The kid behind the counter acted as if he'd been expecting this. He opened the door a crack and peered outside. He didn't approve of whoever was there.
He said, "This is a private club." Then he leaned outside to listen to some explanation or other, at the end of which he shrugged his shoulders and opened the door.
In with a gust of cold air came the guy from the Lincoln Tunnel. I got up and moved silently to the back of the cloak room. The guy showed some sort of ID card and followed the kid behind the counter. They talked. The guy from the Lincoln Tunnel's hands sculpted the air as he described someone tall and broad. The kid looked uncomfortable. He glanced at the door that led to the pool, and then into the cloak room. I shrank back. The guy took a bill out of his pocket and placed it on the counter. The kid hesitated. I couldn't understand why he didn't just turn me over to the guy when only a few minutes before he had begged me to hang around and wait. I also couldn't imagine what K. could possibly have to do with that guy, what had made K. decide to turn me in, and why he had chosen to do so at the club, of all places.
I shouldered the bundle and quietly moved toward the exit. The kid followed me with his eyes, but didn't say a word. My wet sneakers squeaked. The guy turned around. I opened the door and ran out. The street was quieter and emptier than it had been before. I wasted a precious moment deciding which way to turn. The door creaked behind me. That familiar little cough gave away the identity of the man who had opened it. A car came speeding down the street. Was it his partner, urging the Chevrolet toward us? I grasped my bundle tightly and prepared to take off. The car came to a screeching halt in front of me. It wasn't the Chevrolet; it was a yellow cab. There was a woman inside.
She pushed open the door and said with visible relief, "Thanks for waiting."
Miss Doherty.
I didn't yet understand what was going on, but I threw the bundle into the cab and hurled myself in after it. The guy from the Lincoln Tunnel was left standing alone on the curb.
*
We rode in silence for three or four blocks. She seemed to have changed somehow since the last time we'd met. Her hair was disheveled, her lips were cracked and dry, and her face looked tired and full of pain. At the first traffic light I grabbed the door handle.
"Wait," she pleaded. "Isn't there someplace we can talk?"
"About what?"
"I've ridden in this taxi for an hour just to see you," she looked at me in true desperation. "I think I can explain a few things to you."
The light turned green.
The cabbie said, “Where to?"
The lighted dome of the library glowed at the end of the street. Even though I really wasn't a part of that world anymore, the building still filled me with a sense of home and security.
"Let us off there," I pointed.
When we got there, I climbed out and waited for her to pay the driver. Then, without saying a word, I ascended the stairs. Miss Doherty stayed on the sidewalk.
"I despise this place." Strains of music wafted from inside, and a cardboard sign announced: "Last Concert of the Summer".
"They're playing in the main lobby. I'll bet we can find a quiet spot in one of the halls." She climbed the stairs after me.
The main lobby was well lit. People were sitting on folding chairs and listening to a violinist, a cellist and a pianist. Quietly we made our way past the sign that said, "New Acquisitions" and the display cases containing rare books. Ms. Yardley was sitting at the end of the third or fourth row. Her eyes were closed and her head bobbed in time to the music. Velvet ropes blocked the way to the steps that led upstairs. We ducked under them and tiptoed ever so softly up to the administrative floor.
K.'s office was locked for eternity. The janitor had placed a standing ashtray squarely in front of the door. Miss Doherty stared at it in silence. I walked in front of her and moved the ashtray aside. I could see her eyes in the light that filtered up from below. They were filled with a fathomless sadness. I sat on the floor and leaned against the wall. She sat down beside me.
After a few minutes, she said, "You undoubtedly expect an explanation."
I nodded.
She wiped her eyes with a tissue and mumbled to herself, "Where do I start?"
"What's your connection to K.?"
"I'm his wife."
The pianist struck a few especially high notes; or maybe it was the shock of her statement that rang in my ears.
"K.'s wife?"
She nodded.
