Jake & Mimi (19 page)

“I took my seat again, and I was shaking. I stayed in it through the end of the movie. Through all the credits, stayed in
it even after the lights came up. I was the last one to leave. And when I walked outside, there she was. Standing in front
of the theater, waiting.”

Jake is quiet again. And still quiet. And now I realize he is through. I want to hear more, to hear everything. To know where
it comes from, his cruelty. But he is through. Past him, I can see almost half a mile up the river walkway, see the light
from the well-spaced lampposts, light that catches the bright clothing of two runners who come toward us at a steady pace.

“Mark wanted to videotape the wedding,” I say. “I couldn’t imagine it. The first dance ruined while we watch out for wires
and mikes and lighting. We fought about it. He was adamant. ‘Think of twenty years from now,’ he said. ‘We’ll have all the
magic of it preserved.’”

Jake’s eyes are on me again. Bottomless blue.

“Last night he covered my eyes and steered me to the dining-room table. He took his hands away. Spread out on the table were
photographs. Black-and-white photographs. He had fired the videoman and found a photographer in Brooklyn who does weddings
in black and white. The pictures were so beautiful. The bride and groom. The priest in his collar. Panoramic shots — the wedding
party with the whole of the reception hall behind them. Everything looked timeless, permanent. I saw them and I knew.”

The runners reach us now, the sound of their breathing loud as they pass, then softening and disappearing as they start up
the winding overpass, leaving us again to the sound of the waves against the concrete wall, the distant hum of traffic from
the streets.

“I’m going to marry him, Jake.”

Jake looks out over the water again. He is quiet for almost thirty seconds.

“Friday night, when I kept her still, you almost couldn’t take it.”

I close my eyes.

“And when I told you to go, you didn’t leave the apartment.”

I hold tight to the black railing. I can see her again. Her tiny hands, lying open on the covers, desperate to clutch the
silk but not permitted to.

“What do you want from me, Jake?”

He is quiet again. I look into his eyes, and there it is. Steel.

“Do you have your cell phone?” he asks.

“Yes.”

I reach down into my purse and take out the small black phone. Jake motions with his hand at the water.

“Drop it in. You’ll be free.”

I hold the phone against the railing and look down into the river. The wind has stirred the waves into small whitecaps.

“The girl in the theater, Mimi. She went into the lobby and asked for the manager. She was going to tell him to call the police.
It took them a few minutes to find him. When they did, and he asked her what was wrong, she couldn’t answer him.”

I stare hard at the ring on my finger.

“I’m going to take the next one further, Mimi.”

My sweater is tight around me, but even so, I feel it. The thrilling flush that starts on the back of my neck, as if I’ve
just been touched there, and now spreads all through me.

“You’ve dreamed of it, Mimi, without ever admitting it.”

I can’t look at him.

“Pain,” he says.

I close my eyes again. When I open them, Jake is gone. I turn to see him on the overpass, crossing the bridge back toward
the city streets. I turn back to the water and look out over it, holding the black cell phone in my shaking hands.

•     •     •

“Powerful work.”

“Isn’t it?” she says. “We’re lucky to represent him. Was there one in particular you were interested in?”

“I buy collections, Ms. Torring, not paintings.”

“I see.” Two new customers enter the gallery and shed their coats. They look our way. “All told, we represent more than forty
of his works.”

“Then my investment would be serious.” The newcomers stand expectantly back at the gallery door. I nod at them. “I wonder
if I might return when I could have your full attention.”

“Of course. We offer after-hours appointments for collectors at your level. You could come back any night this week, and we’d
have the gallery to ourselves.”

“Very well. How is tomorrow?”

She nods. “Fine.”

“Eight o’clock?”

“Fine again.” She takes my hand in both of hers and smiles. “Tomorrow it is, then. I look forward to it.”

I walk to the gallery door and step out into the evening air. I walk to the corner of West Fourth Street. From my coat I take
the crumpled handbill that I rescued Friday night from the flowerpot outside Nina Torring’s apartment building. Rescued just
moments after Miss Lessing emerged, shaken and crying.

