Walking the Perfect Square (19 page)

Katy then regaled him with stories of her trip into the realm of unisex bathrooms.

“Sounds kinky,” Pete feigned a chill. “I gotta get me one of those.”

That reminded me; on the cab ride over I’d decided to give two of my Dirt Lounge passes to Jack. It seemed more his kind of place than anyone else I was acquainted with. Even if he hated the place, it would be worth it just to listen to his sarcastic rantings.

“Where’s Jack? What’d he pick up some ballerina and ask to go home early?”

“Jack?” Pete packed a lot of distaste into that one syllable. “Not old Jackie boy, he’s as queer as the Queen of France.”

Katy took the pronouncement in stride. My first inclination was to debate the point. Then it dawned on me that I’d sound like my Aunt Sadie the time she heard cousin Artie was dating a black woman: “A
schwartze
, not my Artie!” And trust me, Aunt Sadie knew my cousin Artie a lot better than I knew Jack. Jack’s homosexuality also went a long way toward explaining Pete’s hostility. I didn’t figure it stemmed from Pete’s love of the Jersey shore. Cops and gays had a long history in New York, kind of like the Turks and Armenians but not as loving.

“Well,” I fumbled for something to say, “do me a favor. Leave these passes for Marie Antoinette and tell him we had fun tonight. And let me know how the Liquor Authority thing shakes out.”

Pete just shrugged, promising I’d be the first to hear after his partners. He thanked me again and locked the doors behind us.

“Give me a dollar,” I demanded as we approached my car.

Confused, Katy said: “What?” But even as she did so, she reached into her pocket and fished out four quarters. “Here.”

“It’s official,” I announced.

“What is?”

“That I’m working for you now.”

“You want to keep your new job?” she asked coyly.

“I do.”

“Then you’re going to have to sleep with the boss.”

I opened her door. “I guess I can force myself.”

“I’m counting on it.” When I slid in next to her, she said: “Let’s go to Coney Island.”

“Coney Island’s closed.”

“Then I guess you’re gonna have to kill some time making the boss happy.”

If I hadn’t turned the ignition key at that moment, it would have turned itself.

IT HAD BEEN long since I’d drifted into sleep with a woman in my arms instead of a pillow. Warm bodies were never the problem. Dating is easy for cops, single or otherwise. Early on in my career I learned never to underestimate the power of the uniform. In the middle of an antiwar demonstration at Brooklyn College, a girl asked me out as I walked her back to the paddy wagon. When I declined, she called me a pig. And, of course, there was always Suzie the actress, so disappointed by my appearance out of the bag. Uniforms were makeup for men. For some reason, the uniform got your looks bumped up from coach to business to first class in the eyes of certain beholders. Rock stars aren’t the only ones with groupies.

Exhausted, sleep is all we did. By the time we got upstairs to my apartment and made our trips to the bathroom, it was past 5:00. When I came out of the bathroom dressed only in pajama bottoms, Katy was waiting for me in the living room. Nude beneath her shirt and sprawled across the couch, I saw her eyes were shut only as I reached her. She startled and, like a trooper, stood right up, pushing her body close to mine. Tilting my head down, I kissed her lightly and led her into the bedroom. I kissed her again, stroked her hair back and whispered the word “later.”

Years had passed since I’d felt comfortable enough not to force my hand, not to say yes when my disinterested heart stood by. And when those hungry moments were past, there was often too much embarrassment and self-loathing left on the sheets, poisoning the air for intimacy. For me, taking all I could get was no prescription for love. That’s what I could say later to Katy, because I had faith somehow there would be a tomorrow for Katy
and me that allowed sleep to come to us without coming between us.

We woke up on opposite ends of the bed. This wasn’t TV, after all. But when we did wake up, Katy slid across the sheets to me, her back against my chest, my arms around her.

“You know that night we met at the canal,” I whispered, “you smiled at me.”

“I did?”

“You did. And when I got back to my car and closed my eyes, I could see your smile. It means a lot when I can see something with my eyes closed. Not that I closed my eyes much that night. I couldn’t get you out of my head.”

I kissed her neck and she spun around in my arms to face me. “Why does it mean so much?” she asked.

