When the Thrill Is Gone

6

The number 1 train at rush hour is a fast-moving mob. Commuting workers and others are piled on top of each other, using anything they can to escape the feeling of melee. Young people form into circles and talk loudly enough to drown out the shrieking of steel on steel. Families huddle, blue-collar workers nap, and almost everybody else is plugged into loud music, last night’s missed TV show, or any game from sudoku to Grand Theft Auto. There are readers, too, concentrating on sensational magazines, nineteenth-century novels, and comic books.

I usually gravitate toward the end of the platform — the last car is most often the least populous. But I don’t get distracted. I like watching people, seeing how they turn inward and turn away when finding themselves in a throng. You’d think that anyone who’d decided to live in a city like New York, to travel by underground train, would revel in the closely packed company of others — but no.

One day it came to me that the isolation and alienation of rush hour is like so many marriages I’ve investigated — a lifetime spent together in the same bed and still managing to keep separate and remote.

In the majority of my marital cases, I got the definite impression that I knew more about the private lives of the couple than either of them did.

Those three monkeys, my father used to say, Hear No, See No, Speak No... Just drop the Evil and you have a civilized prole.

I climbed out of the Ninety-sixth Street station behind an old white man who had to take the steps one at a time. His baggy green trousers were held up by bright red-and-blue suspenders worn over a gray woolen sweater. There were people coming down the other side, so I couldn’t go around.

“Hurry it up, will ya, man?” a voice behind me said but I had no intention of interfering with the oldster’s pace.

“Hey!” the voice insisted.

I stopped and turned to face a thirtyish young man dressed in a style of someone ten, or even twenty, years his junior: a blaring red T-shirt with a writhing form drawn upon it and jeans that hung down on his hips. He was white but that hardly mattered. He could have been any race and still held the same misconceptions as to his place in the world.

At first the young man thought he could bowl right over me. After all, he did his exercises and watched kung-fu movies. So I held up a hand like a steam shovel.

He stopped and gave me the look — that gaze of resentment and threat that has yet to reach a physical aspect.

“If you’re lucky,” I said before he could announce his own undoing, “you will one day get to be old enough and infirm enough to have some young man yellin’ at you to hurry it up. If you’re unlucky you’ll lay hands upon me.”

The young man took half a step back. He thought about attacking, and then thought better. I watched him for the appropriate amount of time and then resumed my climb.

I love the subway system and the people it brings together. It’s better than any sitcom or pop song. The subway and its nerve centers are like a jazz sonata, bringing the past into the future — all the generations crammed together in dissonant and almost unbearably sharp focus.

Other than the fact that it was constructed from glazed white brick instead of dark red, the building was nondescript. Nineteen stories high and taking up nearly the whole block, it had two fire-escape systems that I could see — one in the front down the middle, and the other cascading down the side, leading into a fenced-in alleyway.

I look for fire escapes wherever I go. This because of a dream I used to have every night and that still recurs now and then. I’m in a burning building, on a high floor, and there’s no escape...

The doorman wore an immaculate red-and-blue-trimmed uniform. The costume itself didn’t set him apart from others in his profession but the punctilious attention to detail spoke reams about his persona.

He was a coffee-and-cream-colored man and, of course, taller than me by half a foot or more. He moved into the doorway at the top of the stone stairs to block me. To him I might as well have been a young man in a garish red T-shirt and slouching jeans.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

He had a beautiful voice. If his mother had paid more attention, or had his father been more understanding, he might at that moment have been preparing to sing opera in Cleveland, or maybe Orlando. Instead he positioned his big gut in my face, a living shield for his betters.

“Leonid Trotter McGill for Cyril Tyler.”

“Who?”

“Which ‘who’ do you wanna know about?”

“Say what?” He had a good scowl, but I had a great left hook and so was unimpressed.

“I mentioned two names,” I said. “And in answer to my declaration you asked ‘Who.’ ”

“I never heard of a Cyril Tyler.”

“Then either this is your first day on the job or you’re stupid.”

He took one step down the granite stairs.

“Why spill blood and teeth when you could just pick up the phone, brother?” I asked.

A friendly voice is often the most threatening.

He looked at me and pointed. “Wait here.” And then went to his little vestibule to make the inquiry.

I wondered if Cyril had a private exit; if he had ever walked in or out the front door.

I took a deep breath, and then another. Events had been tumbling down too fast and I was losing the grip on my temper. And, as any fighter can tell you, while you have to stay hot in a fight, you can’t let yourself burn out of control.

“Take the elevator to floor nineteen,” the doorman said, breaking into my reverie. “Turn left when you get out, walk down the hall to the other car, and take that up one floor.”

“That’s one more floor than you got,” I said.

