Fearless (36 page)

After the paper had settled, Max said softly and gently: “You’re not good. You’re precocious. Maybe someday you will be good, but right now you’re simply doing something ordinary at an early age.”

“You’re jealous,” Byron nodded his head up and down, grinning. “Yes, you are.”

“Listen to me.” Max took him by his narrow shoulders. The firm grip stilled Byron. His eyes were alarmed; they stared into Max’s, their usual conviction flickering. “You’re very bright and I’m sure you’ll be successful and your father loves you. You don’t have to pretend to be grown-up. You don’t have to do great grown-up things for your father to love you.”

Byron shrugged Max’s hands off. He swaggered away, skidding onto his knees and sliding to the fallen drawings. He picked them up carelessly and shoved them into the portfolio. “My dad,” he said as if it were of no consequence, “is a wimp.”

Max assumed he had misheard. “What did you say?” he asked. He was still on his haunches, an adult cut in half. He stood up; suddenly, he had to be tall.

Byron was done with his sloppy cleaning. He flipped the portfolio together and zipped it up recklessly. The zipper buzzed shut. “He’s a wimp.” Byron faced Max. “He’s even scared of my mom.”

Max slapped the boy. His hand was already back at his side before Max was conscious of the action. He had hit Byron hard. The child’s head remained turned to the side where the blow had pushed it. White ghosts of Max’s fingers still burned on the clean new skin.

“My God,” Max mumbled.

Byron’s face gradually pivoted back toward Max. His eyes were awash with tears and yet they looked fearlessly inward at something ugly. Byron’s mouth trembled but made no sound.

Max shivered. He was cold.

The sun came across his jaw, bobbing through the plane’s windows. He glanced at Jeff and made a decision—I’m going to sit with that abandoned child so he will not die an orphan. Max saw the look on Jeff’s face as he left him. Jeff’s eyes were startled and frightened. He mouthed something at Max, a plea…

Max understood his partner’s last look—
Jeff wanted me to stay with him. He needed me
.

Byron was gone. He heard wailing.

Debby was shouting: “Max! What’s going on?”

She came out of the bedroom with her hair wet, wearing only a towel. Max shook himself, like a dog drying off, to wake up from the memory.

He had forgotten exactly who he was or where he was or what time in earth’s history he was living in. His first real thought was that he was living on the Upper West Side and that his apartment needed to be painted. Then he noticed Byron by the front door. From the angle he had of the foyer, Max could only see Byron’s legs. He moved until he had a full view. Byron was spread on the floor, leaning his head against the door, clutching his portfolio and sobbing. Debby came beside Max muttering or mumbling something—Max didn’t pay attention. He smelled fragrant shampoo.

Max and Debby approached the weeping child together. She talked while they moved, saying things to both Max and Byron. Her eyes looked scared. Max was curious whether the marks from his slap would still be on Byron’s face.

Byron lifted his head from the door. He looked at Debby. He paused his sobbing and shouted: “I wanna go home!” There were no marks, only tears.

“Okay. Max will take you home,” Debby said soothingly.

“He’s angry,” Byron said and sobbed again.

“You take him home,” Max said to Debby. Even he was shocked and frightened by the cold fury in his voice. “I don’t want to have anything to do with him.”

Carla was downstairs waiting for him the next day. She smiled at the sight of his black Saab, bleached gray in spots by cold and dirt. Her eyes were lively and her hair was organized somehow—although still looking wild, black and lustrous. She likes me, Max thought and felt as proud as a teenage lover.

“So where are we going?” she said, bustling in, her down coat swishing. She pulled the door shut with a bang and grabbed the seat belt, pulling it across her chest in a hurry. Today, all of her movements had energy.

A dark-skinned man came out of her building, walked up to the curb, rested one foot on a fire hydrant and stared at Max. He was short and broad; his hair was a dulled black, straight and slicked back as if it were a skintight cap. He wore a gray uniform with a name sewn in script over his breast pocket. He didn’t have a coat in the freezing air and he didn’t shiver or blanch. He was still and ominous.

“Who’s that?” Max said although he knew.

Carla had to look; she didn’t know he was there. She had been concentrated on fastening the seat belt. She glanced up and frowned a little. She said in a disparaging tone: “That’s Manny.” She finished buckling herself in and said: “So where to?”

