“I’ve just got a few more people to see.”
“Take all the time you want. Nobody’s complained, and if they don’t mind I sure don’t.”
Of the tenants I hadn’t yet interviewed, only one was on the premises. She’d lived in the building since May and didn’t know Paula Hoeldtke at all. “I wish I could help,” she said, “but she doesn’t even look familiar to me. My neighbor across the hall said she’d talked to you, that this girl disappeared or something?”
“It looks that way.”
She shrugged. “I wish I could help.”
When I was first getting sober I started keeping company with a woman named Jan Keane. I’d known her before, but we’d stopped seeing each other when she joined AA and took up again when I started coming to meetings.
She’s a sculptor, living and working in a loft on Lispenard Street, which is in TriBeCa, just south of Canal Street. We began spending a fair amount of time together, seeing each other three or four nights a week, occasionally getting together during the day. Sometimes we went to meetings together, but we did other things as well. We’d go out to dinner, or she would cook for me. She liked to go to galleries, in SoHo or the East Village. This was something I’d never done much of, and I discovered I enjoyed it. I’d always been a little self-conscious in situations like that, never knowing what to say when confronted by a painting or a piece of sculpture, and from her I’d learned that it was perfectly acceptable not to say anything at all.
I don’t know what went wrong. The relationship escalated slightly, as relationships do, and we reached a point where I was half living on Lispenard Street, with some of my clothes in her closet and my socks and underwear in one of her dresser drawers. We had conversations in which we speculated gingerly on the wisdom of my maintaining my room at the hotel. Wasn’t it a waste to pay rent when I was hardly ever there? On the other hand, was it perhaps valuable as a place to meet clients?
There was a point, I suppose, when it was appropriate for me to give up my room and begin paying my share of the expenses at the loft. And there was a point, too, where we might have gone on to talk about commitment and permanence and, I suppose, marriage.
But we didn’t do any of this, and, having left it undone, it became impossible for things to remain as they had been. We disengaged gradually, in little fits and starts. Our times together were increasingly marked by moods and silences, and our times apart became more frequent. We decided — I honestly forget who suggested it — that we ought to see other people. We did, and subsequently found that made us that much more uncomfortable with each other. And at last, gently, and with a surprising lack of drama, I returned a couple of books she had lent me and retrieved the last of my clothing, and I took a cab uptown, and that was that.
It had dragged on long enough for the ending to be something of a relief, but even so I felt lonely a lot of the time, and possessed of a sense of loss. I’d felt less at the breakup of my marriage some years previously, but of course I was drinking then, so I didn’t really feel anything.
So I went to a lot of meetings, and sometimes I talked about what I was feeling at meetings, and sometimes I kept it to myself. I had tried dating shortly after the breakup, but I didn’t seem to have the heart for it. Now I was beginning to think that it might be time for me to start seeing women again, or a woman. I kept having the thought, but I hadn’t yet reached the point of acting on it.
All of which put a curious spin on the business of going door-to-door in a West Side rooming house and making conversation with single women. Most of them were a little young for me, but not all of them were. And there is something about the kind of interview I was conducting that facilitates flirtation. I’d learned this when I was a cop, and a married one at that.
Sometimes, asking my endless questions about the elusive Paula Hoeldtke, I would be aware of a strong attraction to the woman I was questioning. Sometimes I sensed, too, that the current ran in both directions, that the attraction was reciprocal. I wrote little mental scripts, moving us toward emotional intimacy, and from the doorway to the bed.
But I could never bring myself to take the next step. I felt out of sync, and by the time I left the rooming house, having talked to six or ten or a dozen people, my mood had darkened and I felt unutterably alone.
This time all it took was one conversation to bring on the feeling. I went back to my hotel room and sat in front of my TV set until it was time to go to the meeting.
At St. Paul’s that night the speaker was a housewife from Ozone Park. She told us how she used to take the first drink of the day as her husband’s Pontiac was pulling out of the driveway. She kept her vodka under the sink, in a container that had previously held oven cleaner. “The first time I told this story,” she said, “a woman said, ‘Oh, dear Jesus, suppose you grabbed the wrong jar and drank the real oven cleaner.’ ‘Honey,’ I told her, ‘get real, will you? There was no wrong jar. There was no real oven cleaner. I lived in that house for thirteen years and I never cleaned the oven.’ Anyway,” she said, “that was my social drinking.”
Different meetings have different formats. At St. Paul’s the meetings run an hour and a half, and the Friday night meetings are step meetings, centering upon one of the twelve steps of AA’s program of recovery. This particular meeting was on the fifth step, but I don’t remember what the speaker had to say on the subject or what particular words of wisdom I contributed when it was my turn.
At ten o’clock we all stood to say the Lord’s Prayer, except for a woman named Carole who makes a point of not taking part in the prayer. Then I folded my chair and stacked it, dropped my coffee cup in the trash, carried ashtrays up to the front of the room, talked with a couple of fellows, and turned when Eddie Dunphy called my name. “Oh, hello,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”
“I was in the back, I got here a few minutes late. I liked what you had to say.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering what I’d said. He asked if I wanted to have coffee, and I said a few of us were going over to the Flame, and why didn’t he join us?
We walked a block south on Ninth and wound up at the big corner table with six or seven other people. I had a sandwich and fries and some more coffee. The conversation was mostly about politics. It was less than two months before the election, and people were saying what everybody says every four years, that it was a damned shame there wasn’t anybody more interesting to vote for.
I didn’t say much. I don’t pay any more attention to politics than I have to. There was a woman at our table named Helen who’d been sober about the same length of time I had, and for a while now I’d been toying with the idea of asking her out. Now I placed her under covert surveillance, and I kept coming up with data that got entered in the minus column. Her laugh was grating, she needed some dental work, and every sentence out of her mouth had the phrase you know in it. By the time she was done with her hamburger, our romance had died unborn. I’ll tell you, it’s a great way to operate. You can run through women like wildfire and they never even know it.
A little after eleven I tucked some coins alongside my saucer, said my goodbyes, and carried my check to the counter. Eddie rose when I did, paid his own check and followed me outside. I’d almost forgotten he was there; he’d contributed even less to the conversation than I had.
Now he said, “Beautiful night, isn’t it? When the air’s like this it makes you want to breathe more. You got a minute? You want to walk a few blocks?”
“Sure.”