Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  He did not call her again until Wednesday. In the cubicle next door, Haydee was busy talking about the Manhattan judicial conference that was being held later in the night. Maximo told himself to mention this to Nicki, and then change the subject; let her know that he was going to be within blocks of her and then let the matter be sheared off. Even up, he told himself.

  She was on the phone immediately. “You! Where have you been?” she said.

  “Working.”

  “When am I going to see you?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Hotel Marlborough.”

  “The what?”

  “On 46th Street.”

  “Are you crazy? I don’t go into a hotel like that.”

  “I’m going there for that business with the judges.”

  “Oh, that’s as bad as what I thought you meant. All right. What time?”

  “Nine o’clock. I’m going to leave the lecture early so I can be there.”

  “How long do we have to stay?”

  “It won’t take that long.”

  “All right. Because I don’t want to waste a night there. I’ve got better things to do.”

  That night, he saw her from the dingy balcony that ran along one wall of the hotel lobby. She sat in an old leather chair alongside the doorway, smoking a cigarette and talking to a bellhop who stood with his hands on his hips and looked out into the summer night onto the bruised sidestreet.

  “It’s lucky you got here, I was ready to leave,” she said when she saw Maximo coming down the stairs.

  “I’ve been upstairs for an hour,” Maximo said.

  “You expected me to go upstairs in this place?”

  “Just up those steps to the ballroom.”

  “For what?”

  “They’re going to vote in about a half hour and then we’ll go.”

  “As if I have all night.”

  “Just a half hour.”

  Through the doorway stepped a woman whose legs struggled to move in a shiny red sheath. She wore a black wig that added a half foot to her height, and a fall that went halfway down her substantial back.

  “Hiya, Jackie,” the bellhop said.

  The woman nodded regally and walked to a doorway over which grimy blue neon advertised a cocktail lounge.

  “That’s Jackie Onassis,” the bellhop said. “That’s the name she uses. Know her girlfriend’s name? Mary Tyler Moore.”

  “I can tell you this Jackie Onassis no woman,” Nicki said.

  “That’s right, she’s a prostitute,” the bellhop said.

  “I wasn’t referring to that,” Nicki said. “I mean she’s not a woman, period. Jackie is a guy.”

  “Oh, sure,” the bellhop said. “You know what I did once? Just to kid around, I asked her what she ate so she could keep the weight down. Being a guy, it’s tough to get that skinny to fit into a dress. I don’t know, I asked her. Know what she told me she eats? Said it right out loud, front of the whole place here. She says to me, she eats—”

  “—I don’t want to hear,” Nicki said. She stood up to leave.

  “Oh, you’re going upstairs?” the bellhop said. “Speaking of whores, that’s some bunch you got up there. Politicians. This is turnin’ into some place. Whores in the lobby, whores in the bar, whores up in the rooms, now you got the whole grand ballroom full of whores. Place getting to be a regular whorehouse.”

  Maximo led her up the flight of stairs to the grand ballroom, whose old radiators had sprayed rust onto large areas of the gray walls. There were about three hundred people in the room, some dawdling among the rows of folding chairs and others milling along the walls. This was the Bronx-Manhattan Judicial Convention, Maximo explained to Nicki, with two candidates running and the one receiving 100 of the 199 delegate votes would die and enter heaven, a Supreme Court judgeship. A cardboard sign over a doorway in the front of the room said, “Meet Rose Keogh over Coffee.” Standing under the sign was Rose Keogh’s husband, who attacked the hand of each person he could reach. On the far side of the room, Maximo pointed out, was the one Rose Keogh had to beat, a man named Goldenberg, who was the favorite of the liberals, blacks and Hispanics. A woman in jeans, her rear end as big as a rail worker’s, ushered people into Golden-berg’s room.

  “I see where you’re going,” Nicki said. She pointed with her chin to a crowd of blacks and Puerto Ricans who stood in a doorway that had a fire exit sign over it. They seemed to be listening intently to something going on out on the staircase.

  “That’s a caucus,” Maximo said.

  “That isn’t what I call them,” Nicki said.

  She took a seat in the last row. Maximo went into Rose Keogh’s room, reveling in the stares he received, and filled a container of coffee. Rose Keogh was hugging a white-haired man. She made a point of not looking at Maximo; therefore, it did not matter whether or not she remembered his face from the Bronx meeting. He brought the coffee to Nicki and she took it and lit a cigarette and stared about the room as Maximo ran to the crowd under the fire exit sign.

  The stairway was filled with people who listened to a chunky black man with wavy hair who said that until a day ago, there appeared to have been enough people associating with each other to compile enough votes to get Goldenberg, the liberal, the nomination. Since then, the black man explained, a leader on the lower East Side of Manhattan, who controlled six of the voting delegates, suddenly had announced his intentions to support Keogh. This swift turn of current left several delegates clinging to barrels and indications now were that their fingers were becoming fatigued and they were about ready to let go and allow the current to carry them. This would give the judgeship to Rose Keogh. At the moment, Goldenberg, who was in the room next door, was catatonic and unable to rescue his own cause.

