The New Yorker Stories (66 page)

At almost the same instant, she touched something on her lapel and looked down, surprised. It was Santa: a small pin, in the shape of Santa’s head, complete with a little red hat, pudgy cheeks, and a ripply white plastic beard. A tiny cord with a bell at the bottom dangled from it. Nicholas must have gone back to the store where they had seen it on his first day home. She had pointed it out on a tray of Christmas pins and ornaments. She told him she’d had the exact same pin—the Santa’s head, with a bell—back when she was a girl. He must have gone back to the store later to buy it.

She tiptoed upstairs in the dark, and the dog followed. Nicholas was snoring in his bedroom. She went down the hall to her room, at the front of the house, and, without turning on the light, sat on her bed to look out the nearest window at the scene below. The man she had spoken to was emptying his pockets onto the hood of the police car. She saw the beam of the policeman’s flashlight sweep up and down his body, watched while he unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open wide in response to something the policeman said. The other man was being led to the police car. She could hear his words—“my car,
it’s my car, I tell you
”—but she couldn’t make out whole sentences, couldn’t figure out what the driver was objecting to so strongly. When both men were in the car, one of the policemen turned and began to walk toward the house. She got up quickly and went downstairs, one hand sliding along the slick banister; the dog came padding down behind her.

She opened the door just before the policeman knocked. Cold flooded the hallway. She saw steam coming out of the car’s exhaust pipe. There was steam from her own breath, and the policeman’s.

“Could I come in, ma’am?” he asked, and she stood back and then shut the door behind him, closing out the cold. The dog was on the landing.

“He’s real good, or else he’s not a guard dog to begin with,” the policeman said. His cheeks were red. He was younger than she had thought at first.

“They were going to keep that racket up all night,” she said.

“You did the right thing,” he said. His head bent, he began to fill out a form on his clipboard. “I put down about fifty dollars of damage to your wall,” he said.

She said nothing.

“It didn’t do too much damage,” the policeman said. “You can call in the morning and get a copy of this report if you need it.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He touched his cap. “Less fun than digging out Santa and his reindeer,” he said, looking back at the car, tilted onto the lawn. “Have a good Christmas, ma’am,” he said.

He turned and left, and she closed the door. With the click, she remembered everything. Earlier in the evening she had gone upstairs to tell Nicholas that she was sorry they had ended up in a quarrel on Christmas Eve. She had said she wanted him to come back downstairs. She had said it through the closed door, pleading with him, with her mouth close to the blank white panel of wood. When the door opened at last, and she saw Nicholas standing there in his pajamas, she had braced herself by touching her fingers to the door frame, shocked to realize that he was real, and that he was there. He was looking into her eyes—a person she had helped to create—and yet, when he wasn’t present, seeing him in her mind would have been as strange as visualizing a Christmas ornament out of season.

Nicholas’s hair was rumpled, and he looked at her with a tired, exasperated frown. “Charlotte,” he said, “why didn’t you come up hours ago? I went down and let the dog in. You’ve been out like a light half the night. Nobody’s supposed to say that you drink. Nobody’s supposed to see you. If you don’t ask any questions, we’re supposed to stop noticing you. Nobody’s supposed to put you on the spot, are they? You only talk to Father Curnan, and he prays for you.”

Downstairs in the dark hallway now, she shuddered, remembering how she had felt when he said that. She had gone back downstairs and huddled in the chair—all right, she had had too much to drink—but it was she who had woken up and been alert to squealing tires and people screaming, and Nicholas who had slept. Also, she thought, relief suddenly sweeping through her, he couldn’t have been as angry as he seemed. He must have put the pin on her coat after the party—after their words in the car—or even when he had come downstairs to let Horatio in and had seen her asleep or passed out in the chair. He must have pinned it onto her lapel when the coat still hung in the closet, so she would find it there the next day. She had found it early, inadvertently, when she went out to investigate the car and the noise.

She looked at the dog. He was watching her, as usual.

