nonfic by kate clymer

Beekman Street

I don’t believe in God, but I’ve been visited by an Angel. I wasn’t in a car crash and no one I knew was in the hospital, at least not this most recent time. I was just walking, during the day, to nowhere in particular, when I saw a man in the distance take a picture. Picture-taking people are not a rare find in lower Manhattan. The light can be good, the buildings can be beautiful, the people can look very New York, going to work on Wall Street or a stylish young person looking angry and aloof. I wasn’t working on Wall Street and I am not young. Angry and aloof—check, check. I walked by not thinking much until he stopped me. 

- It’s a beautiful picture of you. 

He says in a slightly undeterminable, foreign, forced accent, holding up his phone, showing me the picture.

It looks like me or maybe a happier version of myself than I thought would be randomly walking down Beekman Street on a hot summer afternoon. It’s startling to see yourself on a 2x5 inch screen, held up four inches from your face, by a perfectly nice, but otherwise unknown person. A true candid picture captures something that a mirror cannot—the buzz of the life deep inside you—the real face behind the public facade that your family, friends, coworkers, people on the subway—view. I didn’t look wild animal large, like a chipmunk that turns bear-size in a house, I looked small, almost comforted, by the buildings, the cars, the general chaos behind me. Home.

I am not exactly the picture of downtown street style, not anymore. I am over twenty-five, currently wearing black, leather flip-flops that are half falling apart, and purchased during the Obama years. Was the zipper on my skirt the entire way up? It was never entirely clear. I wasn’t a 90’s actress hiding from the paparazzi due to years of hard living gone bad, either. I did long for the days of leaving Grand Central to be lured at by the finance guys walking to their Midtown hedge fund/investment house/cubicle—on my bad days/weeks/years of self-loathing. I get it now, but those pre-#Metoo years where fresh meat for my low self-esteem. Did men talk to me on the subway anymore or hand me their business card? I will stop at “hand me their business card” to show exactly how ancient this history is—it was Paris-Hilton-wearing-Juicy-tracksuits years ago.   

 - Do you want the picture? 

I still can’t place the accent.    

 - No, thank you. 

I walk away—he was obviously a scam artist waiting to spam my email or phone, and since I don’t exactly have anyone else lighting up my phone—no, thank you. I continued walking my morning loop, weaving through narrow downtown streets, toward Midtown and back. I spy him again, getting lost in the crowd of tourists and street vendors.

It has been a long time since my last candid picture turned up. A photographer at college graduation caught me full-mouth-open as I looked up to try to find the person screaming my name as I was handed my diploma. It appeared in my college yearbook. On the scale of useless memorabilia and yearbooks—college yearbooks are the lowest rung. You could count every fucking tooth in my mouth from that picture. I always thought the weeks of sunless tanning—in a tanning bed—really was the secret sauce to that picture. I wasn’t sunless-tanning-bed-tan in my downtown street style picture, just old person tan—you know, the kind of tan that comes from years of your skin just being worn down by life, and regardless of the application of SPF 100 you tan because your skin just says fuck it, we might not have many years left to soak up this sun, and rejects the SPF. I have heard of bodies rejecting birth control but never sunscreen. I still think it’s possible.

The open mouth graduation candid was completed by a newspaper article. I was stopped by a local reporter while searching for my family. My mother was about to hand me fake flowers because real ones die, and she wanted me to have the fake ones forever. I think I actually still have them. I will die before these stupid fake graduation flowers disintegrate into the ground. A reporter approached me and asked me questions - What’s Next?  I don’t remember my response, but I was in my save-the-world phase and there was a theme of getting every person in the US to register to vote. A very soon-to-be-someone-who-paid-way-too-much-for-a-graduate-degree answer. Or was it totally predictive of the shitshow our political system would become, and ironically, extremely important? I wish I was smart enough to foresee the political future and someone reading my college newspaper interview would credit me with understanding the importance of the American voting system. That definitely was not on the horizon at the end of the Clinton Administration or the general trajectory of my life. I am a long way from registering every American to vote.

The only bit of life buzzing in my college candid picture was my love of dark lipstick, ribbed turtlenecks, and my 90’s-short hair. The sweet, anonymous, clueless 90’s—filled with so much hope that everything was going to work out—you could still breeze through airport security, the economy was good, I had job offers I was turning down, I looked good in shorts. 

