He corrected the typo, checked the clock in the screen’s upper corner.
—
And what if he flinched? Took a little break and slunk off to a Washington Square hustler for a dime bag cut with oregano? Bounced out for a night with the boys, as implicitly suggested by all these people when they asked How are you holding up? Or tactfully nudged, Make sure to take care of yourself. Sentences filled with goodwill and concern, the least painful way to address his baggy red eyes and doughy second chin, his growing stomach pushing his belt and pants until they were halfway down his hips, his stares of distance and incredulity, his quick temper and pissed-off looks, a scowl that threatened to become permanent.
But what if he was indeed good to himself and accepted a joint with a thank you and got so high that air traffic controllers had to direct him to the nearest couch. If he let his friends buy him shots all night. If a call arrived, once he’d done that. If something happened with Alice, something went wrong with the baby.
Like fuck he was going to let that happen.
Oliver’s most responsible means of escape was employed rarely — only at those moments when the planets were in their proper alignments, and he was feeling magnanimous, and had the energy to be a good and upstanding daddy, and someone was around to keep an eye on Alice besides. Lifting that papoose thing over his head, he’d strap himself in, holster the little squiggler inside. He’d take Doe to the school yard on Horatio, lift her carefully from her papoose, fitting each leg into one of the plastic seats of those special baby swings. With the little one getting all excited and rocking in her seat, Oliver would push, not even close to hard, just enough. Once he’d gotten a decent rhythm going, he usually stared out into the basketball courts, watching men younger than him play three-on-three. He’d scan the playground, eyeing the young mothers in their sculpted jeans, the proudly displayed figures that had been worked back into shape.
Today that wasn’t happening. Today was something else.
He’d withdrawn eighteen twenty-dollar bills from the company account. Fifteen sat neatly in an unsealed white mailing envelope, which Oliver now withdrew from a desk drawer and placed in the front left pocket of his corduroy pants. The other three were in his wallet, just in case. At the base of his keyboard lay a creased, lemon-yellow business card. He was supposed to call the number at 5:00 P.M. But he couldn’t call from the office phone, as there could be no record of this call, and the people he needed did not talk to anybody on a cellular — twice Oliver had forgotten, been hung up on.
Just fuck it.
Rising from his desk, he glanced around, quickly checked his reflection in the terminal screen.
—
Heading eastward, passing the sneaker stores and boot stores and the health food place, his steps were making him a bit queasy, though Oliver still moved with speed. He didn’t want to be late. He kept an eye out, cursed to himself because goddamn Giuliani still hadn’t replaced any of the pay phone receivers or gutted wires. Moving to the other side of Broadway, nearing the triangle of busy avenues at Astor Place. And it was here that the old truism presented itself, the idea that you were only part of the city when your history here reached out for you. For Oliver it was a bulky line of bodies, ensnaring him in its meaty arm. Blocking half of the sidewalk and running along the base of the large commercial stone building that had been built back during the previous century. Bodies grouped in twos and threes, bunching up, leaning against, and blocking the large pictures that took up the windows of Astor Wines & Spirits; all these people killing time, shooting the shit with the neighboring stranger; standing and staring out at whatever. A blow-up doll was being batted like a beach ball.
Oliver hadn’t realized it was Tuesday; but it had to be. Of course.
—
Every Tuesday afternoon, the better part of three years: this line, its untold bodies. That clichéd new arrival from the sticks with the hay straw in his mouth and dreams of making it big. The loser in a breakup who had to find a new place to pick up the pieces. You didn’t have a friend who had a spare room or inside angle? You couldn’t really afford to give fifteen percent of a year’s rent to a real estate agent? Getting work in this city was so much easier than getting a pad; so, on Tuesday afternoon, it was in your best interest to leave work early, right around the time when the gray pages of The Village Voice were still warm from the printing press, and the recognizable royal-blue ink of the paper’s logo was still seeping into its cover. Five thirty or so, the first bundled stacks of the famed leftist weekly came out on a rolling pulley, dragged from the headquarters near Cooper Union, onto the sidewalk of Fourth Avenue. The Astor Place newsstand — just a few hundred yards away — got them around 5:45 P.M. A solid hour earlier than anywhere else.
Even the Statue of Liberty knew that the Voice’s classifieds were the alpha and omega for halfway affordable places, so valuable that even the rag’s most powerful editors, even its famed columnists, couldn’t get advance access. The only early access was the front of that line. Every Tuesday afternoon, to supplement his meager grad school scholarship income, Oliver used to place business cards with the name Hudson Realty, as well as his phone extension, in each pay phone within a half mile of the Astor newsstand. Oliver then would offer a card to every person on line, chatting up those toward the middle and the back, explaining that if you weren’t in the front third of that line, by the time you paid for your Voice, got to a pay phone that worked, and found a few ads that didn’t sound like that much of a compromise, the numbers would already have been bombarded, and the dude who placed the ad would’ve given up on answering the phone, and even if this person’s answering machine wasn’t filled, you’d be like fifty-fifth on the list. No shot.
Once he let stragglers know that if the ads didn’t net them anything, he’d be available to show them places, Oliver hightailed it back to a dusty office in an old Gramercy hotel, where he spent the evening answering calls. Next morning he was up at seven. On the half hour, lasting long into the evening, he met groups of six to eight strangers at designated corners of the Lower East Side, amid all those knish shops and quinceañera dressmakers and noodle places with dead plucked chickens hanging in windows. Listings generally were considered dogshit, where pretty much any agency could get keys, and commissions were up for grabs. Oliver always met his groups on the southeast corner — southeast was his. Other groups of prospective tenants would congregate around their entry-level real estate agents on the other three corners, all these clusters of nervous white people at once conspicuous and funny, a shaking little harbinger. Invariably, a grumbling super then led the parado de blancos up stairways thin and creaking and smelling of weird steamed vegetables, guiding them down dark hallways echoing with the cries of infants and the barks of ignored dogs. Always they ended up in front of some metal door festooned with half-ripped stickers — the Puerto Rican flag, some princesses, a purple dinosaur.
When the mom of a trench-coat-wearing graduate student complained that her family had spent fifty years working to get out of these low-ceilinged one-bedroom shoe box shtetls, Oliver would answer that she was totally right, this space was unacceptable. He’d also mention a bigger place his listing sheet said was nearby, a bit above their price range, but if she was interested, they could take a look. When the temp with ambitions of documentary filmmaking recoiled at splattered walls and a decapitated body outlined in chalk along the kitchen floor, Oliver agreed. Totally unacceptable. No reasonable person could be expected to make their breakfast at a murder site. Except, you know, the floor’s scheduled to be cleaned. And the walls will get a new coat of paint.