Homer, Winslow. Two Boys Watching Schooners. 1880, The Art Institute of Chicago. 

 

 

Look Who’s Up From the Dead!

by Ed Falco

 

When Ryan heard Tayce unlocking the front door, he got back in bed, pulled the covers to his neck, and pretended to be sleeping. She came into the apartment without calling his name, crossed the living room quietly—she must have slipped out of her shoes—paused at his bedroom, and closed his door. A moment later, she was back in the living room talking to someone, explaining that Ryan was her brother, that he’d lost his job several months earlier, when everybody was losing their jobs, and now he thought he might have some kind of chronic fatigue thing going on, but actually she was convinced he was depressed, and she was doing her best to get him out of bed and out of the house but not having much luck. The person she had returned from shopping with—a guy from the sound of his voice, even though they were both whispering—asked her if she lived here, too. Tayce said that she did, that Ryan had been living here for a couple of years—he was five years older than her—and that he had offered to share the place when she decided to follow him to the city straight out of high school. They had been sharing the apartment for the past six months. “Hell,” the guy said, “you picked a bad time to move to New York.” “Tell me about it,” she said. She and Ryan, she explained, were from a small town in West Virginia, and she had been desperate to get away from there—and then their voices faded as the door to Tayce’s bedroom clicked closed behind them.   

This made the second guy Tayce had brought back to the apartment in the last few weeks. Ryan turned over onto his back, stared at the ceiling fan for a moment, and then got out of bed and took a seat at his desk, which was positioned alongside a window that looked across a narrow alley and into the windows of another apartment, where an old woman lived alone. Ryan had never seen anyone else in the old lady’s apartment, though he saw her so often—or they saw each other so often—that he felt he knew her, or, in a weird way, as if he had always known her. He rarely closed the blinds on his window, preferring to turn off the lights when he wanted privacy, and she never pulled the shades on her window. The alley was dimly lit by the sun even at the height of the day, but it provided the only natural light for both apartments. The old woman and Ryan were both willing to trade privacy for sunlight. That afternoon she was lying on her side on a black leather couch reading a book. She was slight and frail, with short white hair that seemed to nearly glow against the deep black of the couch. When she looked up from her reading and saw Ryan looking back at her, she watched him for a second or two, and then went back to her book. Ryan believed, though he had never said a word to her, that they had a relationship, and that momentary interaction defined it. They were silent neighbors, aware and accepting of each other, even trusting in a way, but with no connection beyond the space they shared, separated by a thin slice of alley.

When the sound of bed springs creaking and a soft moan of sexual pleasure slid across the living room and into his bedroom, Ryan got back in bed and put his headphones on. The last thing he’d been listening to, Segovia playing Bach’s Prelude No 3, came on softly. He turned the volume up, pulled the covers over his head, and settled into darkness surrounded by Bach and Segovia, the plucked guitar strings humming around him like another, more comforting, blanket. He hadn’t been out of the apartment in weeks. The person he used to be, an ambitious young man who came to New York from the West Virginia hills, got a job as a bartender, and within a year was managing the place and making plans with friends to open a bar of their own, that person felt like a stranger, someone he used to know a long time ago. His friends, the ones who had money, had moved out of the city to second homes upstate or out in the Hamptons. The ones that remained were scraping by with help from their families, just as he and Tayce were getting by with regular checks from home, money he swore he’d repay, though he had no idea at the moment how.

It made him furious that Tayce was picking up guys and bringing them back to the apartment. It was reckless and cruel, reckless because she was putting both of them in danger, and cruel because he was the way he was, constantly tired, something wrong with him, he was sure. He knew two older men—not that old, both in their fifties—who had no clue they were sick, who had no symptoms, but both had gone to bed one night and neither ever woke up again. Both it turned out had the virus and didn’t know it—and how could Ryan be sure that wasn’t what was going on with him, even though he’d been tested twice and both were negative? Why was he so tired all the time? It was cruel of her to be the way she was being, like there was nothing wrong in the world. One moment Ryan’s heart was racing with anger at Tayce, and the next moment, as soon as he resolved to tell her that she had to move out, he was calm. He had been building toward this decision for months. Now that it was made, a peacefulness settled over him. 

