One Day the Wind Changed (21 page)

He stood now facing St. Patrick's Cathedral. Shadows of birds moved lazily on the white marble arches. A man with a camera bumped his shoulder, mumbled “Sorry,” and moved to take a picture of the church's shaded steps. The man said something in French to a female companion. Bern caught the words
sacre
and
cite. Sacre
, he thought he recalled from school, meant “cursed” as well as “holy.”

He remembered reading, years ago on an airplane, a not-bad thriller about an IRA man who rigged the cathedral with bombs.

The church's treelike spires and gently bending portals reminded him of his moment with Kate the other night in front of the Presbyterian's arch. Mysterious groves, these houses of worship, forests encased in stone, hiding secret rituals. Wind wheezed in the gaps among the rose-colored windows. The breath of orphans, Bern thought, children now forgotten, whom monks once tended on this site, long before the cathedral was built. The structure's thin arcs resembled oak limbs laden with ornaments: animal skulls, pelts, and hides-the leavings of a sacrifice, the attempt to dress up murder as a thoughtful gift to the gods.

Bern shivered, the sunlight cold on his skin. A group of Japanese tourists joined the French couple in a digital snapfest. Bern turned. He didn't want to hurry back to the office, to the chatter of his young colleagues. Moving slowly down Fifth, he was startled to see a pair of homeless men kneeling under a makeshift shelter in the space between a clothier and a bank. Since Giuliani's Days of Stomp-and-Thunder, the homeless had become largely invisible in New York, especially in an area such as this. The men recalled recent photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans.

A shopping cart, cardboard, blue plastic tarp … but the squatters had also outfitted their space with metal buckets of differing sizes, and paper kites arranged to create an airy, split-level effect, almost Oriental in its aesthetic. Ingenious. While in grad school, as part of his dissertation project—an investigation into architectural origins—Bern had traveled to some of the world's political hotspots. Nicaragua, Yemen. He had witnessed brilliant adaptations of the “primitive” to the modern, to organic necessity, to cultural arrogance: in Managua, he had marveled at the marriage of native stone to Spanish colonialism, and in Sanaa, at the use ofdun-colored mud in sheltering animals, children, and the elderly-but never, he decided now, as he admired what these men had done with their scraps, had he seen such elegant adaptability.

Dread. Bern thought, isn't that what drives construction—fear of harsh sunlight, wind storms, lightning? Honoring terror, a precondition for beauty, instead of trying to stave it off? One of the men shared with the other a slice of uncooked frozen pizza.

This spot, with an asking price of nearly $1,500 per square foot, was, Bern knew, one of the most expensive strips of real estate on the planet.

He passed an IRS branch office. With each ticking second, an LED sign above its door counted off the size of the national debt. The numbers, in the trillions, flashed as quickly as the burps of a Geiger counter he remembered using in his middle school science class. One day, he had sat with twelve other sweaty kids in the center of a football field to measure the assault of the earth by solar rays.

On the north side of Union Square, Bern saw a billboard touting “Lifestyle Buildings.” He didn't know what a “Lifestyle Building” was, and he experienced a moment of panic. Was it possible that eventually you lost your edge in the city? Dulled by overwork, so you couldn't even spot a wedge of geese?

When he reached the office he spoke to no one. Two of his colleagues argued in the hallway outside his door—something about a realtor “flipping a building, repping a new client.” “We
all
know that product doesn't move that far south of the fucking park,” said one of the men. “Everyone in America knows that!”

The wide glass doors of Bern's apartment building infused him with relief from half a block away. A quick change of shirts, a fresh tie before running to meet Kate. When he entered the lobby, he saw Mrs. Mehl sitting hunched and red-eyed on the sofa. Ryszard, the super, knelt beside her, dabbing her face with a wet cloth. Two tall blondes and a dark woman with taut, boxy hair (a look Bern associated with fashion magazines and stoned stupidity) stood in the center of the room. They held whippets on diamond-studded leashes. The dogs were gorgeous, vividly sculpted, gray with wispy orange streaks down their legs.

“I told him, ‘Why shouldn't I style my personality after my pet?'” one of the blondes said to her companions. “Style is style, darling. You take it where you can get it.”

Bern thought, No animals were harmed in the making of this psyche.

