I walked back into the Garden of Freedom. JJ had found his freedom, I supposed. What of the others buried here? I looked at the stone crosses, angels, and the intermittently grandiose memorabilia of death scattered across the vast expanse of cemetery. The inscriptions on theheadstones could stay unread: much missed, much loved, blah, blah. The attraction for me was to experience the utter peace of thousands of corpses lying in their discrete plots quietly working on being dead. Not like the man screaming for help as he tried vainly to pull the door pillar of a Lincoln Towncar away from the neck of a woman who had already qualified for her slice of cemetery.
I trudged back toward the estate office—taking another route: around the Garden of Psalms, along Greenlawn Avenue. A train rattled slowly a few hundred yards away from me. From the parking area at the end of William H. Locke Drive, I made my way to the canopy at the entrance of the estate office.
Carol Amen stood in the porch. When she saw me she didn’t move. Her lips just curved into a gentle smile.
“I hope you figured out how to get picked up,” she said. “It’s a long walk back to Tribeca.”
NINE
Carol’s loft apartment wasn’t new to me. But this time it was different. The studio set hadn’t changed—old furniture, mostly American and thoughtfully coordinated with rugs and throws and plants. No chrome, no steel—just woods and bright materials and savvy knickknacks dotted around for the curious eye. A room at ease with its inhabitant. And very, very comfortable, everything designed to enfold you, draw you in. A giant cocoon of a room, just enough of the noise of a summer’s evening in Tribeca filtering in, to confirm how hip the place was, but not so much as to interfere with its internal harmony. It was as if someone knew precisely where the volume control should be set.
But the script had changed. I felt that I was supposed to be here, not just a visitor like all the times before. No agenda and preset departure time. Maybe it was just the after effect of a rather quaffable Beringer Pinot Noir. Second glass, ready for a third. I reached over and filled up, replacing the bottle in the teak coaster on a huge coffee table made from an ancient door.
Carol came back into the room, carrying her glass, empty now.She’d discarded her mourning wear and settled for blue drawstring shorts and a T-shirt. Shapeless and shapely all at once. And bare feet, no makeup on her anywhere, jewelry gone: no rings, no bangles, no wristwatch. Just her. Carol, soft and alluring.
She filled her glass and sat next to me. Near me. She slid her legs up onto the cushions of the ample couch and looked at me through a curtain of hair that had fallen across one side of her face. She swept the curtain aside and took a sip of wine. I noticed the blond down on her forearms, hairs as fine as spiderweb.
“Nice,” she said.
I nodded. What was she thinking? Not about wine.
“You hungry?” She asked.
Not about food either. But the question came out so easily, naturally.
“Not really,” I said.
“Me neither.” She was watching me, slow blinks alternating with slow sips of wine. Blink, sip, blink, sip.
“I expect we don’t want to talk about JJ or the funeral,” I said.
“Damn right.”
A pause. Blink, sip. The hum of the street. Carol leaned over to the table and picked up a remote control, pressed a button, and the sound of Stan Getz came over some speakers I couldn’t see. I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” She was laughing too.
“Well,” I said, “and don’t take this the wrong way. We come here, you slip into something more comfortable, pour out the wine, and put on the background music. It just made me think. I mean . . .” I paused. “I found it funny, that’s all.”
Carol replaced the remote on the table. “Do you like apple pie?”
I shook my head. “But don’t let me stop you.”
She clicked her tongue impatiently. “I didn’t ask if you wanted any. I just asked if you liked it.”
“Sure I like it.”
“Apple pie’s a cliché,” she said. “You know: As American as apple pie. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t good, worth cooking, worth eating.”
“Fair enough,” I said. I had no idea where she was going with this.
“You like what I’m wearing, you like the wine, you like Stan Getz?” She gave me a look of mock terror. “Well, don’t you?”
“Umm,” I said slowly. “Yes. But what if I hadn’t liked apple pie?”
“I’d have had to throw you out.”