By the time the Segovia stopped playing, Ryan was asleep. When he awoke, it was dark. He sat up in bed, disoriented, forgetting where he was for a moment, until the sizzle and smell of meat cooking grounded him. From the smell and sound, he assumed Tayce was searing a steak in her favorite cast iron frying pan. That he had asked her not to do that because the smell permeated every corner of the apartment and lingered for days apparently mattered about as much to her as his demand that she quit bringing random strangers home. He ran his fingers though his hair, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and went from his room to the bathroom. When he was done there, he pulled up a stool at the kitchen counter.

“Hey!” Tayce glanced over her shoulder at Ryan. “Look who’s up from the dead!” Her hands were covered in two vibrant red potholder mitts as she lowered the steak and pan into the oven, closed the oven door, and then spun around to offer Ryan a bright smile as she pulled off the mitts and tossed them on stove. “Sorry about the smoke!” She picked up a Vanity Fair from the dish rack and waved it at the thin haze that filled the kitchen. Ryan said nothing. Tayce was barefoot and without pants, dressed only in a man’s white dress shirt, the sleeves bunched up at her elbows and the tails down almost to her knees. Unruly, auburn hair tumbled over her shoulders and midway down her arms. She set a timer on the stove for seven minutes, and then leaned over the kitchen counter, kissed Ryan on the forehead, and propped up her head on her elbows so that she was nose to nose with him. “I know,” she said, “that you don’t like it when I cook a steak here, but I made enough for both of us, and I have a salad in the fridge to go with it. I figured the smell would wake you up and I was right.”

Ryan got up from the counter, went into the living room, and opened the windows. It was unseasonably warm for November, though the seasons had been so cockeyed for so long that nothing surprised him anymore. He looked down and saw that kids had gotten into the alley again and spilled garbage everywhere. He cursed and told Tayce what had happened.

Tayce said, “They’re going to have to put up barbed wire or something.”

Ryan plopped himself down on the living room couch, across from the wall-mounted, flat-screen TV. “Tayce,” he said, looking at the blank TV screen, “you brought another guy back here earlier, after I asked you not to do that again.”

“So you weren’t completely comatose in there all day. Did you listen at my door?”

“Don’t be revolting. You can’t whisper on one end of this apartment without being heard on the other.”

“And so?”

“So, I’ve asked you not to put me in that position.”

“Ryan . . .” Tayce checked the timer before joining Ryan on the couch. “I’m nineteen. I’m too young to seal myself up in this place like it’s a coffin.”

“You mean like I do?”

“You said it.”

“I never asked you to seal yourself up. Why couldn’t you go back to his place? And who is he, anyway? Please don’t tell me he’s some random you picked up off the street.”

Tayce smiled, beaming, backed up to the opposite end of the couch, and pulled her feet under her. “He bought me a prime cut of steak—and he had no idea how much I loved steaks!” Her face was lit up with amusement. “He comes up to me,” she went on, “I’m in Fresh Market looking at the produce, he hands me this big cut of steak wrapped in brown paper, and goes ‘I know this is super-weird, but I’d love you to have this prime cut of steak. I bought it for myself,’ he says, ‘because I wanted to treat myself,’ but then he realized it was me, even with my mask on, and he goes ‘and I really wanted to give it to you, to say thanks.’ So I’m, ‘you want to give me a steak to say thanks?’ and he’s, ‘As soon as I saw you, I realized how much I missed you. It’s crazy. It hit me like a freight train how crazy I missed you.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, who are you?’ So he backs up a bit, takes his mask off, and, holy shit, it’s the guy from The Coffee Project, used to come in every morning, order the same thing, and check me out when I brought him his coffee and a scone. I yell, ‘coffee and a scone!’ Swear to God, both of us with our masks down in Fresh Market, we give each other this huge hug, like long lost lovers been separated for years. And then . . . you know where it went from there.”

