It was funny that I had thought of Miles because just then he walked in the door. He didn’t see me. The way the White Horse is laid out there is one entrance but three rooms, one after the other running along Hudson Street. The table where I sat was tucked all the way back in the third room. I could see the bar at a distance from where I sat but unless the people turned on their stools and purposely peered through the doorway they weren’t likely to notice the folks in the other rooms.
Now I watched the bar to see what would happen once Rusty and Miles got an eyeful of each other. Miles was with a guy I’d never seen before who had the good looks of a movie star and who reminded me a little of Errol Flynn. They ordered a couple of whiskeys neat and started right away talking to each other with serious, confidential expressions on their faces. It was clear that whoever the other man was, the two of them were very close. I considered going over there and saying hello to Miles and telling him I had picked up the composition book he’d dropped in the diner in Harlem, but then he would see the company I was keeping and catch on to the fact I was friendly with Rusty again and the last time we’d talked I’d sworn I was through with Rusty for good. The fact that Rusty had come over—uninvited, but even so—was bound to make a liar out of me and I slouched a little lower in my seat and hoped Miles wouldn’t look through the doorway.
But just then Miles caught sight of Rusty and flinched. I held my breath. I was sure Rusty was going to do something rude, make some sort of snide gesture or remark, but to my surprise Rusty merely approached Miles and the young man and shook hands politely. Miles recoiled but shook Rusty’s hand anyway and I could see mostly he just didn’t want trouble. Rusty proceeded to chat it up for a few minutes, making what looked like small talk, as calm and as indifferent as ever. Then he left the bar and came back over to me.
I was surprised by this, because Rusty always struck me as one of those stingy bullies and I figured he would really have it in for Miles. I expected a few petty remarks at the very least and as Rusty put down the beers and slid back into the bench now I considered perhaps I’d misjudged him.
“It was swell of you to keep your cool,” I said.
“I’m a swell guy,” Rusty said.
“I would’ve thought you’d try for some kind of revenge.”
“Nah. I don’t pick on my inferiors,” Rusty said, all tough and proud, like he was the kind of guy who lived by a goddamned code or something. “Besides,” he added, “if I really wanted to get revenge, I could, you know.”
This sounded more like the Rusty I knew. “How?”
“That fella he’s with? Got his first and last name and a few little tidbits. Turns out he works for the good old State Department—how ’bout that for some comedy? That ol’ sonofabitch Joe McCarthy might’ve croaked, but his way of doing business hasn’t. All it would take is one phone call. It just so happens, I know some fellas who work for the State Department. You know: anonymous tip, that sort of jazz. It would bust up their cozy little knitting circle.”
I asked him what he meant but I already knew. It was a malicious idea. Once you knew Rusty you knew exactly how he thought. Rusty elaborated and as he talked I began to wonder if he wasn’t going to make that phone call simply out of spite. The more he talked about it the more he seemed excited by the idea. I tried to sneak another look at Miles, wondering what terrible thing he must’ve done in a past life to merit having caught the attention of a villain like Rusty, but Miles and his friend had gone.
Before I could think about it anymore, Eden sailed through the door. It was funny, because we’d been awfully sore at each other lately and you wouldn’t think I’d be happy to see her. But there was something about the way she walked into the room and smiled when she saw me that reminded me of how it had been that first time I’d waited for her to turn up at the White Horse.
When she saw Rusty sitting with me, her smile flickered and faded a bit but did not vanish altogether.
“Cliff!” she said in a happy, breathless voice, ignoring Rusty. “I have some wonderful news.”
MILES
65
I told Joey I wanted to go home.
“Home?” he asked. I could tell by his voice he was hoping I meant the hotel.
“To my mother’s apartment,” I clarified. Our chance encounter with Rusty at the White Horse Tavern had left me supremely uncomfortable and I was still worried about what Cob might be thinking, having seen us at the museum. “I’d like to go home,” I repeated. “Now.” My brain ticked through the list of possessions still in Joey’s hotel room. There wasn’t much, only a change of underpants, an old razor, and a fresh shirt; I didn’t need to go back for any of it, not right away.
“All right,” Joey said, baffled and clearly hurt. “Will you come back to the hotel later?”
“I’ll phone you,” I replied, and said good-bye. We were standing on the sidewalk on Hudson Street, and didn’t embrace. I walked away quickly and didn’t look back.
• • •
When I got to the apartment it seemed empty at first. I heard a faint stirring from the back of the apartment and I was surprised to find Cob in his room picking up fragments of shattered glass and smashed insects.
“Cob—get away from that glass!” I commanded, kneeling down to take his place. “Let me do this.” He stood up and stared at me glumly as I took the broom and dustpan from his hands.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Wendell got mad,” he said. His child’s voice sounded old and weary. I prodded him a little more as we continued to clean up, and was able to piece together, more or less, what had happened.
