The Deed (19 page)

The air outside, after the show, was cold and sudden, a slap in the face.

“Cabinet?” wondered Amanda, bundled in a scarf and a light coat.

Jason looked at her strangely. “What?”

“Are…you…cabinet?” she asked slowly, bouncing on her toes for emphasis and staggering slightly.

He laughed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, you drunk.”

“Are you…taking…a…taxi…you…stupid…idiot,” she elaborated.

They shared a cab all the way up the east side, to gallantly drop Amanda off first, and Jason busied himself cracking her up in the back of the cab.

“Same time tomorrow?” she said as they pulled up.

“High noon,” he amended.

“Thanks again for coming out with me,” she said, smiling indulgently. “Sorry about Mom. Just give me a week or so to work on her.”

“Yesterday, you said all I had to do was meet her and then you’d let me go,” Jason said drunkenly.

“Yeah, but then you fucked it up,” she replied.

“Indian giver.”

“Come on,” said the cabbie. “In or out?”

With a sneer toward the cabdriver, Amanda suddenly lurched toward Jason with alarming speed, pivot hand burying itself in the cracked seat leather as she planted a big, wet kiss on his mouth. Taken by surprise, Jason missed whatever window of opportunity was there and tried vainly to catch her retreating arm. Their fingers locked briefly as hand slid past hand, but she expertly scooted her tail out of the cab, slammed the door, and was gone.

As the cabdriver peeled out, Jason tried to hold on to the kiss, to paint it warm and wet on his memory. But the impression was already slipping away; a transient taste of candied lipstick died on his tongue as the cab roared into a darkened Central Park, heading for home.

There’s plenty more where
that
came from,
he reassured himself.

“I’m getting off right up ahead,” he said aloud when they neared his place.

“Good for you,” said the cabbie.

The dawn unfurled patiently across the eastern sky, casually dissolving a fleecy field of cloudlets. By the time the sun itself deigned to rise, reflected whole in a million devout faces of glass, it was clear there would be no rain today. No fires or earthquakes, either, no water-main breaks flooding the subways, no mad bombers abandoning ticking U-Hauls in the tunnels, no gutless, wavering would-be jumpers tying up traffic. It was the unofficial first day of spring, and it was picture-perfect. Better still, against all odds, it was a Sunday.

Early risers returned home to shuck long pants and laptops, to fill water bottles and dig out classic reggae tapes and shake roommates awake. By eleven o’clock, virtually all of the city’s eight million denizens, instincts honed for the rare public freebie, had poured blinking out of their cubbyholes to soak in the moment.

Already Central Park was awash in dogs and Frisbees, steadily pixillating with color as sunbathers and picnickers staked out square footage. On the Park Avenue side, shaky-limbed doyennes emerged from park-view high-rises in embarrassing sundresses. At Strawberry Fields, the arborial shrine to John Lennon beneath Yoko’s Dakota digs, yet another incarnation of the eternal amateur guitarist worked out his “Julia” for a patient crowd. At the bandshell, corporate Rollerbladers bought unexpectedly excellent pot from slack-jawed skate punks and had to sit down under the trees to steady the earth.

Almost reluctantly, Jason stepped off the warm Broadway sidewalk and into the cool, dark cave of Amazonia, a yet-undiscovered Upper West Side brunchery. True to its Zagat’s review, Amazonia was a sunken green-house thick with thousands of live trees, vines, and plants that had seemingly taken root on every horizontal surface, caressed here and there by gentle billows of steam. The rain-forest walls had the secondary effect of crowding the circular tables tightly into the center of the room, like soap bubbles, requiring waiters and waitresses to scuttle sideways between seat backs.
A little clear-cutting might not be out of place here,
Jason mused as he scanned the room, quickly spotting Becky, then Nick, at a small booth by the door to the kitchen.

“Welcome to the jungle,” said Nick as he approached. “We’ve got fun and games.” He was unshaven and a bit haggard, two-hundred-dollar sunglasses notwithstanding. Jason ignored him in favor of a small cheek kiss from Becky.