I looked at her again. She was wet and unkempt and sniffling with a cold but she was pretty, damn it, far too pretty and sexy for me to imagine her with K., no matter how special or intelligent or educated he was.
"You mean...” I sputtered in embarrassment, "that is...”
She seemed to understand.
"I was a student of his," she explained, "and in the rat race of the campus, he was so different, so true to himself; he seemed to confront life with a rare blend of innocence and intelligence."
I remember thinking: would I have to come close to death before a beautiful woman would speak so lovingly of me?
Miss Doherty wiped her nose.
"So that's what our life together was like: not exactly easy, but meaningful; special. Then, a few months ago, things started to go wrong. He kept coming down with all sorts of little, inexplicable illnesses. He went to doctors: first to a dermatologist about an ugly sore that wouldn't heal, then to an ENT man for a pain in his esophagus, and once to an internist because of purple spots that didn't go away. Each doctor diagnosed something different, which he'd barely tell me about - and only after I'd pressed him. It's hard to believe that such an intelligent, educated man could be satisfied with local diagnoses and refuse to see that there was some overriding, general problem that demanded attention. In the meantime, the house was becoming cluttered with pills and prescriptions, we had no money to live on because he was spending everything on doctors, and I kept finding blood and mucus on the clothes he'd thrown in the hamper. He was still denying it, but the front he put up wasn't working anymore...” she took a deep breath, "and one day it dawned on me that all his ailments weren't from some passing bout with illness, but from that disease. Of course I still couldn't let on what I suspected, but I began asking myself: who was this man I loved, who'd lived with me? I knew the only thing I could do to keep from collapsing or going insane was to know - to know everything, everything that had happened, everything he'd done, every place he'd been. I wanted to know his friends, maybe even his... his lovers. I had to know the most awful, painful truth."
I thought of my need to know and about Mom, who never wanted to know anything.
"So...” she continued, "I started using my mother's maiden name, Doherty, and I got that job photocopying articles. I went to the library every day but I made sure he didn't see me; I searched his office one day when I knew he'd gone to the doctor, and I followed you that day when you waited for him outside, and he disappeared...”
"And you thought that I was...”
"Anything was possible, and you seemed the most likely. I wandered around the library for several days before approaching you. You went to his room more often than anyone else, you addressed him every time he crossed the Catalog Room... one evening I saw you follow him to 42nd Street, and another time, when you brought him my forms to sign, you even said how well you knew him...”
I blushed. Me and my tendency to exaggerate. "I wanted to be his friend. He didn't let me get close."
"I know. He told me yesterday, along with all the other things I didn't know."
"Why didn't he tell you before, why only now?"
"Maybe because he knows he hasn't many days left, and he's not leaving me with anything - not even enough to live on - so he figures I at least deserve to hear the truth," she touched the bundle, "his lists, letters he wrote me but never dared send, postcards and letters from his other life - the parallel life he led in secret. I want to be part of all that; and if I couldn't while it was happenin
g, then at least I will be in retrospect...”
"He wanted me to destroy all that...”
"He doesn't want that anymore."
"How can I tell...” again I felt embarrassed, "that is, how do I know...”
"That I'm not lying to you? I couldn't have found you without his help. He told me he'd given you his card and he also gave me the club's address and your telephone number. No one ever answered the telephone at your house, so eventually I paid off the guy at the club to call me when you showed up."
I needed a moment to digest it all.
"And the other guy, the one who ran outside after me?"
"What other guy?" she tried to remember. "Oh, yeah, there was someone there, on the sidewalk... I've never seen him before." She poked around in her purse. "This is yours," she placed an envelope on the floor between my legs.
I opened it and fingered the slide.
"Did he tell you about this, too?"
"No. He just asked whether I'd found an envelope in his drawer in the library." She glanced at me. "You look worried."
After she'd been so open, there was no point in my holding back. "Did you... you haven't shown this to anyone, have you?"
