Three-Martini Lunch (42 page)

A
n unexpected event occurred around that time. I was tip-toeing around the apartment one morning, getting dressed and making breakfast as quietly as I could so as to not wake Wendell, when the telephone's shrill ring nearly caused me to drop the glass into which I was pouring orange juice. I hurried to pick it up before it could ring a second time.

“Mr. Tillman?” came a man's unfamiliar voice over the line. His words were articulated with that type of stiff jaw particular to businessmen and lawyers, and I couldn't imagine why someone like that would be calling. I wondered if by
Mr. Tillman
the stranger on the line meant my father.

“Mr. Miles Tillman?” he clarified, as though reading my mind.

“Yes?”

“I presume you're acquainted with a gentleman named Augustus Minton?”

My mind swirled.
Mister Gus.
The voice on the phone meant Mister Gus, I realized as my brain dredged up Mister Gus's full name from some
forgotten place. But why was someone calling about Mister Gus? My armpits were suddenly cold with sweat.

“I'm sorry to be the one to inform you that Mr. Minton passed away today,” the man continued.

“Oh,” I said. I paused, trying to find the right words, ashamed at my relief. “Oh,” I said stupidly again.

“Yes,” the man said. “My name is Jim Arkle, and I'm Mr. Minton's attorney.”

“All right,” I said, not certain what to make of this information.

“I see Mr. Minton has your name written down here.”

My heart pounded. My mother came into the kitchen, frowning, and looked at me askance.

“The notation he's made here indicates he'd like you to have a hand in facilitating his arrangements. It says you were once his assistant and that you will know how he'd like things done.”

I was silent, hesitating.

“There's also an envelope of cash with your name on it,” the lawyer added, as though he sensed I needed persuasion.

“No, it's not that,” I said.

“Beg pardon?”

“I just . . . This is a surprise. I'll need to call my current job and notify them of my absence today, but I'll be there as soon as I can.”

“Good,” the lawyer said in a tone that insinuated he firmly believed his mention of the envelope of cash had convinced me. “See you soon.”

I hung up.

“Miles?” my mother prodded.

“Remember the old man who paid me to run errands?”

She
tsked
and shook her head. “That him, demanding you do somethin' for him?” My mother, with that sixth sense of hers, had always been leery of Mister Gus, an older white man who—
she
felt—was unnaturally
interested in me. “You tell him: You got enough to do without him callin' you at all hours in the morning, expecting you to drop everything and come over.”

She paused, and her frown deepened.

“Why you look like that?”

“He died today,” I said.

Her mouth opened, then closed again.

•   •   •

I
called in sick to my messenger job. When I got to the townhouse, I walked so as to go around to the side and use the servants' entrance, as was my habit, but I realized I no longer had the key, so I went to the front door and rang the bell, a small copper button inside a lion's mouth. The door sprang open to reveal a short bearded-and-bespectacled man within.

“Yes?”

“Are you Mr. Arkle, the lawyer I spoke to on the phone?”

“Spoke to on the phone . . . ?” he echoed.

“I'm Miles Tillman.”

“Oh—oh yes! Pardon my surprise. But of course you're a Negro! I don't know why I hadn't thought of that.”

“Why would you?” I blurted, puzzled.

“Exactly, my son, why would I,
exactly
. Well, come on in! There's so much to do,” he said, gesturing. I followed. “I was going to get this unpleasant business under way—you know, call the coroner and such, but Ada, the cook who was hired recently—have you met? She's the one who found him—stopped me and directed my attention to these papers and told me I ought to read them first.” We had made our way into the kitchen and he scooped up a series of what appeared to be folded letters.

“Here you are,” he said, handing one folded sheaf of paper to me. I opened it and read it. In Mister Gus's tight, stingy handwriting was an
enumerated list. At the top was written
MR. MILES TILLMAN TO ADMINISTER THIS LIST
. “So that's you, hey?” The lawyer pointed.

“Yes.”

“Shall we start with the telephone calls?”

We worked our way down the list Mister Gus had written, telephoning one person at a time. We called Mister Gus's personal physician first, and he came over about an hour later to check the body and write up a certificate of death. The notary, a scarecrow-like fussy man with glasses, was second. He seemed irritated by our request to notarize the certificate, and barely looked it over before putting his seal on it and leaving. A mortician and a funeral home were called, as well as a church Mister Gus had long ago stopped attending—or so we deduced, for the name of the minister he had written down corresponded to a man the church said had made his eternal migration from the pulpit to the churchyard several years prior.

