Rain
“WE ARE THE DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE,” THE young man says, gesturing behind him toward a shadowy group of people, “and Rockefeller Center is a place of meeting for us and all other prisoners of love. We are Catholics.” They all stand in front of an elevator that is, although dark and grimy, much like the elevators in what he recalls is named the Our Lady of Angels Building at 165 West Forty-sixth Street. It’s raining very hard as they step off the elevator and he is permitted to join them as they move quickly down the street. “I’m having a Charms myself,” the young man says affably. He is not quite the same young man who was on the elevator but he is the same in certain ways that are something, something, he can’t think of the word — intransigent? “Catholic,” the young man says, and puts his palms together in mock prayer. Mickey! “Mickey?” he asks, but the young man ignores him. They walk out of the rain into a crowded street and stop, he and Mickey, in front of the Three Deuces. “The Deuces” he says, and turns to Mickey, who is gone, along with all the others. Charlie Parker is inside the club, right now, and he’ll get to hear him play again. He walks into the long room, at the end of which is the little bandstand, empty. There’s nobody at the bar, either, or the tables. A woman arrives on the bandstand from backstage. She’s in a black-and-silver evening dress that needs cleaning. She starts to sing “Prisoner of Love,” and he calls out “Bird!” He’s on the street, the rain soaking him through. He’ll go home to his wife if he can find the subway, where the hell is the subway, it used to be right there on Forty-ninth Street. “The Catholics are down there,” a man rushing by says, “over on Father Duffy Square.” He wants a smoke and puts his hand into his pocket but his cigarettes are a soggy mess. “Wings?” he says. He hasn’t smoked Wings since he was a boy. His wing-tip shoes are oozing black dye or polish, no, they’re dissolving. How will he get home without shoes?
The Alpine
WHEN LITTLE CHILDREN WERE TAKEN TO THE ALPINE by their fathers on Saturday afternoons, they were expected to be frightened by Tarzan and his wild treetop screams, his sinister humanoid ape friend, his somehow bewildered yet attentive half-naked companion, Jane; by the faceless Spider and his clubfooted shuffle and clump, forever out of the reach of Dick Tracy; by the grinning foreign fiends who were the perverted enemies of the Daredevils of the Red Circle. They were expected to cry, to drool, to drop from their sticky mouths their Charms lollipops onto their bright candid scarves, to know that they and their fathers were soon to be assaulted by the huge black-and-white monstrosities that jerked and shifted and rumbled and glared out at the dark from the glitter of the screen that ordered and dominated all of life above the passive and awestruck and terrified audience. These children were expected to become hysterical, to have their Charms decorate, as sweet multicolored jewels, their clothes, to present faces that were flushed red and wet with tears. And then their fathers would hoist them to their chests and carry them out to the cold, brilliant afternoon streets, and home. These fathers often began, sooner or later, to carry on, as they used to say, with other women, and were then, suddenly, nowhere to be found: not in the Alpine, nor the jungles of Africa; not in the dark streets of the threatening metropolis, nor in the secret lairs beneath those streets, lairs favored by the depraved Orientals who worshiped evil gods. They were gone, these fathers, and warm memories of their presence, invented or elaborated tales of doting words murmured to calm endearing childish terrors, and the hopeful deluded beliefs of the sad and bitter women who did their best and then did their best again would not serve, ever, to return these men from the delicious sexual folly that they had expectantly embraced, and were, as often as not, crushingly betrayed by.
