The 25th Hour (5 page)

Jakob, wondering why he did not leave while the leaving was good, realizes that all the middle-aged men in the room are watching this performance without expression, as if they have seen the act before, and better done.

LoBianco tries to sit but misjudges the stool’s location; his knees buckle and he begins to fall. Jakob lunges for the older man, manages to catch him under the arms, and holds him upright. His hands around LoBianco’s rib cage, Jakob notes how frail his old teacher has become, a tweed jacket and bones. LoBianco lives alone in his Park Slope apartment and never learned to cook. Who feeds him? wonders Jakob. He must live on takeout and free school lunches.

Shaking off Jakob’s assistance, LoBianco sits heavily, facing away from the bar, and leans backward until the brass railing supports his weight. He pretends to disregard the near fall, but Jakob sees the color in his face and knows the man is embarrassed. Still, LoBianco carries on, adding volume to disguise his humiliation. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living, blah blah blah. True enough. But neither is the examined life; he never mentioned that.’

Jakob nods, wondering if he’ll be able to carry his friend to a taxi. And if a taxi driver will be willing to haul a drunkard to Brooklyn. The bartender stands at the far end of the counter, dishrag in hand, watching LoBianco with bored irritation.

‘Oh, Mr Deering. When the plane goes down, Mr Deering, when the babies are bawling, when the stewardesses are buckled into their seats, eyes closed and saying their prayers, when the pilot radios in his love for his wife, when the old men piss their pants and the baggage racks burst open and the suitcases tumble out and the plane is falling and the ground is rising – will your philosophy comfort you then, Mr Deering, or will you scream with the rest of us?’

His tirade complete, LoBianco swivels about on his stool, swallows the last of his vodka, orders another. The room is silent save for the bartender pouring the drink.

‘So why did he want to meet with you?’ Jakob finally asks.

LoBianco watches the bartender hawkishly, suspicious that the man might pour him a short one. ‘Hmm? Ah, well, he’s letting me go, Jakob.’

‘He’s
what
?’

LoBianco looks up, brow wrinkled. ‘You can’t be surprised. I’ve been telling you for weeks the end is near.’

‘But that’s – how can he fire you? You’re the best teacher in the department. Nobody else—;’

‘He’s not actually firing me. He just won’t renew my contract at the end of the year. I’m expensive, Jakob. They can hire one of you young pups for half the money they give me.’

‘That’s not right, Anthony! We can’t let that happen. If we get all the teachers together, we’ll get everybody to sign a petition. All the students! We’ll get the students, we’ll get the alumni! He can’t do this. No, there is no way.’

‘Why not? It’s a private school, they can do whatever they want. Listen, it’s all for the best. What should I do, teach Harper Lee until the day I die? I think not. I’ll finish this year and that will be the end of it. No more blue-book essays to grade. No more vocabulary quizzes. No more red ink on my dress shirts. The schoolteacher’s stigmata. Enough of that.’

‘But—;’

‘Enough, Jakob.’ LoBianco rises unsteadily to his feet. ‘Gentlemen,’ he calls out loudly, ‘raise your glasses. We have a newcomer with us today, a young man who stepped forth from the darkness into the light only minutes ago, for the first time free to indulge his true passions.’

‘Send him back to the darkness,’ comes a cry from the far corner.

‘Quiet, sir. What he lacks in physical gifts he more than compensates for with . . . well, with other gifts. He’s a little nervous, a bit of a virgin really, but I think you’ll find him highly charming once he gets past his initial jitters.’

‘Why don’t you shut your trap, LoBianco,’ yells another man. ‘You’re not funny anymore.’

This news strikes LoBianco hard, but he glares around the bar-room defiantly, then snarls, ‘This is where faggots come to die!’ He rears back as if to hurl his glass, thinks better of it, drinks deeply.

‘Then die, LoBianco,’ says the voice from the corner, ‘and get it over with.’

That’s one way out, thinks Jakob. And the door is another.

Four

Naturelle is waiting for Monty when he gets home, her black hair tied back in a simple braid. She sits on the stoop stairs, a closed book on her lap. When he comes closer she stands on the second step so they are eye to eye when he reaches her. They kiss, but he does not open his lips. His mouth is too dry. Doyle ferociously wags the stump of his tail and sets his front paws on the first step. Naturelle crouches down and scratches the dog behind his mangled ear and Doyle closes his eyes, licking her wrist with his rough tongue. The sun has gone down and the air’s getting colder.

