A DROPPING SENSATION WAKES LEANNE. IT HAS something to do with a dream, but she can’t remember how. She stares at the ceiling. The silence is so complete it’s startling. From the character of the light—gray and flat, the way it is before the sun clears the horizon—she guesses it’s between four and five AM. But Michigan light can fool her after living out east. Here, at the western edge of the time zone, everything is shifted back. The sun rises later and sets later; twilight drags on until ten PM at this time of year. Now, even in this half-light, it could be as late as six.
She can sense Kit next to her. His body is solid and turned away from her, a ridge on the horizon, inscrutable pathways in the darkness of its near side. Is there an approach on that sheer wall? She could reach a hand out and touch him. Even in his sleep, he responds to her touch, gravitating gently toward it, the way a magnet moves. If he stayed turned away from her that would make it easier to talk. But where should she start? I can’t go to Mexico with you.
Kit is the talker in their relationship, the one who tries not to let things go unsaid. Leanne is willing to let pain go untended or sorrows unvoiced in order to avoid scenes. Her mother was always a big scene-maker. Leanne still cringes when she hears her mother’s voice take the tone that means she’s spoiling for a fight, looking for an action or statement on which to hang her sense of injustice. When she gets like that, nothing Will says can appease her. Even though Leanne always automatically took her mother’s side, she would end up feeling bad for her father. For all his energy, he could make no headway with Carol.
That’s the danger of talking. Too often it descends into pointless recrimination or complaint. That was the beauty of Hoyt. When Leanne and Hoyt were together, they hardly ever talked, and when they did, it was never like that.
Of course, she and Hoyt weren’t actually together; they couldn’t even be said to be seeing each other, really. Looking back, Leanne knows she didn’t love Hoyt, not the way she loves Kit. Eating breakfast, she sometimes watches Kit dip his toast into the yolks of his fried eggs and she loves the gesture, simple as it is, because it’s his. She never loved Hoyt like that. She loved his blankness. He wasn’t a love object so much as an escape, a place to lose herself.
She met Hoyt while she was tending bar at the Dingo, a grubbily hip bar on the Lower East Side. She’d been in New York a year, most of which she had spent waitressing. Bartending seemed cooler and more grown up, especially at a place like the Dingo. Leanne had been there about a month when Hoyt came in, settled himself on the bar stool, and parked his arms in a neat circle, marking off territory.
“So,” Hoyt said to Leanne. “What are you doing with your life?”
“Who are you, my mother?” At the time, Carol was telling everyone that Leanne was taking some time off, as if life were a nice job with benefits and Leanne was on vacation from it.
Hoyt regarded her intently. His eyes were large and slightly droopy; in fact, his entire face looked like it was migrating downward. Leanne made him to be in his midforties, not bad-looking but not as well preserved as he might be. Probably a painter, she thought. Only three kinds of people strayed east of Avenue A: artists, drug addicts, and tough Latino kids. Occasionally, those categories overlapped.
“Jim Beam, neat,” Hoyt said, raising two fingers like a blessing. “I’m Hoyt.”
Leanne was nineteen. When she applied for the job at the Dingo, she had said she was twenty-one, with experience tending bar.
She handed Hoyt his Jim Beam, and he stared morosely into the glass as if it disappointed him.
“Are you a painter?” she asked. Being friendly, they’d said, was part of her job.
“I don’t like the word ‘painter,’” he said. “ ‘Painter’ implies will and intent. One who paints takes action. I do not. Art is made through me, but I am only a passive medium for its creation.”
Leanne nodded. After three months of life in New York, she was used to people talking that way.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think people are just fooling themselves. They think they do a lot of things when really things just get done to them.”
Hoyt raised his head. “How old are you?” he asked.
Leanne looked at his sad-sack eyes. He was taking her in the way a large man might eye a chair, wondering if it would hold him.
“Twenty-two,” she said. “I look young for my age.”
That was how it started.