“Because I have a good memory for words, for details, not images, for names, not faces. Well, that’s not a hundred percent true. I can remember a face, but it’s hard for me to visualize a face. When my life flashes before my eyes, it’ll be in text, not pictures. Christ, am I making any sense? Just stop me before I make a complete ass of myself.”

“Ssssh,” she put her finger across my lips. “You know yourself, that’s a good thing. Not many men know who they are. I’m a little embarrassed,” she said, pulling herself so close to me her breathing sounded like the wind.

“Don’t be embarrassed, not here. What is it?”

“No one’s ever liked my smile before. My lips are too thin and my teeth—”

“I can see my father’s face with my eyes shut,” I stopped her, “but I have to look at a picture to really see my mom. And I remember Andrea Cotter’s smile. Before you, hers was the only smile to ever stick in my head.”

“An old girlfriend. I think I’m jealous.”

“Old maybe, but not a girlfriend. Andrea was a year ahead of me in high school. You know how some people aren’t beautiful to look at or anything, but there’s this energy about them or the way they carry themselves that just makes you want to be close to them?”

“I think so.”

“Andrea was like that. She was a little stocky and her legs were too thick, but she was a cheerleader. She was the lead in
Sing
. She was editor of the school newspaper and she wrote great poems. I was just in awe of her, not in love exactly. Don’t get me
wrong, I used to imagine us together. I think every guy in school tried to imagine being with Andrea. She never made herself unapproachable or acted above it all, but I just couldn’t ever bring myself to talk to her. Then in my junior year I wrote this poem—”

“You write poetry?”

“Wrote! Wrote! One poem, and it got published in the school magazine.”

“Do you have a copy?” Katy asked excitedly. “Can I see it?”

“Someday maybe.”

She kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry. I interrupted. Tell me about Andrea.”

“There isn’t that much more to tell, really. The last week in May, the week the magazine came out, I was cutting a class and went to hang out on the boardwalk with my friends. By the time we were almost there, it got cloudy and they turned back. I went anyway and sat on a bench and stared out at the beach. ‘Excuse me,’ someone said, and I looked around. It was Andrea Cotter. ‘You’re Moses Prager, aren’t you?’ I said something stupid like, yeah, the last time I checked. ‘I love your poem,’ she said. ‘I wish I could inspire someone to write like that.’ ”

Katy covered my mouth with her hand. “The poem was about her, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Now I really want to read it. Do you think she knew?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid to ask,” I confessed.

“What happened?”

“She took a copy of the magazine out of her bag and asked me to autograph the page my poem was on. I said I would only if she would autograph her poems in my copy. We exchanged books. When we handed them back, she just smiled at me for a second. That was the smile that stuck in my head. I’d seen her smile before, you know, but never at me. I wished her good luck in college and she told me something goofy like keep on writing. When she was out of sight, I looked at the page she had signed.”

“You were hoping she left her phone number.”

“Can’t blame a guy for hoping,” I said. “But she didn’t. She just signed her name.”

“So, is she famous? Did she marry rich?” Katy actually sounded jealous.

“She died that summer in a fire in the Catskills with two other girls from school. They were up there waitressing to earn money for college. Some drunk moron was smoking in bed in the
employee quarters . . .” I snapped my fingers. “Seventeen people died.”

“Oh my God, Moe, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It was a long time ago and now I have someone else’s smile to dream of.”

Katy was crying, more for Patrick, I think, than for Andrea Cotter. When she calmed down some, I kissed her mouth, her neck. Tears on a woman’s neck are intoxicating. I worked my lips down her body until I turned her crying into coos.

 

FOR ALL MY bravado and confidence, I kept listening for the other shoe to drop. When would she quietly get out of bed, shower—maybe not even shower—collect her clothes from the living room and dress as quickly as she could, begin her makeup job in the hallway mirror only to decide to finish in the cab or subway car and call to me as she walked out the door: “Thanks, Moe, I’ll call you,” or “Call me.” I liked it better when they said nothing at all or stayed for coffee.

