Red Cat

20

We got his clothes off- the sopping cashmere overcoat, the sodden English shoes, the Italian suit, soaked and stained from the knees down- and cleaned him up as well as we could with a damp washcloth. I levered him into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and Clare put sheets on the sofa and covered him with a blanket. He muttered and flailed a little, and threw up once more, but I’d wrestled less cooperative drunks before.

“He showed up maybe twenty minutes ago, and I didn’t know what to do with him,” Clare whispered. She was in the kitchen, drinking tonic water and watching David sleep. “He was leaning on the buzzer and saying he was your brother, and he was covered in snow from the chest up. I couldn’t just leave him out there.”

I nodded. “You don’t have to whisper,” I said, “he’s gone. From the look of him, he must’ve walked uptown.”

“Good thing he didn’t stop to rest along the way- they’d be chipping ice off him for a month.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Besides that he was your brother, nothing that made sense. Is he like this a lot?”

“Passed out drunk, you mean?”

Clare nodded.

“This is the first I’ve seen it, but…I don’t really know what he’s like.”

Clare looked at him and looked at me and shook her head. “Jesus.”

I came awake in the middle of the night. Clare was breathing slowly beside me, and we were both sunk deep into the mattress. Beneath the wind and shaking windows, I heard a stifled cough from the living room, and the rustle of bedsheets. I got up carefully and pulled on a T-shirt and went out.

David was cross-legged on the floor. He was wrapped in a sheet and his back was to one of my bookcases. His skin was pale and his hair was damp-looking. He had a book in his lap and he was turning the pages. He looked up at me. His eyes were still confused, and his face was somehow out of focus. I closed the bedroom door.

“You should sleep,” I whispered.

“Things were spinning,” he said quietly.

“You want anything?”

“Water, maybe.”

I went to the kitchen and filled a glass. I carried it over and David took it and drank. I looked at the book he held. It was a big coffee-table volume with frayed covers and a cracked spine, a collection of BrassaД photos I hadn’t opened in years. David set the glass on the floor and turned a page, to a picture of a fog-wrapped Paris avenue. He turned again, to a picture of a woman under a streetlamp.

He laughed softly. “The first time I went to Paris, I had in my head it was somehow going to look like this. I was just out of college and, boy, was I disappointed. I was expecting fog, and hookers on every corner, and I thought it would be all smoky and romantic. Then I saw that fucking Pompidou Center. After that, I didn’t feel so bad that Mom hadn’t let me spend junior year there.” There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and he shivered as he spoke.

“I didn’t know you’d wanted to.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said absently. “Instead, I did an internship at Beekman Quist that year.” He turned another page- a sedan idling on a cobbled street. He chuckled to himself. “There was a receptionist there who gave me head in the supply room every Friday afternoon. Now, that was educational.” He reached for his glass and emptied it.

“You want more?” I asked. He nodded. When I returned, he was examining the book’s cover.

“I used to look at this thing all the time,” he said. “It was on Daddy’s desk.” He turned it over and ran his fingers over the torn dust jacket. “It’s really falling apart now.”

“You should get some sleep,” I said.

David ignored me, and turned the book over again, and opened the front cover. There was a bookplate pasted inside- a white rectangle, yellowed now, with a line drawing that was supposed to be the Widener Library. Printed across the bottom were the names Philip and Elaine March. Our parents.

He looked at me. “How’d you end up with this?”

“I’m not sure. I ended up with most of Dad’s books.”

He nodded vaguely and ran his fingers over the bookplate, over their names. “What was it with them, anyway?” he said.

“I don’t-”

“I mean, why stay together, if all you do is fight? Why get married in the first place, for chrissakes? And why have children, when you don’t have a single fucking clue of what to do with them- or any interest in finding out? You’d be better off on your own.”

Old questions, and I certainly had no answers. I shook my head. “You should get-”

“And what the hell were they looking for in their kids, anyway, that they could never seem to find in me? Did I not have the password, or something- the secret charm?” He looked up at me again, and his eyes were shining and angry. “How did that happen, Johnny? How is it that you got all the fucking glamour, and I got none?”

