By the Rivers of Brooklyn (41 page)

“How's the world treatin' you?” he asks. The woild. His accent is still pure Brooklyn.

“Not so bad, not so bad. You?”

“Oh, fair to middlin'.”

Diane crosses her legs and smiles again, feeling like her face might crack. This is what a twenty-fifth reunion is all about: running into the guy who broke your heart, the one you thought you'd love forever, and finding you have nothing to say except the most appalling clichés.

She thinks of a real question to ask. “How'd you get in here? You're not class of '50.”

“Nope…shoulda been class of '49, if I'd graduated. My cousin Charlie–” he gestures at a short, bald man a few table away “–he was in your class. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember Charlie.” Only as Mickey's cousin, of course, not as a human being in his own right.

“So, Charlie's wife didn't want to come, seein' as how she's busy having an affair and getting ready to dump Charlie, so I told him I'd be his date.” There's a pause, and Mickey says, “I was hoping you'd be here.”

Diane stares down into her drink. Here she was feeling smug about how trite their conversation was, and Mickey has just upped the ante. She won't pass back the compliment, though. “I had no idea you'd be here,” she says instead. “I didn't even know if you were still in the area.”

“Yeah, more or less. I'm in Brooklyn Heights now,” he says.

“Still in Brooklyn?” She's surprised. “I think you're the first person I've met tonight who's still living there.”

“Pretty much, I'd say.” He takes a look around at the crowd. “Jersey, Jersey, Jersey, Long Island, a few here in Manhattan – doin' pretty well for themselves – and some from places unknown, like you.”

“California,” Diane says. She's finished her drink and could use another one. Mickey's drinking what appears to be rum and Coke and it's still half full.

“California, hey? Nice place.”

“It's different from Brooklyn, that's for sure,” she says lamely.

Mickey shrugs. “Well, Brooklyn's different from Brooklyn, these days. Here we are, a bunch of kids from Brooklyn, havin' our twenty-fifth reunion – well, your twenty-fifth reunion, anyway – in a hotel in Manhattan.”

“They say the crime rate there is awful.”

This time Mickey looks down and smiles. “Well, we're doin' what we can about that,” he says, and pulls out his wallet to show her his badge: NYPD. She looks up, surprised.

“You're a cop?”

“Wouldna thought it, would you?” Mickey says, and pockets the badge again. “Yeah, after the army it seemed like the thing to do. I've seen some tough things on the streets. But it's tough for those kids too,” he adds, staring down into his glass. “Not much to look forward to. You can see why they get into drugs and crime, I guess. And the parents come here, you know, from Haiti or Puerto Rico or wherever, looking for something better. Kinda like our parents and grandparents came. To us it seems like Brooklyn's changed, but to them… I don't know, I think it's pretty much the same.”

The band starts playing “Tennessee Waltz” and suddenly Mickey stands up. “Well, listen to that, Diane. They're playing our song. Wanna dance?”

Now she's really surprised, though she stands up and lets him lead her out on the dance floor. “You? Dancing?”

“Tennessee Waltz” is “their song,” kind of, in that they both used to like it and listen to it a lot when they were going out. But Diane has no romantic memories of floating around the dance floor in Mickey's arms to this tune, because Mickey never danced. He was one of the guys at school dances who would hang around on the edges, keep going out to the parking lot for a drink and coming back in, eventually to start a fight and get kicked out by the chaperones.

“Just an excuse,” he says. “You're lookin' great by the way. You look ten years younger than half these gals.”

She laughs, a slightly brittle laugh. “Well, you know how it is out in California. It's all about looking good. The fountain of youth.”

“Are you married?” he asks, apparently giving up on any idea of working the question into the conversation subtly.

“I was.” She gives him the same pared-down version of her life story she gave everyone else. “And you?”

“Yeah, I was, too.” He looks over Diane's shoulder as if concentrating hard: frown lines cut down between his green eyes. “I married a girl from Queens a few years after I got out of the army. Her name was Julie. She was nice; we had three kids. I'm the one who screwed that up. Divorced eight years now.”

