Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  Nathan was standing at the window of his parents' bedroom, which had a view downtown, fielding questions about college. Directly behind him, alone in the corner, stood the city's latest hero, champion of law and order, a thin, stooped, bookish man with an unruly beard, a narrow, meatless head, sunken temples, narrow beakish nose. He had the vacant, preoccupied look of a discouraged Jesus. He spoke to no one; he looked on the verge of speaking to himself. The month before, he had killed an aggressive subway beggar with a penknife. The tabloids had dubbed him the Philosopher King of New York, model of decisiveness and integrity and moral action. And Milton Stein had stepped forward as Christ's champion and spokesman, his John the Baptist, a model of generosity himself, having offered his legal and publicrelations services free of charge. Standing at the window in his ragged clothes, the parade passing below him, the man spoke to no one. The heaping plate of food had been foisted upon him, and he did not touch it. He looked about the room disapprovingly, more angry, still more discouraged. The experiment-his, presumably-had gone awry. He was a lunatic and everyone knew it, but he had taken on the role of an expensive and exotic pet.

  And Nathan was beautiful. His adolescent features had come into focus. He had grown tall and trim, and the frame made by his cleft chin and high forehead converged nicely at the tip of his Grecian nose. He had watery, feminine eyes deep with character that outran his own. His stature as the best-looking man in whatever room was an obligation. And here he stood, before a woman as old as his mother, who, holding him by the elbow, cheerfully drank everyone at the party under the table. Nathan could have 'd nothing, it would not have mattered. The woman referred to her Kandinskys, her Picassos, to her schedule-her husband's evenings away at poker, her maid's days off-and the silence and loneliness of a Park Avenue triplex. And all those ridiculous paintings staring down at you, accusing you, so why not-the old lyric-give them something to accuse you of Nathan's father was simply divine. Now she had to know, like father like son?

  Nathan excused himself, waving his empty plate, he would be back. They exchanged winks, she tweaked his arm. He gave a winning smile and was gone, twisting through the crowd, carefully eyeing everyone he passed, considering the consequences of a bump-the bodyguards, the violinists, the whores-he achieved the living room, where the wall of law journals and case books rose above the heads of the criminals and custodians like a monument to the system of criminal justice, inscribed with the names and numbers of laws deceased and irrelevant.

  Suddenly the sun dimmed. It felt like an eclipse. People were turning toward the windows. The first of the gargantuan balloons was passing. Goofy or Daffy or Superman-not the whole figure, just passing elbows, cheeks, feet. The gusts took them against the wires, against the buildings themselves, against the most wealthy of the spectators encased safely above the masses, Milton's guests, who, laughing nervously, held firm to their plates of whitefish salad as the passing monsters ferreted them out, the giant eyes filling the apartment windows like some parody of King Kong. The room giggled and screeched in a brave show of silliness, then quieted with an unsettled strain. The cease-fire was called off, as though, despite the concealed arsenal of small weaponry-ankle holsters, switchblades-nowhere was safe. Hostility settled in. The room began to empty of guests making parting comments about the traffic, missing the rush.

  Nathan felt someone beside him. It was the Philosopher King, twitchy, eyes deeply abstracted. There was commotion down on the street, a faint roar from the crowd. A pillow-waisted Santa was rolling down Central Park West on the flatbed of a truck, his recorded ho-ho-hoing blaring tinny and staticky through loudspeakers. Waving at the crowds. The crowds waving back. Lifting his fat, rouged face up toward the buildings. Toward the windows where the children were raised in fathers' arms aloft. As though at some signal previously agreed upon the fathers would send the infants tumbling out the windows up and down Central Park West, some mass move toward infanticide, fathers offering up their young sons and daughters in sacrifice to the Santa god. Upstairs, meanwhile, Milton Stein's guests streamed out, pouring out onto the street. The Philosopher King hurried across the living room and disappeared through a narrow door, the back stairs down.

