The celebration was over. And down he went.
21
FOR THE SUN, the crisp early February wind, and an appointment in the city, Sidarra wore her best. She looked forward to this day once a month when she had a morning round table meeting with the mayor’s education staff at City Hall and did not technically need to report to her office in Brooklyn. She could wear what she wanted. That morning after a long shower she dried her newly toned body and suffused her naked skin with Quelques Fleurs fragrance, slipped La Perla lace over her primary attractions, and went to the wardrobe with glee. Her imaginary husband still lay in the white cotton sheets, a hazel-eyed bar of Godiva watching her from beneath the canopy. She put on a blood red Dolce & Gabbana dress that hugged her down past the knee, a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes one shade darker, a fox coat, and shades to minimize the UV and maximize the splendor. Leaning naked against the door, her imaginary husband wrapped her in a full hug, pulled back her bra for a last kiss of her breast, and hoped with his hardness that she would stay a little longer. As she stepped into the bright sun to her car at the curb, Sidarra thought she saw Tyrell approaching from the far end of the block. But when she looked directly, whoever it was had vanished quickly. Her day was her own.
The glamour ended as soon as the long meeting started. As usual, the agenda included a proposed bond offering for new school construction. As usual, yet another good idea was defeated by the end of the meeting. The only good news was that all of the mayor’s choices for a permanent schools chancellor to replace Jack Eagleton had finally turned him down—all five of them. Only Dr. Grace Blackwell remained.
But really, Sidarra spent most of the meeting spacing out. She wondered how her daughter could talk like a monster disguised as an angel. She wondered how some people could talk so long at meetings and say nothing. She walked out of the building and back toward the garage where she’d parked and wondered when it was that she stopped having big ideas. There was a time when she did, and being in the palatial confines of City Hall’s meeting rooms—even if she was too shy to speak—always made her hungry to retrieve them. There was a time when Sidarra thought she might be a leader, and the reminder made this day different from any she’d had in a long time.
As she pulled out of the driveway in her fabulous German cocoon, she decided there was no way she was going back to her office in Brooklyn. Maybe she should plan for her fortieth birthday. It might be fun to have a joint of some of Yakoob’s bodacious smoke right about now. Or go belly-dancing. Sidarra fumbled with the stereo knobs she was still learning to use and pressed PLAY. Anita Baker’s “My Funny Valentine” came on like a wish come true. She waited for the light to change at Foley Square and Worth Street, pulled out her cell phone, and started punching in the number for the dance studio in Union Square to find out the afternoon class schedule. She always kept belly-dancing gear in the trunk, just in case. It was two o’clock.
The pedestrians moved along the crosswalk in their typical blur except one, a man still leaning against the light pole. He was tall and wore a long, open cocoa brown wool coat and a dark green suit. Sidarra was momentarily stuck on him, as he was on something in his head. Daydreaming, he had not noticed that the light had changed. He stood alone looking up about halfway into the tall buildings across the street. His expression bore a combination of pain and resolution as well as an ignorance of strangers who might have caught him distracted in his private moment. Alone like that, he was purely beautiful. An innocent strength and a serious wonder came off the fine lines of his long, mature face. Sidarra blinked twice behind the steering wheel and momentarily held her breath. Just as the light changed green for her, she realized. Just when the light turned red for him, he stepped into the street. It was Griff. She honked her horn and he immediately jerked backward.
“Griff!” she called out of her window. He didn’t hear her. “Griff!” she shouted ecstatically. “It’s me!”
Shaken from his daze, he peered into the windshield and squinted to make out who was calling to him from behind the glare. “Sidarra?”
She leaned her head out of the open window. “Yes! Yes, it’s me!” She opened the car door and stood up with one foot still on the floorboard. The row of taxis, town cars, and other hooligans behind her began slapping their horns like monkeys.
His demeanor brightened. His eyes awakened to more than the fact that he had been daydreaming dangerously at a Manhattan crosswalk. They woke to the image of her outside his thoughts. “My God. Hey! It’s you. Sidarra. Hey, baby! Hey!”
