Heart of the City (31 page)

WHEN OFFICER Sim told the guys at the precinct house that he was headed to Minnesota for a few days before Christmas, they were unsparing. “You’re going where? Who’s after you?”

“Nobody, except hopefully this girl I’ve been dating.”

“Hold on a minute, there are five million women in this city,” said one patrolman, an Italian American. “You can’t just go down
to Mulberry Street”—Manhattan’s Little Italy, with its sidewalk cafés and bars—“and find yourself some hot dish?”

“Not like they have in Minnesota.”

The razzing continued on the way to the airport. “Before you go, Sim, give me your tax number,” a cop buddy who was driving said. Tax numbers were how the NYPD tracked officers’ pensions.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you might not come back. Like in that movie
Fargo
. Where that guy gets caught in the wood chipper. Somebody’s gonna need to collect your pensh.”

Marcel’s first visit to Moorhead—in the days before Christmas 2002—was not without moments worthy of a Coen Brothers film. When Robin took Marcel to meet her twin sister at a campus bar, her sister showed up with a wanted poster she had ripped off the wall of a post office. It was for a white male with blue eyes and tattoos, a former paramedic and volunteer firefighter, who was wanted for a triple murder in Arizona, where Marcel had lived for a while in the 1990s.

“Robin, you better look at this.” Her sister was dead serious. “Don’t tell me this isn’t a match.”

Her sister had brought a friend, a six-foot-four brawler, in case the situation got out of hand. It took a few beers and even more reassurances—Robin had visited Marcel’s station house, he had been back in New York for several years on the dates of the alleged murders—to convince Robin’s sister and her burly friend that not everyone from New York was a serial killer.

Caught up in the holiday spirit, Robin’s mother, for her part, gave Marcel an early Christmas present: a glass tree ornament shaped like a pickle, a German tradition. Marcel was not the blushing type. But he came close when he opened the card from Robin’s mother: “Hope you and your pickle make it home in one piece.”

When Robin led him on a snowmobiling expedition across a frozen lake, Marcel clung to his seat in fear. Afterward, he scratched his head at the camouflage every other person on the lake seemed
to be wearing. “Where’s the Army base?” asked Marcel, who was partial to Guess jeans, black sports coats, and Doc Martins.

“They’re not soldiers,” Robin said. “Camos are just casual wear up here.”

The only thing that seemed to make sense that first visit was that this was Robin’s home. People left their doors unlocked. They held doors for strangers. Motorists stopped for pedestrians and drove cars you’d never know had horns. Where a New Yorker might have dismissively said, “Fugheddaboudit,” Minnesotans were always ready with a “You betcha.” In the trust and warmth locals felt toward one another, Marcel saw that he had in some sense misjudged Robin. Her values were as much a product of her hometown as his values were of his.

IN JULY 2003, two months after graduation, Robin moved to New York to be with Marcel. They slept in separate bedrooms in the house on Long Island where Marcel had been living with his father and stepmom. Robin worked as a sales clerk at a clothing store while applying to architecture firms in the city. As fall approached, Marcel secretly shopped for a ring in the antique styles he knew Robin liked.

On a visit to Moorhead that October, Marcel told Robin’s father, Mike Miller, that he wanted a moment alone with him. Mr. Miller, a former meat cutter who now hosted a local radio show on fishing, invited Marcel to a tournament he was taking part in on Waubay Lake, in South Dakota. Mr. Miller was still in his bath towel, having stepped out of the shower after a long day of angling, when Marcel unburdened himself. “Mr. Miller, I love your daughter,” he said. “In every possible way, she is my better half. With your permission, sir, I’d like to ask her to marry me.”

“Sheez, Marcel,” he said testily, “you could have at least waited until I had my pants on.” Then a smile leaped across his face, he laughed, and he thumped Marcel on the back. “Go get her.”

That night, at Untitled, a restaurant in downtown Fargo, Marcel proposed.

THEY WANTED to marry near Robin’s home. But they would be planning the wedding from some 1,200 miles away, in New York, and they suspected they would need a full year. As they looked over the calendar for 2004, one weekend date kept leaping out at them: Saturday, September 11.

Not everyone understood at first. But they would, the couple felt, once they heard their story. Out of the darkness of that day came a few specks of light—and their love story was one of them.

