Bed-Stuy Is Burning Read online

  Simon must have liked it, because even though he had just drunk formula, he let out a little laugh, and Antoinette put the hand that had been supporting Simon’s neck around under his armpit, so both hands were now supporting his body and neither supported his neck, and Simon was fine, supporting his own head, and laughing. Aaron’s son was laughing. Aaron had never seen Simon laugh or fully support his own neck. This was unbelievable. It was a movie. But it was real, and it was about his son. It was Simon. And Antoinette didn’t stop there. Simon was laughing loudly and Antoinette tossed him in the air a little bit, and Simon laughed even more. Aaron had never heard Simon giggle. Whinny, sure, but this was a much older child’s laugh and it was sustained. It started like a cartoon evil laugh, a villain’s laugh, deep and silly, but as it continued it grew into something even deeper and funnier, coming from a source of real pleasure, as though Antoinette was causing Simon real pleasure.

  Aaron panicked.

  His son was growing older, months older in the span of a minute in the arms of the nanny on the computer screen. Aaron finished his cereal and he wanted to hide what he’d seen from Amelia. It would upset her. His son, no longer six months old, was a year old, or two. He imagined running these numbers—six months, twelve, twenty-four—into an algorithm that would guarantee exactly who Simon would be when he was Aaron’s age. How old were babies when they could hold their own heads up? When they could laugh? He had no idea. But what was he thinking? He did know now. It was on the screen right in front of him. They were six months old. His boy was one of them.

  He’d be late for work, and there might be delays—more protests or the cops taking extra precaution. That poor boy and his family. He couldn’t even imagine. He’d been watching his own son for nearly a half hour. Simon was resting after his first bottle. Amelia was drying her hair. But next weekend he wanted to make his son laugh like that. Or tonight, even if it was late. He’d wake Simon up. He wanted to be the one to make him feel that good.

  Chapter 7

  Every morning at 7:00 sharp Antoinette arrived wearing red or purple nurse’s scrubs and listening to spiritual music on her iPhone. Seven o’clock sharp meant leaving her home at 6:15 to catch the A train at 6:23.

  This morning, the streets were lined with angry flyers taped to trees, lampposts, and metal gates. Antoinette had read on Facebook about Jason Blau, but the cops never bothered her or Teddy. She always made sure Teddy looked respectable. If this boy’s death had been an accident, people had the right to be angry, but everyone made mistakes.

  She listened to her church’s chorus sing “Oh Devil, God shall defeat you!” which would be the soundtrack to Antoinette’s own performance the following Sunday. Antoinette was in a period of spiritual transition. She still danced at church every Sunday afternoon. It was the highlight of her week. Listening to that music, and rising up, up above it. But for more than a week now, she’d also worn the hijab. She didn’t see it as a contradiction—wearing the hijab and dancing at church. She took it off at church. And the Bible pretty much said that the hijab was right.

  Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. This was something Pastor V had talked to her about the day before at prayer dance, and it was something that rang true given the path of her life to this point. That was one reason she had been wearing scrubs for a year now, her hair tied back, with bangs and no lipstick. It was like a secular hijab. Like don’t look at me sexually. But the hijab was easier. It was what had attracted her to Islam to begin with. One of the many things (the low-ceilinged rooms, the carpet on her toes, how many women welcomed her arrival with no judgment or questions), and why she’d started taking Teddy to mosque services in Clinton Hill on Friday nights. The only makeup she’d owned for years was stage makeup for her prayer dance. Her lips had always gotten her in trouble. She hadn’t realized she could look beautiful until she was sixteen. Then at eighteen she was done with all that. But it was only now, approaching thirty, that she understood why it was so important not to look beautiful. Because beauty got in the way of what was important. It got in the way of the spirit. Beauty was vain.

  So even if she wanted to make a new friend, that didn’t mean she needed to be vain about it. If Jupiter admired her, he would like her under the hijab. He would admire her eyes. If he admired her at all. It had been a couple of months now, his coming over. They had only ever met inside Aaron and Amelia’s house. But she had to admit she looked forward to his visits. She had never had a father. She hadn’t had a lover since Teddy’s father. And she didn’t necessarily want either. But she did look forward to his visits. All Jupiter had said so far about the hijab was that it made her eyes pop. She liked that word. Pop!

