City of Boys Read Free

always smile.
    —Hey, Tiiiiiiito, I say. —
Mira, mira
, huh? And all his friends laugh, while Tito tries to look as though this is something he’s planned himself, as though he has somehow elicited this remark from me.
    I suppose one day Tito will use the key he forgot to leave behind to sneak in and cover me with his flagging desire, his fading regrets, and his disappointments, and she will moveon then, away from me; but rent control will not last forever in New York, and I cannot think ahead to the beginnings and the ends for which she prays.
    The boys in the car lean against one another and leer and twitch like tormented insects, exchanging glances that they think are far too subtle for me to understand, but I have come too far looking for too much to miss any of it. We drive too fast up Riverside, so that it’s no time at all before the nice neighborhoods become slums full of women in windows, with colorful clothing slung over fire escapes, and, like a thick haze hanging over the city, the bright noise of salsa music. Like the sound of crickets threading through the Ohio summer nights, it sets the terms for everything.
    —So, one of them says, —so where are you going, anyways? —Well, I say. —Well. I was thinking about going to the Bronx Botanical Gardens.
    The Bronx Botanical Gardens is no place I’d ever really want to go, but I feel it’s important to maintain, at least in their eyes, some illusion of destination. If I was a bit more sure of myself, I’d suggest that we take the ferry over to Staten Island and do it in the park there. Then I could think of her.
    When we went to Staten Island, it was cold and gray and windy; we got there and realized that there was nothing really that we wanted to see, that being in Staten Island was really not all that different from being in Manhattan.
    —Or anywhere, she said, looking down a street into a corridor of run-down clothing stores and insurance offices. It was Sunday, so everything was closed up tight and no one was on the street. Finally we found a coffee shop near the ferry station, where we drank Cokes and coffee, and she smoked cigarettes, while we waited for the boat to leave.
    —Lezzes, the counterman said to another man sitting at the counter eating a doughnut. —What do you want to bet they’re lezzes?
    The man eating the doughnut turned and looked us over. —They’re not so hot anyways, he said. —No big waste. She smiled and held her hand to my face for a second; the smoke from her cigarette drifted past my eyes into my hair. —What a moment, she said, —to remember.
    On the way back, I watched the wind whip her face all out of any shape I knew, and when I caught the eyes of some boys on the ferry, she said, not looking at me, not taking her eyes from the concrete ripples of the robe at the feet of the Statue of Liberty just on our left, —What you do is your own business, but don’t expect me to love you forever if you do things like this. I’m not, she said, turning to look me full in the face, —your mother, you know. All I am is your lover, and nothing lasts forever.
    When we got off the ferry, I said: —I don’t expect you to love me forever, and she said I was being promiscuous and quarrelsome, and she lit a cigarette as she walked down into the subway station. I watched her as she walked, and it seemed to me to be the first time I had ever seen her back, walking away from me, trailing a long blue string of smoke.
    Something is going on with the boys, something has changed in the set of their faces, the way they hold their cigarettes, the way they nudge each other. Something changes when the light begins to fade, and one of them says to me: —We have a clubhouse uptown, want to come there with us?
    —What kind of club, I ask, —what do you do there?
    —We drink whisky, they say, —and take drugs and watch television.
    My boy, the one I have picked out of this whole city of boys,stares out the window, chewing at a toothpick