Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I tried putting her off: “It’s a long story.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of pizza and I don’t think Mr. Bryson is going to come around before we’re finished.”

  I wondered if curiosity was a bad thing for a nun. Sister Margaret told me that curiosity usually wasn’t encouraged in the order, but as a nurse in a hospice she’d found her natural curiosity a gift.

  “Many of our people have hidden things for years. I believe in many cases their guilts and stresses over these unspoken things have contributed to their suffering. It’s not a very scientific analysis, I know, yet I believe it.”

  “Shouldn’t they confess to priests?” I asked.

  “Don’t believe everything about the Catholic church you see on TV.” She happily goaded me. “Some in our care aren’t even Catholics. Mr. Bryson, for example. And frankly, the dying have the right to tell what they want to whomever they want. Surely I have heard some dark tales over the years. Rapists and molesters have unburdened themselves to me. But mostly people just share things with me they had wanted to say to a long-gone relative or friend they did wrong to as a child. Sometimes, Mr. Prager, the thing that haunts the dying most is an old unkindness to a stranger.

  “I think knowing death is coming for you is a mixed bag, a blessing and a curse. For the family of the dying, it’s a blessing, I’d say. Things can be put in order, grudges forgiven, balance restored. And when death finally comes, it comes as a relief. The mourning is shorter lived, because the loved ones have been grieving all along. For the dying, though, it can be brutal. And I’m not talking about the physical pain here. I had a waitress friend tell me once that she could barely remember the customers who’d given her her biggest tips, but she could describe with crystal clarity the people who’d stiffed her. Impending death can be like that, it can amplify your sins so that everything else is background noise. I think Mr. Bryson has a ringing in his ears. Now, I’m not sure what he has to say, but he’s made it abundantly clear that in this instance, you’re the only one he’s prepared to say it to.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re jealous, Sister.”

  She held her right index finger and thumb about an inch apart. “Maybe just a little. Are you married, Mr. Prager?”

  “Separated.” I swallowed hard. “What’s that they say, all roads lead home? The reason my wife and I are apart is because I kept an old secret. It’s funny that that’s what we were talking about.”

  “I’m so sorry. An affair?” Sister Margaret asked boldly.

  “Nothing that simple, I’m afraid. I think she could forgive me that. You know how there are some guilty secrets you can own up to at any time? Because their time for pain has passed? Like a few years ago at Passover seder, I told my brother Aaron that I used to watch him and his girlfriends make out through a hole I found in the wall. We all laughed about it and I rated each old girlfriend on a make-out scale from one to ten. But there are some things that grow worse with time. You have a narrow window of opportunity to share the pain or admit your guilt, but once that window closes . . .”

  “I don’t mean to pry,” Sister Margaret said, placing a comforting hand on mine, “but if you’d like to share it with—”

  “Thanks, Sister. It’s nice of you, but no, not now. Maybe when everything shakes out, we’ll make a date for pizza and we’ll talk about it.”

  “It’s a date. Do you have children?”

  “A daughter,” I said, producing Sarah’s high school graduation picture. “She’s eighteen today.”

  “Oh that red hair, she’s beautiful.”

  “She’s supposed to be going to the University of Michigan in a few weeks,” I said with equal amounts of pride and anger.

  “Supposed to . . .” she parroted. “There’s a problem?”

  “A boy. Listen, Sister Margaret, can we get—”

  “Absolutely.”

  There was a moment or two when the only noise at the table was chewing, but eventually I got around to asking about Tyrone Bryson: How had he come to the hospice? How long had he been there? What did Sister know about him and his past?

  The answers were straightforward if not very enlightening. Bryson had come to the hospice after being treated at one of the diocese’s hospitals. He had been at Mary the Divine for only three weeks. Sister Margaret didn’t know much about Mr. Bryson other than he had been living on the streets of New Haven. His only possessions were his ill-matched clothing, the slip of paper with my name on it and the newspaper article. He was a New Yorker. He’d shared that much with her and from the day he’d arrived at the hospice, Mr. Bryson had begged for someone to track me down.

