The Bright Silver Star

CHAPTER 16

“Hey, Tina-long time no see.”

“Mitch, it has been too long!” Tina’s round, pink face lit up with motherly delight as she planted wet kisses on both of Mitch’s cheeks. She was a chubby, bustling little strawberry blond in her fifties. “Now tell me,” she commanded him, gazing up, up at Des. “Who is this lovely creature?”

“Say hello to Desiree Mitry.”

“Welcome to my restaurant, Desiree.”

Des smiled at her. “Thank you, I’ve heard a lot about it.”

The Port Alba Cafe was on Thompson Street a block below Washington Square Park, next door to a shop where men sat playing chess with each other. It was a tiny cafe-no more than a dozen tables, all but one of them filled. Young families with small children were eating there. Several couples. One very dignified old man in a white suit who sat alone, sipping an espresso. There was a mural of a fishing village on one wall, a tiny bar with glasses in an overhead rack. The ceiling was of stamped tin. Wonderful smells were coming out of the kitchen.

Des had on a dress for the first time in ages, a sleeveless little yellow knit thing that clung to her hips and bootay for dear life. She wore sandals with it, gold loops in her ears, her grandmother’s pearls, a bit of lipstick. She had even painted her toenails, which she almost never did. But this was a special night. She was out on a genuine New York City date with the man she loved.

Mitch wore a white oxford button-down, khakis, and Mephisto walking shoes, which was the same damned thing he always wore. But for this occasion his shirt and trousers were actually pressed and his mop of curly hair combed. He looked positively grown-up.

Tina seated them at the empty table by the window and brought them a bottle of chianti, a loaf of warm, crusty bread, and a platter filled with little plates of antipasti-grilled sardines, white beans in extra-virgin olive oil, marinated calamari salad, fresh buffalo mozzarella with basil leaves and tomatoes. After Tina had poured them each a glass of wine she went to fetch her husband, Ugo, a grave, scrawny little man who was the chef. Ugo solemnly shook hands with Mitch and asked him if he wanted the usual.

“For two,” Mitch said, beaming at Des. “If that’s okay with you.”

“What I’ve been waiting for, boyfriend.”

Ugo disappeared back into the kitchen.

Mitch reached across the table and took her hand. “You are a total hottie, you know that?”

“Um, okay, I’m thinking maybe I should put on a dress more often.”

“That’s funny, I’m thinking about taking it off of you.”

“You’re awfully frisky tonight, sir. Happy to get away from Dorset?”

“I’m just excited about spending the night here with you,” he said, attacking the grilled sardines.

Des spooned some calamari onto her own plate and dove in. “That was our deal. And a deal’s a deal, right?”

“Whatever you say, Master Sergeant.”

Des gazed over at the mural of the fishing village, loving it even though she was fully aware that Professor Weiss would pick it to pieces. The proportions, angles, placement of cast shadows-all were wrong, wrong, wrong. “So this was your place, am I right? You and Maisie.”

Mitch lowered his eyes, nodding.

“You haven’t been back here since she died, have you?”

“No, I haven’t.” His eyes met hers now. “Is this okay, us coming here?”

“Mitch, it’s more than okay. It’s an honor.”

They had gone through the entire antipasto platter and a half bottle of wine by the time Ugo emerged from the kitchen with a battered copper skillet full of spinach fettuccine. Tina laid warm platesbefore them and he spooned it out. Ugo had a whole Alfredo thing going on in there with the homemade green pasta and fresh spinach-lots of cream, butter, and melted cheese. Total sin. Especially when Tina was done grating even more cheese onto it.

She hovered there anxiously as Des tasted it. “You like?”

“No, I love.” Truly, it was the best pasta Des had ever eaten. It positively melted in her mouth.

Thrilled, Tina left them to it.

“Have you figured out what to do with Tito’s script?” she asked Mitch as they ate.

“I’m going to publish it,” he replied. “I’ll write an introduction that expands on the article I wrote after he died. I’ll go into the real deal of what happened to him, complete with the transcript of Will’s confession. Esme wants it that way. Whatever money it earns will go into a college scholarship fund for kids in the barrio where Tito grew up. And if someone wants to buy the movie rights, the same deal applies. Sound good?”

“Sounds real good, Mitch.”

“Des, what do you think will happen to Dodge?”

“You mean with the law? My guess is he’ll cop to malicious mischief, get off with six months probation.”

“No jail time?”

“I wouldn’t think so. He is a pillar of the community, after all,” she pointed out dryly.

