One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

  “Why?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. I guess I want to…pay for my sins?”

  He startled me by laughing, revealing brown teeth that seemed as jagged as a wolf’s. He released my shoulder and shook the bills in my face.

  “Pay for your sins with real money, is that it?”

  “I guess.”

  “Kinda literal, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right about that.”

  He cackled, pocketed the bills, thumped my shoulder twice with his hand, and was gone.

  I returned to Lynn. “I thought that guy was going to kill me.”

  “Easy, baby. I’ll take you to a nice place.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  We left the terminal and headed eastward and downtown, dropping hundreds all the way.

  I had six hundred bucks left in the coffee can when we reached Lynn’s destination—Gramercy Park, the only park in Manhattan where you need a key to get inside. Only the people who live along the park’s borders get keys.

  “I love this park,” Lynn said. “Even though we can’t get inside, I wanted to see it.”

  It looked glorious in the late afternoon sunshine—tall trees, immaculately maintained footpaths, black nannies in white outfits pushing strollers containing Caucasian babies. A piece of old New York that had somehow survived.

  We started walking the perimeter of the park, and there she was when we turned the corner, sitting on the sidewalk with her back against the wrought-iron fence—a bag lady with her worldly possessions jammed into a two-wheeled cart. Clothes, deposit cans, and even a cruddy old black telephone with a rotary dial. Why would anyone keep such a thing? Maybe it was the last phone she’d ever owned, from the last place she’d ever lived in.

  She was street-grimy, tinted dark by the exhaust fumes of a million buses, but there was a weird dignity to her. Her thick brown-gray hair seemed cleaner than the rest of her, swept back behind her ears—she must have had a hairbrush or a comb tucked away somewhere in that junk. Snug inside a red cloth coat, she leaned against the fence as if it were a beach chair, with her face tilted toward the sun. In her mind, she could have been on the shore in East Hampton, waiting for the ringing of the lunch bell from a seaside mansion….

  When we stood in front of her we put her in sudden shadow and she opened her eyes, which turned out to be remarkably blue and clear.

  “How am I supposed to acquire a tan if you stand in my sunshine?”

  Her voice stunned me. She sounded as if she’d grown up in a finishing school. Her teeth were yellow but there were no gaps in her smile, which she beamed at me in a way that was both friendly and menacing.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked, as if she were seated at the customer service desk at Bloomingdale’s. I looked at Lynn. She seemed fascinated and frightened. In a strange way this woman was much scarier than the giant at Grand Central. I reached into the can and took out a hundred bucks.

  “That’s for you,” I said. She took the bills without counting them and casually tucked them inside her coat. You’d have thought strangers gave her a hundred bucks every day.

  “Take care,” I said as we turned to leave.

  “Wait!”

  We turned back to face her. She pointed with a filthy finger at a building directly across the street. It was a magnificent brown-stone with potted flowers on the stoop, red geraniums that glistened from a recent watering.

  “Do you see how those geraniums have been watered? Can you see that they’re wet?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s the wrong way to do it when a plant is in direct sunlight. You burn up the petals that way. The right thing to do is to water them at the roots.”

  I could think of nothing to say in response to this impromptu gardening lesson. Why had she told me this? Could she tell from looking at me that I was a gardener? Did she have mystical powers?

  She smiled at me and pointed at the house again. “I was born there, you see, so I do take an interest in these things.”

  I swallowed. My heart was hammering. My brain told me she could have been a crazy, delusional old lady, but my heart told me she had to be telling the truth.

  She raised her finger slightly, to indicate a higher target. “Third floor, facing the gardens out back. That was my nursery. Light blue wallpaper with angels on it. I’d fall asleep counting the angels…. A midwife delivered me. Do you know what a midwife is?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Anyway, that was my home until I left for college. I was very happy there, very happy indeed.”

  She seemed happy now, remembering it. Somewhere along the way, her life had gone horribly, unimaginably wrong, and now here she was, sixty- or seventy-something years later, back where she started. Twenty yards from the door, and a million miles from home.

  Why wasn’t she angry? Maybe the wisdom of her years told her she was lucky to have ever had it at all. Or maybe she was nuts. It amounted to the same thing.

  Lynn spoke up. I’d almost forgotten she was with me.

  “Did you play in the park when you were little?”

  The old lady’s face brightened. “Oh, yes! Let me show you something.”

  She dug into her coat pocket. Moments later she pulled out an ancient brass key that was green with tarnish and handed it to Lynn as if it were the Holy Grail. It was a large, heavy thing with a loop at one end, the kind of key that looked as if it could open a castle door.

  “Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes,” said Lynn. “It’s the key to the park, isn’t it?”

  “Right you are, child. Sadly, the locks have been changed many times since we lived here, but I like keeping it for—oh, I don’t know—old times’ sake, I suppose.”

  She took the key from Lynn, put it back in her pocket and shifted her back against the fence, in search of a more comfortable position.

  “How,” I began, and it came out like a cry, and that was as far as I got. The question was just too terrible to actually put into words. The old lady knew what I wanted to know, though.

