Rise and Shine (28 page)

I must have talked for fifteen minutes, telling him about the little house, about the running and the swimming and the snorkeling, about the meals we had and some of the things we talked about. And yet as I spoke, all I could think of was how much we lie to one another with all the best intentions, how nearly every conversation has somewhere within it, often throughout it like veins in marble, obfuscation or avoidance or the kind of shading that shaves off the hard edges of the truth. Kindness and custom have turned us all into cowards.

“Come on, Bridey, how crazy is she?” Leo said, putting his big sneakers on my desk, laughing as I pushed them off.

“She’s not crazy. She’s a little hard. But her communication with you has been nothing but a comedy of errors. Apparently she left you endless messages on your dorm machine at school and the voice mail at the apartment.”

“Neither of which I ever listen to. Yeah, I know. I’m going to have a Momathon tonight. I’m going to start with the first message at school and go straight through to the most recent one at the apartment. She says she thinks there are maybe fourteen messages in all. That’s a lot of messages.”

“You talked to her?”

“Not exactly. When I got here this morning, there was this long letter she sent on the fax machine. Handwritten and everything. I’m going to write her back, too. That’ll be cool, you know. It gives you more time to think. And you can hang on to a letter afterwards.”

“That’s great. Speaking of something you can hang on to, she sent you something.” From beneath my desk I lifted an enormous conch shell, speckled brown and cream, a gorgeous thing called Triton’s trumpet. Percy had brought it the day after he took us snorkeling, as an apology, I imagine, and Meghan had asked me to bring it to Leo.

“Man,” he said, turning it carefully in both hands, peering inside, holding it up to his ear. It seemed incomprehensible that a week ago this creature had been crawling in the grass in the warm blue water, and that what was left of him was in a cramped office in the Bronx, a gift from an absent mother to her boy-man.

“How did they get the guy out of there?” asked Leo. The one question he was certain to ask, the one best not answered. “They poured salt on him and he oozed out,” I said.

He put the shell down on a pile of papers. “That’s harsh,” he said.

I nodded. “It’s an empty house,” I said.

When he’d left to go drive two of the women to job interviews, Tequila came in and picked the shell up. “That’s a beauty, mon,” she said in an amped-up accent. “How much you pay?”

“A gift.”

She jerked her head toward the door. “You know how to play chess?”

I shook my head.

“It’s hard, I tell you that. I was watching last week, the kids are like, this one only moves like that, that one only moves like this. Give me checkers instead. Nice and easy.”

“So you think this is a waste of time.”

She shook her head. She sat down in my chair, too, and put down the shell. “Princess Margaret’s working with him on this. She got that job starting at the botanical garden, she gets off at three, I don’t like her at home by herself. He’s gonna pick her up when he has a drop-off over at the projects, then she goes home with me, keep her busy all day long.”

“Give the girl a break, Tequila. During the school year all she does is study.”

“My second one, Armand, got this friend named Marvin, always hanging around the house, coming by, picking Armand up to go out to KFC, whatever it is. But every time I see him he’s looking at Princess Margaret.”

“Beautiful girl,” I said. Tequila nodded. That was just what she was thinking. A beautiful brilliant girl, one year away from changing her life as magically and as utterly as though a lamp had been rubbed, a jinn summoned, an improbable wish granted. I knew in her mind’s eye Tequila could see it all, just slightly out of reach: the salary, the apartment, the professional man, the business card. But the pitfalls were considerable, and the greatest was a boy and a baby. Not so much a sleazebag who would beat and leave her, like Tequila’s first husband; Princess Margaret was too smart for that. But an ordinary boy, someone who would go to work for the Transit Authority or Best Buy, wear a name tag, grow old without moving out or getting rich, the kind of man who would help lift her daughter a couple inches out of the projects when Tequila wanted her to fly, fly across the river to Manhattan, into a life where her own mother might sometimes be an embarrassment. That was the sacrifice she was willing to make. Children blow up your life, and then they leave.

