Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  Rick hesitated.

  “By the way, is Sid McKay coming?” he finally asked.

  I was startled. “Why?”

  “I’m just asking. You’re friends with Sid, aren’t you? Pretty good friends. I thought he’d come to your wedding. I just thought you’d have asked him. Or maybe your Russian pal, Sverdloff, doesn’t like aging faggots.”

  “What’s with you? Sure I asked Sid. He said he didn’t feel like coming into the city. Of course I asked him. I didn’t even know Sid was a friend of yours anyhow,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m a little bit drunk.”

  “So you know Sid?”

  “You introduced us.”

  “What? When? I don’t remember that.”

  “Forget it,” Rick said.

  I leaned closer to him.

  “Listen to me. I saw Sid this morning. He called me, he was worried, there was a guy who died off Red Hook, you know anything about it?”

  “No,” Rick said, making to move away. “How would I know? I need a drink. Talk to my sister, she came all the way from Hong Kong just for you.”

  “Darling, Artie. Congratulations!”

  Her face near mine, her hand on my arm, the heavy sexy smell of Joy that she had always worn clung to Dawn Tae.

  “Dawn.”

  “Hello, Artie.”

  “We kissed and then she drew back slightly and I saw how much she had aged. The incredible girl I’d once known was now a middle-aged woman. She glanced around and a waiter appeared with her drink. Dawn was still imperious, a commanding presence. People noticed when she wanted something. She kissed me again.

  I smiled at her. “Hello, Dawn, I can’t believe you made it!”

  “I came back for this,” she added, keeping hold of my hand. “And the parents. And I thought Rick needed cheering up. There he is,” she said, gesturing towards the bar where Ricky was standing.

  “Is Ricky happy?” Dawn said. “He doesn’t talk to me about his life anymore. I feel he’s so solitary, so obsessed with work. Is he seeing anyone? Does he have anyone? Is there a guy in his life at all?”

  “He doesn’t talk to me much, either,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m, well, I am what you see,” she added, her tone wry now.

  When she married a rich guy who turned out to be an asshole who abused her, Dawn had been an exquisite ambitious girl, a brilliant trader on Wall Street. The creep she had married dealt in illegal immigrants and baby sales, and drugs on a global scale, including Hot Poppy, the worst junk that ever got into the system; Dawn got hooked on it. It was years before anyone picked him up and even then he got off on appeal. I never really felt easy about him being out on the streets.

  I had been crazy about Dawn right from the beginning when I first moved into my loft and sometimes we sat out on the fire escape and fooled around. By the time we had a desperate fling in Hong Kong she was strung out on drugs. She got clean, settled over there, quit her job as a high-powered trader, and bought a house up on a hill looking out over the water where she raised her adopted kids.

  Dawn was probably in her forties but she looked older now: she was stocky and her face was thicker than I remembered and there was gray in her hair. She wore a plain gray silk suit, very severe, very expensive, and flat shoes and big diamonds in her ears. Only her eyes looked like the girl I knew. But I could still smell the Joy she had always worn, that drove me crazy the first time I smelled it at her own wedding. Long long time.

  She said, “I’m just like some old Chinese lady now, don’t you think? I look at myself in the mirror, I see my Auntie Petal.”

  “You had an aunt named Petal?”

  “Yeah, they ran out of flowers. It was a fashion, you know, Chinese girls, little flowers, Flower Drum Song, fuck that shit,” Dawn added. “They were already into weather and stuff when I came along. Dawn. I’m lucky it wasn’t dusk, you know? Or evening. I could have been called Evening. I’ve had too much champagne.”

  She saw me looking at her, and she said, “It’s OK, I have a mirror, you know? And I don’t care anymore. I really don’t care. I don’t have to worry about getting old. It’s a relief.”

  “You look great. You always look great.”

