Instead, I thought of Alice. This was something I almost never let myself do—just think of her, as opposed to think about
not
thinking about her, which I did almost constantly. The thought of Alice broke open in me, and I let it fan out until I saw her hair in the sun—gold, her hair was gold—and I smelled those oils she used to dab on her wrists with a dropper. Patchouli? Musk? I couldn’t remember the names. I saw her face with all the love still in it, no anger, no fear—none of the sorry things I learned to make her feel.
Come inside
, her face said, and I did. For a minute, I came inside.
I looked down at the city. Its extravagance felt wasteful, like gushing oil or some other precious thing Bennie was hoarding for himself, using it up so no one else could get any. I thought: If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.
I took a long inhale and turned to Bennie. “Health and happiness to you, brother,” I said, and I smiled at him for the first and only time: I let my lips open and stretch back, something I very rarely do because I’m missing most of my teeth on both sides. The teeth I have are big and white, so those black gaps come as a real surprise. I saw the shock in Bennie’s face when he saw. And all at once I felt strong, as if some balance had tipped in the room and all of Bennie’s power—the desk, the view, the levitating chair—suddenly belonged to me. Bennie felt it too. Power is like that; everyone feels it at once.
I turned and walked toward the door, still grinning. I felt light, as if I were wearing Bennie’s white shirt and light was pouring out from inside it.
“Hey, Scotty, hold on,” Bennie said, sounding shaken. He veered back toward his desk, but I kept walking, my grin leading the way into the hall and back toward the reception area where Sasha sat, my shoes whispering on the carpet with each slow, dignified step. Bennie caught up with me and handed me a business card: sumptuous paper with embossed print. It felt precious. I held it very carefully. “President,” I read.
“Don’t be a stranger, Scotty,” Bennie said. He sounded bewildered, as if he’d forgotten how I had come to be there; as if he’d invited me himself and I were leaving prematurely. “You ever have any music you want me to hear, send it on.”
I couldn’t resist one last look at Sasha. Her eyes were serious, almost sad, but she was still flying the flag of her pretty smile. “Take care, Scotty,” she said.
Outside the building, I walked directly to the box where I had mailed my letter to Bennie a few days earlier. I bent my neck and squinted up at the tower of green glass, trying to count the floors to forty-five. And only then did I notice that my hands were empty—I’d left my fish in Bennie’s office! This struck me as hilarious, and I laughed out loud, imagining the corporate types seating themselves in the levitating chairs in front of Bennie’s desk, one of them lifting the wet, heavy bag from the floor and then recognizing it—
Oh, Christ, it’s that guy’s fish
—dropping it, revolted. And what would Bennie do? I wondered, as I walked slowly toward the subway. Would he dispose of the fish forever then and there, or would he put it in the office refrigerator and take it home that night to his wife and baby son, and tell them about my visit? And if he got that far, was it possible that he might open up the bag and take a look, just for the hell of it?
I hoped so. I knew he’d be amazed. It was a shiny, beautiful fish.
I wasn’t good for much the rest of that day. I get a lot of headaches from eye damage I had as a kid, and the pain is so intense that it throws off bright, excruciating pictures. That afternoon, I lay on my bed and closed my eyes and saw a burning heart suspended in darkness, shooting off light in every direction. It wasn’t a dream, because nothing happened. The heart just hung there.
Having gone to bed in the late afternoon, I was up and out of my apartment and under the Williamsburg Bridge with my line in the East River well before sunrise. Sammy and Dave showed up soon after. Dave didn’t actually care about fish—he was there to watch the East Village females on their early morning jogs, before they went to school at NYU or to work at a boutique or whatever East Village girls do with their days. Dave complained about their jog bras, which didn’t allow enough bounce for his satisfaction. Sammy and I barely listened.
That morning when Dave started up, I felt an inclination to speak. “You know, Dave,” I said, “I think that’s the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“That their breasts
don’t
bounce,” I said. “It hurts them. That’s why they wear jog bras in the first place.”
He gave me a wary look. “Since when are you the expert?”
“My wife used to jog,” I said.
“Used to? You mean she quit?”
“She quit being my wife. She probably still jogs.”
