Slipping Into Darkness (11 page)

 

The brass canopy stanchions gleamed in the sun. A rat-faced little doorman in a forest green uniform with gold braid on the shoulders clocked him suspiciously as he cruised past. So the Irish had finally gotten control of the place again.

 

Hoolian noticed, with some quiet satisfaction, that the black rubber mat the doorman was standing on was slightly worn, and part of the white-stamped 1347 on it had been rubbed away by hard soles and high heels. Papi would’ve replaced it by now.

 

He walked to the end of the block and then turned around to walk past the building again, his heart beginning to pound.
Come on now. Don’t be a little pussy. You know what you came up here to do. Why should anybody else help you if you can’t help yourself?
The doorman watched him with eyes like slits in a gun turret.
Yeah, you know I’m up to no good, don’t you? What else could someone who looks like me be doing in this neighborhood?

 

Or worse yet, maybe he knew. Maybe he’d heard that the old super’s son had just been let out and was likely to return to the scene of the crime. One of those old cop myths that was actually true, sometimes. Hoolian must have talked to a dozen guys upstate who got caught because they kept circling around their own shit like flies.

 

“Osvaldo?”

 

He froze, hearing his father’s name spoken aloud for the first time in years. He kept walking, thinking the voice must have come from inside his own head.

 

“Osvaldo, is that you?”

 

An old woman sat sunning herself on the fire hydrant just to the side of the entrance. Somehow he’d missed her the first time he walked past, in her red bolero jacket, matching skirt, and shiny patent-leather high heels. Her hair was dyed a bluish shade of black, and when she blinked, her lashes splayed over her lids like a drummer’s brushes over a well-beaten snare’s skin.

 

“My God,” she said. “How long has it been?”

 

He stared at her until the name and apartment number came back to him. Miss Powell, 14A. With the Degas print in the foyer, the Steinway grand in the living room, and the crystal chandelier in the dining room. The original brass fixtures in the bathroom sink were always leaking.

 

“Come let me look at you.” She raised her thin trembling arms, beckoning. “Where on earth have you been?”

 

He lumbered over slowly, unsure what to say. Old age had come down on her like acid rain, staining her teeth and speckling her hands with liver spots. But she still had the eyes of a girl waiting to be asked to dance.

 

She turned her cheek, expecting to be kissed. The dead-flower smell under her perfume made him gag slightly. But some instinct made him hold his breath.
She could help me, maybe.
She probably still had money, at the very least. For sure, she had jewelry to go with that Degas and Steinway. He put his lips to her cheek and found it was like kissing the Magna Carta.

 

She touched him lightly on both shoulders, pushing him back to take in the full sight of him.

 

“You look wonderful,” she said. “Not a day older. How can that be?”

 

“All that heavy lifting.” He flexed his arms self-consciously. “Keeps the blood pumping.”

 

She’d always been a little loose at the hinges anyway. His father said she was some distant relative of the famous industrialist Andrew Carnegie. She’d lived here since about 1923, a shy wallflower with knobby knees and horsey gums. Legend was, her parents had thrown an extravagant Sweet Sixteen party for her back in the day, hoping to bring her out of her shell: a band in the living room, a top-of-the-line caterer in the kitchen, and engraved invitations going out to all her classmates from Spence and the boys across town at Collegiate. When eight o’clock came and went, though, nobody showed. There was just a pink party dress with no one to admire it, platters of expensive food going to waste, and musicians in rented tuxes looking at their watches.

 

And ever since, according to Papi, Miss Powell had hardly left that apartment except to sit outside on the hydrant for an hour or so every afternoon. Though once, when he was eight, Hoolian had glimpsed her on a swing at the Mariners’ Playground in Central Park, looking up dreamily at the sky, as if she were waiting for someone to come along and push her.

 

“How’s your son?” she asked.

 

“My son?”

 

It took him a beat to realize that his father had been close to this age the last time she saw him. Up to now, he’d only vaguely acknowledged the growing resemblance in his cell’s shaving mirror, still half expecting to see his seventeen-year-old self staring back.

