Beautiful Lies (7 page)

nine

I stepped from the cold into Five Roses, the pizzeria in my building owned by my landlady. The heat offered relief to the red and tingling skin of my face. There were a couple of cops sitting at a corner table eating meatball Parmesan sandwiches, dripping sauce and cheese onto paper plates. The sight of it made my stomach grumble. I’d been walking for hours and the day was fading.

The place was homely, badly decorated, but made glorious by the aromas that wafted from Zelda’s magical kitchen. Dreadful faux wood paneling edged the wall, dark and pocked with holes. Fluorescent lights flickered from the sagging water-stained ceiling, casting the space in the worst possible shade of white. There were rickety tables covered by the perennial red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, surrounded by brown vinyl chairs with tufts of foam showing through gouges. A Pepsi cola clock hung crooked above the door. Hundreds of creased, aging photos were taped or thumbtacked to the wall behind the old cash register. My personal favorite was of Zelda beaming up at Robert De Niro, who draped an arm lazily across her shoulders. He smiled that
Cape Fear
smile and held a slice up to the camera.
The best pizza in New York,
he’d scrawled above his signature. Zelda looked over the moon in that picture; she was much younger then, her features had an open lightness to them. She wore a bright red blouse that brought out a blush in her cheeks. Her smile was wide but tentative, as if she never expected it to last, was suspicious of the act itself. In ten years, I’d never seen her smile in person and I’d never seen her wearing anything but black chinos and a black turtleneck, both forever dusted with flour.

I walked over to the counter and Zelda didn’t so much as acknowledge me as she shuffled back and forth. She took a pizza out of the oven with one of those giant wooden trays and slid it effortlessly, perfectly into a waiting box. Then with the same quick efficiency, she plucked two slices of Sicilian from a pie underneath the glass case and put them in the oven. I was so predictable, I didn’t even have to order anymore. When that was done, she looked up at me.

“That it?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks,” I said, and handed her a five. She pressed in digits on her ancient cash register and the drawer opened with an excited
ka-ching!
It was the sound of joyful expectancy.

Zelda was a petite woman with fragile, bent shoulders and small, hawklike features. All the light that I witnessed in the photograph had drained from her, leaving her to sag and go gray. She moved with an aura of resignation, as though her life was no more than forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other. I always imagined that if it were a matter of sheer will, she could lift a ten-ton block of concrete onto those shoulders and carry it as long as she had to. She impressed me as one of those people who saw her life as a prison but wore the key on a chain around her neck.

I used to try to make conversation with her, but some years back I’d given up with no hard feelings. So I stood, waiting for my pizza and staring off into space until she surprised me by talking.

“A man,” she said, her beady brown eyes edged with blue fatigue and a million tiny lines, her lips thin and pressed into a straight line. “He look for you.”

“Who?” I said, keeping my voice sounding casual as a hole opened in the pit of my stomach.

She shrugged. “I dunno.”

“What did he say?”

“He said to call. He said you had the number.”

I suppressed the urge to spin around and examine the faces of people on the street. A feeling of dread wrapped itself around me as I noticed that the cops had left. Zelda handed me my pizza in a white paper bag.

She looked at me sideways. “No good,” she said with a definitive shake of her head. “He was no good.”

Her words made me go cold inside, and as I left the pizzeria and walked out onto the street, I felt vulnerable and alien. People moved past me, carrying their dry cleaning and briefcases, their backpacks. Someone slid by on Rollerblades; a homeless guy slumped on a stoop across the street. First Avenue was a sea of traffic, honking horns and quick stops emitting brief shrieks of rubber on concrete. The light flashed
DON’T WALK.
Everything was normal, as it always had been. Except for me.

