Windy City

by Scott Simon

  This will pass. Love to your family. What can I do? Sunny

  His phone trembled and lit up with Vera's number—from her firm's office on south LaSalle—as he reached his own name. Sunny held her voice next to his left ear as she announced without preamble, “This is a tragedy. I regret that this unwonted intrusion of gossipmon-gers into a public official's private life has caused pain and embarrassment. My thoughts and prayers are with Alderman Agras and his family at this difficult time.”

  “Exactly right,” said Sunny.

  “I also think that I just promised to make Rod Abboud ambassador to the Vatican.”

  “Can the mayor of Chicago do that?”

  “If Rod has such confidence, why disappoint? I also promised Wandy Rodriguez a TEZ for a lot on west Belmont. I promised Cassie Katsoulis to name a new vest-pocket park on Kedzie after Colonel Mordechai Frizis, the hero of the battle of …” Sunny could hear Vera shuffle papers, rustle coffee cups, and clink a pen against an ashtray.

  “Kalama.”

  “Eight votes on the block, Vera,” he told her. “We can get six— maybe even Arty's. As much as I despise taking advantage of tragedy.”

  “A person shouldn't be in politics if he doesn't know how to take advantage of tragedy, Sunny,” she said crisply. As she spoke, Sunny saw a message flash in above the one he had just sent to Arty Agras.

  Were fine. in bed. Mss's from vera linas ivan janet jane. facing cheewowows in morning.

  Can I come over? Sunny proposed.

  In my pjs sunny, Arty Agras thumbed back. What would people say?

  It was a stroke after eleven when Sunny turned the key and opened his door into a dark apartment. Rula and Rita were not home. Sheldon snoozed in a shadow of the pyramid of mail on the disordered dining table. Heat hissed in the front hallway. White light from the street and snow glowed against the drawn white shades in the windows.

  Sunny snapped the switch in the hallway and Sheldon scowled and twitched, putting a gray paw with pink pads over his eyes. Sunny snapped the light off. He crept quietly into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and found a quarter bottle of South African white, capped with tin foil. “Didn't I teach them better?” he groused. He felt Sheldon circle his heels. He felt Sheldon's small, warm head butt his ankle. He found a carton of blueberry yogurt with the foil pulled back, took a smudged spoon from the sink, and held down a brittle gobbet for Sheldon. His small tongue lapped and scratched.

  Sunny took Sheldon under one arm, the uncrowned bottle in the other, and turned down the hall. He passed his daughters’ room: both beds were empty, unmade, and turbulent with mussed covers, outcast shoes, and rejected blue jeans. He stopped at the bathroom, lifted the lid with a toe, and put the bottle down on the ledge of the sink while he did his business. Sheldon whirred and tweeted softly while he watched Sunny's arc and nosed forward as Sunny rubbed his fingers under the spigot.

  Sunny finally sat down heavily on his bed, his back against the wall.

  Sheldon circled his lap and outstretched legs, before scrunching into a pillow while Sunny reached over into a plastic case and took out one white oblong pill for cholesterol and a small yellow aspirin for his circulation. He upended the bottle to swallow. He heard a couple of isolated guffaws, a man and a woman, ringing in the street. He heard the Lawrence Avenue bus groan as it pulled across Broadway. He heard the bones of the building under the floorboards creak in the cold and wind, and as he took a second swig of wine he saw a few lashes of Elana's nut-brown hair against the dark of the doorway, and then had to sit back and clutch his chest while his face blazed and his eyes burned when he realized that there were still sounds in the walls and floors that brought her back.

  Sunny's phone trembled and danced in front of the blue numerals on the alarm clock next to the bed. It said 11:24. It was Linas.

  “Arty. Arty, Arty, Arty,” he announced. “Moussaka a tois. Poor bastard.”

  “I sent him a message.”

  “Me too.”

  “He told me was doing okay.”

  “Me too.”

  “The depressing truth, your lordship, is that there's almost no sex in political sex scandals,” said Linas. “Nobody has the time. Nobody has the oomph. You see someone, you flirt, you send off sparks. She writes something on a napkin. But before the night is over you've got twenty business calls to return. You've got a stack of cards thick as a gin rummy deck in your pocket that's stiffer than a boner. And you've got to get to sleep because you've got to get up early. For a prayer breakfast.

