Corkscrew (23 page)

'I don't know,' Wayne said, 'it just feels weird. Like the cuckoo in another bird's nest, you know?'

'Don't worry about it,' Joe told him. 'If I could afford the place, I'd take it myself. If it was in the Village. We
need
more space.'

'We certainly do,' Shelly said.

The situation was, as they explained it, that Joe and Shelly, with their two sons, Joshua and Sam, eleven and nine, were still living in the too-small apartment they'd moved into when they'd first got married and were only a couple. And now Shelly was a computer programmer, working out of her home, helping clients set up websites and do links to other sites, which meant a lot of equipment jammed into a corner of their bedroom. They needed a larger place, but they didn't want to move out of the West Village, and had searched fitfully for years without getting anywhere.

Wayne and Susan's place was perfect for them. Wayne had always gotten along well with the landlords, an older Italian couple who lived in an apartment on the first floor, so a deal was cut with no trouble, and not too terrible a raise in the rent. On the morning of March first, Wayne and Susan and a moving van had moved north, and that afternoon Joe and Shelly and a moving van had moved around the corner from West Fourth Street to Perry.

From time to time, Wayne thought about showing the half-manuscript of
The Shadowed Other
to Joe, but what was the point? Just awkwardness for Joe, who'd have to say complimentary things while nevertheless handing it back. So why bother? Let
The Shadowed Other
remain where and what it was: unsung, and undone.

Wayne had even cannibalized
The Shadowed Other
in a way, using part of the research and some of the turns of phrase from the manuscript for an article on the last thirty years of unrest in Central America, comparing the reality of what had been happening down there with the American cultural interpretations of those events, the novels and movies that had used the revolutions and unrest as the base for their stories. Willard had sold that, just last week, and it would soon be in print. The shadow of
The Shadowed Other.

Ahead on his left, as he jogged, was a basketball court, with a pair of guys at each end playing one-on-one. It was still March, and nippy, but these players were all in shorts and T-shirts and the usual giant spaceship sneakers, and were working up a sweat. There was a bench on the right, unoccupied at the moment, so Wayne sat there, to take a breather and watch the two games.

One-on-one is a game for two players, using all the rules of basketball, but it's no longer a team game. There's no one to pass off to, no one to feint with, no one to block for. There are no easy moments, loping along while your team-mate has the ball. It is constant motion, unrelenting, one man with the ball, dribbling, moving, feinting, driving, trying to get a clear shot at the basket, while the other man defends, blocking, holding him out, dashing in to try to steal the ball, both of them straining, giving it their all, working at the peak of their ability.

The two games Wayne watched now were uneven, the guys on the left being much more practiced and skillful than the guys on the right. Everybody struggled, everybody fought, but the guys on the left moved with swift hard grace, like dancers combined with wrestlers, while the guys on the right kept flubbing, overreaching, not quite tripping, neither of them ever quite quick enough to take advantage of the other guy's mistakes. They were like a parody of the first team, but they were just as serious, just as absorbed, just as determined. And no doubt having as much fun, which was after all the point. One-on-one isn't a team sport, and it isn't a spectator sport either; it's a game for the players.

Sitting there, watching the two games progress, Wayne sensed that fiction itch starting up in him again, as though he'd actually finished
The Shadowed Other
and were ready for a new story, a new invented world. Two guys who meet in Central Park and play one-on-one, and don't know one another in any other context. Who are they really, and how does the rest of their lives begin to impinge on their game? Competition and camaraderie; the seriousness of the determination to win, and the fun of just playing the game.

Wayne looked off down the path to his right, and saw Lucie coming. He blinked, but of course it wasn't Lucie. It never was. A tall slender woman with that kind of halo of gold-shavings hair, wearing black, walking with that the-street-is-mine stride, was not a rarity in New York. Wayne saw about one Lucie a month, but of course on second look they were always significantly different.

This one, for instance. She was with two other women, she walking on the left, on Wayne's side as they moved toward him along the path, and when he'd first seen her she'd had her head back, laughing. Now, when she wasn't laughing, and she had turned her profile to Wayne to face the other two women, she didn't look like Lucie at all. They never did.

