When the Thrill Is Gone (11 page)

AFTER GETTING off the phone with the ghost of Christmases past, I called another number.

“Hello?” he said, panting like a fat dog after a young bitch in heat.

“What’s up, Bug?” I asked the systems whiz kid.

“How many push-ups can you do, Mr. McGill?”

“Eighty or so—if I get warmed up first.”

“Eighty?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Straight out? I mean, not on your knees or an incline?”

“Straight out.”

“I have to stop after three.”

“Three months ago you’d have stopped before you started.”

He took in a breath, tried to talk, inhaled again, and said, “What can I do for you?”

“You know those messages Twill’s been getting on Twitter?”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to send the eleven dollars to him and give that fake address Zephyra has for me in Queens.”

“What’s the address?”

“I don’t remember. Call her and find out.”

“Um . . .”

“What?”

“Uh . . . you want me call her?”

“I take it you want to do a lot more than talk with Zephyra.”

“Yeah but . . . I mean, um, you know.”

“Listen, kid, the girl wants
something
from you. There’s no doubt about that. Maybe she just wants to be friends, but if that’s so, why’d she say that you should get in shape?”

“We only saw each other alone that one time.”

“I’m not askin’ you to go see her. Just call.”

I broke off the connection and glanced over at the resident of the adjacent bench.

What might have been a black man was in reality a middle-aged white woman rearranging her nylon bags to achieve some aesthetic effect that escaped me.

She looked up at me with her broad potato face and smiled.

Taking this as a good omen I waved, then set my feet back on the path to Azure.

17

MRS. A. ROGERS was in her middle fifties, like me, but she’d taken a very different path getting there. She was white with comfortable padding, delicate, and at ease with the insipid tranquility of her job. Her desk was a small maple table that had a green blotter, a tan phone with an array of buttons on it, and a solitary framed photograph of herself, ten years younger, standing with a friendly bearlike man, his arms circled around her and his smiling eyes peering into the lens.

Above Mrs. Rogers’ head, a gray sign, stamped upon in blocky yellow letters, said ADMITTANCE. The reception room was little more than a vestibule. This was the wasp waist of the upscale mental institution through which visitors and professionals passed like grains of sand ticking off the monotonous microseconds that made up the infinity where Mrs. Rogers patiently waited.

She smiled in bland welcome.

“Leonid McGill for Azure Chambers,” I said.

“Are you a relative?”

“Chrystal sent me with a message.” I’d learned my lesson. Even though Shawna had hired me, I had to keep up her lie if I didn’t want to be frowned upon and turned away.

“A message?” this middle-aged woman from the middle of Middle America said.

“Yes. I’m supposed to speak with her about something . . . private. I’ve been prepped on how to comport myself in her presence, and Mr. Tyler is aware of the visit.”

The second key for entrée would certainly be Tyler. The milksop nerd was a god among citizens like A. Rogers.

The prisoner loves his warden,
my father’s words came back to me.
The slave fairly worships his master, and the worker deifies even the name of the rich man.

Her gray eyes fixed on me, A. Rogers’ smile dimmed.

“Mr. Chambers told me to tell you hello,” I said, trying to keep the ember of that smile alive. “He told me how you always deliver his flowers.”

A brief schism of mild pain passed through the otherwise plain woman’s face.

“He’s such a dear man,” she said.

I nodded, ever so slightly.

“I hate doing that to him, but even flowers are too much for Azure,” A. Rogers said to me, her temporary confessor. “I give them to other women residents. Those poor souls would love to have a husband like Nathan.”

I tried to look understanding.

It was this tame expression that finally overcame the passive barrier, the infinite boredom of that room.

“Have a seat, Mr. McGill,” Mrs. Rogers said.

I looked around and noticed a spindly rosewood chair that was, I thought, unlikely to hold my one hundred and eightythree pounds. I took this offer as a challenge. Maybe Mrs. Rogers was testing me to see if I could manage not to break her furniture before she trusted me with Azure.

