“Bees?” said the man at the end of the bar.
“Like honeybees.”
“I know they make honey,” he called down to them.
She turned back to Tim. “Charmer, isn’t he?”
She drifted back down the bar.
When he and Jane talked about her drinking, they were free of the recriminations that might have taken hold of them over some lesser matter. This only seemed to make it harder to talk about. A strangeness lay coiled in their domestic familiarity. They lay in bed in anticipation of talking but remained silent for long stretches of time, as if the subject under discussion were not the self-evident steps they would have to take to address her willful drunkenness but the unimaginable ways they might resolve his involuntary walking. They stared into the essential mystery of each other, but felt passing between them in those moments of silence the recognition of that more impossible mystery—their togetherness, the agreement each made that they would withstand the wayward directions they had taken and, despite their inviolable separateness, still remain. It had nothing to do with how age and custom had narrowed their circumstances or how sickness had shaped them outside of their control. It was not a backward but a forward glance.
“I don’t want to go,” she had said.
“It will go by fast.”
“What will you do?”
“Wait for you. Visit you.”
“I don’t see why,” she said.
She hated herself for having failed him. Becka had done it better, she said. He would have done it better by an order of magnitude. He interrupted her. If she was going to assign blame, he would have to take his share. He never intended to bring this on them, no, but intention, or the lack of it, could not grant a full pardon. He could not escape blame even if it was the faultless blame of being born and falling ill, blame that was also Jane’s, that was anyone’s, really—everyone’s price to pay for being mortal.
“We’ll take a vacation afterward,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”
“How often will you visit me?”
“As often as they let me.”
Visiting hours were from six to nine. He often left work early to spend a few hours with her before returning home.
The ring of his BlackBerry brought him back to the bar and the barstool.
From the moment Masserly began to speak, with his clown’s voice that seemed to suggest the arrival of puberty any day now, Tim forgot his resolution to remain in the world and resumed a bitter longing for his old job. He didn’t even mark the transition. The pockmarked bar smooth to the touch, the mahogany details, the bottles arrayed before the distressed mirror like all the king’s men—they faded the moment of the phone call. “Tim, it’s Kyle Masserly.”
“Yeah?”
“This motion for summary judgment in Keibler.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Didn’t you get a call from Kronish?”
“How do you know about my motion, Masserly?”
“They gave it to me.”
“They who?”
“They want me to clean it up. Not that it, you know—”
“Clean what up?”
Tim listened intently. He had his finger drilled into his opposite ear to block out the music from the bar, and for a quick second it sounded as if Masserly had hit the mute button.
“Did you just put me on mute, Masserly?”
The office ambiance came back with the kid’s voice. “Yeah, clean it up. They’re going to submit it tomorrow.”
“To the court?”
“But like I need to do anything to this thing.”
“They’re going to submit that motion to the court?”
“Tomorrow. I just got off the phone with—”
He was standing now between the bar and the stool, trying to concentrate on what Masserly was saying.
“With who?” he said. “Masserly?”
“—and they love it.”
“I wrote that motion,” he said.
“Which is why I’m calling. You should get credit, not me.”
“Kronish told me it was pointless.”
“And where did you get the genius to—”
Tim thought he heard the start of a guffaw just as Masserly’s voice cut out. His end had gone mute again. Or so it seemed. Sometimes lawyers made phone calls with one finger poised over mute so they could bad-mouth the opposition.
“Did you just hit mute again? Is someone in the office with you?”
“Mute? Look, I was asking where you got the insight to write a motion for summary judgment in Keibler when there’s Horvath. It’s genius. But you know Horvath chapter and verse the way you make implicit the differ—”
There might have been another guffaw, but the line went dead.
14
Another thing he had to do after getting his life back was tend to his ailing body. He visited the Russian and Turkish Baths on 10th Street, not far from Tompkins Square Park, where he sat in the steam room. The heat softened his bones. A bucket of cold water poured over his head reawakened dulled nerves. He liked the place, despite the fact that the other men made him feel like an anorexic. They were hunched, hairy, burly-backed men with traces of immigrant pasts who walked naked around the locker room, their taut bellies and bulby pricks too much for the rough handkerchiefs that passed for towels at the registration desk. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t vain. Vanity was a luxury of those exempt from the compromises of a long illness. He felt self-conscious only of his missing toes.
The entrance to the baths resembled any other crumbling red stoop in the city, with a lunette above the double doors that read Tenth St. Baths. A man came out just as he was entering and held the outer door open for him. Tim thanked him and climbed the small flight of stairs and almost went through the black door to the registration desk when he suddenly stopped. He dropped his gym bag and ran quickly back down the stairs.
He spotted the man walking east toward Avenue A. He was just then opening a translucent umbrella screen-printed with a map of the world. The unfurled umbrella swallowed up his head and shoulders.