My mother was out running errands and Cob had arrived home from his field trip. Excited about the beetles he’d seen in the Egyptian wing, he had chattered away about them to Wendell, who—as habit often found him—was seven beers deep into his afternoon. At some point Wendell grew irritated with Cob and got into one of his ornery moods, until finally he went on a rampage around the house, shouting at Cob and calling him “an inconsiderate bug-crazy little shit.” That’s when he’d flown off the handle altogether and charged into Cob’s room, smashing the jars of live bugs Cob collected and cared for, stomping the insects underfoot. Now Wendell was gone—out for another beer around the corner, surely—and Cob was trying to clean up everything before my mother came home.
“Wait! Save that, please,” Cob called out as I brushed up what appeared to be some kind of carrion beetle. Cob had made a small terrarium for the beetle, and had been feeding it tiny pieces of hamburger meat. Now the life had been knocked out of it, but somehow its hard outer shell had remained intact. I carefully extracted it from the broken glass and handed it to Cob. With an expression of deep sadness, he pinned it to one of his felt boards, where he kept and catalogued his non-living insects.
“I guess it can go here now,” he said in a dull voice. Out of the corner of my eye I became aware of a tiny movement somewhere on the floor by the window. It was a swallowtail butterfly, injured, but trying to come back to life in jittery fits and starts. I remembered Cob had caught the butterfly as a caterpillar and nurtured her as she spun her cocoon. I went over to the window, scooped her up, and brought her to Cob.
And then he did something that broke my heart.
He picked up the swallowtail and looked at her for a moment. With a cold, mechanical movement, he placed her against the felt board and swiftly pushed a pin through her. Her wings pulsed twice slowly and stopped moving.
“I might as well get to her before Wendell does,” Cob said.
As we finished putting the room back in order, I made up my mind. I would have to make the call quickly, before my mother got home. I walked to the kitchen.
“I won’t be back to see you this weekend, Joey,” I said once the hotel clerk had put me through to his room. “I’ve got some things to do.” I could tell from Joey’s voice on the other end of the l
ine that he was disappointed, and also frightened.
• • •
Having canceled my plans with Joey, I spent the rest of the evening thinking about Cob, and soon enough the thought of my lost composition book returned to gnaw at me. I had, over time, increasingly come to the conclusion that I’d lost the book when I’d gone to the coffee shop to meet Cliff. If he had picked it up, I couldn’t imagine why he would want to keep it instead of returning it. I hoped he was just too lazy.
Either way, there was only one thing to do: track him down and ask him about it once and for all. I made my way over to his East Village apartment. I stood on the stoop, but as I was about to press the buzzer, the door flew open.
“Oh! Pardon me,” a woman’s voice said. To my surprise, I found myself staring at Eden. She froze when she caught sight of me. “Miles?” she said in disbelief. I explained to her, in very abstract terms, about Cliff’s visit to Harlem and that I’d come looking for him now because I’d dropped something and it was possible he’d picked it up. Her brow furrowed.
“He’s upstairs, all right,” she said. “But I’m afraid he’s in a bit of a state: He’s going on nearly two days of celebration.”
“Is it all right if I go up?”
“Of course,” she said. Then she hesitated. “But, Miles . . . you should know . . . well, Rusty is there. That’s why I’m stepping out to run some errands. I couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. I’m still . . .” She paused as though searching for the right words. “. . . very sorry about what happened to you that night.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to talk about it. I also didn’t want to see Rusty again—it was bad enough Joey and I had run into him only the night before—but if I truly wanted to determine the whereabouts of my composition book, I had no choice. Remembering the night before, a thought occurred to me: Cliff had likely been there, somewhere in the White Horse Tavern, lurking in a corner. The two of them running around together had never brought about anything good for me in the past.
“You said Cliff is celebrating?” I asked, wondering what awaited me upstairs.
“Oh yes,” Eden said. “Cliff is just over the moon. He’s written a novel—a very good one, as a matter of fact—and his father is going to publish it at Bonwright.”
“A book?” I asked, my stomach suddenly dropping.
“Oh yes. It’s amazing . . . I’m so proud of him,” she said. “Cliff is much deeper than I ever imagined. You know, he hasn’t the easiest relationship with his father, and yet he wrote an incredibly detailed, subtle, touching story about a father and a son. The son grows up with a disabled father, you see, and doubts the father as a role model, but what he doesn’t know is that the father was actually a war hero of great integrity . . .”
I went numb as she prattled on. Nothing could’ve prepared me for the shock as I listened to Eden describe the details of Cliff’s literary victory, the dim comprehension of exactly what he’d done with my notebook slowly sinking into my bones.
CLIFF
66
Rusty and I were in my dump of an apartment, singing drunken medleys to each other. We were celebrating my book deal. The sun had just gone down and an eerie glow was radiating through the window like an atom bomb. Once the simile came to me it bothered me something awful, so I got up to turn on the overhead light to break up the violet light of the glow. No sooner had my finger left the switch than I heard a loud noise at the door and a man came crashing into the room. It was a tall Negro man and at first I thought we were being burgled but then I made out the familiar shape of Miles.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I hollered, and waved my arms.
