The Girl in Times Square (16 page)

Spencer sat in front of his Saturday night special—magnificent and rare Speyside Malt Whisky. He didn’t work on the weekends—though sometimes, like today, he could not avoid it—and he did not see Mary, citing either work or family obligations, but the truth was, even his ailing father could not lure him for long away. When there was a family function he had to prepare himself in advance. He would take sick days and vacation days ahead of time, sometimes after. His body counted the five days from Monday to Friday as if they were a metronome, a pendulum of sobriety. Five days to be sober, and by Friday his body could barely function. He could not eat, he could not be merry, his mind clouded, his body a tremor. On Fridays he would sometimes go out with the guys from Homicide, and he would begin drinking with them, drinking cheap-ass stuff neat and small to show everyone how normal he was, how jolly, how much like them, killing two birds with one stone: showing faux sociability
and
starting his weekend reward. He preferred going out with Mary on Thursdays, but it was hard to avoid seeing your girlfriend on both weekend days. She was bound to get suspicious. Either you broke up with her, or you kept her and paid your price. So Spencer kept her and took her out Fridays, ending up at her apartment on the Upper West Side. He never stayed
over, thinking of only one thing—going—even as he was coming.

He was very well trained, he bought his drink ahead of time and from different stores, for since he drank until there was not a drop of Scotch in the house he became too ill-behaved and erratic to go out during. Too many people knew him around the neighborhood. He didn’t want them to see him in such need. He was a senior NYPD detective-lieutenant. He had to be operational, he had to be in control, hence the whisky-buying in Chelsea or Soho, hence the grumpy sobriety Monday to Friday, hence the careful drinking around his friends. He did not know of Saturdays. Most Saturdays were lost days, gone days, by all definitions of reality nonexistent days for Spencer. By Sunday morning all the Macallan and Chivas or Johnny Walker and Glenmorangie, and even the best, 25-year-old Highland Park, was gone and he remained home and confined and by necessity got slowly and painfully sober.

Then came Monday again and five days of being good, five days of penance. Five days of living for the weekend. Spencer liked Mary, he needed Mary, he liked work, he needed work, but there was nothing Spencer needed as badly as a drink on Friday night.

Why did his mother have so many children? Why couldn’t he have been an only Irish Catholic child? The weekends he had to stay sober for communions, confirmations, baptisms, weddings were torture to him. Actual torture. His body, dehydrated and throbbing, was expressing outwardly its internal malcontents. He was sullen, silent, and shaking. He never drank a sip at the gathterings, because he knew there was no way to drink without eventually drinking to blackout. There was no way to take one sip, one glass, one beer, one cocktail. Spencer never fooled himself, never deluded himself, never pretended. He knew the truth fully and accepted it fully, but it was more important that others did not know, didn’t even suspect, than it was for him to casually wet his throat with his drug of choice. So he didn’t drink but
drummed out the dry hours on his fingers, on his napkins, on the tines of his fork.

After he returned from Port Jeff and dropped off Harkman, and signed in the patrol car, and came home, Spencer without even taking off his shoes drank 70cl of Glenmorangie, while standing by the sink, straight from the bottle.

He had a long shower to wash the drink out of his pores, and was now, hours later and a quarter sober, sitting in front of the carefully placed full bottle of Macallan and the accompanying highball glass. It was after midnight, and Spencer was wondering if he could throw it away and not drink from it. He tried watching TV, opening a newspaper. What to do with the afflictions? Just go on, try to go on, try to function in a world which has no patience for tremors, for weakness. He would lose his job in Missing Persons, he would be placed on disability and then retired from the force if Whittaker thought he was not in control of his life. Gabe McGill didn’t know, though if he knew, he wouldn’t have cared. If Harkman knew, Spencer would have been out of a job long ago. Perhaps this was what Harkman was threatening him with?

This Saturday there was something else as Spencer sat in front of his bottle and contemplated his eternal conflict and struggled with himself in his losing battle. Tonight he thought of Lily. He thought of the girl with doe eyes and spiky hair, the wisp of a very young woman being taken down by things far worse than elective addictions, though Spencer wanted to say in his own feeble defense that there was nothing elective about his addiction.

He wasn’t contemplating the bottle in relation to Lily’s sickness. He was contemplating himself in relation to Lily. She needed him yesterday—and by luck he was with another woman, and was therefore sober. But tomorrow? And the next weekend? If she needed him again, he would not be there. He would not be able to pick up the phone, answer her page, come over, help her. She would call him, and he would not reply. She would ask him where he’d been and he would not respond.

