George said, What are those?
Henry Moore, Anna said. English sculptor. Reclining figures. You gonna share that? We sure there’s no one around?
He handed her the joint.
You see anyone around? he said. Except these giant nudes, who look mellow. Once you get used to them.
She took a hit, held it, and after releasing she said, I love Henry Moore. He understands bodies.
Their own two bodies leaning into each other, looking. Anna gave him back the joint. She could feel his solidity, like the solidity of Moore’s statues, which every time she saw them she wished to slosh out to and lean against in much this way. She expected them to be warm as if in perennial sunlight. She wanted to attack them face-first, arms outspread. The famished lover. Now she had him to lean against and she could transfer the desire to this, to now. She tried to do that. She leaned harder. His legs almost gave way and they both staggered leftward. Anna laughed and laughed and tried to explain it—you were supposed to be solid, she kept saying—and he laughed too, but he didn’t understand precisely what had happened and she knew it. Which, then, they both knew: that she knew what was funny and he didn’t know and she knew he didn’t know and he knew she knew that: which made them both laugh over again, and him saying, What? What? but there was no answer to it and every time he said it—What?—they laughed more. They wandered from there farther back into the complex and found an open area with a bandshell and behind that a fence from which they could look down on the barren scape of Tenth Avenue, the residential towers and housing projects beyond. They smoked more of the joint but didn’t finish it. He went to save it in his pocket and she stopped his hand. Don’t save it, she said. He looked at her, then flicked it out between the wires of the fence and it sailed onto the sidewalk beneath their high post. They walked back then and climbed up onto the stage of the bandshell and they sang songs and declaimed from the stage in an intoxicated mockery of actual performance which they fully understood and deeply enjoyed and neither of them, recollecting the bandshell, would be able, ever, to remember what they said and what they sang there on that cool-winded night. George remembered best that he could, in fact, charm her; more than that, he never lost this new sense of stunned liberation.
Afterward they got themselves back to Broadway and walked for perhaps two blocks before it became exhausting and overwhelming with the noise of traffic and the moving lights and so, though barely competent, George bounded into the traffic and hailed a cab and magically, with full knowledge, avoided a splattering death—she watched him, knowing somehow he would not die. He might never die. For his part he could see it play out in the acid cinema of his mind, but his mind made it into a dance, a beautiful promenade, honkings and veerings of no import and the cab pulling up beside him with the door spotted exactly to his hand, for his opening, Anna just watching him, calm as could be, and he and she then in the cab. They sat close in the back and closer still until their lips touched, and tongue tips touched and George entered a staggering tunnel of desire. They kissed slowly and precisely as if each new movement of the mouth and tongue was a dissertation in response to the previous movement by the other. His arm across her lap and hand on her far hip, tilting her toward him, the feel of that extraordinary folded spot where so much flesh meets. Speaking in this wordless, mouthy way. Until she pulled away—
Dry mouth time-out, she said.
He had it too.
We have to get something to drink, she said.
I have a can of Coke in my room.
Oh my god, Coke, she said, and began sliding down in her seat and laughing again. He hoisted her up.
They arrived at 114th Street. Sorting out the money was comical. George found a five and paid. They got off at Broadway and walking down 114th they came upon a tree behind Carman—a young, small tree, recently planted, it was uprooted and brutal and spilled on the sidewalk, torn from its stingy rectangle of dirt, yanked down by that wind, which had been with them all night, the gorgeous, unthinking wind, and after staring at that, the roots and tendrils of roots hanging like nerve endings or guts or miniature bones, so wrong when you see the living insides of something pulled out, then finally walking on, imbued with a tragic sense, they looked far down the block and saw the rest of it, near Amsterdam, the police cars and the dark silhouettes of the half dozen cops, with their distinctive hats, gathered there, the red and white light passing so quick and bright, a momentary return to the hallucinogenic. For years after, through separate lives, they would associate that night, that wind, the sadness of that yanked-out tree, young and destroyed, and their own first sense of irretrievable loss, with Jeffrey Goldstein’s death out a window on a high floor of John Jay Hall, a living thing, tender and new, ripped like that tree from his place in the world and dying that night on a New York City sidewalk.
