What the hell, he thought. In a few more years, maybe at sixty-five, sixty-six, I’ll get prostate cancer. Maybe that’ll put an end to this miserable daily ache.
Dried flowers formed a circle around a splintered guitar lying on the sidewalk. People dropped coins into the instrument. “Peace and love. Yeah, right,” said one boy to another, walking past. They wore Harvard Business sweatshirts. Japanese teenagers pushed through the crowd, snapping digital pictures of each other, whispering, “Beatle John! Beatle John!” Nearby, a fiftyish-something husk slumped in a wheelchair, a more ragged contraption than the bagel lady’s. He held a German Shepard on a leash. A Cat-in-the-Hat top hat wilted on his head like a Neapolitan ice cream cone. “Welcome! I’m the Mayor of Strawberry Fields!” he called to the strollers. “Oh yes, oh yes, we loved Johnny Rhythm, didn’t we?”
He pointed to the dark apartment building towering above the trees. As an architect, Bern knew he was supposed to love the structure’s ornate grandeur. But it was fussy. Thick. “See that black railing in front of the white shutters … up there on the seventh floor … that’s where he lived. Yoko still sleeps there. Wasn’t it just the greatest love story of the century, folks? Wasn’t it? “
A few minutes later, with a lull in the sightseeing, he wheeled his chair to the scuffed guitar, picked it up, and shook the money out of it. He stuffed the coins into his coat. “Hey! Fuck! I need me some juice!” he yelled at a small Hispanic man sitting on a bench. “You! Pancho! What say you push me on down to the corner store?”
“Man, I got no time for this!” the fellow said.
The Mayor said, “Fuck you. You got the fuckin’ time. What are you? Late for a fuckin’ Security Council meeting at the fuckin’ UN?”
Bern rubbed his eyes. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he should just slip into a coffee shop, warm up for a few minutes, and take a subway home.
Then Kate appeared, hunched and flushed, from around a curve in the path leading to the street. She wore a long wool coat, charcoal gray, and a green scarf. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, squeezing next to Bern on the bench. It occurred to him she had chosen a popular spot to fend off intimacy.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Nausea. You know.”
“Should we—”
“I don’t have the strength for a long discussion, Wally, but I needed to see you.”
“Me, too.”
“I didn’t want us to end on that badness from the other night.”
“We don’t have to end, Kate.”
“We do.”
He stared at his hands. “I’m a grown-up. I can control myself.”
“Of course I know you have the best intentions, Wally. And I miss spending time with you. I enjoyed our friendship. But what’s there is there … actually, I’m glad you confessed your feelings … it’s good to get them out … but I’m not strong enough … you’re not strong enough …”
Wait, he thought. Had she just admitted she was attracted to him? Or did parsing her words prove her case: despite his good will, he’d always press her for more?
“No, Kate.”
Her cheeks, already crimson from the cold, reddened further. “You’re never not sure, are you?” she said. “But that’s not the point. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The point is—”
“Katie, please—”
“… the point is, your certainty is another reason we’re wrong together, Wally. You’re the teacher. The expert on everything.”
“No, no, no.”
“Absolutely. That’s how you see us. That’s how I saw us, too, at first. I liked it. Your little lectures to me. From that very first night we met at the bar.”
“I thought they were conversations.”
A sad, brittle laugh. “The gap between Venturi and … who was it? … Gehry? Pediments and dormers … I’m sorry, Wally, what were they? …”
“I’m no expert, Kate. Especially about … you know. I’m a fool. I’m ashamed. I apologize,” Bern said. He felt for her fingers. “Really. I won’t say anything more about my … my …”
“You don’t understand, Wally. I crave your certainty.” She smiled. “It’s comforting, so different from people my age, and I don’t want you to change. But given what’s happened …”
“No, no, no.”
“Stop ‘no-noing’ me!” She puffed her cheeks. Then she doubled over, holding her stomach. She’s right, Bern thought. The body will have its way.
