The Girl in Times Square (39 page)

“You drink on the weekends?”

“That’s
all
I do.”

Spencer was silent.

Lily was silent. “It can’t be true. It can’t.”

The June breeze blew in from the open window, and the cats were wailing.

“Oh my God,” Lily said at last. She tried to figure it out, she tried to wrap her brain around it. “I don’t understand,” she said. “It’s not my mother’s drinking. You work, you have a job, stress, responsibility. You function, it just sounds like…”

“You’re right,” he said. “You don’t understand.”

Lily thought back to all the weekends Spencer had spent with her. His absences, his lapses, his silences, his broodiness, moodiness, his soul on mute and she saw but didn’t see.

“But you stop for five days a week.”

“Yes.”

“And sometimes when you’re here, longer.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never smelled drink on your breath before,” Lily said, catching with shame the pang of desire in her groin. He was telling her of his darkest demons and she found herself craving
him. This is what she meant by failing him. Did men do this? You pour out your soul to them and all they want is to get into your pants?

“I never drank and came to see you before.”

“Why did you drink tonight, a Tuesday night? For nerves?”

He smiled slightly. “I’m not in the least frightened of you, Liliput. Just that, since I stopped seeing you…the drink has unraveled me.”

It has?
She stared at him as she would at something she was about to render—consumingly.

“Spencer, this drinking, is it something serious?”

“What’s serious?”

“As in, something you can’t stop?” Lily said it but she didn’t mean it even as the words were coming out. It was just words to say.

“This is something I can’t stop,” Spencer said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe me, Lily.”

“But you stop every time you go to work, and when you come to see
me
!”

“I stop because I know my reward is waiting for me. I stop and as a reward for stopping I drink to oblivion. I drink until I can’t stand up, until either all the whisky is gone or I pass out, whichever comes first.”

Lily was astonished. “That is how you drink?”

“That is how I drink.”

Vehemently she shook her head. “No. That can’t be true. It can’t be true, because that is how my mother drinks.
She
drinks until she passes out.”

“Yes.”

“But, Spencer, my mother is an alcoholic.”

For a moment there was only the cats crying outside. “Lily,” said Spencer, “I am also an alcoholic. I am the textbook definition of an alcoholic. I cannot not drink. And when I drink I can’t stop. I hide my drinking from other people because they
would be shocked if they knew how much I drink. You say you cannot imagine your life without me. Well, I cannot imagine my life without the drink. I have not been able to be in a relationship with one woman for any length of time because of the drink. They all run their course in about a year. As soon as they think they can change me, I’m gone.”

Lily was watching him. “It can’t be,” she mouthed.

“Friday night I drink. Saturday the whole day and night, I drink. Sunday I spend sobering up. Sunday is the hardest day I live all week. Which is why when I spend it with you, it’s easier.” Spencer smiled a little then. “A true Harlequin, like a jester, with your comedies and your cancer, you keep me forgetting about the drink. Monday I go to work.”

“Every Monday you go to work?”

“Every Monday I go to work.”

“Never skipped a Monday?”

“Never skipped a Monday.” He opened his hands. “What can I tell you? Appearances are everything. The appearance of seeming normal, of behaving normally is essential to continuing to drink. Because if you’re seen to be losing it, you will be asked to stop—by your family, your friends, your women, your employer. So you do everything to hide yourself, so that you’re never asked to.”

Lily was thoughtful, alert, she sat up straighter, her body was hyper. He saw it; reaching for her, he carefully brought her down on top of him. He lay her down on top of him and, cupping her head, kissed her face gently, kissed her lips, her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead. “Liliput, you are adorable. You want to help me? You want to help me overcome? I’m not saying you’re not admirable. You’re a rock. I used to be a normal drinker but now I’m hopeless. I’ve been drinking since my late teens. Whereas a few years back—when I thought I hit bottom—I needed one bottle of whisky a weekend, now I need two, maybe three, sometimes four, depending on how strong the Scotch is. I spent two fifty a week, twelve thousand a year on drink. I spend on drink nearly what I spend on my rent. I can’t afford a life even if I wanted one.”

“You can afford me,” Lily said. “I won’t cost you a penny.”

“You indeed are a powerful drug yourself,” he said, lowering his hands to her hips, squeezing her, opening her, not letting go, caressing her.

Lily couldn’t concentrate on his words. “You’ve stood up admirably for me. You’ve always shown up. Nothing thin-lipped about you.”

He kissed her. “Yes. I’ve shown up. Because I know it’s temporary. I’m always going back to my place. The drink is the forever thing.”

“Is that why you haven’t lived with anyone?”