Tim needed a better look, a clear and unambiguous look, to confirm that it was the same man he’d encountered on the Brooklyn Bridge. He ran down the stoop stairs and crossed to the opposite side of the street. It still felt unnatural to walk hurriedly with missing toes. He pressed down on their phantoms. He reached the corner ahead of the man and lingered there to see in which direction he would turn. The man waited for the traffic to clear and then walked across Avenue A. Tim followed him into Tompkins Square Park.
He kept his distance as they walked along the curving path, past benches and fenced-off trees. As they approached 7th Street, Tim quickened his pace. He walked ten feet ahead of the man and then turned and walked toward him. The man’s head was downcast and buried in the umbrella. Tim realized he wasn’t going to get the look he needed unless he said something.
“Excuse me.”
The man peered up. Tim saw the same drawn, lonely face, the same dimpled chin, the same long pointy nose with the knuckle in the middle. The man lowered his head quickly and resumed walking.
They hit 7th Street. They walked alongside each other just as they had on the bridge. “Hey,” said Tim, but the man would not be distracted again. Tim tapped his umbrella, and when that did nothing he grabbed it and held on. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”
The man yanked the umbrella away. “What do you want?” he asked.
“I know who you are.”
“Do you want some change, is that the idea? Well, I don’t have any change to give you. You should get a job.”
The man returned the umbrella above his head and resumed walking.
“Hey, don’t walk away from me.”
Tim had to move quickly to remain at the man’s side. He looked around for others on the street with them but there was no one. The city seemed to have cleared out.
“Find someone else to harass,” said the man. “I have
no change for you.”
“I know who you are,” said Tim.
“You’re obviously a lunatic.”
Tim reached out to grab hold of the man’s arm. With one graceful move the man slipped his grasp and retreated two paces. In the process he abandoned the umbrella. It spun like a dying top on the sidewalk. When Tim looked at the man, he saw that he was standing oddly erect, his two hands lightly fisted.
“You must stop harassing me,” he cried loud enough for anyone to hear.
“You know something about the murder of Evelyn Hobbs,” said Tim. “The police want to talk to you.”
“Fine,” the man said, again too loudly, “take the umbrella. Just leave me in peace and you can have the umbrella.”
The man walked sideways toward the corner of 7th and A. He raised one hand to hail a cab, but the street was just then empty of all cars except those parked at the curb.
Tim approached him cautiously. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“You are a lunatic!” cried the man.
“You and I need to go to the police.”
Finally a single cab appeared in the distance. The man held up his hand. “Do not come any closer,” he said to Tim.
Tim took another step forward. “I’m not letting you inside that cab.”
The cab aimed its way toward them. He grabbed the man just as he was reaching for the door. He got hold of his upper body and clasped him from behind in a bear hug. The man swiveled with Tim on his back and slammed him against the rear door of the cab, knocking the wind out of him. He had a raw vital power all out of proportion to his pale demeanor. His struggle was a practiced struggle, his resistance a trained one. Pinned against the cab, Tim gasped for air. The cabbie stepped out but then stood there frozen, staring from the open door. Tim told himself he just needed to hold on until someone called the police. The police would take them in, they would identify the man, they would finally have the man in custody. But then he was lifted off his feet and lofted into the air, thrown right over the man’s back, and landed hard on the curb. He lay, stunned, half on the sidewalk, half on the street.
The man hovered over him and grabbed his jaw like an angry mother. He got close and looked him in the eye. “You forget me now,” he whispered, “or I will kill your wife and daughter. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Forget me.”
“Okay.”
Tim stared up at the dense sky for he didn’t know how long. Only his eyes moved, blinking involuntarily when a raindrop landed close by. Someone finally came over.
“Where’d he go?” asked Tim.
“Are you okay?”
“Where’d that man go?”
The stranger looked up. “What man?”
In the days that followed, Tim reengaged Fritz Weyer. Fritz showed the sketch to the guys who ran the baths. No one recognized the face. Tim told Fritz to keep searching. He was confident the man lived in the area. He said nothing about the fact that he and the man seemed to be the only two people in the entire city at the moment of their encounter.
15
The details of the Ellison deposition came back to him, unbidden, while he sat at the bar, and he couldn’t see any reason why it precluded summary judgment in Keibler. The credibility dispute issue was highly debatable. And as for Horvath, whatever that was, there was always a way around precedent.
But was someone in Masserly’s office guffawing at him?
He was on his way back to the office to find out when his cab slowed for a light. He peered over at a garbage truck, where a man in corn-colored gloves was just then stepping off the truck’s ledge. From the street corner the man dragged one of the city’s green mesh bins over to the truck’s hopper and tossed it in, shaking it twice with quick indifference before returning it and resuming his weary perch on the ledge.
As Tim watched him, he thought despite all that man must see of the city on any given day, he probably noticed none of it. He put in his eight hours of garbage and went home. His memories were of stench, stickiness, weighty bins. That was no way to live. If you want to do it right, he thought, you have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl inch by inch across the earth, stopping occasionally to touch your cheek to the ground.
So then what was he doing in a cab?