Without speaking, he seized her hand and pulled her out of the park. Down the block he spotted a Greek deli, not too crowded. He pointed to the facilities in back. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said. A roast pig turned slowly on a wooden platter in the window. Several minutes later she joined him again on the sidewalk.
“Can we get a cup of coffee?” he said.
“No. I have to meet Gary,” she said.
“Ask him to take you straight home. You need to lie down. Kate. Can I call you? Please? We need more time. I am your friend. I won’t try to be anything more than that. I promise.”
“Wally. No. I—”
A carriage driver passed them, whipping his horse. The animal did not respond to the blows: its exhaustion seemed saintly, beyond the possibility of pain. “Hey! Stop it! Stop it!” Kate yelled at the man. He glanced at her contemptuously and raised his whip again. Kate turned to Bern, outraged, as though he had staged this incident for some unfathomable reason. She looked dangerously weak and pale. “I’m going to be sick!” she muttered. She scurried away.
Bern felt certain he would not see her again.
The perils of the city.
He stared after the carriage at the spot where he’d got his last glimpse of her. The horse whinnied. Any minute now, Bern thought, this beaten brute will crumble to the street. At least its agony will have ended.
He laughed bitterly at his self-pity. A self-pitying man is not capable of being anyone’s friend.
Oh, now—that’s self-pity, too, he thought.
He turned for his apartment.
2.
Too much. He was talking too much.
Conscious of the need not to teach, he tried to keep his mouth shut. But Kate! A week after their last meeting, she had called and asked to see him again, yet now she sat glumly in the restaurant, twirling her fork, poking at the head of a langoustine in its bed of yellow rice.
Nervous, Bern gulped his first glass of wine, asked for another. He stared at the crab meat on his plate. It glistened warmly. Waiters bustled around him in the narrow aisles between tables where diners came and went, bulked up in wool coats and floppy cashmere wraps. Every now and then, cold gusts from the opened door swirled the caramel-cocoa odors in the air.
Bern’s nose ran. He dabbed at it with his napkin. Kate’s usually clear gray eyes seemed drained of color. “Are you feeling better?” he asked her. “The nausea?”
“Fine,” she said forcefully, as if this was the last word she ever meant to utter.
So Bern—halfway through his second glass of wine—described for her a recent walk he’d made past the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. A work crew in green caps and maroon coats maneuvered quiet machines across the blade-scritched ice, glazing it with water, he said, while impatient skaters huddled around the ring, chatting, laughing, munching bagels or hoagies. Bern stood and watched the scene from the sidewalk, dwarfed by the shiny metal statue of Prometheus.
“Sounds nice,” Kate said, clearly underwhelmed.
Bern nodded. What had been the point of telling her this? Honestly. Was he suggesting they go skating sometime, like a pair of young lovers? No. No point, really.
The things that struck him that day at the rink were so private, so completely beyond sharing, and so fleetingly insignificant, awareness might as well take a hike, he thought.
It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous.
How could he tell Kate—and why should he—he had stood there, that afternoon, recalling the frozen lake in Dante’s Inferno, one of his favorite
books in college? Satan brooding in the center of the earth. Then he’d noted the joke (were the center’s architects and designers in on it?): Prometheus, the bringer of fire, guarded the ice. Then his mind swelled with jigsaw scenes from silly old television shows—visual bric-a-brac as tangled as the ice tubes, electric wires, and water mains invisible beneath the street. Only later did he realize he’d thought of these shows because RCA, Rockefeller Center’s old tenant, had churned them out from its studios here when he was nine or ten years old. Somehow, deep in his brain, he had made a connection … just as, moments later, he underwent an auditory hallucination—chopper blades. Vietnam. Cambodia. And why? Because General Electric, maker of napalm—the bringer of fire—also lived in the Rock.
TV. College. A well-edited war. O, what a mix of miracles was a man!
A young girl, leaving the restaurant, said to her friends, “I hear they’re tearing down Coney Island. Let’s go out there and get high.”
Glancing at Kate across the table, Bern considered communication—even failed communication—a minor amazement. “More wine, sir?” asked a passing waiter.
