Nice Girls Finish Last (19 page)

“Yeah. A bunch of Jack Jackson's stories about how he started out with a small Sunday advertising insert business … ,” Claire began.

“Anything about me?”

“About your job, you mean? No, sorry.”

At that point Bianca's cellular phone rang and she took the call. It was Pete, telling her he was almost through at ANN and she should go back to her place and wait for him there. Her master's voice. She turned to me so Claire couldn't see and then mouthed the words, “Don't tell.”

I smiled and nodded ever so slightly, but the result of her continued paranoia was that it incited my curiosity, which didn't need any more inciting these days, thank you very much. By now, I was wondering what deep dark thing she didn't want Pete to know about. With Bianca it could be anything from chlamydia to a past abortion to a yeast infection.

After making her hasty good-byes, she left.

“Man, Pete has her trained,” I said.

“She's only twenty-three, twenty-four,” Claire said. “She'll outgrow it.”

“I hope so. She could end up rebelling like Mistress Lina, emotional doormat one day, dominatrix the next. Anyway,” I continued, “I feel like I would have been in more danger if this Pinks guy had actually made contact with me, even if he wasn't after me, know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do,” Claire said. “You think someone killed him before he could tell you something and now you're safe because of it. How is that story coming?”

“It's a piece of shit, but I don't care. Do it, get it over with, move on.”

“So, the less you know about this murder, the less danger you're in,” Claire said.

I didn't like the way that sounded.

“You think I'm trying not to find out what happened?”

“Don't get so defensive. I didn't say that. Whatever. You're very lucky anyway,” Claire said.

Yeah, I thought positively, I was lucky the guy was killed. That was a bright side. But then I thought of what the IRA had said in a communiqué to Margaret Thatcher after she escaped unharmed from a bomb blast in her hotel in Brighton. “You were lucky,” the IRA said. “We were unlucky. But remember, we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.”

“It's not just fear or whatever. There are so many leads away from the S&M angle, but Jerry insists on doing that angle. He has a ‘hunch' …”

“And he has exclusive videotape.”

“And several publicity-hungry dominatrices,” I said. “But, Claire, what if he's right and I'm wrong? Maybe I'm the one who can't see the truth …”

“Without knowing all the particulars, between you and Jerry, I'd bet you're right ninety-nine percent of the time.”

“It doesn't matter. Tomorrow I go in and edit a story, most of which will be devoted to spurious S&M demonstrations, and I have no idea who killed Kanengiser or why, and now I have a whole new corpse thrown into the works.”

“Aw, sometimes I miss getting down and dirty in Special Reports,” Claire said nostalgically.

Claire had changed the subject slightly. These murders loomed rather larger in my eyes than in hers. Hard to get people like Claire, who'd been to Rwanda, and Mike, who'd been to every major war zone in the last five years, worked up over a couple of dead guys in Manhattan.

“Yeah,” I said. “It must be a drag, interviewing those pesky ambassadors and national leaders all the time.”

“No, really. Special Reports was kind of fun in its way, because we didn't have to take what we did so seriously. We got a lot of laughs out of that sperm-bank story. And when we did the AOA on Satan? A classic.”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “But you got out. It's easy to look back on it and laugh, now that you don't have to do it anymore.”

“You know, a friend of Jess's is looking for a speechwriter. It just occurred to me that—”

“What are you saying?”

“It'd be a great gig, a new city …”

“You think I should change careers? Have you heard something? I'm on my way out, aren't I? If you've heard something, Claire, you have to tell me. Why did—”

“God, Robin. Calm down. You mentioned earlier that you were thinking of changing careers and you were just bitching about how awful Special Reports was. … I remembered Senator Kiedis was looking for a speechwriter. The point is, there
is
life beyond television news, if that's what you're worried about.”

Despite Claire's impassioned insistence that she knew nothing about my fate, I was not reassured. I felt that people were sending me veiled messages to prepare me for the blow, either because they were too polite to give it to me straight, or because they worried about my reaction if the news came at me full force.

