Chapter three

 

Susan entered Connie's room bringing kisses, and they went on to make love in quiet morning fashion. In the shower Connie genuflected before her and soaped her up good, starting with her feet. He washed her bottom like it was his own bottom, and he scrubbed her back gently with long flowing strokes of the cloth. He took the showerhead and rinsed her thoroughly. Susan reached for the cloth and started to wash him. "No," Connie said, "leave me." She mock-frowned and got out.

He took a guzzle of bourbon to set the pins of his mentality straight. There was a full-length mirror inside the closet door, and as he put on his uniform he wondered if anybody had ever seen him for who he was, wondered if he himself knew who he was. There was a school of philosophy which dismissed identity. To know oneself: give me a break. You show me somebody claiming to know himself and I'll show you a bullshit artist. He considered Susan. I don't know her, but here we are under the same roof and we made good love a few times, so why not leave it alone? The ability to know somebody—how possible? From day one he had known Maureen. He held his wife's hand during fire drills in first grade. Have you ever seen me, Maureen? Have I ever seen you?

On the job he had witnessed poses of identity crumble and dissolve, self's house of cards collapsing despite the finest external trappings—the country homes, the luxury station wagons, the purebred dogs, the wraparound terraces. And at day's end all was mystery, vulnerability, and—life's great equalizer—death. As a doorman he watched the posturing, padded by material wealth, nonetheless fold under the blunt-force trauma of illness, betrayal, and the like. There were tenants who walked by Connie for months, barely acknowledging him, until one day the marriage implodes and the passage through the lobby becomes less cocksure. Life stops you, softens you—an adultery, say, or some serious diagnosis—and there you now sit, openly weeping in the lobby before your doorman, and more than once Connie consoles you with a hug and a few kind words. The job funny that way, offering windows into lives even the closest of family and friends did not access. Women generally liked Connie. Men from old money liked him fine, as well as men who made their money. Younger men living off the wealth of still-living parents he customarily had problems with.

He went to Bickford's, ordered a bacon-and-egg sandwich on a buttered roll to go, took the 1 to Times Square, and caught the shuttle east. He waited at the top of a staircase eating his sandwich, taking the cue of a young black kid waiting with him. They would take whichever came first—the 4, 5, or 6. The kid with his highly attuned ears skipped down the flight and Connie followed.

He entered through the service entrance, a coffee light and sweet from the Greeks in hand.

"Qué pasa, Hector," Connie said.

"Very good, Mr. Con," Hector said, "how is you?"

"You're a good man, Hector, I don't care what they say about you."

"They no saying anything about me," Hector responded, "they saying about you."

"I bet they are." Connie changed into his custodian's uniform. "I'm a utility player, Hector, you know that."

"Yes, Mr. Con."

"I don't fuck around."

"I know you don't."

"Service car, front car, front door, whatever I can do to help this house."

"Me too," Hector said.

"That's why I'm talking to you. We have the same work ethic, a little thing they call character."

"Cartoon character," Hector said.

"How's the front?"

"Quiet."

"Super around?"

"Painting."

"Where?"

"Six," Hector said, "Gillespie."

"Big job?"

"Nah. Small job. Bathroom."

"Thank you, my friend."

"Okay, Mr. Con, you be good."

Connie arranged things to his liking on the service car, got settled with his coffee and a cigarette. With a can of Brasso and a clean strip of old T-shirt, he went to work on the fixtures. "Make it shine, Mr. Con-Con," he said, rocking slightly on a leather stool's tripod of castors. He liked the smell of the chemicals, the pleasing way the brass shined.

The car gave off one short ring from the fifteenth floor. Connie shot up there and swung the door open.

"Game of crib, Con, a little later maybe?"

"Down the office in twenty," Connie said.

"Ten-four," John said.

* * *

Everything folded out, the chairs and table, as John went on a run of fives and fifteens in the back stairwell of the ninth floor.

"Look at you," Connie said.

"Look at me," John said sadly, throwing down cards. Lonely as all get-out, what he was. How can six thousand square feet feel claustrophobic?

"How's school?"

"Sucks." He went to an old, established school across the park where he had to wear a blazer. "Did you like school?"

"Me?" Connie said. "I hated school. The nuns and priests, they paddled you on principle."

"I'd like to quit," John said, "but my mother would have a shit-fit."

"Biggest mistake of my life," Connie said, but he didn't mean it.

