Rise and Shine (9 page)

There are very few Jewish guys in the department. “Because,” Meghan had once said tartly, during one of our many disagreements about Irving, “Jewish boys tend to go to college and then find remunerative work with regular working hours.”

“Wait a minute,” I’d replied. “Most of the guys you know work seven
A.M.
to nine
P.M.
when they’re not on a plane to Bonn. Those are regular working hours?”

“None of them sleep on their office couches,” Meghan said.

It was true that Irving led an irregular life. Often I kept track of him by watching the news and seeing him behind a bank of microphones, trying to wrap his mind around the word
perpetrator
when he would have preferred
scumbag.
If he’d been up all night, he looked it, with a dark jaw and a tie that appeared to have been recently balled up in someone’s fist. He was good-looking, but in an old-fashioned way, with a thatch of gray hair and a big, square face full of nose and brows.

“I ordered a pizza,” he called from the kitchen, where I heard him pop another beer. The cat strolled across the back of the couch and curled up on the spot where Irving had just been sitting. “I’d move if I were you,” I said.

“Why’d you ask if I saw her this morning?” he said, executing a lacrosse sweep that landed the cat on the other side of the coffee table.

“You understand this stuff better than I do, but I’m pretty sure she made it worse. She was supposed to give this apology, but she did it as though she thought they were all morons. And I don’t think I was the only one who knew that.”

Irving clicked the TV remote and went to one of the cable stations. The retired anchor of a defunct morning show was talking. “Jeez, she’s had a bad lift,” Irving said, cranking up the volume with his thumb. “I’m not sure she can survive this in terms of her credibility with the American people,” said the woman, her plumped lips pulled into a tight little O-ring. “It seems to me that the line between outspoken and inappropriate—”

“A line which she’s always been in danger of crossing,” said the host.

“Shut up,” I said to the TV.

“Well, certainly there are those who think so. And there are many people who think it has now been crossed. She will probably have less supporters in-house and out.”

“Fewer!” yelled Irving and I simultaneously. One of the things Irving and I have in common is a powerful affection for grammar.

“Sources at the network say they are putting Meghan Fitzmaurice on leave until the FCC takes a look at this,” said the host. Then they ran again the clip of the end of the Greenstreet interview with the appropriate bleeps.
The New York Times,
in its inimitable fashion, had referred to Meghan’s use of two barnyard epithets, which I thought sounded lively. Naturally the
Times
had not done a story on a network news personality swearing on air. That would have been beneath them. The paper did a story on whether standards had slipped in what they called “the everyday tenor of public conversation.” Meghan was exhibit A, and the answer was yes.

The tabs just said she had a potty mouth and should be soundly spanked.

“What’s Meghan say?” Irving asked.

“I haven’t talked to her since Sunday. I can’t reach her anywhere. I’m going out of my mind. I’ve left messages everywhere, and she won’t call me back. She could be dead in a ditch for all I know.”

“She’s not dead in a ditch,” said Irving. “I’d know if she was dead in a ditch.”

“It gets worse,” I said. “Much much worse. Evan came to my office this morning.”

“Your office? Evan went to the Bronx?”

“He’s left her. He says—Oh, God, I don’t know what he said. They don’t talk anymore. They have nothing in common.”

“He’s got a girlfriend. Bet on it.”

“That’s what I said!”

“Well, that explains everything. That’s why she blew. She’s got a mean temper. You know she’s got a mean temper.”

The bell rang. The pizza guy and Irving had a deal; Irving buzzed him in, then met him on the third-floor landing. Then Irving gave him twenty bucks for a ten-dollar pizza. It worked for them both, and Irving never worried about letting a strange man into the building since he tended to be wearing a shoulder holster when the pizza handoff was made.

“It’s not really about the woman,” Irving said around a mouthful of cheese. “It’s just that, to have the balls to do it, he’d have to have another woman. Guys can’t do the alone thing. Or straight guys can’t.”

“I asked him over and over who it was. If it’s someone we know I’m going to kill him.”

“Yeah, but who it is isn’t important. It’s someone ordinary, someone normal. She’s someone not too famous. She’s someone not too busy. That’s the main thing. I’m surprised the poor bastard has hung in there that long.”

