AUGUST 13, 1984
NEW YORK CITY
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE NEW YORK ARTISTS’ COALITION
A Cocktail Party for Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro
The next President and Vice President of the United States
Donation 250 Dollars
Cocktails, Nibbles
And a Surprise Guest
RSVP to the New York Artists’ Coalition 212–4______
Hurry!
THADDEUS WONDERED IF THE GIRLS WERE OF DRINKING age. One thing seemed certain: they were Republicans. At least he thought they were. He’d overheard one of them saying something affectionate about Ronald Reagan. What had once been a punch line—that cipher becoming president—was about to become another four years. Whatever they were, the girls stirred his hunger for a human touch. They had peach lips and freckles, they wore black slacks and white button-down shirts. They had a way about them that made you think they were doing you a favor whenever they poured a drink. Maybe it was because they had to bartend a party in a sea of well-heeled liberals. Out there in the world, on the blazing-hot sex-drunk streets of New York, the girls might not be noticeable, but here in his seldom-used New York apartment, filled with media business types willing to spend two hundred bucks on gin and cheese, they were riveting in their pure insolent beauty.
Thaddeus sidled next to his agent, Josh Zoller, who was being served an ironic gin and tonic. Zoller had just arrived from his summer house in Bridgehampton dressed in tennis shorts and a Polo shirt, with a pale blue sweater tied around his shoulders, though it was scorching hot outside. His thinning hair revealed a sunburned scalp, and his nose was peeling.
“Rumor has it that you’re shopping around for a new agent,” Zoller said, wasting no time. Known for his directness, he took off like a helicopter, straight up and away.
“Where’d you hear that?” Thaddeus asked.
“You haven’t been talking to other agents?”
“Hey, I don’t know who the fuck I’m talking to half the time.”
“That’s weak, Thaddeus. It’s a small world. I hear things, you know.”
“You hear rumors,” Thaddeus said.
“Here’s the thing about rumors—most of the time they’re true. Don’t let your friendliness get you into trouble. You can’t like everybody and everyone can’t like you. Don’t be naive. These people are sniffing around because you’re currently making money. Sorry to be the voice of common sense here, but that’s how it is. Anyhow, where’s Grace?” Zoller frowned, contemplating the possibility that Thaddeus was not only a man who would deep-six his loyal agent, but who’d also ditch his own wife.
“In dear old Leyden.” Thaddeus was going to elaborate about why—David was being difficult, or maybe David had a cold, or Grace was tired, or the nanny went back to El Salvador. But Grace simply didn’t feel like coming down to the city and didn’t give a damn about the election. She refused to see the importance of what was happening in the country, of how the Reagans had given greed a deviously benign face, of how unions were being crushed, and trees caused pollution. Even the Democrats nominating a woman for vice president failed to galvanize Grace. She could not get past her initial insight that Thaddeus offering their pied-à-terre for a Democratic fund-raiser was a career move on his part, or perhaps a way of proving to his parents and himself and to whoever else might be keeping score that all those absurd Hollywood paychecks hadn’t changed his values. He gave houses away and he hosted fund-raisers! What more could those scurrilous old Trots want of him?
“I tried to interest her in a Mondale fund-raiser, but no such luck,” Thaddeus said. Oh Grace, Grace. Right now, even hearing someone say her name agitated Thaddeus. With every emotional inch she moved away from him, he longed for her more.
“I think of this as a party for Geraldine Ferraro,” said a voice behind him, a woman’s voice. “I’m here for Gerry.”
Thaddeus turned toward the voice, reminding himself to Stop smiling, goddamnit, for once in your life. The speaker was Ann Rosenzweig, who ran United Artists’ small New York office. Thaddeus was fond of her and didn’t know anyone who wasn’t, but she was, in terms of the movie business, strictly a dead letter, with authority to reject pitches and scripts, and none to accept them. She was dressed in a shimmering gray skirt and a white silk blouse. She had large, rather comical ears, which she emphasized with clunky, humorous earrings.
“Honestly, Ann?” Thaddeus said. “I’m stoked about Ferraro. A woman vice president? It would be amazing.” He patted his chest, as if his heart was swelling. “If the money we make here tonight can help put a woman in the White House, then I will truly believe I have helped do something worthwhile in my lifetime.”
He was surprised by how moved he was by his own expression of sentiment, since the Mondale candidacy was hopeless, and nominating a woman for vice president was a kind of Hail Mary pass. Mondale was a hack, but at least he was humane—a union guy who’d rather do the right thing than screw you over. The Reagan Republicans were different from the Republicans of Thaddeus’s childhood, the grocers and the small-town pharmacists, the biddies and the bigots and the Babbitts and the Buckleys. Though Reagan was elderly, the Republicans seemed suddenly young, a new breed who seemed to be working out, slimming down, catching up with the culture, having sex, getting high, while the Dems looked pudgy and exhausted, trudging around the convention center pumping their placards up and down like pistons in an engine running on fumes. One thing remained constant, though: the Republicans were the party of the rich. Yet wasn’t Thaddeus himself rather on the rich side of things? At least statistically? Didn’t he have a lot to show for himself, and a lot to lose? Did he really want inflation and higher taxes? Did he really want the government’s hand in his pocket? Did he want to start schlepping his own suitcase? Not out of liberal gallantry, but because there would be no one there to take it out of his hands.
He ran his fingers through his hair. He was losing touch with what he believed about any given issue. Everything was confusing, verging on the freakish: on the one hand this, on the other hand that, and on the other other hand this and that. His life was a crash course in indeterminacy. Pages were written, pages were revised, pages were thrown away. You were hired, fired, promises made, promises broken. You were not supposed to complain, you were not even really supposed to notice.
Ann was with a good-looking man with a Weimar haircut. He spoke languidly, his posture careless. “But Ferarro’s husband,” he said. “Isn’t everyone saying he’s mobbed up? John Zaccaro, aka Johnny Z?”
“He’s a businessman,” Ann said. “And before that he was a Marine.”
“Sounds like Michael Corleone,” Thaddeus said.
