At the motel, I showered and shaved. I called Detective Sergeant Bill Tillman to tell him what I had found and to see if he had come up with anything.
“Tony, we have trouble,” he said as soon as he heard my voice. That sounded interesting, so I responded with a grunt of inquiry.
“That reporter you sent out here.” Reporter? I sent? “I don’t know if she’s the right person for this. That psychic gave her a reading and told her she was gonna win the Pulitzer because her mind was more open than most and could see the value in things that most people rejected out of hand. I think she’s falling for it.”
While he spoke, my brain pretended to think. It came to me that I had spoken to Gene about it. He must have done something about it. Which meant he was going to bill me for it. And how was that going to go into the expense report: $250 (nothing Gene did ever seemed to cost less) to con reporter into doing story on psychic?
“Did you go up to the farmhouse, Bill?”
“Do you think she could be just acting like she’s been conned so those nuts will be more open with her?”
“And the microphone, did you check it out?”
“Of course I did. Hey, you will not believe who it belongs to. Or belonged to, because they claim they lost it.”
“OK, Bill, who?”
“The DEA!” he announced. It made sense. Why should the Colombians buy the equipment when there was so much of it around them from the Drug Enforcement Agency? With a gun pressed to his groin, Hencio deVega could probably delineate the equipment transfer in detail. I explained all that to Tillman.
“Thanks for telling me,” he said. “How do you think I should handle this reporter of yours?”
“Handling the media is a delicate thing, Bill.”
“I know, Tony, I know.”
“Just stick to the facts, dates, man-hours, manpower assignments, and hope for the best. Hang tough.”
“I’m gonna do that. Thanks,” he said.
I very much wanted to sleep. To trade day for night. I did hated calisthenics and swam in the motel pool, but when I lay down I kept mixing thoughts and dreams. Edgar Wood in prison, and me there too, watching me rape of a young boy. The boy tried to scream, but every time he did, they punched his face and kept banging away from behind. Then they came after Edgar. When they grabbed him and pulled him down he turned to look at me. He cried for help. When they tore his pants off his mask came off too, and it was Christina.
I didn’t want to dream that. I made myself awaken.
She was pretty, but if it was pretty I wanted all I had to do was stand on the corner, Fifty-seventh and Fifth, or look in on the aerobics class at the club, or go back to Clara Barton High in Brooklyn and watch the Puerto Rican girls flash by. I had too much to lose to trade it in on a tastier orgasm.
Lear jets were zipping down to the islands. Over & East executives rode down With mistress-secretaries to hotels the corporation owned. Everyone flying, eating, drinking, screwing at company expense. Wood went on at length about who did how much on Over & East money. The stockholders’ money, he pointed out virtuously. And who they did it with, and even specifically noted preferred sexual practices. There was one vice-president who was convinced that anal sex did not constitute infidelity. Later, apparently, his wife’s attorney invalidated that conceptual model.
Even skimming, it took another night to get the gist of that hunk of gossip, and I resented me triviality of it all.
There was no scale to Wood’s indignation and no perspective in his accusations. He sounded the same talking about sex in the office as he did when he spoke about political corruption, which he finally got to in his third week of testimony and my third night of reading.
The Over & East fleets, ground and air, had been put at the disposal of Stephen Caldwell, a big-time New Jersey contractor and, at the time Wood was speaking of, brother-in-law of the governor. Caldwell’s use of the fleets coincided with campaign season.
Over & East also used Caldwell as their prime contractor in New Jersey. Several of the jobs, also coincidental with campaign season, were, according to Wood, overpriced to the tune of 300–400 percent, an estimated $5 million in overspending. Money that was intended, Wood said, to find its way to political figures throughout the state.
The results indicated that it had. Various municipalities, as well as the state, did Over & East some substantial favors. Zoning variances. Roads built and rail service improved when they led to O&E facilities. Jersey had a tax-abatement program designed to lure new industry. It was applied twice in favor of Over & East when they simply took over and reorganized existing companies. Exemptions were granted in dumping and clean-air ordinances.