Once we had telephoned everyone, we were left to wait, and I moved to the items lower down the list. These were more like the chores I had performed in service of Mister Gus while he was alive, but with an obvious difference. For instance, Mister Gus wanted a particular suit to be laundered and pressed for his burial, and a specific pair of dress shoes polished. There were also the contents of a safe to be emptied; Mr. Arkle stood over my shoulder and watched me open it. Once he saw it contained nothing but letters and photographs, he lost interest and left me to my own devices. According to Mister Gus's instructions, I was to burn these things in the downstairs fireplace, watching over them until I was certain all had been reduced to ash. I built a fire, lit the kindling, and stoked it. I put the letters in gently and watched them curl. I didn't open or read them first. I thought perhaps Mister Gus would not have wanted anyone to read them, and that was why I had been selected for this particular task. At one point, one of the photographs slipped out of its sleeve and landed on the hearth. It was an aged, sepia-tone portrait depicting a
young man with his hair parted neatly down the center and a smile turning the corners of his mouth. The words
Charlie, April 3, 1902
were scrawled in ink on the bottom right-hand corner. I had the strange feeling of being watched as I moved to lift the photograph and ease Charlie back into the flames, and for a brief moment I thought I understood exactly who Charlie was and my heart filled with a profound regret.

Eventually a newspaperman turned up, and I was even more certain as to why I, of all people, had been named by Mister Gus to assist in sorting his final affairs. As the reporter probed my recollections of Mister Gus's private life, I treated each gossipy question with the practiced evasion it deserved. When the reporter thanked me (with ironic intonation) and departed, the blackened photograph flashed again in my mind.

Towards the dinner hour the hearse from the funeral home finally pulled up to the townhouse. “Well,” Mr. Arkle said, sighing with exhaustion, “I think we're mostly done here. If you have any last respects to pay, son, now's the time to pay 'em.” Seeing Mister Gus in the flesh had never occurred to me, and I looked now at the lawyer in surprise. I'd spent the whole day in the house but hadn't gone upstairs, much less into the bedroom. In this manner, Mister Gus's body had been a sort of offstage actor in our scene, setting everything into motion but remaining far away and out of sight. “It's up to you,” the lawyer said, “but here's your big chance.” By now it was clear Mr. Arkle was under the impression Mister Gus and I had been lovers, the money-hungry apprentice and his lonely master. I didn't bother to correct him; his opinion hardly mattered to me.

I went upstairs with reluctance and poked my head cautiously into Mister Gus's bedroom. Everything was as jewel-toned and opulent as I remembered. I walked towards the foot of the bed but stayed several feet away, unable to draw nearer. With the life gone from his frame, Mister Gus looked even smaller than I remembered. The bedcovers had been folded back—for the doctor's examination, I expect—and he lay there atop the sheets clad in burgundy silk pajamas, so slight as to barely disturb the
bed. He looked so brittle, so white, almost like a shell you'd find on the beach, the curves of his gnarled fingers and cheekbones so deep as to be scalloped.

I stood there for the better part of ten minutes, my feet rooted to the floor, my eyes unblinking. I couldn't think of anything to do or say. I thought about his last words to me, uttered months earlier. One fragment in particular of what Mister Gus had said kept returning to me as I stood there . . .
and
you're left to fumble in terrible places and it's only
your body . . . yes, only your body trying to prove to
the soul that it's not alone, and failing time and
time again.
The photograph burning in the fireplace flashed in my mind for the third time that day, and I thought of San Francisco and of Joey, not wanting to believe there could ever be a part of Mister Gus's life that had ever resembled my own. There were parts of Mister Gus's life during which he had likely been happy and felt alive. And there were years that had inevitably come after 1902, in the wake of “Charlie”—whoever he was; years driven by loneliness that had prompted Mister Gus's speech to me that I realized I'd never wanted to know about. Not then and not now. I continued to stand there, gazing upon Mister Gus's frail shell of a body.

When I finally spoke, my voice barely croaked out of my throat. “I'm sorry,” I said, and walked out of the room.

Downstairs, Mr. Arkle was waiting for me with an envelope. Inside was a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.

•   •   •

T
hat evening, I went to a pay phone and dialed the number for Joey's apartment in Washington, D.C.

“I'm sorry, Joey,” I said once he picked up. “I need to talk to you. I'd like to see you this weekend. If you still want to.”

