Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  “I am in love with old buildings,” Tolya added. “I like to buy everything. You should buy something,” he said to me now.

  “What with?”

  “I help,” he said.

  I said leave the money to me in your will. He laughed.

  “You’re older than me, you bastard,” he said. “You’ll die before me. You’ll be fifty before me.”

  “Yeah, by three measly years.”

  “Four,” he said. “And coming soon.”

  Maxine watched Tolya. She had kissed him eagerly when he gave her the flowers, then drawn back, wary, worried she had been too effusive; like a little girl she was uncertain. Odd, because she was more of a grown-up then I ever was. She looked a lot younger, but she was thirty-eight, a single mother with two children who were almost teenagers; she was good at her job; she didn’t take a lot of crap from people.

  At her job in the forensics lab where she worked, she had seen more than anyone should ever have to on and after 9/11. She saw the bodies, but also the body parts. She had waited for pieces of her own husband, but nothing ever turned up.

  Still, now, in front of Tolya she was shy, girlish, almost timid.

  Max had always been unsure about him because she thought he felt that she didn’t measure up to Lily Hanes. She felt Tolya had wanted me to marry Lily.

  Lily was gone, though. Not part of my life anymore. Tolya leaned down and kissed Maxine again, and grinned, and moved back into the crowd.

  “What did Tolya give you?” she said.

  I looked at the envelope still in my hand. “God knows,” I said.

  “Open it.”

  “Here?”

  “Sure,” Maxine said. “Don’t you want to look?”

  I said, “I’m scared maybe he gave us money, I mean like those mafia weddings where they give money for the little silk purse, and I wouldn’t know what to do, keep it, give it back?”

  Maxie said, “You’ve had a lot of champagne, honey. Anyway they give the girl the money for the purse, she holds the silk purse. Also you’ve seen way too many movies. Open it.”

  I opened it. There were two tickets to Paris, first class, a note from Tolya and keys to an apartment he had and a picture of it. I looked at the dates on the tickets, but they were open and good any time. Maxine took them from me and stared at them.

  “My God,” she said. “Is it OK to take it?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Sure I do.” She sounded hesitant.

  “What is it? Come on, tell me.”

  “I’ve never been out of the country.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t tell you because it didn’t come up and I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of hick, and me and Mark, we talked about maybe going to Canada, or even Ireland some time, but it never happened.” Shyly, she added, “I finally got a passport last spring, though.”

  “Yeah? How come?”

  “I got it when I thought maybe we, me and you, we’d go someplace together.”

  “Where did you have in mind?” I said. “Where would you like to go?”

  “I don’t know. Russia. Israel. Some place connected with you, or some place you lived, or something. Shit. Never mind.” She blushed.

  “But Paris will be OK?”

  “Shut up.” She kissed me. “We could go if you can get the time,” she said. “We could do it. Couldn’t we, Artie? Our next vacation. The girls could stay with my mom or something.”

  “We’ll go for sure,” I said, and added, “I can see your mother is waving at you so crazy she looks like she missed her bus. On the other side of the room near the bar.”

  Max said, “Am I OK? I’m not wrinkled or anything?”

  “I think you look gorgeous. I can’t figure out why the hell you married me, but I’m not asking, and you look really great.”

  “But not wrinkled.”

  “Not wrinkled. I love the dress. The orchid didn’t wilt, your hair is perfect, your mascara isn’t running, even though you cried in front of the judge, and I love you.”

  “I did not cry,” she said.

  “OK, allergies.”

  “So I better go inside and deal with my mom, and my nana who looks like she’s going to fall down, I mean she’s eighty-five and she’s pretty good, but she likes a few drinks, you know. Honey?”

  “What?”

  “My mom’s fine about us coming down to the shore, there’s plenty of space. I’ll take the kids tomorrow or the day after, OK, and then you can come and meet us Thursday, right? You’ll come though, right, like we planned? I mean you’ll come to Jersey, won’t you? They want that, the girls. So do I. Artie?”