He nodded hello to Ryszard and asked Mrs. Mehl what had happened. She said she was taking her cat to the vet, making her way through the lobby when “these three harridans stomped in with their smelly old beasts and scared my little poopsie. She ran out the door.”

“We should have known we had the wrong building,” the dark woman said to her friends. “
Look
at this dump. Stephane would never stay here. He'd be ill.”

“All right, all right,” Ryszard grunted, waving his arms. No matter the concern—a burst pipe, a minor break-in, a scuffle in the elevator—from Ryszard it was “All right, all right” and a choppy wave of the arms. He was Polish, had never learned much English, couldn't repair a paper clip, yet somehow had earned the landlord's trust. He'd been a fixture in the building for years.

True, he was strangely effective in emergencies involving livid people. Bern figured this was because Ryszard's presence was such an anomaly; people backed off rather than engage a fellow with whom it was clear there would never be a resolution. He reminded Bern of a puffer fish he'd seen once in a wildlife documentary.

The whippets left the building, tugging the harridans behind them.

Ryszard pressed the wet cloth into Bern's hands and shuffled to the stairway. Bern helped Mrs. Mehl into the lift. She was the very image of reduced yet indomitable dignity, like the homeless men on the street. “I'll draw up some flyers. We'll post them around the block, and over at McGee's,” he told her. “We'll find your cat.” For once this week-the fire escape still nettled him-his drawing skills might be useful. Mrs. Mehl described the animal to Bern. “Her name is Madame Anna Mona Pasternak,” she said. “After my aunt, in Minsk.”

“That's unusual.”

“It's her
name.
”

“Yes, yes. Of course.”

“Put it on the flyer.”

“I will.”

The old woman moved slowly down the third-floor hallway, and it occurred to Bern that she could pass away before they found her pet. He wouldn't be surprised to hear in the morning that she had died in her sleep. Well, he thought: life among others.

The phone in his living room blinked its round red eye. A message from Kate. The moment he heard her voice, he convinced himself she had called to cancel. “Wally, I walked by the Cedar today at lunch. It's closed!” she said. “There's a sign in the window saying the disruption is only temporary.”

He stared at his moss rose. What was more distressing-the news about the Cedar or the insecurity Kate's voice had just caused him? Was he becoming too dependent on this girl?

“Why don't you come to my place?” Kate said.

Her place.

“‘l'll fix us some gumbo. A salty little taste of the Gulf, how's that? And Wally? I know what you're thinking.”

Flame in his cheeks.

“You're thinking it's another loss-the Cedar.”

His shoulders fell. Once again, his insecurities had forced him face to face with his vanity. Naturally, it didn't occur to Kate that her invitation would arouse him, even mildly. She didn't think about him the way he thought about her. Wasn't that clear by now?”

The sign
does
say ‘Temporary,”‘ Kate observed. “Let's wait and see, okay? It doesn't mean the sky is falling again.”

Sweet girl.

“I'll see you around six?” she said. The loud click of her hang-up echoed the ticking of the numbers on the national debt sign.

Bern pulled from his closet a fresh, white, long-sleeved shirt. Should he iron it? The collar was askew. Wouldn't ironing suggest—
reveal
—to Kate a hope on his part?

It's said that Carlo Lodoli was perpetually disheveled and dank, distracted as he moved through the world. Yet young people flocked around his tattered, tottering frame, eager to hear his talk.

In the bedroom, Bern considered his face in the mirror of his dresser. Querulous. Pale. An expression of frozen surprise. I le recalled the lost eyes and mouths on the wall at St. Vincent's. Tucked inside the wooden edge of the frame around his mirror was a newspaper clipping, yellowed now, about the discovery of an old burial ground in Lower Manhattan. Workers had unearthed ten to twenty thousand slave remains when they dug a pit for a new federal building. Bern had kept the clipping to keep alive in his mind knowledge of what Kate called the city's layers—the island's onion skins. Paper and bone. A passing breath.

The clipping nudged another scrap on the mirror, also beginning to yellow: “Ten Rules for Cardiovascular Health.”