  Antoinette liked walking to work from the Utica subway station, thinking about the day to come, nodding and offering good morning to faces that looked like hers. Unlike where her previous employer had lived in Cobble Hill, this was a neighborhood that felt like a neighborhood even when she could feel the anger in the air chirping alongside the birds. My God, it was a beautiful day. And she liked the trees. They were well taken care of, with signs like “The poop fairy doesn’t live here. Scoop your poop.” She thought that was funny.

  In most places in Brooklyn, and everywhere in Manhattan, people didn’t nod and say good morning, but in this area of Bedford-Stuyvesant they did. The black people did, at least, and nine of ten faces were black. Antoinette walked against the crowd. No one else was walking away from the subway station to the houses. Everyone was nodding to her, finding solidarity in their anger. Jaws locked, eyes focused and intense, they looked like they were heading off to battle. As though on an unspoken mission against a common enemy.

  After her previous employer moved out to Jersey, Antoinette went on Sittercity.com, and in less then a week, she received three requests for interviews. The first one was with a family in Manhattan, and the second one was with Amelia and Aaron. She’d always wanted to work for a rich family in Manhattan, but during the interview with Aaron and Amelia, she’d seen a tall bookshelf of all types of spiritual books. Half were in Hebrew, and the other half were in English. When Simon took naps, she read. She read holy books and books about holy books. She didn’t care that the books were Jewish. Muslims believed Abraham was a prophet, too. Abraham and Jesus both. She looked up words she didn’t know on her iPhone and saved them to memorize and test herself later. A lot of the books had strong bindings and others were very thin and bound in twine and cheap paper that was almost the same as pastel-colored construction paper. They were clearly used, not just for show. Antoinette read the books, then put them right back where she found them every time.

  It was a problem that Simon couldn’t fall asleep without being rocked and that he couldn’t stay asleep with any noise in the house. But Antoinette was confident she could cure him of that. They’d only been together three months, and already they were working on tummy time for two minutes straight. Aaron and Amelia had a hidden camera in a clock facing the couch where they set up Antoinette with the Pack ‘n Play, but Antoinette didn’t mind. Simon was their child. Their son. It was their right to look in on him when they wished. So whenever she held Simon or fed him, sang to him, played with him, read to him, did tummy time or anything like that, she tried to do it in front of the clock so they knew they were getting their money’s worth. Anytime she read the Torah or the books about the Torah when Simon was sleeping, she did it away from the clock.

  When Teddy went to day care for the first time, she’d made sure to call every few hours and ask to speak to him. He was three and could have told her if things were wrong. That was how she raised him. That was one of the reasons why, at twelve years old, he was one of the youngest dancers ever to be given top-twenty billing at the holiday Sabaatarian Thanksgiving Jubilee. Antoinette had never been so proud as she was on that Wednesday morning last November.

  Teddy had needed to practice every afternoon after school, and it was good he had role models at church,
except for the one time when Pastor V had gotten all the boys together and asked them to pray for the girls. He told them that some older girls were sinners for getting pregnant. Of course, Antoinette took this personally. She was sure Teddy did, too, because it wasn’t a secret that his father had never been around. Antoinette had been those girls before she was saved. She had Teddy to prove it. And he was a blessing. Even though Antoinette took him to Pastor V as often as she could, that wasn’t the same. But when Pastor V told those boys to pray for those girls, she knew Teddy was praying for her. “I prayed hard, Mom,” Teddy said that afternoon. “I closed my eyes and got down on my knees, even though everyone else was sitting in chairs, and I squeezed my hands together as hard as I could.”

  Antoinette liked getting down on the floor with Simon and saying good morning with her face right up against his. Sometimes she put her face in his lap, which made Simon coo and open his mouth with his little crooked smile. Antoinette, having raised her own boy, liked knowing that, three, six, twelve months down the road, this useless creature Simon would become a walking, babbling, talking little man.

