With these thoughts I drained off my drink and then indulged another. That made five or perhaps six or maybe even seven. I have been drunk many times in my life and enjoyed most of those times, but never has drunkenness revealed in me some hidden streak of self-destruction; I do not drive while drunk, I do not leap from windows or pick fights in bars. While drunk, I am incapable of the fatal gesture. This does not mean that I don’t make mistakes, only that my most disastrous errors in judgment occur when I am not drunk, when, presumably, I am lucid. So, in that moment, when Caroline Crowley, the lonely, beautiful widow, stood before me, clutching her record of the violent destruction of her husband and seeming for all the world ready to be embraced and kissed and plunged into voluptuous copulation—the image of the homeless couple fucking feverishly outside in the cold returned to me—in that moment, I chose to remember my own sleeping wife, with her arm thrown across my empty pillow, and this gave me the further will to stand, quite unsteadily, and say, “I’m sorry your husband was killed or died or whatever happened to him, Caroline. I imagine it was a terrible shock, and it seems to me that you’re still haunted by it. I know we’ve been joking around all evening, but let me say … let me just say that if it’s possible to suddenly have a certain affection for someone in only one evening, only a few hours, then I feel that way toward you, Caroline, and I am saddened to think what it must have been like to lose your husband. Every week, just about, I talk to people who’ve just lost someone they love, and it always saddens me, Caroline, it always—it always reminds me that we, all of us, are—that it all—can be lost. You are beautiful and about twenty-eight years old and should have all good things come to you. If I were not married, I would—no, I will avoid—maybe better to … say that perhaps you sought me out tonight because you figured that, hack tabloid columnist that I am, that I’ve seen an unnatural amount of human destruction and might therefore offer you some useful words of solace or perspective. But I assure you”—and here I desired to touch her cheek with my fingers, just for a moment, by way of comfort, as I would comfort my own daughter—“that I’m unequal to the task. I’m as mystified and terrified by death as the next person, Caroline. I can’t really say anything useful …in such—such a disabled state … except that I suggest that you embrace life, that you venture forth and marry your fiancé, if he’s a good guy, and have faith that some losses are recoverable, that life has, finally—excuse me, please, I am very drunk—that life actually has … has some kind of meaning.”
She said nothing, and instead watched me with her lips pressed in amusement, and I wish now that I had understood it to be quite an unfunny sort of amusement. She saw me struggling against myself. I stood and moved toward the door, watching my shoes to make sure they went where I expected them to go. She followed me and silently helped me with my coat, then hung my scarf about my neck. She was spectacularly beautiful.
“Oh, Caroline Crowley …” I lurched sideways accidentally.
“Yes?”
“All men are dogs, and I am one.”
She smiled this away. Then she reached up with one hand, held my cheek with her warm fingers, and kissed my other cheek, slowly, with a breath. “I’m going to call you,” she whispered. Then she kissed me again. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I murmured, feeling that she had outsmarted me.
“Are you all right?”
“I am … I am mystified, Caroline. I’m just—” My lips had that buzzy drunken feeling about them, and I fell against the door frame. I was now suddenly so drunk that I’d have to get a cab home and retrieve my car later. I felt like a fool. “But then again,” I slurred, “that may be your intention.”
Twenty minutes later, my cab pulled up outside my brick wall downtown. I always get my keys out before opening the door, because once the cab pulls away, the street is dark and anybody could walk up to you. Even drunk, I had that New York paranoia. Only after I shut the gate behind me, pulling against the weight of it and turning the dead bolt, did I relax. The city, for now, remained on the other side of the wall. But gate or no, Caroline Crowley and the history of her doomed husband had now entered my life.
Six-thirty A.M., and a drunken hand (my hand) under instructions from a drunken brain (my brain) crabbed over to the phone next to the bed, lunged for the receiver, which it flipped off the hook, and then felt for the last automatic-dial button, marked BOBBY D., which the drunken index finger (mine) then pressed. As the phone rang, the hand lifted the receiver from the floor, while the drunken brain thought of Caroline Crowley, the most beautiful woman I had never fucked, while the ears, not drunk, waited for Bob Dealy, the overnight guy on the city desk, a man so cadaverous that he looked like he drank gasoline and ate what the cat sicked up—which perhaps was to be expected if you spent each night for twenty years sitting in a newsroom listening to the police radio, making calls to the precincts, reading a dozen papers from around the country, eating doughnuts and, with them, no small amount of newsprint.
“Desk, Dealy.”
“What you got, Bobby?”