I spent the afternoon amid the wreckage. One of the women in transitional housing was in danger of having her parental rights terminated because of some miscommunication between the courts, the child welfare workers, and her own attorney. She wanted her three-year-old daughter back, and foster parents out on Long Island wanted to adopt her. “You know what they’re thinking,” she said wearily. “Nice white couple with a house and a yard.” When she left to go meet with a landlord who had a small apartment in a walk-up building, Annette was sitting in the chair outside my door. “Where’s Delon?” I asked, and she started to cry. She ripped through a handful of tissues and explained that Delon’s father’s girlfriend had just given birth to a second girl in as many years. Delon’s father had decided that his best chance for a son was the one he already had, and he had stopped by Sunday to mention that he was figuring Delon should come and live with him. And his girlfriend.

“He’s all, like, that boy growing up to be a sissy, all those women around. But he’s all about bad business, Miz Fitz, and he is always using his hands. He say, ‘spoil the rod and spoil the child.’ ” I wasn’t going to correct her; I got the idea, and when the weather was warmer I’d get another look at the scars on her upper arms, which had been made with her own curling iron by Delon’s father.

“Just keep the baby close, Annette. We’ll tell everyone in the house he can’t go with anyone but you. Where is he now?”

“He’s watching the chest.” It turned out that most of the residents thought we had a chest club now.

A letter about one of our kids who had a bad TB test, a letter about another who’d never been inoculated, a recommendation the charter school needed to enroll a boy whose mother was in transitional housing. When it’s so cold in my back office that a decorative rime of crystalline frost appears around the edge of my window, I don’t dare use a space heater. It’s not just that the space heater is the official instrument of death and disaster in our neighborhood, that nearly every fire story includes the words “sparked by a space heater,” with the lit oven in the unheated building and the candle flame for those without electricity running close behind. It’s that we have so much paper in our offices, the vast written record of the nit-picking and inhuman social welfare bureaucracy. Our families do not have millstones, except in the metaphorical sense. They have great unyielding piles of paper that chronicle their broken hearts and broken promises.

At the bottom of the pile were papers that had come in the previous Monday asking for the whereabouts of a girl named Alezabeth Johnson. I remembered her vaguely, a chubby kid with dozens of little braids, a bow barrette at the end of each one, so that when she ran she made a clinking noise like dice being rattled in the hand. She, her mother, and her five brothers and sisters had stayed with us, sent from one of the city shelters. That had been maybe two years ago. The report I had was of her mother’s suicide at Rikers Island. She’d cut her own throat with a Bic pen that had been sharpened into an ersatz blade. Three of the kids were in the foster care system. Two had been located living with her sister in Alabama. Poor people in New York City have sent their children south for decades, to get them away from the filth and the crime and the guns and the drugs, to get them back to wandering through fields, picking berries off bramble bushes, and going to church with a big Sunday supper after. None of them have realized yet that all the bad things from the city have migrated south, like birds, and that the biggest difference between Biloxi and the Bronx is that in one place their kids will wind up doing crack, and in the other it will be crystal meth.

But no one knew what had happened to Alezabeth, with her clicking head of hair, her poor mangled phonetic name. Sitting looking out my office window, I could let my imagination run wild. I was tired or perhaps I would have thought of the sunnier scenarios: sharing a room with a friend from school whose mother had decided to keep her on when her mother was busted, sent off to an aunt in Cleveland or Detroit or somewhere with an Indian name upstate that the system didn’t know about. In fourth grade, in the choir. Instead all I thought was the worst. Killed by one of the men for whom her mother ran dope. Used as a sex toy for assorted pedophiles. Dead in the ER of one of the city hospitals of an asthma attack, undocumented, waiting in the morgue for the clock to run so some Rikers inmates on cemetery detail could toss her in one of the mass graves on Hart Island. I put my head down on the paper, on my desk, next to the shell with its infinite whorls, its secret spaces inside. I had figured having a baby was going to make me sick, and tired. I hadn’t imagined how it would make me feel about the wreckage of little lives I saw every day in my work.

There’s one thing I’ve never figured out about Irving Lefkowitz, and that is why he always shows up when you least want him. Have your hair highlighted and blown out by Mr. Victor of West Fifty-eighth Street, and Irving will be handling the local TV mokes for five days after a cop killing. Develop cold sores so bad that everyone suspects you have the syph, as Tequila once charmingly opined, and he’ll be at the door with a bottle of good wine and a sex jones that very night.

