Derailed

FOURTEEN

I met Lucinda at the fountain on 51st and Sixth.

When I called and told her what Vasquez wanted, she’d lapsed into silence and then asked to meet me there.

I’d been sitting there ten minutes when I saw her cross 51st Street.

I stood up and began to raise my hand in greeting. But I stopped — she was with another man. She continued toward me, and for a moment I was caught between sitting down and standing up, between saying hi and saying nothing. I sat back down; something made me lie low.

I stayed seated right there on the rim of the fountain as Lucinda and the man walked right by me without a glance.

The man was dressed in a respectable blue suit and recently shined shoes. Fiftyish, hair just beginning to thin, lips pursed in thought. Lucinda looked almost normal again, I thought, which was to say gorgeous, if you didn’t look too closely. If you didn’t peer intently at the faint rings under her eyes — not like the rings under mine, which resembled football black, but undeniably there. A woman who looked as though she hadn’t slept much lately, who’s tossed and turned despite the two Valiums and glass of wine.

She seemed to be speaking to the man, but whatever she was saying was swallowed up by a cacophony of New York clatter — car horns, bicycle bells, piped music, bus engines. They passed within five feet of me and I couldn’t hear a word.

I waited as they headed for a side street. I was surrounded by the usual mix of tourists with craned necks, afternoon smokers puffing away with undisguised desperation, and the odd street person mumbling to himself.

I stared at the Christmas decorations on Radio City Music Hall across the street. “Spectacular Christmas Show,” it said, the entire marquee wreathed in holly. A sidewalk Santa was ringing a bell by the front doors and shouting, “Merry Christmas, everyone!” Here by the fountain it was cold and raw.

I waited five, then ten minutes.

Then I saw Lucinda coming back, hurrying around the corner and staring straight at me. So. She’d seen me after all.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome. For what?”

“For not saying hello. For not saying anything. That was my husband.”

That was my husband. The golfer. The one who would never know.

“Oh,” I said.

“He surprised me at the office. With flowers. He insisted on taking the cab uptown with me. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. How have you been?”

“Just terrific. Couldn’t be better.” The tone of her voice suggested that I was kind of stupid for asking her that, like one of those TV reporters at a scene of unimaginable tragedy asking the victim’s remaining family how they’re feeling these days.

“Has he called you again?” she asked me.

“Not since he asked for ten thousand dollars. No.”

“And?” she said. “Are you going to give it to him?”

“Yes.”

She looked down at her hands. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” And I didn't want her to mention it, either. Because every time I mentioned it, it became realer, something that was going to actually take place.

“Look,” she said, “I have one thousand dollars here. A little account my husband doesn’t know about.” She reached into her pocketbook.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Forget it.”

“Take it,” she said as if she were trying to pay for the Milk Duds and soda and I was insisting on being old-fashioned about it and covering the entire date.

“No. I’ll take care of it.”

“Here,” she said, and forced ten hundred-dollar bills into my hand. After a brief tug-of-war, I gave up. I put the money into my pocket.

Then she said: “Do you think it’s going to stop here?”

Which was the real question, of course. Would it stop here, or would it not?

“I don’t know, Lucinda.”

She nodded and sighed. “What if it doesn't? What if he asks for more money? Then what?”

“Then I still don’t know." Then we’re doomed, Lucinda.

“How did it happen, Charles?” she said, so softly that at first I wasn’t sure I’d heard her.

“What?”

“How did it happen? How? Sometimes I think I dreamed it. It seems impossible, doesn’t it? That it actually happened to us? Us? Sometimes . . .”

She dabbed at her eyes—they’d turned liquid, and I thought how her eyes were the second thing I’d noticed that morning on the train. First her thighs, maybe, then her eyes. I’d seen a tenderness in them, and I’d said: Yes, I could use that. I need that now.

“Maybe that’s the way you should think of it,” I said. “A bad dream.”

“But it wasn’t. So that’s stupid.”

“Yes. That’s stupid.”

“If he found out, it would kill him,” she said.

Her husband — she was talking about her husband again.

“If he found out, he’d kill me. ”

“He won’t find out.” We were in this together, I was assuring her. We may have cheated on our spouses, but we wouldn’t on each other.

“What did you say to your wife?” she asked me. “About your nose?”

“I fell.”

“Yes,” she said, as if that were what she’d have thought of, too.

“Look, I wanted to tell you . . .” Tell her what, exactly? That I’d failed her, I suppose, that I’d failed her, but I wouldn’t fail her again.

“Yes?”