It was a tale I read with mounting excitement. Hot stuff. Prison-sentence and vote-the-bastards-out-of-office stuff, even in New Jersey where four of the five mayoral candidates in the last Newark primary were under indictment even as they ran.
Mel confirmed my immediate reaction over the squall of breakfast children. It was indeed, he agreed, hot stuff.
So hot, Mel said, that Caldwell had already done time for it. As had several executives of the Over & East subsidiary, John’s River Chemical and Refining, Inc.
Charles Goreman, speaking through his attorney, Edgar Wood, had expressed deep shock and dismay. Everyone in a position of authority at John’s River had been dismissed or transferred. A special letter of apology and explanation was sent to every stockholder. At the next meeting the stockholders voted a special memo of appreciation to Charles Goreman for responding so responsibly and promptly to me mess.
“What a load of crap,” I said. “He sold you a bill of goods.”
“We only had him for three weeks, dammit,” Mel said. “Wood was at the center. He knew it all. He was spilling it, slowly, sure, but he was spilling it. We just lost him too soon.”
“Brodsky, you know what occurs to me. What occurs to me is that Charles Goreman is a very smart man. Slick, tricky, sails close to me wind. And that is all. Edgar Wood was a very angry person who made a lot of threats, which were promises he couldn’t keep. That happens when people get upset. For instance, there are people who have said they were going to blow me away, and here I am. And then, it occurs to me, a couple of dumbshit half-amateur car thieves got caught in the act, and they bopped Edgar Wood a little too hard. That all occurs to me.”
13
A BODY OF WATER
I WENT FROM BRODSKY, to National, to LaGuardia, to a pay phone and, when she said “come over,” to Christina Wood’s apartment.
“So far,” I had to tell her, “there is nothing.”
“I want you to, I need you to go on looking. Please.”
“Of course I will, if you want me … I want to go back over some things about your father. Now, you told me you weren’t here at the trial. Were you here when he was arrested?”
“Can we take a walk? Or go out for a cup of coffee?” We headed west. I got her to laugh by telling her about Mel Brodsky, acid king of the SEC. Crossing Sixth Avenue, she took my arm. The casual intersection of limbs seemed to curl through my whole body.
“Were you here when your father was arrested?” I asked again.
“Yes, yes, I was,” she said like an admission of something.
“What did he say? How did he react?”
“He said, said it was nothing, nothing serious. He said they couldn’t prove anything and it would be over very quickly.”
“Is that all he said?” She let go of my arm. It left a void. Its absence filled me with desire.
“That’s all he said to me and my … mother.”
“Go on. You heard him say something to someone else.”
“On the phone. I heard him on the phone. He was talking to one of his attorneys, I think. He was cursing a lot. Every other word was ‘fucking,’ and I’ll try to remember what he said, but I’ll leave that out.”
“Sure, I can visualize it.” It would have sounded like a great deal of the transcript.
“He said it was a persona
l and vindictive thing. That the other partners resented him because he was an upstart, he wasn’t part of their little club. If, if it had been anyone else, he said—and that was the first time I realized he was guilty, that Daddy was a thief—they would have kept it very quiet and certainly they would have had the bare minimum of courtesy to come and talk to him first.”
“Did you ever talk to him about it?”
She moved away from me. Then, after a long pause, moved back and answered, “I tried.”
“What happened?”
“‘My dear daughter,’ ” she mimicked him, angry about it, “ ‘you don’t have to concern yourself with this matter. It’s just smoke, and where there is smoke there is not always fire,’ and I knew that there was. But I didn’t … he didn’t let me talk to him.”
“You called Charles Goreman ‘Uncle Charlie.’ You were close to him? He was close to the family?”