  A black woman on the stairs called out, “We sure don’t want that woman. She don’t even want to talk to us. According to her, we just people from the forest.”

  The chunky black man said, “That’s not the point. Nobody is ever going to do us any favors. The point of this election is that Goldenberg is going to give the law secretary job to the black and Hispanic caucus. Don’t spend your time fretting over who’s good and who’s bad. Tell me about who’s giving out the jobs to us.”

  A man called out, “You say ‘us.’ But then when this job come through, I hear you goin’ give it to your own wife.”

  “I’m not going to give it to her,” the speaker said. “She’s just going to reach out and take it right out of my hands. After twenty years in Harlem politics, do you think she’s about to play fair?”

  He shot his finger into the laughter. “And the next time we win something and a job comes out, it could be your turn. If we win now, and my wife takes this job because she’s earned it, then next time the job that comes up could be yours!”

  He began to pace back and forth, his hands in his pockets. “Don’t know what to tell you about those votes we’re losing right now. I can’t imagine why Feinstein would vote for Keogh.” A small, loser’s smile came on his lips.

  “People getting paid,” Ron Seguera’s voice called out.

  “Right in the pocket,” Haydee said.

  The man running the meeting shrugged. “Don’t know how I can say that.”

  “We can,” Seguera said. His arms began to wave, causing his flag of Puerto Rico T-shirt to jump.

  At this, Luis Jimenez, the pale one, obviously present as an agent for the regulars outside, stood and pointed a finger at Seguera. “You tried that last time and what did it get you? People like you make it harder for Hispanics. We’re trying to work in order, and you walk into rooms and look to bust them up.

  He was drowned out by yells from several people, including Maximo, who tasted rage in his throat as the man called Jimenez spoke. When the have-nots become reasonable, Maximo thought, they become servants of the influential.

  “What are you doing here?” Maximo said. “You belong outside with the regulars. The whit
es.”

  The tall fair Puerto Rican sneered through the applause for this.

  “I’ve been in this business for twenty years now,” he said. “And who are you and how long have you been around?”

  “What have you done in your twenty years?” Maximo asked.

  “Survive,” the tall one said.

  When Maximo did not answer, the tall one said, “And that’s more than you’re going to do.”

  Maximo glanced out at the ballroom and saw the student he knew from Harvard, Woolcott. He wore a dark blue suit and vest and stood in the aisle with his father, a sleek real estate man whose name was frequently in newspaper stories about Democratic politics. When the older Woolcott moved two steps to shake hands with somebody, the son moved two steps. When the father stepped into a row to shake hands with a delegate, the son remained six inches behind. When the father smiled, Woolcott smiled. As he watched Woolcott, Maximo felt even more comfortable with this crowd of outcasts listening to a lunatic dressed in a Puerto Rican flag.

  Out in the ballroom, Nicki looked around for a place to put out her cigarette, saw none and dropped it into her coffee container. Now she had to find a place to put the container; she would not be like everybody else in the place and throw it on the floor. All slobs. She walked to a trashcan in a corner of the ballroom. The trashcan was placed at the door to the ladies’ room. As long as she was up, Nicki decided, she would go to the bathroom. Under ordinary circumstances she would not dare use such a place as this for a facility, but she thought of sitting in this ballroom for another half hour, perhaps an hour, and then the train ride all the way up to Maximo’s house.

  “Door’s locked, you got to go downstairs,” a woman said to her.

  Nicki walked down to the lobby and the bellhop directed her to the ladies’ room. As Nicki started over to it, the red sheath with Jacqueline Onassis inside it walked out of the cocktail lounge and into the ladies’ room.

  “I’m not going in there,” Nicki said.

  “Come here,” the bellhop said to her.

  “Come where?”

  “I’ll take care of you.” He led her to the other side of the lobby and pushed open the men’s room door.

  “I’ll stay right here and keep everybody out until you come out yourself,” the bellhop said.

  “You better,” Nicki said.

  “Rely on me,” the bellhop said.

  As Nicki walked in, she glanced at herself in the mirror over the sink and was disgusted to find her hair matted from the ballroom heat. Then she walked over to the stalls which sat in dimness under a ceiling light that had burned out. No sooner had she settled her thin cotton pants about her legs when the door opened and two men walked up to the urinals alongside the sinks. At least if they look, they’ll see pants, Nicki told herself. She peered through the crack in the door and saw a man with a drawn face, the hair slicked straight back, talking to a chubby man with thick glasses. The man with the drawn face was at the urinal and the one with thick glasses was splashing water on his face. Nicki dropped her face into her hands and sat motionless. If anybody looks in on me, I’ll scream.

  “It’s all right,” Rose Keogh’s husband said.

  “Just,” McCafferty said.

  “What was the figure?” Keogh said. “Ten.”

  “Ten? Henry, we’re putting up one year’s salary for the job. It isn’t fair to ask us to come up with ten more. A whole year’s salary. Do you know anybody who’d pledge that?”

  “Not this year. That’s why you’re getting the nomination in the first place.”

  “But now it’s ten more?”

