I looked over at where her hand was on herself.
“You’re doing what I think you’re doing?”
“Yes. Your voice is sexy.”
“Would you like—?”
“Keep telling the story.”
I looked at the ceiling.
“Just tell the story, sweetie.”
I took a breath. “A call came in and we drove into a trailer park. Depressing place. Everything was sand and scrub pines and old cars and busted-down trailers. We pulled up to the one we were looking for—does that really feel good?”
“Yes. I’m listening and I’m doing this—and it’s just right.”
“When we got there I saw that a neighbor was leading a little boy away from the trailer. This tall, skinny guy comes out in bell-bottoms. He was a sailor. There was a big navy base in the area. The tall guy doesn’t have a shirt. He waves us closer. He was skinny and blond and he’s just about my age. I mean, he’s exactly my age but we’re living very different lives. So we get out quickly, and he’s worried and upset and says, ‘It’s my baby, it’s my baby girl’—I can’t tell this—Jesus, you’re lying there masturbating.”
“Tell it.”
“It’s a fucking sacrilege.”
“Tell it.”
“We go up the steps of the trailer and inside there’s a pretty Puerto Rican girl, and she is weeping and taking her fists way above her head and slamming them down on her legs, really punching herself hard, really hurting herself. And the sailor takes us through this cramped trailer into a tiny nursery with no pictures on the wall, no Mickey Mouse or anything, and there in the crib is this six-month-old baby girl lying faceup, and the EMTs get to work on the baby and they try for a while, while the woman is wailing outside in the other room. I’m just standing there like the most freaked-out person in the world.”
Caroline’s hand touched my penis.
“They worked on the baby with their oxygen and tried to get a heartbeat going, and then they gave up and called the code and one of them went out to talk to the mother and father. And so it was just me and this older guy, the EMT, and he started looking at the baby very carefully, even opened up the diaper. And I asked him what he was doing—I mean I was still freaked out, but I had to ask him. He said he was checking the baby for signs of abuse, bruises, whatever. And I said, What do you see? He said that the linen on the crib was clean, the baby was well-nourished, there were no bruises, cuts, or marks on the baby, the baby’s hair was clean, her fingernails were trimmed, the diaper was clean, the little—do you have to do that?”
Her mouth was on me now. She lifted her head. “Talk. I’m listening.”
I took a breath. “The baby was clean, there was no diaper rash, not even a tiny spot. The EMT looked at me and said that the baby had received perfect care. Perfect. Then he turned the baby onto her stomach and pointed out two purplish stripes on either side of the spinal column. That was the lividity, the blood settling in the corpse. Then he turned the baby over and brought down her eyes and cleaned up the little bits of wrappers and tubes and stuff in the crib and then told the other EMT to call in the mother and father. I was there when they came in and the woman’s face … she saw her daughter … ah … she saw her daughter, and it was like wires yanking her face back across her skull … I looked at the boy, the father, and he was military, he’d been trained not to show emotion and he was biting his bottom lip so hard that there was blood on his teeth. I saw—ahh … I saw that and—never—never forgot it.”
My words seemed to echo in the darkness. It might reflect better on me if I could say that my tale finally short-circuited our lust, but that would not be true, and a reporter is supposed to tell the truth. Caroline, straddling me, presenting her hips forward, pulling back, presenting forward, seemed to be arguing a point—that her appetite could not be dulled by stories of wives and frozen drunks and dead babies. In this, I felt her to be my teacher. I have no doubt that we could have had graphic footage of the Holocaust projected on every wall, truckloads of gray, emaciated bodies being emptied into mass graves, and that I could still have effortlessly pushed myself into her, my face a mask of satiation and triumph. Perhaps that makes me godless, awful. But I do not think so. For I think that when we have sex, those corpses are always projected there on the walls of the imagination, dropping limply and heartbreakingly into the mass grave of time. Yes, I am sure of this. Those bodies are always there; they are the people outside the room and the people past, the people future, our parents and our children; they are our lost selves of youth, our selves of the moment and selves of tomorrow, all doomed.