  “Bill Clinton: What was that all about?” asked Linas. “A couple of licks of the popsicle stick. I got better nookie than that in the seventh grade. At a Catholic school. Most powerful man in the world, and he can't get a full-court, bow to stern, stash the sausage, tickle her tonsils, ‘Watch out, thar she blows!’ screwing. Most of the time, he just talked dirty on the phone while bombing the wrong pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Textbook frustration, I'd say. JFK? A collector, not a lover. Marilyn, Angie, Jayne, Judy—his back was so bad, he was so hopped up on uppers, downers, and diet pills, all he could do was lay back, blast off in his shorts, and fall asleep before they unhooked their Wonderbras. From Jack Profumo to Bill Clinton, it's all about phone calls, messages, secrets, and signals. Not sex. Even French politicians don't get laid as much as they'd like you to think. Their mistresses cook them coq a vin and let them fall asleep on the couch watching soccer. Ooo-la-la, le head butt! They conk out, wake up at three, and go home to their wives. You get so tired in politics, you dream about a good night's sleep, not a good night's screwing. Sex in politics? It's politics. It's about winning, not doing. Poor Arty—he probably just wanted someone to rub his neck.”

  “What an extraordinary confession, Linas.”

  Sunny had let his eyes droop to darken the room. Sheldon kneaded his elbow and bent his small, ashen head into Sunny's shoulder. If a wink could be heard over a phone, Sunny heard one now from Alderman Slavinskas.

  “Exception proves the rule, lordship.”

  “What are you going to pull tomorrow?”

  “I can't say,” he answered after a pause. “Promised not to.”

  “I think I know,” said Sunny. “I think I have the what, when, and where. But not the who or how. You sure that's what you have to do?”

  “Gave my word, lordship.”

  Sunny understood: Linas's position was not subject to disclosure or revision. Giving your word was different from making a promise. A man could leave promises behind. Circumstances changed. Events intervened. A politician could promise, “I'll do everything I can to help,” or, “I'll support you every way I can,” and adults understood that the expression was like pledging, “I'll always love you,” to a sixth-grade girlfriend. The phrase came with a time stamp.

  But a man's word was hard currency. It meant “I'll vote for you tomorrow,” “I'll hire you today,” or “I'm with you if that happens.” A pol who went back on his word had no credit and couldn't do business. He might as well sleep in a box on the street. Linas had been in politics for twenty-five years, and though he had lied, cheated, and connived in almost any given week, Sunny had never heard a complaint—Linas would hardly have lasted if he had—that he had broken his word.

  “Hey, where are you calling from?” was all Sunny asked.

  “My deck.”

  Linas lived on south Mozart, a street lined with neat miniature lawns in front of small, spotless, brick houses with screen doors in the back, barbeque grills in the driveways, and inflatable pools filling small backyards. But the alderman's home stood four floors tall on a corner plot. It held a two-story living room, a four-car garage with a wine cellar below (including a 1787 Château d'Yquem that had once rested on Al Capone's wine racks), huge, color-dribbling Leroy Neiman oil portraits of Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, and Abraham Lincoln, a cedar-clad cigar humidor the size of an ice cream truck, a basement swimming pool, and a dazzling roof deck from which the Slavinskas family and guests could behold the light
s of the Loop blinking sixty blocks north.

  “Must be cold out there,” said Sunny.

  “Got a Montecristo to keep me warm,” said Linas. “And a radiator lamp designed by the guy who keeps the Bears toasty along the sidelines. Just me and the view out here. Quite something. Even late on a Sunday night.” Linas paused to dispatch a pole of smoke into the frosty air. “The light shoots up from the streets and skyscrapers and seems to freeze in the clouds. It's the Magic Kingdom. It's Oz. It's Never-Never Land. Next time you're here, lordship, we'll ditch the others, come up here, and fire up a couple habanos.”

  “I'll look forward to that,” said Sunny softly.

  “Rosie knows a gal from the gym,” Linas announced. “Acquisitions and mergers. Just divorced. Smart, pretty, funny. Natural blonde— they're in the locker room together. Unnatural bazooms—she's had them installed, like new kitchen cabinets. To say, ‘Can you believe the bastard left these behind?’ I've seen this gal on a NordicTrack, Sunny. You'll want to send flowers to her surgeon.”

  Sunny chuckled mildly and said, “I don't think I'm ready. I saw Elana tonight. Just a few minutes ago,” he explained quietly. “A dark flash in the doorway. I thought …” It was as if Sunny's voice had been running on a track that just ran into a gravel road. Linas paused until he could hear Sunny clear his throat.

