Small Town

Seven

He woke to the sound of bells, probably from the Franciscan church on Thirty-first Street. His hotel — the hotel where he was staying, it was by no means his hotel — was on Eighth Avenue at Thirty-second. It was thus convenient to Penn Station, but it would have had to be a much better hotel than it was for this to be anything more than coincidental. It was an SRO (for Single Room Occupancy, not Standing Room Only), which was essentially a euphemism for flophouse — small rooms for $30 a night, $200 a week, a sink in the room, a toilet down the hall, a tub and shower on the floors above and below. Cash in advance, no credit cards. No cooking, no pets, no guests in rooms.

He liked it well enough.

When the bells ceased to ring he dressed, used the hall toilet, and returned to his room. The room had a single chair, which looked to have had an earlier life as part of a dinette set. He posted it next to the window and sat in it with his current book, a volume of George Templeton Strong’s diary, an exhaustive record of life in nineteenth-century New York.

His name for now, the name he’d used registering at the hotel, was G. T. Strong. No one had asked what the G stood for, and no one knew the name but the clerk who had signed him in, and who had very likely long since forgotten it. For six weeks now he’d paid each week’s rent in advance, and he never had calls or callers, never spoke to anyone, never made any trouble, asked any favors, or registered any complaints.

He read thirty pages of his book, the third volume of his edition of Strong’s diary, then marked his place and tucked it under his mattress. This was almost certainly an unnecessary precaution, the sort of person who’d break into this sort of room would be unlikely to consider a book worth stealing, but it would inconvenience him greatly to lose the book, and it was little trouble to tuck it out of sight.

He’d finish the book in a few days or a week, and then he would exchange it for the next volume at the warehouse on Seventeenth Street west of Eleventh Avenue, where he rented a storage cubicle. He had hardly anything there, three cartons full of books and a fourth holding the few other articles he still owned, but it was well worth the monthly charge to keep the books where they’d be safe yet readily accessible. They were all historical works about New York City. That had always been a chief interest of his, and, when he walked away from everything else he owned, those were the volumes he kept.

He’d even enlarged his collection, browsing at the Strand, picking up, oh, ten or a dozen books over the months.

He made the bed, and when he put his tweed cap on his head and left the room it looked unoccupied. His clothes were in the cigarette-scarred mahogany dresser — a few changes of socks and underwear, a couple of plaid shirts like the one he wore, an extra pair of dark trousers. But, unless you pulled open a drawer, you wouldn’t know anyone lived there.

He bought a sandwich and a can of V8 juice at a nearby deli. He walked a mile downtown, stopping along the way to salvage that morning’s Times from a trash can, and a block below Fourteenth Street he came to Jackson Square, a little pocket park with benches and ornamental plantings. There was a fountain, turned off on account of the drought.

Fountains don’t use water, they recirculate the same water over and over, and the loss from evaporation doesn’t amount to much. But they look as though they use water, so the law requires that they be turned off during water shortages.

He found this fascinating.

He ate his sandwich, drank his V-8, and read his newspaper. When he’d finished he put the paper and the sandwich wrapper in a mesh trash can and set the empty juice can on top of it, where it could be easily retrieved by one of the men and women who made a living redeeming cans and bottles.

Then he left the park and walked south and east on West Fourth Street.

It was on an afternoon like this one, a lazy overcast afternoon in the middle of the week, that Eddie Ragan had first realized material success was not likely to come his way.

He’d been behind the stick at the Kettle, with a pair of beer drinkers at one end and a regular, Max the Poet, drinking the house red at the other. The TV was on with the sound off, and the radio was tuned to an oldies station, and Eddie was polishing a glass and thinking how this was the time he liked best, when the place was empty and peaceful and quiet.

And that’s exactly why you’ll never amount to anything, a little voice told him. Because nobody makes any money working a shift like this. When you’re jumping around playing catch-up with fifty thirsty maniacs, that’s when the tips roll in. And that’s when an ambitious bartender rises to the occasion, and loves every minute of it.

There were bartenders who wanted to make a lot of money so they could spend a lot of money — on cars, on travel, on the good life. They wanted a Rolex on their wrist and a babe on their arm, wanted to fly out to Vegas and leave their money on the craps table or stay home and put it up their nose. And there were others who wanted to make a lot of money and use it to get their own joint up and rolling, so they could put in even longer hours and make even more money — or bust out and start over, if that’s how it played out.

