Beverly’s Greenwich Village apartment was indeed not far from Minetta Tavern, or from the black-and-white checkerboard exterior of the White Horse. Just looking at the place gave me a residual hangover. I’d been there with the guys a few times, in what now felt like my past life, for a late-night cocktail and to gawk at Dylan Thomas.
The driver let me out at the corner of Bleecker and West Eleventh. I’d taken a taxi straight down the West Side, claiming a doctor’s appointment so that Mr. Franklin would allow me a long lunch. In the time since Beverly had passed me her address, Joe had convinced me to move into his apartment. I’d left the second eviction notice on my kitchen table, and he’d read it the day of Harry’s funeral, then insisted the baby and I move in with him. Admittedly, it hadn’t taken that much to get me to capitulate; I was weary of the feeling that time was ticking against me. If I’d tried to fight the eviction and lost, I’d have been kicked out of my apartment today.
But the sense of the walls closing in hadn’t dissipated with my move to Forty-second Street. Rather, it had increased. Most of my pieces of furniture, which had been castoffs before I’d acquired them, had ended up on the curb. Now that I owned nearly nothing, I felt like a kept woman. All that I’d moved to Joe’s were my clothes, some kitchen items, and the filing box in which I kept my manuscript. I’d had to hide that on a high shelf in his office.
On the corner near Beverly’s place, a tiny grocery advertised fancy fruits and five-cent Coca-Cola. I headed west on Eleventh, toward the river, which I felt I’d never truly smelled until now. Dead fish, garbage, marine-engine oil. My purse tucked under my arm, I made my way past row after row of neat brick buildings. The rain, followed by unseasonable warmth and sunshine for the first week of March, had brought the first periwinkle blooms peeking through the wrought-iron rails.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I muttered to myself, when I realized I had at least half a block to go. “Should’ve had him drop me off farther down.” A group of teenagers snickered at me over their cigarettes as they smoked on a stoop, but I didn’t care. My belly felt as tight as a basketball, and just as heavy. The space between my legs throbbed.
At last I reached her building, 333 West Eleventh, a handsome four-story with a shiny green door. I stared up at it, wondering how she could afford a place like this. Perhaps her relationship with Harry had progressed to the point where he’d set her up in a pad.
As I approached the steps, I realized she was waiting outside, smoking. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, and she wore some kind of coverall contraption, a gray one-piece, like a glamorous housepainter. Her face was bare except for bright-red lipstick, which left a stain on her cigarette. She took a few quick, nervy drags to finish, then gestured me inside.
“Come on,” she said by way of hello, “I’ll get you a drink.”
Inside, her slim gray bottom disappeared up the dark staircase like Alice’s rabbit, leaving me to trudge after her. I figured she had to be on the second floor, but, no, she led me up, up, all the way up to the fourth floor, and by the time I arrived I had sweat pouring down my brow. “Oh, sorry,” she said, waiting at her door when I finally arrived. “No elevator. Your doctor probably told you not to do that.”
“You could’ve had the article,” I said, between breaths, “waiting for me downstairs.”
“Oh,” she said, her face falling a bit, and I wondered if she was lonely. “Yes, I suppose I could have.”
She led me inside. The apartment was a studio with a Murphy bed in the far corner, a postage-stamp-sized kitchen with a coffeemaker and toaster oven, and a love seat and little TV with rabbit ears askew. The two tall windows were decked in spider plants, their offspring strewn over the radiator and onto the floor, and a soft-looking gray cat sat with its tail twitching on one of the sills. The whole place stank of stale coffee. I noticed a red typewriter on a TV tray, fresh paper on the platen. As I got closer, I caught a glimpse of a few words she’d typed.
“You’re a writer, too?” I asked, aghast.
She made a move to get between the typewriter and me. “Of course I am,” she said in a hurry. “Why else would I have been with Harry? Why else would either of us have requested to work those parties?”
“Good point,” I said. It made sense now, the way she’d challenged Harry to get Hughes or Baldwin to write his Harlem piece. I should have known.
“Please, sit down.” There was only one place to sit, so I took up the middle of the love seat. Despite myself, I let out a long sigh.
I pointed at the typewriter. “Did you really think he’d help you?”
Her thumbnail found its way between her lips. “I don’t know. I guess I thought, just being around him, just being with an exciting man like that…something would rub off.”
“You sound like Glenys,” I replied, and Beverly pulled a face. She brushed something I couldn’t see off her thigh, then cleared her throat.
Her question caught me off guard. “Did you really think Joe would help you?”