  “She stopped in to say hello, lordship,” he said. “That'll happen for a while. A man who loses his right arm still feels his hand and fingers twitch. He reaches out to touch something before he remembers that he can't. You never—you're never meant to, I guess—make a complete recovery. Just smile back, lordship. Blow her a kiss. Sleep happy.”

  A longer pause fell between them while Linas leaned back, Sunny closed his brimming eyes, and a Red Line train pulled away from the Lawrence Avenue platform, its steel wheels screeching with swarms of sparks.

  “You know, I'm not from here,” Linas said finally.

  “Good God no,” said Sunny. “I always thought you were found in the tall grass, like a Pottawatomie babe.”

  “Novelty, Ohio,” he explained.

  “Novelty?”

  “No shit.”

  “Novelty?”

  “Near Cleveland. Near nowhere. Came here when I was three.”

  “Novelty, Ohio.” Sunny pronounced the town as if it were a name on a topographical map of the moon. “Imagine if you'd stayed.”

  “Ouch,” said Linas.

  “Yeeow,” said Sunny.

  “Great fucking town you've got here, mister,” said Linas. “Leastways, to a small-town boy like me.”

  Sunny had been asleep for an hour before he felt Sheldon press his ear with his wet nose, as if he were trying to call an elevator. He let Sheldon lick the outside of his ear in a slow, deliberate circle, as if Sheldon were cleaning it for some inspection. Sunny opened his eyes halfway.

  Sheldon's blue-rimmed eyes glimmered in the dark. His blunt gray paws grazed the midnight stubble on Sunny's chin. The blue numerals on the clock flipped to 1:04. He heard Rula and Rita giggle and hush at the other end of the hallway and decided to pretend that he was asleep. But his feet in his shoes suddenly felt as if they'd been filled with sand. His slacks wound around his legs like a snarled garden hose. Sunny sat up straight and tried to lean forward, but Sheldon pushed him back with his small pink nose. He smiled and put a palm against Sheldon's gray head.

  “You know, Sheldon,” he whispered. “The same letter could mean different things. You'd get a note from the mayor saying, ‘Please hire this man,’ but know you could ignore it. Or you could get the same note and know to help. Someone could get a note saying, ‘I support this man, give him money,’ and they'd know they could throw it away, or the same note—exact same words—and know that the mayor really wanted them to do it. You know the difference?”

  Sunny drew his lips next to Sheldon's cheek and spoke just loudly enough to brush the small gray hairs standing in the white of the cats’ ears.

  “The ink, Sheldon,” he whispered. “Black ink meant to do as he asked. Hire the guy, give him money. Blue-black ink, you knew you could ignore it, it was just for show. But the poor bastard in the note never knew the difference.”

  MONDAY MORNING

  Sunny found his daughters by following the echoes downstairs into the kitchen. He turned the corner in time to be thrown back by a blast of guffaws. Sgt. Gallaher quickly unwound her tall, trousered legs, scraped back her chair, and stood, tucking the last gasp of a laugh into her chin.

  “Am I the punch line?” asked Sunny.

  Sunny thought the sergeant's face simmered again. Eldad stood and extended his hand.

  “Good morning, alderman,” he said, and inclined his head toward the sergeant. “She's a pistol.”

  “Yes. Bang-bang,” said Sunny.

  Rula and Rita stayed seated, while Matina poured out a cup of coffee for Sunny on the counter next to the grill.

  “Diego says we should consider Columbia Business School,” said Rita. She had put her long black hair back into braids that she had taken care to place across the front of her shoulders along the line of a pearly gray sweater that had belonged to her mother. “He says that with our backgrounds, we could do deals all over the subcontinent and Middle East. It's a fertile crescent of opportunity.”

  “That's why we were a little late last night,” Rula added. She wore a high-necked burgundy sweater that Elana had worn to school meetings because she thought its slim form suggested youth, while the high collar reassured teachers of seriousness.

  Sunny paused while Matina added a thimble of skim milk to his coffee, nodded thanks, and took a sip.

  “With your fertile knowledge of Hindi and Punjabi,” he told them, “you should be able to tell any cabdriver anywhere in the world, ‘Starbucks, please, chop-chop.’”

  Sgt. Gallaher broke into a soft smile while Rula floundered in her seat from side to side, and Rita flailed with her hands for Sunny's attention.

  “India is the largest English-speaking country in the world, Pap-paji,” she said. “You've always told us.”

