Fearless (32 page)
For a split second he saw it all so clearly: I’m suicidal and I’ve goofed and I’m about to die.
No! His body talked back. From his stomach he pushed up at the dead weight of his body with all of his energy. His left arm contracted, his feet kicked at the rough bricks. He was reminded of pulling himself out of a swimming pool in Florida when he was a child, his mouth filled with chemical water, afraid of the deep end he had wandered into. Max put everything he had into one single jerk of power in his left arm. Something punched him in the stomach.
He groaned. It hurt and made him wish to give up. He was lying on top of the wall again, spinning it felt like, and he had only a little energy left, a last bit of himself with which to decide his fate. The wind was furious and powerful.
He had to get off the wall. He couldn’t see from the pain. He pushed himself off the wall without considering that he didn’t know if he was headed for a short drop to the tar or the long battering fall to the street.
The suspense lasted only a second.
Immortal Max landed on the roof and laughed.
Max hadn’t been in Little Italy, that he could remember, since he was a young man romancing Debby. They used to have cappuccino and cannoli in the sidewalk cafes after delicious, cheap meals in Chinatown and walk north arm in arm, talking all the way to her apartment on Washington Square. Hadn’t lasted long. Only a few months later she was injured and eventually moved in with him uptown. They were no longer sixties lovers but that ungainly thing of the seventies—a relationship.
He met Perlman on the corner of Mulberry and Canal. It was late morning on a December Monday, the last week of the year before Christmas. It was cold. The therapist’s breath flowed out of him in a long arched white column of smoke, curling up past the tenements to the sky, as if he were a little chimney that had bolted from the buildings. The streets were dirty from last night’s tourists. Attached to every lamppost was a gaudy and, especially in the morning sun, tawdry white and red Christmas bell decoration. Lights were strung between the bells; sometimes they became overgrown and smothered an awning or a tenement’s banisters. On one staircase leading down to a basement, where the garbage cans would normally be, a Nativity scene of miniature figures was displayed; the steps made a steep descent for the Wise Men to Baby Jesus at the bottom. Max stepped on a green Michelin guidebook that was soggy and broken. Only one shopkeeper was out sweeping. In this cold, the quick way with a hose wouldn’t work. The other store owners must be sleeping late. Or maybe hoping the bright sun would eventually warm things up.
“She knows you’re the Good Samaritan,” redheaded Perlman said as they walked to Carla’s apartment. He had grown a beard since their last meeting. It wasn’t as red as the hair on his head, but it was full. Max thought that with his bulk Perlman would make a good Santa Claus. He sounded like one; and in the nearly empty streets the therapist’s deep bass had even more resonance and volume. “It doesn’t impress her, that’s not why she agreed to meet with you. She agreed to meet you because she wants to ask if you saw her child while inside the wreck. I’ve told her no. But she wants to hear it from you. She’s completely obsessed and very—I don’t know—primitive about the whole thing. She’s very Old World, very Catholic, you know?”
“No, I don’t.” Max no longer bothered to guess at the meanings hidden in everyone’s talk. He insisted they be explicit or he would be deaf to their half-speeches.
“I don’t know. She’s filled with guilt and shame. You know?”
“No, I don’t. I’m filled with guilt and shame. How is that Old World?”
“We’re here.” They were in front of two unlocked glass doors, leading to a small tiled vestibule with an intercom and a locked door. “You judge for yourself. I wanted to warn you. She could do anything. They tell me she’s been almost catatonic for weeks. But that could change. She could scream at you. Hit you. Her mother is there and she’ll keep an eye out. Carla doesn’t want me to go up. I’ll be across the street visiting with her priest. He’s actually the one who first called me about her. But we’ve never met, only talked on the phone. Would you ring the bell at that door”—Perlman pointed to a small wooden door in a building next to Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral—“after you’re done and let me know how it—?”
“Isn’t that where the first black American saint is buried?” Max asked. He gestured at the long wall around an adjoining cemetery. “I was reading about it in yesterday’s
Times
.”
For a moment Perlman was ready to laugh. He checked that, however, and looked at the top of the wall as though he might be able to vault it with his vision. “I don’t know. I didn’t see the piece. I’ll ask the Monsignor. Give us something to talk about.” He opened the outer glass doors and pointed to the fake gold buttons of the intercom. “It’s three A.”
