We were late arriving in New York, though I don’t know why. Perhaps a headwind slowed us down. Stu was still next to me when we landed. Out of his incomprehension of my behavior, or perhaps out of simple boredom, he’d resumed speaking to me and I was grateful for this. Stu’s conversation increasingly revolved around his mildly pornographic fantasies—the numberless girls he slept with at the University of Illinois, the dental technician he brought to orgasm by blowing on her clitoris with that forced-air contraption dentists use to dry out your mouth, and all the bars and massage parlors where he persistently tried to heal the erotic wounds of adolescence. He sounded half like a liar and half like a middle-aged man gone mad from too many nights alone, but it was somehow agreed upon that I was obliged to listen to him
As we waited for our luggage, Stu was still with me. He was at the next stage of his approach, which was to invite me to come with him and sample the paid-for pleasures of a certain New York whorehouse. “I haven’t been there myself,” Stu said, “but a friend tells me it’s the best deal in New York. Thirty bucks for everything and no tipping. If you try to give the girls anything extra, they get pissed off at you. It’s really supposed to be nice.”
Our suitcases came out on the conveyor belt at the same time, his big blue American Tourister right next to my smaller wheat- colored case, an early inheritance from Arthur. My senses were at once blurred and jittery. Why of all the luggage in the belly of that plane did mine have to gravitate next to Stu’s? Our bags glided toward us. Stu grabbed his with a possessive snap and I picked up mine gingerly because the night before, when I was stuffing it with as much clothing as it would take, I’d somehow yanked the handle loose and now it was affixed to the case only by a few feet of kite string.
“An antique,” said Stu.
“Not yet.” I was slipping into a kind of despair. I didn’t regret causing him the small pain an hour before but the immediacy of my impulse still frightened me. I hadn’t any real idea whether or not Stu knew all about my three years in Rockville—I hadn’t had enough control over the conversation or myself to find out. And if he was in the habit of talking about me—his loneliness and sense of revenge made him a likely type to gossip about anyone who’d passed through his life—then it remained to be seen whether my meeting him was another instance of my generally crummy luck. I didn’t think he was going to call the department of corrections to report seeing me, but his knowledge made my eventual apprehension just that much more likely. He was, at the least, an eyewitness.
We walked out of the baggage area, slowly, as if we were afraid to part. “Where you staying?” Stu asked.
My plan was no more developed than to go someplace central and find an affordable hotel. “With friends,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“This guy I know.”
“Someone from Chicago?”
“No.”
“What’s his name?”
I stopped. We were in the lower level of La Guardia. The world beyond the glass doors looked to be the color blue of a gas flame. There was a line of cabs waiting and a few enormous buses.
“What’s with all the questions?” I asked.
“In case I want to call you,” Stu said with an uncle-ish shrug. “Look. I’m staying at the Taft Hotel. It’s near everything.”
I nodded. “The guy I’m staying with is named Ben Ecrest.”
“What’s the phone?”
“I don’t remember. He’s in the book, though. He lives in the Village.”
“The Village sucks,” said Stu. “Look. You want to share a cab? It’ll be about three bucks each. It’s worth it.”
“No thanks.” I waited for him to do something but he just stood there. “Ben’s coming to pick me up.”
“Oh yeah? OK. Would it be OK if he dropped me off in Manhattan? Then I could scoot up to my hotel on the subway. I could use the extra money to have fun with.”
“If you don’t mind waiting,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s going to be late. Maybe about two o’clock.”
“Well that fucks that. I’ve got a two o’clock appointment on Fifty-seventh Street. Why’s he coming so late?”
“He works.”
“Well, why don’t you give him a call and tell him you’ll come in yourself and save him the trip out here?”
My anxiety was giving way to a great weariness. It seemed that no matter what I said, Stu would have another maddening idea. I was growing comfortable with my lies and my made-up friend; I could have imagined standing there lying to Stu and dodging his questions for hours. “He works. I have no way of getting in touch with him.”
“He doesn’t have an office?”
“No.”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s a cop.”
“A cop? A New York City cop?”
“That’s right. Weird, isn’t it?”
“Weird? Are you nuts? That’s very weird. And he’s a friend of yours?”
“He’s a great guy. Not what you’d think. He smokes pot. He’s a socialist, too.”
“Leave it to Axelrod to know the one hippy cop.”
I was outfoxing myself, I realized. My phantom pal was sounding glamorous enough for Stu to forget about the plaster- of-Paris teeth waiting for him in their plush cases. I could see him considering waiting with me, pacing before the idea like a guilty man pacing in front of a porno theater, leaning toward the ticket window, pulling away. He looked out through the glass doors. The long line of people who’d been boarding the bus was almost gone now. The driver was boarding.
“I’m going to take that bus,” Stu blurted out. He grabbed my arm. “Remember. Taft Hotel. You remember my last name?”
“Neihardt.”
Stu looked pleased, even a little touched. “So call me,” he said, turning away. “Call me and we’ll do something.”
I waited a few minutes before leaving. I found a phonebook and looked up Ann’s number and address, though I knew them by heart and had also written them down on the back of my library card, which was in my pocket. But it made me feel better to see her name and I went out to hail a taxi with a portion of my confidence and determination beginning to return. I asked the driver to take me to Macy’s. I’d never been to New York and had no idea where to look for a hotel—the only hotels I knew were the fancy ones I’d read about and I knew just enough to realize they were way out of my price range. Macy’s, I thought, was central and I felt certain there’d be plenty of hotels around. The driver navigated his cab as if he were more accustomed to driving a motorcycle. We sped practically up to the bumpers of the cars in front of us, darted in and out of lanes, and managed to pass nearly everyone on the crowded Long Island Expressway. “You want the tunnel?” he called to me over his shoulder. I didn’t exactly know what he meant but I had a foolish horror of being taken for a total out-of-towner so I said yes. At one point, we were entangled in a knot of traffic that the driver could not pass through. To our right was one of those infinite graveyards that cause in us strangers something very close to disapproval—as if so many dead people reflected darkly on the city. And to our left was a big silver bus, its motors roaring, its sides splattered with mud.
After some tiresome, typical mishaps, I finally checked into the Hotel McAlpin. The lobby had quite a few people who looked even more awkward and on the loose than I felt—men in green pants and string ties, an Oriental woman with a hairdo that must have been two feet tall, a furtive pair of aging teens carrying filthy knapsacks, eating Snickers and trying not to be noticed—they looked more like siblings than lovers; they were probably part of the last wave of mass runaways and they paced the lobby not to get away from the elements (it was a balmy day) but to relieve the foreverness of being outside. In a huge conference room off the main lobby, the Scientologists were conducting a personality test for people they’d spirited off the streets. Shoppers, wanderers, and businessmen who didn’t care to return to their offices sat in folding chairs and answered questions pertaining to their emotional lives while a few grim-looking Scientology employees paced the room like proctors at a college board examination.