“Look’t Frank.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You better stick ta Budweiser, my man.”
Hock poured rum into a paper cup and took a small sip. He looked away, spit.
“Go on. Drink,” Rogero said to Hock. “You ain’t got no one waitin.”
Geroux seemed mildly surprised.
“Thought you were married.”
“Was,” Hock said. “No more.”
Rogero tapped his cup.
“Welcome to the club.”
“That’s right,” Burnett said in a boisterous way.
Hock gave Burnett a withering glance.
“I don’t know what you’re yappin about.”
“You’re married,” Rogero said resentfully. “You got a kid.”
“On the way,” Burnett said. “That’s why I gotta . . .”
He drank.
Hock stood back with his thumbs in his belt, swaying a little. I was leaning against the car. I was usually pretty quiet in a group. Geroux shook his cup out, crushed it, and tossed it at my feet.
“You ain’t married, are you, Frank?”
“Nah.”
“You got a girlfriend?”
“Nah.”
Burnett smiled broadly.
“He’s fuckin some HIV girl.”
“Aw shit,” Rogero said.
Hock was smiling, too.
“Are you?”
“Nah,” I said. “I was just talking to her.”
They all laughed. Geroux leaned over, holding the tip of the bottle out.
“You doin that you better drink up, my man.”
He poured in my cup.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said, and they all laughed again.
It made me feel good to have them think I was doing something with her.
Burnett reached over and grabbed the neck of the bottle.
“Gimme that,” he said. “Once the kid comes—”
Across the street, at the station, ambulances were lined up in the lot. From time to time medics jumped in their ambulances and sped away, the sirens sounding, and a hand held out the window, waving as they passed. Sometimes, after a job, they came over and joined us. We all drank for about twenty minutes and then Rogero said, “You all ready?”
“I guess we better be,” Burnett said.
“Shit,” Hock said, motioning with his cup. “It’ll only be seconds and thirds.”
“You think I give a fuck?” Burnett said.
He took the bottle of rum and poured into each of our cups, then hurled the empty bottle at the green Dumpster. It shattered against the side.
“Ah shit,” Geroux said. “I see where this’s goin.”
We all walked down the block with our paper cups and then cut west on 138th Street. A metal staircase led into a concrete channel between two buildings. The staircase rocked as we clambered down. Burnett dropped his cup. At the bottom he retrieved it, drank the last few drops, and tossed it aside.
To our right there was a doorway propped open with merengue music coming out. A guy I knew, Henry Pennachio, stood in the door, counting money.
“Fifteen bucks,” he said.
“Aw fuck,” Burnett said.
“You knew it,” Hock said. “So shut the fuck up.”
“Pay the man,” Geroux said.
“I better get my money’s worth,” Burnett said.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Pennachio said.
We heard voices, shouting.
“They already here?”
“Fuck yeah they’re here. They been being here an hour.”
“Pay the man,” Geroux shouted.
Burnett said he only had ten bucks. Everyone started yelling behind him. Pennachio hesitated, then said fuck’t, and took the money. The rest of us had the fifteen. We walked through a dark hallway that turned right, then opened into a large area with exposed pipes and three or four bare bulbs lighting it. There was no furniture or anything. Just a concrete floor, a long drain down the middle, and an old washing machine pushed up against the wall. A boombox sat on the floor with some tapes resting on top. There were about thirty men inside, medics from the station, cops we knew from the Thirtieth and Thirty-Second Precincts, some of Hock’s friends. Wandering among the crowd of men were six prostitutes from the neighborhood, dressed in short skirts that cut off at the thigh. One of them stood along the wall wearing a bikini bottom and a jean jacket, not buttoned, and nothing on underneath. Rogero walked up to her and reached inside her jacket and they moved toward the corner where there were sheets hung from the ceiling, making a little closed-off area. Beyond the sheets shadows moved.
“Ah fuck,” Hock said. “They weren’t kiddin.”
I walked past everyone slowly, some people I knew nodding at me.
“Frank,” they said, and I went on.
Against the far wall I saw a tall Hispanic woman with swollen breasts. She was lactating. Burnett was talking to her, squeezing her breasts, making the milk come out.
“Look at this, Frank,” he said. “Like a fuckin cow.”
She smacked his hands.
I walked out the back door into a little alleyway. A fence lined with shrubs made a sheltered area where a blanket was spread in the dirt. Obviously someone had been sleeping there. I looked at that blanket and then I sat on it. After a while I lay flat in that hidden spot. I could hear music from the basement faintly. The door swung open and a silhouette appeared. It was Hock. He walked over. Kicked my leg with his boot.
“You sick?”
“Nah, I’m not sick.”
“What the fuck you doin then?”
“Nothin.”
“You paid your fifteen bucks. You don’t wanna go inside?”
“I will in a minute.”
Hock sipped from his paper cup. He spit over the fence.
“Well, you look pretty fuckin weird. Layin there in the dirt.”
“I’m o.k.,” I said, and Hock made a face like he didn’t believe it.