“By the way, how was your date with Fennell?” Claire asked.

“Sheer hell. Didn't he tell you?”

“I didn't see him.”

“Wasn't he at the ANN All-Stars brunch this morning?”

“No, he didn't show.”

“Well, I'll tell you. He's a pig, an asshole, a boozer. He fell off the wagon last night. He criticized everything. He forced a kiss on me …”

“God, Robin. Why do you date these guys? There are lots of great guys out there.”

Yeah, and Claire had dated all of them already. Claire was a serial monogamist. I think that's the popular term for someone who dates a lot of guys, but always one at a time. Mind you, she'd been with her current boyfriend, Jess, one of the few freshman Democrats in the House of Representatives, for a record seven months, so despite her checkered romantic record she felt qualified to give me advice.

“Why do you bother with people at ANN? You have to start dating outside the family,” she said.

“When I started in television, Bob McGravy told me that it was going to turn my life upside-down and I'd never have regular hours. If I wanted a social life, he said, I had two choices: date within the company or date the short-order cook who works the night shift at International House of Pancakes. Besides, I did date outside ANN … I dated, and married, Burke Avery.”

“Well, that's still within the news business, just a different network.”

“And I dated this comic, Howard Gollis, and this guy in Seattle …”

“And you dated Eric Slansky, and you dated Reb Ryan …”

“You promised not to mention Reb Ryan. And in my defense, I didn't know about the Haiti incident when I dated him. You know, I'm not the only one overly impressed with Reb's awards and honors,” I said testily. “Bianca dated him, and so did Susan Brave. Who knows who else succumbed to his overblown reputation.”

“Okay, okay. Get a sense of humor,” Claire said.

Claire was straining to be sympathetic. It was hard for her, since everything was coming up roses, more or less, in her life.

“Come on,” Claire said. “Let's go shopping, look at men, and talk about me for a while.”

It was a beautiful day, clear, brisk but not too cold. There were a lot of people out on Avenue A, which is a kind of bohemian-punk-anarchist-criminal main street. St. Mark's Place used to have that honor, but it became a bit too commercial. All manner of humanity drifted past us on the cracked sidewalk, old people, young people, white, hispanic, black, Asian people, people with green hair and pierced eyebrows and lips. Even the street people in mud-colored clothes who sold trinkets and old magazines on the sidewalk seemed benign.

It was good to be out.

“I love New York,” Claire said. “I'm going to miss living here. … You'd be surprised how many people outside New York hear me say that and look at me like I'm crazy.”

“My Aunt Maureen thinks it is the most wicked place on earth.”

“What does she think about this neighborhood?”

“I don't know. I'm avoiding her. But I can imagine what she thinks. She'd look around this neighborhood and see only the disorder and the decay, the squats, the homeless.”

I know how New York looks to people like Aunt Maureen, but I think it's the greatest city in the world. Not the center of the universe, but a microcosm of it. And I love my neighborhood, the mix of people, the guerrilla art and the weird folk art, the way kids string old sneakers up in trees in the spring. I don't know why they do it, and I never saw them doing it, but come spring and the trees are full of old shoes. On Ninth Street, the squatters adorn their buildings with odd but beautiful things, like upside-down mannequin legs painted in bright colors that form a fence around the roof of one building. I even love the vacant lots full of glinting colored glass and rusted automobile carcasses, and the peeling layers of posters on the walls of abandoned buildings, the homeless guys who sleep in Tompkins Square Park during the day because the city closed the park at night after the squatters' riots of 1988. I don't know why I love it all. It just moves me in ways I can't explain, that's all.

“What's this?” Claire asked, stopping to look at a graffitied wall, covered with symbol slang—little minimalist drawings almost impenetrable to grown-ups. This, and clothes with real bullet holes in them (factory-shot and shipped to the stores in this condition) were the two latest trends among our local youth.

