Small Town

forty-two

On September 11, 2002, sunrise came at 6:31 A.M. The forecast called for partly cloudy skies, with a forty percent chance of showers in the late afternoon.

Jerry Pankow, who worked for a catering service and didn’t have to report until nine, had not broken the habit of early rising. He was up before dawn, took a long hot shower, and thought about the cute guy he’d picked up over the weekend. Really sweet, in and out of bed, but he could have been a guest on I’ve Got a Secret, because he sure did. Wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but was wearing the mark the ring had left, and kept touching the spot nervously. Married, clearly, and new to the sin that dared not speak its name, which in recent years had become the sin that would not shut up. Lou, he’d said his name was, but he’d stuttered a little getting it out, and Jerry’s guess was that his name did in fact start with an L, but that it was anything but Lou. Dressing, he wondered if he’d ever see him again.

At 7:24, a young woman in a white uniform attached a fresh bottle to one of Fran Buckram’s IV lines. “Oh, good,” he said. “Breakfast.” She giggled as if she’d never heard the line before, which struck him as unlikely.

He closed his eyes but couldn’t get back to sleep. He hoped they’d let him out of here soon, and wondered what he would do when they did. Mend, of course, and eat real food again, and do a lot of physical therapy, but what would he do after that?

Not run around the country making speeches. Not run for office. Not hang out a shingle as a private investigator. None of the above, but what?

He’d think of something.

At 7:40, Jay McGann came back from his morning run and went straight to the shower. He was dressed by eight, and by the time his wife got to the table he had their breakfast ready. He’d be at his desk by nine, as he was every morning. Writing was a business, after all, and if you wanted to get anywhere with it you had to approach it in a businesslike fashion.

He asked his wife how her omelet was, and she said it was fine, and then she asked him if anything was wrong. No, he said, nothing was wrong. Why? Because you seem different, she said.

“Well, now that you mention it,” he said, and he told her he’d been thinking that he ought to get an office. Someplace just for writing, so that he could go there every day and do his work and then come home. John Cheever, he told her, had had an office early in his career in the basement of his apartment building, and every morning he put on a suit and tie and stuck a hat on his head, and he rode the elevator to the basement and went into a room and took off the jacket and the tie and the hat and went to work. And put them on again at five o’clock, and went home.

She said, Just for work, right? And he said, Sure, what else?

At 8:12, Jim Galvin woke up on the couch of his Alphabet City apartment. He’d taken off his shirt and shoes but was still wearing his pants and socks. There was a bad taste in his mouth, and a pounding in the back of his head.

He drank a glass of water, threw it up, and drank another. When that one stayed down he drank one more glass of water with a couple of aspirin. He showered, and when he went to shave his hand was trembling. He put the safety razor down and went into the other room, and there was still plenty of booze left in the open bottle, and most of the bottles left in the case. He poured himself a drink, just a short one, and when he resumed shaving his hand was rock steady.

Maury Winters got up four times during the night. Around seven he decided that was as much sleep as he was going to get, and got busy taking the fistful of herbs he took every morning. He wondered if they were doing any good. One was supposed to shrink his prostate, which would be a blessing, but so far he couldn’t see the difference.

He checked to see if they’d delivered the Times yet. They had, and he brought it in and read it. At eight-thirty his wife told him breakfast was ready, and he told her she was an angel. While he was drinking his second cup of coffee, his wife asked him if he’d had a good night.

“Every night above ground’s a good night,” he told her. “Every day being married to you is heaven.” And he got up from the table and went over and gave her a kiss.

Eddie Ragan didn’t open his eyes until 9:20. He wasn’t in his own apartment, and it took him a moment to remember where he was, and even then he couldn’t pin it down geographically. He could ask the woman who’d brought him home with her, but a check of the apartment’s other rooms didn’t turn her up. Off to work, he thought.

He’d hung out at the Kettle for a while after he finished his shift, and then he and a couple of people went next door to the Fifty-Five, and then where? It got a little hazy at that point, but he wound up at Googie’s, late, and that’s where he pulled the dame, and she’d brought him back here.