Mitch sat back from his plate. He had a troubled look on his face. “I’m thinking I don’t believe in what I believed in before.”

“Which was?…”

“Dodge is a really, really bad guy. He’s done horrible things to Esme, to other girls, to his business competitors, his friends. He gets a slap on the wrist and is basically free to dust himself off and start all over again. Will, meanwhile, was a decent guy who fell in love with the wrong person, lost his head, and now he, Tito, and Donna are all dead. Where is the justice here?”

Des patted her mouth with her napkin and said, “First of all, you’re wrong. Will wasn’t a decent guy, he was a stone-cold killer.”

“And Dodge?”

“Total human scum, I’ll grant you.”

“So where’s the justice?”

“You don’t win them all. That’s why I have such a clean kitchen floor.”

“Okay, you just lost me.”

“Bella gets down on her hands and knees and she scrubs when she’s upset. You watch old movies about giant bugs-”

“Not always. Sometimes they’re about giant crustaceans.”

“And I draw pictures, or at least I used to. I don’t know what to call the stuff I draw now. Actually, I do-I call it crap. My point is, we all deal in our own way. That’s real life.”

“Well, it sucks,” he grumbled, sipping his wine.

“Sometimes it does. Other times, it can be pretty damned perfect.”

“Like when?”

She put her hand over his and squeezed it. “Like right now.”

The Tavern was on Horatio and Washington, right around the corner from Mitch’s apartment. It had sawdust on the floor and very little in the way of decor. In past days, it had been a saloon favored by the neighborhood’s big burly meatpackers. Now it was filled with bright, boisterous young writers, artists, actors and grad students. A lot of them hadn’t paired off yet and were assembled in groups. A lot of those groups were mixed. Des saw black faces, Asian faces, all sorts of faces.

It was not, repeat not, a proper dance club. But it was a place he liked and it did have a jukebox. Since he’d insisted on buying dinner she got the drinks while he edged his way warily over to the juke, a look of sheer dread on his face.

She was at the bar fetching them two frosty mugs of New Amsterdam draft when she heard that opening blast of horns-the one that belongs to no other song than “Respect,” followed by that slamming guitar riff, and then by the lady herself. And now Aretha was singing about what she needed. And Des was gliding her way across the bar toward Mitch, their eyes locked on to each other, and therewas no one else in that crowded place, just them. She put their beers down on the juke and raised her arms up high into the air, bumping hips with the boy, feeling the music and the wine and… and… Damn, what was he doing with himself? Passing a kidney stone? And where was he going with those two clumsy feet of his? Did he not even feel the beat?

But, hey, he was dancing his dance and no one was staring or caring. And he was so damned cute.

Besides, it wasn’t long before they were back at his place and they were in each other’s arms in his big brass bed. He was still worried about her shoulder but she kept telling him not to be. They made sweet love deep into the night while the sirens and the car alarms serenaded them, and the refrigerator trucks outside the packing houses beep-beep-beeped as they backed up and the cabs went tha-thunk-ker-chunk over the steel plate Con Ed had put over the hole in the street.

And for some strange reason there was a special urgency that had never been there before for either of them. Together, they found something new and even more fantastic that night in Mitch’s bed.

“Now you’ve felt it,” he murmured at her as the early light of dawn approached, Mitch stroking her face gently. Truly, he was the most loving man she’d ever been with.

“Felt what, baby?”

“The energy of the city.”

“I thought that was the energy of you and me.”

“Maybe we had a little something to do with it,” he admitted, immediately falling into a deep sleep with his mouth open.

Des was wide awake herself. Something about being here in his apartment made her feel all wired. She threw on a T-shirt, padded barefoot into the living room and flicked on a lamp, gazing around at his place. She was definitely uneasy here. It was Maisie’s place. He’d tried to scour it of her presence after she died. He had told Des this. But there was still a lot that smacked of her. Like the exquisite, matching leather loveseat and club chairs positioned just so. And those vintage brass lamps with green glass shades. And the genuine Stickley library table that he used as a desk. Out on Big Sister, theman used an old door on sawhorses. Des’s trained eye also caught the small things he had missed, like a fat volume entitled Simplified Site Engineering that was shoring up one end of the radiator cover.

Standing there, Des felt a sudden, powerful urge to be somewhere else.