Ann laughed and said, “You,” by which she could have meant You jerk or That was such a you thing to say.
He was sorry he’d made the joke. “Don’t get me wrong.” It was a phrase he was using with increasing frequency. “I like her. She’s from Newburgh, not so far from where I live.”
“Where you live?” Ann exclaimed. “Then what’s this?”
“This is extra,” Thaddeus said.
“Lucky you.” She gestured, encompassing the apartment—the second floor of a Federal town house on Horatio Street. With its whitewashed plaster, polished oak floors, practical furniture, and shallow hearth filled in the summer with eucalyptus branches.
“Well, we’ll see how long it lasts.”
A man in his forties, tall, balding, with seething eyebrows, a military posture, held a drink in one hand and a napkin filled with canapés in the other. He shoved the canapés into his jacket and extended his hand to Thaddeus.
“This is your joint, right?” he said. “You’re Thaddeus Kaufman.”
“Welcome. Thanks for coming.”
“And you wrote Hostages, right?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I wrote it, yes.”
“I’m a lawyer, and I’m representing a whole bunch of folks who worked on the set of your movie. Car parkers. Are you aware of any of this?”
“Not really. It’s amazing how many jobs a movie can create, though. That’s sort of great.”
“If the jobs are decent. If the jobs don’t strip a man of his most basic human dignity. My clients were hired to hold parking spots for production trailers. Their job was to sit in a car for five, ten, sometimes fifteen hours, so when the production needs the space it’s there for them. They just have to sit there. Pretty easy work, huh? Except they cannot leave the car. That’s the thing. Leave your car and you’re fired. So what happens when you’re holding a spot for a director or a movie star or some big shot? I’ll tell you. I have a client who lost three toes. Frostbite. I have clients who were relieving themselves in bottles and bags. And I’ve got two from El Salvador without papers and they are still waiting to be paid.”
“That’s horrible.”
“So? Can you help us out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you on set? What did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“And you didn’t know anything about it?”
“How could I know?”
“Yeah, how could you know? That’s what they all say.” The lawyer reached into his jacket and pulled out his card, handed it to Thaddeus. Thaddeus put it into his shirt pocket without looking at it.
The five-room apartment normally looked neglected, but this evening it had an air of elegance, filled as it was with affluent Democrats. Curious to see if this party was going to be worth the effort, Thaddeus had called someone at the New York Artists’ Coalition, an organization for people in the local media business who wanted to pitch in on liberal causes, and under whose auspices this evening’s fund-raiser was being held, and asked how many people were expected. He’d been told that 105 people had RSVP’d yes, and at $250 a person that was a respectable haul, enough to pay for tens of thousands of leaflets, possibly enough to put one under every windshield wiper in the city. Who knew? Maybe Mondale could pull off a miracle . . .
Suddenly a crash of cymbals, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the party. Startled, Thaddeus turned toward the noise. Kitchen. Kitchen? It took a few extra moments to realize what he had heard was the sound of many, many glasses shattering, to the accompanying rattle of a dropped tray.
THE CRASH HAD MOMENTARILY CAST a haze of relative quiet over the party, but by the time Thaddeus reached the kitchen the cross talk and the laughter had resumed. Small, with only one window, the kitchen was separated from the rest of the apartment by a swinging door, and when Thaddeus pushed through, it hit the heel of Susan Fialkin from the New York Artists’ Coalition.
“Sorry,” Thaddeus said.
“Oh there you are,” Fialkin said. She was the Coalition’s sole staff member. Inefficient, harried, confrontational, and unkind, her employment was a mystery to Thaddeus.
One of the bartenders was slouched against the sink. Her face was pale, and her eyes were bright red. Countless broken glasses were spread over the blue-and-white tiles—the wineglasses, bowl, stem, and foot, the cocktail glasses in great shards. Some of the broken glass had landed on the table, and possibly found its way onto the trays of hors d’oeuvres—they’d have to be disposed of. A stocky, impatient-looking looking man in his thirties, with a broad, Eastern European face and salt-and-pepper hair, was quietly berating the bartender, whose nerves were as shattered as the glasses she had dropped.
“You can’t put too many on. How many times do I say this? Nine? Twenty?”
“I didn’t,” the girl managed to say.
“No?” her boss said, pointing to the floor.
“You’re not hurt, are you?” Thaddeus asked. But she seemed not to have heard him. Her attention was completely in the grip of her boss, like an animal in a trap.
“Okay,” Susan Fialkin said. “Let’s just get this cleaned up. We’ve got a lot of party to get through.” Turning toward Thaddeus, she asked, “Broom?”
“Broom?” he asked.
“And a dustpan. Something.”
He thought for a moment. He was quite sure he had a broom and a dustpan, but he couldn’t say where they were. He noticed a narrow closet to the left of the refrigerator.
“Did you look in there?” he asked.
Evidently, the door had not been opened in some time; he had to give it a vigorous tug, and when it finally opened there was no broom inside, or anything else that would be of use. It was full of brown paper bags from D’Agostino, a nearby supermarket. Thaddeus remembered shopping at D’Agostino only a couple of times since purchasing the apartment. There was no way he could have accumulated so many shopping bags. They must have been left there by the previous owner, a U.N. translator named Lawrence Winnick, who was leaving New York after the death of his boyfriend from the “gay cancer.” Thaddeus had liked genial, soft-spoken Winnick, but now felt a twist of fury at him—what kind of person leaves a bunch of Dag bags stuffed in the closet?
“No broom here,” Thaddeus said, closing the door, and then kneeing it shut even tighter.
“We’re going to need something,” Fialkin said. She moved a chunk of glass with the toe of her tan shoe. She moved it an inch, and another inch, and then kicked it hard, sending it skittering across the floor.
“What are you doing?” asked Thaddeus.
“I’m standing in a kitchen with a man who doesn’t know where to find a broom in his own apartment.”
“I’m not even sure I have a broom, Susan. What is the big deal?”
“Sweeping. How do things get swept?”
