Stepping from the subway, the sheer height of Manhattan staggers me. Even the sky’s bigger here, swollen, free, soaring down to meet four horizons at the crossroads.
Mariana’s parents live in an apartment on the corner of Central Park West and Seventy-First but we’ve come up for air several blocks north of Times Square, having taken the AirTrain to the subway. The police weren’t waiting for me at the airport, which was something of a surprise.
I’m initially struck with the unfamiliarity of the place. Walking through this end of Central Park, a place I’ve always been led to believe was something of a natural oasis in the middle of Manhattan, I’m shocked by the number of roads that intersect us, the volume of canary-coloured taxis powering through its arteries. But it’s my first glimpse of Central Park West – all zigzagged fire escapes, smoking road grilles, cable-suspended traffic lights; the visual frilling on a thousand Hollywood rom-coms and gangster flicks – which convinces me that, though these steps on American soil are my first, I’ve lived here all my life. The dollars sleeping in my pocket have always been there.
I haven’t told Mariana about my mother’s latest revelation. I’m angry it’s taken so long, that those who actually care about my father have to wait on the faxing of stats, for Death’s paperwork. It’s taken the coroner a preposterously long time to clarify that my father was poisoned. I could probably, given access to his body, have told them within minutes how he died.
‘You’re quiet,’ Mariana informs me.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s pretty awe-inspiring, isn’t it?’
We arrive at the apartment block and step into a spacious, mirrored elevator. Mariana depresses the button for the eighth floor and we emerge into a wide, white foyer. Six doors lead off from this open space and Mariana rings the bell of the fifth.
‘Go easy on them,’ she says.
A tall man in a light blue suit jerks open the door. He’s older than I’d been expecting, but his eyebrows, set against the severe greying of his hair, are so black they seem absurdly false. He has a handsome, intelligent face and the smooth and sloping Venezuelan pedigree of the cheekbones is confirmed by the burst of urgent, unexpected Spanish with which he greets his daughter.
‘Hi there,’ he says to me, juicing my fingers of feeling with a handshake so unnecessarily painful I wonder whether I’m at all welcome. ‘You must be… Um, sorry. What was it? Lucas. That’s it. Well come through, both of you. Let me take your bags.’
Mariana’s mother now hovers behind her husband. She’s about his age but her auburn hair hasn’t lost its hold yet, and the skin around green eyes seems weathered only minimally by life’s anxieties. As Mariana claimed over dinner yesterday, the resemblance between mother and daughter is plain. Upon closer inspection, there’s something not-quite North American about her too, in the full lips, the proud width of the face. Maybe Mariana’s parents, as courting twentysomethings, didn’t see money in Latin America. They certainly found it here.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ her mother requests. ‘I’ll make coffee.’
The apartment is large and opulently furnished. A wooden floor is covered in a number of thick rugs woven with complicated, arabesque designs. I refuse both Chesterfield sofas in favour of standing to inspect the bookcase. It contains the usual American heavyweights amongst the foreign-language texts. One large Rauschenberg print dominates the wall to the right of the long window.
No, wait, it’s an original.
And outside, Central Park: their vast, perfectly quadrilateral garden, the towers of the East Side a picket fence forming a neat, trim border behind the fairylike joggers in its bowers. The view of lower Manhattan is awesome and the sky is a solid, flat blue.
I’m fascinated by the view until long after the family’s congregated behind me on the sofas and are sipping coffee, bitching about aunts and cousins back in Caracas.
The conversation shifts to Syngestia. It’s clear that Mariana, from her father’s gushing praise, is expected to forge a career as a computer whiz kid, as he once did. I take my cue to sit down next to a beaming Mariana, who praises my handling of the lab cock-up, explaining that we’re only here because the crisis is partially, potentially averted. Her father wants to hear all about it, even though he doesn’t understand any of the lab-speak, and both parents suddenly act like they’re casting for the role of son-in-law.
