The 25th Hour (7 page)

‘I warned you,’ mutters Charlotte.

At last the car arrives and Jakob enters. He is facing Charlotte now; he can’t avoid seeing her head bowed down to her chest, her entire shrunken body convulsed with shudders. ‘Evie!’ she cries out. ‘Evie!’

‘Hush, girl, I’m right here. Come on, give me your hand.’

Jakob passes his fingers over the electric eye and the closing doors jerk open. ‘Hi, sorry, are you sure you’re okay there?’

Evie looks at him over her shoulder. ‘Sure we’re sure. We do this every night.’

‘Louis?’

For a second Jakob wishes he
were
Louis, wishes he could say
I’m here, Mom
, then cross the lobby and lift the old woman to her feet. That would be heroic. The elevator doors slide shut and Jakob closes his eyes. Between the walls of the building he rises. He imagines himself a bucket of water being cranked to the top of the well. It hits him now how tired he is; he has not slept soundly in weeks. And Monty? Can Monty sleep at all?

Slattery’s trophy apartment, a sprawl of largely empty rooms, strikes Jakob as the perfect example of a type: the Young Man with Money without Woman apartment. The television set in the living room is so gigantic that the weatherman frightens Jakob. Slattery mistakes his friend’s disturbed look. ‘Big, huh?’

‘Yes, it’s very big. When did you get it?’

‘Couple of weeks ago. Gave myself a little gift. I mean, I’ve got to start spending the money sometime.’

What a vulgar expression, thinks Jakob.
The money
. Vulgar in large part, Jakob would admit, because his friend’s annual earnings are approximately twenty-three point seven times greater than his own, an approximation Jakob figured on his calculator one afternoon when he was supposed to be calculating grade point averages for his freshmen.

They sit on a yellow sofa that Slattery slept on for two years as a child, before the family moved to a bigger place in Bay Ridge. Jakob wonders why Slattery doesn’t spend a little more of
the money
on new furniture. The living room, larger than Jakob’s entire apartment, is empty save for the old sofa, the mammoth television, and a stack of artificial logs by the fireplace. Slattery’s bottle of beer rests on the hardwood floor between his feet. A large rug, rolled and corded, lies under the windows. Propped up in the corner is a glossy red electric guitar, another of Slattery’s gifts to himself.

The back of the sofa bears twin dark smudges from thousands of hours supporting dirty heads; Jakob’s side sags because of a spring that snapped when the teenage Slattery held his younger brother face-down on the cushions and then jumped on his back, sending the boy to the hospital with a chipped vertebra. Jakob pities Eoin – the kid still seems shell-shocked, as if his childhood were a war he barely survived.

The television is flanked by twin speaker towers. Smaller speakers hang from the ceiling, providing surround sound, which Jakob imagines is wonderful for movies. For the weatherman, though, it’s agitating: the professionally cheerful voice comes at Jakob from every possible angle. ‘We might be looking at our first major winter storm for the New York metropolitan area, and I’ll tell you what, Carol, it could be a doozy. Expect anywhere from four to ten inches of snow—;’

‘Ten inches of snow!’ shouts Slattery. ‘We ought to drive upstate day after tomorrow, do some skiing. I just bought some Völkls – racing skis.’

‘I don’t know how to ski,’ says Jakob.

‘So what, neither do I. But ten inches of snow . . . Maybe not this weekend.’

The weatherman’s voice echoes in the underfurnished room.

Jakob shudders. ‘Do you think real human beings use the word
doozy
?’

‘What?’

‘Have you taken any lessons yet?’ asks Jakob, pointing at the red guitar.

Slattery shakes his head. ‘You think I have time for guitar lessons? It’s pretty nice, though, isn’t it?’

‘It’s really nice,’ says Jakob.

‘Yeah. That’s a nice color red.’

‘Do you want another beer?’ asks Jakob, anxious to get away from the giant newscasters.

‘Yeah, thanks.’

The kitchen is suspiciously clean. Jakob examines the shimmering stainless steel sink, runs his finger along the countertop, finds no sticky spots, no crumbs. The enormous black stove, complete with six burners and an integrated griddle free of splatters and fingerprints, has apparently never been sullied by the tawdry chore of cooking. Bastard has a maid coming in, Jakob decides. The Sub-Zero refrigerator is well stocked, crammed with bottled olives, horseradish mustard, a round of smoked mozzarella wrapped in plastic, a roasted turkey drumstick in aluminum foil. This looks like my parents’ refrigerator, thinks Jakob, sadly.

