Bodies in Winter

TWENTY-ONE

Like any other athlete, even a pseudo-athlete, I sometimes pause to check myself out in the mirror. I’m not obsessed, not like body builders where narcissism is the whole point. Just occasionally, late at night coming from the pool, I pause before a full-length mirror in the locker room to make a quick evaluation. And why not? No one can say I haven’t worked for my body, that I haven’t put in the hours.

A single glance is usually enough to assure me that I’m holding it together as I enter my forty-first year on the planet. Only occasionally am I dissatisfied; only occasionally do I suspect that my body has tipped over the edge, that the inevitable diminishing has begun.

My features undergo a similar shift at such times, rugged somehow becoming goofy. I have the good hair, as I’ve already said, but my eyes, always narrow, have been narrowed further by fanning crows’ feet and a slight puffiness that no amount of sleep can erase. They are at different heights, as well, with the right a bit lower than the left, producing a cock-eyed look made worse by a mouth with a pronounced bias to the right and a noticeably off-center chin.

Not even in my most charitable moments would I call the face in the mirror handsome. My features are too unbalanced for that. But rugged is a tradable commodity for a middle-aged bachelor in New York, whereas goofy doesn’t work at all. I knew because that crooked smile I flashed across a crowded room sometimes produced a quick frown, shortly followed by an exaggerated rolling of the eyes. God, why do I keep attracting the losers?

I relate to my apartment — which I finally re-entered some two hours later — much as I do to my body. Mostly, I feel comfortable when I lock the door behind me. I feel at home. But there are definitely times when the place seems more like a bad joke. From the roughly finished dining table and the captain’s chairs, to the wall-to-wall Berber carpeting, to the green sectional couch and the bookcases framing the television, to the posters on the walls. Artificial is the first word that comes to mind, followed shortly by phony, then pathetic.

When I flicked on the lights that afternoon, I felt as if I’d been the unwitting victim of an apprentice decorator at a failing discount department store. Case in point, the posters on the living room walls were of extremely obscure, extremely bad movies, the kind that played rural Mississippi drive-ins in the 1950s. Captive Wild Woman (starring Acquanetta as the Gorilla Girl); Juke Joint (The Joint is Jumpin! The Jive is Jivin! The Jam is Jammin!); Girl With An Itch (Have Negligee, Will Travel!). I’d thought them clever enough when I’d accumulated them over a period of nine months, but now they seemed as superficial as the movies they were created to publicize.

Compounding the felony, I’d paid way too much for the posters, as a recent visit to a series of websites offering the same ones attested. But then I’d sunk more than I could afford into my furniture as well. My bedroom set had come from Stickley, the couch and bookcases from Ethan Allen, the oak dining table from a cabinet maker in Williamsburg who saw customers by appointment only. Which is not to suggest that my furnishings were top of the line by New York standards. Not even close. But they were definitely beyond the legitimate aspirations of a cop living on a single paycheck. Most cops I knew shopped at department stores on sale days.

I hung my coat in the closet, then went from room to room, turning on lights. When I got to my bedroom, I spent a few moments staring at a pair of low bookcases against the far wall. The bookcases were made of walnut and too expensive, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. There were more than a hundred books on the shelves, mixed fiction and non-fiction, all hard covers. With very few exceptions, these books were about New York.

Why did I have them? To show them off? To show myself off? Most of the women I dated were far better educated than I was and had far more prestigious jobs. Slipping an obscure fact into the conversation, or so I believed, made me appear sophisticated enough to be safe. Maybe I was a cop with a high school diploma, but I most likely wouldn’t bite.

I continued to move through the apartment. Wherever I looked, I found not just the pitiful efforts of a dull mind, but evidence of pure desperation. Everything would be alright as long as I kept pretending that everything was alright. My apartment would be the home I’d never had. The job would be the family I’d never known. Even the women in my life had a place in the facade, a burden to endure. Their job was to stick around just long enough to convince me that I had the capacity to love. If only I found the right lover.

When the apartment was fully lit, I retreated to my tiny kitchen, to the wall phone next to the refrigerator. I stared at the phone for a moment, Adele’s number a series of mad little beeps that repeated themselves as if somebody had pressed my REDIAL button. Then I dialed her number and put the phone to my ear. My reward was Adele’s answering machine, where I left a simple request that she call me back.

That done, that line crossed, I made a second call, to a Chinese restaurant on First Avenue called Mee. My dinner ordered, I began to set the table. I felt pretty good about things, comforted as I was by a battlefield maxim declaring that any decision, even a bad decision, is better than no decision. Then my phone began to ring and I walked back into the kitchen, expecting to hear Adele’s voice.

‘Hey, Harry, how’s it going?’ Bill Sarney asked.

‘It’s goin’ alright, Bill. How’s by you?’

‘Me, I got a headache.’

‘And its name is Adele Bentibi.’

‘How’d you guess?’

Sarney was using that hearty, cheerleader voice he generally deployed before asking a favor. It was a voice I’d responded to in the past, as I’d responded to the occasional dinner we shared, or being invited to his home. We were friends and allies, Bill Sarney and Harry Corbin, and I had no reason to doubt his sincerity at that moment. But sincerity was no longer a relevant concept, for either one of us. Sarney had long ago decided that his interests and the interests of the job would never be at odds. That was his line, his personal line, and I’d stepped across it when I phoned Adele. I had no choice now, except to play him. Nailing Lodge’s killers would be hard enough without telegraphing my intentions.

‘So what’s that bad girl done now?’ I asked.

‘We know she’s the one leaking to the Times.’

‘Know?’

‘Yeah, we’re sure.’

It was my turn to chuckle manfully. ‘I could ask if you maybe tapped her phones, Bill, or somehow got your hands on her phone records, but I think I’m just gonna leave that dog lie. In the meantime, I haven’t spoken to Adele in a week.’

That was at least technically true. Though I’d called her only a few minutes before, we hadn’t actually conversed.

‘Harry, look, we think it would be a good idea if you contacted her.’ Sarney’s tone dropped a half-octave as he shifted to that gossipy tone he used when he was passing on insider secrets. ‘Let me level with you here. The bosses think those stories in the Times are not gonna be a problem. They’re worried about what your partner-’

‘Former partner,’ I corrected. ‘With the emphasis on the former.’

‘Yeah, your former partner. The bosses wanna know what she’s gonna do next. Like, specifically, if she’s gonna go public. You can’t blame them, Harry. They’re scared because she doesn’t give a shit about her badge or her reputation. They got nothin’ to hold over her head.’