The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  The joke had one more gruesome laugh. When Judith's new husband took his company public a week later, he was suddenly worth some $852 million, and my obliteration was complete. My knees actually buckled— ever so subtly— as I read the newspaper article on the way up the stairs to my apartment. You had to shake your head, even smile at the thing! I had been well paid, had worked like a sled dog for that pay, but the pile of security I had amassed for my family had been rendered meaningless, reduced to a rounding error in the new husband's countinghouse.

  That Timothy now lacked for nothing— except for his father— and never would, was bitter solace. He was still young enough that he'd be blinded by his new stepfather's supernova of wealth— the nineteen-thousand-square-foot house in Marin County, the skybox seats to the '49ers, the beach house in Hawaii. I, his father, who issued the seed of him from my loins, was reduced to a dead moon in a lost galaxy, a small voice of a shrinking, uncle-like presence. For a time, I wrote him letters and sent him e-mail and small gifts. But these activities seemed to make me cry. Yes, I wept at the loss of my son. My wife, too. Oh, I missed Judith, too, everything about her. Would have taken her back, in a minute, forgiven all. I tried to keep up my end. But Timothy's letters and calls became less frequent. We didn't have much to talk about. I didn't know anything about his school or friends. I think he and his mother were happy. She was successful, Judith. She made the transition. She saved her son, she saved him from me, from what I had done.

  Days flicked by, months drifted along. I was silting my way to the bottom. One could rightly ask how it was that I failed to find another job or rebuild my life to some minimal degree. Or even talk to someone. What friends remained suggested that I should move to Seattle or gobble antidepressants or practice exercise regimes banned in China. And as for my loneliness, certainly Manhattan is filled with an abundance of intelligent, forbearing women, some of whom might have been patient with my despair, but I was unequal to the task of finding one. Surely a better man would have resisted, argued, fought, asserted his rights and achievements and responsibilities. But as we always learn too late, the world doesn't care who we used to be, not particularly. My identity proved as removable as one of the tailored suits I used to wear, and I must confess that as I witnessed each piece of my life flutter away— job, marriage, child, home, money, friends, I entertained a perverse curiosity as to what might remain. Certain small lifelong habits, such as cracking my knuckles and double-knotting my shoelaces, gave me unnatural satisfaction, and seemed increasingly important proof that I had in fact come from somewhere and not plummeted out of the sky, wet and blinking and alone, a newborn forty-year-old man.

  * * *

  In time, I got used to life in my damp apartment on West Thirty-sixth Street, miserable as the building was. The place included a living room, a small but newish kitchen, a bedroom perhaps eight feet across, and a small bathroom. I kept the apartment reasonably clean, considering no one visited me. I tended my accounts at a small desk, sat in one small sofa, ate at a simple table with one chair, owned ten or eleven dishes, slept in a single bed. Outside, the hallway carpeting was worn thin like a path through the weeds, the windows hadn't been cleaned in at least a decade, and who knew if the fire escapes actually worked? The super, a retired and kindly Latino man with dozens of keys on his belt, was occasionally seen escorting an exterminator inside or changing lightbulbs in the hallway, but in general he remained in the basement, where he ran an unlicensed air-conditioner repair shop and looked after several young grandchildren. The building housed perhaps fifty souls, and at first I told my fellow neighbors almost nothing about myself, for I regarded my stay as quite temporary. Within a few months, however, I began to study them with more curiosity, to engage in harmless conversations in the hallways and lobby that allowed me to patch together a mental map of the building. It became clear that about a quarter of the building's inhabitants were happy and on the way up— young girls with good office jobs, say, or the thirtyish Pakistani couple who'd soon have enough money to buy a small apartment— while the rest were moving along various angles of descent, each an example of the grotesque nature of normality: the divorced woman of fifty suffering from cancer, abandoned by her children, painfully climbing the stairs to her apartment, her torso shrunken hideously by her disease, her hair so thinned by the chemo that I could see the shimmering curve of her scalp; the ruined day trader who had high-quality pot delivered three times a week; the would-be dancer with bad skin whose inability to get work was gradually pushing her toward prostitution; the manic salesman who ran an illegal oyster-exporting business; the fat man with no visible form of income who waddled out each day with his Pekinese and a red cane, and returned a few hours later clutching a greasy bag of fried chicken in one hand and an X-rated gay video from the shop around the corner in the other; the chain-smoking ex-magazine writer (author of lengthy and once important new journalism features in Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Look, Harper's, McCall's, and the old Life), formerly almost-famous and now in his late sixties, coughing softly all day behind his door as he pounded out wads of filler for obscure sports-junkie Web sites; the Russian couple whose fighting and fucking was indistinguishable; the older Italian woman who lived on the income generated by her late husband's ownership of two New York City taxi medallions, now rented to a Bengali taxi company in Queens, and so on.

