Lush Life (41 page)

"She thinks you are. Are they talking to him?"

"I don't think so. I don't know."

"Did you whisper in his ear at least? Did you at least tell him to keep his mouth shut?" "What do you think?"

"What do I think? You're a police busted for drugs and you want to know what I think?"

"Who are you to talk to me like that. Where do you come off-" "Matty, Matty, hang on, wait, I'm sorry. I just want you guys to be OK. I just want to be sure you don't make any more stupid-" "Fuck off." Over and out.

Matty leaned over the balcony, kept leaning until his feet left the ground, pulled back.

Down on Essex, the tin man was walking back the way he had just come, as if on sentry duty He called back his ex-wife.

"Hey. That lady, the court stenographer, she's still living next door to v'

you?

"What about her?"

"OK. Listen to me. You need to go over there, right now, wake her up and get the name of a lawyer. Eddie's got no representation and I don't trust those fucks for a second."

"It's three-thirty in the morning, Matty. I'm not waking anybody up." "You woke me up."

"Huh. Now why would I have made that an exception."

"No, I didn't mean, just . . . Please, I don't know anybody up there, otherwise . . . You got to get him someone right away."

"I am not banging on doors now, everybody all of a sudden knows our business."

"Like what, they won't find out otherwise?"

"Forget it."

"Just do it for your son."

"Excuse me?"

"I am not criticizing-"

"Fuck off."

Matty stood there in his boxers, staring glassy at the charcoaled skyline of the financial district until he picked up the flashing lights of the presidential motorcade on its way into the sleeping city via the shutdown Manhattan Bridge; dozens of black SUVs in tight formation, led, bracketed, and followed by NYPD motorcycles and cruisers. Waiting until the entire caravan, silent save for the gargling bikes, had passed beneath his terrace on its way uptown, he finally hauled himself back inside, went to the refrigerator, and opened a beer.

Fucking kids.

Tristan took the hamsters to P. S. 20, walked them down the too bright hallway lined with photos of famous graduates from the tore-down building, Jews mostly and mainly from olden-days' movies, and saw them into their classrooms, the smell of white glue making him gag.

Back out on Ridge, he headed for Seward Park, walked into the lobby and up to the security station before remembering that he was carrying, started to back out, then saw that the guards were only doing bookbag inspections and patdowns, which meant that the metal detectors were broken again, which meant you could probably sneak a hand cannon into the building if you knew where to hide it.

The first class was tenth-grade English, which, because he was the oldest student in the room by two years, he hated. But today felt different. Having Little Dap's .22 on him made it feel like today was his birthday, and even though you could say that it wasn't much of a birthday if no one else knew it, for Tristan that was the kick, the secret -
identity thing, everybody needing a little secret something in his kit.

As the teacher, Ms. Hatrack, went on about some poem she wrote, he took out his real notebook and knocked out a rhyme.

Lone ranger Is a stranger Has to be for the danger

" 'I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
-
/ I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.'"

Cause if people know they blow and out you go

"Tristan?"

He looked up to see Ms. Hatrack staring at him and pointing to her poem on the blackboard. "What do you think he's talking about?"

"He?"

"The poet. 'Made all the difference.' How so?" "Difference what."

The teacher took a breath. "He took the road that less people take. What does that mean to you?"

At least three girls around the room were waggling their hands in the air while clutching their opposite shoulders. "Ooo Ooo Ooo . . ." "What would be the advantage of taking a road less traveled by?" "No traffic?" Laughing.

"OK. Fair enough. But then why doesn't everybody take that road?" "Why?" Tristan clenching his teeth. "'Cause they stupid." Then, flushing, "I don't know. They get lost?"

"OK, maybe they're afraid of losing their way'' Ms. Hatrack said. "How about in our own lives . . ." Looking out on the class but then zeroing in on him again. "Can you ever think of a time when you've taken the road less traveled?"

Everybody looking, their mouths half-open ready to laugh before he even said anything, the stupid bitch not getting it-don't call on me. Don't give them opportunity.

"Tristan? Have you ever-" "No."

At the end of the class he just left the building and went off to walk the streets. He had no destination, no itinerary, except to hit every one from Pitt to the Bowery, from Houston to Pike, walk down every street, pass every building, go into every store that he'd ever felt bad or afraid or stupid in front of and, with the .22 snug up against his belly, reclaim them all.

The early-to-arrive mourners smoking and drinking coffee on the broad front steps of the Langenshield Center and along news truck-lined Suffolk Street were what Eric expected, mainly in their twenties, mainly white with a sprinkle of everything else; genteel rebels with colored hair, androgynous crops or shaved-headed, high boots, low cleavage, dressed in respectful black, which for some was not that much different from what they would wear on any other day. They were the crest of the wave, young, gifted, privileged, serious for now about making art or launching some kind of maverick free enterprise or just being citizens of the world, and not only reasonably confident in their ability to do so but also in their god-given right to do so. And why not, Eric thought, why not.

The Langenshield had started life as an immigrant dance hall, notorious as the site of a 1910 shoot-out between Jewish and Italian labor racketeers that went on for fifteen minutes and left one fatality, a young seamstress who had been necking in a dark corner with her boyfriend. Since then it had served time as a fraternal lodge, a union hall, a boxing arena, a warehouse, and until recently the largest abandoned building on the Lower East Side.

Now run as a freelance venue, the new owners had left the interior artfully raw: exposed beams, gap-toothed chandeliers, balding velveteen curtains, defunct gaslight armatures protruding from the walls, the walls themselves stripped and peeled here and there to reveal the building's various incarnations, all of it lit from beneath to evoke the atmosphere of a massive archaeological discovery.