She motioned urgently for him to get a grip and walk over to her. He eventually complied and stepped into her embrace. The taxi-honking be damned, she was so glad to see him. Griff grabbed her up like an adolescent boy and smooched her fat on the lips.
When it was a few moments past time to let go, she pulled back. “What do you know? My statue man. What are you doing here?”
“I work here,” he said. “I’m just coming from court.” He pointed up the street to the Criminal Courts Building. “Just got a continuance on a trial that was supposed to…What? What are you doing here?” His smile was so fresh he couldn’t fake it.
“Well,” she grinned uncontrollably, “I had a meeting with the mayor’s staff like I do once a month.” More taxicabs came upon them. Like a law of nature, more honking commenced.
His eyes scanned her face several times before they ventured over her clothes. “You look, baby, you look just marvelous. Can I say that? Damn, it’s nice to see you. It really is. Sid, I can’t think of another human being who I would rather break my legs than you almost did.”
She giggled and pinched his side. “Get in, please. Where are you off to?”
He started for the passenger door. “I didn’t know really. That’s probably why I was so distracted. I guess I could go back to my office. I haven’t eaten. I don’t know. I thought I’d be at trial now, but the judge was reassigned at the last minute so we got continued till next week.”
“Wanna do something?” she asked, turning to face him beside her.
“With you?” he answered. She nodded a little too happily. “Baby, in the worst way. Whatever you wanna do. I could use some hooky with you. God must be looking out for me today.”
Griff sounded relieved, nearly excited except for the weight of preoccupation his eyelids couldn’t hide. She watched him pass a heavy glance over his own clasped hands. That’s when Sidarra realized she might not just love Griff, she knew him. She knew that he did not ordinarily stand dazed at intersections like that and walk out into traffic. She knew he had more inner cool than his worried hands now showed. Whatever was on his mind, whatever made him this way right now, she knew she was the one thing that could make it right.
“Let’s eat, baby. Relax,” she said firmly. “Whatever happened this morning, let me buy you lunch.” She drove west. “The handle on the floor to your right will put the seat back for you.” She heard the electric seat recline under his weight and he sighed. Sidarra found the stereo button with no problem this time. “My Funny Valentine” began again.
Several blocks later Griff realized that Sidarra was driving around in circles so that he could rest his mind. “C’mon, turn right here,” he said. “Let’s go to Odeon.”
Located on West Broadway just up from City Hall, Odeon was a fashionable place to be seen eating if you were a reasonably high-level official in municipal government. By the time Sidarra and Griff strode in, the lunch crowd had tapered away and the place had the feel of fresh air returning. The Art Deco detail was good on the eye. The waiters were slowing down. The maître d’, who knew Griff, hurried up to greet them.
“How are you, Griff?” the man with the slight accent and full mustache asked.
“How are you, Sergio?” Griff returned.
Sergio looked pleased to see him and turned a warm gaze on Sidarra. “Hello,” he bowed toward Sidarra and turned back to Griff. “I have a very nice table for you and your lovely wife, Griff.”
Neither o
f them corrected him because, it struck them privately, there was no better error. And what if they were married? The idea rushed up and hit them on the back of the neck. The world had never seen either of them that way before. It was a damned good idea. So they decided—each in their own head—to pretend to be married, to try out the feeling, until whenever their day together ended.
Once they were seated at a nice half booth on one end of the uncluttered room, their giddy elbows began to bump and they stared hard at each other. Suddenly Griff was brimming with something to say. “How much do you follow astrology?” he asked her (as if it were a sport).
Sidarra laughed and shook her head, trying to decide how much to lie. “I follow it from time to time,” she answered (as if it were a debate). She followed it at least twice that much.
