I caught a noon meeting at the Y on West Sixty-third. The speaker was celebrating his ninety days, which is the minimum amount of sober time you have to have before you can lead a meeting. He was pleased as unspiked punch to be sober, and his qualification was giddily buoyant. During the break the woman sitting beside me said, “I was like that. Then when I fell off my pink cloud it shook the earth.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m happy, joyous, and free,” she said. “What else?”
Afterward I bought coffee and a sandwich at a deli and picnicked on a bench in Central Park, breathing some of that Canadian air Elaine had spoken so highly of. I could think of things to do but they could wait, and probably ought to; most of them centered on Glenn Holtzmann, and it made sense to put them on Hold until I’d learned what his wife had to tell me.
I spent a couple of hours in the park. I walked up to the zoo and watched the bears. At the expanse called Strawberry Fields, I thought of John Lennon and figured out how old he would be, if a bullet hadn’t assured that he’d stay forty forever. If you could see the world from God’s perspective, I’d heard someone say once, you would realize that every life lasts precisely as long as it ought to, and that everything happens as it should. But I can’t see the world, or anything else, from God’s perspective. When I try, all I get for my troubles is a stiff neck.
Of course there are those who’d say I’ve had that all my life.
There were messages at the desk from Jan and TJ. I called him first and beeped him. When five minutes passed without a call back, I rang Jan’s number. I got her machine and said I was returning her call, and that she could call me anytime.
I turned on CNN and was paying precious little attention to it when the phone rang and it was TJ, apologetic for taking so long to answer his beeper. “Couldn’t find a phone,” he said, “ ’cept there be somebody on it. Whole stretch of Eighth Avenue, the phones is gone, Dawn.”
“They’re all out of order?”
“Out of order? They out of state, Nate. What dudes’ll do, ‘stead of breakin’ ’em open, they’ll wrap a chain around ’em an’ attach it to their car bumper, pull off an’ rip the whole box off the wall. You figure they go through all that just for the quarters, or can they get something for the phones?”
“I don’t know who would buy them,” I said. “Unless they can work out a way to sell them back to the phone company.”
“Slow way to get rich, Mitch. Hey, what I called to tell you. Could be I findin’ somethin’ out. What I heard on the street, somebody saw what happened.”
“You found a witness?”
“I didn’t find nobody yet. I don’t even know her name. All’s I know is the name of somebody who knows her. But I think I be gettin’ somewhere.”
“The witness is a woman?”
“More like what we was talkin’ about last night. A chick with a dick, ’cept you told me a different word. Transsexual?”
“That’s right.”
“I keep hangin’ around you, I gone be educated. This here chick with a dick, I think I most likely be able to find her. Might take a while, is all.”
“Just be careful.”
“You mean like safe sex?”
“Jesus,” I said. “I mean don’t do anything that’ll get you shot.”
“Hey, no prob’, Bob. That’s why it might take time, ’cause I bein’ careful. An’ these transwhatchacalls ain’t too swift. ‘Tween the drugs and the hormones, they inclined to be on the vague side. Tell you, though. I don’t think George did it.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Ain’t he our client? And don’t we be the good guys?”
“I guess you’re right, Dwight.”
“You learnin’,” he said. “You comin’ along fine.”
Elaine called, to tell me about her day and ask about mine. We agreed that it had been a beautiful day, and that the autumn was the best time of the year. “There was something I wanted to ask you,” she said, “but of course I can’t think of it now. I hate it when that happens.”
“I know.”
“And it happens more and more. Somebody told me about an herb you can take that’s supposed to help your memory, but do you think for one minute I can remember what the hell it is?”
“If you could—”
“—I wouldn’t need it. I know, I thought of that. Well, it’ll come to me. You’re seeing Lisa tonight, aren’t you? Call me afterward if you feel like it.”
“If I think of it. And if it’s not too late.”
“Or even if it is,” she said. “You know what? I love you.”
“And I love you.”
Jan called again while I was taking some shirts to the laundry around the corner. I was gone less than ten minutes and walked right past the desk without checking for messages; but the clerk spotted me entering the elevator and rang my room with the message. I called her right back, and once again I got her goddamn machine.
“We seem to be playing tag,” I said. “I’m going out in a few minutes, and I’ve got a business appointment this evening. I’ll keep trying you.”
It was exactly nine o’clock when I gave my name to the lobby attendant and told him Mrs. Holtzmann was expecting me. His expression turned wary when he heard her name. I sensed that she’d had her share of visitors since her husband’s death, the bulk of them unexpected and unwelcome.
He used the intercom and cupped the mouthpiece in his hands, pitching his voice too low for me to hear him. Her reply allowed him to relax. He wasn’t going to be called upon to throw me out or summon the police, and his gratitude was visible. “You go right on up,” he said.
She was standing in the doorway of her apartment when I got off the elevator, looking prettier than I remembered her, and older, too, as if recent events had sculpted character into her face. She still looked young, but now it wasn’t so difficult to credit her with the thirty-two years the news articles had mentioned. (She was thirty-two and he was thirty-eight, I found myself thinking. And George Sadecki was forty-four. And John Lennon was still forty.)
“I’m glad you could come,” she said. “I don’t remember what to call you. Is it Matt or Matthew?”
“Whichever you prefer.”
“I called you Mr. Scudder on the phone this morning. I couldn’t remember what I called you the night we all had dinner. Elaine calls you Matt. So I guess I will. Won’t you come in? Won’t you come in, Matt?”
I followed her into the living room, where two couches stood at a right angle to one another. She seated herself on one and gestured toward the other. I sat down. Both couches were placed to take full advantage of the western view, and I looked out through the window at the last vestiges of the sunset, a pink and purple stain at the edge of the darkening sky.
“Those high-rises across the way are in Weehawken,” she said. “If you think this is something, imagine the view they’ve got. They can see the whole Manhattan skyline from there. But then when they go downstairs and out the door, they’re in New Jersey.”
“Poor devils.”
“Maybe they’re not so bad off, living there. From the day I came to New York I assumed Manhattan was the only place to be. I grew up in White Bear Lake. That’s in Minnesota, and I know it sounds as though you’d have nothing but moose and Eskimos for neighbors, but it’s actually more or less a suburb of the Twin Cities. Well, I got off the Northwest flight with an MFA from the University of Minnesota and I don’t know what else. A sketch pad, I suppose, and the phone number of a friend of a friend. I spent the night at the Chelsea Hotel, and the next day I had a share in an apartment on Tenth Street east of Tompkins Square Park. If there’s a better definition of culture shock, I don’t know what it is.”