The New York Trilogy (27 page)

Shortly after nightfall, he adjusts his tie one last time before the mirror and then leaves the room, going outside, crossing the street, and entering Black’s building. He knows that Black is there, since a small lamp is on in his room, and as he walks up the stairs he tries to imagine the expression that will come over Black’s face when he tells him what he has in mind. He knocks twice on the door, very politely, and then hears Black’s voice from within: The door’s open. Come in.

It is difficult to say exactly what Blue was expecting to find— but in all events, it was not this, not the thing that confronts him the moment he steps into the room. Black is there, sitting on his bed, and he’s wearing the mask again, the same one Blue saw on the man in the post office, and in his right hand he’s holding a gun, a thirty-eight revolver, enough to blow a man apart at such close range, and he’s pointing it directly at Blue. Blue stops in his tracks, says nothing. So much for burying the hatchet, he thinks. So much for turning the tables.

Sit down in the chair, Blue, says Black, gesturing with the gun to the wooden desk chair. Blue has no choice, and so he sits—now facing Black, but too far away to make a lunge at him, too awkwardly positioned to do anything about the gun.

I’ve been waiting for you, says Black. I’m glad you finally made it.

I figured as much, answers Blue.

Are you surprised?

Not really. At least not at you. Myself maybe—but only because I’m so stupid. You see, I came here tonight in friendship.

But of course you did, says Black, in a slightly mocking voice. Of course we’re friends. We’ve been friends from the beginning, haven’t we? The very best of friends.

If this is how you treat your friends, says Blue, then lucky for me I’m not one of your enemies.

Very funny.

That’s right, I’m the original funny man. You can always count on a lot of laughs when I’m around.

And the mask—aren’t you going to ask me about the mask?

I don’t see why. If you want to wear that thing, it’s not my problem.

But you have to look at it, don’t you?

Why ask questions when you already know the answer?

It’s grotesque, isn’t it?

Of course it’s grotesque.

And frightening to look at.

Yes, very frightening.

Good. I like you, Blue. I always knew you were the right one for me. A man after my own heart.

If you stopped waving that gun around, maybe I’d start feeling the same about you.

I’m sorry, I can’t do that. It’s too late now.

Which means?

I don’t need you anymore, Blue.

It might not be so easy to get rid of me, you know. You got me into this, and now you’re stuck with me.

No, Blue, you’re wrong. Everything is over now.

Stop the doubletalk.

It’s finished. The whole thing is played out. There’s nothing more to be done.

Since when?

Since now. Since this moment.

You’re out of your mind.

No, Blue. If anything, I’m in my mind, too much in my mind. It’s used me up, and now there’s nothing left. But you know that, Blue, you know that better than anyone.

So why don’t you just pull the trigger?

When I’m ready, I will.

And then walk out of here leaving my body on the floor? Fat chance.

Oh no, Blue. You don’t understand. It’s going to be the two of us together, just like always.

But you’re forgetting something, aren’t you?

Forgetting what?

You’re supposed to tell me the story. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to end? You tell me the story, and then we say good-bye.

You know it already, Blue. Don’t you understand that? You know the story by heart.

Then why did you bother in the first place?

Don’t ask stupid questions.

And me—what was I there for? Comic relief?

No, Blue, I’ve needed you from the beginning. If it hadn’t been for you, I couldn’t have done it.

Needed me for what?

To remind me of what I was supposed to be doing. Every time I looked up, you were there, watching me, following me, always in sight, boring into me with your eyes. You were the whole world to me, Blue, and I turned you into my death. You’re the one thing that doesn’t change, the one thing that turns everything inside out.

And now there’s nothing left. You’ve written your suicide note, and that’s the end of it.

Exactly.

You’re a fool. You’re a goddamned, miserable fool.

I know that. But no more than anyone else. Are you going to sit there and tell me that you’re smarter than I am? At least I know what I’ve been doing. I’ve had my job to do, and I’ve done it. But you’re nowhere, Blue. You’ve been lost from the first day.

Why don’t you pull the trigger, then, you bastard? says Blue, suddenly standing up and pounding his chest in anger, daring Black to kill him. Why don’t you shoot me now and get it over with?

Blue then takes a step towards Black, and when the bullet doesn’t come, he takes another, and then another, screaming at the masked man to shoot, no longer caring if he lives or dies. A moment later, he’s right up against him. Without hesitating he swats the gun out of Black’s hand, grabs him by the collar, and yanks him to his feet. Black tries to resist, tries to struggle against Blue, but Blue is too strong for him, all crazy with the passion of his anger, as though turned into someone else, and as the first blows begin to land on Black’s face and groin and stomach, the man can do nothing, and not long after that he’s out cold on the floor. But that does not prevent Blue from continuing the assault, battering the unconscious Black with his feet, picking him up and banging his head on the floor, pelting his body with one punch after another. Eventually, when Blue’s fury begins to abate and he sees what he has done, he cannot say for certain whether Black is alive or dead. He removes the mask from Black’s face and puts his ear against his mouth, listening for the sound of Black’s breath. There seems to be something, but he can’t tell if it’s coming from Black or himself. If he’s alive now, Blue thinks, it won’t be for long. And if he’s dead, then so be it.

Blue stands up, his suit all in tatters, and begins collecting the pages of Black’s manuscript from the desk. This takes several minutes. When he has all of them, he turns off the lamp in the corner and leaves the room, not even bothering to give Black a last look.