“Aah, Porter, we have a collision between a taxi and a philosopher on lower Broadway. We got the recurrent gentleman with no name supine in an alley in the one-oh-four, and aah, in the seven-oh, we got two young pharmaceutical executives of the Nubian persuasian shot in the head. But it didn’t bother them much. In Brooklyn we got somebody who robbed a bank with a jack-hammer—tore out the night-deposit box. In Midtown we got two philosophers who tried to ride a fire truck that was making a run. We also—hold on—”
Now the drunken brain discerned other voices. Lisa and the kids were downstairs. Spoon and bowl. All kids love cereal. Love her. Good with the kids. Looks good enough, swims a mile every other day, could screw me dead anytime she wants. Loves it from behind. Why? The action goes in farther, among other reasons. Loves it. Don’t throw the eggie! Mommy, I can’t eat my cereal. Sweetie, just eat it. But Tommy didn’t eat his cereal. He’s eating eggs, sweetie. She’d nursed the kids so long they ruined her tits. Sucked them off, basically. Wan juicee. Want some juice? Juicee! Wan juicee, Mama. Eat your cereal, Sally.
“Yeah, Porter, also we got a diving champion—”
I opened my eyes. “What bridge?”
“You sound funny. You sick?”
“Nah. What bridge?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Anything?”
“Construction guy,” Bobby wheezed. “Broke his leg at work, couldn’t buy the groceries no more, girlfriend went shopping elsewhere. Guy died of a broken heart before he hit the water. When they pulled him out he was still wearing his hat.”
“Come on.”
“Hey, I’m not lying.”
“Guy jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and his hat stays on?”
“I’m telling you, the police said his hat was still on.”
“Come on, Bobby.”
“Hey, call them yourself.”
“If it was a hat, it must have been a football helmet.”
“No, it was a Yankees cap.”
“He had duct tape keeping that hat on!”
“No.”
“Then it was fucking glued on his head, Bobby!”
“No.”
“All right. You saving me a good one?”
“Matter of fact, I—wait, sorry again—hold on.”
I closed my eyes, listened to the chaos downstairs. You want more Cheerios on it? Juicee! Juicee! Yes, Tommy. Here. Eat the eggie. Na! Mommy cooked them for you. My wife was a fucking saint. I was lucky to be married to her. Man sees a peach-colored gown, gets an erection. Who cares if her husband got run over by a bulldozer? Fuck me. I was a cur with a hard-on. Lift up your head, I thought, see how it feels. Head just not right. Should drink more often, get used to it. I’d given some kind of cheesy speech. She’d seen right through it. Pick up the cereal, sweetie, please sit up, please, Sally, sit up this minute. I can’t. Sit up, you’re spilling your cereal all over the—I said SIT UP! All right, that’s it, young lady, get down, now
! Are we protecting your virtue or mine? Wan eggie! You just threw your eggie! Too coal! Too cold? Ya. I’ll heat it up. Mommy, when people die, do their bodies get all rotten? Who told you that? Lucy Meyer. Lucy Meyer said that? Wan eggie! Yes, Tommy. Sweetie, when people die, they still have a spirit. What is spirit? It’s, uh—here, sweetie. Too ha! It’s not too hot! What is a spirit, Mommy? Blow on it, sweetie. Too ha! Just blow on it. Bwow? No column was due today, I’d just make some calls, mess around in the office, pay bills. Get up, you fucker. Still drunk. A spirit is … it’s your heart, sweetie, it’s who you are. But Mommy, when you die, does your spirit fly home to God? Who told you that? I can’t remember. Did Josephine tell you that? Fucking jig baby-sitter preaching voodoo Catholicism. Sweetie, do you have poopie? Nah. I think you have poop in your diapee. Make a few calls, get the mortgage check into the mail. No poo diapee! Forget the woman, who you may now remember as the most beautiful woman you never fucked. Let’s get down, sweetie, you ate most of the eggie. No poo! I think you have poopie. Eyes blue as a mailbox. You’re still drunk but I think you can … get up, do it, you can do it, I can do it, I was doing it, I was sitting up, back in the game, and Bobby was back on the line: “Porter, I do got a woman shot last night on the Upper West Side in a Chinese laundry. Maybe the boyfriend.”
“What’s good about it?” I asked, squinting into the sun from the window.
“Died holding her wedding dress.”
I swung my feet off the side of the bed. Uglier every year, the ingrown nails permanent. “What did she do?” I said.
“Accountant, age thirty-two.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Insurance guy, age fifty-six.”
“She went for the older guys.”
“Maybe she had a daddy thing going.”
“I can hear you eating the doughnut, Bobby.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve got to start washing the ink off your hands!”
“The coffee cancels it out.”
I sighed. “They know where he is?”
“No, but they’re looking.”
I stood, and heard a Froot Loop crunch under my foot.
“TV do it last night?”
“Happened too late.”
“The wedding dress, just standing there, boom?”
“Yeah. I got the wedding dress bit just for you.”
“Could be good.”
“It’s good. It’s the romantic angle. You always love the romantic angle.”