He'd been sitting here too long; he was beginning to feel the chill. He waited for the
fausse
Lucie to go on by, then stood, and jogged home.

Shelly Katz was a tiny dynamo of a woman, compact, with tightly curled black hair almost as Brillo-like as her husband's. Her whole body seemed to be tightly curled, one muscle ready to spring, but her manner was easygoing, comic, relaxed. 'I want to see the changes you made,' she said, Saturday evening, as Wayne and Susan greeted them at the door.

'Not that many yet,' Susan told her.

Wayne was helping with their coats when Shelly pointed at the hall table where Jorge the doorman would leave their mail if they were to go away. 'Isn't that Bryce's?'

Wayne, trying to sound light and casual but feeling again that flutter, as though he were about to be found out for some crime, not knowing exactly what that crime might be, said, 'A lot of the stuff here is Bryce's. He left it all behind.'

'We'll replace as we go along,' Susan explained, 'but for now, it helps to fill the place.'

Shelly gave Joe a bewildered look. 'He left his
furniture?'

'He thought of it as Lucie's,' Joe told her. 'She decorated this apartment.'

Wayne hadn't thought of the furniture as Lucie's, he'd thought of it as Bryce's, and he'd enjoyed living in its midst. He said, 'Bryce must have had
something
to do with it. Picking it out.'

'Writing the check, I think,' Joe said.

Susan said, 'Wayne, you put their coats in the bedroom, and I'll do drinks.'

'Right.'

Wayne carried the coats to the bedroom, seeing for the first time that the furniture around him, the colors of the walls, were all Lucie, not Bryce. It made him feel odd, uncomfortable. That ghost had faded, so much so that even when he saw it walking, as he had yesterday in the park, it had no power to bother him. But the furniture? Lucie's? It was like suddenly finding yourself in enemy territory.

Everything in the bedroom was theirs, their own, brought up from Perry Street. His office, too, was all his, except for the leather armchair and the revolving bookrack. The dining room was completely their own. It was the living room, and the kitchen, and the guest bedroom, and the outdoor furniture on the terrace, and the long room-size hallway, it was all of those that had the dead hand of Lucie Proctorr laid heavily upon them, like a fog you just can't quite see.

Where Joe and Shelly will spend the next hour before dinner, Wayne thought, in that living room, that's where they'd spent so much time with Bryce and Lucie, on those sofas, with that coffee table, those end tables, those lamps.

Even the drapes kept open to frame the view of the park. He found himself reluctant to leave the bedroom, to go to the living room, as though some jaws were waiting for him in there, some trap. Or maybe some glaring bright light to shine into his soul and show him complete to Joe Katz; like the picture of Dorian Gray. We all have that picture inside us, don't we, he thought, in the locked secret attic nobody ever sees.

It had been a long while since he had visualized Lucie clear in his memory, her mocking eyes, that slightly twisted mouth and the raised head of the matador as she'd said, 'Is Susan any good in bed?' The last words she'd ever spoken.

The doorbell snapped at his attention. His own bedroom was around him, in this strangely wonderful new place. He left it, to be host. This was
his
home now.

He was seated at dinner between Shelly and a woman named Ann, whose husband worked with Susan. Again he was surrounded by his own furniture, and the easy rituals of dinner chitchat were familiar and comforting. It wasn't until they went back to the living room for after-dinner drinks that he sat near Joe, who looked around and said, 'I have to tell you, it's weird to be here like this. Without Bryce and Lucie, but with all this familiar stuff. I keep expecting them to walk in. Well, him, anyway.'

'It's a bigger apartment than our old one,' Wayne said, 'too big for what we brought with us, and the stuff was here. But Susan's right, we'll have to replace it. A couple things you might be interested in.'

Joe grinned. 'Because now
we're
in a bigger place? I don't think so, Wayne.'

'No, there's one thing in particular,' Wayne said. 'I brought everything up from my office, and he left a couple things, and it's too crowded in there. One thing he left is a very nice wooden revolving bookrack, looks expensive, but I don't need it. Would you like to see it?'

