I needed, of course, to contact Caroline about Hobbs, and the fact that she had not called me after our visit to the Malaysian bank was both a matter of relief and anxiety. I wanted to see her again (yes, I wanted to fuck her again, too—there was, I greedily sensed, a bounty there yet to be plundered), but at the same time I wondered if perhaps I should wisely call it quits, now, before I got in further. And hey, maybe she had beaten me to it, maybe she was done with me. She seemed quite capable of doing so without apology or explanation; there was a coldness in her warm chest, and if I was honest with myself, I would admit to being interested in that quality about her, too. But such a decision seemed unlikely, given her references to her mysterious problem and her effort to winch me into her life. Then again, perhaps she had deemed me no good in bed or her fiancé had floated back into the picture. I didn’t know how often she saw him, or where, or under what conditions, or if he was likely to learn of me, a development I wished to avoid; on the street, it is the young men who burn brightest with jealousy. Older men presented with a woman’s infidelity are furious, true, but also privately contemplative of the nuances of the situation. The younger men tend to look for a gun; the older ones, for a drink. Yes, I could work up quite a bit of anxiety about young Charlie, who was able-bodied and knew where to find me.
If I was confused about what would happen next with Caroline, I did know that I had to get back into the Malaysian bank and have a look at every last one of the videotapes stored there. I wasn’t sure if I believed that Caroline would bedevil Hobbs with a video and then lie to him about it. But I couldn’t simply disbelieve it either. Could I come straight out and ask her for the tape Hobbs wanted? That didn’t seem wise. I didn’t know her well enough yet. Better, I thought, to keep learning about what mattered to her; I made a point of seeing Rictus and Minutes and Seconds, Simon Crowley’s second and third big-budget movies. Both were utterly unrelated in style and content to the grainy, jerky videotapes I’d watched, yet were preoccupied, like the tapes, with the infinite ways humans abuse one another. Was there another connection? I could only wonder.
Lisa, meanwhile, did not notice my anxiousness, for she had her own worries. She had been swimming a lot—slipping out an hour early in the mornings to a health club where she could put in forty or fifty laps—and this meant only one thing: she had a big operation coming up. One night, after the kids were asleep, I asked her about it as she washed her face.
“Toe transfer,” she exhaled, her face a soapy mask.
Some unfortunate soul had lost a thumb. The patient in question, said Lisa, was a thirty-seven-year-old woman, the manager of a $500 million mutual fund, whose left thumb had been amputated by a boat propeller while she was scuba diving in Cancún the previous summer. The thumb was not retrieved. It was a risky operation and required an evaluation of the patient’s psychological condition. Lisa showed me the woman’s file, which, in addition to the usual write-up, included a photo of a woman’s hand with the thumb sliced cleanly off and various lesser lacerations. “That was three weeks after the accident,” Lisa noted. After the injuries had healed, skin from the woman’s groin had been attached to the stump and web of the thumb.
“Tomorrow is the toe?” I asked.
Lisa nodded. It was an epic operation, lasting eight hours. Only two or three people in the city were capable of doing it. At six the next morning, Lisa would “harvest” the woman’s toe, which would be kept cold and dry, and then spend hour upon meticulous hour connecting tendons, veins, and nerves. In effect, the operation was a transplant, and the recipient was also the donor; the patient was trading one amputation for another, and if the operation was botched—well. Lisa Wren, microvascular orthopedic surgeon, didn’t botch operations, she swam laps ahead of time.
“It’s all under the scope?”
“Yes.” She dried her face. “First the dorsal and volar vessels—the arteries, then the neurovascular bundles.”
“The toe is alive again at that point?”
“We hope. Then the bone and tendons and the joint capsules and skin.”
“You’ll knock it out of the park.”
She shrugged. “I need some new eyepieces made.”
“Microscope scratched?”
“No. My eyes are changing.”
“Getting worse?”
“Just a little. But I like to have the extra resolution, the clarity.”
“You’re going to do a great job,” I told her. “You always go through this and you always do a great job.”
