Shadow Traffic (2 page)

There was a large Christmas tree in the Ritz, fully decorated, with a lot of tinsel and a star on top, but the lobby was so big the tree merely blended into the room instead of dominating it. In the approximate center of the lobby a pianist and saxophonist were playing “Someone to Watch over Me.” A few middle-aged couples and one elderly couple were dancing on the relatively small dance floor.

Chris and he sat on a green sofa in a corner of the room waiting for their drinks. He'd forgotten that there was sometimes live music at the Ritz. That made it more difficult to talk, of course, and he sensed Chris was feeling awkward. They sat through a somewhat jazzy version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in something close to silence, then, after some tepid applause, the musicians took a break just as their drinks mercifully arrived.

“Not exactly Debussy
or
Ravel,” Malcolm said, with a smile.

Chris smiled. “No, not exactly.”

“The pianist had pretty good chops, though, what'd you think?”

“He played all the notes, but I couldn't really evaluate him as a musician,” Chris said, “'cause they make them water down the music so much so people can dance to it.”

“Elevator music, we used to call it.”

“Yeah, I know. I used to have a gig like this once.”

“Really?”

“Not at the Ritz but at the Adams Mark.”

“Still, that's a pretty good hotel.”

“It was a good gig, moneywise, the best I ever had.”

“So you really were at a professional level?”

Chris shrugged, then took a large swallow of his tequila sunrise, and Malcolm followed, fugue-like, with his.

“Why did you stop?”

“I was studying to be a classical pianist till that got too expensive. Then I tried to do something with jazz, but I didn't really have the nerve and I never had the money.”

Malcolm finished his drink and ordered another round from one of the waitresses who were pouncing on tables every ten minutes like leopards to solicit more drinks. “I wish I'd known you then. I might have been able to help you. When did you stop studying?”

“Maybe four or five years ago.”

“Before I came into my big money, but I still had enough where I could have helped.”

Chris gave him a strange look and then began his new drink.

“It's so rare that we meet the right person at the right time,” Malcolm said, “or that we realize who the right person is in time. It makes you wonder sometimes why we've lived at all if we only realize things when it's too late to do anything about them.”

He looked at Chris for a response, but he was busy finishing his new drink.

“There's a poem by T. S. Eliot,” Malcolm continued, “I hope I'm not confusing him with W. H. Auden, no seriously, it
is
from Eliot. Anyway, he wrote ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning.' Do you identify with any of this?”

Chris shrugged moodily again with his eyes averted, and Malcolm felt the same sense of panic he'd felt earlier—like a buzzing in his brain, easier to hear now that the music had stopped. Then
Chris finally answered and the buzzing sound went away as if it too merely had the endurance of a firefly.

“Sure, that's happened to me, I've realized things too late. But other times you do know what you should do, you realize the path you should take but just can't afford it. I was once in the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia.”

“Wow,” Malcolm said, “pretty good school.”

“Yah, but I had to take care of my father because he'd had a heart attack, and support myself, and I couldn't do all three, so I just had to leave school before I got my degree.”

“That's a shame. I feel very badly for you. That's different from what I'm saying really—that's definitely a different kind of tragedy.”

Chris nodded. “I've had the other kind, too, especially with my last girlfriend,” he said, suddenly turning his head and staring directly into Malcolm's eyes.

Had Chris emphasized the word “girlfriend” or had he imagined that? He heard the buzzing again and finished his next drink quickly, as if to drown it.

“You want another?” he said, holding his glass up in the air.

“No, thanks, I've got to get back to my cab now.”

“What? You've hardly spent any time here at all,” Malcolm said, withdrawing a couple of fifties from his pocket and holding them out above the table as if he were about to throw food to a fish or duck.

“No, no, I really can't.”

“But I …”

“Please put your money away, sir,” Chris said, rising from the table almost as if he were going to fight him. “My … time isn't for sale like that.”

“Oh my God, I know what you're thinking, oh this is funny, sad mainly, of course, but also funny how you've gotten the wrong idea. Should I say what I think your idea is?”

