The Key
"Ya don't have ya key?" Peter pushed open the building door, laughed, and stood back as it closed behind me. "We only have one now and today my wife took it" "Give ya one" He raised a hand and turned, sliding slippered feet across the lobby's tile floor, then up the landing toward his open apartment door. Inside, I could see the beaded curtains on his living room doorway. We celebrated there when he and Monica married, plates overflowing, Soca pumping from a triple stack of Klipsch horns, toasting with paint-removing Chocolate Creme liqueur from his home, Grenada.
In 1999, weeks before moving in, we handed Peter, our new Super, a repair and cleaning list. The day our truck pulled up, we could see the same cracked street-level window askew. I checked the bathtub. He'd used acid on the thick crud and plugged the drain to quicken the process, scarring the enamel down to its rusty iron core. When I told him we'd need tetanus shots after baths, he laughed but said he couldn't re-glaze the tub. Later that year, my parents visited over an Arctic December weekend. Asleep after a long, happy night, we woke to steady rain in the bathroom, the result of broken toilet float upstairs. Through his bolted door. Peter said, "It's tree-o'clock! Come back in de morning, lemme sleep." Unwilling to use the umbrella we stationed outside the bathroom, my father called the fire department, who broke the upstairs unit open and closed the toilet valve. Soon after, our landlord, an affectless Greek guy with a six-syllable last name, lost the job. The new manager installed his own Super. Peter moved to our floor and redoubled his side gig: a handyman truck he ran with a succession of young assistants.
21 years later, in a grey, unpromising March, our city locked-down under a contagious disease order. Doors inches apart, the six units on the first floor became submarines, periscopes rising intermittently, then retracting into squeaky hinges. Sirens Dopplered past and into oblivion. Across the street, the 1932 Sears building, an Art Deco slab, gathered birds and windblown trash. In its fenced parking lot, a testing site opened. A cluster of spotless white tents surrounded by snaking pink cones. Each morning around 5, Humvees and police cruisers arrived with bullhorn voices to secure the perimeter. Beeping tow trucks removed cars whose drivers foolishly ignored the official signage. At night, in and around an open garage next door, elders gathered even on the chilliest spring nights, sitting in a few widely-spaced folding chairs, rising to pour from a sack-covered bottle, drawing down their masks to sip, sometimes roaring with laughter. Peter often joined the crew.
I'd fall asleep to murmuring outside my window and wake up to the pre-dawn testing maneuvers. Sleep left me even before the cars lined up. I made elaborate breakfasts, accompanied by Newark's Jazz radio station, then took our dog for marathon walks. We stood motionless in crosswalks, traffic lights cycling infinitely overhead,watching the white lines bend east to Canarsie. Caked over with fine, urban silt, Flatbush's streets were parched riverbeds, sailed by our Flying Dutchmen: battered Sanitation trucks making shuddering halts, gorging their whining gates and roaring away.
In April, hand-lettered signs appeared on the wall and at the building's front door.
"Monica our dear neighbor has passed and Peter is in the hospital. Please pray for them and BE SAFE". Through a closed door, Lucy, their immediate neighbor, told how she listened at their silent shared wall, calling them repeatedly and knocking on their door until overcome with fear. The firemen pried the door open and found them in bed, paralyzed with sickness. Monica lasted only a few hours, Peter was in isolation and then a rehab facility. While we worried on his condition, I bought a bottle of Hennessy to toast Monica. The fancy box waited inside our front door. Every few days, I walked across the lobby and knocked on Peter's door. That ritual only added to my sadness.
Mid-July, his door hung open, braced by a dusty tool cart. Fifty years ago the whole building was sinking, the floors on the topmost units pulling away from the walls and mouldings. In the basement, a block-wide cross brace was screwed in place, secured to pillars driven into the concrete floor. Each first floor unit's flooring, subject to more moisture and temperature fluctuations, warped over the brace's steel beams. A ball dropped onto the middle of our floor wobbled erratically and rolled all the way to the wall. Now the boss' crew began replacing Peter's floors. Pulling up century old pine boards, splintered and nail-ridden, then replacing, sanding and finishing. After 20 years in the building, I knew any significant rehab jobs were the result of a court case or tenant's voluntary relocation. With Peter, I hoped it was neither.
My wife saw him first, handing off the Henny and our sympathy in his newly-floored kitchen. By the time I made contact, summer and Peter's eyesight had faded. He now showed me pieces of mail to decipher. As I read, he looked off to my right, blinking rapidly, "Yes, yes...",
hand curdling the air. Before I could finish, he reached for the paper, arm scissoring close, then turning, re-folding the sheaf as he strode to my front door. "Thank you." "Peter, I didn't finish. The next.." He waved me off, but had to wait in the dark hallway until I unlocked the door, then moved quickly across the lobby, head down as if counting the tiny floor tiles. Later, I brought his November election ballot to the King's Theater, as holy an errand as I have ever done.Again, at night, he joined the guys by the garage, his popcorn laughter tumbling through our window screen.
Peter's kitchen window and new floor glowed. In the southern exposure: bright dish towels, floral curtains, hanging vines (some plastic) and windowsill succulents. He pulled a fob from a crowded hook, twisted off the key and reached it toward me.
"How'd you get this key? These are expensive" "I didna get it special. It was Monica's." My hand drooped in the space between us. "Peter, I'm gonna cry. I can't take this. You..." He shook the key at me. "Take it, take it, take it. I don't need it." I turned it in my palm remembering how she held the lobby railing and swung her bad leg from the hip for each step. "Thank you so much." "I'm having a mass for her, ya know? "A mass?" "Yah, a mass. A cat-o-lick mass. She was cat-o-lick, ya know. " "Peter, this is your key, if you need it..." He leaned a fist into the door frame, laughing from his belly. "If I getta new wife, ya gotta give it back"