Tom chose to shrug. “Why not? What are we supposed to do, cry?”
Dempsey shook her head and in an attempt to imply that his gift for humor was beyond belief, she said, “Tom. Tom.”
Tom, too, shook his head. “Forgive me, but I have to run. I want to make it to the Christopher Street Pier before it gets too cold.” No longer looking into her eyes, he said, “With my T-cells disappearing the way they are, I might not be able to get there as often as I’d like to. If at all.” He turned aside and looked down. “Michael and I met on the Pier.” He paused, then said, “I like to go there and spend some time with him.” Again he paused as if lost in thought. Dempsey knew she should say something but didn’t know what it was. Tom rescued her by finally saying, “I’d better run.”
He then turned and, with effort, again took up the arduous task he’d set for himself.
Dempsey stayed where she was and watched his slow advance. She was completely immobilized. She waited and she watched until he was halfway to Greenwich Street.
A sudden impulse had taken hold of her—she had been cured—and now she wanted to tell him a cure was obviously possible. She was the proof. Couldn’t he, too, be cured? He would be able to spend time with Michael on the Pier whenever he wanted to. If she could be cured, why not him? Without thinking further, she called out, “Tom! Wait!”
Tom stopped and turned around. His feeble response was, “I have to run.”
Dempsey had almost caught up with him by the time he’d finished the sentence. She would let her own words proceed her. She would call out, “I had it too and I’ve just been cured!” But then she was close enough to see his face, the scattered lesions, the empty eyes, the sorrowing look. She stopped. What if I wasn’t cured? Was she ready to give him a vain hope, to drive him to an even deeper despair?
In a breathless gasp, he said, “What—?”
Dempsey opened her mouth.
After a moment, Tom gasped out the word again. “What—?”
Dempsey pulled back a little and forced herself to say, “I—, I—, I just wanted to tell you to tell Michael I said, ‘Hi!’” So feeble. So stupid. She couldn’t possibly have been more inadequate.
But Tom slowly raised his right hand and put it gently on her cheek. Tears were welling up in his eyes. Still gasping, he said, “Oh, I will. I’ll tell him. I promise I will. And—and—thank—thank you.”
In a near whisper, Dempsey said, “It’s all right. It’s all right. Run along now. Michael’s waiting.”
Tom let out a long breath, moved his lips in an effort to smile, then turned around. He moved his torso forward three times, then took a first step. Then a second. Dempsey stayed where she was. She would wait until he had reached the pier. And as she watched and she waited, the word cured came to her in a completely different context than it had before. The only words that came to her now were: Why me and not him? And why not Michael?
Tom had reached the pier. Dempsey slowly turned and started back to Hudson Street. It was immediately apparent that she had been given a new refrain, one that again she must repeat over and over again. Why me and not him? Why me and not them? The one difference between this experience and the one before was that it was accompanied by a persisting image: Tom, enfeebled, walking out onto the Christopher Street Pier.
9.
There were fewer passengers on the upper deck, and Johnny was able to find an empty bench in the forward area. No one was directly behind him, and only one man three benches in front. The man was reading a magazine, a reasonable assurance that he’d continue reading for the entire trip and not feel he had a right to talk to Johnny because Johnny was wearing his fireman sweatshirt. People never bothered cops; priests and firemen were always fair game for anyone who wanted someone to listen. Johnny, when he’d left the loft, had forgotten what he was wearing; he should have been more attentive. But he wasn’t.
He settled onto the seat, squirming a little—as if a bench on the Staten Island Ferry could somehow be made more comfortable if one just made the effort. He listened carefully for sounds. There was only the low growl of the motor and, far in the back, the low-pitched conversation between two teenaged girls, both of them Asian.
Johnny opened his manual. The exam was still over a month away, but he considered himself a slow study and applied the maxim drilled into him by his high school English teacher: Repetitio mater studiorum est. Repetition is the mother of study. Well, he would repetitio and repetitio and hope some of the repetitios made it through his skull and into his brain.
Ordinarily he would go out on deck and look at the Brooklyn Bridge until the ferry had veered to the right toward the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Then he would cross to the other side and look at EIlis Island. After that he would have a hot dog. Then he would move forward and watch the home island come closer and closer, stealthy in its approach, but harmless. But now he was supposed to study. He had promised himself he would study and he must not break his promise.
He opened the manual to the section on ladders. He had already gone through the subject—more than twice—but it wouldn’t hurt to do it again. When a thirty-foot ladder is being raised to the roof, the point for. tying the clove hitch is the twelfth rung from the top. To reach the eighth floor, a one-hundred-foot ladder, to reach the fourth floor, fifty feet or forty-five feet. The base of a fifty-foot trussed ladder should be placed twelve feet from the building. Set the axle jacks first when an aerial ladder is to go into service. A one-hundred-foot ladder can allow six men climbing…
After he’d stared down at the page for at least two minutes and seen nothing, Johnny looked at the back of the head of the man reading the magazine. His hair was dark brown, long enough to touch his collar. His ears seemed tanned.
When Johnny had come into the loft earlier that evening, he hadn’t, at first, seen Dempsey. She had taken one of the chairs away from the table and was sitting near the windows, off to the left near the ficus tree Johnny had planted in a bucket. The only colors in the loft were shades of gray. Nothing was blurred or misted over; most things were still distinguishably themselves—the paintings stacked faces to the wall, the worktable, the tin cans, bottles, jars, tubes, the kitchen area, the chairs, the ivy on the window ledge, the window shades drawn down to uneven lengths. The streetlight had not yet come on, and the single lit window across the street seemed to have held its light completely inside the pale yellow trapped by the glass, unable to spill into the air outside.
When Johnny had reached his hand over to the wall to turn on the light, he heard Dempsey’s voice—soft, but without inflection. “Don’t turn on the light. Please.” There she was—a darker gray against the lighter gray of the windows. She was facing the room, angled slightly toward the kitchen cabinets. Her head was bowed, her hands resting on her lap.
“You’re sitting in the dark.” Dempsey said nothing. “You all right?”
“Yes, I’m all right.”
“You want to go lie down?”
“No. I just want to sit here.”
“In the dark?”
“It’s not dark. I can see.”
Dempsey turned her head to her right so she wouldn’t be looking directly at him. “Maybe you could go for a walk, go someplace, and come back. Later.”
Johnny went no closer. He pulled a chair away from the table, sat down and folded his hands in front of him. “You’re feeling lousy, huh?”
“No. I’m feeling all right.”