  • • •

  She rang the doorbell, stashed the earbuds in her pocket. The weather was hot for autumn. She liked autumn. Amelia fumbled with the door.

  “Good morning, Antoinette,” Amelia said.

  “Good morning, good morning, how’s our boy, is he sleeping?” Antoinette said. “He sleeping? Has he had his morning bottle? Where is he? Simon? Simon says?”

  “Just starting to rouse,” Amelia said. “He drank all eight ounces this morning.”

  “That’s good news,” Antoinette said. “We’re going to have that child walking and talking soon.”

  “Is Mr. Jupiter going to come by today?” Amelia said.

  Antoinette knew that Amelia didn’t like him coming by, but she didn’t know how to turn him away. And she didn’t want to.

  “Don’t see why he would,” Antoinette said.

  “That’s great,” Amelia said. “Come on in. Good morning. How was your weekend?”

  Chapter 8

  Aaron—shaved, brushed, and suited—kissed Amelia on the forehead. Her profile on the funny guy who used to be fat and was now acting in serious movies was due to her editor at Esquire the next day, and she sat drinking coffee at her desk in her office on the top floor of their brownstone.

  Amelia couldn’t help being pretty, and the room was pretty around her. She wore an old gray T-shirt. Her hair looped around her ears. She was sexy without trying. Or maybe Aaron was going crazy. The three things he used their shared desktop computer for these days were watching Antoinette with Simon, fantasy football, and porn.

  The top windowpanes behind Amelia were 1890s stained glass, and they all matched one another. Orange teardrops emanated from a central sky-blue whirl surrounded by golden diamonds. Aaron owned those windows. He and Amelia did together. They owned the stained-glass windows and the original woodwork surrounding them. The wood was mahogany, carved to look like columns holding up a frieze, with little torches surrounded by wreaths carved into the corners. Aaron and Amelia owned this woodwork, as they owned the fireplace tiles around the still-functional gas fireplaces, the sconce lighting, the hardwood floors, the built-in closets.

  “Have a good day,” Amelia said. “Love you. Stay out of trouble.”

  “Love you,” Aaron said, closing the door to the staircase. He descended the mahogany stairs with latticework balustrades, past the bedroom floor to the first floor, where he tiptoed, holding his shoes, toward the kitchen, parlor, and TV room. There, he kissed Simon, who didn’t notice him. Simon was poking at Antoinette’s nose while Antoinette laughed. Aaron wanted Simon to laugh, but Simon was silent. Drool all over his lips and chin. Aaron wanted to ask Antoinette how she’d made him laugh on Friday, but he wouldn’t be able to explain how he knew about that. They were in the TV room, under a mahogany ceiling that framed a skylight of the same stained glass that illuminated Amelia’s office.

  These windows were all over the two-family house; Aaron, Amelia, and Simon lived in the triplex on top, and they rented out the garden unit below to Daniel and Thela, a strange, quiet couple they’d found on craigslist and that helped offset Aaron and Amelia’s mortgage. When the house hit the market, Brownstoner.com wrote it up as one of the nicer houses on the nicest block in Bed-Stuy, and though some commenters responded that they’d have to be paid $1.3 million to step foot in Bed-Stuy, Aaron ran the numbers and thought it was a steal. They both all but emptied their bank accounts—split the down payment evenly, $125,000 each, with money Aaron made advising investors and the near-last of Amelia’s inheritance from her grandmother—and Aaron paid a bit more of the mortgage, which wasn’t much because of Daniel and Thela’s rent. Amelia paid one thousand a month (until her grandmother money ran out in a couple of years, or, better yet, her freelance career took off), and Aaron paid fifteen hundred, all to live in a three-story turn-of-the-twentieth-century museum.

  They shared the garden with Daniel and Thela. Daniel was a freaky professor of some kind of New Age social philosophy. How the media affected (or was affected by) philosophy, maybe? He never seemed to leave the house. Thela was a pianist. Jazz? She played late gigs and gave lessons all day in Manhattan and never seemed to be at home. She was Asian and very skinny. They were ghosts. Ideal tenants.