“What’s up, dolly?” he asked, sliding into the seat next to her. Becky, too, looked pale and drained under the lid of a fading MTV baseball cap. When she craned her head to crack the vertebrae of her neck, the limp ponytail that leaked out of the back of the cap lagged behind, as if too exhausted to obey the laws of physics.

“You guys are a wreck.” Jason smiled approvingly. “I take it the others are dead or disabled?”

Nick shrugged. “Well,” he began slowly, looking at Becky for support, “I think it’s safe to say Paul’s lying in a pool of his own sick.”

“
Stop
it,” said Becky gravely. “We ordered you hash and eggs, Jason.”

“Regurgio, ergo sum,”
Nick continued, and resumed construction of a wobbly cheerleaders’ pyramid of nondairy creamers. “Paul’s an ectomorph, you know,” he noted clinically. “His body’s not built for stress tests.”

“How’s J.D.?” Jason wondered.

“Alive and well,” Becky replied. “He’s entertaining out-of-towners.”

“Ouch,” said Jason. “Empire State Building?”

Becky smiled, but shook her head. “No, no, it’s a couple of friends from high school. You know J.D.—they’re probably on the bar crawl already.”

Jason laughed. “Yeah, how
does
he do that? He’s like an Australian or something.”

“You should have seen him last night,” said Nick. “He was in top form. He climbed the pole at Hogs and Heifers and put on one of the bras from the ceiling without falling off.”

“That’s
right!
” Becky squealed, erupting in sudden laughter. “I totally forgot that!”

Egged on by Jason’s appreciative grin, Nick launched into a florid tale of the previous day’s shenanigans: a twelve-hour Saturday romp that started with curly fries and cheap Rolling Rock pitchers at lunchtime and ended with being thrown out of the Dublin House at three o’clock
A.M.
Through no small rhetorical effort, the woolly tale seemed perpetually on the verge of mounting to an adventure of epic scope, but ultimately devolved into a series of entertaining, but disconnected, anecdotes: the fight with a bouncer narrowly averted, the dull party heroically escaped, and so on. At some point, Nick and J.D. were taking turns bodily throwing each other into the metal overhead doors that roll down and shield the picture windows of Manhattan stores at night.

“Sorry I missed it,” said Jason, and meant it.

“Where were you?” said Becky. “We tried to call.”

“Were you with that girl all day long?” said Nick, and Jason nodded. “Did you make ficky-fick?”

Jason responded with a bland look.

“Don’t be all civilized on my account,” interjected Becky. “Go on, say whatever you want.”

Jason nodded. “Well, it was—”

“What kinda titties she got?” Becky interrupted in a gruff, ersatz trucker voice. Nick flashed her a grin.

Jason patiently described the abortive meeting with Amanda’s mother, and some of the mini-date after, omitting the good-night kiss as low-end schlock. Somewhere in the middle, the waitress returned with a pitcher of bloodies and platefuls of high-end grub, garnished with suspicious-looking edible flowers. As they ate, Becky was appropriately sympathetic to his trials; Nick was amused, and cracked bon mots that Jason wasn’t punchy enough to appreciate, but which tickled the hell out of Becky.

“What a
nightmare,
” she exclaimed, shaking her head and painting grape jelly on a triangle of toast. “She blindsided you.”

“I’ve never felt like such an ugly American,” said Jason.

“And
she’s
the American,” Nick reminded him through a mouthful of Brazilian waffle. “That’s the kicker.”

“Whatever.”

“
You’re
just ugly.”

“I’m actually about this close from packing it in with this chick,” said Jason, pinching an invisible grape between thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, you are not,” said Becky. “You’re practically dating.”

Jason smiled. “All right, I’m seeing her again today.”

“So you’re just blowing through all the warning signs,” Nick accused. “Even though you got a glimpse of the mother, the woman she’s genetically determined to become—”

“Oh, just stop,” Becky reprimanded Nick. “What a frat boy we are today.”

Her antagonist smiled broadly, making her point, but she turned back to Jason. “So where are you going?” she wondered.