'No, I remember it,' Joe told him. 'Lucie gave Bryce that for Christmas, three or four years ago. He left that behind? That surprises me.'

'Well, I don't want it,' Wayne said. 'I thought you might.'

Joe shook his head, with a rather sad, nostalgic smile. 'I was part of the conspiracy,' he said, 'when we smuggled that thing in here without Bryce's knowing, so it could be a surprise on Christmas Day.'

'Oh.'

'Every once in a while, you know, Wayne,' Joe said, 'some unexpected emotion shows up, something you didn't remember or didn't know you cared about. That bookrack — You know, now I'm thinking about it, I think Bryce always thought it was kind of over the top. Too ostentatious, you know? I don't think he ever did like it.'

'So that's why he left it.'

'But it still represents a happy moment,' Joe said. 'A moment in this room. Me sitting on this sofa, right here. They used to have the Christmas tree over there. When Lucie was pleased by something, you know, she used to clap her hands together, like a little girl.'

Wayne almost said, 'I never saw her do that,' which would have been a brainless thing to do. Instead, he said, 'I guess they had good times before the bad. Most divorced couples can say that.'

'Oh, sure.' Joe nodded, and looked toward the empty corner where the Christmas tree would go. 'I can just see her, though, clapping her hands like that, when Bryce suddenly found this huge
kiosk
kind of a thing, all wrapped in gold paper,
hidden,
believe it or not, behind the tree.'

Gold paper; Wayne could believe that. 'It sounds like a great Christmas,' he said.

'If I were you, Wayne,' Joe told him. 'I'd take that, it's on its own wheels, I'd take it down the service elevator and just put it out by the curb. That's the great thing about New York, you know. Anywhere else, you put something out on the sidewalk, either it stays there for a month or you get a ticket for littering. In New York, you can put
anything
out on the street, on West Fourth I saw a sectional sofa put out, must've been ten feet long. In twenty minutes it's gone, no matter what it is. That's New York.'

Wayne understood now that everything Joe saw around himself in New York had to be unique to the city; crackpot but benign. 'You're right,' he said.

'Wheel it out,' Joe advised. 'In twenty minutes, it'll be on its way to Queens.'

'I think I'll do that,' Wayne said.

Wednesday again, a week since Detective Johnson's visit, and the new regime was holding. Bryce had stopped prowling in stores, and now he limited himself to quick trips for perishables and the
Times,
which was also a perishable, of course. He spent most of his daylight hours now outdoors around the house, repairing winter's damage, getting ready for spring. He felt better, almost as though he'd gotten over something physical, the way you get over a low-level fever that had hung on for so long that it had begun to seem like normality; when at last it lets go, what a relief to find the real normality once more.

He had also stopped making up new storylines every morning. He didn't know how many he'd done, but there were certainly a bunch of discs in the rack on the shelf above his computer screen. He didn't remember any of them exactly, but felt that soon he would go back into the office, run through all those ideas, choose one, and finally get started on the next book.

But not yet. At the moment, all he wanted to do was physical labor by day and then watch tapes of old movies after the dinner he heated for himself every evening. Weekends, he still had plenty of social invitations, so he certainly wasn't becoming some kind of hermit.

Before now, he'd only been full-time in this house in the summer months, and hadn't been much aware of it as an entity in itself. Now the changeable beauty of the land fascinated him, and he found himself much more aware of the details of the weather than when he'd lived mostly in New York. He loved being out here, working, in the middle of his land.

He always carried the cellular phone from the BMW with him when he worked outside, and on Wednesday afternoon it rang as he was using the posthole digger to make a hole for a new support at one corner of the fence around the swimming pool. This was the kind of job he always used to have Gregg, the lawn guy, or one of the other local handymen take care of, but he was finding these days he liked to do the work himself.

He left the digger propped in the half-dug hole, peeled off his work gloves, and answered the phone just after the second ring: 'Hello?'

'Bryce. Joe. How we doing?'