Thirst (11 page)

“No one asked you,” Mr. Morton snapped.

“I’m going to be the one wearing the goddam thing.”

“And I’m going to be the one paying for it,” his father said, his voice down to a searing whisper. Benedict and the salesman were just out of earshot. “You’re lucky I don’t make you wear what I found you in when I posted bail, you little bastard.”

The night Gerard had spent in a holding cell had been a bad one. The arrest had been rough, and his jeans were torn above one knee and he had lost virtually all the
buttons to what had been an already frayed workshirt. And, although he did not recall being hit, a large bruise had erupted over his right eye. Worst of all, he had puked on himself, and the cops wouldn’t give him anything but a small, unclean towel. By the time morning came, he had forgotten that he had asked them to call his parents. He didn’t expect to be rescued; he would spend the rest of his life in jail, in these clothes. “Go ahead,” he said now. “See what I care.”

Gerard meant it: he saw himself before the judge and jury in rags or, better yet, naked. He would make no defense. The jury would not be shocked. They would understand him. They would take him into their arms, caress and soothe him. He would welcome their judgment, accept any punishment.

“Show me collegiate, but it has to be subtle,” Benedict said to the salesman.

“Ralph Lauren has a very fine herringbone.”

“I don’t see him in anything quite that sporty. It has to be youthful, but classy.”

The salesman had gone to a rack of herringbones, but now stopped. He turned toward the three men and tilted his head, like a little bird studying something outside his cage. “Ah,” he began. “I’m not exactly sure I can entirely visualize the precise statement we’re trying to make.”

“Trustworthiness. Naiveté. Innocence,” Benedict said.

“Something a middle-class college student would wear,” Mr. Morton added.

The salesman made a thoughtful moue.

“I’m charged with selling heroin to an undercover
cop,” Gerard explained. “I’m going on trial Monday and they want me to make a good impression.”

“I understand,” the salesman said brightly. “Very well, come with me.”

He led them around a corner of the room to a rack of suits that had escaped their earlier notice. Benedict’s eyes lit and he smiled in satisfaction. Mr. Morton murmured his approval. The salesman riffled through the rack, stopped, and said, partly to himself and partly to Gerard, “Let’s see. What are you?”

Gerard was about to blurt
guilty.
The salesman, however, answered his own question, suddenly recalling, “Oh, yes, that’s right. A 38 long.”

J
ack Latin, retired and divorced, played nine holes of golf, swam a few laps in his backyard pool, and then drove to the airport at West Palm Beach. The tempera-drove to the airport at West Palm Beach. The temperature was eighty-one degrees. Three hours later he arrived at La Guardia, and freezing rain blew into his face and down his neck. Jack cursed his parents, the only people he still knew in New York. By the time he reached their apartment, two rooms on Eastern Parkway, he had the flu.

“You know, if you moved down to Florida like normal human beings, I wouldn’t have to do this every month,” Jack told them. He lay on their couch, under two quilts. His mother was setting the table.

“You should see the co-ops they’ve got fifteen minutes from my house,” he went on. “They’re beautiful. New appliances, terraces, everything.”

“I seen ’em,” his mother said, on her way into the kitchen to check on the soup. “They’re full of old people.”

“Ma, you’re eighty-seven. You’d qualify.”

“Florida? Hah,” his father said, putting aside his newspaper. “It’s a hot New Jersey. You go from one damned mall to another. Gas stations, hamburger places—”

“Sun, swimming pools, more sun, golf courses, even more sun.”

“Go find a decent bookstore.”

“You should take a look at yourselves. You look like ghosts. When was the last time you were down there? Three years ago?”

“It’s so boring. All those people could talk about was how much better the weather there is than it is in New York.”

“Pop, there’s so much to do. You can join clubs, attend lectures, take bus tours—”

“Yeah, kill time.”

Meanwhile, the freezing rain had turned to snow. By the following morning there were fourteen inches of it on the ground. The airports were closed and Jack had a high fever. He lay on the couch, watching his mother in the kitchen. Outside the window, which looked out onto the wall of an adjacent building, snowflakes the size of postage stamps fluttered by.

