Jake & Mimi

by Frank Baldwin

  • • •

  The artist’s name is Iliati.

  He paints village scenes in dazzling color. The town plaza on market day; an olive field at dusk; a stone church, with the faithful converging. Somewhere in each painting is the brilliant Tuscan sun.

  I step back and look across the room. In the muted light I can see her, moving gracefully among the other enthusiasts. She looks over. I walk to the next painting. A water tower in silhouette, set against the flaming hills. She breaks from the others and starts across the room, and I remind myself again of the painter’s career details. His apprenticeship in Arles. His love of cinema.

  “Hi,” she says. “May I help you?”

  “Yes. I’m here to buy.”

  She laughs. “So much for small talk,” she says, extending a delicate hand. “Welcome. I’m Nina Torring.”

  • • •

  “Tell me about your first one, Jake.”

  Jake Teller looks at me, then down at the black railing, and out at the lights of Roosevelt Island. He doesn’t say anything for so long that I think he’s not going to answer.

  “It was a year ago,” he says quietly. “She worked in the building across from mine.” Jake looks at me, then out at the lights again. “My office was on the fourth floor, and hers was on the second. The street was narrow, maybe fifty feet across. I could see right in.”

  The wind is cool on my face and neck. On my bare calves. Mark expects me at his apartment in twenty minutes. We’ll rent a movie, he said.

  “I couldn’t see her features, but I knew she was a beauty. I could tell from her posture, from the way the guys in her office lingered in her doorway. And there was something else about her, something… lonely, restrained. She wore her hair up every day. Sometimes if she worked late and everyone was gone, she would take it down. Take the pins from it and shake it loose.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “I didn’t. I just watched her.”

  Jake looks at me again, then down into the dark water.

  “For a month, at least. Then one night I was finishing up my work, and I looked across and saw her lock her desk and take her coat from her chair. I went downstairs to the street and there she was, just coming out of her building. I followed her to Grand Central. Down the stairs, through the turnstile, down to the platform for the uptown trains. An express came, the one I always took home, but she didn’t get on it, so I stayed on the platform. A local came next, and I watched her step into it. I stood there, staring at the open doors, and just as they closed, I jumped in. I took a seat down and across from her, and I saw her face close-up for the first time. She was beautiful. Delicate eyes, very little makeup. She sat with her knees close together, a book in her lap. At Seventy-second Street she got off, and I followed her all the way to her apartment building. I watched her go inside.”

  I look at Jake, and he meets my gaze.

  “For twenty minutes I just stood there. Then I walked home. The next morning, at work, I pulled the blinds down in my window. I never watched her again.”

  Jake steps away from the railing and looks down the walkway at the distant lights of the Manhattan Bridge. He puts his hands on the railing again, looks at me for a second, then back down into the dark water.

  “Three weeks later, I worked late on a Friday night. When I finished, I walked to Grand Central. I waited on the platform; when the express came, I let it go by. I took the local to Seventy-second Street and walked to her apartment building. I was still in my work suit. I sat down on the steps of a building across the street. At eight-thirty, she walked out the door. I stood up and followed her. Onto the subway, down to West Fourth Street. To the Waverly Theater. She went to the window and bought a ticket. An erotic movie was showing. A Japanese erotic movie. It wasn’t porn — there were write-ups from the big papers outside the theater. It was an art-house movie. I bought a ticket and went inside, and I took a seat right behind her.”

  I try to picture it. The dark theater. Jake in his suit, sitting just behind her. Bodies on the screen. I feel the weakness in my legs, the color rising in my face.

  “I couldn’t take my eyes off her hair. When I leaned forward I could smell it, rich and dreamy. It was held up by a single long pin, passed through a wooden hairband. Deep into the movie, I reached forward and pulled the pin out of her hair. Her whole body convulsed, but she didn’t make a sound or turn around. I watched her hair come down, and then I reached forward and touched it. Still she didn’t move. And then I got out of my seat, crouched in the aisle beside her, and held out the pin and band in my open palm. She looked at me, and I saw in her eyes that she was terrified. She took the pin and the band, and then she stood and walked past me and up the aisle and out of the theater.

