‘It’s still our last night,’ she says angrily, speaking to his pale, naked back. ‘Me and you is our, can’t you understand that?’
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head slowly. ‘Baby, do me a favor; please just be quiet. Okay?’ He reaches for a pack of cigarettes and tamps it against the nightstand.
Thinking about her tomorrows makes him lonely – the idea of her laughing and talking with friends, walking down the sidewalks and glancing into shop windows, eating dinner at a restaurant. He draws a cigarette from the pack but does not light it.
Wasn’t there a moment when he suspected Naturelle, a single lunatic moment when he thought she might have made the phone call, told them where the drugs were hidden? He had quickly slammed the door on that thought – why would she? what did she have to gain? – but once the thought is there, can you ever forget it? As soon as doubt begins to nibble at your faith, can you ever trust her again? And if you can’t trust the woman who sleeps with you, the woman who lies beside you in your most unprotected hours, who can you trust?
In the distance sirens keen, and Montgomery longs to run, to bolt from the apartment, down the stairs, into the street, to catch the red truck and leap aboard with a wink for his brave comrades. He knows he could be a wonderful fireman. He wishes he were speeding toward the fire.
Five
The whores in the parlor love to tell stories about Uncle Blue; rolling cigarettes and sipping tea from chipped teacups, they gather in front of the fireplace and trade rumors. Every Thursday at dusk he comes to them, hangs his black coat on a hook by the door, nods to Natasha, and follows her upstairs. After the couple have cloistered themselves in the grandest room of the brownstone, proceeding in complete silence, the other women begin with the guessing, trumping each other with wilder tales. Not one of them knows his true name, though they do know that ‘Uncle Blue’ is a corruption of his family name, a name apparently unpronounceable for Western tongues. Not one of them knows where the man comes from, though several possibilities are ventured. Perhaps he was born in a small city in Armenia, or else a village in northern Iran. Helena, a Muscovite, believes his accent is Afghani.
All of the women are émigreés from Eastern Europe, as are nearly all of their clients. The women’s passage to America was facilitated by Mrs Dimitriev, who owns the brownstone and lives in a separate apartment on the top floor, where she listens to Billie Holiday records and trades stocks on her computer, only going downstairs when there’s an argument about payment.
The women arrive in the early evening and leave in the early morning. Most of them work for a year or two, until they can pay off their debt to Mrs Dimitriev, who is so stingy she only turns on the heat in the bedrooms. So the women build big fires and drink lots of hot tea and talk. Not about work, usually – most of the johns are bores, even the dangerous ones. Uncle Blue is the exception, an enigma. The women are only certain of what they can see, so they try to frame their theories around the physical evidence. He is not a young man, though his thick hair and beard are still black. Perhaps it is the beard that reminds Helena of the Islamic fighters she remembers from childhood television, the fierce-looking men carrying AK-47s, bandoliers of ammunition crisscrossing their chests.
The skin below Uncle Blue’s eyes is dark from weariness, the creases in his forehead as deep as knife scars. His palms are rough and calloused, as if from years of wielding a shovel or pick, but his fingernails are immaculate, professionally trimmed and polished. One time Natasha, staring straight into the fire, her chin held high, declared that Uncle Blue had beaten a man to death twenty years before, over a woman. She was lying, of course – if Uncle Blue had beaten a man to death he never would have boasted to Natasha or anyone else. Still, nobody doubts Natasha’s story. After all, he has the hands of a fighting man, several fingertips splayed sideways, knuckles swollen. His wrists are as thick as Natasha’s ankles.
Natasha ought to know him best, but she doesn’t; she never questions him. Not that he refuses to answer, or that he forbids her from speaking – he makes no rules and has never uttered a harsh word. Uncle Blue is clean, courteous, and generous. He pays with hundred-dollar bills pulled from a silver money clip; the bills are always mint condition, the clip always full.
