A Long Line of Dead Men

8

When I first moved to my hotel, Jimmy Armstrong had a saloon right around the corner on Ninth Avenue, and that was where I spent most of my waking hours. After I got sober Jimmy lost his lease and reopened a long block west, at the corner of Tenth and Fifty-seventh. In AA they tell you to avoid the people and places and things that might make you want to drink, and for several years I stayed away from Jimmy's joint. These days I get there now and then. Elaine likes the place on Sunday afternoons, when they have chamber music, and it's always been a good choice for a late supper.

I walked west on Fifty-seventh, but instead of paying a call on Jimmy I went to the high-rise apartment building diagonally across the street. The doorman had been told I was coming; when I gave him my name he said I was expected and pointed to the elevator. I rode up to the twenty-eighth floor and her door opened even as I knocked on it.

"I really was," she said. "Thinking of you just before you called. You look tired. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"It's probably the humidity. This is going to be some summer if it's like this in June. I just put the air on. This place cools off pretty quickly."

"How are you, Lisa?"

She turned aside. "I'm all right," she said. "Do you want some coffee? Or would you rather have something cold? There's Pepsi, there's iced tea…"

"No, thanks."

She spun around to face me. She said, "I'm glad you're here, but I don't think I want to do anything. Is that all right?"

"Of course."

"We could sit and talk."

"Whatever you say."

She walked to the window. Her apartment faces west, and there are no tall buildings to block her view. I moved up behind her and watched a couple of sailboats on the Hudson.

She was wearing perfume, the musky scent she always wore.

She said, "Oh, who am I kidding?"

She turned to face me once again. I circled her waist and linked my hands, and she leaned back and looked up at me. Her forehead was shining and there were beads of sweat on her upper lip. "Oh!" she said, as if something had startled her, and I drew her close and kissed her, and at first she trembled in my arms and then she threw her own arms around me and we clung together. I felt her body against me, I felt her breasts, I felt the heat of her loins.

I kissed her mouth. I kissed her throat and breathed in her scent.

"Oh!" she cried.

We went to the bedroom and got our clothes off, interrupting the process to kiss, to clutch each other. We fell together onto the bed. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh, oh…"

Her name was Lisa Holtzmann, and it would not be inaccurate to describe her as young enough to be my daughter, although she had in fact been born almost ten years before my elder son. When I first met her she'd been married to a lawyer named Glenn Holtzmann, and pregnant with his child. She lost the baby early in the third trimester, and not long after that she'd lost her husband; he'd been shot to death while using a pay phone just a couple of blocks away on Eleventh Avenue.

I'd wound up with two clients, one of them the dead man's widow, the other the brother of the man accused of shooting him. I don't know that I did either of them a world of good. The alleged killer, one of the neighborhood street crazies, wound up getting stabbed to death on Rikers Island by someone no saner than himself. The widow Holtzmann wound up in bed with me.

That it happened does not strike me as extraordinary. Traditionally, widows have been regarded as vulnerable to seduction, and as more than ordinarily seductive themselves. My role in Lisa's personal drama, the knight in tarnished armor riding to her rescue, did nothing to hinder our falling into bed together. While I was deeply in love with and committed to Elaine, and by no means uncomfortable with that commitment, there is something in the male chromosomal makeup that renders a new woman alluring simply because she is new.

There had been no other women for me since Elaine and I had found each other again, but I suppose it was inevitable that there would be someone sooner or later. The surprise was that the affair wouldn't quit. It was like the Energizer rabbit. It kept going and going and going…

You didn't need a doctorate in psychology to figure out what was going on. I was obviously a father figure to her, and only the least bit more available than the genuine article. For several years back home in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, he had come to her bed at night. He had thrilled her with his fingers and his mouth, teaching her to gasp out her pleasure like a lady, softly, so the sounds would not carry beyond her bedroom door. He taught her, too, to please him, and by the time she went off to college she had become skilled beyond her years.

And still a virgin. "He would never put it in," she said, "because he told me that would be a sin."

While she and I had not drawn any such line, in other respects our relationship echoed what she'd had with Daddy. Although she had originally made the first overtures, giving me to understand that she was available to me, since then she had initiated nothing. She never called my home or office. I always called, asking if she felt like company, and she always told me to come over.

We were never together outside her apartment. We never walked down the street side by side, or had a cup of coffee together. One night Elaine and I stopped at Armstrong's after a concert at Lincoln Center, and Elaine spotted Lisa in the crowd at the bar. It was Elaine who had introduced me to Lisa and her husband; the two women had met at a class at Hunter College. "Isn't that Lisa Holtzmann?" she'd said, nodding toward the bar. I looked and agreed that it was, but neither of us suggested going over and saying hello.

In her apartment, in her bed, I could shut out the world. It was as if those rooms on the twenty-eighth floor existed somehow outside of space and time. I would shuck off my life like a pair of boots and leave it at the door.

I suppose it wasn't much of a stretch to say she was like a drug or a drink to me. I'd thought fleetingly of calling the liquor store, reached for the phone, and called her instead. The connection wasn't usually that clearly wrought. I would find myself thinking of her, and wanting to be with her. Sometimes I resisted the impulse. Sometimes I didn't.

I rarely went to her more than once a month, and during the winter there'd been a stretch of almost three months when I'd never even reached for the phone. Shortly after the first of the year I thought of her and thought, Well, that's over, feeling a curious mixture of sadness and relief. Early in February I called and went over there, and we were right back where we'd started.

Afterward we watched the sunset. It must have been around nine. The sunsets were coming later every day now, with less than a week to go until Midsummer Eve.

She said, "I've been working a lot. I got a great assignment, six covers from a paperback western series."

"Good for you."