Back at my loft I don’t think about the picture, the random guy with a foreign accent, my left flip flop that is falling apart, or the fact that shorts are now absent from my life. To stay cool, I take a nap because it's too hot to move. My AC has been broken and I have not fixed it. I hate AC, but now I need it.  It also sums up my life in eight words or less. I sleep.

My phone buzzes me awake even though I didn’t set an alarm.  I look at the chain of text messages: 

- What were you wearing yesterday? 

I slept through the late afternoon to the next morning—depression is a bitch on time management.  

- What on earth is going on? I finally respond.

- Is this you? Look at #3 on @InstaNYC

I had come to live in this apartment during the second half of covid, when people were dumping property and I wanted to jump out of my skin. Downtown was empty and felt like a deserted island and I wanted to feel that way too, but it was more a deserted island within a deserted island—which fit me and my state of mind well. I really wanted to feel it and I did.  I bought it soon after the person that I was living with at the time told me they would rather not anymore. I had thought it, I mean we looked at each other in those first weeks of covid and we both thought it, but they said it—I guess they won. There is a big difference between thinking it and saying it. It was a bridge I wasn’t ready to cross—I guess they were ready to cross it. I felt more like I was hanging from it, wanting to disappear, leaving by just melting into the floor of our shared, miserable home. 

Maybe it was the gloomy, April weather, the constant fear of death from a virus where little was known, or the fact that my decades-long relationship was evaporating before my eyes, I began to look different—like life-sucked-out-of-me different. It’s surprisingly easy to avoid looking in mirrors, thankfully work never expected us to be on camera, and I just started to fade—the outside matching the inside. Lack of actual sun hitting my skin, any physical contact with a human being, even the one I was living with, took its toll. No amount of Sephora products could bring the “glow” back. In fact, they only seemed to make it worse and added breakouts to the list of insults. Middle age is a kick in the teeth sometimes. You learn a lot; you look like shit.

Downtown became an opportunity to explore something new, so I packed up the little valuables that I had, a couple of paintings, books, clothes, my computer, and made my way to a bare-bones loft that I looked at and thought, like me, it had a lot of potential and needed someone with vision—which wasn’t me. When a relator tells you something needs vision, what they are actually saying is it needs: an unlimited bank account, a contractor with skills and a level of patience for buildings that date back to the late 1800s, and someone without a mood disorder. I failed on all accounts.

When you spend a lot of years of your life with a person, you have surprising little of your own. It all becomes common goods, and I didn’t feel like fighting for it. I didn’t want to sort through our CD-collection-years-long relationship. I grew to hate every piece of furniture. In the world of moving in NYC, furniture is a liability. Sell it, burn it, get rid of it. The curbsides of broken couches tell the story of moving couples that broke up before, during and after they moved into a new apartment together. I packed my life into suitcases and boxes and FedEx’d my old life to my new downtown apartment.    

 - Are you are mailing your suitcases and boxes to yourself? 40 blocks? 

The look, even though we were both in a mask and six feet apart, was clear. 

-Yes, and yes.

-No one has done this before?

-No. . .

-FedEx are the only movers I could find working during covid.

-FedEx is not a moving company.

-I think it is and you just don’t realize it. Next day, please.

I set my credit card on the counter. He grabs it giving up hope of winning this argument. 

I paid $1,000 to have two paintings packed and shipped three miles. They were the only thing of value that I owned. One Girl with a Pearl Earring-ish, if the Girl with a Pearl Earring was a non-Japanese/Japanese Geisha wearing a flowered hat, robe, and white makeup. Costumed Girl, I called her, she was young and beautiful in her happy-sadness. I didn’t view it as sex-trade-ish-y, but one could. She had the most piercing blue eyes and hung in the bedroom of my old apartment. It was the first real piece that I had ever purchased, and it made me feel important. I had seen it in an art gallery in a small town upstate, then called the next day to purchase it when I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  It was years ago, when life was different, not yet broken. We were still living together. The happy, public facade still standing. I bought it right after Christmas as a gift for myself, it was likely the only gift I liked that year.

