Bleeding Hearts (7 page)

“Maybe Chuckie will throw another fit when the verdict is read.” Sid got to his feet. “Is he really that dumb, or is he putting on an act? I keep thinking nobody could be really that dumb.”

“He’s really that dumb.” Fred got to his feet himself. “But she isn’t. I wonder what it is she thinks she’s up to.”

“Who?” Sid demanded.

“Candida DeWitt,” Fred said, leading the way back out into the corridor. “She really isn’t a stupid woman, you know, and this memoir thing is damn near terminal idiocy. So she’s got to be doing it on purpose.”

“Right.” Sid sounded dubious.

“I wonder what she’s up to,” Fred said again. “I wonder if I paid her a visit if she’d tell me.”

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN WAS OUT
to dinner with a friend who had been with him in the FBI, but that was all right. Lida Arkmanian had a key to his apartment. She had a key to old George Tekemanian’s apartment on the first floor of this same building and a key to Hannah Krekorian’s place up the street, but for some reason Lida had keys to neither Bennis Hannaford’s apartment nor Donna Moradanyan’s. There was no significance in this. Keys got passed around on Cavanaugh Street the way baseball trading cards had before they got valuable enough to collect. Keys came and went too, until somehow they mysteriously disappeared, and then somebody had to ask Gregor to jimmy a lock.

Since Gregor’s key was the only one she needed for the moment, and since it hadn’t disappeared, Lida was thinking about keys in only the most desultory way, because she was tired and drifty-headed and really in need of an early night. She had spent the past several hours making pastries of various kinds, for no good reason at all. God only knew she didn’t need to eat more desserts than she already did, and Gregor needed it even less. God only knew she had better things to do with her time than cook—or did she? That was a very hard question to answer. Lida didn’t know what a fifty-eight-year-old woman was supposed to do with her time. She just knew that she’d been feeling restless all evening, and wondered if she ought to take a vacation. She was much too jumpy to sit still, and so it had seemed the perfect solution to do some serious cooking and let her nerves do some good for somebody while she couldn’t make them calm down. Now it was eight-thirty and she was coming empty-handed out of Gregor Demarkian’s third-floor apartment, having left a pile of halvah in his refrigerator tall enough to qualify as a foothill. She felt like a complete idiot.

Not such good decorations this time, she thought, giving a last look at Gregor’s apartment door. It sported a single large metallic red-and-silver heart in honor of the upcoming Valentine’s Day, but nothing as exuberant as Donna ordinarily put up to celebrate a holiday. Donna Moradanyan decorated this entire town house, inside and out, and most of Cavanaugh Street on any excuse at all, and did it with energy too. One Christmas, she’d wrapped the entire front façade of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church in ribbon and tinsel until it looked like a package. One Halloween, she’d decorated a lamppost on Cavanaugh Street to look so convincingly like the Devil, someone had called a cop. This time Donna’s heart didn’t seem to be in it, so to speak. She didn’t seem to have the fire.

February, Lida murmured to herself, starting down the stairs. February. That’s all it is. I ought to get Hannah and go to the Bahamas until the good weather comes back. That would cheer me up.

She reached the half-landing, looking down the stairwell at what she expected to be nothingness, and stopped. There was definitely not nothing on the landing outside Bennis Hannaford’s apartment door. There was a tall young man with longish hair and an immense down parka, looking agitated. He must have heard her coming. He turned, caught sight of her on the half-landing, and relaxed a little.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry if I startled you. The front door was unlocked, so I just came in—”

—the front door was always unlocked. Gregor was always lecturing old George and Bennis and Donna about how they ought to remember to lock it—

“—but now that I’ve gotten up here, I’ve knocked and knocked, and nobody answers, and I just don’t know what to do. I’m Christopher Hannaford.”

“Oh,” Lida said, feeling instantly better. “Oh, yes. Bennis’s brother. She told us you were coming.”

“She doesn’t seem to have remembered I was coming,” Christopher said. “She isn’t home.”

Lida came the rest of the way down the stairs to the second floor and looked thoughtfully at Bennis’s door. “I think I know where she is,” she said. “She must have gone to pick up Father Tibor at the demonstration—”

“Demonstration?”