I tear the handbill in two.

I
had my first drink the night the Berlin Wall came down.

I was sixteen and living with Grandpa on Long Island, a year after my parents were killed in a car crash in Japan. I was asleep
on the cot in my room when he woke me with a rough shake. “Let’s go, boy,” he said. “We’ve got business.” On the way out,
Grandpa stopped at the rolltop desk in the corner of the living room. I’d never seen him open it, but he slid a key into the
ridged top, pushed it up, and pulled out a small green pouch.

It was almost midnight, the streets quiet, and he didn’t say a word until he pulled his ’77 Chevy into the driveway of Artie
Moore’s house. He was about to hit the horn, but we could see Artie through his living-room window, and he could see us. He
stood on a small stepladder, hanging two stars high up in the window.

“Know what those are for?” Grandpa asked.

“No.”

“Families used to put ’em in the window when a son went to war. In ’forty-three, ’forty-four, you walked around these streets,
every other window had one.”

“One of them is gold.”

“Gold means they didn’t come back. Artie’s brother, Donald. We all called him Dooley — I can’t remember why.” We saw Artie
step down and pull the curtains closed. “Go give him a hand.”

I walked up the driveway and reached his front door as he opened it.

“Hi, Mr. Moore.”

“Jake,” he said, nodding and taking my arm, his grip strong. He leaned heavily on me, and we walked carefully through the
wet leaves to the car.

We drove a mile through empty streets to the Veterans Club, a squat building of chipped paint tucked away at the quiet end
of Main Street. Other cars were parked or pulling up, and men were walking over the short grass to the open door of the club.
Men in their sixties and seventies. Grandpa’s war friends, the ones who, like him, came back from World War II to their hometown
and stuck around. Plumbers, dentists, admen. Most of them retired, all of them woken up just a while earlier by Grandpa’s
call.

Inside the one-room club, they took the stools down off the worn wooden bar. Smitty found some glasses and opened the taps
and then pointed at me. “You’re tending bar tonight, Jake,” he said, and then started a fire in the small fireplace and joined
the ten others around the television at the far end of the bar. Grandpa took the green pouch from his jacket and shook out
his dog tags. All the men had brought theirs. Some laid them on the bar, and some held them in their rough, spotted hands
or worked them between thumb and fingers as they drank their beers. And together they watched the Wall come down.

They watched kids stand on top of it, their arms locked, swaying and singing. Watched two women at a crossing point dance
over the line and then back, over again and back. Watched men bury their faces in the shoulders of other men. All along the
Wall, people with chisels and hammers chipped away at it. Chipped away and then moved off a few feet to stare, stunned, at
the bits of wall in their open hands. One man kissed the pieces; another dropped them on the ground and crushed them beneath
his feet.

They watched in silence, looking from the television to the floor, or out the window at the quiet streets. After a while the
beer got into them. “Patton,” said Artie, lifting his glass high, and everyone raised theirs in answer. “Elsenborn,” said
another, and they raised them again. “C rations.” They raised them. “Fuckin’ pillboxes.” They raised them. “Carole Lombard,”
said Grandpa, to a round of “hear, hear”s. And then Charlie Bell, the oldest among them, raised a hand for silence, rose slowly
to his feet, paused for effect, and said, “To Monty!” and they all roared with laughter.

Smitty tossed me the keys to the storeroom. “Jake, find some whiskey, will you,” he said, and when I came back with Jack Daniel’s
and shot glasses and started to pour, Grandpa pulled over another stool. “Make room, men,” he said. “This might as well be
the night.”

Artie poured a shot for me, right to the top of the glass. “Whoa,” said Grandpa as I picked it up. All the men lifted theirs.
“Anyone ever asks you what I did, boy,” said Grandpa, and then pointed at the television, where a young man sat straddling
the Wall, his arms in the air, his head back in triumph. “There it is.” They all touched their glasses to mine, and in their
company I had my first taste of whiskey.