6
They walked down the long block toward Amsterdam through a thickness of knowing and dread. They got as far as the east gate on 114th, between Butler and Jay, stairs up to the walkway past the tennis court—Anna stopped, held his hand, kept him from going on. Something deep told her not to see this, something beyond how it might be awful or bloody or very sad—something having to do with herself, her essence, her own suddenly threatened animal survival: as if it were her death they were walking toward, as if she were the toppled tree, a fallen body.
Let’s go up, she said.
George: I can’t. I have to see what it is.
The paper?
Yes.
A moment’s silence then George said, why don’t you go up and I’ll come later? She stood, head down, shaking it no. She pulled on him, but he resisted. He was so thick. Physically and right now in other ways too. He gave a small tug. So she went. They came around the corner to the body on the sidewalk: not even taped off yet, a uniform standing there to keep them from going on. Move along, he said. His colleagues were backing a few people away on the other side, north of the body, so they could tie a cordon around the signposts. George took in that Arthur was already there, shooting, flash going off and whirring in re-charge, trying to get as close as the cops would let him. He had some kind of bogus-looking credential hanging on a chain around his neck. Farther on, George saw a detective looking at him. George told the guy he was with Spectator and asked him, was he shot?
He jumped. Or fell.
From John Jay?
That this building?
Yes, this is Jay.
Then from John Jay. The cop was smoking a cigarette and when he inhaled he looked as if it was ripping his lungs out.
He said, I thought for a minute you meant the college on 57th Street.
George just looked at him.
I didn’t know there is a college on 57th Street.
You from out of town or what? the detective said.
Eastern Connecticut, George said.
Right, said the detective. John Jay College. It’s City. Criminology is their main thing. Therefore well known by the likes of me.
Did anyone see what floor? You willing to give your name? You from the two-seven?
Everyone said the two precinct numbers separately.
Actually I’m from the two-five but I was on 110th when the call went out. I’m Detective John Snetts. No jokes. S-N-E-T-T-S.
The two-seven is coming or you guys have it?
Homicide Division is coming, Snetts said. Manhattan North. I’ll be assisting with preliminaries.
Homicide? George said.
It always starts with them, Snetts said.
George thanked him. Anna was facing away from him, staring at the boy on the sidewalk, at his misangled limbs. George touched her back. They watched Arthur with his camera, working around the body, the cops basically ignoring him now, something avid and surgical in his interest, his absorption in the specificity of the thing. He kept looking around, searching out sources of light. A pudgy man—something about him led Anna to wonder if he was a virgin—but intense and quick-motioned. He looked at them for a solid tw
o count, nodded in his Arthur way, went back to work. George pointed toward the other side of Amsterdam, a change of focus. Across there—but 150 feet away—was, almost bizarrely, the hospital, St. Luke’s, and closest of all, the glare and buzz and the two parked orange-sided ambulances of the ER, black-silhouette figures of cops and medical techs moving into and out of the double doors at the head of the bay. The boy had jumped and died right in front of the emergency room. The cop car lights, the ambulance lights: a moment of spinning nausea; surreal, but everything was surreal tonight. George had the feeling he was momentarily tuned into a foreign television channel: something in German or Polish or Russian, with weird lighting and production values. The language didn’t convey.
Three medics from St. Luke’s were kneeling beside the boy but soon they stood: there was no need for urgent measures.
He’ll have to be pronounced at the hospital, one of them said to Snetts, who nodded.
I’m noting the time, oh-one-thirty-nine, he said.