Bern's dresser was thick with relics from his past: a framed quote from an Isaac Babel story: “You Must Know Everything.” Marla had given it to him for his twenty-eighth birthday. A cherrywood box for paper clips and pennies, also a gift from Marla. A comb, rarely used. An empty container for “Cactus Candy,” a souvenir of Houston, vividly blue and green with a hot yellow streak on the side of the box. Probably these things will outlast me, Bern thought. Through the years, their hard edges will soften but remain, and here they'll stay: testimony to the life I lived, good or ill.

Kate's place resembled a parochial school, with framed, out-of register prints of St. Patrick and the Virgin on the wall above a bookshelf. On the shelf were candles in thick glass containers imprinted with the faces of saints and prayers for salvation, fortitude, and luck.

The solemn atmosphere, broken only by a couple of sports magazines left open on the floor, was bolstered by Faure's
Requiem
, playing softly on the CD player. Bern recognized the stately Kyrie.

In the lobby, on his way to the elevator, Bern had noticed the grime on the walls, the tiles like weak, malarial eyes staring at him. The stench of old cabbage and rotting meats in black plastic bags piled in a side room next to the elevator shaft caused his stomach to clench, the odors clashing with the scent of the single rose he'd brought for Kate. The feathery erotic charge that had tickled his skin since her phone message dissipated in the lobby's pungent assault.

The building's hallways appeared to be part of a wasp's nest, cells within cells. Rough, sandy walls. Holiday decorations-all out of season (red Christmas bells, cardboard skeletons, brittle and dry four-leaf clovers)-sagged on a few apartment doors.

When Kate let him in, her roses and the cayenne prickle of the soup carried him back into East Texas bayous: the hunt for crayfish in muddy bottomlands packed with steamy brown leaves, warm seepage from rice paddies.

“How nice,” Kate said, taking the rose from his hand. She placed it in a glass of water and set the glass on a wood plank atop her antique radiator, next to pots of roses. Starlike blossoms strained toward the window and the lights of the street. “Portaluca, the man at the market told me these were called,” Kate said, touching the flowers. “I'd never heard that name. I guess that's what they say up here. Wine?”

“Yes, thanks,” Bern said. Through her window he glimpsed satellite dishes, ash cans, rainspouts.

She pulled the cork from a bottle of Cabernet.

“No Guinness?” Bern asked.

“I only drink Guinness in bars, to impress older men,” Kate said. She saw him eyeing the saints. “I know. It's like a K-Mart convent in here. I'm lapsed, don't worry. What can I say—I like the kitsch. It comforts me. Childhood, you know. You?”

He thought she meant the wine, to which he had already assented, and he stood puzzled. Then he realized she was asking about his religious upbringing.

“Oh. Nominally Jewish. What the newspapers call ‘cultural Judaism.' Little to do with faith, so I never had a chance to lapse. I must say, I've noticed in others that ‘lapsed' is a pretty murky category.”

Kate laughed and raised a thick brown brow. “A Texas Jew …”

“It's true, we were rare in our part of Houston. But not ostentatious, which is why my wife's family, good Southern Baptists, finally accepted me in spite of their doubts.”

“You married hellfire?”

“She told me she had lapsed.”

“I see.”

Now the
Requiem
soared. The minor strains of the Offertory gave way to the Sanctus. The violas wept.

Kate didn't join him in the wine. For herself she poured a glass of mineral water. He felt the odd treat of seeing her beyond public arenas, among her private things, at a rhythm of her choosing. He would watch. He would learn.

“Gumbo's almost ready,” she told him. “Relax.
Mi casa es tu casa …
does that apply to rentals? Anyway, kick those magazines out of your way. Gary's old baseball stuff …”

At the mention of the name, Bern stiffened involuntarily. He stepped around the magazines as though they were predators whose sleep he shouldn't disturb. The wine tasted like pepper.

She ladled the gumbo into fat yellow bowls, topped off his glass of wine, and placed a stiff baguette, wrapped in a tea towel on a platter, on her tiny dining room table. She switched off the lights in the kitchen. Candlelight perked across her forehead, nose, and cheeks. They toasted. The
Requiem
reached its climax-in Paradisum. The piece's martial pacing opened up into lighthearted trills: for one jaunty measure, Bern caught something like a Rodgers and Hart beat. Perverse of him to hear, in sacred strains, the Great White Way. What kind of philistine was he? What was he doing here?