Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  “All you have to do is say the word, Big Guy.”

  He stopped and looked at her quizzically. Maybe it was occurring to him that she was upset about something.

  “Why should I?”

  She felt like a fool, suddenly.

  “I don’t know. I’m just joking. You shouldn’t.”

  The machine printed out her ticket, she removed it, and they walked on. She was going to have sex and she was going to do drugs. When she came back she’d be someone different from who she was now.

  And he would be someone different too. He wouldn’t be the father of the same girl he was the father of now. He would be the father of a girl who was older and more worldly and sneakier and more cynical, and he wouldn’t even know.

  How does this happen? How do you betray someone you love? Of the two of them, she thought, he was the more innocent, because he trusted her.

  I’m sorry, Dad, she thought. I’m so sorry.

  “Stay safe, kid,” he said, and he embraced her, and she felt something going on in her backpack. He was probably putting some money in, knowing that if he tried to hand it to her, she’d refuse it.

  She watched him walking off alone through Penn Station. He seemed so small. He seemed so old. She needed to do what she was doing; she needed to grow; but she felt as if, by growing in this way, by taking up a different kind of space in the world, she was inching her father toward his death.

  She could still stay home. She didn’t have to do drugs and get naked with a boy who was probably a little unstable. She could still stay home. She could go back uptown with her father—they could walk all the way, just for fun—and tonight they could make popcorn and watch Star Trek, just like they used to do when she was twelve.

  He was still in sight. She wanted to call out to him; she wanted to run to him. She watched him until he disappeared.

  64

  After he said goodbye to Emily, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He took a bus to escape the ugliness of midtown, and got out at Seventy-second Street, a few blocks from where Janine worked.

  He wasn’t sure what time her flight was leaving. Maybe he could catch her and they could meet for lunch.

  It felt like a childish impulse—they’d already said goodbye—but he missed her.

  Part of the reason he missed her was that they’d barely had sex since he got here. In the past, whenever they’d drifted away from each other, the intensity of their mutual attraction had brought them back together, but now, for some reason, this wasn’t happening. Instead they seemed to have settled into a disconcerting routine: an old married couple’s parody of romantic attraction. This morning, when he was taking a shower, she had come into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and she’d pulled the shower curtain aside and waggled her eyebrows at him Groucho Marxishly, and then she’d passed her hand over him, slowly, and then gone back to brushing her teeth. The implication seemed to be that if only they’d been free—if Emily weren’t in the apartment and if she, Janine, didn’t need to leave—she would have wanted to have sex with him. But every time they actually were free, they didn’t have sex. There was always a book or a paper that Janine needed to read or an email she needed to write. It was bad, and he didn’t want it to stay this way.

  He called her office, and the friendly young woman who worked at the front desk told him that she wasn’t there.

  He tried to figure out whether there was anything he needed to do in the neighborhood. A high-end toy store had just opened up on Seventy-ninth Street; he fleetingly thought it would be nice to get something for the kids, and then remembered that his kids didn’t play with toys anymore. He was ten years late on that one.

  He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do. There was a Richard Thompson concert at Town Hall that night. Maybe he could still get a ticket. But it wouldn’t be fun without Janine.

  At the corner of Broadway and Seventy-fourth he was waiting for the light to change when something made him turn his head, and he found himself looking at a couple sitting near the window of a restaurant. The woman was familiar. The woman was Janine.

  He got that feeling he always got when he saw her, that little lift.

  She and the guy were holding hands.

  He crossed the street against the traffic—away from them—scuttling awkwardly to avoid a taxi or two. At a newsstand he bought a copy of the Daily News, and then he turned around and held it up and tried to look around it, like some hapless detective in a movie. It was the first time, in all his years of copdom, that he’d tried to observe anybody without being seen.

  When he was in retreat mode, trying not to get hit by a car, he’d allowed himself to doubt that it was really Janine. From his observation post behind the Daily News, he couldn’t deny it. She even had her hair in a ponytail, the better to display her glowingly beautiful face.

  And who was the guy?

  The guy had to be Lev, of course. Had to be.

  They were holding hands.

  They were sitting behind big cups—those tall silver fluted cups they have in ice cream parlors.

  They were having ice cream sundaes. Or maybe one was having ice cream and the other was having a nice fruit cup.

  They were laughing. They were still holding hands. This seemed important, as though, if they’d held hands for only a minute, there might have been an innocent explanation.

  He felt disoriented. He was afraid he was going to fall down.

  He didn’t feel angry, which surprised him.

  Maybe it was the ice cream sundaes. Somehow the ice cream made the two of them seem less tawdry. It made them seem less like adults having an affair than like high school students out on their first date.

  How could she be doing this?

  Daniel had met Janine when they were barely out of their teens. Both of them pretended to great sophistication, of course, but they were children. Everything they’d gone on to discover about life, they’d discovered together.

  That was the deal, wasn’t it?—that they would go through everything together. Their children’s marriages, grandparenthood, old age . . .

  Wasn’t that the deal?