“At my sweet sixteen,” and it was clearly a memory she was fond of, “Charlie gave me a fur coat. He was very sweet. He said, ‘Now that you are a grown-up woman you must have a grown-up woman’s coat.’ It was Russian sable. I was quite careful not to find out how much it cost. That way I could say to my girl friends, ‘Of course I don’t know how much it cost, it was a gift from a man.’”
“Your father seemed to have resented Goreman a lot, at least at the end. Did that have anything to do with it?”
“What?”
“Things like giving you a fur coat.”
“No,” she said nervously.
“Did he always resent Goreman?”
“In a way, thinking back, I guess he did,” she said thoughtfully. “Daddy was very status conscious. There were clubs that invited Charlie in that wouldn’t even speak to my father. Charlie spoke to presidents and kings. He made deals with entire countries and with the heads of companies that were bigger than some of those countries. And if Daddy got to speak to those people at all, they spoke to him like a … flunky. No, not that, but like a functionary.”
We were at West Street, where the West Side Highway was until it fell down, six lanes of overanxious traffic. The sign said “Don’t Walk,” but there was a fragment of green left on the light. We looked at each other, grasped hands and ran for it.
Laughing and gasping, we beat the bestial charge of the cars and trucks and walked out onto the Morton Street pier.
Gay couples passed us hand in hand and with arms around each other. Single men sat, gazing at the wide, wide river, dreaming reams of sailors. A queen drifted past, looked me over, gazed at Christina with disdain and sniffed. We were the last heterosexuals.
“You don’t have to do this out of guilt,” I told her.
“Is that what you think?”
“I have no real way of knowing. I’m just telling you that you don’t have to.”
“Do you want to drop it? Is that what you’re saying? Are you saying you want to give it up?”
“No. I just have to let you know the real status of things. It’s your money, and you have to know how it’s being spent.”
“I don’t care about the money, there’s plenty,” she said carelessly. “And if it turns out that he was killed by a car thief, as everyone thinks, I will accept that. I just want to know for sure. As long as it is proved and I know.”
“I will do all I can,” I promised.
We were at the end of the pier. The sun was riding down from its apex and clouds were coming up from the west to meet it. As they began to touch, color tinged the smog over New Jersey and it promised a lavish sunset.
“I don’t know anything about you,” she said. “You look like there’s a woman in your life.”
“ Yes. Yeah, there is.” I looked at the river and away from her. I did not want to see the way that she had been looking at me change when she had the facts.
“Tell me about it.”
I turned toward her. Our eyes met, hers sea-green and looking up at me, and yes, it was all there. The poem in my head, the tension in her room, the look that I had seen the very first time and consigned to delusion—they were not projections of desire. They were manifestations of desire. It was all of whatever there is, and both of us knew it.
I stared into her eyes. My hand reached up and touched her cheek.
Passion lies sleeping like a dog in a kennel. Then there are fences, collars and leashes, so that even when the bitch wakes up she won’t have her freedom. Later on, after the investigation, the accusations, the recriminations, still, no one knows who left the gate unlocked.
My voice was thin and hoarse when I spoke. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t think so.”
She turned her head so her lips nestled into my palm. They were moist, they were open and they kissed me. There was a sound unheard, a cry, and I lifted her mouth to mine. We came to each other so that every queen on the pier envied the royalty of our lust and the purity of my erection. We walked back to her apartment, to her bed, kissing on corners in full oblivion, gazing moonstruck, our bodies liquid and poured together, for all the honest world to see.
The door closed behind us. Breasts and buttocks, shoulders and thighs, eyes, thighs, penises, ankles, loins and finger joints are all day long such ordinary things, like fried eggs, shoes and doors. Then a moment comes when the days are torn off and the weight of a woman’s breast, the fatness of the moon in autumn, the laugh of a fool, are as fresh and awe-inspiring as the moment you realized the bullet missed.
I wanted to recite poems. Once poets were dangerous men. Leading to war and insurrection, opening the seraglios of forbidden beds and unmentionable desire, taunting and arousing whatever gods their times had. Now the poets, it seems, are declawed and defanged, as good as gone.