While I was dressing I heard Josephine come in downstairs, shake snow off her boots. She had a key to the gate in the wall. Good morning, how’s my little friend? I ha eggie! He just finished his egg. Josephine is an immense black woman from Haiti. We found her one day when Lisa was seven months pregnant with Sally and had called a cleaning service. Josephine arrived, huge and deferential and embarrassed by the girlish blue uniform that she was forced to wear. She cleaned for us once a week a few times and I only caught a glimpse of her before I left for work, but she struck me immediately as exhausted and too old—somewhere in her late forties—to be cleaning houses. That second Saturday I went out and bought a new vacuum cleaner and put it upstairs in the hall closet so that Josephine would not have to carry the heavy Electrolux upstairs. Then we asked what she was being paid from the cleaning service and it turned out that her bosses, a couple of clever professional white women in their thirties, were keeping almost half of her salary. We were paying the service ten dollars an hour and Josephine was getting $5.20 an hour, before taxes. So we called the service and said that we were canceling because the baby had been born. They asked whether we were dissatisfied with Josephine, and we said oh no, not at all, absolutely wonderful woman. Then we hired her for ten dollars an hour and paid her directly so that she got to keep all the money. After that she came in to help with the children and gradually became full-time, arriving at eight and leaving at five. There was a period of adjustment, for Josephine is, after all, from an island culture; on the way home from the playground, she would pluck plants growing in the park and cook them up in strange potions on the stove in the afternoons, mixing in a little of this or that from the local botanica. Many of these concoctions were later taken home and forced upon poor LaTisha, she of the hairy bottom, in an effort to correct certain sulky teenage behaviors. But sometimes Josephine left her potions in unlabeled jars in our refrigerator; they announced themselves by their greenish tinge and swirl of worrisome sediment, but one night that first summer I woke up in the middle of the night and, looking for something cold to drink, opened the refrigerator and tossed back a jar of what looked like iced tea; it went down blandly, but in ten minutes my mouth was full of saliva and I felt an odd desire to eat uncooked rice. Another time Lisa came home early and Tommy, then eleven months, had his head covered with bits of wet tissue paper. For a moment Lisa was shocked, but as Tommy seemed perfectly well, she only casually asked why, and Josephine explained that Tommy had been suffering from the hiccups and that this was the cure.
Yes, it was all very quaint and multicultural at first, with my wife and I congratulating ourselves for “saving” Josephine, but the reality was that an oppressed, uneducated black woman arrived each day wearing sweatpants and sneakers. And by now I was tired of seeing her. I was tired of her goodness, her uncomplaining suffering. I was tired of her poverty. I hated this in myself and felt guilty about it and would hide our pay stubs and bank statements and retirement-account statements and anything else that proved the financial discrepancy between Josephine and us. And she never let on that the condition of her family was akin to a rickety shack perched high above a river frothing away at its banks; she herself was dependable and clean-living (in sort of a starched Catholic way, such that I suspected she’d never been much fun, ever), but she’d had a couple of different husbands and occasionally made reference to a cousin or a nephew who got hisself into all kind of trouble, and then she shook her head as if someone was going to try to make her feel bad about that, too, and she just wouldn’t, she just wouldn’t do it. I’d driven her home once into the Bronx—kids on the street selling crack, big radios, the whole scene. Her husband worked for the food service in a nursing home; he was a huge man, at least six foot five, great of belly, great of blood pressure, too, and when I met him I knew he could crush me instantly, take my little white hand and break it like a handful of dry sticks. But when we shook hands he smiled deferentially and his fingers barely contracted against my own; it was not politeness—rather, I was his wife’s white boss and so not to be accidentally insulted or intimidated by an overly firm handshake.
Now I was standing in the bathroom, listening to Josephine get Sally ready for school. We took turns walking Sally to school. Then I heard the little feet on the stairs.
“Daddy?” Sally burst into the bathroom, holding one of her Barbies by the leg. “Why are you peeing?” she asked.
“I need to.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“Because you just do!”
“Right.”
“Boys don’t have to wipe when they pee.”
“That’s true.”
She followed me into the bedroom. “Daddy?”
“Sweetie?”
“Daddy, do dead people all die lying down?”
“I don’t know, Sally. That’s kind of a strange question.”
“Lucy Meyer says all dead people when they die, they have their tongues sticking out”
“I don’t think so.”
“Lucy Meyer told me, in school.”
“Has Lucy Meyer seen a lot of dead people?”
“Lucy says they all die with their eyes shut, and if—and if they forget to shut them, then bugs eat the eyeballs.”
“Don’t worry about it, sweetie, okay?”
Lisa called Sally downstairs, then came up, carrying the day’s newspapers, which pile up one by one outside the gate each morning and get stolen if we don’t retrieve them promptly.
Manhattan Nocturne Page 6