  “It’s hard to get things,” she said, “and it’s easy to lose them.” She narrowed her eyes at us. “But I have a feeling you people already know that.”

  Lynn’s lips were trembling. She pulled me aside, out of the old lady’s earshot.

  “Give her the can.”

  “What?”

  “Give her the rest of the money.”

  “You do it, Lynn.”

  She took the can from me and squatted at the old lady’s side. “This is for you,” she said, handing it over. The old lady peeled off the lid and peeked inside at the bills. She didn’t even raise her eyebrows. Then she took the hundred I’d given her, put it in the can, put the lid back on, and stuck the can inside the many folds of her coat.

  “That’s quite a bit of money,” Lynn said gently. “You can get a room tonight.”

  The old lady smiled. “I live here,” she replied simply, as if she were stating the obvious to a child.

  It was a dismissal. We both knew it. Lynn put her arm across my shoulders as we began the walk back to Penn Station. Neither of us looked back at the old lady with six hundred bucks in a coffee can, the last of the shakedown money from a corrupt Los Angeles cop. Our glorious mission had come to a bizarre end.

  “That should last her a long time,” Lynn said.

  “Unless somebody mugs her.”

  “Who would mug a homeless person?”

  “Another homeless person.”

  “Mickey. Maybe we should go back and open a bank account for her.”

  “What?”

  “I can do it for her. It’ll take ten minutes. We’ll bring her to an HSBC and get her a checking account. You can guard her stuff outside the bank while I do it. As long as she’s coherent enough to know her name—”

  “Lynn, Lynn. Turn around.”

  She did, and the two of us looked back to the fence where th
at old lady had been. She was gone, gone, gone.

  “Oh, Mickey. Hold my hand.”

  We were close, Lynn and I, almost as close as we’d been in the old days, and that’s when I thought of one more thing to do, with my own damn money.

  “Hey, baby. You ever been up the Empire State Building?”

  “Never.”

  We looked up at it in the waning light of day, the once-tallest building in the city that lost its title when the Twin Towers went up and regained it when they came down.

  “I’ve never been up there either. Should we go?”

  “Now?”

  “It’s right here. What the hell. Let’s do it.”

  I paid for admission tickets and we took a series of elevators to the observation deck, eighty-six stories in the sky.

  The view was astounding, truly a thing to take your breath away. The sun had just set and lights were coming on throughout the city below us, which sprawled in all directions, embraced by two rivers.

  The spikes atop the gates surrounding the observation deck curved inward and down, ending in sharp points to discourage jumpers. Far below, dozens of wretched lives had been brightened by what Lynn and I had done that day.

  The air was chilly with the coming of autumn, and I was overwhelmed with hope as I embraced Lynn from behind, a deed that coaxed gentle words from her mouth, words I had to ask her to repeat.

  “I said, I’ve been here before.”

  That surprised me. “I thought you said—”

  “I didn’t think I had been here, but now it’s coming back to me…this view…oh, God…”

  She was trembling, and not from the cold or the wind. I tightened my embrace, and she did nothing to try and break it.

  “Lynn? You okay?”

  She nodded, not looking at me, and hesitated before saying, “I was here with my dad.”

  I was stunned. “Your father brought you up here?”

  “Uh-huh. I must have been five years old, maybe six. I think he had to attend some conference about fire prevention in sky-scrapers, and for some reason he took me along. I guess there was no school that day….”

  I broke my hold on Lynn, who walked to the edge of the deck and put her head against the fence, facing Ground Zero.

  “Yeah, I remember this view,” she said to the wind. “There’s no other view like it in the world, so I must have been here.”

  She turned to look at me. “It was just the two of us. I don’t know where my mother could have been, or my brothers…home, I guess.”

  Her eyes shined with sudden tears. “He said, ‘Look all around you, Princess. This is the world, and it’s all for you, every bit of it.’”

  She lowered her head and put her face in her hands. It was hard for me to imagine the man I had known ever saying anything like that to anyone.

  “I guess he loved me, in some crazy way,” she said to her hands.

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “This was before…”

  She stopped speaking, lowered her hands. Her eyes widened and narrowed in one continuous motion that told me she’d caught herself in the nick of time, stopped herself from revealing something she’d kept locked up her entire life and now, giddy from the heights and the sights, she’d nearly let out of the bag.

  “Before what?” I asked as gently as I could. She forced a smile and shrugged.

  “Before he turned into a complete asshole. Come on, DeFalco, take me home, it’s been quite a day.”

  There was more to know. She knew my secret and I had a feeling this was hers. Lynn had given me a glimpse of it, a flash of lightning that lit the landscape for an instant, but the image was gone as fast as it had appeared.

  We rode the elevators back down and were seized by a weird depression at street level. It was a blowy night. Paper cups and sheets of newspaper whirled around on the sidewalks, like ghosts with no place to go. We only had to wait a few minutes for a train to Little Neck.

  “You okay, Lynn?”

  She hesitated. “Will you stay with me tonight? If you stay with me tonight, I think I’ll be okay.”