And there was no question about it—he couldn’t deny it, even to himself in his dark apartment in front of his solace, his soul, his spirit. Lily needed someone.

Maybe just this one Saturday, this one Sunday, he thought, finally and with effort getting up. I’ll hang on for six more days. Think of it as an unexpected, protracted family function. Before he could talk himself out of it, Spencer went and poured the bottle of $93.06 whisky into the sink, grasping the stainless steel side while bending over to inhale the fermented barley mash’s intoxicating iodine scent as it swirled down the merciless drain.

Through the ebony sleep, the phone, the phone rings, rings, insists on itself, on its rights in her life, pick me up, answer me, now, come, come, COME.

Lily crawled out of bed and yanked the cord out of the wall. Tomorrow she was going to the hospital. Grandma must have called everybody. Well, that’s good. At least Lily didn’t have to. She wasn’t going to waste her time talking on the phone. But maybe she should talk to someone—who would take her to the hospital in the morning to admit her to begin her chemo?

She wondered if Grandma called her mother.

I hope so. I can’t call her. She talks, complains, hurts, aggresses, pushes toward a conflict I don’t want to give her, but finally I scream at her, I turn into the ugly thing she wants me to be, and hate myself. Well, I don’t want to blame my mother anymore for the person I am when I am with her. Joshua, bless him and his mother complex, cured me of that. I choose to become someone else, but to do that, I can’t speak to her. I can’t be drawn in to what I don’t want to be. I’m not calling her.

Brave words from a young girl. But in the back of Lily’s sick heart was the mother she wanted her mother to be, the mother, who, upon hearing that her daughter was gravely ill, dropped everything, let everything go to pot, and flew seven thousand
miles to take her daughter to the hospital on Monday for induction chemotherapy. Induction into the rest of her life. A mother, who came in, and cleaned up, and cooked weak chicken soup for her, and washed all her towels, dragging them to the Laundromat, a mother who talked no nonsense to the doctors, who read medical reports, who drew Lily a bath, even though Lily hated baths and waited for the day she could stand up long enough, be strong enough, to take a shower.

It was for the purple-rose, wishful, child-like vision of that mother that she so desperately wanted that Lily called Maui. Her father picked up the phone.

“Hey, Papi.”

“Hey, Liliput,” he said, and Lily nearly broke down.

“How are things?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, and her mother came on the other line.

“Lily?” she said in a slurred voice. “Get off the phone!” she screeched, and Lily wasn’t sure who she was talking to until her mother added, “Iwantshoshalkshomydaurreralone.”

“Papi, no, don’t hang up, I have something to tell you.”

“He izh driving me crazy,” Allison said, “I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to throw myself out the window. Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME??”

And George in a gritted voice, said, “I hear you, I hear you. The whole world hears you.”

Her mother dropped the phone and started screaming at her father. Her father started screaming back. Lily waited for an impolite moment, then another, and hung up.

The phone calls were unending. News of the lottery was drowned out by news of Cancer, news of Andrew. Amanda, Anne, Grandma, Rachel, Paul, Dennis, Joshua! Rick from the diner, Judi, Jan McFadden. Amanda and Anne didn’t know what to do—cry for Lily or cry for Andrew as they told Lily about her brother being interrogated in his own house on a Saturday
afternoon by intrusive and objectionable NYPD detectives. “That Detective O’Malley needs some sensitivity training,” Amanda said in a finger-wagging voice. “He’d put his own grandmother in jail.”

The doorbell rang. It was one in the afternoon. Lily had to put Amanda on hold, tell Rachel she would call her back—again—and go to the intercom. “Who is it?”

“Spencer.”

“Amanda, I gotta go.” It’s the jailer of grandmothers, she wanted to add.

She buzzed him in, running a hand through her hair, and changed into pants from shorts, to cover from him the bruises on her legs.

Spencer, unshaven, looking beat and pale and red-eyed himself, brought with him electric hair clippers. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Like I have cancer.” She pointed to the razor. “What’s that for?”

“I’m going to cut my hair.”

“You came to
my
apartment to cut
your
hair?”

“Well, yes. I thought I’d cut mine, and then…” He smiled thinly. “Cut yours.”

“What are you talking about?” Lily said, stepping away from him, touching her own hair. She was not finding him to be of sound mind this morning. “I’m not cutting my hair.” The phone rang. They looked at each other. “I’m not picking up. I’ve been on the phone all morning. Hearing about you at my brother’s house yesterday.”

