Rules of Civility (11 page)

Beyond the kitchen was the maid's room. By all appearances, Tinker was still sleeping there. A sleeveless undershirt was on a chair and his razor was in the bathroom propped in a glass. Hanging over a small bookcase there was a rather primitive social realist painting. The image looked down on a freight dock where longshoremen were assembling for a protest. Two police cars had pulled up to the edge of the crowd. At the end of the dock you could just make out the words
OPEN ALL NIGHT
in blue neon. The painting was not without its virtues, but in the context of the apartment, I could see why it had been relegated to the maid's room. Victims of a similar exile, the bookcase was filled with hard-boiled detective novels.

I doubled back past the kitchen, past Eve's sleeping figure and went down the opposite hall. The first room on the left was a paneled study with a fireplace. It was half the size of my apartment.

On the desk there was another fanciful deco piece: a cigarette caddy in the shape of a race car. Each of these silver objects—the shaker, the cocktail catalog, the race car—fit nicely into the international style of the apartment. They were finely crafted like pieces of jewelry, but unmistakably masculine in purpose. And none of them were the sort of item a Tinker would buy for himself. They suggested the work of a hidden hand.

Between two bookends, there was a small selection of reference books: a thesaurus, a Latin grammar, a soon to be extremely outdated atlas. But there was also a slender volume without a title on the spine. It turned out to be a book of Washingtonia. The inscription on the first page indicated it was a present to Tinker from his mother on the occasion of his fourteenth birthday. The volume had all the famous speeches and letters arranged in chronological order, but it led off with an aspirational list composed by the founder in his teenage years:

Etc.

Did I say et cetera? There were 110 of them! And over half were underlined—one adolescent sharing another's enthusiasm for propriety across a chasm of 150 years. It was hard to decide which was sweeter—the fact that Tinker's mother had given it to him, or the fact that he kept it at hand.

The chair behind the desk was on a pivot. I spun around once and came to a stop. The drawers could all be locked, but none of them were. The lower drawers were empty. The upper side drawers were stuffed with the usual accessories. But sitting on top of a pile of papers in the center drawer was a letter from Eve's father.

I folded the letter and returned it to the drawer with a heightened respect for Mr. Ross. In its stark factual prose, businessman to businessman, I think his letter could have stymied Don Juan. No wonder Tinker left it there—where Eve was sure to find it.

In the master bedroom, the drapes were open and the city glittered like a diamond necklace that knows exactly whom it's within the reach of. The bed had a blue and yellow cover that complemented a pair of upholstered chairs. If the whole apartment had been designed pitch perfect for a wealthy bachelor, here there was just enough color and comfort so that a woman who lucked into the room wouldn't feel herself on alien ground. It was the hidden hand again.

In the closet there were some new additions to Eve's wardrobe. They must have been bought by Tinker because they were not inexpensive and not Evey's style. As I ran my finger along the dresses, flitting through them like the cocktail recipes, a blue flapper's jacket caught my eye. It was mine. For a moment, I wondered how it had gotten there, since I was the one who had unpacked Evey's things. But then I remembered—Evey had been wearing it the night of the accident. Through a miracle of Civility & Decent Behaviour, it had been salvaged and cleaned. I hung it back in its place and closed the closet door.

In the bathroom Eve's medication sat on the sink. It was some sort of painkiller. I looked in the mirror wondering how I would bear up in her place.

Not so well, I reckoned.

When I went back to the living room, Eve was gone.

I went to the kitchen and the maid's room. I doubled back to the study. I began to worry that she had actually run from the apartment. But then I saw the living room curtain rise and fall and the white silhouette of her dress on the terrace. I went out and joined her.

—Hey Katey.

If Eve suspected me of snooping, she didn't show it.

The sleet had stopped and the sky was starlit. The East Side apartment buildings glimmered across the park like houses on the opposite side of a cove.

—It's a little cold out here, I said.

—But worth it, right? It's funny. The skyline at night is so breathtaking and yet you could spend a whole lifetime in Manhattan and never see it. Like a mouse in a maze.

Eve was right, of course. Along whole avenues of the Lower East Side the sky was blotted out by elevated tracks and fire escapes and the telephone wires that had yet to be put underground. Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.

—Tinker doesn't like me out here, she said. He's convinced I'm going to jump.

—Would you?

I tried to put a hint of jest in the question, but it didn't come off.

She didn't seem particularly annoyed. She just dismissed the notion in four words.

—I'm a Catholic, Katey.

About a thousand feet off the ground three green lights entered our field of vision heading southward over the park.

—See those, Eve said pointing. I'll bet you a good night's sleep they circle the Empire State Building. The little planes always do. They just can't seem to help themselves.

 

As on those first nights out of the hospital, when Eve was ready I helped her back to her room; I helped take off her stockings and her dress; I tucked her in; I kissed her forehead.

