The Perfume Burned His Eyes. Michael Imperioli

      six

      I sat on the edge of my bed in apartment 6K. It was around dinnertime and still lots of daylight left. I could hear footsteps on the ceiling above me, voices and shouts from the sidewalk and the building across the way, helicopters chopping the sky, ambulances and police cars wailing through the street, and maybe worst of all the incessant elevator lurching through its shaft.

      How could I possibly live this way? How would I find any peace? I couldn’t believe how much I could hear. I thought I was used to lots of noise. Jackson Heights wasn’t exactly Hicksville. It was a pretty busy place and we lived close to the main drag, but there was no comparison to East 52nd Street. I wanted to tell my mother that this couldn’t work, that it was too much for me to handle and I needed to go back to Queens.

      I held my tongue and we went out for dinner. We walked to the Wellington Restaurant (a diner in actuality) a few blocks away. My mother told me that I would have an interview the next morning at what she hoped would be my new school. She said it was a private school which I took to mean a religious school. This was bad news. I was not happy at the thought of Catholic nuns and priests running my life.

      But I said nothing. I kept to my strict policy of not asking questions about what was happening in our lives. The only thing I asked about was the soup of the day.

      It was lentil. I ordered it and it was very good. They gave us loads of free breadsticks, little packs of crackers in cellophane, and foil-wrapped pats of butter. It seemed like an extraordinary amount of food to give away. We barely made a dent in the pile even though I gorged on it before, during, and after my soup. The waiter even gave us a paper bag and insisted we take the remainder home. Besides the doormen, he was the first friend we made in the city.

      When we first walked into the diner I thought he’d be mean. Busing a table with great speed, he was curt and gruff when we entered.

      “Two?” he said, and jerked his head toward a small table in the corner near the bathrooms.

      My mother asked if we could have a booth.

      He stopped his work, looked up at us, and scratched his shoulder. “Anywhere you like.” He smiled wide and made a grand, sweeping horizontal arc with his arm. The smile revealed a big gold incisor below his bushy black mustache. The tooth so big it reflected light off the overheard fluorescent, and beamed a thin blue ray right between my eyes.

      He wasn’t nasty at all, just busy. In time I realized that was how most of the city’s people were. They seemed cold and unkind on the surface but it was simply the armor necessary to live tightly among millions. Beneath the shell you could usually find the goodness.

      Right after we ordered our meals, I spotted the guy with the Iron Cross in his head. He was sitting in a booth next to a woman with long jet-black hair. She sat between him and the plate-glass window nibbling on a muffin and sipping tea. He was pressed tight against her.

      He wore the exact same getup as before: black leather jacket, T-shirt, pants, and the big black sunglasses. She wore a matching pair. He had a full plate of food in front of him: a cheese omelet with bacon, fries, and well-done toast.

      He didn’t touch it at all.

      Not a bite.

      He wasn’t even holding a fork. He just sat with his head erect looking straight ahead. The large glass of OJ next to his plate was full to the brim. He didn’t take so much as a sip. The only time he moved was when he reached for his woman’s hand. He intertwined his fingers with hers and had her hand in his lap for the remainder of the time we were there. Resting on his knee, their hands caressed each other, twisting and turning on each other, both restless and gentle. It was tender and sweet. I couldn’t take my eyes off them and I didn’t know why. He was certainly strange-looking and weird-acting but the way the two of them were together in the booth made me feel good. Maybe it was because they were obviously so very much in love.

      When we got back to our new home I felt much better about the place. I think it was a combination of the gold-tooth waiter’s hospitality and the blond guy holding his girl’s hand so affectionately that calmed me down.

      I sat on my brand-new bed. My mother had bought new furniture for the apartment and trashed all of our old stuff except for two end tables that once belonged to my great-grandmother. Legend has it that she brought them from Poland.

      I could hear a man shouting in the street: “Back it up!! . . . Keep her coming! . . . Keep her coming!!!”

      The shouts didn’t bother me at all. I put my head on the pillow. The elevator was moving less frequently but there was still a lot of noise coming from the street: trucks, cars, buses, sirens, voices . . . None of it disturbed me that night.

      All the sounds blended into one big hum of white noise like a steady wind or a patient tide.

      I passed out cold till morning.