He knocked on the door. “Are you finished?” Ezra called from inside.
“Yes, I’m finished.”
The lock clicked open, and he stepped out. “Well?”
“Well … yes.”
Bob returned to his chair. Ezra followed him. “So what did you think?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not exactly sure what I think.”
“But did you find it disturbing?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course I did.”
Ezra sat down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put it that way … I’m incredibly nervous just now, as you can imagine. My heart’s racing, I’m sweating like a pig—”
“Well, I suppose at the very least I ought to be grateful to you … you know, for giving me a last glimpse of the loved one and all.”
“That’s why I can’t look at it myself. A last glimpse of the loved one would be more than I could bear.”
“But how can you not have looked at it? Someone must have—Kitty, for instance—otherwise—”
“No, you’re the only one.”
Bob looked up. “But then how did you know about Ralph?”
“What about him?”
“His being on the tape.”
“Ralph is on the tape?” Ezra’s hands flew to his face. “Oh, I’m so sorry! If I’d … Ralph is on the tape? But you must think I’m monstrous! To spring something like that on you without any warning … Believe me, if I’d known, I’d never—”
“Hold on. Then why were you so keen for me to watch it?”
“I told you, because I need your advice about what to do with it. Where to sell it.”
“Sell it!”
“That’s the whole point of my coming to New York. I want to sell it to one of those scandal programs—you know, Hard Copy, or something. Hadn’t you guessed?”
“But why?”
“For the money, of course! I thought I’d begin by asking fifty thousand. Do you think that’s reasonable? Too much? Too little?”
“Wait a second, are you actually saying you think people will pay money for this?”
“Of course—but only if I act fast. I know how journalism works. People eat this stuff up. My hope is that if I can get a bidding war going, get them foaming at the mouth, the price will really climb. Only I don’t have the right contacts, and if I did it myself, I might end up being sold short.”
“But you’ll hurt people. The parents of those kids—”
“Oh, I know people will be hurt. Only when you think about, when you consider the sort of indescribable hell they’re already going through, honestly, what difference will ten minutes of footage make? It might even be a comfort, seeing their children one last time.”
“You’ll be cashing in on their suffering.”
“Correction. My suffering, too. After all, who’s front and center in that video? Larry. ‘Person of the Week.’ And anyway, everyone else is going to make money, a lot of money, off this thing. I mean, confidentially—it’s not public yet—they’re pretty sure now that the crash was due to an electrical failure—not a missile, not a bomb. There was an engine part the airline hadn’t got around to replacing even though they were supposed to. And if that’s the case, there are going to be lawsuits—big lawsuits—and big settlements. Everyone who’s next of kin will be compensated, all the parents of all those kids, and Larry’s kids, and Kitty. Has she talked to you about it, by the way? About money?”
“No.”
“She’ll probably give you some. Kitty’s a decent sort. And yet when you think about it, why should Kitty be getting anything? I mean, is she really next of kin? Only legally. In every real sense, you are … just as I am.”
Bob said nothing. Almost triumphantly, Ezra crossed his arms. “You see? Now the whole picture looks different. What’s fifty thousand, after all, compared to what they’re going to get? And of course I’ll give you a percentage for your help. Twenty-five percent, I was thinking.”
“But what on earth makes you think I can help you?”
“You can get me contacts. Living here in New York, you must know people in television.”
“I don’t know anyone in television.”
“Well, then you must know someone who knows someone. Or someone who can represent me … us. Someone who can sell the tape for us.”
The “us” stung. “I feel very strange about this. I’m not sure I want to get involved in something so … frankly, so questionable.”
“But all you have to do is give me an introduction! I’ll do the rest. And anyway”—here Ezra touched Bob’s arm, which made him flinch—“it’s as much for your sake as mine. You’re obviously a decent guy, Bob. Still, a bookstore can’t rake in a fortune, and Ralph had a big career ahead of him, didn’t he? If he hadn’t been killed, you would have had things to look forward to, money to look forward to, which now you’ll never see. And so if everyone else is going to be compensated, why should you get left out in the cold?” He smiled. “Yes, I can see it now. His being on the tape, Ralph’s being on the tape … that’s really the icing on the cake. For that I think we can jump to seventy-five K, don’t you?”