“Sorry to hear that,” says Diane, thinking how inane and, in many ways, untrue this is.

“Are you?” Mickey says. “That's funny, ‘cause I was so happy to hear you were divorced.” There's a pause, and he laughs. She thinks it's funny, how direct he's gotten, how good he is at being honest, which is not a talent she would have predicted Mickey Malone would develop.

After that dance, Mickey says he needs to go say hi to some guys, and drops her back at the table where Carol and her friends are sitting. “Do you have plans, afterwards?” he asks.

“My gosh, Mickey Malone,” Carol says, when she and Tina have Diane to themselves. “Who'd have thought. I figured for sure he'd end up in jail or something.”

“He's still very good-looking,” Tina says, lighting a smoke.

“You and him were hot and heavy, one time,” Carol says, nodding slowly at Diane.

“He told me he was nothing but trouble and I'd be better off without him,” Diane says. “He said he was going to go get his ass blown off in Korea.”

“Obviously he didn't,” Carol says, watching Mickey walk across the floor to talk to someone.

“Good thing too,” Tina says. “Damn fine ass.”

Diane looks too, and has to agree. “
Damn
fine,” she says, and all three women giggle, feeling for one more minute like high-school friends.

The evening winds down; the band plays “Goodnight Irene.” Diane says goodnight to Carol and Clint, Tina and Frank. Declines offers to share a cab. She hasn't seen Mickey for an hour and wonders if she's going to be fool enough to hang around waiting for him. But then, there he is.

“Want to go somewhere else?” he says. “We could go for…for a drink, I guess. I'd like to talk some more.”

She puts her arm through his and they leave the hotel and go out into the street. He picks a small, not very trendy-looking bar where Diane orders a gin and tonic and Mickey, to her surprise, orders just a Coke.

“I'm glad I took the chance on coming tonight,” he says. “It was good, seeing you again.”

“Yeah, considering the last time I saw you, you said you were on your way to get your ass blown off in Korea.” She smiles, remembering Tina, but decides not to share the joke.

Mickey looks down into his glass again. “I gave it my best shot, but it wasn't in the cards.”

There's a silence between them, though not around them, as music pulses through the dark air. “See?” Diane says finally. “You were wrong. You told me we didn't have that many choices, that you could go get killed in the army, or else we'd wind up just like my parents, or just like your parents. But we didn't. We made different lives for ourselves.”

Mickey looks up, meets her eyes. “You still remember that night.”

“I think I remember every word you said.”

“I remember it too. And every word was true. I was headed for trouble, and it wouldn't have worked out. You made a good, clean getaway.”

“But you were wrong,” she repeats. “We didn't turn out like our parents, either of us.”

“Well, maybe not,” Mickey says. “I think just because the world changed, though. Like divorce. Hardly anybody got divorced in our parents' day. Now everybody's doing it. Isn't that the only thing that saved us from being stuck in dead-end marriages like our parents were?”

Diane is quiet, considering this. She felt a kind of desperation the last years she and Henry were together, as if she were being smothered in layers of pastel chiffon. It wasn't really fair to Henry, because she married him hoping that he could take care of her, look after her, and he did exactly that.

She isn't about to reveal all that to her high-school sweetheart. They have one evening together – maybe one night? It's a possibility – and Diane has already polished and prepared the self she's going to show on this trip. Just as Mickey has, no doubt, prepared his own persona: the Good Cop. “Look at you, though,” she says, keeping it light. “A fine upstanding member of society. People in the neighbourhood thought you'd come to a bad end. And you said yourself you were going to end up a drunken bum like your father.”

This time, he doesn't smile, or look away. He looks as serious as he did twenty-five years ago when he told her she should stay away from him. He holds up his keychain and she recognizes one of those little AA chips. “A cop can be a drunken bum just like the rest of them. Just like my old man. Don't let the uniform fool you.” He's not in uniform tonight, of course, but she knows what he means.