“Can you let me out here please?” he asked the driver.
He paid and stepped to the curb. He was still far from the office. He stood on the street corner in his new coat and pulled his gloves tight. He watched the people passing by on the opposite side of the street, the cars thundering past, the unyielding permanent motion of the city. He stood absolutely still. The first of a spring snow was beginning to fall. It collected on his shoulders. The wind bum-rushed him from the west, filling his eyes with tears. He squinted and took a close look at a building across the way, the three whipping flags mounted above the revolving door, the green scaffold poles. A cluster of exiled smokers hovered around the entrance. Closer by, pigeons cooed and balked. A stout Hispanic woman in sandwich boards stood on the street corner mutely passing out flyers for discount men’s clothing. Metal burned bitterly from a pretzel vendor’s cart.
Maybe they let him return not because they were generous, but because they were cruel. They knew the greatest way to punish him was not to freeze him out forever, but to put him within reach of real work every day and then to deny him and deny him.
He walked down to the West Village. He sat for a spell on the stoop leading up to a brownstone. The sun had fled from the block and was rapidly disappearing from the city altogether while casual flakes drifted in the air. The exposed brick, the cement stairs, the small ironwork gates, the tin garbage cans, the protective grilles overlaying the windows of the garden apartments—all radiated a falling night’s cold. The cars parked along the curb were naked and cold.
A woman emerged from a brownstone across the street. She was accompanied by a couple. The three of them stood on the stairs a moment before shaking hands and saying good-bye. The woman remained on the stoop and looked in both directions as if expecting someone. He noticed a For Sale sign posted on the brownstone.
He walked across the street and introduced himself. He told the woman he was a partner at Troyer, Barr. Quick to recognize the name of the firm, she immediately invited him in. She was trim, smartly dressed, and full of rehearsed speech. They entered the parlor-floor apartment. He walked to a recess of windows where he admired the view. The woman stood behind him, in front of the fireplace. She broke her monologue occasionally to say, “Let’s see… what else…” He stared through the darkening glass as it began to reflect more of his warm and motionless silhouette than the stuff of the outside world.
“Would you mind turning off that light?” he asked.
The woman walked to the kitchen, her shoes clapping against the hardwood floor. The room fell into darkness, and his reflection in the window faded. Outside, lit windows made a lambent patchwork in the brownstones across the street. The buildings were built of white brick and red brick and the brick of fall colors. Residents walked down the street toward home as softly as the falling snow. He resolved to call Kronish. They weren’t going to let him back in. And what did it matter anyway.
“It’s a wonderful street,” he told the broker.
16
Jane came out into the light and stood abreast the long white columns of the porch while he walked down the stairs and placed her bag in the trunk. The fickle temperature had risen overnight and the day was warm and bright. They left the facility down a dusty lane overhung with trees just coming into leaf.
“Would you like to take a drive?” he asked.
“Where to?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just wasn’t sure if you wanted to go home right away or if you’d like to be out in the world. You haven’t really been out in the world.”
She didn’t know how to tell him that she didn’t want to go home. She wasn’t sure she was ready to leave the facility.
She lived among flowers and courtesy there, among the firm and guiding voices of the counselors, surrounded by nicely groomed lawns. She was cut off from temptation, unburdened by compromise and guilt, and there she had only one room with one bed, her life stripped down to the simplicity of self-survival.
“A drive’s a good idea,” she said.
“It’s a good day for one.”
“It’s nice to feel the wind coming in. I haven’t been in a car in a long time.”
“Are you happy to be going home?”
She didn’t answer.
“You can be honest.”
“Yes,” she said. “Very much.”
They avoided the highways. They took the numbered routes that turned into streets with names whenever they entered one of the small towns. They stopped at a state park and walked from the parking lot down a footpath to a flowering lake and stood at the edge a few feet from the still water and listened to the silence.
“Let’s jump in,” he said.
“I don’t have my bathing suit.”
“We’ll go naked.”
“In the middle of the day?”
“Who’s looking?”
She peered around and saw no one, no one on the water itself or on the far shore. They walked up into the woods a few feet and took off their clothes and hung them from a tree and then ran silently into the sun-skinned lake, which was much colder than either of them anticipated when they were taking its temperature with their fingertips.
“Christ, oh Christ,” he said. He reached for her in a panic of cold, and she was eager for him. They fought the water in a firm embrace, turning in circles and chattering and rubbing each other’s bodies with their hands and wondering how much longer they could stand it. “It’s kind of torture.”
“Bracing,” she said.
“Stupid.”
“Your idea,” she said.
“Really stupid. Are you ready?”
“We just got in.”
They raced back to their clothes. He dried her off with his undershirt and stopped to kiss her breasts. Her red nipples had hardened and dimpled from the cold, and with her hand on the back of his head, she pressed his hot mouth tighter. He got down on his knees and pushed her gently against the tree. She spread her legs and dug her backside into the rough bark and gripped his hair between her fingers until she came.
The Unnamed Page 15