  I began to give the nun some background about my involvement with Patrick Maloney, getting only as far as that first call from Rico when, as if on cue, my cell phone chirped.

  “It’s for you.” I handed the phone over to Sister Margaret.

  “He’s conscious,” she said, “but I don’t know for how long or that he will ever be again.”

  I threw too much money on the table before catching up to sister. Part of me regretted not having the leftovers wrapped to go. It’s funny what you think about.

  February 7th, 1978 (late night)

  FIRST KISSES ARE a revelation, so uncomplicated and so unlike firsts in bed. Somehow, the awkwardness of first kisses adds to their beauty: Which way should I tilt my head? Will she mind if I cup her chin in my hand or should I hold her in my arms or should I touch her at all? Will she close her eyes? Should I look to see? Will she part her lips? If she does, should I follow her lead? And when, in the end, in spite of your considerable calculation, you bump noses, it’s funny and the tension burns off like fog.

  Dinner was eaten in splendid silence, each of us lost in contemplation of consequence and possibility. Driven to distraction by the sweet perfume of onions frying in butter and chicken fat, my mental riffings were under attack by the vision of my Bubby Hana, dressed in black grandma shoes, hairnet and housedress, standing in her kitchen and grinding chicken livers. I was such a romantic. I wondered if Katy was under similar attack. What would Freud have said? Pass the rye bread and chicken schmaltz, probably.

  “What are you laughing at?” she asked, as we finished splitting a piece of strudel.

  “Nothing,” I lied. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a graceful way to weave Freud, my maternal grandmother, chopped liver and the curves of Katy’s breasts in a coherent sentence that wouldn’t insult Katy or make me seem certifiable. Though I suspected the both of us would have forgiven most anything at that moment, I wasn’t willing to risk it.

  Agreeing that twenty bucks a man would properly motivate the people whose help Katy and I were about to solicit, I talked the restaurant manager into cashing a personal check. Getting a personal check cashed in New York City is an accomplishment on par with finding the Holy Grail and winning at Three Card Monte. The badge helped, but it was the poster of Patrick and Katy’s sincerity that turned the trick. As thanks we offered a twenty to the manager. He refused and set about taping Patrick’s poster to the door.

  “I hate banks,” Katy said, as we began walking downtown. “They have our money twenty-four hours a day, but our access to it is confined to six hours, five days a week. You shouldn’t have to beg someone for what’s yours.”

  “They’re experimenting with cash machines in other parts of the country,” I told her. “Banking hours are good for impulse control. I’m not sure letting people at their money all the time is such a great idea. Even level-headed people make some pretty stupid decisions with a bellyful at three in the morning. I don’t think adding ready cash to the equation is bound to help.”

  “I can see what you mean.”

  “Plus the bad guys’ll love cash machines. Muggings will skyrocket and drug dealing will become a real growth industry.”

  “You still think like a cop,” Katy observed.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said, before kissing her again.

  LOCATED OFF BROADWAY
, below Canal Street, in a part of Manhattan that was not unlike Pooty’s neighborhood, Dirt Lounge was our third stop after CBGB’s and The Vatican. This area, however, was still heavily commercial and unlikely to go completely artsy-fartsy any time soon. Dirt Lounge played the dance hall equivalent of the anti-Christ to Studio 54: no glitz, no neon, no paparazzi. If not for the black leather and spandex crowd milling about at the short flight of steps outside the little factory building, you might miss the place altogether.

  I showed my badge to one of the motorcycle-jacketed bouncers at the rope and asked to speak to the man in charge. The bouncer grunted. Turning, he whispered to someone who must have been standing directly behind his mountainous body. Stepping around to the bouncer’s right came a slender little man with a magenta mohawk, sickly white skin and black lipstick. His ears were so littered with studs, safety pins and dangling razor blades that if he were to stand between two strong magnets his face would peel off. Betraying all the metal and makeup, his droopy eyelids and downturned mouth lent him the bearing of cultivated boredom more closely associated with eighteenth-century French aristocrats than punk rockers.

