The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel

by Lorna Graham

  “Arauuuuuuuuuuuu. Arauuuuuuuuuuuu.”

  “Quiet, doggy, now—”

  “—The glove is beginning to block out the sun, shadows fall darkly on the island—”

  “—Donald—”

  “Arauuuuuuuuuu.”

  “—Everyone is running for a taxi—”

  “Arauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.”

  “—But the taxis have all turned red—”

  “Arauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.”

  “—Red, the color of death—”

  Eve sat down heavily on the floor, covering her face with her hands. There was absolutely nothing, she decided, as wretched as the particular loneliness wrought by the wrong sort of full house.

  Chapter 4

  The little pearl-faced clock on the nightstand read five-thirty in the morning. There was just an hour and a half until Smell the Coffee. Eve’s arm itched; something was tickling it. She opened one eye and saw the dog, curled up next to her in a tight ball, her breathing deep and rhythmic. How had the tiny pup even gotten up onto the bed? Surely it was too high. Yet here she was, sleeping deeply, presumably exhausted from her fit the previous evening. Eve looked at the dog’s trusting chin resting on her forearm and felt a tug of affection. She disengaged herself carefully and stumbled toward the kitchen to make coffee. Cup in hand, she gazed out the window at the buildings across the courtyard. The light was just starting to come up, a thin sapphire front pushing away the blackness across the east.

  It was funny that Eve should be getting up at dawn; when Penelope had lived in New York, as she’d dreamily confided to Eve, she’d never come home before it. The city of her youth had been a place of literary salons and poetry readings, cigarettes and jazz. She and her friends would hop from the Café Carlyle to the Stork Club, then down to the Village, to someone’s loft or basement, during long nights fueled by liquor, intrigue, and repartee, returning home only when the first rays of sun hit the slate sidewalks. The night simply hadn’t been long enough to contain their revelry.

  These images danced in Eve’s mind as she hunted through the dim kitchen for something to nibble, but the breadbox and pantry shelves were empty. Quite a contrast to the bright Smell the Coffee studio with its bouillabaisse bounty.

  “Bouillabaisse? What an odd thing to ponder.” Donald’s salutation was like a stone thrown in her pool, sending a series of ripples outward, fragmenting her daydream.

  “I made bouillabaisse yesterday. A giant pot of it. Mussels, fish, everything. You should have seen me.”

  “You’ve taken up cooking?” heaved Donald with a sniff. “Girls in my day would have killed anyone who tried to stick them in the kitchen. It is the lowest kind of women’s work. Putting your mind on hold to feed the stomachs of the patriarchy, offering sustenance to others while your soul starves—”

  “I was only cooking because it was part of my interview. The food person was out. The real point is, I wrote my first television script and, in case you’re wondering, it went quite well.”

  “I see,” he said. “How nice that your writing career is taking off.”

  At six forty-five, Eve held up the leash. “Ready for a walk?” The dog stirred, blinking. Eve hooked the leash to her collar. Together, they crept softly down the stairs to avoid waking Mrs. Swan and the other neighbors and outside into the cool, hushed morning. They walked several blocks, Eve scanning the buildings, wondering, as always, if any of them might have been Penelope’s. She’d never mentioned where her apartment was, nor had any of her old papers contained the address. It seemed she’d thrown almost everything out from her old life. But each time Eve passed a townhouse or tenement, she tried to picture her mother there, looking out a window or sitting on the stoop, as the locals so loved to do.

  Before long, the moment that Eve had been dreading came: the dog’s sudden pull out to the curb and ominous squat. Sure enough, contractions began, and suddenly, there it was in all its reeking banality. Eve had thought raw fish was bad. But there was absolutely no doubt about what she had to do: Dog owners who didn’t clean up after their charges were considered the lowest of the low around here.

  “You’ve done your job. Now I must do mine,” Eve said to the dog as she fished out one of the crinkled plastic bags Mrs. Swan had provided. She squatted down next to the blight, holding her breath. She looked up at the sky and began to tap the ground with a bag-enclosed hand, hoping to find her target without having to actually look at it. A couple of punky girls in heavy black eyeliner, who looked like they’d been out all night, walked by arm in arm, giggling at her. After several attempts, Eve’s fingers went from the unforgiving hardness of concrete to the sickening yield she sought. With a clawing motion, she picked up the mound and, still holding her breath, sprinted like an Olympian to the nearest trashcan, the dog struggling to keep up on her short legs.

