Dear Old Dead (16 page)

The woman at the desk smiled at them and took them to a table in the “Pool Room.” It could have been a table in any room at all, because the restaurant was nearly empty. Gregor supposed the rooms had status rankings among Manhattan regulars who kept track of that sort of thing. Because he couldn’t hold on to information of that kind even when he wanted to, he didn’t worry about it. The table he and Michael were seated at was on a raised platform looking out over a sea of other tables, all empty. Gregor ordered a bottle of wine and Michael ordered a Perrier water.

“I work too much, you see,” Michael said, when the drinks had come and he had a menu in his hands. Gregor was interested to see that Michael wasn’t much interested in the menu. He flipped through it quickly, seemed to check something he expected to be there, and put it down. “With the clinic, it’s not possible to say that I’m actually off duty. If I’m around and somebody needs me, I’m on. Once every four years, I declare myself on vacation and rent a motel room on the Island for a night. Then I watch the returns from the presidential elections and get dead drunk.”

“I know somebody else who drinks for presidential elections,” Gregor said.

“It’s necessary. Republican, Democrat. Reagan, Carter, Bush, Clinton. Nixon, for God’s sake. Where do they get these guys?”

“Do you vote?”

“Absolutely. I write in James Madison.”

“My friend who also drinks for elections writes in Snoopy.”

“Snoopy couldn’t hurt.”

The waiter came with the drinks, but not with his order pad—did the waiters carry order pads in here? Gregor couldn’t remember. He did remember that there were a lot of waiters, in the way that there were a lot of people on Broadway stage crews. Each waiter did one thing and no other. It was rather nice. Michael Pride took a sip of his Perrier water and looked around.

“Funny,” he said. “My brother took me to this place once, right after I’d opened up uptown, trying to talk me out of it. I had a wonderful time, stuck him with a six-hundred-dollar bill, and went right back to doing what I was doing. Larry was furious.”

“This was right after you opened the clinic?”

Michael shook his head. “No clinic. I never intended to open a clinic. In the beginning there was just me and a rented office suite about five blocks north of where we are now, with a sign hung out saying I’d do doctoring for anyone who wanted it for free. Believe it or not, it took a while before anybody showed up at my door. I realized later they all thought I’d had my license revoked. It wasn’t until I got friendly with one of the African Methodist ministers that I got any business.”

“Do you have family money?” Gregor wondered. “You must have income from someplace, to work for free. That is, if you do work for free. I’m afraid I didn’t ask the Cardinal about the arrangements at the clinic. Possibly they pay you a salary.”

“They quite definitely pay me a salary,” Michael said. “Fifty dollars a month. And I’ve got my room, of course, and I can take anything I want from the cafeteria without paying for it. And no, I don’t have family money. When I first went uptown, I had about twenty-two thousand dollars that I’d put away from three years as part of a medical partnership with offices off Central Park West. If I’d stuck with the partnership, I’d be a millionaire several times over by now. All the men I used to work with are into real estate.”

“What did you intend to do for money after the twenty-two thousand dollars ran out?”

“I didn’t let myself think about it.”

“New York is full of people who didn’t let themselves think about it, Dr. Pride. Bag ladies. People sleeping on the street.”

“That’s not how people end up sleeping on the street, Mr. Demarkian, you should know that. And it’s not the same thing. People like me do not end up on park benches, not unless we take to liquor and refuse to do anything about it. People like me have something to give. If we give it, the world gives back. Which isn’t to say it gives back very well. I’ve slept with my share of bedbugs.”

The waiter was back, except that it was a different waiter. Maybe. Gregor gave his order and then sat back to listen to Michael Pride order enough shrimp to populate an ocean. Gregor hadn’t realized there were that many different kinds of shrimp on the menu. Gregor’s wine was gone. He asked for a bottle of Chardonnay and the waiter disappeared.

“The wine waiter will be back to create a fuss,” Michael warned him. “Where were we? Oh. At the beginning of my brilliant career.”

“I think the question is why you didn’t continue with your brilliant career,” Gregor said. “Your credentials are very impressive. In fact, they’re spectacular. You had started out with what sounds like a lucrative partnership. You’re probably right, you probably could have been a millionaire several times over if you’d stuck with it. Why didn’t you stick with it?”

