She was dressed for work. It’s always amazed me that she puts on stockings and perfume to cut people open. “I thought you might like to know that tragedy has struck Sally’s class,” she said.
She handed me a notice on the school’s stationery, signed by Sally’s two pre-kindergarten teachers, serious young women adept at dealing not only with three- and four-year-olds, but perhaps as importantly, with their mothers and fathers.
Dear Parents:
We are writing to share some sad news with you. As you may have heard, Banana Sandwich, our class guinea pig, suffered an injury to her leg, after which her condition deteriorated. When the vet examined her, she diagnosed a neurological problem. We were informed that this damage could cause Banana to begin biting herself and others. The vet strongly suggested euthanasia, and after careful consideration, we agreed. Banana was taken to the vet’s office last Thursday afternoon.
We did not share all of the details with the children. We told them that Banana had to be taken to the vet’s office because she was sick, and that she died while she was there. We will share some books on the death of a pet and talk about our questions and feelings about Banana. If you have any questions, please let us know.
Patty and Ellen
“Sally brought it home yesterday,” Lisa said.
“Was she bothered by it?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“There’s that creepy Lucy Meyer stuff she’s worried about.”
“Kids are always worried about things,” Lisa said.
“Yeah, but they’re just kids. It’s too early to worry.”
“Kids are people,” Lisa said. “People worry. All people worry.”
“Me included,” I said.
“You better worry, babe.”
“I do, don’t worry about that.”
She gave me a look, a certain look. “I liked the column this morning.”
“The fact that he was a lousy gymnast was the main thing.”
She smiled. “Did you see the headline?”
“How bad was it?”
She turned to page five and held up the paper: SAVED BEST FLIP FOR LAST.
“Pretty bad.”
“Your head all right?” she asked as she looked into the mirror, brushing her hair.
“It will be, in an hour or two.”
“You didn’t drive back, did you?”
“Cab.”
She kissed the air and pressed a tube of lipstick to her mouth. “Thank you,” she said.
“I’m a decent guy.”
She looked at me. “You still have a few indecencies about you.”
“You love them.”
She smiled. “True.”
“Knifing anybody today?” I asked.
“Some knuckles.” She stood to go. We don’t often kiss each other good-bye in the mornings. Sometimes I’ll say, “See you,” or she’ll say, “I love you,” but that’s it. We’re in a hurry. It’s easier that way.
This account is, I think, a confession and an investigation. My wife is here and there in this story and deserves, I suppose, some sort of identification beyond the fact that she is a clever hand surgeon. She is tall and too slender, with hair the color of a penny, and she studied art history and biology at Stanford. She arranges her hours so that she operates Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The rest of her week is consumed by office visits, consultations, and hospital rounds. On the days she operates she drinks thick Colombian coffee in the morning; on the other days, Earl Grey tea. Ironically, her work affects her own hands. The skin of her palms and fingers is dry and blotchy from scrubbing, not only on the days she operates but between office appointments, when she handles patients’ hands as she examines them, one after another, many of them with open or recently closed wounds oozing blood and pus. The roughness of her hands is a small yet real source of sadness for her, for her children have only ever felt them as rough. When she told me this she slipped her wedding ring over her second knuckle—still keeping it on—and showed me the ring of smooth, undamaged skin beneath. Both of us see the city through our professions; her patients include secretaries with overuse syndrome more serious than mine, cops bitten by pit bulls, construction workers who have had steel beams drop on their thumbs, kids with hands blown up by firecrackers, executives in Connecticut who have cut their fingers off trying to use a chainsaw. She is smart about a lot of things, my wife, and I admire her greatly. In contrast to my work, hers actually helps people.