Big Red’s reply was to step aside and allow me entrée.

When I got into the tiny vestibule-lift the button for nineteen was already lit. This gave me the impression that not just anyone was allowed access to the top floor. I rode up without interruption and emerged into a hallway of apartments with doorways but no doors; no furniture or ornaments or tenants either. It was a floor full of vacancies in a neighborhood where the rent on a one-bedroom ranged from three to five thousand dollars a month.

Fake-Chrystal wasn’t lying when she sneered about Tyler’s wealth.

The light-green paint on the second set of elevator doors was cracked and peeling in places. Underneath, the metal was beginning to rust. This reminded me of Real-Chrystal’s steel canvases.

There was no button but the doors opened for me when I arrived and closed after I got in. The trip upward was little more than the distance between the floor and ceiling and when the doors came open I found myself standing at the edge of a broad, bright-green suburban lawn.

One the other side of this verdant expanse was an oversized ranch-style house with a glassed-in porch and a red-brick chimney.

“Mr. McGill?” The voice came from my right.

The young man was slender and would only be called African-American by an American with a fixation on race. His skin was lighter than many a Mediterranean and his hair was curly but light brown. His features marked him as one of my people: broad nose and generous lips. His expression told me, however, that we had nothing in common.

“My name is Phil,” he said, somehow making even this bland statement condescending. “You’re here to see Mr. Pelham?”

I took a moment before answering, my momentary silence a reply to his attitude.

Phil was wearing a pale lavender suit and gave off the scent of violets. I wondered what he might smell like if the suit was strawberry red.

“My appointment is with Mr. Tyler,” I said at last.

“Come with me,” Phil replied as he turned and made his way across the lush lawn.

Tyler’s building was the tallest for quite a few blocks and so no one nearby could guess at what was up there. If you were in the middle of that lawn, reclining on a chaise lounge, you could easily believe that you were in Westchester or Beverly Hills. It was Dorothy’s house dropped by some twister on that Manhattan rooftop.

Phil moved swiftly but I kept up with him. We got to the glass door of the veranda behind which was a perfectly proper office replete with a blond desk, dark-green filing cabinets, and a computer.

Next to the desk stood a man somewhere in his sixties who was defined in various shades of white: light-gray suit, off-white shirt, an opal ring on the baby finger of his left hand, and crystalline eyes that barely hinted at blue.

The man raised his ringless right hand and gestured for me to enter. At this sign Phil opened the door and waved me in.

From up close I could see that there was a scar, whiter than his skin, just above the boss man’s left cheekbone.

“Mr. McGill,” the white-on-white man said as a greeting. “My name is Arthur Pelham.”

“Interesting scar,” I said.

“Fell out of a canoe in some unexpected rapids,” he said. “That was back in my college days.”

“Oh?” I feigned. “Where’d you go to school?”

“Cambridge,” he said, and then, as an afterthought, “Massachusetts. Have a seat, Mr. McGill.”

There was a simple wooden folding chair there in front of his desk. He used the same style seating for himself. There was something I liked about that. I guess it was a little, barely conscious lesson learned from my father about the equality and simplicity possible in a modern life so filled with pretense and hierarchy.

I took my seat and Pelham did his. Phil closed the door behind me. I was neither in the house nor outside it. This realization made me smile.

“What can I do for you, Mr. McGill?”

“Nothing.”

“Why are you here?”

“To see Cyril Tyler.”

“About what?”

“That’s private.”

“I’m his personal lawyer,” Pelham assured me.

I had no answer to this statement.

“Mr. McGill.”

“Yes, Mr. Pelham?”

“Why are you here?” His tone hardened just a bit.

“We’ve already completed that circuit of the merry-go-round,” I said.

“I am Cyril’s conduit to the world, Mr. McGill. Anyone wanting to speak to him has to go through me.”

“And here I am.”

“If you can’t give me a compelling reason why you should see Mr. Tyler, I will have to turn down your request.”

I stood up, reached into my back pocket, and produced my decades-old, fat, red-leather wallet. From this I took a business card that had my real name and number on it.

I placed the card on the edge of the white desk and smiled.

“You tell Mr. Tyler that if he ever wants to talk to me he can use the number on the card.”

I turned and almost took the first step.

“Hold on, Mr. McGill.”

“Yes?”

“We are not the kind of people that you can bully.”

I turned around to see that Pelham had also risen to his feet.

“We?” I asked.

“What do you want?”

“If I have to turn around again I’m walking all the way out of here,” I said. “If you want to stop me you’re welcome to try.”

My temper still needed tending.

Pelham tried to smile, failed at the attempt, and then said, “Take the door behind me. Walk down the hall in front of you until you get to a cream-colored door.”