After a moment John broached a subject with tentative concern: "Something happened."

"What happened?"

"My mother."

"I saw her taking off for Washington."

"This morning. Before she left."

"Okay," Connie said.

"All right," John said. "So I'm just . . . you know. I'm waking up. I get up, I go to take a leak. I go into the kitchen. You know, like, still half asleep."

"I got you."

"And so . . ." John said, looking inwardly, recalling it, reliving it, "so I go to make a bowl of cereal. Like I always do."

"Rice Krispies?"

"Special K."

"Continue."

John chuckled nervously. "So I'm making the cereal. And my mother. She comes into the kitchen. She's ready to leave for the airport. I'm at the counter, over by the sink. I put some cereal in the bowl. I get the milk out, and I'm about to, you know . . ."

"Pour some milk over the cereal."

"Yeah. And my mother comes over. She comes over. Says something about me needing a haircut. Something like that," John said, trying to recall the beats of the story in their proper order. "And then I think she says, I'll have Andrea"—the governess—"make you an appointment at the salon. And just then Andrea comes in. And my mother, I don't know, she comes over, and—she puts her hand on my shoulder. And then . . . and then . . . she, like, brushes the hair away from my face."

"Okay," Connie said.

"And then—boom!" John reenacted the sudden move and Connie jumped back a bit in his chair.

"Whoa."

"And I tell her, Don't fucking touch me!" John shot a quick, worried look at Connie. "I don't curse like that at my mother, Con."

"I know that."

"I say, Don't fucking touch me. I smack her hand away and slam the milk down on the counter, like a half gallon. I had just opened it and it explodes, and I push my mother across the room. She almost falls, but Andrea catches her! The milk's all over the place—the whole kitchen's white! In Andrea's hair. My mother had to change her clothes." John stopped a moment to consider Connie, who offered no hint of an opinion one way or another.

"Then what?"

"I don't know. I say, Don't fucking touch me, and I slam the milk down—and she goes stumbling back into Andrea—and I say, You have one daughter, not two!" John stopped again to gauge his listener's reaction. "And then I go, I'll get a fucking haircut when I feel like it—I'll go to a fucking barber, not your goddamn salon."

After a moment Connie said, "And what'd your mother do?"

"Just—she looked shocked. We were all shocked. She said Well a few times. Just, Well. And then she looks at her wrist, where I smacked it. She says we'll talk about it when she returns. She goes to change. Andrea starts to clean up, I tell her get out, and I clean up."

After a long moment Connie said, "You didn't do anything wrong, if that's what you're worried about. Things like this, they happen, you know, in families." He picked up his pack of Camels off the table and shook one out.

"Can I get one, Con?"

He'd given John cigarettes before but felt bad about it. With a small frown he gave the pack a second shake and John snatched one.

Connie lit their cigarettes. John coughed a little, almost choked, and Connie smiled, produced his pint, and took a hit. John extended his hand.

"What?" Connie said.

"Come on, let me wet my whistle."

The stairwell dead quiet, their voices slapping off the walls with a sting. Connie handed him the pint and John took a hit, his face freezing from the shock of booze. He took a drag off his Camel, attempted a few smoke rings.

"Watch," Connie said, demonstrating perfect rings, and performed a French inhale.

"Cool."

"All right, let's play some cribbage," Connie said, "and I apologize in advance."

"Dream on," John said, and he produced a massive joint, picked up Connie's Zippo, striking the flint against his leg. He lit the joint, careful not to set his locks on fire.

"That's one big son-of-a-bitching jaybird."

John passed it to Connie, and he smoked it up, and handed it back to John. Connie took another hit off the pint and handed it to John.

"Whew," Connie said, and John started to laugh. Connie picked up the cards and went to shuffle them and they shot out of his hands onto the floor for a fifty-two-pickup, and they laughed their asses off like you do when you're high.

Connie on his knees started to gather the cards. John lit another joint.

Connie climbed back into his chair, shuffled the cards slowly, no fancy stuff. He looked like he had a concussion. "Wait," he said, looking around on the ground, "are there . . . ? I better count them."

John watched him count the cards. Connie was drooling, spit collecting at his mouth, and John passed him the joint.

Connie toked on it and said, "Okay, now wait a minute." He stared down at the cribbage board.

"What?" John said.

"Forgot how to play," Connie said. John started to laugh hysterically, when Connie raised a sudden hand. "Hold up, hold up."