A Wake
WHEN SHE HEARD FROM A FRIEND THAT HE’D DIED IN the Whitehall Street subway station of a massive, as they liked to put it, heart attack, she decided to go to DeRosa’s Funeral Home in the old neighborhood to pay her respects, as they liked to put it. Then she decided that she wouldn’t. His first wife, knowing her, would surely be there, wronged, cold, and distant, but civil in that perfectly vulgar way that she’d learned from Christ knows how many carefully smoothed movies. And she’d no doubt have one of her young deadbeat boyfriends along, some twenty-five-year-old two-bit grifter with a habit and a ponytail, in a curiously ill-fitting Hugo Boss or Armani suit that had exhausted another one of her credit cards. But then, who had known him longer than she? So she would go, after all. She’d see the old neighborhood anyway, the restaurants that had been saloons, the cocktail lounges that had been diners, the Burger Kings that were once pizzerias with breezy summer gardens in back. Why let the vengeful, adulterous, grasping shrew play her part in comfort? She could wear her purple velvet dress with a black silk jacket, black pumps and stockings, or the black gabardine suit that was almost like the one he’d always liked, or said he liked. She’d knock the eyes out of her head, whatever she wore. Here I am, you bitch, looking better now than you looked when you walked all over him and fucked everything in sight. But she really wasn’t going to go. Let the dead bury the dead. As they liked to put it.
Book Two
Happy Days
MAUREEN HAD BEEN SLEEPING WITH HER BOSS, PIERRE, for six months. Everybody called him Blackie, even the stock boys. He was such a good sport about everything that he didn’t mind at all. He’d told her that he was going to leave Janet, it was only his daughter that kept him from walking out on her right now, she’d turned into such a nag — nothing that he did was ever good enough for her. Surprisingly, out of the blue, as Maureen put it, he showed up at her apartment one Friday night about nine o’clock, carrying a suitcase. “I did it,” he said. “That’s that.” They made love all night long and it was just wonderful, although she made him leave very early in the morning because of her nosy neighbors — all she needed was gossip reaching the Swede landlord. The next day when he came over for lunch he told her that he and Janet had been fighting like cats and dogs all week long; she’d found a book of matches from the Parisian Casino, and although he did his best to lie — he hated to lie, even to Janet — about what he was doing in a Union City roadhouse, it wouldn’t wash. She said that she knew all about roadhouses and what went on there and what went on after people left them, and she knew what sort of women men took to those places. And then she said, and Blackie was struck dumb by it, that she knew damn well what woman he’d taken there and did he think she was a complete fool that she didn’t know what was going on all these weeks and with that scarf that Maureen — she said that woman—gave him for Christmas? A silk scarf, and a potted plant for the dumb little wife? Did he really take her for a complete fool? The fight went on from there, and on and on, and then it would simmer down, but start up all over again. That’s why he hadn’t been able to see his sweetie all week. He didn’t tell Maureen that he and Janet had made love before and after all the episodes of their serial quarrel, and that their lovemaking was better than it had ever been in their eleven years together, it was hot and kind of dirty. It looked as if maybe things were going to blow over for a while so that he could talk to Janet, choose his own time to leave, explain things to little Clara — but then yesterday she woke up ready for battle, started in all over again with the scarf business. She must have been lying in bed stewing about it. That scarf had really gotten under her skin and there was the old song and dance about it, silk, made in Italy, B. Altman’s, the works! And how he never gave her anything nice, he never took her anywhere, when was the last time they went out to dinner in a nice restaurant, oh Jesus God! And then she mentioned, the bitch, that maybe Maureen had also bought him his hat, that makes him look like an ambulance-chasing shyster. Blackie went upstairs, without a word, packed a bag, and came down to tell her that he wasn’t coming back, he’d call her. Janet yelled at him, actually she screamed at him that she didn’t want him to call her ever ever again and that he’d never see Clara again and that she hoped he’d die and burn in hell along with his whore. Blackie sat back on Maureen’s sofa and she patted his leg, shaking her head. She got up and brought him a cup of coffee. She was wearing a tight skirt and he reached out and touched her leg. She looked at him and smiled. “Why didn’t you wear your scarf, darling?” she said. He looked up at her and smiled back, his hands under her skirt, caressing her thighs. He’d looked for the scarf high and low and it hadn’t been in his closet or dresser drawers, or anywhere, and he figured that maybe Janet, she could be very mean, had thrown it out. “Thrown it out?” Maureen said, pushing at his hands and stepping back from him. “You let her throw it out?” Her expression was cold, her face closed and pinched. Blackie looked out the window at the cold Saturday streets, trying to think of an answer to the envenomed question. Christ, she made a really lousy cup of coffee.