334 (22 page)

The nurse who answered was a temporary. Sniffles, always an inspired liar, insisted that his mother—“Mrs. Anderson, of course she lives there, Mrs. Alma F. Anderson”—had to be called to the phone. This was 248 West 16th, wasn’t it? Where was she if she wasn’t there? The nurse, flustered, explained that the residents, all who were fit, had been driven off to a July 4th picnic of Lake Hopatcong as guests of a giant Jersey retirement condominium. If he called bright and early tomorrow they’d be back and he could talk to his mother then.

So the initiation rites were postponed, it couldn’t be helped. Amparo passed around some pills she’d taken from her mother’s jar, a consolation prize. Jack left, apologizing that he was a borderline psychotic, which was the last that anyone saw of Jack till September. The gang was disintegrating, like a sugar cube soaking up saliva, then crumbling into the tongue. But what the hell—the sea still mirrored the same blue sky, the pigeons behind their wicket were no less iridescent, and trees grew for all of that.

They decided to be silly and make jokes about what the M really stood for in M-Day. Sniffles started off with “Miss Nomer, Miss Carriage, and Miss Steak.”

Tancred, whose sense of humor did not exist or was very private, couldn’t do better than “Mnemone, mother of the Muses.” Little Mister Kissy Lips said, “Merciful Heavens!” MaryJane maintained reasonably that M was for MaryJane. But Amparo said it stood for “Aplomb” and carried the day.

Then, proving that when you’re sailing the wind always blows from behind you, they found Terry Riley’s day-long
Orfeo
at 99.5 on the FM dial. They’d studied
Orfeo
in mime class and by now it was part of their muscle and nerve. As Orpheus descended into a hell that mushroomed from the size of a pea to the size of a planet, the Alexandrians metamorphosed into as credible a tribe of souls in torment as any since the days of Jacopo Peri. Throughout the afternoon little audiences collected and dispersed to flood the sidewalk with libations of adult attention. Expressively they surpassed themselves, both one by one and all together, and though they couldn’t have held out till the apotheosis (at 9.30) without a stiff psychochemical wind in their sails, what they had danced was authentic and very much their own. When they left the Battery that night they felt better than they’d felt all summer long. In a sense they had been exorcised.

But back at the Plaza Little Mister Kissy Lips couldn’t sleep. No sooner was he through the locks than his guts knotted up into a Chinese puzzle. Only after he’d unlocked his window and crawled out onto the ledge did he get rid of the bad feelings. The city was real. His room was not. The stone ledge was real and his bare buttocks absorbed reality from it. He watched slow movements in enormous distances and pulled his thoughts together.

He knew without having to talk to the rest that the murder would never take place. The idea had never meant for them what it had meant for him. One pill and they were actors again, content to be images in a mirror.

Slowly, as he watched, the city turned itself off. Slowly the dawn divided the sky into an east and a west. Had a pedestrian been going past on 58th Street and had that pedestrian looked up, he would have seen the bare soles of a boy’s feet swinging back and forth, angelically.

He would have to kill Alyona Ivanovna himself. Nothing else was possible.

Back in his bedroom, long ago, the phone was ringing its fuzzy night-time ring. That would be Tancred (or Amparo?) trying to talk him out of it. He foresaw their arguments. Celeste and Jack couldn’t be trusted now. Or, more subtly: they’d all made themselves too visible with their
Orfeo
. If there were even a small investigation, the benches would remember them, remember how well they had danced, and the police would know where to look.

But the real reason, which at least Amparo would have been ashamed to mention now that the pill was wearing off, was that they’d begun to feel sorry for their victim. They’d got to know him too well over the last month and their resolve had been eroded by compassion.

A light came on in Papa’s window. Time to begin. He stood up, golden in the sunbeams of another perfect day, and walked back along the foot-wide ledge to his own window. His legs tingled from having sat so long.

He waited till Papa was in the shower, then tippytoed to the old secretaire in his bedroom (W. & J. Sloan, 1952). Papa’s keychain was coiled atop the walnut veneer. Inside the secretaire’s drawer was an antique Mexican cigar box, and in the cigar box a velvet bag, and in the velvet bag Papa’s replica of a French dueling pistol, circa 1790. These precautions were less for his son’s sake than on account of Jimmy Ness, who every so often felt obliged to show he was serious with his suicide threats.