A little more than a week and a half since standing on this corner and seeing Justin about to get hit, everything about my life had changed, everything about me felt different. I had walked the few feet from the pizzeria to the door of my building about a million times and never been so aware of the scene around me. I looked at the faces of strangers and envied how they bustled about in their lives, secure in the knowledge of who they were and where they were going…or at least where they’d come from. And I sensed a menace beneath the surface of the street noise, as if something dark was waiting, hidden behind the facade of the innocuous scene before me. I felt watched. I moved quickly to the door of my building, opened it with my key and moved inside, feeling the breath of danger on my neck. With the metal clang of the door slamming, I felt a shudder move through me, as if someone was walking on my grave.

Much later that night, when the phone jangled me from an uneasy sleep, I knew it was Ace before I answered.

“I heard you were looking for me,” he greeted me, sounding distant like a stranger on an overseas line. “Bad idea, Ridley.”

I didn’t say anything, just hung silent on the line. I thought it was funny, though not in a ha-ha way, that my junkie older brother thought he had better ideas about how to handle things than I did.

“What’s wrong?” he said after maybe a minute.

“I have to talk to you.”

“So talk.”

No, I needed to see his face, look into his eyes. He was bad on the phone, anyway. I could never get a sense of him, what he was thinking, feeling. Not that I had much luck with that in person, either.

“I need to see you.”

More silence. I could hear him breathing. I could hear the street noise that told me he was on a pay phone. I looked at my caller ID display; the word
Unavailable
glowed there. The word made me feel so lonely, so separate from everyone in my life. I waited. Our phone conversations were generally comprised of these heavy silences.

“Meet me at that diner on West Fourth,” he said finally, as if his better judgment had been pinned to the mat, after a lengthy internal wrestling match.

“How long?” I said, glancing at my clock. It was 1:30
A.M.

“Just come now.”

“Okay.”

I was dressed and out the door in less than ten minutes. I hailed a cab on First and the driver took a left on Twelfth. We glided south on Second; it was quiet and nearly empty, reminding me that Truman Capote had described Second Avenue as having an air of desertion and I had always agreed. We raced by St. Mark’s Church, Telephone Bar. People who don’t know what they’re talking about call New York the city that never sleeps. But it does sleep. Well, it dozes. Windows grow dark; gates come down.

At a light, I watched a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket walk up the avenue. He pulled his jacket tight around him and seemed to huddle against an imaginary wind. He moved quickly, leaning slightly forward, his face blank, eyes straight ahead. Solitary people on the street after a certain hour always seem lost or tired or drunk, rushing toward their destination with an aura of worry. Except for the college students and the people out partying in groups, I always thought of them as people slipping through the cracks, existing on the outer fringes, past concern with early-morning alarms and schedules, deadlines and responsibilities. I always wondered, What leads people to walk the streets alone at night? And here I was, as lost as any of them, albeit in a cab, nursing a bit of a headache. I attributed the dull pain behind my eyes to the bottle of wine I’d nearly finished all by myself.

I hadn’t told anyone except my parents and Jake about the notes and photograph, but after Zelda’s warning I could no longer carry the burden alone. My mind had been racing as I took the stairs back to my apartment. The man in the stairwell last night…was it the same person looking for me this afternoon? I thought of the note I’d found this morning.
They lied.
Did it mean he knew somehow that I’d been to see my parents? And if so, did he have some way of knowing what we’d discussed? Or was it a lucky guess? Or did it mean something else altogether? I thought briefly about checking in with Jake, maybe telling him that someone had been asking about me in the pizzeria. But I wanted to be alone, surrounded by my things, my space safe and familiar.

Lost in thought, I’m not sure how long the driver had been stopped in front of the diner. A knock on the window brought me back to myself. I saw Ace’s face hovering behind the glass. He opened the door for me as I paid the driver and slid out onto the street.

He looked okay, almost healthy if a bit gaunt and gray. His faded denims sagged from his thin frame, but they were clean. He wore a distressed motorcycle jacket over a black turtleneck. He kissed me and I felt sharp stubble on his face; his breath smelled of peppermint. I took this minimum of personal hygiene as a good sign, because, trust me, he didn’t always smell of peppermint.