Ryan, unamused, said, “You still didn’t answer my question. Why couldn’t you go back to his place?”

“It was Fresh Market!” Tayce said, as if Ryan were being thick-headed. “We were like three blocks from here, I had groceries to bring home, plus the steak, and he lives way down in TriBeca. I’m having lunch with him tomorrow,” she added, a smile blossoming. 

“That’s great,” Ryan said, “but you’re not listening to me. I swear to God you absolutely refuse to hear me. This guy—”

“Rajiv,” Tayce interrupted. “His name is Rajiv.”

“Fine, Rajiv. Rajiv could have the virus, he could have given it to you, and you could be currently giving it to me. What is there about that,” Ryan said, raising his voice, “that you don’t understand?”

Tayce covered her eyes with both hands. “How many times,” she whispered, “have we had this argument?”

“Not enough for it to make any difference, apparently.”

“We’re young.” Tayce took her hands away from her face when the timer went off in the kitchen. “If we get it,” she said, “it won’t most likely be any worse for us than a bad flu.” She took the steak out of the oven, releasing another cloud of smoke that wafted up to the ceiling.

“Most likely won’t be any worse,” Ryan said, “except if it is.” He had gone over with Tayce so many times the possible health issues that might follow a bout with the virus that he couldn’t bear to do it again. He fought off a pressing weight of tiredness, raised himself up from the couch, and took an N95 mask, a black cloth mask, and a heavy denim jacket from the hall closet.

Tayce put the steak on a platter and watched Ryan with a mix of surprise and interest. “You’re going out?” she asked, as if amazed at the possibility.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, “but I’ve had it with letting you disregard my wishes. I really am sorry,” he repeated, “but you have to move out, Tayce. You can call Mom and Dad. I’m sure they’ll let you move back in with them—but you’d damn well better quarantine for two weeks before you do.”

For a long moment Tayce looked back at Ryan as if she hadn’t fully understood him, as if she were trying to figure out what he had just said. Then she asked him what he was talking about. “First of all,” she added, gathering herself, “Mom and Dad have been paying the rent here since May, so it’s not even your call who lives here.”

Ryan held the apartment door open with one hand. “I’m the one who’ll repay Mom and Dad, not you. And it’s my name on the lease, not yours. You’ve never paid rent. You have no rights. I’ll give you a week or two to work out the moving, but then you’ve got to go. I’m sorry. But you’re essentially telling me to go to hell, you’ll do what you want, and I have to live with it. Well, I don’t,” he said, and he left the apartment without looking back.

In the hallway, Ryan slipped the N95 on first, and then covered it with the cloth mask. He avoided the elevator and took the stairs down to the street. Outside, he shoved his hands into the pockets of the same wrinkled, loose-fitting draw-string trousers he’d been wearing around the house for days. It was warmer than it should be in November but still chilly compared to the comfort of his apartment. He hunched his shoulders against a breeze that whipped around buildings and carried scraps of paper and plastic bags up to third and fourth story windows. He didn’t know the time precisely, but he guessed somewhere between eight and nine, early enough that there should have been more people on the streets, on their way to or from restaurants or wherever, but of course most of the restaurants were closed or had limited seating, and, anyway, people weren’t taking chances, not after what the city had been through in March and April, those months when it seemed like ambulance sirens were screaming twenty-four hours a day while the dead were being stacked up in freezer cars. New Yorkers, those that remained, were cautious, and the few pedestrians on the street were all wearing masks and keeping their distance, which was fine with Ryan.

