“Because anonymity is everything.”
“He was speaking and he invited me to come down and hear his qualification. Was it his anniversary? It may have been.”
“And he said the line?”
“No, but he liked it well enough so that we talked about it afterward over coffee. It was during the discussion, and a woman spoke up. ‘Old age is not a burden. It is a privilege denied to many.’ What was her name?”
“Does it matter?”
“I can picture her,” I said, “and if I were an artist I could draw her face. She grew up in northern New England, Maine or Vermont. She was a librarian.”
“Marian the Librarian?”
“No, but that came to mind because her name was Mary. ‘Old age is a privilege denied to many.’ ”
“It’s probably good for us to remember that,” she said. “Every once in a while.” She frowned. “Something you said.”
“Something I said?”
“God, I hate when that happens. Something you said triggered a thought, and then the conversation went on, and the thought got lost. What were we saying?”
“Mary the Librarian,” I said. “Old age. A privilege, not a burden.”
“Before that.”
“How far back? You said I was vigorous for an old man on his last legs.”
“Well, you are. But that’s not it. Perry Street, anonymity, Ray’s anniversary. How many years has he got now?”
“Four.”
“That’s all? And what’s so funny?”
“The traditional response is ‘Isn’t that wonderful,’ not ‘That’s all.’ ”
“I just thought he’d been going to meetings a lot longer than that. Oh, I guess he’s had relapses.”
“It took him a little while to get his footing,” I said, “and then he picked up a drink again. The circumstances were in his qualification. He met this attractive European woman at a conference, and the conversation just sparkled, and she said, ‘Why don’t we have a glass of wine?’ And he didn’t want the wine, but he didn’t want to kill the mood, either. And by the end of the evening he was in a fake Irish pub on Columbus Avenue, knocking back the Bushmill’s while all the other drunks hung on his every word.”
“And the attractive European woman?”
“Left the meeting with her girlfriend.”
“These things happen.”
“But he’s sober now,” I said, “and as of that meeting he had four years, but it must be closer to five by now.”
“Five years,” she said “Isn’t that wonderful?”
Half an hour later she came over to where I was sitting. She had a dish towel in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, and she said, “Ray G.”
“As in Gruliow. What about him?”
“Not him,” she said. “The other Ray G.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“I had the thought and I couldn’t find my way back to it. And then a minute ago it was just there, and I wanted to tell you before it went away again. But I’m pretty sure it won’t at this point, and now I’ve told you, so—”
“Are they still living in Williamsburg?”
“As far as I know. And I would think he’d still have the same number. I can look it up.”
But it was in my phone’s list of contacts. I made the call.
Tuesday morning I awoke from a dream and when I got back from the bathroom I decided I wanted to get back into it. I couldn’t find my way into the dream, it had gone wherever dreams go, but I did manage to fall asleep again and got two more hours. Dreamless hours, as far as I could tell.
For breakfast I had a piece of toast and a cup of coffee, because in less than two hours I’d be meeting Ray Galindez for lunch at the Morning Star. It was getting on for noon when Elaine left for the Croatian church, and not long after that when I headed out for my meeting with Ray.
I picked a table at the front window where I could keep an eye on the door, and ordered coffee while I waited. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Ray, and I decided it had to be about as long ago as Ray Gruliow’s last drink. Elaine had seen him more frequently than I, as they’d had an ongoing business relationship while her shop was still open. But as for me...
Maybe it had been longer than five years. Jesus, would I recognize him?
I kept looking toward the entrance, and it wasn’t long before he came in, wearing pressed jeans and a blazer and carrying a black leather portfolio, and of course I recognized him instantly. I raised a hand, and he saw me and came over, and after the handshake he took a seat across from me.
“You look the same,” I said.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing? But you, Matt. You look terrific. What’s so funny?”
“The three stages of a man’s life,” I said. “Youth, middle age, and ‘You look wonderful!’ ”
“I never heard that one. But you do, you know. Life good?”
“No complaints.”
“What about Elaine? Does she miss the shop?”
Once she’d left the life, Elaine looked around for something to do. She took classes and was a regular at her gym, but none of that was work, and she felt the need for work. She’d always had a good eye for art and antiques, and one day she signed a lease for a small Ninth Avenue storefront a few blocks south of our apartment. I forget what they used to sell there, but she replaced the existing sign with her name, ELAINE MARDELL, and stocked it with items from her storage locker.
One day we came home from a Matisse show at MOMA, and she said, “You know, he was a genius, and—”
“Matisse?”
“Uh-huh. A genius, and the Fauve style holds up marvelously, and I wouldn’t want to say this in front of the man himself, or in front of anybody but you, actually, but—”
“But your average four-year-old kid could paint like that?”
“No,” she said. “No no no. But there are some paintings of his that are not all that different from what you see in thrift shops. He knew what he was doing, and the thrift-shop artists didn’t, except maybe intuitively. And he knew how to get the effects he wanted, and they didn’t, and who’s to say that they got what they were aiming for? But if you look through enough bins of amateur crap, like one thrift shop after another—”
“You might find something to hang on the walls.”
“The shop’s walls.”
“Right.”
“Not our walls.”
“Perish the thought.”
The shop was fun for her. Fun for both of us, in fact, as I sometimes spelled her when she had a yoga class or a hair appointment, or the urge to prowl second-hand shops in a search for the next unheralded masterpiece. I enjoyed the interaction with the people who wandered into the shop, didn’t mind the bargaining that was a part of many transactions, and felt triumphant when somebody actually bought something.
The place showed a profit, although we would have been hard put to live on it. But it kept us busy and it earned its keep, and she’d still have it but for the fact that the landlord quadrupled the rent.
She came home and sat down with a pencil and paper, and an hour later she said she couldn’t make it work. “We’d be losing minimum of two grand a month staying open,” she said. “Probably more like three.”
“We can do it if you want. We can afford it, can’t we?”
She’d put money aside during her call girl years, then followed the advice of one of her regulars and began investing in real estate. Now she owned a batch of apartment houses in Queens, and enjoyed a nice stream of income from them. I had my pension and Social Security, plus the occasional windfall dollars I’d managed to set aside, so we were comfortable. If we had to subsidize the shop to the tune of twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars a year, we could do so without missing any meals.