“It was a protest of some kind he was involved in. I’m not really sure of the details. Anyway, she must have gone to get him, and not expected to be long, and then things happened to hold her up. Somehow, with Father Tibor, things always happen to hold you up.”

“I’ve heard.” Christopher grinned. “I get regular reports about Father Tibor and old George Tekemanian and Gregor Demarkian and Donna Moradanyan. Which one are you?”

“I’m none of those,” Lida said. “My name is Lida Arkmanian.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of
you
,” Christopher said. He stepped back a little and tilted his head to one side. Lida flushed and turned away. He made her—he made her so conscious of the way she looked. A small woman, still relatively thin—although not as thin as she had been—and relatively shapely, in spite of the fact that she’d had five children and—oh, who was she kidding? How old was this man? Forty? Less than forty? Her stomach stuck out. That was why she wore dresses with full skirts with elastic waistbands. After five children, anybody’s stomach would stick out, unless you had one of those operations, the way movie stars did and—what was the
matter
with her?

“You don’t look at all the way Bennis described you,” Christopher Hannaford was saying. “She makes everyone on Cavanaugh Street sound so foreign.”

“Some of us are foreign,” Lida said. “Father Tibor came from the Soviet Union. When there was a Soviet Union.”

“Getting to be a crazy world, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Lida said. “I read somewhere last week that the Swedish government is going to privatize their post office. Sweden. It’s hard to believe it.”

“We’re probably going to nationalize our parking garages,” Christopher said. “It’s just an itch for change, that’s all. It goes through the world every once in a while. It’s been going through me for the last six months.”

“Has it?” Lida said. “I think I’ve been experiencing something similar. Restlessness. Restlessness but no real need to do anything in particular. Are you the one who’s the poet?”

“I’m a deejay out in California. I write poetry sometimes.”

“You publish your poetry in
The New Yorker
and in
Poetry
magazine. Bennis shows them to me sometimes.”

“I’m flattered. I never thought Bennis took my poetry seriously. It doesn’t pay enough to keep me in coffee beans.”

“I wish I could do something like write poetry,” Lida said. “All I seem to be able to do is cook.”

Christopher kicked a toe at Bennis’s closed door. “I suppose I’ll just have to camp out here on the landing and wait. She can’t be all night, can she? And I’ve got a book to read. In fact, I think I’ve got six. I hit one of those huge Barnes and Noble stores right before I got on the plane.”

“Ah,” Lida said, looking toward Bennis’s darkened doorway herself.

It was very odd. She didn’t feel restless anymore. She didn’t feel self-conscious. She was really very relaxed. That strange feeling of being on trial and sure to be found wanting had disappeared. Maybe it was just that Christopher Hannaford didn’t seem to be looking at her anymore. Not looking at her to any purpose, at any rate. Maybe it was just that she finally knew what it was she was supposed to do.

“You can’t stay here,” she told him. “It could be hours before Bennis gets back. Father Tibor is definitely not reliable when it comes to time. And you must be hungry.”

“I’m always hungry,” Christopher said. “Why? Is there a restaurant—”

“There’s a very good restaurant just a couple of blocks away,” Lida said, “and you can go there if you like, of course, but that wasn’t what I meant. I meant you should come across the street with me. That’s where I live, across the street. That big window on the second floor of the building immediately opposite this one is my living room.”

“You can’t see it from here,” Chris said.

“No,” Lida agreed, “but you can see it from the living room windows of all four of the apartments in this building, and what’s more important, you can see all their living room windows from mine.”

“Meaning when Bennis gets in, I’ll be able to see her window light up.”

“Exactly. Of course, we will leave a note on the door before we go, just in case you would rather watch television or read one of your books instead of watch for lights in Bennis’s window.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble. I know it’s late, or getting that way—”

“You won’t be any trouble at all. I will be glad to have the company. I have that big town house, and there isn’t anybody to live in it but me. It gets very lonely sometimes.”

“Bennis said something in one of her letters about your giving room to some refugees.”

“Oh, yes,” Lida said, “I gave rooms to refugees. I gave rooms to quite a few refugees. But refugees are just like anybody else. They like to have places of their own. Mine found very nice apartments. We keep in touch. Do you like Armenian food?”

“I don’t know,” Chris said. “I’ve never had any.”