He was quiet.

“Joey? Are you there?”

“Did they put you up to this?” he demanded. “Look, I don't know who this is, but I don't want any trouble. This is a private line.”

I blinked, uncomprehending at first.
Did they put you up to this . . .
The words went through me with a cruel jolt. He was pretending not to know me. He was acting out of fear and suspicion, I realized. During the time we'd been apart—the time I'd abandoned him and sworn him off—his paranoia had gotten the upper hand. I felt a terrible pang of sympathy for him.

“It's just me, Joey. Something happened today that made me realize how sorry I am . . . how much I need to tell you I'm sorry. I need to tell you everything.”

“What was that?” he demanded. “What was that clicking sound?” There was a pause. “Where are you calling me from?” he asked in a low, suspicious tone.

“A pay phone,” I answered.

He was quiet again; I could sense his tortured mind working. Finally, he sighed.

“It's a pretty sure thing I'm going to lose my job, Miles,” Joey said. The tone of frenzy had left his voice, replaced by one of slow, defeated sorrow. “My family will know why. And you . . . I can't stand it when you change your mind about me. You can't do that anymore, Miles. You can't. I can't take it.”

“I won't,” I said. I remember it came out forceful and clear, as though this time I truly meant it. And I believe I did.

A
sudden spate of last-minute deliveries had me detained. The weather conditions were terrible that day; I recall sliding all over the frozen streets on my bicycle, my gloved hands gripping the handlebars so tightly my knuckles throbbed. A light rain had seeped into the snow that had fallen a few days earlier, rendering them soggy lumps that later refroze into treacherous, glasslike ice. Joey was scheduled to come in early on the train; it was likely he'd already checked in and was waiting for me. I knew he would worry when I didn't show up at the hotel on time, and I tried my best to hurry through my deliveries without breaking my neck, steering in and out of the throngs of taxi-cabs that knotted the streets. I had a sort of unofficial saying in those days: If the taxi drivers of Manhattan are driving more cautiously than you are, you are doing something wrong. Twice I caught myself speeding up to a reckless pace and had to remind myself to slow down.

Before I hopped on my bicycle and left the dispatch office I considered telephoning the hotel to warn Joey I was going to be late, but doing so
might spook him, I reasoned. I remembered his paranoia over the telephone line when I called him a few days earlier, and I imagined him now, eyeing the phone with terror as the front desk connected the call to his room. So far, the clerk at the front desk at this new hotel had yet to make his opinion of us known. He didn't show signs of openly disapproving, but he could hardly be counted as an ally.

After four deliveries, I was already over an hour and a half late, but was finally on my fifth and last one. I was told the heavy stack of papers wrapped in brown parchment that I was delivering were editorial notes, and the recipient was an elderly historian producing his latest volume on the life of Abraham Lincoln. The person who answered the door of the Upper East Side townhouse was a little gray mouse of a woman, and—I deduced—the historian's wife.

“Ah!” she said, upon opening the heavy door of a somber brownstone. “There you are! Thank you for making the trip so late in the day. He'll be very glad to have those.” She reached for the parcel, but it was quite large and heavy, and I could see she was going to struggle with it. I felt a small tickle of guilt.

“Where would you like it?” I asked, knowing this meant I would be carrying it inside.

“Oh,” she said, smiling. “He'll be needing those in his study.” She ushered me inside and I followed her down a hallway past a staircase and into a little parlor where a fireplace was sputtering and crackling with happy flames.

“Over here, boy,” an elderly man called, waving to me from behind a mahogany desk. He patted the leather ink blotter before him, and I set the parcel where he indicated. “Thank you, boy,” he said in a wheezing voice as he reached into a desk drawer to extract a letter opener with which to cut the parcel strings.

“You're welcome, sir,” I said. I turned to go out the way I had come in,
but as I whirled about I came face-to-face again with his wife, who was now holding a tea tray.

“You must be a block of ice, riding that bicycle about in this weather!” she said. “Here, have some tea and biscuits to warm you up.” I attempted to decline. “Please,” she said, squeezing my arm in a surprisingly viselike grip. “I insist.” She peered at me with a pair of large, kind-seeming eyes, and smiled. There was something sweet and fragile in her small face.

“Thank you,” I said, relenting.