  “I took my seat again, and I was shaking. I stayed in it through the end of the movie. Through all the credits, stayed in it even after the lights came up. I was the last one to leave. And when I walked outside, there she was. Standing in front of the theater, waiting.”

  Jake is quiet again. And still quiet. And now I realize he is through. I want to hear more, to hear everything. To know where it comes from, his cruelty. But he is through. Past him, I can see almost half a mile up the river walkway, see the light from the well-spaced lampposts, light that catches the bright clothing of two runners who come toward us at a steady pace.

  “Mark wanted to videotape the wedding,” I say. “I couldn’t imagine it. The first dance ruined while we watch out for wires and mikes and lighting. We fought about it. He was adamant. ‘Think of twenty years from now,’ he said. ‘We’ll have all the magic of it preserved.’”

  Jake’s eyes are on me again. Bottomless blue.

  “Last night he covered my eyes and steered me to the dining-room table. He took his hands away. Spread out on the table were photographs. Black-and-white photographs. He had fired the videoman and found a photographer in Brooklyn who does weddings in black and white. The pictures were so beautiful. The bride and groom. The priest in his collar. Panoramic shots — the wedding party with the whole of the reception hall behind them. Everything looked timeless, permanent. I saw them and I knew.”

  The runners reach us now, the sound of their breathing loud as they pass, then softening and disappearing as they start up the winding overpass, leaving us again to the sound of the waves against the concrete wall, the distant hum of traffic from the streets.

  “I’m going to marry him, Jake.”

  Jake looks out over the water again. He is quiet for almost thirty seconds.

  “Friday night, when I kept her still, you almost couldn’t take it.”

  I close my eyes.

  “And when I told you to go, you didn’t leave the apartment.”

  I hold tight to the black railing. I can see her again. Her tiny hands, lying open on the covers, desperate to clutch the silk but not permitted to.

  “What do you want from me, Jake?”

  He is quiet again. I look into his eyes, and there it is. Steel.

  “Do you have your cell phone?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  I reach down into my purse and take out the small black phone. Jake motions with his hand at the water.

  “Drop it in. You’ll be free.”

  I hold the phone against the railing and look down into the river. The wind has stirred the waves into small whitecaps.

  “The girl in the theater, Mimi. She went into the lobby and asked for the manager. She was going to tell him to call the police. It took them a few minutes to find him. When they did, and he asked her what was wrong, she couldn’t answer him.”

  I stare hard at the ring on my finger.

  “I’m going to take the next one further, Mimi.”

  My sweater is tight around me, but even so, I feel it. The thrilling flush that starts on the back of my neck, as if I’ve just been touched there, and now spreads all through me.

  “You’ve dreamed of it, Mimi, without ever admitting it.”

  I can’t l
ook at him.

  “Pain,” he says.

  I close my eyes again. When I open them, Jake is gone. I turn to see him on the overpass, crossing the bridge back toward the city streets. I turn back to the water and look out over it, holding the black cell phone in my shaking hands.

  • • •

  “Powerful work.”

  “Isn’t it?” she says. “We’re lucky to represent him. Was there one in particular you were interested in?”

  “I buy collections, Ms. Torring, not paintings.”

  “I see.” Two new customers enter the gallery and shed their coats. They look our way. “All told, we represent more than forty of his works.”

  “Then my investment would be serious.” The newcomers stand expectantly back at the gallery door. I nod at them. “I wonder if I might return when I could have your full attention.”

  “Of course. We offer after-hours appointments for collectors at your level. You could come back any night this week, and we’d have the gallery to ourselves.”

  “Very well. How is tomorrow?”

  She nods. “Fine.”

  “Eight o’clock?”

  “Fine again.” She takes my hand in both of hers and smiles. “Tomorrow it is, then. I look forward to it.”