Max returned the stare of her sentinel husband. He wondered: Will I have to fight him to get her?

He drove to the Staten Island ferry.

“Is this safe?” she asked with a sly smile as they were being guided in to park their car in the ferry’s wide belly.

“No,” Max said, not smiling. “It’s had accidents. I think there are more boating accidents than with any other kind of vehicle.” He reached the spot where the attendants wanted him to park. He shut off the engine.

“I can’t swim,” Carla said. She wasn’t smiling anymore but she didn’t sound scared.

“I’d like to make this ferry sound especially dangerous, but it isn’t. I wanted to show you the dockyard on Staten Island where old ships are hauled to be scrapped for junk. Besides, we’ll get a good view of the city on the ride.” Max opened his door.

“I know that. My girlfriend lives on Staten Island,” Carla said and for a moment seemed not to be willing to move.

“Do you want to visit her?”

“No,” Carla laughed. She opened her door. “She’d ask me a million questions about you later and that would drive me crazy.”

They got out. The other passengers were heading for the enclosed deck. Max took Carla’s arm—he could feel her fragile elbow inside the down of her coat—to the open area at the back of the parked cars so they could see Manhattan retreat as the ferry moved into open water.

A gust of wind blew across them. His face felt paralyzed by the cold.

“We’re gonna freeze to death,” Carla said but she didn’t make a move to go inside.

Max had spent all night alone in a hotel waiting to be with Carla, expecting that she would make him feel happy. He had spent the night alone in a hotel because when Debby returned from taking Byron home, they had a fight and Max had walked out.

Debby had come in, stood at the closet and told Max right away, “His mother was very angry. I think you’re going to be hearing from them.”

Max didn’t answer. He studied his wife to see if the mean truth he had told her had left a mark on her face. She was composed.

“I want you to call somebody,” she said, turning her back on him to hang up the dramatic black cape she wore for a winter coat. She was angry. Everything about her posture and face and tone of voice told him that, but, as had been true since the crash, she was unnaturally holding it in, holding it like a position on the barre. “It doesn’t have to be your psychiatrist,” she said to the closet and then faced Max again. “Maybe you should call Bill Perlman.”

“Bill? You call him Bill?”

“I told you,” she had to swallow to contain her exasperation. “I’ve seen him a few times. He’s helpful to talk to. But it doesn’t have to be him. It can be your mother. Or maybe a friend. You haven’t spoken to Larry or Paul—”

“They’re not real friends.”

“Then who is?” Debby insisted.

Jeff. Jeff was the answer. He was the person Max would have talked to.

“You’re getting worse,” Debby said.

“I talked to somebody,” Max said.

“Who?” Debby asked. Curiosity wrinkled her high forehead.

“You,” Max said. He reached past her and took his coat from the closet. He held it in front of him and looked at her, asking her to give him a reason not to go.

She tried to hold her calm pose. “I can’t help you,” she said but the words were churned up and suddenly she lost her grip on the barre. She yelled: “You tell me you’re in love with a woman you just met! What am I supposed to say to that!” She seemed relieved for a moment and then sagged into despair. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she added in a low note of resignation.

“I’m going to a hotel,” Max said. “Just for tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.”

He had checked into the Carlyle. He had fantasized spending the night there since his youth when he learned that it was JFK’s favorite hotel in New York. Later on he read that Kennedy put Jackie in one suite and had his mistress in the adjoining room. That fact didn’t make him less curious.

Max asked for and got a room four floors down from the famous suites in the tower. It was a disappointment. Although the elegant room wasn’t pompous like the Plaza, it wasn’t the good old days either. It had the modern luxury of a video recorder and a CD player. The desk told him a fax machine could be sent up if needed. All that made Max think of business, of what travel had become in the modern world.

He hardly slept, dozing off near dawn and yet waking early. He spent most of the tedious night staring out his window at lights in nearby buildings that stared back at him. All night he waited anxiously to meet Carla.

But he wasn’t happy now that he was with Carla.

