“Oh, the Times has found out about it!” he would groan, tossing the paper onto his desk, and Claire knew he would never go to that restaurant again.
The Times had not yet discovered Pho Pun, though, and so as Claire and Meredith sat waiting for Peter she ordered a cup of Vietnamese coffee. Physically, Pho Pun was a strange place: long and narrow, more like a hallway than a restaurant space, it was festooned year-round with Christmas decorations. Cheerful Vietnamese Muzak poured soothingly from speakers in the back of the room, bland and banal. The pink tablecloths, shiny black chairs, and gold tinsel hanging from the ceiling gave the place an eerie cheer, a kind of surrealistic coziness. Tiny white holiday lights dangled from the tinsel, blinking on and off, reflecting endlessly in the long mirrors covering the walls on both sides of the room. The effect was a hall of mirrors, with the customers sitting along each side, their images endlessly duplicated in ever-receding waves, like an Escher painting.
“Wow,” said Meredith. “It looks like Christmas in here!”
The staff was entirely Vietnamese, and so were most of the patrons. Peter always said this was a good sign: he thought an ethic restaurant frequented by its own countrymen must be doing something right. This would not hold in Claire’s neighborhood, where most of the restaurants were likely to be a sea of white faces, but down here in Chinatown it was not unusual to be the only Caucasian in a given establishment.
While Claire drank her coffee Meredith ordered a mango soda.
The waiter was a cheerful, stocky older man with thick white hair and a square face. Claire loved Vietnamese coffee: thick and strong and black as mud, it seeped slowly through the little metal filter into the cup below, mixing with the condensed milk lying in wait at the bottom of the cup. The resulting drink was a mix of strong sensations: the dark, rich coffee combined with the thick sweetness of the milk was almost unbearably flavorful, and made American coffee seem thin and pale.
Claire took a sip and closed her eyes, enjoying the rush of flavors. She opened her eyes to see Peter breezing into the restaurant, coat askew, shirttails flying.
“So sorry I’m late,” he said, collapsing into a chair opposite her. “The meeting went late, and I tried to call you but you had already left.”
“That’s all right,” said Claire.
“This place is cool,” said Meredith.
“Isn’t it?” Peter answered, energetically seizing the menu. He scanned it, eyes narrowed, put it down firmly on the table as if he were afraid it would jump up again, and signaled for the waiter. Peter did everything vigorously, decisively; he treated inanimate objects as though they were recalcitrant employees who needed to know who was boss. As a boss, however, he was the soul of gentleness, supportive and kind—a major reason Claire had remained at Ardor House as long as she had.
After they had ordered, Peter leaned forward, resting his short arms on the table. “So, what do you make of our Nazi friend’s nom de plume?”
Claire shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Can you trust Liza?” said Meredith. “Maybe you should tell her.”
Claire shook her head. “Well, if I can’t trust Liza, then I don’t know who I can trust. I don’t know; maybe I shouldn’t have left . . . it’s just that I was feeling so—”
“Claustraphobic?” Peter suggested.
Claire sighed. “Yeah. The old fears, you know, rising up.”
Peter nodded. “The whole Robert incident.”
Claire laughed, but the sound was stiff and dry and died in her throat “It sounds like a miniseries: The Robert Incident.”
Peter shook his head. “I’m not sure you’re over that yet. I mean, I don’t know if you ever really get over something like that, but I think maybe you should take it easy, you know?”
“That was part of the point of going up to Woodstock—to take it easy.”
“And look how that worked out. Ah, here’s our food,” he said as the waiter arrived with steaming platters of shrimp and pork dumplings, noodles in chili and lemon grass, and skewers of grilled chicken in peanut sauce. Peter had ordered several bottles of Vietnamese beer, and as their food arrived he poured a glass for himself and Claire.
“Bloody good place, this,” Peter said, and tucked into his food vigorously.
As they ate they discussed Willard Hughes’s new book, a political thriller involving international terrorists.