She slipped back into the bedroom for her gym bag. Put on her shorts and running shoes, pocketed Mitch’s spare keys and let herself out the door. It was not quite 6:00 a.m. but the cobblestoned street was awake and active. A half dozen meatpackers were going home after their night’s work, exhausted but rowdy. An executive type in a spotless seersucker suit was walking his Jack Russell terrier and scanning the Wall Street Journal. A young Latino man, stripped to the waist, was working under the hood of his parked car, a sheen of sweat on his bare shoulders, a can of Budweiser within arm’s reach. An old lady in the brownstone across the street was watching him from her second-floor window, her arms resting on a cushion on the windowsill, the smoke from her cigarette curling lazily up into the early morning sunlight that slanted low across Gansevoort from the east.

Des found herself lingering there on the stoop of Mitch’s building, staring at that lady, that sunlight, that man working on his car. To her surprise, her pulse began to quicken and her fingertips tingled. This was the same sensation she felt whenever she walked into the studio at the art academy-an overwhelming sense of being in a special, hallowed place. Des had never experienced this while standing outside on a street before. Not anywhere.

She headed out, suddenly giddy with excitement. The Chinese laundry down the street was already open. So was the corner grocery store, where a young boy was hosing down the sidewalk and a milk truck was making a delivery. She bought herself a coffee and sipped it as she began walking through the close-knit neighborhood of family-owned brownstones, her eyes open wide, soaking in every detail. The building super who was out bagging the trash, muttering to himself. The housewife in her bathrobe who was moving her car from the no-parking side of the street before she got ticketed. Thewasted rock ‘n’ rollers in black leather climbing out of a cab from their night out, reeking of cigarette smoke and patchouli.

By now it was nearly seven, and some folks were heading off to work. Des followed them, swept along by their urgency. Found herself on Fourteenth Street at the entrance to the subway. Bought a token. Rode the Number 1 train all the way up to Times Square and back, gazing at all of those faces across the car from her, faces representing ten, twenty, thirty different nations and races and ethnic groups. Young faces and old faces, the hopeful and the homeless, students, laborers, and millionaires, all of them standing there shoulder to shoulder, gripping the handrail, clinging to their own individual dreams.

Des was gone for hours. There was a bagel place near Mitch’s corner where she bought fresh bagels and two more coffees on her way back. Then she went back down Gansevoort to Mitch’s building, the one that had that scrawny London plane tree growing out front in a cutout in the sidewalk. A low iron rail had been positioned around it to keep dogs from peeing on it. It was not an easy life for a tree in the city. As Des started up Mitch’s steps she paused, noticing just how tenaciously the plane tree’s shallow, exposed roots clung to the soil- exactly like the knuckles of those subway riders she’d just seen- fighting for its place, fighting for its life, fighting for its…

And that’s when it hit her. Why she hadn’t been able to draw them.

Trees weren’t things made out of twigs and leaves. They were living, breathing creatures. Their trunks and branches weren’t wood, they were muscle and sinew and bone. That’s what that poor little cedar had been trying to tell her, the one that had been clinging to the side of the cliff at Chapman Falls-until it died saving their lives up there that night.

Trees weren’t things.

Breathless, she darted inside for her sketch pad, rushed back out and sat down on the stoop, resting it on her bare knees, graphite stick in hand. She started with quick gesture drawings of the plane tree. Except she wasn’t drawing a tree anymore-she was drawing a nudefigure model who was posed there for her in the morning light, reaching high for the sun. Des drew and she drew, her stick flying across the page.

She barely heard Mitch when he moseyed out and joined her there, yawning and blinking “What time did you get up?”

“Never went to sleep,” she replied, as an old lady went by with a grocery cart.

“Morning, Mrs. Fodera,” Mitch called to her. “Lovely day.”

“Eh,” the old lady grunted, waggling a hand.

He sat next to Des on the stoop and opened a coffee, glancing over her shoulder at her pad, not saying another word.

“Do you ever get tired of being so smart?” she asked him.

“Nope, it stays fresh pretty much all the time,” he replied, biting into a bagel.

“Mitch, I’ve been thinking about something…”

“Uh-oh, this sounds serious.”

“It is. I’d like to start spending more time in New York than I have been.”

“Are you kidding me? I’ve been begging you to.”

“Wait, there’s more,” she warned him, swallowing. “I’d maybe even, you know, keep a few… some of my clothes here. Can you handle that?”

“Would any of these clothes be little yellow dresses?”

Her eyes locked on to his. “I mean it, Mitch. Can you?”

“That all depends,” he said gravely. “Would I have to dance in public again?”

“Try that one more time and I’ll bust you myself.”

“In that case, girlfriend, I think we can work something out.”