Two of them were pulling the stretcher out of the truck. Snetts said, We gotta wait for the homicide division and the ME so don’t take him yet. Anna’s face was still, deep, without horror—as George too was without horror, he realized then. It was some form of acid detachment, or no, they should call it acceptance—there it was, the seemingly real, unsolvable, unchangeable, implacably mysterious, the facts, the present, you can’t plan for it or play with it in memory and alter it, because there it is and in this head you accepted it. He tried to imagine the pain. Perhaps from now forward this is how he would be in the face of death: can acid change your relationship to death? There would have been only a second of pain: he counted it off: one one thousand. Then you settle into darkness that looks like sleep. God how brutal that impact. Anna’s face beside him so solid, so silent, silver-pink with the flash of red and white passing over it, a poh-lice disco strobe.
I can feel this, she said. I can feel myself falling falling falling like nothing that’s ever fallen. The look on her face was distant, her voice as calm as pond water and as unrevealing of what lay beneath.
But it wasn’t you, George said.
She looked at him then. Oh? she said. I can feel it. I can see it, a whirling darkness and then a brilliant light, falling falling falling. Falling. I’ve never imagined falling. It takes the stomach and shoots it skyward. You fall and what’s in you wants to stay up where you were. Your lungs up in your throat. Your skin mashing upward on your body, wrinkling like water. It’s insane. It’s hideous. It’s also comfortable in some bizarre way, alluring. Flight. Such as it is.
He wanted to put his arm around her, hold her close to him, but felt it wasn’t wanted; he rested it carefully on her shoulders and back. Comradely.
We can’t fly and we can’t walk on water, he whispered.
People keep saying.
Four cops standing near one of the patrol cars: Snetts said to one, Jimmy, gimme your radio, who’s upstairs on this?
Karelsen and Dumbo.
Apparently they have a guy they call Dumbo, George said quietly to Anna. She looked at him without amusement, just taking it in. Facts. Guy called Dumbo.
Couple of mopes, said Snetts. What’s Karelsen’s number? Cop mumbled, Snetts pressed the side button and said, one-fourteen come in one-fourteen—he let the button up and what felt to George like a long delay—two seconds probably—before the static and Yeah this is one-fourteen, over.
Detective John Snetts of the two-five. Confirming you’re in John Jay Hall, gimme your floor, over.
Confirm John Jay, thirteenth floor, over.
Snetts says: How many witnesses, over.
Could be twenty to thirty. Nobody saw it but almost everybody heard it, over.
All right, I’m coming up with Jimmy and what’s his name—Snetts snapped his fingers at the cop named Jimmy, pointed to his partner.
Tommy Tonelli, Jimmy said.
Double T, said Snetts. Over.
Affirmative, over, said the radio.
George said to Anna: I have to go upstairs too. She turned to him; her movements seemed a little slowed, cased in gel. Her eyes were far off.
Can you feel the hardness of the concrete? she said, low-voiced. Its coldness?
For reasons he didn’t understand, and would wonder about later, he said: End of time.
Hey, Spectator, said Snetts, behind him. Show me the quickest way into this place.
Let’s go, George said quietly to Anna.
They walked in silence. Snetts followed but in the lead, asking if this was the way. The two uniforms followed behind. After the stairs up from 114th to the campus, George gestured to Snetts, indicating the pathway around the old tennis court. Snetts went fast, then, ahead of them, ahead of the uniforms, but all four caught up with him at the elevators as George knew they would; the things were practically medieval. One finally rattled down and Anna rode with them as far as the fifth floor. What about my Coke? she said to George.
You know where the key is, he said. Wait for me or find me later at Spec.
* * *
THE ELEVATOR DOORS closed behind her, that beautiful woman, and George looked at Snetts. All of reality seemed to be moving slowly, the elevator doors clanking and banging shut, and he could hear all the individual sounds, and see all the details of Snetts’s face, the detective’s eyes rising to meet his own. He heard Anna’s voice, and the word Coke, in his head. Coke. But wait.
Coca-Cola, he said to Snetts. You know, soda.