And there were guys who were just doing this for a little while, waiting for a chance to quit their day job (or night job, or whenever the hell their shift was) and make it as an actor or a painter or a writer. And yes, he’d been one of those wannabes himself for a stretch, taking acting classes and getting headshots taken and making the rounds, even picking up small parts in a couple of showcases. But he was no actor, not really, and by the time he’d gotten a third of the way through a screenplay (about a bartender who got laid all the time, which was art improving on life, wasn’t it?) he realized he wasn’t a writer, either. One thing about paint, he didn’t have to try it to know he’d be no good at it. He’d helped a girlfriend paint an apartment once, and that was plenty.

Nope, he was a lifer in the bartending trade. He knew that, and as of that particular weekday afternoon — he figured it was something like two years ago, though he hadn’t marked the date on his calendar — he’d known he wasn’t going to be a great success at it, either. The thought, which he’d instantly recognized as wholly true, had depressed him at first, and that evening he drank a little more than he usually did, and the next morning he felt a little crummier than usual, and took three aspirins instead of two, plus an Excedrin to keep them company.

By the time the hangover was gone, so was the depression. The fact of the matter was that he’d never really wanted to get anyplace. He just thought he ought to want to, like everybody else. But he didn’t. His life was fine just the way it was. He never had to work too hard, he never worried much, and he got by. There were things he’d never have or do or be, but that was true for everybody. You could be the richest, most successful man on the planet and there’d always be one woman who wouldn’t love you back, one mountain you couldn’t climb, one thing you wanted to buy that nobody would sell to you.

He had a good life. Especially on lazy afternoons like this one, when he didn’t have much to do, and the perfect place to do it in.

The Mets were playing a day game in Chicago, and the set was on with the sound off, so you could watch Mo Vaughn take the big swing without some announcer telling you what you were seeing. On the radio, the Beach Boys were proclaiming the natural superiority of California girls. Max the Poet sat with his usual glass of red, reading a Modern Library collection of Chekhov’s stories, and an older dude with a tweed cap was at the corner by the window with a bottle of Tuborg, and two semiregulars, wannabe actors or writers, he couldn’t remember which, were drinking glasses of draft Guinness and talking about the woman whose household goods they’d just moved from her ex-boyfriend’s place in NoHo to a studio apartment in the Flatiron district. She was nice, they agreed, pretty face and a great rack, and the tall one said he got the feeling she liked him.

The other one shook his head. “That was flirting in lieu of a tip,” he said.

“She tipped us.”

“She tipped us five apiece, which is the next thing to stiffing us altogether. In fact it’s worse, because when they stiff you maybe they didn’t know any better, or maybe they forgot.”

“You know Paul? Big Paul, got the droopy eyelid?”

“Only sometimes.”

“What, like you only know him on months that got an r in them?”

“The lid only droops sometimes, asshole. And I know what you’re gonna say, because I seen him do it. He never gives ’em a chance to forget, or not know better, because he tells ’em in front that a tip’s expected.”

“ ‘Just so you know, sir, we work for tips.’ Takes brass balls, but only the first time. Only I have to say I’ve seen it backfire.”

“I guess you got to know when to do it. He works it right, they’re scared of him, they overtip. The only thing is it feels like extortion, and for chump change at that.”

“Well, chump change is what we just got, all right, but maybe it’s all she could afford. I still say she liked me.”

“You gonna make a move?”

“I might. Give her a chance to settle in first.”

“Give her a chance to forget all about the studly moving man.”

“You think? How long is too long, that’s the question.”

Jesus, Eddie thought, he could listen to this shit all day.

He turned to see how the guy in the cap was doing with his Tuborg. The bottle was still there, the glass still filled to the brim, but the guy was gone. He’d come in what, half an hour ago? Sat there with his tweed cap halfway down his forehead and his plaid shirt buttoned up to his neck and his shoulders hunched forward, never spoke a word. There’d been a Tuborg coaster on the bar, and the guy had picked it up and tapped it with his forefinger. Eddie’d said, “Tuborg? Only got bottles,” and the fellow nodded, and put a twenty on the bar. Eddie hadn’t said anything when he brought the beer or when he came back with the guy’s change, and whenever he’d glanced over there the guy was in the same position, and so were the glass and the bottle.

And now he was gone. Unless he was in the john, which was possible. He turned to the TV to see how the Mets were doing, and somehow the score had gotten to be seven to four, with the Mets on the short end of it. They’d been up four-three last time he’d noticed.

Maybe Sosa’d hit one out. When the wind was blowing out, your grandmother could hit the ball out of Wrigley. And Sammy Sosa, shit, he could do it when the wind was blowing in.

He watched the Mets go down in order, then went to refill a glass for one of the moving men, and he checked on the Tuborg, and it was still there, the bottle and the glass, and the guy was still missing.

