“You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day’s wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.” —George Bernard Shaw
Robert, the long-faced chain-smoking shopkeeper, made his start as a restaurateur in SoHo the year President Reagan was re-elected for a second term. His restaurant was a dreamy nook full of odd trinkets, tchotchkes, and paintings of nude men mounted in the way of old French salons that gave one the impression of a slightly tilted room. When the disease took Arturo, Robert’s partner of eleven years, he fell under a terrible spell and was forced to close down his restaurant, selling most but not all of his collectibles from centuries past. Robert kept a few of his favorite things: a vanity mirror from Paris; a stained-glass triptych from a Florence monastery; his infamous collection of Indonesian dolls; some paintings worth a pretty penny, and last, but certainly not least, the framed photograph of “the David” that Arturo took on their last trip to Italy.
Robert spent many nights in the quiet dark of his apartment looking at David: severe architectural muscles, the living ribcage, his godly head of wreath-like curls, and that queer expression on his face Robert couldn’t quite put his finger on. The sort of expression one makes when they notice something glimmering in the distance, like a mirage. To Robert, David’s face carried an air of cosmic irony.
And every night, like clockwork, his mother Sue called, demanding where he was and who he was with: “Robbie, are you on dope?” Sue would ask, and Robert always replied, half-jokingly, “I wish,” popping another one of Arturo’s expired oxycodone.
Like her son, Sue was both a hoarder and a collector of miscellaneous things. She spent most of her days scouring the Home Shopping Network for clearance sales while bargaining for cheap China sets over the phone. Robert avoided visiting her in the Garden City house as much as possible. The smell bothered him—that mildewy stench mixed with frankincense—but it was the plaque from Matthew 3:17 in the front hall that accosted him every time he walked into his father’s house:
This is My Son, whom I love; with Him, I am well pleased.
For years after Arturo’s death, Robert lived as a recluse, conspiring with David in the dark. David understood what it felt like to be modeled after his maker and his maker’s desires, only to become something far greater, lonelier, the romantic genius always looking over the precipice.
On New Year’s Eve in 1995, after his second botched suicide attempt, Robert had an epiphany. He was going to leave New York and move to the countryside, where he would open a café and antique store. He would bring everything with him from the city, especially David. Together they would create a singular experience for their customers. An experience David felt would have the power to transform anyone curious enough to enter their shop.
When Sue passed that spring, Robert used his inheritance to purchase and renovate an old barn in the quaint farming town of Housatonic. He installed rafter beams across the slanted ceiling to display his largest antiques from the region, a twin set of ten-foot-long Mohican canoes he’d won at an auction in Great Barrington. Bookshelves, tables, chairs, glasses, and strange figurines adorned Robert’s collection. Paintings and prints were stacked in every corner. Outside, he built a sculpture garden with tables scattered around. It was charming and motley, an assorted display of scrap metal giants and Greco-Roman busts swallowed in moss. On the barn door hung a row of gilded mirrors, and when the sun was out, the garden would look as if a ball of light had dropped from the sky, bleaching the statues bone-white. In the center was an old wood-burning stove that Robert fed year-round. The smoke masked the smell of cigarettes he habitually smoked through his teeth, like he was sucking on a piece of candy.
Besides Robert, the shop had one elderly waitress named Rebekah. She has been around long before the curiosity shop when the land surrounding the Housatonic River was covered with trees, and the forest floor was as luscious and as red as molasses. Years ago, she appeared to Robert while he was working in the sculpture garden. Rebekah, who had been long in the business of amending treaties, struck a bargain with the shopkeeper. The same deal she’d made with the farmer and the farmer’s grandfather who built the barn. A covenant between them and the land, which would forever flourish and produce from the river of tears soaking the earth. Land that demanded sacrifice.
* * *
On the day I wandered into the curiosity shop, at least thirty minutes went by before Rebekah visited my table. I spent that time admiring the artful chaos and considered buying an oil painting when I noticed, almost every ten minutes or so, an alarm bell trilling in the distance.
“Excuse me, Ma’am?” If not for her jingling bracelets, I would never have noticed Rebekah breezing by. For a woman who looked as if she could expire at any moment, it was surprising how light she moved on her feet. “What’s that bell I hear ringing every few minutes?”
Rebekah froze in place, splashing tea on the floor as she abruptly turned around. Her moon eyes bore into mine, sending a tingling down my spine. The waitress’s face was soft yet stern, her expression was sphinx-like as she looked me up and down.
“Someone’s been peeking in the bathroom again,” Rebekah said, clicking her tongue. Before I could muster up an appropriate response, she filled my cup with lukewarm tea and disappeared.
Curious and somewhat startled, I headed straight for the bathroom. The room was roughly the size of a broom closet, and hanging there, on the peeling walls, was a framed photo of Michelangelo’s “the David.” Covering David’s pubic area was an old French letter box dyed with patina and the printed letters PRIVÉ. Beside the letterbox was an iron key dangling from a string. My hands trembled with anticipation as I pressed the key into the lock and slowly pried the box door open.
There were David’s creamy muscular thighs looking larger than life and dangling there, just below his pelvis, was a wooden fig leaf. I lifted the fig and found myself face to face with David’s penis, as tiny as a thimble. I heard the familiar trill in the distance. A childlike giddiness spasmed inside my body. I now understood the “peeking” joke. I threw back my head, laughing from the pit of my stomach. What a garish and funny place I had wandered into!
When the bell rang again, I could no longer move. I had shrunk, too, my line of sight level with the peeling yellow wallpaper marked by a broken radiator on the ground. It was Rebekah who found me minutes or hours later—time was somewhat slippery—and put me on the windowsill near the front of the shop.
“Robert will come by soon to assess your value, which may change depending on how long you stay here. You’re lucky, you know, that you’re a pretty thing. Some folks get turned into fishing rods or wooden dolls. And the spiders make their nests all over them. That guy,” Rebekah said, pointing to a shrunken head in a jar with its eyes and mouth stitched shut. “He tried to steal from Robert way back when, but the boss is very keen. He made a deal with the spirits of this land, and they don’t suffer trespassers.” With that strange and secretive smile, Rebekah turned, jingling away.
When I caught my reflection across the room, I was stunned. I had turned into a lamp, old but newly wired with a baroque hourglass body and an ivory lampshade dripping with fringe. My first and last memory was of my mother, of her slender hands, cutting my hair under the yellow glow of the Tiffany lamp on her bedside table. She used to laugh and say that I should’ve been born a girl because my hair kept growing back like ivy, curling past my shoulders. Did mother see me as I saw myself now? I was beautiful.
* * *
I enjoy the sunlight, the living dust, the volley of local gossip exchanged over tea and scones. When I am noticed, and someone carefully runs their fingers through my fringe, I have these incredible orgasms and shiver with delight. At night, Robert will sometimes sit by me and ask in his dreamy, quiet way if he can borrow my light. “Yes, but only if you tell me a story,” I say. Robert tells me about Arturo and all the beautiful men in his life who died in unimaginable ways: “I have something of theirs. All sixty-two of them. Shirts, photographs, records, paintings, poems, rosaries. I’ve heard people call my friends the ‘lost generation,’ but as long as I have a piece of them, they’re not really lost. Only a different shape.” As he speaks, my light draws out shadow figures that dance little stories of their own.
Meanwhile, in the sculpture garden, Rebekah stands over the fire, chanting for the dead.