He went back to the party, and I listened to the muted music, distant voices, and beyond that, to the north, the sound of a siren turning deep and sad before it faded.
31
Dogs of all shapes and sizes leapt and snarled and tumbled in the dog park, while the owners, along the edge, sat on benches, watching. Emily stood at the fence and pretended she did not see me coming. She only looked up at the last moment, motioning inside the fence with the white end of a broken twig.
“They do everything for their dogs. Bring them places. Buy them things.”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“It’s not embarrassing. It’s what they want to give each other.”
She brushed her hands on the back of her pants, then made a vague gesture with her right hand—the beginnings of a parry in fencing.
“Have you taken their pictures?”
“The dogs? No.”
“The owners?”
I shook my head.
“It’s not like that with me.”
“Like what?”
“I just take pictures of what I’m interested in. I don’t make statements.”
A tennis ball shivered the fence links. A writhing knot of fur and dust overtook the wet ball. Dust floating away slowly. She looked at the place where the ball had been.
“I have some new pictures. I’ll show you,” I said.
I took out a shot of a Styrofoam face, old hands on straight hair, and the distant, blank eyes of the blind man.
“That’s better than the dogs,” she said.
Something resentful in the way she said it. She had not looked me in the eye the whole time, and I could tell she was angry. I hadn’t talked to her for three weeks. She placed a foot on the green metal armrest of a bench. She untied then began to tie her shoe. With her hands holding the two laces, not moving, she said, “I called you.”
“I know you did.”
“I thought maybe you were angry.”
“About what?”
<
br /> “The lawyer,” she said simply, glancing up, then looking back at her shoe. “I thought maybe you were waiting to see if I’d go with him. When you saw I wouldn’t—”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Eyes lowered, she went on tying her shoe, then stepped ahead of me.
“I thought maybe you did,” she said.
I walked with my head turned away.
“Now you’re smiling,” she said.
“I just think it’s funny you thought I was thinking about the lawyer. I’m the exact person who doesn’t care about that.”
She saw I was telling the truth. We turned from the dog park and walked on the concrete path lined with green benches. Beneath maples and London planes there were older men with canes, couples sitting close, chess players with their hinged boxes. She did not say anything else for a minute, but something in her loosened. She seemed happy. A pretty teenaged girl with a textbook open turned a page as we passed.
“When I was a student I’d come out here to study. I couldn’t sit ten minutes without someone coming up. Even in that last year they’d do it. College girl alone in the park. I’d get annoyed and think of going with them. As a punishment.”
“Did you?”
“No, no. Not the kind of thing you do.”
An athletic-looking man in his thirties stood in front of the schoolgirl. Swaggered a little. The girl looked up from her book, curling a strand of blond hair behind her ear. Beyond them, the swirling activity of the dog park was muted by distance.
“We could get a drink,” Emily said suddenly.
“I’d get a drink,” I said.
Walking toward the East Village, we paused at several bars, and finally we stopped in front of Holiday. She rolled an empty bottle away with her foot.
“Frank,” she said, and I could tell she didn’t want to get a drink anymore. She said, “I’m sick, Frank. I ought not to. For a second I thought, Who cares? Why not? But I shouldn’t be drinking. Can we go to the park?”
“I like the park,” I said.
“Not much fun for you.”
“If you saw the fun I normally have, you wouldn’t feel bad.”
We walked past the bars, talking idly, and it all came back at once. We were friends. It seemed silly not to have called her. As we approached Houston she said, “I thought maybe you found a girlfriend or something. Did you?”
“Are you kidding?”
She crossed the street with her head down and we spent an hour along the river. It began to drizzle and soon it was raining in earnest. A gray, steady rain. We left the park and walked single-file along buildings. I figured we were going back to her place, but I wasn’t sure. I was cold. I could see my breath. Emily wore a green knit hat with a white stripe. We stopped in the arched doorway of a four-story brownstone. She took her hat off and squeezed. Brown water came out. She pulled the wet hat over her wet head and a man looked at us through the first-floor window. A minute later he came out and told us we couldn’t stand there, that we had to move on, that it was private property. We went down the block beneath construction scaffolding. She took her hat off again. Her hair clung to her forehead. Beneath the scaffolding there was a middle-aged woman with a paper bag stained dark at the top. She was doing the same thing as us, trying to wait out the rain. She set her bag down roughly and tried to light a cigarette with a wet lighter—snick snick snick snick—damn—snicksnick—and finally it lit. She wiped her palm on the inside of her jacket and stepped out. Emily and I went west with dirty brown water running along curbs into grates. It grew dim and the air turned a grayishblue color. The streetlights came on. It began to rain harder. All the buildings in that area were being converted into residential lofts. We stopped at the gutted shell of a warehouse and walked up the stoop to the first floor, where old bricks were half-covered with new plasterboard. There were buckets of spackling compound placed here and there haphazardly. There was no front door. Emily and I stood in the hallway.
“What made you call finally?” she asked.
“I just wanted to.”
She looked like she thought it was something else.
