Tara Ison - Rockaway

“Oh. Hello.”

“So, you’re what, on vacation?”

“No, I’m here to paint.” She closes her sketchbook, picks up her sandals, rises; she will have to pass right by him to get to the house. She puts the piece of glass in her pocket, to dispose of properly in Bernadette’s kitchen recycling.

“Oh, hey, you’re an artist?”

“Well,” she says.

“Great. Hey, Marty,” he yells, “we got an artist here!” The man on the wall finally looks over at them, and nods. He swings his sweatsuited legs over to their side, like a concession.

“So, what, you want to go for a walk with us?”

“I was just about to get back to work,” she says, approaching them. “I’m here for painting. I’m getting ready for an exhibition.” Mommy, Daddy, come see, come look! she remembers.

“Oh, come on, take a break. Come for a walk with us. Marty,” the man yells, “come get her to go for a walk with us.”

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“I’m Julius. Bruce’s brother Julius. This is my friend, Marty. We grew up together. Marty still lives here, just a few blocks over. Tell her, Marty.”

Marty points in the direction of a few blocks over.

“Yeah, Marty’s an artist, too. Musician.” Julius tells her the name of a band that sounds slightly familiar, like a group mentioned in a Sounds of the Sixties album commercial. “Big glory days. Ever hear of them?”

“Maybe.”

“So, there, see? Come on, come for a walk with us.” He reaches, puts his hand on her arm, and she is glad to be wearing a long-sleeved blouse. He has skin either an enhanced or natural nut brown, and a ruby red, pouty lower lip.

“I don’t know. .”

Marty strolls over. He takes off his sunglasses, looks at her inscrutably, and nods. Closer up he looks like a pleasant-faced but aging actor in a going-psychotic role.

This is how women’s cut-up bodies wind up washing ashore, she thinks. This is how it starts.

AS THEY WALK along the shoreline, on the damp, toughened strip of sand, Julius tells of his youthful escapades. A buddy once invited him to a concert in New York and he found himself on a helicopter to Woodstock, where, Jimi Hendrix’s manager having not shown up, Julius walked around for the weekend wearing Jimi Hendrix’s manager’s security badge and doing drugs with John Sebastian. Another time he wound up schlepping a suitcase of opium across Europe, and getting busted in Israel. They kept him in jail for six months, finally letting him go the first night of Hanukkah, he thinks, because he’s a Jew. Not much of a Jew, hafta say, Julius says with a laugh. Now, Marty, that’s a Jew, a real Jew. He’s started keeping kosher, the whole bit. Getting conservative on me these days.

Marty bobs his head in good-humored acknowledgment.

“You Jewish?” Julius asks her.

“Yes. But not much of one, either,” she says.

Now Julius is a stockbroker in Manhattan. He still keeps in touch, though; he manages a Cuban musician and twice a month flies to Havana for club dates and banana daiquiris at one of Hemingway’s favorite bars.

“Seventeen dollars for a daiquiri!” he says. “You gotta come sometime.”

“Are you still in music?” she asks Marty.

“I play around a little,” he tells her.

“He still tours,” Julius says. “He’s got a doo-wop group, they do revival, you gotta hear ’em sometime. And he scores movies. They’re filming a big movie over in Brooklyn,” Julius says. “Marty’s on the set every day.”

“That sounds interesting.”

Marty shrugs. “I mostly produce for friends, do some mixing.” He glances at, then away from her. “Whatever.”

They pass one of the decaying old buildings she has wondered about, three stories of smashed windows and graffiti’d brick, a chain-link fence. “What is that, do you know?” she asks. “It’s horrible-looking.”

“Old age home,” says Julius. “Been here forever. They got it shut down, now.”

“It’s like some Dickensian orphanage.”

“Marty, you had someone in there, right? Your uncle?”

“Yeah.” He nods. “Old guy. Died in there when I was a kid.”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah says. “That’s so sad.” She smiles in sympathy, envisions a lonely old man, abandoned by family and friends, lying on a cot, withering away to the unrelenting sound of seagulls and crashing waves, the smell of aging bodies and industrial disinfectant. Marty doesn’t look especially sad, however, or say anything more, and her words sound insipid, hanging there. “So. . are they going to tear it down?”

“No, they’re re-doing it,” he says. “It’ll be a community center or something. Maybe a new school. There’s good stuff coming, here.”

“Yeah, he keeps saying.” Julius nudges her. “This whole place went to hell a while back. Great when we were kids, but the late sixties, the seventies, you know, economy tanked and people got the hell outta here. I been trying for years to get this guy to move to the city. You gotta move to the city, I keep telling him.”

Marty nods good-naturedly.

“He won’t budge. Says it’s all coming back these days. It’s your life, I tell him.”

After another hour of walking, Julius says he’s hungry. It is now late in the afternoon, the sun has sloped, and it’s too late, she thinks regretfully, to paint.

“What’s that place you were talking about around here, Marty? The seafood place?” Julius asks.

“Lundy’s. But that’s in Sheepshead Bay. We go after shooting, sometimes.”

“Let’s go. You like seafood? I’m starving.”

“You know, I’ve never been to Brooklyn,” she says. “I picture it like in movies. Moonstruck. Goodfellas . Woody Allen stuff.” She glances at Marty, to include him.

“I don’t want to eat yet,” says Marty.

“You want to come for dinner?” Julius asks her; she hesitates, unsure whether Marty has merely postponed the dinner, or declined his inclusion entirely.

“I don’t know. . I should still get a few hours’ work done.” There’s spinach left, she thinks, and pasta waiting for her. I might open a can of tuna.

“Tell you what, gimme your number, I’ll call you in an hour.”

“Okay. .” She scribbles on a page of her sketchpad, rips it off, hands it to him. She wonders if Marty will be hungry in an hour.

“What’s this?” Julius asks.

“The phone number.”

“This’s the house number. My brother, he’s married to Rose eighteen years, you think I don’t know Pearl’s telephone number?” Julius takes the scrap from her and passes it to Marty. “Here. You keep that.” Marty shrugs, and puts it in the pocket of his sweatsuit. He nods at her, turns, and strolls away, heading back along the shoreline toward the Rockaway homes. Julius takes out his phone. “Gimme your cell. I’ll program it in mine. See? We can do this now. Look how good this works.”

Julius doesn’t call until seven-thirty, at which point Bernadette and Avery have already taken over the kitchen with some kind of stew, are banging pots, bellowing at and around each other. Julius’s first-person pronouns indicate he’s coming to pick her up alone. She’s hungry, and the yelling in the kitchen is giving her a headache. She decides to go to dinner, but also decides, at least, that she will partly stick to her resolution and not wash her hair. An assertion of indifference.

“Do you know Julius?” she inquires of Avery as he pours out basmati rice from a massive burlap sack he and Bernadette keep in the storeroom off the kitchen.

“Ah, Julius. Yes, he is uncle to Susan, I think. You are going out?” He seems very pleased, relieved almost, that she will not be having her dinner alone.