Morris lives on Rivington Street in a tenement with a depressing exterior—cigarette butts gathered on the front stoop like rain in a gutter and a paint job that had surrendered to the New York weather years ago—but the guts of the building were vibrant and alive, each floor housing a different artist who had knocked down walls and built in showers and archways and new doors, painted and nurtured and constructed, took the space and, like pioneers conquering new territories, carved out comfortable, rent-stabilized homes for themselves. (Sarah Lee was most impressed by the sense of permanence there, that people could do it, they could really stay put somewhere.) The tenants, all skilled carpenters and artists, were perfectly capable of transforming the front of the building, but they wanted to keep the place a secret, maintain the illusion of pregentrification for as long as possible.
“The minute they know you’ve got something good, they want it for themselves,” said Morris. A short, hairy fireball of mysterious ethnic descent (some said Israeli, others Italian), he was obsessively protective of his personal space. He only took visitors from 10:00 to 11:00 AM daily, after his morning coffee, in his kitchen, unless you worked for him, in which case you were only allowed in his workspace—a spare bedroom off the living room he’d converted into a design studio—from 3:00 to 5:00 PM. If you came late to visit, you were not allowed in, and you were asked to leave promptly at 5:00, even if you were in the middle of something. But during his sample sales, he was a glorious host, and he had a reputation as a charming dinner companion and had a beautiful singing voice. He scoffed at the karaoke bars his friends tried to drag him to, but one or two bottles of wine into the evening, on the streets of Manhattan, if you linked arms with him and asked nicely, he would sing you love songs that would bring tears to your eyes. At least this is what Carter had reported to her before he left town. Morris had made Carter cry miserably, thinking of all the loves he had and lost in his thirty-four years, but then he felt free suddenly, and then full of something, love he supposed, and he had kissed Morris on the street.
“Not like that,” said Carter.
“Sure,” said Sarah.
“I’m not that way.”
“Whatever you say, Carter.”
“Sarah, I’ve made love to you a hundred times. You know that I’m a deeply feeling heterosexual man.” He reached out toward her breasts. “Come here, let me feel you.”
She let him feel her.
AT 10:30 AM Sarah buzzes Morris. Even though he kept hours from 10:00 to 11:00 AM, he really didn’t want to see people until 10:30, and even then not till 10:45 AM. Fifteen minutes was just about all he could tolerate in the morning, but if he must, he must. You must, thinks Sarah. I need some money.
On the stairs, past orange walls and up to a skylight that welcomed sun up and down the interior, she finally lands in front of Morris’s door. She knocks, and he opens the door slightly, just a wedge, peeks through, then, grudgingly, allows her in.
She tries not to take it personally. She understands the need for control. She tries to keep her mind at room temperature at all times.
He waves her in, a kiss on the cheek, and then a pinch on the other.
“I saw Carter the other day. He was asking about you. You should return his calls, I think. Don’t be a silly girl.”
Sarah hasn’t been talking to him for weeks. She thinks she’s mad at him, but she’s not sure why. She thinks she might even hate him.
“Anyway, dear, enough of that. I asked you to stop by because I realized”—he says that last word as if he had made some great scientific discovery, a cure for cancer perhaps—“that I hadn’t given you any sort of bonus for the work you did for me this holiday season. So I wanted you to have one of my scarves.” He walks into his studio and returns with three scarves still in their plastic wrapping. “I think you need one of the fringed serapes. These colors—” He splays them on the table in front of her: the first red with orange stripes, the next orange with brown stripes, and the third plum with pink stripes. “These colors will suit you.”
Sarah Lee mentally calculates how much she might be able to get for the serape on eBay. A couple hundred at least.
“I like the plum for you, but you could do orange, too. Orange is such a happy color, and the plum, it might pull you down. It’s up to you.”
Well, it would be the plum, of course. Plum, somber but pretty plum. She moves her hand to the package, pulls it closer to her. But she’s going to sell it anyway. She doesn’t need a new scarf. It was frivolous. No one needs a silk scarf when you can buy a perfectly nice fleece one on St. Mark’s for seven bucks, which is what Sarah had done. There was a time she might have coveted the scarves, but these days she just wanted to eat something beyond those rice and beans. She wanted steak, even if she wasn’t dressed for it.