“Not currently,” he’d replied.
He’d been standing outside a burning building two doors up from our shelter screaming at the public affairs guy from the fire department over who was going to do a briefing. There was no doubt that a fire was involved, but it had apparently been preceded by the murders of a woman, her common-law husband, and three small kids. “Which is a goddamn police matter, unless you guys are suddenly investigating crimes, Jimmy!” Irving had yelled.
I insinuated myself between the two of them. “Can one of you gentlemen help me? I’ve got nine families standing out in the cold here in their pajamas and I’d like to send them back inside but I don’t know if it’s safe.” Irving turned his face to mine with an exaggerated expression of rage. It was very convincing, and I took a step back. But behind me I could hear one of the little girls in our shelter, who had been burned out of her own house the year before when her father tried to set her mother on fire, wailing at the top of her lungs. I stood my ground.
“Lady, that’s the fire department’s call,” he said and stalked off toward a knot of reporters.
Later, when two cops came up the steps of the shelter to find out whether any of the residents knew the victims and might know who had wanted them dead, Irving came with them to apologize. We made all the cops and firefighters coffee in the communal kitchen at the back of the shelter house, and Irving sent a car out for sweet rolls and more milk around dawn, when the burning house had gone from incandescent orange and blue to dead black, its paint blistered, its windows blown out. His third cell maxed out as the sun was coming up and I let him use our phone. Some of the kids were already downstairs foraging in their family cabinets for cereal, jazzed up on the combination of crisis and fear that had been their birthright.
“You want some instant oatmeal?” I asked him. His shirt collar had gone gray from the smoke, and his eyes were red. “Miss Bridget, is this your maaaaaan?” sang a boy named Taurus, and he did a little dance move.
“You leave that lady alone, Taurus,” his mother called from the stairs.
We went outside and sat on the steps of the building, coughing a little in the smoke, our white breath mingling with the steam from the coffee cups. Irving ate three bowls of instant oatmeal and put a twenty in the locked donations box by the front door. The house had been a convent before we bought it, left over from a time when the Catholic schools in the Bronx had nuns to teach in them.
“You like Italian food?” he said.
“Who doesn’t like Italian food?”
Irving had the best kind of black car, a police sedan driven by a rookie officer named Valerie Morales. He took me to a little red sauce place in Little Italy. After four glasses of wine, I said we probably needed a check. “I can tell you don’t date cops,” he said. There was no check. There was never any check.
He walked me to the door of my building. I’m tall, but Irving is taller, over six feet, and he looked down at me, his eyes glittering and his lower lip held firmly in his teeth. “The next time I take you out I’m gonna have you for dessert,” he said firmly and walked away. But the next day a Circle Line boat crashed into a tennis pier in midtown, killing nine people, including a mixed doubles foursome from the East Side, and I didn’t see Irving for more than a week except on television. Which seems to be a pattern in my life. Days go by and I don’t see or hear from Irving. And then there he is at the door, pulling at his mustache, pulling off his tie.
“I don’t get it,” Meghan once said while we were running together on a Saturday morning.
“I don’t think you want me to go into detail about this.”
“Jesus, please don’t.”
“And aside from that, he loves me. He really loves me.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Bridge, everyone loves you. You’re the last lovable person on earth.”
“Well, thanks. And yet somehow you make that sound like a bad thing. Besides, Irving’s honest.”
“Irving’s crude. There’s a crucial distinction between the two.”
What Meghan doesn’t understand is how much Irving and I have in common. Much of our work life consists of seeing, hearing, and resolving the kinds of situations that most people would turn away from in disgust. Neither of us is a stranger to the body bag or the room spattered with blood. Irving lives in the same New York that I do, the New York that Meghan and her friends will never know. They walk through the elegant foyers of their apartment buildings, through the limestone surrounds, into the car with its paper and skim latte waiting, then out and into other gleaming lobbies and up into their offices. This makes it possible for them to think that New York is a wonderful place and the mayor is doing a wonderful job.