“Why should I bother?”

“Money,” Gregor suggested.

Michael Pride nodded. “I like money as well as anybody else, that’s true. I like lots of shrimp in the Four Seasons and a dozen other luxuries I could name. I’ve had this jacket for fifteen years. I’ve never replaced it because I couldn’t afford to replace it with anything this well made. But everybody likes money, Mr. Demarkian. Most people don’t have it. As long as they’re not destitute, they survive well enough. They’re even happy.”

“If they’ve got a chance of getting money, though, they usually take it.”

“True.” And then they’re stuck with what I’ve always thought of as the fate worse than death.”

“What’s that?”

“Boredom.”

“Were you bored, in that partnership of yours, Dr. Pride?”

“Very. And I would have gone on being bored. I would have had regular hours and regular days and an apartment on the Upper West Side and a house on Martha’s Vineyard, and I would have lived for the two days every three years that a difficult case came up. What’s worse, I would have done heart surgery after heart surgery after heart surgery. That was my specialty. Heart surgery without end.”

“That kind of experience is necessary, isn’t it?” Gregor asked. “Specialists specialize because it makes them better at what they do.”

“Some of them specialize for that reason, yes. And the best ones do work they couldn’t have done any other way and that nobody else on earth can do. Maybe I would have been one of them. But my eyes glaze over even thinking about it. And thinking about the patients I would have had to put up with is worse.”

The wine steward came with the Chardonnay. He did indeed make a fuss, which Gregor endured with as much grace as possible. There were swishings and smellings Gregor didn’t understand at all. There were bowings and assurances that only made him feel ridiculous. Gregor drank Chardonnay because he liked the taste of Chardonnay. He didn’t know what it was supposed to go with and he couldn’t tell the good stuff from the bad, except at the extreme ends of the scale. Every time the wine steward raised his voice in a question, Gregor made indecipherable grunts he hoped would suit. They apparently did. The wine steward backed off and gave a final bow. Then he disappeared into that limbo where Four Seasons waiters went until the instant they were wanted by their tables, at which point they reappeared instantaneously, like genies out of lamps.

“Told you he’d make a fuss,” Michael said.

Gregor poured himself a new glass of wine. He had a new wineglass to pour it in. The Four Seasons would never have let him pour Chardonnay into a glass that had held Chablis.

“So,” Gregor said, “all this is very interesting, but none of it seems discreditable to me. I can’t believe this is what you meant when you said that people were deliberately withholding information about you from me.”

“It isn’t.” Michael Pride smiled. “I think I was just trying to head you off at the pass, stop you from doing what everybody else does. I was just trying to convince you that I’m not a saint.”

“With that résumé? With that résumé I could press your case in Rome, tomorrow.”

“Oh, no, you couldn’t. That’s my point here, Mr. Demarkian, and it’s a very important point. I’m not a crusader, I’m not Robin Hood, I’m not Mother Teresa—whom I’ve met, by the way. She came to tour our operation a couple of years ago.
There’s
a saint. No, Mr. Demarkian, I’m like anybody else. It’s just that I’m not afraid of the same things most people are. I’m afraid of other things.”

“Boredom.”

“Boredom. Waking up when I’m sixty-five years old and not being able to explain what I’ve done with my life, not being able to remember it. That’s what happened to my father, you know. He was a brilliant surgeon, too. But by and large saints are ascetics, Mr. Demarkian, and I am no ascetic. Just watch me with the shrimp tonight. And later at dessert with the chocolate. Just what do you know about me, Mr. Demarkian, aside from what I’ve told you?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Gregor said. “The Cardinal told me you were a homosexual.”

“Oh,
homosexual.”
Michael waved this away. “My brother Larry is a homosexual. He’d say gay. He’s living with the same lover he’s been living with for the past twenty years. They bought an apartment in the West Seventies and they’re more married than our parents were. Homosexual is not the point. Do you know what happened to me the night before Charles van Straadt was murdered?”

“No.”

“I got arrested.”

“For what?”

