by Con Lehane
“I’ll see you back at the rooming house,” I told Ntango.
Sitting alongside John in the plush Eldorado, I picked up his car phone, pretending, as my mother would have said, that I was somebody. “Does this really work?”
“Of course.”
“If I had one of these, I could call my service more often,” I said.
“What for?”
“In case my agent has called with an acting job.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Never.”
A familiar look of bewilderment passed across John’s face as he tried once more to understand why I did things for which there seemed to be no reward.
For a moment, I fiddled with the phone, then said, “This whole charade might make a pretty good movie itself. Maybe I should call my agent and offer him a part.”
“He can have mine,” said John, who hunched wearily over the steering wheel as he pulled away from the curb.
I did call my service and found that my agent hadn’t called. But there were messages from my ex-wife, who needed me to call immediately, as usual. Another from John Wolinski, saying he’d gotten tied up. He’d left a 609 number for me to call. The last call was Ernesto, who said his call was very important but didn’t leave a number.
“Why the gun?” I asked when I hung up. For some perverse reason, I didn’t tell John about his call or about Ernesto.
John’s expression hardened. “It’s a fucking jungle. You can’t ever stop watching your back.” He looked with disgust at my leg and crutches. “Even you, someone takes a pop at, for Christ’s sake.”
I wasn’t sure how to take this idea that the gunman had lowered his standards by shooting me, but I wanted out of the deal anyway. “You know, this guy Walter scares me. So does Wilson. Why don’t we drop a dime on both of them?”
John arched an eyebrow. “Yeah, and let them have Greg, too,” he grumbled. “And maybe I’ll turn you over to the union thugs. I’m the boss; I don’t need no friends. That’s only for working stiffs, right?”
Preaching, I’ve discovered, always comes back to haunt you.
Feeling gabby, for some reason, I told John about going to see Linda.
“Linda? Why’d you go see her?”
My face started burning; I could feel myself turning red. “She’s married to Ralph Ettinger now.”
John nodded, his face screwed up with distaste.
“Greg was arrested a few years ago for assaulting Ralph. Do you know anything about that?”
John shook his head. “The guy’s an asshole.”
“But why?
John shrugged his shoulders again. Then he looked at me quizzically for a moment, his expression one that had always made me feel like his little brother. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this, bro. But we’ll get it straightened out.”
He drove a few blocks more on the dimly lit, car-lined, deserted streets and pulled up across from a small one-story house, this one also set on a bed of whitish rocks. On a street of massive structures with flying bridges and picture windows, it had neither. It was just a small cinder-block house with small windows, set on a small lot, with a plain cement walk leading through the polished round stones.
“Let’s go.” John was out of the car and up the walk, so once more I hobbled after him. There was a ramp leading to the porch, which made it a lot easier for me than climbing the steps.
I don’t know what I expected, so I don’t know if I was shocked when Greg opened the door. But open it he did. I don’t know if he was surprised to see us, either. His face registered the fact that we were there with the same expression he used to greet various calamities behind the bar—a stiffening of his mouth, a clamping down of his eyebrows, a quick push with his finger to get his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose. Nothing more.
“John! Brian!” he said heartily. “This is a surprise. Come in! Come in!” This was more enthusiasm than I’d seen from Greg since I’d known him. Nothing in his voice suggested shame or fear or even consternation at being found. He acted like he didn’t know we were looking for him, like he wasn’t in hiding—like he’d never knocked a gimp off his crutches in his life.
“Do me a favor,” he said softly as he stood back to let me walk past him and into the house. “My name is Greg Peters.”
The hallway and the tiny living room off of it were as neat and polished as any bar Greg worked. The furniture was too large for the living room, a kind of fake colonial style with thick wooden frames for the couch and easy chair. But the room was as neat as pin and as clean as a cat’s whiskers, as my mother would have said. I stopped beside John at the alcove entrance to the living room while we both looked at a dark-haired woman sitting at the end of the couch. A wheelchair stood beside the couch, and I knew right away that the chair belonged to her.
“John and Brian are friends of mine, former clients,” Greg announced.
“I’m Sandra,” the woman said, holding out her hand so graciously that I felt chivalrous when I walked over and held it briefly. I liked how her hand felt, her touch. I liked her; there was a lively light in her dark eyes. She seemed sensitive. Some feeling came from her that I connected to right away. She held out her hand to John also, who, dimples flaring, swooped down on her like Sir Galahad, while I, awkward and flustered, moved aside. The wheelchair loomed up before me like an iceberg; I didn’t know if I should acknowledge it or not, say I was sorry she was crippled or pretend it was no big deal. I know I kept looking at it and then at her.
Big John had no such difficulty. He sat down in the chair and began wheeling himself across the living room. “This yours?” he asked her.
Laughing, she said yes.
“It’s hard work,” said John. “Don’t your arms get tired?”
“Not when you’ve used it as long as I have.” She smiled, but sadness like wisps of her black hair drifted across her eyes.