His father, sitting beside him in an armchair, wouldn’t allow him to turn on the television except for the news. He refused to play pinochle. He had to finish reading the paper. There was more trouble in Albania.

“Albania?
Albania?
Do me a favor. Look at the weather. What’s the temperature in Florida?”

It snowed the remainder of the day. The weather bureau was predicting the heaviest snowfall in twenty years. At about four o’clock one of their neighbors, a young woman, came by with groceries. “I knew you wouldn’t be going to the store today.”

Jack said, “There’s two feet of snow out there. How’d you get through?”

“Oh, it was terrible,” she said unconvincingly.

“Have they plowed the streets?”

“Not till May,” his father interrupted. “This isn’t the Helmsley Palace, it’s Brooklyn. Mother’s Day or so—that’s when we’ll see plows. The outer boroughs get squat. I’m going to write another letter.”

By the next morning a state of emergency had been declared and the National Guard called out. The highways and roads were closed to all but emergency vehicles. Jack’s father piled up a few dozen magazines containing heavily marked articles he thought Jack should read.

Jack’s patience, however, was exhausted. How long could he lie on this tiny couch? In fact, the entire apartment was too small. You could barely sit down to eat in the kitchen, or turn around in the bathroom. Ten years earlier he had tried to get his parents into a spacious and airy garden apartment in Douglaston, Queens, but they said, “Douglaston? Who’s in Douglaston?”

The question he wanted to ask them now was: Who’s in Brooklyn? The people upstairs, the Zucks, who had been living in the building longer than his parents, had packed themselves off to Delray Beach just the week before. Jack didn’t know any of his parents’ new neighbors, whose impromptu visits carried into the apartment the smells of curry, chili, exotic soaps, and exotic skins. Nowadays you could go from one end of Eastern Parkway to the other and not make a minyan.

Time passed uncertainly, between naps and soup. He was never sure exactly what meal he was eating. Small children, seven- and eight-year-olds reprieved from school, passed through the apartment. They ignored
him but listened attentively to his father’s lectures about the president’s China policy. Jack’s mother made
mandelbrot,
but the kids finished it off while he was asleep.

Lou Berger, a member of his golfing foursome, called from Florida. “How’s the weather?”

“What? Haven’t you heard about the snow?”

Lou chuckled. “Bad, huh?”

“Bad? It’s the worst snowfall in New York history. We’ve already got five feet.”

“It’s so beautiful here, you wouldn’t believe. I’m just wearing a polo shirt, and that’s so I don’t burn.”

“Lou! Did you hear me?
Five
feet—and it’s still snowing!”

“And cold too, I bet,” Lou said.

All that afternoon Jack lay on the couch. He napped. He listened to the radio. His mother made him more soup. Where’d it come from? Was she making it every day from the same chicken? He napped again.

When he woke, his father was reading the
Times.
“You want a section?”

“No,” Jack said. “Wait a minute. Is that today’s paper?”

“Herschel Tannenbaum brought it.”

Herschel Tannenbaum was a tiny, frail man with a wispy gray goatee and thick glasses. Jack hadn’t seen him in years, and hadn’t even known he was still alive.

“What do you mean, Herschel Tannenbaum brought it? There isn’t a store doing business in the whole of Brooklyn. The roads and highways are all closed. Didn’t you hear the radio? Not even fire trucks can get through. The Red Cross has had to open shelters and
food-distribution centers. And Herschel brought you a paper?”

“He’s a good friend. I know him sixty years. You have good friends like this in Florida?”

“We don’t have snow like this in Florida!”

His mother protested as he pulled his trousers on over his pajamas, wrapped himself in a sweater and coat, and stalked out of the apartment. He challenged a similarly bundled man passing on the stairs: “Tell me the truth. How bad is it outside?”

“Pretty bad,” the man admitted.

But it was much worse. When he reached the lobby, Jack discovered a mass of snow the height of his chin flush against the door to the building. Its untouched surface stretched as far as he could see through the storm. Eastern Parkway had never before looked so clean.