“I don’t know,” Peter said, heaping delicate white rice noodles onto Claire’s plate, “I think Willard should stick to mysteries.”
“But you have to admit thrillers sell,” Meredith remarked, pulling a piece of chicken off its thin wooden skewer.
“Sure they do, but so do Willard’s mysteries. I’m just worried that Willard . . . well, politically, I suspect he’s somewhat to the right of Pat Buchanan. I’m not publishing anything I find offensively right-wing. Simon and Schuster can do it if they want, but I swear to God I’ll block it—”
“Simon and Schuster broke their contract, remember?” Claire pointed out.
Peter nodded. “They were fools to consider a book like that in the first place. It didn’t do them any good in the long run.”
“So you don’t believe any publicity is good publicity,” Meredith remarked.
Peter shook his head and poured them both some more beer. “No, I don’t. And I think any publishing house has the right to turn down any book, the First Amendment notwithstanding.”
Claire took a sip of beer. “Well, I’ve just started it, so I’ll let you know. Willard’s mysteries are fairly innocuous, after all.”
They decided to stroll uptown after dinner, “to walk off some of this food,” as Peter said, though Claire just wanted to look around. She loved downtown Manhattan, and got there rarely enough that when she was there she wanted to explore a little. The Upper West Side was lovely—quiet and almost bucolic—but downtown held its own unique pleasures, mysterious lives squirreled away behind storefronts and warehouses; here, squeezed between darkened stoops and alleyways, was the real history of New York, the original city, already hundreds of years old when the Upper West Side was still farmland.
Now, having been away for a few days, Claire was surprised at how glad she was to be back again; after the bizarre events at Ravenscroft, the city felt strangely safe. Here, it seemed, nothing could happen without someone seeing it, whereas at Ravenscroft, sitting on the side of a mountain, when you were alone, you were really alone. Now, wandering through the narrow streets of lowerManhattan, Claire felt strangely protected, wrapped in a cocoon of buildings, surrounded by the comforting buzz of the lives humming within them.
And so they tramped up the Bowery through Chinatown, past the tearooms and noodle houses, curiosity shops selling everything from glazed pottery to ground tiger bones and shark fins. They moved through the ceaseless press of bodies that fills the narrow twisting streets every Friday and Saturday night, turning Chinatown into a swarming carnival of sights and sounds. They stepped over fetid piles of garbage, the smell mingling with the aroma of freshly roasted duck and brewed green tea swirling from every other doorway. Families hurried along, small children in tow, wearing the flat cotton slippers favored by many of the Chinese in the summer. The families were in turn followed by sinister-looking roving groups of teenagers, no doubt some of them members of tongs, as Chinatown gangs were called. Here, then, in all its contradictions and glory, was a microcosm of New York itself: gangsters coexisting with families, locals and tourists, garbage and Peking duck, all packed together in less than two square miles.
“It’s so odd, isn’t it?” said Peter as they picked their way through the crowded streets, stepping over the discarded crates and cardboard boxes that merchants had tossed onto the curb. “When I was in college we were at war with Vietnam, and now we sit eating in a Vietnamese restaurant, being served by some of the same people our soldiers were shooting at twenty-five years ago.”
“I know,” said Claire. “I think about that, too.
”
They continued on through Little Italy, past pastry shops and ristorantes, cappuccino bars and clam houses, and into SoHo, with its art galleries and French bistros, filled with young, black-clad patrons, their silky hair as smooth as the skin on their unlined faces under the track lighting. Here, young couples strolled arm in arm, their fashionable footwear striking the pavement crisply, ringing against the flagstones with the ummistakable sound of success and optimism.
They walked up Second Avenue and into the Eastern European enclave of the East Village, past Polish butcher shops and Ukrainian-owned bakeries, past the Pakistani-owned Indian restaurants of Sixth Street, past the Veselka with its flamboyant wall murals and hand-lettered sign advertising six kinds of homemade soups daily. So many people, so many lives, Claire thought, stacked atop each other in concrete hives on this rock jutting out of the sea.