“Do you two auger doom from Greg’s secret life?” she asked, and I almost dropped right there. John didn’t miss a beat with the wheelchair. In fact, he was doing a wheelie as she spoke. She made a grand effort at happiness, but I saw the rage and bitterness, and also despair. Beneath the placid smile and the self-control lurked anger much larger than any I had ever felt.
“How about a drink?” said Big John.
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” said Greg Peters. “I don’t drink.”
That did it even for Big John. He crash-landed his wheelchair into the solid-oak coffee table.
“It’s been a long time,” I told Greg, although it had been only about twenty-four hours since he’d pushed me over in the hotel lobby.
“Too long,” said Greg with more of his fake enthusiasm. He looked at me steadily, a rather superior pose for someone in his position, I thought.
“It’s good to see you, too. How’ve things been going?”
He smiled ruefully. “‘My grief lies onward and my joy behind.’”
John danced in place during all this, like he was waiting for the bell, then gestured with his head toward the door. “Maybe we could go out on the porch for a minute,” he said. “Brian can entertain Sandra.”
Greg’s eyes narrowed, his brow wrinkled, and he pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose again. His eyes searched out mine, lighted there for a few seconds, reminding me we were stand-up guys who watched each other’s back, that if it came to taking the rap, each of us would take it silently and alone.
“You take my husband’s Shakespeare in stride,” Sandra said when Greg closed the door behind him and John.
“I met Greg at an audition, years ago. I guess it’s something we have in common.” I was immediately captured by Sandra’s eyes. The sympathy and kindness in her manner drew me to her, so, knowing her less than five minutes, I was ready to pour out my heart. I don’t talk to people about acting—the one thing besides Kevin I really care about. Talking about it seems self-indulgent, like feeling sorry for myself. But I told Sandra more in those few minutes than I�
��d told anyone ever before. I just opened up and babbled about what it was like to struggle for nearly twenty years and yet have nothing to show for it.
Her own suffering, I realized, gave her sympathetic understanding, rather than the bitter jealousy it would have given me. Already, I wanted to stay with her. Her deeply tanned skin perfectly matched her dark eyes and hair. Her face had lines at the corners of her eyes and the corners of her mouth—she wasn’t a child. Her neck was long and graceful and her face thin, with the bone structure slightly angular, so that you wanted to touch her face, like you might want to touch a statue when looking wasn’t enough and you needed to feel it.
I guess I looked at her for a long time, because she said, “Do I make you nervous?” Her eyes were gentle, but they persistently followed mine. “It’s okay. I make most people uncomfortable. They don’t know whether to notice that I’m crippled.”
“I noticed,” I said stupidly. This was only part of what made me nervous, though; the rest was the strength of the attraction I felt for her. I think she noticed; maybe she felt it. But she changed the subject.
“Greg doesn’t want me to talk about his work, so I won’t ask you. But that’s strange, don’t you think, keeping his work secret?”
“Naw,” I said, hoping to get off this subject, too, before I got myself in trouble. “Work sucks. Why talk about it at home? I don’t blame Greg. It’s not like he’s Monsieur Verdoux or anything.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I certainly hope not.”
Realizing this, too, might be dangerous ground, I tried again. “You’re from here? I mean you grew up here?”
With some difficulty, Sandra changed her position on the couch and then nodded. “I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I love the ocean and the beach.”
I nodded. “What I like about it here is that it’s not part of the mainland.”
She laughed lightly. “I never thought of that. Why would you care?”
“I figure maybe you’re less responsible for all the crap that takes place back on the mainland if you don’t actually live on it … . Technically, I don’t live on the mainland, either.” She looked at me blankly. “Manhattan,” I said.
She smiled again and said, “‘No man is an island.’”
Her face took on that angelic, searching one’s memory look of a fourth grader in a spelling bee. She recited:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
Her voice was melodic and perfectly tuned to the words.
“You’re a poet,” I said.
Her face flushed, and she looked quickly away from me, casting her eyes down into her lap to fiddle with a small quilt that was tucked around the top of her legs. “That wasn’t me. That’s John Donne.”
Obviously, my village idiot pose was convincing. “I know. But you are a poet. I can tell from your voice, the way you say the poem.”
She looked up, her eyes glistening; then just as quickly she was fiddling with her quilt again. “I have,” she said. “I do.” She looked up again. Though she was still embarrassed, her face was brightly happy. “I mean, I write poems. But that doesn’t make me a poet.”
“Oh? If not that, what? Out-of-work actor, out-of-work poet, who’s to throw stones?”
She laughed again, a happy tinkling sound.
When John and Greg came back in from the porch, I didn’t like the strain I saw in their faces. Hard faces on hard men. Sandra saw it, too—it was the flicker of fear in her eyes that made me turn to look. She was no fool. After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, with John and Greg standing next to each other in the hallway like strangers on a subway platform, John asked for the bathroom, so I was alone with them.
Sandra kept her eyes on Greg’s face, worrying at him until he spoke.