What else? She relaxes by reading histories—of China, the Spanish Inquisition, Mogul rulers in India. She piles her books and magazines next to her side of the bed. Bits of this or that. Jane Austen. The Silence of the Lambs. A biography of Tolstoy. Vanity Fair. Salman Rushdie. Strange accounts of sixteenth-century saints. The World According to Garp. Anything. She loves to read in bed after the children are asleep. She has a cunning little light that attaches to the top of her book. She has a mole next to her belly button. She has some Sephardic blood in her, and her toes are flat, sand-paddling Arab toes that have genetically trumped my Anglo-Saxon bloodlines: both our kids have Arab toes, a fact that she is proud of. She watches no television. She reads two newspapers each day and yet is largely uninterested in day-to-day politics. She’s read all the major tracts of feminist ideology written in the last forty years and believes that men and women are almost incompatible and always will be. With the accounting nightmare of a medical practice, she prefers that I handle the family’s money. She’s aging like a beautiful wooden sailboat—signs of wear but all the lines intact, slightly more maintenance each season. (My own aging pattern resembles a mud slide in slow motion. In the mirror I inspect the gray hairs, pull out a few, and think myself ridiculous.) She won’t yet join an HMO. She is often tired, yet usually will want to have sex, so as not to have missed the chance. Since the birth of our children, she has become progressively more voracious in bed. Every few years we seem to stumble upon a new theme in our sexual routine and of late Lisa generally wants to first suck on me while fingering herself. This can go on for some time, and eventually, as she’s coming, she pushes me all the way down her throat just for a second or two. Or sometimes I push. Then we move around on the bed and go at it. She often asks me to do it as hard as I can, and I will answer that’s pretty hard, but she wants it anyway. She switched back to the Pill, because although she wants another baby, she doesn’t really want another baby. She has a couple of close friends—generally smart women in bad marriages—and when they come over they all sit in battered Adirondack chairs on the porch and drink bourbon and smoke cigarettes. Their laughter rises and falls and seems almost tearful at times, and then later, after her friends have gone, Lisa comes inside and seems glad to be living her life and not theirs.
We have one enduring argument. I think that society is going to hell and Lisa doesn’t. The difference has been evident from the moment I met her, when she was an intern working in an emergency room. I had followed a gunshot victim into the hospital to try to get some quotes from the family. Lisa was sitting with the father in the waiting room, explaining something about lung tissue in the airway, when she noticed me and looked up. “Who are you?” she asked with some irritation. “And what do you want?”
The question is still relevant. Who I was then was a twenty-five-year-old guy working his ass off on the crime beat, in way over my head, running for my life every day. Renting a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, getting up early, into the newsroom, doing the job, going home late, then reading the early editions of all four New York newspapers. And as for what I wanted, I wanted Lisa. When I told her that, two days later, she laughed. At that time, she was almost married to a man who is now a high lord at Citibank. I stole her away from him. I out-hustled, out-talked, and out-fucked him. It was the only chance I had.
What else about my wife? She is a careful mother, and this, I think, is because she values life. Her father was one of the first heterosexual victims of AIDS. He suffered a car accident in 1979, being hit by
a drunk teenaged boy who walked away from the wreck. In the emergency room, Lisa’s father received a transfusion. The blood was tainted, and after he made a full recovery from a broken jaw, a perforated liver, and crushed legs, he began to decline, his body subject to one opportunistic infection after another. The accident occurred when Lisa was in college, and as her father became sicker, her course of study shifted from the humanities to the behavioral sciences, and then to the hard sciences. She was accepted by every medical school she applied to, and her interest in hands came from her desire to help people with their daily lives. She has satisfactions and she has frustrations, especially when a child has lost a finger as a result of adult negligence. She understands the way the muscles and tendons and nerves of the hand work in the way a conductor understands the complexity of a musical score. She has published some articles on nerve-sparing techniques in medical journals. Sometimes she sits up at night, thinking about other people’s hands.
Beyond the foregoing, is it necessary for me to say more about my wife? I don’t think so. With one major exception, I don’t think I need to recount our domestic conversations during the period I’m describing. Most of what follows didn’t involve her, and it would be wrong and too easy to suggest that my actions were in response to our marriage, or to her supposed character flaws. That wouldn’t be true. I was happily married. My wife was smart and observant and kind, and that’s all that’s necessary to know, I think. I want to protect her in this. One could be clever and find ironic motivations in any word I might use to describe Lisa (thus “smart” might be read one way; “kind,” another), but in fact, what happened to me derived not from my marriage with Lisa but from the actions of four people—me, Caroline Crowley, Simon Crowley, and one other. We were an odd troupe who found one another across time and space. There were minor players in our little urban drama as well, and I’ll get to each one of those people, too, in time. But my wife did not drive events. She simply went to work each day and took care of the kids while I found trouble. This doesn’t make her powerless or a flawless innocent, either; and this is not to say that she did not know what was going on; my wife is capable of a powerful, watching stillness. My wife, I hasten to add, is far smarter, far wiser than I.
