Vida (70 page)

Where the hell was he? She knew she had suggested as politely as she could that he get there ahead of her, but he was nowhere to be seen. Damn him. It was exactly two. She tried to concentrate on the tapestries, but irritation was nagging at her. Couldn’t he do anything right? New York threw him. He had to do things his own way. Probably he’d got lost, thought he’d found some dandy new route and ended up going over the Triborough Bridge. All she wanted to do was clear out of the city. The later they waited, the heavier holiday traffic they would have to endure and the greater chance of something’s going wrong.

At two fifteen, she did not know quite why, she went back to the lobby and called Oscar.

“Listen, Oscar, what time did my friend pick up from you?”

“He was here just before lunch. But I wish you’d called first, squirt. Leigh didn’t give me that money.”

“He didn’t? What a jerk. How come?”

“Aren’t you seeing him today?”

“No, I am not.”

“Well, he thinks you are, and so does Joel.”

“Joel thinks I’m seeing Leigh?”

“Yes, yes” Oscar sounded impatient. “So does Leigh”

“Well, I’m not. Oh, damn it, Oscar. Everything at sea” She hung up and ran back to the tapestries. No Joel. His damned stupid jealousy. He thought she was seeing Leigh while she was getting the prescriptions, so what had he done? Going out and getting drunk was not his style. What would he do? She had a moment of conviction and ran back to the phone. She had no choice; she had to call Natalie.

“Natalie? Me. Did my friend call you?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want?”

“He said he had to reach you.”

“Where did you say I was?”

“He seemed to think he knew. I thought you weren’t going there, but he said you’d gone. He said he had to find you in a hurry. That it was desperate”

“So you told him that address?”

“I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Don’t worry,” she said automatically as she hung up. She started running before she decided, while she still swam in confusion. She acted first, running toward the subway, knowing she would have time to think on the way south. She ran, pushing herself, panting, her heart hurting, each breath serrated. If only Natalie had a worse memory or more suspicions of Joel’s motives; but Natalie had never seen Joel as jealous lunatic. If only Leigh had been less arrogant in assuming she would meet him because he wanted to!

She sat on the train, clutched, quivering. Natalie’s phone had to be tapped. The only question was how much Joel had said over the tapped phone and what they had been able to put together. Part of her demanded she clear out; part wanted to die on the spot with fear; part was determined she could still save the situation. Burst in, grab Joel, run for it. What had she failed to do? How had she failed Joel and herself?

She had told him she didn’t plan to see Leigh, but he had not believed her, for in the past she had concealed meetings. His jealousy from Eva slopped over, contaminating this situation. What a stupid place for Leigh to suggest meeting! The train hurtled along. Her whole body thrummed with impatience. In normal times, whatever those might be, she would never have agreed to meet him in Midtown. What Leigh was doing was trying to fit her into his lunch hour. Then she realized she should have called at once, called the hotel room 314. But if she got off the train to do it now, she would have to wait till the next train. Too long. No, she was headed in the right direction, although the ride was interminable. What mess was she walking into? Leigh and Joel presumably were still shouting at each other. How could Joel have assumed she would fit such a meeting in? He wouldn’t think clearly; he wouldn’t think; he would just bull in bleeding, expecting to catch her in bed with Leigh.

She wanted to bang her head on the filthy window. She was sitting at the far end of the car facing a corner decorated with glowing graffiti of names and streets. Faster, faster! Joel and she had lacked the leisure, the space away from hustling money, being on the run, to work out tensions between them. They must sit down and confront the ugly doubts and misgivings; they must face what they each most feared and mistrusted in the other. They could come through: she knew it. She would not give up on him. No matter what danger his possessive impulses dragged them into, he was too powerfully entwined with her to relinquish; her love for him was too strong. She would not give him up. She would fight him to make it better, to make him better, but she would not give up.

She got off the train and ran three blocks and then stopped abruptly and stepped into a long steamy tunnel of a bar, back to the women’s room. She went quickly past men drinking at the bar. A couple of men watched her all the way. In the women’s room she opened her rucksack and with a spray can quickly streaked her hair gray, put pads in her face to round it, put on glasses with pink plastic frames. She wriggled into a dress and panty hose and crammed her tiny rucksack into the Bloomingdale’s shopping bag from Natalie. The scent of the garlic and onion rose. How could he doubt her? She had a moment of anger: while he was stalking her presumed rendezvous, she was buying him bagels. Would he be embarrassed! As she hurried on, she tucked in the hood of her parka to make it a suitable coat for her new role. Middle-aged, slightly dowdy, respectable, that was the invisible woman she intended to be.

Still, the time was ten after three. Could they be waiting? If Joel had left, where would she ever find him? Nothing to do but charge back to the Cloisters. That idiot! Surely Leigh would not sit in the hotel bashing heads with Joel all afternoon. What would they talk about? Trouble, trouble, trouble. Yet what tugged at her as she picked out the hotel marquee across the street, on a building about ten stories tall and one hundred feet wide, was not an inkling of that kind of trouble. The hair rose on her arms. Slowly she ambled along the other side of the street, moving in the crowd, a shopper among shoppers. On the corner, a bundled-up nun huddled over a charity bucket. The first flakes settled like midafternoon ennui, little flat white yawns. She marched along the far sidewalk past the hotel, around the comer. She could not stop. She could not cross the street and enter. She could not.

Slowly she crept back around the block. As she came along the far side of the block, she stopped at the first functional pay phone to look up there the number of the hotel. She called. “Room 314 please”

“I’ll connect you,” a woman said. There was a pause. “What room was that?”

“Room 314” she said, waiting.