He’d studied the booklet carefully when Papa had bought the pistol and was able to execute the loading procedure quickly and without error, tamping the premeasured twist of powder down into the barrel and then the lead ball on top of it.

He cocked the hammer back a single click.

He locked the drawer. He replaced the keys, just so. He buried, for now, the pistol in the stuffs and cushions of the Turkish corner, tilted upright to keep the ball from rolling out. Then with what remained of yesterday’s ebullience he bounced into the bathroom and kissed Papa’s cheek, damp with the morning’s allotted two gallons and redolent of 4711.

They had a cheery breakfast together in the coffee room, which was identical to the breakfast they would have made for themselves except for the ritual of being waited on by a waitress. Little Mister Kissy Lips gave an enthusiastic account of the Alexandrians’ performance of
Orfeo,
and Papa made his best effort of seeming not to condescend. When he’d been driven to the limit of this pretense, Little Mister Kissy Lips touched him for a second pill, and since it was better for a boy to get these things from his father than from a stranger on the street, he got it.

He reached the South Ferry stop at noon, bursting with a sense of his own imminent liberation. The weather was M-Day all over again, as though at midnight out on the ledge he’d forced time to go backwards to the point when things had started going wrong. He’d dressed in his most anonymous shorts and the pistol hung from his belt in a dun dittybag.

Alyona Ivanovna was sitting on one of the benches near the aviary, listening to Miss Kraus. Her ring hand gripped the poster firmly, while the right chopped at the air, eloquently awkward, like a mute’s first words following a miraculous cure.

Little Mister Kissy Lips went down the path and squatted in the shadow of his memorial. It had lost its magic yesterday, when the statues had begun to look so silly to everyone. They still looked silly. Verrazzano was dressed like a Victorian industrialist taking a holiday in the Alps. The angel was wearing an angel’s usual bronze nightgown.

His good feelings were leaving his head by little and little, like aeolian sandstone attrited by the centuries of wind. He thought of calling up Amparo, but any comfort she might bring to him would be a mirage so long as his purpose in coming here remained unfulfilled.

He looked at his wrist, then remembered he’d left his watch home. The gigantic advertising clock on the facade of the First National Citibank said it was fifteen after two. That wasn’t possible.

Miss Kraus was
still
yammering away.

There was time to watch a cloud move across the sky from Jersey, over the Hudson, and past the sun. Unseen winds nibbled at its wispy edges. The cloud became his life, which would disappear without ever having turned into rain.

Later, and the old man was walking up the sea promenade toward the Castle. He stalked him, for miles. And then they were alone, together, at the far end of the park.

“Hello,” he said, with the smile reserved for grown-ups of doubtful importance.

He looked directly at the dim-bag, but Little Mister Kissy Lips didn’t lose his composure. He would be wondering whether to ask for money, which would be kept, if he’d had any, in the bag. The pistol made a noticeable bulge but not the kind of bulge one would ordinarily associate with a pistol.

“Sorry,” he said coolly. “I’m broke.”

“Did I ask?”

“You were going to.”

The old man made as if to return in the other direction, so he had to speak quickly, something that would hold him here.

“I saw you speaking with Miss Kraus.”

He was held.

“Congratulations—you broke through the ice!”

The old man half-smiled half-frowned. “You know her?”

“Mm. You could say that we’re aware of her.” The “we” had been a deliberate risk, an
hors d’oeuvre.
Touching a ringer to each side of the strings by which the heavy bag hung from his belt, he urged on it a lazy pendular motion. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

There was nothing indulgent now in the man’s face. “I probably do.”

His smile had lost the hard edge of calculation. It was the same smile he’d have smiled for Papa, for Amparo, for Miss Couplard, for anyone he liked.

“Where do you come from? I mean, what country?”

“That’s none of your business, is it?”

“Well. I just wanted … to know.”

The old man (he had ceased somehow, to be Alyona Ivanovna) turned away and walked directly toward the squat stone cylinder of the old fortress. He remembered how the plaque at the entrance—the same that had cited the 7.7 million—had said that Jenny Lind had sung there and it had been a great success.

The old man unzipped his fly and, lifting out his cock, began pissing on the wall.