  Yes, and so on. The mood of the hallways was undifferentiated loneliness, the smell a mixture of air freshener and cigarettes, the sound the chatter of television sitcoms— including the famously popular ones about clever young professionals living in Manhattan apartment buildings. We, the people who stayed, regarded each other warily, for the presence of each other's failure and misery confirmed our own.

  * * *

  Judith sent me a postcard saying that she and Timothy and her husband would be spending the summer and fall in Tuscany, perhaps with a few weeks in Nice when it got hot, and that, if necessary, I could contact her through her attorney. Timothy would have private tutors in each city, she added. I studied the postcard carefully. Judith's lettering was precise and orderly, showing no wild emotional looping up and down, no leftward-slanting overcontrol. I could tell from her handwriting that she'd written the postcard in a mood of upbeat functionality, ticking items off her things-to-do list. Hire house-sitter, pay lawn service, get mail forwarded, drop postcard to sad-sack ex-husband. The happy wife doing happy things.

  I slipped down another notch after that. Life, I understood now, was not ever as it seemed; the windowpane of assumption is shattered, the real view revealed, then shattered again. Yes, I slipped a bit— nothing dramatic, exactly. I was depixillating, becoming invisible, emptying. I let my health insurance lapse, I forgot to pay my bar association dues, I quit checking my e-mail, skipped the latest movies, met no one for lunch, spoke rarely, forgot what I read, dreamed nothing.

  You may live emptily in Manhattan and be well entertained, however. It doesn't matter if you're unemployed and emotionally disoriented. The city— mysterious, indifferent, ever-changing— remains available for inspection. It also helps if you wear good suits from your old job, for people won't bother you and you can slide into places and use the men's room. Yes, it helps to look respectable. Which, absurdly, I did— each day dressed in coat and tie, carrying my briefcase on the way to nowhere. The city doesn't mind if you spend too much time on a park bench or street corner; the city invites you to stand anonymously, windy grit swirling by. The buildings and shadows and faces practically beg you to fall into a walking dream, a speculative fugue. I did not quite become one of those chattering philosophers with matted hair and blackened fingernails but I was patrolling the perimeter of sanity. If you'd passed me on the street you'd have seen a man just standing, clearly in no hurry, making private studies of things that busy people don't have time for. The patterns of taxi movement on the widest avenues. The afternoon strobing of shadow and sunlight on Broadway. The way water moved.

  Yes, one rainy November morni
ng it was water that interested me, how it arrived in the city and how it left, having touched the people I no longer knew. The waterways of Manhattan begin as bubbling streams one hundred miles north, and become enormous aqueducts roaring through bedrock ninety feet below street level that divide upward into a jungle of pipes that telescope ever narrower as water is pushed hundreds of feet into the air, captured in rooftop tanks, then released through iron to brass, chromed steel, even gold plate. Water, pure as rain, but for the fluoride added upstream, and maintained at relatively constant upward and downward pressure but certain always to be recaptured by pipes and fall earthward— flushed, emptied, drained, trickling from spigots and immediately mixed with coffee grounds, urine, food parts, hair, menstrual blood, including, I imagined, that of Wilson Doan's wife, toothpaste rinse, dirt, vomit, the cold semen of Wilson Doan himself (were they trying to have another child?), cigarette butts, Adolphus Clay III's salt-and-peppery whiskers, the soap scum left from Larry Kirmer's 5 a.m. prework shower, Dan Tuthill's confettied credit card receipts and other small documents of compromising information, and the skin cells from Selma's sweet but disappointed face. This muddy stew, this broth of humanity, joined the rain when it came in sheets across the glassy facades of the skyscrapers, running down copper roofs, tar paper, asphalt shingles, aluminum gutters, the windows my son used to gaze through, downspouts, gargoyles, granite facing, bricks of every shape and color, marble, brownstone, painted clapboard, vinyl siding, rusting fire escapes, air-conditioning units, including those that had cooled my wife's skin after she'd screwed Wilson Doan, furnace exhaust vents, the vacuum-sealed double-paned windows illuminating my former law firm office (a new partner in there now, on the phone, safe as a man could be), the rain rattling the leaded colored glass of the church windows where young Wilson Doan was mourned, the penthouse cedar decking where his father drank martinis in the summer… down all these, passing rivets, screws, nails, bolts, mortar joints, caulking, television antenna wire, security cameras either swiveling or of fixed position, including the ones outside our former apartment house that recorded the removal of young Wilson's motionless body to an ambulance, the billioned drops of this vertical floodplain carrying leaves, incinerator soot, a dusting of lead and heavy metals, pigeon and rodent matter, paint chips, rust, volumes of dead and dying insects, the whole mingled sedimentary waterfall plummeting back below street level, sewered and forgotten…

