these were what had made him unbearable at the end. Life had been unpredictable with Kevin in a way that depleted rather than energized her. Selfish and consequently unsatisfying. Or, paradoxically, Amelia was infused by a greater selfishness now. She wanted more for her life. To mean more, matter more. To take care of people and hope she might be cared for. The selfishness Kevin brought out in Amelia had been too small. It had been about sex and food and fun.

  So Kevin was gone. And replaced by Aaron. And childlessness was gone. And replaced by Simon. And France was gone. And replaced by Bed-Stuy. And all of this was at risk now as Amelia made sure the gun’s safety was on, as she fortified herself for the stairs up to the office. This was her family and her house and she wasn’t going to let some teenage girl scare her away from it.

  Chapter 34

  From the one time he’d been locked out a few weeks after moving in, Aaron knew his house was impenetrable. Maybe he could jump the side fence from Bainbridge into Jupiter’s yard, and Jupiter could let him in through the back, then he could cross over from Jupiter’s roof to his neighbors’ then his own? Or he could just jump the fence in the first yard off Stuyvesant and keep jumping fences and take the back stairs up into the TV room? Unless kids had found that way in, in which case he hoped it would be locked. If Amelia hadn’t thought of it, Antoinette would.

  Running to the train, he discovered his phone didn’t work and email wouldn’t load, but Twitter did refresh once, which was enough for him to learn that the riots had started at the Boys and Girls School two blocks from his house. He still couldn’t do anything for another twenty minutes until his stop, and since he hadn’t had a chance to use his one prayer at the racetrack, he prayed.

  And it felt different. Immediately. He didn’t feel the usual blockage. He didn’t feel the futility and the anger. The plaque. The tension and worthlessness that had to be gambled away. He closed his eyes. His body was empty. Thoughts were water filling him up from inside. His fingertips seemed accessible from his lungs. For the first time since . . . for the first time in his adult life. He didn’t remember being a child. Simon was the child now. Something could be accomplished now. He could go home. He could help. Maybe as a rabbi he hadn’t been able to help a woman who’d lost her son. The son had already been taken. But his son! Aaron’s son! He was on his way!

  The problem hadn’t been the lack of God—whether God existed or not. It had been God’s—and Aaron’s—failure to act. To sit there and watch suffering. But now—soon—Aaron could act.

  And the thought of having prayed for money—for sports—it sickened him. The thought of gambling sickened him. Lying to Amelia sickened him. He sickened himself. How happy he’d permitted himself to be, alone without his family, repulsed him. It was a sickness. Having stayed even those extra moments at the track—he did need help. Actual help.

  He begged for forgiveness. He begged himself for forgiveness, bu
t that wasn’t enough.

  He started to cry. He was in a middle seat of a three-seat bench squeezed between two women—one white, one Hispanic—who ignored him. He was on the local C train, three stops away from his Utica stop.

  He was thankful for the second chance at life that Amelia had given him. He was thankful for Amelia’s willingness not only to see the best in people but to help them. She was there for Simon. She was there for him. She knew he was weak. And she was there for him in spite of his weakness. Sometimes, he thought, because of it.

  He was proud of her lately. Proud that she wrote the article about the neighborhood. He would read it tonight. This was serious work. Not like the celebrity stuff. But now he was being patronizing. He focused again on the prayer. He was grateful to be part of what Amelia cared so much about. Not since his parents had someone cared about him as she did. Especially someone so picky about what and whom she cared about. He was grateful for his neighbors and his neighborhood. He was grateful for his time as a rabbi, short though it might have been.

  If you give me my son and girlfriend back whole and healthy, I will do anything—everything—I can, Adonai. I will rededicate my life to you. Even if it’s just as a congregant, I will turn back to you. Forgive me for abandoning you. I’ll try to believe.

  Aaron thought about instances in the Bible where humans bartered with God. Sodom and Gomorrah where Abraham bargained God down to just a few good people—if God could find just a few good people (down from, what was it, fifty?) he’d save the city—and still Abraham and God couldn’t find them. God had been willing to strike a deal. So this is when Aaron begged.