Chapter 2: Shave and a Haircut
The first lesson was a disaster, which was how you knew it would go well.
He showed up at seven on Sunday with a paper bag of beans from the Italian place on Court Street, the one where the owner yells at you if you ask for oat milk. He had shaved. He was wearing the gloves. He stood in your doorway holding the bag like a corsage.
"You said you'd bring coffee," you said. "You brought the whole store."
"I didn't know what kind." He held it out. "The guy said this was what his grandmother drank. Then he said I looked like I needed it. Then he gave me a cannoli for free, which I think was pity."
"Did you eat the cannoli?"
"On the stairs," Bucky admitted.
You started with the moka pot because it seemed only fair. You filled the bottom chamber to just under the valve, packed the basket without tamping, screwed the top on. He watched every step as though he were memorizing a weapon. When you handed it to him, he twisted the top so hard the aluminum squealed.
"Gentle," you said.
"I am being gentle."
"You're being gentle for a forklift."
He looked at his left hand, then at you, and then he did something you didn't expect. He pulled the glove off. Finger by finger, slow, the way you'd take off a bandage you weren't sure about. The hand underneath was black metal traced with fine gold lines, jointed like a jeweler had built it, and when he flexed it the plates shifted with a soft, expensive whisper.
"It's easier to feel things without it," he said, not looking up. "The glove's for other people."
"I'm other people."
"You've already seen it," he said. "And you let me back in. So."
You didn't say anything for a second. Then you said, "Twist it till it stops, and then stop," and he did, and the pot didn't scream, and when the coffee came up it gurgled and spat and filled your kitchen with a smell like somebody's childhood, though not yours.
He went very quiet. He stood over the stove with his eyes shut and breathed.
"She used to put a pinch of salt in the grounds," he said eventually. "Ma. When it was the bad coffee, during the Depression. Chicory, mostly, and whatever was cheap. She said salt took the bitter out." He opened his eyes. "I forgot that. I forgot that until just now."
You reached past him into the cabinet, took down the salt and set it on the counter by his hand.
"Next pot," you said.
He looked at you then. Really looked, the way he hadn't let himself before, and you saw him put something away somewhere careful.
It became a thing.
Not every morning. He was gone sometimes, two days, three, with no explanation and no noise, and when he came back he moved stiffer and didn't knock until the afternoon. But most mornings around seven there would be the two polite knocks, and you would open the door in whatever you'd slept in, and he would be standing there with beans or bagels or once, memorably, an entire babka from the Jewish bakery on Atlantic that he said Mrs. Lebowitz had told him to buy "for the girl across the hall, she's too thin, she works on computers."
"She thinks I'm a hacker," you said.
"I told her you fix podcasts. She said that's worse."
He learned the DeLonghi in a week. He named it, which was alarming. He called it the Colonel, because "it gives orders and it's never been in combat." He learned to hold the cup and steam button for three seconds. He learned to talk to it, low and reasonable, when it demanded descaling. "Not today, Colonel. We talked about this." He learned how you took yours, which you had never told him, and one morning it was simply waiting on the counter when you came out of the shower, your mug, right temperature, a splash of milk, and he was by the window pretending he hadn't done anything.
You learned things too. You learned he'd grown up eleven blocks from here, on a street that was now a Whole Foods. You learned he'd been gone for seventy years and back for ten and still sometimes reached for a phone that had a cord. You learned he hated the word "asset" and liked plums and couldn't stand cilantro and had read every book in the Brooklyn Public Library's Western section twice. He did a crossword every day in pen and lied about how many he finished.
You learned he had a therapist, a woman he called Dr. Raynor with the respectful dread most people save for dentists, and that she'd told him to "build a routine with a low-stakes social component."
"So I'm homework," you said.
"You're a low-stakes social component," he said gravely. "It's very clinical. I'm writing you up."
"Am I getting a good grade?"
He took a long sip of coffee. "You talk during the crossword."
"That's because you're wrong about fourteen-across. It's 'Emu.'"
"It's not Emu."
"Flightless bird, three letters."
"It's Kiwi."
"Kiwi is four letters, James."
He looked at the paper. He looked at you. He put the pen down with dignity. "I'm docking you points for that," he said.