“Are you real good, or not a guard dog to begin with?” she whispered. Then she pulled the cord. Santa’s face lit up. She pulled the cord again, several times, smiling as the dog watched. Over her shoulder, she looked at the kitchen clock. It was three-fifty Christmas morning.

“Come on,” she whispered, pulling the cord another time. “I’ve done my trick. Now you do yours.”

Second Question

T
here we were, in the transfusion room at the end of the corridor at Bishopgate Hospital: Friday morning, the patients being dripped with blood or intravenous medicine so they could go home for the weekend. It was February, and the snow outside had turned the gritty gray of dirty plaster. Ned and I stood at the window, flanking a card table filled with desserts: doughnuts, cakes, pies, brownies, cookies. Some plastic forks and knives were piled in stacks, others dropped pick-up-sticks style between the paper plates. Ned surveyed the table and took a doughnut. In his chair, Richard was sleeping, chin dropped, breathing through his mouth. Half an hour into the transfusion, he always fell asleep. He was one of the few who did. A tall, redheaded man, probably in his mid-fifties, was hearing from a nurse about the hair loss he could expect. “Just remember, honey, Tina Turner wears a wig,” she said.

Outside, bigger snowflakes fell, like wadded-up tissues heading for the trash. Which was what I had turned away from when I went to the window: the sight of a nurse holding a tissue for a young woman to blow her nose into. The woman was vomiting, with her nose running at the same time, but she refused to relinquish the aluminum bowl clamped under her thumbs. “Into the tissue, honey,” the nurse was still saying, not at all distracted by her posturing colleague’s excellent imitation of Tina Turner. I’d stopped listening, too, but I’d stuck on the phrase “Gonna break every rule.”

Richard was dying of AIDS. Ned, his ex-lover and longtime business associate, found that instead of reading scripts, typing letters, and making phone calls, his new job description was to place organically grown vegetables in yin/yang positions inside a special steamer, below which we boiled Poland Spring water. A few months earlier, in that period before Richard’s AZT had to be discontinued so that he could enter an experimental outpatient-treatment program at Bishopgate, Ned had always slept late. He couldn’t call the West Coast before two in the afternoon, anyway—or maybe an hour earlier, if he had the unlisted number of an actor or of a director’s car phone. All of the people Richard and Ned did business with worked longer hours than nine-to-fivers, and it was a standing joke among us that I was never busy—I had no real job, and when I did work I was paid much more than was reasonable. Ned joked with me a lot, an edge in his voice, because he was a little jealous of the sudden presence of a third person in Richard’s apartment. Richard and I had met in New York when we were seated in adjacent chairs at a cheapo haircutter’s on Eighth Avenue. He thought I was an actress in an Off Broadway play he’d seen the night before. I was not, but I’d seen the play. As we talked, we discovered that we often ate at the same restaurants in Chelsea. His face was familiar to me, as well. Then began years of our being neighbors—a concept more important to New Yorkers than to people living in a small town. The day we met, Richard took me home with him so I could shower.

That year, my landlord on West Twenty-seventh Street remained unconcerned that hot water rarely made it up to my top-floor apartment. After I met Richard it became a habit with me to put on my sweatsuit and jog to his apartment, three blocks east and one block over. Richard’s own landlord, who lived in the other second-floor apartment, could never do enough for him, because Richard had introduced him to some movie stars and invited him to so many screenings. He would sizzle with fury over the abuse I had to endure, working himself up to what Richard (who made
café filtre
for the three of us) swore was a caffeine-induced sexual high, after which he’d race around doing building maintenance. Now, in the too-bright transfusion room, it was hard for me to believe that only a few months ago I’d been sitting in Richard’s dining alcove, with the cluster of phones that rested on top of
Variety
landslides and formed the centerpiece of the long tavern table, sipping freshly ground Jamaica Blue Mountain as my white-gloved hands curved around the pleasant heat of a neon-colored coffee mug. The gloves allowed the lotion to sink in as long as possible. I make my living as a hand model. Every night, I rub on a mixture of Dal Raccolto olive oil with a dash of Kiehl’s moisturizer and the liquid from two vitamin E capsules. It was Richard who gave me the nickname “Rac,” for “Raccoon.” My white, pulled-on paws protect me from scratches, broken nails, chapped skin. Forget the M.B.A.: as everyone knows, real money is made in strange ways in New York.