  She went on making plans, arranging domestic details. I realized I had stopped listening.

  “Look, I better get over to my family, before my mom and my nan and my ex-mother-in-law kill each other with kindness, like they say,” she said, and glanced out of the window. “You know, my grandpa sold eggs down around here some place. He was an egg man, you know? I don’t remember him real well at all, but I remember the eggs, so many of them in one place.”

  I watched her go and realized I was still holding the envelope Tolya had given me. There was a box in it that contained a watch, thin as a dime, on a black strap, one like Tolya wore that I’d admired. I put it on.

  I thought how lucky I was, lucky to make it to New York, lucky to get Maxine, lucky to have friends, as lucky as the guy with the winning lottery ticket. I could have been a cop in Moscow taking petty bribes to put food on the table, but I was here, in New York City. I went to thank Tolya for the watch.

  “To you, Artyom,” he said and drank some of the champagne in his glass.

  “I love the watch. Thank you. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “More beautiful than me?”

  “Yes.”

  He held out his arm. “Same like mine. This makes us brothers.”

  “We already are,” I said, and thought if you lived long enough, and like me you had no kids of your own, your parents dead or dying, like my mother who had Alzheimer’s, what you had were friends.

  “You’re thinking of your mother?” Tolya asked and I nodded. He knew. His own mother had died a few months earlier.

  “I am planning to drink much much more,” he added. “Please help me.”

  “Yes,” I said and raised my glass.

  We drank.

  “I see you looking distracted at your own wedding, I know you’re on a case. What? You need help?”

  I thought about Sid McKay. It wasn’t a case.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  Tolya went to greet some guy who had just arrived. I felt someone hovering. When I turned around, Sonny Lippert was standing near me, holding a square box.

  I wanted to ask him about Sid. Sonny knew everyone in New York, but the box was an offering and I kept my mouth shut about Sid, at least for now.

  I said, “Thanks, Sonny, that’s really nice. You want me to get Maxine so we can open it together?”

  He shook his head. “No, man, it’s for you. OK?”

  Sonny Lippert, who I worked for a lot of the time, was small and tightly wound, his hair still dark like a tight cap over his head; I figured he probably dyed it. Sonny was around sixty now. He’d been a cop, had risen up through the ranks, gone to law school, moved over to the federal prosecutor’s office, worked as a US attorney. He was driven. He was ambitious. I never knew exactly what he would do to win, to get what he wanted.

  A while back he had started up a child abuse unit that almost killed him. The revelations of what people did to children were too much, and by the time he had a heart attack in May he was up to a bottle of Scotch a day.

  A glass in one hand now, he stood awkwardly while I held the gift.

  Sonny suddenly started coughing. He shoved his glass at me. I took it. He had worked at Ground Zero right after the attack, some of the time without a mask. I waited while he turned away, head down, an
d coughed the wracking sick cough.

  People said, OK, enough with 9/11, enough. They said give it a break, stop talking about it, get over it. There’s other stuff now, they said.

  It wasn’t over, though. In New York, it was part of the language. People looked up on a beautiful morning and said, “It’s a 9/11 day.” The Republicans were in town to exploit it, like all politicians. It was fixed. 9/11 was like a point on a compass where the needle got stuck; it vibrated constantly, but never moved.

  “You OK?” I said.

  “Yeah, sure. And stop looking at my drink.”

  He was supposed to stay off the booze, but I wasn’t his keeper. I gave him back his glass.

  “You ever hear of a guy named Sidney McKay, Sonny?”

  “Yeah, sure, everyone knew McKay, wasn’t he the city editor at the Times once, something like that? He worked for some of the other papers, TV, did books, a black guy, right? He still alive?”

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t he be?”

  “I don’t know why I said that, yeah, I don’t know, man. Something. Some kind of trouble. So open the fucking box, man,” Sonny added. “I need to sit down.”