He took the glass and drank the water in one swallow, and a shudder ran through his shoulders. He squeezed his eyes shut and held his head in his hands. His skin went from white to gray, and I knew his world was spinning, and that he was fighting to hold on. I went to the kitchen and came back with a garbage pail. I took the book from David’s lap and held the pail while he retched.

By morning the storm had passed, and the city was a frosted fantasy of wind-carved snow and glistening ice, achingly bright under a lapis sky. Squinting out the windows at the GaudГ curves and spires, I forgot for a moment about David, who was in the shower, and had been for a long time.

“You think he’s drowning himself in there?” Clare asked. She wore yoga pants and a sleeveless T-shirt, and her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail. She looked maybe twenty.

“Feel free to check.”

She smirked. “I’ll give it another hour or so.”

We were eating oatmeal and watching news reports about the storm when David appeared. He was pale and drawn and wrapped in my bathrobe. His ginger hair was damp and roughly combed and his eyes were painful to look at. When he spoke his voice was hoarse but devoid of embarrassment.

“Where are my clothes?”

“In there.” I pointed to a black plastic garbage bag in a corner.

David walked over on brittle legs, and opened the bag and looked inside. He drew his head back quickly and closed the bag. “Shit,” he said. “You have something I can wear?”

I nodded and went into the bedroom and pulled a pair of jeans and a turtleneck from my closet. When I came out, David and Clare hadn’t moved, but were eyeing each other over the kitchen counter. The look was one I’d last seen exchanged on the Nature Channel, between jackals and lions over an antelope carcass. David took the clothes and went into the bathroom. Clare frowned.

“Friendly guy,” she said. “Very warm.”

“Always.”

“Not like you.”

“Don’t even joke.”

Clare laughed and kissed the corner of my mouth. “Not as cute, though.”

The news showed endless scenes of plowing and digging- snow from roads, cars from snow, people from cars- from D.C. north. In the city, the mayor, mindful of the storms that had permanently buried the careers of some of his predecessors, struck brave and resolute poses astride plow trucks and sanders, assured us that all was well, and pledged not to rest until asphalt was showing on every street in Queens. In fact, surface transportation was only just beginning to recover, though the people skiing down Fifth Avenue seemed in no rush to have it back.

David returned wearing my clothes, which were too long in the leg and too snug at the waist. He squatted by the black plastic bag and wrinkled his nose and began sorting through it. “Where the hell are my shoes?”

“They’re in there,” I said.

He pulled through the wet wreckage and came out with them and dropped them on the floor, disgusted. More clawing yielded his wallet, his watch, and his cell phone. He popped the phone open and pressed some keys and in a moment he was shouting.

“The roads are your problem, not mine. My problem is getting homeand unless you want to lose the Klein amp; Sons account, you’ll fucking solve it for me.”

Clare suppressed a laugh and looked at me, eyebrows raised. David pressed some more keys on his phone. When he spoke again his voice was a low monotone.

“I stayed with John. Yes, my brother John. He was walking distance, that’s why, and I couldn’t get a car. There were no taxis, Stephanie, and the trains were all screwed up. Why, you want to talk to him? I didn’t think so. How are things in New Canaan?”

He said his goodbyes and closed the phone and looked at me. “There any coffee?” he asked.

I poured a mug and handed it to him. Clare excused herself, shaking her head, and went into the bathroom and shut the door. In a moment, I heard water running.

“Who’s she?” David asked.

“A friend.”

David snickered. “I figured that out. She have a name?”

“Clare.”

He nodded. “Nice looking. I thought you were seeing that Chinese girl.”

“Not for a while now. Stephanie’s in New Canaan?”

“With her parents.”

“Is she…okay?”

David scowled. “She’s great. Is there more coffee?”

I refilled his mug. “And what about you?” I asked. “Are you great too?”