The second painting was by the same artist. I had started to follow her on Instagram and noticed she did a series of women underwater. I bought it soon after the day I realized I had to move out, that things were really over, the day that we looked at each other and felt like two strangers in our own home. The Woman Underwater could be coming up for air or maybe going under and staying there—it’s hard to tell. Her lips are bright red and her dark brown hair waved in the blue-green water, arms by her side, eyes closed, the water—still. It felt venerable and powerful. She knew what she was doing, even if it wasn’t obvious to the outside world.  It hung next to my fireplace.  I wanted to stare at it, especially when everything—the world, life—felt like it was falling apart, that I was the one drowning. 

I flipped back to @InstaNYC and there was my smiling, anonymous face, looking back at me. Caption: Unknown woman, Beekman Street. My obituary had finally written itself—was my first depressingly, accurate thought. 

When I got married, I didn’t want to have my picture in the newspaper. The Wedding Announcements was a Sunday treat in the thick paper we would all fight over when my father brought it home with the donuts. My father would point out just the ugly brides. I wasn’t an ugly bride. I didn’t want to be in the paper because I knew on my wedding day that I would get divorced. I succeeded. I don’t think it’s how most people approach marriage—maybe it was just my way of not disappointing myself, predetermining my own failure and planning ahead for it. I was good like that. The oldest, darkest, deepest form of self-sabotage. Then again, I was the one with the father who spotted the ugly brides, so my self-esteem never really had a fighting chance. On the surface, I wanted to be the Costumed Girl, wishing for happily ever after, and I was her until I wasn’t. It’s easier to look happy, or so I thought.

Both of my grandmothers attended my wedding, neither of them would live much longer thereafter. In the grand scheme of things, they died young, but then again, they lived a lot of life.  My father’s mother was my favorite—there is always a favorite grandmother. She was a ball of fire and would be your best friend, the one you would call when your parents yelled at you. She would listen to you talk for hours.  I could almost hear her pulling the black, rotary-original, Bell telephone around her first floor, sitting on her front stoop, the screen door open, as she told me - listen to your father! She lived in her little evergreen house her entire life—birth to death, the wallpaper yellowed from years of cigarette smoke, never went to college, never drove a car. Her permed, brown hair was never dyed. She was the wisest, strongest person I have ever known. We shared a name, but not really. She was Leigh, I am Lee.

I asked my mother if I was named after her and the response was - we liked the name.  This incomplete answer was an example of why, as an adult, my anxiety and need for certainty was constantly running like a hamster on crack inside my head. I never told my grandmother, but I always said that I was named after her—regardless of my mother’s half-answer. I was jealous of her preferred spelling—I was often mistaken for a boy. After my name was called on the first day of school, the next remark out of the teacher’s mouth was typically - Oh, you’re a girl, that’s different! Or the one I liked to think scarred me the most - Are you sure that’s you, honey? Adults don’t realize how much they suck sometimes. In those final days after my wedding, she was always sick, barely weighted 100 pounds and still secretly smoked. The last time she was in the hospital, I called a local flower shop nearby to have flowers delivered. I dictated the card - Get well soon Grandma! Love you! to the woman on the phone. 

-What’s the full name on the credit card, honey?

-Lee Carrick. C-a-r-r-i-c-k, and Lee is L-E-E.

I stated and began running off the account number. 

-Was your grandfather’s name Charles? Charles Carrick? From Choate Street?

My grandfather had died before I was born, before my parents married or met. I had no idea what street my grandfather grew up on, but Choate sounded like something that I had heard before. I never changed my name when I got married and I had never known another Carrick, the only two in the phonebook in our area where my father and my grandmother.

- Who are you?

I felt like I had suddenly said Beetlejuice three times.

- I knew your grandfather, I was his neighbor, I grew up next door.

Panic flashed over me. How old was this woman and why was she still working? 

My grandmother was a first-generation American and grew up hard. She saw things, believed things, and lived things that she never spoke about. She had lost her daughter and then her husband in a quick twelve-month succession and mourned them every day for the rest of her life. She never spoke of them. The calls to my grandmother as I got older were rare, but I called to see if she received the flowers.

- They are just lovely!

