Paradise Man (28 page)

H
E COULDN’T LIVE AT LORETTA’S
. The rooms reminded him of the leopard girl. He couldn’t live at his office. He didn’t enjoy the company of furriers and Nick Tiel. He moved into his mattress pad. But the walls bothered him. They smelled of isolation, a bumper growing old.

He returned to Mansions, seized a table, and sat. But no amount of kings could soothe him. And it didn’t matter how often Josephus said hello. Holden couldn’t finish his London broil. He was about to leave when Fay walked into Mansions with Rex and their two daughters, girls who were older than the
santita
and had his darling’s blonde hair. Holden sank into his chair like a spy. His darling sat with Count Josephus. The girls ordered lemonade. They had beautiful complexions and they talked like the characters in their father’s plays. He never thought children could behave like that, with all the bump and bother of adults. He watched his darling move her mouth. He was as drawn to her as he’d ever been. But he couldn’t steal Fay from her own family. He might have sat there with his London broil until the lights went out and the goddess Oyá climbed on his lap to tease him and taunt him. Holden wouldn’t have minded Oyá’s hostile attentions. But Fay looked up from her avocado salad and saw the Frog. And that’s when Holden fled. He was a bumper fated to be alone.

He ran a few blocks, his heart shaking, and discovered Gottlieb in a pair of two-hundred-dollar pants.

“Gottlieb, go away.”

“I can’t,” the kid said.

“Who are you working for now? The Greek furriers? Did you sell them Nicky’s paper?”

“I’m not that dumb. I have the paper, Holden. I’m selling it back to the Swiss ... a cuff at a time.”

“Then you’re a dead person.”

“No I’m not. I’m your whore. And we go half and half.”

“You’re a dead person, I said. You betrayed me twice.”

“I didn’t betray you, Holden. I acted for the firm.”

“What firm?”

“Holden
&
Company. I’m your junior partner. I’ve been keeping strict accounts.”

“You’re a dead person. I’ll whack you the first chance I get.”

“Holden, it was good business. I had Swiss’ ass to the wall.”

“But you didn’t refer to me.”

“How could I? You were lying in pig heaven somewhere with that Cuban mama. I had to take the initiative.”

“I knew Swiss was full of shit. Nicky’s eyes were heavy. He’s doped up. He can’t create. Swiss is recycling Nicky’s old cuffs.”

“Does it really matter?” Gottlieb said. “We’re rich.”

“If we’re so rich, how come you didn’t find me?”

“Holden, I’ve been following you around for a day and a half. Longer than that. I visited your mattress in Queens. I played cards with the witch. I brought lollipops to the little girl.”

“You’re a dead person.”

“Holden, I had to deal with the Swiss. Dolores couldn’t protect you. She was running out of mattresses and men.”

“So you decided to deal.”

“No. It was Goldie’s idea. He saw what was happening. He met me in Bryant Park.”

“That man never goes midtown.”

“He did for you. He told me how to treat the Swiss. ‘Give him a nibble,’ Goldie said. ‘Nothing more.’ He loves you, that old man.”

And the Frog was depressed. You think you know the world, and then you fall on your ass, like Humpty Dumpty. “All the king’s horses,” he said.

“What?”

“I was thinking to myself. Take my share of the money, kid, and find Dolores. I want her to eat. And bring the little girl some dolls. Tell them, ‘Holden is back on his horse.’”

“You never had a horse,” Gottlieb said.

“They’ll understand.” And he removed Changó’s beads from his neck. “Here,” he said. “Give it to Dolores. Thank her for the god’s hospitality.”

“Where are you going?” Gottlieb asked.

“Home.”

But he didn’t have a home. He had a mattress pad. He went to a realtor, Di Robertis, who rolled money around for thieves in the fur market. Di Robertis was a short, clever man who’d given up most of his clients, but he happened to admire Holden. He found the bumper six rooms on Central Park West. It was in one of the great old towers. The price was a million two. “A lot of gold,” Di Robertis said.

“I’ll get it.”