  … yes, you may do nothing in Manhattan but tramp around in a suit and tie and study the rainfall, but you still need to watch out where the hell you're going. Which, that soggy November day, as I descended the subway steps at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, I didn't do. The sky had broken open, and everywhere the streets were flooded, taxis splashing sidewalks, oily runoff gurgling into storm drains. I'd completed my idiot disguise that morning with an umbrella, a raincoat, and a week-old copy of The Wall Street Journal. But I failed to notice the muddy waterfall pouring over the header above the subway stairs, and when I felt the cold shower upon me— and leapt sideways— I ran headlong into a younger man in a studded leather jacket as he hurried up the stairs.

  "Fucking business freak." He squared his shoulders and I noticed the rings in each nostril, the tattooed tiger coiled around his neck.

  "Accident," I sputtered. "Sorry."

  "I guess you are." He swung his fist, hitting me once in the jaw, squarely and with authority, as if he'd done it many times before. I fell back onto the slippery stairs, holding my mouth.

  "You keep running into people, they're going to fuck up your executive shit, man." He glared, then continued up the steps.

  I slumped to one knee, then both, pain ricocheting around my head. Finally I steadied myself and looked up. Had anyone seen the assault? A gaggle of teenage Chinese girls swept down the stairs past me, all colored raincoats and gossiping happiness. In the sluicing downfall they barely noticed me. I spat out a broken molar and staggered back upward, tonguing the throbbing place in my jaw and wanting nothing so much as a drink and a dry place to sit down. Any goddamn place would do. Any place where civilization was still intact. My head hurt as much as my jaw. In front of me a group of young businessmen sporting blue umbrellas with identical corporate logos jostled merrily along Sixth Avenue. I followed them, a lurching figure with a hand to his cheek. The men turned at Thirty-third Street, then disappeared through a big door flanked by potted evergreens. EST. 1847, claimed the gold lettering on the glass. It was an old-time Manhattan steakhouse. I'd passed the place a hundred times before, but never gone inside. Now I did, pulling open the heavy door.

  And that— the greasy glass of milk, the long fall from grace, the sudden punch to the head— was how I discovered the Havana Room.

  Two

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, you saw only the gold script and the heavy door— nothing that suggested how big the place really was, nor what went on inside, and with whom. You stepped down to the main floor, a vault of mahogany hung with nineteenth-century oils (railroads, western expansion, warships under sail), and there you submitted to the aroma of steak. The maître d' greeted every arrival from his station, and once you penetrated his skepticism, two blond assistants conveyed you to a table. One could order oysters Rockefeller or Scottish smoked salmon as an appetizer, but these were merely prelude to the fifteen-ounce filet mignon au poivre, the incomparable New York sirloin, or, say, the sixteen-ounce Kobe. Real gut-droppers and heart-stoppers. The cost? Too much, of course, and washed down with liquor marked up five times from wholesale. But no one cared. Each day the place moved four hundred lunches, mostly to office dwellers along Sixth Avenue and Broadway, as well as to a smattering of midwestern and Japanese tourists who believed, incorrectly, that the restaurant represented no more than a quaint exercise in nostalgia and American history. After the lunch rush, however, in the lingering long afternoons and swelling nights, the joint filled with its real customers— space-peddlers and debt-dealers, sex-biters and lie-eaters— the very people, in other words, who've always made New York City so grand.

