Not far away church bells rang: six o’clock. This was the hour when flights to Europe made their departures, when taxis mobbed the terminals at JFK, and travelers in whom the mere prospect of the abbreviated transatlantic night had already incited a state of proleptic weariness and disorientation dragged their luggage through the snaky line to the check-in. Then would come the journey itself—he knew it well—the mask and the earplugs, labored sleep, a too early dawn. Under the closed eyelid of the window, light would creep, heralding jet lag and the stumbling weirdness of arrival. Many times Bob and Ralph had made that trip together. He recalled with a certain tenderness early mornings in Paris, dropping off their bags at the hotel and then, because the room wasn’t ready, wandering red-eyed and unwashed through the half-asleep city, stopping at a bar for coffee and a warm croissant and gazing at the brisk, freshly shaven Frenchmen as if they were members of another species … And had Ralph, in the same way, been looking forward to his first morning in London? Was he envisioning, just before the plane blew up, the monuments and museums through which he would lead his wide-eyed companion, or the restaurants he would take him to? The sushi bar at Harrod’s? Or that Thai place on Frith Street he liked so much?
It didn’t matter. His hotel room—long reserved—had gone unclaimed. Oh, no doubt the flight had begun as flights always do, with a stewardess standing at the front of the cabin and explaining the use of the life jacket and the oxygen masks. More inured to flying than his companion, Ralph would have ignored her implorations to consult the little plastic card mapping the emergency exits. But the companion—for some reason Bob was certain of this—would have studied it assiduously. “In the event of a water landing,” he would have heard her intone, all the while attending to the cartoonish plane, conveniently submerged just to the level of its doors; the passengers, resembling figures from a first-grade primer, making their orderly progress onto the slides; the slides themselves detaching, floating tranquilly out onto tranquil water, as if not only people, but fate could be trusted to behave, to follow the playground rules … yet when you thought about it, who had ever heard of a “water landing”? When in the entire history of commercial aviation had one taken place? In the world, planes blew up. People died. Their bodies were incinerated, or eaten by sharks. And though, for the first few days after the crash, newscasters would persist in avowing that divers were still “hopeful of locating survivors,” well, everyone knew that this was just a gesture, made in deference to some outmoded protocol. You knew better than to believe that someone might actually be out there, clinging to a piece of wreckage, held aloft by a life jacket when in truth there hadn’t been time even to put on a life jacket.
The apartment was now so dark that Bob could hardly see the furniture. Switching on the lights, he reached for his jacket, then hurried out onto the street and hailed a taxi. Past warehouses and department stores he rode, white brick apartment blocks and condemned tenements, until the taxi dropped him off amid the headachy neon of Broadway at night. The lobby of the Sheraton, when he stepped into it, was filled with airline pilots and cocktail music, overtired children, a chaos of perfumes and accents through which he pushed his way to the elevator. Up to the twenty-second floor he rode, then walked down a long corridor to a door marked 2223, on which he knocked.
Within seconds, Ezra answered. He had taken off his jacket and tie. His cheeks glowed, as if he had just been washing his face.
Seeing Bob, he smiled without surprise. “I’m glad you came,” he said.
“I wanted to return the tape,” Bob said, “only I seem to have forgotten it …”
“Never mind about the tape,” Ezra said, and, leading him through the door, closed it behind them.
After that Bob gave in to strangeness. He accepted that the terms of his life had been altered radically, perhaps irrevocably, that from now on he was going to be a citizen not of the familiar world, but of an off-kilter landscape rather resembling the villains’ hideouts in the old Batman series, shot with the camera atilt so that children would believe the Catwoman and the Joker and the Riddler actually lived in lopsided buildings, urban Towers of Pisa, where the floors slanted up or down or swayed like a seesaw. At least the past, for all its coarseness and sorrow, had been part of a fluid traffic, enviably unremarkable and thus passed over by television’s greedy eye. Here, on the other hand, dog collars washed up on Newfoundland beaches. He lived not in his own apartment, but with Ezra, on the twenty-second floor of the Sheraton. They had their dinner naked, room service club sandwiches the crumbs of which got between the sheets, all the while observing with a certain detached wonderment a battle to purchase the videotape every bit as fevered as Ezra had predicted, with Bruce Feinbaum, Veronica’s husband, acting as referee.
Only forty-eight hours had passed since they had taken the tape to Veronica. While Ezra hid, once again, in the bathroom, Bob watched it through with her, the two of them perched on leather library chairs exactly like the ones in his own living room, although here the television was hidden in a Shaker cupboard instead of a Tuscan bread chest. This go-round, the children’s death march did not appall him as it had before; even Ralph’s brief apparition did not appall him. Instead he watched, fascinated, as an apprehension of the tape’s import gradually stole over Veronica’s face, opening her mouth and pulling her eyebrows taut and painting her skin first scarlet and then a dyspeptic gray. If she noticed Ralph at all, she chose not to mention it. Instead, as the tape broke off, she seemed to be struggling to compose a response in keeping with her self-appointed role as a woman immune to sentimentality.