“You dirty son of a bitch,” he spat at me, and when I saw the look on his face I knew somehow he had found out the truth of everything. Ordinarily Miles was the type of guy who looked civilized in every situation, with his glasses and posture and polite manners, but his entire being had shifted now and a deep guttural roar started somewhere in his throat. I knew he was going to lunge at me and I considered various evasive maneuvers. Rusty was still on the ground over by the mattress and he sat up and crawled farther into the corner and I could see if I decided to take Miles on I would have to do it on my own. When he had slipped someone Amytal, Rusty was very brave and keen to get in on the action, but when he hadn’t he was much more the spectating type.
“YOU SON OF A BITCH THIEF!” Miles roared, and came at me with everything he had. Any other time, I would’ve laid him out flat, hey. But I was exceptionally drunk that night, and besides, I more or less understood why the guy was angry and even though I didn’t sympathize, I figured maybe it was best to let an angry guy get it out of his system. Let him get in a few licks and send him on his way. I felt Miles’s hands grip my shoulders and drag me to the ground and soon enough he’d thrown a punch and caught me square in the left eye. I scrambled away and he caught me again and I scrambled away again.
“Truce! Truce!” I yelled, because now I was really worried Miles had lost it and might truly injure me if he didn’t regain some sense. He stopped hitting me but pinned me all the same, until I was lying face-up on the floor and he was on top of me with his forearm bracing my chest and throat.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” he yelled, sweat and tears and spit dripping off of him and onto my face. “You have no right.”
I could just make out Rusty in the corner looking on.
“If you think I’ll be quiet about this, you’ve got another thing coming,” Miles warned. “You may have my composition book, but I have my father’s journal, and it doesn’t lie. All those stories—his life! What do you think, Cliff, you think everyone is going to believe it’s a coincidence?” he said in a bitter, mocking voice.
All at once an idea occurred to me and it was like the time I was fighting with Eden and I suddenly knew if I really wanted to shut her up what I ought to say. I wasn’t proud of that fight I’d had with her but my tactics had proved effective and anyway Miles was hardly Eden. I didn’t owe Miles anything.
“Say, Rusty,” I called from the floor where Miles had me pinned. “What’d you say was the name of that fella Miles was running around with last night?”
This startled Miles. Freshly alert, he turned his head to look over at Rusty, and Rusty looked at us with that smirk of his and got a glint in his eye because he knew exactly where this was going. He opened his mouth to respond but before he did Miles cut him off and this meant Rusty and I had him on the hook.
“See, we know a few things about you, Miles. About you and your friend,” I said.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Miles said. But as he said it, Miles’s body went all stiff and I knew I’d hit the jackpot. “He’s nobody,” he said.
“You weren’t looking at him like he was nobody, Miles,” I said. He let up on the pressure of his forearm across my chest and I squirmed away and sat up. I was still drunk but I had started to sober up and as I looked around the room the walls had stopped spinning and Miles’s face came into focus.
I stared at old Miles, watching him shake now that I had called his bluff. “Rusty here says your friend works for the State Department,” I continued. “Lots of you boys work for the State Department, don’t ya? Seems like every time I pick up a paper, I read about them kicking out yet another homosexual commie.”
I paused for emphasis. I wanted to make sure Miles heard my next point loud and clear.
“Sure would be a shame if someone were to make a phone call and report your friend—what was his name again?” I turned to Rusty. “You remember the fella’s name, don’t you?”
Miles’s face went slack. He took his hands off me as though my skin were hot and burned him, and in that moment I believe we both realized he was defeated. He stood up, looked around the room, and took a few staggering steps, first towards the window, then away. Finally, without another word, he went out the apartment door.
“You don’t really plan on making that telephone call, do you?” Rusty asked after Miles had gone. Rusty was clearly delighted with the situation.
“Of course not,” I said. “I only meant to put old Miles in his place.”
“Say, what did he mean?” Rusty asked with that sly expression on his face. “What did he mean with that business about you being a thief?”
MILES
67
That’s when things turned ugly. Looking back on things now, I realize I was carrying around something combustible in me, only there was no way to know it at the time; I was too blinded by wild-eyed fear. A bitter winter had settled into the cold concrete bones of New York, and suddenly it felt as though the dark clouds overhead were laced with constant threat.
“What happened to your cheek?” Joey asked the next time he saw me.
I knew I had a cut there, a souvenir from my confrontation at Cliff’s apartment. I had put a Band-Aid over it, hoping to pass it off as a shaving accident, but when I told Joey this lie his mouth twitched.
“Awfully high up,” he commented, as the cut was on my cheekbone just under my eye, nowhere near my beard line.
“Cob bumped me,” I said.
Joey did not press further. We had plenty to do that day, as we were moving our things to a new hotel. No sooner had Joey checked in and called me over than he became convinced we should check out and leave. This was a defensive measure: The clerk at our regular hotel had begun to eye us with suspicion. We knew it was impossible to go completely unnoticed, but there was generally a comfort in the apathetic dispositions of New Yorkers, who noticed but more often than not decided it was none of their business. The clerk had seemed reassuringly indifferent to us the first few times we’d stayed at the hotel, but over the course of our visits his demeanor had somehow soured, and now he was distinctly unfriendly and full of snide insinuations and veiled threats. It was only a matter of time, we both felt, until the clerk began dropping hints to the police.
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