 

“He’s doing the best he can,” he said, playing along since setting her straight at this point would only scare her. “Trying to be strong.”

 

“He was such a good boy.” She nodded at the swish and sigh of passing traffic. “Julian. Such a pretty name for a boy.”

 

“Got his butt kicked for having it in public school,” he muttered ruefully.

 

“He used to come up and keep me company.”

 

“Yes, he did.”

 

He nodded, the doorman keeping a wary eye on him from under the shadow of the canopy, as if somebody were actually angling for his sorry-ass job.

 

“I used to use any excuse to get him to stop by,” she said, slipping deeper into reverie. “I’d pour coffee grounds down the sink and put too much paper in the toilet, just so he’d have to come up with the snake and the plunger.”

 

“Is that what you did?”

 

He shook his head. The super’s son. Always eager to come up with his tool kit when Papi was too busy. Was she another one who’d taken advantage of him? He worked it around in his mind, trying to convince himself that’s how it had been, so he could justify getting upstairs and exacting reparations for all the time he’d spent there without being paid.

 

But then he remembered how she’d let him sit at her big oak dining-room table sometimes with his calculus book, catching up on homework, avoiding the grim little motherless apartment downstairs, rush-hour light slanting through the old drapes and finding prisms in the chandelier glass, making a small rainbow on the wood while she bustled around the big hollow kitchen, keeping the servants’ door open to look in on him now and then. It’d been years since he’d allowed himself to think of those long quiet afternoons, the two of them staving off loneliness until six o’clock, when he had to go start dinner for Papi.

 

“I never believed . . .” She caught herself on the verge of an uncomfortable utterance. “Well . . . I just thought it was a shame what happened. I knew the young lady as well. I’d said hello to her on the elevator. She was subletting, but she was lovely.”

 

“People still talk about her?”

 

She looked up at him, the mist burning away a little. “Not too often anymore. It was so upsetting.”

 

“Yeah. End of my life too.” He saw her pink-rimmed eyes open wider. “Because of what happened to my son,” he amended.

 

“Of course.”

 

The doorman had disappeared into the building, leaving the entrance unguarded for a moment.

 

“So,” Hoolian said, seeing a chance to help himself in a different way. “Any of the old crew still around?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“You know, Willie from the back elevator. Nestor, the porter . . .”

 

The lashes batted in confusion. “Oh,” she said after a few seconds. “The older gentleman who worked in the cellar?”

 

“Riight.”

 

“Julian used to bring him up sometimes, to help rearrange the living-room furniture for me. Small but strong as a bull. Didn’t speak much English.”

 

“Exactly.”

 

He nodded again, sensing her slight unease. He knew it was too soon to be back. What did he expect, a “welcome home” banner? These people wanted to forget him, to act like he’d never existed. Look at it their way: They’d seen him grow up right before their eyes, let him into their homes, treated him almost like a son. He’d been the proof of their liberal good intentions, the evidence of their egalitarianism, the Puerto Rican boy allowed in their kitchens.

 

And how had he shown his appreciation? He’d betrayed them, he’d confirmed their worst fears, he’d destroyed their peace of mind and the sanctity of their homes. He’d gone and killed one of their own, a member of their class, the best of the best, a golden girl.

 

“He was a musician, wasn’t he?” Miss Powell said, still clinging to the veil of memory. “He had this rather small feminine face but big powerful hands with long fingers. He played the piano.”

 

“He sure did. Papi said he was in one of the best bands in Santo Domingo before he came here.”

 

If she caught the slip, she didn’t let on. “You remember, I have that old Steinway in my living room? It probably hasn’t been tuned since my Sweet Sixteen party. But he came up one afternoon with the boy and, my goodness, it was like George Gershwin suddenly appeared in my apartment.”

 

He could still see the old porter crouching over the keyboard right after they moved a couch behind the coffee table. Picking out the notes slowly, tentatively at first, like a man negotiating a spiral staircase in the dark. Wandering up and down the scale almost haphazardly, until you realized this random string of sounds was actually a melody. The left hand stirring up trouble, gradually locking into a groove. Deep pedal tones echoing off the ceiling and shimmering against the windows. Long crooked fingers stabbing and dancing, poking and prodding, plonking and tangoing, gliding and mamboing.