Her old lady, sing-song voice said with a slight NY accent that I can still hear when I close my eyes and imagine her. I told her the story of the woman at the flower shop and the line fell silent.  

- He is coming for me. She spoke in a haunted clear voice.

I had never thought much about what a visit from an Angel would look or sound like, but I quickly realized I was telling my grandmother goodbye. I told her I loved her, something I never said to her in my adult life. She was right, he, my grandfather, was meeting her and he brought her flowers, and she left this earth soon after that phone call and went to him forever. I cried when I hung up the phone—it was the last time I spoke to her. 

It’s easy to lean on movie cliches of a life interrupted and a redirection down a predetermined path to make life easier to swallow. I wanted to believe that too. My mother bought me a used set of Encyclopedia Britannica from a garage sale across the street when I was in first grade. I remember my parents fighting over them, where they would go in our small, cramped duplex. When it was finally settled that they would live on my bookshelf. The Yearbook series ended before 1963 and the last President in the “P” edition was John F. Kennedy. I loved them. I poured over them, carried one with me for months on end. I wanted to read my story rather than the often shocking torture of living it. Feeling the pain of the many small adjustments, during the course of one day, that forever change our future over time. We become numb and life moves along, often with our thousands of decisions unnoticeable. Every life comes to an end, when you know that it's going in that direction, in those final moments, is it a luxury to know that the life you have lived is completed? My grandmother died on my father’s 50th birthday, in her little, green house. It gives me hope that even when something seems so destined, it's still random. Fate’s unromantic counterpart can be so cruel. 

- OMG! It is you! You made @InstaNYC! You are famous. 

The shriek from the text was almost audible.

- You look fantastic! What a great picture. I wonder what filters he uses?

I ignore the insult. 

- I think you need a name to be famous.

Unknown woman, Beekman Street made me feel strangely exposed—visibly-invisible. Most of the time I want to go unnoticed, just hoping to make it back to my hot box without getting pulled into a dark alley or tripping and breaking an ankle. Feet, legs, ankles are the most valuable body parts when living in the city. Especially now that everything is half-open or has weird hours, your legs are survival. A definite destination is usually unnecessary, just seeing people, watching the city come back to life in the morning, regardless of how dark it gets, the city always restarts.  The sound of the metal doors being lifted from the storefronts, hose water hitting the steaming pavement, cleaning off the night before. There is life in this deserted city, if you look for it. 

After a picture-free evening walk, I return to my loft, social media doom-scroll until I get tired of it, or begin to fear what the bars on the Screen Time app will show me. I don’t look up people I know only to obsess over their lives, the pictures of happy couples, children, families, even the perfect dog living its best life, at least not anymore. I write, I tweet, I angry tweet, I write some more, erase everything that I have written and stare at the wall and then I buy stupid shit on Amazon. I surround myself with fellow doom-scrollers and feel community. We focus mostly on celebrities because they have the most unrealistic lives, giving the richest conversation and therefore are easiest to pick apart and of course the random girl from high school that still annoys the living shit out of us. We are not bigger people; we are older people. 

I save pictures that I like, save, save, save. Screenshot, when I really want to save something. After a while even an algorithm is smart enough to filter out the shit that triggers depression; could social media be saving me? The gallery I purchased the Underwater Woman pops up with a new artist—the picture is striking. A Mona Lisa smile, blue, blue, blue—her blue piercing eyes, her chin resting in her hand with a face full of color and light and blue-hued dark soft hair, fallen and framing her face. My mouth is hanging slightly open—I want it. I message them immediate.

- Is this available for purchase? 

Time is a weird thing during covid—it no longer matters. I get an immediate – yes at 12:34 am. I don’t even ask the price. 

- Can you ship?

- Yes.

- Send me the total cost and your Venmo id - My shipping address is Lee Carrick, 39 Beekman Street, Apt 4, NY, NY. The Yay! This-is-exciting response comes 24 hours later with tracking information.