When he enters the house tonight she silently rises from her fire-side bench and climbs the stairs to the largest bedroom. Outside is winter, the skeletal trees of Prospect Park, the streetlights crowned with yellow haloes. A dying fly buzzes feebly on the windowsill. Their transaction complete, Uncle Blue sits shirtless at the foot of the bed, forearms folded over his knees, the black spade of his beard resting on his chest. He remains in this position for a minute and then begins to dress. Natasha wonders if he is married, has children; she wonders why he never asks her about herself. Her other regulars probe her constantly, fancy themselves white knights destined to rescue her from the profane life. Uncle Blue does not care about Natasha’s whereabouts when he is absent; he does not care what led her to this profession, whether she cries at night, whether she longs for a calm suburban marriage. A single problem lies knotted in his mind; all his thoughts are directed at unraveling its complexities. Any errors will lead to trouble, and Uncle Blue has worked too hard, for too long, to tolerate self-inflicted trouble. The stupidities and betrayals of other people can never be eliminated; that is the essential problem facing every great businessman. In the slop of this world, a realist seeks only to minimize damage. Tonight Uncle Blue will murder a man. He cannot afford to make any mistakes.
Six
Jakob is one of the greatest pedestrians in New York’s history. He angles through the crowd, slipping the jabs and hooks of oncoming walkers, ducking below tree branches, tiptoeing along the curb’s edge, dodging the scattered piles of dog shit, waiting for an opening, and then darting into the clear. Like all good citizens of the city, Jakob has learned to avert his eyes from the freaks of the street: the panhandling amputees, the palsied church-step dwellers, the deranged sideshows picking through the garbage.
He threads his way through the rushing mob outside the 72nd Street subway station. Past the turnstile, down the stairs, he finds the emptiest stretch of platform; when the train arrives he burrows into the scrum of the packed car, snatches a strap, and holds on as the train accelerates. Jakob’s tolerance for alcohol is minimal. The two beers he drank with LoBianco have left him disoriented, a woozy wedge driven between mind and body. He pictures himself, his true self, commanding this spastic Jakob android from a remote location. What is this body? he wonders. And why did I have to get it?
Sometimes when he wakes up in the morning the face he sees in the bathroom mirror seems unfamiliar and unhelpful. He will squint at this tired face like a man at a high school reunion trying to remember the name of a classmate vaguely associated with disappointing times. Jakob doesn’t like the body he’s got, but it’s more than that; he feels he doesn’t truly belong to this body. There was a mistake back in the beginning; his brain was loaded into the wrong skull; the proper Jakob body sits naked and inert in a corner somewhere or else dances at the command of a usurper mind.
He brims his Yankees cap low, reads the advertisements posted above the seats. One is a cartoon strip, an ongoing AIDS-awareness saga about a group of New Yorkers. This particular strip is in Spanish, which Jakob does not read, but he sees that the heroes are in a cemetery, apparently for the funeral of their friend Rafael. Silver tears drip from one woman’s eyes. Jakob notices that someone has drawn fat nipples onto her blouse, and he frowns at the impropriety.
The train stops at Columbus Circle and Jakob remembers what he always remembers in this station, the time nine years ago when Monty, on a dare, leapt from the subway platform onto the tracks, skipped over the third rail, hoisted himself onto the opposite platform, kissed a pretty girl on the cheek, and returned, grinning – not at his own audacity, which he took for granted, but at the girl’s openmouthed shock. Jakob never understood where Montgomery came from, what produced such wildness
, such an absolute disdain for the consequences.
Jakob wonders what a seventeen-year-old Monty would have made of Mary D’Annunzio. Not much, probably. The boys in her grade don’t seem to fancy her. She is flat-chested, rough-voiced, unwashed; she sits through class silent and scowling, unless she launches one of her diatribes, which are generally cranky and always unrelated to the topic at hand. Her friends are all seniors, ‘that androgynous crew of dope fiends,’ in LoBianco’s phrase, who seem to be forever clustered in the school’s cafeteria, drinking coffee, their rumpled black clothes foul with cigarette smoke, their hands marked with blurred door stamps from last night’s round of clubbing. Jakob doesn’t know whether any of these young hipsters are coupled off. He suspects that one lean David Bowie look-alike might be intimate with Mary; they’re often engaged in head-to-head low-voiced debates that leave Jakob sick with loneliness. Jakob saw this entire gang one time in the Sheep Meadow, sprawled in a circle around an older Rastafarian who played Scratch Perry songs on an acoustic guitar. Nobody noticed Jakob and he hurried past, not studying Mary’s bare belly, hardly aware of her fingertip tracing the rim of her navel.
