The Havana Room

Eight

I tried Jay's phone fifty times over the next twelve hours, and if that sounds like harassment or stalking that's because it was. I was due to start a new job in a mere two days, and, standing at the window in my hotel room listening to the phone ring endlessly, I was keenly aware that if I could lay down several decent years in Dan Tuthill's new shop- and there was no reason to think I couldn't- then I'd have levered myself back into the game. With the gyrations in the economy, firms had shrunk and grown, splintered and recombined; no one would care what had happened to me a couple of years back. People forget, after all. (They forget that George W. Bush was once a dry-well oilman with a drinking problem, that Hillary Clinton once had a brown afro and snaggleteeth.) A few good years, that's all I needed. I could eat mountains of paper, I could clock monster hours. And maybe the firm would do well as a whole. Dan had private financing from his father-in-law if he needed it. And if he was walking the straight and narrow, he'd throw himself into the enterprise. So, my boat had come in and I needed to make sure I climbed aboard- not get caught in the riptide of Jay Rainey's strange life.

I called Allison, too, wondering where we stood, and reached her at the steakhouse.

"Well, look who it is," she said. "The man who called back."

"Of course I called back."

"They don't always, you know."

"About what happened-"

"I want you to know that, contrary to expectation and all previous behavior patterns, I am issuing an apology."

"You are?"

"I think I was a bit brittle the other morning."

"Well-"

"I had a headache."

I didn't ask why. "You're in a good mood now."

"Yes, I am."

"I was expecting crankiness and accusation."

"And until yesterday, you would have gotten it, too."

"What happened?"

"There was an arrival, a somewhat unexpected arrival."

"Who?" Had Jay shown up?

"Not a who, but a what."

"Fish?"

"Fish. It puts me in a good mood."

"You addicted to this stuff, Allison?"

"Only psychologically. Now then, are you coming to see me?"

"Yes, but I'm bringing a date."

"What?" came her shrill response.

"An older woman."

"How much older?"

"About fifty years."

"Who is it?"

"The woman who sold Jay's farm."

"This is still tangled up? There's still a problem?"

"Yes. Want to hear about it?"

"No, I don't. I want to dream about my fish."

I collected Martha Hallock at the corner of Forty-third and Third Avenue, which is where the luxury bus into Manhattan drops people from Long Island's North Fork, and in the low light of a winter's day, she stepped down with her cane, looking more tired than I remembered. This was a great effort for her; I doubted she could walk without the cane. But she'd gone to the trouble, so something was at stake. I helped her into the hired car I'd arranged through the hotel and we drifted downtown.

"Things have changed." She looked out the window. "I came to the city so much when I was younger."

"See a lot of shoes?"

"Yes." She smiled, pleased that I remembered her terminology. The wrinkles around her eyes collapsed in upon themselves. "Many shoes, Mr. Wyeth. Big ones, small ones. Nice ones, rough ones. The city was good for that. I could come in and have an adventure and then disappear out into the country, and no one at home would know. Once met a man standing in line at the movies. He didn't know which movie to see and I told him to see the one I was watching."

"What was the movie?"

"Oh, for goodness' sake, I have no idea. I doubt I saw five minutes of it." She settled her purse in her lap. "I was like that. Some girls are, and most people condemn them for it."

We pulled up to the steakhouse a few minutes later and I helped her out of her door and down the steps, into the vault of mahogany and oil paintings. The door to the Havana Room, I noted, was closed.

"Wonderful!" Martha Hallock cried. "Still."

"Excuse me?"

"I ate here years and years ago!" she said, throwing her gaze toward the back of the room, then letting it come forward, over the white tablecloths and silverware, the pitchers of water sweating in the corners. "They used to say Frank Sinatra owned the place. It looks the same."

"Well, we probably changed the carpeting," said Allison, gliding up to us, carrying her clipboard. "Hi, I'm the manager."

Martha Hallock took Allison in. "What do you manage?"

"I manage people's expectations."

"She does more than that," I added.

Martha nodded skeptically. Allison showed us to Table 17.

"Need anything?" she asked. "A pillow, anything at all?"

"A drink. I'll take that."

"Bill?" said Allison. "What may I get for you today?"

"Nothing. I can wait for the waitress."

"Oh, there must be something you'd like?"

Martha Hallock looked up at Allison. "He's taken right now, honey. Sorry, all mine."

"Then I'll have to wait," she said. "Very nice to meet you." She met my eyes. "Hope you find your meal delicious, sir."

Martha watched Allison move away. "I'd say that you know her."

"Well, I eat here a lot."

"I repeat. I'd say you know her." The waiter appeared. "I'll have a gimlet, then your New York sirloin, well done."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I mean burnt, so well done the chef objects."

"Before we start," I said, "I want to make sure you understand the situation, my situation."

Martha considered me. How many messy problems had she dealt with in a life? City dwellers, especially New Yorkers, tend to underestimate the sophistication of country people. She gave me a humoring little nod. "Mr. Marceno thinks something untoward is buried on his land," she began, her voice confident and analytical, "based on the fact that local police discovered the former owner of the property, Jay Rainey, and his attorney, you, on that land hours after the deal was done. He is also suspicious because there appeared to be a lot of heavy bulldozer work done the afternoon of the closing."

"There's also-" I stopped. Better to listen first.

"Mr. Marceno is apparently not aware of the fact, not yet anyway, that Herschel Jones was found dead of a heart attack on his bulldozer that same night on the adjoining property. Mr. Jones was known to do work for Jay Rainey and his family for many years. He was a good man, loved by all. The police were called by another man-"

"Poppy," I said.

"Yes-"

Colin Harrison

The Havana Room

"Who is your nephew."

That I knew this was a surprise to her. "I'm afraid that's true," she said after a moment's consideration. "Poppy called the police to report Herschel's death. He had a long history of heart disease, four heart attacks in the last few years, and the local doctor who signed the death certificate happened also to have seen him a few weeks earlier when he came into the emergency room with a scare, and had specifically warned him against heavy labor, or working in the cold. Herschel should've told Jay this. But Jay never should've sent him out into that cold."

"I don't think he did."

Martha held up her hand. "Because the body had been frozen solid, the family was advised to have him cremated, which they did. Am I right so far? Is this the topic under discussion?"

I nodded.

"The problem is that Jay is being hounded by Mr. Marceno?"

I wondered if I should tell her about H.J. and his friendly limo riders. Not necessarily. "Mr. Marceno is putting a lot of pressure on Jay and on me. I'm having trouble finding Jay. I don't want to talk to Marceno, not yet anyway. You yourself said on the phone that it didn't seem to be much trouble to dig up a bit of sand. But now you're ready to talk to me?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what's out there, what Herschel was covering up?"

"No."

"You're sure?"

"Positive."

"Then why're you here?"

"Because I realized that you and Jay have no idea what you're up against."

"A Chilean winemaker with deep pockets who wants to get a foothold on the fabulous North Fork of Long Island, no?"

"Yes, but also no."

"I don't get it, Martha."

She shook her head and appeared resigned to having to provide me a remedial education. She opened her bag and pulled out a tax survey map. "This is the area around Jay's land," she said. "These tracts aren't labeled or named but I know who owns them. Now look."

The map showed the land between Long Island Sound and the north road, and looked like this:

Then she labeled the lots, and it looked like this:

"Okay," she said, "let's talk about each of these properties. The old estate piece has some nice high bluffs, some roll to the land. It was once owned by the Reeves family, very nice people, and then they sold it. Not much has happened to it. In the sixties there was a commune there and they all lived in the old barn and tried to make goat cheese. Well, you know what happened."

"What?"

"All the girls got pregnant and the boys grew beards and they found out that the world doesn't need any more bad goat cheese."

I smiled. But Martha Hallock stared grimly at me. "Foolishness, Mr. Wyeth- the world runs on it. When it comes to real estate, foolishness makes things happen. More important than money, actually. Then the piece was bought by some fellow from North Carolina who said it was perfect for a golf course. He'd developed a dozen of them. Paid too much, but the development rights remained intact. I sold it to him. He had the surveys done, he got the approvals, which last ten years. Those ten years expire in eighteen months, by the way. As for him, he had trouble in the stock market, was in no position to develop. Okay, now, this large tract, Sea Gull Vineyards- terrible name for a vineyard, makes you think of bird poop in your wine- they, the Hoyts, planted one of the first vineyards out here, and their vines are now very good. Good vines with a bad name. Needs a new name. The development rights were sold to the county ten or fifteen years ago. You can only farm it. But Mrs. Hoyt got multiple sclerosis and her husband became depressed and the place started going downhill. Now then, next to it, to the east, is Jay's land. This little strip was a set-aside for the farm housing, separately deeded. You can see that it's a beautiful run, straight from the north road to the water. Mostly level, with a good well set back from the ocean, nice land. It was in his family a long time, came through the father's side. Remember it's in the middle of our map, it's the keystone property. Over here on the inlet is the preserve. It used to be part of the piece that was owned by Jay's family. It's beautiful but unfarmable. Marshes and lovely birds. You can catch crabs in a little rowboat. The land was deeded to New York State back in 1965 or '66. The way the deed was set up, the owner of the adjacent piece, Jay's piece, has a right-of-way along a dirt road from one property to the other. Remember that. Whoever owns Jay's piece has sole legal access to the water through here. In other words, access to the marshes and so on, but also to-"

"There's probably a little beach."