He squinted. “Don’t start with me, all right? I had a little too much on an empty stomach, and-”

“Enough bullshit, David. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I didn’t have lunch yesterday, and I-”

“I’m not just talking about the drinking, or the wandering around in a storm. I’m talking about all of it- the Internet sex, not cooperating with your lawyer-”

“I slept on your fucking sofa one night; that doesn’t give youyou of all people- the right to lecture me.”

“Fine, don’t listen to me. But don’t waste my time, either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means don’t ask people to help you when you won’t help yourself- when you’re actually making things worse.”

David’s pale face went red; he opened his mouth to shout, then shut it again. “Worse how?” he asked.

“Mike needs to know what’s what, and so do I. Surprises make our jobs harder, and, trust me, they’re already hard enough. You want your lawyer’s mind on solving your problems, David, not on wondering about what you haven’t told him and why.”

He tugged at his turtleneck collar. “Is that what this is aboutyou and Metz have doubts about me?” I looked at him and said nothing. “You son of a bitch, you think I did it.”

“I think you’re not being upfront with me, and I don’t know why.”

“I haven’t seen that girl in months,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse. “I had nothing to do with her death.”

I nodded. “How much does Stephanie know about…all this?”

David reddened again. “She knows…I guess she knows that I’ve seen other women. I…” His voice broke and he ran shaking hands through his hair. He took a deep breath. “That’s enough,” he said finally. “I’m not talking about this anymore.”

I started to speak, but the bathroom door opened and Clare came out. She looked at me and at David.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“Not a thing,” David said quickly. “I need to eat.”

I made him toast and he sat on the sofa, eating in silence and looking like a sick old man. Two hours later his car came. He slipped on his still-damp shoes, hoisted the black plastic bag, and left without a word.

“What the hell is his problem?” Clare asked, but I had no answer. She opened a window and let some icy air climb in.

Clare had finished the Warhol biography and had started another, this one of Diane Arbus. She sprawled on the sofa and read. I tried not to think too hard about my brother, and opened my laptop instead.

The phone number J.T. had given me for Jamie Coyle was answered only by a synthetic voice and an out-of-service message, and I found no corresponding billing address for it in any of the reverse directories on-line. The post office box had a zip code in Peekskill, New York, and it too did me little immediate good. J.T. had told me that Coyle had done time in Coxsackie, so I plugged his name into the always helpful New York State Department of Correctional Services inmate search, and got lucky.

According to the DOCS database, Jamie Coyle, d-o-b August 11,

1979- the only Jamie Coyle in the system- had been convicted of Assault II, a class D felony, and had been sentenced to no less than two and no more than five years in prison. He’d spent three years in Coxsackie and was paroled a year ago, and he’d behaved well enough for the next ten months to have been discharged from parole, free and clear, last November.

Googling him yielded little- an article in a Westchester newspaper about his arrest, and another, a few weeks later, when he pleaded out. The arrest piece played up a local-hero-gone-bad angle, and squeezed some pathos out of Coyle having been a high school football star and Golden Gloves champ who’d fallen in with a bad crowd after blowing out his knee in the last game of his senior year season. The bad crowd belonged to a local loanshark for whom Coyle had become a collector, and Coyle’s arrest was apparently the result of some vigorous debt rescheduling with the owner of a Peekskill video store. Skull fracture, facial lacerations, fractured jaw, detached retina, and fractured ribs- with that list of injuries, I was surprised that Coyle had only gone for Assault II. Good lawyering. I took down the details and the name of the reporter who’d written the pieces.

Clare sighed massively and put down her book. She stretched and walked to the window and looked down at Sixteenth Street.

“I want to go for a walk before they plow it all away. You want to come?”

I was surprised: Clare was usually very careful about us and public places. Maybe the storm had swept away her caution. I nodded. “Let me just call this guy again,” I said. “I’ve been trying to reach him for days.” Clare pulled on a sweater and I pushed the buttons for Gene Werner’s number yet again. And was stunned when he actually answered.