They both made a show of being quiet. Connie cocked an ear toward the service car.

"Did—"

"Huh?"

Connie listened intensely, shook his head, relit the joint, passed it back to John. "Reefer's got me hearing things. All right, let's play some cribbage."

"Remember how to play?" John said.

They laughed and played.

Then: "Fuck," John said.

"What happened?"

"Ah. Bit my tongue."

"Okay?"

John showed a mix of laughter and pain. "Fucking braces," he said. "Tired of them. Can't eat, can't do shit." Then, on impulse, "I want them out," and he reached into his mouth.

"Don't," Connie said, smacking his hand away.

"Hate them," John said, and then, above them in the stairwell, the sound of a door creaking open.

Footsteps descended the staircase. Connie reached quick for the joint roaches, ate them, and pocketed the pint.

Like the ghost of an old-time journeyman painter, there on the halfway landing of the stairs, dressed in painter's overalls, cigar in hand, stood Walter. They looked at each other a moment in silence.

"Hey, Mr. Mezzola," John chuckled.

"Hi, Walter!" Connie said, too loud.

Walter looked down at them, eyes tight with confusion, Connie and John seated across from each other at the small table, cribbage board before them.

John stared down at the table and started to crack up. The more he attempted not to laugh, the redder his face got, his body convulsing in fits.

"He all right?" Walter said.

"No, you know what it is, Walter . . . he . . . recently, just got braces," Connie said.

"Yeah?" Walter said, as John held his face in his hands, sobbing, his whole body shaking.

"Ahhhhh!" John cried.

"Go ahead," Connie said, "let it out."

"Ahhhhhh!"

"They put the damn things in wrong," Connie said.

"For the teeth," Walter said.

"Yeah, yeah, so he's in pain, and so he doesn't know what to do with himself. He gets a little . . . I don't know."

Walter stayed quiet for a moment. He had to be careful. Everybody tippy-toed around the kid's family. The kid's mother could have Walter packing by the weekend. She wasn't on the board but the board kissed her ass, recognizing the value of her tenancy. With John's mother in the house you sit back and watch the price of your apartment go up. "Do me a favor," he said to Connie. "My office."

"Be right there, Walter."

The super turned and went back up the staircase. They heard the door creak open and shut.

"You in trouble?" John said.

"Nah, nah," Connie said, "it'll be okay."

"Because if you want . . ." John said, laughing and crying.

"Nah, don't worry," Connie said. He looked at the battleship gray on the walls, and imagined himself sitting inside the upended, gutted carcass of an elephant.

John produced a small vial of Visine.

"Let me get some."

John handed the vial to Connie. He tilted his head back and tried not to blink, but the drops missed his eyes and rolled down his face like tears.

* * *

"Probation as it is," Walter said, holding more fire to his cigar. "Playing games in the hall with the kid like that. How you figure such a thing's all right?"

Connie thought he could see Walter attempting to sound like the superintendent of the house, which he was, but why do you have to try to sound like it?

"Listen to me careful, now, what I'm going to say," Walter began. Connie watched him build a head of steam consistent with a boss who's ready to chastise a worker, when Walter's wife appeared in the room.

"Hey, Miss Mezzola," Connie said.

She nodded at him, a woman of few words. "Ready?"

"Yeah," Walter said.

"Here?" she said.

"Why not," he said, and she popped away.

"Still busting my chops, Saxton. By the way, forget the game-playing in the hall."

"Does she know I'm represented by a labor union?"

"Look, Con, you know, I know: they want you gone, you go."

"Not why I pay dues."

"Got to write you up again."

"Write me up?"

"Insisting."

"That hurts me."

"Hurts me too," Walter said. "What's wrong with your eyes?"

"What?"

"Bloodshot, here to Jersey."

Connie lit a cigarette.

"I don't know what to do," Walter said. His hands were spotted with tiny specks of paint, the rims of his nails pleasingly caked with plaster. "Trying to help you get on track, which case I don't have to terminate you."

His wife appeared with two plates of baked ziti, some salad and bread on the side. From the front pockets of her housecoat she produced two bottles of Coca-Cola. She opened them with a bottle opener, dropped a fork on each plate, and disappeared.

"Oh my God," Connie said.

"Go ahead," Walter said.

Connie dug in, hungry from the reefer.

"Son of a."

"Hot, watch."

Connie drank some Coke. "Delicious," he said.

"So maybe," Walter said, "if you talk to Saxton."

