The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  "Are you going to find a job?" Judith finally asked one night.

  "Of course."

  "No, I really mean it, Bill."

  "I will find a job, okay?"

  Judith had lost a few pounds, five perhaps. There had been some long, unexplained lunches, and she'd lost a few pounds.

  "I understand that you may subconsciously need to do this to yourself, because you feel so bad. But you don't have to do it to us."

  My son had taken down his Derek Jeter posters and given them to me, saying I could sell them if I wanted. There's nothing subconscious about any of this, I thought.

  "I've contacted twenty-something law firms in the city, Judith. I've been to six search firms, I've been through the alumni directory, I've lunched with everyone I know." But I was damaged goods. The word had gone out. It was in my face, my eyes, my posture. Even though I tried to hide it and wore nice ties and talked about needing "new challenges." When you're desperate they can tell, and they pity you and hire someone else. It's monkey-logic, it's human nature.

  "You were Yale Law Review, you were top-drawer!" Judith cried. "What's going to happen?"

  "I'm waiting for the bounce," I confessed.

  She almost laughed. "The bounce?"

  "I won't break," I promised. "I'll bounce."

  "When?"

  "I don't know." It was the truth.

  Judith's voice was nakedly bitter, dismissive. "How far down do you go before you do this bounce thing?"

  I didn't answer.

  "It's pretty far, isn't it?" she said, her own voice bouncing off the white ceiling.

  I thought I knew you, I muttered to myself.

  "And what makes this so-called bounce happen, anyway?" she cried. "What do you hit that makes you come back up?"

  I loved Timothy. This is what I wanted to say. He had a nice motion with a baseball, he was sloppy eating his cereal, he brushed his teeth haphazardly, he was learning script and made funny errors with his capital K's, he could listen to an entire Yankees game on the radio and tell me how every run scored, he never picked up his towels or his underwear or dirty socks, he donated his allowance to the World Trade Center charity, he got carsick in taxis, he loved Bart Simpson, he practiced holding his breath in the tub, he was a boy. He was a boy I loved, every last molecule, and there had been another boy who was loved just as much, and I had caused his death. The bounce would come when I had forgiven myself as best I could, had earned some fragment of peace, but not before then. That was what I knew, deep in my own lost boy-self, but I could not tell Judith that.

  "Listen," I said, "we'll sell the apartment. I'll do whatever I can. You know that. I can work for the government. I'll sell real estate. I'll drive a cab, I'll teach high school. We can move to another city and I'll work as a lawyer there. You know I'll do anything to support this family."

  Judith didn't reply. Instead she tilted her head, adjusted her angle of perspective. What she did next scared me. She blinked. She was thinking. Understanding something— if not about me, then about herself. "I don't know, Bill."

  "What don't you know?"

  "I don't know if I can do this."

  I nodded supportively, I thought. "It's a tough time. But we'll make it through."

  Judith crossed her arms. "I feel very uncomfortable about everything. We're becoming poor." She waited for me to react. I didn't. "Poor!" she screamed.

  "I would say we've dropped down no farther than what's politely called the upper middle class, Judith. I don't think you or I have the first goddamn idea what real poverty is."

  "Well, I feel poor."

  "That's a perception, not a fact."

  "I also don't feel good about us, Bill, I don't feel good about you." Her voice was shrill, fearful. "Because I don't think that you can fix everything. I know how much you blame yourself. But it was a fucking accident! But you believe you have to suffer because of it! That's what's in your head. And I don't want to suffer with you! And I don't want Timmy to have to suffer! Why can't you just shake this off, why can't you just sort of pretend it didn't happen?"

  Pretend that Wilson Doan Jr. hadn't died in our son's bedroom? I didn't have an answer. I could only watch Judith's gaze dart around the apartment— as if all we owned were burning before her— and then back at me, her expression furious, her beautiful eyes filled with resolve, even hatred. Yes, she hated me now, and wanted me to know it.

  "You're not going to stick around and find out, is that it?"

  "I don't think you under—"

  "I understand that you're embarrassed by the fact that I'm not making any money right now. I understand that your sense of security has been assaulted—"

  "Shattered— fucking shattered, Bill."

  "And I understand, Judith, that you have withdrawn all spousal affections until such time as money has returned to your hot little hand."

  "Oh, fuck you!"

  "Well, that's my point. You won't."

  "That's right, and why would I want to?"

  "Because you used to like it."

  "Yeah, well, I used to do a lot of things and now I do other things," she said, coldly. "And you might as well understand that."

  Judith moved out less than a month later, after badgering me into letting her sell the apartment. Yes, she moved out— to San Francisco. We didn't know anyone there, so far as I knew. The giant yellow moving van came while I was out buying coffee, and the two of them left that evening, Timothy holding his empty baseball glove. No fight, no tears, even. As if it wasn't really happening. The real estate agent will be here in the morning, Judith said, everything is taken care of. All you have to do is leave. I nodded dumbly. You'll have to find yourself a place to live, Bill, okay? Her arms were folded in front of her. Lips rigid. Voice firm. You understand why this has to happen. I think she had Timothy on some kind of tranquilizers, because he didn't protest or cry, not at that point anyway, and when they were gone, when they had actually left me, forever and ever, I—

  — well, I fell apart.