  A lone figure pushed through the congested hallway into the apartment. A tall woman, young, Nathan's age or younger, he couldn't tell. He stopped and stared at her. A client? But what could she have done? There was something vaguely familiar about her; he'd seen her before, he knew her, and he was equally sure they'd never met. Not pretty enough to be a model, not that pretty, not one of the set of anonymous women. She was the color of coffee, with Caucasian features, faintly like an Arab, or a Somali.

  He stepped forward, but the girl moved away, heading confidently toward the kitchen, as though the layout of the apartment was not merely familiar but home turf. As though she lived here. Nathan followed her into the kitchen, where his father's secretary, Ellie, was helping herself to another bagel with lox. The girl came up behind Ellie and kissed her on the cheek. Ellie turned, and the two women looked at Nathan, who stood dumbstruck in the doorway. Their bodies were the same height and build, the benign expressions the same, the intelligence and competence of their eyes. But the girl's eyes: though the expression was the same, the shape was not. They were green and almond shaped; they looked roughly like his. Her lips, no-foreign, neither here nor there. But her nose, narrow, almost hooked, flaring out at the end in a knobby bud. Nathan gazed at the nose, and if he squinted, blurring her color and her hair, the nose was the one he looked at in mirrors and window panes across the city. The nose was his, a Stein nose, distinctive in its attempt at a puggish waspiness, its failure coming at the hooked bridge. Before his own mother pushed by him, before she greeted Ellie and this girl with the comfort and familiarity usually saved for family, before she'd introduced the girl-it struck Nathan standing there, as his mother was pushing past, that what he was seeing would have been a mirage had this been a desert. Before him stood a perfect fusion between Ellie, Milton's secretary, and-how else to explain it?-his father. Here, in no need of introduction, stood Nathan's own half sister, his black twin.

  Nathan nodded hello. Ellie turned away. The girl did too. Nathan was left with his mother, her face set with determination, as if she knew she was staring straight at her betrayal and knew that the consequences of not enduring it were worse than having to live with it. She had coped and accepted and put it in its place, permitted the betrayal, nurtured it.

  "That's Isabel," his mother said.

  "Of course," Nathan said.

  "Ellie's daughter," his mother said.

  "I understand."

  Nathan stands now in the light of the open refrigerator. He takes a long hard look inside at each shelf, contemplating the eggs in their little cups, the month-old apples collapsing in the crisper. A half-eaten TV dinner. The same food, the same locations. The whole thing kept carefully and lovingly empty, as though his parents had neither eaten nor shopped nor cleared these shelves since he last left this apartment some number of years ago he would not remember. Since that Thanksgiving morning, when his mother so offhandedly introduced to him his long-lost sister; that face that seems now to have launched his thousand ships.

  He pours himself a glass of milk, drinks off half then refills it and drinks another half, then leaves the last half on the shelf next to the container. He goes looking for replies to questions still unknown to him. Through the high rooms with their marbleized plaster and faux wainscoting, past a dry fountain where an old bronzed angel aiming bow and arrow stands lit in ambient streetglow. He finds one answer. He stops in a small study and sits at a desk before a typewriter. His hands awash in the green nimbus of a banker's lamp. On the stationery of Stein & Stein he calmly types, Maria Rosa, Last Will and Testament, and recommits to paper as best he can in numbered paragraphs and noted subsections all Maria asked him two years ago, as her attorney, to put down and notarize, including the sole rights of one Nathan Stein to titled property on the priceless paradise, a
stretch of as-yet-undeveloped coastline on the Honduran island of Roatin.

  Along a narrow hall the door to his old room is locked. At the hall's end another door stands open. In the silence, he can hear his parents snoring together in a duet of practiced confusion. Then only one, his father, goes his own way while his mother gurgles and whimpers through lonely dreams. The sheets shift and Nathan feels someone standing in a doorway behind him. Footsteps? Somewhere a door closes. Nathan turns. The doorway is empty. Clutching the deed to his freedom, he steps in, filling the doorway, and through to the next, and the next, stopping and filling doorways until he stands in his parents', open as it had been. A room sour with sweat and old breath. They lie there like corpses, his mother spreadeagled on the king-size mattress, hands up overhead as though shot in the snow. Milton rising beside her like a sudden hillside, his belly pale and monstrous. Beside a glass of water his toupee askew on an eyeless wig stand.