There are three kinds of people who live in New York City. There are the ones who will leave as soon as they can, and the ones who will never leave. There are two groups of that second kind: the ones who are trapped by circumstances, and those who are trapped by love. I am of the second variety. So is Irving.
A disproportionate number of us live in Manhattan. Like a thief with his fist behind his back, the other four boroughs are clenched around a core of gold, and the gold is the island. Irving has an aunt in a nursing home in Elizabeth, a city whose name is a lot nicer than its reality, and when we drive back from visiting her, there is one steep curve on the highway that leads to a sharp rise, and when you are atop that rise, Manhattan suddenly spreads itself out. And I always think to myself: There it is. Irving shares the feeling, with more reason: He was born in Queens, lives in Brooklyn, spends most of his time on West Sixty-ninth Street. But like a convert, I am more overwhelmed and outspoken about my faith. I, too, think that New York is a wonderful place, but the mayor is an incompetent who cares only about the zip codes of Manhattan in which there are Prada boutiques and big-ticket donors to the Republican party.
“Meghan Fitzmaurice is one of the most illustrious residents of this great city,” the mayor said that evening on the local news. “I’m confident she’ll do the right thing.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked, holding a pillow to my chest.
“It means nothing. He always gives saying nothing his best shot. He only gets in trouble when he says something that means something. Nothing works for him long term.”
“He hates her. She says he hates her.”
The next morning we both rolled over in bed when the alarm went off, and Irving clicked on the TV. Tom McGregor was wearing a tie with a small pattern that flickered on the screen like a disco ball. “Good morning,” he said. “Meghan Fitzmaurice is off today.”
“That is it!” I shrieked. “I need to talk to her now! And when I do, I am going to rip her limb from limb! How can she do this to me?”
“Calm down,” Irving said, sliding out of bed. “I’m a cop. I’ll find her. Let me make some calls.”
But I’d underestimated the investigator I’d already assigned to the case. Tequila was on the phone when I got into the office. “Yeah, honey,” she was braying, with a big, barking laugh. “I sure know that.” Out back, to one side of our parking lot, two kids were blowing bubbles sitting on the stump of an ailanthus tree, the weed tree of the city so resilient that I once saw one growing out of a slag pit of chopped concrete at an abandoned urban renewal project. It was a sweet, old-fashioned scene, the puckered lips, the lifted chins as the kids followed the flight skyward. By the trajectory of their gaze, I could tell that the bubbles were flying into the fire escape on the back of our building, there to burst into little smears of soap. But it was a raw March day, with a steel gray cloud overhang, and the kids had no coats. “You two come inside and put on warmer clothes,” I called out the window, a disembodied adult voice that froze them both.
Tequila let out a loud whoop. “Oh, girl, I know what you’re talking about. Times I say to myself, Tequila, you’re gonna get yourself in trouble. But the Lord sets a bar on my tongue.” Tequila belonged to an evangelical church, but she was reasonably fluid in her piety. My feeling was th
at she liked the singing. She had a beautiful alto voice; to hear her sing “Natural Woman” full-throttle was an almost otherworldly experience.
There was a long whistle from outside my office. “Oooh, baby, you got the president on your tail, you better be careful. Cause if there’s one thing we know around here, it’s that the government, they don’t care. They don’t care about truth. They just do what they do. What. They. Do. That’s all. They gonna twist up everything. That happened to me once with the police, they were trying to mess me up every which way—”
“Who are you talking to?” I asked, standing by her desk and digging in her candy jar for a Tootsie Pop.
“Hold on, honey.” She put her big hand over the receiver. Tequila wore more rings than Liz Taylor, although it was hard to tell exactly what sort of metal they were made of, especially the older ones. “It’s your sister. The president of the United States is after her. She better watch out.”
“Meghan? You’ve been on the phone all this time with Meghan?”
“We been visiting.”
“Put her through. Now.”
