On Green Dolphin Street (48 page)

Mary pulled back her face from his chest. “It’s not much of a legacy, is it? The ability to make people miserable. A talent for despair.”

He could think of no reply.

She said, “I won’t beg you, my love. I’m too old, too proud. And I’m too unhappy. But I swear to you that I have thought about this and I know in some deep, deep place inside me, somewhere that I can’t explain, that it’s right. And I know another thing. A simple, simple thing. That we’d be happy. It’s a kind of miracle, Frank. That we’ve come from so far apart, different worlds. Across the sea. But only I could give you the happiness that you deserve. The life that could be yours.”

Frank went to the kitchen, poured coffee that he did not want, made as though to wash some cups, did things to keep his hands moving. Then he sat on the stool he had used on the first night Mary came to his apartment, to keep himself away from her.

“I won’t do it,” he said.

“Are you being a coward, Frank? Is it that you don’t dare?”

“Maybe it is. You can believe that if it helps you. I want to go out. I want to get out of this apartment.”

“Can I come?”

“Of course. I have only a few hours left of you. I’m not taking my eyes from your face.”

They were early for lunch in the local bar, where the young waitress was still setting the salt and pepper on the tables.

“Sure it’s okay,” she said. “What can I get you?”

The bar began to fill, and somehow they went through the process of lunch as though they were normal people. A menu came and went; they placed an order and drank without knowing it from the glasses on the table.

A nervous exhilaration came over them because they knew they had almost no time left. At the next table was a man in his thirties with a boy of about eight, possibly a son to whom a divorce settlement gave him weekend access. The man tried to cheer the boy along, talking of the ball game they would see later and the big dessert he was going to order him. The boy was no good at conversation and between times the man kept sneaking glances at the newspaper on his lap.

Frank and Mary, with no reason to hold back, said things of riskless rhetorical candor.

Mary told him what her mother had explained about the Titans and concluded, “You are the other half of my soul. I can’t bear that I wasted all those years before I met you.”

“I wasn’t ready for you. It couldn’t have happened a day before it did. My life was leading to that point.”

“Was it the Caesar salad for you, sir?” said the waitress, leaning over them.

“My life is over,” he said. “It dies when you board that plane.”

“I want you to tell me everything because I’ll never have the chance to talk to you again.”

“In thirty minutes, sweetheart?”

“Don’t look at your watch. Just don’t look.”

“Nothing in my life was of any consequence before I met you.”

“Would you care for any dessert?”

“One thing we need to agree. I need to know this, Mary, to stop me
from going insane. If you go, you go. There’s no coming back. Get in that taxi and it’s over. I can’t take any more. I’m a strong man, but I can’t take any more of this. Is that a deal?”

“It’s a deal. And no writing afterwards. No telephone calls. A complete break.”

“Swear to me, swear to God.”

“Shake my hand on it.”

“Okay. Now tell me everything you need to say.”

Mary’s good humor faltered for a moment. “All I can think to say is that I love you.” She sniffed noisily.

“Okay, okay,” he said, frantic not to let the scene degenerate. “I’ll tell you … I’ll tell you …”

“Just tell me how much you love me. Tell me.”

“I love you with all my heart … I love you so much that my life is worthless without you, that—”

“Then let me stay, my darling. Let me stay.”

“Can I get you folks the check now?”

Mary looked up from the table for the first time and saw that the place was almost empty; their waitress was now eating her own lunch at the bar.

It was dark when they emerged; it had stopped snowing and Grove Street was almost empty. They went one last time across to Frank’s building, and, up in the apartment, he called for a taxi to take her to the airport.

Now that it was coming he wanted it to be over; yet he could not bear to take his eyes away from her face. If he looked hard enough, he thought, he might imprint its image permanently on his retina, so she would not really be gone, but would be a veil or mist through which he would see the rest of his life.

They managed to remain calm, even humorous as the minutes passed. Then there was a silence.

Frank said, “I will think of you every day. All the time. If ever you should think of me and wonder what I’m doing, I’m thinking of you. That’s all I’ll be doing. Nothing else.”

She smiled. “I believe you.”

“How can you smile at me at a time like this?”

“It’s my happy temperament, Frank. I’m famous for it.”

The telephone rang. It was the taxi.

“I’ll come down with you. I’ll carry your suitcase. Have you got your ticket? Passport?”

Mary stood inside the front door of the apartment. “Remember the deal? This is your last chance. Once I’m gone …”

He could not speak, so he leaned down and grabbed the suitcase and walked along the corridor toward the elevator. She smiled at him wanly as they waited.

Downstairs they crossed the marble lobby.

“How ya doin’, Frank?” said Giovanni, the super, coming out of his office.

The cab was waiting by the curb. The driver threw Mary’s bag into the trunk.

“Idlewild Airport,” said Frank. “Have you got money?”

Mary nodded. She looked up into his face, scraping it with her eyes. “Good-bye, Frank.”

He held her once, wordlessly, then released her. She did not look out of the cab window as the vehicle moved off, signaling as it swung out slowly onto Christopher Street. Frank stood, shivering, watching the taillights as the car slowed down in the slush, made a slow, deliberate right onto Waverly Place, and disappeared.

Back in his apartment, Frank felt reasonably calm. He was certain he had come to the right decision, certain that Mary would, in the course of the years, come to think so too. He wished that he had a photograph. Maybe he could break the deal just once to write and ask for one. He wished that he had had a little more time. But what they had done together, the time they had had, surely that was enough; surely, he thought, lighting a cigarette, prowling across the room, that had a density and richness off which he could live forever.

The difficulty lay in passing the future days. Whatever hours remained in his life would be filled by other things, by other people; not by her.