“Just one moment, please.”

“What room was that again, please?” the voice asked a moment later.

Vida hung up. She knew immediately they were putting a trace on the call. She kept walking around the block. She must be crazy, her Manhattan paranoia rampant. She must overcome her irrational fears, cross the street and go in and get Joel; yank him out of there and streak for safety. As she came round the corner to face the marquee again, that was her determination.

Again she strolled along the block across from the hotel. Why could she smell a stakeout? She could no more cross the street than a fish could climb out of its tank. She felt the surveillance. She cursed herself and kept walking. She could not cross.

The man sitting in a blue sedan on her side of the street, the guy reading a newspaper just inside the door of the lobby, they could be heat or just folks. The only way to find out was to go over. She could not cross; she could not enter. A strong magnetic wind blew against her. She could feel something wrong and she could not approach the hotel.

Why was she being so fearful? She stepped into a store, a women’s boutique. The clothing was not suitable for the role she was playing, but she needed to watch the street. She felt crazed as she lilted to the salesgirl, “Something for my daughter. I’d like to bring her a present from New York City.”

“Oh? Where’re you from?”

”Erie, Pennsylvania” Abruptly her eyes stung, and she turned to finger a beige silk blouse. The car with the man sitting in it had left—ah, but the man holding the newspaper still stood just inside the lobby watching who came and went. Waiting for his wife? His mistress? Or her? She noticed a cab standing by the marquee, but it had its sign turned to Off Duty. When a couple tried to climb in, he waved them away. She felt a stab of certainty.

Slowly she walked in the direction from which she had come, back to the pay phone that was hers by use. This time she called Leigh’s station. “Yes, I’m returning Leigh Pfeiffer’s call. I had an urgent message to call him?”

“Oh, is this his wife?”

“Yes.” A year ago, she would have denied that but meant it. Now she pretended it and had never felt less connected to him. “Is something wrong?”

“Don’t be upset, Mrs. Pfeiffer. We had a phone call from Leigh’s lawyer telling us the police are holding him for questioning. I’m sure it’s some mistake. Apparently he was interviewing a deserter. We don’t know anything more about it, but you should get right in touch with Leigh’s lawyer. Do you have his number?”

“Yes, thank you. When was this?”

“We had a call just half an hour ago. The lawyer said that at first they wouldn’t let Leigh make his call, but he was supposed to be downtown covering the gay-rights hearings so we had to be notified. That’s where we thought he was.”

“Thank you ever so much” she said mechanically, hung up and began to walk south toward the Port Authority bus terminal. She had to get moving; she had to keep moving; she had to walk and keep walking, although she did not know why. Leigh would be out by nightfall, for he had his journalist’s cover. But the police had Joel. They had Joel and they had been waiting for her. Her they would not get.

She waded on as the flakes came down faster, beginning to wet the sidewalk, beginning to whiten the edges of buildings, the small squares of open ground around a tree or an excavation. They had Joel. She forced herself on, her life peeling off in strips. Part of her mind fixed on that loss, her heart ripped out of her; part of her mind worked rapidly, solving equations. Would they have Port Authority covered yet? Could they cover it with Christmas travelers in lines a block long? Should she head for the East Side instead, take the bus to LaGuardia, the shuttle to Boston, the bus north from there? She could go to ground in Boston if she had to. Contact Laura? No! She could not bear the thought of returning to the cabin on the pond without Joel. She would go crazy.

She felt as if she stood back there still paralyzed, gaping at the facade of the hotel where her lover had been taken while snow fell on her. Disguised as a hunched-over invisible woman of middle age, she trudged on through the snow falling with a slight hiss on the heated metal of cars waiting in stalled traffic. “O come, all ye faithful” “had a very shiny nose,” hit her from loudspeakers. No more distractions. No humanity. No hostages. What can be taken from me now, except my life? I could piss that away and feel only relief.

Yet she could not walk into a trap. Joel and she would not be together in prison. Break him out? Some of those federal facilities did not employ tough security. He was still alive. Unlike Ruby, Joel was still alive. But tomorrow, the next day, the next day, stretching away toward a gray horizon, she woke up and he was not with her. Shaking her head in exasperation, she must have mumbled because a young man glanced at her and veered away as if startled. Crazy, he judged. She could not afford to seem crazy and tried hard to compose her face. He was so inept as a fugitive! Perhaps because he had been underground all his adult life, it was too normal to him and he did not take the precautions she lived by. Nevertheless, he was alive, even though she could not see him, hear him, touch him. Only she felt dead, the ghost of a life broken off a second time midway. Another great wound through the center of her life. She did not know if she wanted to survive it.

But she still had Natalie. Herself. Eva. Work. Her history, her political intent, her ability to cause trouble. What she had was what she had had in September, except for Ruby, except for the false promise of Leigh. Natalie must keep an eye on Joel for her. She shook her head heavily to and fro as the snow settled on her hair. How could she go on? She could not cry yet. She had to survive, even if she could not remember now just why—a life in the service of something that had once felt far more pressing. She stopped abruptly and pulled the bag of bagels out of her rucksack and threw them into a trash can. She could not bear the smell; she could not bear the hope they leaked in fragrance. I am at the mercy of history, she thought, feeling its force concretely as a steel press closing on her chest, but I can push it too a bit. One thing I know is that nothing remains the same. No great problems in this society have been solved, no wounds healed, no promises kept except that the rich shall inherit. What swept through us and cast us forward is a force that will gather and rise again. Two steps forward and a step and a half back. I will waste none of my life.

She hurried faster toward the Port Authority terminal and Vermont.

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