What the hell was her name, anyway? He couldn’t remember. They had a good time, he remembered that. Nice rack, and she gave head like she could teach school in the subject, he remembered that. He couldn’t quite picture her face, but was sure he’d recognize her if he saw her. Well, fairly sure.

She drank Sambuca, straight up in a little cordial glass, with three coffee beans in it. That he remembered.

Lowell Cooke was at his desk by nine-thirty. He went right to work returning phone calls and answering mail. He had a lunch date scheduled with an agent making her fall trip to New York, and one of his writers was coming by during the afternoon. And, of course, he had a stack of manuscripts to read if he ever found the time.

At breakfast his wife had asked him if everything was okay, and he said of course it was.

I’m gay, he wanted to say, but he hadn’t been able to say it, any more than he’d been able to say his name to the fellow he’d been with Monday night. I’m Lou, he’d said, and his companion for the evening had been polite enough to pretend to believe him, and to call him Lou throughout.

God, what was he going to do?

Stelli Safran rarely got to bed before three, and rarely got up before noon. Today, though, a muscle cramp woke her around ten. She went to the kitchen and ate a banana, on the chance that it might be a potassium deficiency. Or maybe it was calcium, so she drank a glass of milk.

Then again, she thought, maybe it was butter and sugar and flour, and wouldn’t it be terrible to suffer cramps because of a deficiency of any of those essential elements?

She got out a mixing bowl and made pancakes.

At a quarter to eleven, Esther Blinkoff returned a call from Roz Albright. They told each other, not for the first time, how excited they were about Darker Than Water, and eventually Roz said that she had a new writer she was also very enthusiastic about, a woman, she’d published some short stories but this was her first novel.

Think Bridget Jones meets The Lovely Bones, she said.

Esther said she’d love to see it.

Chloe Sigurdson opened up the Susan Pomerance Gallery at eleven. She’d been coming in earlier lately, a change Susan had made in order to give her own schedule more flexibility. This day Chloe didn’t have much to do other than listen to the radio and talk to friends on the phone. Susan came in at eleven-forty-five, changed the station to WQXR, took a moment to brush her hand over Chloe’s breasts, then across the top of her head.

“I’m leaving early,” Susan told her. She was going to her boyfriend’s apartment, she’d brought him a present.

Chloe knew who she meant. The writer, Mr. Big Shoulders.

He’s cute, she’d told Susan, and Susan had said, Would you like to do him? Maybe I’ll give you to him for his birthday.

She wondered if Susan was kidding. Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Susan.

But she knew one thing. When she grew up, she wanted to be like Susan.

John Blair Creighton rose early and went to the gym. It was a new one, right around the corner at Greenwich and West Twelfth, where the Greenwich Theater used to be. Years ago, not long after he’d moved to Bank Street, he joined the Attic Gym, which then occupied the floor above the movie theater. The gym went out of business when the theater expanded and became a duplex, and now the theater was gone, and a new building had gone up to house this new gym, and a few days ago he’d joined it.

He had a workout and a sauna and a shower, ate across the street at the Village Den, but waited until he got home to have coffee. He got halfway through his second cup before he wondered what he was going to do next.

Writing was great, he thought. You suffered and you agonized and you were beset by doubts and fears, and then you finished a book and felt absolutely ecstatic, convinced that you were great and your book was great and your future was coming up roses.

That lasted for about a week, and then you realized that you were washed up, that you’d never do anything decent again, and look at you, you indolent slug, why were you just sitting around doing nothing? Why weren’t you writing something?

So he sat there, trying to think of something to write.

And then the bell rang, and it wasn’t cops, it wasn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses, it wasn’t the kid from Two Boots. It was Susan, and she’d brought him a present.

And shortly thereafter they were in bed, and she was telling him a story. And, on the bookshelf, a magnificent white bear with turquoise eyes shared the dish of stone-ground yellow cornmeal with the little turquoise rabbit.

It looked as though they were going to get along just fine.

And all of them, like everyone else in the great city, waited to see what was going to happen next.