“I like it, I really like it.” I smiled and touched her arm. It felt as good as it looked.
“When people need help they should send unambiguous signals. I learned that someplace.”
I wanted to know where. I wanted to know everything. But supplemental questions were for lawyers and we weren’t being lawyers right then.
“There’s a line that sticks in my head,” she said. “Something about not waving but drowning.”
Another favorite of Ernie’s. Jesus, I’d had more poetry in the last twenty-four hours than in the previous five years. I realized how little poetry there had been in my life.
“Stevie Smith,” I said. I could recite the line; it had become a tad worn with use, but it was still good. “I was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning.”
Carol’s face lit up and she tapped my nose with a finger. A light tap, but it felt like a magic wand. “That’s the one,” she said. “Ambiguous signal, you see. Look what happened. The guy drowned.”
“And do you need rescuing?” I asked.
She looked deep into her wine, nursing the glass with both hands. “Maybe not rescuing,” she said at last. “Maybe just . . . whatever it is, I looked at you today and I figured you could use the same kind of thing. We’ve known each other a long time and, well, I just. . . . Tell me if I’m wrong. You standing in the rain, with a widow screaming at you. I knew you would understand what I was talking about.”
She was right.
“When Miranda Carlson let me have it,” I said, pausing to think, “I knew it wasn’t her fault, but she put me in the searchlight and it hurt.”
Both our wineglasses were on the table, so there was no need for awkward movements, no minutely rehearsed choreography, no complex hand/eye coordination. I just leaned over and kissed her on the lips. I sensed a sigh, a release from the pressure of waiting, the devil of a day fading in the rhythm of a heartbeat. We held each other tightly, unmoving.
I still had my suit on. I hadn’t even taken my jacket off. I sat up and Carol removed it, folding it neatly, smoothing out the lapels,aligning the sleeves. She seemed as if she were going to lay it carefully over the back of the couch, but then she threw it across the room.
She had the rest of my clothes off me in moments and I lay back naked with her sitting on top of me, still dressed.
She shed her T-shirt and bent her head over my face and Eskimo-kissed me. “Maybe it’s time for outside counsel to become inside counsel.” She smiled.
“I haven’t washed,” I said. “There’s the rain and heat, you know . . . I could take a shower, for the greater comfort of my client.”
She nuzzled herself into my chest, nibbling my meager hairs and encircling a nipple with her teeth. “No need. You’re fine.”
I drew her to me and our mouths met like old friends while the rest of our bodies writhed with a burning need to get on with it.
She sat up. And then stood up. Over me. With swift and perfectly poised movements she removed her shorts, revealing nothing further to unpeel. She slowly began to lower herself on me. I wanted to watch all of her at once: her face, her breasts, her hands, the divine sand-colored delta, the curve of her hips. And the eyes: pupils wide, the chestnut brown interior, a concert of darkness and light. I raised my arms and held Carol’s head, combed her hair with my fingers, explored her face. Traced the lines of her ribcage. Her breasts. There would be no ambiguity here.
I awoke from a deep sleep. I was in a
bed. Carol’s bed, I remembered. It seemed to be moving ever so slightly. I turned my head. Carol was sitting upright against her pillow, knees drawn up, the sheet held tightly against her neck. Hugging her knees, she was rocking gently and from the streetlight sneaking through a gap in the curtains, I could see her face, raw and wet with tears. She was staring ahead.
I hoisted myself onto an elbow. “What’s the matter?”
She didn’t look at me. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
I sat up and took her in my arms, burying my face in her thick cushion of hair, feeling her softness, the tremble of her body.
She sobbed.
“The TV. Horrible.”
JJ, she was talking about JJ. Had she, like me, foolishly kept thelight off as she’d watched the horror played out over and over on every channel the previous night?
“I know. I know,” I said. The images had been so graphic. In the end, I’d switched off, ashamed to have witnessed it live, in the light of day.