Even then, after a year, Leanne wasn’t sure what she would eventually do in New York. Most people seemed to arrive in the city with big plans: go to school, act, get rich on Wall Street. Leanne thought she might do any of those things; she just had to figure out what she wanted. She thought that would be easier in New York, a world of strangers and new ideas, not driven by the desires of her family. At home, she sometimes felt caught in a slipstream, pulled forward in the wake of others. Her father’s dreams of farm life, her mother’s projects, Margaret’s ambition—each of them hauled Leanne along, heedless of her own desires.
And for the most part, she had none. Content to be pulled along, she drifted through life until high school graduation. The most self-directed, assertive thing she had ever done was move to New York. Even that was someone else’s suggestion: her high school friend Julie was going to NYU and driving out with a truckful of stuff. Leanne could go with her, she had said, take turns with the driving and help pay for the gas.
“What you should do,” Julie had told her as they pounded the highway, talking about the millions of possibilities awaiting them, “is open up a shop for arts and crafts. You are so good at all those things.”
Leanne had smiled. She might do that one day. She might do anything. For the first time in her life, the paths she could take seemed endless. She didn’t want to make any decisions. She wanted to enjoy the feeling of potential, the sense that as she went to work or drank with friends or wandered down the crowded, grubby streets of the East Village, her real life was still out there somewhere, waiting for her.
Hoyt came back the next night. Leanne’s heart skipped a beat when she saw his face coming toward her. But he barely seemed to recognize her when he sat down at the bar.
“Hey,” he said flatly. “Jim Beam, please.”
“How are you tonight, Hoyt?” Leanne asked. He looked up, vaguely surprised, before settling back into a slump.
“I’m here,” he said glumly. As if to underscore the point, he pulled a book out of his backpack. The title spilled across the cover: Be Here Now.
Leanne handed Hoyt his drink and noticed for the first time that his hair was bright red, or at least used to be. It was now the color of a dried-out scab.
“Have you ever read this?” he asked her. She shook her head. “You should.” He closed the book and examined it, nodding.
Leanne looked at the book. “I think my mother had that book on her shelves,” she told him. “But I doubt if she ever read it.”
“Why not?” Hoyt’s face looked younger when his attention was roused.
“I don’t know. My parents weren’t very good at being anywhere now. They were always chasing after the next thing.”
Hoyt shook his head. “That’s the problem,” he said. “The future—it’s just as oppressive as the past. You can’t get sucked in by either of them.”
Leanne studied Hoyt’s face. His presence felt light, indeterminate, as if he might fade away on his bar stool. She was drawn to him the way one is drawn to a perfectly flat green lake. The smoothness of the water is both what you want to be part of and what you disrupt if you try.
Hoyt drank steadily from ten PM to two AM. As Leanne was wiping down the counters and loading the last glasses into dishwasher trays, he looked at her with that summing-up expression again. She spoke quickly. “How about a nightcap?”
Hoyt laughed, slow and world-weary. “Where?”
“I was thinking your place,” she said.
He shook his head. “Bad idea.”
“No pressure,” Leanne said, concentrating on the last stretch of counter. “I just thought we might, you know, be there now.”
He leaned back and looked at her, and it was as if he were studying her through glass. He narrowed his eyes. “I hope you have cash. ’Cause we’ll have to get a bottle.”
Liquor stores were closed, so they went to a bodega where Hoyt nodded to the counter guy and waved Leanne’s twenty. They were ushered to a curtained doorway, and a small Indian man looked Leanne up and down with a dark stare. Then he disappeared behind the curtain and returned with a fifth of Beam.
Hoyt lived in a largish building on Ludlow Street. The staircases sagged in upon themselves, and the hallways were painted a lurid purple. His apartment, however, was surprisingly clean. In the kitchen, black-and-white linoleum squares gleamed as if no one ever walked on them, and the porcelain sink in the bathroom had been scoured to a suedelike nap. They sat on the living room floor, Leanne cross-legged, Hoyt leaning back against a pine green couch, his knees up, his head resting on the cushions. He smoked Winstons, ashing them into an incongruously delicate china teacup.