She reached up, took my forehead in her hands and kissed me back.

—It was good to see you, Katey.

—Do you want me to turn out the light?

She eyed the bedside table.

—Look at this, she groaned.
Virginia
Woolf.
Edith
Wharton.
Emily
Brontë. Tinker's rehabilitation plan. But didn't they all kill themselves?

—I think Woolf did.

—Well, the rest of them might as well have.

The remark caught me so off guard that I burst out laughing. Eve laughed too. She laughed so hard that her hair fell over her face. It was the first good laugh the two of us had had since the first week of the year.

 

When I turned out her light, Eve said that there was no point in my waiting for Tinker, that I should let myself out; and I almost did. But he had made me promise.

So I turned off the lights in the hall and most of the lights in the living room. I settled down on the couch with the white throw over my shoulders. I pulled a book from the middle of the pile and started reading. It was Pearl Buck's
Good Earth
. When it bogged me down on page 2, I turned to page 104 and started again. It didn't help.

My gaze settled on the pyramid of books. I considered the selection of titles for a moment. Then I carried the stack down the hall to the maid's room and swapped the lot for ten of the detective novels. When I put them on the living room table, there was no need to arrange their vertical order because they were all exactly the same size. Then I went to make myself some closed-kitchen eggs.

I cracked two eggs in a bowl and whisked them with grated cheese and herbs. I poured them into a pan of heated oil and covered them with a lid. Something about heating the oil and putting on the lid makes the eggs puff upon contact. And they brown without burning. It was the way my father used to prepare eggs for me when I was a girl, though we never ate them for breakfast. They tasted best, he used to say, when the kitchen was closed.

I was eating the last off my plate when I heard Tinker calling my name in hushed tones.

—I'm in the kitchen.

He came in with that relieved look.

—There you are, he said.

—Here I am.

He dropped into a chair. His hair was combed and his tie sported a crisp Windsor knot, but his turnout couldn't hide the fact that he was weary. With puffy eyes and depleted drive, he looked like a brand-new father who's been shocked into working extra hours by the arrival of twins.

—How'd it go? he asked, tentatively.

—Fine, Tinker. Evey's tougher than you think. She's going to be okay.

I almost went on to say that he should relax a little, give Evey some space, let nature take its course—But then, I wasn't the one who'd been driving the car.

—We have an office in Palm Beach, he said after a moment. I'm thinking of taking her down there for a few weeks. Some warm weather and new surroundings. What do you think?

—Sounds great.

—I just think she could use a change of pace.

—You look like you could use one yourself.

He offered a tired smile in response.

When I stood to clear, he followed the empty plate with the eyes of a well-behaved dog. So, I made him his own batch of closed-kitchen eggs. I whisked them and fried them, plated and served them. Earlier, I had seen an unopened bottle of cooking sherry in one of the cabinets. I pulled the cork and poured us each a glass. We sipped the sherry and drifted from topic to topic in unnecessarily hushed tones.

The notion of Florida brought mention of the Keys which brought memories to Tinker of reading
Treasure Island
as a boy and of digging with his brother for backyard doubloons; which brought memories to both of us of
Robinson Crusoe
and daydreams of being stranded; which got us on the track of what two belongings we'd want in our pockets when we were eventually shipwrecked alone: for Tinker (sensibly) a jackknife and a flint; for me (insensibly) a pack of cards and
Walden
by Thoreau—the only book in which infinity can be found on every other page.

And for the moment, we let ourselves imagine that we were still in Max's diner—with our knees knocking under the tabletop and seagulls circling the Trinity steeple and all the brightly colored possibilities dangled by the New Year still within our reach.

Old times, as my father used to say: If you're not careful, they'll gut you like a fish.

 

In the foyer, Tinker took both my hands in his again.

—It was good to see you, Katey.

—It was good to see you too.

As I stepped back, he didn't immediately let go. He looked as if he was wrestling with whether to say something. Instead, with Eve asleep at the end of the hall, he kissed me.

It wasn't a forceful kiss. It was an inquiry. All I had to do was lean a little forward and he would have wrapped his arms around me. But at this juncture, where would that have gotten anybody?

I freed my hands and put a palm on the smooth skin of his cheek, taking comfort in the well-counseled patience for that which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and, most importantly, endures them.

—You're a sweet one, Tinker Grey.

The elevator cables whooshed past as the car approached. I dropped my hand before Hamilton pulled back the elevator door. Tinker nodded and put his hands in his jacket pockets.

—Thanks for the eggs, he said.

—Don't make too much of it. It's the only thing I know how to cook. Tinker smiled, showing a flash of his normal self. I got on the elevator.

—We didn't get a chance to talk about your new place, he said. Can I come by and see it? Maybe next week?

—That would be great.

Hamilton was waiting respectfully for the conversation to end.