It transpires that three tickets have been booked for a show at The Lyceum this evening. Her father is adamant another ticket wouldn’t be hard to obtain but, stressing I’ve no wish to disturb a family affair, I insist I’ll be fine left to my own devices. In fact, I’d rather it that way. I’ve got the last part of my diary to finish.
Her father compromises by offering to lend me a map.
‘Anywhere I shouldn’t go?’ I ask, mindful of what I perceive to be frightening crime statistics.
‘Nah,’ Mariana says. ‘Perfectly safe. Everywhere.’
‘But stay clear of anywhere north of One-Hundred-and-Ninth and avoid the Lower East Side,’ her father gravely adds. ‘And don’t go into Chinatown or Midtown west of Broadway. The financial district will be full of gangs in a few hours, and don’t even bother with Tribeca or SoHo. And stay off the subway after dark.’
Mariana turns towards me, crosses her eyes and purses her lips; the child challenging a surrogate sibling not to laugh at the absurd paranoia of a parent. Taken aback, it takes all my strength not to snigger.
‘Does that leave anywhere?’ I joke.
Mariana’s father doesn’t laugh. Instead he asks about my parents, keen to know the stock I come from. I tell him my mother has her own design company, which is a whopping lie. She sometimes makes greetings cards and sells them through eBay.
‘And your father?’ he asks.
A week ago, I would’ve replied that I didn’t have one. ‘He was a writer.’
‘Was?’
Mariana steps in. ‘Lucas’s dad passed away recently.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he says.
I nod, shrug, try to pull the appropriate face.
‘That must’ve been hard,’ her mother muses. ‘You’re so young.’
Mariana’s father looks at me with his mouth set to ‘intrigue’, his dark eyebrows at ‘sympathetic’.
‘The funeral’s this weekend,’ I tell them. ‘At least it was meant to be. The police now think someone killed him.’
Her parents’ faces freeze with their carefully cast expressions of deepest compassion. Mariana asks me if I’d like to see my room and then leads me out of the lounge to the sound of rattling coffee spoons and nervous coughing.
‘Nice work, Lucas. It only took you five minutes to totally freak everyone the fuck out.’
Manhattan, according to my map, is a giant tooth, a girded and gridded fang. I walk down Seventh Avenue, through Times Square and its flashing, rippling neon, under the 3D M&M characters and Mr Peanut, and then head down Broadway. I walk for hours, through the areas Mariana’s father has told me not to, to the very tip of the fang, to Battery Park and the World Trade Center site, that part of the tooth now irretrievably chipped.
When I looked through the plane’s window, diary in lap, a sleeping Mariana by my side, and saw our aircraft’s shadow on the Atlantic, like a leviathan giving chase thirty-five-thousand feet below, it was plain to me: I was doing the right thing. Maybe, I thought, looking her over, nothing else matters.
But now… Swallowed by the size of New York, little more than a worm in the Big Apple, it occurs to me that I’m three-and-a-half-thousand miles from Becksmouth.
From home.
From the place of my father’s murder.
On my way back up Broadway, I enter a bar called The Old Peculiar. It looks quiet.
The establishment is not unlike many British pubs, with several booths and tables clustered around a central bar. The place is air conditioned by two disconsolately spinning ceiling fans, performing, with slow munificence, the job of moving the smoke around so everyone can breathe it in. Sweat beads on the barman’s forehead as he draws pints for chinless puffers, their ashtrays overflowing in the smoker’s tricolour: lipstick red, filter orange, tar black. I was under the impression smoking was banned in New York; presumably this place is carrying on the fine tradition of the speakeasy.
Even ordering a single glass of Coke, I’m advised to set up a tab. A down-and-out eyes me with envy over the meniscus of his Super Cool.