"There's nothing unusual about it. His drawers are full of diagrams like that from the days when he worked for NASA or, before that, from when he was an engineer at McDonnell-Douglas."
I pictured the tiny, wooden cubbyhole of an office behind us. "How did he get from NASA and McDonnell -Douglas to the library?"
"He never knew how to fit in; actually, he didn't want to fit in. He couldn't stand the race for status and money. Every promotion made him feel awkward, and then he'd get depressed and angry. In a sense, the library was his idea of paradise: a place where both an errand boy and a Harvard professor could have access to infinite stores of knowledge and wisdom."
It was all so much to swallow at once.
"Didn't fit in?" I asked. "But he served in the Israeli army... doesn't that demand a certain amount of conformity?"
"Exactly. And he couldn't hack it. He went AWOL after eight months over there, and came back to the States."
We sat there, not speaking. There was something comforting then, something that dispelled all my tension. I searched for something to say, perhaps to repay her for her candor. I remembered that day I'd seen her in the stacks. I told her about it, and asked her what it was she had stolen.
I suppose I was expecting something romantic, or at least tantalizing; instead she said straight out, "It was just his personal file. I wanted to know how often he'd missed work; maybe I was hoping to find out more about the disease. I managed to get it out of the archives, but I was afraid they'd find it in my bag when I left the library." She glanced at her watch, then hurriedly got up. "I've got to get back to him." She tried to lift the bundle.
I got up and helped her balance the bundle on her back.
"Wait, it's heavy." She dropped it back on the floor, then bent over it and untied the sleeves and spread out the jacket. She stuffed the letters into her bag. The pills, too. Then she wrapped the tricot shirts, underwear, and bars of soap in the towel. All that was left lying on the jacket were the gun and the steel-tipped boots. She looked at them for a moment and said, "What'll I do with these? You take them."
I pulled off my wet shoes. She untied the towel and rolled a balled-up pair of socks over to me. I put them on and then slid my feet into the boots. They were warm and soft, and fit perfectly.
"That's not K.'s size," she said. I didn't say anything, but I imagine we were thinking the same thing. She picked the jacket up off the floor and helped me get my arms into the sleeves. It, too, was a perfect fit. She held the gun out to me.
"Take this, too."
I hesitated.
"Please," she pleaded, "help me get rid of it."
I stuck it into the inside pocket of the jacket. Quietly we slipped down the back steps. I unlocked a window and we jumped to the street.
The sidewalk was wet with rain but the boots and the jacket made me feel protected. She took my arm as we crossed the street. We stood for a moment on the opposite sidewalk, our arms entwined. I felt the warmth of her body and the solidness of her arm under her shirt. I hugged her shoulders. She let me hold her, and leaned her head on my chest. We stood like that for a few minutes, until the alarm on my wristwatch went off.
She placed her hand on my cheek and said, "Take care of yourself."
Then she turned and walked away.
I began walking, too. I don't know why, but I turned in the opposite direction. After a few paces I stopped and turned around. She had stopped, too. I waved to her. She waved back weakly and turned to walk away. When I reached the end of the block I stopped and turned around again. She was gone.
I felt very sad, and lonely. I sat down on the steps of the library to take stock of things. I had a little over $70 on me, plus the pistol and the slide - which, by that point, seemed totally useless and unimportant. I crumpled it, envelope and all, into a tight ball and tossed it into a nearby trash can. People started coming out of the concert; carefully, they walked around me. I tilted my head as far back as I could and looked upside down at the distant building as it emptied out. For me, it would never again be just a library; it would always be someplace significant, painful.
*
I found a relatively clean flophouse on 11th Avenue. I paid the $23 up front (I didn't have any bags, which didn't seem to make the desk clerk too happy) and walked up the narrow staircase to the second floor. The room contained a large bed, a sink, and a chair. I locked the door, got undressed, lay the pistol under the pillow and slid under the covers.