“I…” For so long, I’d convinced myself that what existed between Joe and me was different, that we’d fallen in love by coincidence, even though he was a powerful magazine editor and I had been a struggling writer-cum-waitress. I hadn’t wanted to believe that the allure of his connections had had anything to do with my attraction to him. But the two were intertwined, weren’t they, as difficult to pull apart as braided strands of taffy. Were girls ever free simply to fall in love, without considerations of power, connection, access? I wasn’t sure.
“Yes,” I confessed, collapsing a bit in fatigue. “Yes, I suppose I did. He has.”
Beverly handed me an ice water in an etched green glass, which I gulped greedily. She pulled a stool from the kitchen, then perched on it with one knee bouncing, thumbnail in her mouth.
“What happened?” I asked softly. “The night…the night of?”
She took a few breaths in through her nose, shredding the nail with her teeth. Her eyes were unfocused, staring at a dusty corner of the baseboards. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” she said, and I got the sense this was the real reason she wanted me here. She had no one else to talk to. “It was so strange. Sometimes Harry and I will go get some dope. We usually go down to see the Italians in Sheridan Square. You know, Mafia kids.”
“You go with him?” I said, and she answered with a smug look, a what-kind-of-writer-are-you kind of look.
“Yes, I go with him. Well, this time, the guys met him here, right outside my place, which made me sort of nervous that my landlord might see. I said, ‘Come on, Harry, let’s meet them around back of the bar,’ but Harry told me it’d be quick. These two guys, older guys, about my father’s age, showed up and gave Harry a bag, and that was it. He must have paid them ahead of time. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“Dope,” I said. She already thought I was a square, so I figured I’d ask the question. “Dope, like mary jane?”
She shook her head. “Most of the time, yes. I thought that’s what he was getting, but he told me when we came inside it was H. Heroin. Harry thought it would take him to a higher level intellectually—that’s what he called it, a higher level. But he told me I didn’t have to try it.” A huge sob racked her body, and she squeezed her eyes tight. “And I didn’t. I didn’t want to try it. I almost did, just to keep him company, but I didn’t want to try it.” Her eyes were wide, scared, as if she’d just stepped into the path of an oncoming bus and someone had yanked her back at the last second. “So…I let him smoke it alone. He got really affectionate, really laughy, and then sleepy. We put on—we put on I Love Lucy—he said I could pick. I fell asleep next to him, and when I woke up, he was cold and—and he’d gotten sick all over my shoulder.” Her face constricted in tears.
I felt dizzy. My swollen hands throbbed. I couldn’t imagine waking up like that, Harry’s heavy, cold body lying against my shoulder. Surely Glenys resented Beverly for having been with her husband in his last moments, but I could see that this had been no privilege.
The cat leapt down and rubbed its body against one of the legs of Beverly’s stool as she wept. It fled when I got up to hand her a tissue.
“Thanks,” she said, and blew her nose.
Someone down on the street was yelling, his voice shrill, about where to put the cooler of fish. When I went to close the window, I looked down, meeting the eyes of a man in a dirty white apron and hat. He squinted up at me, and the hairs on the back of my neck lifted. I crept slowly away from the window.
“What did the men look like?” I asked her.
“I don’t know, one was…small, dark-complected, Italian or Puerto Rican. The other was big—as tall as Harry, I’d say. But older, at least fifty. He had a mustache.”
“A red mustache?” My mouth felt as if I’d been chewing cotton. I’d seen a man with a red mustache, and recently. I just couldn’t pinpoint where it had been.
Beverly frowned, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I don’t know. It was dark. But…maybe.” She began to nod. “Why?”
Our faces had grown close as we leaned into each other over the ash-strewn coffee table, as if we were old friends or co-conspirators planning a coup. I sat up. The stench of coffee was overpowering. I had to get out of here. I felt a roaring begin behind my ears, a rushing of blood.
My thighs edged forward on her scratchy sofa, the weight of the baby pressing me down, and I reached for her hand to get myself up. “Listen,” I said, collecting my purse with shaking fingers. “Don’t tell anyone I came here. And be careful, Beverly. Watch yourself when you come and go.”
She crossed her arms. “Now you sound like him. He was so paranoid.” Her voice belied her nervousness. “Always watching his back.” She reached down for the cat and squeezed it against her chest, clutching its tail.
“I sound like him. He sounded like Hemingway. I’ve heard too much lately about people being watched, people being followed, to believe it’s all a coincidence. I think there could be a…a plot under way.” I was talking quickly now—babbling, perhaps—and she watched me as if I had two heads. “I’m just not sure— Ouch.”
My hand shot to her arm, to catch myself, and I squeezed my eyes shut as a rolling pain passed through me, a hot wave like a curling iron being dragged across my stomach and down through my legs.
