Melancholy Baby

33

The red digital display on the cable box in Peter’s bedroom said that it was 2:30 in the morning. I was lying on my back beside Peter, listening to him snore softly. I had no clothes on. I wished very much to be dressed and in a cab back to my hotel. I wished I were back in my hotel, dressed in an oversized two-tone-orange T-shirt, and in my bed. Like so many liberated, up-to-the-minute contemporary men I had met, Peter felt it was important to spend the night together. No slam, bam, thank you, ma’am. Which meant a sort of awkward maneuvering around the bathroom in the morning. It meant wriggling into my pantyhose while he watched. Or it meant picking up my clothes and getting dressed in the closet. Ick!

There was no real basis for speculating about Lolly Drake. Except the coincidence that she knew Sarah’s father. And she was represented by a man who may have hired someone to beat up Sarah. But if I decided that it was a meaningless coincidence, and that Ike Rosen had probably lied to me, in the grip of his passion, then I had nowhere to go, and the discovery of that coincidence did nothing for me. And if it wasn’t a coincidence, I might be sleeping with the enemy. I decided to assume that it wasn’t a coincidence. So what if I had slept with the enemy.

The red-letter clock told me it was ten of three. I slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the chair where my clothes were folded and got dressed in careful silence. The pantyhose seemed too challenging at three in the morning, so I put them in my handbag and, carrying my shoes, I tiptoed out of the bedroom and through the living room, where the ambient light of the city showed the empty champagne bottle and two fluted glasses standing in mute memory of our evening. I stepped into my shoes while the elevator dropped silently to the lobby.

There was a sleepy doorman at the desk. I smiled at him demurely, trying not to look like a floozy, as I went by him and out onto Fifth Avenue. There is very little emptier than anywhere at three in the morning. I didn’t see a cab. The night was pleasant enough, so I headed downtown and walked twenty-one blocks down Fifth to my hotel. Most of the way, Central Park was on my right: lovely, dark, and deep. And beyond it, the eternal lights of the West Side marked its westward definition.

At my hotel, I had to ring to get in. I tried my I’m-not-a-floozy look on the security man who checked my room key. It’s a hard look to pull off when you are coming home alone at three in the morning with your pantyhose in your purse. I’m not sure he bought it.

Upstairs, I brushed my teeth and took a long shower and put on my orange T-shirt and went to bed and fell asleep almost as soon as I was prone. I dreamed Rosie and I were walking in a landscape I’d never seen, and Rosie was running around in ever-widening circles. When I called her, she came back, but then as we walked, she would continue to stray farther and farther until I called her back.

In the morning, I awoke with no new insights about myself or Peter Franklin, but I felt rested and lay in bed for a while being alone, reading the room-service menu, thinking about breakfast. Love and sex were great. Especially when they overlapped. But alone had its moments, too.

Two hours later, freshly showered, with a fine breakfast settling comfortably and my teeth newly brushed, I left the hotel and went to work.

It was 11:20, bright and cold with some wind coming up 57th Street off the Hudson, when I settled in opposite Peter Franklin’s office. I was in jeans and sneakers and a warm black trench coat with a lot of zippers. I had on a dark wool watch cap, pulled down over my ears, the kind of hat that I would have to wear for the rest of the day, or suffer the heartbreak of hat hair. In my coat pocket I had a little digital camera with a zoom on it. I looked at my watch. I was betting he’d come out for lunch in the next hour or two.

I had checked out of my hotel. My luggage was in my car, and my car was parked in a garage near Tenth Avenue. Get my pictures and beat it north along the Hudson. While I had been lolling around my room, enjoying solitude and eating breakfast, the phone had rung three times. Each time, I didn’t answer. Each time my message light began to flash, and when I checked the voice mail it was Peter Franklin.

The first message was, “Hey, babe. Where’d you go? Was it something I did... or something I didn’t do? I want to see you again. Give me a call.”

The second and third messages were variations of the first. The second message also contained a graphic anatomical compliment.

Oh, shucks.

The size and quickness of New York always excited me. It always made me think of the way Lewis Mumford had defined a city. Something like “the most options in the least space.” It was all of that.

I was comfortable in New York. I had lived all my life only four hours up the road, and was pretty much at home in Manhattan, though, like most people who didn’t live in New York City, I had only limited experience of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, and was pretty sure I’d never even been to Staten Island.

I wasn’t much worried that Peter would see me. He wasn’t expecting to see me. I had on the hat and big sunglasses, and was dressed very differently from the last time he’d seen me, even not counting the time he’d seen me undressed. Even if he did see me, it wouldn’t matter much. I’d say I was on my way to say goodbye and stopped to take a sentimental-memory picture of his office building.

At one o’clock I bought a soft pretzel from a vendor and ate it. With yellow mustard. At 1:15, Peter appeared in the doorway of his building with two other men. All three wore dark overcoats and light scarves. Peter had on a soft hat with a wide brim like crime bosses wear in movies. The three of them stopped to talk for a moment on the sidewalk outside the building, and I took some pictures. Peter was animated. The two men nodded. Then one of them talked with a lot of hand gestures, and Peter kept shaking his head. Then, finally, he put his hand up and the man who had been gesturing gave him a high-five and the three of them laughed. The two men turned west and walked away. Peter stood, looking after them, ever solicitous, and I took some more pictures. Then he turned and walked east, toward Sixth Avenue. I put my camera away and headed for my car, walking straight into the wind with my head down a little to keep it from blowing grit in my face.