Sam Wilson came by on a Thursday in October. You knew it was Sam Wilson because he was wearing a hoodie, sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low, and was still the most recognizable man you'd ever seen in your life. He was standing in the hallway knocking on 4B when you came up the stairs with laundry.
"He's at the hardware store," you said. "He's buying a new hinge for Mrs. Lebowitz's cabinet. She's been asking for three weeks and Gary won't do it."
Sam turned around. He lowered the sunglasses, looked at you over them and broke into a slow, delighted grin.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, you're Coffee."
"I'm sorry?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all. Ma'am." He held out his hand. "Sam. I'm a friend of his. He's been very mysterious lately, which for him is saying something, because the baseline is pretty mysterious. He told me he'd 'been working on a project.' I thought he'd joined a cult."
"He's been learning to make a flat white."
"That's worse," Sam said. "That's so much worse. He used to drink it out of a tin cup in the snow. I've watched him eat an MRE cold and say it was fine."
When Bucky came up the stairs ten minutes later with a hinge in a paper bag, he found you and Sam sitting on your kitchen floor with the Colonel between you, Sam showing you photos on his phone of Bucky asleep sitting upright in the back of a quinjet with his mouth open.
Bucky stopped in the doorway. He looked at Sam. He looked at the phone. He looked at you, and for a second the ice-blue sweep of his eyes went soft at the edges in a way that made your stomach do a slow, stupid roll.
"Get out of her kitchen," he said to Sam.
"She invited me."
"She invites everybody. She invited the guy who reads the gas meter. She's a menace."
"He was very nice," you said. "His name is Hector. He has twins."
Sam got up, still grinning, clapped Bucky on the shoulder on his way out and said something low you weren't supposed to hear. You heard it anyway. You hear everything; that's the whole problem with you.
"Don't screw this up, Barnes."
And Bucky, just as low: "There's nothing to screw up. She's my neighbor."
Sam's laugh went all the way down the stairs.
The walls of the Delancey Arms are a rumor, and so you had known about the nightmares since the first week.
They came maybe twice a week, always between two and four. At first it was just movement, the bed frame shifting, feet on the floor, pacing. Then sometimes his voice, ragged and fast, words in Russian you didn't understand and a few in English you did. No. I won't. Steve. And once, terribly, a string of numbers, recited flat and obedient in a voice that didn't sound like his at all.
You never said anything. It wasn't yours to say. But you started sleeping lighter, and you started noticing that on those mornings he knocked a little later and drank his coffee faster and didn't do the crossword.
On the first cold night of November you woke at 3:12 a.m. to a sound through the wall like something heavy hitting the floor, and then his breathing, fast and wrong and right there, inches away on the other side of the plaster. His bedroom shared a wall with yours. You'd figured that out the first week too. You'd moved your bed so the headboard didn't knock.
You lay in the dark with your heart going. You thought about knocking on his door and hated the idea, hated the thought of making him answer it in whatever state he was in, making him put his face back on for you.
So instead you sat up, and you put your knuckles to the wall, and you knocked.
Shave and a haircut. Five quick taps, the old rhythm, the one your grandfather used to knock on your bedroom door every morning of your life.
The breathing on the other side stopped.
You waited. You thought, Okay, that was weird, you're weird, go back to sleep.
Then, very softly, from the other side of the wall, right where your hand was: two knocks. Two bits.
You stayed there with your palm flat against the plaster for a long time. On the other side, you heard him exhale, slow and shaky, and then the creak of him lying back down. You didn't hear him get up again before morning.
At seven there were no knocks.
At eight there were no knocks. At nine you opened your door and there was no paper bag on your mat and no index card, and the door of 4B was shut. You knocked. Nothing. You pressed your ear to it like a lunatic. No breath, no footstep, not even the hum of the small refrigerator he'd carried up by himself.
On your phone there was one text, from a number you'd saved weeks ago and never used. It had come in at 4:40 a.m.
Have to go away for a bit. Work. Don't let the Colonel boss you around. Thank you for last night.
And then, a minute later, as if he'd typed it and deleted it and typed it again:
Nobody's done that since 1943.