  At six minutes before seven, she placed the puppy carefully in an old leather tote and pushed open the door of the diner. She saw Vadis’s hand go up from a nearby table.

  “Hey.” The combination of Vadis’s olive skin and wide-set pale eyes—gifts from her Colombian father and Swedish mother, respectively—made her stand out even in New York’s diverse population and drew admiring glances from a couple of nearby diners.

  Eve half leaned in for a cheek kiss, but when Vadis made no move, she pulled back. “Thanks for coming all the way downtown,” she said. “I could have come up to you.” She sat down, gingerly placing the bag on the floor next to her chair.

  “Nah, it’s cool. I have a meeting in Soho at nine-thirty,” said Vadis. She went back to scrolling through her BlackBerry’s reams of contacts. No doubt about it, she was part of this town. Vadis was a real New Yorker. And she was the one who’d insisted that Eve could be—and should be—one, too.

  It all started almost three months previously at the reunion of the Ambrose Aesthettes, the club for art history majors at Ambrose College. The college dedicated to creating “the women leaders of tomorrow” lay just outside Columbus, but the girls had gathered in New York to attend the opening of Inez Montoya’s play, Recognition. Over dinner afterward in the theater district, the other alumnae shared their own stories of triumph: Several ran their own businesses, one had won a genius grant, another had adopted a pair of Mayan twins, and still another had just celebrated her marriage to a minor member of the English aristocracy.

  Eve couldn’t bear to admit she worked for her father—and lived in a condo several doors down from his amid the electric green hills of Rolling Links, a golfing community just outside of Greenwich, Ohio. It was every bit as claustrophobic as it sounded. More so, because most of her relationships were with the sons of Gin’s law partners and golfing buddies, a singularly privileged and feckless set. Especially her most recent boyfriend, Ryan, who ran his father’s company, which involved selling drainage systems to farmers, and who’d lately taken up the topic of marriage.

  But Eve had been so deep inside this life for so long, she had no idea that when she surfaced, when she finally had occasion to pop her head out of her little gopher hole, her contemporaries would be so far down the road.

  After dinner, Vadis asked if anyone wanted to meet her friends for a nightcap in the Village. Eve, more than ready to drown her sorrows, was the only one who wanted to go. They made their way through a deserted brick courtyard surrounded by weathered tenements to a door in the back. Vadis wrapped her hand around the doorknob and gave it a twist. Eve wondered what on earth was going on; it looked like they were about to barge into someone’s private home. But when the door opened, out floated the sounds of a rollicking bar.

  “Former speakeasy,” said Vadis over the music. “No sign.”

  They claimed a back booth. The sepia walls around them seemed to hold the smoke and secrets of a century, while the names carved into the battered tables hummed with the spirit of countless departed drinkers. A sudden wave of déjà vu made the hairs on Eve’s forearms rise. She’d never been to New York before, let alone this bar, s
o why did it feel so familiar?

  “You missed your turn back at the restaurant. To tell everyone what you’ve been up to,” said Vadis, sipping her wine. “Though I get the feeling that was no accident.”

  You never could get anything past Vadis. Eve was tempted to make something up, something about writing a novel or designing clothes, but she decided to come clean. She took a long pull of bourbon and told her friend about living between sand traps on the fairway and working for Gin.

  “And now he’s upping the ante,” said Eve. “He wants me to go to law school, and as long as I agree to work for him for five years, he’ll even pay for it.”

  “Are you going to take him up on it?” Vadis asked.

  “I guess. I mean, I’ve dug myself in a bit of a trench. After twelve years of paralegal, what else am I really cut out for? Plus, it’s not like there are a lot of options in Greenwich.”

  Vadis signaled to the waitress for another round of drinks. Then she touched Eve on the arm in a way that indicated she was about to say something important. “Just say no to law school.”