But he spoke to me. “‘One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,/So fast they follow.’” Once more, remembering he’d asked me to call him the night Aaron was killed and I hadn’t, I felt like he wanted to tell me something.
“If I can help, call me in New York,” I said. “I’m in the phone book.”
When John emerged from the bathroom, he looked us over like a disapproving parent. “We need to get going,” he said, already galloping toward the door. My eyes met Sandra’s for a second. Hers seemed to ask for help, too. When my eyes met Greg’s, his were so sorrowful, I felt guilty.
In the car, John sat like the Sphinx, so I didn’t interrupt the silence. Soon enough, I would know what was going on—too soon probably. I watched the endless sky as it stretched out toward the sea on the far side of the island. We were a couple of blocks from the ocean.
“I want to see the ocean,” I told John.
He was preoccupied. “The what?”
“The ocean. I want to see the fucking ocean. It’s right over there.”
John turned toward me. “Why do you want to see it?” he asked suspiciously.
“Because it’s there. It’s one of the wonders of the world. If you got a chance to go see the ocean, you should go see it.”
“You want to look at the goddamn ocean? Now? With all this shit coming down!”
“Now! Especially now!” Our eyes met. “You used to sit and look at the ocean, too. You used to know something about your goddamn soul.”
Big John stared at me; then he seemed to let go. At the next corner, he turned and drove to where the street dead-ended against the sand dunes.
Without speaking, we climbed out of the car. The horizon glowed pale blue; the white-capped slate gray waves rushed against the beach and slid away again. John walked ahead. I hobbled on behind him, until my right crutch sank too far into the sand and I went headfirst down the slight decline of the sand dune, landing on my forehead and my shoulder while the errant crutch whacked me on the side of the head for good measure. John halted his trek to look back at me sprawled on the sand.
“You need some help, bro?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. When I got myself somewhat righted, I made my way a little bit closer to the water, then sat on the sand, watching the horizon for the paleness that came well before the rising sun. John stood at the edge of the sea, looking like he would command the waves to cease. I expected he would tell me what he’d talked to Greg about sooner or later. For now, he was digesting it. I admired his ability to meet a situation squarely without bemoaning his fate. I would sit around whining, “Oh no, why me? Why now? How could this happen?” Big John expected nothing from the gods; life’s unfairness never surprised him. Instead of whining, he worked out a plan. This is what he was doing now, standing in front of the ocean while the battle raged: life against him, him against life.
For the first time since I’d known him, John looked small to me. Against the massiveness of the ocean, he seemed downright tiny. After a while, he came and stood over me, then sat down. His awkward, lumbering movements, as, grunting like an old walrus, he bent himself this way and that to park himself beside me finally on the sand, regained for him his real-life stature.
“Well, bro, there’s the ocean. Did communing with your soul tell you anything?” He spoke softly, so even though he was putting me on, I could tell he wished it had.
“Not a fucking thing,” I told him. “A couple of days ago, I was tending bar, minding my own business. Then you came along. Since then, I get thrown in jail and shot in the leg. Greg knocks me down. You climb into my car and stick a gun in my ribs. I don’t know if I have a job, and even if I have a job, I can’t work because I can’t walk. I should have listened to Pop and not gotten mixed up with people who are slicker than I am.”
Big John watched the sky over the ocean; it was still dark but now had a hint of gray. “We got a lot of trou
ble,” John said.
“I thought I just said that.”
John ignored the comment. “I know now what was going on. These guys tried to do something on their own. They didn’t cover their bases; they didn’t make the right connections. Anything could have happened. Still could.” John shook his head. “Now I gotta undo this mess. But it ain’t goin’ to be easy. I made that gig for that stupid bastard at the Ocean Club, and I had something better lined up. But he had to go off doing this.”
“What did he go off doing, and what do you have to do with it?”
“Me? What I got to do with it? … Nothin’ … . Nothin’ and everything. Greg decides he should be top banana. And he got this Sandra thing going on. Can you believe this? Something like this was going on for years, and I never knew.”
“You didn’t know? Didn’t you know Greg was using a fake name?”
John nodded. “That part I knew. He said it was because of income tax he owed, so I didn’t think nothin’ of it. But this Sandra thing? It’s goin’ on for years, and we don’t know anything about her, and she don’t know anything about who he is and that he bartends in New York? … He’s a goddamn drug-dealing drunk and she thinks he’s some kind of pillar of the community—Mr. Fucking Prim and Proper? How do you figure that?” John’s eyes were question marks. And I was baffled, too. Ntango was right: Greg had a double life. But why? As far as I knew, he didn’t have anything to hide from—at least not until recently.
“You didn’t know anything about this?” I asked John again.
John shook his head, as if he still didn’t believe it. “Not until a few hours ago. I ran into one of Greg’s old navy buddies. He said, ‘Greg’s probably at Sandra’s,’ like I should know all about it—and I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Greg’s been with her for years,’ he said. So I’m trying to cover myself, actin’ like I forgot and tryin’ to find out the address. The guy musta thought I was a complete fool.”