A volcanic “huh,” a muttered explanation, and then my interoffice line bleated feebly. We’d had our phones hot-wired by a former client who’d been recruited by the telephone company for a minority hiring program. “Good morning,” Meghan said.
“Good morning? Good morning? I am not the television audience at home. This is your sister. Where in the hell have you been?”
“Put Tequila back on. She was much nicer.”
“Meghan, I haven’t talked to you since Sunday. I left messages everywhere. I’ve been beside myself. I almost had the police looking for you.”
“I bet the police you know didn’t want to find me.”
“Oh, shut up. Why haven’t you called?”
“Honey, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been busy. Kissing the brass’s ass. Making nice to the lawyers. Although I draw the line at Ben Greenstreet. If that little jerk thinks he’s going to get a private apology out of me, much less a public one, he’s stupider than I thought he was.”
“I’ve been so worried about you. Are you all right?”
“Me? Of course.”
“Don’t ‘of course’ me.”
“God, Bridge, you’re starting to sound like Aunt Maureen.”
“And don’t try to change the subject. Why weren’t you on the air this morning?”
“I was not on the air this morning because apparently there is some feeling at the highest level of the network that a cooling-off period is called for. For whom I am not sure. I certainly don’t need a cooling-off period. I’m perfectly cool. But since I was leaving on vacation Saturday anyhow, it has been decided that I should begin my vacation a few days early. It would have been nice if anyone had informed me of this fact so that I wouldn’t have gotten up at four in the morning and called the car service and found out from them that I wasn’t on the schedule for a car this morning. But the network guys probably figured that if I could scream at some stranger named Ramon at daybreak it would cool me off a little bit so they’d get off easy. Which is not the way it eventually happened, but that was probably their thinking.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“I can’t even run,” she said, and her voice seemed a little thin, as though that monologue had exhausted her. “Or swim. Yesterday was the first morning I’ve missed swimming in eleven years. When I covered the Sydney Olympics, I got off the plane and swam double laps to make up for the twenty-three hours in the air and the time difference.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. It’s such a relief to talk to someone who doesn’t go like this”—and turning her voice into something between a moan and a croon, she said—“Meghan, how aaaaaare you? Which of course really means, Jesus, girl, you are so screwed and I can’t wait to report back at lunch about what a shadow of your former self you’ve become almost overnight. Which reminds me. Want to have lunch?”
“Where are you, anyway? I tried you at Harriet’s and no one answered.”
“How did you know I was at Harriet’s?”
This is my particular area of expertise. I step in it. I am the person who once asked a woman who was not pregnant when she was due, who congratulated Meghan’s producer on the great job she was doing at a party fifteen minutes after she’d been fired, who thought Meghan was joking when she said she was going to name the baby Leo.
“Bridge-et? Bridget Anne Fitzmaurice?”
“Evan.”
“Evan called you?”
“Evan came up here to see me.”
“Up to the Bronx. Evan?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“Black car, I assume?”
“Duh.”
“And he said…?”
“He was upset.” Oh, no. I let my head drop into my hands. I am the woman who asked the wife of the Nobel Prize winner in Literature whether she critiqued her husband’s poetry three months after her husband had left her. For a twenty-two-year-old waiter at Repaste. A male waiter.
Perhaps I only imagined that the silence on the other end was vibrating. It might have been the connection. “Do you have a pen, Bridget? I’m at three thirty-two Central Park West, at the corner of Ninety-fourth Street. Apartment eight-N. I’ll order out. Indian?”
“Sounds fine. Do you want me to bring anything?”
“Not a thing. Put Tequila back on, please.”
From the other room I heard Tequila say, “Here, baby.” Then there was a long silence. “I’ll say a prayer for you,” she finally added.
“What did she say?” I hollered out to reception.
Tequila came in unwrapping some Dubble Bubble, her eyes lifted heavenward. “She say if her husband come back here, I oughta cut his thing off.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“Taking the Lord’s name never improved a damn thing.”
