He had both of us pointing out whatever looked off about the sketch, and he'd go to work with the eraser and make a slight change, and gradually the image came into focus with our memory. Then, when we couldn't find anything else to object to, he brought the sketch up to date.
"What we've got here," he said, "is already a man who looks older than twenty-eight years of age. Partly that's because all three of us know for a fact that he's forty or forty-one now, so our minds have been making little unconscious adjustments to our memory. Still, there's more we can do. One thing that happens as you age, your features get more prominent. You take a young person and draw a caricature of him, ten or twenty years later it doesn't look so exaggerated. I had an instructor once, she said we grow up to be caricatures of ourselves. What we'll do here, we'll make the nose a little bit larger, we'll sink the eyes a little beneath the brow." He did all this with a hint of shadow here, a change of line there.
It was quite a demonstration.
"And gravity starts working on you," he went on. "Pulls you down here and there." A flick of the eraser, a stroke of the soft pencil. "And the hairline. Now here we're in the dark on account of we lack information. Did he keep his hair? Is he bald as an egg? We just don't know. But let's say he did like most people do, most men, that is, and he's got the beginnings of male-pattern baldness with the receding hairline. That doesn't mean he's going to look bald, or even well on his way. All it means is his hairline's changed and he's got himself a higher forehead, might look something like this."
He added a suggestion of lines around the eyes, creases at the corners of the mouth. He increased the definition of the cheekbones, held the pad at arm's length, made a minute adjustment with eraser and pencil.
"Well?" he said. "What do you think? Suitable for framing?"
* * *
His work done, Galindez accepted a Heineken. Elaine and I split a Perrier. He talked a little about himself, reluctantly at first, but Elaine was masterful at drawing him out. I suppose it was a professional talent of hers. He told us how drawing had always been something he could do, how he'd taken it so utterly for granted that it had never occurred to him to make a career of it. He'd always wanted to be a cop, had a favorite uncle in the department, and took the test for admission as soon as he finished up a two-year hitch atKingsboroughCommunity College .
He went on sketching for his own amusement, doing portraits and caricatures of his fellow officers; and one day in the absence of a regular police artist he was pressed into service to produce a sketch of a rapist.
Now that was the bulk of what he did, and he loved it, but he felt himself being drawn away from police work. People had been suggesting that he might have the potential for an artistic career far greater than anything he could expect to realize in law enforcement, and he wasn't sure how he felt about that.
He said no to Elaine's offer of a second beer, thanked me for the two fifties I handed him, and told us he hoped we'd let him know how things turned out. "When you take him down," he said, "I hope I get a chance to see him, or at least a photo of him. Just to see how close I came. Sometimes you'll see the actual guy and he's nothing like what you drew, and other times anybody'd swear you must have been working from a model."
When he left Elaine closed the door after him and engaged all the locks. "I feel silly doing this," she said,
"but I've been doing it anyway."
"There are people all over town with half a dozen locks on every door, and alarm systems and everything else. And they don't have somebody who's threatened to kill them."
"I suppose it's comforting to know that," she said. "He's a nice kid, Ray. I wonder if he'll stay a cop."
"Hard to say."
"Was there ever anything else you wanted to be? Besides a cop?"
"I never even wanted to be a cop. It was something I drifted into, and before I was out of the Academy I realized it was what I'd been born for. But I never knew that early on. When I was a kid I wanted to be Joe DiMaggio when I grew up, but that's what every kid wanted, and I never had the moves to go with the desire."
"You could have married Marilyn Monroe."
"And sold coffee makers on television. There but for the grace of God."
She carried our empty glasses into the kitchen and I trailed along behind her. She rinsed them under the tap, placed them in the strainer. "I think I'm getting stir-crazy," she said. "What are you doing tonight? Do you have anyplace you have to be?"
I looked at my watch. I usually go toSt. Paul 's on Fridays for the eight-thirty step meeting, but it was too late now, they'd already started.
And I had caught a noon meeting downtown already that day. I told her I didn't have anything planned.
"Well, how about a movie? How does that sound?"
It sounded fine. We walked over to Sixtieth and Third to a first-run house. It was the weekend so there was a line, but there was a pretty decent film at the end of it, a slick caper movie with Kevin Costner and Michelle Pfeiffer. "She's not really pretty," Elaine said afterward, "but there's something about her, isn't there? If I were a man, I'd want to fuck her."
"Repeatedly," I said.
"Oh, she does it for you, huh?"
"She's all right."
" 'Repeatedly,' " she said, and chuckled. Around us,Third Avenue was thronged with young people who looked as though the country were every bit as prosperous as the Republicans kept telling us it was. "I'm hungry," Elaine announced. "You want to get a bite? My treat."
"Sure, but why is it your treat?"
"You paid for the movie. Can you think of a place? Friday night in this neighborhood, wherever we go we're going to be up to our tits in yuppies."
"There's a place in my neighborhood. Great hamburgers and cottage fries. Oh, wait a minute. You don't eat hamburgers, do you? The fish is good there, but I forget if you said you eat fish."
"Not anymore. How's their salad?"
"They serve a good salad, but is that enough for you?"
She said it would be plenty, especially if she stole a few of my cottage fries. There were no empty cabs and the streets were full of people trying to hail one. We started to walk, then caught a bus onFifty-seventh Street and got off atNinth Avenue . The place I had in mind, Paris Green, was five blocks downtown. The bartender, a lanky fellow with a brown beard that hung down like an oriole's nest, gave a wave as we cleared the threshold. His name wasGary , and he'd helped me out a few months ago when I'd been hired to find a girl who'd done some of her drinking there. The manager, whose name was Bryce, had been a little less helpful then, but he was helpful enough now, greeting us with a smile and showing us to a good table. A waitress with a short skirt and long legs came over to take our drink order, went away, and came back with Perrier for me and a Virgin Mary for Elaine. I must have been watching the girl's departure, because Elaine tapped my glass with hers and advised me to stick to Michelle Pfeiffer.
"I was just thinking," I said.
"I'm sure you were."
When the girl returned Elaine ordered the large garden salad. I had what I generally have there, a Jarlsberg cheeseburger and well-done fries. When the food came I had what felt like déjà vu until I realized I was getting echoes of Tuesday night, when I'd had a late bite at Armstrong's with Toni. The two restaurants weren't that much alike, and neither were the women. Maybe it was the cheeseburgers.
Halfway through mine I thought to ask her if it bothered her that I was eating a cheeseburger. She looked at me as though I were crazy and asked why it should bother her.
"I don't know," I said. "You don't eat meat, and I just wondered."
"You must be kidding. Not eating meat is just a choice I make, that's all. My doctor didn't order me to quit, and it wasn't an addiction I had to struggle with."
"And you don't have to go to the meetings?"
"What meetings?"
"Carnivores Anonymous."