“A graveyard,” Jason replied.

Nick leered at this. “Casanova.”

WEST SIDE HIGHWAY
, 12:35
P.M.

Amanda’s brown bomber tore fearlessly up the West Side Highway, skirting a breathtaking view of the verdant cliffs of the Palisades, across the Hudson. In the northern distance, a misty George Washington Bridge bounded the horizon. Closer at hand, Amanda’s tan was contrasting fiendishly with a white sleeveless shirt and red denim shorts; a heavy silver amulet puckered the valley between her twin peaks.

“It’s a hell of a view,” said Jason from the passenger’s seat.

Amanda, unsuspecting, was inexpressibly cool behind opaque sunglasses, wearing a bluesman’s smile that shifted constantly, infinitesimally, as if testing its ability to express nuances of emotion.

“You’re just loving this day, aren’t you?” he guessed.

She grinned broadly. “I am a complete and utter slave to the weather,” she confided, tweaking the rearview. She turned to look him over, and her loosely bound hair, caught in the crosswind between the open windows, danced like fire around her head. “You look
much
better today,” she decided, and he smiled in response, holding a hand out the open window to cup the breeze.

“So you’ve never been here, right?” said Amanda.

“Nope,” he replied, pointing his flattened hand into the wind, then changing the angle until his palm caught the breeze and jerked backward. “It may not even exist, frankly. We could be chasing an old grandmother’s delirium. But she’s still pretty sharp.”

Amanda nodded. “So then where are your parents buried?”

“They’re not,” he replied, surprised by the frankness. “They were cremated.”

She nodded again, sagely, unaware or unconcerned about overstepping a boundary. “Tell me about them,” she urged casually, without looking.

Jason closed his eyes and drew his hand in from the window to rub his forehead, embarrassed by the thrill of anxiety running through him. He hated talking about his parents, had never found a way to do it without reimagining the accident. It was a major roadblock, one which his friends seemed to understand through common, unspoken accord. But admitting his reluctance, now as always, seemed worse than facing it.

“What do you want to know?” he replied softly, in a manner he hoped would sound offhand.

Jason’s parents had lived a love story far too saccharine for Disney. His father, a stringy eighteen-year-old, worked part-time at a fruit stand in Goleta, California; his mother, also eighteen, was slogging her way through the local community college, and traipsed by the front of his shop every day with her girlfriends, driving the poor guy berserk with her giggling, her apple eating, her book carrying, and so forth. In Jason’s mind, the boy stood tall in overalls and a Marlon Brando guinea tee, blond hair slicked back away from slate-gray eyes. When the girls hove into view, he’d hose down the sidewalk in front of the store with redoubled intensity, as if the menial task were a matter of national security, trying vainly to ignore the fruit flies that sabotaged his gravitas by buzzing playfully about his ears.

One day the girl walked by unescorted, and the naked opportunity so discombobulated him that he lost control of his motor functions. Eye contact with the girl had always been minimal; this time, though, he found himself unable to stop staring, garden hose held limply across one hand, water pressure backed up painfully against the nozzle in his other. And then, right as she passed him, he surprised himself by pulling the trigger, and caught her broadside with a blast of water so powerful it literally blew all the books out of her hand. She gave a little yelp and he dropped the hose, terrified. But she said nothing, only stared at him curiously as she picked up her books and ran off, flats splatting through the puddles. He lay awake all night and agonized, quite sure he’d never see her again. But there she was, the very next day, walking by with her now-smiling, blushing friends, and this time she was wearing a full-length raincoat.

They married and had exactly one child; whether they had ever attempted more was a secret that died with them. People weren’t supposed to have kids in the mid-seventies, when the world was widely believed to be going to hell. They bandaged his knees and went to his ball games, stayed up with him not just for cough and croup but for test anxiety and teen heartache as well, all the exaggerated agonies of the only child.

They stayed alive just long enough to see him through college, and, the experiment concluded, abruptly left the planet. He’d gotten the call at work.

“How well did you guys get along?” Amanda was wondering.