When I got to our apartment on East Sixth Street, I found that the frontdoor had been left unlocked, but Eddie was gone. The place was unbearably hot and airless, as if nobody had opened the back window in days. Not a good sign. His things and mine were there, though, strewn around the same as when I left. I figured he must have just stepped out to the corner or something, so I found a piece of paper—an unopened month-old Con-Ed bill—and wrote a short note:
10:30 P.M.
Dad back in hospital. Have gone over to visit for a minute. See you later.
Love,
Janet
I locked the door, wondering whether Eddie had bothered to take his keys. Well, serve him right. You’re not supposed to leave your front door open in New York City.
It was no cinch getting past first the man at the front desk, then the big-chested, old night nurse on duty on Dad’s floor.
“He’s fast asleep,” she said.
I repeated the speech I had delivered in the lobby: “Listen, I came all the way from the country as soon as I heard. I know he’s dying. I just want to say good-bye. I got to. It’s my pop,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Chace doesn’t have long. All right then, for a few minutes,” she said.
He was alone, because the inordinately devoted Betsy was too sick herself to make the trip that night. He was not asleep. My father was sucking the air, trying to breathe. When he saw me, he mouthed, “Morphine, morphine,” over and over.
The tube trailing from his tracheotomy gurgled, and the air around his bed reeked from the excess of chemotherapy mixed with galloping cancer, from the foul odor of rotting, burning flesh.
The big nurse was reluctant at first. “I gave him his last shot two hours ago.”
“But he’s suffering. He’s in terrible pain. I know the guy, he wouldn’t be asking if he didn’t need it,” I said.
I was wild. What kind of country was this that you had to beg to relieve a dying man of his torture?
Finally, she agreed.
After the morphine took, I watched his drawn, sweaty face relax. I mopped his brow, but it scared me. His skin was so clammy and cold, it felt like touching a cadaver. His white hair, what was left of it, sprouted from the top of his skull like the hair on a shrunken head. I kept thinking, “Damn, if it weren’t for the chemotherapy, he’d still have his gorgeous mane. Rayfield wasn’t meant to go bald.” I almost wished, for cosmetic reasons alone, that people died the way I imagined they used to: quickly, naturally.
I sat with him in the semidarkness for as long as the nurse would let me. It wasn’t very long, however, before she came and stood in the door, her massive shape blocking the light from the hallway.
“You’ll have to leave now,” she said.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be here tomorrow,” he whispered. He patted my hand. “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”
As soon as I hit the street, it occurred to me that I had about seventy dollars cash on me. I meandered through Stuyvesant Square, pausing for a moment underneath the tall trees to listen to the leaves rustle and get my bearings before I walked over to the Monterey Bar and Grill on St. Mark’s Place. I figured Eddie would be there.
But there was no sign of him. I decided to wait, of course. Various regulars offered opinions about where he might be. Most of them suggested the shooting gallery on Seventh Street and Avenue B. It did seem likely. Meanwhile, I was pouring down shots of Jack Daniel’s and chasing them with short beers. Soon, Eddie’s whereabouts no longer seemed like a big deal. I had a place to crash; that was all that was important.
The Monterey Bar and Grill was a misnomer: there was no grill. The bar itself was a thing of beauty: wide, semicircular, and polished to a high gloss. The Ukrainian owner obviously cherished his place, but he was too practical to try to discourage the onslaught of kids that had taken over the joint. In fact it was he who had renamed it after the famous music festival in the hopes of attracting them. He didn’t protest either when they offered to fill up his old jukebox with the Stones, the Sex Pistols, Television, the Talking Heads, and Elvis Costello, along with a fine selection of rock ’n’ roll oldies, like Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and “The Girl Can’t Help It,” by Little Richard. It was a hip jukebox, cutting edge, a philosophical statement, evidence of a shared worldview. But this guaranteed that his once-loyal customers would desert him, which they did; friends and neighbors of a lifetime cleared out forever, preferring now to hang at small taverns, such as the Blue and Gold, on the side streets.
Sometimes in the late morning, I would catch a glimpse of the old man through the window. He’d be sitting alone at the end of the bar with his head bobbing on his sunken chest, snoozing. The nights were too much for the poor geezer. Still, he didn’t dare leave the place alone, because he thought, and rightly, that everyone working for him was a thief. He was always there, dressed in old-fashioned suit pants, hitched high on his waist, and white nylon short-sleeved shirts, through which you could see his cotton undershirt. He winced when Sid Vicious hit a particularly raucous chord, the wonderfully hideous noise of it blasting over the crowd. For hours, he would pace slowly up and down at the back of the room, looking sadly to me like a fish flopping on the sand.
Now the old grandpa made his way through the small cluster of people at the bar and tapped me on the shoulder. “I tink your boyfriend has got trouble,” he said.