They drank Jim Beam and listened to music. Hoyt had hundreds of cassette tapes lined up in perfect rows across a set of built-in shelves. The tapes all appeared to be bootlegs, labeled in the same precise handwriting. Leanne didn’t recognize the music, but she liked its slow trancelike beat. Sometimes there were words, sometimes not. Hoyt closed his eyes, his jaw pulsing slightly. Leanne sat still and watched him for a long time. She had never done anything like this before. She’d had sex only a few times, each time with someone who seemed so bent on getting her into bed that giving in was the easiest path. This was entirely different. She watched Hoyt until he seemed to be asleep. Then she crawled over to where he sat, and placed her palm, fingers spread, on his stomach. He opened his eyes but didn’t move. She slid her hand down his stomach to his belt buckle. Still he didn’t move or speak, just watched her. One hand on his buckle, she used the other to unbutton her own blouse.
“You’ll have to do everything,” he said. She nodded and kept going.
After that, Leanne and Hoyt saw each other regularly, but there was never a plan or an agreement. Hoyt came in two or three nights a week. On one of those nights, sometimes two, he would stay until closing time, and when he did, Leanne went home with him. He didn’t speak or acknowledge her in any way; he would just stand up, and Leanne would get her jacket and follow. At his place they drank, listened to music, talked, went to bed. Sometimes they had sex, and sometimes Hoyt would roll over and fall right asleep, his back to her. She would trace his tattoos with a finger. He had two, an American flag and a dead dove. When she saw them, Leanne wondered if he had fought in Vietnam. He seemed about the right age.
Leanne always left first thing in the morning. Sometimes Hoyt would go with her. They would meander in silence, roaming the streets of the East Village, where artists had adorned vacant lots with sculptures made from scrap metal or stuffed animals. Farther east, between Avenues C and D, there was a shantytown where chickens roamed among cardplaying groups of men. Occasionally, they walked through the East River Park, a grubby, forgotten strip of land between FDR Drive and the river. Autumn had set in, and they scuffed over leaves, lost socks, chicken bones, menus. On the park staircases, their shoes crunched the glass of empty crack vials, scattered there like tiny jewels.
Hoyt dealt drugs. There was no particular moment when Leanne realized it, just a series of small things that added up: cryptic late-night phone conversations, vagueness about his activities, the precise way he lived. When they left his apartment together, he would open the door slightly, surveying the hall before stepping outside. Keys in hand, he’d turn and fasten the locks—two Medeco cylinders and a police bolt. Then he’d take Leanne’s hand and wordlessly lead the way to the building’s rear stairs.
She knew it should bother her, but it didn’t. Dealing didn’t seem like a vocation to Hoyt so much as a habit he had slipped into, casually and with no intent, the way he seemed to have fallen into the rest of his life. There was something admirable in that ability to move through the world rudderless, living entirely in the moment and taking things as they came. Leanne had never known anyone who could do that, but she recognized it immediately as a quality she had always harbored herself.
It was what made her enjoy the fact that she never knew what was coming next with Hoyt. Sometimes he came into the Dingo and reached over the bar, fingers tucked into the waistband of her pants, to pull Leanne toward him. Other times he would come in and barely speak to her, or look at her darkly, as if she had done him some wrong. On those nights he would leave before closing, and Leanne would walk home alone, dropping the change from her tips into the cups of Avenue A’s panhandlers, by that time asleep or staring straight ahead, lost in memory or blankness.
One night Hoyt took her to a party. It was the launch of a magazine called Playground, a fat, densely printed review of alternative culture edited by one of his customers. It was in a warehouse on Clinton, a street so far east and edgy that even Leanne avoided it. At the door, a large man with dreadlocks slid his eyes down her before stepping aside to let them in.
Inside the cavernous warehouse, the magazine people had set up an X-rated playground. There was a sandbox filled with sex toys and a jungle gym to which a man was being tied with nylon cord. At the center of the room, a long swing was suspended from one of the building’s rafters. A man in leather pants was swinging.