  I walk to the gallery door and step out into the evening air. I walk to the corner of West Fourth Street. From my coat I take the crumpled handbill that I rescued Friday night from the flowerpot outside Nina Torring’s apartment building. Rescued just moments after Miss Lessing emerged, shaken and crying.

  I tear the handbill in two.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I had my first drink the night the Berlin Wall came down.

  I was sixteen and living with Grandpa on Long Island, a year after my parents were killed in a car crash in Japan. I was asleep on the cot in my room when he woke me with a rough shake. “Let’s go, boy,” he said. “We’ve got business.” On the way out, Grandpa stopped at the rolltop desk in the corner of the living room. I’d never seen him open it, but he slid a key into the ridged top, pushed it up, and pulled out a small green pouch.

  It was almost midnight, the streets quiet, and he didn’t say a word until he pulled his ’77 Chevy into the driveway of Artie Moore’s house. He was about to hit the horn, but we could see Artie through his living-room window, and he could see us. He stood on a small stepladder, hanging two stars high up in the window.

  “Know what those are for?” Grandpa asked.

  “No.”

  “Families used to put ’em in the window when a son went to war. In ’forty-three, ’forty-four, you walked around these streets, every other window had one.”

  “One of them is gold.”

  “Gold means they didn’t come back. Artie’s brother, Donald. We all called him Dooley — I can’t remember why.” We saw Artie step down and pull the curtains closed. “Go give him a hand.”

  I walked up the driveway and reached his front door as he opened it.

  “Hi, Mr. Moore.”

  “Jake,” he said, nodding and taking my arm, his grip strong. He leaned heavily on me, and we walked carefully through the wet leaves to the car.

  We drove a mile through empty streets to the Veterans Club, a squat building of chipped paint tucked away at the quiet end of Main Street. Other cars were parked or pulling up, and men were walking over the short grass to the open door of the club. Men in their sixties and seventies. Grandpa’s war friends, the ones who, like him, came back from World War II to their hometown and stuck around. Plumbers, dentists, admen. Most of them retired, all of them woken up just a while earlier by Grandpa’s call.

  Inside the one-room club, they took the stools down off the worn wooden bar. Smitty found some glasses and opened the taps and then pointed at me. “You’re tending bar tonight, Jake,” he said, and then started a fire in the small fireplace and joined the ten others around the television at the far end of the bar. Grandpa took the green pouch from his jacket and shook out his dog tags. All the men had brought theirs. Some laid them on the bar, and some held them in their rough, spotted hands or worked them between thumb and fingers as they drank their beers. And together they watched the Wall come down.

  They watched kids stand on top of it, their arms locked, swaying and singing. Watched two women at a crossing point dance over the line and then back, over again and back. Watched men bury their faces in the shoulders of other men. All along the Wall, people with chisels and hammers chipped away at it. Chipped away and then moved off a few feet to stare, stunned, at the bits of wall in their open hands. One man kissed the pieces; another dropped them on the ground and crushed them beneath his feet.

  They watched in silence, looking from the television to the floor, or out the window at the quiet streets. After a while the beer got into them. “Patton,” said Artie, lifting his glass high, and everyone raised theirs in answer. “Elsenborn,” said another, and they raised them again. “C rations.” They raised them. “Fuckin’ pillboxes.” They raised them. “Carole Lombard,” said Grandpa, to a round of “hear, hear”s. And then Charlie Bell, the oldest among them, raised a hand for silence, rose slowly to his feet, paused for effect, and said, “To Monty!” and they all roared with laughter.

  Smitty tossed me the keys to the storeroom. “Jake, find some whiskey, will you,” he said, and when I came back with Jack Daniel’s and shot glasses and started to pour, Grandpa pulled over another stool. “Make room, men,” he said. “This might as well be the night.”

  Artie poured a shot for me, right to the top of the glass. “Whoa,” said Grandpa as I picked it up. All the men lifted theirs. “Anyone ever asks you what I did, boy,” said Grandpa, and then pointed at the television, where a young man sat straddling the Wall, his arms in the air, his head back in triumph. “There it is.” They all touched their glasses to mine, and in their company I had my first taste of whiskey.