  “Badges don’t get you an entree here,” he said, looking past me and pointing to people in the crowd. “And what’s with the cane, new undercover squad?” He almost smiled.

  That joke was getting old fast. “I’m not looking for an in,” I said, “just two minutes of your time.”

  “Please,” Katy pleaded over my shoulder. “Please.”

  “Okay, I need a break anyway. Bear, you can handle it for a few,” he told the bouncer before turning back to us. “This way.”

  The bouncer unhitched the ratty velvet rope, letting us and three or four other people through. Poorly lit and shabby, the place smelled like the bathroom of an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day, only not as sweet. But the music was loud and snappy, even if the snippets of lyrics I caught were as dark as the lighting. Some of the dancers—mostly kids just jumping up and down like palsied pogo sticks—smiled in spite of themselves. Dancing makes alienation a tough mask to wear.

  The mohawked aristocrat led us past the caged ticket window, down a long hallway and up a flight of stairs. The office was lined with album covers literally stapled to the walls and ceiling. The albums covers of bands like Yes, Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Jethro Tull, the Strawbs, Gentle Giant, Genesis and some I’d never heard of, were defaced in one way or another, mostly with rude graffiti. “Fuck” and “suck” comprised the bulk of the Magic-Markered criticism. Some of the defacement was pretty skillful, however. “Days of Future Past” had been sliced into razor thin strips and reconstructed into a nonsensical but striking square of blues, yellows, blacks, whites and reds. It did not escape me that two of the album covers featured here had been reproduced—minus the Magic Marker—on dormitory walls by Patrick Maloney.

  “Adolescent white boy music,” the little aristocrat shook his head disdainfully, resting his cigarette in a vinyl record heated and perverted into a scalloped ashtray. “Pretentious, bankrupt bullshit.”

  “In ten years someone will be saying the same thing about the Sex Pistols,” Katy spoke up.

  “We’ll all be dead in ten years, so what the fuck?”

  This was all too profound for me. I decided to get to the point before anyone mentioned Camus or Nietzsche. I gave him some posters, asked him how much scratch he would need to spread around with his staff and wondered if there was anything we could do for him personally. He dismissed the offer like his cigarette ashes, with the flick of the wrist. Throughout my presentation, his ennui seemed to deepen and set like concrete. Then, for a reason I couldn’t immediately grasp, his face brightened.

  “You know, you look familiar. You from Brooklyn?” he asked.

  “Sheepshead Bay, but I went to Lincoln.”

  “You’re shittin’ me, right? You know Tony Palone?”

  “Tony the Pony, the best second baseman in South Highway Little League history? Nah,” I winked, “never heard of him. Who do you think used to dig his throws outta the dirt at first base?”

  “I’m his little cousin, Nicky.”

  We rehashed old times in the neighborhood, talked about how Tony was doing down in Florida with his construction business. I was careful not to point out how the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys might consider talk of baseball and Brooklyn adolescent white boy bullshit.

  “Don’t worry about your brother.” He threw his arm around Katy like she was family. “If he’s around, I’ll hear about it. Moe, gimme your number. I’ll spread the money around to the right people and I’ll tell you later how much you owe. Keep your bread for now.”

  Katy thanked him and asked to use the bathroom. Nicky hesitated: “The Dirt Lounge bathroom is kinda like Berlin before and after the war,” he said, “only worse.”

  Nature’s call blinded her judgment. “If I spot Dr. Mengele, I’ll call Simon Wiesenthal.”

  When Katy was down the steps, Nicky began to whisper: “What if I find this guy, but he don’t wanna be found? You know half of the losers downstairs got a habit. Maybe this Patrick kid’s got one, too?”

  I told him he was right to guess Patrick didn’t want to be found and that I was counting on the community’s taste for heroin to help us along. “Junkies would sell their sisters for a fix. You think they’ll hesitate to give this kid up?”

  Nicky agreed. If Patrick Michael Maloney was involved in this scene, his life incognito would soon be drawing to an end “I better get back out front,” he said. “We’ll meet Katy on the way.”