I sat delicately, tensing my thighs to lessen the burden on the chair. But as my weight tilted unerringly earthward I realized that there was a strength in that doelike seat that one wouldn’t, one couldn’t, have imagined.

I sat there while the mild-mannered woman went about reading and amending notes on tiny slips of pink paper. She hadn’t made a call or sent any other message that I could discern.

I had begun to wonder if her offer of a seat was just a kindness and not an invitation when a door to her right opened.

The woman who came into the vestibule-office was Mrs. Rogers’ spiritual twin. She was in her thirties, dressed in a nurse’s uniform instead of civvies, caramel colored, and thin, with a severe cast to her face. But, still, Colette Martin had all the earmarks of bland resistance.

“Mr. McGill?” Nurse Martin said.

I never did figure out how she knew my name. I only knew hers because of the name tag over her tiny left breast.

“Yes?”

“Come with me.”

I got to my feet and followed Nurse Martin into a long hallway where the walls, floors, and ceiling were the same nearly colorless gray hue. Every fifteen feet or so we passed a set of greenish-yellow elevator doors. Three elevator banks down, Colette stopped, pulled a keychain from her clamshell white pocket, and carefully chose a key that fit into a slot next to the lift. The doors slid open immediately and we entered into a surprisingly large space.

Choosing another key, Colette turned the lock for floor seventeen.

There was no further verbal communication between Nurse Martin and me. There was nothing to impart, nothing to gain by words. I simply stood, waiting to arrive, and then, when the doors slid open, she moved to the side, indicating to me by this gesture that I’d be getting off by myself.

THE SITTING ROOM I entered was a palette of pastel blues and grays. There was a window, but its light-gray shade was pulled, a diaphanous blue curtain drawn over that. The table in the corner was almost, but not quite, white, and the chairs (relations of the fawn downstairs) had considered green but gave up half the way there.

I don’t think that I’d ever experienced such spatial peace. It was like the experience of a zazen breath exhaled into a room where it had become both real and ethereal.

“Hello.”

She was what the old folks called
high yellow
, the color of a darkening lemon. Her gown was creamy blue with a hint of satin, somewhere. The gray-and-brown hair was coarse, combed back from a well-defined round face that was understated and yet deeply aware.

We might have shared the same birth year.

“Mrs. Chambers,” I said.

“Azure,” she replied, making it three syllables as her husband had.

It made me happy to think that even in their separation she and Nate were of the same mind.

She turned her head slightly and I understood that she was offering me a chair.

I also knew that I should leave my hands at my side, speak in a modulated tone, and keep my eyes focused on her while not staring her directly in the face. She was royalty and I a subject, but this distinction had nothing to do with hierarchy; it was more a system of shared duty.

It was as I lowered into my chair that I realized a piano sonata was playing softly, maybe in another room.

My host did not sit. She stood behind the chair across the table from me, resting her delicate hands on its back for support.

Behind Azure the wall was recessed. In this shallow alcove sat the only aberration in an otherwise perfect environment. It was a thin, coal-colored table against the wall supporting golden frames of the picture-portraits of her children and husband.

“And your name is?” she asked, giving me her full beneficent attention.

“McGill,” I said, hoping that the word wasn’t too pointy or sharp.

“You have a message for me from Chrystal?”

I glanced at the portraits behind her.

“Your daughters look very much alike.”

“Very.”

“Did people confuse them for each other from time to time?”

“When they got to be eleven and twelve they used to switch places. They never fooled me, but even their aunts and uncles were tricked sometimes.”

“How could you tell the difference?” I asked.

“If they were standing you could always see that Shawnie was the shorter one. But when they were alone or sitting down you could tell by their eyes. Chrystal has the eyes of an ancient, and Shawnie has the look of a wild creature that stumbled into civilization and can’t find her way back to the wilderness.”

Hearing this analysis, I could imagine the long talks that she and Nate must have had. I felt the pain of his loss—and hers.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Where?”

“This, this place.”

“Oh,” she said, “yes. I have a condition, a mental condition.”