  • • •

  I come up from the subway into the cloudy late-afternoon sky. I walk east to Third Avenue and up to Twentieth Street. Just past the house where Teddy Roosevelt was born is a green common set back from the street, and just behind the common is the Columbarium. It is an old marble building with the look of a church, but instead of spires it is topped by a dome. The path to it winds through a garden. I walk to the arched doorway and through it into the quiet lobby. High above me, in the open center of the building, are windows of stained glass. All three floors are designed as circular walkways, and built into the walls of those walkways are small niches. Seven thousand of them, each holding cremated ashes.

  Classical music plays softly from hidden speakers as I start up the winding staircase. Even the stairwell landings are filled with niches. Most are glass, allowing you to see into them, to see the urn, or urns, inside and the keepsakes the families have placed beside them. Photographs. A square of lace. A baseball card.

  On the broad third-floor landing I pass a family: a mother, father, and daughter gathered around an empty niche. The mother holds a small ceramic urn in her hands, and a director in a dark suit stands to the side. I step past them and start around the walkway, the air scented by the flowers in the hanging vases spaced along the wall. I pass hundreds of niches until, a third of the way around, I reach Grandpa’s.

  He died a year ago today. It was Artie Moore who called me. “Chopping wood, Jake,” he said. “Couldn’t ask for much better.” I look through the clear glass at the two silver urns inside. Grandpa hadn’t wanted any keepsakes put in. And nothing inscribed on the urns but names and dates. I can hear his voice: “What good will words do me, boy? I’ll be dead.” I take a cloth from my shirt and clean the glass. The first time he brought me to see Grandma’s urn, he said, “Make sure mine is just like it.” Then he shook his head. “Fifty years, Jake,” he said. “The war. Three kids. Six grandkids. At the last, she didn’t know me. Patted my hand and asked if I would send in her husband. You leave this world alone.”

  I squat down and press my fingers to the floor. The mu
sic stops, and for a moment the place is quiet. From another floor I can hear, faintly, a woman’s heels on the marble. And now, from behind me on the landing, where the family is gathered, the grinding sound of the heavy key the director uses to open a new niche.

  In my summers home from college, Grandpa got me a job at the Veterans Club, tending bar, even though I was years too young. Saturday night was poker night, and all his war buddies would come. After the game broke up, they would sit and drink and talk. If they had enough in them, they’d talk about the war. Never the heavy stuff — wounds, friends lost — not when I could hear. If they talked about battles, it was quietly, in a kind of code. “H?,” someone might say, and those who fought there would grunt or nod their heads. They talked freely about machines and about the brass, how the generals kept bragging about the Sherman tank when any GI knew it took five of them to knock out a Panzer. But mostly, if they could see I was listening, they talked about the carousing, about the nights they’d managed in spite of it all. French girls. Belgian beer. Shots for the clap.

  After the rest of them went home, Grandpa would sit at the bar and drink a last beer while I cleaned up. One night I was drying glasses and thinking of the story Smitty had just told, of how his unit got separated from their regiment, then got so lost that they crossed from Germany back into France, and instead of reaching the munitions plant they were supposed to attack, the one surrounded by dug-in Germans, they wound up on the steps of a whorehouse, and after the savvy radioman called in their position, mentioning only the coordinates, they were ordered to hole up there until nightfall. Grandpa was sitting quietly, as he always did just after they’d gone, his mind still back in that time. “Sounds like you guys miss those days,” I said to him. He looked up quickly, his eyes flashing, but he didn’t say anything. He stayed quiet while I put the good liquor away in the cabinets, quiet while I counted out the register, quiet still while I turned the barstools upside down and lifted them onto the bar. I knew I’d said something stupid, so I took my time cleaning up, sweeping the floor twice, even dusting the liquor bottles on the back shelves. Finally there was nothing left for me to do, so I locked up and we walked to the Chevy in silence. He crossed to the driver’s side, then looked at me over the roof of the car.