“Griff’s wife. How nice to meet you,” a waiter interrupted, and stepped forward to gently shake Sidarra’s hand. “Serge told me you were here,” he said in a thick accent, and smiled at Griff. “How are you, my friend?” Griff nodded and warmly took the bald man’s hand. “Your husband is the whip, did you know that? This man great lawyer. Bad. Ass. Appetite killer, too. Bad for business. Believe me, I know.”
Once again, neither of them disabused the man of his assumption.
Sidarra looked up into the waiter’s eyes. “My guy doesn’t play,” she said.
“Ha ha ha ha ha!” he blurted, and pointed knowingly at Sidarra.
The waiter insisted on a complimentary bottle of red wine, Griff conceded, and the man disappeared. Then Griff eagerly returned to his point. “Well, I don’t really follow astrology either, but I have seen a psychic several times over the last few years.” He paused, realizing Sidarra probably didn’t figure him for that. She didn’t. But he could see that she was more interested in what he had to say than in why he saw a psychic. “I first went to her about eight years ago, as a gag, a favor to a friend who swears by her. At first, nothing came of it, but near the end of one session, she gave me an interesting warning. She told me I better be prepared for my Saturn return. ’Cause it was coming up.” He raised his eyebrows in fun. “That’s supposed to be some spooky shit if you know about Saturn returns. Do you know what a Saturn return is?” he asked.
Sidarra looked away for a second. “Vaguely,” she said. “It’s some kind of crossroads. A spiritual crossroads? A pure moment?”
“Almost,” he smiled, glad that she’d heard of it. His voice grew lighter and full of breath. “As the psychic explained it to me, in every person’s chart, Saturn returns to the same exact point in the sky every seven years. I’m not sure how long it stays. But its presence is a very powerful force, especially if we ignore it or make excuses for it. It’s supposed to create a time of crisis. We’re supposed to surrender to the crisis and make careful choices. It’s one of those opportunities to either change course or remain stuck repeating dumb shit in your life.” Then, for no obvious reason, Griff reached across the table and gently squeezed Sidarra’s hand. “The truly cool thing about this notion, Sid, is that supposedly the return of Saturn coincides with the point every seven years when all the cells in your body have completely regenerated. Every single cell. It’s as if you’re new.”
Sidarra was sitting on the edge of her seat, squeezing her legs together under the table, and with the hand Griff did not touch, twirling red wine around in her large glass every few sentences. “If nothing else, it’s some very useful poetry,” she finally said. “I like it. You buy it?”
“I do,” he answered quickly, with an unfamiliar mischief in his smile. “A year later the psychic was right. Seven years ago I had a Saturn return—my work, my marriage, and I needed some pretty serious medical help.” He moved food around his plate and finally filled his fork with salad he wouldn’t lift to his mouth. “I don’t think I did it right, Sid. I got help for the injury and eventually healed up. But I didn’t change a thing about my work. And my marriage, the only thing we did was to buy our brownstone. Some people have a child to save a relationship. We bought a building.”
Sidarra smiled into her food and looked lovingly across the table. “Now it’s back?”
“Seven years later, baby. And I’m forty-two now. I mean six times seven, right? There’s no doubt Saturn’s back. And there’s no doubt I’ve got an answer this time.”
“What makes you so sure?” she asked.
Griff leaned back in his chair, took her in his eyes, and leaned his elbows forward on the table again. “Because this time it followed me. I was already changing when it came over me.” He sighed with a gentle smile, as if he wasn’t sure how much to reveal. Maybe Sidarra was wrong. Maybe she didn’t know Griff as well as she thought. First the psychic thing, now shyness. Griff finally continued. He explained how playing pool again was an improvement in his life. His politics had grown stale and apathetic, but Whiteboy had changed that. “My anger’s back, but I don’t get as mad anymore. That’s a good thing, too. You know, you can change by returning to yourself, Sidarra.”
“That’s true!” she said, emphatically agreeing with him by pointing in the air. “But I’m not sure how to tell you this.” She caught the moment when Griff’s face registered worry. “I’m pretty sure your psychic got her math wrong.”