"Yes, a beautiful little sandy beach just on the tip of the inlet. Very private. Backed by a stand of Norfolk pines planted a hundred years ago. One of the nicest beaches on the Sound, totally private."

"Jay never mentioned that."

"He probably didn't care much about it." She pointed to the little inlet called Crabber's Cove. "Surrounded by luxury houses. Serviced by one dead-end road. Large lots, mostly two acres. The subdivision was done in the early eighties and the lots sold for maybe ninety thousand back then."

"What would they be now?"

"Oh, at least four hundred thousand."

"Wow."

"That's the way it goes, Mr. Wyeth, up, sideways, then up again. Now, look here." She pointed at the property marked Boatyard. "This was owned by Kyle Lorton, who came home so dirty his wife made him wash off in the yard with a hose. Naked. You could see it from the road. His rear end looked like an old apple left out in the sun. So did his front end, for that matter. Kyle's business was lobster boats. That's what he did. He was no good with regular people. That's why lobster-men liked him. He was dirty and smelled and had black teeth and could fix anything."

"The lobsters are gone, though."

"That's right. Giuliani, your old mayor, who pretended he wasn't as bald as my knee, sprayed poison all over New York City for West Nile virus."

"Which turned out to be basically harmless."

"Yes, except for the old people and the lobsters. All that mosquito poison washed into Long Island Sound and killed our lobsters. They should have let the old people die and the lobsters live, if you ask me, which, as usual, no one did. Now the lobster business is dead and Kyle Lorton went bankrupt. It didn't help that he'd been dumping oil out back for twenty years and the DEC caught him. But that piece has a grandfathered commercial-marine-use zoning, which is now impossible to get, the only one on the inlet, by the way. It also has a nine-foot channel that Lorton used to dredge himself illegally, which means you can get a big boat in there."

"So all these pieces are in play?" I asked, studying the map. "It's a land assembly. Is that what you're saying?"

"Yes," Martha Hallock went on. "The cabbage farm also sold its development rights. I guess no one eats cabbage anymore. These little strips, A, B, C, D, maybe eight or ten acres each, are in contract now. They're used for sweet corn and potatoes. Actual potatoes, which you don't see very often anymore on the North Fork, except for the fingerlings. This is Christmas trees. This fellow's failing because too many people are selling Christmas trees and America is less and less a Christian country. We're pagans, Mr. Wyeth, every year more so, and I've been saying it for forty years." She sighed. "This is what Mr. Marceno has in mind, Mr. Wyeth."

She handed me an altered copy that looked like this:

I studied it.

"Not just a vineyard, you see."

"A giant project," I said. "Have they bought all the pieces?"

"Everything except strip A, where he's holding out for a little more money, which he'll get. They own everything else or have it in contract."

A huge piece, being assembled. The key was to divide and conquer using stealth; to work through different brokers and to sequence the land buys in such a way as to avoid purchasing contiguous properties simultaneously, and to do it all as quickly as possible so prices didn't rise too much. Sometimes a matter of buying leases instead of land, it nonetheless was a common technique in developing property. The land under Rockefeller Center, for example, was assembled by gaining control over 229 deteriorating brownstones. Early in my career I helped put together an enormous lot in the East Sixties by buying nine little properties, one a mere sixteen feet wide. The firm sent me in because I looked young and guileless. I was thrilled, of course. The nine sellers sold to nine different legal entities, one with a Korean-sounding name, another with a Jewish name, and so on. If the sellers compared notes, they might not see the game. Of course, each buying entity was merely a stack of paper owned by our client, a Dutch bank.

"A big piece. Now I see it's, what, two hundred-plus acres?"

"Yes. There are a number of other sizable pieces on the North Fork, but very few of them are on the water, suitable for grapes, have proper zoning, come with their own private access preserve, have access to a sheltered inlet, and also are for sale."

"How much is involved here? I mean how much money?"

"The most expensive piece was the old estate piece, because it has the ocean frontage and the approval for the golf course. That was about six million. Sea Gull Poop Vineyards went for three million, owing to the quality of the vines."

I found myself remembering H.J.'s outrageous claim about the purchase price of Jay Rainey's property. The number was wildly high, but viewed in this new context, it made a kind of crazy sense. The locals must have figured something was afoot- seen the black Lincolns arriving, men in business suits standing in muddy fields, agate-type listings of real estate transfers in the weekly paper- and chattered among themselves, some of this talk reaching Mrs. Jones, and then H.J. himself, who, like Jay Rainey, was a native son. "But if you're talking putting in new vines, a golf course, and maybe building luxury housing, the total cost is moving up past, what, twenty, thirty million?"

She shook her head. "Forty-two million, Mr. Wyeth, in phases. A ten-year project. That includes a beautiful wine-tasting center right at the end of Jay's property. Golf and wine. Forty-two million." She leaned forward conspiratorially. " They have the money. A Latin American company buying prime oceanfront in the United States of America gets Latin American money very easily. These are smart, sophisticated people. They do business in eight or nine countries."

"What about all the local approvals, the zoning?"

"They have it. Or they will massage it through. All the property falls within the town of Riverhead, which is much easier. All those unemployed blacks in downtown Riverhead, frankly. Displaced by the Mexicans and Guatemalans who will work for less, live in a tent if we'd let them. Riverhead has huge social problems. The town has lost industry. One of the aerospace companies, Grumman, had a huge site but closed up, taking their tax dollars with them. The strip malls have sucked money out of Main Street. The town is addicted to new tax dollars, Mr. Wyeth. A project like this means jobs," she said proudly. "It won't be too hard to get through. Also they've hired a local person who knows all the right people. An old hand. Somebody who can fix things when they go wrong."

"Who?"

"Me."

Judging from the map, it looked like the wine-tasting building would be located in about the place where Herschel had been regrading the land. Did this account for Marceno's anxiety? I kept studying the map. "You could bring in private tour boats or small luxury cruisers in the inlet, have them dock at the boatyard and drive them straight to the golf course or the vineyards."

"Now you're starting to think like a real estate developer." Martha Hallock smiled. "There's a local airport only five miles away. Private high-speed jet foil service to downtown Manhattan- a beautiful ride, by the way- takes forty-five minutes. You got a beach, a nature preserve, the whole thing."

"Why not do it on the South Fork, in the Hamptons, where there's more money and the famous beaches?"

"Because the Hamptons are too crowded, too built out, and you can't get pieces of land like this anymore. They just don't exist. All carved up. Plus, growing grapes on the South Fork isn't as feasible. The soil is different, the season is slightly shorter, and the zoning boards are controlled by ladies who lunch and run flower shops."

"You sound a little bitter."

"I'm sick of the Hamptons, Mr. Wyeth. Hate them. Snobs and bores. Silver spoons jammed into their brains. They've been looking down on the North Fork for fifty years. Believe me, I know. So now they've gone and ruined it and are looking around and want to gobble up the North Fork. All the big real estate agencies have opened offices, want to drive me out of business. Well, fine. But let them and anyone else who wants our fork pay. Let them make the old farmers and fishermen rich."

I jabbed at the map. "If it's all wrapped up, what's the problem?"

"I can help with the local officials," said Martha. "But if there's an environmental problem, then that involves the state of New York. I don't know anyone at that level. The state will take its own time, the state doesn't care that Mr. Marceno has money burning. Also, this deeded preserve piece has a section of wetland. It's on the maps. Wetland is federally protected. Any lobbying to change its designation would have to be done in Washington."

"You could lose five years."

"That's right. Easily. You see Jay's land dips to the east and drains into this section of wetland. They want to know what's under the ground before they dig it up, Mr. Wyeth. Once they dig it up, then they're locked into a sequence."

"And Jay knows what's buried there."

" They think so."

"Does Marceno know Poppy is familiar with the land?"

"He could find out easily enough. There's a lot of pressure on them. The next town board elections are in the fall and I'm pretty sure they want to railroad all this through before then."

She'd just wiggled past something. I said, "You're pretty sure, huh?"

"Yes."

"They're paying you to read the local weather patterns?"

"Well, yes."

"So you're telling them to get this pressed through before the local elections."

She looked at me.

"It seems, Martha, that you're being paid to make this happen and have guided them all along, and now you have a problem they expect you to solve."

"Well, that'd be one-"

"And that you weren't just thinking of Jay's better interests in all this."

"Mr. Wyeth," said Martha, "I'm here to help."

"I still don't understand why you don't talk to Jay directly."

She chewed a bit of steak in response, and it was hard for her. But she kept at it, just as she was doing with me.