“The housekeeper,” he said. He moved a little closer to her, wanting her to know that he was getting angrier. “Obviously.” He had donated the use of his apartment out of the goodness of his heart, and suddenly this mieskeit is treating him like a sociopath because he can’t locate a broom?
“I’m sure you have a broom somewhere in this very beautiful apartment,” Fialkin said, holding her ground. “Or a mop? A mop would do.”
“Susan, I’m sorry. I’m helpless, okay? I’m pathetic. I’ll look around. It’s not that big a place.”
The other young bartender clattered through the door, carrying a broom; it seemed to Thaddeus that the dark green shaft and bright yellow head were much larger than what you’d find on an ordinary broom. In her other hand she carried a gleaming copper dustpan, also oversize.
“Wow, those are some high-end cleaning implements,” Thaddeus said.
The supervisor, who had, while Thaddeus and Susan discussed the broom, gone from berating the girl who’d dropped the glasses to discussing upcoming jobs with her, stepped forward and immediately began berating the second girl, even though she had somehow come up with the mysterious broom.
“Well, I guess this is under control,” Thaddeus said to no one in particular, backing out of the kitchen, and resisting the temptation to ask a stranger where his broom closet was.
But wasn’t that the whole purpose of success? he counseled himself. To not know these things?
THE CATERING STAFF CONTINUED TO circulate hors d’oeuvres, but the bar was now self-serve. Thaddeus looked around his apartment. For the most part these were agents and assistants, producers, publicists. There were a few familiar faces. Jerzy Kosiński was there, thin and impeccable. Every few minutes, like a soldier blindly firing his rifle over the top of his foxhole, he raised a small camera over his head and snapped a picture.
A woman from Governor Cuomo’s office addressed the guests, making a couple of jokes about the governor’s famous reluctance to spend a night away from Albany, and reminding them that “this upcoming election is perhaps the most important election of our lifetime.” She was an imposing dark woman in a sleeveless green dress. When she was finished she introduced Ed Asner. Stocky, balding, he had recently fallen; he had a black eye and a large bandage on his chin, and he leaned on a dark red cane.
“I saw Michael Jackson doing that moonwalking thing of his and wanted to try it myself,” Asner explained, and glowed with pleasure when the line got a laugh, as if an old dear friend had wandered into the room. In his brief remarks, he seemed less interested in talking about Mondale than in going after Lee Iacocca, the auto exec whose book had been a bestseller all that year. “When auto execs get treated like rock and roll stars, you know a country is in trouble.” He went on to defend actors and other people in the creative community who got involved in politics, thumping the black rubber tip of his cane against the floor as he demolished a series of straw men who would want to deny entertainers their constitutional right to affect national policy. It was an odd argument, Thaddeus thought, since Mondale was in fact running against an actor.
“Question?” a voice from the crowd called out, managing to pack that one word with an overflow of irony.
It was Kip. Oh shit.
“Who can turn the world on with her smile?” Kip asked.
There were a few laughs, but mainly the room was uncomfortably quiet.
“Who in God’s fuck are you?” Asner rumbled. His small dark eyes scanned the room, squinting as though he were looking past stage lights.
“And I’m also curious about this whole taking a nothing day and making it all seem worthwhile,” Kip added. “Curious how that is achieved. What with all that’s going on.”
Asner’s face reddened, making his fringe of cottony hair look all the whiter. There was something joyful and Christmassy about his coloring, though his expression was murderous. “We’re here because we care about our country,” Asner said. “We’re not here to fuck around like a bunch of children. This is a very important election and we’re here because we are tired—and ashamed of!—having thieves and murderers run our government. You want to play little piss-pot games? Go to the playground. You understand me?”
Thaddeus wound his way through the tightly packed room and took Kip by the elbow. He hadn’t seen him in months—Kip had suddenly left E.F. Hutton and moved to Bangkok without saying good-bye, returning just that week to begin work at Paine Webber.
“Kip, what are you doing? Are you drunk?”
“I don’t think so. Why? Are you?” Kip asked, genially. He placed his hand gently on Thaddeus’s cheek.
“No.”
“Well, maybe I am.” He held a glass with a look that seemed to say, What are we going to do about this incorrigible troublemaker of an empty glass?
“You need to be quiet,” Thaddeus said, momentarily destabilized by Kip’s touch, the warmth of it, the suddenness.
“You’re so out of it, my friend,” Kip said. “Both of you in that stupid house in that ridiculous little town. You live in your own world and you have no fucking idea what’s going on.”
Several of the guests standing closest to Thaddeus and Kip needed to register their disapproval of Kip’s remarks. One young man was practically shaking with rage. “Do you want four more years of Reagan?” he asked in a furious whisper. “Is that what you want?”
“I think my question to Mr. Asner was legitimate,” Kip said, drawing himself up to his full height.
“We’re trying to do some good here, Kip,” Thaddeus said, his teeth clenched. Asner had gone back to his speech, but the people close by seemed more interested in what Kip and Thaddeus were saying.
“Oh please. It’s hopeless. It’s all hopeless. You’re such a . . .” Kip searched for a word to convey his contempt. “Do-gooder. And like all do-gooders, you’re selfish. But here’s a bulletin for you, old pal. The meek do not and will not inherit the earth. The meek are going to do what the meek have always done, which is eat shit and die.”
“Kip. Please. What’s happening here?”
Kip shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t mean to spoil the party.” He fixed Thaddeus with a furious stare. “A friend of mine is dying.”
“Oh God. Who?”
“No one you know.” For a moment, it looked as if he might touch Thaddeus’s face again, but instead he patted his shoulder dismissively. “Ergo, not your problem.”
Meanwhile, Ed Asner concluded his remarks with a request that everyone join together for a verse of “Solidarity Forever.” The old union anthem borrowed the melody from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but few people present knew the words, so basically it was Asner singing by himself. He didn’t seem to mind, and when it was over he thrust his fist into the air. “Viva La Raza!”
“Viva La Raza!” the crowd replied, and when Thaddeus looked around, Kip was gone.