“Yes, please,” Bern said. Accidentally, Kate dropped a clam shell on the floor.
“So,” said Bern. He cleared his throat. “Have you written many new pieces?”
He’d looked for her byline whenever he came across a copy of Theatre News.
“A few. The usual. You know.”
“Seen some good shows?”
“Nothing to shout about.”
She was watching him like an animal eyeing a snake, Bern thought.
“Is this what you did, growing up?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Questioning everything. Like, Talmudic study.”
“You feel I’m interrogating you?”
“A little bit. Yes.”
Bern was about to ask why she’d wanted to meet tonight, but she pressed him. “What was it like for you, growing up Jewish?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Really. I’m curious. We nun-beaten micks don’t get outside our circle much.” She laughed, and seemed to relax for the first time. “Your education … did you read the Bible a lot? Or the Torah—what’s it called?”
He fingered the stem of his glass. He would have to slow down if she continued to stall. Don’t push, he thought. Give her some slack. “Well. The most intense reading I ever did—religious reading—was in a study group when I was a teenager,” he said slowly, drawing out the words. Filling the social space. “We read the Five Books of Moses with our rabbi.” He took a sip of wine. “He was very good, insisted we pay attention to the literary qualities. Characterization. Narrative arc. Metaphors, repeated images. He steered a course between the way most lay people read sacred texts—looking for heroes, inspiration, that sort of thing—and the Midrash, the laws and meanings rabbinical students are supposed to take from it. We saw Abraham and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, David, all the rest, just as people. Flawed, ordinary people who—granted—did extraordinary things sometimes.”
Kate nodded thoughtfully.
“We refused to draw morals from the stories. We tried to live them, walk with these folks, find parallels with our own lives. It was a very fine education in … empathy, I would say, as well as reading.”
Oh Lord. He was dangerously close to teaching again. And he caught himself totting up risks: the suggestion of a movie later this week, a concert, a walk through Central Park? These activities masked his true concerns: his body weight and hers, his middle-aged stamina, the pesky aches in his joints in the mornings, the care he should take with his heart.
She sat silently.
It is what it is, he thought, trying to picture him with her, a view from above, the two of them sitting at the table. Two characters in a story. A love story. But you don’t have to act on it.
Still, he decided, is anything sweeter than two people who genuinely enjoy each other anticipating, moving toward, then consummating new sexual bliss?
How do I let this go?
The waiter passed again. What the hell. Bern asked for another glass of wine.
This seemed to prompt Kate to come to the point at last, before he was beyond absorbing it. “Wally, I need your help. This weekend,” she said. “Two old friends of mine from my New Orleans days are coming to town. A couple—Glenn and Karen Lindahl. They lost nearly everything in Katrina.”
“I’m sorry,” Bern said.
“They’ve been living in a Best Western in Houston. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got the idea of throwing a small party for them, inviting some of the theater folks I know, really generous people, collecting money and supplies. Just enough to get the Lindahls through this little stretch of time. I’ve talked to my friends here. Most of them are willing to give, and so … I’m going to do it. A small gathering at my place on Sunday.”
“That’s wonderful,” Bern said.
“Well. I’m calling on everyone I know. I need help getting ready for the party. Shopping. Straightening the apartment. Moving furniture.”
“Sure,” Bern said. “Absolutely. Count me in.”
What was she withholding? Nothing she said explained why she had wanted to meet for dinner. A simple phone call would have done for the party. Her reserve restrained him, as well. He waited patiently, watching her pick at her rice. Her gestures were delicate and contained. Observing her, he understood with some regret (because he wanted to be a better man, more present and giving in the moment) he was intrigued with Kate philosophically; that is, he was compelled by her necessity to him as a woman, the need he had for a certain kind of feminine beauty offering grace, grief, acceptance, and lament: qualities he also asked of the architecture he loved and, yes, romanticized.
Construction always fell short of its promise. Okay. So what?
Kate pulled a chicken bone from her mouth and set it on the table next to her plate.
