Like People in History (40 page)

"Either we walk to Canal Street and see what's coming from the East Side off the Williamsburg Bridge," Wally calculated our taxicab chances aloud, totally ignoring what I was saying, "or we go down to Park Row and try the traffic coming off the Brooklyn Bridge."

"You were wearing nothing but a forest-green Speedo with a white side panel," I went on. "The embryo of a ponytail draped your neckline."

"Canal Street! It's closer!" Wally decided, and headed uptown, walking in the middle of the empty street.

"I had a huge bag of groceries, because I was a guest and I'd decided to pay my way by filling my host's refrigerator," I continued my story. "Even so, I followed you out of the Pantry and around the harbor and along Fire Island Boulevard, although it was in the direction opposite to where I was staying. I walked barefoot on that sidewalk and boardwalk, which in the late-August afternoon must have been a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit."

Wally speeded up and impulsively threw out a hitchhiker's thumb at a passing earful of what looked like Guatemalan laborers, already so tightly packed inside die pastel-green Plymouth of barely postwar vintage that you couldn't have wedged in one of those near-naked, half-starving, flyblown infants with huge brown eyes, from those guilt-inducing magazine ads that said, "For just two dollars a day, you can save her life."

"I didn't for a second dream of getting ahead of you on the boardwalk," I continued. "I was in a trance, following those dimples in your lower back, the Wagnerian rippling of your back muscles, the Apollonian heft of your astonishing buttocks, barely contained in your Speedo."

The sedan blew its horn at Wally to get out of the way, and the driver swerved extravagantly to avoid hitting him and sped on. We were approaching Canal Street. Chinatown. Food. I was suddenly starving for Hunan Eggplant with Lake Tung Ting Shrimp. Nothing could be—nothing was—open this late.

"I was entranced by those dimples on your lower back. No, more, completely mesmerized by them. I couldn't think of, couldn't even see, anything else. I wanted to put the tip of my tongue inside each one simultaneously, physically impossible though that was. I knew they would taste like pistachio ice cream and turkey sandwiches and caviar from the Caspian Sea all at once. Someone I knew tried to stop me along the boardwalk, tried to talk to me, but I walked past him. He was offended for months afterward."

Wally and I had arrived at Canal Street now, and it was as dark and desolate as Foley Square had been. Wally turned to the East River, searching for signs of oncoming taxis. There wasn't an unparked car on the street.

"It was a bright, cloudless August day, Wally. Remember? Secretary birds perched in mimosa trees chattering. Gloria Gaynor's version of 'How High the Moon'—one of my absolute favorite songs—played in a house we passed, and queens there danced, sniffed poppers, and loudly carried on. Still I trudged on after you, hypnotically drawn by your dimples. All the way to Coast Guard Walk, then left, off the boardwalk and all the way to where you finally turned into your house, unable to pull my eyes away from those dimples in your lower back, the play of your lower back muscles, the totally edible ice-cream scoops of your ass, the perfect chamois tan of your skin, the wet, drying streaks of cinnamon in your hair."

A car went by headed for Broadway and honked its horn at us to get out of the middle of the street. We ignored it.

Wally spun around and began walking along Canal Street muttering, "Maybe the Bowery...?"

"I stood entranced even when you went inside the house where you were staying. I remained on the boardwalk for I don't know how long— twenty minutes? a half hour?—never having seen your face—or the front of your body. Entranced. Unable to move. Until you sent a housemate to ask what I wanted."

"I thought this was the city that never sleeps," Wally said irritatedly. "Where are all the cabs? It's only three
A.M
. for Chrissakes!"

"Remember what I told your housemate when he came out?"

"There's always cabs on the Bowery," Wally said to himself.

"I told him I didn't know what I wanted exactly. But that I couldn't live another minute without your lower back dimples. Remember, Wally, and you had to come out of the house and talk to me? Remember?"

"I remember!" he shouted back at me. "I remember that my roommates were convinced you were a fuckin' psychotic. Martin Gernsen wanted to call the Pines cops and have you taken to Islip State Hospital for observation."

"But you didn't. You came out. Came out and talked to me."