Bob moved away from Ezra’s touch. “Look, I can’t think right now. You’ll have to give me some time.”
“But there isn’t any time! Every minute we waste, we lose money.”
“Just until tomorrow morning?” He checked his watch. “It’s nearly five now. Nothing’s going to happen between now and tomorrow.”
“I wish I could be sure. Still, I suppose I don’t really have much choice, do I, other than to pick a lawyer at random from the phone book.” He stood up. “All right. Tomorrow. Early, though.”
“I’ll call you by eight.”
With a gesture of impatience, Ezra put on his coat, relocked his briefcase. Bob followed him to the door.
“Ezra,” he said, when they got there, “you wouldn’t by any chance be willing to leave the videotape with me, would you? Just for tonight. I give you my word, I won’t show it to anyone.”
Ezra grinned. “I never doubted for a minute that I could trust you,” he said, then opened the briefcase, took the tape out, and handed it to Bob.
“Thank you.”
“Besides, this isn’t the only copy.”
“Somehow I suspected that.”
“Like I said, I know how journalism works. Well, good night. Think carefully about what I’ve told you. Oh, and if you need to reach me—even if you just want to talk—I’m at the Sheraton on Broadway. Room 2223.”
“O.K.”
“Call any time. Even the middle of the night. Or just come over …”
Again, he smiled—this time a bit tartishly, Bob thought. They shook hands, and Ezra left.
Almost as soon as Ezra was out the door, Bob locked it. He went into the bathroom. An unfamiliar smell of lemons hung in the air—Ezra’s cologne, perhaps, or his shampoo. Bob switched the fan back on, shut the door behind him. Then he carried the tape over to the bread chest and loaded it, once again, into the VCR.
He fast-forwarded through the first scenes—the bus, the interview with the doomed valedictorian, the checking of the bags—and let the button go only once the young travelers were at the gate, gathering for their farewell. Nothing had changed in fifteen minutes. “Tigers rule!” Peter with the pimples shouted, as Ralph, still in his leather jacket, glided past with his two water bottles. How his hair was thinning! He had a birthday coming up, his thirty-ninth. Rather dispassionately, he regarded the children—was he worrying that they might make noise during the flight?—then sat down, as before, next to his shadowy companion, to whom he passed a bottle. Here Bob pressed the pause button; stepped closer to the television, so that the tip of his nose brushed the screen. Yet he was no more able to identify Ralph’s blurry friend now than he had been twenty minutes earlier.
He stopped the tape. A dim idea seized him, and he stumbled to the bedroom, to Ralph’s closet, which he hadn’t opened since the crash. Was it poss
ible the leather jacket might still be there? … but it was gone. Where it had hung, only an empty hanger dangled. Other clothes pressed in on the vacancy, like flesh crowding to close a wound: pants and belts, a hank of ties, a new wool blazer Ralph had bought the winter before but not yet worn. And how faint—yet how distinct—his smell was! It lingered in his shoes, rose up from the hamper. Still, nothing about the closet provoked the slightest nostalgia in Bob. He didn’t want to bury his face in the shirts. He wanted to haul them away, have the place aired and fumigated. As swiftly as he had opened it, he shut the closet door.
The next step was to search Ralph’s desk, an early-twentieth-century rolltop, positioned at the far end of the bedroom. In the past, it had never occurred to him to rifle through the trove of documents Ralph kept there, if for no other reason than because he had always felt so secure in their companionable coupledom that even when he knew Ralph was having sex with other men, the matter hadn’t seemed important enough to warrant prowling; the stability of their bond, not to mention the zeal with which Ralph loved him, were givens, and if over the years sex had ceased to be a crucial part of their relationship—well, what of it? The truth was, Bob didn’t care all that much about sex. To him there was nothing wrong with a man going elsewhere to seek out those gratifications with which his home—a place of safety and retreat—had never been meant to provide him in the first place. So why was it that today, in the wake of a death that rendered jealousy moot, nonetheless jealousy, for the first time in years, was rearing in him? Was it Ezra’s presence that had induced this unlikely response? Or was jealousy merely one of the many cloaks in which grief costumed itself?