But we still have rock ‘n’ roll.
The way was open. We both made sounds as I entered. We both reached down, deep into hunger, and yielded. We began the beginning of the end. It was a warm and liquid place, full of rhythms, we began to forget that it’s only rock ‘n’ roll, and there was a ballad, ancient and tender, somewhere above the pounding Afro-percussion.
Fuck cannot be that good. Fuck can’t be so full of wonder. When it’s not bits and pieces of physiology, when your fingertips are as urgent as a cock, hands as clinging as a cunt, and your eyes seek each other as violently as your hips, then what is it? The word love floats in, but that just can’t be.
When the first group of orgasms ebbed, I lifted the upper part of my body from hers and looked down into her eyes. We were wet and sweet with sweat; stray hairs clung to her moist forehead and I brushed them away.
“Can you stay the night?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. I had not called ahead to say home will be the sailor, and this one night could be lost in the slipstream of the shuttle.
Wordless, when the second group of orgasms ebbed, we clung to each other, still wordless. You can fuck on the first date, but you can’t say “I love you,” and each time I ambled through the catalog in my mind for a phrase, that was pretty much it. If glances were words, if touches were words, the style of giving and taking were words, and they are, then they pretty well covered it.
The clouds that had been forming in the west did not come in. The night was clear, and we stood at the window with a bright moon watching us. Close, light kisses hovered around the edge of sex. She slid to her knees looking at my body as if she thought it was the kind of miracle that I knew hers to be.
When I was young and first loving women, there was one moment that thrilled me above all. It was not a physical moment. Not when I would first touch the lips of a vulva and find them wet, or a clitoris and find it erectile responsive, or the ritual of making bodies naked for each other. It came earlier, fully dressed, most often with a close-held kiss. The moment of yielding. The moment when resistance was gone, the tension melted, and I would actually feel the girl’s whole body become soft, her body letting her be mine. The moment when all her struggling “no” turned to “yes,” to yielding.
I
t is a moment that has disappeared from my adult sexual experience. Possibly because times have changed and sex is no longer a contest of the male “yea” and female “nay.” Yielding has been replaced by mutual agreement, by the consent between consenting adults, brittle and pallid.
Christina touched that adolescent place where sexual feeling is formed. The fantasyland inside met the reality before me as she found a way to give me that gift of her yielding. All of me pulsed with the heat of the blood that swelled me hard. The tools of sex are part of the body; sex itself is rooted in desire, and desire is a swelling of the mind.
The moonlight came. The hooks of her sexuality sunk into the heart of my desire. She looked up at me. Sea-green eyes soft with tenderness, her cheeks blushed with a faint hint of pink.
“I want you,” she said, “to fuck my face.”
14
HOME
THERE IS PREPARATION H, aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, Orajel, cocaine, Tylenol, Desenex, morphine, Valium, Brioschi, grass, grain alcohol, Ace bandages, stress-formula vitamins, and Ben-Gay for all the niggling pains that make the walk through life a trudge. Nothing beats infatuation as the all-in-one painkiller, pick-me-up, body toner and stimulant. I went home with a spring in my step and a light in my eye.
I picked Wayne up from the after-school center early to give him his birthday present, a midget membership at my squash club, complete with an El Cheapo beginner’s racket and a group of lessons.
The time would come soon, I thought, when he would also have to learn to fight. When I was growing up the Police Athletic League, the Catholic Youth Center and me YMCA all had boxing programs. I wondered if they still did. Everything was becoming karate and kung fu, which would do just as well. It’s not the technique that matters. It’s learning how to deal in fear, violence and pain, until you’re cool enough to stay with your technique while the violence rains around you and rages inside you.
I’m not in love with violence, either way, coming or going. Nor did I want Wayne to be. But taking a blow and not returning it can be a pain far more insidious and long-lasting than a split lip or a cracked rib.
No One Rides for Free Page 10