“Hey! That’s my sister you’re talking about! And what I always thought was her supposedly happy marriage.”

“Baby, I love you. But if people were always elbowing me aside to get to you, that could change pretty fast.”

“It’s Meghan’s fault that her husband is bailing on a twenty-two-year marriage?”

“It’s not anybody’s fault. It is what it is. No guy wants to feel like he’s a bag carrier for his wife.”

“Which women have been doing for men for centuries.”

“If we’re going to have the interchangeable argument again, I’m going to come out where I always come out. It ain’t so. The important thing is to figure out what kind of bounce this will take in terms of your sister’s situation. If the brass knew she was under stress because of marital troubles, would they cut her a break?”

“It doesn’t make any difference. She’d sooner cut her own throat than go public with something like this. Meghan Fitzmaurice, ditched? No way. That’s why she’s avoiding me. Actually, there’s probably a lot of reasons why she’s avoiding me. She knows how much I love Evan. Or how much I used to love Evan.”

“Whoa,” Irving said.

“And I talked to my aunt today and it seems like Meghan’s been upset for a while, anyhow. Apparently she’s been going up to Westchester and having grilled cheese sandwiches with Maureen once a week for the last couple of months.”

“Is the grilled cheese sandwich symbolic?”

“Yes, wiseass,” I said, hitting him in the shoulder. “It’s what Maureen makes us when we’re sick, or upset.”

“So she saw this coming. The Evan thing. Not the work thing.”

“How can that be? If she did, why wouldn’t she tell me? We ran six miles Saturday morning!”

“Your sister doesn’t do failure,” Irving said. “Especially with you.”

He narrowed his eyes. I’ve always suspected that it’s the way he looked when he shot that guy, the last sight the guy ever saw: Irving Lefkowitz on his knees on a narrow street in Brooklyn outside an auto body store, bleeding into an oil slick, raising his weapon like a third eye.

“I gotta cogitate,” he said. It’s one of Irving’s favorite expressions.

“This isn’t your problem.”

But he was making it his problem for my sake. He didn’t like Meghan, and she didn’t like him. Maybe that was inevitable, but it wasn’t helped by their first meeting, which had been a disaster. Six months after I’d begun to go out with Irving, I brought him to a dinner party at Evan and Meghan’s apartment. For so long she had been demanding that I find the right man, a man who was accomplished, secure, intelligent, mature. Irving was all of those things, as well as authorized to carry a gun at all times. And in New York City, where psychobabble, half-truths, obfuscation, and downright lies are the order of the day, he always, as he likes to say, calls a spade a spade. So does Meghan. That’s precisely what she thought she was doing at that dinner when she called the senior senator from New York a moron. It was the sort of pronouncement she was used to having greeted with rapt attention.

“Nah, he’s not,” Irving said flatly, turning his fish fork over in his big fingers. “He’s done a lot of dumb things and he’s got a problem with how he handles himself in public, but he’s actually a pretty smart guy.”

Meghan assumed her attentive television face. A child could have seen that her neutral expression was insincere. “I appreciate that someone in your position would have to give him the benefit of the doubt,” she said, “but I’ve interviewed him at least a dozen times on various topics, and I can tell you unequivocally that he’s a moron.” She began to turn to the man on her left.

“Nah, he’s not,” Irving said, a little louder this time. “We went to junior high together, so I’ve known the guy almost fifty years. Smart guy. Reads a lot, thinks a lot. Like I said, the problem is with how he handles himself, but even in junior high he was smart.”

“Junior high?” Meghan asked, as though it was a technical term.

“Yeah, in Coney Island. I remember even at his bar mitzvah the old guys were talking about how he should go into politics. Funny, right?” Irving looked around the table. I remember that Evan gave him a grin. Meghan was flushed beneath her makeup. “The kid glad-handed everyone in the temple reception room. And he gave some great speech during the service, something about his Torah portion and Adlai Stevenson, maybe? The New Deal? Jeez, am I that old?”

Meghan replied sweetly, “I guess you must be.”