With a weirdly furtive anxiety, as if he feared Ralph might come striding through the door at any moment and catch him in the act, he opened all the drawers of the desk and emptied their contents onto the floor. Key rings, bookmarks, computer disks, an extra knob from the kitchen cabinets, fabric swatches, pages torn from design magazines, sketches of sofas and coffee tables and naked boys, earplugs, snapshots from a Halloween party, some old Corgi cars, a monogrammed leather passport holder that had been a Christmas gift from Kitty, extra Filofax pages, packets of tissue and gum, scissors, paper clips, a stapler, pens and pencils and pads stolen from various hotels: all this detritus, this flotsam of a life being lived at full throttle, fell in heaps on the Tabriz carpet. It made Bob think of the things Ralph had taken with him, and that had gone down with the plane: his datebook, his briefcase, the toothbrush now so conspicuously absent from the bathroom sink. A few days earlier, Kitty said, a dog’s collar had washed up on the beach near her hotel. Nothing, however, of Ralph’s; nor Ralph himself.
For a few moments, Bob sifted through this heap of valueless objects. Then, as nothing in it illuminated the identity of Ralph’s companion, he moved on to the files. “Letters and Postcards”—from clients, from Kitty, from Brenda on her honeymoon—proved unrevealing, as did “Apartment,” “Taxes,” and “Insurance.” The contents of the next file, “Credit Card Bills,” he scanned with greater avidity, in the hope that there, at least, he might happen upon some clue, some shred of evidence pointing to an affair. Yet aside from an order for flowers, which Ralph would have normally charged through his office, nothing in the file shed light upon or even verified the stranger’s existence. No extra plane tickets had been purchased in Ralph’s name. Nor had he used the card to pay for any of the typical expenses of an affair: motel rooms, sex toys. Did this mean that he was being careful, taking the sort of precautions that in the past he hadn’t deemed necessary? And if so, why? Because for once he had gotten caught up in something serious enough to merit deception? Yet if this was the case, nothing in his behavior, in the weeks before he’d boarded the plane, had given him away.
Kicking aside the papers, Bob lay down on the bed. What he was feeling was a maddened curiosity, a rage directed not at Ralph himself but at whatever forces were conspiring to make available only this clue, this fleeting image of a water bottle being passed into a stranger’s hand. Nothing at all would have been better, he decided, or short of that, something he could work with, from which he could at least derive a lead or two. Perhaps if he scanned the lists of the dead, called the airline, and demanded to know next to whom Ralph was sitting, then he might find something out … only wouldn’t making such calls be to presuppose a prior “arrangement” of which he had no evidence? What if, on the other hand, the friend was someone Ralph had picked up in the men’s room? Or better yet, just a fellow passenger he’d started chatting with, and for whom he’d offered to fetch some water? An old lady, even. Someone who couldn’t walk very well.
He closed his eyes. The mistrust in which he had been wallowing since Ezra’s visit horrified him. It did not fit the profile of a man who wore argyle sweaters, and owned a bookstore, and prided himself on the civility of his domestic arrangements. For his life with Ralph had always been the very model of civility. There was no surprise here: a craving for the refinements in which their childhoods—Bob’s in a Dallas suburb, Ralph’s on a series of military bases in California, Korea, and Germany—had been so singularly lacking was what had attracted them to each other in the first place. Thus their courtship had taken place in antiques shops. The first purchase they had made together was a set of Sèvres porcelain dessert plates. Even when they were young and poor, and lived in an East Village walk-up, they always had good furniture, Persian rugs, old hotel silver. For these things, above all others, mattered to Ralph, and if, on occasion, an urge came upon him to go out searching for sex of the seamier variety—an urge utterly out of keeping with his otherwise scrupulous habits—well, what did it matter? Squabbling was tawdry, like paper napkins. Much better to show a bit of tolerance, to laugh the matter off, to remain, at all costs, civilized.