“Yes. Can’t have anyone see me when I’m like that.”

She was mulling. “Have you tried that twelve-step approach? My mother is trying it.”

“Your mother is lying to you.”

He said it so swiftly, so brutally. How did he know that? “No, no,” Lily protested, wanting to give him hope, even though she knew he was right. “She was very earnest. She saw her life flash before her. She lost a foot, Spencer. She wants to do everything she can to stop.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“You’re not my mother, you’re much stronger.”

“No, Lily. I’m just as weak. It’s just that I drink differently than she does, because I have responsibilities, because I have a job. But tell me, if I didn’t have anything to do, like your mother, how long do you think the sober Sunday night would last? How many sober Mondays would there be?”

“Spencer, don’t say that. You’re not like my mother.”

“I am, Lily. I know you don’t want to believe it.”

“Because it’s not true.”

“It is true. Believe it.”

“Well, my mother is going to AA.”

“Then she is stronger than me.”

That was the most absurd thing Lily had heard all evening. Her mother was so weak. She turned her face from him, tried to
get herself together, but she was shaking uncontrollably now. Get it together, Lil, get yourself together. This is what it means to fail him. This is the definition of failing him. You pretend you love him? For God’s sake, raise your eyes to him and stop your nonsense. It’s not about you. This isn’t about you.

“What if
you
try AA?” she got out, getting herself halfway together.

“How do you think I’m able to lie here and tell you how much I drink? I tried. But I can’t go to AA. They demand total abstinence, and I abstain totally for four days. After several months they see through me. They know I’m a fake.”

Still on top of him, her whole body continued to shake and he said, “Don’t cry for me, Lily”, and she wanted to say, “I’m not crying just for you, I’m crying for my mother, too” and he was quiet, and then she felt him getting hard, unquietly, and suddenly many things were forgotten, and anguished bliss severed the air again, and glued their hearts, and her breasts to him, and her hips and lips to him, and their ailing bodies. “Spencer Patrick O’Malley, you’re not a fake. You’re the realest thing I know,” she whispered.

“I am disfigured,” he whispered to her. “Why can’t you see it?”

“I see it. I see right through you. I know your crying room.”

They lay side by side, face to face, panting in the sweltering night.

“So what are we going to do?”

Who said that? Him? Her?

“Look, is this ideal?” she said. “No. Would I prefer it if it weren’t so? Yes. Would I prefer that my roommate and best friend hadn’t been involved with my only brother? Would I prefer she weren’t missing? Would you prefer I hadn’t been sick? But yet here it all is. I didn’t know how to live my life, and suddenly I was thrust into it and had no choice but to live it.”

His hands on her hips, on her stomach, he observed her. “Have you been to see DiAngelo?” He was so quiet.

“No. I have to go, I know,” Lily said just as quietly. We are thrust into our life, kicking, screaming, and we have no choice but to live it out to the bitter end.

Wednesday
mid-morning,
Spencer was—spectacularly!—still in her bed. He called in to work, said he was working in the field and would be coming in late.

“Working in the field? Is
that
what you call it now?”

Pulling her to him, he said, “I do call it that. Because you’re going to tell me about your accosting vagabond. Or did you make him up just to come in your little slip of a dress and make me crazy?”

“Well, I’m not saying that was not a desired side benefit,” Lily said with delight. “But I didn’t make him up.”

She told Spencer what happened. She told him about how silly she had felt about the slight anxiety that she was being watched, about the weekday morning hanging up yellow ribbons. “But that night, Spencer, his arm was around my elbow. He wasn’t helping me up. He wasn’t letting go. I know the difference. And he did whisper,
Lily.
I mean, did I imagine that? If a stranger hadn’t interfered, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“You’re unbelievable,” Spencer said, “walking through that place at night, despite all my warnings.”

“Well, maybe if you had answered your doorbell, I wouldn’t have had to walk through Tompkins Square, said Lily.”

“Yes, perhaps if I were a different man, none of this would be
happening at all. But let’s just deal with realities, shall we? Can you remember what he looks like?”

“I can. Unfortunately he is etched in my memory. I can draw him for you, if you like.”

It took her an hour. She had to get out of bed to do it, because seeing his face, even with Spencer by her side, frightened her and she didn’t want her white and light fluffy comfy bed associated with such ominous portents. She drew him in her studio while Spencer showered and got ready for work.

He looked at the face for a briefest instant, “Oh, fuck.”

“What, you’ve seen him?”

“Somewhere I’ve seen him.”

“You think it could be Milo?”