•     •     •

I come up from the subway into the cloudy late-afternoon sky. I walk east to Third Avenue and up to Twentieth Street. Just
past the house where Teddy Roosevelt was born is a green common set back from the street, and just behind the common is the
Columbarium. It is an old marble building with the look of a church, but instead of spires it is topped by a dome. The path
to it winds through a garden. I walk to the arched doorway and through it into the quiet lobby. High above me, in the open
center of the building, are windows of stained glass. All three floors are designed as circular walkways, and built into the
walls of those walkways are small niches. Seven thousand of them, each holding cremated ashes.

Classical music plays softly from hidden speakers as I start up the winding staircase. Even the stairwell landings are filled
with niches. Most are glass, allowing you to see into them, to see the urn, or urns, inside and the keepsakes the families
have placed beside them. Photographs. A square of lace. A baseball card.

On the broad third-floor landing I pass a family: a mother, father, and daughter gathered around an empty niche. The mother
holds a small ceramic urn in her hands, and a director in a dark suit stands to the side. I step past them and start around
the walkway, the air scented by the flowers in the hanging vases spaced along the wall. I pass hundreds of niches until, a
third of the way around, I reach Grandpa’s.

He died a year ago today. It was Artie Moore who called me. “Chopping wood, Jake,” he said. “Couldn’t ask for much better.”
I look through the clear glass at the two silver urns inside. Grandpa hadn’t wanted any keepsakes put in. And nothing inscribed
on the urns but names and dates. I can hear his voice: “What good will words do me, boy? I’ll be dead.” I take a cloth from
my shirt and clean the glass. The first time he brought me to see Grandma’s urn, he said, “Make sure mine is just like it.”
Then he shook his head. “Fifty years, Jake,” he said. “The war. Three kids. Six grandkids. At the last, she didn’t know me.
Patted my hand and asked if I would send in her husband. You leave this world alone.”

I squat down and press my fingers to the floor. The music stops, and for a moment the place is quiet. From another floor I
can hear, faintly, a woman’s heels on the marble. And now, from behind me on the landing, where the family is gathered, the
grinding sound of the heavy key the director uses to open a new niche.

In my summers home from college, Grandpa got me a job at the Veterans Club, tending bar, even though I was years too young.
Saturday night was poker night, and all his war buddies would come. After the game broke up, they would sit and drink and
talk. If they had enough in them, they’d talk about the war. Never the heavy stuff — wounds, friends lost — not when I could
hear. If they talked about battles, it was quietly, in a kind of code. “H?,” someone might say, and those who fought there
would grunt or nod their heads. They talked freely about machines and about the brass, how the generals kept bragging about
the Sherman tank when any GI knew it took five of them to knock out a Panzer. But mostly, if they could see I was listening,
they talked about the carousing, about the nights they’d managed in spite of it all. French girls. Belgian beer. Shots for
the clap.

After the rest of them went home, Grandpa would sit at the bar and drink a last beer while I cleaned up. One night I was drying
glasses and thinking of the story Smitty had just told, of how his unit got separated from their regiment, then got so lost
that they crossed from Germany back into France, and instead of reaching the munitions plant they were supposed to attack,
the one surrounded by dug-in Germans, they wound up on the steps of a whorehouse, and after the savvy radioman called in their
position, mentioning only the coordinates, they were ordered to hole up there until nightfall. Grandpa was sitting quietly,
as he always did just after they’d gone, his mind still back in that time. “Sounds like you guys miss those days,” I said
to him. He looked up quickly, his eyes flashing, but he didn’t say anything. He stayed quiet while I put the good liquor away
in the cabinets, quiet while I counted out the register, quiet still while I turned the barstools upside down and lifted them
onto the bar. I knew I’d said something stupid, so I took my time cleaning up, sweeping the floor twice, even dusting the
liquor bottles on the back shelves. Finally there was nothing left for me to do, so I locked up and we walked to the Chevy
in silence. He crossed to the driver’s side, then looked at me over the roof of the car.