  “Give me a cigarette, Artie, honey, You’re such a liar, and so am I. Actually, it depends. Some days I’m glad it’s over, sex, men, business. I take care of the kids, I hardly ever go shopping, I read a lot, I listen to music. I’ve fallen in love with opera, weird considering what a rock chick I always wanted to be. So I’m OK. It’s just when I see old friends, when I see you, I hate the way I look, but what the hell, let’s get drunk.” She looked around. “Where’s a waiter? You know, my Auntie Petal always said everything starts and ends at weddings, maybe it got to Ricky, you getting married, maybe he feels left out, maybe he feels he’ll never find anyone, and he never will, you know, because he can’t let anyone get close, no man, no woman,” she said. “I should talk. Go celebrate.”

  “Let’s have lunch soon. Just us,” I said.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Dawn?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you ever know a guy named Sid McKay? Back when? Someone we all knew, maybe, something like that?”

  She glanced at her brother. “Yeah, I remember him. He was twice Ricky’s age. What about him?” Her tone was sour.

  “Were they close?”

  Dawn shrugged, and said, “I don’t really know. “Why?”

  “Never mind,” I said, and kissed her and then she stood back from me, straightening her jacket, and looking at someone behind me.

  “Look who’s here.”

  “Jack?”

  I was pretty surprised that Jack Santiago had come to the party and I didn’t know who had invited him, but I was glad to see him. The place was still crowded, but people had settled into groups, at tables, eating, on the terraces, smoking, flirting, the little kids cross-legged on the floor, a few already asleep.

  “Hey, man, congratulations,” he said, shaking my hand with both of his, pumping my arm.

  “Thanks for coming, Jack.”

  He was medium height and wiry. He had probably been a skinny ugly kid, but he had turned his looks into a style. He looked like he went to the gym. He wore a soul patch on his chin, the black eyes glittered out of the narrow face. He had a good haircut; expensive, I thought. He wore a hip pinstriped suit, a dark blue shirt, no tie.

  Jack could really write. He was a reporter who had won a Pulitzer for his work in Moscow during the collapse of Communism. He knew everyone in the city and when I was single I used to run into him in bars sometimes. He liked knowing cops. He reminisced about Sonny Grasso. He liked retailing other stuff he knew, movie gossip, mafia lore, choice pieces of city life that he fed to his audience at a bar or restaurant—where John Gotti’s parents lived off Houston Street, who had done liquor deals with Frank Costello in the old days, which store on Grand Street Tom Cruise bought a suit at when he was filming in New York, which Klimov made money on gas scams in Brighton Beach. Jack knew where to drink, he knew the bartenders, the club owners, the guys at the door. He always had great-looking women.

  He leaned in towards you when he talked and energy flowed out of Jack. He shook my hand some more and gave me a guy hug, and he listened to what I was saying even though it was probably just social stuff, how are you, where you going on vacation, joking about the city, the politicians.

  Jack kept those hot coals he had for eyes right on me; it was the thing they talked about when anyone mentioned him, the way he gave eye-lock, the way he made you feel you were the most important person on earth; Clinton had it, people said, Jackie Kennedy, too. I once heard somebody say, “Men want to be Jack, and women want to fuck him.”

  He scanned the room for people he knew.

  “You need a drink?” I said.

  He held up the empty glass in his hand. “I will, thanks. Good party, Art, really nice.”

  I suddenl
y saw that Jack was loaded.

  “So congratulations again,” he said. “And hey, sorry I got here so late. Took me a while.”

  I remembered that Jack had lived somewhere downtown, not far from me.

  “You still in SoHo?”

  “SoHo’s so over,” he said. “I’m out in Brooklyn now by the water. But where’s the bride? I always liked Lily, man, always thought she was a seriously great woman, brains, looks.”

  “Lily?”

  “Didn’t you marry Lily Hanes?”

  “I married Maxine.”

  “Holy Christ, am I an asshole or what, I only got a message by phone about the party today. I never thought. Shit, I am sorry. Who’s Maxine?”

  “It’s OK.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck, either way, of course,” he said and then I saw he had spotted someone in the crowd and I knew he had been looking for a particular person all along. Jack moved off into the crowd and out on to the terrace. People stopped him, shook his hand, enlarged by meeting Jack Santiago.