They leaned against the rail of the ferry and watched the city first grow bigger and wider as they pulled out into the water. Gradually the huge buildings shrank against the widening water and sky, their tops narrowing into needles lost in the clouds, their foundations revealed as resting on only a thin sliver of support. Manhattan was merely a wafer floating on the steel water. The massive works of the city seemed to be a carefully drawn miniature at the bottom of a huge canvas. He felt himself shrink.

“It
is
beautiful,” she said wonderingly, as if she had never seen the skyline before.

Max looked at her face, her young skin even tighter as it clenched against the freezing wind. He didn’t have her really. Any more than he had anything. Maybe he was dead after all.

“I had a fight with my wife,” he told her.

“Oh yeah?” Carla smiled. She turned away from the open water. “I had a fight with Manny.” She shivered and squinted at the wind’s force.

“You’re too cold,” Max said. They went inside, bought coffees, and sat on a bench. The hot coffees were in thin Styrofoam cups; holding them hurt. Max burned his tongue on the first sip.

“What did you fight with your wife about?” Carla asked. She was hunched over her coffee, bracing the cup between her knees, warming her hands with its steam.

“I told her I’m in love with you.”

Carla sat up straight and turned to look at him full in the face. Her circular eyebrows raised; up there they made an even rounder shape. “You’re crazy.”

“That’s what she thinks.”

“Well, she’s right. Jesus,” Carla turned away and shook her head.

“It’s what I feel. I’m not going to lie about what I feel.”

“There are some things you’re supposed to lie about,” Carla said energetically, looking at him again. “You gotta stop doing that to people.”

“You want me to start lying to you?” Max argued. “You want me to tell you you’re safe when you go out? You want me to tell you Bubble’s up there looking down at us wearing little wings?”

She slapped his arm with the back of her right hand. “Shut up,” she said casually and shook her head again. “I’m talking about them.” She smiled slyly. “The living.” She nodded at the window, at the water and sloppy landscape of Staten Island. “They can’t take it. You have to give the rest of them a break. I’m as crazy as you are—you can’t go by me.”

“What did you fight with Manny about?” Max edged closer to her until he felt her coat against him, up and down his side. He noticed her ear—it was little and had the ideal shape of a prototype.

“I told him after my mother left I was going to sleep in Bubble’s room. I went in there and started to pack things up. They had kept everything in his room the way it was because they were afraid I would go crazy if they changed anything. And I’m glad they left it so I could do it. I went in yesterday after I saw you and I started packing his little things. I was crying like crazy. But I didn’t mind crying and I was getting it done. My mother goes and hides in the kitchen. She was yelling at me from there. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then Manny comes in and tells me to stop. I told him to leave me alone, to leave me alone for good. He said it was your fault. He said you were a bad influence.” She laughed mirthlessly for a moment. “A bad influence. You know, like I’m a teenager and he’s my pop. ‘You’re running around with the wrong crowd,’ ” she imitated a deep, rough-voiced man.

Max smiled. He felt sorry for Manny. Manny had had a wife and a son when he put them on that plane and now both were lost to him. “I
am
a bad influence from his point of view,” Max said.

“He’s got no right to talk about who’s bad.” She darkened. Her high cheeks and deep-set eyes seemed to become shields; behind them, still visible to Max, she thought something black.

Max was quiet. Staten Island’s dock, a dull brown nest, limited their view. He felt better, vindicated in his feelings toward her. He could say the worst to her and she accepted him. The uneasy feeling he had moments ago—that he had been mistaken about Carla—was gone. “Let’s get in the car,” he said.

This time, when Carla strapped herself in she did it slowly and sadly. “I’m gonna tell you something nobody knows,” she said quietly as they drove off the ferry. Max had studied a map at the Carlyle. He turned right aiming to stay along the water if he could, hoping to find the famous shipyard. He wasn’t sure if the street allowed a view. “Just before the crash,” Carla continued. “Do you remember? We could see the runway. It looked like we were gonna be okay?” Her voice was tremulous, as if she were weeping in her throat. Her eyes were dry. She said shakily, “I let go of Bubble.”

Max had never heard a voice in so much pain. He stopped the car immediately, right after a curve. He parked beside a white seawall, tall enough to block the view of the harbor. He shut off the engine and faced her. Carla was staring ahead, through the windshield. Her hands and arms were out forming a circle, holding something invisible in her lap.