I have lived in my building for a year, but don’t know anyone except for Tom who lives upstairs. An Australian, he has been trapped here since covid started and was a commodities trader on Wall Street and a decade younger than me, at least I assume so. I have never actually asked his age and trading ages you quicker than war, he may actually be younger than I think—I try not to think about it. Commodities traders are making buckets of cash trading in their bedrooms right now, but Tom is regularly high on anything he can get delivered, judging from the fumes coming from the 5th floor—living off past cash, a steady stream of some dating apps’ entire spectrum of gender, and likely a trust fund. He is charming; trust fund kids are always fucking charming. It’s in their DNA, with cash gets passed along the charm that got them there in the first place. 

I would want to go home, too. I am home and often don’t even want to be here. We have become two, sad, six-feet-distant, kindred spirits in a nearly empty apartment building, in a nearly empty neighborhood. He appears more productive in his sadness than I am in mine.  

When my painting arrives later that week, the buzzer rings and I ask the driver to leave it at the door.

- It's big and heavy. Do you want us to bring it up?

- Leave it. I will get it. 

This, of course, is the wrong answer, and pride is nothing but a bitch. Living in an old loft building means I am generally terrified of the elevator, regularly take the stairs, and living on the 4th floor has given me an amazing cardiovascular system and an ass of someone twenty-years younger. I wait until they leave—the serial killers on Netflix come from true stories that have to start somewhere. I will get it myself. I run down the stairs in the black, broken flip-flops and open the heavy front door to see the package is nearly my height. It looked smaller from my 4th floor window perch. The Jesus I let out is audible to an unknown man walking a white Frenchie on the street with a red collar. I smile and shrug.

- Bigger than expected!

Damn it. 

I manage to slide it through the door and realize that someone is holding the weight of the door behind me—Tom. 

- Do you need help?

He is carrying his coffee in a brown bag. NYC’s dedication to coffee in a brown bag even during a pandemic is really sweet. Straws are paper and so are the bags for a small coffee.  He sets the bag down. 

- What is this?

- It’s a painting I bought.

- Another one? Are you like an art collector or something? 

The Australian accent gets him away with a lot of things, namely, how on earth does he knows that this is another one.

- Tom, are you spying into my apartment?

He laughs with his adorable Aussie laugh. 

- Ok, I may have followed you up the stairs a time or two and seen your door open—is that a crime in the US?

- Creepy, stalker-like, but you have not committed a crime yet. I will let you know when you hit a felony.

- Fair enough—do you want help or no?

- Fine.

 It takes the two of us to carry and turn up the four, narrow flights of stairs.

- Why didn’t we take the elevator? Tom asks between floor two and three, catching his breath.

- Well, it’s fucking terrifying.

- True, true, I got stuck in it last week. I thought that was bad—I picked the wrong time to go out for coffee.

- You offered to help!

- I am a nice guy and you are were struggling.

- Is that an insult in Australia?

- What? Being nice?

- Please stop talking and keep moving.

We reach my door, my hands are red, I am sweating, I am out of breath. My twenty-years-younger ass did not assist in this process. I feel light-headed. Tom continues to stand by the door with me. 

- Thanks!

- Oh no, I gotta see this thing after I dragged it up all those stairs.

- Fine.

I relent and open the door as we drag the painting over the threshold. 

- Just a minute, I need to find scissors. He pulls out a pocketknife and I feel like I am living a late, bad remake of Crocodile Dundee.

- Don’t make a joke about Crocodile Dundee.

I roll my eyes and I lie. I suddenly miss my covid mask to hide behind.  

- It never even crossed my mind.

- Please be careful.

Through endless tape and packaging, emerges the Blue Woman. My hand immediately pops to my mouth as we stand back for a moment, as the paining—now leaning against a blank wall, resting on the floor, is fully exposed for the first time. It has me speechless, it has Tom speechless, in its real unfiltered life.

- Is this you? Tom asks, now looking at me.

- No, it’s not me. It’s no one. I have no idea who it is. It's a blue woman. I just liked it and bought it.

- Where are you putting it? 

The waves of AC-less air have fried me.

- I don’t know—its bigger than I expected. I was going to put it in the hall but now here—by the chair.

I point in the general direction of the chair. I am suddenly conscious of my hands and how much I am using them. Above the chair, is the current home to the Woman Underwater.

- Is this the same artist? Tom focuses on the underwater painting.