"The hardest part is reading the books. They're what they call adult westerns. Do you know what those are?"

"I could probably guess."

"You probably could. The hero doesn't say, 'Shucks, ma'am.' "

"What does he say?"

"In the one I just finished he said, 'Why don't you get shed of that petticoat so I can eat that sweet little pussy of yours.' "

"How the West was won."

"It's shocking," she said, "because you think you're reading Hopalong Cassidy, and the next thing you know somebody's getting fisted behind the corral. The hero's name is Cole Hardwick. That's pretty straightforward, don't you think?"

"One gets the point."

"I'm doing a different western scene for each cover. The two constants are guns and cleavage. Oh, and Cole Hardwick's weathered face in the foreground, so you'll know right away it's another book in the series." She extended a hand, ran her forefinger along my jaw. "I almost used this face," she said.

"Oh?"

"I started sketching, and what came out began to look curiously familiar. It was a great temptation to leave it. I wonder if you'd ever have seen one of the books, and if you'd have recognized yourself."

"I don't know."

"Anyway, I decided you're not right for it. You're too urban, too streetwise."

"Too old."

"No, Hardwick's pretty grizzled himself. Look, there goes the sun. Will I ever get tired of sunsets? I hope not."

The show was even richer once the sun was down. A whole rainbow of colors stained the Jersey skyline.

She said, "I've been seeing somebody."

"Somebody nice, I hope."

"He seems nice. He's an art director for an in-flight magazine. I showed him my book and he didn't have any work for me, but he called me the next day and took me to dinner. He's nice-looking and fun to be with and he likes me."

"That's great."

"We've had four dates. Tomorrow we're going to have an early dinner and see Eleven Months of Winter at Playwrights Horizon. And then I suppose I'll sleep with him."

"You haven't yet?"

"No. A couple of, you know, lingering kisses." She clasped her hands in her lap and looked down at them. "When you called, my first thought was to tell you not to come over today. And then I said I didn't want to do anything, and how long did that last? Half a minute?"

"Something like that."

"I wonder what it is with us."

"I've wondered myself."

"What happens if I start sleeping with Peter? What will I say when you call?"

"I don't know."

" 'Come on over,' I'll say. And afterward I'll feel like a whore."

I didn't say anything.

"I can't see myself sleeping with two men at once. I don't mean literally at the same time, I mean-"

"I know what you mean."

"Having a relationship with Peter, and still going to bed with you. I can't see myself doing that. But I can't imagine saying no to you, either."

"Daddy stuff?"

"Oh, I suppose so. When you kissed me there was a split second when I could taste liquor on your breath. Of course that was just memory. He never came to my room without liquor on his breath. Did I tell you he was in treatment?"

"No."

"Well, Minnesota. Land of ten thousand lakes and twenty thousand alcoholism-treatment centers. The doctor was concerned that his liver was enlarged and sent him for treatment. My mother says he's not drinking anything now but a little beer with meals. I don't suppose that will last."

"It never does."

"Maybe his liver'll blow up and he'll die. Sometimes I wish that would happen. Does that shock you?"

"No."

"And other times I want to pray for him. That he'll stop drinking and, and, I don't know what. Get better, I guess. Be the father I always wanted. But maybe he already is the father I always wanted. Maybe he was all along."

"Maybe."

"Anyway, I don't know how to pray. Do you pray?"

"Once in a while. Not very often, though."

"How do you do it?"

"Mostly I ask for strength."

"Strength?"

"To do something," I said, "or to get through something. That kind of strength."

"And do you get it?"

"Yes," I said. "I generally do."

I showered before I left her place, then got to the basement of St. Paul's in time for the last half hour of the meeting. I raised my hand and said that I'd thought of drinking earlier. "I was looking out the window at the liquor store across the street," I said, "and I thought how easy it would be to call them up and tell them to send over a bottle. I've been sober a few years now, and I don't get thoughts like that very often, but I'm still an alcoholic, and I've stayed sober this long by not drinking and by coming here and talking about it. And I'm glad I'm sober, and I'm glad I'm here tonight."

Afterward I joined a few of the others at the Flame. I ate a hamburger and drank a glass of iced coffee. I got home a little before eleven.

"You look a little wilted," Elaine said. "Thank God for air-conditioning, huh? Joe Durkin called, he wants you to call him in the morning. And you had a couple of other messages. I wrote them down. I hope your day was more exciting than mine."

"Things were pretty slow?"

"Well, who wants to go gallery-hopping in this weather? But I think I have a commission for Ray Galindez. A woman in her seventies, a Buchenwald survivor. Her whole family died over there, and of course she doesn't have any pictures. She came over after the war with the clothes on her back and nothing else. She wants Ray to draw them all- her parents, her grandparents, her little sister. She lost everybody, Matt."

"Can she afford it?"

"She could buy my whole store out of petty cash. She married another camp survivor and they opened a candy store. Her sons went into business together, they have a metal-casting business in Passaic. She has six grandchildren, three doctors and two lawyers."

"And one black sheep?"

"The black sheep is at Harvard picking up an MBA before she moves back to Passaic and starts running the factory. That's if she doesn't get sidetracked and decide to become the CEO of General Motors."

"You got the whole story, huh?"

"Complete with pictures. Money's no problem. Her only worry is that she won't be able to remember what they look like. 'I close my eyes and try to see them, and I don't see nothing.' I told her to sit down with the artist and see what happens. She got a little teary at the thought. I tried to comfort her and I started to remember what an emotional experience it was when Ray did the sketch of my father. You should have seen us, honey. Two old broads with our arms around each other, crying about nothing."

"You're really something."

"Me?"

"I think you're wonderful."

"I'm just another former whore," she said, "with a former heart of gold."