"You do know about the accident?"

I shook my head. "Not really."

"Oh my. Well, so you don't understand a word of what I'm saying. One of the summer girls was just terribly enamored of Jay. And he of her. This was fifteen years ago, more or less. He wasn't even twenty. I think she was from a very wealthy family. British. They'd rented a big house on the water a few miles away. Girls like that would never look at local farmboys. But then Jay came along. She'd fallen in love with him, and her parents were closing up the house for the summer and the girl was frantic, you know, that was the way I heard it, anyway, and she called Jay's house and his father said he couldn't go out andwell, to make a long story short, he slipped out that night and on the way back he ran through the potato fields, his father's own fields, and someone had left a paraquat sprayer on. Use it on weeds, anything that grows. Terrible stuff. They found him in the morning, just about dead."

Martha looked straight through me. "The same night that happened, Jay's parents had a terrible fight. I told you his father was a rotten man. His mother ran away. Never seen again, never contacted anyone. No one could believe it, except that her husband was so bad. They think she left the North Fork, could have gone anywhere. She was a good-looking woman and might have called a few men- who knows?

"And then Jay got better. He came out of it, after being in the hospital for weeks. It was terrible- a terrible blow for a boy. He was still a boy, nineteen. I call that a boy. His mother was gone and his father was no good. And Jay himself was- he was in a wheelchair for a month, too weak to walk. There was considerable lung damage. Permanent."

"Yes, I know."

"So, Mr. Wyeth, I'm trying to help Jay get free of that land. Get on with his life. What's wrong with that?"

"Can't blame you," I said.

"He left town after the accident. The family had blown apart. We didn't see him. I heard he went to Europe, ran chasing after that girl, still loved her. His father drove the farm into the ground just like I knew he would, finally leased it out, let the hands stay in one of the houses. He died a few years ago when his liver gave out and then the land passed to Jay and I guess he felt it was time to sell it."

She watched me as she finished her story, and it occurred to me that much as Martha Hallock had filled in Jay Rainey's biography, much as she had demonstrated the size of the operation arrayed against him, and me, she had not in any way helped solve the problem. In fact, I could even say that she was turning the screw- on me.

"Martha," I began, "what exactly is your fiduciary relationship with Marceno?"

"Well, I said I was helping a bit. Nothing more than that."

"I mean specifically. Contractually. Are you a consultant, fee-for-hire, an agent working on percentage, or a principal?"

"That's a ridiculous question, Mr. Wyeth, I'm an old woman who's only trying to-"

"Since you aren't answering me, I'll assume you're a principal. You have a stake in this thing. Which means, from a legal point of view, that you're Marceno's partner. Which means your interests are aligned, Martha. I might as well be talking to him directly."

She stared at me, eyes troubled.

"What's buried in the ground out there, Martha?"

She shook her head once, almost as if slapped. "Nothing."

"How do you know?"

"I don't," she hissed.

"Then how can you assert anything one way or another?"

"Nothing is in the ground that is going to hurt anything."

These were shavings of an answer. "Then why can't you tell your business partner that? Your interests are the same, are they not?"

"It's not like that."

"And while I'm on the topic, it sounds to me like you have a conflict of interest, Martha. You were the seller's broker. Your sign was out there in the weeds."

"That's not true."

"How else did I know to find you?"

She couldn't answer that.

"You were the seller's broker yet representing the buyer's interests. Does Jay realize this? And by the way, does Marceno know the man who found the dead body is your nephew?"

"I can't answer these questions, and even if I could, I wouldn't."

She started to rise. But I reached around the table and grabbed her cane. "Martha, you came into the city to put pressure on me, didn't you? Just like Marceno is putting pressure on you, now."

"No."

"He's suing me, you know, Jay as well."

"You don't say."

What kind of answer was this? "Marceno sent you."

"No."

"Told you to act like you were helping us."

"No, Mr. Wyeth!"

"And either you do know what is buried on that property and don't want anyone else to know, which means you're in a hell of a fix with Mr. Marceno- I could tell him all this, by the way, or"- I stuttered for a moment, trying to understand-"or you actually don't know what's buried there and fear that something is. Something very bad. Like a barnload of arsenic or something. In either case, it seems to me, you are certain that Jay Rainey has no idea what it is. As am I! And yet you are letting Marceno attack him, and me. Isn't that right?"

"Give me my cane!"

But I didn't. "I just realized what you want, Martha, why you came into the city."

"I doubt that."

"No, I got it, I got the message."

"What?" she cried, seemingly more alarmed than ever.

"You wanted me to figure it out. This is all a big mistake. It was never supposed to happen. There is something buried there, and even if you don't know what it is, you want me to find out. Jay doesn't know, so he's of no use! Marceno doesn't know that you know either what's there or that Jay doesn't know. You want me to somehow figure it out- and if you do know, you're not telling me- and you want me not to inform Jay, but to inform Marceno, but not in such a way that it looks like you were coaching me to do so. Yes, you're in some kind of jam with both men, Martha, and you're dropping the pressure on me!"

I gently handed her the cane, and she stood to rise. The car was waiting for her outside. As she gathered her purse, a look passed into her face, and despite her advanced age, I glimpsed a shrewd businesswoman. "Pretty good, Mr. Wyeth," she allowed, "pretty good."

"Don't expect my cooperation, Martha."

"I won't. But you"- she put both of her wrinkled old hands on the cane and dared to lean forward, right into my face, so close I could see her stumpy teeth, the little hairs on her chin-" you should not expect Mr. Marceno to remain patient with you."

"With me?"

"With you."

She stood back, quite confident of her position. I suddenly understood that Martha Hallock had been ahead of me at each step. "You told Marceno that I knew what was there?"

She didn't quite answer. But it was answer enough.

"And you told him Jay didn't know?"

Now she nodded.

"And if I find out and tell Jay?"

"Oh, Mr. Wyeth," she said, taking her first step toward the door, "I wouldn't do that."

The window said STEINWAY, and that evening I walked past milling parents and nervous children to confront a circular performance space, centered with an enormous grand piano and rows of chairs. Families of well-to-do people. I floated toward the rear, which receded very elegantly into a hallway that opened upon room after room of beautiful pianos, mahogany, ebony, cherry, some new, others reconditioned, each costing tens of thousands of dollars. I heard a round of applause and walked back to the performance space. A woman with ambitious hair stood before the group thanking the Steinway Company for lending them the space for the concert, and if any of the parents were interested in a piano, then a sales representative was there to assist them. The parents looked tired and determined, glad to be seeing their children perform, steeled against the effort of another event. And then I saw Jay, far off to one side, in a chair, holding a program. He was dressed, as at the basketball game, in a good suit, and appeared to be just another big, well-fed Wall Street trader or banker or corporate executive whiling away an hour, with whatever aloofness in his expression attributable to pressing worries over matters large and high-dollared.

Sally Cowles was the eleventh child to perform. Her interpretation of Beethoven's "Fur Elise" was neither very good nor very bad- adequate, a bit of pedal work, the chords done well. But her determination was clear and she glared into her sheet music and then back at her hands, and the notes arrived more or less on time. Not that it mattered- she was sweet and spirited and were I her father I would tell myself that kid has no musical ability whatsoever but she's happy, she's going to be fine, she's one of life's winners.

I took this opportunity to check on Jay, and could see him in half profile staring at Sally Cowles. He sat dead still, hunched over like a diamond cutter, careful in his scrutiny, blinking from time to time. His face was filled with pain. Yes, it was pain on his face, a kind of uncomprehending suffering. When the girl had finished her performance she sprang up and gave a formal, nervous bow, charming in its artlessness. She hurried back to her seat and sat down with heavy relief next to a woman in her early thirties holding a baby boy on her lap. This was the woman I'd seen while looking through Allison's window. The girl shrugged at her stepmother's comment and giggled with a friend sitting next to her and then returned her attention to the next performance, which was being given by a fat little boy with red curls, and who was much better.

Jay looked down, as if to gather himself, and then back at Sally Cowles, who had no inkling of his interest. She was now giggling behind her program with her friend, rather rudely, in fact, and had slipped down on her seat. Her stepmother bent closely and said something sharp to her and the girl sat up obligatorily but returned to her secret communications with her friend. The fat little boy, meanwhile, sweetly filled the hall with Mozart. Sally Cowles was quite pretty but seemed still mostly unaware of it. Later, no doubt, it would complicate her life. Beauty always does.

I took a step back from the crowd then, and watched as Jay stood up during the enthusiastic applause over the boy and made his way through the audience, toward the row behind the girl. He smiled polite excuses as he moved past the clapping mothers and fathers and kids until he lingered behind Sally Cowles's head, staring down at the perfect part of her hair. He let his fingers linger on the back of her seat, perhaps incidentally touching her shoulder or long hair. Then he lifted his hand next to her head, as if to gently smooth his palm along her head. I felt suddenly alarmed. Did he mean her harm? Sally's stepmother noticed him and looked back in curiosity. Jay eased onward, crinkling his eyes and nodding and saying all the right things as he reached the end of the row and fled toward the entrance. I was ready for this and followed him from behind, but when I stepped out onto Fifty-seventh Street, I could see his wide back already down the block.