  We sat on a couple of chairs. Sipping the drink, Sonny waited while I unwrapped the gift. His eyes never left me as I opened the box, pulled out some tissue paper and then lifted out a Lucite cube.

  “Fuck, Sonny, I mean, I don’t know what to say.”

  “It’s OK. You don’t need to get all fucking teary-eyed, man,” he said and drank a little of his Scotch. “I wanted you to have it. You’ll be around after I’m dead and I couldn’t trust anyone else with it.”

  I held up the Lucite cube and turned it around so I could see the baseball suspended inside. Signed by Jackie Robinson, it was a ball Robinson actually hit during the first season he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the first black man in major league baseball. He was Sonny Lippert’s childhood idol. He had showed the ball to me a million times in his office, talking with a kind of religious fervor about the Brooklyn Dodgers and Robinson.

  When Sonny split up with his wife Jennifer and moved into an apartment by himself, all he brought were his books and the baseball. Lately he’d been drifting backwards into his childhood more and more, talking about Brooklyn when he was a boy. I was pretty amazed that Sonny would give me the ball.

  I said thank you and reached for his arm, and patted it because I didn’t know what else to do, and he looked uncomfortable, but pleased.

  “Yeah, OK, so I’m glad you like it,” he said and changed the subject. “You believe people living in this fucking Meat District over here? I had an uncle named Stanley who was in tongues, you know that? He made tongues here, I ever tell you how they make a tongue, man? They used to take these shrivelled tongues and they pumped them up with water so they were four times the size of a normal animal tongue, and they sold them like that. I worked summers at the tongue plant. We used to pump them full of water, all the tongues. Listen, man, your lady’s waving at you. I like her, Artie. Did I tell you? She’s good, your Maxine. I need a drink.”

  Old Maxine—Max had been named after her grandmother—was sitting on a chair, her face red, looking as thin and glazed as a piece of wax paper.

  “She had a few too many,” Max whispered. “I’m going to take her downstairs. We have a car waiting to take her home.”

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  “Thanks, Artie.”

  We rode the elevator silently, me propping up old Maxine, her concentrating on staying upright.

  In the street, I found the car and driver, a shabby beige Towncar, and I helped her in and gave the driver some extra money. Then I tried Sid on my cellphone.

  I stayed out on the street, watching people parade up and down the streets of the Meat District, preening, looking for action and waited for Sid to call me back. He wasn’t a guy who panicked. He had covered war zones and race riots. He was plenty tough and I didn’t get why he was so scared.

  I tried calling a friend from a station house out in Brooklyn, but he was in midtown overseeing barricades going up around Madison Square Garden, then I got through to someone else; he put me on hold. I waited a couple more minutes, and then Maxine came out of the building. I closed up my phone.

  “Hi.”

  “I got worried about my grandma,” she said.

  “She was fine. I put her in the car. I was just thinking. Come on, let’s go back up.”

  There was a crack of thunder, and a brief flash of lightning over towards New Jersey, but instinctively Maxine turned her head south. It was almost three years, but sudden noises in the city made her look south.

  “It’s just thunder,” I said. “Maybe I should go AWOL, honey, and come out to the shore with you tomorrow. I could find someone to cover for me. I could try.”

  “You can’t do that. We’ll be fine. You’ll meet us, and anyway we could use the overtime. You’ll come out in a few days like we planned,” she said. “I know. I still get jumpy when I hear something. We all fake being OK, and then you hear something. I know girls I work with who drink now who never had a drink before 9/11. I think about stuff and I think, I can’t do it again, Artie. That’s what scares me, that I don’t have anything left if it happens again. I figured that out during the blackout last summer, that I couldn’t go through it again.”

  August 14, the summer before, we were originally supposed to get married, me and Maxine. The day before we planned it, the city went dark. The lights went out.

  Maxine was stuck at work downtown, the girls were with her mother in Jersey. My car was in the shop and I was on the subway, sweating.