As he walked aimlessly, Ryan’s stomach growled and gurgled, and he realized he hadn’t  eaten anything all day. He considered turning around. He had some frozen dinners in the fridge he could make a meal of with little trouble, but he dreaded having to face Tayce again. The more he walked the more disgusted with himself he felt about telling her to move out and then leaving the apartment, running away, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her reaction. It was a chicken-shit way to behave. Tayce had looked up to him all her life, had treated him as if he walked on water when he came home from school for holidays and summer breaks. When she graduated from high school, she couldn’t be talked out of moving to the city to be near him. He had done everything in his power to talk her out of it. When she wouldn’t budge, he offered to share his apartment with her. That way, at least, he figured he could keep an eye on her—and she was beyond excited. She was thrilled. Now here he was six months later throwing her out. Again and again he went over his reasoning as he walked into the wind, toward the river, nearly blind to his surroundings. She was behaving recklessly. She’d be safer at home. She’d been out of a job since she got laid off at the coffee place. She had little money of her own left. It was costing their parents a fortune to support both of them. Plus, with her new freedom, being away from their parents, she was pushing things. She’d slept with five different guys in the six months she’d been in the city. Was that normal for a girl her age? About that, he really didn’t know. He knew that he hadn’t been with anyone since Celia broke up with him, and that was nearly nine months ago. But that was different. He’d been pretty wild too his first year away from home, at college.

Ryan continued walking and trying to think things through until he ran out of city at the Pier 66 Boathouse, where he leaned against a metal railing and looked out over the Hudson. The water was choppy and dark, lit up dimly by a sliver of moon. He hadn’t thought at all about where he was, in an empty part of the pier, behind the boat house, someplace he would have avoided even in daylight had he been thinking straight—but he wasn’t thinking about any of that until he heard someone approaching him from behind. He turned around and saw a skinny black guy with a hard-shell instrument case dangling at his side. He looked to be about Ryan’s age, maybe a little older. He was tall, an inch or two taller than Ryan, who was just under six feet, and he had a neatly trimmed circle beard, the chin patch and mustache framing a round face with dark, inquisitive eyes. “Hey,” he said, “what’s happening here?” Without waiting for Ryan to answer, he went on, chattering, pointing his instrument case at the river, “I was half thinking about jumping,” he said, and laughed before he added, “Nah, don’t worry. I’ve got too much ego. I studied at Julliard, I’ve played with the likes of Benny Green and Jason Moran, alto sax.” He lifted the hard-shell case again, showing it to Ryan. “Now, with all this shit, I’m busking in subways trying to pick up a few extra dollars, can’t get a gig nowhere. What about you?” he asked Ryan, “you weren’t thinking about jumpin’ in, were you? Kind of looked like you might be. Or was I just projecting?” he said, and his eyes lit up with a smile.

“Nothing like that,” Ryan said. “I just needed to get out. I think I was going stir crazy.” He gestured toward the stranger’s face. “I see you’re not wearing a mask, plus you’re playing in the subway. Aren’t you worried about getting sick?”

“I’ve already had it.” The stranger joined Ryan at the river railing, keeping his distance, and put his instrument case down. “My doctor says I’m immune now.” He pulled a mask from his jacket pocket and showed it to Ryan. “I wear it in the subway and around people,” he said, “but, shit, we’re outside, there’s a good breeze, and I’m so damn tired of wearing this ugly thing.” He stuck the mask back in his pocket.

Ryan pulled down his cloth mask and took off the N95. The stranger was five or six feet from him, and a constant breeze was blowing in off the river. “I hate wearing it, too,” Ryan said. “Sometimes it makes me so anxious I feel like I might pass out.”

“Man, do I hear that,” the stranger said, and then he went off on a long, nearly breathless narration about much of his life since leaving his home in Atlanta. His father was a well-known jazz pianist, whom he hated taking money from, it injured his pride, and he only took it when he was desperate, but gigs had disappeared and all his students stopped coming, so no money from lessons, and all he had left was busking and a rare studio gig, and he was down to his last few bucks and would be forced to ask his father for money again soon, and sometimes he’d go days without talking to another soul. He must have gone on uninterrupted for five minutes before stopping and laughing and asking Ryan if maybe it wasn’t pretty obvious that he hadn’t talked to anyone in a while.

“Same here,” Ryan said. “I haven’t talked to anyone in forever except my sister, who I’m sharing my apartment with, and we’re both about at the point where we’re driving each other crazy.”