And he wasn’t in the john, because Max was just coming back from there, and there was only room for one at a time. He asked Max if he’d seen the man leave, and Max didn’t know who he was talking about, hadn’t even seen him come in.

He could have ducked out for a breath of air, or to buy a newspaper. Or cigarettes; the ashtray where he’d been sitting was empty, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a smoker, and he could have discovered he was out and gone out to buy some.

But he’d been gone too long for that. And he’d scooped up the change from his twenty. Some people did that automatically, just as others left the change on the bar top until they were ready to call it a day or a night. This man, this fucking enigma in the tweed cap, had originally left the change in front of him, never touching it or his Tuborg, and now he was gone. Vanished into thin air, just like Judge Crater, except he didn’t even walk around the horses first. Just plain disappeared.

The record ended, and there was a commercial, and on the television set someone hit one over the ivy. A Met, evidently, because they had the usual shot of one of the Bleacher Bums throwing it back. Remarkable, he thought, that people still did that, showing their disdain for balls hit by anyone but their beloved hometown losers. Suppose you were from out of town, suppose you didn’t give two shits about the Cubs, and you caught a home run ball hit by the visiting team. Would they be able to pressure you into giving it back, the way Big Paul, Droopy-eyed Paul, pressured people into tipping him?

Another record played, the Stones with “Ruby Tuesday,” and he looked over and the beer was still there and the guy was still gone. Something wrong with the beer? He went over and sniffed it, and it smelled like beer, and he was going to take a sip and thought better of it. He got a fresh bottle of Tuborg from the cooler and poured an ounce or two into a glass and held it to the light. Clear enough, and he took a sip and it tasted fine.

He got two clean glasses, divided the remaining beer between them, and set them in front of the two movers. “Taste test,” he said. They gave him a look, shrugged, and sipped the beer.

“Well?”

“Tastes like Tuborg,” the tall one said.

“Meaning you saw the bottle. It taste all right?”

“It’s not going to win me over from the black stuff, if this is a marketing thing.”

“I just wondered if the case was off,” he said. “Guy ordered a beer, didn’t touch a drop. Look at it, full to the brim.”

“There a fly in it? That’d put a person off.”

“No fly, and wouldn’t you say something if there was?”

“This asshole? He’d drink it, fly and all.”

“Protein,” the other agreed. “You’re gonna drink, you gotta eat. Maybe he quit drinking.”

“He never even started,” Eddie said. “Not one drop.”

“Maybe he quit a while ago, and came in here to test himself. Ordered a drink and walked out without touching it.”

“He must have stared at it for half an hour.”

“There you go, man. Testing himself, proving he’s stronger than a bottle of Tuborg.”

“Anybody’s stronger than that Danish piss,” his friend said. “Let’s see him try it with Guinness.”

Earlier, when the papers were full of the Marilyn Fairchild murder, they’d had their share of curiosity seekers, drawn by the media attention. Corpse-sniffers, Lou called them. Lou had been on that night, and had served drinks to the woman and to Creighton, the man who’d walked out with her and later strangled her. (Or allegedly strangled her, as the papers were careful to put it, allegedly being accepted journalese for We know you did it but we don’t want your lawyer up our ass.)

The corpse-sniffers came mostly at night, hoping Lou could tell them something they hadn’t read in the tabloids. Funny thing was that Lou, working nights, never saw much of Creighton, who was more likely to come in and nurse a brew in the afternoon, a Beck’s or a St. Pauli Girl, enjoying the peace and quiet the same way Eddie did. He’d stop in occasionally at night — otherwise he and Fairchild would have missed each other, to the benefit of both of them, unless you believed in karma and kismet and destiny. Anyway, Lou served them that night, but it was Eddie who’d shot the shit with him many times, and you wouldn’t have figured him as a guy to do something like that, but then you never knew, did you?

One thing he did know, the mystery man in the cap wasn’t coming back for his Tuborg. Eddie carried the bottle and glass to the sink, and poured them out.

Now if there was anything the least bit important about the mystery man, he thought, then he, Eddie Ragan, had his hands full of evidence. Because the guy had almost certainly touched the bottle or the glass, hadn’t he? Eddie had set them both in front of the man, the glass topped with its creamy head, the half-full bottle beside it, and didn’t the man then take hold of them and move them an inch or two closer? Everybody did, it was a reflexive response, even if you weren’t going to take a drink right away.

Or, in this case, ever.