“She’s everything people told me she would be,” Irving said afterward. And the more I pushed, the less he said. From time to time he had accompanied me to Meghan’s house, but not very often. Four years in, and the two people I loved most were still in a battle for my soul, although Irving’s chief weapon was passive resistance. Meghan preferred the barb, about his cheap cigars and rumpled clothes. Most of the time she simply ignored his existence, as though if we did not discuss him, he would cease to be. All the young lawyers and college professors and stock analysts and junior executives she’d fed and cosseted at dinner parties on my behalf, watching their eyes glow with the combination of merlot and proximity to power. And somehow I’d run through a personal trainer, an actor who worked as a bouncer at a club, the guy who made bread for a chain of caterers, only to end up at Irving, whose signature line, faced with a phalanx of microphones, was “Yo! Listen up!” He usually said this while pulling at his mustache, his mouth twisted to one side. When Irving thought deeply, he seemed to be acting out deep thinking in a game of charades. Ditto pissed off and reaching orgasm. It was one of the things I loved about him. There was no nuance. I have a red couch and a bed surrounded by mosquito netting and twinkle lights and a cat named Kitty Foyle. I hate subtlety. My least favorite color is beige.

“Are you married?” I’d asked when Irving first asked me to dinner.

“Not currently,” he’d replied.

He’d been standing outside a burning building two doors up from our shelter screaming at the public affairs guy from the fire department over who was going to do a briefing. There was no doubt that a fire was involved, but it had apparently been preceded by the murders of a woman, her common-law husband, and three small kids. “Which is a goddamn police matter, unless you guys are suddenly investigating crimes, Jimmy!” Irving had yelled.

I insinuated myself between the two of them. “Can one of you gentlemen help me? I’ve got nine families standing out in the cold here in their pajamas and I’d like to send them back inside but I don’t know if it’s safe.” Irving turned his face to mine with an exaggerated expression of rage. It was very convincing, and I took a step back. But behind me I could hear one of the little girls in our shelter, who had been burned out of her own house the year before when her father tried to set her mother on fire, wailing at the top of her lungs. I stood my ground.

“Lady, that’s the fire department’s call,” he said and stalked off toward a knot of reporters.

Later, when two cops came up the steps of the shelter to find out whether any of the residents knew the victims and might know who had wanted them dead, Irving came with them to apologize. We made all the cops and firefighters coffee in the communal kitchen at the back of the shelter house, and Irving sent a car out for sweet rolls and more milk around dawn, when the burning house had gone from incandescent orange and blue to dead black, its paint blistered, its windows blown out. His third cell maxed out as the sun was coming up and I let him use our phone. Some of the kids were already downstairs foraging in their family cabinets for cereal, jazzed up on the combination of crisis and fear that had been their birthright.

“You want some instant oatmeal?” I asked him. His shirt collar had gone gray from the smoke, and his eyes were red. “Miss Bridget, is this your maaaaaan?” sang a boy named Taurus, and he did a little dance move.

“You leave that lady alone, Taurus,” his mother called from the stairs.

We went outside and sat on the steps of the building, coughing a little in the smoke, our white breath mingling with the steam from the coffee cups. Irving ate three bowls of instant oatmeal and put a twenty in the locked donations box by the front door. The house had been a convent before we bought it, left over from a time when the Catholic schools in the Bronx had nuns to teach in them.

“You like Italian food?” he said.

“Who doesn’t like Italian food?”

Irving had the best kind of black car, a police sedan driven by a rookie officer named Valerie Morales. He took me to a little red sauce place in Little Italy. After four glasses of wine, I said we probably needed a check. “I can tell you don’t date cops,” he said. There was no check. There was never any check.

He walked me to the door of my building. I’m tall, but Irving is taller, over six feet, and he looked down at me, his eyes glittering and his lower lip held firmly in his teeth. “The next time I take you out I’m gonna have you for dessert,” he said firmly and walked away. But the next day a Circle Line boat crashed into a tennis pier in midtown, killing nine people, including a mixed doubles foursome from the East Side, and I didn’t see Irving for more than a week except on television. Which seems to be a pattern in my life. Days go by and I don’t see or hear from Irving. And then there he is at the door, pulling at his mustache, pulling off his tie.

“I don’t get it,” Meghan once said while we were running together on a Saturday morning.