Inside the diner, which was busy with people stopping off after clubs or bars for late-night cheeseburgers or pancakes, we slid into a red vinyl booth. A pie case turned, flirting with me, offering key lime pie, cheesecake, tiramisu. Cigarette smoke, burned coffee, fry grease, maple syrup mingled in the air. Conversations hummed and silverware clattered against ceramic plates.

Ace didn’t like it when I looked at him directly for too long. He’d told me he felt like I was inspecting him, and maybe he was right. Looking for signs of an improved or deteriorated condition. Searching for clues of his return to the world, my world, or that he was drifting farther down. I always thought of Ace as existing beneath my life in some secret underworld, as if I had to descend stone stairs to a dungeon and find him by walking through dark corridors and calling his name. So I stole glances at him, looking for new track marks, bruises, lesions, whatever, thinking, How long can he survive? I mean, what is the actual life expectancy of a drug addict? I didn’t know.

“So what’s going on, Ridley? You look tired.”

I told him the whole story, interrupted a couple times by the waitress taking our order and then delivering our cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate milkshakes. Ace didn’t say a word the whole time, just kept his eyes down, first on the gold-flecked gray tabletop and then on the food in front of him, which he nibbled at and pushed around his plate.

“What did Mom and Dad say to you exactly?” he asked me carefully when I got to the part about seeing our parents.

I repeated the conversation for him pretty much verbatim as I remembered it.

“I left there believing them. Feeling pretty foolish, a little unstable.”

He snorted a little and nodded. “They have a way of making people feel like that,” he said, his bitterness sharp in his tone. “What’s changed?”

I told him about the second note and the newspaper clipping. He was shaking his head when I looked up at him again.

“What?”

“Ridley…” He looked off out the window to his side and watched as the tide of traffic ebbed and flowed up Sixth Avenue. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because…I don’t know. I’m scared.”

He sighed heavily and looked down at his fingers. I tried not to notice the track marks on the back of his hands. I could only imagine what the rest of his body looked like if he’d decided to start using veins there.

“You don’t want the answers to these questions. Trust me.”

There had been, even in my despair of the last two days, a part of me that believed this all might be some kind of mistake. Like those moments after you crash your car, and the impact has jolted you, those few seconds where you still can’t believe it actually happened. I was still in that gap. I had felt such an urgent desire to find my brother, in the hopes that he wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. I had wanted him to tell me that I was nuts and ask me for money. This had been my last-ditch effort to hold on to the illusions of my life, and it had failed.

“Ace—” I said. But he stopped me by raising his hand.

“Ask Dad about
our
uncle Max,” he said, inflecting the word
our
with his typical vitriol. He reminded me that there had always been this weird vibe between Ace and Max. And some strange jealousy about my relationship to him that I never understood. “Ask him, Ridley, about Uncle Max and his pet projects. That’s all I have to say about this.”

“But—”

“I have to go, kid,” he said getting up. My heart fluttered when he stood. My life felt so chaotic right then, I was seized with dread that when he left my sight I might never see him again. And there was anger, too. Anger that he would leave me to face this, whatever it was, alone.

“Ace,” I said, my voice sounding desperate, childlike even to my own ears. “You can’t just leave me.”

He looked down at me and shook his head. His eyes were flat, tired, edged with—dare I even admit it—apathy.

“Ridley, I’m a ghost. I’m not even here right now.”

The two girls in the booth behind us had stopped their conversation, and I could sense them listening to ours. I was glad I couldn’t see them, because I couldn’t stop the tide of tears. That familiar alchemy of adoration and hatred simmered, transforming the flawed man before me into the mythic hero of my imagination. Superman, who had the power to reverse the revolution of the earth to save Lois Lane but refused; Prometheus, afraid of fire; Atlas, who dropped the heavens.

“If you’re smart, you’ll forget this thing. Just go on with your life. Move, so the person who’s doing this to you can’t find you.”

I nodded, not trusting my voice. I reached into my pocket and handed him the cash I’d brought for him. He took it from me, embarrassed, and looked longingly at the door. He stood there for a second wrestling with something, but then I saw him move away.