September 11 had sent tidal waves across the world, but as the days passed, the waves broke into a million ripples and flowed in rivulets to the least likely reaches of the country, before washing back in some inevitable way to New York. As Marcel continued to work through his anguish, he saw a September 11 wedding as a chance to surround his most painful memories with better ones, so that one day the good might outnumber the bad. That year, at Robin’s urging, he sought help for the first time. He enrolled in the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program, a government-funded program of free medical care and psychological counseling for survivors of the attacks.

IN THE months after their wedding, life in New York seemed possible. Robin, after a grueling battery of interviews, landed a job with a firm that remodeled Manhattan restaurants and built homes in the Hamptons. Marcel won a prestigious “Finest of the Finest” award from the police union for climbing onto a ledge at the Time Warner Center to stop a suicidal twenty-two-year-old man from leaping to his death. The brass promoted him to a plainclothes unit, and he was getting good vibes about his chances for a
dream job in the Emergency Service Unit, an elite squad whose members perform rescue, SWAT, and other high-level tactical operations. (The unit lost more members on September 11 than any other in the NYPD.) But the pressures of city life began to wear on Robin. She was commuting two hours each way to her job. She returned so late that she and her new husband would scarcely finish packing lunch and laying out clothes for the next day before it was time to go to bed. Adding to her stress was that Marcel, never thinking for his own safety, had some distressing close calls. He cut open his hand taking a knife from a robber who had begun stabbing people in a bodega; he wrestled with a coked-up street peddler who managed to unholster Marcel’s gun; and he was struck by a van that blew through a red light.

Robin admired Marcel’s fearlessness, but she grew increasingly worried about him. Especially unsettling were the vague reports he’d bring home some nights of possible plots to blow up buildings or subways. Marcel could see his wife’s unhappiness. They were starting to talk about having children, and even he conceded the difficulty of being good parents in their current circumstances.

The NYPD let officers retire with partial pensions after as few as five years of service. For Marcel, that would be 2005. He began making inquiries, telling superiors about his plans for a family, and worrying about the flak he’d get from the other guys in the precinct. This time, though, none came. “It’s just a job, buddy,” his commander said. “You stay here too long, you forget that.”

In April 2005, Marcel walked into One Police Plaza and filed his retirement papers. First he said goodbye to friends. Then he said goodbye to the city.

By the summer, he and Robin were in a pickup truck bound for Minnesota.

Renovations

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

When Mara Gailitis awoke, the tiny apartment above the drugstore on Lexington Avenue still smelled like a spice bazaar. The night before had been her Christmas party, an annual rite now well-known among her acquaintances for the elaborate and sometimes eccentric dishes she prepared.

At age thirty-three, Mara had yet to outgrow her introversion. Her parents were old-world Latvian aristocrats who believed that the highest virtue in children was silence. She had hated that part of her childhood, though its aftereffects were still with her. Her party—her only one each year—had always been strategic. With this one social nicety, she hoped to discharge an entire year’s social debts. She invited everyone who had asked her to anything. Her guest list was a bricolage of the disparate worlds she straddled: a student from ballet class, a friend from her days as a substitute teacher in Harlem, a German from the office.

This year, 1975, Mara made
rijstaffel
, a traditional Dutch Indonesian feast. It meant “rice table.” But it was actually a vast smorgasbord of appetizers and pungent sauces, or
sambals
, set out in small dishes and served with a variety of cooked grains. Mara had spent a week gathering ingredients for chili pastes, chutneys, banana fritters, coconut-dusted peanuts, and tofu omelets. What she may have lacked in social effusion, she sought to make up for in the assertiveness of her food. (The year before, she had made the Brazilian national dish,
feijoada
.)

The party fell on a Saturday. And for a shimmering moment, when the apartment was full and there was laughter and music and people were eating and talking and playing records, she felt she belonged. But then, one by one, her guests went home, as they always did, and the apartment was again, as so often, still. When she crawled out of bed at three the next afternoon, the room was cold and the sky was already streaked violet and gray. She glanced up at the ceiling. In a flight of whimsy not long ago, she had painted it with a trompe l’oeil of a bright blue sky dabbed
with puffs of cloud. But it didn’t help. It was December 21—the winter solstice—and the gloom outside her window made her feel even more alone.