Ira Levin (16 page)

    Not a bad space-the amphitheater and its dressing rooms and green room, the conference rooms, all carpeted, soundproofed by floors of empty offices above and below-not a bad space at all for a Black Mass. Better than Minnie and Roman's living room, for sure.

    Five people to get it spick-ana-span? Didn't the cleaning crew hit nine? Ultramesso?

    SOULMASTER…

    Snow strummed the window, falling faster now, windswept swaths of white, whipping down out of darkening sky. Score one for the forecasters; four inches by midnight, they had said, two to four more by morning. Wind gusts up to forty miles an hour.

    Snow was probably coming down at the radio station too,- Bing Crosby had begun dreaming of a white Christmas.

    Just like the ones he used to know. The blizzard of '99, lasting two and a half days and dumping two to five feet of the white stuff all the way up the Eastern seaboard from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod, was far and away the peak, the pinnacle, the Everest of the century's blizzards, and the paramount headache of them all.

    New York City was lucky, only 23.8 inches. God got thanks for that-Boston, it was said, would never dig out-and "Mother Nature" (god in drag?) took the rap for the rest of it: the buried commuter trains, the collapsed roofs of supermarkets, the empty theaters and stores, the stranded travelers, the homebound everyone else except children with sleds and cross-country skiers.

    The last flakes fell and the sun came out early Friday morning, as if in direct obedience to the feisty, irreverent order of only one of the tabloids: stuff it, bing. Midtown Manhattan was a grid of lumped tundras where people tramped, kicked, skied, threw snowballs, frisked with dogs, pulled children on plastic shells-while store managers watched, smiling, from open doorways.

    Tiffany's alone was jammed with card-waving customers, not only the Fifth Avenue store and its satellite boutiques but the branches in White "Plains and Short Hills as well-proof yet again that as long as they spell the name right, there's no such thing as bad publicity. t.j5sg5r8*ff less-than teffi."

    U "T Tj. Let's go look at the tree."

    L JL They hadn't seen or spoken to each other since Tuesday morning, when her obviously wretched state of exhaustion had given her a legitimate excuse to send him and Joe on their way, each with a kiss on the cheek, Joe with the rest of the doughnuts and both the rags, thank you. Andy had said he was going to the retreat but would be back in time for Christmas-morning brunch.

    She had been glad of his going-the radiating hadn't been exactly a lark-but she had wondered whether it was grief or guilt or a mixture of both that he was retreating from, and in whose company, if anyone's. She imagined him or them in an adobe-andsteer-horn Playboy pad surrounded by desert. Another subject left unmentioned; a retreat is a retreat.

    "You there?"

    "Yes," she said, moving with the phone to the bedroom window. "Where are you?"

    "Forty-five floors overhead. Just got in." "Howl" she asked, looking down at the billowed white quilt laid over the park.

    "Plane, chopper, and subway. Feel like some exercise? The snow's more or less packed in the middle of the streets and the plows are getting plowed out. It's real Christmasy."

    She sighed, and said, "We had a tree of our own the last Christmas I remember. You were five and a half, we trimmed it together. Do you remember that?"

    "Completely forgot it. That's why I'm still in Arizona. Do you have boots? The boutiques must be sold out."

    "I've got," she said. 93aret So caret Tf*caret S8A caret 9

    Everybody had- boots brown, black, red, yellow. Gloves, mittens, scarves, hats, earlaps, red cheeks (those usually pinkish), i caret andy buttons, i V rosemary buttons, big smiles, shiny shades or eyes smiling right back at you.

    "The city's never better than after a big snow," Rosemary said, pluming out breath, tramping along arm in arm with Andy down the center of Central Park South amid dozens of other proud Reclaimers of the  Land from Vehicles. "It really brings out the best in people."

    "I guess it does," Andy said, as they paused at Seventh Avenue to watch some men, women, and children helping a crew of sanitation workers dig out a drifted- over salt spreader. Another group farther down the avenue was doing similar work on something else large and orange.