“Still,” the stranger said, “I envy you having someone to live with. This is a bad time to be living alone, trust me on that.” He took a step closer to Ryan and reached out his hand. “I’m Tivon,” he said. “Tivon Ross.”

Ryan reacted instinctively. Before he had a moment to process what he was doing, he shook Tivon’s hand. The feeling that washed over him in that moment, when he took Tivon’s hand in his own, was electric, as if he had taken hold of a live wire. A pulse of energy like an infusion shot up through his arm and into his chest, and it wasn’t fear that he felt but some other mix of emotions that practically lifted him off the ground. How long had it been since the last time he shook hands with someone? It felt like a lifetime.

“Damn,” Tivon said as he pushed his hands into his jacket pockets. “Broke that rule.”

“Wasn’t even thinking,” Ryan said.

“Me neither,” Tivon answered.

“Listen.” Ryan looked out over the river, at the white foam on the choppy surface, and then back to Tivon. “Do you think I could learn to play the sax at my age? I’m twenty-four.”

“ ’Course,” Tivon said. “Anyone can learn to play. Chances you’ll be any good at it are a longshot, but, shit, anyone can learn. Why? You want to take lessons with me?”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Ryan said. “Hell, if for nothing else other than the company,” he added, and then laughed as if amused with himself.

“Problem is,” Tivon said, “it’s a bad situation. Indoors, closed space, a lot of spit flying around.”

“Right,” Ryan said, “probably a bad idea.”

“But, you know, a day like today, the weather nice, we could go up on the roof. That’s a possibility.”

“Would you do that?” Ryan asked. “How much would it cost?”

“I’d do it cheap, given the situation,” Tivon said. “Say, fifty bucks a lesson. Can you handle that?”

“I could do that,” Ryan said. “What about an instrument, though? Would I have to buy a saxophone?”

“I’d let you use one of mine to start. If you take to it, I’ve got a tenor sax I could let you have at a good price.”

“Sounds like a plan then,” Ryan said. “I’m definitely up for it.” In fact, though he didn’t say it, he was excited. He had always been a music lover. It had just somehow never occurred to him that he might be able to make music himself—and a big part of him was thrilled at the prospect.

Tivon took a business card from his wallet and handed it to Ryan. “Supposed to be warm like this all week,” he said. “What about tomorrow around two o’clock?”

“I might be able to work that into my schedule,” Ryan said, grinning.

“I’ll be damned.” Tivon picked up his sax. “Never do know what’s going to happen next, do we?”

“Guess not.” Ryan nodded to Tivon and then watched him walk away, the saxophone case swinging alongside him like the ticking of a metronome.

Ryan didn’t bother with his masks on the walk home. Tivon was right: he was outdoors, there was a constant breeze, and he never got within six feet of anyone. Tayce was right, too. If he got sick, the way Tivon had, he’d most likely recover and be fine—and the thought of being immune felt like a trip to paradise. Still, he put the masks on when he reached his building and didn’t take them off until he closed his apartment door behind him. 

Inside, the rooms were dark except for the glow of several electronic devices spread around the kitchen, which lent a dim illumination to the whole apartment. The door to Tayce’s bedroom was open, but she slept with the door open and there was no light coming from within. In the dark, he hung his jacket up in the closet, tossed the cloth mask into the bathroom hamper, and washed his hands before returning to his bedroom, where the first thing he saw was the old woman across the alley at her open window, looking down to the street. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her window open before, and certainly not with her grasping the ledge with both hands and looking out. In response, he opened his own window and looked down to see what had drawn her attention, and he remembered the alley had been trashed.

“Look at what they did down there,” the woman said. She was dressed as she had been earlier, in slacks and a black blouse that emphasized the whiteness of her hair. They were close enough that she didn’t have to raise her voice.

“I don’t know what pleasure they get out of that,” Ryan said.

“Hooligans,” the woman said, as if that explained it.

“You know,” Ryan said, “I see you all the time and I don’t even know your name.”

The old woman was quiet a moment, as if considering her response. “When friends ask me why I live alone,” she said, finally, a smile brightening her face, “I tell them I don’t live alone. I live with a handsome young man. I just don’t know his name.”