“It was so . . .” She couldn’t find the word and broke down again.
Suddenly she pulled away from me and wiped her face with the sheet, letting it drop, leaving her top half naked, exposed. Her vulnerability was both tragic and erotic.
“There was graffiti,” she said.
I hadn’t noticed. “Where?”
“On the wall along the FDR. It was on the news. It said ‘shit happens.’ ”
I didn’t know what to say.
She eased herself back into my arms. “It was written in those fat dumpy letters, you know: graffiti letters. Theeinhappenshad been made into a smiley face, a little tongue hanging out of it. Disgusting.”
I held her tight.
“I’d been in a meeting with him just the day before. He was chewing me out, chewing everyone out. He wanted to get some documents to a client. It was all he seemed to care about. That and a visit to . . .”
She tensed. “I was somewhere once. A good place, but it was a bad place too, if you know what I mean.”
I had no idea what she meant.
“Was that where you learned how to give unambiguous signals?” I asked.
It was as if she hadn’t heard me.
“I don’t want to go back.”
“Then don’t,” I said.
Her legs unbent, I heard them slide against the sheet.
I felt her teeth on my neck, then biting into my shoulder. Her fingers were gripping me; nails like talons. She pulled me on top of her, grinding her pelvis against mine, legs scissoring me. The nails again, this time digging deep into my buttocks.
Her eyes were wild.
“Make love to me.” Her voice was breathless. She moaned. “Fuck me. Fuck the carnage out of my head. I want to feel you in me, fucking me. That’s all I want to feel.”
TEN
It was 6:00A.M.I was back in my apartment. My body was unshowered but I felt cleansed. An hour before, Carol’s warm body had bathed me, anointed me for the day ahead.
On returning, I’d been ready to find that twenty-four hours had conjured a makeover on my home: white sheets drawn over the furniture, spiderwebs hanging from the light fixtures and curtains. I expected my footsteps to disturb a layer of dust.
Wandering into my compact kitchen, I pulled an iced tea from the refrigerator. I stripped off and wrapped myself in a towel that had been left hanging damply over the back of a kitchen chair. I padded across the living/dining room and slumped into a big overstuffed chair, a chair I’d picked up in my first days in New York and to which I had become thoroughly attached.
I liked my apartment. It wasn’t impressive or even homey, but the walls were solid and neighbors could play Eminem at top volume or screw with bacchanalian abandon and I’d never hear them. And there was plenty of space, more than enough for my few possessions: thecomputer, the random furniture, the stacks of books, a few framed photos, CDs and videos, and a rather tired yucca plant. Visitors would have had difficulty deducing my personality from my living quarters. Not like Carol’s place: Her fixtures and fittings spoke of someone who cared about her surroundings, who matched and selected things rather than simply stuffing a credit card in her bag and sauntering around midtown until she’d assembled an ill-matched ensemble of household items.
Grand Central Station hung over me. A huge photograph, sepia, grainy. Great shafts of light aimed down from high windows to form discrete pools on the floor of the main hall. It was like a cathedral, where the worshipers were constantly on the move rather than nailed to their pews. Some were caught in the spotlight, while others lurked in the shadows, waiting to be exposed.
Carol, naked, walked across the marbled floor. Beneath her luxuriant crown of hair, her eyes danced and she was laughing. She was coming toward me.
In her hand she held a dog leash, nothing attached to it, dangling, redundant.
Carol opened her mouth slowly. Would she say something? Would she scream? But she uttered a buzz, electric and insistent, inhuman.
The buzzing filled my head. But my eyes were open now.
Alongside the buzzing from my front door I could hear the rain beating hard against the windows.
If I had been more awake, I’d have noticed that the bell to the apartment itself had buzzed and not the intercom. It was the concierge who usually announced guests. But I was still fuzzy, still gripped by sleep. I loped along the hall, didn’t bother to look through the spy hole, and was able to open the door wide as I had forgotten to attach the chain.