  “Well you might try studying a little English, too,” he said, and then his voice softened.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “Just a little tired and being an ass. You can be anything you want to be. Your mother and I always said that. Any homework I can pretend to understand? Or were you too busy doing deals?”

  His daughters exchanged squishy rueful looks that Sunny began to notice included Sgt. Gallaher.

  “Not exactly,” said Rita.

  “No,” said Rula. “We thought—Sgt. Gallaher suggested it actually—that we'd go into City Hall with you.”

  “To see your day as mayor,” said Rita.

  “I'll write the note,” Sgt. Gallaher came in from the counter behind Sunny. “For school. A field trip, a civics lesson. ‘Rula and Rita Roopini were absent so they could watch their father be mayor until noon.’”

  Sunny frowned. He put his knuckles to his chin and scrunched his forehead before saying, “Three ballots, I'd guess. That should keep me on the throne until nearly one. Let's stay down for lunch in Greek-town.”

  His daughters pushed back their chairs and sprang to their feet, snapping their fingers, chanting and cheering, “Opah! Opah!”

  “We really want to go, Pappaji,” said Rula, while Rita tossed her braids behind her shoulders—the gesture was distressingly flirtatious and startled Sunny—and said, “Since Sheldon can't.”

  Sunny decided to make dosas. “Tiene gusto?” he asked Wilmer, and “Tiene gusto?” he asked Matina. She was Greek, but they spoke kitchen Spanish together.

  “Naddd-ah,” she trilled.

  “Potatoes, onions, and chilis,” Rita called out.

  “Add cheese for me,” said Rula, who then turned around to the counter. “But make one for Sgt. Gallaher!” she said. “Sgt. Gallaher should get the first.”

  The sergeant shook her large, dark head. A sable spray of hair fell against her neck like a fat feather.<
br />
  “I'm on duty,” she demurred. She'd worn a red and black scarf that day, knotted just below the neck with a small silver band, which her fingers seemed to run up and down, like changing messages on a signal flag.

  “No dosas on duty?” said Sunny. “I'd never heard …” and as Sunny strode toward the scalding grill, Sgt. Gallaher pulled the ring down to just above her belt.

  “Okay, sir. One.”

  “One done right is all you'll need,” said Sunny.

  Matina stepped up with a green apron she pulled around his white shirt and silver tie. The apron bore a flaking yellow seal of Local 81 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Sunny held his hands, abracadabra style, over the small tubs of chopped ingredients that Wilmer and Nelson had prepared.

  “Cheese, carrots, chilis, peanut butter, whatever,” said Sgt. Gallaher. “Nothing special, no trouble.”

  Sunny ran a splash of water on his fingers and dribbled it onto the griddle. The water went whoosh then splat and quickly steamed into bubbles, which danced and disappeared.

  “No trouble at all, sergeant,” he announced over his shoulder above a new commotion of bubbles as he squirted a slick of corn oil over the hot silver surface.

  “The key is touch and timing. I made my first dosa—oh mercy in my father's place on Brick Lane, just before we came here. Young boys in the Amazon, I suppose, slay a jaguar.”

  Sunny dipped a tin ladle into the large white tub of rice and lentil batter, which had been churned and fermented overnight. He swirled a line of the batter onto the grill, holding it, his daughters noticed, just a little higher than usual for Sgt. Gallaher.

  “When I was a teenager, we counted one Sunday,” he said. “I think I made one hundred and two in an afternoon.”

  “A lot of hot work,” Sgt. Gallaher called out above the escalating sizzle. Sunny smoothed the batter with the butt end of the ladle over and over, into an oval about the size of a football.

  “You know the worst part of making so many dosas?” Sunny asked as he worked the ladle slowly up, down, and around. “Seeing so many bits and pieces come back, with the nice brown edges that I strived to get. You want to send them back out and say, ‘You left the best stuff, don't you know?’ Maybe it was my first lesson in politics. You can never tell what sticks with people. You can figure out how to bring peace to Jerusalem, but if you ever voted for a bus fare increase … Okay now, you can't lift the edges to check the browning,” Sunny announced. “Or it will be lighter on that side. You stare into the batter and watch the bubbles. See? One, two. Now it's six, eight, then they begin to sprout all over. The smell should just be opening in your nose. You sprinkle the potatoes and onions over the inner two-thirds of the oval. The bubbles come quick now. You add the chilis last, so they don't get soggy. You hold off for a moment. You think, ‘Got to flip it now,’ but you hang back for the count of one … two!”