It felt as if half an hour had passed since she’d said Coke and now he was a fool and Snetts wouldn’t even know what he was talking about but of course they’d barely moved a floor upward so it was only a few seconds.
Snetts gave him a half nod and quarter-mouth smile.
I’m guessing you might have had something a little stronger than that earlier, he said. He held up his hands: I’m not asking. Not my department.
We enjoyed a period of enlightenment, George said. We, uh, rode the ferry.
Oh, enlightenment, said Snetts. Not that many people find satori on the way to Staten Island.
George thought about this.
With her I could probably find it anywhere, he said.
Well, yeah, Snetts said. There’s that.
* * *
FLOOR THIRTEEN. MCKIM, Mead & the long-dead White had shown no compunction nor did the university about the unlucky number, unluckier tonight than ever. The endless corridor—of narrow single doors opening into narrow single rooms—was in a state of disturbance that George felt the moment he was off the elevator, as if there’d been a fire drill or a bomb scare, doors open, people standing talking in the hall, women with tangled hair and long cotton shirts, some with teary eyes, hugging each other or hugging men in shorts and T-shirts. It was cool out but hot here: always hot on these upper floors of Jay. The building was stolid and oversized and brutal and inside it was cheap; these upper floors were the last stop for the rising heat of the other floors plus the building baked beneath the copper-clad roof and the inevitable sun. In summers it could kill you.
Down near the window, one bone-thin young man, in khaki pants, safari-type jacket despite the heat, cowboy boots, and a western hat. He was squatting with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette and tapping the ashes behind the radiator beside him.
Snetts homed on him like a falcon on a field mouse. What’s your name, son? he said.
Tex.
Of course it is, Snetts said but not unkindly. He too squatted. George stayed upright, looking around. Snetts said, So Tex, have you seen some police officers up here?
They’re down by the windows onto Amsterdam, said Tex. He gestured with his cigarette.
Do you know the boy who fell?
He didn’t fall, and yeah, I know him.
What’s his name?
Jeffrey Goldstein.
Snetts went to his notebook. Jeffrey with a J?
Yeah, I think so, yes.
You said he didn’t fall?
He was pushed, Tex said. Or else he jumped. Gon’ be hard for y’all to find out which.
What makes you say he was pushed? Snetts said.
I said he didn’t fall, Tex said. He was pushed or he jumped. He was with some guy. There was an argument.
You saw this?
I heard it. Everybody heard it. Jeff was screaming and crying.
What about? Snetts said. He lit his own cigarette. He smoked Parliament. With the plastic filters so he could hold it with his teeth, it turned out. Tex was smoking Lucky Strikes, with no filters at all. White pack, red-and-black-circled target on the floor beside him. And that thin band of green.
You couldn’t tell, really, he said. It was like the usual shit: you said you loved me. Et cetera et cetera.
He pronounced et cetera like Yul Brynner meets Jimmy Rogers.
Snetts was looking at him.
Tex looked back.
He was gay, Tex said.
You mean he was a homosexual?
Tex looked at him with large eyes, unhostile, brown, mildly curious. Fundamentally unreadable. He held the look a beat longer than he might have. That’s what it means, yessir. Common moniker. I heard them. I was in the lounge. Then I went to the outhouse and took a shit. Had a bowel movement, I guess I should say, if you’re writing it down. Shit’s the common moniker.
That one I get, said Snetts.
Then I come out and the fellow was gone and Jeff was out the window.
What were you doing in the lounge?
I was watching the TV.
He pronounced it TEE-vee.
What were you watching? Snett said. A cop’s automatic question with verifiable answer.
Harry O, Tex said. Love my Harry O.
Snett nodded, as if he knew the late-night schedule and Harry O checked out—maybe he did know the schedule. George slipped for an instant inside Snett’s life, home alone watching David Janssen reruns at 1:30 in the morning. Eating beans and franks out of a can.
Crazy Sorrow Page 5