We were late arriving in New York, though I don’t know why. Perhaps a headwind slowed us down. Stu was still next to me when we landed. Out of his incomprehension of my behavior, or perhaps out of simple boredom, he’d resumed speaking to me and I was grateful for this. Stu’s conversation increasingly revolved around his mildly pornographic fantasies—the numberless girls he slept with at the University of Illinois, the dental technician he brought to orgasm by blowing on her clitoris with that forced-air contraption dentists use to dry out your mouth, and all the bars and massage parlors where he persistently tried to heal the erotic wounds of adolescence. He sounded half like a liar and half like a middle-aged man gone mad from too many nights alone, but it was somehow agreed upon that I was obliged to listen to him
As we waited for our luggage, Stu was still with me. He was at the next stage of his approach, which was to invite me to come with him and sample the paid-for pleasures of a certain New York whorehouse. “I haven’t been there myself,” Stu said, “but a friend tells me it’s the best deal in New York. Thirty bucks for everything and no tipping. If you try to give the girls anything extra, they get pissed off at you. It’s really supposed to be nice.”
Our suitcases came out on the conveyor belt at the same time, his big blue American Tourister right next to my smaller wheat- colored case, an early inheritance from Arthur. My senses were at once blurred and jittery. Why of all the luggage in the belly of that plane did mine have to gravitate next to Stu’s? Our bags glided toward us. Stu grabbed his with a possessive snap and I picked up mine gingerly because the night before, when I was stuffing it with as much clothing as it would take, I’d somehow yanked the handle loose and now it was affixed to the case only by a few feet of kite string.
“An antique,” said Stu.
“Not yet.” I was slipping into a kind of despair. I didn’t regret causing him the small pain an hour before but the immediacy of my impulse still frightened me. I hadn’t any real idea whether or not Stu knew all about my three years in Rockville—I hadn’t had enough control over the conversation or myself to find out. And if he was in the habit of talking about me—his loneliness and sense of revenge made him a likely type to gossip about anyone who’d passed through his life—then it remained to be seen whether my meeting him was another instance of my generally crummy luck. I didn’t think he was going to call the department of corrections to report seeing me, but his knowledge made my eventual apprehension just that much more likely. He was, at the least, an eyewitness.
We walked out of the baggage area, slowly, as if we were afraid to part. “Where you staying?” Stu asked.
My plan was no more developed than to go someplace central and find an affordable hotel. “With friends,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“This guy I know.”
“Someone from Chicago?”
“No.”
“What’s his name?”
I stopped. We were in the lower level of La Guardia. The world beyond the glass doors looked to be the color blue of a gas flame. There was a line of cabs waiting and a few enormous buses.
“What’s with all the questions?” I asked.
“In case I want to call you,” Stu said with an uncle-ish shrug. “Look. I’m staying at the Taft Hotel. It’s near everything.”
I nodded. “The guy I’m staying with is named Ben Ecrest.”
“What’s the phone?”
“I don’t remember. He’s in the book, though. He lives in the Village.”
“The Village sucks,” said Stu. “Look. You want to share a cab? It’ll be about three bucks each. It’s worth it.”
“No thanks.” I waited for him to do something but he just stood there. “Ben’s coming to pick me up.”
“Oh yeah? OK. Would it be OK if he dropped me off in Manhattan? Then I could scoot up to my hotel on the subway. I could use the extra money to have fun with.”
“If you don’t mind waiting,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s going to be late. Maybe about two o’clock.”
“Well that fucks that. I’ve got a two o’clock appointment on Fifty-seventh Street. Why’s he coming so late?”
“He works.”
“Well, why don’t you give him a call and tell him you’ll come in yourself and save him the trip out here?”
My anxiety was giving way to a great weariness. It seemed that no matter what I said, Stu would have another maddening idea. I was growing comfortable with my lies and my made-up friend; I could have imagined standing there lying to Stu and dodging his questions for hours. “He works. I have no way of getting in touch with him.”
