The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

EIGHT

ON SATURDAY MORNING Corman spent several hours arguing intermittently with Lucy over what movie they’d see that afternoon. Lucy sat cross-legged on the floor, carefully going over the entertainment section of the Times. She preferred movies that edged cautiously into the forbidden zone of sex and violence, but Corman suspected that this had less to do with the actual film than with her need to feel grown-up. It was the sort of attitude that could become a way of living, so that in the end you grew to adolescence hating childhood, then to adulthood hating adolescence, went all the way to death, hating life.

“How about this one?” Lucy asked suddenly. She pointed to a full page advertisement that showed a grim-looking cop nuzzling a forty-five automatic against his cheek.

“Not my thing,” Corman said.

“How about a play then?” Lucy said. “You promised you’d take me to a play.”

“When did I promise that?”

“About a year ago,” Lucy told him. “You said you’d take me to the one about the fairy tales.”

Corman thought about the money, the promise, the collision course between the two. “Okay,” he said finally.

Lucy’s face brightened. “Really?”

Corman pulled himself to his feet. “A promise is a promise.”

The theater was on Broadway, and as Corman stood in line to buy the tickets, he stared at its wildly teeming lights. Despite the gaudiness, it struck him as beautiful. He admired the energy that swept out from it, the self-assertion, the refusal to lie down and take it. It had always been like that, first as an Indian warpath, then as a street of burning effigies, secret conclaves, plots, riots, scandals. As part of his scheme to bilk the city, Aaron Burr had sunk his only water-well alongside it. Not a drop of water had ever come from the well, itself, but later someone had used it to hide the body of a murdered girl.

Lucy knew nothing of all this, and as the line inched toward the ticket booth, Corman wondered if there were any real way to teach it to her. He could take her on a tour, of course, point out this and that, but he wasn’t sure that anything could find its way into a mind that wasn’t ready for it. That was the reason he’d finally given up teaching, because he could teach only skills, nothing beyond them; how to read and write, but not how to feel about what was written in a way that was immediate and searing, the way he’d dreamed a photograph might teach.

“This is supposed to be good,” Lucy said enthusiastically as her eyes swept over the billboard at the front of the theater.

Corman nodded. “You’re staying with your mother next Saturday night,” he told her.

“I know.”

“And all day Sunday.”

She looked at him. “I always stay all day Sunday.” Her eyes remained on him. “She’s taking me to a play Sunday afternoon. Jeffrey’s coming with us.”

“He’s a nice man,” Corman said, forcing himself.

He bought the tickets a few minutes later, then escorted Lucy to their seats.

The lights dimmed slowly. The play began, an amalgam of fairy tales which started with the happy endings then went on to what happened after that, untimely deaths and unfaithful princes. Corman thought it interesting, but glum. After a time he found himself drifting back to Julian’s suggestion, money, finally the stacks of photographs he’d gathered in boxes, stuffed in drawers, every picture he’d taken since the first time he’d gone out with Lazar.

That had been over five years before, but he could remember it very clearly. A woman had called a local precinct, claimed that she’d swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, that she was dying, that they had to hurry, hurry, before it was too late. Even so, Corman and the old man had made it to the hotel before the police, then followed them as they kicked down the door to the woman’s room and plunged inside.

Corman could still recall the precise details of what he’d seen that first time. The woman was stretched out facedown across the plain wooden floor. The phone was still in her hand, but her fingers had released it, so that it simply lay in the palm of her open fist like a dead bird. A few feet away, a two-year-old boy jumped up and down in a rickety playpen, gurgling happily while the cops stripped his mother to the waist and began pumping her back to life.

She’d finally come to, dazed, but still able to walk shakily to the ambulance downstairs. A big cop had taken the child, cradling it gently in his arms, as if posing for a publicity photograph for the police department. “This is what it’s all about,” the cop had said to Lazar on the way out, and Corman remembered thinking that for one of the few times in his life, he’d actually heard someone say something that struck him as absolutely true.

“This is what it’s all about,” he repeated now in his mind as he watched the action on the stage. A world-weary man was singing to a little boy, trying his best to teach him how to live. “Careful,” he kept saying. “Careful.”

Once home, Corman prepared dinner for the two of them, read to Lucy awhile, then washed the dishes, his mind thinking of Lazar again, a story the old man had told him several years before. It was a kind of fairy tale, like the ones in the play, he realized now, with its own oddly happy ending. In his mind he could see Lazar as he’d appeared that night, puffing at his cigar while his voice sounded over the featureless hum of the barroom crowd.

“I was in the coalfields, you know,” Lazar had said. “When I was a boy. There was a strike, and I hired on, you might say, as a courier. At night, I’d run from one striking mine to another, telling the miners the latest news, keeping everybody up to date on what was happening.” Here he’d paused, taken a draw on his cigar. “Well, I got caught one night, and some of the gun-thugs gave me a bad beating.” Here he’d waved his hand, dismissing it. “But I survived, and before long I was here in the city, working for the Tribune.” A quick, ironic smile. “Well, a few years after that, there was another strike down in the coalfields and the Tribune sent me down to take some pictures. I took a lot of pictures, and during the course of the whole thing, I found out that one of the couriers for the miners was really an informer.” Here he drew the cigar downward, like the muzzle of a gun. “I didn’t know what to do about it, so I finally decided to take it into my own hands.” A pause, mostly for effect. “So, I tracked down that courier one night, and I gave him a good beating.” The voice deepened slightly. “I learned something from all that, Corman. I learned a little part of what it’s like to live a balanced life.” The face grew very calm, the voice exquisitely soft. “Once to receive the blow, once to deliver it.”

Corman put the last of the dishes away and walked determinedly to his darkroom, as if it were a research laboratory on the rules of life. He sniffed the clean, sweet smell of the chemicals, peered at the soft red light, felt the way the room’s continually building heat gave him the sense of moving toward the core of something. Outside, the world seemed hopelessly diffused, but in the darkroom, it became concentrated, intensified, and the vast blur gave way to small rectangles of highly focused light. Sometimes, in brief visionary glimpses, the mosaic struggled toward a decipherable design. Coils and spirals disentangled, and when that happened, he felt as if he were edging not so much toward some great revelation, as just a small, faint suggestion of what life ought to be.

After a while he returned to the living room, snapped on the television, and collapsed onto the sofa in front of it. Lucy came out of her room a few minutes later and eased herself beneath his arm, her eyes focused on the flickering screen. An old black-and-white detective movie was playing, and in the film, a wiry little snitch had just handed a battered-looking private eye a picture. “See. See,” he told him excitedly. “Now you know.” As Corman watched the screen, bethought again of Lucy, Trang, his work, all the other imponderables, and it struck him that basically what everyone needed was a skinny little snitch just like the one on television, someone who could clear things up, get to the bottom of something, hand over a single exquisite photograph of what had really happened.