An hour later, I was at Eighty-third and Broadway, standing outside in the bright cold, working the wedding dress-murder story. Her name was Iris Pell, and she had spurned her boyfriend, a man named Richard Lancaster. She was dark-eyed, a bit heavy, an attractive woman who had been disappointed in love several times. She pushed paper in a large accounting firm in Rockefeller Center; he was a mid-level insurance executive remembered by coworkers for his courtly manners and fastidious bow ties. A man who got his hair cut every ten days. Iris had told Richard that she was calling off the wedding and never wanted to see him again, and yet he found her, and then stalked her, confronting her in the Chinese laundry just as it was closing. As Bobby had told me, she was in fact holding a newly dry-cleaned wedding dress when she whirled at the sound of Lancaster’s voice, and the bullets, two of them, passed through the cellophane, the dress, the second sheet of cellophane, her winter coat, the blouse she was wearing, her bra, and then into her heart. Yes, as Bobby had said, Iris Pell died holding a wedding dress. There was a lot of blood, and most of it was on the floor, smeared and tracked and furred with dust, dried but then made sticky again by the snow on people’s shoes. Someone had thrown some newspapers down, but it didn’t help much. I watched as the detectives gave the nod to the owner of the shop, who had stayed up all night as they tramped in and out, and a Chinese boy in a T-shirt dropped a heavy wet mop onto the dark stain and wiped up what Iris Pell had left behind. There was a perceptible reverence to the boy’s care with the mop; he had known Iris Pell, and it was a personal sadness to him.
Richard Lancaster—yesterday a citizen, today a criminal—had fled. But not far, as it was later discovered. He went to the movies, avoided his own apartment. Used a cash machine, ate a fancy steak dinner. Tipped the waiter well. Was seen to type madly into a laptop computer, then toast the empty chair in front of him. That same morning, even as I was riding the train uptown, he had been found by an anorexic female jogger on a park bench on the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. There the glassy skyline of lower Manhattan seems to greet the sun as it rises. Lancaster was dressed in his business suit, with full identification in his wallet, and a suicide note tucked in the other hand, which said: I killed Iris. He’d shot himself in the mouth and then slumped there, the blood dripping through the slats of the bench and crawling along the cant of the sidewalk toward the brightening skyline.
But he hadn’t died. A second woman, looking out her apartment window, had seen Lancaster shoot himself and had called the police. The ambulance arrived and found that although he had blown away part of his cheek, skull, and left eye, he was still yet very much alive, so much so that he begged to be allowed to die in the back of the ambulance. The twist was that the police couldn’t find a gun near the park bench where he’d shot himself. The woman who had called the police volunteered that she had seen a figure, perhaps a homeless man, stoop down next to the slumped form of Lancaster just after the shooting but that she had not been able to see him clearly or what he had done, only that he had stood up and scuttled away into the morning haze.
All this information took me another two hours to retrieve, and after I got back from Brooklyn, I didn’t yet see how it would make for a decent column a day hence. I had facts, but except for the Chinese boy with the mop, no emotional content, no decent quotes. I couldn’t reach Iris Pell’s family, and the further comments of Richard Lancaster’s coworkers were useless. (“Richard Lancaster was a fine employee, never a complaint,” the insurance company’s public-relations officer announced.) Lancaster’s ex-wife had left her phone off the hook, and maybe counted herself lucky in that funny way we do when disaster brushes by us.
I was stuck on the column, and this was the moment that Caroline Crowley called me. As soon as I heard her voice, I got the nervy feeling in my fingertips that I used to get before high-school football games, when we were all on the field in our uniforms and cleats and could see the crowd in the stands, hear the public-address system booming scratchily, Ten minutes to game time.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. “You’re out early.”
“I was running around on a story.”
“You remember our conversation?” Caroline asked.
“I remember I gave a drunken, sentimental speech. The audience was weeping.”
“No, what you said was very kind.”
“Yeah, well.”
“So,” she began, “what do you usually have for lunch?”
“Whatever.”
“Why don’t you come up to my apartment and have some whatever?”
I said nothing.
“Well?” came Caroline’s voice.
“I’m smiling,” I answered. “You wanted me to smile and I’m smiling.”
“Do you do other things, too?”
“Yes, I flirt with strange women on the phone.”
“They flirt with you, you mean.”
“Only when they want something from me.”