Later, at her husband’s office, she told Bob and Ezra about a legend she had recently encountered in her Greek class, in the hope that sharing it would allay any feelings of guilt they might be suffering. “Cleobis and Biton,” she began, “were the sons of Hera’s priestess at Argos. And one day when she was supposed to perform the rites of the goddess, the oxen that usually took her to the temple didn’t show, so her sons harnessed themselves to the chariot and dragged her there themselves. Five miles. Into the mountains. When they got to the temple, the priestess was so grateful to the boys that she prayed to Hera to grant them the best gift possible. And what did Hera do? Knocked them off. Killed them, in the prime of life. That’s the Greek view of death.”
“Funny,” her husband said. “When you got to the end, I thought you were going to say that Hera killed the mother so the boys wouldn’t have to drag her all the way back. Which is, I guess, the Jewish view of death.” And he picked up the phone.
Afterward Bob and Ezra went back to the Sheraton, where they spent most of the day having sex. Intermittently they would take breaks to eat, or watch television, or answer Bruce’s phone calls. Progress reports came about once an hour. “We’ve got an offer of sixty K,” Bob said at five, “but I can tell from her voice, they’re prepared to go higher.”
By six they had gone higher. Ezra ordered champagne with the club sandwiches. Because the windows did not open, their room had begun to stink. When the bellhop brought the food, his nose twitched. Ezra only laughed. Gratification made him giddy. He could not seem to get fucked enough. As for Bob, never in his life had he felt so horny; it was as if Ezra had tapped into some cache of libido he hadn’t ever suspected himself of harboring. He was a tiny man, Ezra. He had tiny feet, a tiny penis. He was in no way Bob’s type. Still, when Bob fucked him, he felt as if he were breaking through the shell of the known universe. Somewhere near the ceiling there floated an undiluted pleasure, toward which the vessel of his body flew unpiloted.
When they weren’t having sex, they talked about the future. It went without saying that Ezra would never return to Porter Valley. Instead, he said, his plan was to settle in Manhattan, using the money from the sale of the tape to buy himself an apartment. Once he was fixed up, he would look for a job teaching at a private school. Then he would live quietly, his phone number unlisted, in case anyone from Porter Valley should ever decide to hunt him down and shoot him.
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“And in the meantime?” Bob asked.
“In the meantime I’ll stay at your place.”
His place! Not a question, a declaration. “Come to think of it, what are we doing here?” Ezra went on. “This room costs a fortune. And your apartment would be so much more comfortable.”
“I can’t go back there yet,” Bob replied, for he was thinking of the bed: he had never slept in it with anyone except Ralph.
“Why not?”
“I’m having the place exterminated.”
“Exterminated!”
“I mean, I’m having the exterminators in.”
Ezra frowned. They stayed on at the Sheraton. In the mornings, when the maid came to clean the crumbs out of the bed and spray room freshener, they put on their jackets and took a walk through the theater district. Generally speaking, the half hour the maid needed to clean the room was the only time they got out. “I’d love to see Cats,” Ezra said, gazing up at a marquee. “Let’s go see Cats. I’ve never been to a Broadway musical.”
“We’ll get tickets this afternoon,” Bob promised. And yet, by the time the afternoon rolled around, they were already in bed, the club sandwiches had been ordered, the television was on.
Now the phone rang every half an hour. “We’re up to a hundred twenty-five K,” Bruce told them at four. Then, at four-thirty: “Hard Copy’s come in ten thousand higher.” After hanging up, Bob aimed the remote control at the screen, unmuting whatever was on. As a rule they watched only the programs that were at war to win the rights to the tape. If two were on at the same time, they’d switch back and forth between channels. All these programs had thrusting names, and alternated the gruesome (kidnap victims buried alive) with the heartwarming (a two-year-old dialing 911 to save his grandmother). On one, a dachshund kept an alligator at bay just long enough for its master, whose arm had been bitten off, to crawl out onto the street and scream for help. In this instance, the report was accompanied by a “dramatic reenactment” of everything that had occurred, including the arm’s reattachment.
At Bruce’s office, negotiations continued well into the night. Already the price had climbed far beyond what Ezra had hoped for. “This thing is smoldering,” Bruce said over the phone. “It’s hotter than I ever could have guessed.” By morning, only two contenders remained. By three that afternoon a show called The Real Story had finally won, with a bid of $150,000. This meant that once Bruce had deducted his percentage, Bob would clear $30,000 and Ezra $90,000.
To celebrate, they went out to dinner at a sushi bar on Park Avenue that had just gotten three stars from the New York Times. It was posh and quiet. The chefs were tall for Japanese, with faces and hands as gleaming as the slabs of salmon and halibut they sliced so expertly. One of them, Bob noticed after a few minutes, was missing his right thumb.
“If they’re really planning to air the tape tomorrow, we’ll have to get out of the hotel in the morning,” Ezra said. “The last thing I want right now is to be chased down by reporters.”
Bob glanced up at him. “Do you honestly think they’d find you?”
“They might.”
“But there are hundreds of hotels in New York. Anyway, you told me you registered under an assumed name.”
“Still, I’d rather not risk it. At your place I’ll feel safer.”
“All right,” Bob said, gulping sake, “but you’ll have to sleep on the sofa. Just until I get a new mattress.”