So it was only natural that when I dozed off on my desk, then raised my head, the outline of a paper clip imprinted on my cheek, he would be standing in the doorway. In the interval between my waking and his sitting, I understood that he was angry. Cops tend, like old sinks, to have a hot tap and a cold one. It takes some doing for them to work it out to warm. He wasn’t trying. If I’d been a criminal, I would have been terribly afraid.

But his voice was soft as he began. “Here’s the thing we can never figure out. The bad guys don’t even try most of the time. We get a line on someone who has capped a couple of people, and we find him asleep in his own bed, and in his sock drawer we find a loaded weapon. And it’s the same weapon used to cap the victims. Or there’s a couple thousand dollars’ worth of stolen goods, and they’re stacked neatly in the closet. It’s like it’s immaterial to them. Or maybe they’re so delusional about apprehension that it never occurs to them.”

I like the way Irving uses police jargon. I don’t like it when his voice is low, slow. I think of it as his interrogation voice. He used a sweeping motion of his hand to indicate his clothes, the polo shirt, the neat slacks.

“So I’m at Midtown South and I have to get changed for the game, which I’m taking Leo to tonight. It’s too long a distance to go to my apartment. But I recall that I have all the right clothes at your apartment from that trip to Coney Island. I change, I go to the bathroom. And what do I see in the bathroom?”

“What?”

“In the trash. Right there. Like it doesn’t matter. Of course the real evidence has been hidden. But there’s the box.”

Irving said nothing as the silence dragged on. Again, a cop thing. Guilty people love to fill up a silence.

“A pregnancy test is not evidence of a crime,” I finally said. “And I didn’t hide anything. I put it away.”

“That’s not hiding?”

“You’re talking about the little stick thing. I put it away.” Then I was angry, too, angry and sick at heart. “I put it away to put in the baby book someday.”

He slammed his hand down on the desk and leaned forward. “What have I said a hundred times? A hundred goddamn times? What have I said over and over again, Bridget?”

“I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened, and here we are. Can’t you be happy at all?”

“Do I get any say in this?”

“Irving, I’m forty-three years old. I’m too old to have an abortion.”

He stood up, rubbed his hand hard over the bottom of his face like he was trying to get his mouth, his chin, into some particular position. There was a Yankees hat sticking out of his back pants pocket.

“I’m too old to have a kid,” he said.

“Just think about it. Don’t make a snap decision.”

“You think I haven’t thought about this for years and years? I’m sixty-seven years old. You know how many times I’ve been asked if I have kids? I am not cut out for it. That’s all there is to it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“I’m sorry, too,” he said, shaking his head. “You have no idea how sorry I am.” And then he left for the game. The Yankees lost, 4–3. Later Leo said Irving took it hard.

G
OING OUT TO
dinner with the Borowses would be funny if the maelstrom that develops around you did not feel so frantic, so desperate, so much like that news footage of people putting up plywood and throwing their dogs in the car to escape a hurricane. It’s much worse even than going to a restaurant with Meghan, which usually results only in an assortment of unasked-for tastings and wines, and an obeisance so marked that it makes you feel a little dirty. But Kate, in her ever-present tribal jewelry, and Sam, with the trademark Hanes T-shirt and Levi’s jeans beneath a thousand-dollar raw silk sport coat, are to a New York City restaurant what the pope is to a parish church. One slip and you’re done. Or so all the restaurateurs believe. In fact the Borowses pay little attention when they are not working on their restaurant guide. They simply want decent food and good conversation. What they get is a waiter for every diner at the table and a recitation of specials that have appeared out of nowhere, in chef haiku:

The arctic char

Sautéed with baby capers—

Served with mesclun salad.

When I first met the Borowses and began to dine out with them, the secret ingredient was always shiitake mushrooms, but that was a long time ago. In the course of our friendship, we have passed through pumpkin risotto, balsamic reduction, and peach salsa. “Please God, no lemongrass,” Kate had muttered the last time we had dinner at a place that described itself as French-Thai.