  He could trail them. It would be a piece of cake, since he was a cop, except that he’d never actually trailed anybody in his life, and had no idea of how to do so, apart from what he could remember from old episodes of The Rockford Files. And anyway, what would be the point? He knew where they were going: to the airport, and then to Pittsburgh, where they’d spend the weekend talking about the multiple nature of the self and fucking their brains out.

  Maybe he should go into the restaurant and beat the guy up.

  He was supposed to be someone who would do that sort of thing. He’d taken boxing lessons. He was an off-duty cop. Off-duty cops were always getting involved in street hassles, embarrassing the badge.

  But he had no desire to.

  When Mark was in first grade, some other boy in the class kept hitting him, and when Daniel suggested that Mark hit him back, Mark said, “I don’t want to hit him.” Not in a voice that suggested he was afraid, but in a voice that suggested that hitting someone was an absurd thing to do. Now he felt the same way.

  They were still laughing, still holding hands.

  He’d seen enough. He walked north, and after ten blocks, still feeling dizzy, he stopped at a coffee shop. He didn’t want coffee, though. He wanted to have something that he’d never normally have, as if to set this afternoon apart from his life. So he ordered a slice of cherry pie. Only after it arrived did he think about how close it was to an ice cream sundae, and he wondered why he’d ordered it. It felt as if he were trying to horn in on their happiness.

  What do I do now?

  He didn’t know what to do, with the afternoon or with his life.

  I should ask Janine, he thought, and then remembered that he couldn’t.

  He imagined trying to tell the children that he and Janine were separating. Which of them would be affected more? Emily usually seemed so poised, so im
perturbable, but in her quiet way she felt everything. Mark, the explorer, never coming home for more than a few minutes, it seemed, would be the obvious candidate to be less affected, but you couldn’t be sure.

  He wondered what Janine would say about how the children would react to a divorce.

  Every thought led back to the family.

  How could she be walking away from this?

  He paid for his order without having touched it and left the coffee shop.

  What kind of person, when he discovers that his wife is cheating on him, decides to get himself a slice of pie?

  What kind of person sees his wife holding hands with some joker and just slinks off? Why hadn’t he walked in and punched the guy?

  Why the fuck am I thinking about myself now, anyway?

  He was thinking about himself because he had such trust in Janine that he thought that if she were turning away from him, then he must deserve to be turned away from.

  He felt revolted by his self, his identity, his history. His act. It seemed to him that he was a fraud, and not even a successful fraud at that. He was a fraud whose fraudulence was obvious. Over the decades he had worked to transform himself into something that it was not his nature to be, but the transformation had never been effected. He’d tried to turn himself into a strong and silent cop; he’d tried to turn himself into some archetypal figure of calm, benevolent male authority—he’d tried to turn himself into Henry Fonda—but inside he was still a quiveringly oversensitive boy, and anyone who looked at him hard enough could see that. That was why the other cops called him “the professor.”

  Of course she was leaving him. Of course she was running off with the grit investigator. She was leaving him because he’d never really become himself. The grit enthusiast—that’s who it was, of course: it had to be Lev—as pudgy and unimpressive as he’d seemed at a glance, was at least himself, thoroughly and unapologetically himself, and though Daniel could undoubtedly knock his teeth out if he wanted to, the plump psychologist’s comfort in his own skin made him the better man.

  He wanted to feel good old-fashioned fury. He wanted to be the kind of guy who might be tempted to kill the ice-cream-eating sage, and kill Janine in the bargain, maybe. But that wasn’t, it turned out, who he was.

  He was crossing into Riverside Park. He saw each stranger with a kind of double vision. He wanted to stop them all and cry on their shoulders, but at the same time he was scanning them all for suspicious behavior. Apparently he was a cop.

  If you cultivate a set of habits long enough, they become second nature, and then they remake you. Maybe he was no more a fraud than anyone else.

  Life was confusing.

  His cell phone vibrated. It was Janine, calling to say that she’d almost made a terrible mistake, but had suddenly come to her senses, and wanted him to know that what the two of them had together was the most important thing in her life.

  No. It wasn’t Janine. It was his mother. He let it go to voice mail.

  Thank God Emily was away for the weekend. He could just go back to the apartment and collapse.

  What was Janine doing? Why was she doing this?

  He realized that he hadn’t yet wondered what was on her mind. This gave him another reason to feel bad: the thought of how selfish he was. He’d been thinking only about himself and the question of whether he was a fraud and the question of whether he was unlovable. But what was it like for her? What was she going through? What did she need that he hadn’t given her?

  It shouldn’t have been that surprising that his wife was having an affair. She’d been restless. She’d been dissatisfied. Wasn’t that what all the Internet crap was about? All the Facebook bullshit, all the time spent friending people and bookmarking people’s tweets, or whatever the hell she was doing online all the time. If you’re in love with your life, you’re not spending time worrying about how many “friends” you have on Facebook.

  He was feeling sick to his stomach. He wanted to vomit. The only thing that kept him from vomiting was the fact that he’d always hated it in movies when people vomited in reaction to upsetting news. It always seemed so phony. So he was damned if he was going to vomit now.