Diane takes the keychain and fingers the red plastic disc. She has friends who are in AA, who call themselves recovering alcoholics, but she has always thought of this as a California thing. The chip says “Ninety days.” She looks back at Mickey, cradling his glass of Coke.

“Three months, this time. I was sober for six years after Julie left me. Started again two years ago. I've been lucky to hold onto my job – it's about all I've held onto.”

Diane stares at him in the dim and flickering light, seeing the curious double image: the boy who said he would come to no good, and was right; the man who has done well for himself. And this third man, the honest one, who feels he has to tell her all this. She puts out her hand and covers his lightly. “Mickey,” she says. It's the first time she's said his name since he came up to her at the party. “Sorry…Mike,” she corrects. “But I don't think I can call you anything but Mickey.”

“That's okay,” he says. “Do you want to get out of here?”

She does. He pays the bill and they go out onto the sidewalks of New York, through the night that is never really dark or quiet, past the flashing signs and the bars pouring noise into the streets. For a while they walk without saying anything.

“I used to work here, when I first came to Manhattan,” Diane says as they pass Macy's. “I thought it was the doorway to heaven, that I could be or do anything if I could get a job here.”

Mickey takes her hand in his and squeezes it. “And see? You did. You got what you wanted.”

Now Diane is the one to shake her head, as if she owes him something for his honesty back in the bar. “Don't be fooled by the uniform,” she says.

She doesn't mean to tell him everything, but her story comes tumbling out – not the polished one she had prepared for meeting old friends, but the truth, or as close to truth as she can get. At some point – maybe when she's talking about the postpartum depression, or maybe it's the part about the suicide attempt – she realizes tears are pouring down her cheeks, making a mess of her makeup. Mickey hands her a three-ply Kleenex, large and manly, which unfolds like a bedsheet in front of her.

They are still staring at the window display, a vivid splash of rainbow colours. Mickey puts his arm around her waist. “And now… how are you doing?”

“Not bad.” That's the official line, the happy ending she'd decided on after he told his story and she knew she'd have to tell part of hers. “Yeah, things are pretty good now. I like my job, and the girls are pretty good, even though they're getting to that difficult age. And I don't come home much, because I still have… issues, I guess, with my parents, but I'm hoping we can get over that. My dad's sick; maybe Mom will need me. And I've dated a few people, but I haven't really met anyone, and sometimes I feel kind of lonely and…there's a lot of pressure, you know?” Her words are blurring, running together, like the lights in front of her eyes, and she's shaking, though it's a warm night. “I shouldn't…I mean, I still see a doctor. I take these pills…mostly I keep things together. The last time I… well, it comes back, you know? And–” she blew her nose hard “–I was so
mad
at myself, because I was supposed to be all better, there was no
reason
to be depressed. That's supposed to be all behind me, and it scares me to find out that it's not.”

“Yeah,” says Mickey. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

She stops walking and swipes at her eyes and nose with the giant Kleenex. They are standing under a brilliant neon sign advertising XXX Live Nude Girls, All Night Long. Mickey puts both arms around her, makes a little circle for the two of them to stand in. “I know what you mean,” he repeats.

Diane starts sobbing for real, like something has been untied, or unlocked, inside. She cries, and leans against Mickey's shoulder, and he holds her while she cries in a messy, unpretty way, blowing her nose into the Kleenex. An unshaven, bleary-eyed drunk careens past them towards the blacked-over door of Live Nude Girls.

“This is so funny,” Diane says. “All those years ago, when we were together, I always thought I had to look out for you, take care of you, be the strong one. And here we are, twenty-five years later, and turns out you're being the strong one.”

“No.” Mickey's voice is surprisingly hard, like it used to be when he got angry years ago, like she imagines it might be when he's interrogating a suspect. The Bad Cop. “No, Diane.” He doesn't push her away, but he lifts her face away from his chest, up towards his, so their eyes meet. “Don't make me the strong one. You know who I am, what I am.”

“But you quit drinking…again,” Diane says. “
You're
strong.
You're
a good person.”