Restoration Heights Page 4

It was easy to imagine how it began—on a map of Brooklyn, in some sprawling office, you saw the future. Start with the East River, where the swelling pressure of downtown Manhattan sent a wave to the opposite shore, a rising tide of young, moneyed whites flowing inward along the L and the J, dousing and displacing black and brown communities, encircling the entrenched islands of housing projects or crime or just people who loved too much to sell. It drowned Williamsburg and Bushwick years ago, pushed east and south toward the only logical end point, the convergence of the two train lines: Broadway Junction. Once the borders were marked all that remained was to fill the spaces, paint over the existing lives and businesses with gluten-free bakeries and bicycle lanes, clusters of bars and fair trade coffeehouses. Shops that sell cheese at forty-nine dollars a pound. Delineate and fill.

  But there is another train at that convergence. Why limit this playground to the L and the J when the A forms the natural southern boundary. It was already happening, at the edge of Clinton Hill, in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights. Refugees from overcrowded Bushwick have established base camps, four or five to an apartment, marveling at the space and the architectural detail, funded or only recently defunded by their parents, with professional jobs and professional salaries but with bohemian values and aspirations. Kids whose desires can make smart men rich. The model was already in place. Do to the A what was done to the L. Zoom out from the map, trace this new perimeter—from the water, along the L to East New York, but now touch the A, follow it back west, toward the river. Do you see what that does, the shape that it makes? How it captures and unifies—the bravado of it—how it dares to claim the heart of the borough? It is the masterstroke of a land war, a double envelopment. It allows only one response: abject surrender.

  Restoration Heights is your conceptual lynchpin. Two towers on the main property, ringed by commercial space, a small park with an open field, honey locusts and sycamores, 15 percent more units allocated for affordable housing than the ordinance requires—a campus stretching from Tompkins to Throop. Two smaller satellite buildings that follow the same logic, camouflaged by skilled design. Spread them out as a gesture of appeasement, a way to knit the project into the fabric of the neighborhood, to leave landmarks intact in the shadow of the new construction. An olive branch, like magnanimity isn’t one more mark of power.

  The white kids will complain—another bullshit corporate condominium, destroying the neighborhood—but those same white kids will move in. I never thought I’d live in a place like this but, ugh, I need a dishwasher. And I hate laundromats. All my friends are here and besides, the design fits the neighborhood, not like those other buildings, plus a doorman. All the cachet of the neighborhood and none of the hassles. The guilty thrill of being surrounded by blackness without having to live like them. Not separate but unequal.

  You still have to get it past the community—local councils, the Historic District. That’s why you chose that block, the whole thing was an eyesore, except for the church, and you’re keeping the church. Postwar brick townhouses and a massive, sloppy apartment building—it didn’t fit the rest of the neighborhood, it represented precisely the sort of additions that the Historic District was created to guard against, so knock it down, give them something that fits, a design that respects the surrounding architecture. Sell it as a job creator. Give it a name that connects it to a community landmark, that summons a false history. Bribe the right people. Steamroll whomever you cannot cajole.

  Expect protests. Expect a grassroots coalition to mobilize. Expect hand-wringing, black opposition and white guilt. Expect them to have some successes. Permits delayed, city council votes against you—at least you have the mayor. Expect a hard fight until ground is broken on the first site and even after, when the battle is won but the opposition continues. It’s been three years since the first plot of land was bought by Corren Capital—the old buildings are leveled, concrete is poured, the frame is constructed, and still resentment erects obstacles and roadblocks. You have made no progress on the two smaller sites, where the current buildings still stand. You must trust momentum to realize the totality of your vision. It is late fall when some technicality is raised, some ordinance that your cadre of lawyers missed, and you have to stop. Wrap it all up for the winter and blame the weather. It was snowing on Thanksgiving. It promised to get worse, to be hard enough and regular enough to offer a plausible excuse, the worst winter since ’96. Save face, don’t allow them even this minor victory. Restoration Heights will define Bedford-Stuyvesant for decades to come.

  * * *

  The truth was that it looked like a good place to hide a body. Maybe that’s why he came. He stared between panels of green plywood at plastic sheeting rendered almost opaque by weather, at the yawning dark spaces beneath it. Kids must hang out there. He looked for evidence, for bottles or crumpled cigarette packs. It didn’t seem that difficult to get inside. Maybe the homeless used it for shelter. Stacks of building materials littered the campus, enigmatic shapes of plastic and metal waiting for spring. Vast areas of rough ground, buried white, surrounded the unfinished towers. It could definitely hide a body.

  This was a morbid way to begin. If that was what this was, a beginning. Why assume a body, assume death? The Coney Island girl had anchored Hannah to a violent fate; Reddick couldn’t shake the similarities. He had only intended to walk to the fence and look, a half-formed purpose to help him think. He couldn’t admit that he had already made his decision. He walked north to Monroe, turned west toward the Y.

  It was an open court at seven, after the last group fitness class surrendered the floor. Crowds varied, particularly in the late winter, and informal games took shape around the evening turnout, half-court or full, according to mood and ability. Derek was waiting out of bounds when he arrived, cheering the group through a final round of sprints and jump squats. Reddick didn’t understand the class’s appeal—an hour sweating through watered-down facsimiles of the drills he had dreaded on his high school team. He slapped his friend five and sat on the floor beside him.