"I should have checked into Islip State myself."

I followed him along Canal Street to the Bowery. Not a car.

"I must have like the worst taxicab Karma of any person in modern history," Wally mused. "In a past life I must have constantly cheated fares, beaten up, even murdered hackney coachmen, for all the bad cab luck I have. I must have been a Jack the Ripper to hansom drivers in nineteenth-century London."

"That's how we met, Wally. You walking away from me."

That stopped him. He spun around, his face, his entire posture gathering together for some total utterance. But he stopped himself, turned, and walked toward Grand Street.

"Walking away from me." I said the obvious, and followed.

He allowed me to catch up

"Are we going to talk?" I asked.

"We're going to Alistair's. We're doing what you said you wanted to do before we went to Gracie Mansion and all this... went down..." He gestured vaguely, then figured he'd said enough to explain. "That is if you still think saving Alistair's life tonight is important."

"Of course it's important."

"Given your earlier antics tonight, I naturally wondered."

"What's that mean?" I demanded.

Wally held out a quarter. "You want to call him? If Alistair hasn't swallowed all sixty-four pills yet, we might help."

"What if the White Woman doesn't believe us and hangs up?"

"Why wouldn't he believe us?" Wally asked. "Oh, you mean, Alistair's talked about offing himself before?"

"You know how melodramatic he can be."

"How will our actually being there be different?" he reasoned.

"I don't know! It just will!"

"I have no intention of going there and—"

"We'll see for ourselves if Alistair's okay. We'll demand to see him," I said. "And if he is, we'll leave."

"You really think Dorky will let us in this late without a reason?"

"I'll give him a reason. I'll threaten to call the police if he doesn't Jet us in! Do you think we should call and say we're coming?"

Wally looked at me with a combination of amazement and incomprehension, then turned and trudged up the street.

The Bowery was, if anything, even bleaker, less peopled and less trafficked than Canal Street. I followed as Wally reached Delancey and faced the hollow yellow glitter of the Williamsburg Bridge, searching for a taxi.

"Not even a gypsy cab! Fuck! We'll get a subway!"

"At three-fifty-two
A.M.?"

"There must be a subway station around. What line do we need?"

"A West Side line."

We found a station for the F train on Delancey off Essex. Perhaps the worst sixty square feet in Lower Manhattan for crime. Tonight, it was completely dead. And no wonder. All six exits—on four corners—were locked up.

"What is this, London?" Wally asked from the still taxiless island in the middle of Delancey.

We trudged back the way we'd come until finally, at Grand and Broadway, we located an open IRT station with three gated stairways and one open one. Downstairs, on a level above that along which the trains ran, the entire area was relict but for a lone, heavily defended token booth. Within, through double panes of well-scratched bulletproof glass, we made out a token seller, a heavyset black woman wearing an enormous headdress of apparent Nigerian manufacture, influenced in colors and style by the Classic Dogon period. She was reading a celeb-rag, too immersed to hear us. After we'd determined that one closed panel was supposed to be an open grille, after we'd knocked for her attention, she threw down the paper in disgust and opened a completely different panel on another side of the booth.

"Must be pretty interesting!" I said as I shoved money in.

"Whaaaaa?" she asked.

"Must be an interesting story!"
I shouted.

To my surprise, she actually brought the paper over and held it up so I could make out the headline. So it was that I learned the indispensable news that Dolly Parton's tits would never droop—though she lived to two hundred—as they were made of interstellar non-sag material, payment to the country singer-actress for a series of unborn fetuses she'd regularly delivered, for experimental mating and surgery, to bug-eyed aliens from an unnamed star in Galactic Cluster NGC-235.

Our tokens managed to jam in three of the four token machines.

As we dropped down to the platform, the smell of industrial-strength ammonia nearly knocked us over.

The station's waiting area across the tracks was being hosed down by workers in yellow rubber suits and helmet-hoods with plastic eye windows—outfits designed for walks in outer space and dioxin spill cleanups. Our side was already hosed down. I could tell from how sudsy water dripped off the platform edge, ate into grouting, puddled in small depressions in the plastic sheets covering opaque pods of the homeless sleeping on subway benches.