“You seem very normal to me.”

“In here I do. But the noise and mess outside drives me crazy. There’s a science word for it but it’s what our mothers would have called nerves. Doctors say that there’s a medicine I could take but I’d rather just keep everything around me quiet and peaceful. That way I don’t have to feel like I’m sick.

“You’re smiling, Mr. McGill.”

“Oh? I hadn’t realized. I guess it’s because what you’re saying is that you are only emotionally disturbed when there’s someone else in the room.”

Azure laughed. It was a very pleasant sound.

“Yes. And only a kindly gentleman like yourself, who keeps still, can know the real me.”

“Who pays for all this?”

“That’s a very blunt question, sir.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m trying to understand who I’m dealing with. Not you, but your daughters and Mr. Tyler.”

“Cyril owns the nursing facility. He bought it when Chrystal couldn’t find a suitable place for me,” she said, adding, “You said you had a message from her?”

“Indirectly,” I said. “A woman who looks like Chrystal came to my office and asked me to help with a problem. But I’m beginning to believe that it was Shawna who approached me, and I’m trying to figure out why.”

“Was she asking you to help Chrystal or herself?” Azure asked with no visible tension showing.

“Chrystal,” I said. “But I’m not sure that Chrystal has a problem.”

“That’s very odd,” Azure commented. “It’s Chrystal who looks after her brother and sister. She was here visiting me only two days ago.”

“Really? What did she say?”

“That she and Cyril were going on a cruise,” Azure said. It was the first lie she told me. “Chrystal has always wanted to be a Merchant Marine like her father. She loves boats, and Cyril is not a very physical man. He lets her take care of everything when they go out on his yacht.”

“Do you know where I can find Shawna, Ms. Chambers?”

“Azure. Call me Azure.”

“Azure,” I said as if speaking an incantation.

“There’s a red-brick building north on D past First, that’s what Chrystal told me. It has a stand of aspen on the roof.”

For a moment Azure’s mind traveled to the faraway tenement inhabited by her wild creature daughter. Her lips twisted and she directed that gaze toward the reassurance of a blank blue wall.

“I should probably go,” I said.

“My husband, Nathan, doesn’t know how to talk like you,” she said. “He needs to move around too much, and he, he touches me.”

“I’m going to stand up now,” I said.

“It was nice seeing you, Mr. McGill. You’re a kind man.”

18

IT WAS LATE in the afternoon but the summer sun was still up and luxuriant. I considered walking across town to the place where Shawna might live but gave up on that idea for the moment.

Age has taught me to take my time with some destinations.

That includes going home.

I started walking north on Greenwich Street, realizing as I went that I was probably going to walk the eight miles to the Upper West Side and my broken family.

WALKING THROUGH the borough of Manhattan is another supplementary exercise for me; I feel my whole history passing down the blocks of my delinquent adolescence and criminal maturity. The bricks and concrete, stoplights and police cruisers were my indictment for a thousand crimes committed without remorse, or even much awareness. I’d never been caught or convicted, not so much as indicted for the lives I’d shattered. But I remembered when walking who I’d been and why I paid penances like sitting patiently with innocents like Azure Freshstone-Chambers.

At Christopher I turned right, making my way over to Hudson Street. Six or seven blocks north of there Hudson became Eighth Avenue, the artery toward Broadway and, ultimately, my home.

As I was crossing Thirty-second Street I pulled out my cell phone and called information.

“Say a city and state,” a pleasant woman asked over the invisible waves of communication.

“New York, New York,” I said.

“Say ‘residence’ or the name of the business you wish to call.”

“Residence.”

“All right. You said ‘residence.’ Is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said, looking up toward the Thirty-third Street sign.

“Say the last name and the first.”

“Highgate, Corinthia.”

“Yes. Corinthia Highgate. Would you like me to connect you at no extra charge?”

“Yes.”

The phone went dead for a moment, but I knew from experience that this was just part of the charade. The human voice without a soul returned to her electronic tomb and the system passed along the digital impulses of my request.