“He doesn’t have an office?”
“No.”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s a cop.”
“A cop? A New York City cop?”
“That’s right. Weird, isn’t it?”
“Weird? Are you nuts? That’s very weird. And he’s a friend of yours?”
“He’s a great guy. Not what you’d think. He smokes pot. He’s a socialist, too.”
“Leave it to Axelrod to know the one hippy cop.”
I was outfoxing myself, I realized. My phantom pal was sounding glamorous enough for Stu to forget about the plaster- of-Paris teeth waiting for him in their plush cases. I could see him considering waiting with me, pacing before the idea like a guilty man pacing in front of a porno theater, leaning toward the ticket window, pulling away. He looked out through the glass doors. The long line of people who’d been boarding the bus was almost gone now. The driver was boarding.
“I’m going to take that bus,” Stu blurted out. He grabbed my arm. “Remember. Taft Hotel. You remember my last name?”
“Neihardt.”
Stu looked pleased, even a little touched. “So call me,” he said, turning away. “Call me and we’ll do something.”
I waited a few minutes before leaving. I found a phonebook and looked up Ann’s number and address, though I knew them by heart and had also written them down on the back of my library card, which was in my pocket. But it made me feel better to see her name and I went out to hail a taxi with a portion of my confidence and determination beginning to return. I asked the driver to take me to Macy’s. I’d never been to New York and had no idea where to look for a hotel—the only hotels I knew were the fancy ones I’d read about and I knew just enough to realize they were way out of my price range. Macy’s, I thought, was central and I felt certain there’d be plenty of hotels around. The driver navigated his cab as if he were more accustomed to driving a motorcycle. We sped practically up to the bumpers of the cars in front of us, darted in and out of lanes, and managed to pass nearly everyone on the crowded Long Island Expressway. “You want the tunnel?” he called to me over his shoulder. I didn’t exactly know what he meant but I had a foolish horror of being taken for a total out-of-towner so I said yes. At one point, we were entangled in a knot of traffic that the driver could not pass through. To our right was one of those infinite graveyards that cause in us strangers something very close to disapproval—as if so many dead people reflected darkly on the city. And to our left was a big silver bus, its motors roaring, its sides splattered with mud.
After some tiresome, typical mishaps, I finally checked into the Hotel McAlpin. The lobby had quite a few people who looked even more awkward and on the loose than I felt—men in green pants and string ties, an Oriental woman with a hairdo that must have been two feet tall, a furtive pair of aging teens carrying filthy knapsacks, eating Snickers and trying not to be noticed—they looked more like siblings than lovers; they were probably part of the last wave of mass runaways and they paced the lobby not to get away from the elements (it was a balmy day) but to relieve the foreverness of being outside. In a huge conference room off the main lobby, the Scientologists were conducting a personality test for people they’d spirited off the streets. Shoppers, wanderers, and businessmen who didn’t care to return to their offices sat in foldi
ng chairs and answered questions pertaining to their emotional lives while a few grim-looking Scientology employees paced the room like proctors at a college board examination.
My room seemed like as good a place as any to commit suicide. I turned on the TV and unpacked. The phone rang and I lunged for it, my hopes wild and unformed. It was the front desk. A woman’s voice apologized: wrong number. I hung up, my desolation laced with little threads of paranoia. I took a shower and while I stood beneath the powerful hot spray, the thought that finally I was in the same city as Ann Butterfield took on a new vividness and my heart began to slam so fiercely that I pressed my hands against the wet tile wall to keep from falling. “What am I going to say to her?” I heard a voice say, and I was in a sufficient state of confusion to take a full moment before realizing the voice was my own.
It hadn’t been my plan to waste so many hours but I couldn’t control it. Sitting in my hotel room and staring at the telephone I was closer to Ann, and to Jade, than I had been in nearly four years and I was afraid that the wrong response from Ann would break the spell. Then I was seized by the idea that calling her would be totally wrong and what I should do was simply appear at her door. Her apartment was on 22nd Street.