I immediately realized that I would not be able to sleep. You know the feeling. Soda, not blood, was coursing through my veins. The room's odor was driving me crazy. It smelled of sex, and of her; her smell clung to the shirt and jacket. I looked down at the street. There was nothing unusual outside; just rain. Once I read that there was a way to hint to the desk clerk that you wanted a woman sent to your room, but I didn't know what that way was, whether my $50-some-odd would be enough, whether the desk clerk would even take such a hint seriously from a kid my age, or whether I'd know what to say or do once the whore showed up. I paced up and down the room. Then I lay down on the bed and carefully took the gun out from under the pillow. It was cocked and loaded. A small latch locked the slide. I realized from all the movies I'd seen that this was the safety. I was dying to try it, to shoot just one shot; but I controlled myself and slipped the gun back under the pillow. I lay down on my back, rolled onto my stomach, then turned back over onto my back. Finally I jerked off with the soap that was by the sink and fell asleep, ashamed.
When I woke, it was pitch dark. I found myself sprawled across the width of the bed; the clock read 6:10. I thrust my head into the pillow and took slow, measured breaths in an effort to fall asleep again. But in vain. I would have given anything for it to be morning already. I thought of Mom coming home just then to a cold, empty house. I also thought about what was going to happen today to the man she loved. I didn't believe you'd be able to prevent it; something in our last telephone conversation made me think you wouldn't be able to stop anything. Suddenly I realized the groundlessness of my belief that today, the 7th of September, all my troubles would be over. Even if the man who controlled Mom's life were to disappear at The Society for Proper Nutrition ("disappear" was the word that made me the least uncomfortable) at 12 noon, my problems would not. Dad would not stop looking all over the country for secrets until he got caught; Mom wouldn't be any happier with him, and might even be more miserable; and I would still have one year left before I'd have to go back to a country I hardly knew and serve in an army that all the newspapers denounced.
My memories of the previous night were hazy, as if the magic spell had evaporated. My other worries came back with renewed force. I had an overwhelming desire to talk to Mom. I got dressed, put on the steel-tipped boots, and went downstairs. The telephone in the lobby
was broken. I zipped up the jacket and went out into the street. I bought some cookies at an Italian bakery and asked to use the phone.
It was a little after seven. Mom answered after eight or nine rings and sounded confused. That didn't keep her from asking if I was behaving myself wherever I was a guest.
I reminded her to pick up Aunt Ida at the hospital. I wanted to make sure she wouldn't make the mistake of going to the offices of The Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of the Body, but that proved unnecessary.
She remembered, and even added, "I don't know how I'll manage everything. At 12:00 I've got to get Ida, and the service at Uncle Harry's Temple starts at 4:00... when will I have time to get dressed?" Getting dressed is a long, drawn-out affair with Mom, so a statement like that indicated she'd probably be running quite late. This time, it reassured me. It meant she was going to spend at least half an hour trying on clothes and rejecting them, rather than just putting on the pink shirt with the black stripe - which would have been a bad sign.
Nevertheless, I felt edgy. I looked at my watch again. There were less than six hours to the event. What would happen afterward?
"I want to come with you," I said.
"Where?"
"To Temple."
She was bewildered. That was understandable, given the fact that the Temple was one of those places she usually had to beg me to go.
"What happened?" she asked.
"Nothing. Rosh Hashanah."
She didn't buy it.
"There are only two tickets: one for me, and one for Aunt Ida."
"Aunt Ida won't be able to go. She's sick."
"She's healthy as a horse. She just called an hour ago and asked why I'd lied to her doctors about being in Syracuse instead of coming to get her."
"What did you tell her?" I asked with some trepidation.
"You know it's beneath my dignity to argue with someone feeble and senile."
I went back to the matter of the Temple. "You can leave a message at the entrance telling them to let me in."
The Last of the Wise Lovers Page 19