I ran and caught up. "Jay," I said. "Stop."

I took him by the arm.

"Bill? Hey. What a coincidence."

"It's nothing like that."

He smiled in false confusion and I had to remind myself that this was the same man I'd seen earlier sucking on adrenaline, smashing baseballs at the batting cage, a man who sat in an oxygen chamber penning unsent letters to Sally Cowles's father. I kept my arm on the sleeve of his coat. "You talk to me now, Jay, right now."

"What's the problem?"

It was a good try on his part, and if I hadn't known better I might have believed I'd made a terrible mistake. "You're good, Jay. You fooled Allison, and you fooled me for a while and who knows who else you've fooled, but-"

He shook my arm away. "You're out of your mind, Bill."

He stood there, squared off, daring me, and in some manner probably curious to see what I actually knew.

"The girl who just played the piano was Sally Cowles, Jay." I spoke slowly, trying to calm myself. "As you know, Sally Cowles is the daughter of David Cowles, your tenant on the fourth floor of the building on Reade Street. She was on the bench at the girls' basketball game a few nights ago. You wanted the building where Cowles worked. That building, that specific building, and no other. Marceno told me that, thought you were nuts. You negotiated a trade for the land. They looked into it and saw you were offering a fantastic deal. So they made it. And then there's Allison's apartment. This isn't all coincidence. I don't get all the connections, Jay, but what I do get is very weird, very sick."

Rainey considered me coldly, mouth a slit, like he might punch me in the face.

"And then there're your lungs."

He said nothing, but seemed to soften, even crumple before me.

"From the herbicide."

He blinked. "You found out?"

"Martha Hallock."

"She would know."

He'd talk to me, Jay claimed, but he wanted to go back to Brooklyn to do it. At first this made no sense to me, as there were any number of bars and restaurants in Manhattan where we could have stopped, but then I realized he probably needed either medicine or oxygen.

"I'm not leaving you until I know the whole story," I said.

"Right." His head was bowed and I sensed he was already far from me.

"There are people looking for you, Jay, and they're making my life a fucking misery."

"Right, right."

"No, not 'Right, right'! You're making it better, for me, tonight, Jay. You are going to tell me what I need to know to escape whatever fucked-up situation you're caught in."

We were quiet during the long cab ride, and who knows what the driver thought when he dropped off two grown men in front of a dark garage in the bowels of Brooklyn. Jay took out his keys as we climbed the steps. In the streetlight I could see the streaks on the risers from the oxygen tanks going up and down. "Somebody broke into my place yesterday," he said. "Didn't steal anything."

We stepped inside and he sat immediately on his small bed.

"Let me just do this," Jay said. He took what I thought was a clear plastic device off the table, fitted the mouthpiece between his lips, and blew hard. A red indicator jumped. He coughed mightily and spat a glob of mucus into the wastebasket. Then he studied the red indicator and leaned over to a chart and wrote it down. The device, I suspected, was a peak-flow meter, used to measure lung capacity.

"What was it?" I asked.

He didn't answer, so I picked up the device and looked at where the red indicator had stopped along the measuring line.

"Two hundred and thirty?" From the charts in the library, I remembered that a man of Rainey's size and age would have a lung capacity of well over six hundred milliliters. I did the math. His FEV was about 35- terrible. I was surprised he could stand.

Now he picked up an aerosol canister off the table, shook it, fitted it into the inhaler, and pressed it. I could hear the quick burst of medication go into his throat. He closed his eyes and held his breath. Finally he let it out. He was opening up the airway. Then he fit an oxygen mask over his face, punched a square red button, and breathed deeply. The oxygen machine hummed. His motions had the smooth unconsciousness of habit. Then he clicked on another machine that showed several readouts: pulse, blood pressure, respiration per minute, and percent oxygenation. They all read zero. Jay picked up a wire with a loop and a red light on the end, fit it over his finger, and the oxygenation number beeped on. It was eighty-nine percent.

"Even I know that's low."

He nodded. Lifted the mask. "I can go for a few hours with it low but no more."

"That night we drove back into the city?"

"I was close to passing out."

"You got some kind of oxygen tank in the back of your truck?"

"Yeah." He looked at the monitor. It had reached ninety-one. He poked through some pills on a dish, picked up several, and swallowed them dry. I realized that he lived on a cycle of medications, up and down, through the day, and from what I'd seen, he was a different man in each of the phases of the cycle: high and charismatic and exuberant when the steroids kicked in, despondent and nearly catatonic at the low.

"You just took a steroid?"

"Yes. Man, I'm sorry I got you into all this, Bill. I never expected it, okay? It wasn't the plan, I was just trying to get back… I've been, I've been way out, man. I'm feeling the oxygen."

He lay slack on the bed, eyes closed, a smile on his lips, and I felt like I was losing him.

"Who was your father?" I asked, for this is often a way into who a man is.

"My father? He was a bastard, a real hard-ass. He's the reason… he was just a bad farmer. Never should have been a farmer, but my mother loved the land, see. Potato farming was in his family, but potato farming on Long Island started to die in the sixties. He was frustrated. I accept that. A frustrated, bitter man. I don't think my mother was easy, either. They fought like hell. She once threw a pot of coffee at him. I loved her, though, I always did."

"You worked on the farm?"

"Sure, sure, I could drive a potato truck by the time I was eleven. Tractor, too."

"Your dad kept farming?"

"Even though there was no money in it, yeah. He broke even some years. We put some ornamental trees in, sold them to landscapers, that kind of thing."

"Who was the girl from England?"

Jay wasn't expecting my question, and his face fell into the same haunted melancholy I'd seen the first night I knew him, when he'd hugged Allison after the deal to buy the property on Reade Street.

"Her name was Eliza Carmody," he said. "Beautiful girl. Sassy as hell. It was June after my sophomore year in college. I was going toI'd been-" He sighed, unable to say it.

I pointed at the yellow clipping on the wall. "The Yankees?"

He nodded and pressed his lips together and closed his eyes.

"Would you've made it?"

"Who knows? Maybe. They had a great farm system. I'd played well for two seasons in college."

"You had a shot."

"Yeah."

"You were a big kid from a farming town way out on Long Island, your family had no real money, your parents argued a lot, and you had a shot. You would've given it your everything," I thought aloud. "Is that fair to say?"

"Fair to say, yes," he agreed. "At this late date."

"So," I pressed him. "Eliza Carmody?"

"Yeah, it was the summer, I was working for my father. I'd had a bunch of girlfriends in college that year, you know, the usual sort of thing, no one special, nothing really serious, basically doing more fucking than studying, playing ball and drinking beer, then I got signed, and they told me, Play out your season at college, finish the college playoffs, then we'll work you into the double A team in July. I had two or three weeks to kill, so I went home, worked out, threw the ball every day. I was just waiting for things to get started."

In that time he did a little work for his father, Jay said, delivering a truckload of privet hedges to a big shingled place on the water a few miles away, he and a couple of other sweaty, sunburned boys working for seven dollars an hour, more than the Mexicans got, simply because of the color of their skin, and they pulled the green farm truck up in the driveway and started unloading the bushes, each with a heavy ball of earth wrapped in burlap. That was when he saw a tall young woman of about twenty hitting a tennis ball against a backboard. She wore a pleated tennis dress that just reached her fanny and the boys on the crew watched her with hunger, watched not only her tanned thighs and shoulders but the way she drilled the ball with aggression, again and again, grunting each time she hit it.

"I just had to talk to her," Rainey said, adjusting his oxygen. "She was spectacular. I didn't care that I was some poor kid from a potato farm. Worse that could happen was she'd tell me to go to hell."

He threw down his shovel, he said, and stepped onto the court, suddenly awkward and out of place within the crisp white lines.

"Hello," she'd called, "those are not exactly tennis togs."

He'd looked at his work boots. "No."

She came over to him. "Can I help you with something?"

Was she amused by his presence? Her accent was British, he realized. He liked it. "No. Not really."

"You're not planning to serve it to me?"

"Excuse me?"

"Not planning to bang it at me?"

"No."

"Do you play tennis?"

"Not really."

"What good are you then?" She was standing quite close to him, considering they didn't know each other's names. "You have another sport?" she asked, squinting up into the sun.

"Baseball." He watched her eyes move from his face to his throat to his chest and then back again.

"I see," she said.

"You're British?" he ventured.

"Yes."

"I was watching you hit the ball."

"Yes, that was apparent."

She was a year or two older, he could tell, and decades more knowledgeable about the world. "You're visiting?"

"I'm just on holiday for a week with my mum and then it's back to London."

"You live there?"

"I do. You live here?"

"Jamesport."

"Where is that?"

"Here on the North Fork. Just a small town."

"So you may be accurately described as a small-town boy?"