The next morning, with Lisa gone early, I decided that if my wife could sew a toe onto a hand, then I could pick up a phone. I called Caroline and told her I wanted to see the rest of the tapes. “Which ones did you already look at?” she asked, her voice husky with sleep. Remember how late she gets up, I told myself, that means she’s awake late into the night.
“The garbagemen, the two lawyers on the train, Clinton getting mad.”
“Number sixty-seven?”
“Which one was that?”
“Rwanda.”
“Yes, that one.”
I heard Josephine downstairs with Sally and Tommy.
“Number three?”
“Which one is that?”
“The men in the prison. It’s short.”
“No.”
“When do you want to go back?”
“Today. This afternoon.”
Caroline said she would arrange my access with the bank. “You could come over afterward,” she suggested.
I wasn’t ready to see her. “Tomorrow,” I said.
“But tomorrow your column is due,” she protested. “You’re free today.”
“Not actually.”
“I’ll be most disappointed.”
“I doubt it.”
“I’ll run off with the first man I see.”
“Charlie?”
“Maybe a policeman. I like policemen.”
“Might be fun.”
“I could do it—you don’t know me.”
“That’s true.” I thought of Hobbs; how did he know Caroline?
Now Sally ran into the room.
“Daddy, we have to go to school!” she shrieked.
“Yes, sweetie.”
“Is that your daughter?” asked Caroline in my ear.
“Yes,” I said into the receiver. Sally had jumped on my lap. “You’ll call the bank for me?”
“Yes. And Mr. Wren?” Caroline added.
“What?”
“Get your column done.”
Yes, I told myself. Yes. But first I needed to take Sally to school. The nine-block walk was a duty that I undertook happily, for I believed that it lay outside of whatever troubles I now glimpsed, and after saying good-bye to Josephine and Tommy, Sally and I walked there, with me holding her hand the entire way. We passed a low wall, and I hoisted her up so that she could walk atop it, her feet lifting high, as if she were marching. She became so agitated with happiness that she forgot to watch where she was going and fell into my arms. Then we were on Eighth Avenue. One of the laundries had a grimy fountain with four or five half-rotten goldfish swiniming around in it disconsolately, and we looked at them, as we always did, and I explained that Chinese people came from a place called China, and then we passed by the baker’s shop, where there was often a fat old cat in the window, blinking into the morning sun. Then we inspected the melting snow, and flitted past the newsstands—magazine racks of joyful disaster and approved scandal and eternal fad—and then onward, to the little private elementary school that Sally attended.
The school appeared to be a hub of enlightenment and bliss. For the children this may have been true, but for the parents the morning trip to school is a ritual of discomfort. Although in Manhattan everyone may presumably remain strangers if they wish, in practice this is not true. The parents look at one another, at one another’s clothes and spouses and cars. Measuring. And just as the children take immediate likes and dislikes to one another, so, too, do their parents
, but these irritations and judgments and affections are cloaked in ritual politeness. Most of the kids are dropped off by their mothers, and these women break into two camps: the hard-core professionals, dressed in business suits and pumps, who deposit their children in a ritualized spasm of guilt; and the freelancers, part-timers, and stay-at-homes, who have more time. yet who eye the professional women with a mixture of envy and maternal superiority. These two groups have their own hierarchies and channels of gossip. But the mothers are different in other ways. Some are on their first child, some are pregnant again, others are done, thank you. Some are happily married, some are not, some are divorced, and a handful are lesbian or living with two men or God knows what. The few dads who regularly drop off their kids, myself included, understand that the mothers approve of our involvement with our children or suspect that we are deadbeats—or both. And indeed, none of the dads who have the real killer corporate jobs ever drop off their children. They’re in the office by seven, yanking on society’s big levers.
I followed Sally up to the second floor and reminded her to hang up her coat. The classroom smelled like fish, and indeed, the teachers, Patty and Ellen, had a red snapper, quite dead, lying in a pan.
“We’re going to paint it!” Sally said, pulling on my hand.
“Yes,” said Patty, a kindly woman of about forty. “Do you want to get a smock?”
Sally put on a little yellow smock and began to dip a thick brush into some red paint. The idea was to paint the fish, then press a piece of paper on top of it. The fish would then be washed and readied for the next child.
