“I don’t know, Verne. I don’t think he did.”
“You ever love anybody like that, Lew?”
“No.”
“Think you ever will?”
I shook my head.
“Me neither.”
“I better be going, Verne. Her parents are waiting.”
“Lew.” She looked back from the window. “Will you come stay with me tonight? I don’t want to have to think about myself tonight. I don’t want to think about-” She moved her mouth but no further words came.
“I’ll be there.”
She just nodded. Something in her face made me think of when we’d first met, how beautiful I’d thought she was and all I had felt for her that night so suddenly, how I would have done anything then to make her feel safe and happy and cared for-anything. Though I couldn’t tell any longer how much of what was left was feeling, how much only memory.
Chapter Twelve
I dropped off the Claysons, who were slowly turning to stone, and told them again that I was sorry.
“We’ll be expecting a bill, Mr. Griffin,” Mrs. Clayson said, handing over a scrap of paper with their home address penciled on it.
They wouldn’t be getting one, though. I drove uptown with my thoughts in tow. The rain had run most drivers off the streets; only good ones, and the fools, remained. One of the latter had just tried sliding into home under a trolley. He didn’t make it.
I was remembering all the women I’d loved or thought I would. Thinking how that felt at first, how the feelings declined, how they stayed around for a while like locust husks on a tree and then one day just weren’t there anymore.
LaVerne met me at the door in what could not possibly have been the gown she was wearing when we first met but looked just like it. She said nothing. On the coffee table inside sat chilled scotch, a pitcher of martinis, a plate of cheese and fruit, mixed nuts in a round silver bowl.
I pointed to the pitcher and she poured martini into a glass of ice. She poured herself one as well, without ice, and we sat there, two lonely people together for however long it would last. I thought of lines by Auden: “Children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good.”
Verne leaned against me and shut her eyes.
“Why do things always have to change, Lew? When I was a kid my mother’d have a new man around the house every few months-wasn’t that often, but seemed like it, you know how it is when you’re a kid-and I kept wondering why she couldn’t just find one she liked and leave those others alone. Never occurred to me that she didn’t have much to say about it. That the world wouldn’t be the way she wanted it, the way any of us want it, just because we want it so bad.”
She sipped at her drink and we sat there quietly for a while, each with his own thoughts.
“I used to ride trains a lot. Mama’d put us on one and give the conductor fifty cents to look out after us. And I’d sit in the end car and watch everything pass by, all those places and people I’d never get to know, gone for good-and so quickly.”
She looked up at me.
“I’m still on that train, Lew, I’ve always been. Watching people I’ve loved go away from me, for good.”
She looked into my eyes for a long time and then made an odd, choked sound. I don’t know if she had tried to make a train sound or if it was a sob, but I reached for her there on the couch as, outside, the storm began to quieten.
Part Three
Chapter One
Light: it slammed into my eyes like fists.
I groaned and tried to move my arms. Someone had put sandbags on them to hold them down. I was incredibly thirsty. The air reeked of alcohol, vitamin capsules and fresh urine. Red hair floated above me somewhere.
“I wou’n’t be trying to move about too much, sir,” a voice said, each r a tiny engine turning over, almost catching.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“You’re in Touro Infirmary, sir.” Again, those r’s. “The police brought you here. Welcome back. Try to rest.”
Everything kind of floated away then, and for a long time there were just snapshots. Some kid about nineteen who said he was a doctor, holding the garden hose he said he was going to “run” down my nose. He didn’t. Dozens of lab people with Mason jars they needed to fill with blood. A guy in a three-piece suit who sat as far away from me as he could get and wanted to know how I was handling all this.
Gradually days fell into place. Labwork before breakfast, a perfunctory visit from your doctor about ten, group at eleven, lunch, kitchen duty, thirty-year-old travel films, TV, evening medications, lights out at ten.
After three or four weeks I said, “There was a woman.”
“Lots of them.”
“She took care of me in the beginning, when I was really in bad shape. Scottish, I think.”
“That’d be Vicky. She’s over at Hotel Dieu, I hear.” This one was short, Latin, hair in a thick braid. “I never did understand why those British nurses are all so damned good. But if I was sick, that’s who I’d want taking care of me, bet money on it. You need anything else, Mr. Griffin?”
“No. But thanks, Donna.”
“Por nada.”
This went on for some time. I remember my father sitting beside the bed for a week or two. Verne came in a few times and told me if there was anything she could do … Corene Davis bent down and whispered something in my ear, which later Earl Long tried to bite off. One night Martin Luther King was there, but nobody else saw him. I asked.
“Lew?” someone said. “Lew? You okay?”
It was Don. He looked a lot older than I remembered him, a lot tireder. “You need anything, you better let me know.” He told me his wife had finally left, taking the kids with her. He said one of his people had picked me up and they’d kept it quiet.
“What do you feel about all this?” he said.
“Jesus, Don, you sound like one of the shrinks around here. I feel fucking embarrassed, is how I feel. Mortified, as Daffy Duck used to say.”
“You were pretty far gone, Lew. Ever since you and Janie got back together and it went bad again. I guess you know I was sending jobs your way.”
“I knew.”
“But finally I had to stop. I couldn’t answer the questions those people came back to me with. You remember much of how it was the last few months, Lew?”
I shook my head.
“My men had standing orders. Every night they’d find you about twelve or so and see that you got home. You didn’t want to go home, but you did. Sometimes they’d take you home three or four times a night.”
He paused and I said, “That bad.”
“One morning the captain wanted to see me. ‘Who the fuck is this Lew Griffin’, he said. ‘He a dealer, a stooge, what?’ I told him you were a friend. ‘They don’t pay us to take care of friends, Walsh’, he said, they pay us to scrape the bad guys off the streets, keep a little order out there. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I said, ‘Yessir’. He said, ‘I’m not going to hear this name anymore now, am I?’ I said, ‘Nosir’. But my men still had that standing order.”
I started to say thanks, but Don said, “Just shut the fuck up, Lew, all right?” I did. “Then a night or two later I get this call from Thibodeaux. I’d promised Maria we’d have that night together, it was our anniversary or some damn thing, and between the second drink and salad the beeper lets loose. It seems the waitress at Joe’s had called. For about an hour you’d been methodically walking into one of the walls there, saying you were trying to find the bathroom. The guys picked you up, I came down and had a look, and I told them to bring you up here.”