He took a step to her. “I’m sorry about that. This is a terrible time. Don’t read the papers.”

“I don’t intend to. It’s all lies. Please put the clippers away, you’re scaring me.”

He came closer. “You’re going to lose your hair.”

“Not by your hand.”

“Your hair is going to come out in chunks. You’ll have bald
spots all over your head. But my way, I’ll cut it all off evenly, snazzily even, and to show you I can do it, I’ll cut mine off first.”

“I’m not cutting my hair,” she said, but less forcefully. Chunks?

“Fine,” Spencer said. “But I’m cutting mine.”

She watched him in the kitchen, with a hand held mirror propped up on top of the dish-drainer rack. He had taken off his denim jacket and polo shirt and was suddenly and inexplicably undressed to the waist. His chest hair was still brown, barely graying at the edges. He was lean; there was not a scrap of fat on him, as if he played soccer one time in his youth. Though well-formed he looked like he didn’t eat well. Seeing a man even remotely naked in her apartment made Lily uneasy. Not bad uneasy. Just tense uneasy. He was crazy. He really was cutting his hair.

And now it was all gone. Spencer turned to her. “What do you think? Good?” He looked ready for the army. He left himself with an eighth of an inch of brown fuzz, to match his stubble.

“Frightening. And bald.” But his eyes were large and blue and his very full mouth looked sculpted on, drawn on as if in caricature with heightened lines all around. The jaw line, the cheekbones, the eyebrows, the ears, the stubble, everything on him was somehow made more pronounced through his absence of hair.

“Yes. You next.”

“No.”

“Lily.”

“I don’t care what you call me or what kind of tone you use. No.”

He tilted his head to look at her with mock-seriousness.

“Stop.” She left the kitchen. He followed her.

After fifteen minutes of trying to get away from him in her closet of an apartment, Lily relented. “I’m not getting undressed though.”

“I think that’s wise.”

She sat in front of him on a chair. “I don’t want you to do this.”

“I know. But look at me. You think I wanted to do this? And I’m not even sick.”

“I don’t know why you did it. Clearly you’re sick in the head. But besides, you’re a man, what do you care about hair?”

“All right, fine, you’ve obviously never met a man before.”

Lily sat uncomfortably as the razor whirred close to her ear, and sheaths of her brown, highlighted hair fell to the floor. “Spencer,” she said, “Didn’t the doctor say all my hair is going to fall out?”

“Yes, he did.” He continued cutting. His hand was holding her head to keep her steady. Lily closed her eyes. She was being touched by someone other than herself.

“Spencer.”

“What?”

“
All
my hair?” Lily didn’t open her eyes, because she didn’t want to either smile or go red. She really shouldn’t be making a joke like this to a police officer.

Spencer leaned around to stare into her face. She opened her eyes, saw his expression and laughed. His eyes were smiling. “Would you like me to cut
all
your hair, Lily?”

“No, thank you.” She turned red.

“That’s what I thought.”

Finally done, he ruffled her buzz head and dusted her shoulders off with a towel. Without hair she looked worse than him. Simply frightful. Her bark-colored eyes, bare forehead, half-asleep mouth and drawn oval facial bones were doing nothing for her. “You look much better bald than I do,” Lily said in a disagreeable voice. “How is that fair?”

“I think it’s hip. You look like Sinead O’Connor.”

“That’s great. Well, my grandmother would be proud. I look like a survivor from one of the camps she keeps telling me about. All I’m missing is the pajamas.”

Spencer offered to take her for brunch at the Plaza. Lily had once told him she’d always wanted to go, and so he offered. But she felt too self-conscious today with her porcupine head to go
to a place like the Palm Court; she didn’t have a wig or a nice hat for cover-up, all she had were Amy’s skicaps.

“Thanks, Spencer, but maybe I can take a rain check on that? I have no appetite anyway.”

As if he knew why she didn’t want to go, he said, “We’ll get you a hat at Bergdoff’s, if you want.”

“I haven’t been paid yet.”

“I’ll buy it.”

“No. Really, it’s fine. Another time, okay? I just can’t today. You understand.”

He understood. He stood silently, cleaning out his razor. “Well,” he said after he was finished. “The barbershop’s closed. So…do you want me to go?”

Lily didn’t. Her mouth twisted a little, and not looking at him, she shook her head.