“I’ll check with Clive.” Spencer took the drawing from her hands. “When I saw him, he didn’t quite look like this. The memory of it is so vague. But I never forget. Let me see what I can find out. You go see your grandmother, go see DiAngelo, and I’ll take care of this.”

“But Spencer…what could this person possibly have to do with Amy?”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Wouldn’t it be great to finally learn something, to finally know something.” The unspoken remained unspoken—to finally learn something that would push a missing Amy away from my brother.

“Yes. In the meantime, do me and yourself a favor, promise me that under
no
circumstances will you walk out of your apartment in the evening.”

“I promise,” Lily said. “But, what about that week
day
at Second Avenue?”

“That could have just been your anxiety talking. This is real.”

It could’ve been. For some reason Lily didn’t think so.

As Spencer was strapping on his weapon, she asked him timidly what they were going to do about the thing that drove them apart—the essence of him and the essence of her clashing against
each other, her brother, his work. Spencer took her into his arms. “I will advise you as I advise everybody who finds themselves in a similar situation.
You have the right to remain silent.
” He kissed her. “I suggest you avail yourself of it. I intend to avail myself of it.”

Spencer spent the rest of the morning looking through mugshots for the years 2000, 1999, 1998. He buried himself in the evidence room, unreachable, as he pored over every face that had been photographed by the New York police after bookings. He found nothing, but he wasn’t getting discouraged yet. Because he
knew
the face that Lily drew. He knew it. He had been going through mug shots daily for five years. And if he had seen it, that meant that he would find it again. What did Clive tell him at the homeless shelter? He said when he first started running it, there was no Amy or Milo. They came after him, and then Milo disappeared for two years. So 1997.

In February 1997, Spencer found him. It was a mugshot from one of the Bronx precincts. There were no bruises on the face, no tattoos, no goatee, the face was covered with hair, and his scalp was not clean shaven, as per Lily’s drawing, but the eyes were the same, the dead expression in them was the same. Before Spencer called the station that had booked him, he allowed himself a small swelling of astonishment that the girl had this gift in her—distilling on paper the very essence of what was true of life. Yet it had lain dormant until cancer woke it.

He dragged Gabe to the South Bronx.

Spencer asked for the original documents of the perp in question, and found out that this man was arrested in a drug bust of a crack den off Cortland Avenue, in February 1997, in a house that was full of addicts who were trying to stay warm. The man violently resisted arrest, and had to be physically subdued. After he was booked and fingerprinted, he refused to speak. Clearheaded or not, addicted or not, he did not open his mouth, he did not tell them his name, he did not volunteer who he was,
not even after he had been very roughly interrogated. He simply never spoke, as if he knew no English. They had tried a Spanish interpreter, and German, and Greek, but there was no response.

Spencer read on. Did he use his one phone call? He did not.

Did he make bail? He did not. When he was arraigned he did not give his name, nor did he enter a plea. The Bronx Public Defender’s office entered one for him. Not guilty they said. He was charged with resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer, possession, and illegal use of controlled substances.

He refused to speak even to his public defender. He was detained for months, a psychiatrist was brought in, got no results, and even the threat of going to prison for ten years did not force him to say who he was. He was put in the Bronx House of Detention while the District Attorney’s office and the courts tried to figure out what to do with him. A judge finally allowed for him to be institutionalized pending a disposition of his case. The public defender’s office cried foul, the Bronx office being famous for vigorously defending those who could not defend themselves. Involuntary institutionalization was against the law. He was released and sent back to the Bronx House of Detention, where he kept to himself, ate little, bothered no one, and preferred solitary confinement to sharing a cell.

They tried to threaten him with the loss of his few privileges, of books, of work in the cafeteria, if he didn’t give what they wanted in return for what he wanted—but not only did he refuse, but stopped eating, too. They went on like this for a little while, and then had to feed him intravenously. The public defender got an injunction against any unauthorized medical treatment or examination, saying it was an invasion of his privacy and a violation of his human rights. He was not allowed to be medicated, treated, examined, or tested. They were working on getting him released on the grounds of the Seventh Amendment clause against cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourteenth Amendment for due process. The Bronx ADA argued that giving due process to a man who refused to tell the courts even his name
was impossible. Human beings had to participate at least superficially in their own rights of habeas corpus. “Monkeys don’t tell you their name. Dolphins don’t tell you their name. Human beings tell you their name!” In March 1999, as he was being transferred from the Bronx House of Detention for men where he had spent most of the previous two years to the Vernon Bain Center, a more secure barge prison facility, he escaped, jumping into the East River, but not before he bashed one of the guards transporting him with a lead pipe. Miraculously he did not kill him.

His name was John Doe.