When they reached the northern edge of the East village at Fourteenth Street, Peter stopped at the bus stop.
“I think I’ll hop on the M15 uptown,” he said. Peter lived on the Upper East Side. “Oh, look—there it is,” he added as the bulky blue-and-white bus bore down upon them, brakes squealing, metal against metal. “You taking a cab?”
“Sure,” said Claire, Meredith loved riding in Taxicabs.
“Okay,” said Peter. “Good night.” He kissed Claire on the cheek and flung an arm out at the passing traffic. Immediately a taxi screeched to a halt in front of them. Peter hopped onto the bus as Claire and Meredith climbed into the cab, waving to them as they sped off into the night.
“Hey, look at that guy!” Meredith said as their cab stopped at the intersection of Broadway and Seventy-second Street. The man was leaning up against the building housing Gray’s Papaya, home of the fifty-cent hot dog. He was dressed in a blanket tied at the waist with a thin little rope, frayed and dark with dirt. What caught Claire’s attention, though, was that he was laughing—a deep, toothless laugh, his mouth opened in a parody of mirth. His red, puffy face, with its big bare-gummed grin, was grotesque, reminding Claire of a nineteenth-century Daumier caricature. There was something timeless about this man; he seemed to have always existed—and like the grotesques of Daumier, his vices and follies appeared to be imprinted on his face. Gluttony, sloth, intemperance: all were written upon the slack, broadly open mouth, the rheumy bloodshot eyes, the ruddy cheeks, red from sun, wind, and alcohol, and the bulbous nose, with its maze of tiny broken capillaries, creeping like crimson spiderwebs across his cheeks. Here was a face with a million other identical faces before it, ancestors stretched out across the centuries in a direct line. Some things are passed down from one generation to the next, in ways other than heredity, Claire thought; some things are as cyclical as the seasons, an ever-renewing cycle of birth and death. There will always be men like him on streets around the world, she thought, and no amount of social programs or welfare will eradicate their ranks entirely. A quote from Goethe sprang into her head: Du must Hammer oder Anvil sein. “You must either be the hammer or the anvil.”
The light changed and the cab jerked away from the intersection.
“He was weird,” Meredith said, looking out the back window at the man. “You know who else is weird?”
“Who?”
“Jack. What’s with him, anyway?”
Claire could imagine Jack’s face as the face of a drunk; a few years of dissipation, living on the street, and he would look like the man’s brother. But it was more than that: there was a slyness about him, a roguish rudeness, that reminded her of the homeless man.
“Funny you should ask.” Claire told Meredith about the book Peter discovered, and Jack’s other identity.
“Wow,” Meredith said when she finished. “That’s really weird. What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know . . . I need to talk to Liza first. She’s the director of the program, and I don’t want to put her in a difficult position.”
“Do you think she knows?”
“I doubt it. She would have said something.”
“But we should tell Detective Hansom.”
“Yes,” Claire replied. “He should know about it.”
As the cab turned onto West End Avenue, Claire looked at the bulky brownstones of the Upper West Side, feeling a sudden, unexpected rush of affection for mankind: for their earnest, heartfelt search for comfort on this cold ball of minerals hurtling relentlessly through space, traveling inexorably away from the center of a frozen universe.
Back at her apartment, Claire threw down the pile of mail on the table by the front door and checked her answering machine while Meredith roamed the kitchen looking for cookies. The light was blinking once, indicating one message, but when Claire played it back she heard only a dial tone; whoever called had hung up without leaving a message. She considered calling Liza to see if everything was all right, but it was after eleven and Liza was an early riser.
She wandered into the kitchen, where Meredith was rummaging through the cupboards.
Meredith held up a box of Fig Newtons. “This is all I could find,” she said, disappointment in her voice.
“Haven’t you had enough to eat tonight?”
Meredith shrugged. “There’s always room for cookies.”