When I opened my eyes, Beverly’s were wide as a guppy’s, her mouth hanging open.
“Don’t worry, it was only a Braxton Hicks. I’m not going to have a baby here on your rug. It’s due to come April Fools’ Day. I have nearly a month.”
She led me to the door. “The joke’s on— Oh, wait!” She ran and grabbed a manila folder from her coffee table. “I almost forgot, the entire reason you came here. This is the thing Harry was working on when he died. I’m not sure who else has it, but here you go.”
It said something about my state of mind that I’d almost left without the pages. “ ‘Castro’s Favorite Yanqui,’ ” I read. “Not a bad title.”
Beverly sniffed. “He couldn’t really write,” she admitted, her shoulders falling a little in relief. It was her bitterness talking, I thought as I shoved Harry’s work into my handbag. Everyone knew the man was brilliant. With a tight smile, Beverly closed the door, and I heard two locks slide into place.
I made for the stairs immediately, taking them two at a time in places, my hand sliding along the old, worn banister. Tiny splinters pierced my glove. My thoughts raced from one scenario to the next, like a little game piece hopping around the Monopoly board. Could Harry’s death have been no accident? Was it possible he’d been killed just for writing the wrong kind of article, for picking the wrong celebrated writer to expose as a pinko, or was that crazy talk? Or could Harry have been involved in deeper schemes than any of us realized?
And what did Joe know about it all?
On the second-to-last flight of stairs, my right shoe slid out from under me.
I cried out, landing hard on my left hip and wrist. My purse skidded against the far wall. Harry’s article lay fanned around its paper clip on the dusty floor. Breathing heavily, with rivulets of sweat pouring down from my hairline and into my big maternity brassiere, I sat there waiting, listening, praying no one would come out of their apartment to check on me.
All was quiet. I could hear a radio droning inside the nearest apartment, 2B. Beverly’s door remained closed upstairs. My stomach contracted. Another hot red wave crested, as though someone had flipped up a switch and sent one long bolt of electricity through me. I shut my eyes, bore down with my chin toward my chest. In a moment, it stopped.
Out on the street, I found a pay phone to place a call to Mr. Franklin. I had to call collect—strike number one—and tell him I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t return to the office today—strike number two against me. Already I was skating on thin ice, I knew it, but never in my life had I wanted more to shut myself in, bolt the door, and pull a blanket up over my head. My entire body was shaking, and I hoped to God the fall hadn’t damaged the baby.
The problem was, I didn’t have a home to return to. I had someone else’s home. And even though it was not yet three in the afternoon when I got to Joe’s apartment, I could hear him inside as I turned the key in the door.
“Joe?” I called tentatively, hanging my jacket on one of the hooks on the entry wall. I tried to keep my voice steady. “What are you doing home from work so early?”
He didn’t answer. I could hear pages turning in the little study. I turned the corner and there he was, my “Lunar Housewife” manuscript strewn over his lap and the desk, his face flushed.
So he’d gone snooping, as well. I put a fist to my hip. “What is this?”
“I should be asking you that!” he sputtered. “Is this how you’ve been spending your time? Writing this, this nonsense—”
To hear him speak this way of my pet project, to see him tossing pages aside as though they were so much junk, cut something loose in me. I’d planned to broach the subject of Harry’s betrayal tactfully, shrewdly, to extract as much information from Joe as I could, but now I slapped Harry’s article on the desk in front of him. “Maybe you can tell me what the hell this is.”
His lip curled as he looked down at the papers. “Never seen this before, and I’m in no mood to play guessing games.”
I poked my gloved finger into his lap. “It’s Harry stealing my work, that’s what it is. It’s an article he was working on about Hemingway. It’s terrible, I might add.” During the ride downtown, I’d read it, and I’d been flabbergasted to find Beverly hadn’t been kidding. The thing was a piece of crap, disorganized, childish in tone. At one point Harry had even used the wrong form of “your”—“Hemingway is not you’re typical literary icon.”
Knowing I’d done such better work with the same material filled me with even more rage.
“He stole the stuff you two cut from my interview,” I shouted, spittle flying from between my teeth, “everything Hemingway said about surveillance, and the FBI, and the Castro brothers. Did you know Harry was sneaking behind your back?”
Joe’s hands came down, slowly, and he gathered the pages into a stack. Ducking his head, he tried to hand them back to me. “I don’t even want to see it.”
“Joe,” I said quietly, the pads of my fingers pressed into the desk. He didn’t look up. “Someone must have found out about this. Someone had him killed.”
Joe ran his hands through his hair. “Do you hear yourself? You sound crazy.”