EVENTUALLY, EVERYONE LEFT, EXCEPT FOR the caterers. The two bartenders walked through carrying crates of steaming clean glasses down to the van. The girls looked tired and unself-conscious, shirts out, covering their sweet Republican derrieres. Thaddeus felt his heart beating despicably in his throat.
The second girl out, the one who had dropped the tray of glasses, might have felt his gaze upon her, sensed his dubious intentions, and turned to glance at him, mainly as a way of confirming her instincts—she was still learning to protect herself from men. She hurried to catch up with her coworker and Thaddeus heard her say, I feel horrible. I forgot to take my medicine. A feeling of desolation washed over him.
He went to the kitchen. The leftover booze was apparently for him. He poured a large dose of Stolichnaya. He raised his glass to commemorate the years he had been consigned to drink vodka with names like Prince Igor or Dudley’s. He had read an annoying piece in a magazine, claiming that in blind tastings a panel of experts rated some of the cheap vodkas higher than the pricey ones, but Thaddeus did not believe it. Such findings contradicted his experience and his faith.
How was he ever going to get through the rest of this night on his own?
The phone rang, and he hurried to answer it. He had a premonition, which was really no more than a wish, that it was Grace. Grace to the rescue, calling to assume her rightful place at the center of his universe. She would be calling to convince him to drive home and promising to wait up for him. Hint, hint. Or perhaps she was about to tell him that Doris had agreed to spend the night with David and that Grace herself was just packing a bag and would be walking up the steps to the Horatio Street apartment in under two hours. Or perhaps she was just going to speak loads of lovely filth to him while he got himself off and she pretended to do the same.
But the call was from Neal Kosoff. Thaddeus supposed the director was a friend, but was always aware that it’s called the movie business not the movie friendship, so you couldn’t be beguiled by the flattery, humor, and abundant charms of these people. Helping in this unsentimental education was his being replaced on Hostages by other writers (finally six of them, in rapid succession), while Kosoff, who he had originally thought of as an ally, and a kind of partner, sat idly by. Thaddeus assumed he would never hear from Kosoff after that, but these guys had no shame and Kosoff’s friendliness never abated. Not only was there that elaborate housewarming present in the person of Buddy Klein, but there were numerous requests for Thaddeus’s opinions and suggestions while Kosoff went through the dozen or so drafts that inexorably buried the work Thaddeus himself had done. When production on Hostages commenced, Kosoff occasionally called Thaddeus from the set, and when production was completed, Thaddeus was invited to Austin, Texas, for the wrap party. Then the film’s premiere at the Ziegfeld on Fifty-Fourth Street, where Thaddeus and Grace were seated in the row reserved for the writers and their plus ones, which Thaddeus feared was going to be a nightmarishly uncomfortable situation, assuming, as he did, that most of the other writers harbored the same resentments that burned within him. But the mood in the Writers’ Row was one of dark hilarity and cynical solidarity, in which their shared insignificance was a catalyst for camaraderie. When the character of the ambivalent Islamacist said, “I love many things about your country,” one of the writers called out from the darkness, “Hey, that’s my line,” which began a continual volley of tomfoolery from the writers, as if they were all rowdies in a high school auditorium. One writer called out her ownership of the line, “There’s not much time,” and another claimed “Step on it,” and even Thaddeus got into the act, calling out Mine! after Elliott Gould said, “Thanks a lot,” though Thaddeus worried that they were all committing career suicide, racing like lemmings off the edge of a riff.
Kosoff was calling from his car, which added some drama. His calls from the car had a way of ending abruptly, and waves of static rolled through the connection as Kosoff free-associated about a script he and Thaddeus were working on about the bombing of the Marine headquarters in Beirut. He offered various names of actors who could play the young Marines, speculating, spit-balling, bullshitting. That was the key to success in the business—you had to continually tell yourself that your dreams were about to come true and that what you thought and said actually mattered. “What do you think of Steve Guttenberg?” Kosoff wanted to know.
“As a Marine?” Thaddeus asked.
“I like Kevin Bacon in this, too. Ellen Barkin as the girlfriend.”
“What girlfriend?”
“Terrible idea,” Kosoff said, laughing. “Just a thought. I mean if we have a stateside component. It could be good. What’s your availability look like right now?”
“I’m working and I need work. I haven’t paid last year’s taxes yet. I’ve managed to become rich and broke.” He knew you weren’t supposed to say you needed work, but he had a theory that by admitting to weakness he might be suggesting hidden strength.
“Yeah, yeah, I know the feeling.”
“Hey, Neal, this lawyer was here tonight and he’s running a case dealing with stuff that happened on the set of Hostages.”
“Really? I’m not aware of anything. . . .” He might have been going into a canyon. Thaddeus waited for the crackling to stop.
“A bunch of drivers? Apparently some of them got treated really badly.”
“Wow. Good luck to them.”
“Do you know anything about it?”
“How would I?”
And with that he was gone, Kosoff vaporized without a word of warning. Thaddeus was sure that the affable director almost certainly made his important calls from a real telephone in his office, and filled the time of the commute between Pico Boulevard and Benedict Canyon with his second-tier calls.
Why did Grace not call? And why was he sure that if he were to call her, all he would hear was his own voice on the answering machine? He understood that his success, for all the pleasures it had brought them, had separated them. He was suddenly celebrated, not by the people he had hoped to impress when coming to New York, not this imaginary tribunal of clever, basically progressive literary types, but by the movie folks, who were so good at flattery, who sent rock legends to your house to entertain at your party, who signed such big juicy checks and had them delivered to you by Federal Express. And in the meantime, there was Grace, making her exacting drawings with the unflagging devotion of a monk illuminating manuscripts, day after day, month after month, year after year.