I walked from the hotel on 34th, downtown on Avenue of the Americas. It was not the New York of movies or my imagination. Small stores, some of them permanently closed, others with plain old junk pressed against their sooty windows; Jewish cafeterias mixed in with hardware stores, old men’s saloons, and wholesale linen outlets; the streets filled with taxis and phenomenally noisy trucks; the sunlight white, blurry, and warm; the odors of cardboard and gasoline suddenly giving way to eucalyptus and carnation as I passed three solid blocks of flower shops.
I turned the wrong way on 22nd Street and walked west for a while, past handbag and ladies’ clothing factories and tiny restaurants with Spanish names lit up in green and red neon. I asked some truckers the way and they pointed me east. My shirt was wet with perspiration, but only partially from the heat. I crossed Fifth Avenue—not the Fifth Avenue of fashion models but the street of toy manufacturers—and continued down 22nd Street, past an occasional young tree and huge, stately buildings that were either empty or filled with small factories. There were no Chicago industries here, no sausages, no steel. Here they made corrugated boxes, flags and banners, and junior miss raincoats. Mixed in was an occasional townhouse with window boxes filled with geraniums and kingly grillwork on the slender windows to keep out the burglars. There was a grubby little sandwich shop and an Indian restaurant slightly below sidewalk level—it was empty except for the staff who sat reading newspapers and drinking tea at a front table. I was at Park Avenue now (and, for me, an utterly perplexing Park Avenue), standing next to a savings bank such as an early socialist balladeer might have sung about—bricks the size of mattresses, the tinkling glow of chandeliers in the high arched windows—and the addresses were climbing quickly and neatly toward Ann’s. Looking east, I saw a dark green canvas awning reaching across the sidewalk with her address printed in white. For the entire walk, I’d done my best to keep myself at bay, but now my pulse was racing and I felt a mixture of yearning and dread I hadn’t experienced since the day I stood in Judge Rogers’s chambers waiting to hear what he planned to do with me as punishment for starting the fire.
Posted in front of Ann’s building was a middle-aged man with long graying hair and thick, wire-framed glasses. He was hosing down the sidewalk, and when I passed him he redirected the stream of water just enough to allow me to walk by without getting wet. I was dizzy with anxiety; everything felt dangerous and unstable. The heavy doors leading to the lobby were covered with thick decorative grillwork, the sort I would now call Art Deco-ish but which then seemed creepily fancy. Of course those doors had been opened and closed for decades by young children and enfeebled old people, but that day it took all my strength to push them open—my arms felt as if all the bones had been removed and my blood had been exchanged for scalding weak tea. The lobby was small, cool, and lined with green marble. There were a hundred or so buzzers next to a locked glass door. As I searched for Ann’s name, my eyes moving sporadically from column to column, the glass door suddenly opened. It was a beautiful young woman. Her face was at once pale and Egyptian. Prancing excitedly at her side were two largish dogs, an Airedale of sorts and a German shepherd. The shepherd sniffed passionately at my thighs. “Judy!” the woman whispered and yanked the dog’s leash. Then, to me, she said, “Are you all right?”
I nodded but a large part of me must have been looking for help because involuntarily I placed my hand on the back of my neck and squeezed.
The woman snapped her fingers and her dogs sat. They were both panting deliriously. “You sure?” she said. “You’ve got that look.”
“What look?”
She raised her hand and cupped it the way you would to swim. Then, as she lowered it again, she made a whistling sound that ended in an explosion.
“I’m all right,” I said, glancing away. My eyes landed on Ramsey—7G.
“You’re sure? I don’t want to come back from the park and find you lying on your back.”
Oh my God she’s so beautiful, I thought. What’s happening to me? She wore wheat-colored pants and a sheer blue shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her arms were narrow and hard—long muscles, prominent veins and tendons: you’d have to be half mad not to want those arms to hold you.