Patty watched to see that Sally was occupied, then said to me, “Mr. Wren, I’d like to show you something that Sally drew yesterday.”
She pulled out a drawing from Sally’s folder. Five stick figures: Mom, Dad, Sally, Tommy, and Josephine. Each had a lurid scrawl of hair, herky-jerky limbs, big smiles. “I always ask the children what they are drawing,” Patty said, “and Sally told me who each person was. I asked what this black thing was”—she pointed to a black, spiderish scribble next to the figure of Josephine—“and she told me it was the gun that Josephine keeps in her bag.”
I looked directly into her face, aghast.
Patty nodded. “I asked her again. I said, ‘What is that?’ And she repeated it.”
. “Jesus.” I’d seen the bag a million times; Josephine pulled out all kinds of things from it: potions, religious tracts, asthma inhalers, junk mail, just about anything. The bag was always left on a certain chair in the living room, within reach of the children.
“I thought you should know,” Patty said.
“Absolutely. Yes.”
“We talked about calling you, but I know you and Mrs. Wren both work late …”
I nodded. “Now I have to find out if it’s true.”
Patty looked at me. She’d taught children for a long time. She had seen a lot of parents, too, and preferred, I could tell, to trust their children.
Lisa was not to be disturbed, not when she was looking at a freshly severed thirty-seven-year-old toe through a surgical microscope, trying to figure out how to connect it to the thirty-. seven-year-old stump of a thumb. We would discuss Josephine and her gun, but for the moment I would have to deal with Josephine alone. I walked straight back to the house, angrily pulling the gate shut behind me. Having gone to a lot of trouble to see that nuts and idiots did not endanger my family, here I had Josephine quietly packing what I could only imagine was a loaded gun in our house five days a week. I found her in the living room pulling one of Tommy’s rubber boots onto his foot. He sat in her huge lap, watching her hands.
“You forgot something?” she asked.
“No, Josephine. I just took Sally to school and the teacher showed me a picture Sally had drawn. You were in it, too, and something that Sally told the teacher was a gun. A gun you kept in your bag.” .
Josephine sat frozen, her eyes open. Tommy fumbled with his boot.
“Just tell it to me straight, Josephine, yes or no—is there a gun in the bag?”
“Well—”
“Just tell me, Josephine.”
“Yes.”
I said nothing.
“I only carry it to be safe.” She pulled on Tommy’s second boot. “Sometimes I come home very late, you know, and so many people I know been attacked and mugged, you know, so I went and got lessons on it, you know. I’m just trying to be safe—”
“Josephine! One of the kids could have pulled that thing out and shot it! Goddammit!”
“But the children never go in my bag, they know they not suppose to do that.”
“Well, how did Sally know about the gun, then?”
Josephine didn’t have an answer. She looked down in obvious shame, and I thought perhaps that Sally must have spied the gun when Josephine had the bag open and was searching for something else.
“Let me see it.”
“In front of Tommy?” asked Josephine.
I got Tommy started with some Lego blocks, and then went into the kitchen with Josephine. She reached into the bag and pulled out the gun, keeping it pointed down. It was huge and ugly, like you could bang nails into a board with it. As a kid I shot a gun at crows in the woods and actually hit one once, its head turning to red mist and black feathers.
“Jesus, Josephine, that’s a thirty-eight.”
“I’m very careful.”
“Is it loaded?”
She looked at me.
“I want the bullets.”
She didn’t answer.
“I want them, Josephine. I can’t go to work this morning knowing there’s a loaded gun in the house.”
She tipped the gun up and slid out the bullets. She handed me each one. Black hand putting bullets into a white hand. Simon Crowley could have filmed the moment. I slipped them into my pocket.
“Any more in the bag?”
She shook her head.
“Sure?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t lie about it.”
“Did you imagine that we would be happy that you were bringing a loaded gun into our house every day? No, of course not, Josephine! So yes, that is sort of a lie, don’t you think? For God’s sake, Josephine, who the hell do you think you are?”
She was silent. I hated to do this. “Josephine, look, you’re fantastic with the kids. They love you. We feel lucky to have you, and we’ve tried to show you our appreciation—”
“You and Lisa been very good to me.”
