When any bill came, he reached for his wallet.
‘Oh please,’ Elaine would say. ‘Put it away. I enjoy paying for you.’
Later, after a nightcap, his bill would come. And he always paid in full. Elaine was divorced, and she made love in absolute darkness.
‘Jonah,’ she said as she drifted off to sleep on his chest. ‘Don’t let me fall in love with you.’ As if such a thing could happen. For him, maybe it could. He often fell in love. Women were exotic and wonderful creatures to him, no matter what Melinda said. He felt it for them down deep. It might last for just a little while, but it was there, like the best music. When the music was right, when it was some smoky Miles, or some funky driving hip hop, he caught the line and felt it all over his body.
Love was like that.
But for Elaine, love was improbable at best. She had scraped and crawled and scratched people’s eyes out to get her position, and it had cost her half a lifetime to get there. The wars had taken their toll. Even in her most human moments, even in passion, she was like a granite cliff face warmed by the sun. The heat was there, but then so was the stone.
Jonah grew weaker and less alive the more time he spent with her.
Show up, smile at the dumb jokes, fuck the expensive lady. He knew why he was moving up. He was the thinker who never had a decent idea. But behind the scenes, people pulled strings – Elaine was the chief string-puller right now.
Bending had become routine for him. He came in one morning and some comic genius had cut a picture of Step’n Fetchit out of a book and taped it to his computer. All he did, he pulled the picture down and threw it in the trash.
They were laughing at him.
Meanwhile, shopping had become his consolation. He bought so much expensive shit his apartment looked like the inside of Home amp; Garden magazine. In fact, he subscribed to Home amp; Garden and got his ideas from there.
He lived through his things: the car; some pricey Crate amp; Barrel knick-knacks gathering dust on his shelves; a couple of one-of-a-kind ironwood Nubian sculptures, one of a man and woman making love, the other of an old man’s balding head, both of which were good at gathering dust; the cleaning lady from Romania who came in once a week to wipe the dust off everything; his hanging ferns and aloe plants, which the Romanian gave him a hard time for neglecting; a Trek mountain bike (which he sometimes rode on the streets near his apartment); his two year old Rossignol skis (he had gone skiing once since buying them); his bedroom set, his living room set, his home entertainment center; that river view, don’t forget that, put that first on the list; his Ray Bans; his jacket from the Leather Factory…
He couldn’t afford any of it. The pay was good, but not that good. He carried nearly forty grand in balances on four credit cards. Some days it made him want to cry. But the fun didn’t stop there. As the economy went down the tubes, the firm started letting people go. The citizenry stopped buying things, the companies that sold things started going under, and there came a steep decline in the need to advertise things – especially in the need to have a whole creative group sitting around, throwing out ideas about how to advertise things. Jonah sensed that Elaine protected him as long as she could, but there came a day when even she couldn’t do anything for him.
He remembered the day they pinked him, going on two years ago. He was in her office that day. He could tell from her tone that he was dismissed in every way. ‘Baby doll,’ she said. ‘You’re going to do great things one day. I know that about you. This downturn isn’t going to last forever, and when it ends, even before then, I’m sure you’ll be doing better than ever before.’
Half an hour later he was out on the bright and cold evening streets of the city, the people a faceless swirl around him. Christmas coming – the shop windows were all dressed up for the holidays. Tourists ran around, all bundled up and carrying packages. Downtown, the spire on the Empire State Building shone green and red.
He went down into the subway and made the long ride up through the Bronx. He stood at the head of the first car, looking out the front window at the tracks ahead. It was a place he had stood many times as a child. The mystery of it, the vastness of the dark underground empire, never lost its hold on him. He stared and stared as the train roared through tunnels, lights zooming by on each side. The train changed tracks, never hesitating, as workmen with lanterns stood to the side in the gloom. The train passed through stations that were out of service, darkened corners, graffiti-stained walls, empty platforms long disused. Sometimes there’d be no lights at all out there, and he’d catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the black window. He stared back into his own eyes.
Who was he? Where had he gone?
Now, Jonah poked his head up and was almost surprised to find himself still in Kelly’s Bar. He glanced around. The long hairs had gone. The juke box was silent, and the only sounds came from the television and a few people sitting along the bar and talking in low voices. Jonah’s head had settled down to an almost pleasant thumping.
Three pints of beer hadn’t hurt him any.
Thump.
Thump.
The pain beat slow and gentle, like the bass signature on a sad love song. He was already thinking better about the day’s fiasco. At least one good thing had come out of it. He had sure flown across that alley. There were many days when he felt he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, but man, what a feeling today. He envied the birds. He was beginning to think he should take up hang-gliding.
Gordo nudged him. The big man sat with three piles of Foerster’s open mail before him, one pile for possible leads, one for garbage, and one for mail he hadn’t opened yet. That third pile had dwindled away to almost nothing.
‘I found him,’ Gordo said, waving the piece of paper in his hand. ‘He’s out on Staten Island. He’s at his mother’s house.’
CHAPTER 3
They gave Gant a bedroom, and a girl to go with it.
The bedroom was very large, with a gigantic bed and the girl draped across it. Cool stone floors and windows facing the ocean. Evening was coming in. Peach-colored curtains billowed in the light breeze. Wide double doors gave out onto a private balcony. Someone had left him a cart on rollers with a bottle of spirits, as well as a bottle each of red and white wine. Also, there were some finger sandwiches, a pitcher of water and a bucket of ice. He barely glanced at the wines or the sandwiches. The whiskey was Glenfiddich 30-year-old Scotch, so that was good news. He poured three fingers-worth into a glass, without ice or water, and sipped it, enjoying the taste and the feel of the fire entering his belly.
The girl was fair-skinned and young, just old enough to be out of high school. She was dressed in an electric blue sarong and a bikini top, and had a body with so many curves that it was almost an outlandish cartoon of the female form. She spoke English with a strong accent from somewhere. Her eyes were green, and while Gant stared out at the breakers marching toward land far below him, he felt those eyes on his back.
‘Russia?’ he said, still facing away from her.
‘Moldova,’ she answered.
He shrugged. Same difference to him. Commies. They lost, we won. It took a hell of a bite out of some of us, but we did win. He turned now, and took a long look at her. Good Lord, he remembered how they used to make you think Eastern Bloc women were huge, ugly – powerlifters in the Olympics. Of course, after the collapse it turned out nothing could be further from the truth. He thought of maps and how one day the Soviet Union was this big red smear across the top of the world, and the next day there were all these little countries you never heard of there instead, places like Tajikistan, and Belarus, and Moldova. He remembered air raid sirens and how in junior high school, when the sirens sounded, the teachers used to make the kids go out in the hallway, kneel in front of the lockers, and cover their heads with their arms. Each kid had to kneel in front of his or her own locker. Gant figured that if the nukes ever came, whoever was left afterward would know him as the pile of radioactive dust on the floor at the base of locker number 126.