"Talk to her."

"Miss Saxton, I'm sorry I got fresh with a friend of yours, simple, like that."

"Me, got fresh?"

"Please forgive me, and in the meantime I'll watch my Ps and Qs, and I hope you can forgive me, Miss Saxton, some shit like that."

"This ziti's incredible."

"Like a second thought for my wife, that ziti, a third thought. Because otherwise they insist on something in the file come the time for me to terminate you. I mean, look, Con, you cannot skate on your buff job forever."

"Got friends in this house. Saxton ain't shit."

"On the board she is."

"I got people on this board," Connie said, his mouth full, his face down close to the plate on Walter's desk, "way before Saxton ever thought about coming here."

"And these days sometimes they don't even let you collect in the meantime."

"Hah?"

"Last guy I got out. Charles. Remember Charles?"

"Yeah?"

"Management fought him on the unemployment. To let you know I say this. 'Cause the thing is, if you back down with her just a little, Saxton, swallow your pride two seconds, because I would hate to see you go."

"Thank you, Walter."

"Go ahead. Eat."

Walter picked up his fork and did some eating himself, and he said, "Let me ask."

"Yeah."

"The kid."

"John."

"He all right?"

"What sense?"

"You play games with him in the hall."

"Once in a while. If I got a little time."

"What do you talk about?" Walter asked.

"Whatever," Connie said. "You know, he's a kid."

"My point."

"Thing of it is," Connie said, "he's lonely."

"That right?"

"I don't know . . . I'm like a father figure in a way."

They ate a little bit, and now it was Walter's turn to laugh.

"What?" Connie said.

"Nah, it's just . . . it's funny is all! You, a father figure to him! I don't know why," Walter said, and you would think he had been smoking some strong reefer of his own. "I could see you showing up to the family compound they got up there, yeah, yeah, and you show up in your doorman's uniform!"

"That's funny."

"Yeah, yeah, and you say, I'm John's new father!" Through laughter he added, "And, and who knows, maybe you end up marrying the mother!"

They laughed some more about Connie becoming the newest member of the famous political clan, before Walter got up, grabbed the plates off his desk, and left Connie alone.

* * *

He went downstairs, took a dreamless nap on his bed of cement, got up, and got busy. He did a garbage run, bagged it up nice, and left it just inside the service entrance. He checked with the guys working the front to see if they needed anything. He delivered some dry cleaning and a few packages. The mail came and Connie cased it, throwing letters into slots with accuracy and speed. He rolled the cart onto the service car and delivered the mail upstairs. He prepped the bucket in the slop-sink room and mopped the back stairwell landings, a salty bead of sweat stinging one eye. He hosed off the service entranceway, swept the area of leaves and other detritus, and when he was done with that he grabbed the can of Brasso and some rags and headed toward the front of the house, where he spotted Larry outside.

Larry as a rule had two cameras hanging on him, and attached to the straps, like beads on a necklace, a string of 35mm film canisters. He had bad skin, rough and uneven—like his personality, Connie thought. You could read the whole shitty history of Larry's life by the map of pockmarks on his face.

"There he is, Mr. Fucko in a dirty-ass pickup," Connie said. Larry sat in the passenger seat of his Datsun, a black California license plate hammered with yellow glyphs.

"See this one here," Larry said, displaying a camera.

Connie held up the can of Brasso and, as if a courteous afterthought, said, "Would the supercilious parasite like a taste?"

"This one has no film in it," Larry said. "I carry it with fuckers just like you in mind."

"You try it."

"Keep rattling my cage," Larry said with scary California slowness, "I just might."

Connie turned the corner onto Fifth. He polished the standpipe off the house's front entrance. As it started its descent over the park, the sun gave a direct hit, and the brass responded with a glisten. He sauntered over to the canopy poles and saw Ramey and Slovell in the Impala across the street, an early-season ball game wafting from the vehicle.

George appeared. An older man from Ireland, George had worked the house a very long time.

"How are you, George?"

George, Connie suspected, resented having to share the tenants with the rest of the staff, such was the greedy nature of the man's obsequiousness. Connie tried to befriend him any number of times but finally gave up, dismissing him as a sycophant. In more generous moments Connie considered another take: George had seen one too many coworkers come and go, and it hurt too much to bond with a man only to have him depart. This take, more forgiving, exposed the soft underbelly of George's standoffish posture, and Connie tried to choose it.