He wasn't sure if she was teasing him or belittling him. But he also knew they'd be having sex soon, perhaps within the day.

"I guess."

"But a big small-town boy."

"I guess, yeah."

"You must play sports?"

"Baseball."

"Oh yes, you said that. Are you quite good?"

"Yes."

"You are?" She smiled to herself. "How good?"

It was his one piece of currency, he knew then and remembered now, his only one, and he had never used it before, at least not in this way, with someone from well outside his world, and he didn't know if she would find it valuable or even know what it meant.

"Well," he began, "I got signed by the Yankees."

"The New York City Yankees?"

"Yes, the New York Yankees is the name. Their farm system, I mean."

"The baseball team."

"Yeah," he said, a little frustrated, "the Yankees."

"They signed you up, then?"

"I play on their farm team first, then you eventually get your shot at the majors."

She had edged even closer, dragging her tennis racquet in the green clay. "Will you make it?"

He waited. "I don't know."

"What do you think?"

"I think I will. Yes."

And this twenty-year-old British girl, who later Jay was to discover had already enjoyed a number of lovers, ranging from an Oxford don to a banker colleague of her father's, saw in Jay, I suspect, what was really there. Strength and decency and confidence and pure talent. It was not just his size and animal health, it was the openness of his face, and enough of this had survived to attract Allison Sparks years later, I realized. She was embittered and amused and skeptical, but she still saw it in him. As I had, too. He had been, standing in the sun on that tennis court, a beautiful boy-man. Eliza Carmody had known such men before, but he was pure and this intrigued her. It was new.

"I think," Eliza Carmody said a little more softly, "that you should pick me up here tonight at seven o'clock."

"Okay," he said.

"You do want to, don't you?"

"Yes," he'd answered, and his look went through her. It had been simple between them five minutes prior but it was no longer.

Now Jay lifted the oxygen mask from its holder, fitted it against his mouth, and closed his eyes. The pulsometer atop the flow regulator blinked. I saw him inhale. He let the mask fall away.

"We had two weeks together. I was over there every night. I knew she was going to leave and I knew I was going to report to the farm team. Basically we just spent every night together. I was nineteen years old, man, I was at the top of my game, I was in love."

And then, he said. Their last night. Eliza called his house to say that her parents had decided to leave the next day, a change of plans. She had to see him that night, he had to sneak over. It was not far and he decided to run it, to keep in shape. His mother's car was an embarrassing little subcompact that only advertised how poor they were, and his father drove battered farm trucks and was possessive about them. So, better to run, and he did, slipping in past the tennis court, meeting her on the beach. She was ready with blankets and a picnic basket. They spent most of the night on the beach, and not for a moment did I not remember what it was like to be that age, to be torn by love and grief and desire, so I did not belittle this, I did not see it as any lesser than what happens to men and women later in their lives, which is heavier and filled with an awareness that one is not young anymore. Jay told me about that night and when I think of him with this young woman, I see them kiss agonizingly and then Jay force himself away. It's late. There's sunrise in a few hours. He must get home. He doesn't have a car, but no matter. His mind is full of the girl, and he feels strong. He knows he is strong enough to run the few miles from her house, after the sex and weeping and terrible parting. He knows this about himself without having to think about it. He is all arms and legs and lungs and he enjoys the sweat building on him, for he can walk the last quarter mile to his house and cool down. He pounds along the main road, enjoying the shadows, a bug catching in his mouth that he spits out, then turns the corner, nearing his father's field. He knows all the turns and dirt side roads, every one, and he sees the light of his house far across the field and wonders if he might be in trouble. Yes, he is probably in trouble. His father is expecting him to be up early, at 6 a.m., in fact. It's already well past two. Maybe he can get a few hours of sleep. So he will take a shortcut, striding over the rows of potato plants to save a few minutes, go directly. He feels the strength in his arms and legs, a pleasant cramp in his side, nothing he hasn't felt many times before during football practice, or running wind sprints on the basketball court. And the Yankees farm system coaches made him run for the physical, made him run the bases, run the outfield, and then a treadmill. They made him stand in against a practice pitcher throwing in the low nineties, they made him throw from a crouch from third to first to test his pure arm strength. He wants to play second base. Cal Ripken Jr. revolutionized the position. Ripken was six foot four. Second used to be for wiry little guys, now it can be big guys. He knows, however, that they might try to make him into a catcher. They've already told him this. He's got the size, especially in the legs. They put him on the leg press and he could stack seven hundred pounds and they said that's enough, you're still getting stronger, we know you played high school football, that's plenty enough, in fact. Pleased by it, writing the number down on their sheets. And they took him outside so he could put on the catcher's equipment and make the throw to second and he nailed it only two times out of ten. Not great. Sometimes the speed but not the accuracy, sometimes the accuracy but not the speed. Keep the arm up, come over the shoulder. Fucking bad habits, the old sidearm. And the equipment bothered him, the catcher's mask the most. The coaches didn't seem too worried. They knew he'd never played catcher, except back in Pony League. He had the size, they knew it. So he would agree to catcher but try to get some action at second. It occurred to him that he was thinking about baseball even though he'd just left her, which was a good sign. I think I'm in love with her but if I have baseball I can stand it, can stand missing her. They'd talked about him visiting her in London in the fall. Yes, she would wait. He worried that she would sleep with other men. He had already been with enough girls to know which ones were like that. But she had liked him, he could tell. And not too many other men would be playing pro baseball. At least there was that. Which did he love more? Baseball or Eliza? It was a stupid question. No it wasn't. They were different but they could be thought of in the same way. That was the thing. He saw it. His thing for her was as big as his thing for baseball. He needed both now. He thought it was just baseball but now it was her, too. Maybe she would come see him play. He would make the fucking team and send her a schedule, maybe a few clippings. Rainey goes 8 for 13 in three-game home stand. Fucking British with their cricket bats. She'd come over here and see American baseball. He pictured her in the stands. What's a fly ball? Why do they call it "fly"? That musical accent he loved. All those questions. He looked forward to the bus rides and the motel rooms. Of course it was tiring but it was exciting too. The best guys he'd ever played against and with. The best coaching, the best fields. Well, some of the university fields were pretty good. But the farm teams had their regular fans, the whole deal. It was good, good, good. A world away from the farm, from his parents. His father was a fucking bastard and his mother responded with open hatred, and Jay could escape them both by playing baseball. That was the beauty of it. The better he played, the farther away he would be. He kept the pace up as he turned onto his family's land. There'd be girls along the way. He didn't have to be faithful to Eliza yet. He loved her but there would be other girls. There had to be. It was too good. They'd done it twice that night, the second time much longer. He didn't worry about coming too soon. He'd learned to hold it. She'd been wet the first time and sort of sticky the second time, then got wet again as he was doing it. He reached down into his shorts and rubbed his finger against his groin, then brought it to his nose. That smell. You had to learn to like it and then you liked it a lot. He felt good. Stride was smooth, his shadow on the road rippling and synchronized, arm, leg, arm, leg, right through the rows of potatoes. The stitch in his side was gone. He had a tendency toward tightness in the calves but tonight they felt good, warm and loose.

And as he thinks this, he smells something, a metallic tingle in his nose, then his eyes sting. Blinking, suddenly tearing up. He slows his speed to rub his eyes; then he cannot breathe. He slows to a walk, then stops, leaning over. A sledgehammer is pounding his chest. His eyes burn. He lowers his head, realizing he smells herbicide. Someone left the paraquat sprayer on. He falls to the ground and crawls. Which way is the wind blowing? he thinks. Usually it comes out of the southwest. But it can wheel around. Am I going farther into it or out the other side? He can't open his eyes. He is coughing terribly. His lungs feel swollen, heavy. He had the whole night sky in his lungs one moment and then the next he's sucking life through a flaming straw. He can feel his head getting stupid. I'm going to run as hard as I can in one direction, that's my only chance. And so he does, somehow forcing himself to his feet and then, eyes closed, mouth tight, lungs burning, he runs through the night, stumbling and staggering over the low potato plants. Perhaps he runs fifteen seconds, thirty, no more. No one can run with lungs filled with paraquat, and then- and then Jay is on the ground, vomiting, nose bleeding, lips foaming, and if there is a benevolent God or a being or a higher power, then the wind would shift right then.

It doesn't.

When he is found the next morning by one of the farmworkers, a middle-aged black man named Herschel, Jay is lying in the dirt, barely alive. The wind has shifted, but only later. A boy of nineteen, in his prime, lying at the edge of a potato field. His fingernails have turned black.

You could think about that a long time, and I have, ever since Jay told me.

"When I woke up in the hospital, like three days later, they had an airway down me-" He lay back on his bed. I noticed that he was playing with the dial on the oxygen machine. He breathed through his nose, easily now. The oxygenation meter said ninety-six percent. "I asked about my mother. They told me she was gone. Drove off. She probably had no idea I was in the hospital. She and my father had a terrible fight that night. I think she was angry that he wouldn't let me use the truck. He probably hit her. He really might have. She had this little old shit car, a Toyota, and took off. Didn't pack. Just fucking took off. Later my father admitted he'd hit her."