It was sweltering in the room and I could feel trickles of sweat forming in my armpits, buried deep beneath my thick sweater and coat. I helped myself to two dry, crumbly biscuits and an almond cookie that wasn't half-bad, which I washed down with a cup of weak yet piping-hot tea. I tried to conceal my hurry so as not to offend the historian or his wife. Finally, after a decent interval had passed, I gave a tiny, apologetic bow to my hosts and pointed to the front door. “I'd better get back to my bicycle. I left it leaning by the gate on the front stoop.”

The old man grunted indifferently.

“Of course,” his wife said. “But please take some for later.” She held out the plate again. I hesitated. It occurred to me Joey might like some. I took a few and stuffed them into my pockets.

Once outside, I looked at my watch. A tremor of fretful panic shook my body. By the time I finally made it to the hotel, I was going to be well over two hours late. I stood on the stoop of the brownstone, thinking about what to do. Under ordinary circumstances, I would ride back to the depot at the end of my shift and lock my bicycle in one of the little sheds in the basement beneath the publishing house, but I didn't want to take the time today. I decided to bike straight to the hotel instead.

The December sun had set hours earlier and it was treacherously dark as I pedaled through the streets, furiously weaving in and out of automobile headlights, praying not to be hit by a car. Twice I heard the squeal and
screech of brakes behind me followed by a tremendous amount of honking, but I did not look back to see whether these noises were aimed at me.

When I neared the hotel, there was some kind of commotion out front. A small cluster of people was gathered around the entrance, and the large front door—it was a small hotel, and there was no revolving door—was propped open. I dismounted my bicycle and wheeled it closer, but then froze when I caught a glimpse of several policemen milling about inside. Someone had called them to the hotel, I realized with a start. Joey must be hiding in his room, distressed to suddenly find the hotel halls and lobby full of officers who might want to ask him questions, officers who might—for reasons that might make sense to Joey's paranoid mind—report Joey's presence in New York back to the State Department.

It was rotten luck to have all this happen now, especially given how rattled Joey had been lately. I needed to get to Joey, but the question was
how
. If I walked in now with the intention of going upstairs, I was sure to be asked a lot of questions.

As I made my way through the small crowd I deduced that the people gathered outside were curious spectators, people who had been walking by and caught a whiff of scandal and lingered to see what the fuss was about. I didn't know what to do with my bicycle. I spotted a middle-aged woman with a tiny dog on a leash squinting into the lobby, her thin lips pursed stubbornly off to one side. Something about her prim, disapproving expression suggested to me that she was not going anywhere anytime soon.

“Excuse me, ma'am,” I said, leaning the bicycle against the outer wall of the building next to her. “Would you mind if I left this here for a moment?” She frowned and gave me a critical once-over but finally shook her head.

“I can't stop you,” she said. I knew better than to ask her to mind the bicycle for me; she would say no. I also knew no one would dare interfere with a bicycle that didn't belong to them with a woman like her standing nearby. I left the bicycle where it was and hurried into the lobby.

Inside, the lobby was chaotic. A handful of young officers shuffled around the room looking busy doing nothing, while a more senior-looking policeman barked something into the front desk telephone. Newspapermen in their telltale trench coats scribbled on notepads. The elevator cage went up and down, steadily reshuffling the men in the lobby, dropping some off while bringing others up. To my relief, no one took notice of me right away, and the regular hotel clerk was nowhere to be found.

There had to be an emergency stairwell. With the elevator in constant use, there was no easy way to get upstairs to Joey. I watched a group of men crowd into the cage and disappear upwards, the heavy brick-shaped counterweights and slack cables sliding down and arriving smoothly in their place. The brass needle above the elevator entrance moved counter-clockwise, ticking off the floors until it stopped. Suddenly, with a jolt, I noticed the floor. It was the fourth floor. I knew that was the floor Joey was on. He'd said over the phone that he'd returned to the same room in which we'd previously taken refuge on the day we'd changed hotels. For all his wild ways, Joey liked consistency.

•   •   •

“
Y
eah, yeah, that's right,” the officer on the phone was saying, “you heard me: Cancel the ambulance.” Pause. “No.” Pause. “No, no, no. Like I said, no need; won't do him any good. Be a waste of time. He's a goner for sure.” Long pause. “Well, that's what I told 'em. I already phoned over and I says, ‘You boys need to get the coroner over here right away,' that's what I says. I told him we all got wives to get home to who've been waiting around all day to go out and do some holiday shopping.”

My stomach turned over. Whatever the commotion was about, it was worse than I thought. I looked around and tapped one of the newspaper reporters on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Can you tell me what's happened here?”