We fell back to the sheets. “I’m finished,” I told her. “That’s it.”
“Out of gas?”
“Out of juice.”
She got up, brushed her hair at the dresser, and collected our glasses. “You hungry?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to make something.” She left the room.
It was close to eight now. Lisa would be putting the kids to bed, waiting for a call from me. I wasn’t ready to make it. I couldn’t be sure of my voice. Maybe the drinking helped, maybe not. But there was something else, too. As a reporter you have conversations with strangers by the thousands. Some of them go quickly, some are agonizing. But in a successful interview, there is an identifiable moment, which, as I have mentioned, might be called the point of dilation, when the speaker opens up. Did I intend to interview Caroline? In a sense, yes. The dilation was coming, I could feel it. I knew that now that I had talked she would, too. This is why people exchange stories. They want to be known. The story is a kind of currency. If you give one, you usually will get one back. I didn’t want to call Lisa, because I didn’t want to break the moment with Caroline; either she would overhear the call or I would hang up the phone possessed by guilt. The chance would go, maybe forever.
But there were some other calls I could make. I picked up the phone next to the bed and dialed Bobby Dealy, who had just started his overnight shift.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Burning building in Harlem, one alarm, lady says her grilled-cheese sandwich caught on fire.” His voice was flat. “Man left a snake on a bus outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Cop shot in the leg in the Bronx. Several Nubians arrested on suspicion of being suspicious. Let’s see—two guys from New Jersey jumped two gay guys in the Village, called them fags, the gay guys beat the shit out of them. Also, we got a girl in a nursing home who has been in a coma for twenty years who is pregnant.”
“Raped.”
“Right. Thing is, her eyes move. Follow people around the room.”
“The guy raped a woman in a coma and she could still watch him?”
“TV people are all over it.”
I sighed. “What else?”
“Philosopher with a knife arrested in the U.S. Passport Office in Rockefeller Center.”
“What was that one?”
“It was the line for emergency passports,” Bobby said. “The guy wanted to get out of the United States. Country going to hell, couldn’t stand in line with everybody else.”
“What else?”
“Body found on the Whitestone Expressway.”
“On or next to?”
“On.”
“Drug hit, in the car.”
“Right.”
Caroline came back in with two bottles of red wine and two glasses.
“What else?” I said to Bobby.
“You made page one for tomorrow.”
“The Lancaster diary thing.”
“Yes. How’d you get that?”
“A guy took it off Lancaster.” I picked up one of the wine bottles. The price tag was still on it. Fifty-nine ninety-five.
“Nice piece,” Bobby said.
“That it?”
“No, you got a call from Fitzgerald.”
“He’s at home?”
“Yes.”
I called Hal.
“We’re cool on your conditions,”
he said.
“I have your word on that?”
“Yes.”
“No testifying, no identification of source, no giving the story away in the first twenty-four hours.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll drop off the tape at your office tomorrow morning.”
“Fine,” Hal said. “Now what’s the story?”
I told him. He was excited. “This is major, you realize.”
“Yes, Hal.”
“You’re sure it’s Fellows?”
“Tompkins Square Park. Rioters fighting the cops. Officer Fellows standing near curb. Tall black guy, about thirty years old. Firecrackers go off somewhere across the park. Fellows gets it from behind, perp runs away, crowd surges past body, cops see it, push crowd back. You know the rest.”
“I’ll send a car over to get the tape now.”
“No.”
“It’s no problem.”
“I’m not home.”
“Where are you?”
“Not anywhere in particular.”
“We can send a car there, too.”
There was a pause while he realized I wasn’t going to tell him.
“Tomorrow morning, I promise.”
“Has to be the first thing.”
“You got it.”
“Thanks, Porter.”
Sewn in. I hung up as Caroline returned with a tray of hot soup and bread. A naked woman carrying a silver tray. “Developments in the story?” she asked.
