Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

He took off his T-shirt and faced west. The sun was slowly descending into New Jersey, and the sky was full of new colors, blue and purple and red, all mixed together, changing every minute. Beautiful. He did fifty curls with the hand weights. Paused. Did fifty more. Then faced the remains of the abandoned pigeon coop, where the birds once fluttered and murmured behind wire walls and now were gone forever. He did moves he had seen the boxers doing at the gym on 8th Street. Jab, jab, jab, bend, left hook. Jab, right hand, hook. The rooftops of the block’s six tenements were all different. Different kinds of chimneys, some bare, some cowled. Some had clotheslines, some did not. Some were covered with gray pebbles, a few with raised wooden planks, others with tar paper. In the summers, they called those rooftops Tar Beach. People would get home from work, too late to grab the trolley to Coney Island, and try to spend an hour or two in the fading sun. On weekends, some of them would spread blankets and cover themselves with suntan lotion, all the while drinking iced tea or soda or beer. Tar Beach. For Shawn, it was just the roof. All of it.

Now he turned to face north, beginning his bends, touching his left ankle with his weighted right hand, the right ankle with his left. Doing each bend very hard. Grunting. Feeling the sweat on his face and shoulders and back. Feeling muscles tightening in his gut. Turning from north to east to south.

Then he saw a woman on the roof of the last house on the 11th Street end. A woman with long black hair, wearing a pink bathrobe. She was smoking a cigarette.

When she saw him staring, she smiled.

When Shawn first met Marilyn Carter on the roof, he was a virgin. Three weeks later he was not.

She lived in the apartment just below the roof and went down to fetch him a glass of cold water, introduced herself, and just started talking. That day, and on the afternoons that followed. She wasn’t some beautiful kind of movie star. In the real world, who was? She was on the chubby side and her hair was often tangled in a frantic kind of way. But she had a beautiful smile, and good white teeth, and talked very clearly, without an accent. She definitely wasn’t from the neighborhood.

“I grew up in New Jersey, way down, below Atlantic City,” she said one afternoon that first week. “Whatever you do with your life, Shawn, never move to New Jersey.”

He learned that she was a teacher at PS 10, the public school six long blocks away, teaching English. In the mornings now, she taught summer school. One afternoon she asked Shawn the name of the last book he had read, and he told her The Amboy Dukes, by a guy named Shulman.

“Hey, Shawn,” she said with a laugh. “You could do better than that.”

And brought him a copy of The Red Badge of Courage, which he read across three nights on the bottom bunk in his room. A book about a young soldier who was afraid. He wondered if his father had been afraid when he landed at Anzio. He wondered if Uncle Jimmy felt fear, too, but didn’t ask. Uncle Jimmy never talked about his war.

On the evening he returned the book, they talked about the characters and the writing, and what it was like in the Civil War, and then her voice abruptly dropped and her face darkened.

“My husband, Danny, is in the army,” she said softly. “In Japan.” She turned her head and stared at the darkening harbor. “I’m real worried now,” she said. “Korea’s right up the block.”

She turned away from the harbor, looking now at nothing.

“I can’t call him,” she said. “He can’t call me. We write every day, but the letters take forever.… I told him not to go in the army, but no, he knew better. He wanted to go to college, get the GI Bill, get a degree. Like I did. That was a year ago. He—”

She turned to Shawn and smiled in a thin way. “Why am I telling you all this? Don’t worry. I’m okay.” A pause. “I just hope my husband’s okay.”

That evening she invited him down to her place for a cup of tea. They sat facing each other at the kitchen table, and in the muted light he thought she looked beautiful. Her husband watched them from the photographs on the walls. His name was Danny Carter. Blond and handsome in the photographs from civilian life. Looking like a soldier in the photographs from Fort Dix, where he did his basic training. Marilyn saw Shawn stealing looks at the photographs.

“Danny’s such a wonderful man,” she said. “A man with a good heart. A very good heart. My parents wanted me to marry, oh, I don’t know, a doctor, a lawyer, a school principal, at least. They barely talk to me anymore.” She looked again at Danny Carter in his soldier’s uniform. “I can’t imagine him killing anyone.”

She stood up and started into the other rooms, flicking on lights as Shawn followed her. There were paintings and photographs on most walls. One room had two walls packed with books. He had never seen so many books in a person’s house.

“Let me find you another book,” she said.

Two days later, on a Saturday morning, a pair of uniformed soldiers came to her building.

Shawn was in the basement of the grocery store, unpacking cans of Del Monte peaches, when he heard her screaming.

He didn’t see her leave, and didn’t see her, or hear her voice, for five more days. He rang her bell. No reply. He tried the roof door. Locked from the inside. At night, no lights ever burned in her top-floor apartment. As he worked at the grocery store, leaving with deliveries, then returning, he watched her front door. Other tenants came and went. But there was no sign of Marilyn Carter.

On the sixth day, Shawn brought Uncle Jimmy two slices of pizza for dinner, and then went up the roof with his hand weights. He worked out with a kind of fury. Then, his bare hands gripping his knees, facing the sunset, breathless, he heard a door creaking open. When he turned, she was there. She looked forlorn. She gestured for him to come to her.

He did. An hour later, they were in bed. She was his teacher, helping him to do what he had never done before. He entered her wet, gasping warmth, into a kind of grieving heat and closeness he had never known until then. And then she rose to a pitch, gripping him tightly, digging fingers into his flesh, erupting into a deep, aching moan. One prolonged name.

Daaaaaaannnnnyyyy…

After that night, and for a dozen nights afterward, Sean was there with her. She cooked him small meals, even preparing food for him to bring to Uncle Jimmy. She told him about books he must read and gave him copies from her own library. She told him he should never drop out of high school and should try to get into City College, where there was no tuition. She urged him to buy a notebook and when he saw a word he didn’t understand, he should look it up in a dictionary and write it down. “Just writing it down,” she said, “will help you remember it.” She even gave him an extra dictionary. And he started writing down many words from the newspapers. Mortars. Casualties. Shrapnel.

She never mentioned her own future. When he told her the latest jokes he’d heard at the grocery store, she laughed out loud. Sometimes, lying in bed, they watched a movie on her television set, but never looked at the news. She said nothing at all about Danny and how he had been killed in Korea.

Above all, their time was devoted to the joys of the flesh. They pleasured each other in every part of the flat, in darkness or lamplight. In bed. In the bathtub. On hard wooden kitchen chairs and the soft couch and armchair in the living room. On a dark blue exercise mat on the floor beneath the cliffs of books.

Each fleshy embrace ended the same way: with the moaning of her dead husband’s name. Full of regret, longing, desire, and memory.