Leanne had seen a lot of interesting and strange characters at the Dingo, but she had never seen so many in one place. There were men in dresses and a woman with a real beard. There was a bald man with a tattoo of a large hawk covering the back of his head. When he turned, Leanne saw that he was wearing a beak, melded so realistically with his face that it gave her a small shock. Other women were gotten up in gorgeous excess: corsets, leather dresses, sparkly evening gowns, plastic, space-age minis. One woman was completely naked except for a pair of silver boots. Blindfolded, she was following a man in black jeans who was ringing a tiny bell. He never touched the woman or spoke to her, just rang the tinkly bell every time he moved. She would lift her chin slightly and follow the sound.
Hoyt got them beers from the bar. They wandered around the party together, not speaking. Near one wall, a large, upended wooden box was punctured with round fist-sized holes. Attached to each hole was a long black cotton glove. People outside the box were putting their hands into the gloves. Leanne and Hoyt approached. He held out a hand, welcoming her to try it. Leanne reached her hand into a glove and extended it into the box. There was a person standing inside. Her hand landed on his or her hip. Feeling strange, she ran it up the person’s side. Other people were groping more freely. She could feel their hands, too, reaching in, slipping over her own hands in their excitement to explore the stranger.
Hoyt turned to her. “Let’s go on the swing.”
They got to the swing just as a woman in a black evening gown was finishing. She smiled at Leanne as she handed over the seat. It had a been a long time since Leanne was on a swing, and she had forgotten what a rush it was, the slow, smooth glide forward and up, the loosening at the top and then the swift drop back to earth. The swing was long, and she swung higher and higher, skimming through the crowd and up above it, into the rafters, then back down through all those bodies. She pumped her feet to go faster, higher. It was exhilarating. She found herself laughing out loud. Her heart had never felt so light.
It was a strangely happy time. Leanne went to work, walked home, went out at night with work friends or with Hoyt. She never made plans, and she never worried about the future. The future was there, ahead, like a bubble or a sealed room, waiting patiently for the time when she would break the seal and enter it. Until then she could do as she pleased, be who she wanted. She dyed her hair blond, then red, then cut it all off and put a blue streak down the side. Each time she did it on impulse, looking in the mirror and walking right out to the drugstore to buy the dye. She wore a gorgeous flapper dress to work one day, frayed jeans and a Metallica T-shirt the next.
Slowly, almost unnoticeably, Hoyt’s visits to the Dingo grew less frequent.
“You should stop hanging around me,” he said one day as they sat having their coffee at noon. “You’re young, you’re pretty. You’re wasting your time.”
“Maybe I want to waste my time,” Leanne said.
He never mentioned the war, although once, looking through his kitchen drawer for a knife, she found a pair of dog tags with his name. She closed the drawer silently, never mentioning it. She liked their arrangement, wasn’t willing to risk it by trying to talk about things he wanted left alone.
Even so, he stopped coming to the Dingo. It was January. A week went by, then two, then three. Leanne told herself that this, too, was part of Hoyt’s attraction, that the uncertainty she loved had always included the possibility of his not coming at all. But she missed him. She didn’t have his phone number, and he’d never given her a key to his apartment. There was little she could do.
One night, walking home, she went by his building. She couldn’t say exactly what she wanted. To see him or touch him, yes, but there was something more. When she lay in bed at night, it seemed to her that she wanted to hear him say her name. Leanne. She stood on the street looking up at his window. His light was on. A couple came out of the building, and Leanne grabbed the door as they left. Once inside, she decided to go up to Hoyt’s apartment and say hello.
But when she got to the door, she stood outside, unable to knock. Who was she to Hoyt, after all? Just some girl he had picked up a few times, hung out with a few more. She didn’t know anything about him. She had no right.
She was turning to leave when the door opened. A woman stopped, startled, when she saw Leanne. She didn’t look like anyone Hoyt would know. She was older than Leanne, probably in her late thirties, with high, heavily sprayed hair. She was wearing acid-washed jeans and a T-shirt with a sequined flag.
“Who are you?” she said, unfriendliness in her face and voice.
“Oh, just …” Leanne stumbled, unsure how to answer, taken aback by the woman’s hostility. “I’m a friend of Hoyt’s. I was looking for him.”