“Big.”
She put the tray down. “Big is good.”
“Sometimes.”
“Oh, usually, I think.”
“A small problem is better than a big problem.”
“Well, I suppose.” She gave me a bowl. “Were you calling somebody?”
“Yes, the police.”
“Why?”
“Chitchat.”
“About me?”
“No.”
“Honestly?”
“No.”
“You won’t turn me in for anything?”
“Nah.”
“For crimes, I mean.”
“Like what?”
“Making pornographic statements, maybe.”
“I didn’t hear any.”
“You weren’t listening.”
“I listen to everything you say to me. I remember every word.”
“Sure.”
I took a sip of soup. “Try me.”
“What were the very first words I said to you tonight?”
“You said, ‘I’m making you a little drink.’”
“How about the last words I said yesterday on the phone?”
“‘Get your column done.’”
She shook her head. “That’s kind of scary.”
“Not really.”
“Can you remember what my very first words to you were?”
That was a little harder. I recalled Hobbs’s party, and how Caroline came across the room toward me, how she sat down. “‘Your picture, Mr. Wren, is lousy.’ That’s what you said.”
“I did?”
“Yes.”
We ate the meal silently then put the dishes on the floor.
“This is the longest time we’ve been together,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It’s nice.”
“When I was that young reporter looking at the baby in the trailer,” I said, “where were you?”
“I was probably about nine,” Caroline answered, finishing her glass of wine. “We lived in South Dakota. I guess that’s where I’m from. My mother got pregnant when she was seventeen. With me. She was from Florida, and one winter she had sex with a boy from a rich family in Connecticut who was vacationing down there. He didn’t want to get married, so she lived with her parents, and then a couple of years later she met this guy Ron Gelbspan, who drove long-distance trucks. They moved to South Dakota and then they had my brother. I was born with my mother’s maiden name, but then she changed it to my father’s, which is Kelly, but she changed it again after she got married to Gelbspan, which I hated. I always thought of myself as Kelly. I never minded changing my name to Crowley. Sometimes I think if I get married to Charlie and take his name, then that will be five names, which is kind of fucking ridiculous. I guess after a while the last name doesn’t really matter. Anyway, my mother worked for Visa. She was on the phone all day, talking to people about their charge accounts. We lived in a little house maybe ten miles outside of town. I got two letters from my real dad, the last one when I was about ten—that was it. Ron was totally crazy, he wanted to own a long-distance trucking company. He was trying to build up a business, you know. He was really crazy. He had a shrine to Jackie Onassis in the house, this little corner where he had a lot of books and pictures of her. He had a lot of guns, too, especially shotguns. He used to hit us; one time we were riding in a motorboat and he threw my brother right out of the boat.” She refilled her glass and then mine. “Anyway, by the time I was maybe eight, I wanted a horse, badly. Some of the other girls were riding by then and I wanted a horse. That was a big thing with Ron—I used to bug him for a horse, and—” She paused. Her blue eyes blinked. “It didn’t work out. In high school I had boyfriends and everything, but I started to ask my mother about my real father—who he was, where he was, and all that—and at first she wouldn’t tell me, but I kept asking and she told me she thought he was living in Santa Monica, California. That sounded so beautiful to me. Santa Monica, California. I had let my hair grow really long, maybe halfway down my back, and Mom and my brother and sister and Ron all had brown hair, so I asked Mom what my daddy looked like, and she said that he had blond hair and blue eyes like me and had missed Vietnam because he had scoliosis of the spine, just enough, but maybe the doctor was paid to say that. His daddy was an Atlantic Richfield Oil Company executive here in New York—you know, the name before ARCO. When I was eighteen, that would have made him about thirty-seven. Mom hadn’t seen him in almost fifteen years. I asked her if she missed him, and she said she wondered what happened to him, and she told me how his mother was very, very beautiful, with the same forehead I had. My mother was so beaten down. She listened to credit problems all day long. I told her I wanted to go see my dad and did she have his phone number in Santa Monica. She said no, but his sister in New York might. So the summer after twelfth grade, I took the bus to Los Angeles.”