- No. It’s a different artist. All I see is a clock over his head with the amount of time that he has sucked up.

- God, it’s fucking hot in here—don’t you have AC? Wait a second, where you on @InstaNYC the other day? Was that you in the pink skirt? #3 right?

For fucks sake, I had underestimated the reach of my anonymous picture. Is everyone living through pictures of strangers on their phone?  Is no one living in real life? I thought it was just me. 

- Did you leave your coffee downstairs? Do you need to go get it?

- It was shit coffee. I will get it the next time I go out. 

He stares at me, expecting a response. I give in.

- Yes, I believe that it me, a few other people have pointed it out. I am not sure why it ended up on the page, maybe Mr.@InstaNYC didn’t feel like walking around much because of the heat.

- I thought that was you—you looked so happy—I thought there was no way that could have been the same person. I don’t think I have ever seen you smile like that. Did you know he was taking the picture?

- No. I didn’t know anything about a picture, I was just walking.

I might actually just pass out standing up. I lean slightly against the wall to hold myself up.    

- You must be hiding happy. He smiles, his stupid attractive smile with his perfect teeth.

He looks like a mashup of every young, blond, blue-eyed, under-thirty-five actor: Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, Thor, a guy I used to work with that drove a scooter to work in Midtown and wore his pants hemmed short with no belt and had a Talented Mr. Ripley vibe.  He has to be on something. I wish I was on something. The talking is nonstop, I am feeling light-headed again. I need my required mid-morning nap, like an 85-year-old. Covid has aged me decades.

- How many paintings do you have?

Oh god. I was annoyed by him, in a little brother way. 

- This is the third. I respond flatly.

- And the other one is here—down the hall?

He walks to the Costumed Girl, which is barely visible.

- And this one also isn’t you?

- Not me.

- Different artists?

Again. . . .

- Yes.

- Do you not see it?

I pause, searching for an explanation—I joked with friends that all of the paintings were Women in Contemplation, but otherwise totally random. They were purchased years apart, at different points in my life. I felt my annoyance had completed its lifecycle and returned from panic to confusion. What was this stoner, ex-commodities trader, Mr. Ripley Australian, and, unfortunately, my current only human interaction in real life, saying? 

- My father is an art broker in Australia.

Fucking, of course.  My eyes could roll onto the floor. 

- You don’t say.

He has to be making this up as he goes along—isolation gone mad.

- He used to own a gallery, art is a weird world, you become surrounded by it. These three paintings look like they belong together though, there is a thread between them. It's striking.

His arms are crossed and one foot is perched in front of the other, like a postcard from the MET or Sloane Peterson in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This is a conversation that happens in the small of the morning, glasses chiming, music playing, cocktails in hands and illegal substances pulsing through both of our veins. This seems rather one-sided at the moment. 

- I have seen this picture before, this Blue Woman.

He continues and walks back to the painting we have just dragged in. 

- It’s the same girl that I saw on @InstaNYC, it’s the same smile. Happy, content, strong. This one. . . .

He walks back to the Costumed Girl. 

- This is a dressed-up version of the same girl. She looks Geisha-like at first, the make-up, the hair, all of that has softened now—she has changed. The Underwater Woman, her rebirth. See, she is rising.

My preferred perspective was that she was falling, I never considered another. 

I was suddenly living some strange Aussie Da Vinci Code.  I knew Tom enough to say hello, chat about the weather, share the various annoyance of NYC, covid, and a work antidote. He had become my work from home, non-working, coworker. This was the first time he was in my apartment or standing within six feet of me—to my knowledge—and he had, within five minutes, retold me the story of my life—as if he was reading it from an Encyclopedia Britannica, Yearbook 2022. I realized my hands were covering my mouth and I was sitting in the chair beneath the Woman Underwater. I looked at the paintings, which now seemed to line up all in a row, an unintentional series, a timeline of a life lived outside of myself, imagined, painted by others, unknown, and suddenly in front of me and being retold to me by a near perfect stranger. 

- You should smile more.

Tom said as he walked toward the door and closed it behind him. This was my second visit from an Angel—the one that told me I had a lot of life yet to live. 

Kate Clymer lives in New England with her husband, son, and daughter. “Beekman Street” is her first published short story.