  “Did I ask you for it yet? I said, I promised him ten. That doesn’t mean he’ll ever see it.”

  “Henry, what if he doesn’t get it and he yells?”

  “How’s Feinstein going to yell? He’s going to do the same thing as Wolf did last time. We promised him more than ten and after the vote we wouldn’t even take his phone calls. You know what happened? He was very mad at me. He pouted. Until he needed something, and then he came around to me one night as if nothing had happened. We made a lamb out of Wolfie. Same thing will happen here. Who the hell is this guy to get ten thousand for a half dozen votes?”

  McCafferty stepped to the sink.

  Just don’t come near me, Nicki said to herself. She squeezed her face with her hands. I’m so embarrassed, she thought.

  The bellhop was not in the lobby when Nicki came out of the men’s room, causing her to become even more angry. She regarded betrayal as a personal possession; when practiced by others, even at the lowest form, it became a sacrilege. She glanced at the clock over the room clerk and saw that it was after eight o’clock already, which would make it impossible for her to spend time with Maximo and still get home at an hour other than one so late as to cause certain detection. At the same time, she told herself that she deserved a night with the body of her choice. She looked around the decrepit hotel lobby, saw a phone and called her friend Angela and informed her that as far as anyone was concerned, she, Nicki, was staying with her tonight. Then Nicki called her mother and said that she was going to be out late shopping with Angela and it would be easier to stay overnight with her.

  “What shopping?” the mother said. “You went shopping Saturday.”

  “Just some things I want to get with Angela.”

  “Lately, you’re starting to live in the wind,” the mother said, her voice trying to lead Nicki into the reaction, overly loud protest, the least stammer or traceable falsehood that would expose the evil she suspected.

  “Ma,” Nicki said evenly, “are you telling me I can’t spend one night with a girlfriend, go home and wash my hair with her?”

  “I never said a thing like that,” the mother said.

  “I’ll call you from work in the morning,” Nicki said. “Unless you want to call me at Angela’s tonight and check up on

  me.”

  The sarcasm hit her mother, who backed off and said, no, she would never do such a thing as check on her daughter. Let her try, Nicki thought; Angela would declare that there was no way to wake up anybody sleeping this soundly, and persuasion would not move her from this.

  Nicki went upstairs where she found Maximo looking about the room bleakly. Seeing her, a smile came onto his face that caused Nicki to touch him before she spoke.

  “I have something important to tell you,” she said.

  Maximo’s eyebrows went up.

  Oh, I like his eyes so much. I like his whole face.

  “I’m staying with you tonight,” she said gaily.

  He answered with his eyes.

  She squeezed his hand. “Unless you don’t want me.”

  “As long as everything is all right at home. I don’t want your father crawling through my window at four in the morning.”

  “He doesn’t know you exist, dear,” she said.

  “How much longer is all this going to take here,” she said, indicating the crowd now milling about the ballroom at a more excited rate.

  “Not long now,” Maximo said. “But it’s all right. We’ve got a lot of time ton—”

  Nicki suddenly dropped her forehead on his shoulder.

  “Oh, please. I don’t want that man to see me. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Which man?”

  Nicki’s eyes peered over Maximo’s shoulder as if it were a parapet. “The man over there. In the brown suit.”

  Maximo turned his head and saw McCafferty and Rose Keogh’s husband talking in the middle aisle.

  “Do you know him?” Maximo said.

  “The one in the brown suit,” she said.

  “From where?”

  “From no place. I went down to the ladies’ room before and the greasy bellhop, oh, I never should have trusted him; anyway, he told me to use the men’s room. Said he’d be right there to keep people out. I’m not inside there twenty seconds and these two men, the man in the brown suit and somebody else, walk right in on me and start peeing. Oh, I wanted to di
e.”

  “Right in front of you?”

  “Oh, I was in one of the booths. They didn’t even notice I was there. At least, I hope. I could see through the crack in the door and I saw him, all right, the one in the brown suit.”

  “He didn’t say anything to you?”

  “No, he didn’t know I was there. I told you. He was talking to the man with him. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve seen him,” Maximo said.

  “Not much to get excited about.”

  “I know that,” Maximo said.

  “He’s a thief, too.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “Oh, this man said it. What a rat this one is. He said he promised some man ten thousand and he wasn’t going to pay it in a million years.”

  “Promised who?”

  “Who else? Some Jew. Who could know the name? I know he said he did the same thing to some guy Wolf last year. I remember that name because he said he made a lamb out of him.”

  Maximo led Nicki to her chair, sat alongside her for a moment and then walked along the side of the room to where the head of the black and Hispanic caucus was standing. The chunky black man cocked his head and made a dubious face as Maximo spoke to him. Then the chunky black man walked slowly around the room until he saw Feinstein, the leader whose six votes were going to Keogh. Feinstein dropped his chin on his chest and listened. Then the chunky black man walked away and Feinstein stood for a moment, then his head rose and he prowled the center aisle. He beckoned to a man who sat in the middle of a row. The man got up and followed Feinstein out to the staircase. A lapel badge said his name was Wolf.