“The edge is all there is,” Victor concluded finally. “It’s the thing you have to nurture.” He waited for Corman to respond.
Corman took a sip of coffee and said nothing.
“So, how’s Edgar?” Victor asked after a moment.
“The same.”
“Frances still the typical neurasthenic?”
“More or less.”
Victor shook his head. “Pure bathos, those two.”
Corman’s eyes drifted toward the table where two sets of initials were carved inside a jagged heart. It struck him that if the world made sense, only the most courageous natures would risk such public declarations. The rest would move about as Victor did, never tying their lives with such exquisite jeopardy to anyone, victimized by nothing but the cowardice of solitude.
“So what do they do, Edgar and Frances?” Victor asked, with a slight laugh.
“They manage,” Corman said.
Victor laughed again. “Manage? Is that the goal? To manage? Christ. The last time I saw Frances, she was boiling. I mean it, a blink away from humping the doorman.”
Corman turned away slightly.
“And she’d be better off if she did, too,” Victor added flatly.
Corman looked back toward him. “Do you ever think about Mississippi?”
Victor stared at him wonderingly. “What?”
“The way you lived in those days,” Corman said.
Victor’s face softened slightly. “Sometimes,” he said quietly. Then he smiled. “In fond remembrance.”
“I remember all your stories.”
Victor looked pleased. “Really?”
“Yes,” Corman said. “I think they made a difference.”
“In the world?”
“In me.”
Victor studied Corman’s face silently, his eyes narrowing very slightly before he spoke. “What’s the matter, David?” he asked solemnly. “I can tell something’s wrong.”
Corman shrugged.
Victor leaned forward and touched his hand. “I’m your brother. What is it?”
Corman drew in a long, slow breath. “Lexie wants me to let Lucy live with her and Jeffrey out in Westchester,” he said.
Victor brought his hands together on the table. “When did she tell you?”
“She told Edgar. He passed it on to me.”
“Is he representing you?”
“If it goes to court.”
“Will it?”
“I don’t know,” Corman said. “That’s up to Lexie.”
“So she’s just asking you, is that it?”
“That’s what Edgar thinks.”
“What are you going to say?”
“I’m not sure I have much to say,” Corman told him. “My work is off. Trang’s going to evict me. Lucy’s school is lousy. I know what they could give her.”
Victor started to speak, drew back, then began again. “I don’t know what to tell you, David. You know how I live. On the lam, more or less. I stay with a woman for a month, two on the outside. Kids are things I see on milk cartons. You know, the Missing.”
Corman nodded.
Victor shook his head slowly. “Mississippi. Why’d you bring that up? Christ, that was another world.” He picked up a fork and raked his index finger across the prongs. “It should have lasted. You could have come down when you got old enough, left the old man, worked with me in the Great Cause.”
Corman smiled. “I dreamed of that.”
Victor drew in a deep, faintly resigned breath. “But it died before we did,” he said, then smiled knowingly. “Most things do, right?” The smile withered. “And nothing stinks like a dead cause, you know?”
Corman nodded. “How long will you be in New York?”
“A few days,” Victor said. “I was thinking of taking Lucy out tonight. Maybe pick her up at school. Dinner and a show, something like that. Any objections?”
“No.”
“Still don’t think I’m a bad influence?”
“No more than most.”
Victor laughed sharply, then grew serious. “I wish you luck on this one, David. I know what she means to you.”
Corman said nothing.
Victor let his eyes linger on him for a few seconds, then he took a final sip of coffee and motioned for the check. “I guess you’d better get to work.”
“Yeah,” Corman said, then quickly drained the last of his coffee, too.
They walked out of the diner together and got into the car.
“Where do you want me to drop you?” Victor asked as he hit the ignition.
For a moment, Corman wasn’t sure himself, then he remembered the picture he’d taken in the basement of Midtown North, the small crumpled receipt. “A blood bank on the Bowery,” he said.
Victor’s eyes shot over to him. “Christ, David, you’re not …”
Corman shook his head. “No, not me,” he said. “Just something I’m working on.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
THE BLOOD BANK operated out of a cramped storefront off the Bowery on East 3rd Street. Several men were scattered among the short, jagged rows of metal chairs that crisscrossed the front of the building. Some of them munched the plain sugar cookies distributed after the blood had been taken. Others were still waiting, their fingers holding idly to small cards with hand-lettered red numbers.
“Thirty-seven,” someone called from the back of the room.
Corman turned toward the voice and saw a tall man in a slightly soiled lab coat. He wore large, black-rimmed plastic glasses and cradled a clipboard in the crook of his left elbow.
“Thirty-seven,” he repeated. His eyes darted left and right, surveying the crowd. “Thirty-seven.”
A very thin old man eased himself to his feet, then walked shakily past Corman, nudging him slightly with his shoulder as he made his way down the aisle toward the tall beige curtain that divided the room. He had an oddly crumpled look, as if his body had been snatched up, crushed in a large hand then tossed back to earth.
“Your name Sanderson?” the man in the lab coat asked him.
The old man grunted, shifted on his feet, then reached listlessly for the clipboard.
The man in the lab coat drew it away from him. “Just a second, please,” he said sharply, then adjusted his glasses. “Have you been hospitalized recently, Mr. Sanderson?”
“No.”
“How old are you?”
Sanderson shrugged. “Somewhere ’round sixty, I guess.”
The man in the lab coat looked doubtful, but wrote it down on the form anyway. “Are you on any form of medication?”
Sanderson grinned. “Just my old standby,” he said.
The other man scribbled something on the form.
Sanderson waved his hand impatiently. “And it’s ‘no’ to all the rest of them questions.”
The man in the coat nodded, made a few checks on the paper, then escorted Sanderson behind the curtain.
Corman walked to the front row, shoved his camera bag beneath one of the chairs and sat down. For a moment, he stared about, trying to get a fix on the room by concentrating on the details: a Coca-Cola wall calendar, its pages a month behind, the soda machine next to it, a small table filled with uneven stacks of medical pamphlets, the poster of an earnest physician urging regular checkups on the listless men who muttered obliviously a few feet away. One by one, Corman envisioned the individual frames, trying to find a way to get beyond the obvious social ironies and clichés.
“Excuse me.”
Corman glanced around and faced the man in the lab coat.
“May I help you?” the man asked.
Corman reached into his pocket, brought out the small yellow receipt and handed it to him.
The man glanced at it peremptorily and gave it back. “What about it?”