Now he looked really worried. “She did?”
“I think Saturn returns every forty-nine years, darling, not every seven.” Sidarra felt bad breaking it to him. He was so sure.
Griff looked briefly crestfallen and stared down at his plate for a moment. “Wow, hundred bucks a session, she really had me going,” he muttered to himself. “How ’bout the cell replacement part? That probably happens every seven years, though, don’t you think?” He smiled at her.
“She couldn’t be wrong twice.” Sidarra smiled back. “Plus you felt it. Either way it’s a comeback. You don’t have to change into someone else to improve your life. A comeback is change, too.”
A natural grin grew across his face. “I like that,” he said, fully satisfied. “You on a comeback, sweetheart?”
“More than you know,” she admitted. Sidarra started to blush.
At first he had to look away. “All right, I have another question.” She waited. “How do you conceal your bounty?” Griff asked. The main course arrived.
She looked around the almost empty room. “What do you mean?” She giggled.
“Like, how do you show up at the Board of Ed in an S450 convertible and your fine vines without causing a civil service scandal?”
“Oh,” she laughed, “I thought you meant something else.” He’d said “bounty.” She heard “beauty.”
“Sidarra, I would never ask you to hide your booty.”
She giggled some more. “Okay, that stuff? Well, you have to be mysterious. I have a few strategies. Like I park in different places at lots nobody I work with parks at. Sometimes I park in this neighborhood and take the subway one stop over to Brooklyn. I bring a bag of clothes to change into.”
“Like a gym bag?”
“Now it’s a gym bag, but that’s not how it started. I was using a restaurant bathroom regularly for a while till it occurred to me I could just join a gym.” She sipped her wine and thought about other strategies to tell. “Sometimes I admire other people’s clothes and deliberately call them by the wrong labels. It’s gotten to be a pretty exciting game. I feel like Batwoman some days. You have to remember, for years I let a lot of people I work with think I was stupid. It would take a lot to change their minds now.” Griff laughed almost out of his seat. “Well, what do you do?” she asked, the wine taking over and her smile shining big. “What about your booty? You got pretty things to hide.”
He laughed some more. “Not around here. My office is different. I’m a free agent, and the prosecutors all assume we’re dirty anyway.” He took a bite of his swordfish fillet. “Buying the Full Count. Nobody knows about that but you, Koob, and Q.” Griff’s face got serious again. “But to be honest, the person I conceal the most from is my wife. For her, i
t’s what’s on paper—she’d know in an instant—and by now there’s a lot to hide, of course.”
Sidarra’s guard immediately went up. “How can you say that? I thought she advises you.”
“That’s what you thought, Sidarra? You thought I was bringing ideas from Belinda?” Griff laughed incredulously. “How ’bout that. Ye of so little faith. No, the only information I learn from Belinda I get from the things she leaves lying around. I never talk to her about investment options for me or the club. And the actual decisions”—he leaned across the table and held her eyes with his gaze—“that’s just us, baby. If you’ve been thinking you had some secret investment-banker backup, think again. We take our own risks. We make our own gains.”
It was true that occasionally Sidarra had assuaged an investment doubt with the assumption that Griff was running a lot of ideas through Belinda, who after all was a stock insider, if not an expert. Now, the realization that Griff could be so secretive at home made her uncomfortable.
“I used to be pretty jealous of you, Griff, to tell you the truth. Now, I guess I have to say I’m a bit sorry for you,” she said gently. “Your home life’s not so good, is it?”
He looked around, or maybe he just looked away. His eyes had some of the distance in them they had when he was being a statue man at the crosswalk. “No. If I were trying to hold on to a bad situation, I’d accept your pity. But, baby, this is the sign of a Saturn return: me. I think I’ve been preparing myself for a long time, and now, well,” he smiled broadly at her, “luck has a way of facilitating things. Belinda’s going away, Sid.”
The Importance of Being Dangerous Page 21