“I love this wall,” I said. Every week someone added to the hieroglyphs. I sensed a story was building on the wall and found it very frustrating not to be able to decipher it. I wondered if there was some inner-city Rosetta stone out there that would crack the code. I'd asked a couple of neighborhood kids, who had snickered and told me nothing. It was then I had realized I was part of the “older generation.”

Even though I didn't understand what the wall said, it moved me, maybe because the only symbol I recognized was a heart.

“It's so odd,” Claire said. “And strangely beautiful.” While we were standing at the wall, both charmed and puzzled, the mysterious and insanely handsome man walked by in the opposite direction. It sounds weird, but I felt him before I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I saw him see me looking at him, and I closed my eyes until he passed.

Even that moment of peripheral eye contact gave me a powerful charge, and when he was gone its absence made me feel suddenly exhausted, sleepy. This was ridiculous. Was this the so-called thunderbolt? Or a dangerous attraction?

Claire had been talking to me about the devolution of language, but I stopped hearing her. This guy had an effect on me. When he was around, all I saw was him, and all the noise around me turned to white noise.

“Wow,” said Claire. “Who was that?”

“Huh? Oh. The guy who moved in upstairs.”

“Whoa. You had excellent eye contact. Who is he?” “Wim Young. He's an actor or artist or something like that. That's all I know. I don't know. He keeps to himself. But I keep running into him …”

“Haven't you talked to him?”

“No, I …”

“Honey, what is wrong with him? There's a guy for you.”

“He makes me nervous. … He's … I don't know. I'm not ready for him. He plays the guitar a lot.”

“So what? This could be true love.”

There was a voice in my head that said that as well. But that voice had been famously wrong before and, fortunately, there was another voice too. You know, the voice of reason. Impossible, my brain finally said, when my cognitive cells had regrouped. You can't possibly be in love with a man you don't even know, even if you think you recognize him on some level.

Then I suddenly remembered where I had seen this man before, and that I had seen him many times, in fact. Oh, he looks a little different every time—he's very clever—but I'd know him anywhere. To paraphrase John O'Hara in
Butterfield-8,
I'd know him at the bottom of a coal shaft during a total eclipse. He was the sinuous and smoky Hungarian writer with the beautiful Oxford accent who had locked his dark eyes on me as we chugged out of Budapest on the
Orient Express
to Paris, many moons ago. He was the aqua-eyed rich Swiss-Italian guy backpacking around America in 1986, and the blond Teutonic god with the “Correspondent's Squint” whom I married.

He is the Devil.

I am only half-joking about this.

“A musician, Claire? At my age? Jeez. This isn't true love. This is a Margaret Trudeau Midlife Moment. This is me thinking with my genitalia again.”

“I keep forgetting how elderly you are.”

“Let's be realistic …”

“Bock bock bock bock bock,”
she clucked like a chicken. It was the second “cowardice” reference of the day.

“Give me a break.”

“Listen, I have to go to a matinee of a play this friend of mine is in. Why don't you come?” she said.

“Naw, I'm broke and anyway, I have an errand I want to run, but thanks for asking,” I said.

Until Claire made that remark about how the less I knew the safer I was, I had planned on going home after seeing her. Maybe she didn't mean it the way I took it, which was as a dig about my courage. Maybe I was just being oversensitive. Whatever. It was enough to make me detour to the Hotel Bastable.

At one time, the Hotel Bastable, which was just eight or nine blocks from my place, had been a respectable lodging house catering to young immigrant men. Later it became a haven for poor, struggling artists and writers, like O. Henry, who lived there for a while before his fortunes took a healthy uptick and he was able to move into much finer lodgings at the Hotel Chelsea. Since then, the Bastable had steadily degenerated into one of the worst single room occupancy hotels in the city. Even Charles Bukowski wouldn't stay in this place now, and he's been dead for a couple of years.

The Bastable charged ten dollars and fifty cents a night or two hundred and fifty dollars a month, according to the stained rate card next to the desk in the “lobby.” The smells of urine, disinfectant, and frying meat mingled in the dingy beige foyer where a guest was asleep, akimbo, in a chair. At least, I thought he was asleep. He might have been dead.