  “Of course I’ll stay with you. I already said I would.”

  “What I mean is, I’d like to make love with you, if that’s okay.”

  If it’s okay.

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’d be…really good.”

  “You sure? If you need time to think about it—”

  “Lynn, I’ve been thinking about it since 1987. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I’d like to do it more than I’d like to do anything else in the world.”

  She held me tightly all the way home.

  Lynn checked in with the hospital while I took a shower. Her mother was still in stable condition, still unconscious. I got into the bed while she took a shower.

  Unless the world came to an end it was about to happen, this thing I’d come to believe would never happen.

  I checked under the bed, and there they were where I’d left them—a three-pack of lubricated Trojans, with an expiration date of May 2014. Was anyone really expected to carry them around for that long?

  The door creaked and she entered, her hair hanging damp, a blue terrycloth robe covering her body. I lay there on my back, my cock tent-poling the sheet. She jutted her chin toward it.

  “Are you naked under there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I have a look?”

  I pulled the blanket away like a magician revealing a rabbit-in-a-hat trick, but there was no trick, just the way I felt about her, hard and true. Then she let the robe fall to the floor, and at last I saw what I’d been dreaming about for so many years.

  It was a paradoxical body, a baffling blend of generous curves and sharp angles that made me wonder how it was possible to be so lean and so voluptuous at the same time. It really was not so different from the body I’d gazed upon at Jones Beach, except for the dark webs of wrinkles just below her eyes. I stared and stared, and only a growing sense of light-headedness made me realize I’d been holding my breath. I let it out, resumed breathing with a gasp. Lynn smiled at me.

  “So. Do I meet with your approval?”

  “You’re more beautiful than ever.”

  She got under the blanket with me and we rolled into each other’s arms, just like that. As we kissed I felt a quiver running through her, or maybe it was going through me. She bit my ear with playful restraint, took my face in her hands.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “So far.”

  “Long time coming.”

  “Yeah, but your persistence paid off.”

  “So you’re glad this is happening, right?”

  “For God’s sake, Mickey, we’re naked in bed together after twenty years of mental foreplay. Of course I’m glad this is happening.”

  Something was off. I probably knew less about women than any man in the world but I did know this woman, and I knew that something was off.

  I cleared my throat to talk about it but before I could she slipped down and took me in her mouth. The pleasure was gentle and thorough and maddening, so that I had to twist around and do her without breaking the connection, and after sixty-nining each other for what felt like forever it was at last time to see how well we did or did not fit.

  I slid my arm under the bed and pulled out the Trojans.

  “It’s okay, Mickey, you don’t need those.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You look clean to me. Are you clean?”

  “So far as I know.”

  “All right, then. I’m clean, too. Let’s trust each other on that.”

  My God, sex without a condom! Lynn and I were going to christen this voyage by going skin to skin!

  It was too much. Suddenly there wasn’t enough air in the room. I got up to open the windows as wide as they could go, and the curtains puffed back and forth with cool breezes. Lynn lay on her back, her hair spilling all over the sheets in a blond cornucopia. I knelt before her, as if t
o confess my sins, but I’d already done that. She took my cock in hand and stroked it.

  “Now.”

  I let her guide it, seemingly a centimeter at a time. This was what I’d dreamed of, what I’d given up for lost. The sensation was as startling as it should have been pleasurable, and so why wasn’t it pleasurable?

  Because Lynn lay there as if she were undergoing a surgical procedure. I was breathing hard, afraid of hurting her, afraid of doing it wrong, afraid of failing to satisfy her, and mostly, mostly, afraid of her tight-shut eyes and that sudden snarl on her lips….

  “Why are you out of breath?” she asked through tight teeth.

  “I was just wondering…”

  “Wondering what?”

  I had to say it. “What have you got, a diaphragm?”

  “Oh for God’s sake!”

  She brought her knees together and I was out of her. She rolled to her side and popped up into a sitting position, clutching the sheet to her chest. I covered myself with the other half of the sheet and gazed at her face. The green flecks in her eyes seemed to be swimming like maddened tropical fish, and this, I remembered, only happened when she was enraged.

  I tried to swallow, but my mouth was cotton. “I think it’s a fair question.”

  “I’m not wearing a diaphragm, Mickey.”

  “All right, so you’re not wearing a diaphragm. It’s all right with me, Lynn. I’ll have a kid with you, if that’s what you want.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Here I was, barely able to take care of myself, offering to reproduce with Lynn on our very first time together. It was crazy, it was insane, and I meant every word of it.

  “I love you, baby. Let’s make more people like you.”

  Her eyes filmed with tears, giving the fish more room to swim, only now they weren’t swimming as fast. Her anger was dying.

  “Mickey…Jesus, you’re a sweet boy.”

  “I’ll pay you to stop saying that. All I mean is, I’d love to be the father of any kid of yours.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Well, it’d be tough, but I wouldn’t say—”

  “Mickey. Don’t you get it? I can’t have kids.”

  It was as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. I held my breath, had to tell myself to start breathing again.