Little Mister Kissy Lips fumbled with the strings of the bag. It was remarkable how long the old man stood there pissing because despite every effort of the stupid knot to stay tied he had the pistol out before the final sprinkle had been shaken out.

He laid the fulminate cap on the exposed nipple, drew the hammer.

He said “Ha!” And even this, rather than being addressed to the boy with the gun was only a parenthesis from the faintly aggrieved he resumed each day at the edge of the water. He turned away and a moment later he was back on the job, hand out, asking some fellow for a quarter.

Mrs. Hanson liked to watch television best when there was someone else in the room to watch with her, though Shrimp, if the program was something she was serious about—and you never knew from one day to the next what that might be—, would get so annoyed with her mother’s comments that Mrs. Hanson usually went off into the kitchen and let Shrimp have the teevee to herself, or else to her own bedroom if Boz hadn’t taken it over for his erotic activities. For Boz was engaged to the girl at the other end of the corridor and since the poor boy had nowhere in the apartment that was privately his own except one drawer of the dresser they’d found in Miss Shore’s room it seemed the least she could do to let him have the bedroom when she or Shrimp weren’t using it.

With Boz when he wasn’t taken up with
l‘amour,
and with Lottie when she wasn’t flying too high for the dots to make a picture, she liked to watch the soaps.
As the World Turns. Terminal Clinic. The Experience of Life.
She knew all the ins and outs of the various tragedies, but life in her own experience was much simpler: life was a pastime. Not a game, for that would have implied that some won and others lost, and she was seldom conscious of any sensations so vivid or threatening. It was like the afternoons of Monopoly with her brothers when she was a girl: long after her hotels, her houses, her deeds, and her cash were gone, they would let her keep moving her little lead battleship around the board collecting her $200, falling on Chance and Community Chest, going to Jail and shaking her way out. She never won but she couldn’t lose. She just went round and round. Life.

But better than watching with her own children she liked to watch along with Amparo and Mickey. With Mickey most of all, since Amparo was already beginning to feel superior to the programs Mrs. Hanson liked best—the early cartoons and the puppets at five-fifteen. She couldn’t have said why. It wasn’t just that she took a superior sort of pleasure in Mickey’s reactions, since Mickey’s reactions were seldom very visible. Already at age five he could be as interior as his mother. Hiding inside the bathtub for hours at a time, then doing a complete U-turn and pissing his pants with excitement. No, she honestly enjoyed the shows for what they were—the hungry predators and their lucky prey, the good-natured dynamite, the bouncing rocks, the falling trees, the shrieks and pratfalls, the lovely obviousness of everything. She wasn’t stupid but she did love to see someone tiptoeing along and then out of nowhere: Slam! Bank! something immense would come crashing down on the Monopoly board scattering the pieces beyond recovery. “Pow!” Mrs. Hanson would say and Mickey would shoot back, “Ding-Dong!” and collapse into giggles. For some reason “Ding-Dong!” was the funniest notion in the world.

“Pow!”

“Ding-Dong!” And they’d break up.

It was the best time she could remember in how long, though it seemed a pity none of it was real—the rows and stacks and pyramids of cans, the lovely boxes of detergents and breakfast food—a whole aisle almost of each!—the dairy shelf, and all the meat, in all its varieties. The meat was the hardest to believe. Candy, and more candy, and at the end of the candy a mountain of tobacco cigarettes. Bread. Some of the brands were still familiar, but she passed by these and put a loaf of Wonder Bread in the shopping cart. It was half full. Juan pushed the cart on ahead, moving to the half-heard melodies that hung like a mist in the museum’s air. He rounded a corner toward the vegetables but Lottie stayed where she was, pretending to study the wrapper of a second loaf. She closed her eyes, trying to separate this moment from its place in the chain of all moments so that she’d always have it, like a pocketful of pebbles from a country road. She grappled details from their context—the nameless song, the spongy give of the bread (forgetting for the moment that it wasn’t bread), the waxiness of the paper, the chiming of the registers at the check-out counters. There were voices and footsteps too, but there are always voices and footsteps, so she had no use for these. The real magic, which couldn’t be laid hold of, was simply that Juan was happy and interested and willing to spend perhaps the whole day with her.