‘You been waiting for a while?’ asks Monty, drawing his keys from his pocket and mounting the steps.

‘How long have you guys been walking? I woke up at seven and you were already gone.’

‘I didn’t wear my watch.’ He holds the front door open for her and she passes through, Doyle bounding in behind her. ‘Why were you sitting down here?’

‘I had my book,’ she says, waiting in the vestibule for Monty to open the second door. ‘It was a beautiful day.’

Monty laughs. ‘Of course it was a beautiful day.’

He checks the mailbox, drops a take-out menu on the tiled floor, follows his girlfriend and his dog up the dark, narrow flight of stairs. He catches hold of her hand as she reaches the landing and inspects the cover of the book she’s holding. ‘
A Style of Her Own: The Life of Coco Chanel
. Who’s she, the one with the perfume?’

‘She was the Queen of Fashion. All the white ladies used to want to be white, white, white. But Coco Chanel went down to the Riviera one summer, and when she got back to Paris she had a really dark tan, and all of a sudden everybody wanted a tan.’

Monty nods, half smiling, as he unlocks the four locks of his steel-plated apartment door, each turned with a separate key. The best lockpick in the five boroughs would need nearly an hour to break in; Monty knows that for a fact. They enter the apartment and Monty switches on the lights.

In contrast to the ominous staircase, the apartment is very handsome, a large one-bedroom with hardwood floors, tall windows facing the brownstones across the street, black-and-white framed photographs on the walls. Monty snapped the shots himself, mostly views of the city, with an old camera that had belonged to his father. Monty is a decent amateur, good enough that a roll of film generally produces one worthy picture. Above the sofa is a poster-size portrait of Naturelle, snarling for the camera and wielding a butcher knife. The night of that photograph she became furious because Monty continually neglected to leave messages when her mother called; she threatened to cut his heart out. She actually said, ‘I’ll cut your heart out,’ yelling at him with her tiny fists clenched at her side, and he began to laugh hysterically, rolling on the floor as Doyle barked, and she started kicking him in the side, and she’s small but her legs are very strong, and he would grunt and roll away from her and continue to laugh, and Doyle barked madly, confused, and finally Naturelle started to laugh too but kept kicking him in the side anyway, because he deserved it and because she didn’t want him to think he was so easily forgiven, and then she ran into the kitchen and came out with the kitchen knife and yelled, ‘I’ll cut your heart out!’ while both of them laughed. ‘I’ll do it! I’ll cut your heart out and feed it to Doyle!’

Monty developed the picture himself, in a walk-in closet that his father had converted into a darkroom in his apartment in Bensonhurst. His father helped him make the frame, out of rusted metal salvaged from a junkyard. The walls of the Bensonhurst apartment are crowded with black-and-whites in rusted frames. Monty’s father is a much better photographer, gifted with a discerning eye. There is a subtlety to his compositions that Monty recognizes but cannot reproduce, an ability to make the ordinary look strange. The frames are always rusted, giving the pictures the aura of relics retrieved from a sunken ship.

Monty’s father had done most of the work that afternoon, sawing the metal into the necessary lengths and filing the edges smooth, while Monty drank beer and watched the football game. When the photograph was dry, and before they went out to buy the glass, Monty penciled an inscription on the back:
For Naturelle Rosario. The Day She Stole My Heart (and Fed It to My Dog)
. Later, after he had given it to her for Valentine’s Day, he decided the inscription was a little goofy, even embarrassing, but Naturelle had already read it and laughed and kissed him, so it was too late for the eraser.

Today Monty does not notice the picture; it has become part of the apartment’s furnishings. He unhooks Doyle’s leash, and the dog trots across the room and curls up in his usual spot by the radiator. Monty turns on the television and watches the weatherman’s face materialize on the screen, speaking of the coming storm. He turns off the television, looks around. Naturelle still stands by the door.

‘What?’ he asks.

She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. What do you want?’

He sits down on the sofa, arms spread wide and resting on the back cushions. His feet hurt. He can feel the blisters forming on his soles, the skin raw and abraded after ten hours of walking through the city. ‘What do I want.’ He stares at Doyle for a moment. ‘I want to be that girl from the X-Men, the one who can walk through walls.’

Naturelle walks over to the sofa and sits down next to him, her hands clasped between her legs.