If he’d touched the glass or bottle, he’d probably left his fingerprints. Because he certainly hadn’t been wearing gloves. The cap was an odd touch on a mild day, but there were guys who never went anywhere without a cap, they felt naked without it. Gloves would have been ridiculous, though, gloves would have stuck out like a sore thumb (he had to grin at that one), so the guy had clearly been gloveless, and would have left prints.

An ambitious bartender, he thought, might slip the bottle and the glass into separate plastic bags and set them aside for when the police came calling. Or he might even ring them up over at the Sixth Precinct — he knew a couple of cops there, as far as that went. Hey, got a clue, he could tell them. Give it to the forensics team, lift the prints, check the FBI computer, find out who this dude is.

He laughed, tossed the bottle with the other empties, plunged the glass into the sink. Rinsed it, took it out, polished it with the towel.

Not a bad life, he thought. You had time to let your mind wander, time to imagine all sorts of crazy shit.

From his bench in the triangular patch of fenced-in greenery called Christopher Park, the man with the tweed cap had a good view of the entrance of the Kettle of Fish. In the course of half an hour he didn’t notice anyone entering or leaving the bar, but he might not have noticed. His mind wandered, and what he saw, for much of that time, was a series of images that had burned itself into his vision, and, he had to suppose, the vision of everyone in the city, and beyond.

An airplane, gliding effortlessly, inexorably, into a building. A brilliant explosion of yellow at the left, like a flower bursting into bloom.

Two towers standing, their tops spewing smoke and flame.

Then one tower standing.

Then none.

The horror.

The horror and the beauty.

The beauty...

He had lived with his wife in a sprawling three-bedroom apartment in a prewar brick apartment building at Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam. They’d lived there for almost all of their thirty-five-year marriage. When the building went co-op in the early seventies, they’d bought their apartment at the insider’s price, paying a low five-figure price for what was now worth well over a million dollars.

After he’d collected his Christmas bonus for the year 2000, he’d opted for early retirement. He had headed the research department at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and they were just as happy to replace him with someone younger and less expensive. His health was good, and he looked forward to years of leisure, to the foreign travel they’d never had time for, to long walks in the city, to long evenings with his books. They might take to wintering someplace warm, but they’d never move to Florida or Arizona or the Caribbean. Their children were here, and soon they would be grandparents. Anyway, he loved the city too much to leave it.

He’d just finished breakfast that morning, and he was sitting in the living room with the morning paper. The television set was on — his wife had turned it on, then returned to the kitchen to do the breakfast dishes. He wasn’t paying attention to the television, but then it got his attention, and he put down the paper and never picked it up again, because it might as well have been from the last century, or the one before that, for all the relevance it had.

Their windows faced north and east, and they were on the fourth floor, so you couldn’t see anything. At one point he took the elevator to the top floor and climbed up onto the roof, but the building was only sixteen stories tall and there were any number of high-rises that blocked the view of Lower Manhattan. He went back downstairs and sat in front of the television set and they showed him the same shot over and over, the second plane sailing into the South Tower, the bloom of fire and smoke, over and over and over. He couldn’t look at it, he couldn’t not look at it.

His daughter, twenty-seven years old, three months pregnant, was an administrative assistant at Cantor Fitzgerald. They’d joked about the name, how it sounded like an extremely ecumenical cleric, but that was before the plane hit the floor where the firm had its office and made the name a synonym for annihilation.

She could have been late for work. She had severe morning sickness, her husband had joked that she was preparing for the world’s first oral delivery, but it rarely stopped her from beating the rush hour and getting to her desk by eight-thirty.

She’d have been sitting there with a cup of coffee when the plane hit. She wasn’t supposed to have caffeine during pregnancy, but one cup in the morning, really, what harm could it do?

None now.

Her husband worked for the same firm, and in the same office. That wasn’t a coincidence, it was how they’d met, and of course he was always early for work, often arriving at seven or seven-thirty. That was when you could get a lot accomplished, he used to say, but sometimes he’d wait so that he and his wife could share the walk to the subway and the ride downtown. So maybe he’d gone in ahead of her that morning, or maybe they’d been together. There was no way to tell, and what earthly difference did it make?

His daughter, his son-in-law.

His son, his baby boy, was with an FDNY hook-and-ladder company stationed on East Tenth Street between Avenues B and C, and lived with a young woman in a tenement apartment two blocks from the firehouse.

And was involved in rescue operations in the North Tower when the building came down on him.

For days — he was never sure how many — all he seemed to do was sit in front of the television set. He must have eaten, he must have gone to the bathroom, he must have bathed and slept and done the things one does, but nothing registered, nothing imprinted on his memory.

One day he went into the bedroom they shared and his wife was sleeping. He called her name twice, a third time, but she didn’t stir. He went back and sat down again in front of the television set.