I unfold a New York Post someone’s left on a booth table. Amid the articles on prostitute-murdering Wall Street bankers and bellicose letters rubbishing the current administration’s policies in Iraq, I find a piece on the closing down of a series of nightclubs, due to the sale of drugs. What else? West Twenty-Seventh, Twenty-Sixth, all just off Eighth Avenue. So Chelsea might be a part of town worth avoiding too, given I just felt my heart rate increase at the thought of it. I fold up the paper and sling it to one side when my drink’s ferried over. Do I tip the barman? Do I stick the extra on the tab? Do I offer him fifty cents?
A voice from a neighbouring table interrupts my minor panic. ‘Y’ English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thought so. Thought I heard the English accent. Thought I did.’
‘You did.’
Pausing to scratch a bristled cheek, the hobo gestures to the empty chair opposite me. ‘Mind if I…?’
I shrug to indicate that I’m not bothered and he scrapes himself over with his beer, gathering the bottom of his tatty greatcoat around his middle as if to stop it touching furniture. I hope this guy’s got good stories. I hope he’s lived well. A greased yellow-white blade of hair cuts across his craggy face, his teeth are mossy stumps and two patches of thick brown hair sprout below his eyes, old-man-growth too high on the cheeks to trouble the razor’s well-practised trajectories.
‘Don’t like seein’ young fellers like y’self drinkin’ on their lonesomes,’ he says. ‘What y’ thinkin’ ’bout? Y’ look glum, boy, like death warmed over.’
‘Nothing. I’m fine.’
‘Woman trouble, is it?’
He commences a bronchial coughing session. I wait for the performance to finish before saying, ‘Not really, no.’
‘Not a woman?’ He flops back in his seat, cracks a crooked smile. ‘Hot damn! Y’ not from Greenwich Village, are y’?’
I wonder whether this is his way of accusing me of being homosexual. To get him off my back, I announce my father’s recent demise. ‘We never saw eye to eye, but I’m still, you know, shaken.’
‘Ah, it’s different when they’re gone, ain’t it?’
‘Is it?’ I honestly thought he’d have taken the hint by now.
‘Hell yeah. Y’ see ’em in a different light don’tcha? You’re not s’posed to speak ill of the dead, but sometimes, if y’ called a spade a spade durin’ their life, why shouldn’tcha? But a dad’s different, ain’t he? He’s flesh ’n’ bone. The apple don’t fall far from the tree ’n’ all that. Suddenly, I bet, y’ thinks to y’self, he can’t have done nothin’ that bad.’
This, it should be noted, is my interpretation of his wisdom, pieced together from the words I can actually discern through the stream of gruff incoherence. It would appear that shared DNA counts for something to non-scientists too, that ‘flesh ’n’ bone’ elevates people to a height from which faults can be overlooked. To disprove his theory, I tell him about my father’s affair, who it was with, where it occurred, everything.
‘Shit, fire ’n’ thunderation.’ He shakes his head, casts his features into a mournful jowl, then drops an octave from his voice. ‘The poor guy.’
‘What “poor guy”?’
‘He loved y’ real mother, but couldn’t be with her. Sad.’ He shakes his head, coughs. ‘What were the reasons for ’em not gettin’ together? Y’ real mom and dad?’
‘They were together, for a while.’ I sigh. ‘They were both young – perhaps too young – and my real mother left us when I was too little to remember. Soon after, my father moved house and met… the woman who would become my brother’s mother. The reasons for my real parents’ split hardly mattered to an eleven-year-old. I couldn’t understand why my actual mother came back for my father, but not for me. And I couldn’t understand why my father, a man I once respected and trusted more than anyone, chose to ruin everything for the love of a woman who’d rejected me.’
The tramp takes out his cigarettes. ‘Mind if I…?’
‘Go ahead,’ I say, shaking my head to decline his offer of one.
He strikes a match and lights the cigarette over-cautiously, as though outside in a fierce wind, and then furiously chews at the white cylinder until silver smoke plumes and twists from his mouth. He gulps the rest of his drink then fixes me a thirsty look. I feel duty-bound to order him another.