“I have a date in housing court I’ve got to cancel.”
“No you don’t. That woman went to North Carolina. She called this morning, said to hell with this city and everybody in it. She say she going where it’s nice and warm.”
“I get that.”
“Me, too,” Tequila said.
HARRIET’S BUILDING WAS right around the corner from a building I’d lived in for two years when I was still working as a potter. In fact, there are few Manhattan neighborhoods in which, sooner or later, I do not walk past a vaguely familiar stoop and realize with a pleasant shock that I once had an apartment there. The tiny floor-through in the Federal house in the south Village with the fireplace in the living room out of which a terrified squirrel had erupted one day. The one-bedroom in Chelsea on that seminary block with all the trees that I’d had to vacate because a venture capitalist bought the house and wanted all six thousand square feet for his family of three. The place on Ninety-sixth Street where I’d lived while I was getting my master’s in social work at Columbia and working nights at a restaurant on Columbus Avenue, making more in tips than I was now making as a social worker. Over the course of twenty years, it is possible to bounce through New York City like a stone skipping across the surface of the reservoir. You don’t leave more than ripples. The first of every month the moving vans and U-Hauls double-park on the streets, and the new people come, identical to those who’ve just left.
“Hey,” said Meghan when she opened the door. Without her makeup, in a T-shirt and sweatpants, my sister looks like a teenager. But she looked like a very tired teenager, and I didn’t like the look in her eyes.
All the way up in the lurching elevator, with its smell of Windex and wax, I had wondered how to greet her. Perhaps this seems simple to you. Your sister has been publicly disgraced at work and, more important, has been ditched by her husband on virtually the same day. All evidence suggests that she has been unhappy, or at least unsteady, for some time. So you wrap your arms around her, pat her back, murmur comfort. But all those actions assume that sympathy is welcome. Meghan did all those things for
me upstairs after all the people had cleared out when the after-funeral lunch for our parents was done. Meghan did all those things for me when my apartment was robbed and when two of my clients were killed in a home invasion and when I was on a subway car that derailed. Meghan did all those things for me. It was not a reciprocal transaction.
I had done the same for her only twice. Once was in the hospital after her second pregnancy ended at eighteen weeks. The other, ironically, was the morning of her wedding, when I was fastening her veil. “What the hell am I doing?” she had wailed, turning in my arms. “I’m only twenty-five years old. I have no business getting married. Why did I let him talk me into this?” I’d patted her silk-satin back and offered to call a cab, and then she’d pulled away. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bridget, be practical,” she’d said. The moment gave new meaning to the direction to pull yourself together. The window of opportunity to see Meghan Fitzmaurice undone was, I had figured out, approximately five seconds. The next thing I’d known I was standing at one end of the college chapel and she was at the other, coming down the aisle looking utterly composed.
“Hey,” I said back, reaching for her arm, still wondering what to do. She took it out of my hands. She moved forward and bumped me. Bumped me twice, and I bumped her back, and then we both made the face that went with the bump, a kind of rueful frown. The bump is how we show solidarity, camaraderie, one of us throwing shoulder and hip slightly into the other. It is a guy thing, I guess, the kind of thing men do to show physical affection when a hug is too much. I can’t remember its genesis, but certainly Meghan must have invented it.
Harriet’s kitchen, just large enough for a tiny table and two chairs at its end (but with a window, sure enough), smelled sharply of cumin. Meghan pulled containers from a shopping bag on the counter, and we put out all the food and filled our plates before we began to talk. I looked in the refrigerator. There was Tsingtao, Grolsch, Sapporo, Kirin, a United Nations of beer. I held up a bottle, and Meghan shook her head. She rarely drinks except when she has Mexican food, when she will hold up the beer between bites and grin. Dos Equis and enchiladas—perfect together. If only the manufacturers had known. Although she doesn’t do commercials, either. A panty-hose company once offered her a million dollars to do one. Meghan always goes bare-legged.