“What else is new?” I said, throwing back a shot. “Have a vodka, Doc.”
We all called him Doc.
“No, no tanks, later maybe. But you listen what I tell you,” he said, shaking his finger.
“OK. I’m listening,” I said.
“Some colored boys was in here asking for him. I tell them I don’t know nothing. They go away, but they say I should tell Eddie they was looking for him. I don’t like it,” he said.
Doc lived in fear of the black and Hispanic population. No matter that his saloon catered to second-story men, dope dealers, and every other kind of lowlife vermin. The point is they were white.
“Thanks for telling me, Doc,” I said.
Fat Jack sidled up next to where I was sitting on a tall barstool and pushed his good-sized belly, which hung out over his jeans, into my thigh.
“You look gorgeous with that tan, Janet, like a Penthouse foldout. Since Eddie is nowhere around, Red and I was just wonderin’ if we could turn you onto some rock, dynamite stuff. We’d be perfect gentlemen. Whaddya say?”
Fat Jack pursed his pudgy cupid’s bow mouth, then he licked his lips. His jolly, open face, with its quizzical expression, might lead you to believe that here was a nice guy, until you witnessed one of his bar fights, during which Jack would think nothing of breaking a beer bottle against the wall and then going after his victim with the ragged edge.
Fat Jack had been a mail carrier on Long Island before he got busted for the sauce. Once upon a time, he had total health benefits, a little bungalow in Malverne, the promise of a life. His buddy Red was an albino who was as tall and stringy as those punks from Queens, the Ramones, but without their charm. How he got his nickname was a mystery to me. I thought the two of them were loathsome as toads, beneath contempt. For the past month, they had been breathing down my neck, traipsing at my heels, staring after me when I walked along St. Mark’s Place.
“That’s a fine woman,” they said to Eddie.
“You shoulda seen her before I got to her,” Eddie said.
“Where’s Eddie? He isn’t shtupping someone else? C’mon, Jack, tell me the truth,” I said, suddenly seized with dark suspicion.
“Nah, Janet. You know better. Eddie don’t care about pussy enough to fuck around. You know what he’s into,” he said.
“Dope.”
“Yeah, he managed to get into a real jackpot during this last week while you were away. I don’t think you should ever leave him alone, Janet. He started working for these young kids on Fifth Street and Avenue B. Got some kind of a super deal going down, where they fronted him ounces, and he was supposed to step on it once more, break it up, and sell it off, bag by bag. Imagine, he conned those niggers into fronting him, a white guy, ounces of smack. A good thing, a really good thing, but he’s already blown it.”
“What do you mean, blown it?”
“Janet, Eddie is such a fuckup. Thinks he can get away with anything. Thinks he’s so sly and so tough. The kid’s heading for a big fall. Believe me. Not only is he lifting huge amounts of smack off the top and cutting it to nothin’, but he’s braggin’ about it all over the place. Worst of all, he’s trying to beat those black kids. Hasn’t paid them a cent so far. What’s his problem, anyway?”
“Is that what’s going on?” I asked, grateful it wasn’t a woman and horrified, too.
“You better not even go home tonight. Those niggers are looking for him all over. They’re pissed. Come upstairs with Red and me, why don’t you?” he said.
“OK,” I said.
Once upstairs in his nearly empty railroad apartment, I almost regretted my decision. The floors were so thick with dirt, there was a path worn onto it where Jack walked from room to room. The furniture consisted of a claw-footed bathtub in the kitchen, a bare mattress in the far room, and a few foam pillows scattered around. Red got out a new set of works and mixed up some cocaine with water. We took turns getting off. I was too drunk to be uptight about doing myself; I didn’t miss. I even booted it the way Eddie would have done. The steady drip from the faucet in the sink began to ring, to chime like bells. The world stopped moving. Everything got very clear and still and made perfect sense. Bam, I booted it one last time. The air sang, the floor dropped out from under me. I reeled. A hand caught me.
“Drink some of this whiskey,” Red was saying. At that moment, he looked to me like a holy man, bathed in an eerie white light, wearing shades.
We sat on the pillows and passed the bottle for a while. In spite of my drunkenness, in spite of the lingering effects of the cocaine, I was so disgusted I felt physically ill. It occurred to me suddenly, as I closed my eyes, that this was no fun anymore at all. In fact, it had not been fun for a long time now. I had sunk much lower than I could have imagined. My dissolution had taken on a life of its own. I actually experienced the sensation of gravity pulling me down at an accelerating speed, deeper and deeper. “Fuck it, too late to care. You’re under the rock now for good,” I told myself. “Only a matter of time now... Don’t fight...just go with it...All over soon,” I thought, as I turned my face into the dirt-black foam pillow behind my head.
After a few more minutes of this, I insisted the three of us return to the Monterey Bar and Grill. I was starting to miss Eddie.
“He been here looking for you,” Doc said.
