The bus pulled into Port Authority, and she rode the subway uptown. Cal waited near the door of her building, and again they didn’t speak but did their dance of nods and shrugs, and he followed her into the lobby, just as he must have followed her home some night to know where she lived. What was creepy to civilians was protocol for their kind. How else were you going to figure out where somebody lived, where the drugs were, or the money, or somebody to cling to long enough to forget the shame.
Inside the apartment, Cal pulled a bottle of wine from his coat, but Mandy shook her head, poured them glasses of water from the tap. They gulped them down and filled the glasses again. Then Mandy led Cal into the bedroom and lit a lavender candle. Cal stood before her and stroked her hair.
He started to take off his shirt, but Mandy whispered, “No.” He seemed to understand, even tugged his sleeves down to his wrists to better hide his tattoos. He pulled her to the bed, and his body was smooth and taut through his shirt. Toward the end, he whispered something too muffled to make out, though she heard the words “beautiful” and “feels” and “so good,” and then maybe “cabal.”
The world was what it was, one day at a time. Mandy rocked Cal to sleep and thought about this day she’d had, this stranger in her bed. She thought about pinot blanc. She thought about all the colors of the key tags, about salmon and salmon-colored blazers and the cleaver on the kitchen’s magnetic strip. Before she fell asleep, she yawned once and stretched her arm across the panzer tank, invisible to her now, that in the morning would burst forth in loud hues from Cal’s belly.
Tomorrow she’d look up tattoo removal. They were doing big things with lasers. When he was just a little more stable, she’d break up with Cal, gently, and then she’d begin her project of helping everybody she could help, and after that she’d head out on a great long journey to absolutely nowhere and write a majestic poem cycle steeped in heavenly lavender-scented closure and also utter despair, a poem cycle you could also actually ride for its aerobic benefits, and she’d pedal that fucker straight across the face of the earth until at some point she’d coast right off the edge, whereupon she’d giggle and say, “Oh, shit.”
the REPUBLIC of EMPATHY
WILLIAM
My wife wanted another baby. But I thought Philip was enough. A toddler is a lot. I couldn’t picture us going through the whole ordeal again. We’d just gotten our lives back. We needed time to snuggle with them, plan their futures.
But Peg really wanted another baby, said we owed Philip a brother or a sister. That seemed like a pretty huge debt. What do you do for the second child? Have a third?
“Peg,” I said. But I had no follow-up. Or was it follow-through?
Peg sat at the kitchen table scribbling in the workbook she’d gotten from Arno, her German tutor. The handwriting didn’t look like hers, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her handwriting.
“This is a dealbreaker,” Peg said.
“The deal being our marriage?”
“Please don’t leave me,” she said.
“Who said I wanted to leave?”
“If you refuse to have another baby, that’s the same as leaving me.”
“This is emotional blackmail.”
“The emotional aspect is implicit. You could just say blackmail.”
“But why, Peg?”
“This morning I smelled the top of Philip’s head. That sweet baby scent is gone. Now it just smells like the top of any dumbshit’s head.”
* * *
I took Philip for a walk. He tired easily, but his gait was significant. He tended to clutch his hands behind his back, like the vexed ruler of something about to disintegrate.
“How about a brother or a sister?” I asked.
“How about I just pooped,” Philip said.
“Thanks for your input.”
Peg always said I shouldn’t model sarcasm for the boy, but who will? Everybody’s so earnest around children. Besides, I’ve always wanted to model, to strut down the runway under all that strobe and glitter while the fashionably witty cheer on my sarcasm.
* * *
Later I had to jet over to the office. The flip-flop prototypes were a total joke. Art had ignored my notes. Where were the porpoise pods, the sea grass? I hated Art. They needed some attitudinal realignment, or whatever the badasses say. Art and I were scheduled to meet in the meeting room and communicate about our communication problems.
Gregory walked up to my desk. He didn’t work for our company, but rented a room in the building, where he made paintings for plays and movies. Gregory painted to the specifications of the filmmakers and stage directors. He could paint a copy of a famous painting or create a whole original series to represent the work of a character in a play or a movie. His oeuvre wasn’t known, but it had won fame and riches for fictional artists in several films.
Gregory always wore a festive shirt and a baseball cap with no logo. He said he wore these clothes because he believed they made him resemble a thoughtful, retired gay cop, which he was.
He’d come to see if I’d join him for a joint.
“Code Doob,” he said.
“Stat,” I said.
We went to the roof and smoked and stared at the large metal exhaust units mounted on nearby roofs.
“So, Peg…” I said.
“She wants to do a number two,” Gregory said. “I mean…”
“Oh, yeah, I told you already,” I said. “Guess I don’t have anything super-recent.”
“That’s okay,” Gregory said. “I got one. Guy just asked me to do a painting. Not a copy job, but a painting in the style of. A very famous painter. Died young, but did spectacular things. A great talent. All my gifts would fit in his pinkie, and so forth. This guy said he would pay me the equivalent of what I thought a real, newly discovered peak-performance painting by this painter would fetch. I said it would be many millions. He said, ‘Fine.’”
“Why?”
“Said he’s interested in exploring questions of authenticity, and he’s got the money to do it. Investment banker. But did some art theory in college. He’s not going to throw his money away on a yacht he’ll have no time to … yacht on. Here, at least, he’s shaking things up.”
“You’ll be so rich.”
“I told him to go to hell.”
“Why?”
“I’m a copyist and a hack visionary, but I’m not a criminal. Fuck the banker.”
“You’re a proud man,” I said.
“If that’s all it takes. Hey, look.”
Across the way, on the roof of another building, two figures fought. They both wore dark coveralls and walkie-talkies clipped to their tool belts. They threw huge roundhouse punches, wrestled, choked each other, broke apart, and banged each other into the shiny exhausts and flues. You could hear the metal flutter.
“It’s either about money or women,” Gregory said.
“Or another man,” I said.
“Don’t get inclusive on my account,” Gregory said.
“Shouldn’t we call this in?”
“Good thinking, Citizen.”
We did call it in, but only after the next thing that happened. One of the guys grabbed the other guy’s shirt and spun him off the edge of the building. The falling guy fell. His head hit a steel fence post and made a moist, crunching sound. His body slid limp beside a Dumpster. Vomit fired up my throat. Gregory called it in, used a language I knew vaguely from television.
We gave statements to the police. Afterward we went to a bar. Gregory warned me that I might have nightmares about the grisly scene we’d just witnessed, but if I had the wherewithal to utter, from within the dream, the word “Miranda,” I might break out of the gruesomeness.