Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“I left out the front door. I got into Doc’s car, which was idling in his driveway with the lights off. Anybody could have seen us leave, but I didn’t see any lights come on — in either of our houses — as he pulled away, and I watched out the back window. Where were we going?”

Delaware, he says.

What’s in Delaware, I ask.

A bus to New York.

“Like James Bond, this guy! His plan was to ditch the car outside of Wilmington. And once at the bus station, pay some wino to buy us two tickets to the city. Why all the secrecy?”

“People didn’t need to know our whereabouts.”

“I said, ‘I can’t get an abortion in New York,’ and he said, ‘You’re not getting an abortion. You’re keeping this baby.’ ”

It’s the first time he has referred to the thing growing inside of Cynthia as a “baby.” And doing so is like casting a spell. They both can feel it. After he utters the word, it’s no longer something to be gotten rid of, to be dealt with. It’s a life — to make room for, to figure out.

Okay, Cynthia says. But you’re not leaving your wife for me. That’s not what this is — you’re not ending one family just to start another. I’m not going to be your wife. And this is not going to be your son.

Fine, he says. But I’m coming with you, wherever you go.

Fine, she says. You can be a Superstar, too.

THEY ARRIVE AT PORT AUTHORITYa little after six in the morning on Tuesday, May 31. They find a motel room on Forty-Ninth Street and Tenth Avenue. The rates are designed for use by the hour, more time than most customers seem to require, from all the coming and going. They sleep in a windowless room that smells like a urinal and bad breath. The bed is narrow and surprisingly clean for what this place is — the sheets bleach white and fresh. They sleep next to each other but do not touch.

When they wake, it’s night. The place has suddenly become very active.

They go out to a nearby diner. We need a plan, he says, and outlines his idea for how to proceed. The day before they left, he withdrew half the family savings — he slides the cashier’s check across the counter to her now. And I have enough cash in my wallet for us to get by for a couple of weeks without making use of this, he says.

Will he start up a practice here in the city?

No, he is through with that life. It’s time for something new. He wants to make something, to use his hands, tools on a large scale — use picks and drills that aren’t all designed to fit in a person’s mouth. He has heard of a man who went into business for himself restoring rundown properties and then reselling them at enormous profit. He can buy a place with the money, and they can live in it while he fixes it up — then they could sell it, which would net them enough for another place and enough left over to live on while they fix the new one up. And so on. It would be a self-sustaining way of life. There is something graceful about its logic — from the micro to the macro — restoring cavities in the face of a block. He’ll learn as he goes. He already knows quite a bit from being a homeowner — it’s surprising what you pick up intuitively about structural engineering from managing your own home repairs. And when the baby is born, he — or she — will have a roof over his head. Cynthia meanwhile can do whatever she wants — sing, dance, act — anything her little heart desires.

See, she says, I knew this is what you would do.

Do what?

You’re making a family. You are not my husband. And you are not going to be a father.

Honey, in seven months I am, like it or not. Fine. So let’s hear your plan.

You do what you want. My plan is simple and hasn’t changed since tenth grade.

Do you even know where this place is? (She doesn’t.)

And what do you imagine will happen once you get there? He waves his fairy magic wand — presto, you’re a superstar! You still don’t have a place to live. (She’ll figure something out.)

You’re still going to need to eat. (She’ll manage.)

They walk along Forty-Second Street, among a rough crowd of transients and prostitutes. They lug their belongings with them because they don’t trust them in the motel. Cynthia insists on stopping every vagrant with a cup of change to ask where she can find Andy Warhol’s factory. She has heard somewhere that Ultra Violet and Candy Darling — and most of the other superstars — were, at the time of their discovery, bohemian eccentrics with no fixed address .

Why don’t you just look it up in a phone book?

Don’t be stupid — he’s not going to put his phone number and address out there for just any person to see. The place is underground , man! (In fact, she has no idea whether or not it would be listed in the phone book. Thinking about it now, she imagines that it probably was.)

One man Cynthia asks leads them to a place several blocks away. The Factory? Sure, I know it, he says. But it turns out to be a jazz club called the Factory. Inside, it reeks of sweat and furniture polish. The three of them slide into a booth and listen — Cynthia enthralled, Doc skeptical — to the man’s life story over the cacophonous quintet of musicians onstage.

When the man gets up to go to the bathroom, Doc says, He’s just milking us for free whiskey.

Cynthia looks at him blankly. So? He’s broke. What else is he going to do?

They stay until the place closes at two and then wander, drunk, back to their motel, which, when they arrive, is being raided by the police. An officer at the entry tells them to move along, and they happily comply.

They book a room at the motel next door, which isn’t being raided. (“A stupid, stupid thing to do,” Doc said. “It was just dumb luck the cops didn’t — when they were done with the one place — move on and raid this place, too. I would have been toast. Cynthia would have gotten what she asked for — cops find a forty-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl in a motel room? They would have driven Cynthia back and locked me up and thrown away the key.”)

This place isn’t as well maintained. The carpet is stained; the sheets are not clean; a haze of cigarette smoke hangs in the air from the previous occupant, who seems to have vacated only minutes before their arrival — the cigarette butt stubbed out on the windowsill is still damp with saliva.

They sleep in their clothes, on top of the covers.

The sounds of a violent argument shake the walls. Stomping, screaming (a woman), bellowing (a man), splintering furniture (a bed?), glass shattering (a mirror? an ashtray?), outside the wail of sirens. When he wakes that morning, Cynthia — as well as all the cash in his wallet — is gone.

He waits in the hotel for three whole days, not daring to leave lest she return and not find him there. But she does not return.

He walks the Forty-Second Street corridor, from river to river, but she does not turn up. He begins to recognize the faces of the permanent vagrants, to learn names. Popcorn Jack. The Cardboard Preacher. Josephina Billingham III. Haunted faces, faces worn hard by vices, by insanity. Scars, open sores, hard callous feet.

When he reads a couple of days later that Andy Warhol has been shot by a woman, he thinks, My God, Cynthia — what have you done? He starts at every police siren, sure they are looking for him, sure he will be arrested as her unwitting accomplice. It turns out, though, not to have been Cynthia but rather a radical feminist by the name of Valerie Solanas, who had been in one of his movies. According to the papers, there had been some dispute about a screenplay.

He goes to the Factory, which turns out to be in a building down in Union Square, but he is stopped by a drag queen on his way off the elevator.