Only once before had jealousy gotten the better of Bob. This was in the early eighties, when for a few months Ralph had entered into a sort of carnal tailspin. Every night he’d gone out at around eleven (they were still living in the East Village then), only to return at dawn, reeking of cigarette fumes and sweat and poppers. Then he would shower, while Bob lay quiet in their bed with its upholstered headboard, its four-hundred-thread-count sheets, its canopy of English glazed chintz (Roses and Pansies), pretending to be asleep but really listening for the water to shut off. Eventually Ralph, moist in his cotton pajamas, would climb in next to him, lie still for a few moments, then, with great caution, wrap his arms around Bob’s chest and nuzzle his neck.
One morning during this period, as they were fixing breakfast in their tiny kitchen, Ralph started washing an orange. Where cleanliness was concerned, he could be excessively fastidious—when he ate french fries, he would leave the tips on the plate, like cigarette butts, rather than put anything his fingers had touched into his mouth—and now, watching him wash his orange, which he was going to peel anyway, Bob giggled. “What is it?” Ralph asked.
“It’s just … you’ll lick some stranger’s asshole through a hole in the wall, but you won’t eat an orange without washing it.”
Ralph put the orange down. Almost angrily he glared at Bob; he swallowed, as if swallowing back an impulse to lash out. And then he, too, laughed. He laughed and laughed.
Bob opened his eyes again, sat up. Had he fallen asleep? Behind the pillows in their beige cases, the headboard, made from a pair of Venetian gilt and painted gesso doors, creaked in reaction to his weight. Although he was alone, he was lying on the left side of the bed; he had always slept on the left, just as Ralph had always slept on the right. Each had his own table, his own drawer, Bob’s containing disorder (earplugs and magazine clippings and buttons and handkerchiefs and cufflinks), Ralph’s only a first-aid kit, a flashlight, matches, and a few candles. On top of each table sat a red tole lamp hand-stenciled with fritillaries. To the left was the window draped in the beige linen toile de Jouy it had taken Ralph so many months to settle upon, and next to the window was the dresser, and across from the dresser was the desk, its drawers pulled
open, its contents spread all over the carpet, as if a thief had been searching fruitlessly for jewels … Getting up, Bob quickly put everything back.
Streetlamps came on; instinctively he shut the curtains against them. In the morning, he knew, he would have to answer Ezra’s scandalous proposition. And what would he say? From a financial perspective, it was true, Ralph’s death had left him in a precarious position. The import of his will was no secret; it was identical to Bob’s, both of them stating that if one should predecease the other, the survivor would inherit the apartment, whatever money was in the dead partner’s bank account, and the cash value of his business. Yet so far—just as Ezra had guessed—Ralph’s business hadn’t earned much in the way of profit; the big money was supposed to come next year, when he completed the first of his corporate commissions. Nor was the bookstore alone likely to generate the kind of income necessary to keep up the mortgage payments on a large Manhattan co-op, purchased at the height of an economic boom. Their whole life, when you thought about it, had been provisional, based on the assumption that Ralph wasn’t going to die—and this was odd, for in recent years his health had become for both of them a chronic, if largely private, worry. Ralph, for instance, was always feeling his glands. Whenever he got a cold, an expression of grim stoicism claimed his face, only to give way, once he had recovered, to a kind of euphoria, as if getting over the cold meant that he was utterly safe: exactly the sort of reassurance the HIV test was supposed to provide.
No, Bob reflected, the problem with Veronica Feinbaum’s ill-mannered remarks wasn’t that they had been so off the mark; the problem was that in her contempt for the niceties, her devotion to the unvarnished truth, she had given voice to the very cynicism that the rest of their friends, out of respect for the dead, had left unspoken. Not an if, but a when: all of them—Bob too—took it for granted that one day soon Ralph would get sick. For the orange had its price. And though in recent years Ralph had made it his habit, when engaging in what he called his “extracurricular activities,” always to practice the safe sex that Veronica’s beloved GMHC propounded, even so, the residue of those early debauches could not so easily be leached from the blood. Every morning when they woke up, Bob wondered, Will this be the day? He’d never admitted it before, but he had. He had kept his eyes averted from the future, grateful only for what didn’t happen, for every blessed deferral.
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