After he was buzzed in, Max paused in the small area at the foot of the stairs, too cramped a space to be called a lobby. He smelled a kind of cooking and mustiness that reminded him of something. What was it? He waited there until he remembered it was the smell in the halls of his childhood building in Washington Heights. After his father’s heart attack, thanks to the insurance money and his uncle’s help, they had moved to the Upper West Side, which, although it was decayed in those days, was still more definitely middle-class than his old neighborhood. Certainly the buildings smelled different and sounded different. You didn’t know who lived behind most of those doors or what they felt about each other; in Washington Heights he knew what everyone was eating and whether they loved each other. Not that he missed it as a thirteen-year-old. He had preferred the relative bourgeois dignity of the Upper West Side, despite its heroin-addicted muggers and demented rent-control elderly.
Max winced at the fact: his father’s death had improved his life. He was indulged; they lived in a better neighborhood; he was sent to a private school. Max breathed deep of the unventilated odors of ancient garlic and detergents that had worn away the tiles to a smooth rubbed finish and he had to admit it to himself—Dad’s death was boom times for me. He had confessed this to his shrink years ago, but its clarity had been muddied when the good doctor forgave the observation as a generic feeling all sons are liable to. In the vestibule Max looked at the truth, admitting to himself that it belonged to him as an individual characteristic. His shoulder still hurt from his latest struggle with death the month before and he sometimes shuddered at the memory of what he had dared, but the truth stayed with him, that death was his friend, had always been his friend, and now was the source of his strength.
A little old woman, her skin dark and wrinkled, her teeth as white and fake as kitchen Formica, opened the metal door of 3A. She immediately took Max’s enormous goose-down coat—removing it he felt small, as though he had shed a big man’s skin and emerged as a child—and explained that she was Carla’s mother. She said she would take him to the living room and then get Carla.
Max hardly answered; he was surprised by the condition of the apartment. He had expected the dented front door to squeal with age and open into a decrepit interior. But the door opened silently. Judging from the small foyer and the living room, the tenement apartment was maintained in extraordinary condition. The plaster and paint job was immaculate; Max couldn’t see a single bump or crack. The walls were as smooth and pure as if it were eighty years ago and New York was mobbed with meticulous immigrant craftsmen—a Babel of geniuses who worked for what New York’s WASPs considered nothing and the workers considered a fortune. The living room windows, framed by tacky red drapes, were brand-new single Thermopane; but they weren’t sloppily fitted with a slapped-together frame; they had been replastered and set with old-fashioned round-edged sills, each carefully painted so that only the absence of multiple panes made it obvious the windows weren’t original. Also, the wiring seemed to have been redone throughout the apartment, judging from the three-pronged plugs and the recessed lights in the replastered living room ceiling. Either these working-class Italians were secretly rich Mafiosi or the husband had many friends in the trades. Only love or guns could buy this quality of work.
Max was delighted to be in its presence.
“Here we go,” the old woman said, returning to the living room with Carla. The mother seemed half the size of her daughter, although that was partly because she had the beginnings of osteoporosis. The mother may have been small and bowed by age, but she was both guide and engine for her daughter.
“My God,” Max said on seeing Carla as she was steered onto the yellow and white sofa. He was in a matching love seat at its side. “What a tragic face.”
Carla’s mother looked at him, neither upset nor pleased by his comment, but certainly impressed. Carla had no reaction; she stared at him blankly. That surprised him. She had asked to see him and yet she behaved as if his presence were of no concern. She had an El Greco face, elegant and sad. Carla’s black hair twisted away from her in places and fell off in others. The mess was richly colored even though so black—hair with the tints and shine of youth. She reminded him, although her face was different in shape and texture, of his mother when young and widowed.
Here’s your chance to sleep with Mom, Max said to himself without irony.