  I know this is ugly, I know this is sad. If you see a minivan crash off the highway, engine smoking, windshield a bloody mess, rear wheels in the air, you slow down for a good look and then stomp on the gas to get the hell out of there. I do, too. After all, there are so many pleasant entertainments. The sitcoms and the cyberfrolic. It's all great. Go to it if you must. Flick and click and disappear. You won't get that here. This goes somewhere else. This is about waiting for the bounce.

  * * *

  For a time I rented a two-bedroom apartment in one of the anonymous new towers on the West Side of Manhattan, bright and clean and charmless, faced with pink granite— a bakery confection of an apartment building. The real estate agent, a man who carried three cell phones, sensed my aloneness and distraction and announced that the place was "a guaranteed babe magnet, let me tell you." But that didn't interest me so much as the fact that the building seemed far removed from my old circles. No one I knew would imagine that I'd moved to such a place. The apartment, which faced west toward New Jersey, as well as California, where Judith and Timothy now lived, was large enough that Timothy would have his own room, and I duplicated as many of his possessions as I could remember— clothes, shoes, video games, Yankees posters— keeping alive the dream that my boy might soon be sleeping in the bed or flipping through his baseball cards while listening on the radio to Derek Jeter foul off curveballs. But I quickly found that I was unable to step foot into the room, that doing so filled me with dread, as if Timothy himself had perished, the room merely a shrine to his memory.

  A few months into my time there, one of the residents, a woman of about forty with bluish lipstick, frowned as I passed through the lobby. "Excuse me?" she called.

  "Yes?" I said.

  She stared at me, mouth set.

  "Something wrong?" I said.

  "I don't know," she answered. "I heard something."

  "Heard something?"

  "About you, yes."

  "What did you hea
r?"

  She looked at my feet and at the expanse of floor between us, then back at me. "I heard that you killed a child and got away with it. That there wasn't enough proof to send you to the electric chair." She waited for my response, her hands on her hips, alert to her own bravery. "There are a lot of kids in this building, mine included, so—"

  "So you wanted to know."

  "Yes. That's right. Someone knew someone who knew you. They didn't tell me the exact connection."

  I said nothing.

  "Well?" her voice came back, more righteous now.

  I took a step toward her so as not to raise my voice.

  "Stay there!"

  I stopped. "There was a terrible accident," I said.

  "That's not what I heard."

  "That's what happened. Believe me, I was there."

  "I don't believe you. I think there's more to it than that."

  I resented this lipsticked woman, whose name I did not know, I hated her nosy instincts, her ferocious willingness to make accusations on the flimsiest of information. She was a dangerous kind of person, but she was also trying to protect her children and the children of other parents, and I doubted that I'd have acted much differently if the tables had been turned. "It was a terrible accident," I repeated. "That's all I can tell you. It destroyed two families."

  "It just can not have been that simple."

  I started to move on.

  "Wait a minute! I think you're going to have to explain yourself to the tenants' association."

  "Oh?" I remembered their fliers in the lobby, concerning trash removal and where children's bicycles could be stored. "And what if they don't find my explanation satisfactory?"

  "Then I guess you'll have to leave."

  "My lease is with the building owners, not with the tenants' association," I noted.

  At this the woman gave a tight ratlike smile. She was happy that I'd resisted. It meant that now there was an issue, something to pull at, to get the flesh to tear. "We'll see," she threatened. "We will most definitely see."

  A flier appeared on the bulletin board the next day announcing "a meeting of tenants concerned about family safety issues." Two days later, the minutes of that meeting were posted, announcing that "there was unanimous agreement that there is an urgent need to alert building management about issues relating to the character and criminal histories of specific tenants."

  This was an inquisition and a witch-hunt and a vampire-chase, conducted in daylight by people who meant well, and it was coming to get me. I donated the entire contents of my apartment— toys, furniture, kitchen things— to the Catholic church ten blocks to the north and moved out.