Had he become so absorbed in the titillating terrors of his unexpected life that he had forgotten to encourage her? What was he supposed to say? How do you discuss drawings and paintings? It did not come naturally; you had to study it. The conversation about visual art was generally conducted in a language he did not know, and to the extent that he was aware of it, it was a language he found pretentious and ridiculous, some weird mix of political jargon and obdurate philosophy. He did not know how to articulate what persuasive theory of art or reality Grace’s work illustrated, or if she was a formalist or an experimentalist. Well, no, he knew she was not an experimentalist, that much he knew—but could he say it? Was it a positive thing to say, or was it a knock? Or did it have no particular value, just like those all-white canvases he had seen on one or another of their gallery crawls, big white canvases he stared at to be polite and to appear engaged, and which in time began to strobe with colors, as his own mind, starved for something to do, projected prismatic flashes into the void. It wasn’t only Grace’s work that he lacked the vocabulary to discuss, and now he wished he had made the effort to learn the lingo. Yet he had resisted it, just as he resisted his parents’ arcane patois, refused to learn the difference between Communism, State Capitalism, and Bureaucratic Collectivism, or to admit that there even was a difference, or, frankly, to care. Even without the vocabulary, he ought to have been more vigilant about expressing how beautiful he found her work, how the verisimilitude of it, its photographic qualities, impressed the hell out of him, and how indifferent he was to the fact that the style she worked in tended to exclude her from the conversation among contemporary artists and gatekeepers. The last time he and Grace had been to a gallery—a freezing little box of a place on Prince Street, with a skunky smell in the air and a crack the went from one end of the concrete floor to the other—the work had seemed deliberately incompetent, stick figures with childish faces, and cutouts of the Jetsons and the Flintstones. What shit, Thaddeus whispered to Grace, resorting to layman’s terms because that’s how a man gets laid. When his lips touched her ear it was flaming hot, and when he stepped back to have a better look at her she seemed to be fighting back tears. It recalled to him how she had looked when he went after one of her studio mates on their wedding day—the look of adoration and trust in Grace, how it seemed as if the gate behind her eyes had swung open, and for a short while he was in her world. He had come to wonder if, as far as Grace was concerned, that was it, the finest moment of their entire relationship, and everything else, money, house, children, the thousand nights in each other’s arms, had all been basically placeholders while she waited for the return of the feeling she had in the snow on Park Avenue South, the feeling of being believed in.
HE RETURNED TO THE KITCHEN to pour himself another Mondale-benefit vodka. The kitchen was cleaner than it was before the party. It was as if something was being covered up, a crime scene wiped down. He opened the refrigerator, and saw the caterers had left him two trays of leftovers, tightly sealed. He unwrapped one and ate a couple of dabs of curried chicken salad on water biscuits while waiting for Kosoff to call back.
The malarial fevers of desire were proving resistant to distraction. He tried to think of someone to call. The night was young! Surely, there had to be someone out there who would want to meet him somewhere for a drink. Yet everyone seemed wrong—either too much time had passed since the last meeting, or there was too much disparity between their incomes. He hadn’t made that many friends in New York (or anywhere else, come to think of it). The friendships formed at B. Altman had not survived his leaving the job. His friendships with the Collective had not survived Hostages.
He watched the end of a ball game on TV, feeling like a heel cheering for the Yankees after having spent his childhood despising them. But he was in New York now and part of survival was loving what was near you. Wasn’t it? And who was near him now? The guests gone, Grace a hundred miles north. He allowed his thoughts to drift toward the woman living directly above him on the third floor. Occasionally, while alone, he could hear her light little footsteps clicking out their Morse code: I’m here, I’m busy, I’m happy, I’m nervous, I’m sad, I’m here, I’m here.
Her name was Jeelu Ramachandran. She was born in India, in Delhi. Her family moved to Troy, Michigan, when Jeelu was three years old; her father had a corporate job at X-Ray Industries. Like Thaddeus, Jeelu went to the University of Michigan and now she worked at Chemical Bank in New York, and that was about 50 percent of what he knew about her. The other half was comprised of little scraps of information he had gathered during their brief interactions—she liked baseball, she was allergic to cats, she was mad for John Travolta. She was not beautiful, or maybe she was, he kept changing his mind about that. Nor was she particularly friendly, but there were moments when a desire to simply touch her was so intense that it muddled his mind and made it difficult to believe she didn’t feel something like that, too.
He sank onto the sofa and sipped his drink, numbing one moment, invigorating the next. He listened for her footsteps and there they were, as if conjured up by his horrible, pointless desire. He blamed Grace; had she been more welcoming, he would not have so much untapped desire.
Jeelu’s efficient small steps were followed everywhere by the frantic scamper of her Yorkshire terrier, a butterscotch sneeze of a dog with long ebony claws. Her dog’s name was Jeelu, also. He was amazed at the goofiness of it, naming a dog after yourself, but the oddness of it added an element of incongruity that served to draw Thaddeus all the deeper into the maze. Knowing that he would not in a hundred years so much as kiss her did not make matters better. In fact, it made everything worse. His desire’s only relationship was with itself, there was nothing to keep it in check, it was as unsocialized as a child raised in isolation.
The Jeelus were going down the stairs. He allowed himself to wonder for a moment if she might knock on his door and ask if he’d like to take a walk. Why would she do such a thing? Who knew? Maybe she was as lonely as him. Maybe she was as crazy as him. What a lovely thought that was. It was a bit late to be taking her dog out and perhaps she was leery of the dark streets, and had finally figured out that Jeelu 2 could not protect her from anything, not even an assault from a kitten. In the flurry of maybes he almost missed hearing the Jeelus and their six feet passing from the third floor to the second and continuing their way down. He felt spurned. The madness of these fantasy affairs, it was enough to make you loathe make-believe, enough to convince you fantasy was by its very nature toxic. Yet even now he was not quite finished with the matter. He went to the window, parted the narrow slats of the wooden shade and peered down at the street, just in time to see the two Jeelus walking briskly toward Hudson Street.
Thaddeus was up and out of his apartment without any real awareness of his movement. He was a book that slips from your hand when you close your eyes, an apple that rolls off the edge of the table. He was nothing, just atoms moving around. As soon as he closed the door and locked it, the heat of the evening was on him as if it had been poured from a kettle.
For half an hour, he walked the streets of his neighborhood, forcing himself to maintain a brisk pace, for fear of appearing aimless and strange. He was at once looking for Jeelu and dreading crossing her path.