  As soon as I stumbled inside on that rainy winter day, I was seized by the dark, agreeable gravity of the place— the chair-rubbed wainscoting, the ceiling smudged by lamp smoke. Nothing was dingy but all was broken in, softened by the centuries. Within a few minutes I'd sipped a shot of whiskey, which eased the pain in my jaw, and had tasted a bowl of steaming chowder— my first real pleasure, I realized, in quite some time. On the wall next to me hung a map of Manhattan that showed the coastal contours of the island before they were filled in, the inlets and streams and swamps now gone. Next to it hung a framed newspaper account of the great fire of 1835 that specified the tragedy's death count, as well as the lost value of incinerated shops, saddle manufacturers, and apothecaries. Dry rot crept over the yellowed paper into the columns, turning the crisp, type-struck letters into blank, unreadable clouds. Even great catastrophe, it seemed, would be forgotten in time. And this was a comfort. No one knew me here, I realized, no one suspected me of failure or accidental murder, no one begrudged me my soup, my heavy spoon.

  I came back that same night, wearing a fresh shirt, and the next day, and the day after that, ten of the next ten nights. I ate, I drank, I chatted with whomever. Screw the cost. Why had no one told me of the place? Where had I been? In those first few weeks I spied newborn movie stars and living-dead politicians, rappers in ghetto-fab white furs, the nation's most prominent feminist theorist (a heavy napkin tucked into her shirt as she chewed her meat savagely), the mayor and his bickering entourage, the city's most famous call girl (a Russian woman, she dined alone, with reading glasses and a book), and members of all New York's professional teams. Presidents and prizefighters had also eaten there, long ago, but no one really cared, because new action was available every night, pounding heavily, cigar in hand, up the stairs that led to the Churchill and Roosevelt Rooms (reserved for private parties six months in advance, piano for hire, strippers allowed), or sitting too mysteriously at the junior bar, smoking with impuni
ty and waiting— perhaps for you. They came exactly because the place was not new, not suddenly famous for its piquant sauces or artful arrangement of vegetables; no, the terms of the transaction had nothing to do with recent discovery, but rather with what was long proven: that you and I and all of us were doomed. The paintings and lithographs on the walls featured only the far departed, and to eat beneath their unchanging gaze was thus to understand— no matter how lovely her smile, no matter how handsome his wallet— that it did not matter if you polluted your lungs or liver or gut with the good stuff being served, because a man or a woman's life was itself just a short meal at the table, so to speak, and one had an obligation to live well and live now, to dine heartily by the logic of the flesh.

  Each night the tables filled by six-thirty, and soon I noticed the clientele mostly comprised men eating on business, seven out of ten, anyway. The women could be divided into two groups: the younger ones making their first or second or eighth time around, walking stiffly and with only half-hidden anticipation, and the not-so-younger ones, who by the very fact of their presence had stopped counting just about everything, including tonight's drinks. The men came in more ages and gradations, or so it seemed to me, perhaps because there were many more of them, or because I studied their variety in search of my old self— that optimistic fellow, that happy minivan— as well as versions of my former future self, the Bill Wyeth I would now never be: fifty, settled into the law firm, drinking coffee with Judith each morning, perhaps taking a second or even third child to school, richer every year, each August spent in the shingled house on Nantucket. And those former selves, future and past, were there— by the dozen in truth, sweating through their oxford cloth shirts after the second drink, fiddling with their handheld devices and cell phones, young enough to fear their hairlines more than their hearts, old enough to have seen pals get knocked off the high end of the seesaw. Always drilling for the hidden streams of cash running through the city. Sexed up with ambition, but worried that their penises, like a volatile tech stock, might be subject to sudden performance downgrades. I heard a lot of jokes and saw plenty of smiles, but mostly the talk was reducible to money, the laughter mortgaged, the ambition presold. These were men who were prosperous and in demand, loved by women and children, men who possessed life insurance and clean underwear. Mostly Republicans except when they agreed with the Democrats. Knowledgeable about the interest rate cycle. Oil changes every three thousand miles. Retirement plan well funded. Irony well funded. Safe— just as I had been.