 

“Remember how we danced?” she said.

 

How did they end up like that anyway? Had she asked him or had he asked her? For a few seconds he was a boy again, waltzing on the old red Persian rug at dusk as Nestor thundered on, Cole Porter in one hand, Thelonious Monk in the other, the whole room threatening to fly away. They’d moved around each other awkwardly at first. Hoolian, usually sidelined by fatal self-consciousness at parties, had followed her lead, watching her perform pirouettes and arabesques that she’d probably learned in private ballet lessons in that very room. He remembered how she’d smiled, eager to delight him, and then spun over and put his arm around her waist. He’d held her gingerly, not wanting to break her, afraid of getting in trouble. But she’d persisted in falling into him, entangling his feet, engaging his arms and legs, as if she were pulling him into her own private memory. And for a few minutes, they danced as if she were still sixteen and he would never grow a day older, as if they were the envy of the whole East Side and this was the event of the season.

 

“I think you were thinking of my son,” Hoolian said gently, knowing he wouldn’t be able to suspend time for much longer.

 

“Oh, yes, of course.”

 

She bared her striated teeth in a shy coltish smile and in an instant he understood that she’d known exactly who he was all along.

 

“So does he still work here, that porter?” he asked, a little too avidly.

 

“No. I thought he left before you did. Didn’t he? Or maybe I’m wrong. Forgive a confused old woman.”

 

Damn.
He knew it couldn’t be that easy. Of course not. Why should the rest of the world have stood still? People got older, changed jobs, had children, lost hair, invented new names. They’d turned into smears of light shooting past him.

 

The doorman had reemerged from the building. “Hey, buddy,” he called out. “C’mere a minute, will ya?”

 

Hoolian excused himself with a bow and went over, again answering to the uniform rather than to the man. “What’s up?”

 

“Why ya botherin’ the old lady?”

 

“I wasn’t. I know her.”

 

“You know her.”

 

“My father used to work here. This was his building.”

 

The rat eyes narrowed, adding things up. A gristly little man in a uniform who probably thought that little bit of braid on his shoulder made him Napoleon with a taxi whistle. “You the old super’s son or something?”

 

“Uh-huh,” Hoolian answered, then immediately realized he shouldn’t have. “I used to live on the first floor. . . .”

 

“All right, I know who you are.” The doorman nodded, all bantamweight cock-of-the-walk attitude.

 

“I was just stopping by a minute, to check in. See if any of my father’s old gang was around. Willie Hernandez still work here?”

 

“I don’t know any Willie.”

 

“How about old Nestor, the porter.”

 

“There was never any Nestor.”

 

“What’re you talking about, man? He worked for my father.”

 

“Hey, pally, lemme ask you something.”

 

“What?”

 

The doorman grinned past him at Miss Powell and lowered his voice. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of here?”

 

“What did you say?”

 

“You heard me.”

 

“Hey, bro, you don’t got to be like that. I just came by to see what was up.”

 

“What’s up is I’m not your brother, and this isn’t your father’s building anymore.”

 

“Yeah, but there’s gotta be people still here who knew him. He worked here from ’62 to ’84. . . .”

 

“Yeah, I heard about that too. The place was a shithole then.”

 

“Yo, that’s not true.” Hoolian felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “Take that back, man.”

 

“Your old man almost ran this building into the ground. Now why don’t you get the fuck out of here before I call the police?”

 

Hoolian found himself gripping the nail scissors in his pocket and looking at a green vein just above the doorman’s white collar.

 

“Why you gotta treat me like that? I never did anything to hurt you, man.”

 

“Look, I’m not arguing with you, I’m telling you. Get off my block.”

 

“Oh, so it’s your block now? I thought I had a right to be here.”

 

“You got a right to my shoe up your ass. What are you, stupid?”

 

“No, man, I’m not stupid. I went to St. Crispin’s.”

 

“Good for you.” The doorman’s gaze sharpened, pricked by resentment. “I guess that makes you the smartest nigger in the woodpile, doesn’t it?”