“Well, we’ll try it anyway,” Lida said, and then, suddenly, she was embarrassed again, she didn’t know why. She stuck her hands into the slash pockets of her chinchilla coat and searched around frantically for a pen and a piece of paper. Why she expected to find them, she didn’t know. She never kept anything in the pockets of that coat except a little loose change. She was still in awe of the fact that she owned it.

Chris had come up with his own pen and paper, rooted out of the duffel bag he had brought instead of a suitcase. If Lida hadn’t known he was rich, she’d have taken him for one of those rootless men who always seemed to be thumbing rides just above the exit ramps when she took the superhighway. Still, she was more sophisticated than that. She knew that people who came from old money often dressed like tramps, as a kind of statement. She knew that from Bennis.

Chris finished his note, looked at it thoughtfully, and then nodded to himself. He took his Swiss army knife out of his pocket and opened it to one of the smallest blades.

“This will hold it up,” he said, “and she’ll know it’s really me. I’ve got the ultimate model, you know. It’s even got a knife and fork and spoon.”

“Big enough to eat with?” Lida asked doubtfully.

“Big enough to eat with if you’re Thumbelina,” Chris said.

“Let’s go across the street,” Lida said. “I’ll give you a knife and fork and spoon big enough to eat with if you’re the Green Giant. Or whoever it was that Jack met. I’m not very good at fairy tales.”

“Neither am I.”

Lida felt perfectly at peace. She was silly to chide herself about the amount of cooking she did. She had been cooking since she was a girl. It was an excellent mode of communication with people she only barely knew. It was a completely safe zone of human endeavor. Once she’d started talking about cooking, she hadn’t been afraid of Christopher Hannaford in the least.

Feed them, Lida Arkmanian told herself. If you feed them, the feeding will blot out everything else.

It always had before.

V
ERY MUCH LATER, AT
ten twenty-two, when the windchill was down to minus forty degrees and the sidewalks felt like ice, Bennis Hannaford finally got home with Father Tibor Kasparian in tow. She had a couple of other people in tow too. Father Ryan. Father Carmichael. Father Papageorgiou. Reverend Kress. Cold or no cold, Bennis had the window she was sitting next to all the way open. She was puffing frantically on a Benson & Hedges menthol and seriously considering taking to dope.

“We can’t possibly sit in at the mayor’s residence,” Father Carmichael was saying, “because he’s got pit bulls.”

The cab pulled up in front of Holy Trinity Church. Bennis shoved her hands in her pockets, came up with a wad of money, and peeled off a few bills for the cabdriver. The driver took them and asked,

“Are they always like this? Aren’t they supposed to be holy people?”

“I don’t know what they’re supposed to be,” Bennis said. “You can keep the change.”

“
Very
nice.”

“I’m getting out,” Bennis said to the collective clergy. “This is where we’re all going. You guys should get out too.”

The collective clergy didn’t seem to have heard her. Bennis landed on the sidewalk and walked back along the side of Holy Trinity into the little courtyard onto which Father Tibor’s apartment fronted. She had her hands in her hair and her mind on something else. She was thinking she really ought to get out of there and go back home to see if Christopher had arrived.

“Idiots,” she said to the air.

Nothing happened. No priests or ministers rounded the corner from the church. No sounds of vigorous arguing split the night air. They were probably still back there, taking up space in the cab.

Bennis went back out along the side of the church and around to the front again. It was too cold to sit still and she was too exasperated to want to. She found the Fathers and Reverend Kress standing in the little plaza in front of the church steps, stomping their feet in the cold but otherwise oblivious of it. They were discussing tactics for mounting an assault on Independence Hall.

“It would be a purely symbolic gesture,” Father Ryan was saying, “but it would be wonderful symbolism.”

“Gentlemen,” Bennis said.

And then she stopped.

Holy Trinity Church was much closer to the building where Hannah Krekorian lived than Bennis’s own apartment building. It was close enough so that Bennis could now get a good look at the tall man in the coat who seemed to be taking up Hannah Krekorian’s night. They were coming back from somewhere again, which meant they must have been out together in the meantime, but Bennis didn’t bother about that. She got up as close to the edge of the church’s property as she could, so that she had a clear look at the man’s face.