  That afternoon, getting ready to go home and get ready for our wedding the next morning, the electricity goes and I’m trapped. People around me get edgy first, then frightened; panic sets in. We wait in the dark and the heat. I start talking to the crowd, telling them it’s OK. I talk to them through the dark crowded train. Afterwards, I help people out of the car and along the narrow path in the low black tunnel and up metal stairs on to the street. I do it because I’m a cop and I have to do it; they cling to me. I feel their sweaty hands.

  It’s dark by the time I start home on foot, no lights, the streets jammed with people, some of them, people who missed trains, lugging suitcases. Everyone mills around, yelling into cellphones, gathering near yellow cabs that pull over to the curb.

  Dozens of cabs everywhere, their radios turned up loud, have become mobile communications centers. Parked everywhere, the drivers lean out of their windows and pass news along to people who listen intently, convinced at first that it’s terrorists. The next big attack, we all think; the one everybody’s been waiting for. I look up. I look for a plane.

  “Holy shit!”

  I say it out loud: holy shit. It was the first thing we heard, the first piece of TV footage when the plane hit the Trade Center, before the ball of fire. Holy shit! This time it’s only a blackout. A summer storm, power outage, a cascade. Whatever; just a fluke.

  I get home that night thinking about my first blackout in the city. 1977 was my first year in New York. I’m uptown near Columbia, people crowding around the university, everywhere the sounds of breaking glass and screaming and sirens. Feral kids roam the streets, looting stores. I see a man hump a TV set out of a store window; another carries five radios.

  I have applied to the Academy; I want to be a cop, I want New York. But that night I wonder, for the only time, if I should have gone somewhere safe and bland, Australia, Canada.

  A girl walking by takes me by the hand and we go up on the roof of her building and there are maybe twenty other people, students mostly. I spend the night there on a blanket next to the girl whose name I never learn. When I wake up, I see the others, on blankets, plastic deck chairs, sleeping bags. Their faces are young and sweet in the early light. I look out over the city and watch the sun come up. I’m hooked.

  5

  All night long, through a kind of boozy haze, I kept thinking: who are all these people? The p
arty swelled up with them, some I recognized, others seemed familiar as if from another life. By midnight, it was crowded and chaotic, and I loved it.

  “You collect people, Artie,” Lily Hanes had once said to me. “You are a wanton collector of friends. Women, but not just women. Promiscuous,” she said, laughing. “It makes you feel secure, having so many friends and you do things for them, and you ask them for favors and there’s always a trade-off, isn’t there, but you know that, don’t you?” I remembered her saying it now, and then someone tugged at my sleeve; it was Millie Crabbe, and I turned to talk to her, and thought to myself: It’s your wedding, let it all go!

  “Artie! Artie, hi! Artemy.”

  More people. People speaking English. Russian. People I knew from Brighton Beach, and their children, little kids, kids in their teens who trailed out on the terrace for cigarettes, Millie and Maria, following the bigger girls and looking awestruck by the attention they got. In a pack, they moved outdoors and their laughter seemed to linger in their wake.

  The laughter grew. There was a rise in the voices, and the heat from the crowd and the band playing something Brazilian. I was hazy with wine and trying not to think about Sid when I heard a familiar voice.

  Ricky Tae.

  It was Ricky, wearing a perfect black summer suit, incredibly handsome, smooth and lean, now in his late thirties. He lived upstairs from me. His parents had owned the building, they had helped me buy my loft. We had been close, Ricky and I, but we had somehow drifted apart. He was always on and off planes, always doing business in Asia. I hugged him. I missed him.

  “You got married,” he said. “You really did it.” He handed me a package wrapped in red paper. “From the parents,” he added. “My pop was too sick to come and my mother won’t leave him. My mother was miserable, though, not being here.”

  “I know. I talked to her. Listen, I didn’t ask anyone to the ceremony, you know, no one, it’s how Maxine wanted it.”

  “Darling, I know that,” he said. “Lot of people here,” he added, scanning the room.

  “Yeah, it’s great.”