Newman had been sprung from the District of Columbia jail a week ago today. The charges against him had, by some miracle, been dropped. After two days hiding out at Fitz’s, he’d been bundled onto a train for New York, where he quickly resumed the drinking he’d begun at the chophouse across from the Press Club. In the five days he’d been back in his own place, he had remounted the wagon every twenty-four hours or so, until the weaker side of his nature once again took over and had him reaching for the Bushmills instead of for Dew-ol’s nerve-strengthening tonic.
The carpet was littered with ten or twelve pages of notes—interviews with the Washington bachelors Fitz had brought to the house in Foggy Bottom, in the days after Newman’s release, as occupational therapy. Work had not, alas, proved especially strong medicine. Newman could barely read the notes, let alone write from them. He had, however, succeeded in pulling the telephone out of the wall, so he wouldn’t have to hear himself be fired by Harris or Spilkes. As it was, he expected to see news of his dismissal come slithering under the door in the form of a telegram.
Disconnecting the phone had also cut off the terrifying prospect of a call from Rosemary, who’d now returned to Hollywood, where production had finally begun on her new film.
Newman knew she would at some point exact punishment for his desertion, or for the bad publicity any association with him might yet bring. He had the blinds drawn as much against her as the sunlight. The one time he’d made himself go out and sit in Gramercy Park, he’d spent no more than a quarter of an hour there, all of it looking over his shoulder.
Newman jumped at the sound of a voice beyond the door. Up to now, he’d believed not even his landlady knew he was home. With caution, he rose from the bed, put on his slippers, and soundlessly approached the peephole. Looking through it, he saw the unexpected face of Nan O’Grady.
“Hey, kiddo,” he heard himself saying, before simulating a cough and trying to remember if he ever even called Nan by that name. Was he drunk or sober today? On the wagon or off? He was honestly unsure.
“Do you need a minute or two?” asked Nan. “Take your time.”
Allen Case, watching some squirrels from the hall window, was out of the peephole’s range, but he’d come here from the office with Nan, listening to her on the subway trip down as she tried to interest him “in a human rescue.” While conceding that Newman was nice enough as humans went, Allen had changed the subject to the animal warehouse in Queens and what he was sure the lemur had told the ocelot after enduring the House & Garden shoot with Gardiner Arinopoulos.
Nan now waited with whatever patience she had left. Behind her she could hear Allen whispering to the rodents; through the wooden door she detected the sound of Stuart’s panicky, circular movements. She shook her head. Three years ago she would have been behind her desk at Scribner’s correcting some New England dowager’s spelling of wistaria. Now, for a few extra dollars a week, she was caught between one guy full of sunflower seeds and another full of booze, neither of them with the slightest interest in her.
“Stuart,” she said, knocking again. “You really don’t need to fuss for me. I’m here with Allen. We want to help.” She tried the doorknob. “May we come in?”
Newman, who had certainly not fussed, managed to open up. Nan noticed the clothes, loose papers, and movie magazines featuring Rosemary LaRoche all over the floor. She also couldn’t help noticing how beautiful Stuart looked, unshaven and slightly haggard, in his undershirt. He was no longer just handsome, but poetic, the way the young men in La Bohème should have looked, instead of being so operatically fat, when she took her mother to the Met.
She tried for a lightness of touch. “We’ve given up on Harris ever arriving at the office,” she said, laughing. “We decided we’d rather see you instead.”
“Do I still have a job?” asked Newman, quite bewildered.
“There hasn’t been time to fire you,” said Nan, still bundled up against today’s weather. “And there’s no need to, Stuart. Your column can still make it into the issue if we have a draft by tomorrow. Were you able to do any work on it before your”—she paused for the right word—“mishap?”
Stuart tried to gather lucidity, and at last said, huskily: “I did a little work after it, actually.” He bent down to pick up the notes scattered across the floor; he felt ashamed handing them to Nan, whose whole life, he knew, was a matter of order.
But she took them with a smile, consciously checking the reflex by which she would ordinarily have rolled her eyes. “Wait just a minute,” she said, before crossing the room to confer with Allen, who’d been checking one of the nerve-tonic labels for mineral content and, he hoped, an absence of animal fat. He took the notes, straightened them into a stack, and nodded in response to Nan’s whispered instructions. He waved goodbye to Newman and left the apartment, observing, before he crossed back over the threshold, that Nan had begun to throw away the empty whiskey bottles.
Despite the weather, Allen decided to walk home to Cornelia Street, down Sixth Avenue, whose soaked excavations for a new subway line had the Stygian appearance of those Somme Valley photographs that had shaped him long ago. He half expected to see a dead horse float by the wooden pilings.
Tonight he would easily accomplish what Nan wanted done with the notes. Before he went to bed they’d have bloomed into a whole column in Stuart’s trademark Lothario style, which was already, Allen knew, an unnatural impersonation on Stuart’s part. Even so, he could hear his own parody beginning to take shape inside his head: If you’re courting a gal on Capitol Hill, let me give you some advice for getting her consent …
Hopping a puddle, Allen decided that under certain circumstances it was probably all right to help out a human. Still, he knew that when he turned out the light and said good night to Sugar and to Freddy and the new moosehead, he would lack any sense of achievement. What he’d still be feeling, even as Canberra spent her first night on the high seas, was his terrible failure to have accomplished the liberation of that warehouse across the East River. What use were his perfect grammar and talent for mimicry when it came to effecting what had become his one object in life?
If you’re trying to free a Long Island City lemur, let me give you—
All at once, as the rabbi he was passing struggled with a broken umbrella, the solution had flown into his head. If he could impersonate David Fine and Paul Montgomery and Stuart Newman when need be, why couldn’t he also write in the voice of Gardiner Arinopoulos?