“It’s impossible,” he told his father when he returned. “Herschel couldn’t have opened the door to the building, much less walk through the snow.”

“Herschel is quite a fellow. I give him a lot of credit. Three heart operations and he never complains.”

Although he still had a fever that evening, Jack couldn’t bear to lie on the couch. He paced the apartment, inspecting the titles of his parents’ books and committing to memory every imperfection in the walls. He sighed and tunelessly hummed to himself. His mother warned of a draft, but he stood by the kitchen window for a long time, drumming his fingers against it. The night sky was luminous, filled with snow.

“Our apartment really isn’t big enough for three
grown people,” his father said with uncharacteristic tact the following morning, while his mother was visiting a neighbor in the building.

“Are you kidding? It isn’t big enough for one. You should see some of those places down in Florida. Two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room—I bet you could make yourself a nice paneled study. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“Well, I was thinking this way. Why should three people live on top of each other like this? We’re not on the Lower East Side anymore. Now, the Zucks left some furniture. I have the keys. Their apartment is very clean. You’d never know they lived there thirty-eight years. You’ll be much more comfortable.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll keep you company. And it’s just one flight. You can come down here in your bathrobe.”

Jack thought about it. Anything had to be better than the couch. “Well, until they open the airport . . .”

It was true, the Zucks had left a good deal of furniture: an old bed, a sewing table, a working refrigerator, two lamps. Jack opened the radiator and the heat popped and sizzled up through the pipes. There was, however, no TV.

“Good,” his father said. “I have some books I want you to read.”

“Pop, I’m only staying another day! Maybe two.”

“You can start on them.”

His father went downstairs for some blankets and linen. Jack glumly sat on the edge of the bed for a while, grew restless, and then started walking back and forth,
from one end of the apartment to the other. He imagined he was doing laps in his pool. He picked up a curtain rod and practiced his golf stroke, chipping a crumpled ball of paper into the bathroom. He liked the feel of the curtain rod, it would make a good sand wedge. Retrieving the paper ball, he glanced at the paint-specked medicine cabinet mirror. He was stunned by what he saw.

It was himself, of course, but no one in Florida would have ever recognized him. His eyes had sunk into his head; gray skin hung loosely from his skull. His chest had caved in. He staggered from the bathroom, his temples pounding. Where was his tan?

Finding himself leaning against the window frame, he sadly gazed out onto the street. It was still snowing. And then Jack understood what he must have known in his heart right from the beginning: it was going to snow forever.

T
om and Lucy had been flirting for years. Or had they been? In truth, the affair’s history consisted of no more than a few warm glances, hugs of greeting that remained in place a few milliseconds longer than necessary, a lilting ascent in her tone when she spoke to him, an earnestness in his, legs grazing each other in a movie theater. One afternoon when she was getting out of his car, thanking him for a lift, he reached out and gently put his hand on hers. She allowed it to remain there for several moments, and then she was gone. Also, she had once complimented him on a new bathing suit.

“Hey, Dad,” said Tom’s eight-year-old son, Adam, in the backseat of the car as they sliced along a road cut in the Green Mountains. “They have some crazy music up here.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“Falling rock.”

His wife, Claire, puffed a tiny laugh through her nose, by way of acknowledgement, and smiled into the sun. Tom had also seen the road sign, but he didn’t smile.

“What do you think it sounds like?” Adam asked.

Claire said, “It’s probably heavy on the percussion.”

“So, Dad, how do you think it sounds?”

“Like your mother said. Lots of percussion.”

This was their first trip to New Hampshire since Lucy,
Claire’s onetime college roommate, had moved there a few months earlier, to a little hilltop cottage and a design job on a local magazine. They were lost as soon as they left Route 9. Adam demanded that his mother give him the map. She declined and he fell silent. Eventually, Claire put them on the right county road, leading them to the back of their current telephone bill, on which Tom had written Lucy’s directions for the rest of the way. They drove along a series of densely wooded passages, over two stone bridges, and then up a steep, inspiring incline. Their last turn was onto a gravel road that kicked and bit at the car’s underside before they burst into a sunlit hilltop clearing.