And Katy did get up, walking quietly to the bathroom. I could hear the shower running. I prayed she took short showers. I hated lying silently in bed waiting for them to go. But Katy refused to buy into my history.

“For chrissakes, Moe!” she screamed above the shower, “if you don’t get in here soon, I really am going to do this by myself.”

I didn’t quite set the land speed record.

If there were any lingering doubts after our marathon shower, Katy removed them by using my toothbrush. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how two people can spend hours moving in, out, over, around and through parts of each other’s body but refuse to share a toothbrush in a pinch?

“What do you want to do?”

“I’m too sore for that,” she said, looking up from her coffee. “But I do remember saying something about Coney Island.”

I pulled back the curtains and informed her that the white stuff falling past my window wasn’t ash from the building incinerator and that with most of the rides closed until Easter, Coney Island wasn’t exactly America’s garden spot.

In an eerily accurate aping of her father’s voice, Katy said: “Tough shit, son. You work for me now.”

“I surrender. I surrender. Come on, I’ll take you to Nathan’s.”

After we’d both inhaled our hot dogs and fries and washed them down with orangeade, she told me how her dad used to take
the kids to Coney Island on Sundays. Her dad was from Brooklyn originally.

“He never stopped missing it,” she said. “He used to say how taking us kids to Coney Island was his duty, but I think he enjoyed it more than we did. There are plenty of amusement parks between here and Dutchess County.”

“You mean your father really is human.”

“I’ve never checked his pulse, but I love him.”

I quickly dropped that line of conversation. When I made a move to leave, Katy mentioned Marina Conseco, but not by name.

“Can you show me where you found the little girl?”

I tried to laugh it off. “Cut it out, will you? What is this, an episode of
This is Your Life
? Next thing you’ll want to do is meet the rabbi who circumcised me.”

“Please show me the building.”

What could I say? The snow was barely falling now and it was a short walk. I could see it was important to her. All the optimism over Hoboken had drained out of her. The weeks of false leads and unfulfilled hoping had worn her down. Maybe she just wanted to touch the bricks, to stand before a shrine to answered prayers. Whatever her reasons, she didn’t need to explain them to me.

“This is it,” I said, pointing to the dilapidated building. “They took the water tank down years ago. Good thing, too. It was a rickety old piece of shit. I’m amazed it didn’t collapse in on us.”

The snow had stopped completely. Katy stood silently, looking up at the roof, shielding her eyes from a sun that wasn’t there.

“I heard the story from my mom who heard it from my cousin Rose’s husband,” she finally said, eyes still fixed on the roof.

“Rico, yeah, he was in this precinct with me then.”

“So I heard how you found her . . . What was her name? I know you told me, Maria, Ma—”

“Marina,” I corrected.

“I’m sorry, Marina. I heard the story of how you found her,” Katy said, looking straight at me, “but maybe because I heard it third-hand, I don’t know how she disappeared in the first place.”

“No one ever asks me about that part. Everyone just assumes that because she was abused and someone left her to die up there that she was abducted,” I said, looking away from Katy.

“She wasn’t?”

“Yes and no. She was upset about her parents’ divorce and she thought if she could scare them by running away . . . you know how
kids think. Then she got lost and disoriented. I guess she picked the wrong guy to ask for help.”

Katy said she was finished here. She thanked me for putting up with her insane requests. Still, something had changed. Her tone was formal, her words measured. Although part of me was panicking about the change in her, wondering what I’d done wrong, I resisted the urge to interrogate her. Saying my knee had had all the exercise it could bear, I asked if we could take the bus back to my building.

“Of course,” was all she said.

Hoping a few minutes of quiet reflection and the bus ride would shake her out of her mood, I tried coaxing Katy into staying for dinner, maybe even for breakfast. No, she said, she was tempted but there was work in the morning and a long-neglected project due by midweek. And more importantly, though she never said the words, there was guilt. I’d been a fool not see it. I’d miscalculated her reasons for wanting to visit the building where I’d found the Conseco girl. I imagined I could hear her berating herself: Patrick was out there alone somewhere, hurting or dead or, like that poor little girl, waiting for death to come. How could I have let myself enjoy myself under these circumstances? How can I want to be with a man I would have never met if . . .