  But he was feeling worse and worse. A pain that went from his stomach all the way up to his jaw.

  He started to wonder if he was having a heart attack.

  You’re not having a heart attack. You’re just freaking out.

  But how could he be sure he wasn’t having a heart attack?

  He’d had a friend who’d just dropped dead one day, with no warning, at the age of forty-five. Maybe that was happening to him, here, now. And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

  No, he thought. I’m not ready. I don’t want to miss everything. I’m not ready to go.

  You’re not having a heart attack. Don’t be fucking silly. You’re not having a heart attack.

  With a clownish fastidiousness, with a degree of considerateness that even he found absurd, he felt as if he were exhibiting bad manners: having a heart attack and upstaging Janine, on what might—who knows?—have been the happiest day of her life.

  He had no reason to think that it was the happiest day of her life, happier than any of the days she’d spent with him, but jealousy tends toward self-debasement.

  He tried to focus. If I am having a heart attack, what should I do?

  It was a warm, calm day. The park was filled with gorgeous people—beautiful long-legged girls, hunky boys with their shirts off—and none of them would ever die, and none of them would help him.

  I should call someone, he thought, but who? He couldn’t call Janine. He didn’t want to call Emily. He knew that if he needed her, she’d rush back to help him, but he didn’t want to lay that kind of burden on her. His son—ach. Forget it. Even if Mark had been nearby, the thought of Mark’s being any use was laughable.

  He didn’t want to call his mother, because he knew she was working hard on her memoir, and he didn’t want to ask her to take time off from her work.

  His father? If he called Saul for help and Saul met him in the hospital, the first thing Saul would do would be to ask for reimbursement for the subway ride.

  He had a few old friends left in the city, but no one he would want to trouble with this.

  He was burning from his stomach to his chin. He kept thinking that this faux heart attack would pass, but with every minute it seemed a little less faux.

  He should go to a hospital. He had no idea which.

  I finally found a decent reason to have a fucking iPhone, he thought. If I had a fucking iPhone, I could just search for “best emergency rooms NYC.”

  He thought of finding a cop and asking him where to go, because there was a fraternity among cops, a brotherhood of the blue, but on the other hand, there wasn’t a cop anywhere in New York who would regard a cop from Seattle as a real cop. There was no brotherhood of the blue.

  He left the park and took a cab to Roosevelt Hospital. During the ride he tried to reach Janine with a psychic message. Call me. Stop whatever you’re doing and call me. Don’t go away this weekend. Stay.

  As the cab was crossing over to Tenth Avenue his phone went off again, and again it was Florence, and again he let it go to voice mail.

  In the emergency room, after he told them he was having chest pains, they went to work fast. A male nurse took him to a little makeshift room, where he was separated by dull gray curtains from a coughing old man on one side and a retching kid on the other. He couldn’t see either of them but it was as if he could. It struck him as strange that you could tell how old people were without seeing them, and then he wondered whether the fact that this struck him as strange meant that his mind wasn’t right. Would this seem strange to me on a normal day? He didn’t know.

  Everybody was speaking Spanish. Daniel couldn’t understand much. He was given an EKG, and then he was hooked up to a blood-pressure monitor and a blood-oxygen monitor, and then they ran an IV tube into his arm.

  He was trying to stay c
alm, by means of paying an almost detached attention to the details of his treatment. He noted with approval that the team that was treating him was adhering in a methodical way to a checklist. It was good to know that he was in the hands of competent professionals.

  Then he was alone. His emotions were repeating in a tight little loop. For a minute he was nothing but embarrassed. This wasn’t a heart attack; it was fear confusion grief panic bewilderment rage. His mind was going crazy so his body was going crazy too. In the next minute he admitted to himself that this pain was like nothing he had felt before.

  He had a pen in his jacket, which was draped over a chair near the bed. He asked an aide if she could find some paper, and she came back with two bright-blue sheets. He began a letter to his wife.

  My darling. I don’t know what’s going to happen but I have a spooky feeling. I don’t want to go without telling you what I hope you already know: you’re the love of my life, and you’ve always been the love of my life. I’ve always loved you and I’ve always been in love with you. Loving you has been my life’s great adventure.

  Do you remember that night when we were kids and we went up to the top of the Empire State Building and all the lights of the city were around us, and you said that no matter how big and fantastic it all was, what we had with each other was even bigger and more fantastic? I felt that, and I feel that, and I feel that, and I feel that, and I always, my darling, will.

  On the second sheet he wrote, To my dear children, and then realized that he didn’t want to write to them both at once, but before he could write anything more, the curtains parted and a doctor, frizzy-haired, fortyish, walked in. She looked schlumpy, in a friendly, human way.

  “I’m Dr. Sam,” she said. “What’s the trouble with this one?”

  She was looking at her clipboard, talking to herself.

  “Seattle Police. Far from home.” She looked at him for the first time. She put the clipboard down and put her stethoscope against his chest. “What are you doing in the Big Apple, fella? Chasing down a fugitive?”