City of God (5 page)

—Heist

Wednesday

Trish giving a dinner when I got here. The caterer's man who let me in thought I was a latecomer. Now I think about it, I was looking straight ahead as I passed the dining room, a millisecond of time, right? Yet I saw everything: which silver, the floral centerpiece. She's doing the veal paillard dinner. Château Latour in the Steuben decanters. Oh what a waste. Two of the hopefuls present, the French UN diplomat, the boy-genius mutual fund manager. Odds on the
Frenchman. The others all extras. Amazing the noise ten people can make around a table. And in this same millisecond of candlelight, Trish's glance over the rim of the wine glass raised to her lips, those cheekbones, the amused blue eyes, the frosted coif. That fraction of an instant of my passage in the doorway was all she needed from the far end of the table to see what she had to see of me, to understand, to know why I'd slunk home. But isn't it terrible that after it's over between us the synapses continue firing coordinately? What do you have to say about that, Lord? All the problems we have with You, we haven't even gotten around to Your small-time perversities. I mean, when an instant is still the capacious, hoppingly alive carrier of all our intelligence? And it's the same damn dumb biology when, however moved I am by another woman, the tips of my fingers are recording that she isn't Trish.

But the dining room was the least of it. It's a long walk down the hall to the guest room when the girls are home for the weekend.

We are on battery pack, Lord, I forgot the AC gizmo. And I am exhausted—forgive me.

In the E-mail:

“dear father if u want to no where yor cross go to 2531 w 168 street apt 2A where the santeria oombalah father casts the sea shels an cuts the chickns troats.”

“Dear Reverend, We are two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (Mormon) assigned to the Lower East Side of New York. . .”

“Dear Father, I am one of a group of your neighbors in nearby New Jersey who have taken a Sacred Oath to defend this Republic and the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ from alien heathen interlopers wherever they may arise, even if from the federal government. And I mean defend—with skill, and organizational knowhow and the only thing
these people understand, The Gun that is our porrogative to hold as free white Americans. . .”

—This afternoon as we lay side by side on our backs Moira told me about herself: She grew up in a working-class family in Pennsylvania. She went to Penn State for two years before dropping out and leaving for New York. She thought a job in publishing would be nice but in the meantime was working as a temp in a corporate headquarters when her future husband, the CEO, happened to notice her. I knew the rest of the story: He had her assigned to his own secretarial staff, took her out a few times, proposed, and set about terminating his twenty-year marriage. You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement. In another era, spats and top hats, he might have gone to the theater and picked out a girl in the chorus line. We are not so flamboyant now, we have culture, real art hangs on the office walls, we sprinkle our dinner parties with novelists, filmmakers. We know who Wittgenstein was.

For her part, Moira severed the little connection she had with her family by not inviting them to her wedding.

And that is the genealogy of her serene certitude, and her charming air of being unimpressed to be among them, that the men and women of our set, myself included, found so intriguing.

I feel deceived not by her but by appearances: how real they can be in my America. I feel no animus for her husband, I hardly know him. He's a powerful figure in business often quoted in newspaper articles about the economy. She said he is a child who needs her unceasing admiration and praise. He worries constantly about his position in the business world, she has to listen to his anguished reports of matters she does not really understand and suffer his wild private swings from vanity and pride to whining self-doubt. He is afflicted with nameless fears, he has night sweats, and often expresses his dread that everything he's made for himself, everything he owns, will one day be taken away from him. Including me, she said by way of conclusion.

She turned on her side. She was smiling. Including me, she said again, whispering and then putting her tongue in my ear.

—When a song is a standard, it can reproduce itself from one of its constituent parts. If you recite the words you will hear the melody. Hum the melody and the words will form in your mind. That is an indication of an unusual self-referential power—the physical equivalent would be limb regeneration, or cloning the being from one cell. Standards from every period of our lives remain cross-indexed in our brains, to be called up in whole or in part, or to come to the mind unbidden. Nothing else can as suddenly and poignantly evoke the look, the feel, the smell of our times past. We use standards in the privacy of our minds as signifiers of our actions and relationships. They can be a cheap means of therapeutic self-discovery. If, for example, you are deeply in love and thinking about her and looking forward to seeing her, pay attention to the tune you're humming. Is it “Just One of Those Things”? You will soon end the affair.

—Heist

Yesterday, Monday,

voice mail from a Rabbi Joshua Gruen of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism on West Ninety-eighth Street: It is in your interest that we meet as soon as possible. Clearly not one of the kooks. When I call back he is cordial but will answer no questions over the phone. So okay, this is what detectives do, Lord, they investigate. Sounded a serious young man, one religioso to another, mufti or collar? I go for the collar.

The synagogue a brownstone between West End and Riverside Drive, a steep flight of granite steps to the door. I deduce Evolutionary Judaism includes aerobics. Confirmed when I am admitted. Joshua (my new friend) a trim five-nine in sweatshirt, jeans, running
shoes. Gives me a firm handshake. Maybe thirty-two, thirty-four, good chin, well-curved forehead. No yarmulke atop his wavy black hair.

A converted parlor cum living room with an Ark at one end, a platform table to read the Torah on, shelves with prayer books, and a few rows of bridge chairs, and that's it, that's the synagogue.

Second floor, introduces me to his wife, who puts her caller on hold, stands up from her desk to shake hands, she too a rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, in blouse and slacks, pretty smile, high cheekbones, no cosmetics, needs none, light hair short au courant cut, granny glasses, Lord my heart. She is one of the assistant rabbis at Temple Emanuel. What if Trish wore the collar, celebrated the Eucharist with me? Okay laugh, but it's not funny when I think about it, not funny at all.

Third floor, I meet the children, boys two and four, in their native habitat of primary-color wall boxes filled with stuffed animals. They cling to the flanks of their dark Guatemalan nanny, who is also introduced like a member of the family. . .

On the back wall of the third-floor landing is an iron ladder. Joshua Green ascends, opens a trapdoor, climbs out. A moment later his head appears against the blue sky. He beckons me upward, poor winded Pem so stress-tested and entranced. . . so determined to make it look effortless, I could think of nothing else.

I stood finally on the flat roof, the old apartment houses of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive looming at either end of this block of chimneyed brownstone roofs, and tried to catch my breath while smiling at the same time. The autumn sun behind the apartment houses, the late afternoon river breeze on my face. I was feeling the exhilaration and slight vertigo of roof-standing. . . and did not begin to think, until snapped to attention by the rabbi's puzzled, frankly inquiring gaze that asked why did I think he'd brought me there, why he'd brought me there. His hands in his pockets, he pointed with his chin to the Ninety-eighth Street frontage, where, lying flat on the black tarred roof, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, the eight-foot hollow brass cross of St. Timothy's, Episcopal, lay tarnished and shining in the autumn sun.

I suppose I'd known I'd found it from the moment I heard the rabbi's voice. I bent down for a closer look. The old nicks and dents.
Some new ones too. It was not all of a piece, which I hadn't known: The arms were bolted to the upright in a kind of mortise-and-tenon idea. I lifted it at the foot. It was not that heavy, but clearly too much cross to bear on the stations of the IRT.

How did Rabbi Joshua Gruen know it was there?

An anonymous phone call. A man's voice. Hello, Rabbi? Your roof is burning.

The roof was burning?

If the children had been in the house I would have gotten them out and called the Fire Department. As it was, I grabbed our kitchen extinguisher and up I came. Not the smartest thing. Of course, the roof was not burning. But modest as it is, this is a synagogue. A place for prayer and study. And as you see a Jewish family occupies the upper floors. So was he wrong, the caller?