“I just want you to come over. It’s an innocent request.”
“Do you have more things to show me, pictures of your dead husband in folders, neat stuff like that?”
“How about two o’clock?” she asked, ignoring the question. “I won’t serve any gin and tonics.”
“I’ll be able to keep it all straight, then.”
“Yes,” she answered, “figure out the motivations and so on.”
“Including yours?”
“Mine? My motivation is quite clear,” she said. “I’m looking for deliverance.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“Not like I am,” she blurted.
That’s what did it—I caught a tone in that remark, heard the dark spaces, Caroline’s recognition of her own complicity in something. Yes, I told her, yes
.
It was almost noon, and in a mood of nervous time wasting, I floated outside down to the street, had my shoes shined by a man who told me he was going to be as rich as Bill Gates, and then drifted into a video store and found copies of Simon Crowley’s movies. I picked up one of the bright, cellophane-wrapped boxes: “Mr. Lu is the second work by the brilliant young filmmaker who died a tragic, untimely death. Just twenty-six, Simon Crowley filmed Mr. Lu in only four weeks. The movie caused a sensation at the …”
The movie was sixty-two minutes long, and it seemed that if I was going to see Caroline again, it might not be a bad thing to view one of her late husband’s movies. Back in the office, I slipped into an unused conference room and started the tape. The movie, set in New York, involves a black subway motorwoman, Vanessa Johnson. A world of rushing through dark corridors toward trash and rats and red signals turning green, the train’s two beams of lights sweeping ahead of her as if searching interminably for something. Vanessa is about thirty-five and unmarried, the mother of three, and believes herself to be finished with the affections of men. She must deal with thieves who steal copper signal wire from the subway tunnels and lay the wire across the track so that it is cut by the passing trains, and she is confronted with a homeless man whose arm is severed when she runs over him accidentally as he lies drunkenly on one of the rails. Her face allows no expression, her eyes show no hope. Her only solace seems to be a battered cassette player, on which she plays Mozart’s Requiem from beginning to end, starting the tape just as her shift starts. One evening she notices an older Chinese businessman. He rides her train every night, stepping onto the train at the same point in the music each time. She watches him in the side mirror of the motorman’s booth as he enters and exits, always wearing a tailored suit. In time they speak. His name is Mr. Lu. He inquires about her and she tells him little, yet by her manner intimates that she would like to know more about him. Mr. Lu runs a wholesale hardware-supply store in Chinatown, rides home to Queens each night. After several dates—each of which is marked by awkwardness and tension—Vanessa gives herself over to him, insisting only that he not touch her between her legs with his hands. Something happened a long time ago and she is reminded of it when—he nods. He is gentle with her, and yet his manner remains reserved. He prefers not to tell her of himself, only that he lived in China until the 1970s. The film is suffused with a strange and potent eroticism, for while neither character is conventionally sexy, each is clearly hungry for the passion that has eluded them both until this moment. Eventually Vanessa learns that Mr. Lu has serious heart trouble—each time they have sex literally imperils him—and that he served as one of Mao Tse-tung’s executioners during the Cultural Revolution. In a long and grieving monologue on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, tourists around them videotaping one another and eating ice cream, Mr. Lu explains that he has personally executed more than eight hundred men—and fourteen women, one of whom was pregnant He goes on to tell Vanessa that he no longer understands the world, only that he has played an evil role in it He admits that he hated black people intensely after he emigrated to America, thinking them dirty and stupid. He has never had a family, he says, and wishes fervently that he had lived a different life. He believes that Vanessa is a very good woman who “deserves honor.” He wishes someone to know that he feels remorse for what he has done. He fears that he will soon die at any time, perhaps climbing a stairway or crossing the street. He asks Vanessa if she will allow him to ask her a “question very terrible.” She says yes. He says that he thinks he can induce a fatal heart attack in himself and would like to try it while having sex with her, in order that he might not die alone but in the arms of a woman. She says she will think about it Several days later she tells him no. He is respectful and quiet. When they are to meet again she is told that he has died that very day, lifting a heavy box in his store. The movie ends with an agonizingly long shot of Vanessa inside her subway car, the voices of the Requiem soaring and dropping, the stations and riders flashing by, mesmerizing, exhausting, Vanessa’s eyes seeing them and yet not, her face sorrowful and mysterious.
Manhattan Nocturne Page 7