He asked her what else she wanted to do, and she said maybe walk in Central Park, and that’s where they went, but she got so tired, she couldn’t even get to the entrance to the zoo which was just off where the cab dropped them at 59th Street. It was a sunny and hot August Sunday. They sat on a low stone wall, in the shade. He bought her some water and an ice cream, while he had two hot dogs and an Italian ice.

She was feeling weak and needed to go home and lie down in her bed; needed to but didn’t want to. After a bit of energy returned to her, they strolled to Wollman’s rink. There was no ice in August, but they went around to the bleacher seats and climbed to perch high in the blue benches.

Quietly, quietly they sat in the summer. There was much weighing heavily on Lily, and she didn’t want to talk about any of it. “Do you know who Oliver Barrett is?” she asked him instead.

“No.”

“Jenny Cavilleri?”

Spencer shook his head.

“Never saw Love Story when you were a kid?”

“Thirteen-year-old boys don’t watch
Love Story. Night of the Living Dead,
more like it.”

“You weren’t thirteen in 1970!” exclaimed Lily, mining his face. Was Spencer older than her brother?

“Well, yes, there were thirteen-year-olds running around even in 1970.”

“Did they even have moving pictures back then?”

“They had barely invented money.”

“I thought so.”

They continued to sit side by side, their domed round heads bobbing together like fishing floats in the swaying waters.

“So when did you join the police force?”

“In 1978.”

“You’ve been a cop for almost as long as I’ve been alive?” How was that possible?

“Guess so. How long has Amy been leaving her ID on the dresser?”

“Ah. Please. Don’t know, Spencer.” Lily sighed. “Look, I know you want to tell me what you and my brother talked about yesterday…”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Good. Because I don’t want to hear it. I can’t hear about it, you understand?” She emitted a small groan.

He pressed against her shoulder. “I understand.”

“Did he say…he knew where she was?”

“He said he didn’t.”

“Do you believe him?” Lily didn’t glance at him when she asked.

Spencer stared straight ahead. “Chicks. I thought you didn’t want to talk about it?”

“I don’t. Let’s go.” She struggled up.

They took a cab to 11th and Broadway.

“I don’t live here,” Lily said as they got out.

“I do,” Spencer said.

They stood on Broadway in the late afternoon heat. He put
his hand over her cheek. “You got nothing to worry about,” he said. “Come upstairs. I’ll make you a cup of tea. You can watch TV. Why don’t you have a TV in your apartment?”

“Joshua took it.”

“He’s just a prince of a man, isn’t he? Well, when you get out of the hospital and your money comes, you can buy yourself a plasma screen for every room, even the bathroom.”

“Oh, that’ll show him.”

His place was clean. The newspapers were on the floor, the mail was on the table. The kitchen looked infrequently visited, like hers.

Lily liked his twelve-foot ceilings and Broadway right out of the ten-foot windows. Right across the street was Dagostinos in front of which she had run into him and Mary last month. The thought of Mary made her twitch, and Lily backed away from the window, sitting down on his taupe-colored L-shaped couch and picking up a
Sports Illustrated
while Spencer was in the kitchen, making her some tea. The leafing of the pages, the distant drone of Sunday cars outside, the clanging of doors, the occasional honking, the whistling of the kettle, the clinking of the silverware, and Lily was asleep, with the magazine on her lap, her hairless head falling back.

When she woke up she found herself covered by a blue cotton blanket with cats on it, while Spencer sat in the corner of the couch, watching something on TV. She tried to focus, couldn’t. A movie and the music was familiar, and the faces…who was that? There was snow and a snowball fight and happiness and lilting waltzing music. Lily lay down, curling up under the blanket and went back to sleep. When she woke up, it was dark, and Spencer was still sitting in the corner of the couch, watching a baseball game this time.

“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to get up.

He got up to help her. “Don’t be sorry. I better get you home. It’s late. You have to be up early tomorrow. What time do you have to be at the hospital?”

“Six in the morning for blood work.”

“Come on, the nurses aren’t awake at six. They’re just messing with you.” Spencer watched her as she straightened herself out. “Do you…
need
me…to come and take you?”

“No, no. My sisters are drawing the short straw to see which of them will do it. Don’t worry. I didn’t mean to be so out of it. I’m such bad company.” And in the foyer, Lily asked, “What were you watching?…When I was sleeping?”

“I went to Blockbuster and rented
Love Story
,” Spencer replied, holding the door open for her. “To see what all the fuss was about.”