Listen to me, my father's name is Taliaferro, he's the Italian,
not my mother, my mother's Bolivian, Anthony said
when I asked him why his mother was always speaking Spanish
and something that sounded like small animals
clicking their teeth together, and I guess it also explained
her cheek-bones and why she was so tiny,
because she had these little bones,
like a sparrow, and she was even smaller
than Anthony, who was only eleven, and kind of small himself.
I liked Anthony. He had that direct, matter-of-fact way
of explaining difficult things European kids seem to have,
so when I asked him a few weeks later what I really wanted
to know, and my mother too, which was, Where is
Mister Taliaferro, and Why does your mother
walk around the apartment all day in her slip,
he looked at me with his mother's dark, wide-open eyes:
My father is in Argentina, he sends us money, he said,
and when he saw I was still waiting, My mother
doesn't like clothes, she likes slips, which pretty much
settled things for me, but not my mother,
because when I told her about Anthony's father,
she looked up at the ceiling, said, Wouldn't you know,
another Italian, and this time he's in Argentina,
which was pretty much my mother's standard response
to men, but she didn't say anything about
Mrs. Taliaferro’s preference for slips,
just looked at me like she'd sent
the wrong messenger on the errand,
but there was still talk at the table about the men
who visited her apartment during the day,
but after a few weeks even my father got tired of it,
said to my mother, Margaret, give it a rest will you,
and that pretty much ended it except my mother
would ask me every so often what I did at Anthony's
and I'd say, Oh nothing, just listen to her sing,
which kind of stymied her, because Mrs. Taliaferro
sang all the time, mostly opera she'd learned
from Anthony's father according to Anthony,
and all we listened to were Bing Crosby and Perry Como
and sometimes Jo Stafford, but after a while
I liked listening to Mrs. Taliaferro, she'd sing
all these beautiful arias by Puccini, and sometimes
she'd even sing an entire opera, except when she sang
the male parts she sometimes sounded like dogs growling
and she'd crack up, start laughing in this wild, high cackle,
and I guess if we'd lived anywhere else she would have been evicted, but this was Fort Tryon, on the upper West Side, near the Cloisters,
and most of tenants were Jews lucky enough
to have escaped the Fatherland,
but they brought a bit of it with them,
because every weekend I'd sit in my window
watching them walk up and down the esplanade
overlooking the Hudson like it was the Lindenstrasse,
and they'd have these dark coats on, and hats,
all the time hats, and if they weren't walking,
they'd be standing in little bunches or sitting
on benches jabbing each other with their fingers
or throwing their hands up in the air
like they were surrendering, but they never
complained about Mrs. Taliaferro because
she sang Mozart's operas too, not a lot, like I say,
she preferred Puccini, but she did enough
to make the neighbors forget about the men visitors
and her walking around in a slip all day,
because these people were crazy for Mozart.
They had Mozart for breakfast, and for lunch,
and for dinner, and don't forget about the snacks,
the little schnitzels, I mean if Mozart had walked down
the esplanade one weekend, hundreds of middle-aged women would have torn off their corsets, men dropped their pants,
that's how crazy they were about Mozart, so whenever she sang Magic Flute they'd be sitting in their windows listening to her
and there'd be endless discussions the next day
in the courtyard about her: OUR Ima Sunac,
they'd be nodding to each other, because
I guess they thought she had a chorus
in her apartment, and backdrops and costumes,
just like at Carnegie Hall, so why tell them
the apartment was almost empty, that Mrs. Taliaferro
would wander around it all day like she was
following animal tracks or sometimes
she'd stare out the window for hours
or turn on four or five radios all at once,
which should have sounded like gibberish,
but it didn't, it sounded like a forest
full of birds, don't ask me how,
or sometimes she'd go to the refrigerator
and pull out a bottle of Rheingold beer
and turn to me with this big grin on her face screaming,
RYNE-GOL! RYNE-GOL!