‘And if I can’t do that,’ he continues, ‘if I can’t figure out how to walk through walls, I’m thinking one shot through the roof of the mouth,
boom
, problem solved.’

She hits him on the shoulder. ‘Quit joking about that.’

‘You think I’m joking?’

Naturelle stands and walks into the kitchen, pulls a jar of raw honey from the refrigerator, a teaspoon from the drying rack. She returns to the living room and sits beside Monty again, handing him the jar. ‘So what are we doing tonight? Before you shoot yourself.’

‘Uncle Blue’s throwing me a party at VelVet. We ought to go.’ He twists off the top and gives the jar back to her. ‘You don’t think I can do it, do you?’

‘No,’ she says, dipping her spoon into the honey. ‘I know you can’t. Did you meet with your probation officer today?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said, “Report on time tomorrow.”’ He watches her lick the teaspoon clean. ‘That’s a nasty habit you have.’

She leans over and kisses him on the lips. ‘Let’s go into the bedroom,’ she says.

This is where they got him, right here, this sofa, this is where they ruined him: last June, early in the morning, awakened from a deep sleep by violent pounding on the front door and Doyle’s furious barking. Naturelle, the lighter sleeper, had slipped out of bed and into a long T-shirt while the pounding continued. She left the bedroom and hushed the dog. Monty listened as she spoke to whomever was outside the door. He heard her unlock the door and open it. When she returned to the bedroom he saw her face and he thought about running, about opening the window and launching himself onto the linden tree outside, catching a branch and swinging down to the street, running as fast as he could for as long as he could. Instead he stood, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and walked shirtless into the living room.

There were four men, all white, none much older than Monty. They wore suits with the jackets unbuttoned, shoulder holsters snug beneath each man’s left armpit. They showed Monty their badges, DEA, and handed him the search papers, authorized by a federal court. All of them were smiling, so Monty smiled too, offered them coffee. They thanked him but declined.

‘We’re going to take a look around,’ Agent Brzowski told Monty, seating himself on the sofa. The other three agents strolled around the apartment. One of them crouched down by Doyle’s spot next to the radiator and stroked the dog’s fur. One looked out the window to the street below. The third inspected the photograph of the RCA Victor building, his hands behind his back.

‘You take this picture?’ he asked. When Monty said yes the agent whistled. ‘Nice picture. What kind of camera you got?’

Brzowski leaned back in the sofa, hands behind his head, still smiling. He listened to the conversation with interest. Naturelle headed for the bedroom but Brzowski called out to her. ‘Ma’am? It’s Miss Rosario, right? I’m going to have to ask you to stay with us for a few minutes, okay? Can’t have you wandering around out of sight.’

Monty leaned against the kitchen’s doorframe, willing his face to appear relaxed, free of worry. He knew how federal sentencing compared to state; state attorneys often threatened federal prosecution the way mothers scare children with stories of bogeymen. He knew it didn’t matter to a federal court whether there had been prior convictions. Even with his clean record, if he got bit he was going to stay bit. But the agents weren’t searching the apartment; they were looking it over as if they were appraisers from a real estate office.

‘Hmm,’ said Brzowski, sitting up straighter. ‘This sofa is not very comfortable.’

Monty stared at the agent and then exhaled. They were fucking with him. He was fucked.

‘Maybe it’s your posture,’ said the agent petting Doyle. ‘Posture’s very important. You’ll wind up with a bad back.’

‘No,’ said Brzowski. ‘It’s this sofa. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s lumpy.’

The other agents laughed and Naturelle looked at Monty. He shook his head at her and rapped the kitchen door with his knuckles. ‘Get it over with,’ he said to Brzowski.

The agent still acted bemused. ‘I just don’t get it. It
looks
like such a nice sofa. How much did you pay for this sofa, Miss Rosario?’ He stood and peered down at the cushion, stroking his chin, miming confusion. ‘Maybe it’s the padding?’

‘Could be the padding,’ said another agent.

Brzowski reached down and picked up the center cushion, turned it over in his hands, found the zipper. ‘Probably the padding.’ He unzipped the cushion and reached inside, pulled out handfuls of white fiber filling and let them fall to the floor like blown cotton. ‘Yeah, there’s something
lumpy
in here, Mr Brogan. It’s a good thing I found this, you know. It’ll make your sofa a whole lot more comfortable to sit on.’