I didn’t mind. It was exciting and romantic. Sort of.
“Your Aunt Minnie is sweet,” Candy said, right before we dropped off to sleep. “But can I ask one question?”
“Shoot.”
“How can ashes object to smoke?”
3.
Our return tickets were for Wednesday. That meant we had one full Honeymoon day, Tuesday, to see the sights of New York, most of which (all of which, truth be told) are in Manhattan. Candy and I got up early and caught the F train at Ditmas. It came right away. We got off at the next-to-last stop in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue, and walked uptown past St. Patrick’s and Tiffany’s and Disney and the Trump Tower; all the way to Central Park and the Plaza, that magnet for Honeymooners. When we saw all the people on the front step, we thought there had been a fire. But they were just smoking; it was just like Brooklyn.
We strolled through the lobby, peering humbly into the Palm Court and the Oak Room, then started back downtown, still holding hands. Candy was the prettiest girl on Fifth Avenue (one of the few in uniform), and I loved watching her watch my big town rush by. New York! Next stop, Rockefeller Center. We joined the crowd overlooking the skaters, secretly waiting for someone to fall; it’s like NASCAR without the noise. Candy was eyeing the line at Nelson’s On the Rink, where waiters on rollerblades serve cappuccinos and lattes. It’s strictly a tourist joint; New Yorkers don’t go for standing in line and particularly not for coffee. But when I saw how fast the line was moving, I figured what the hell. We were seated right away and served right away, and the expense (we are talking four-dollar croissants here) was well worth it.
“What now?” asked Candy, her little rosebud smile deliciously flaked with pastry. I couldn’t imagine anyone I would rather Honeymoon with.
“The Empire State Building, of course.”
Candy grimaced. “I’m afraid of heights. Besides, don’t they shoot people up there?”
“We’re not going to the top, silly,” I said. “That’s a tourist thing.” Taking her by the hand, I took her on my own personal Empire State Building Tour, which involves circling it and seeing it above and behind and through and between the other midtown buildings; catching it unawares, as it were. We started outside Lord & Taylor on Fifth, then cut west on 40th alongside Bryant Park for the sudden glimpse through the rear of a narrow parking lot next to American Standard; then started down Sixth, enjoying the angle from Herald Square (and detouring through Macy’s to ride the wooden-treaded escalators). Then we worked back west through “little Korea,” catching two dramatic views up open airshafts and one across a steep sequence of fire escapes. Standing alone, the Empire State Building looks stupid, like an oversized toy or a prop for a Superman action figure. But in its milieu it is majestic, like an Everest tantahzingly appearing and disappearing behind the ranges. We circled the great massif in a tightening spiral for almost an hour, winding up (so to speak) on Fifth Avenue again, under the big art deco facade. The curb was crowded with tourists standing in line to buy T-shirts and board buses. The T-shirt vendors were looking gloomy, since the buses were coming right away and there was no waiting.
I had saved the best view for last. It’s from the middle of Fifth Avenue, looking straight up. You have to time it just right with the stoplights, of course. Candy and I were about to step off the curb, hand in hand, when a messenger in yellow and black tights (one of our city’s colorful jesters) who was straddling his bike beside a rack of pay phones on the corner of 33rd hailed me.
“Yo!”
I stopped. That’s how long I’d been in Alabama.
“Your name Irv?”
I nodded. That’s how long I’d been in Alabama.
He handed me the phone with a sort of a wink and a sort of a shrug, and was off on his bike before I could hand it back (which was my first instinct).
I put the phone to my ear. Rather cautiously, as you might imagine. “Hello?”
“Irv? Finally!”
“Wu?!” Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu, my Best Man. Wu studied physics at Bronx Science, pastry in Paris, math at Princeton, Herbs in Taiwan, law at Harvard (or was it Yale?) and caravans at a Gobi caravansary. Did I mention he’s Chinese-American, can tune a twelve string guitar in under a minute with a logarithmic calculator, and is over six feet tall? I met him when we worked at Legal Aid, drove Volvos, and went to the Moon; but that’s another story. Then he went to Hawaii and found the edge of the universe, yet another story still. Now he was working as a meteorological entomologist, whatever that was, in the jungles of Quetzalcan.
Wherever that was.
“Who’d you expect?” Wu asked. “I’m glad you finally picked up. Your Aunt Minnie told me you and Candy were in midtown doing the tourist thing.”
“We’re on our Honeymoon.”
“Oh no! Don’t tell me I missed the wedding!”
“Of course not,” I said. “We had to take the Honeymoon first so Candy could get the personal time. How’d you persuade Aunt Minnie to answer the phone? Or me, for that matter? Are you in Huntsville already?”
“That’s the problem, Irv. I’m still in Quetzalcan. The rain forest, or to be more precise, the cloud forest; the canopy, in fact. Camp Canopy, we call it.”
“But the wedding is Thursday! You’re the Best Man, Wu! I’ve already rented your tux. It’s waiting for you at Five Points Formal Wear.”
“I know all that,” said Wu. “But I’m having a problem getting away. That’s why I called, to see if you can put the wedding off for a week.”
“A week? Wu, that’s impossible. Cindy has already commissioned the ice sculpture.”
Wu’s wife, Cindy, was catering the wedding.
“The hurricane season is almost upon us,” said Wu, “and my figures are coming out wrong. I need more time.”
“You don’t have a figure—you’re a guy,” I pointed out. “And what do figures have to do with meteors or bugs, anyway?”
“Irving—” Wu always called me by my full name when he was explaining something he felt he shouldn’t have to explain. “Meteorology is weather, not meteors. And the bugs have to do with the Butterfly Effect. We’ve been over this before.”
“Oh yes, of course, I remember,” I said, and I did, sort of. But Wu went over it again anyway: how the flap of a butterfly’s wing in the rain forest could cause a storm two thousand miles away. “It was only a matter of time,” he said, “before someone located that patch of rain forest, which is where we are, and cloned the butterfly. It’s a moth, actually. We have twenty-two of them, enough for the entire hurricane season. We can’t stop the hurricanes, but we can delay, direct, and divert them a little, which is why ABC flew us down here.”
“ABC?”
“They bought the television rights to the hurricane season, Irv. Don’t you read the trades? CBS got the NBA and NBC got the Superbowl. ABC beat out Ted Turner, which is fine with me. Who needs a Hurricane Jane, even upgraded from a tropical storm? The network hired us to edge the ’canes toward the weekends as much as possible, when the news is slow. And State Farm is chipping in, since any damage we can moderate is money in their pocket. They are footing the bill for this little Hanging Hilton, in fact. ‘Footing,’ so to speak. My feet haven’t touched the ground in three weeks.”
“I built a treehouse once,” I said. “Me and Studs Blitz, back in the old neighborhood.”
“A treehouse in Brooklyn?” interjected a strangely accented voice.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Dmitri, stay off the line!” barked Wu. “I’ll explain later,” he said to me. “But I’m losing my signal. Which way you two lovebirds heading?”