"Where did she go?"

"I don't know. I always figured she went to live with her father, he was some oil guy in Texas."

"She never told you where she'd gone?"

Before answering my question, Jay did a strange thing. He reached into his drawer and pulled out what looked like a cigar. It was a cigar. He bit off the end.

"You going to smoke that?"

"I wish."

"You wish?"

"I love the taste of cigars. I light one maybe once a month. One puff and that's it."

I remembered the night I'd met Jay. "Is that the one Allison got for you in the Havana Room?"

"The very same, man. I saved it for a special occasion."

"Which is what?"

"I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone. Hey, open the windows, would you?"

There were two, one facing the street, one over the stairs. I lifted them up and the cold night rushed in. Meanwhile Rainey went to the kitchen, ran the water, and returned with a glass nearly full. "Open the door, too."

I did. He pulled out an inhaler and gave himself several more shots, and when he pulled it away, the medicinal mist of the stuff floated from his mouth.

"Okay." He pulled the glass of water close, then lit the cigar. He blew air through it, making the tip glow, looked up at me, nodded, then puffed once, held the smoke in his mouth until his eyes widened, then released the smoke upward. It dissipated in the air from the windows and door so quickly I barely smelled anything.

"That's good." He dropped the cigar into the water, making a short hiss, then closed his eyes and seemed to redream the smell of the cigar. His face reddened. He coughed violently and shot himself with the inhaler again. "All right… I'm all right. There. Fucking stupid, fucking suicidal." He coughed deeply but laughed. "One half puff and I'm a"- he coughed-"a mess." He sucked hard on the oxygen. "Stupid, but I love it. Lung tissue reacts so quickly. That was it. My indulgence, Bill. Once a fucking month for Christ's sake, one half puff." He put away the lighter in his drawer, coughed again, hard, and spat a brown glob into the trash.

I got up to close the windows and door. "So, you were telling me-?"

"Right. My mother drove off that night and I never saw her again, man." He stopped, his eyes considering the enormity of this, the implausible strangeness of it. "I asked my father a million times where she'd gone, and he was so fucked up by everything, sometimes he said she must have a boyfriend, sometimes he didn't know, sometimes he said she must've gone back to Texas. He said he called information down there, in Houston. He took a trip one time and I figured he went looking for her. That he knew and didn't tell me. Maybe he'd seen her with another man. But I wasn't sure. He wasn't well. When he was dying, he made me promise to tell her that he was sorry, that he had always loved her, that he- shit, he was a mess, he was weeping, he was fucked up. It's bad to see your father like that. His life came to nothing, he was a drunk and a fuckup and he never got over how one day he had a beautiful wife and son who was, you know, maybe going to play in the majors, maybe- only maybe, and then the next he has no wife and a son who can't even blow out a match."

We sat there. I didn't have anything useful to say. I think it's possible to hate one's father yet also grieve for him, and this might have described how Jay felt. But I didn't give voice to the thought; instead I watched the compression device on the oxygen chamber rise and fall, while outside the room's tiny windows the Brooklyn night spun past.

But in time Jay began to remember again, and now he simply talked into the room toward the ceiling, his voice not confessionalfor a confession requires not only wrongdoing but also a listener willing to make a moral judgment- but duller than that, as if giving testimony in a long and intricate case, the points of which he had mastered and yet which he knew was probably of slim interest to anyone else. There is only a little relief in simply letting such a collection of facts unspool from oneself, but we all of us were once chimps chattering in the trees, desperate to be heard and understood, to find a language particular to the self, and in this Jay was no different.

Within two months of his accident, he said, he'd regained the strength to get to England. His chances of playing professional baseball were now zero. The Yankees called after he hadn't reported, then received further details through his college coach. They sent a kind but brief letter wishing him well with his recuperation. Meanwhile he was spitting up buckets of phlegm every day, learning to use a nebulizer correctly. He could swing a bat weakly and he could throw off speed, but that was it. The shock was enormous, staggering. As was the fact that his mother had not yet come home. The only possible compensation would be to find Eliza Carmody. He'd written her, received one letter back. He did not tell her of the accident. He tried to call her, with no luck. So that fall he bought a ticket using the remains of his signing bonus money. He arrived at Paddington Station, rail thin, hair long, with almost no money, willing to live anywhere in London. He moved between neighborhoods and acquaintances, some benign, some not, the expectable grab bag of out-of-work models, would-be novelists, cannabis lay-abouts, abused seekers of truth, and piano-playing carpenters. That he did not understand the striations of English society meant that he was unencumbered by certain anxieties. And anyway, when you were an American in London, those things did not matter so much. The Brits liked the fact that you didn't understand, it was refreshing to them, or so they said. He found the London girls exciting and he wished he had more money with which to chase them. He found Eliza, he said. A house in Chelsea, on Tite Street. Ivy and black shutters. The parents were never home. Jay and Eliza were left alone. Her father was trying to rearrange the funding for the tunnel between London and Paris, the Chunnel. He was a little fat man with sausage fingers and almost no understanding of twenty-year-old girls. Jay saw him once at the end of the driveway and feared the man instantly.

Eliza didn't seem happy to see him. She didn't seem anything, really. Discouraged, or tired, actually. She played tennis with a friend on the soft clay court behind her house while he watched. But she wasn't well and in the middle of a point she went to the bushes and vomited matter-of-factly. He was in love with Eliza, and when she told him that she was pregnant he felt shock and a small sudden pride. Are you sure? he asked. Of course, yes, of course I am, she said. Mine? My baby? Yes absolutely, who do you bloody think I am? she said. They kept it secret for several weeks, but her mother, herself a former tall beauty, began to ask questions, and so with Jay present, Eliza told her mother. Instantly the parents were furious. They had plans for their daughter, plans that did not include a penniless, good-looking American who hung over park benches winded after a short walk.

There followed quite a fight, with Eliza defiant of her parents' disapproval yet noncommittal toward Jay himself. She was, after all, from a wealthy family, and had no intention of marrying someone with no money. None whatsoever, end of discussion, no romantic illusions ever suffered for a moment in this house, Mr. Raintree, or what ever your name is! Finally Eliza's mother burst into tears and fled up the stairs, leaving her father to glare coldly upward at Jay. He understood that he was an intruder, and said he'd come for Eliza the next day; when he did, pressing the buzzer on the big green door early in the morning, she was gone. I'm sorry, her mother said, lips pinched in resolution. I shan't discuss it. He called the house almost one hundred times over the next two days and there was no answer, and then a male voice answered and said if he called again they'd have him arrested and deported. They knew where his apartment was, they would make it difficult for him, maybe they would have a go at him- just so that he remembered what's what- Mr. Carmody's bank had security people. Finally, Jay stood outside the house with a small backpack of food for three more days, leaving his station only to use the men's room in a pub half a mile away. At length the maid took mercy on him and came out and told him that the family was overseas, where exactly she wouldn't say. He might as well give up.

He returned to his flat and continued his penniless existence in London. For a few months he helped tend a bar, other times he took the train to the sea, wandered around, and came back. In that year he returned to the big house with black shutters several times a week to check for activity. The grass was being mowed, the bushes clipped, the leaves raked from the gravel driveway. But no Eliza. In his disconsolate and random way, he began to see other girls, English, Irish, French, a new girl every few weeks or months, depending on a lot of things, including how his lungs felt, since they seemed to vary quite a bit, with the pollen in the air and how cold it was, many factors, all making his bronchial tubes unknowably fickle. He wasn't using any medicine with regularity- stupid, he knew, but he was resistant, for once you started you were dependent. At first the girls were understanding but in time they became irritated. He could still screw passably well but there were days he couldn't get out of bed. He arranged to have some inhalers stolen for him and for a time he was better. But the girls came and went. Fifteen years later he did not remember their faces or their names. "I still missed Eliza," Jay said, looking at his ceiling, "it was unfinished."

He continued monitoring her house, riding by several times a week on his bicycle, which he'd started to use to keep his lung capacity up. One day, nearly a year after Eliza had left, a taxi pulled into the driveway. Watching from across the street, he saw her mother emerge holding shopping bags from Harrods and other stores. The next day he called the father's London office and claimed to be a Mr. Williams from Citibank in New York. He made up a number with a 212 area code. The call would be returned within two days, he was told, Mr. Carmody was soon expected in town. And so it seemed the family had returned. When next Jay visited the house, he saw another young man with a flop of fine blond hair and a familiar manner around the yard. The young man stepped up to a porch, said something when inside, and then stepped out again holding a baby in the sun.

The sight of it was shattering.

He began to fall forward in a run across the grass but stopped himself, not yet believing what he already knew was true. The man took the baby inside, and Jay waited until Eliza stepped out of the doorway and saw him coming. "Stop!" she called. "Stop this!"