“What’s wrong with the old one? Don’t tell me bedbugs, because you said you just had the exterminators in.”
“No, not that … It’s just that it was Ralph’s mattress. Ralph’s and mine.”
Ezra’s mouth narrowed; he was quiet. “Really, Bob,” he said after a moment, “considering all we’ve been through, don’t you think that attitude’s a little—well—sentimental?”
“But you must understand. No one else besides Ralph and me has ever been in that bed.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
“But you must have gone out of town sometimes by yourself. How can you know what Ralph got up to while you were away?”
“He might have gotten up to all sorts of things. Just not in the bed.”
Ezra raised his eyebrows.
“What? You’re doubting me?”
“I just think that maybe you’re being a tad bit naive.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bob said finally. “What Ralph did doesn’t matter. The point is, I never slept with anyone else in that bed.”
“Is that really what this is about? Or is the truth that you just don’t want to share that bed with—you know—some scoundrel, the kind of person who’d sell a tape of innocent children to a scandal show?”
“I never said anything to suggest that.”
“Still, I can read between the lines. In the anonymity of a hotel room, that’s one thing … but to have the horrible Ezra in your precious marriage bed, oh no!”
“The tape has nothing to do with it.”
The bill arrived. Ezra paid—he insisted—after which they walked back to the hotel. Most of the way they didn’t speak; Ezra had his fists buried in the pockets of his trench coat, kept his head bent, seemed at once ruminative and cross. Every few minutes Bob would try to introduce a neutral topic of conversation, only to have it shooed away like an insect. Finally he gave up. They arrived at the hotel, went up to the room, where Ezra threw off his coat, sat down at the little desk across from the bed, and frowned at the window. It took Bob a few seconds to realize that he was frowning at his own reflection.
Finally he turned to Bob, and said, “I haven’t been straight with you. There are things I haven’t told you—and other things I have told you that, well … aren’t true.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” He gazed at his own hands. Then he said, “Larry Dowd was never my lover. He wasn’t even queer.”
“What do you mean, wasn’t queer?”
“We were colleagues, that’s all—who sometimes ate lunch together. Oh, I admit, I had the hots for him, a little. But I never said anything. I wouldn’t have dared. So far as I know, he had no idea that I was queer.”
“You mean you made up the whole story?”
Ezra nodded.
“But what about the tape?”
“That was for the kids. You’re years out of high school, you think that journalism class means a newspaper. Remember, we’re living in the age of video! The kids wanted video, so I just … invented this idea of PVTV. And then the plane went down, and suddenly it seemed like I was being offered an opportunity.”
“To make money?”
“Not only that! Also to commemorate—what might have been, what would have been, if conditions had been different, if Larry had been different … And then when I got to Newfoundland, and heard about Ralph, and met Kitty—well, things just fell into place. It seemed predestined that I should come to New York. That I should find you. That we should—”
“But you said it was a question of justice. You don’t deserve justice.”
“I deserve this chance. How else was I ever going to get to New York? Stuck out in Hicksville, a closet case teaching high school journalism.”
“So you decided to pay for your freedom with the corpses of dead children.”
“No! It was for you, too … for us.”
Bob turned away. “If I’d known what you were up to, I’d never have helped you.”
“That was why it was imperative you not know what I was up to.”
“Then why are you telling me now?”
“Because you wouldn’t let me sleep in Ralph’s bed. Because you made me feel like shit, like my very presence was defiling. And then I thought about it, and you know what I decided? You’re right.”
Bob moved toward the door. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I have to digest all of this. I have to figure out what I feel.”
“Of course.” Suddenly Ezra turned. “Only please remember, no matter how much you hate me, you�
��ll still get the money. Thirty thousand dollars. For that, at the very least, you ought to be—”
Bob ran. At the elevator, he pressed the call button twice, focused his eyes on striped wallpaper, listened for the ringing of a bell.
“Grateful,” Ezra murmured in the distance.
The elevator doors opened, admitting Bob—irony of ironies—into a throng of uniformed stewardesses.
The day after the tape aired, Kitty called to deplore Ezra’s “disloyalty.” Veronica called to reassure Bob that he had no reason to feel guilty. Only Ezra did not call. Every day, at the bookstore, Bob watched for him, at first with fear, then with worry. At home he waited for a message on his answering machine. None came. Perhaps Ezra had gone back to Porter Valley. Perhaps, in a fit of guilt, he had done himself in. As for whatever little storm the screening of his tape had drummed up, it took place too far outside the arena of Bob’s daily life for him ever to hear about it. He was Bob Bookman, owner of Bookman’s Books. What happened on programs like The Real Story had nothing to do with him.
One afternoon a few weeks after the airing, Kitty called to say that an umbrella monogrammed with Ralph’s initials had washed up on a Maine beach. “They’re bringing it to me for identification,” she added, “and I wondered … well, if you wanted to come. If you wanted to be here when it arrived.”
Bob wasn’t sure how to answer. Was he sorry? Relieved? Sorry—and relieved—that it hadn’t been Ralph’s body that had washed up?
“I think I can trust you to handle this,” he said after a moment.
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