‘There’s no beer in here!’ yells Jakob, louder than he meant. The echo of his own voice in the kitchen sounds bitter.

‘Hold on a second.’

Jakob returns to the living room, watches Slattery watching the national news. ‘There’s no beer in the refrigerator.’

‘Did you really look?’

‘No, I didn’t
really
look. Was I supposed to
really
look?’

‘Have you seen this?’ asks Slattery. ‘Here, sit down, watch this.’

Jakob sits reluctantly, trying not to stare directly at the screen.

‘This elephant in Bangkok got loose in the streets, last night or something. Look at this.’

Someone with a handheld video camera recorded the scene, a gray elephant stomping down the middle of a broad thoroughfare, followed by a cheering crowd of men, women, and children. Police officers try to hold the people back, setting up orange sawhorses and waving their billy clubs, but everyone ignores the officers in the happy pandemonium. Soldiers in military fatigues track the elephant through the scopes of their high-powered rifles.

‘I was watching this on CNN an hour ago,’ says Slattery. ‘They said old elephants lose their minds sometimes, just snap. Watch this.’

Black quills appear on the elephant’s weathered hide and Jakob listens to the reporter describing the tranquilizer darts, six in all, each loaded with enough sedative to knock out any reasonable elephant. The beast shudders for a moment, shaking its massive head, the great ears flopping back and forth. Then it turns in its tracks and charges toward the sidewalk. The crowd gathered there disperses in all directions, like billiard balls after a good break. The elephant lowers its head and smashes through the glass storefront of what appears to be an electronics shop.

‘Goddamn,’ says Slattery, rocking back and forth on the sofa. ‘Look at that mother go!’

The soldiers begin firing their rifles – loud, echoing retorts – and the video image shakes before being replaced on screen by a Thai military spokesman standing behind a lectern, explaining the day’s events.

‘They killed it?’ asks Jakob.

‘Oh, yes,’ says Slattery, ‘they did indeed. Poor fuck went for a walk in the wrong part of town.’

Jakob wonders what caused the animal to snap: old age, faulty synapses in the brain, the long-resisted urge to take an afternoon stroll down the avenue? He tugs the bill of his Yankees cap lower on his forehead.

‘What time is Monty coming over?’

‘He’s not. He’s eating with his dad. We’re going to meet him later on.’

How can Monty eat? Jakob wonders. How can he swallow his food?

The television screen goes black for a moment between commercials, and Jakob sees his face reflected in the glass. ‘Do you think I look like a ferret?’

‘A ferret?’ Slattery laughs. ‘That’s good, I hadn’t thought of that before.’

‘So do I?’

‘One of the kids in your class told you that?’

Jakob frowns. ‘Nobody told me. I was just wondering.’

‘Somebody must have said something. You wouldn’t just think, all of a sudden, Hey, I look like a ferret. You’ve been looking at your face for twenty-six years.’

‘Actually,’ says Jakob, ‘let’s drop it.’

‘I don’t even know what a ferret looks like. But yeah, you might resemble one.’

‘Fine, thanks. You’re a wonderful human being.’

Slattery pats Jakob on the head. ‘And you’re not bad for a ferret. I’m going to take a crap and then we can go eat.’ He lifts himself from the sofa with a groan. He squats low to the ground for a moment and then straightens up, left knee creaking loudly. ‘Christ,’ he says, limping to the bathroom.

Jakob sits alone with the television, staring sullenly at the square-jawed anchorman, angry without knowing the exact cause of his anger. Sometimes he is fairly sure that he doesn’t like Slattery, that he never liked him, even if Slattery is his best friend. Jakob remembers the first day of ninth grade, walking through the school gates, uneager to spend another year with the tanned boys who milled in the courtyard wearing loosely knotted ties and boat shoes. When he met Frank and Monty he thrilled at their Brooklyn accents, their carefully combed hair the opposite of traditional prep school dishevelment. Both of them had been in scores of fistfights, which mesmerized Jakob, who had been in exactly zero. But they were out of their element here, nervous around the diffident poise of the oldtimers, intimidated by the casual displays of wealth. They immediately fastened upon Jakob as a sympathetic figure who knew his way around. During the convocation that opened the school year, Monty nudged Jakob with his elbow and motioned to an older boy sitting several pews in front of them. ‘That’s a Ralph Lauren jacket the guy’s wearing. Thing costs four hundred bucks.’ Jakob was delighted by the immediate intimacy, by the presumption that they came from similar backgrounds and that both of them would be shocked by a high school junior wearing a four-hundred-dollar jacket. Three months went by before Jakob had his two new friends over to his apartment. He feared they would lump him with the rest of the soft aristocrats in their grade. But by the time Monty and Frank showed up at the Elinsky household, they had already been to parties at triplexes on Fifth Avenue, townhouses on Park, a spectacular beach cottage in the Hamptons – and Jakob’s place, though perfectly nice, was far from intimidating.