like it was the biggest joke in the world,
and then she'd climb into one of the hammocks
strung around the apartment and start swinging
back and forth, humming to herself,
but I never told my mother about all that,
because she would have ended it right there,
and I liked the hammocks, and the beer too,
because sometimes Mrs. Taliaferro
would give us one and we'd all be swinging
in the hammocks screaming RYNE-GOL! RYNE-GOL!
because Mrs. Taliaferro didn't really do anything
except sing, she didn't even cook, Anthony did that,
and the shopping and the cleaning too,
all she did was lie around in the hammocks,
or stare out the window with all the radios playing,
but things changed a bit after everyone had dinner
because she'd grab a bottle of Rheingold and climb up
into her favorite hammock, a big woven red and green one overlooking our apartment, and she'd start making noises
like birds and cats and dogs, little imitations,
and the dogs in the next apartment
would go crazy, and after that she'd tell us
these scary stories, and we'd all be sitting around
on the floor, looking up at her and sometimes she told them
in that tongue that sounded like animals clicking their teeth together, but Anthony was the only one who really understood it,
even his two younger brothers didn't, don't ask me why,
they were twins, about 5 years old, and they looked like
real little fat bambinos, not at all like Anthony and his mother,
but most of the stories were in English and they were all
pretty much the same, they were always about
a mother, or an aunt, and three children
who had been abandoned in the woods or the city
or an airport, and sometimes the children would be boys, sometimes girls, but nobody seemed to care, and sometimes she'd even
throw in a fourth character, just for me, usually a cousin,
but the stories were dark, and sad, and the animal sounds
scared me and I'd want to go home because she'd be drinking
and her eyes would be all dark and round and glittery,
but sooner or later she'd begin singing Puccini,
and things would begin to settle down, and sometimes
she'd sing the aria from Butterfly where Cio Cio San
is waiting for Pinkerton to return and she's looking out
the window at the ships and this long, high blossom
is rising from her throat like she's bleeding to death
and everyone except her knows some lackey
is coming ashore to tell her Pinkerton's
married to some white bread back home,
well anyway, she'd sing that particular aria, Un Bel Di
is the one I think, and then she'd go back
and sing it again, but when she did,
she'd improvise, always keeping the melody
but weaving in these moans and cries
until the aria was bleeding so much I wanted to cry,
and I'd get up and go downstairs to bed
and try to forget it, but it was always there,
rising and falling through my window, that's what my nights
were like whenever she sang Butterfly, so whether
I was reading comic books or eating dinner
or doing my homework, the music was always
tumbling down out of her apartment until it seemed
like I was living next to an orange grove
that never stopped blossoming, that's how sweet
and sad it was, and I remember lying in my bed one night
when she was singing Butterfly again, who knows why,
except as I was leaving her apartment that evening,
she’d told me she was going to sing it for me,
that she knew I liked it, so I said OK but I didn't mean it
because her eyes were slippery and dark and I didn't
want to hear Butterfly, it made me cry,
and besides, I wanted to try
what my cousin Timmy had shown me
the day before, he was grinning and telling me
it was fun you just pulled it up and down and he had
his dick out and he was rubbing it up and down in his hand
and he looked so happy and greedy I wanted to turn away,
and then I felt something click inside me so quietly
I almost didn't hear it but I knew as soon as
I was alone, I was going to try it, and I remember
lying there that night and it's hot and the window's wide open
and I can hear her voice tumbling out of her apartment
and I'm lying naked on the sheets and there's this
white moonlight filling up the room and my cock
is growing warmer and thicker I haven't even
touched myself yet and then I'm moving my hand up and down
like it's alive and I'm rising out of my body I don't know
where I am and then I'm standing in front of the window,
holding the warm glitter spilling from my belly,
looking up at Mrs. Taliaferro's apartment,
her beautiful, irreparably lost voice
dragging like a razor down my body.