In his contemplations of beauty, he was only seducing himself. Oh, for the lightness of a Ladder to Heaven, he thought. My life weighs too damn much.
“Gary left me,” Kate said quietly, setting aside her fork.
He removed his fingers from his wine glass. “What did you say?”
“He’s gone.”
And just like that, gravity seemed to drain through a hole in the bottom of the earth.
“First things first,” Bern said. He steered Kate past a circle of people milling in the halo of their collective breath on the sidewalk outside the International Film Center. He took her down bright lanes, warmed by quickly moving bodies, skirting Washington Square Park. “The party on Sunday. Let’s get through that. If you’ll give me a list, I’ll do the shopping. Food, drinks, whatever. On Saturday I can come over and help you arrange the apartment. Your friends, the Lindahls, will stay with you for a while, right, so that’ll be a comfort. After that, Kate, whatever you need, however I can help …”
“He said he couldn’t handle the baby,” Kate said. “Can you believe that? I expected him to be nervous about it—hell, I’m nervous about it—but …”
“I know.”
“Wally, I didn’t think he’d leave.”
He patted her back. Near the park’s south entrance, a man sold jewelry, clothing, and books. He prowled behind loose boxes wearing a gray sweatshirt and furry Sherpa boots. At his feet, spread across quilts, turquoise, a lifelike baby doll, a broken-spined volume, Journey of a Soul, written by one of the popes, and a Jimmy Durante album.
The park shone under spotlights mounted on spindly metal stands; a portable generator growled among twiggy bushes. Perhaps someone was filming a movie scene or a television commercial. Under the arch, a klezmer band performed a Tom Waits song. The spotlights burnished dancers. Swirling shadows moved against the limbs of the trees, a large half-moon above.
Kate pressed her body against Bern’s left arm. “I’m scared,” she said. “Raising a baby alone …”
“A lot can happen in the next few months.”
“And I’m scared about us.”
“I understand.”
“I need you, Wally. I need you to be my friend.”
“I am your friend, Kate.”
Laughter and applause for the players. Wooly dogs on leashes. Leaden air. A man sold individual flowers from purple buckets: irises, lilacs in green water. A car backfired as the band began again. Lemon light through the trees. The rasp of an airplane engine broke the moon-tinted darkness beyond the boundaries of the park, at first as soft as a grasshopper whirring, then louder as the plane came into view. Everyone stared, as though its appearance signaled something uniquely important to each of them. What does it mean? Is my life going to change?
Bern watched the bobbing heads. Against all odds, we’re bred to endure, he thought. He reached for Kate’s hand. At first unsure, she relented, and offered a tentative squeeze of the fingers.
3.
The Lindahls were delightful. Easygoing, down to earth. Glenn was a tall man in his early thirties, pale and blond. Karen’s shoulders swayed as she talked. Her eyes glistened like chicken broth in a pot, verging on boil.
Kate’s smart-talking actor-friends could lead a parade. Loud and gaudy. One young diva wearing … what were those godawful things—toreador pants? … glared at the CD player as if soldering its parts with the heat of her gaze. A middle-aged woman, clearly used to attention, wore a tall, wiry wig: like the whirling brushes in an automated car wash. In the kitchen doorway, an old woman squeezed past Bern, her face a welter of marks. Time had chewed her up and spit her out.
Kate stood across the room from Bern, plainly exhausted. He circled the dining room table, served himself salad. The spoon in the bowl was hot to the touch, the handle slightly sweaty. On a blue dish, slices of lime, their delicate curves reminding Bern of the planet Venus, the green crescent he had seen once through a planetarium telescope. Next to the dish, melon rinds, tossed like dentures in a stainless-steel bowl.
Three young men, exuding a powerful musk, huddled near Bern, discussing the Tonys. “Brian F. O’ Byrne,” said one. “Coast is going to sweep this year.” “No no,” said another. “If Frank Langella doesn’t win it, I’ll eat my Equity Card. As for Vanessa Redgrave, I mean, really honey, doesn’t she get enough adulation?”
The Empire of the Dead Page 5