“They found a man dead in his room,” the reporter said, and resumed his scribbling. “Got some complaints from the room below that water was dripping from their ceiling, and when the maid went to investigate she found the guy had turned on the bath tap and never turned it off. Killed himself, evidently. Some fella in town from D.C.,” he continued.

“What room number was it?” I demanded. Before I could stop myself, the question leapt from my mouth a second time. “WHAT ROOM WAS IT?”

“Say, what's it to you, anyway?” The reporter frowned and scrutinized me more closely. “You here to rubberneck?” A few of the other men in the lobby glanced at us. I made an effort to regain my composure.

“All these reporters are here to report . . . the death of one man?” I stammered. My voice sounded far away. “Seems to me there's an awful lot of people here.”

“Yeah, well, the fella who died worked for the State Department,” he said. I thought for a moment I might vomit. “Somebody phoned in a tip he was making all these trips to New York because he was secretly meeting with the Communist League.”

“That isn't true,” I snapped. The reporter blinked at me, startled.

“Say, buddy, you're awfully cagey for a nosy bystander. What's your business here again?” By then we had gotten the attention of one of the more senior cops in the room.

“What's your business here, boy?” the cop chimed in to repeat the question, spitting the word
boy
at me.

“I'm a bicycle messenger,” I murmured, but it was too low for him to fully hear me.

“You're a what?”

“A messenger-boy,” I repeated with more effort. My brain was spinning; I couldn't tell the truth—not the whole truth. “For a news bureau. There's a reporter here . . .” I said. “I'm to bring him extra notepads.” I held up the messenger bag that was slung over my shoulder and hoped they wouldn't want to look inside it lest they find out my whole story was a bald-faced lie.

“Yeah? Well, do you see him?”

I pretended to look about the room. “No,” I said.

“In that case, if he needs you, he'll have to find you outside. We can't have you wandering about in here.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Well? Get.”

I nodded. My body had gone numb. I willed my legs to take me to the open door, but I moved very slowly; it was as though the lobby had filled with sand. I was dimly aware of someone answering a telephone and shouting to the officer who had just interviewed me.

“Sarge? It's the dead fella's uncle on the horn. Dunno how news got to him so quickly, but you'd better take this. Calling all the way from Kentucky. He's some kind of bigwig in the bourbon business. Sounds like he's gonna throw his weight around.”

I froze mid-step. For a minute I felt like I might faint. The sergeant snapped his fingers in my face as he crossed the room to the telephone.

“What's taking you so long, boy? Step to it!”

“How did he . . . how did he die?” I asked, shaking. It was all I could do not to race up to the room.

“Cut his wrists in the bathtub,” the sergeant said in a bored voice, reaching for the receiver. “What's it to you?”

I said nothing. As though floating in a trance, I walked the remaining distance to the open door, down the steps, and over to my bicycle.

“I hear somebody was murdered in there,” said the pinched-faced woman, more friendly now that I had been inside. I nodded at her and she looked impressed. “Get a look at the body?”

I wheeled my bicycle away without answering her.

•   •   •

I
walked my bicycle for a long time. Without knowing exactly how I got there, I ended up downtown, along the Hudson near the ragged pylons that jutted out from the Village shore. Once there, I dropped the bicycle on its side and sat near the icy rocks, watching the factories across the river in New Jersey belch brown steam. I imagined Joey alone in that room, waiting for me, nervous and growing increasingly paranoid, until finally he gave into his despair. I hoped, curiously enough, that the water had been warm, that it had made him feel full and sleepy. I had read in novels that death could be like that. Every once in a while the impulse came over me to return to the hotel, to sneak up to the fourth floor, to force my way into Joey's room. I kept careful track of the hands as they moved in a circle around the face of my watch, wondering how long they would leave him in the bathtub, how long it would be until the coroner arrived, how long until Joey's body—his once beautiful body—would be loaded into the hearse and taken away.

Something—some kind of stone-shaped object—was worrying my hip through my coat pocket, and I reached in to discover the almond cookies from the historian's house, the ones I had accepted thinking Joey might like them. A queer choking came over me and I shoved all of them into my mouth, chewed them, and swallowed them. Then I got up from where I sat and retched into the rocks, the stomach acid of the vomit burning my nose and throat. I wiped my mouth on my coat sleeve and staggered over to where the bicycle lay, picked it up, and prepared to ride home. But the bicycle was useless. It was so cold, the wheels had frozen to the frame and they would not turn.