The woman glared at her. “Hoyt’s dead,” she said, cold and slightly wild at the same time. “You druggies keep coming around asking for him. Don’t you have a phone network or something?” Leanne knew she must have looked shocked, because the woman modulated her tone slightly, looking back over her shoulder and lowering her voice as though someone in the room might hear. “He overdosed, okay? Why don’t you take that as a sign from God and get yourself to the methadone clinic.”
Leanne was speechless. The woman stood there, waiting for Leanne to leave.
“I’m sorry,” Leanne squeezed out. The woman shifted on her feet, and Leanne saw that she was holding a garbage bag. She must be cleaning out Hoyt’s apartment. Her face had a family resemblance. A sister, maybe. She didn’t look old enough to be his mother. Suddenly, it was too hot in the hallway. Leanne stared at the half-open door. Hoyt would never walk through it again. She turned and fled.
All the way home, she searched her heart. Had she known? She had seen marks on his arms and legs. But she’d never known a junkie before—she didn’t know what tracks would look like. Hoyt was skinny and ate badly. He smoked and drank. Bad skin just seemed like part of his general unwholesomeness.
Then again, she hadn’t wanted to see it. It was hardly a surprise. He sold drugs, and he was a vet: lots of guys got hooked on heroin in Vietnam. But if so, he had been addicted for years. If he had overdosed, it must have been on purpose. She clutched her arms around herself. The worst of it was, she’d had no idea Hoyt was that much on the edge. She just hadn’t known him that well.
She went home and drank a whiskey, then another. The numbness that began to spread through her felt almost like peace. She sat on her floor, the way she and Hoyt had always done, and worked her way through half the bottle before crawling into bed and falling into a heavy, overheated sleep.
Her life wasn’t much different with Hoyt dead. She went to work at the Dingo, came home, drank herself to sleep. She didn’t answer phone calls from Julie or her mother. Occasionally, she had drinks with the bar manager, Mike. They would end up in bed back at his place, but Leanne felt none of the excitement she had felt with Hoyt. Once Mike asked her what had happened to Hoyt, and she shrugged and said she didn’t know, he had just disappeared.
Spring came, then summer. As the days got longer, Leanne found she was unable to fall asleep without enough to drink. That August she went to Margaret’s wedding, and her mother decided to visit her in New York.
Carol didn’t lecture Leanne. She set about helping her figure out what to do next. She didn’t mention the possibility of Leanne going back to school, even though that was surely her own secret wish. When Leanne proposed opening a crafts store, Carol immediately started looking into locations. They stumbled upon Cold Spring on a friend’s recommendation, and Leanne found the town oddly appealing in its old-fashioned simplicity. She wasn’t worried about whether she would live the rest of her life there. Like her trip to New York, the move to Cold Spring was a reaction, not a plan. It was a place to get away for a while, somewhere she could sort things out and figure out what she really wanted to do with herself.
Leanne never told her mother about Hoyt. Once she mentioned a friend who had died, but she didn’t go into the details. It would be too hard to explain her attraction to him. Sometimes she thought about the naked woman at the Playground party, following the bell. She imagined herself, blind and exposed, following that tiny but clear sound through a room crowded with things to see.
Kit rolls over next to her. For a second Leanne thinks he’s awake and about to speak. His heavy breathing resumes. She listens to it rise and fall. Kit is the opposite of Hoyt. He offers her not surprise but certainty. If Leanne wanted that from anyone, it would be him. But she’s not sure she wants it at all.
There’s a crisp, wheaty smell drifting into the room. Quietly, Leanne gets up and finds her thin robe. Kit is still fast asleep when she slips out.
Her mother is at the kitchen table with coffee and toast. The dishwasher is running. They did last night’s dishes after dinner, so it must be the party glassware. As Leanne comes in, she is sitting still, staring out at a deck dark with rain.
“It’s still raining,” Leanne says, and Carol turns her head. Seeing her mother’s face in profile, Leanne is struck by how it has changed. Carol looks thinner and sharper, her cheeks more defined, her nose the blade of a knife. On the handle of the coffee cup, her knuckles are like bony marbles.
“Shhh,” she says. “Your father’s still sleeping.”