He made the poles of the canopy shine. How had things gotten so contentious with Larry? How had it come to that?

"Am I good or what, Mr. George?"

"You missed a spot there," George said. He gave Connie a vicious smile.

"Go play in traffic, George."

The afternoon sun warmed Connie's back. He worked on his knees, rubbing the Brasso into the pole with a strip of T-shirt, as his mind went soft with a sadness. The sun setting over the park, and the listless vehicles moving down Fifth, and how is it that any of these buildings ever got built in the first place? Things could stop adding up, and the world's steady, inconsiderate pulse would not hesitate to shoot a shiver of despair into him.

The harsh exchange with Larry. The agents across the street. The assignment had a crappy reputation, and not one of them seemed to care for it. Last year one agent, trying to keep up on foot with the kids in a Midtown crowd, drew his sidearm in wits-end frustration, letting off a round over the roof of a taxicab which nearly ran him over. The incident made the papers and the agent got reassigned.

The housephone buzzed, George went inside. Connie worked until both poles shone brilliant in the sun. He thought of a song he liked and smiled, thought of his children and Maureen, of Susan and David and Justin in the rooming house.

Connie had been taught the principles of Christianity. Religion didn't sustain, and his churchgoing faded at puberty, though he enjoyed for a time his service as an altar boy and the theatrical qualities associated with the altar/stage, the sacristy analogous to what he heard Johnny Carson refer to as the greenroom, where players waited to be called onto the show.

His mind's ability to produce intense hatred for people, places, inanimate objects. He feared he did not know how to love, to show love, to receive love—his darkest fear.

Larry, for money, took pictures of people who did not want their pictures taken. He lived to be hated, got his rocks off playing the antagonist, yet Connie also sensed a vulnerability at the core of Larry's mortal soul.

He read something in a book as regards any person you wanted to hit over the head with a hammer, that beyond rehearsing how you would strike the blow, to help release the violent impulse you might instead imagine them as a child.

Before they became enemies, Connie didn't know Larry as a paparazzo staking out the house for photos of the president's widow and her kids. Larry, without a camera in sight, said hello a few times, and they sat on the wooden bench against the stone wall of the park together, conversing easily. Larry, Connie thought, had problems, but wasn't a pathological liar. Connie did not believe Larry fabricated a history from whole cloth to deceive him. No, Larry spoke from a genuine place to serve a specific deception. Larry wasn't afraid to make comments like I don't know or I'm not sure. Dyed-in-the-wool bullshit artists have an answer for everything.

Larry bonded with Connie to get inside information about the family's itineraries. He used real-life circumstances to betray Connie, the connection founded on a fallacy.

"Good enough," Walter said, out of his painter overalls. He turned to head up Fifth.

"Your brother?"

"Yeah." Walter's brother worked as a super in a house on 98th.

Connie got up and examined the poles from a variety of angles. You polish over here, it shines over there, someone once said. A sacred power bears holy witness to every effort we make. He lit a smoke and walked across the street, the temperature seven degrees cooler beneath the shade of the park. He hopped up to the top slat of the bench where he used to hang with Larry, prior to their friendship's reversal.

Ramey and Slovell looked at Connie, their moving mouths on display through the windshield. Connie assumed himself their subject, given how they stared. Let them talk. Beads of sweat evaporated on Connie's back from his brass-cleaning efforts, as he inhaled the verdant scent of nature behind him in the park.

A man across the street turned into the house. After a moment George appeared at the sidewalk's edge and pointed Connie out. The man went to the corner and waited for the light to change. A bit of confusion in his step, which Connie thought a pose. Pseudoconfusion. Connie watched the man approach.

"How you doing?" Connie said, jutting his face at him.

"Not bad," the man said, "and yourself?"

"So far so good."

"Okay, so," and the man double-checked the manila envelope he carried, "are you, let's see, Cornelius Sky?"

"Yes."

"Okay," the man said, and handed it to Connie. "I wish I could say it was good news."

"What is it?" Connie felt its weight, his hand a scale, the nine-by-twelve envelope a dark gift, and they were playing a guessing game.

"An order of restraint."

"Order?"

"But it's really not my place," the process server said.

"No, please."

"From your wife. You're separated or something, right?"

"Okay—I mean, yes."

"The order makes reference to your habit of showing up in the middle of the night."

"Does the order use the word habit?"

"Good question," the man said. "It states it wasn't a one-shot deal, that it was a recurring incident, and believe me, I'm not judging. It's nice around here."