I turned away from the snowstorm. On a TV angled from a wall bracket above us, an orange-faced Phil Donahue glowed. He shifted from belligerence to incredulity as a man who repossessed cars explained his life philosophy. Hattie, the nicest nurse on the floor, stood beside me briefly, considering the array of pastry on our table as if it were a half-played chess game. Finally, she picked up one of the plastic knives, cut a brownie in half, and walked away without raising her eyes to look at the snow.

Taking the shuttle to Boston every weekend had finally convinced me that I was never going to develop any fondness for Beantown. To be fair about it, I didn’t have much chance to see Boston as a place where anyone might be happy. Ned and I walked the path between the apartment (rented by the month) and the hospital. Once or twice I took a cab to the natural-food store, and one night, as irresponsible as the babysitters of every mother’s nightmare, we had gone to a bar and then to the movies, while Richard slept a drug-induced sleep, with the starfish night-light Hattie had brought him from her honeymoon in Bermuda shining on the bedside table. In the bar, Ned had asked me what I’d do if time could stop: Richard wouldn’t get any better and he wouldn’t get any worse, and the days we’d gone through—with the crises, the circumlocutions, the gallows humor, the perplexity, the sudden, all-too-clear medical knowledge—would simply persist. Winter, also, would persist: intermittent snow, strong winds, the harsh late-afternoon sun we couldn’t stand without the filter of a curtain. I was never a speculative person, but Ned thrived on speculation. In fact, he had studied poetry at Stanford, years ago, where he had written a series of “What If” poems. Richard, visiting California, answering questions onstage after one of the movies he’d produced had been screened, had suddenly found himself challenged by a student whose questions were complex and rhetorical. In the following fifteen years, they had been lovers, enemies, and finally best friends, associated in work. They had gone from Stanford to New York, New York to London, then from Hampstead Heath back to West Twenty-eighth Street, with side trips to gamble in Aruba and to ski in Aspen at Christmas.

“You’re breaking the rules,” I said. “No what-ifs.”

“What if we went outside and flowers were blooming, and there were a car—a convertible—and we drove to Plum Island,” he went on. “Moon on the water. Big Dipper in the sky. Think about it. Visualize it and your negative energy will be replaced by helpful, healing energy.”

“Is there such a place as Plum Island or did you make it up?”

“It’s famous. Banana Beach is there. Bands play at night in the Prune Pavilion.”

“There is a Plum Island,” the man next to me said. “It’s up by Newburyport. It’s full of poison ivy in the summer, so you’ve got to be careful. I once got poison ivy in my lungs from some asshole who was burning the stuff with his leaves. Two weeks in the hospital, and me with a thousand-dollar deductible.”

Ned and I looked at the man.

“Buy you a round,” he said. “I just saved a bundle. The hotel I’m staying at gives you a rate equal to the temperature when you check in. It’s a come-on. I’ve got a queen-size bed, an honor bar, and one of those showers you can adjust so it feels like needles shooting into you, all for sixteen dollars. I could live there cheaper than heating my house.”

“Where you from?” Ned asked.

“Hope Valley, Rhode Island,” the man said, his arm shooting in front of me to shake Ned’s hand. “Harvey Milgrim,” he said, nodding at my face. “Captain, United States Army Reserve.”

“Harvey,” Ned said, “I don’t think you have any use for guys like me. I’m homosexual.”

The man looked at me. I was surprised, too; it wasn’t like Ned to talk about this with strangers. Circumstance had thrown me together with Ned; fate precipitated our unlikely bonding. Neither of us could think of life without Richard. Richard opened up to very few people, but when he did he made it a point to be indispensable.