    They tramped on down Central Park South among the other pioneers, steadying each other now and then; the 23.8 inches wasn't packed down hard yet.

    Rosemary was well Garboed: new bigger shades, a scarf around her head, the floppy-brimmed hat, and a coat out of Ninotchkaworn maybe by a Russian colonel. She had been on the verge of giving it to a bellman.

    Andy's simple street disguise had never failed him: shades and a jumbo i caret andy button-transforming him instantly into one of the city's, the planet's legions of Andy wannabes.

    One of the better ones. A cop in shades coming toward them gave him a gloved thumb up. "Yo, Andy!" he grinned. "Great! Numero uno!" They smiled back at him. Andy said, "Thanks, love ya," as they passed.

    "The voice too!" the cop cried, pointing, walking backward. "Say something else!"

    "Up yours!"

    The cop laughed, waved.

    Rosemary elbowed. "Andy," she said.

    "It's part of the disguise!" he said. "Would Andy say that? Never!"

    "Ohh…"

    "Say shit, it'll help."

    They laughed"Shit!"following a right-turning packed-down trail into Sixth Avenue. There the Land had been Reclaimed as far as the eye could see-white tundra dotted with people, bordered with car-shaped igloos.

    "When did they give up on "Avenue of the Ameri- cas"?" Rosemary asked, looking up at a street sign.

    "Officially, just a few months ago," Andy said.

    Smiling, she said, "Hutch used to say someday they'd count the syllables."

    The name cast a pall.

    She had told him about Hutch, the friend he had been to her, that Roman's coven had killed him.

    They tramped down the Sixth Avenue tundra, holding gloved hands, scanning their shades about, smiling.

    Pausing in mid-avenue, they watched a few people scooping snowdrifts from a skewed limo with partly uncovered windows.

    Andy pitched in. Rosemary too. When an unlocked door was found and opened, no one was inside.

    They waved and tramped on, brushing snow from their fronts.

    On the West Fifty-first Street tundra they tramped past the red-neoned rear marquee of Radio City Music Hall. Rosemary said, "When are you going to do your next live show? I can't wait to see one."

    Andy drew breath; plumed it from his nostrils. He said, "I don't think I'm going to be doing any more, not for a while anyway."

    "Why not?" she asked. "They're terrifically effective. The woman at the nursing home who told me about you, she saw you here and talked about it as if-she'd had a religious experience."

    Turning his shades from her, he said, "I don't know, I just sort of feel that after the Lighting I ought to take a little time off and-reevaluate what I want to do next."

    She said, "I've been doing some work on a presentation for a talk show. I don't want to just come in and say, Tm here, I'm Andy's Mom, take me." I've got a great name for it, you gave it to me. 'Fresh Eyes." Isn't that a good name for a program dealing with the differences between now and then?"

    "Yeah, it is, "he said.

    She said, "I want to deal with big things, like the mistake of talking the terrorists' language, and little things, like rollerblades-with people connected somehow with whatever the area is."

    "Don't forget we're going away for a while," he said.

    She blew out a long plume. "No," she said. "No, I really don't think that's a good idea. Not right now."

    He drew breath, clamped his lips.

    They tramped along in their shades, gloved hands joined.

    Turned right into Rockefeller Plaza and froze, cowering. "Wow!" Andy said, raising his free hand. Rosemary whistled. People moved around and past them in both directions.

    They made their way closer to the towering cone of multicolored lights. Rosemary said, "I'll tell you one thing fresh eyes see right off the bat: too much! It used to be you could see there was a tree holding everything up be that's just a gigantic cone of lights and baubles. It could have styrofoam inside it."

    "Actually they cut back from last year," Andy said. "People started complaining."

    They made their way closer-on almost-clear asphalt, in a crowd, between walls of plowed-back snow. "But," she said, when they had found a vantage point where they could stand and see the tree and the skaters on the rink before it, "if you're going to go for glitz…"

    He nodded, looking up at the tree.