It was the detective I’d spoken to in the precinct the day before. He was accompanied by a uniformed officer and neither looked very friendly. They were also soaking wet.
“Detective Minelli,” I said, trying to sound welcoming.
“Manelli,” he said crossly.
He asked me if he could come in as he and his partner bargedpast. I overlooked their presumptuousness and led them into the living/dining room, switching on lights as I went.
“Do sit down,” I said.
They sat down together on the overstuffed couch that in a prestained age had matched my overstuffed chair.
“What can I do for you?” I asked. “It’s a little early for trauma counseling.” I looked at my watch. It was, in fact, just after ten.
“Yeah, right.” Manelli toyed with his attaché case. I offered them a cold drink. They ignored me.
“You and Mr. Carlson both shared an interest in cars,” Manelli said.
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
Lawyer’s instinct told me not to laugh; the same instinct acted like smelling salts under my nose. I was awake. Alert. At work.
“Well, it’s true that we talked a bit about cars. But he had a passion he could indulge: Ferraris, Porsches, you know the kind of thing.” Manelli looked disdainful. Rich kid toys. “I don’t own a car in New York,” I continued, “and the cars I’ve driven in England wouldn’t have excited JJ very much. That’s why I laughed.”
“What did you think of the car he wrecked?”
JJ had committed an act of sacrilege. There was the story of the English judge who’d added an extra year on to the sentence of an armed robber because he had sawn off the barrels from a set of Purdey shotguns. I was certain that a New York judge who knew anything about cars would have done the same to JJ.
“The McLaren F1,” I said. “Everyone has their own opinion about cars, as with wine or paintings, but in my view it is the ultimate. It will be a long time before someone comes up with something better.”
“Why don’t you tell us about the car, sir.”
“I’ve told you. A great car. I’m not an expert; in fact I’d never seen one up close before. JJ had just bought it and he called me to show it off. At least that’s what I thought. Obviously he had another objective. That’s it, that’s all I know.”
Both of them shuffled and exchanged a knowing look. “Cut the bullshit,” said the uniformed cop.
“What do you mean? Everything I’ve told you is true,” I insisted. “I
have nothing to hide. I let you into my apartment voluntarily and you turn aggressive. Why? And I don’t like to be told to cut the bullshit when there isn’t any to cut. Ask your questions, say your piece, then leave me alone.”
“You left it a long time before coming to speak with us,” said Manelli.
“I’ve explained why. You seemed to understand when I came down to the precinct.”
“Is that your injury?” asked Manelli, pointing at the small scab on my forehead. I nodded. Manelli leaned over and peered at it. “Don’t look too serious to me,” he said.
I told him I agreed, but it was the shock that had delayed me, not the splinter in my forehead. Manelli’s partner sniggered.
They’d come with an agenda, but they wanted to toy with me first. Why?
“What about narcotics, Mr. Border?” said Manelli. “Was that another interest you shared with JJ Carlson?”
Apart from four or five joints at college, I was on safe ground. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on.” He zapped the wavelength of the confidante, the crony. Go on, you can tell us, a few joints, a snort in the bathroom, we understand, it isn’t a big deal, we know all about Wall Street.
My receiver wasn’t set to that frequency. “No. Never.”
“Carlson used cocaine,” he continued, no longer the confidante, now the interrogator. “A great deal, spent more on it in a week than I earn in a year. At least that’s what the pathologist reckons. He reckons he was stoned out of his skull when he died. What do you reckon, Mr. Border?”
Maybe JJhadbeen a little trippy. I remembered the mad grin, the eyes. But I’d just put all that down to the thrill of speed and scaring the shit out of me. Anyway, he was always rushing around, from place to place, idea to idea. Coke? Quite possible. On our Jack evenings he’d go to the bathroom a few times, but so did I. It was possible he was going for a refill while all I was doing was having a piss or, on one or two embarrassing occasions, a rib-splitting vomit.
Walls of Silence Page 6