Some hours later he went to the bedroom again, and she hadn’t changed position, and he touched her forehead and realized that she was dead. There was, he noticed for the first time, a vial of sleeping pills on the bedside table, and it was empty.

Her action seemed entirely reasonable to him, and he only wondered that she had thought of it first, and only wished she’d told him, so that he could have lain down and died beside her. Without disturbing her body, he took the empty pill bottle downstairs and refilled it at the CVS on Broadway. He took all the pills and got undressed and got into bed.

Twelve hours later he awoke with a splitting headache and a dry mouth and a bottomless thirst. The throw rug beside the bed was stained with vomit.

He got out of bed, showered, put on clothes, and went up to the roof, intending to throw himself off it. He stood at the edge for what must have been half an hour. Then he went downstairs and called a doctor he knew, and a funeral parlor.

His daughter and son-in-law had been vaporized, atomized. Their bodies would never be recovered. His son lay at the bottom of a hundred stories of rubble. He told the funeral director there would be no service, and that he wanted his wife cremated. When they gave him the ashes he walked all the way downtown, five miles more or less, and got as close to Ground Zero as you could get. There were barriers up, you couldn’t get too close, but he did the best he could and found a spot where he could stand in relative privacy, tossing his wife’s remains a handful at a time into the air. He stood there for a few minutes after he’d finished, then turned around and walked back the way he came.

Crossing Twenty-third Street, he realized he was still carrying the container for the ashes. He dropped it in the next trash basket he came to and walked the rest of the way home.

He got up from his park bench now and walked to Christopher and Waverly, where he walked counterclockwise around the little triangular block on which stood the little triangular building that housed the Northern Dispensary. He liked the lines of the building, the way it filled its space. He liked, too, that it stood at the corner of Waverly Place and Waverly Place. The street didn’t just make a ninety-degree turn here, it actually intersected itself, and that had always appealed to him.

What’s the most religious street in the world? he used to ask his daughter, when he’d take her walking in the Village on a Sunday afternoon. Waverly Place was the answer, because it crosses itself.

The Northern Dispensary had been there forever. There’d been a little café on the corner called Waverly & Waverly, but it hadn’t been there for long. Something else had replaced it, and had been replaced in its turn.

Some things lasted, some things didn’t.

He stood listening to the sounds of the city, breathing in the taste and smell of the city. Sometimes, drawing a deep breath, he would fancy that he was inhaling some of the substance of his daughter and son-in-law. They had gone off into the air, and he was breathing the air, and who was to say he was not taking in some particulate matter that had once been theirs?

He turned, retraced his steps, crossed Christopher. Then came West Tenth Street, and then Charles.

Once all three streets were named for one man. Tenth Street, or at least a stretch of it, was then called Amos Street, and the man was Charles Christopher Amos, who’d owned a large tract of land there.

And West Fourth Street had been called Asylum Street. So, when you stood at the corner of West Fourth and West Tenth, you were at the erstwhile intersection of Amos and Asylum, and how many people knew that?

Of course it was no less interesting an intersection now, West Fourth and West Tenth Streets. What business did they have intersecting one another? Numbered streets ran east and west, numbered avenues ran north and south, that was how it was supposed to be, but here everything was askew, everything came at you on a slant, and West Fourth Street angled north even as Tenth and Eleventh and Twelfth Streets angled south.

He liked that almost as much as Waverly crossing Waverly...

He turned the corner on Charles Street and stood in a doorway across the street from where the woman had been killed. He remembered how the man and woman had left the bar together and walked side by side (but not arm in arm) along a more direct version of the route he’d just taken.

How he’d walked along in their wake.

He put his hand in his pocket and felt the cool surface of the object within, tracing its contours with his fingertips. He drew it from his pocket and held it in his closed right hand, and he stood in the shadows as they lengthened.

A couple passed — college age, the boy Asian, the girl a blonde with almost translucent skin. They were too wrapped up in each other to notice him, but then hardly anyone ever did. Then they were gone, and time passed, although he was barely conscious of its passing.

After a time he moved out of the shadows and walked back to Waverly, staying with it as it crossed Seventh Avenue and walking two more blocks to Bank Street.

This would have been the man’s route home. There was his building, and was that his window, with the light on? Was he at home?

And would he be coming out soon? Maybe yes, maybe no. Time would tell.

He was still clutching the small object in his closed right fist. Like what? A talisman? A charm?

He opened his hand and looked at it lying in his palm, a little turquoise rabbit. There was something sweetly whimsical about it, something endearing.

He returned it to his pocket and drew back into the shadows, waiting.