The moon appeared and disappeared, a face looking briefly in on the dark city. Solitary strollers emerged from the muzzy darkness one by one. Approaching was an Asian woman in flip-flops. New York! Was there any place in the world with more beautiful women? She was delicate and private, wearing neon yellow terry-cloth shorts, a white shirt knotted at the navel; she chewed gum furiously and rubbed her hands together, squeezing them, as if trying to wash with only a tiny sliver of soap. Perhaps she had left her apartment to get away from an argument. His eyes widened; he could hear his own breathing. I’m one of those men, he thought. Yet look at her! Her? There was no her, he did not know the first thing about her. Moments later she disappeared into the haze of steam rising out of a manhole, and a woman in her forties appeared, big boned and swaggering, wild blond hair, beer can protruding from the paper bag, her belly swaying beneath her T-shirt. Oh what a ride she would be, no question about it. She carried the scent of many bridges burned behind her. She detected Thaddeus’s interest, and furrowed her brow. But she saw his harmlessness, his helplessness, and it made her smile. Thaddeus nodded, touched his eyebrow with one finger, half lost in an instant of imagining what it would be like to lie down with this woman, to experience her raucous personality, her pent-up energies, her tipsy abandon, her desire, not unlike his own, to somehow kick the plug out of the wall of Self and be plunged into darkness.
He walked south on Washington Street, wanting the closeness of the river and the possibility of cooling breezes, but not daring to go to West Street or the docks, where by now the skin trade was running at full throttle. Who would be there? Boys down from Harlem, and ridiculously muscled men in ripped leather vests, storm trooper boots. Also, the transvestite hookers who seemed to arrive via spacecraft to ply their trade in the backs of meat-delivery trucks. Venues reeking of torment and ecstasy. He remembered for a moment when imagination was like wings, something to lift him above his life; now it was a jackhammer, pounding him into the pavement.
WASHINGTON STREET WAS SLANTED AND secretive, with the long shadows of street lamps crisscrossing the gleaming black cobblestones. The utility company had opened a portion of the street and thrown up a barricade around it. Steam the color of tarnished silver poured out of the opening, intermittently yellowed by the flashing light on one of the sawhorses. There was rubbish in the gutters, and the moronic sound of air conditioners hummed from the windows of the row houses, walk-ups, and converted factories. On the other side of the street there was a curly-haired man with an unusually large head walking a pair of Airedales, but otherwise Thaddeus was alone. He wondered if he would catch a glimpse of Hannah, but his wondering prevented her from appearing. She could only take him by surprise.
He passed a pay phone padlocked to a cyclone fence, next to a newspaper box selling the Village Voice. The moment Thaddeus was parallel with the phone, it began to trill like a mad bird of night. Startled, Thaddeus stopped, looked up and down the street. There was no one around to answer it and no one to see if he succumbed to curiosity’s temptations and answered it himself. He picked it up and said hello.
“I see you,” a man’s voice said, in a harsh tone. “I’m looking right now at you.”
Across the street was a modest six-story brick building. A light in the window on the fourth floor flicked off and on.
“That’s me,” the voice said. Again, his window blinked.
“What do you want?” Thaddeus asked.
“Are you hairy or smooth?” the man asked.
“Is this a joke?”
“Answer me!” The voice was curdled with a fury that sounded just a bit theatrical. Thaddeus looked up at the window, but nothing interrupted that square of bright yellow light, not even a silhouette. Two men in jeans and T-shirts were approaching, walking downtown. They were blasted out on something or other, and sang a Bach fugue, body-bah-bum-bum instead of words, their voices deep and pure—they may have been Juilliard students, or professional singers. Their eyes were bright and wide, like an owl’s.
“Are you there?” the voice said.
“I’m here,” Thaddeus said. “These two guys just walked by singing so beautifully.”
“I’ll suck your cock.”
“Hey, man. I’m not into it.”
“Fuck you’re not.”
Thaddeus hung up the phone. He hated to leave a fellow human being in the lurch. And his dick registered its own opinion: Are you sure? He turned to check the window again. The light was flicking off and on at a furious rate. Thaddeus made a small salute, a jaunty farewell, no hard feelings.
The phone began to ring. This time zero mystery. He did not want to pick up the receiver, yet he could not walk away. On the seventh ring he thought oh well and answered.
“I knew you’d answer,” the voice said.
“Look, man,” Thaddeus said. “You should not be doing this. It’s creepy. I’m lonely and fucked, too, but there’s a limit. You know? There are things you just have to bear.”
“Is Daddy going to teach me a lesson?”
“All right. That’s creepy, too.” Thaddeus laughed, and to his surprise the man laughed, too.
“You got a name?” the man asked.
“Thaddeus.”
“Real name?”
“Yeah, it’s my real name. What about you?”
“Leslie, as in Caron, as in Howard.”
“All right, Leslie. I have to—”
“Come up. We can talk.”
“No way. I’m not that crazy.”
“Please.” He paused. Thaddeus heard rustling. “For a beer.” Another pause. “Or a cup of tea. Iced tea. I’ve got iced tea.” Leslie had abandoned the fiction of his dungeon master’s voice and spoke imploringly.
“Sorry. I’m going to hang up now . . .”
“Five minutes. You can’t come up for five minutes?”
“All right, Leslie. I’ll tell you what I can do. If you want to come down, we can talk for five minutes down here. On the street.”
“It’s a hassle. I’m on a tank.”
“What?”
“Oxygen tank. My lungs are fucked.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t do that scary voice, probably isn’t very good for you.”
Leslie laughed until it turned to a cough. “What do you do, Thaddeus?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Nice. What kind of articles do you write?”
“Screenplays.” He listened carefully to his voice as he said the word, making sure there was nothing apologetic in it. He was sick and tired of apologizing.
“Really? I bet you hear this all the time, but my life would make a great movie.”
“I do, I hear it a lot.”