It’s past midnight when Blue gets back to his room across the street. He puts the manuscript down on the table, goes into the bathroom, and washes the blood off his hands. Then he changes his clothes, pours himself a glass of scotch, and sits down at the table with Black’s book. Time is short. They’ll be coming before he knows it, and then there will be hell to pay. Still, he does not let this interfere with the business at hand.

He reads the story right through, every word of it from beginning to end. By the time he finishes, dawn has come, and the room has begun to brighten. He hears a bird sing, he hears footsteps going down the street, he hears a car driving across the Brooklyn Bridge. Black was right, he says to himself. I knew it all by heart.

But the story is not yet over. There is still the final moment, and that will not come until Blue leaves the room. Such is the way of the world: not one moment more, not one moment less. When Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door, that will be the end of it.

Where he goes after that is not important. For we must remember that all this took place more than thirty years ago, back in the days of our earliest childhood. Anything is possible, therefore. I myself prefer to think that he went far away, boarding a train that morning and going out West to start a new life. It is even possible that America was not the end of it. In my secret dreams, I like to think of Blue booking passage on some ship and sailing to China. Let it be China, then, and we’ll leave it at that. For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door. And from this moment on, we know nothing.

(1983)

It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am. We met before we could talk, babies crawling through the grass in diapers, and by the time we were seven we had pricked our fingers with pins and made ourselves blood brothers for life. Whenever I think of my childhood now, I see Fanshawe. He was the one who was with me, the one who shared my thoughts, the one I saw whenever I looked up from myself.

But that was a long time ago. We grew up, went off to different places, drifted apart. None of that is very strange, I think. Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

Seven years ago this November, I received a letter from a woman named Sophie Fanshawe. “You don’t know me,” the letter began, “and I apologize for writing to you like this out of the blue. But things have happened, and under the circumstances I don’t have much choice.” It turned out that she was Fanshawe’s wife. She knew that I had grown up with her husband, and she also knew that I lived in New York, since she had read many of the articles I had published in magazines.

The explanation came in the second paragraph, very bluntly, without any preamble. Fanshawe had disappeared, she wrote, and it was more than six months since she had last seen him. Not a word in all that time, not the slightest clue as to where he might be. The police had found no trace of him, and the private detective she hired to look for him had come up empty-handed. Nothing was sure, but the facts seemed to speak for themselves: Fanshawe was probably dead; it was pointless to think he would be coming back. In the light of all this, there was something important she needed to discuss with me, and she wondered if I would agree to see her.

This letter caused a series of little shocks in me. There was too much information to absorb all at once; too many forces were pulling me in different directions. Out of nowhere, Fanshawe had suddenly reappeared in my life. But no sooner was his name mentioned than he had vanished again. He was married, he had been living in New York—and I knew nothing about him anymore. Selfishly, I felt hurt that he had not bothered to get in touch with me. A phone call, a postcard, a drink to catch up on old times—it would not have been difficult to arrange. But the fault was equally my own. I knew where Fanshawe’s mother lived, and if I had wanted to find him, I could easily have asked her. The fact was that I had let go of Fanshawe. His life had stopped the moment we went our separate ways, and he belonged to the past for me now, not to the present. He was a ghost I carried around inside me, a prehistoric figment, a thing that was no longer real. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him, but nothing was clear. My mind wandered for several minutes and then stopped short, fixing on the day his father died. We were in high school then and could not have been more than seventeen years old.

I called Sophie Fanshawe and told her I would be glad to see her whenever it was convenient. We decided on the following day, and she sounded grateful, even though I explained to her that I had not heard from Fanshawe and had no idea where he was.

She lived in a red-brick tenement in Chelsea, an old walk-up building with gloomy stairwells and peeling paint on the walls. I climbed the five flights to her floor, accompanied by the sounds of radios and squabbles and flushing toilets that came from the apartments on the way up, paused to catch my breath, and then knocked. An eye looked through the peephole in the door, there was a clatter of bolts being turned, and then Sophie Fanshawe was standing before me, holding a small baby in her left arm. As she smiled at me and invited me in, the baby tugged at her long brown hair. She ducked away gently from the attack, took hold of the child with her two hands, and turned him face front towards me. This was Ben, she said, Fanshawe’s son, and he had been born just three-and-a-half months ago. I pretended to admire the baby, who was waving his arms and drooling whitish spittle down his chin, but I was more interested in his mother. Fanshawe had been lucky. The woman was beautiful, with dark, intelligent eyes, almost fierce in their steadiness. Thin, not more than average height, and with something slow in her manner, a thing that made her both sensual and watchful, as though she looked out on the world from the heart of a deep inner vigilance. No man would have left this woman of his own free will—especially not when she was about to have his child. That much was certain to me. Even before I stepped into the apartment, I knew that Fanshawe had to be dead.

It was a small railroad flat with four rooms, sparsely furnished, with one room set aside for books and a work table, another that served as the living room, and the last two for sleeping. The place was well-ordered, shabby in its details, but on the whole not uncomfortable. If nothing else, it proved that Fanshawe had not spent his time making money. But I was not one to look down my nose at shabbiness. My own apartment was even more cramped and dark than this one, and I knew what it was to struggle each month to come up with the rent.