“I got arrested in a raid. On a gay porno theater in Times Square. It was not an upmarket porno theater. It took quarters and there were glory holes. When the police hit I was using one of the glory holes.”

What, Gregor wondered, did you say to a confession like this? Especially because Michael Pride didn’t look like he was confessing anything. He was using the tone of voice people use to describe minor irritating problems with their bosses or run-ins with their stepmothers.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Gregor asked him. “I don’t mean because you might get arrested. I mean medically.”

“I’m very careful, medically. I wasn’t always, but I am now. No, Mr. Demarkian, at the moment, the chief problem I have in relation to my activities in this direction is definitely legal, although not legal in the everyday sense. I got arrested in that raid, Mr. Demarkian, but I did not get booked and I did not get charged.”

“The district attorney was doing you a favor?”

“The district attorney was doing the city of New York a favor, or so he thought. Everybody seems to think the clinic will collapse if anything happens to me. Whatever. The problem was, I got arrested in that raid, and I got photographed being led out into the paddywagon, and the photographs ended up on the front pages of both the New York
Post
and the
Daily News.”

“Not on the front page of the New York
Sentinel.”

“No,” Michael said. “That’s what Charlie van Straadt was doing at the center on the night he died. He’d made sure that the
Sentinel
and that television station he owns kept strictly off the story of my arrest. He was a good contributor to the center and Charlie and I went back a long way. He couldn’t just let it go, though, and we both knew it. He came uptown that night to talk to me.”

“Yes.” Gregor nodded. “That’s in the Cardinal’s report, not as a fact but as a conjecture. Still, everybody seems to have assumed it.”

“They ought to. What nobody knows is that Charlie called me, in the afternoon, before he came up.”

“He did?”

“Oh, yes, and that’s the funny part. I’ve been thinking about it ever since and I just haven’t been able to sort it out. Charlie was upset about the publicity, of course. I was upset about it, too. I may not have intended to start a clinic, but I have started one and I think the neighborhood would be in even worse shape than it is now—good God, can you imagine worse shape?—if we were forced to close. In spite of the insinuations the police made, I wasn’t worried about Charlie and his money. There were never any secrets between Charlie and me. It was our position with the Archdiocese of New York that was making me antsy. We walk a tightrope with them every day.”

“Because the clinic does abortions.”

Michael shook his head. “Believe it or not, the abortions are a sore point only in a technical sense. Our position and the position of the Archdiocese is that the abortions are performed by the Sojourner Truth Family Planning Clinic, which is a separate corporation from the Sojourner Truth Health Center, and no nuns or recognized practicing Catholics work in family planning. Were you in favor of
Roe v. Wade?”

“I don’t think I ever thought about it,” Gregor said. “It’s not an issue that comes up often in my life. Abortion, I mean. The only young woman I’ve known in the past ten years or so who’s gotten pregnant when she didn’t want to be decided she did want to be in no time at all.”

“Well, I was in favor of
Roe,”
Michael said. “I’m still in favor of it. The black churches don’t like it. They think it’s a form of genocide. It’s an argument that makes me uneasy sometimes. However, getting to the here and now and the Archdiocese of New York and the center’s abortion practices, the fact is that making abortion safe and legal was a wonderful idea as far as I am concerned, but making abortion legal didn’t exactly make it safe in the kind of neighborhoods the center serves. New York State pays for abortions for indigent women and the hospitals in the area do them, but in spite of those two things, most abortions performed in Harlem and Spanish Harlem and the less desirable neighborhoods of the Bronx are still performed by back-alley abortionists. Except now, the back-alley abortionists have offices right out in the open and there’s no way to know whether you’re in the wrong place until it’s too late. They convicted one of these guys a couple of months ago, but he’d killed a few women before they got hold of him and his arrest isn’t going to do his victims any good. Now the Archdiocese is opposed to legal abortion and I am in favor of it, but we both are opposed to the kind of butchery that goes on in the offices of these quacks. And we both know that there isn’t any other way to stop it except to drain off as many clients as can be drained. The state and the city don’t move in Harlem until they absolutely have to. So. The Archdiocese looks one way. I look another. The high-wire act is successful for one more day.”