Max didn’t bother to say hello. “My father died in front of my eyes when I was thirteen years old,” he said into her exquisite and heartbreaking face. Carla’s eyes flickered to life, as if Max had only just appeared in front of her. “I was walking with Mom and Dad and my little sister down a long hill on 174th Street in Washington Heights. I had a brand-new baseball glove, a special first baseman’s mitt that they had spent a fortune to buy me, and I was tossing the ball up and down in the air. I had just thrown it up and was watching it fall toward me when I heard my mother gasp and kind of scream and I didn’t see where the ball fell—somewhere, I guess, it’s still rolling down the street—and I turned and Dad was dead on the sidewalk. There was a little blood coming out of his nose, and his legs were sort of twisted beneath him. My father looked as if somebody, somebody with a big hand, had just reached down, given him one good squeeze and broken the life out of him.”
“That was God,” Carla said. She smiled a crooked smile.
Max nodded. “That’s what I thought. I thought, God killed my daddy.” Tears came up in his eyes. Carla’s black despairing eyes focused on him with an intensity that might be hatred. Her crooked smile smoothed to calm resignation. She nodded agreement. Max was fascinated by her long mouth and full lower lip, quite red even without lipstick. Her jaw was long and perfectly drawn by its creator. Her chin has great dignity, he decided, the dignity of a judge. “Scared the shit out of me,” Max admitted to her. He hadn’t explained it to anyone that simply. There had been such fancy talk about the effect of his father’s sudden death and what did it amount to? Was it as precise and truthful as that it scared the shit out of him?
“What did your father do to make God want to kill him?” Carla asked. It was clear from her erect posture and alert black eyes that she meant her question literally.
Her mother proved that by her reaction. “Carla!” she chided her.
“I couldn’t figure that out,” Max said. “He was a religious man. He was hardworking. He was kind to my mother and to me and to my little sister—” Max’s tears had returned, blurring his vision. He paused because they had also welled in his throat.
Carla leaned forward. She thrust her beautiful and sad face at him, studying his eyes, apparently checking on his tears. She nodded. “You loved him,” she said and leaned back, again with a judge’s dignity.
“Yes,” Max said. “I didn’t know why God had killed him. There was no reason to kill him and so I decided that meant there was no God.”
Carla’s mother made a noise, something in between a gasp and a groan of disapproval. “Mama!” Carla said. She almost whispered, but there was rage in the breathy wind: “Leave us alone!”
The little woman shut her eyes and sighed, standing still for a second. She scurried out a moment later, calling back, “I’m in the kitchen. Ask him if he wants coffee.”
“Do you want coffee?” Carla said, again with a crooked smile.
Max was amused. She was in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, her eyes were exhausted, her hair was chaotic, and there was no heat coming from her, no sexuality, but he wanted to take her out of the apartment and change all that. He looked at her left arm, pointing languidly at him as part of her question. The underside was smooth, its color a creamy white. One blue vein showed through, cutting across her arm until it ran into bone and disappeared. He declined her offer of coffee and she returned the arm to her side. He was impressed by the knob of her elbow, sharp, its tip pink from friction with the sofa. He wanted to kiss it. He couldn’t remember if he had ever kissed a woman’s elbow.
“I know it’s stupid to believe in God,” Carla said. “I can’t help myself. But you’re smart. You’ve been to college, right?”
Max chuckled. She was funny and not depressed at all, it seemed to him, in spite of what Perlman had said, and in spite of her enervated appearance and despairing voice. He didn’t think it was really sorrow; she was angry. He couldn’t express those thoughts so he merely chuckled. “Yes, I went to college.”
“And you’re Jewish, right?” She hardly waited for his nod before continuing, “Do Jewish people actually believe in God? I know Jews don’t believe in Jesus, but tell you the truth—and I’m sorry, I know I’m being rude—but I ask because it don’t really seem like most Jews believe in God the Father either. Except for the ones with all the hair, the Hassicks—I don’t know how to say it—”
“The Hassidim.” He leaned back and laughed. “You’re right. They’re like really devout Catholics. Jews like me—we’re more like Mario Cuomo.”
“You got it.” Carla snapped a finger at him to indicate he had won a point. “People who go to college don’t really believe in God. People who really know about things don’t believe in him. I’m too ignorant not to believe. But I’m not so stupid that I’m going to believe Monsignor O’Boyle when he tells me that my Leo is with God somewhere playing a harp.” She spoke in an annoyed tone but her face was in pain, as if she were about to cry.