“I should’ve . . . you know, stopped him.”

“Yes.”

“I tried. Not hard enough.”

“He had a gun,” she said.

Yes, he had a gun. He had a gun he sometimes pointed at me and sometimes didn’t. While he was raping her — he didn’t. The gun was there on the floor, three feet from me, maybe, that’s all.

“Forget about it,” she said. But I could tell she didn’t mean it—that she did think I should’ve tried harder, that I should’ve saved her. And I remembered how I’d defended her in the bar that night and how she’d kissed me afterward for it. Bar bullies are one thing, of course, and armed rapists are another.

“I don’t think we should talk to each other again, Charles,” she said. “Good-bye.”

“Happy so far?” David Frankel was asking me.

“What?”

“Happy so far? With the commercial?”

We were finally shooting the aspirin commercial. Stage ten at Silvercup Studios in Astoria.

“Yes. It’s fine.”

“Yeah. Corinth’s an old pro.”

Well, he was old, I felt like saying. Robert Corinth was the director of the aspirin commercial. He was short and balding, with a silly-looking ponytail beneath a half-moon of sun-burnished skin. The ponytail said: I may be succumbing to the indignities of aging, but I am still cool, I am still with it. We were on take twenty-two.

“Who’s doing the music for the spot?” I asked him.

“Music?”

“Yes, the track. Who’s doing it?”

“T and D Music House.”

“I never heard of them.”

“Oh, yeah. They’re good.”

“Okay.”

“They do all the tracks for my stuff.”

“Okay. Fine.”

“You’ll like them. They always give us a good price.”

I was going to ask him why he was smiling at me like that. But I was interrupted by Mary Widger whispering in my ear.

“Charles,” she whispered, “can I have a word with you?”

“Sure.”

“Mr. Duben thinks the aspirin bottle should be higher.”

“Higher?” Mr. Duben was my new client. He’d greeted me by saying, So you’re the new blood.

Yes. Type O, I'd answered him, and he’d laughed and said, Great, that’s just what we need.

“Higher. In the frame.”

“Sure. Can you tell Robert to put the bottle higher in the frame, David?”

“No problem,” David said. “I live for stuff like that.”

Later in the afternoon, somewhere between takes forty-eight and forty-nine, Tom Mooney cornered me by the craft service table.

“Hey, buddy,” he said.

Tom wasn’t my buddy. He was the rep for Headquarters Productions, and his modus operandi was to make himself annoying enough to cause clients to give him work in an effort to make him go away. He’d been fairly successful at it, too.

“How are you, Tom?”

“Me, I’m fine. The question is how are you?” He was looking at my face.

“I fell,” I said. For the hundredth time.

“I meant workwise.”

Tom knew exactly how I was, workwise. He knew, for instance, that up till just a few weeks ago, I’d been in charge of a showcase credit card account but now was solely in charge of this aspirin account. He knew this because advertising was a small community, and as in most small communities, news traveled fast, and bad news faster.

“Great,” I answered him.

He asked me if I’d gotten his Christmas card.

“No.”

“I sent you a card.”

“I didn’t get it.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, Merry Christmas. Christmas gift to follow,” he said.

“No gifts necessary, Tom.”

“Don’t be silly. Uncle Tommy never forgets a client.”

“If it’s a Headquarters hat — I’ve got one,” I said.

“Who’s talking hats?” Tom said. “Did I say anything about hats?”

“I’ve got a Headquarters T-shirt, too.”

“Hey, you’re a Headquarters client now.”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“So think of me as Santa Claus.”

“That’s funny. You don’t look like Santa Claus.” With his slicked-back hair and hyperkinetic mannerisms, Tom resembled Pat Riley on amphetamines.

“How do you know? Did you ever see Santa Claus?”

When Anna was small, five and a half, maybe, she’d asked me how Santa shopped at Toys R Us if he lived in the North Pole. I’d inadvertently left the store sticker on a My Little Pony.

“Nice to meet you, Santa.”

“And what does little Charley want for Christmas?”

If Tom had all day, I could’ve told him.

“Nothing, Tom. I’m fine.”

“Hey, you’re shooting with me, right?”

“Right.”

“You’re working with Frankel, right?”

“Frankel? Yes, sure.”

“Okay. Ask him what he gets for Christmas.”

What did that mean?

“All I want for Christmas is a good spot, Tom.”

“Then why’d you use us? ” he said.

But when I didn’t laugh, he said: “Just kidding.”

That night, Vasquez called my house and told me to meet him in Alphabet City at the corner of 8th Street and Avenue C.