Christopher Hacker - The Morels

I’m pregnant, she said.

Congratulations, he said, and kissed her again.

I’m a little sensitive to smell right now, she said, so if you keep kissing me I may vomit in your mouth. You’re kind of ripe, if you don’t mind my saying.

He convinced her to be his assistant. He had been teaching himself magic and could use one, and her belly was sure to help loosen people’s grip on their wallets. In exchange, she could share in the profits.

He introduced her to the collective: Koko, Andrew, Winston, Margarita, Annan, and Brigit. They pooled their resources and — she came to find out after getting to know them and inviting them to stay — their affections.

Cynthia had somehow, by being spurned from what she thought she was looking for, ended up stumbling into precisely what she’d been looking for all along.

When Doc happened by, the term on her sublet was expiring. She was forced to spend the better part of a week in a makeshift lean-to over a subway grate. She disliked Doc — he gave her the creeps. He made her feel dirty about her body and her desires. And he was responsible for this beast growing inside her, which was devouring her from the inside out, making her hungry all the time, sleepy all the time, having to pee all the time. She hated him for it and wanted nothing more to do with him. But the cash she had taken from his wallet — which she considered money owed and earned — was gone. She is living on nothing, scraps, reduced to outright panhandling, but people’s hearts have gotten colder with the weather. No bills. The slush of coins at the end of the day is mostly small change. Enough for a meal, not nearly enough for a room.

She doesn’t bother calling, and when she arrives at the carriage house, the main door is open.

She says, If you invite me, you’re inviting them as well. Ticulous has come in with her, but the other six are waiting outside.

Doc welcomes them in. There’s plenty of room, he says.

He calls the lesbian sculptress out of her studio as Cynthia calls in the rest of the troupe, and they go through a round of introductions. The construction workers come out — Mario has been staying here on a more or less permanent basis since his father kicked him out of the house, and his cousins Michaelo and Cheech often spend weekends here so they won’t have to take the subway back to Bay Ridge after catching a show at the Garden — and introduce themselves.

Doc makes their stay contingent upon Cynthia seeing a physician about the baby and agreeing to have it delivered in a hospital and not, as she has been threatening, in the pure waters of the Central Park Boat Basin.

He hands Ticulous and the three other men sledgehammers and crowbars and tells them they are now to answer to his construction crew.

Their first order of business: knock down the one remaining partition in the house — the sculptress’s studio wall. This is now a house without borders between public and private, between art and life. It’s an experiment, one in which more or less all thirteen members of this motley crew are willing if not enthusiastic participants. They are all, in one way or another — and each for his or her own reasons — hedonists. Each enjoys the roam they’ve be allowed in this arrangement, each happy enough to give up privacy for the sake of the general pleasure to be had, happy to surrender daily life to art. That is the idea, anyway, without anyone having to say it. Pleasure and art. Revelry. Even the bathrooms are communal, a set of doorless stalls, one per floor.

The Brooklyn Trio, as they come to be called, is able, with the help of the eight others, to outfit the house with modern fiberglass insulation and a proper hot-water heater just on the heels of the first real cold weather of the season. They freely spend all the cash that they’ve been given, and by the time Doc leads a shaky Cynthia back through the front door with her infant son in her arms and a swirl of snow behind her, they are all officially broke.

They subsist through the winter on communal pots of something called frankfurter stew, a Depression-era recipe handed down from Brigit’s grandmother who, with the pittance given her by her alcoholic gambler of a husband, had to feed an entire brood of siblings and cousins. Ticulous has a connection with a grocer, an admirer of the collective, who sells them dented cans and frozen goods past their expiration date. Often he throws in stuff for free. The loaves they make with the flour occasionally have mealworms, and the canned vegetables need to be cooked extra long in case of botulism, but for the steep discount it is worth it; they eat well.

Meanwhile, Doc retains a proxy to go back to New Jersey and find a buyer for his practice. The man returns some weeks later with a check along with divorce papers from Dolores. He signs them and gives over half of the money from the sale of his practice. The remaining half will go toward the renovation and living expenses, which, with a baby and a house full of freeloaders, require more money than he has.

Cynthia dislikes Doc as much as ever, but Ticulous seems to admire the man. He thinks of him as their patron and leader. When Cynthia bestows on Ticulous the honor of naming her child, he chooses the name Arthur, much to her dismay, in honor of Doc. Doc, however, still thinks Ticulous is a buffoon and takes every opportunity to rile him, which Ticulous, for his part, takes in stride. On any matter on which they disagree, Doc Morel would say, Did they teach you that in clown school?

To which Ticulous would insist, Lecoq! Lecoq! The man is the greatest living performer in the world, and L’École—

Tell it to your pal Bozo. I’m not interested.

And Ticulous would laugh. He thought Doc was kidding and that he enjoyed Ticulous’s company more than he let on.

Baby Arthur is doted on by two-dozen hands. Never was an infant more handled than Baby Arthur. There is no crib, nor is there a need for one: he is never put down; he is always in somebody’s arms. Cynthia breastfeeding him, Doc burping him, Ticulous sweeping him around the room, Koko cradling him while he naps, or any of the others caressing or changing or cooing or cuddling.

He sleeps on the top floor, with Cynthia, Ticulous, and Winston. It is the warmest place in the house. On the rare occasions he is left undisturbed to sleep, it is in an old typesetter’s bath, padded down with blankets. When, after months, he outgrows the makeshift manger in the corner, he begins sleeping in his mother’s bed. One day Annan comes in with a crib he’s found on the street and lugged all the way from Midtown, pleased with his contribution to Baby Arthur’s care and well-being, but Cynthia refuses to even consider it. I’m not putting my son behind bars!

It is, most of the time, unbearably hot on the top floor where they sleep, Arthur curled against his mother’s belly as though he were remembering how he used to sleep. Even in the winter they sleep with the portable fans going — the windows on the top level do not open, and so the fans merely produce a swirl of hot air. They sleep naked, mother and son, under a thin sheet, as do Winston and Ticulous, who have taken up together on a separate mattress.

The coupling and decoupling in ever-rotating pairs was a fact of life in those first years at the carriage house. And however free most felt to share and share alike, there remained something quaint about these fleeting unions, for they were always pairs that were formed — the groups came later — always discreetly consummated, on a mattress at night. There was a time to be a couple, a time for sex, and that time was night. These boundaries were understood. There were the usual jealousies and hurt feelings that came with arrangements like this — but they were feelings quickly healed through new pairings. Those that did not heal left, to be replaced by a new face, a new possible permutation in this evolving community. When a couple was engaged in sex, they were given the benefit of privacy, however illusory. For the fact remained, there were no walls. Most had gotten used to life without them. The lesbian, who came to be known as Emily (though this was not her name), insisted on keeping her area private with a series of sheets draped over clotheslines and took to the toilet and shower in the early morning while her floor mates slept, but by that point she was already halfway out the door.