Connie straightened out the fasteners and removed a sheaf of stapled pages. He couldn't read for his racing mind, only picked up words here and there. He went through the motions one goes through when shocked. His eyes scanned Maureen's name, his name, a legalistic maxim here and there.

"I wouldn't take it too personal," the man said. "It's a form, basically, and they type in different—"

Connie hopped off the bench and left the man midsentence before he spun and said, "Your shtick is tired—stop playing dumb, you little bullshit artist," then trotted across the avenue. He grabbed the Brasso and rags, moved past the Datsun showing no sign of Larry through the service entrance.

On the cement bags he perused the order: Showing up in a state of severe drunkenness at various late-night hours, on numerous occasions . . . Attempting to enter the apartment using violent means, beating his fists against the door and yelling obscenities . . . Attempting to break into the premises . . . thereby frightening both the children and Mrs. Sky.

The basement collected a late-afternoon dampness and he caught a chill. He liked the smell of the bags, smelling of a concrete thing. He put the sheaf of pages back into the envelope and let it rest on his chest. The housing cops probably put her up to it. He folded his arms behind his head, closed his eyes. A space opened up behind his breastplate, the spot in his body where he believed tears originated. It hurt so good to be served an order of restraint. I'm such a terrible creature, a ghoul of the first order. What has become of me? An order of restraint? Violence is not my thing. Beyond which, to put a hand on a woman? A child? Order of restraint, are you kidding me? Who ever the fuck protected me?

He curled tight onto his right side. His mind had its way with him a while, when he heard a noise: the zipper on a solitary pair of jeans banging against the spinning metal drum of a dryer. Which reminded him. He got up, went and removed the lint from the machines, cleaning each mesh basket with one sweep of his hand, removing the lint all in one piece if he could, as it brought him a pleasure to do so. He put the garbage out on the sidewalk before calling it a day at the job.

* * *

He made a few stops on his way downtown and arrived at the rooming house feeling no pain. There wasn't much in this world—not a birth, not a death, not an order of restraint—which a drink could not help to facilitate.

He let himself into his room and noticed a stain on the window shade, and with it came a small wave of pity. "Go ahead then," he whispered to his emotion, "do what you're going to do." He sniffed the air and walked across the hall.

"You're just in time," Susan said. "Are you hungry?"

And Connie knew in her smile, seeing her face, and a glance at the food on the hot plate, that their connection was a lost cause. Or that he himself was the lost cause. They might see each other awhile longer, this might be the end of it, who knew? The sex connection was strong but a partnership was not in the cards, and it produced a sad recognition as he stood in her doorway. Anger flash-flooded his system regarding this life—and why do we know we're going to die, could someone explain it to him?

"I could eat," he said.

"Come in, why don't you?"

She wrapped her arms around him and they kissed once, twice. The simmering concoction featured carrots and potatoes and meat, sweet and pungent.

She wore a skirt and a T-shirt displaying the portrait of a good-looking black woman with a perfectly shaped Afro.

Susan had attended Goddard College in the 1960s, one of those progressive, liberal outposts up in the Green Mountains of Vermont, more therapeutic community than institute of higher learning. The events of her life since graduating, as she would later share with Connie, included a stint of midlevel drug dealing. She and her husband moved cocaine by the kilo, Susan herself the Colombian mule. She had until last summer hung with the SDS crowd, the Weathermen, people like that, before everything fell apart and she managed to wash up in this rooming house, if not well, at least alive and not in prison.

"Do you like Indian food?" She liked to cook and bake, a pleasure inherited from her Oklahoma mother. She produced a canister, tapped out some spices into the simmering food, and gave it a stir.

"Would you mind taking that shirt off?" Connie said.

"Right this minute?"

Some writing under the portrait of the woman: Free Assata! and below it, Break the Chains!

"Could you put another shirt on? I like how it fits you, but I don't like her."

"Who?"

"Her," Connie said. "Joanne Chesimard. I don't care for her. I don't dig her. I don't dig what she's about."

Susan looked at him a moment, cleared her throat. "Why?"

"Why? A stone killer's why. The trooper she and her friends gunned down, and here ten minutes later she rates as a fucking folk hero on a T-shirt? Are you joking?"

Susan waited a moment before she spoke. "Do you want to talk about killers? Do you?"