I don’t want to be a teacher, thinks Jakob glumly, watching the passengers shove their way out of the subway car. I want to be an old Rastafarian. Jesus, Fourteenth Street! He slips through the doors a moment before they close and follows the herd through the turnstiles and up the stairs.
Outside the air has grown markedly colder in the fifteen minutes since he ventured belowground; the chill helps him regain sobriety. By the time he gets to Slattery’s building the first snow has begun to fall, heavy flakes tumbling slowly by streetlight and melting on the sidewalk. It will never stick, thinks Jakob, disappointed as a schoolboy.
He announces himself to a doorman sitting behind a marble-topped desk, a thin-lipped, red-haired kid, face awash in freckles, who wears an oversized epauletted uniform. The doorman picks up the intercom phone and buzzes Slattery’s apartment.
‘Jakob’s here,’ he says; then, ‘I don’t know, let me ask.’ He looks up at Jakob. ‘Jakob who?’
‘Ha-ha. Tell him ha-ha.’
The doorman grins and speaks into the phone. ‘You hear that? Okay, you got it.’ He hangs up and points at the elevator. ‘Fifth floor.’
‘I know.’
An old lady, bent and wretched, stands in a corner of the mirrored lobby, staring down at a potted Chinese rubber plant. A nurse waits by her side. Jakob walks quickly to the elevator and pushes the button.
‘Come on, Charlotte,’ says the nurse, in a singsong Caribbean accent. She catches Jakob stealing a backward glance and winks at him. ‘Come on, girl.’
‘I have to sit down,’ wails Charlotte.
‘We’re in the lobby. Come on. Into the apartment and then you sit down. Then you sit down for hours. Let’s go.’
Jakob stifles a sneeze and the old woman turns her head. ‘Louis?’ she calls out, peering across the lobby. ‘Louis?’
I am not Louis, thinks Jakob, scrounging in his back pocket for a tissue. Charlotte slumps against the wall and sinks down to the floor, bird legs splayed before her. ‘I can’t go any farther. Where’s Louis?’
‘That’s not Louis,’ the nurse tells her, smiling at Jakob.
Jakob never wants to grow old, never wants to be like Charlotte, humpbacked and helpless, collapsed in the corner of a mirrored lobby.
‘Can I help?’ he finally asks, terrified that the nurse will say yes.
‘You’re sweet,’ says the nurse. Jakob interprets that as a no. The electric floor indicator above the elevator shines an unchanging 4. He tugs on the brim of his Yankees cap.
‘I told you she was no good,’ says Charlotte. ‘I told you, Louis.’
‘That’s not Louis,’ says the nurse. ‘That’s not your son. Come on now, get up, girl, we’ll miss your shows.’
Jakob pushes the button two more times. He usually rolls his eyes at people who keep pushing the elevator button, trying to goad a lazy machine into action, as if the elevator could be harassed into service like a recalcitrant waiter: All right, all right, the ketchup, I’m coming. He jabs the button again with his knuckle.
‘I warned you,’ mutters Charlotte.
At last the car arrives and Jakob enters. He is facing Charlotte now; he can’t avoid seeing her head bowed down to her chest, her entire shrunken body convulsed with shudders. ‘Evie!’ she cries out. ‘Evie!’
‘Hush, girl, I’m right here. Come on, give me your hand.’
Jakob passes his fingers over the electric eye and the closing doors jerk open. ‘Hi, sorry, are you sure you’re okay there?’
Evie looks at him over her shoulder. ‘Sure we’re sure. We do this every night.’
‘Louis?’
For a second Jakob wishes he were Louis, wishes he could say I’m here, Mom, then cross the lobby and lift the old woman to her feet. That would be heroic. The elevator doors slide shut and Jakob closes his eyes. Between the walls of the building he rises. He imagines himself a bucket of water being cranked to the top of the well. It hits him now how tired he is; he has not slept soundly in weeks. And Monty? Can Monty sleep at all?
Slattery’s trophy apartment, a sprawl of largely empty rooms, strikes Jakob as the perfect example of a type: the Young Man with Money without Woman apartment. The television set in the living room is so gigantic that the weatherman frightens Jakob. Slattery mistakes his friend’s disturbed look. ‘Big, huh?’