“Is there a phonebooth around here?” I asked. It was clear I couldn’t just ring Ann’s bell; I would have to warn her, give her a chance to avoid me.
“Yes. Right on the corner,” She glanced down at her dogs and they stood up, their tails straight up and wagging. I struggled to open the heavy door and we walked out. The superintendent was still hosing the sidewalk. He had the water aimed at a peanut shell, which he powered along the sidewalk and finally off the curb and into the gutter. The dogs quickly licked the wet pavement. “Hello, Rolf,” said my companion.
Rolf nodded. “Hello, Miss LaFarge.”
She walked with me to the corner and stopped at an old phonebooth. “Sit Judy, sit Steve,” she said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a dime. “Here,” she said, putting it in my hand. “Do you want me to stay here while you make your call?”
“No. I’m fine. Thanks, though.”
She walked across Park Avenue with her dogs. I watched her walk away, repeating her name to myself and wanting to know her. Though loneliness and aimlessness had led me into a languid, circular friendship with a woman in Warren Hawkes’s set of friends, this Miss LaFarge awakened in me an intimation of desire that in an instant made her totally distinct from anyone I’d met or even noticed since the beginning of my exile from Jade. I felt her presence drifting within me like sunlight in a dark wood and I knew that she felt my thoughts as they followed her. It was life as dream, afternoons as eternity, it was all manner of leaps of meaning, all varieties of mental magic, it was the world luminous and transparent once again—just as it was when I fell asleep in Jade’s embrace and woke with her hair on my pillow. I dropped the dime into the slot and broke off the dial tone with the first digit of Ann’s number. I was still shaking, still sweating and dizzy, but now it didn’t seem like dread or confusion; it was the change in gravity as I entered now the first and soon the second ring of the only world I believed in, the only reality I wanted to call my own. It hardly mattered if I should quake or faint dead away; I was in a field of force, of emotion raised to the pitch of physics, and it was rhapsodically larger and more powerful than anything else I’d known, finally and at last.
I didn’t remember dialing the rest of her number and didn’t hear the phone ring but there was Ann’s voice. “Hello?” She always said it as a question, a secret, slightly embarrassing question.
“It’s me,” I said. It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t recognize my voice. “I’m twenty-five feet away from your house. Can I come up? Or would you like to go out for coffee?”
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There was silence on her end of the line. I heard classical music in the background and a police car siren that was just then racing north past me, throwing its stuttering red light against the glass of the phonebooth. “Is this who I think it is?” Ann finally said. Her voice was casual. I knew she recognized me and the lack of emotion in her voice both disappointed and reassured me. Clearly, she was not about to weep with joy over my appearance, but neither was she treating me like some armored insect found beneath a rock.
“Can I come up?” I said. “I just came in today. I’m staying at a hotel. I’d like to see you. We can talk.”
“I’ve been having so many visitors,” Ann said. “Keith’s been camping out on the sofa.”
“He’s there now?”
“No, he went home this morning.”
“Can I come to see you, Ann?”
She paused for a moment. “If you like,” she said. She waited an instant for my reply and then hung up.
I went back to her building, rang her bell, and Ann buzzed me in. A small wood-paneled elevator took me to the seventh floor. A conventional sense of anticipation told me I should be busy imagining what it would be like to finally be with Ann, or what I would say, but the future stood with its back to me, warning me not to even try to look in its face. The elevator stopped with a slight lurch and I stepped into a wide hall—white ceiling, faded pink walls, brightly polished black floors. Ann’s apartment was at the very end. The door was freshly painted white and the doorknob was intricately textured lead, round and as large as a croquet ball. I knocked and waited. There was a knot in my leg muscle, painful I suppose, but I barely noticed; it rose through me like a bubble up the stem of a syringe. I knocked again and finally there was the sound of Ann’s footsteps.
Endless Love Page 18