They managed, mainly through strategic silences placed into the conversation by Susan, which served as speed bumps to Connie's drunken self-righteousness, to navigate away from a blowout. But she did not remove the shirt.

One morning at his 34th Street Blarney Stone, Connie read a quote in the New York Times by a self-styled revolutionary: You identify the enemy by the uniforms they wear. A picture of the guy, goatee and beret, posing on the steps of Columbia's library. It sounded like such idiotic dogma and infuriated him. Civil-service jobs were held up as something of a boon where Connie came from, to get work as a cop or garbageman or fireman, and these jobs required, well, a uniform. He knew the guy in the paper was speaking in metaphor, but still. And here you got a dead trooper on the Taconic over a routine broken taillight stop who was making, what, fourteen an hour plus all the overtime he can grab to keep the kids in parochial school?

And it wasn't just the likes of Joanne Chesimard who stirred Connie's ire, because he could in fact imagine the thousand daily indignities, intended or not, thrown at black people from, yes, the pigs—but not just the pigs, all white people practically. But none of it justified murder. Call it hateful retribution, call it spiteful payback, and I'll hear you, but don't tell me you identify the enemy by the uniforms they wear, don't say that stupid shit to me.

What really burned Connie's ass was these rich white kids. Embarrassed by their family money, their trust funds, and Greenwich Village town houses, they set about to apologize for their good fortune, the power of their shame sufficient to fuel the building of bombs. Go ahead and blow it all up, take the whole fucking block with you, why don't you?

They talked this stuff over, Connie in his doorman's uniform, drinking liquor and eating Indian food on Susan's narrow bed. Why, Connie thought, did I bring the whole stupid subject up? Why am I so willfully belligerent? Do I actually give a shit one way or the other? I felt the weight of my fleeting connection to her so I picked a fight. What have I ever committed to? Have I ever stepped up to the plate on behalf of something other than the next drink? That's the question behind my indignation. You envy Joanne Chesimard her courage, robbing banks for something vastly beyond personal avarice. What do I stand for? Anything, anything at all?

They ate and talked. Susan had a small library. Her "core concentration" was in English (Goddard didn't use traditional words like "major"), and her book stash contained novels, classics mostly, with some good junk thrown in too. Not a pretentious bone in the woman's body, and here she is feeding me in our shared rooming house, so why would I accuse her of guilt politics?

They decided to take a walk. Coming out, Susan pointed to a brownstone across the street.

"I used to live there. Me and my husband. We had the ground-floor apartment. Two fireplaces. A private garden in the back. We used to wonder about the lost souls who lived across the street in the rooming house."

A mugginess in the air, the lights of skyscrapers reflecting off low cloud cover, moving up Eighth Avenue.

"What time is it? Maybe we can second-act a show if you want," Connie said.

"Sounds good."

Their pace took on the assurance of destination. They made their way arm in arm past the hysteria of 42nd Street. They looked up 45th, saw a crowd huddled beneath the Morosco's marquee, and turned into the block.

"I don't like violence of any kind," Connie said, apropos of nothing, although Susan understood it referred back to their conversation in her room. "It scares me."

A couple dressed in flowing scarves and shawls moved past them, the man saying, "And the dialogue's so clunky," the woman saying, "Noel Coward he's not."

Connie and Susan cozied up to the intermission crowd, the sidewalk extra bright and warm. Connie looked up into the hundreds of bulbs of the Morosco's canopy, and the images of his dead parents from the dream returned to him, infusing him with sorrow.

Susan told him a story which he accepted as an olive branch. Abbie Hoffman had befriended the Beatles. Abbie, in Lennon's limo, gave John a tour of black Harlem's ghetto as part of a pitch to shake John for some cash for The Cause, the tour evidence as to how fucked The System was. Lennon went home and wrote not a check but some lyrics: If you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you is brother you have to wait.

Susan further conceded that the money from her drug-dealing days went nowhere but into her pocket, or up her own nose.

Connie for his part confessed an uncanny knack for having managed to avoid one difficult stand, ever—a life lived loyal to the throughline of his cowardice.

"Selfish in plain English," he said.

"Don't say that," she said, kissing his cheek.

A loud bell sounded intermission's end. Bolstered by a tight mass of bodies, they took tiny, choppy steps into the theater and found two empties down close on the aisle. They held hands and admired the room's grandeur, the chandeliers, the red velvet seats. They swallowed quick hits off Connie's pint before a human hush rose and moved through the room like a wave, as the house lights started to fade.