  Yes, I hurriedly moved out, and I also moved down, where I hoped no one would know me, to a small third-story walk-up on Thirty-sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in the garment district. It's a lousy area, one of the city's many pockets of dirty, congested nowhereness, a few blocks from the rump ends of Pennsylvania Station and Macy's. I rather liked its hulking, paint-peeling anonymity. You don't want to go there. It'd be a waste of energy— a neighborhood with no neighbors to speak of, just offset-printing shops squatting in looming ten-floor factories where long fluorescent tubes stay on all night and smoke vents elbow from opaque windows. A place where you can get an industrial sewing machine repaired in an hour, or a greasy breakfast for $1.50. Where tired men push racks of sequined blouses on rolling flat dollies or pile five dozen cellophaned office chairs on the street. At night, there's no interesting decadence, no glammy intrigue, just drifting, muttering shadows, many wandering to and from the Hotel Barbadour around the corner, one of the city's few remaining single-room residences. Sad, unsoaped people— tooth-pickers and flagellomaniacs. Hummers and have-nevers. My building, in the middle of the block, looked out on a parking garage where a tired woman in red pants gave blow jobs from inside her van to the clerks on their lunch hours. When they came out afterward into the sunlight, they paused to tug at their pants, look left and right, then went on. Sometimes the woman's children played outside the van while she was inside. Ninth Avenue provided a Laundromat, a deli, a newspaper shop, and a daily encounter with a big-armed Puerto Rican guy who appeared each morning, always with a White Castle coffee cup and often a black eye, singing off his drunk as he staggered in the sunlight. "I took on the Cubans," he'd cough, "I took on the Haitians. I'ma gonna kill everybody."

  Yes, quite a comedown for old Bill Wyeth, someone who'd slept in twenty or thirty of the world's swankiest hotels (the Conrad in Hong Kong, the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, etc.), yes sir, a fellow who'd even been to a White House dinner during the Clinton administration. (The forty-second president himself had come over to me, looming and squinty-eyed, red-nosed, and shaken my hand and said something in his moist, scratchy voice, Good to see you, we 'preciate your support, or some such as the White House staff photographers clicked away, but that was enough for me— as he knew. When the president shook Judith's hand, her ability to speak devolved into breathy, near-coital word-bits: "Yes, oh, I—! Thank you! Yes!" The cameras clicked, as they did with everyone whose hand he shook. The pictures of both of us with the president, grinning like maniacs, arrived in a large, crisp, unsmudged envelope exactly two days later, having been borne aloft on some special private presidential postal service, the return address on the envelope simply THE WHITE HOUSE in raised gray letters. Judith spent $600 having the photos framed and she took the one of her with Bill C. with her to San Francisco, and what happened to the other one, with me, was anyone's guess.)

  I don't remember much from my first few weeks in the walk-up on Thirty-sixth Street, and the reason is simple: I discovered a bottle of Judith's old sleeping pills tucked into my running shoes and swallowed three or four of them a day. You don't kill yourself on that, not even close, not that I actually wanted to. The changes are subtle. You float as you sink. You watch television while sleeping. You actually feel your eyes roll back into your head and it is in no way objectionable. You forget to take off your socks before stepping into the bath. At some point I bought a mattress, a table, and a chair from a guy on the street. I ordered Chinese food every twenty hours or so. I didn't mind the cold ginger chicken, the ants. I shaved irregularly, I used a T-shirt as a pillowcase, I read the news backward.

  In time the divorce papers came; I signed the red-flagged pages without reading them. No custody, arranged visitation. Our old apartment sold quickly, the money went straight to her lawyer. I didn't care. I thought Judith and Timothy should get every cent possible. My retirement savings, so carefully tended and weeded and worshipped, were subject to the division of property, and perhaps already knowing that I was incapable of labor, I agreed to the complete liquidation of all my accounts, subject, of course, to the resulting penalties and retroactive taxes. And after the division of this sum, I was left with enough money to squeak along for a while, a few years anyway.

  This noble destruction of wealth soon proved to have been unnecessary; Judith's sudden and rather expeditious remarriage to a young technology entrepreneur relieved me (sadly, for it might have been a source of dignity) of the obligation of child support. I was left to live off my future. I preferred not to know anything about the new husband, but one day, while flipping through the financial-celebrity magazines at a newsstand, I came upon a portrait of him. It was a shock. The article, titled "Young Wizards on the Verge," explained why his new company was so sought after. It held the patent to some laser-data storage technology I didn't understand. Data storage, the country was obsessed with it, a new way to avoid death. The article included a glossy photo of the new husband. He was young. Surprisingly dopey-looking, even, neck too long, eyes too close together, maybe even a little cross-eyed, but decked out in a good suit that I'm sure Judith selected. The text said he was twenty-eight years old, had three advanced computer engineering degrees. Stanford, Caltech. A kid, almost. Another picture: wide-hipped and duck-footed. If I was a wrecked minivan, then he was a new laundry truck. Some
how Judith had smelled him out from across the country, and teased him with some of the good stuff. A wink and a wet smile and he's stump-staggering toward her on his knees. I hated his youth, his brain that understood obscure, fantastically valuable things. Did she suckle him, I wondered miserably, did she press that geeky, appreciative face into her buoyant breasts knowing that the rest of things would take care of themselves? Knowing he didn't have a hundredth of the danger or poisonous power of Wilson Doan, but not caring, and, for his part, did he feel that deep, peaceful slowing of the pulse, as I had once felt, Judith's large soft nipples touching the roof of my/his mouth, and did he then know, know, that he was home again, parked, garage door down, safe as he had not been since he was two years old, and that this woman, this mother-woman, would take care of him, force these lovely soft things against his face, for him to suck, if only he did what she wished, which was to hand over the money? Well, maybe. Or maybe Judith really loved him.