She hurried to the edge of the yard and, looking over her shoulder anxiously, agreed to meet him in Green Park, on a bench in sight of Buckingham Palace, two days later. He counted the hours and was there early. Eliza appeared along the path and was more composed this time. The baby slept in her pram. They didn't say much, they barely touched. Just fingertips- reluctantly on her part. The matter was simple: Eliza had married one of her old boyfriends, a man named Cowles, a few years older than Jay, much further along in his career, having been both well capitalized by family funds and a prodigy in business school, and they had spent much of the previous year in the south of France. I'm sorry, Eliza told Jay. That's all I can say. There was in her tone the message that she belonged to another man now, that no matter what had once briefly passed between them, that was done and gone, obliterated by four hundred straight days of another man- his eyes and hands, his voice, his cock, his family, his shoes and books and hairbrush. Does this guy know the baby- Sally, I mean- is not his? Jay asked. No, no, Eliza shook her head. That would hurt him too much. He will never know. There was the question of sex, the question of logistics. I don't understand, said Jay. How can he think he's the father if- I saw him once or twice last summer, Eliza interrupted, okay? He came over to visit me in America. You had sex? Yes. After you met me? No, she said firmly. Right before. But the baby is yours. Jay didn't understand. Why? Because I had my period just after. David and I had sex, then I got my period, he left for London, then you and I met and had sex and that was it. I guess I wasn't careful enough. All in about one week or ten days. Are you sure? Yes, Jay. But what about when you returned? Didn't you have sex with him when you got back? I did, she conceded, but not until later. I knew I was pregnant. You did? Yes. That's why I had sex with him as soon as I could when I got back. Because you knew-? How? You can feel it, she said. You feel it in your breasts and everywhere. The timing was close enough, she said, he just thought the baby was a few weeks early. Please don't lie to me, Jay said, please tell me whose baby Sally is.

She's yours, Eliza answered, I swear.

Jay looked at the infant girl. I want to hold her, he said, I've never held a baby. She helped lift the sleeping baby out of the pram and nestled her on Jay's shoulder. So light, so tiny. Sally. After my grandmother, Eliza said. Sally. The tiny eyes and nose, impossibly perfect. He had helped to make this child. He felt the warm weight of her go through him. He settled Sally in his arms and felt himself relax, let his chin fall to the fuzzy head, his own eyes drowsy with love. Eliza watched this and began to cry. After a few minutes, the baby woke, her lips puckering instinctively for a nipple, and Jay handed her to Eliza. She sat on the bench and nursed the baby. He saw Eliza's breast, enormous and full, and desire shot through him. A mother's wet raised nipple somehow was more erotic than usual, leaking life. She's really mine? Oh yes, Eliza said, I can prove it to you. Sally has your little horn. You mean the bump in my ear? She reached out and ran her fingers along the inside edge of the cartilage of Jay's ear, where a point sat hidden on the inner fold. It was more pronounced on his left ear than on his right and so he reached for Sally's left ear, and although it was impossibly soft, it had the same tiny, distinct bump. A horn, just like yours, Eliza smiled. What other proof could possibly be as good as that?

"My left ear," Jay said now, sitting up. "Feel it."

"You want me to touch your ear?" I said.

"Just go ahead."

So I did, tentatively, reaching out to pinch the cartilage at the end of his ear. The vein in his temple pointed to his eye like an arrow.

"Feel it? There's a bump."

"No."

He directed my fingers with his own. "There."

I felt exactly what he was talking about, a small triangular ridge, the tiniest of horns.

"Did you see the baby again?" I asked.

"No."

"No? What were you doing?"

He made, he told me, a point of cycling past the house every month or so, just to torture himself, or to remember, maybe both. And one April afternoon, he said, when he did this he saw that all the wooden trim had been painted a garish blue, a cerulean blue. The shutters and cornice and French doors. C'mon, he thought, why mess it up, it was something the newly arrived Turks or Arabs would do, someone with no understanding of- then he knew. The family was gone. This time for good. They'd sold the house and moved and that meant that something had happened. He turned the bike around and rode back the other way, slowly. Fuck it, he thought, I'm going to find out. He pulled over at the next house. A blond woman in her thirties was kneeling in one of the rose beds, turning fireplace ashes into the earth.

"Excuse me," said Jay.

The woman shaded her eyes. "Yes?"

"I'm an old friend of the Carmodys," he said. "Did they move?"

"Yes," she said. "Hated to see them go."

"But why?"

The woman stood, perhaps because of the naked misery of his voice. "They couldn't be here anymore." She brushed some earth off her trowel. "Business, I suppose."

He mumbled his acknowledgment. He sat there looking at the dusting of tree pollen on the road. Then he walked back to the woman.

"What about the little girl, the family?"

"With Mr. Cowles, you mean? I think they moved to Tokyo. Something about a branch office, I didn't quite follow it. A very good opportunity with the bank."

Thus did Jay lose contact with Eliza Carmody Cowles and his daughter, Sally Cowles.

"I tried to find them, calling, but it was no good. It was too far away."

"You think of following them?" I asked.

He touched the oxygen mask to his face. Shook his head.

"Too far?" I interpreted. "Too difficult and expensive."

He pulled the mask off. "I was a kid, you know? I didn't know anything. I didn't really know what it meant, either." He decided not to go back to America, he said, so he found a better job, not in a bar, where the smoke bothered him, but teaching American conversational English to Saudi princes located in London. A strange job, but not one he minded. All he had to do was talk. "They were very well educated," Jay said, "much better than me. Oxford, usually. Some had gone to school in the States. But they wanted to get the American idiom, the flavor." When one of the students, a young woman, saw him coughing and heard the story of his accident, she took him to her father, a doctor. The man put Jay on a course of steroids that changed his life. The steroids shrunk the swollen lung tissue and his coughing subsided. The chronic infections could clear and he began to gain back weight. Within three months he'd put on thirty pounds, and his color was better. Now a little older, back to nearly his full strength, much of his natural substantiality restored, and with a little money to spend, he began to explore London.

"I think there are women in the next part of the story," I said.

"Yes."

"You were feeling better, your mood was nihilistic, you didn't mind having a good time."

"Something like that," he said. "That's when I learned to like a good cigar, actually. Pubs. The young Brits, the traders and bankers, were giving up pipes and hitting the cigars."

A couple of years followed, Jay continued, in which he met dozens of young professional women in London, a few American, many European, and simply enjoyed himself. He dated two or three women at a time, sometimes seeing older women who were in unhappy marriages. So much money was washing around London that the collective euphoria rounded away the ends of these affairs. "It got a little crazy," he said. "I got a little crazy. I was sometimes sleeping with three or four different women a week."

"You're lucky you didn't get anyone pregnant."

"I was very careful about that," Jay said. "There are tricks you can use."

"Besides a rubber?"

"You don't come."

"You pull out?"

"No, you just don't come. You teach yourself not to."

"You're a weird fucking guy, you know that?"

"You can have sex with a lot of women if you never come," Jay noted. "Or not often, at least."

"It sounds pretty hostile," I said, "a way of having control over women. Also a way to make sure you didn't have another child taken from you."

"Thank you, doctor."

"Shit, Jay, it's obvious."

"I know that. I mean, I know that now."

"Keep telling me," I said. "I want to hear about how you found Sally again."

London was a spinning carousel of money, he went on. "The boom happened there, too, just like in New York," he said, "and I got into a real estate firm that was relocating people into London. Offices, apartments, the whole thing. All you had to do was wear a suit."

"You met a lot of people. It was an education."

He nodded. "Five years. I ran some rehab jobs, I took a few architecture courses, that kind of thing. Learned the lingo. Everybody's a faker in this business. I was working the investment and sales side, in a very minor way. Little projects, nothing big, nothing where my complete lack of knowledge would show. Usually I hired some old boozed-out carpenter to run the site for me. I made some money, and I kept a little of it."

"Stayed in touch with the farm, with your father?"

"No. Not much."

"Your mother hadn't communicated."

"My father told me that he was pretty sure that she'd gone to Texas, because her father was from there. She'd always wanted to know him. I had to think whether I wanted to chase after my mother in Dallas or Houston or someplace or stay in London."

"You were waiting for Eliza to come back."

He was, he said, at least subconsciously. By now he had the business connections to track David Cowles, had even met a few of his associates socially. And then one day he heard that Cowles had moved back to London. "I found his office and followed him home. Sunglasses and a hat. Easy, right? He didn't know my face. There had been no direct communication and I'm sure Eliza never told him a thing. He had no idea. By then he owned a very nice house in the suburbs. High bushes, mansard roof, casement windows. He'd made a lot of money in Tokyo. I spied on him a bit. I saw Sally. She was almost seven now. A little Eliza. Looked just like her, the hair and eyes and legs. Of course, now, she really looks like Eliza at twenty. I mean, it's disturbing. But even then, it killed me to see her, Bill, it broke me up. That was my daughter. My daughter. Then-"

He stopped talking.

"What?"

"She died."

"Eliza?"

"In a car, with a man."