Undeterred, the man on the fourth floor went into his story, every once in a while taking time to let his breathing catch up. His lungs no longer fit him. Breathing was walking around in someone else’s shoes, three sizes too small. “My sister’s boyfriend gets me a job building a squash court in Westchester, and there are a million stories about the client and his wife, both disgustingly prejudiced, she weighs like fifty pounds and he’s a tub of lard, but the point is, I end up with a lung full of fine-particle dust, and now I’m part of a lawsuit and maybe I’m walking away with a million bucks. My lawyer tells me that more masons get on-the-job casualties and fatalities than any other occupation, cops, firemen, anything else.”
“Oh, man, that’s horrible,” Thaddeus said. “What is it? Do you have cancer?”
“I’ve got chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The big COPD. Which is a lot better than cancer, in one way, because it actually pays more, since no one’s arguing about where it comes from and how you get it. Open and shut that it came from the job.”
“It’s got to be better than cancer.” Thaddeus glanced up at the window and a darkness in the shape of a human being had carved out a place in the light. He waited for a reply. A hand pressed itself against the glass. “So what happens in your movie?” Thaddeus asked. “It needs a third act.”
“I get the money. I give some to my other sister, and her schizoid kid who needs a lot of extra stuff. My lawyer leaves his wife and lives with me in Santa Fe. I suck his cock and every now and then I look up and there they are, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.”
“Pure Hollywood. We might have to change it a little, for the studio. Maybe Sally Field can be the lawyer.”
“You don’t think it’s too schmaltzy?”
“It’s what I like about movies,” Thaddeus said. “They tell us to never give up.”
“Hey, I really think you need to come up here. Do you see me?”
“I see you.”
“Have you ever been with a man?”
“I’m married. I’ve got a kid.”
“And?”
“Talk about never giving up.”
“Please. I’m asking. I’ll be your slave.”
“I don’t want a slave.”
“Then I’ll be your master.”
“I don’t want either. This is America,” Thaddeus added, with a nervous laugh. “Land of the free.”
“And home of the brave, too, don’t forget that.” Leslie waited for an answer. “You’re really not coming up, are you,” he said.
“No, I’m not. And you’re not coming down.”
“I can’t.”
“Then there it is, Leslie. Life.”
“Okay. I want to ask you a question. All right? Can I ask you a question?”
There was only the faint sound of breathing on the line. In the interim, Thaddeus’s mind began to race, wondering, somewhat fearfully, what Leslie was going to ask him. Why was a married man prowling the streets alone at night?
“So what’s your question?” he finally asked.
“It’s . . .”
“Just ask it, Leslie. Then I have to go.”
“I want to ask you to come up here so I can suck your cock. I’ll pay you sixty dollars.”
Thaddeus gently hung up the phone, and waved toward the lighted window, but without looking up at it. He turned to walk away and was suddenly face-to-face with Jeelu Ramachandran with Jeelu 2.
“Hello, Jeelu.”
“Hello, neighbor,” she said. The dog moved restlessly, as if the sidewalk burned its paws.
“I hope there wasn’t too much noise,” Thaddeus said. Seeing the lack of comprehension on her face, he added, “From the party.”
“I worked late.”
“It was a fund-raiser for the Mondale campaign.”
“Rots of ruck with that,” Jeelu said.
“So you’re for Reagan?”
“I hate politics.” She quickly looked down at her dog. “Yes, yes, I know. Time to go home.”
“Would you mind if I walked with you?”
“I’m just going back.”
“I am, too.”
They didn’t bother to make conversation. The silence was agreeable to Thaddeus. It was like something plain and well made, like Shaker furniture. At one point, Jeelu followed her dog into the street where it squatted on the cobblestones, and when she stumbled for a moment, Thaddeus touched her elbow to steady her, but only for a moment.
Still, Jeelu seemed to take it as not completely well-meaning. “Is your wife here, too?” she asked.
“No, she’s upstate. I’m Thaddeus, by the way.”
“I know your name.”
“We’re hardly ever here.”
“Your son is David and your wife is Grace.”
“That’s right.”
He could see their house on Horatio Street now. The yellow porch light burned with a special intensity, as if the house had seen them and had taken a deep breath.
“Do you know the name of my dog?” Jeelu asked. She jutted out her chin, as if she were hoping he would fail this test.
“As a matter of fact, yes, I do,” Thaddeus said, in an insinuating voice. Don’t fucking flirt.
“Really? Are you sure? What is it?”
“I’m not going to tell you the name of your own dog,” Thaddeus said, merrily. Flirting. “That’s the oldest trick in the book.”
“What you are doing is an even older trick. And the person who plays that trick is the person who doesn’t know the name of the dog.”
“Can I stay with you tonight, Jeelu? I won’t even touch you. I would just go to sleep next to you.” There. Not flirting whatsoever. He had always thought of himself as a tactful person, tactical even. Could Tourette’s syndrome come on as suddenly as an embolism?
Jeelu 1 picked up Jeelu 2 and held her protectively against her chest. “I have a very small bed. It’s for when my parents come. They’re very old-fashioned, and if they saw a double bed or, God forbid, larger, they would say, ‘For whom do you need such a large bed? What is going on here?’”
“It sounds cozy,” Thaddeus said.
“No, Thaddeus. Tonight, I stay in apartment eight, and you are in apartment four.”
She’s looked at my door. She knows the number . . .
“Are you sure?” he asked, but he felt something shifting. A fever had broken, the beginnings of relief.
“You paid good money for that bed of yours,” Jeelu said, “and you’re hardly ever in it.” She smiled. She knew her smile was dazzling; you don’t smile like that and not know all about it. “I was home when it was delivered. The men were carrying it out of the truck and I came downstairs to let them in.”
“Well then, I guess I owe you a thank-you,” Thaddeus said. “Saved by a banker.”
“You’re very welcome.” Her hand was on the door. “And why do you say bad things about bankers? If it wasn’t for bankers we’d all be dead meat.”
“You think so?”
“Good night, neighbor.”
“Wait,” Thaddeus said. This was something he wanted to get out of the way before she went in. “Since you asked. I know you named your dog after yourself, and I wanted to spend the night with you anyway. I think I deserve some credit for that.” It felt as if his skin was cooling down. Thank God he was not going to put further strain on his marriage by sleeping with another woman, even chastely. Nevertheless, he felt the pique of being refused.