  Nathan leans and touches his elbow to wake him. "Milton," he whispers. "Daddy-"

  He steps away, as though he's caught a whiff of something bad. In the bed there is, as there has been, nothing. The room is deserted, the blankets undisturbed. Only a copy of today's Post, open to a double-page spread where Milton Stein is pictured striding out of court with Schreck at one arm and Ruth at the other. Stein to fight for Williams, the caption reads.

  "Hello," Nathan says. A voice that calls from room to room and back again.

  In the lobby, Ivan is asleep upright on his bar stool, arms folded, chin in his coat.

  Nathan tugs at the doorman's elbow. "Where are they?"

  Ivan opens his eyes with a snort. "They are away for the rest of the weekend. But of course you knew?" He looks at Nathan. "Do you need a doctor?"

  Nathan thumbs down the door latch and sets himself free.

  11 P.M.

  Barbados drapes over the steering wheel, peering up.

  "This is where he does his fun?"

  "In a manner of speaking."

  "You ever go in?"

  "Just the one time."

  Gleaming sports cars and long sedans circle a hunched building with blackened windows and no markings but a line of purple neon above the door. Behind and on either side, chop shops, blocks of buses packed in herringbone patterns, school yellow, Greyhounds; hangars marked with the cyclops seal of the Department of Sanitation. This could be an old diner, or a bus depot, refitted and camouflaged as a garrison to hide atop the pavement on the outer edge of all this industry.

  "I always wondered about this place."

  "You don't want to know," Santos says.

  The door opens on another door within and a tall woman descends the steps flinging a stole around her neck. Despite her great height she has a floral delicacy, the purple light a halo for her teased hair. As she walks toward them Barbados's hands stay gripped to the wheel. His eyes follow her but not his head.

  "She's a man."

  Santos nods.

  Barbados can't help it. He turns in his seat and watches her climb into the back of a limousine. "Chinese, or something."

  They're Filipino. That's part of the thing."

  "I don't get that."

  "Don't think too hard about it."

  They sit a while in silence. Santos watches the door, blinking steadily.

  "What if he's already inside."

  Santos looks at his watch. "We'll wait until twelve."

  A stream of false women comes and goes. The novelty of the parade wears thin, and they are quickly bored. A car pulls up across the street, out of which Krivit steps and looks about, hesitant. He walks quickly toward their car and Santos opens his door and Krivit stops, expressionless. Without a word he opens the back door and slips in. His hair redeployed across his head in countable strands. Eyes watery and half closed. He wipes his forehead with his handkerchief.

  "I didn't think this was your style," he says.

  "I like talking to you," Santos says.

  "Not that much."

  "Enough."

  "You have fun in there?" Barbados asks.

  Krivit holds his stare until Barbados looks away. "Fuck you," he says.

  Barbados holds up a palm. "No offense. It's just that I never thought-"

  No one says anything.

  "It doesn't matter," Santos says.

  Krivit nods out the window, into the night. "Look at these fine cars. They say it's going to snow like hell tonight, but the lot's full. Think about that. You'd be surprised."

  "I guess I would," Barbados says.

  "Enough," Santos says. "I want to hear about Coney Island."

  Krivit nods. "My deepest sympathies," he says flatly.

  He doesn't mean it, Santos knows. He doesn't mean it and it doesn't matter. "You met Stein today."

  "Which one?" Krivit asks lazily.

  Santos stills.

  "I saw you with Nathan Stein."

  “You want to talk about Stein or to Stein? Because you can join me inside."

  Santos looks up at the blank door of the club. Noiseless, hermetically sealed.

  "In there?" Barbados asks.