“I want you to keep working for us. We need you. But you absolutely must never bring a gun into this house again. Never. I’m not fucking around, Josephine. If the gun comes back into this house, you’re fired, on the spot, no questions asked. I hate to say that, but it’s really that simple.”
She was crying now, her hand over her eyes, lips soft and twisted, and I wanted to go comfort her.
“Josephine, I know you’d never try to endanger the kids, but I can’t have this. And I’m not going to go checking your bag or your pockets or anything, so long as you give me your word.”
“I won’t bring the gun here no more,” she sobbed. “I made a big mistake. Oh, Lisa’s going be so mad at me.”
This was true. I went back into the living room and hugged Tommy and kissed him for luck, looking into his happy, unknowing face, his cheeks smeared with snot and red juice, which provided an adherent for green Froot Loop crumbs from breakfast. Oh beautiful, beautiful boy. The world, and his father, were not good enough for him. I kissed him again and for a moment felt like crying myself. Then I got up, grabbed my briefcase, and went out the door, the bullets jingling in my pockets like money. Could I really have fired Josephine, there on the spot? Our children loved her with all their hearts, had never known another baby-sitter. When she got ready to go home each day they ran to her thick legs and hugged her good-bye, and Sally insisted that Josephine give her a “lickstick kiss,” which entailed a huge smack on Sally’s cheek that left the red lips of Josephine there until bath time. To the children
she was a second mother—patient, strict, fair, untiring. As in most things, my wife had made an excellent decision in hiring her, and we knew any number of other families who had suffered disastrous relationships with baby-sitters, even one case in which the husband came home early to find the kids watching a Barney video and the sitter getting an insertion of happiness from the Con Ed man. But Josephine was another matter entirely, and other parents had tactfully inquired as to when we might be “done” with her and what we paid her. (White still owns black in America, let us admit this, if only secretly, to ourselves.) In fact, Josephine’s very existence challenged my conception of myself as a parent; she had wiped more shit from my children’s asses, fed them more meals, taken them for more walks than I had. She was paid for her labor and not her love, but she gave her love freely and copiously to my children, and I wondered from time to time if such a love might be equal, or even superior, to mine. Certainly she was more patient, certainly she communed more closely with the minutes of their lives than I did. She and I rarely spoke directly or deeply to each other, preferring instead to keep the conversation on a level of banality—the weather, the news—but I had a strange feeling for her. Somehow my children’s love for Josephine refracted into my own grudging heart, but in a way that I could not acknowledge openly. The two of us understood that the forces of history had created very different fates and that nothing ameliorated this but basic human respect. She was a proud woman, and I was glad of it, for it meant that her life was not hopeless. Her past had largely been concealed from me, but from time to time she and Lisa talked, perhaps both working in the kitchen together, and I imagined, perhaps unrealistically, that in those moments they stopped being white employer and black employee, and became simply two women talking. Over several years Josephine had told Lisa that she had birthed five children, three of whom had disappointed her, one of whom had died in a fire in a crackhouse. Her first husband, whom she married young, had beaten her as well as the boy who became the man in the crackhouse. They had divorced. Josephine’s second husband, with whom she had three children, was an older man who had died of advanced diabetes. Lisa suspected that he had been the genuine love of Josephine’s life, for he had bought her a small home in Port-au-Prince, where Josephine hoped to retire. Josephine had chosen her current husband less out of passion than pragmatic awareness of his basic decency and economic dependability. In fact, whether there was any passion left in Josephine was a mystery. At times she sat quietly next to the window, reading her Bible in the natural light. Her faith was unshakable, and made me wonder if her belief in God, which seemed to me as humanly genuine as is possible, had been forged by her suffering or only tested by it. I believe that grace is the most elusive of gifts, and Josephine, slow-moving, inarticulate, superstitious, was one of the most graceful women I had ever seen. In my heart I knew that she was a finer human being than I. Let me say it again and know it always: gun in her handbag or not, Josephine Brown was a finer human being than I, and among my other sorrows of this account, there is the miserable knowledge that my acts forced upon Josephine yet another unnecessary dose of suffering.
Manhattan Nocturne Page 15