I knew I better go by Sixth Street, in case he was stuck outside with no key. I ordered one more shooter for the road, on Fat Jack, and spun out into the crystal-still street, still buzzing from the coke.
Sure enough, Eddie was waiting there, sitting at the top of the stoop of the brownstone next door, his elbows on his knees, his chin resting in his hands. He came down the steps quickly when he saw me. We met under the streetlight. He was very high. His face was chalky, with black shadows underneath his eyes that made him look like a sad Pierrot. His face was not unlike my dying father’s, I thought, haunted looking, and his pupils were tiny black dots. When Eddie’s pupils contracted like that, it always seemed to me as if he were concentrating on something, as if his mind were far away, but he took me in his arms, held me, smothered my hair with kisses.
“Oh, baby, baby doll, I missed you so much,” he said.
“I missed you, too,” I said.
He kissed my hands. “My little monkey, my little monkey. Don’t leave me again,” he said.
Eddie was really stoned.
When we got inside, I asked him why he left without his keys, without locking the door. I sounded belligerent because I was pretty drunk, but Eddie was way beyond me, in a dope-chilled world of his own.
“There was business to take care of. I was in a hurry,” he said.
“Fat Jack tells me you’re in some kind of trouble,” I said.
“Yeah, which reminds me. When I came around there, Doc told me you left with Fat Jack and Red. What were you doing with those two scumbags?”
“They had a little blow. We just went upstairs to get off,” I said.
“Oh, well, in that case. Still, I don’t like you hanging around with them. They’re real lowlife scum, Janet.”
“I know, I know...So what’s the trouble you’re in? Don’t I have the right to know what’s going on?”
At another time, Eddie would have leapt at the word “right.” He liked to deny that I had any rights at all. He could be depended upon to deny it, in fact. But now he was impervious.
“Don’t you worry about a thing. I got it under control. There’s no trouble, no trouble at all...A slight misunderstanding between me and my new business partners, but I got it all sussed,” Eddie said.
We had been standing in the back room. Now, he lifted me up, carried me to the front, through the curtains, and deposited me gently on the bed. It was so private, quiet, and safe lying there, surrounded by the rough muslin curtains we had bought at the fabric store on First Avenue. (Eddie’s natural modesty had ensured that we would conceal where we slept and made love, at least, from the bare showcase window, which was not far from the foot of the bed.)
“Everything was great for a while. We could’ve had money, all the dope we needed, but good things never last...You woulda been so proud of me, doll, I scored big...Never mind, something else’ll come along.”
“From what I hear, you’re lucky you didn’t get killed,” I said, still bucking for a fight.
“What? Don’t listen to idle bar gossip. That’ll get you nowhere in life. Forget it, OK? It’s just you and me now, c’mon.”
Eddie was determined to be tender, so I gave up. He kissed me. We opened our mouths and let the hot breath from the bottom of our chests pour into each other. I felt really bad about the Montauk mistake with the fisherman, but I decided to put that behind me.
Our kissing became wilder then. We pulled each other’s hair, grappling the way we did when the sex was good for us. Eddie yanked off my clothes and his. He looked at my brown skin and poured himself over it, hands, mouth. He was discovering new levels of passion, going somewhere he had never been before, and so was I. We were afraid of the intensity, but that didn’t stop us. We rubbed our sweaty bodies together until it was unbearable, and Eddie slipped into me. The friction was so sweet, we would thrust together and pause, shuddering and trembling in the dark. We stared into each other’s eyes with alarm. We could see there where the ecstasy came from: beyond the skin, from our palpable, meshing souls. On the edge of consciousness, I felt at the same time as if I were being returned to myself, as if I were touching down on a deeply familiar but rarely visited place. We settled into a rhythm I hardly recognized, because it was neither too fast nor too frustratingly slow. This was Goldilocks love: at last, just right for me. I opened up all the way. I kept giving more and more of myself; I couldn’t give enough. When I came (an orgasm that started at the base of my clitoris and nipped along like a fuse until it exploded inside), he stayed with me, letting me spend it, but he was right on the edge, and he could hardly move. When he came, it wasn’t in his usual stealthy, controlled way. This time he yelped, sounding surprised, like he’d been shot. And for once, I wasn’t jealous, didn’t resent the exquisite sensation of fluid bursting, didn’t feel aroused and abandoned. Instead, I was coming with him. He belonged to me; I was satisfied.
A lucid break in the general scheme, that was all. An unaccountable night of genuine intimacy. Quixotic as I was (under the circumstances), I had been long searching for it. Our connection was an oasis of grace.
Eddie and I stroked each other, laughed quietly. In the dread first light sifting through the curtains, we peered into each other’s eyes. We were close. It was uncanny how close we were, in spite of ourselves, like the only two soldiers left alive in the field, grateful for not just all of our moving parts, but for each other.