The task began now. There was an evening to dispose of, to bury. He picked up the newspaper and began to flick through it, scanning two pages at once. He turned on the television, which was showing an old ball game, and forced himself to watch it. The third baseman stepped up to the plate. There was one out and two men on base. It was a good-looking game. He might call Bob Levine later, maybe look in at the Five Spot.

He had been watching the game for twenty minutes; he had killed off almost an hour of his life already.

He went through to the kitchen and poured himself a bourbon, threw in some ice, took a deep pull and poured up to the brim again. He did not really know what he was feeling.

The game wore on. He sneaked a look at his watch. It was six-fifteen. Checked in, baggage away. She was almost gone.

He went through to the bathroom and washed the traces of newspaper ink off his hands. He ran his damp fingers through his hair and looked at himself in the mirror above the basin. The face had gazed back from worse places than this: scraps of mirror hanging from a jungle tree, shared toilets in freezing tenements. He smiled stiffly. He felt all right.

He went into the bedroom to find a towel to dry his hands. Among the shambles of the unmade bed, he found one. Beside it, wrapped up in twisted sheets, his hand touched something soft. He pulled it out. It was one of her sweaters.

He held it up, then laid it against his cheek. His hands were shaking. What kind of human being am I? he thought. I had a chance to get outside the limits of my life. She stood on my doorstep; she gave me one last chance. Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.

Oh, Mary. He looked at his watch. It was twenty past six. He had forty minutes. He ran from the apartment, grabbing his coat in the hall; he sprinted down the corridor to the elevator and jabbed the call button repeatedly with his finger.

Down on Christopher Street he looked frantically back and forth, then ran up to Sixth Avenue. A yellow light was coming toward him. He leaped
into the road and waved his arm. The driver swerved over, the front end of the car bucking as the braking tires fought to grip the road beneath the slush.

“Idlewild. Here’s twenty bucks. Twenty more if you make it in less than thirty minutes. Go on!”

The driver, an elderly white man with a greasy-necked plaid jacket, said, “Okay, pal. Don’t push me.”

He swung the cab in a leisurely circle to the right, up West Ninth Street.

“Which way you wanna go?”

“I don’t know. You’re the fucking driver. The fastest way.”

“You sure don’t wanna miss that plane, do ya?”

The cab crawled across town, gripped by the red lights of Manhattan at every intersection, like an honored visitor to whom the island was fastidiously reluctant to say farewell. The cars tailed back beneath the East River: people from Queens coming in for Saturday night, Frank thought, but why so many going out? In the line for tolls, they funneled into the slowest one, the booth manned by some kid on his first experience of handling currency, the drivers placidly searching pockets, rear seats, trunks and trailers for the right change.

Frank was struggling hard to hold himself in check.

“I have to make that goddamn plane,” he said. “I just have to.”

“You told me, pal. I’m doing my best. I didn’t ask all these cars to park their asses in front of me.”

They were on the Van Wyck Expressway at last, the road the city had cut through Queens to speed the traffic to the waiting planes.

“What the fuck is going on?” said Frank.

“Beats me, bud. It’s not like there’s a game on.”

“Change lanes. Get on the inside. Push through. Know any shortcuts?”

“Relax, will ya?”

“Where are you from? Aren’t you from Queens?”

“No, I’m from the Bronx.”

“Aren’t you supposed to know the fucking city?”

“Listen, bud, you go on like this and I’m gonna put you down, twenty bucks or no twenty bucks.”

“Forty. Move it.”

The gantries overhead showed white directions on their placid green rectangles: suburbs you would never want to visit, rows of nothing in the flight path, magnets for the idling traffic.

“I never seen it like this before,” said the driver. “Friday evening, yes. Friday, it’s bad. People goin’ to Long Island. But Saturday. Beats me. It’s ten to seven. We ain’t gonna make it. Face it, feller, we ain’t gonna make it.”

Frank looked down at his watch in the darkness of the car’s interior; the luminous minute hand was sweeping to the upright. The cab was moving at five miles an hour, then stopping; then jerking forward for a few yards, then stopping again. They were not even getting signs to Idlewild; the directions were all still for Kew Gardens.

Frank no longer looked from the window of the taxi; he gazed only at the face of his watch, and when the minute hand touched twelve he lowered his head into his arms and held it for a long time, silently, rocking himself in the darkness.

At fifteen minutes past, he said, “How far are we away?”

“At this rate, I guess another twenty minutes.”

“All right. Pull over. Go up this ramp. Stop the car as soon as you can.”

The driver swung through from the outside lane, where he had been stuck, cut across two lanes of resentful traffic, off the expressway and up onto a raised road that looped back over a bridge.

“Keep going,” said Frank. “Take that small turn there. Down to the right.”

They were on a narrow road that was leading toward a group of houses.

“Pull over right here.”

The cab stopped and Frank opened the door. He stood up and looked down at the solid lights of the Van Wyck beneath them; then he walked a few paces toward the row of frame houses, pinched, shivering and indifferent in the winter night.

By the road was a ditch and he knelt down, lifting a handful of leaves made damp by the snow. He let them fall from his hands, then picked up
more and rubbed them into the back of his neck. He looked up at the lightless sky and then walked back, uncertainly, to the car.

As he stood beside it, he felt a cry coming up from inside him, not a sob but something like a shout of strangled, raging grief, and as it came out of his lungs, he bellowed and howled, trying to free himself of what was welling up inside him, and he began to hammer at the roof of the taxi with his fists, again and again, so the soft metal bent beneath the impact.

The driver came around. “What the hell you doin’ to my car? Are you some kind of crazy?” He pushed Frank in the chest. “Get out of here, will ya?”

The driver climbed back into the cab, turned around and drove off toward the ramp that would take him back to the expressway. Frank felt his knees give way beneath him and he buried his face in the damp leaves to muffle the noise of his howls.

Chapter 21