  She was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. Nicky was curious to hear her reaction to the Dirt Lounge bathroom.

  “You didn’t tell me there was only one bathroom for everybody,” she wagged her finger. “The only thing missing was Joel Grey and the Hitler Youth singing ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me.’ I was the only one in there actually using the toilet for anything but puking. There was a threesome in one corner who were so entangled they looked like a bowl of leather spaghetti. One guy had a needle stuck between his toes and three girls were doing lines of coke off the top of a urinal. You should sell T-shirts that say: ‘I survived the bathroom at Dirt Lounge.’ ”

  Nicky was horrified: “T-shirts!”

  “Bankrupt bullshit!” Katy and I harmonized.

  Nicky shook my hand and kissed Katy on the cheek. He handed me six passes to the place to use at my discretion. I almost gave them back, but didn’t. Even if I were in no shape to use them, I thought they might come in handy. Miriam liked to dance and Ronnie, that tight-assed husband of hers, could set up a practice in the bathroom.

  It was close to 3:00 when we got out of there, the crowd in front bigger than before. Without asking her if she was up to it, I pulled Katy into a cab that had just dropped off a couple of girls so drunk they nearly ran down the sewer. They had left two vodka bottles in the backseat as souvenirs. I gave the cabby a familiar address on Hudson Street.

  There was no crowd milling about Pooty’s and no one, not even my new buddy, Jack, was inside. Only a rather green-at-the-gills Pete Parson remained, mopping the floor. He didn’t exactly click his heels when he saw someone knocking at the door, but summoned up a smile for Katy and me. He unlatched the door for us and made no excuses about the lateness of the hour or his flourishing hangover.

  “A nightcap?” was all he said.

  “Two Grand Marniers?”

  Katy nodded her approval. As Pete walked back around the bar, I said I’d take pity on him and not demand the orange brandy in heated snifters.

  “Demand away,” he laughed. “You won’t get it.”

  After placing our drinks on the bar, he apologized for not joining us. If he were any less green, we might have been insulted. Katy and I clinked glasses. I kissed her, savoring the texture of her lips and the citrus burn of the alcohol.

  “Mopping, huh? You’re gonna ruin this place’s image. Next thing you know, you’ll dust the booths.”

&
nbsp; “Never,” he said proudly.

  Katy then regaled him with stories of her trip into the realm of unisex bathrooms.

  “Sounds kinky,” Pete feigned a chill. “I gotta get me one of those.”

  That reminded me; on the cab ride over I’d decided to give two of my Dirt Lounge passes to Jack. It seemed more his kind of place than anyone else I was acquainted with. Even if he hated the place, it would be worth it just to listen to his sarcastic rantings.

  “Where’s Jack? What’d he pick up some ballerina and ask to go home early?”

  “Jack?” Pete packed a lot of distaste into that one syllable. “Not old Jackie boy, he’s as queer as the Queen of France.”

  Katy took the pronouncement in stride. My first inclination was to debate the point. Then it dawned on me that I’d sound like my Aunt Sadie the time she heard cousin Artie was dating a black woman: “A schwartze, not my Artie!” And trust me, Aunt Sadie knew my cousin Artie a lot better than I knew Jack. Jack’s homosexuality also went a long way toward explaining Pete’s hostility. I didn’t figure it stemmed from Pete’s love of the Jersey shore. Cops and gays had a long history in New York, kind of like the Turks and Armenians but not as loving.

  “Well,” I fumbled for something to say, “do me a favor. Leave these passes for Marie Antoinette and tell him we had fun tonight. And let me know how the Liquor Authority thing shakes out.”

  Pete just shrugged, promising I’d be the first to hear after his partners. He thanked me again and locked the doors behind us.

  “Give me a dollar,” I demanded as we approached my car.

  Confused, Katy said: “What?” But even as she did so, she reached into her pocket and fished out four quarters. “Here.”

  “It’s official,” I announced.

  “What is?”

  “That I’m working for you now.”

  “You want to keep your new job?” she asked coyly.

  “I do.”

  “Then you’re going to have to sleep with the boss.”