But Holden’s vaults were in a reckless state. He couldn’t gather more than a hundred thousand dollars. He presented himself to the building’s co-op board. Holden was gloomy about his financial picture. He’d have to borrow from one of the mob banks. And the rates were prohibitive. He’d have carrying charges for the rest of his life. He wished now he hadn’t given up Changó’s beads. A god might be able to reason with a co-op board. And then, in the middle of the meeting, there was a knock on the door. Swiss had arrived from Paris. Di Robertis must have told him about the meeting. Swiss wore a fur coat. He was eighty-one, and he looked like a king. Not one of the royal hoboes who lived in a cafeteria, but a real king, with fury around him and a magnificent fur coat on his back. He wouldn’t talk of Holden’s current life. “I was with this man’s father in the war,” he said. And he entertained the co-op board for half an hour with stories of how he’d rescued Rembrandts from the German army. Even Holden was bewitched.

They walked out together. “Swiss, where will I get the gold?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Tell me the truth. Nicky will never design a cuff again.”

The owl king glanced at Holden from the depths of his fur collar. “You know that. I know that. But he seems formidable to the rest of the world.”

“You keep him there in the designing room like a prisoner.”

“It’s better than an asylum. He sits. He draws. He drinks coffee. His sketches make no sense. But he isn’t harming anyone ... Holden, I have to catch a plane. I’m due in Paris in six hours. Behave yourself.”

And Holden lingered on that word. How should a bumper behave? He had a new apartment, thanks to the Swiss. He picked up his check at Aladdin. He avoided Nick Tiel. He threatened one or two furriers. But it was simple stuff. Suddenly everyone was paying their bills.

He bought furniture. Couches, carpets, a bed. His windows looked out onto the park. Fifth Avenue seemed across the world. The park itself was an impossible breach, a canvas of trees that could never be crossed. He’d once lived on the other side of the park, with Andrushka, had looked at the very tower he was living in. And still he couldn’t get that illusion out of his head. The park was uncrossable, an extraordinary veldt. He spied the vague, hidden roofs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A contraption, a pillbox where Andrushka had gone to study Caravaggio. The roofs of a dream.

And Holden began to feel that he was living in a city of walls. It was midnight, and for a moment, in the darkness, Holden thought New York was Avignon. The towers of Fifth Avenue were like the ramparts of that city, ramparts as Holden imagined them. And he himself could have been locked in the popes’ palace with leopards springing from the wall.

He had a visitor in the morning. The kid. Gottlieb had arrived with his own cup of coffee.

“Didn’t you trust me to fix you a cup?”

“I know you,” Gottlieb said. “You never keep coffee in the house.”

Holden remembered drinking coffee, but he searched his cabinets and couldn’t find a coffee bean.

Gottlieb gawked at the rooms. “What a spread. It’s like a cattle ranch.”

“Gottlieb, get to the point.”

“Dolores wants to say goodbye. She’s going to Miami with the girl. It’s not safe here for them.”

“How’s that? They can live with me.”

“Holden, there’s a crisis and the gods are going crazy. Come on. I’ll take you to her.”

It was Gottlieb who switched cabs, who took Holden into Brooklyn and out again until Holden thought the kid was copying his style. Then he discovered a map in Gottlieb’s hand. The kid was following instructions.

“Dolores doesn’t want a certain god on her tail.”

“I don’t understand. Dolores is a priest.”

“Holden,” the kid said. “I have enough trouble with human beings. What do I know about gods?”

They got out of the fifth cab near the Manhattan Bridge. And they walked along Market Street. There had once been a thriving market under the bridge. But now it was a city of old, abandoned stalls with an occasional shop that had survived, selling broken lamps and rubber tires, or a luncheonette that was so tiny, it couldn’t hold two customers at a time. Dolores was lying on a couch in an ancient shop that looked like a chicken coop. The floor was a dark mass of feathers that had hardened into bricks. The
madrina
sweated a great deal. She must have lost fifty pounds in the weeks Holden had been away from her. She was a gaunt Carmen Miranda. When Dolores wheezed, the whole couch moved.

“What’s wrong?”

“We must go to Miami,” the
madrina
said.

“But La Familia has suffered and you have no more enemies in town.”

“You must not say that. The other
madrinas
are jealous. They don’t have a champion like you. They say I slept with Changó, tricked him into my bed, so that the lord would favor you in our fight with Don Edmundo. They have woken the spirits, and Oyá is mad. She is the lord’s mistress, after all. And she will steal my daughter if I stay.”

“Dolores, what can I do?”

“Do nothing. It is priests’ business. We will pray to Santa Barbara when we get off the bus.”