  “And yes to …?”

  “I dunno. Moving here maybe?”

  “What?” said Eve.

  “There’s no better place than New York for starting over.”

  “What would I do? Where would I live?”

  “Do a job. Live in an a-part-ment.” She strung out the last word as if talking to a child. “Not that hard, you know. Thousands of people do it every day.” She shrugged out of her leather jacket. “I could help you. You could be my project.”

  Eve was about to probe this idea further when Vadis’s friends descended on them: three young men with intricate facial hair and tiny round eyeglasses and two women in long bohemian scarves and ruched suede boots. They piled into the booth and Eve listened with curiosity and not a little envy to their clever banter, peppered with references to politics and books and The New York Times, most of which she didn’t understand. Their world seemed wide, their prospects vast. Everyone burst into laughter at a joke told by the young man sitting next to Eve.

  And something clicked inside her. The courtyard, the unmarked door, the tables with the initials. “Is this place called Chumley’s?” she asked suddenly.

  “Yep,” confirmed everyone, helping themselves to another round of beers from a tray going around the table.

  Eve hugged herself, looking around the room as the story came back to her.

  Her mother had celebrated a birthday here. Penelope had lovingly recounted an evening at a place called Chumley’s—a so-called “secret bar”—with a big gang of her friends. She’d met most of them through her job as a reader for a literary agent in Midtown. Carol and Robert were also readers, the three of them becoming fast friends over the enormous piles of manuscripts that dotted the office. Most of her other pals were writers, editors, or artists. They had become the family that she’d longed for growing up in their clammy little corner of Ohio, she’d told Eve. They’d made her feel part of something larger, of the world itself, of her very times.

  As Eve studied the animated faces around her, she wondered if she could be happy in New York, too. Maybe Vadis was right. How hard could it be to live here? It was just a spot on a map like any other. One that held not just Chumley’s, but all the other places her mother had spoken of with their wonderful names, like the Gaslight, the Cedar Tavern, and the San Remo. Forty years had passed, but maybe Eve could uncover a bit of the magic Penelope had once known.

  When she got back to Ohio, she sat her father down and informed him that as soon as she could put her affairs in order (which would include simultaneously breaking up with Ryan and fixing him up with her friend Corrine), she’d be moving to New York.

  Today, after the show, she’d call Gin to tell him he could forget his misgivings, that it had all been worth it; she’d landed a job at Smell the Coffee.

  The bag wobbled and Vadis jerked her chin back. “What the hell is in there?”

  “A dog,” said Eve, in a low voice.

  “Why not let it out?”

  “Are dogs allowed in here?”

  “It’s okay. I know the owner.”

  Eve lifted the puppy out and set her on the floor. She blinked up at them. “Voilà.”

  “So cute!” Vadis, in suit and heels, got down on her knees and rubbed the dog behind her ears. “I wish I could have one but who has time for a pet? What’s her name?”

  “Doesn’t have one yet. I just got her.”

  “Aww.” The dog, amiable, and seemingly well recovered from the previous day’s drama, licked Vadis on the knuckle. “There’ll be some bacon in it for you later,” Vadis said, standing and brushing off her knees. “So—check it out.” She pointed at a television hanging on the wall. “I told them all about your big moment and got them to put on Channel 6 instead of Squawk Box.”

  “Thanks,” Eve said, tying the leash to her chair. They looked at their menus for several moments before she spoke again. “So, how do you know Orla Knock? You never said.”

  “Concert at Chelsea Piers. I was trolling for new clients.” Vadis leaned forward. “Corporate PR stuff pays well but it’s boring. So I’ve decided to go after musicians. So far I’ve only signed one band, but I’m going to knock them into the stratosphere.”

  Vadis had always been hard-charging. She’d won the Aesthette’s presidency junior year over one or two seniors chiefly due to bravado and a breezy comfort with sizing up club members and telling them what to do. It was as though she saw those around her as pieces in a chess game, but she had an uncanny way of making people want to please her, which seemed to keep the other girls from taking offense.

  The waiter poured some coffee and took their orders.

  “What’s the name of your band?” asked Eve.