“Ryan,” Ryan said, with a formal nod of the head.

“I’m Julia,” the woman replied, and nodded in return.

“Who are you talking to?” Tayce came into the bedroom and switched on the lights.

“This is our neighbor, Julia,” Ryan said, turning to Tayce. To Julia, he said, “This is my sister, Tayce. We share the apartment. We had a fight earlier and I was a jerk and told her she had to move out, which I didn’t mean, and I’m really sorry about.”

Tayce, looking exasperated, came to the window. To Julia, she said, “I knew he didn’t mean it. He gets wound up lately.”

“Well, these are wound up times,” Julia said.

“That’s the truth.” After an awkward moment of silence, Tayce added, “Nice to meet you,” and waved. To Ryan, she said, “I’ll heat up some dinner. It doesn’t look like you’ve eaten a blessed thing all day.”

Ryan thanked Tayce and watched her leave the room. To Julia, he said, “She’s nineteen. She’s only been here a few months.”

“When this is all over,” Julia said, “you’ll both have to come over for coffee or tea, and we can have a proper conversation.”

“Let’s do that,” Ryan said, and then added, “Let’s really do it.”

“Of course,” Julia said, and then they both closed their windows as Julia retreated to her apartment and Ryan went to the kitchen, where Tayce put a salad on the counter for him while the steak was heating up in the oven.

“I was out of control earlier,” Ryan said to Tayce, who wasn’t looking at him. “Not that I don’t think I have legitimate concerns. But I’m sorry for telling you to move out.”

Tayce, her eyes fixed on the oven timer ticking down the seconds, didn’t respond.

“You won’t believe what happened, though,” Ryan went on. “I walked all the way to the piers, and I met this musician who’s going to give me saxophone lessons.”

“What?” Tayce looked at Ryan as if he might have suddenly become someone she didn’t know.

“I met this guy and we hit it off right away. He’s from Atlanta and his father’s a pretty famous jazz pianist, not that I’ve ever heard of him, but, anyway, I’m going to start taking lessons with him.”

“His father?”

Ryan laughed. “No. Him. His name’s Tivon.”

Tayce took the steak from the oven and slid it in front of Ryan, who dug in immediately. After the first bite he said “Jesus, I think I was starving!” and he cut himself another chunk of steak while chomping on the bite already in his mouth.

Tayce, standing in front of Ryan, watched him with an expression somewhere between curiosity and worry. “Since when do you have any interest in the saxophone?” she asked.

Ryan shrugged, too busy devouring the steak to reply.

“Who is this guy you met?” Tayce pressed. “Can you tell me more about him? I need details!”

Ryan nodded. “Let me have a few more bites,” he said, with his mouth full. “Then I’ll tell you everything.”

Tayce went around the counter, pulled up a stool alongside Ryan, and watched him eat. 

Ryan couldn’t cut chunks of steak off and shove them into his mouth fast enough. 

After watching him for a few minutes, Tayce said, “You really were starving, weren’t you?”

Ryan’s eyes opened wide. “I think so!” he said, and he kissed Tayce, smearing grease all over her cheek.

Tayce squealed happily and swiped at her face. “Tell me!” she said. “I’m dying to hear about this guy.”

Ryan ignored her and went about finishing off his steak. He didn’t really know what to tell her beyond what he already had. While he ate, he pictured himself at a crowded rooftop party with Tivon, and in his imagination he was playing the sax like he was Coltrane and people were dancing to the music packed together shoulder to shoulder.

“Well,” Tayce said, “are you going to tell me?”

Ryan shrugged, as if to say give me another minute, and he lingered a little longer at his rooftop party, his hands moving expertly over the body of the sax, music flying out of him like magic, while he and everyone around him danced. 

 

 

Ed Falco is the author of a dozen books, including novels, short story collections, and poetry collections. His most recent book is the novel Transcendent Gardening (C&R Press, 2022). He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. Twitter: @EdFalco