“But I can send you by plane.”

“Please. Oyá will borrow the lord’s thunder and strike all the planes you send. We will sit before Barbara’s shrine. We will ask forgiveness. And if we are worthy, Changó will come to us in his red dress. Then we can return to the north.”

“Will you give me your address?”

“I cannot write, señor. You have been lucky, and all the priests are jealous.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“With me, señor. But I am not certain she should look at your face. She could be harmed.”

Dolores relented and called the little girl in Creole. Barbara arrived from under the couch. She wore a dirty smock and she didn’t have her doll.

“Querida,”
Holden said. He’d been a ghost until the
santita,
a bumper who lived in closets. He’d found a certain recreation in her eyes, a feel of himself. The girl had nourished him with those animal eyes.

“Froggy,” she said, “will you miss me?”

And he started to cry, because he’d lived thirty-seven years as some kind of pilgrim. He’d loved Andrushka the twig. He’d loved Loretta Howard. And he’d loved his dad in a phantom way. But he’d spent his time dispatching people. The paradise man.

He wanted to hug the little girl, but Carmen Miranda scolded him from her couch. “You cannot touch the little one, señor. It is forbidden.”

“Mother, I—”

“You must not call me that. Señor, you have to go. Oyá will curse our bus, and we shall never get to Miami.”

Holden left that marketland under the bridge. He got into a cab with the kid. He was having murderous thoughts. The kid had helped destroy Mrs. Howard. But if Holden destroyed Gottlieb, he’d have one more person to mourn. “Adiós,” he said, and dropped the kid off at one of the banks where the kid had a vault and then Holden continued uptown to Aladdin. He didn’t have to collect any debts. There were mannequins in the showroom, but they couldn’t excite him the way the twig had done. They were college girls trying to earn a dime for their tuition. They didn’t have that frenzy of the twig. They flirted with Holden because he was rich and wore a king’s suit. But the involvement in their eyes only saddened him. He was the Froggy who couldn’t be brought to life by college girls.

He piddled around in his office and returned to Central Park West. He had an odd sensation outside his door. As if Oyá were still angry at him for interfering in Cuban politics. He shouldn’t have been involved with African gods who sometimes wore a Christian face.

Oyá could swim in the Niger whenever she wants. He opened the door and gave a little scream.

Someone stood in Holden’s rooms, wearing a red dress.

“Changó,” he muttered. And then he noticed a head of curly blonde hair and a suitcase. He felt cheated. “Who let you in?”

Fay turned around and Holden had to fight an impulse to kiss his darling.

“I bribed the super,” she said.

“I’m speechless. I mean, I pay a million two for this apartment and the security stinks.”

“You’re always speechless, Sidney. That’s one of your nicest traits.”

“But you could have been sent here to kill me. How would a super know the difference?”

“He wouldn’t. But he trusted me. I told him it was a big surprise ... that it was your birthday.”

“It’s not my birthday,” Holden said.

“But you could pretend it was.”

She’d worn him down and he’d only been home a minute. He wished he had some coffee in the house. Coffee would have bolted him awake. And he could have provided the necessary answers.

“Why did you run away from me at Mansions?”

“You were with your daughters and Rex. Your family. And I was frightened.”

“You’re never frightened ... are you glad to see me?”

“I am glad,” he had to admit. “Very glad. But you have a husband. You have daughters.”

“My daughters can visit. All it takes is the crosstown bus ... I’m not in love with Rex.”

“And Paul, what about Paul?”

“He’ll have to grow up.”

“He’s already grown up. He’s the district attorney.”

“Paul won’t bother us.”

“I know Paul. Paul’s a brooder.”

“So he’s a brooder,” she said. And Holden couldn’t battle with his darling. He didn’t care about the practicalities. Two daughters on a crosstown bus. He wanted Fay with him in his tower.

“I can’t make coffee. I always forget to buy the beans.”

“I won’t drink coffee when I’m with you.”

“You shouldn’t have told Florinda that we made love in the toilet.”

“Why not?”

“It’s personal,” he said.

His darling laughed. She started to unbutton his collar. “Yes. It’s personal,” she said. Fay was like that city outside his window, that mirage of walls. He couldn’t say what love was about. A knock on the head. A naked woman in a bungalow. Curly blonde hair. The tremors in his darling’s throat. That was more than enough for Sidney Holden.