‘Thanks, pal,’ the hobo says as the barman adds it to my tab. ‘Why was y’ dad getting dirty with her in that antiques place? Sordid little detail, that is.’
‘It was probably their idea of an exciting tryst. The house next to ours was unoccupied for a time and The Old Mint must’ve seemed like a safe place. My mother, my real mother, was in town only occasionally. My father could hardly invite her round the house, could he?’
‘But…’
‘Hey. That’s the story. I don’t know any more “sordid little details”. And I never will now, will I?’
‘And what about y’ real mom? What happened to her?’
‘She wanted nothing to do with me, so vice versa. She can rot for all I care.’
‘Gee. Y’re a right one, ain’t y’? So y’ know nothin’ about her?’
I tell him about the time I caught her and my father arguing at the front door. Over the years, I’ve invented her afresh, based on that sighting. Her eyes – I remember, perhaps incorrectly – were as wild as her tousled, flower-child hair. Hardheartedness, pride, indulgence: the eyes of a woman who knew she was beautiful. Beyond that, I don’t know who she was at all. A few ornaments remained in my father’s possession, long after my mother took my brother and cleared out, that were certainly neither to his nor her taste. A statuette of a kissing couple. A blue tea towel soaked in star signs. Quartz crystal.
My impromptu drinking partner hacks out a phlegmy gurgle then announces, ‘Mebbe she turned up at y’ door to deliberately ruin things for y’ father. Mebbe she was jealous of his marriage. Mebbe she was even jealous that he ended up with you.’
I stare into his haggard face. Perhaps he’s wiser than I gave him credit for.
‘Who knows?’ My father certainly changed at that moment. He became colder. Much colder. ‘You’ve no idea what it was like living with him after that.’
Smoke curls through his spindly fingers. ‘Not many places let y’ smoke in New York these days. This place has been fined somethin’ like fifty times in the last year. Anyways, between you, me ’n’ the fencepost, I still reckon y’re bein’ harsh on y’ old man. If he’s the worst thing that ever happened to y’, you’ll be lucky. He had a few affairs. So what? Don’t let him rattle y’ bones. Y’ know what us men’re like.’
I shudder at this ruined old man’s assumption that the two of us are similar, beyond the Y chromosome and choice of dubious drinking establishment. I down the rest of my glass then tell him I have to meet someone.
‘Watch y’self,’ he mumbles. ‘Stay off the cross streets and stick to the avenues, y’know what I’m sayin’?’
Like Mariana’s father, he’s lived through Manhattan’s darker days. He sees outsiders like me at ease in his city, treading streets that used to be no-go zones. New York’s pulled itself out of the mire but the memory lingers, keeps her citizens fearful.
I say my goodbyes and he discloses his name. ‘Not Sam,’ he says. ‘Samuel.’
At the bar, I’m told there’s a minimum with American Express, which I haven’t reached, so I reluctantly pay for Samuel’s next two beers. As they’re poured, I watch the embracing amber bubbles sparkle and rush under the halogen bulbs.
The barkeeper slides them over. I’m still looking at them, mesmerised, when he asks, ‘So what say I put a little rum in that Coke of yours? On the house.’ He polishes a glass and racks it above his head.
It occurs to me that the glory days of last week, when the past remained in the past and I could simply resent my living, breathing father without guilt, are gone forever. This is what the future tastes like.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Another drink? For you. No charge.’
‘Um… No thanks.’
Samuel gurns a toothless, confused jaw as I ferry his drinks over. ‘I still don’t get it. Y’ hated y’ dad but, unlike y’ mom, he stuck around. Seems to me that…’
I don’t want to get drawn into this again. I put Samuel at ease with an old story, one finally confirmed by yesterday’s phone call.
‘It wasn’t that my real mother didn’t want me. I think she did. She just wasn’t able to raise me. She wasn’t capable. There were rumours from within my family, you see, after the affair. Rumours that she was ill… mentally.’
‘Yeah well,’ he says, launching himself at his next beer. ‘Ain’t we all.’