"An accident?"

"He was driving, driving too fast, and they rolled over, in a Jaguar. Roof collapsed."

Ripped from life. I wasn't sure what question to ask next.

"The guy lived," Jay narrated. "The fucker, though there's not much left of him."

"Who was he-?"

"They knew each other. Were driving at a high rate of speed to London from the country late in the afternoon. That's about all I could find out."

"Who was he?"

"Some guy, also in the financial community. I looked him up, he'd been in Japan the same time she'd been. Same age."

"An affair, hurrying back to town?"

"Yeah, maybe. Hard to say. She was capable of it. After all, that's how she got pregnant with Sally."

"People have secrets."

"Yes," Jay said. "Always. I couldn't go to the funeral, I couldn't do it. I should have. Fucking inexcusable. I was very messed up. It was on a Sunday afternoon, and I was passed out in some girl's apartment."

Jay stood, as if wanting to move away from his last thought, and walked to his refrigerator and opened the door. He shook three pills out of a bottle and swallowed them. "That was the beginning of the end," he muttered.

"What do you mean?"

He meant, he said, that he could no longer survive in London. Could not function. He lost his job and floated back to New York City. The boom was starting to age. He'd saved enough money to rent the apartment we sat in, and he found work rehabbing brownstones in the better neighborhoods of Brooklyn. And then the day came he woke one morning to find himself short of breath, not suffocating, just working harder than ever. "Your lung capacity is really dropping," the doctor told him. "And will keep on dropping."

So he told me about the oxygen. "I stayed off it as long as I could. Once you start, even a little, your body likes it, wants more of it. I'm okay most of the time. If I get tired, it gets harder. Like you saw out at the farm that night. I was really wasted that night."

As he reached thirty, his health began to fail. He felt it in the slightest of ways. He couldn't climb steps the way he used to do. His lips occasionally turned bluish and his fingertips hurt, he said. He had to think about breathing in a way he never had before. What this meant is that the natural decline of his lung capacity, which happens to everyone, was beginning to carry him into the zone of breathlessness. We are born with almost twice the lung capacity that we actually need. This is why people may survive on one lung and also why smokers dying from emphysema take so long to expire. As total lung capacity falls toward forty or thirty percent, problems set in. Breathing becomes labored, the lungs can't clear the mucus they make. In Jay's case, he said, he was told by the pulmonary specialist that he had the lung capacity of a man who'd been smoking sixty to seventy years, or, expressed differently, the lung capacity of a man who had never smoked and who had somehow lived to the age of one hundred and twenty.

His life span was now limited to the declining slope of his lung function; barring an accident, he'd die of gradual asphyxiation. The rate of decline was variable; it could speed up, it could slow, but it always moved in one direction. He had to have his lungs checked every six months, during which time the forced expiratory volume, the FEV, would be measured, the number always trickling downward. The disease was particularly cruel in that he could be stable for periods of time yet wake up with another percentage of his breath gone.

"And then somewhere in here, you found out that David Cowles had moved to New York?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"I got curious and called his London office. He'd gone to a new company. I called them. Got a forwarding number. I sweet-talked some people, said I had a deal for him to look at. You know, bullshitted the situation. I felt sorry for the guy. His wife had been killed and probably because she was sleeping with another guy. I admired him, to be honest. He'd pulled himself together, remarried. Had enough capital to relocate here."

"And once you knew he was in town?"

"Cold certainty."

I stared at him.

"About finding Sally."

"You bought his building."

"I did."

"Why?"

His eyes went hard. "Curiosity."

It was an unnerving answer, and I remembered Jay's ostensible friendliness when he'd been meeting Cowles in his office after buying the building. That performance was the height of fraudulence, I now realized, and furthermore, I remembered that Jay had allowed Cowles to negotiate for a lower rent.

"Did you tap Cowles's phone?" I asked. "In the basement?"

"That's what you would do? If you were me?"

"Yes," I confessed.

He nodded. "Sure. You splice into the phone box. Buy the hardware out of an electronics catalog."

"And?"

"It's boring stuff, mostly. But sometimes I hear Sally talking. Cowles and the new wife talk about the kids' schedules constantly, baby-sitter, birthday parties, school stuff, doctors' visits, you name it. The woman is a good mother, by the way. He married a good woman."

Hearing this made me think of my own lost life with Judith and Timothy, and so his words had a doubled sadness for me; both of us, it seemed, were pathetic, emptied of everything but yearning. Yet Rainey and I were different, too. I felt it. And saw it, in the bright urgency in his eyes. Some aspect of Rainey's character was eluding me, not anything having to do with the old farm and what might be buried there, but a more essential element that was concentrating his focus, pushing him to do risky things like shadow Sally Cowles at basketball games and piano concerts.

"So- that's why you bought the building, to listen to a few phone calls? I think it's more than that."

He didn't answer. He didn't want to answer.

"This isn't good, Jay."

"I know what I'm doing," he said obliquely. "I think out every move."

Ask another question, I thought, slide off the moment. "And Allison? This is why you started with her?"

"Man, you are good." Jay smiled, releasing tension, and if it was not a malevolent smile, then nonetheless it had a kind of coldness in it that worried me. "It wasn't too hard, really. I pretended to be a buyer two floors above. The real estate attorney showed me around. But the place was a little too high, you can't see right. But the second time I was there I saw the elevator man delivering the mail. I saw her last name. It was the right floor. So I had the last name and the floor. Her name is in the phone book. A. Sparks. No other name listed. Probably single. I sort of bet myself that if she was under fifty I had a shot."

"But you had to figure out who she was."

Rainey laughed, but it was at my expense. "Doorman. Hundred bucks."

"How'd he go for that?"

"Told him I was a cop. Said it wasn't her I was checking out, it was one of her friends."

"I have a feeling she's got a lot of guys going in and out of there, on an annual basis."

"That's what the doorman said, too. Once he told me that, I knew I could do it. I watched her, saw she has breakfast in the same place a lot. It was easy. A good suit, sit there with the newspaper. Not too hard."

"You two see each other a lot?"

"Afternoons, mostly."

Jay shrugged away the matter, and in his gesture I realized why Allison had fallen so easily for him; his indifference toward her was thrilling, somehow, and returned her to a more primitive part of herself, the position of a child with a stern father, perhaps. I wondered if she ate the fish with him as well, but this seemed unlikely, given how infrequently it was available.

"So your health now?" I ventured.

"You mean, how fast am I going?"

"I know how fast you're going."

"You do?"

"I guessed earlier you're at thirty-five percent FEV."

He smiled. "Pretty good."

I shrugged.

"But not good enough."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm at about twenty-four percent." He gave a little cough, as if to emphasize the point.

"You're supposed to be in an oxygen tent."

"Yeah, probably."

"Well?"

"I got things to do, Bill." He picked up the oxygen mask then, and, breathing its sweet stream, closed his eyes.

He was, I suddenly understood, preparing to contact his daughter. His desire to see her, if only occasionally, had become the desire to know her, which itself had become the desire to talk with her. It was the organizing principle, the gravitational pole. The more Jay knew about Sally, the more he wanted to know. To hear her talk on the phone with Cowles must have been an exquisite torture to him. It's in the nature of men to want what they cannot have, but it must have seemed to him, with his daughter's voice piping innocently in his ear, that if he had come this far, then all things were possible. And maybe they were. Only that same evening, in the Steinway store, Jay had stood behind his daughter, fingers grazing her shoulders, looking down on her shiny combed hair; it was a kind of triumph, actually, it proved that he was not utterly disconnected from his former self, proved that part of his youth and vigor and own innocence lived on. That Sally at fourteen genuinely resembled Eliza Carmody at twenty must have been further irresistible torment for him, to see the past and the future simultaneously in his daughter's face. The girl's mother was lost, but here she was, a perfect child without her natural parents. How could he turn away from this? How could he not be drawn closer and closer to look and then choose to look longer? To cut off the simple powerful truth of the matter would constitute a death in itself, one that followed the death of Eliza and presaged Jay's own. And who could do that, who could not look at his own child? Many times I had fought off the desire to hop on a plane to the West Coast and drive a rental car right up into Judith's new mansion, wherever the fuck it was, crash through the garage, and race along the hallways to Timothy's bedroom and crush him in my arms. That I did not do this was proof of my own damnable weakness, and I realized now that Jay was teaching me something, that very moment, about what might be necessary to hold on to one's child. You had to be a little crazy, you had to be insanely devoted to the idea of redemption. I felt my own frozen yearning crack apart; I needed to have Timothy back, I needed him like I needed air, and I would get him back, no matter what.

So I did not judge Jay harshly that evening, hearing his story, not at all. I was scared for him, but I admired the truthfulness of his intention. All of his manipulations and lies, the maze of his own devising, were in pursuit of the one good thing he could yet imagine for himself, the recognition that passes between father and child.

"So," I ventured. "Where's all this go now?"

"Simple." Jay dropped the mask from his face and found my eyes. "I'm dying, man."