“Not like there’s so many things I want,” I said, and she considered this for a moment, then said, “At least you didn’t give me some bullshit story.”
She was shivering. I offered her my jacket but she shrugged my hands off. She drew a line in plaster dust with her boot. She took a couple of steps toward the door and slicked hair off her forehead and picked up a rusting iron rod that was used to support the concrete. She whisked it about, then studied the pattern her feet left in the dust. She did not look at me. She stood in the door so slanting rain drops fell on her. She stepped back a few feet. I eased past her and she turned as I did.
“You have your camera with you?” she asked.
“I always do.”
“It’s a nasty day for taking pictures.”
We were standing on either side of the doorway. I found the metal rod. It was heavier than I thought. Rough on the fingers. I waved it in the air, then balanced it against the wall gently and wiped my hand on my pants leg. We were standing in the half-light with the rain pattering outside and then we were kissing and had been kissing for ten minutes. My mind went away and I remember coming back, slowly, like after anesthesia.
“This is all we can do. You know that,” she said.
“I know.”
“You know this, even this, can be dangerous. You can’t bite me.”
“I’m not going to bite you. Be quiet.”
We leaned against the wall. We kissed in the blue dusky light. The room darkened. A while later she said, “You can walk back with me, but you can’t come up.”
“I don’t want to come up,” I said. “I’ll walk you back.” We walked with our arms around each other. We stopped where the man in the window had spoken to us and when I looked up he was watching. I felt tremendously happy. I did not want to let go of her, not even for a moment. We stepped into puddles instead of separating. I didn’t know we were close to her building until we were right there. Dark, wet brick looming over us. We stopped in the doorway.
“We’ll stand here a minute. I won’t come up,” I said.
Ten minutes later she unlocked the front door, and we went up.
32
I woke and realized she was awake, too. It was still dark out. Maybe three or four hours had passed. Raindrops spattered intermittently on the windowpane. Water had pooled on the windowsill and there was reflected light on the ceiling. Outside, long low clouds, colored orange, slid by quickly. It was clearing.
“Did you hear the thunder?” she asked.
“I was asleep.”
“There was thunder. I wanted to open the window.” She leaned over me. “Do you mind if I open the window?”
The heat had not been turned on in the building. It couldn’t have been more than forty degrees in the bedroom. We lay close beneath the sheet and the blanket, not touching. In the dark we heard the sound of trucks crossing the seams of the Williamsburg Bridge. Intermittent clacks and thumps. I felt her shift beneath the covers.
“You regret it now,” she said.
“I don’t regret it,” I said. “Just the opposite. I feel really good.”
She saw I meant it, and seemed surprised. A sort of warmth spread through her slowly. I felt her hand on my side beneath the sheet. She lay closer to me. After a while I went to the bathroom and when I came back she was lying naked on the bed with her arms thrown over her head. She was a little stiff, trying not to be self-conscious.
“You have your camera, Frank? I don’t mind. Take my picture.”
I stood looking down at her.
“No,” I said.
33
It was a few days later, and the rain had turned to snow. Hock leaned back against the wall of the loading bay, smoking a cigarette. Burnett had his arms crossed.
“You’re a dumbfu
ck, Frank. You said it wasn’t happening.”
“I know what I said.”
“You said it wasn’t, and it did.”
“Well.”
“He says well. Good answer, Frank.”
“I don’t know what else to say other than I did it, and I feel pretty good about it.”
“I believe that,” Burnett said. He looked at Hock. “You listenin to this?”
“Yep,” Hock said.
“He’s a dumb fuck, right?”
“Depends on how you look at it. Frank likes sick people. He gets off on it. In that way he showed some sense.”
“It’s not like that,” I said quietly.
“Gimme a fuckin break,” Burnett said. “You even use a condom?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“It’s a legitimate question,” Hock said.
“Yeah, I used a condom.”
Hock made a conciliatory gesture.
“So he used a condom,” Burnett said. “So the fuck what? It’s still fuckin stupid. A million healthy girls. Frank’s gotta pick one that’s infected.” Burnett touched my bag with the toe of his boot. “You got that picture of the kid, Frank?”
“Which one?”
He pointed to his forehead. I knew which one he meant. I searched around and found it. I gave it to him. He turned it for me to see.
“Take a look, Frank. That’s what you got to look forward to. Coming attractions.”
“Nice, Jack.”
I took the print from him and without looking at it put it back in its place. Hock was smoking silently. Beyond the loading bay it was snowing. Practically a whiteout. Really coming down. Hock hit my shoulder with the back of his hand.
“Come on,” he said.
“What?”
“I wanna talk to you.”
“You’re talking to him now,” Burnett said.
“I wanna talk to him alone.”
“Knock some sense into him,” Burnett said, but he looked unhappy. It hurt Burnett’s feelings when he was not included in the conversation. He pulled his hood on and stomped out into the snow. Hock frowned at the place where Burnett had been.
“I don’t give a fuck what you do, Frank. And I know you don’t care what other people think. I appreciate the apathy. But don’t pretend this isn’t stupid.”
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