How could he have so much and still be this alone? If his life was a book, it was as if a sudden wind had unexpectedly rattled the pages forward and, despite his best efforts to look away, he had glimpsed how the story ended.
BACK IN HIS APARTMENT, HE drank and watched a porn tape purchased upon arrival that day, in case he found himself at the ragged end of the night feeling exactly how he was feeling now. The candy store where he picked up the newspaper and Dentyne also sold these videos, which never ceased to astonish him. He made his purchases furtively, never failing to case the place to make certain there were no women or children present. He tried to limit his purchases in frequency and subject matter, avoiding movies that catered to specific tastes—nothing with teen, ass, bitch, or bondage in the title. He was content with middle-of-the-road raunch, something to take his mind off his worries and transport him to a world of generic in-and-out. Right now, he was glad for his foresight as the first notes of the porn soundtrack played. Of course porn music was the worst music ever made, but his body responded to it, just as it had when, as a child, he heard the distant chimes of the Good Humor truck. It was as if he had a body inside his body that needed to be appeased. All he wanted to do was draw the curtain. I shall be released. He watched the actors cavorting beneath the pitiless lights, and as he got closer to completion he closed his eyes and instead of watching strangers—the men pneumatic, the women old beyond their years—he allowed himself to remember fucking Grace in a way that was similar to how Randy was fucking Brandi. Once he entered into the whoosh of memory’s current the trick was to go with the flow and block out the sights and sounds of the tape. As he worked himself with one hand, he groped blindly for the remote control, but he could not find it and the humble reality of his lonely climax was subverted by the theatrical screeches on the film.
HE DRIFTED TOWARD THE FRONT windows and for no particular reason looked down at the street below. There was a man below; he seemed elderly, leaned on a cane and shifted his shoulders, as if trying to establish his balance. On closer inspection, however, Thaddeus saw the man was probably in his thirties—but in rough shape, terrible health. His brown hair was thin, his posture stooped. It was—it must be—Leslie. Leslie had somehow tracked Thaddeus’s movements from the phone booth back to Horatio Street and right to this building. As Thaddeus had this thought the man below looked up, seemingly at the window at which Thaddeus stood, half dressed. Quickly, he moved from view, pressing himself against the wall, like an escaping convict avoiding the searchlight. He admonished himself to calm down. What would the harm be of inviting Leslie up for a drink, and to hear more about his sister and brother-in-law and that squash court? The lives of the obscenely rich were generally interesting in one way or another; you got to see the human animal released from the constraints of economy. Maybe Leslie needed money. Of course he did. Shoved way under the mattress, Thaddeus kept an envelope with fifteen or twenty hundred-dollar bills, per diem leftovers from trips to L.A. Why not give it all to Leslie, who obviously needed the cash a lot more than Thaddeus? The gesture might be misconstrued—money often spoke with a forked tongue!—but Thaddeus could finesse it. He’d go to the window and wave him up. Or maybe go down to the street, in case Leslie needed help mounting the stairs.
Choreographing his movements so that at no point could he be seen, Thaddeus shut off the Betamax, the TV, the lamp. He collected his vodka glass, took it to the kitchen, placed it in the sink, and ran the hot water into it until he was engulfed in steam. The longer he stood there breathing in the hot moist air, the more he doubted that the man down on the street was actually Leslie. He turned off the faucet, picked up the glass, and put it quickly down again. It was scalding to the touch. He drifted toward the front windows, thinking he might go downstairs just to see who it was out there, but he thought better of it.
He turned off the last of his apartment’s lights and went to bed, lest he change his mind again. Yet shortly after going to bed he had changed his mind, or at least had allowed it to shift. Had he fallen asleep? He was quite sure he hadn’t even closed his eyes.
Naked now, he wound through his apartment’s darkness, somewhat unfamiliar with its topography. But the city’s persistent ambient light was enough for him to navigate safely to the window.
He parted the blinds and looked down. The man had his back to Thaddeus now and was speaking to another nocturnal walker. A slender woman in shorts the color of a radioactive lemon—it was the Asian woman he had passed on the street. When? An hour ago? Two? Three? She reached behind her and from somewhere produced what appeared to be a Korean-language newspaper, its front-page pictographs suggesting disaster. How could such skimpy terry-cloth shorts have a back pocket large enough to carry that paper? The question crossed his mind, but attending to it was another matter altogether—it was like a shooting star seen through the corner of his eye. A moment later the man who might be Leslie and the woman who might be the Asian woman in neon shorts were joined by the man Thaddeus had glimpsed for a moment walking the two Airedales, only now he was without the dogs and carried a grocery bag filled with yucca, thick, silver-brown-white, jutting this way and that. Thaddeus had seen that yucca before, on the playing cards in a village on the border of Turkey and Iran. Five men in a café on the town square engrossed in a game whose rules or purpose were incomprehensible to Thaddeus—the men threw down their cards one at a time and every few rounds one of them would excitedly grab for whatever had been discarded and gather them up.
He wanted to go down to further investigate this extraordinary situation, as mysterious as the memory of a scent, the lingering memory of the perfume that came off Grace that afternoon in the purloined hotel room, that stale thrillingly human aroma, tuberose, gardenia, perspiration. He scrambled into his clothes—pants no underwear, shoes no socks, his shirt fastened by only two buttons. He felt unsteady as he descended the seashell swirl of the staircase, gripping the railing. The phrase So many fish in the sea floated across his mind and he followed it into a kind of oblivion, as his soul left his body. He realized he was on his way to meet his sister, to meet Hannah, but he could not forget that such a thing was impossible. It was that time, three o’clock in the morning. Not at all the dark night of the soul. It was the soul’s magic hour, when memory and grief and desire shrugged off the shackles of logic and reason. Hannah would be there even if strictly speaking she was not. But at three in the morning no one is strictly speaking. At three everything is everywhere and it’s all at once. Time and its wormholes, and its parallel universes. Coming from afar, Thaddeus heard the wail of a siren, the whooping cry of a suffering world, a crucifix made of sound.