  “Spoilt Picnic. They’re rap/folk, totally modern. I’m trying to get Orla to put them on Smell the Coffee, to promote their debut CD. She’s stalling, though. Says she’s not sure they’re ready for national TV. So I’m taking them on tour around the Northeast and hopefully, when we get back, she’ll decide it’s go time.” Vadis raised her cup in a toast. “Plus thanks to you I’m going to have another in at the show, right?”

  “Right.” Eve toasted back, trying to quell her distress that her only friend in town was going on an extended trip. Eve would be completely alone in New York. Though with her new job, she was about to gain a whole bunch of colleagues.

  “So, what is the job, anyway? Pretty much what I said?” Vadis asked.

  Eve explained about bouillabaisse and senators and scripts with a line down the middle and writing exactly twenty seconds, enjoying the surprise spreading over Vadis’s face.

  “Damn.” Vadis gave a low whistle. “Still, writing for Bliss Jones will probably open a lot of doors.”

  “You think?” asked Eve.

  “Um, yeah, she’s, like, a major deal.” Vadis reached for a mini muffin in the basket that had arrived, then continued. “You really don’t know?” Eve shook her head. “First off, she’s the only person alive who’s been a Miss America runner-up and a Rhodes scholar. She’s interviewed practically every world leader and parachuted into war zones. She’s supposed to be the highest-paid journalist on television and her Q score is higher than Santa’s.”

  Eve wanted to ask what a Q score was but Vadis had already moved on.

  “And Hap McCutcheon is hot. He was a baseball player in the eighties. Can’t remember what team. At some point he got hurt and became a commentator. Then he snagged an interview with Castro during a secret trip to check out emerging players in Cuba or something. I think that’s how he wound up in news.”

  Eve reached for a muffin but put it down before taking a bite. War zones. Castro. These were the people she’d be writing for.

  “Hey, it’s starting,” said Vadis, looking at the TV hanging on the wall over Eve’s shoulder. “When’s your thing on again?”

  “Not for a while. Eight-thirty-something.”

  The f
ood arrived but Eve’s eggs grew cold while she gazed at the television. So this was Smell the Coffee. The two anchors introduced themselves from behind a sleek blue desk. Bliss Jones was a vision in a glossy blond bob, with purply-blue eyes and the best kind of nose, the kind that didn’t interfere with the rest of your face. Hap McCutcheon sported cinnamon hair and a comforting, dad-standing-over-the-barbecue smile.

  After a short newscast hosted by a no-nonsense brunette named Sandy Horowitz, which featured videotape of various world conflicts, forest fires, and squirrels on water skis, the show segued into a series of discussions about politics (with an animated-looking Senator Farnsworth, who never did get to bring up his wife’s aid organization), classroom size, and a drug recall in which Bliss and Hap led participants who gestured wildly at each other.

  The dog nuzzled Eve’s calf and she fed her a piece of toast. At exactly eight o’clock, Bliss’s voice sounded urgent as she introduced the next segment. “—New information just coming in at this hour on an ongoing crime spree here in New York City. It involves a mugger holding up his victims at knifepoint while wearing, very often, women’s clothing—and always sporting high-heeled shoes. So far, four victims, one seriously wounded. Here with the latest on the attacks is Police Chief Sebastian Pell. Chief. Pell, thank you for joining us. Please start, if you would, by telling us what we know about the man they’re calling the Stiletto?”

  The police chief was barrel-chested and the bristle of his salt-and-pepper crew cut made Eve want to pass her palm over it.

  “Well, Bliss, thank you for having me this morning. This is one perplexing case. You have no idea the manpower we’ve had to put on this.” He went on for a good thirty seconds, saying, if you listened carefully, precisely nothing.

  “Be that as it may,” said Bliss, sounding irritated, “what our viewers want to know is, who is this madman? And why can’t you find him?”

  The chief cleared his throat and began again, this time soberly detailing the most recent attack and explaining that the victim had arrived at the hospital overnight, slashed in the stomach. Thankfully, she was expected to recover. “The Stiletto is a dangerous, disturbed man,” Pell continued. “His MO is unlike any we’ve seen.…”