    She looked at him, at the lights shining on his shades, on his cheeks above his beard.

    "Say hello to Andy," a man before them said, tugging the mitten of a boy of seven or so. The boy nibbled his other mitten, looking up at Andy. The man winked at them.

    Rosemary said, "Be nice…"

    Andy crouched down, smiled at the boy, took his shades off, said, "Hi."

    The boy got his mitten down to his chin and said, "Are you really Andy?"

    "To be perfectly honest," Andy said, "at the moment I'm not sure. Who are you?"

    "James," the boy said.

    "Hi, James," Andy said, offering his gloved hand.

    James shook it with his mitten, said "Hi…" Andy said, "It's fun when there's all this snow, isn't it?"

    "Yes," James said, nodding. "Wef're going to make a snowman."

    Andy clasped his shoulder, smiled, and said, "Enjoy it, Jimbo."

    He stood up. "Great kid," he said to the man, putting the shades back on. "You," the man said, poking him in-the chest, "are a ten-times-better Andy than the guy in the miniseries. And your voice is closer too."

    "Years of practice," Andy said. Rosemary tugged his sleeve.

    "Merry Christmas," the man said. Nodded it to her too as he steered James away toward the tree.

    "Merry Christmas!" Rosemary said.

    Andy waved; James waved back. 93aret s8greater-than er8*anditeand-9 caret That?"8fhey tramped over to Seventh Avenue, a tundra   being carved away by a phalanx of snowplows, and up to the Stage Deli-half empty.

    "Your brother's in the corner," the waiter said, standing at the table with pad and pencil. Andy looked; another Andy waved at him. He waved back. Rosemary waved too. So did the other Andy's tablemate, Marilyn Monroe. "What'll it be?" the waiter asked.

    Pastrami sandwiches, beer.

    Andy chewed, shades facing the window.

    Taking hers off, looking at him, Rosemary said, "Do you want to talk, Andy?"

    He stayed silent a moment. Sighed, shrugged. "It's just ironic, that's all," he said, shades turning toward the half sandwich on his plate. He picked at it. "I finally find a smart, sexy woman who really prefers total darkness," he said, "and it's because it saves her from having to keep an all-over suntan. She told me Indian women never let a man see anything. Who knows, maybe it's true."

    "I doubt it," she said. "They're very open-I think." "It sure frees up the imagination," he said.

    Putting on her shades, scanning, she said, "I can't eat all of this, I'm going to have them wrap it."

    Central Park South had been plowed and was getting a second go be a few cars and taxis crept through a foot- thick dry mash of dirtied snow. Rosemary walked single file after Andy beside a wall of shiny snowbank.

    "What are you doing tonight?"

    She said, "There's an eight-thirty Mass at Saint Pat's. Joe got us seats." She walked along behind him. "What are you doing?" she asked.

    "Turning in early. The trip took a lot out of me. It was worth it though."

    A mailman gave him a hand over chopped-out snow steps, and they both helped Rosemary. They thanked him. "Real good," he said.

    "Thanks, love ya."

    "Great!"

    They walked to the Tower's marquee, nodded to the winking doorman, and first she and then he passed through a revolving door into the crowded lobby of the grand hotel, its marble reaches decked with green branches and gold leaves, "Greensleeves" tintinnabulating overhead on medieval strings. They maneuvered between bellmen with luggage, past the desk where a sheikh and his entourage dallied, through an entanglement of French schoolgirls in uniform and a stumbling waiter spilling a bowl of oranges in thgir path, to the bank of elevators. "I have to pick up a few things in the drugstore," Rosemary said. "Sure you don't want it?" She held up the deli bag.

    "Positive," Andy said, kicking an orange aside. "Around eleven tomorrow?"

    "Fine," she said.

    "I'll call you."

    Their shades clacked as they kissed cheeks. "Merry Christmas," they said to each other, their lips smiling.