  I was heading for the bar nearest the terrace door a minute or two later when I heard someone yelling, “Jack, stop it. Jack!” Over the music and the noise of voices, I heard someone else yell: “Jack, get the fuck down.”

  Outside, a group of people had gathered and they were staring up at Jack who was perched on the narrow stone wall that ran the whole length of the terrace. It was a six-story drop to the street. You fell, you’d break your bones and probably your neck. But Jack was up there, grinning, strolling along the wall that wasn’t more than a foot wide, a bottle of champagne in one hand, a glass in the other. He waved at the crowd. He was showing off, letting everyone see how cool he was. He didn’t look down.

  “Get the fuck off there,” someone said again, and I didn’t say anything, just stood and watched him suck up the attention like a magnet.

  The girl on the terrace was six feet tall, maybe more, as tall as me, and stunning.

  “I’m Valentina,” she said and kissed me on the cheek.

  I’d only met Tolya’s daughter a few times when she was much younger and living near Miami with her twin sister and her mother who was Tolya’s ex. She was nineteen now and incredibly lovely. She wore a plain short black dress, and backless heels that snapped when she walked.

  “I’m really happy to meet you again, Artie,” she said. “I’m happy for your getting married,” she added, running her hand through her platinum crew cut.

  One of Val’s fingers was missing. It had happened when she was a little girl still in Moscow. She had been kidnapped and held for ransom. Tolya had wanted her to have it fixed. He had offered her plastic surgery. She refused and told him it was a badge for her. You looked at her, and your eyes went to the missing finger, but it was the imperfection that made the rest of her more dazzling.

  Val’s face, the cheekbones, the blue eyes, the wide mouth, was Russian; her accent was purest American, bland, featureless, suburban. She had lived in Florida since her early teens. I stood on the terrace, halfway between Val and Jack Santiago and I realized now that he was performing for her.

  Glancing up at him, she was apparently unconcerned that he was still walking along the wall, drinking alternately out of the bottle and his glass. She ignored him and took my hand, and kissed my cheeks again.

  “I know we sort of met when I was a kid, Artie, but now I’m living here in New York, and I love it,” Val said. “I mean all the bars and stuff over here in the Meat District and meeting you,” she added in a rush of teenage enthusiasm. “I mean my pop talks about you all the time, of course, and so I just wanted to get to know you, you know? I’ve like had a crush on you from a distance.” She smiled, and I fell for her, of course, because who wouldn’t, and then realized she could be my kid. She was Tolya’s kid. I felt old.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Val, I really am,” I said when the crowd on the terrace suddenly went silent. I looked up.

  On the wall, Jack stumbled. Everyone gasped except for Val who didn’t flinch. Then, grinning, Jack jumped down and made a beeline for us; for her.

  “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  It wasn’t an accident that they were both here; she had invited him, or he had known she was coming. She towered over Jack and he was twenty years older, but it was electric. I had never seen that kind of electricity between two people. He took her hand and you expected to see visible sparks, and they went inside to dance, wrapped around each other.

  “You know this asshole Santiago?” Tolya’s voice was full of booze and anger.

  “He’s OK. He’s a journalist. He’s good.”

  “What at? This prick is good at what exactly?”

  “He’s a good writer,” I said.

  “You invited him?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe he came with someone,” I said. “Maybe with Val. Valentina’s been going out with him?”

  “She doesn’t tell me. She’s nineteen, she had a place at Harvard, but she wants to be a model. She goes out to clubs all night until next morning, all night, Artyom, with men.”

  “That’s what she should be doing. She’s a girl.”

  “I don’t like him,” he said coldly. “I don’t want. You understand? This doesn’t work for me.”

  “Let it go,” I said. “You could dance with me if you want.”

  It made him smile, and then I said, as casually as I could, “So have you heard from her?”

  “Who?” he said.

  “You know who.” I tapped a waiter on the shoulder and asked him to get me a drink. “Scotch,” I said.

  “She’s in New York,” he said. “You knew she came back, I told you.”