  Derek was a Bed-Stuy native who seemed to know everyone. He was a year younger than Reddick, a little heavier, well-muscled and compact. He ran track in college and looked like it. They were both high school threes, slashers who earned starting time getting to the rim, so they weren’t natural complements. But they enjoyed playing together and found ways to make it work. Derek’s game had more dimension—he could hang outside, feed Reddick the ball on in-cuts while he backed out into open jumpers.

  Once the class cleared they took jump shots and layups with bouts of half-hearted defense. The weather kept everyone else at home. They were alone for almost half an hour and Reddick told Derek everything.

  “Wait. Buckley Seward’s neighbor wants you to find out what happened to his fiancée?”

  “They aren’t neighbors exactly.” Swish. “But yeah. Strange, right?”

  “We’re talking about the same Buckley Seward?”

  “How do you know him?”

  “Because I work with money. And the Sewards have a lot of it. The bigger question is how you know him.”

  “I told you, they’re clients. We manage their collection.”

  “And also, as of today, find their missing acquaintances.”

  Reddick grabbed a rebound, shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “You’re an artist. You’re not qualified for this shit.”

  “I’m so not.”

  “That lady is using you for something.”

  Derek’s shot rolled out and Reddick let it bounce. He had been so consumed with what he should do that he had barely thought about her motives. “What?”

  Derek scooped the ball up and dropped a jumper from the corner, then whirled around Reddick to grab it again.

  “She’s using you, man. I can’t tell what her play is exactly, but she has one. If she just cared about the girl she would have hired someone who could do the job.”

 
; “I can’t do the job?”

  “You can do some things. You can draw. You can paint.”

  “I can play.”

  “Your three is garbage. But you can play a little bit. You just can’t find some missing white girl.”

  While they talked, two guys came into the gym and began to strip out of their sweats. Reddick didn’t recognize either of them. Once the newcomers joined the shootaround the conversation dropped off, their intention narrowing as they moved toward an inevitable two-on-two. One was light-skinned and stocky, with a shy face and a stain of dark hair above his lip. Maybe twenty, but two inches taller than anyone else on the court, his height carried with loose grace. He began the game on Derek. They were used to this—on the rare occasions when their opponents weren’t Y regulars they always lined up their best athlete on Derek, lured by his track physique and the loaded preconceptions of his dark skin. The other one was smaller, a few years older, with a pocked complexion, a sprout of tight braids and a sly smile. He started talking immediately, the kind of guy whose mouth was half his game, who counted on flustering you and abusing the holes your frustration opened. He was genuinely funny.

  “You look like if Tom Hardy got AIDS,” he said to Reddick when they lined up. “I’m playing against sick, skinny Tom Hardy.”

  He ran with the theme as the game progressed. “Damn, Skinny Tom Hardy got a little quick.”

  “What’s your shirt say, Skinny Tom Hardy? What the hell is a modest mouse?”

  “You feeling it, Skinny Tom. Where’s your Bane mask at?”

  “Skinny Tom having the game of his life tonight, though. You going to tell your grandkids about this night.”

  “This dude playing ball in a indie rock T-shirt.”

  There is a type of athleticism that you cannot see in a person until he moves. Acceleration, power, quickness—the cluster of qualities that make someone explosive are not linked to weight or strength or the amount of visible muscle he carries. Three-hundred-pound linemen who can leap over teammates, five-foot gymnasts launching double backflips—it’s the same adaptation, a ratio of fiber types within the muscle that is locked in when you escape the womb. Hard work can make slight shifts in either direction, expand the total amount and improve performance, but the basic proportions remain more or less intact. It is a genetic adaptation, and like any genetic adaptation it may be overrepresented in some populations and underrepresented in others. There are tendencies, deeper and more specific than race. A Jamaican sprinter is more like a Bulgarian weight lifter than she is a Kenyan marathoner, in the composition and force of her body, in the skein of fibers and neurons that map her athletic potential. But these are specific truths, and once they are uncoupled from their narrow province they foster an ugly, lazy shorthand. They become fodder for bigotry and stigma. They set false expectations. And when an outlier comes along the level of surprise is more or less a function of the depth to which these expectations have been absorbed.

  Which is to say that Reddick isn’t always sure how people will react when he dunks.

  The guy with the braids went quiet. Pouty. Never mind that his teammate had already buried one after Reddick and Derek got tangled on a pick, never mind that it had come off the rebound, on a rushed shot by Derek that glanced favorably off the glass—he had been dunked on by the white guy. He was pissed. He had built his game on trolling but didn’t take well to the other side.

  “You let that white boy dunk on you?” It was the first complete sentence they had heard from the younger player.

  Braids was petulant. “That shit wasn’t on me.”

  “You were standing right there.”

  “Man, I didn’t even go up.”

  “Because you saw what was about to happen,” Derek taunted.