Wally turned to me and screamed silently, looking for a second like Nebuchadnezzar in that William Blake print at the Tate.

Then, to our complete astonishment, a train pulled into the station.

More astonishing, it stopped and the doors remained open long enough for us to get in.

The train was empty.

I went to a graffiti-covered glass panel behind which I made out most of a Transit Authority map. The train lurched twice and took off.

"We can get off at Fourteenth Street and take the L over to the Seventh or Eighth Avenue line." I scanned on. "But the L's slow as shit at night. Let's go to Grand Central and grab the shuttle."

By now, the train was shaking so hard we could barely stay on our feet, even holding onto the metal bars hung from the ceiling. We finally relaxed and allowed our bodies to be whirled into seats. The train's sign read "Local," but it sprang past Spring, screeched past Bleecker, and we were gasping as Astor Place slashed by the windows. It did stop at Fourteenth Street, but barely and with an enormous amount of noise. I wondered whether we should get off while we had a chance. The doors shut—too late! The train seemed to switch to the express track, where it belonged in the first place. This allowed the driver to pick up speed. The train streaked past blurs of the Twenty-third, Twenty-eighth, and Thirty-third Street stations.

"How fast do you think we're going?" I had to shout to be heard above the intense clanking every loose bolt in the car made as we charged on.

Wally shrugged. "Eighty? Ninety per hour?"

Faster, I thought.

And I panicked as the train shot into, through, and out of Grand Central Station without a hint of slowing down.

"That was
our
stop!"

"I know!"

"All
trains stop at Grand Central."

"I know, I know!"

I was thinking of that song from the sixties about some guy who got stuck on the Boston subway system just as it was completed and turned into an infinite Möbius strip, riding forever and never returning. Neither would we!

The train speeded up and shot like a bullet past Fifty-first, Fifty-ninth, Sixty-eighth...

"Where's the next express stop?" Wally held onto his seat with both hands just to stay in place, it was rocking so much.

"On this planet? Eighty-sixth, I think."

The train slammed to a stop, and the doors opened with a shudder—at Seventy-seventh Street of all places! Without bothering to wonder how that was possible if we were on the express track, I jumped up and held the doors open until Wally could get out. They were pushy, edgy, greedy steel jaws. They almost caught me as I let them go. The train sped off, bound for who knew where, probably some "Twilight Zone" episode.

Upstairs on Lexington Avenue, I said, "From now on, we walk!"

"Through Central Park?" Wally asked. "At... checking my watch, four-thirteen in the morning?"

"You going to find us a taxi?" I asked.

A brief look around confirmed that Lexington and Seventy-seventh Street was as desolate as downtown. We began walking toward the park. Taking advantage of the lack of passersby, I moved alongside Wally and put an arm over his shoulder. He shrugged it off.

"C'mon, Wally! Don't be like that!" I said, still trying to get near him. But no matter what I did, he continued to elude my attempts at closeness. So I fell back on that old standby in relationships: I began to argue.

"You still haven't explained that crack you made downtown. The one about whether I still thought saving Alistair's life was important."

"What's to explain?" Wally said in that airy way that reminded me of my older sister when she was a teenager, and which had always made me want to wring her neck.

"What's to explain is some reference to my... What was the word exactly? Antics?"

"Most people would call thumping about on the roof of Gracie Mansion antics."

"Except, of course, if you had been one of the people doing it."

"And especially since I know very well
why
you did it," Wally said.

"Really? Care to let the rest of the world in on the secret?"

"For the same reason you did that 'Eleven O'Clock News' spot." "What are you talking about?"

"You really think I'm too naive to see that was planned?"

"Planned? Planned? That business with the TV reporter was a complete surprise. Totally spontaneous. You were there. You saw how it happened!"

"I saw your old childhood buddy arrange it all. First with you, then with the reporter. That's what I saw."

"Ronny Taskin? You're crazy!"

"I know what I saw," Wally insisted. "One minute he was talking to you, the next he was meeting with the reporter, and not long after, the reporter shoved a microphone in front of you and the video camera was going."