  “I didn’t know she stayed. You said she came back, but that was a year ago, more than a year. Is she here? For good?”

  He was silent.

  It was the elephant in the room, the eight hundred pound gorilla, but I had refused to see it, or notice, and now I had crashed into it. Jack Santiago thought that I’d married Lily.

  I had tried not to think about her. She had gone away. After 9/11, she left me and New York and got married and went to London. For a while, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like someone stepped on my oxygen.

  It was almost three years since Lily, sick of what she saw as relentless patriotism that both bored and scared her to death, found someone to marry and take her away. And I felt dead. For a year, I felt dead. But that was all over, and even thinking about Lily felt like a betrayal. She was out of my life.

  I saw that Tolya was only half listening to me, focused on Jack and Val.

  “Let it go, OK? Let them be.”

  “OK,” he said. “OK. So go dance with Maxine, Artyom. Dance with her.”

  It was getting late. I opened my phone and found another message from Sid, and called my machine and found two more, the last one left around eleven, more stuff about the dead guy near the docks, Maxine was waiting for me.

  “Dance with her,” Tolya said, this time in Russian.

  So Maxine and I walked out to the middle of the floor and the piano player called out to ask us what we wanted him to play and I said to Maxie, you choose, and she called over to the piano player and asked for “I Love You Just the Way You Are”.

  The trio began to play. Max was a really good dancer and had taught me some steps, and we began to dance, and I concentrated hard.

  “Am I singing?” I said in Maxine’s ear.

  “Yes,” she whispered, smiling into my face, and I smiled and kissed her all over, eyes, mouth, ears, everywhere, and for a while I almost forgot everything else.

  6

  I have something to tell you, Sid McKay said softly, haltingly, on the phone the Monday morning after my wedding. I need to tell you this, I need you to know just in case. I need to see you. I lied before. I lied when I saw you yesterday morning. I did call it in, it was me. I called the cops.

  I told Sid to talk to the detective on the case, and he said, it isn’t simple, Artie, please.

  Go, Maxine s
aid sleepily. We had gone to sleep around four, and she barely opened her eyes when the phone rang. Go, you won’t feel good unless you go, she said, and turned over, still smiling, and went back to sleep.

  “I knew him,” Sid said as soon as I got to him at his place in Red Hook.

  “Who was he?” I said. “In case of what? You said ‘in case’ on the phone. In case of what?”

  “Please sit down.”

  I leaned against the desk near the window that overlooked the water.

  “I thought you said you were getting out of here yesterday?” I said.

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Sid, please, talk to me. I can’t keep coming back. I’m working this week and then I’m going on vacation. Honeymoon. I want to give you some phone numbers. Two. Two people. Here, look, one’s a good cop, you’ll like him, he has a PhD in English. And you can trust him.” I dug in my jeans for a scrap of paper and held it out. “The other one, you use for emergencies. Big time stuff. OK? Sid? You hear me?” I wasn’t sure if he was paying attention. He seemed to drift away.

  Sid took the scrap of paper, put it on the desk without looking at it, and said, “Thank you.” He sat down in a low armchair and gestured to another one next to it. “How was the wedding? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it. I sent you something,” he added. “I put it in the mail.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I’m sorry?” Sid raised his hand to smooth his hair, looked at it, then put it back on the arm of his chair. “Thank you for coming, Artie. Would you like me to turn the air on? I usually keep just the windows open at night, but it’s getting warm,” he said formally, as if I’d come for a business meeting.

  “You called me. You said you knew who the dead guy was. You said you called the cops. I came. I need you to talk to me.”

  “Yes,” Sid said. “I’ll get us something to drink,” he added and got up heavily and went to the little kitchen. “Juice?”

  The floor creaked as Sid moved across boards laid down a hundred years earlier.

  I was tired. I was sorry for Sid, but I was running out of patience. I walked across the room to the table where there were pictures in neat rows, pictures of Sid, pictures of friends and relatives, and of Sid with famous people. He had been important, a player, a guy who knew people, and now he had retreated to this warehouse on the edge of the world.