Eric stepped inside with the early arrivers, made a sharp left, and headed up the stairs to the mezzanine, which had been reserved for the media. Picking his way through a jungle of cables and cameras, he made it to the edge of the overhang and looked out over the main floor, as large as a high school auditorium, a sea of folding chairs down there facing both a raised stage and a large, blank portable film screen set up to the side. Four ushers were depositing memorial programs and candles thrust through Dixie cups on every chair. Directly below him, Steven Boulware, wearing a Nehru jacket over a black T-shirt, was talking on his cell as he marched with three others up the center aisle to the rear stairs, to the waiting press, traces of the beating Eric had given him, an amber half-moon spooning his right eye, still visible from the balcony.

As Boulware and the others-a young woman with light green eyes and a tight, expectant mouth and two wary-looking males-levitated into view, they were quickly enveloped in a horseshoe of cameras and thrusting reporters, Boulware looking both sad-eyed and feverishly alert as he waited for calm.

"Can you describe to us what happened that night?"

"Not... It all went down so fast. But I will tell you this. Ike . . He paused, raised a hand as he collected himself. "No. Let me go at this another way. The mugger? For the fleeting impressionistic second before he fired, I saw the fear in his eyes. And I saw the humanity. As diminished as it might have been, I don't believe he really intended to shoot anybody. He was counting on our fear. He was counting on Ike not being Ike."

"Would you describe Ike Marcus as fearless?"

"No," Boulware said. "He was courageous. He was courageous because he wasn't fearless. But he was a lion when it came to standing up for what was right, no matter the consequences."

"Was he lionlike that night?"

"You bet."

"What was he standing up for exactly?" the tall, yarmulke-wearing young reporter who had gone after Eric asked.

"For his friends," Boulware said without hesitation. "And I need to say one more thing about the young man who shot him. He will be caught, have no doubt. But that look in his eye told me that he had sentenced himself the minute he pulled the trigger, and no man has a harsher judge than the face in the mirror."

Erics fury was equal to his bafflement: why hadn't anybody harassed this showboating prick? He was the drunk that night, he was the one who caused it all; all Eric had done was do the right thing, the smart thing, and now everyone wanted to peel him like a grape.

"And now if I could"-Boulware half-turned to the three people flanking him-"I'd like to introduce you to some of todays ... I don't want to say eulogizers . . . some of today's . . . celebrants."

Eric marveled at how hungry-eyed Boulware looked, how alive he seemed right now; thinking, I didn't hit him hard enough.

Yolonda and Matty, here to scope out the crowd, sat quietly on the aisle as Billy, Minette, and Nina came into the hall like red-faced royalty and took the chairs directly in front of them. Minette, wearing an anonymously tasteful black dress and a locked-in smile, looked out at the room as if she were worried about everything on earth. Nina, in a dress similar to her mother's, bore an expression of mixed sorrow and defiance as if everyone here had assembled to yell at her. Between them, Billy, clutching his wife's hand, sat like an immobile blur, seeming to materialize and vanish without moving: a radio station on a highway.

Yolonda nudged Matty to make contact but just as he reached for Billy's shoulder, the blank screen set up on the stage abruptly came to life, blooming with a slide show of Ike that jolted his father's spine like a Taser: his son as an infant, at his fifth -
or sixth-year birthday party, as a preteen Clockwork Orange thug on Halloween, in what looked like a junior high school basketball game setting up a play from the point-guard slot, another of him at the high school level driving to the hoop.

And then the sound track kicked in, Joe Cocker singing "You Are So Beautiful to Me"; Billy responding by shooting to his feet, then just as abruptly sitting back down and careening first into Nina, then Minette, both of them reflexively grabbing a hand to keep him from taking off like an unknotted balloon.

As the dusty chandeliers began to dim, the images sharpened: Ike at a beach party showing off one of those effortless teenage physiques, with this girl, that girl, with Billy, with his mother, with Minette and Nina, getting what appeared to be his first tattoo, the kids in the pews laughing as enthusiastically as they could for that one; Billy now beaming out at them as they gamely tried to embrace the euphemism celebrate.

The music shifted to "He's a Rebel," another gut-sock for the guy, but, Matty thought, what song wouldn't be.

The slides appeared to be chronological: Ike in some European city with college-age buddies; at a podium, gesticulating as he read to a crowd similar to this one; shielding his eyes with the back of his hand as he lay on a futon with a long-haired girl, the both of them seemingly just woken up by the camera flash. Again, the crowd whistled their approval.

These pictures seemed easier for Billy to deal with; his son as a man, Matty speculated, probably needing less hovery stuff from him, more just some kind of laid-back supportive admiration or whatever a normal father was supposed to feel for his kid on the other side of adolescence.

The thing about Matty Junior was that he was a bully, and it was so hard to love a bully. But he had always been a not-too-bright, overlarge kid, pressured to play football and basketball because of his size, though utterly without athletic talent, which basically made him an oaf out there. Fairly early on, Matty had gotten into the habit of avoiding all his games. And he was always fighting with Lindsay back then, drinking too much; Matty now remembering one night when the boy came into the living room in his pajamas, couldn't have been older than seven, and Matty, halfway hammered, had blurted, "Jesus, will you look at the size of him," like they had a good shot at winning a blue ribbon at the fair.

And when he was ten, he was sent to the school therapist for some behavior; it was supposed to be in confidence, but every kid in his class knew where he was headed before he even got there, Matty Junior coming home that day laughing hysterically shouting, Tm a whack-a -
doo! I'm a whack-a-doo! I got sent to the psycho doctor and that's what the kids are calling me!" howling with laughter but not wanting to be touched, Matty anguished but just leaving for work; Lindsay was the one who went into school the next day and gave them hell.