Two days later, Caroline said, after seeing and smelling the ocean for the first time, she was standing in a large parking lot in Venice Beach looking at a skinny man with long graying blond hair washing an ancient rust-eaten VW camper that appeared to be parked permanently. He did not recognize her as he saw her walk up and stand in front of the camper. Clearly he was watching her breasts move inside her shirt, her long legs. “Hey, what can I do for you?” He squared up his shoulders to present a more compelling version of himself, which was unlikely, given that his body was both soft and malnourished-looking, his legs and arms and chest skinny. She stopped fifteen feet away from him and asked what his name was. “All depends on who’s asking,” he said.
“Suppose it’s your daughter?” she said.
The man stiffened. “The fuck you talking about?”
She saw how the sun had damaged his face, burning and reburning the skin across his thinning hairline, his nose, and shoulders.
“I said, suppose it’s your daughter?”
He winced. “I’d ask her what she wanted.”
“Maybe she wants to know you.”
“Then I’d say forget it.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I don’t want to know her.”
They stood there under a brilliant, perfect sky. Nearby a stray dog nosed through garbage around a trash can. She looked back at her father. “You’re my daddy. My name is Caroline Kelly Gelbspan and your name is John J. Kelly III, and you grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and your father worked for the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company, and you met my mom when you were in college on vacation and she got pre
gnant with me—from you. She remembers everything about you. She told me the whole story fifty times.”
He stood there, wiped his hands on his shorts.
“Get out of here.”
“You were supposed to be my daddy.”
“I mean it.” He waved his hand, pushed air. “I don’t know you or what kinda thing you’re telling me here.”
The dog had found something in the garbage and looked up, chewing.
“I came here from South Dakota. I wanted to see you.”
“I don’t care if you came from fucking Mars, I don’t know who you are or any of that shit you just told me. You just get on along outa here. I don’t have any business with this whole line of bullshit.”
“I don’t have very much money.”
“That’s not my problem and neither do I.”
She stared at him. “You once told Mom how you were going to—”
“Hey, I told lot a chicks lot a things back then, and most of it was so I could fuck them.”
This was the closest he came to acknowledging her.
“But I’m gonna say it again, I don’t know who the fuck you think you are coming up here and telling me you got some kinda claim on me that I’m your father because that don’t mean shit to me. I got all kinds of other things I gotta worry about besides some girl coming up to me with this kinda shit.”
She didn’t move.
“Go on, get the fuck out my sight.”
She lingered a moment.
“Unless you want to give me a blowjob.”
For the next week, Caroline said, she slept in the sand with the other kids who hung out along Venice Beach around the T-shirt shops and bike-rental places, trying to keep her long hair clean and washing in the public bathrooms. The novelty of the ocean wore off quickly. They kept telling her she could be a model, she had beautiful hair. There was another girl who looked like Caroline did and she had gotten a modeling job and had never been heard from again. All the talk was about either music, tattoos, the police, what the best drugs were, opening a business on the beach, or being an artist. It was high-school talk, not so different from what she had left in South Dakota. She called home, but her mother was out. Ron said, You got to take care of yourself, Mom got put on shorter hours. Perched over the beach was an immense new hotel, a multilevel pink confection, the Loews Santa Monica, and she found herself watching the people who sauntered down from it; usually they rented bicycles or spent money in the shops. She told herself that she would be like that. She went into the hotel’s restaurant and asked if there was work. An officious woman in a suit told her they only hired through a union. On her way out she noticed that there were a lot of young white men in excellent physical condition sitting around the Jacuzzi. The Montreal Canadiens, whispered a towel-boy; they always stay here when they’re in town. One of the players beckoned to Caroline, but she kept moving.
Manhattan Nocturne Page 22