It was a quiet morning. I heard the slow
pop, pop
of tennis balls on the courts behind the Williamsburg Bridge. Aside from the joggers and tennis players, there were usually a few junkies out by the river in the early mornings. I always looked for one particular couple, a male and female in thigh-length leather jackets, with skinny legs and ruined faces. They had to be musicians. I’d been out of the game a long time, but I could spot a musician anywhere.
The sun rose, big and shiny and round, like an angel lifting her head. I’d never seen it so brilliant out there. Silver poured over the water. I wanted to jump in and swim. Pollution? I thought. Give me some more. And then I noticed the girl. I spotted her peripherally because she was small and ran with a high, leaping gait that was different from the others. She had light brown hair, and when the sunlight touched it, something happened that you couldn’t miss. Rumpelstiltskin, I thought. Dave was gaping at her, and even Sammy turned to look, but I kept my eyes on the river, watching my line for a tug. I saw the girl without having to look.
“Hey Scotty,” Dave said, “I think your wife just ran by.”
“I’m divorced,” I said.
“Well, that was her.”
“No,” I said. “She lives in San Francisco.”
“Maybe she’s your next wife,” Sammy suggested.
“She’s
my
next wife,” Dave said. “And you know the first thing I’m gonna teach her? Don’t clamp them down. Let them
bounce.”
I looked at my line flicking in the sun. My luck was gone; I knew I wouldn’t catch anything. Soon I had to be at work. I reeled in my line and began walking north along the river. The girl was already a long way ahead, her hair shaking with every step. I followed her, but at such a distance that I wasn’t following her, really. I was just walking in the same direction. My eyes held her so tightly that I didn’t even notice the junkie couple in my path until they’d almost passed me. They were huddled up against each other, looking haggard and sexy the way young people can for a little while, until they just look haggard. “Hey,” I said, stepping in their way.
We must’ve seen each other twenty times on that river, but the guy aimed his sunglasses at me like he’d never seen me before, and the girl didn’t look at me at all. “Are you musicians?” I asked.
The guy turned away, shaking me off. But the girl looked up. Her eyes seemed raw, peeled away, and I wondered if the sun hurt them, and why her boyfriend or husband or whatever he was didn’t give her his glasses. “He’s awesome,” she said, using the word in the male teenage skateboarding sense. Or maybe not, I thought. Maybe she meant it literally.
“I believe you,” I said. “I believe he’s an awesome musician.”
I reached into my shirt pocket and took out Bennie’s card. I’d used a piece of Kleenex to remove it from yesterday’s jacket and place it in today’s shirt, making sure not to bend or fold or smudge it. Its embossed letters reminded me of a Roman coin. “Call this man,” I said. “He runs a record label. Tell him Scotty sent you.”
They both looked at the card, squinting in the angled sunlight.
“Call him,” I said. “He’s my buddy.”
“Sure,” the guy said, without conviction.
“I really hope you will,” I said, but I felt helpless. I could do this only once; I would never have that card again.
While the guy studied the card, the girl looked at me. “He’ll call,” she said, and then she smiled: small orderly teeth, the kind you only get from wearing braces. “I’ll make him.”
I nodded and turned, leaving the junkies behind. I walked north, forcing my eyes to see as far as they could see. But the jogger had vanished while I looked away.
“Hey,” I heard behind me, two ragged voices. When I turned, they called out, “Thanks,” both at the same time.
It had been a long time since anyone had thanked me for something. “Thanks,” I said, to myself. I said it again and again, wanting to hold in my mind the exact sound of their voices, to feel again the kick of surprise in my chest.
Is there some quality of warm spring air that causes birds to sing more loudly? I asked myself that question as I took the overpass across the FDR onto East Sixth Street. Flowers were just coming open in the trees. I trotted underneath them, smelling their powdery pollen as I hurried toward my apartment. I wanted to drop off my jacket at the dry cleaner on my way to work—I’d been looking forward to it since yesterday. I’d left the jacket crumpled on the floor beside my bed, and I would bring it in like that, all used up. I’d toss it on the counter oh so casually, daring the gal to challenge me. But how could she?
I’ve been somewhere, and I need my jacket cleaned
, I would say, like anyone else. And she would make it new again.