  Santos blinks. Nothing this night will surprise him. "Nathan or Milton? "

  "Either. Both. Like father like son?"

  "I didn't think the South Pacific was their flavor," Barbados says.

  Krivit shrugs. "The Steins have generous and shall we say heroic appetites."

  Barbados waves. "Give me a break."

  "I'm a merchant. I buy what I think I can sell. I sell what I have. I always sell what I have, and what I have is always real."

  Santos passes his hand over his face. "I'm listening."

  "What do you think I can tell you?" Krivit asks. "All I have is a little news. It may be neither here nor there."

  Santos feels Krivit looking at him but he doesn't move.

  "Okay.”

  "Someone is a very large player right now. Let's call it a high-profile-yet delicate-place to be. A place where unwanted news would do damage."

  "What kind of news?"

  "I'm not doing your job.

  Santos lifts his eyes to the pilled ceiling of the car. "This is not a game.”

  "Here's the broadcast: open your eyes, Errol. You don't have to look far. Nothing is a coincidence, nothing is chance. What Milton is doing, what Nathan has done. These are not unrelated things."

  "You're talking about Isabel. What is it with you, what are you saying? First Schreck, now you-"

  "Schreck? That fuck-"

  “He tried to sell me Nathan."

  “He'd sell his mother. Listen to me, Errol-" Krivit slides forward. "What he did, what Nathan did-”

  "What did he do?"

  "And who is who. We don't always know who we are."

  "Give me something, give it to me, something real." "What I have is always real. I sell real."

  "Fuck it, Krivit, I'm buying real." "It's not nice."

  "Fuck you."

  Krivit sits back, hands folded in his lap. "Secrets own those who never wanted to know-"

  Now Claire is alone, has been for some time. Her elbows on the bar, her eyes up toward the murmuring TV but not seeing it. The Frangelico and Ouzo behind the bar green from the TV light and the vodkas blue and the whiskeys the color of thin mud.

  Her fingers around an empty martini glass glumly, she steps back with the gin inside her at chest level and stands at the middle window. She can see only the streetlight and Where it ends and where nothing begins, and she traces the progress of the liquor downward and outward. A high, optimistic C from a song on the radio lifts behind her and holds for the big finish, then turns tinny and hollow, then only the snap and rain-like rattle of the pool rack breaking, and the liquor bottles and shot glasses flashing like jewels.

  She makes a drippy circle in the glass with the heel of her palm and can see now no tracks on the sidewalks. The Witnesses are safe at home with their Bibles, safe here in Brooklyn, witnessing away. Up and down the street she is sure she is the only waking cons
ciousness, despite the little Greek plunging glass after glass into the glass washer and the boys playing pool.

  Why hasn't Errol come for her? After all, didn't she know Isabel, too? Doesn't Errol need her now, now that they-the both of them-have to publicly mourn? And she, of course, deserves-she wants-the chance to need him.

  Looking out across the street, into the harbor, looking but not finding all the things she and Errol have not yet done, she recalls that as a girl, as Nathan's girl, often up at that earliest hour in an apartment not a mile from where she now stands, she'd been unable to bear the thought of her consciousness being so alone, positive she was the only person in the world alone at night. She'd stay up with her consciousness to give it a companion, until Nathan came home. From night court. Or so she'd thought; such was her logic then. The streetlight falling from the window on the bottom of the stairs, the heat in winter or the fans in summer rattling on, the settling foundation sending creaks through the walls, she'd squat as if by her parents' door as the noises and various lights moved over her. Eventually, whispering to herself, she'd fall asleep, more often than not atop her and Nathan's disheveled bed-on top because to go under signified to her her submission, to the house, to him-always with the light on, not for him to see but for her to see him when he returned home, and so she would have herself for company if she should wake.

  Claire senses someone behind her. "Nathan," she says, hopefully, she realizes; she heard the little jump in her voice. She turns, not toward that one but toward the specter of the infant, who, when born, moved the doctor to silence. A nurse had gasped.