  Reddick was good for one or two explosive plays like that a game, not only dunks, but sharp cuts, leaps and crossovers—feats of athleticism rather than skill. At nine or ten years old, the only white kid on his street in North Gastonia, it was the way he had learned to play. He and his friends just wanted to be Jordan. They would spread their legs in the air, unfurl their tongues and palm matted tennis balls or the undersized toys of infant siblings, pretending the edge of the sidewalk was the free throw line, soaring to glory. Be like Mike. No one told him he was the wrong color, that he was supposed to facilitate or work on his defense. Nobody worked on their defense. It was hero ball or die trying.

  On his block he was sometimes singled out, outbursts that were recriminations for a legacy they were all too young to verbalize, but never on the court. There he could disappear. The marks of his difference, his blond hair and pink skin, were rendered irrelevant by shared ambition. There was only one standard by which a player was judged: Could he ball? Once the answer was yes everything else fell away.

  He finished first in scoring his second year of varsity, a feat driven by a first step so quick it bordered on arrogance. He noticed the way it chafed a few of his black teammates, a resentment that wasn’t quite envy, but something darker, structural. He squirmed beneath what he saw as the unfairness of it—as if he were the vanguard for yet another campaign to stymie black progress. As though he were trying to take something from them. He didn’t want to take. He wanted to belong. It never occurred to him that this distinction might not matter.

  He had offers to play Division II but went to art school instead.

  Being white made him a minority at the Y, like he was in high school, but the disbelief his occasional highlight play fostered was rarely expressed in racial terms—not by the regular, rotating crew of guys that teamed up on evenings and weekends. Most of them had played high school ball, too, were used to being among athletes from different backgrounds. Basketball was pure sport again, released from the web of ambition and status. Until nights like tonight, when new players came in and he and Derek exploited their expectations, and he waited for that hint of resentment, that sense that he was overstepping his bounds—waited for it and dreaded it and worried that he was imagining it, that it was all in his own mind, his own history—and he was back in high school all over again, losing his only faith.

  But who doesn’t love making plays. Particularly on a guy who has built his game on his mouth. Reddick hung sixteen of the twenty-one points they needed to win the game himself—Derek barely broke a sweat, and by the time Braids was ready to admit defeat and switch he was far too tired to cover a former collegiate track athlete, never mind their ten-year age difference. Derek dropped two uncontested jumpers and a layup and they headed off court.

  “Good game,” Reddick said, extending his closed fist. The taller kid bumped it. Braids stared at it long enough to make everyone uncomfortable before finally extending his own. They tapped knuckles gently. The defeated pair left first, surrendering the empty court like conquered ground.

  “He got a little salty,” Reddick said.

  “Dunked on by the white guy.”

  “You know my granddaddy—”

  “Nobody believes your blond ass had a black grandfather.” They started for the stairs.

  “I think he was half.”

  “Yeah. Half white, and half made-up.”

  Laughing. “I’m going to find you a photo.”

  “That’s what you keep saying. But I still haven’t seen one.”

  “You want taqueria?”

  “Nah. I promised my mom Netflix and takeout tonight.”

  They clasped hands and bumped shoulders and Reddick started alone toward the basement locker room.

  “Hey,” Derek called when Reddick was at the middle landing. “What are you going to do about that girl?”

  He exhaled and rubbed the sweat from his hairline. “I think I should try and find her.”

  * * *

  He repeated that assertion to Dean and Beth Han. The three of them were in Reddick and Dean’s living room, drinking beer. Reddick started at the beg
inning, for Beth’s sake, before moving on to Mrs. Leland’s enigmatic offer.

  “What could that woman possibly expect you to do?” Beth Han made jewelry, and was almost always referred to by her full name to differentiate her from her studio mate, also a jewelry maker and also named Beth, who had a cumbersome Polish surname no one wanted to bother with. Their studio was next door to Dean’s. Around the building they were usually addressed in plural, the Beths, and when one had to be singled out it was Beth Han who was dignified with an individual humanity, the second Beth reduced to reflection or description. The Other Beth. Tall Beth or White Beth. Blonde Beth until Beth Han had her hair stripped to the color of bone, complicating even that distinction. Beth Han lived in her studio, without a shower, which meant that she couch-surfed a few nights a week to maintain an acceptable level of hygiene. For the past several weeks all of this surfing had taken place here, on Dean’s schedule. There was a burgeoning depth between them that Reddick didn’t probe.

  “Like I said. She expects me to find her.”

  “That’s not the real question, though,” Dean said. “What I want to know is why girls throw themselves at you when they’ve been drinking.”

  “Wait, has this happened before?”

  “It happened twice at U-Arts.”

  “Totally different,” Reddick protested. “I already knew both of those girls.”

  “You had a class with one of them. The other was up from Baltimore. We were at a house party and she follows him into the bathroom, I kid you not.”

  “But I had been talking to her all night. Also she was crazy.”

  “Reddick!” Beth’s eyes were wide and her hand was over her mouth. “What did you do?”

  “What do you mean? I got the fuck out of there.”

  “Really? Oh my god.”

  “Just turned and ran.”

  “I can’t believe you left.”

  “It was freshman year. The sight of breasts still came with a hint of terror.”