Maybe he had expected all these wonders assembled together, served with a side of invulnerability and private wisdom. A vast phantom drama in which he was both audience and actor.
But Joyce had made that impossible.
He had come here wanting love—some salvaging grace— but love was impossible in the playground. Love was a different landscape. Love implied loss and time and vulnerability. Love made all the props and stage sets too reaclass="underline" real war, real death, real hopes invested in real lost causes.
Because he loved her he had begun to see the world the way she did: not the gaudy Kodachrome of an old postcard but solid, substantial, freighted with other meanings.
He raised his eyes to the horizon, where the hot city haze had begun to lift into a comfortless blue sky.
He bought dinner at a cafeteria and showed up at Mario’s, a basement cafe under a bookstore, before Joyce was due on stage. The “stage,” a platform of two-by-fours covered with plywood panels, contained a cane-backed chair and a PA microphone on a rust-flecked chromium stand—not strictly necessary, given the size of the venue. Tom chose a table by the door.
Joyce emerged from the shadows with her twelve-string Hohner and a nervous smile. Out of some tic of vanity she had chosen to leave her glasses offstage, and Tom was mildly jealous: the only other time he saw her without her glasses was when they were in bed together. Without them, under the stage lights, her face was plain, oval, a little owl-eyed. She blinked at her audience and pulled the microphone closer to the chair.
She began without much confidence, letting the guitar carry her—more certain of her fingers than of her voice. Tom sat among the quieting crowd while she ran a few arpeggios and chord changes, pausing once to tune a string. He closed his eyes and appreciated the rich body of the Hohner.
“This is an old song,” she said.
She sang “Fannerio,” and Tom felt the piercing dissonance of time and time: here was this long-haired woman in a Village cafe playing folk ballads, an image he associated with faded Technicolor movies, record jackets abandoned at garage sales, moldering back issues of Life. It was a cliche and it was painfully naive. It was quaint.
But this was Joyce, and she loved these words and these tunes.
She sang “The Bells of Rhymney” and “Lonesome Traveler” and “Nine Hundred Miles.” Her voice was direct, focused, and sometimes inconsolably sad.
Maybe Larry was right, Tom thought. We love them for their goodness, and then we scour it out of them.
What had he given her, after all?
A future she didn’t want. A night of stark terror in a hole under Manhattan. A burden of unanswerable questions. He had come into her life like a shadow, the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, with his bony ringer pointed at a grave.
He wanted her optimism and her intensity and her fierce caring, because he didn’t have any of his own … because he had mislaid those things in his own inaccessible past.
She sang “Maid of Constant Sorrow” under a blue spot, alone on the tiny stage.
Tom thought about Barbara.
The applause was generous, a hat was passed, she waved and stepped back into the shadows. Tom circled around behind the stage, where she was latching the Hohner into its shell. Her face was somber.
She looked up. “The manager says Lawrence called.”
“Called here?”
“Said he’d been trying to get hold of us all day. He wants us to go over to his apartment and it’s supposed to be urgent.”
What could be urgent? “Maybe he’s drunk.”
“Maybe. But it’s not like him to phone here. I think we should go.”
They walked from the cafe, Joyce hurrying ahead, obviously concerned. Tom was more puzzled than worried, but he let her set the pace.
They didn’t waste any time. They arrived too late, anyhow.
There was a crowd in the stairwell, a siren in the distance —and blood, blood in the hallway and blood spilling from the door of Millstein’s apartment, an astonishing amount of blood. Tom tried to hold Joyce back but she broke away from him, calling out Lawrence’s name in a voice that was already mournful.
Fifteen
Armored, alert, and fully powered, Billy identified the scatter of blue luminescence on the apartment door and adjusted his eyepiece to wideband operation. His heart was beating inside him like a glorious machine and his thoughts were subtle and swift.
The corridor was empty. The keen apparatus of Billy’s senses catalogued the smell of cabbage, roach powder, mildewed linoleum; the dim floral pattern of the wallpaper; the delicate tread and pressure of his feet along the floor.
He burned open the lock with a finger laser and moved through the doorway with a speed that caused the hinges to emit a squeal, as of surprise.
He closed the door behind him.
The apartment was long and rectangular, with a door open into what appeared to be the kitchen and another door, closed, on what was probably a bedroom. A window at the far end of the rectangle showed the night silhouette of the Fourteenth Street Con Edison stacks through a burlap curtain tied back to a nail. The wall on the left was lined with bookshelves.
The room was empty.
Billy stood for a silent moment, listening.
This room and the kitchen were empty … but he heard a faint scuffle from the bedroom.
He smiled and moved through that door as efficiently as he had moved through the first.
This room was smaller and even shabbier. The walls were dirty white and bare except for a crudely framed magazine print of an abstract painting. The bed was a mattress on the floor. There was a man in the bed.
Billy ceased smiling, because this wasn’t the man he had followed from Lindner’s.
This was some other man. This was a tall, pigeon-chested, naked man snatching a cotton sheet over himself and squinting at Billy in the darkness with gap-jawed astonishment.
The man on the mattress said, “Who the fuck are you?”
“Get up,” Billy said.
The man didn’t get up.
He doesn’t know what I am, Billy realized. He thinks I’m an old man in a pair of goggles. It’s dark; he can’t see very well. Maybe he thinks I’m a thief.
Billy corrected this impression by burning a hole in the mattress beside the naked man’s outstretched left arm. The hole was wide and deep. It stank of charred kapok and cotton and the waxy smoke of the wood floor underneath. The hole was black and began immediately to burn at the edges; the naked man yelped and smothered the flames with his blanket. Then he looked up at Billy, and Billy was pleased to recognize the fear in his eyes. This was the kind of fear that would make him abject, malleable; not yet a panicked fear that would make him unpredictable.
“Stand up,” Billy repeated.
Standing, the man was tall but too thin. Billy disliked his fringe of beard, the bump of his ribs, the visible flare of his hip bones. His penis and shriveled scrotum dangled pathetically between his legs.
Billy imagined burning away that sack of flesh, altering this man in something like the way the Infantry doctors had altered Billy himself … but that wasn’t good strategy.
Billy said, “Where’s the man who lives here?”
The naked man swallowed twice and said, “I’m the man who lives here.”
Billy walked to the wall and switched on the light. The light was a sixty-watt bulb hanging on a knotted cord, smoke from the charred mattress swimming around it. Billy’s eyepiece adapted at once to this new light, damping its amplification. The naked man blinked and squinted.
He stared at Billy. “My God,” he said finally. “What are you?
Billy knew the question was involuntary and didn’t require an answer. He said, “Tell me your name.”
“Lawrence Millstein,” the naked man said. “Do you work at a shop called Lindner’s Radio Supply?”