Later, the girl lay in her bed reading as Claire tidied up the room around her. Meredith put her book down, rubbed her eyes, and yawned. “You know, I was thinking about Billy Trimble, and something just popped into my head.”
“Oh?” Claire pulled a sock out of the shoe it was stuffed into. Meredith’s ability to create havoc in a room in a matter of minutes was astonishing. She scattered her possessions around as though she were sowing a field: her shirt was tossed over the back of a chair, her shoes were left in the middle of the floor. Her knapsack lay open in a crumpled heap on the foot of the bed, its contents spilling out of it like fruit from an overturned basket. Claire had tried to change the girl’s untidy habits, but she didn’t spend enough time with her to have a lasting effect. Meredith tried, she really did, but tonight they were both tired and Claire didn’t want to make an issue out of it.
“What popped into your head?” Claire said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Meredith raised herself onto one elbow. “Well, it’s just that he was the only one at Maya’s funeral service who didn’t cry.”
“Really?” said Claire. “You mean even Jack cried?”
“Well, yeah. His eyes were wet, anyway. I was watching everyone, you know,” she added, lying down on her back again.
“Hmm,” said Claire. “Interesting. I wonder if it means anything. Of course, some people are just more private, and they do their grieving alone”
Meredith shrugged. “I guess. Anyway, just thought I’d mention it.”
“Okay, well, now it’s time for bed. Claire kissed her on the forehead. “We’re catching an early bus tomorrow.”
“Okay,” said Meredith, snuggling down under the covers. She must be tired, Claire fought, to not argue at all about going to bed. She turned off the bedside lamp and tiptoed out of the room. A single shaft of moonlight fell on Meredith’s wiry hair, copper-colored in the pale blue light.
Claire took a bath and crawled into bed. Next to her bed was Forgotten News, by Jack Finney, a book she had deliberately left behind when she left for Woodstock, afraid that she would read it instead of all the manuscripts she ought to read. Now, however, it lay on the table beside her bed, and she couldn’t resist picking it up.
The first half of the book was about the murder of a Dr. Harvey Burdell in 1857 in his residence at 31 Bond Street; he was knifed to death in his own study late one night in January. Now, a hundred and forty years later, Jack Finney had meticulously reconstructed the extraordinary series of events leading to his murder, a murder probably orchestrated by a woman who claimed to be his wife. Claire’s appetite for nonfiction was enormous, and she often sat up in bed reading until well after midnight. Finally, when she heard the chimes of Riverside Church strike twelve, she put
the book down and rolled over on her side to look out the window.
The apartment seemed empty without Ralph lurking about; she half expected him to leap up on her stomach as she lay on the bed. She looked at the clock on the bedside table: 12:03. She translated that into California time: three hours earlier. Wally’s mother’s number was on the pad on her bedside table. Claire ran her fingers over the phone, feeling the square little Touch-Tone buttons. After her trek through downtown Manhattan, with its echoes of old New York the wonder of it all hit her: a movement of the wrist, a light pressure of her fingers upon a plastic console, and she would be connected to Wally in a room somewhere on the opposite coast on the other side of a vast, dark continent.
Savoring the moment, excitement spiraling slowly upward through her stomach, she dialed the number. His mother answered.
“Hello, Mrs. Jackson. It’s Claire Rawlings.”
“Oh, hello, dear. I’m so sorry—you just missed him. He’s gone out to meet an old friend for a drink.”
“Male or female?” Claire wanted to say, but instead she said, “Oh, that’s all right. I was just back in New York and thought I’d call.”
“Oh, are you done with your seminars?”
“Oh, no—not yet.” Claire wondered what Wally had told his mother, whether or not she knew about the murders. From the cheerful sound of her voice, it appeared as though she didn’t. “I have to go back tomorrow,” Claire said. “I just came into town for a meeting.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to tell him you called.”
“Thank you.” Claire’s brain whirred as she tried to think of something else to say.
“Well, Wally will be glad to hear you called,” said his mother. “Shall I have him call you when he gets in?”
Who Killed Dorian Gray? Page 17