The other old-timers in the class at first affected disdain for the newcomers, the ‘F.A.s,’ students receiving Financial Assistance, two Irish, two Puerto Rican, and four black, shipped in from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Lords of the Outer Boroughs was the initial review, a moniker that Monty seized for his own and ran through his hip-hop spell checker; the Outta Buro Lordz soon became the most admired clique in the school. Jakob reveled in his status as an honorary member, if always conscious that he lived, after all, on Central Park West, that his father was a tax attorney, that his knowledge of the outer boroughs consisted of Yankee Stadium to the north and Kennedy, LaGuardia, and his cousins in Forest Hills to the east.

Now it is Slattery and his associates who dine at expensive restaurants, while Jakob grades grammar quizzes in his eleven-foot-square apartment, boiling water for another meal of spaghetti and tomato paste. Jakob generally enjoys playing this game, the How Pathetic Is Your Life? game, but not now, not tonight, not when his friend is headed for federal prison in the morning.

Slattery finally emerges from the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. ‘You ready? I’m starving.’

Jakob turns off the television with the remote control and stands. ‘What’s he going to do with Doyle?’

‘Huh?’

‘Where’s Doyle going to end up?’

‘Oh. I don’t know.’ Slattery throws the towel onto the coffee table, opens a closet, and pulls a black cashmere overcoat off a wooden hanger. ‘With Nat?’

Jakob shakes his head. ‘I doubt it.’

‘With his dad? I really don’t know. You like this coat? A friend of mine brought it back from London.’

‘Frank,’ says Jakob, picking at his fingernails, ‘are you ready for this?’

‘Ready for what?’

‘For tonight?’

‘I got to tell you,’ says Slattery, buttoning the coat, ‘it was such a crazy day at work, I haven’t even thought about it much.’

‘You haven’t?’ asks Jakob, startled. ‘He’s your best friend.’

‘You don’t have to explain it to me, I understand that. What do you want me to do? We’re going out with him, we’ll have a few drinks, what am I going to do? Come on, let’s move. Tie your shoes.’

Jakob gets down on one knee and begins lacing his rubber-soled hiking boots. ‘I’m nervous about seeing him. I really am; I’m scared. It’s like visiting a friend who’s in the hospital with cancer. What do you say? He’s going to be living in a cell for seven years. What do you say to him?’

Slattery shrugs. ‘You know what? I don’t think you say anything. I think we go out with him tonight, and we try to have a good time, and if he wants to talk about it, we talk about it. He’s going to hell for seven years – what am I going to do, wish him luck? We get him drunk and try to give him one more good night.’

Jakob ties a double knot and stands. ‘You make it sound like you’ve done this before.’

‘I have. My cousin got sent up for three years. Ready?’ Slattery opens the front door and waits for Jakob, one hand on the light switch.

‘He did? You never told me that. What for?’

‘He’s a fucking thief, that’s what for.’

The biggest scandal in Jakob’s family was a bulimic cousin. He wonders what other secrets Slattery has been keeping. ‘So he got through it okay? In prison and all?’

‘No. Not even close to okay. Come on, come on, let’s go.’

‘Wait a second,’ says Jakob, patting his hip pockets. ‘Where’s my wallet?’

‘Oh, Jesus.’

‘I had it when I came in here. I know I had it.’

‘It’s sitting on the sofa, schmuck.’

Jakob retrieves the wallet and pockets it. ‘It’s weird, though, I think, just knowing Monty, I think he’ll be okay.’ He sees the expression on Slattery’s face and continues, hurriedly, ‘No, no, I’m not saying it will be easy. If it was me, I’d never make it a day, I know that. But it’s Monty. He’s tough. He’s always been tough.’

‘No, he hasn’t,’ says Slattery, flicking off the lights, ‘and he won’t be okay. I don’t know what you’re thinking, Jake. There’s not going to be a happy ending.’

Jakob exits the apartment and waits while Slattery locks the door. ‘I’m not saying
happy
. I’m just saying—;’