  “Thanks so much for looking after him, Antoinette,” Aaron said, neither of them looking at each other.

  “See you tomorrow morning, Antoinette. Love you, baby,” Aaron said to Simon, who poked at Antoinette’s nose.

  • • •

  There were trees on both sides of the street—tall trees, starting to lose their leaves. It was a crisp and cloudless September day; similar skies had framed the World Trade Center. A member of his congregation had worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, and even as late as 2008 Aaron had been shy in the presence of the man’s widow and three teenage daughters.

  Aaron and Amelia’s house was 383 Stuyvesant Avenue. A little café had opened just around the corner on Decatur, and on the way to the subway, women in elegant leather boots sipped tiny paper cups of espresso. Black women in high boots, white women in boots, Asian women—all with their tiny paper cups. Men, too. Stylish black men in trench coats. White men in sweaters, jeans, and sports coats. There had been tension lately between the police and members of the community—men and women of all races staring down police officers on the way into the subway—which would now be exacerbated by what had happened on Saturday. Jason Blau had only been twelve. A large twelve. In seventh grade and on the JV high school football team, Aaron had read, but still only twelve. What a catastrophe for the police, for his family, and for the community.

  But that type of thing was, if nauseating, not unheard of for changing neighborhoods. There was still paradise here. And Aaron was in on it. He’d bought the house because it was beautiful and he wanted to spend his life there with Amelia and, one day, children. But he’d already earned 35 percent back on investment in just over a year. Bed-Stuy was the best bet he’d ever made. It was a real risk, and a thrilling one. It took guts to be surrounded by people who didn’t look like him, in a neighborhood without the amenities he was accustomed to, but it was worth it. As long as New York City remained desirable—and Manhattan stayed an island without extra available real estate—the only way he could lose was a spike in crime to scare off new gentrifiers.

  Across the street from Aaron’s row of brownstones were, unusual in central Brooklyn, three large, stand-alone homes. Two could be considered mansions. One was a large church. It was seven thirty, and the church’s chimes were ringing. Walking in step with the chimes, away from his pretty girlfriend and his son, who knew how to laugh, Aaron felt like a man. It was a feeling he relished, one he hadn’t known if he’d ever feel again. He was a man with a house and a job and a son and what was essentially a wife. On good days, that was enough to feel connected to the world.

  He passed 385 Stuyvesant, bought just a few mon
ths earlier by a young couple who both earned in the high six figures. The man and woman had met at a historically black college and now worked in finance. She’d gone to Stanford Business. He’d gone to Harvard Law, where he’d apparently traveled in the same circle as a bunch of men and women who would become good friends of Michelle Obama’s. Then 387, which belonged to Mr. Jupiter, a forty-year-old single father and electrician.

  “You know what kids are doing?” Jupiter had said last Friday.

  “What’s that?” Aaron said, not wanting to offend him or answer incorrectly. Last time they’d talked, Jupiter had told Aaron to buy new windows before the winter, and Aaron couldn’t tell if he was angling for the job.

  “Well you know about Breathalyzer tests, right?” Jupiter said.

  “You mean so cops can tell how much you’ve been drinking?”

  “Well, kids have been pouring liquor right inside their assholes,” Jupiter said. “Cops don’t go around smelling down there, and it enters the bloodstream quicker.”

  Aaron laughed. “That true?” he said.

  “I thought you’d get a kick out of that,” Jupiter said. “But it’s serious. And dangerous. They take their bottles of vodka and pour the whole thing right down into each other’s assholes. With funnels! That’s what my son’s been doing. I caught him at it. Him and his friends. All bent over with their trousers down around their ankles.”

  Jupiter seemed genuinely concerned.

  “Hey,” Jupiter said. “Let’s grab a beer sometime? Talk about raising these kids.”

  “I’d like that,” Aaron said.

  “Pick up women,” Jupiter said.