“He bought heroin from two men who Beverly thought didn’t look like drug pushers.”
“Beverly? What are you doing talking to Beverly?”
“You cannot tell me who I’m allowed to speak to, Joe Martin. You cannot call me crazy and expect that to shut me up.” I winced. A bruise on my hip, from the fall, had really begun to smart. “Who are you involved with? Why did you need to cut that stuff from my work in the first place?”
He glowered at me. “Your piece went too long. Any writer worth his salt knows how to take some cuts.”
“No, no, I won’t accept that as an explanation. Not this time, especially not now that Harry’s dead. Are you working for the CIA?”
“Oh, Christ. The who?”
“The CIA.” I took a second to catch my breath, to make sure what I had to say came out right. My blood was beating madly in my temples. “I’ve been thinking about Harry’s Harvard-Yale essay. If you consider it in a certain way…I’m trying to remember the quote….” I closed my eyes. “ ‘What the new radicals don’t understand is that things like boycotts only result in fewer people getting to enjoy a bus ride.’ He’s encouraging young people to accept the status quo. And his language about that damned football game—like he was describing a holy experience. Do you know what it reminded me of?” I was really on a roll now.
“What did it remind you of,” Joe said, his mouth pinched.
“Goebbels.”
Joe’s eyes popped. His lower teeth came forward. “Goebbels. Propaganda, you mean. You sound like a crazy little girl.” He grabbed a handful of papers, my novel and Harry’s article all mixed together, and shuffled them onto the desk in a heap. “Goebbels! For God’s sake. This is all a nice attempt to distract me from how silly you’ve been. Good try.”
“Excuse me?”
“Writing this Russian fantasy nonsense, which I’ve already told you is a bad idea. No one will want to publish this, Lou. Can’t you see that? Meanwhile, you’ve got your own fellow eating out of the palm of your hand.”
Eating out of the palm of my hand? Then why was I the one who’d been feeling controlled, manipulated, managed lately? “How so?”
“I pay you more per word than I pay any other writer, male or female, to write the kind of features everybody’s dying to write.”
He’d effectively pushed me into the living room. With each step he took forward, I took one back, until I was pinned to the sofa. The room was dark. The sky outside, stretching vast over the Hudson and Hell’s Kitchen, had thickened with rain clouds.
Joe had his finger in my face. “I do everything in my power to get you what you say you want, real work as a writer, and you fritter your time away writing girly nonsense and cooking up crackpot theories. Harry wasn’t killed; he was a reckless blockhead who finally got what was coming to him.”
In all our time together, I couldn’t remember that Joe and I had ever fought like this. We were both breathing heavily, his face still the color of a ripe beet, tears in his eyes.
“You can’t mean that,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. Another Braxton-Hicks contraction gripped my belly. I let it roll past me, ignoring its white heat. “You can’t think Harry had it coming.” An awful realization came to me then—what if Joe, even some part of Joe he’d hidden from himself, had wanted Harry dead? I remembered how hard he’d gripped Harry’s arm after the awards dinner, as if he’d meant to hurt him. “Do you hear yourself? You can’t possibly think that.”
“No,” he said, his voice suddenly quite small. He put his face in his hands. “No, I didn’t mean it.”
“He’s just another dead young man.” I was crying hard now, in pain and exhaustion and grief. “Another American casualty. Just like Paul.”
Joe peeked at me from between his fingers. “I’m sorry about Paul, Louise, but you’re wrong.”
“What did Paul’s death accomplish?” I gasped between sobs. I was changing the subject, I knew it, but I’d been bottling up my heartache over Paul for so long, and it all came spilling out. “The borders didn’t change. They’re calling it a proxy war, did you know that? As if the infantry were toys. It’s an outrage. And you wouldn’t even let me write…” My voice went out. Another contraction came over me, this one even stronger than the last, doubling me over. The pain was intense, ripping me open from the inside out.
Joe’s hands went to my shoulders. “Here,” he said, his voice still stiff, but slightly melted, “let me help you to the couch.” I waited, and he followed suit, as the pain crested and rolled away. When I went to stand up straight, I felt a pop! between my legs. Something warm began gushing down my stockings, pooling in the heels of my shoes.
He was still trying to lead me to sit. “Stop,” I said, and pointed downward. I had my eyes closed. I could hear him gasp.
“We’re taking you to the hospital,” he said. “I’ll call a car. Don’t move. Louise, you hear me? Don’t you move. And don’t look down.”
But I did. He left me, suddenly shivering, standing in a puddle of fluid, and when I opened my eyes and couldn’t resist glancing downward, I saw that the puddle was a deep red.