I
Stephanie and Bennie had lived in Crandale a year before they were invited to a party. It wasn’t a place that warmed easily to strangers. They’d known that going in and hadn’t cared—they had their own friends. But it wore on Stephanie more than she’d expected, dropping off Chris for kindergarten, waving or smiling at some blond mother releasing blond progeny from her SUV or Hummer, and getting back a pinched, quizzical smile whose translation seemed to be:
Who are you again?
How could they not know, after months of daily mutual sightings? They were snobs or idiots or both, Stephanie told herself, yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.
During that first winter in town, the sister of one of Bennie’s artists sponsored them for membership to the Crandale Country Club. After a process only slightly more arduous than applying for citizenship, they were admitted in late June. They arrived at the club on their first day carrying bathing suits and towels, not realizing that the CCC (as it was known) provided its own monochromatic towels to reduce the cacophony of poolside color. In the ladies’ locker room, Stephanie passed one of the blondes whose children went to Chris’s school, and for the first time she got an actual “Hello,” her own appearance in two separate locations having apparently fulfilled some triangulation Kathy required as proof of personhood. That was her name: Kathy. Stephanie had known it from the beginning.
Kathy was carrying a tennis racket. She wore a tiny white dress beneath which white tennis shorts, hardly more than underpants, were just visible. Her prodigious childbearing had left no mark on her narrow waist and well-tanned biceps. Her shining hair was in a tight ponytail, stray wisps secured with gold bobby pins.
Stephanie changed into her bathing suit and met Bennie and Chris near the snack bar. As they stood there uncertainly, holding their colorful towels, Stephanie recognized a distant
thop, thop
of tennis balls. The sound induced a swoon of nostalgia. Like Bennie, she came from nowhere, but a different type of nowhere—his was the urban nowhere of Daly City, California, where his parents had worked to a point of total absence while a weary grandmother raised Bennie and his four sisters. But Stephanie hailed from suburban, midwestern nowhere, and there had been a club whose snack bar served thin, greasy burgers rather than
salade niçoise
with fresh seared tuna, like this one, but where tennis had been played on sun-cracked courts, and where Stephanie had achieved a certain greatness at around age thirteen. She hadn’t played since.
At the end of that first day, dopey from sun, they’d showered, changed back into their clothes, and sat on a flagstone terrace where a pianist rolled out harmless melodies on a shining upright. The sun was beginning to set. Chris tumbled on some nearby grass with two girls from his kindergarten class. Bennie and Stephanie sipped gin and tonics and watched the fireflies. “So this is what it’s like,” Bennie said.
A number of possible replies occurred to Stephanie: allusions to the fact that they still didn’t know anyone; her suspicion that there wasn’t anyone worth knowing. But she let them pass. It was Bennie who had chosen Crandale, and in some deep way Stephanie understood why: they’d flown in private jets to islands owned by rock stars, but this country club was the farthest distance Bennie had traveled from the dark-eyed grandmother in Daly City. He’d sold his record label last year; how better to mark success than by going to a place where you didn’t belong?
Stephanie took Bennie’s hand and kissed a knuckle. “Maybe I’ll buy a tennis racket,” she said.
The party invitation came three weeks later. The host, a hedge-fund manager known as Duck, had invited them after learning that Bennie had discovered the Conduits, Duck’s favorite rock group, and released their albums. Stephanie had found the two deep in conversation by the pool when she returned from her first tennis lesson. “I wish they’d get back together,” Duck mused. “What ever happened to that spastic guitarist?”
“Bosco? He’s still recording,” Bennie said tactfully. “His new album will be out in a couple of months:
A to B
. His solo work is more interior.” He left out the part about Bosco being obese, alcoholic, and cancer-ridden. He was their oldest friend.
Stephanie had perched on the edge of Bennie’s deck chair, flushed because she’d hit well, her topspin still intact, her serve slicingly clear. She’d noticed one or two blond heads pausing by the court to watch and had been proud of how different she looked from these women: her cropped dark hair and tattoo of a Minoan octopus encompassing one calf, her several chunky rings. Although it was also true that she’d bought a tennis dress for the occasion, slim and white, tiny white shorts underneath: the first white garment Stephanie had owned in her adult life.