‘Yes, it’s very big. When did you get it?’
‘Couple of weeks ago. Gave myself a little gift. I mean, I’ve got to start spending the money sometime.’
What a vulgar expression, thinks Jakob. The money. Vulgar in large part, Jakob would admit, because his friend’s annual earnings are approximately twenty-three point seven times greater than his own, an approximation Jakob figured on his calculator one afternoon when he was supposed to be calculating grade point averages for his freshmen.
They sit on a yellow sofa that Slattery slept on for two years as a child, before the family moved to a bigger place in Bay Ridge. Jakob wonders why Slattery doesn’t spend a little more of the money on new furniture. The living room, larger than Jakob’s entire apartment, is empty save for the old sofa, the mammoth television, and a stack of artificial logs by the fireplace. Slattery’s bottle of beer rests on the hardwood floor between his feet. A large rug, rolled and corded, lies under the windows. Propped up in the corner is a glossy red electric guitar, another of Slattery’s gifts to himself.
The back of the sofa bears twin dark smudges from thousands of hours supporting dirty heads; Jakob’s side sags because of a spring that snapped when the teenage Slattery held his younger brother face-down on the cushions and then jumped on his back, sending the boy to the hospital with a chipped vertebra. Jakob pities Eoin – the kid still seems shell-shocked, as if his childhood were a war he barely survived.
The television is flanked by twin speaker towers. Smaller speakers hang from the ceiling, providing surround sound, which Jakob imagines is wonderful for movies. For the weatherman, though, it’s agitating: the professionally cheerful voice comes at Jakob from every possible angle. ‘We might be looking at our first major winter storm for the New York metropolitan area, and I’ll tell you what, Carol, it could be a doozy. Expect anywhere from four to ten inches of snow—;’
‘Ten inches of snow!’ shouts Slattery. ‘We ought to drive upstate day after tomorrow, do some skiing. I just bought some Völkls – racing skis.’
‘I don’t know how to ski,’ says Jakob.
‘So what, neither do I. But ten inches of snow . . . Maybe not this weekend.’
The weatherman’s voice echoes in the underfurnished room.
Jakob shudders. ‘Do you think real human beings use the word doozy?’
‘What?’
‘Have you taken any lessons yet?’ asks Jakob, pointing at the red guitar.
Slattery shakes his head. ‘You think I have time for guitar lesso
ns? It’s pretty nice, though, isn’t it?’
‘It’s really nice,’ says Jakob.
‘Yeah. That’s a nice color red.’
‘Do you want another beer?’ asks Jakob, anxious to get away from the giant newscasters.
‘Yeah, thanks.’
The kitchen is suspiciously clean. Jakob examines the shimmering stainless steel sink, runs his finger along the countertop, finds no sticky spots, no crumbs. The enormous black stove, complete with six burners and an integrated griddle free of splatters and fingerprints, has apparently never been sullied by the tawdry chore of cooking. Bastard has a maid coming in, Jakob decides. The Sub-Zero refrigerator is well stocked, crammed with bottled olives, horseradish mustard, a round of smoked mozzarella wrapped in plastic, a roasted turkey drumstick in aluminum foil. This looks like my parents’ refrigerator, thinks Jakob, sadly.
‘There’s no beer in here!’ yells Jakob, louder than he meant. The echo of his own voice in the kitchen sounds bitter.
‘Hold on a second.’
Jakob returns to the living room, watches Slattery watching the national news. ‘There’s no beer in the refrigerator.’
‘Did you really look?’
‘No, I didn’t really look. Was I supposed to really look?’
‘Have you seen this?’ asks Slattery. ‘Here, sit down, watch this.’
Jakob sits reluctantly, trying not to stare directly at the screen.
‘This elephant in Bangkok got loose in the streets, last night or something. Look at this.’
Someone with a handheld video camera recorded the scene, a gray elephant stomping down the middle of a broad thoroughfare, followed by a cheering crowd of men, women, and children. Police officers try to hold the people back, setting up orange sawhorses and waving their billy clubs, but everyone ignores the officers in the happy pandemonium. Soldiers in military fatigues track the elephant through the scopes of their high-powered rifles.