“I don't have any ideas, sir.”

“I thought you were an intelligent, very intelligent and interesting guy and you told me about your musical career and I felt badly for you and wanted to see if I could help you out and you thought or think, that …”

“Don't tell me what I think,” Chris said, gritting his teeth. “You don't know me, or what's happened to me. Your money doesn't buy you that kind of power.”

“You've misunderstood.”

“Weren't you quoting from that poem about experience? Well I've had the experience and I don't miss the meaning and I'm going to learn from my experiences, OK? I don't know what gives you rich guys the right to think you can treat a person as if you've discovered some great truth about them and what they really need and then insult them with it just because you think they're sad or alone and poor.”

Malcolm looked up at him and saw that his face was getting red.

“No, not at all, Chris, you've really misunderstood.”

“I haven't misunderstood,” he said, pounding his fist on the table. A number of people looked up from their seats at them and Malcolm lowered his head.
“You've
misunderstood, Caesar,” he said, hissing his name sarcastically.

Then he walked away from the table in a few quick, imperious strides. Malcolm was afraid to look around now, knowing that he was still being watched. He knew he should put one of the fifties on the table and go, yet he felt frozen, as if rooted to his chair.

The leopard waitress picked that moment to pounce. “Would you like another drink, sir?”

“Yes, another,” he said. He had reached the point where he was afraid not to drink. Otherwise, the memories would come back, swarming and silent and no two alike, like snowflakes he supposed. Many of them would melt on contact, he told himself, but all the while more were accumulating then melting, and even now he knew Chris would be part of that memory snow that would stick. That was the price of human contact, or, in his case, the attempt at some. Would he never learn his lesson?

The waitress was back with his drink. They were unfailingly dependable when collecting money was involved. Yet how could he blame them, or even Chris, who'd walked off with his hundred dollars. He hadn't been any different when he was young. He was more selfish than any of them. Of course, he'd been at a tremendous disadvantage having to live with all his secrets weighing him down like a backpack of snow. Yes, he'd lived a life full of secrets, and the worst part of that was he never knew who knew and who didn't, not even with his own parents, from whom he was now rich. It was as if they'd rewarded him from beyond the grave for keeping his secret and sparing them the pain of hearing it. That was irrational, he knew, but memories eventually made you irrational, burying your rationality under an avalanche of snow.

It was odd how the beautiful memories hurt more than the painful ones. At least with him it worked that way. Even when it involved the relatively few men he'd been with. He could feel himself tearing up when he thought of them, or before them if he thought of his sled rides with his father down the hill across from the house where he grew up. Their laughter in the snow.

He finished his new drink and looked up for the leopard but
saw a man walking toward him instead. It reminded him of the car accident he was in a few years ago, the way the man approached him as if in slow motion.

“Hi there,” the man said. He was probably around his age although Malcolm hoped he looked a few years younger. The man was well dressed too, in a navy blue blazer and light blue cashmere sweater. He could tell by his half-ironic, half-pitying smile that he'd witnessed Chris's dramatic exit—how could he not have?

“Hello and Happy New Year. I'm just on my way out,” Malcolm wanted to say but instead only managed a muted “hello.”

“I'm Gene,” the man said, still standing in front of his sofa, which in a way was worse than if he'd sat down next to him uninvited. He rose from the sofa and said, “I'm Malcolm,” then right on cue Gene extended his hand and they shook.

“Are you having a happy holiday?” Gene said, in a half-ironic voice.

“I was having a reasonably happy holiday until a little while ago.”

“Oh?” Gene said, raising his eyebrows until he managed to form a completely convincing quizzical expression. He was a good-looking man somewhere in his late fifties, perhaps he'd once done some modeling or acting, Malcolm thought, the way he'd just maneuvered his face so adroitly.

“I'm sure you must have witnessed the unpleasant scene here a few minutes ago. I'm sure the whole room saw it.”

“I saw something. I'm sorry that it was unpleasant for you. What was that youngster in such a snit about? Oh, well, why don't we have a drink and make things more pleasant?” he asked politely enough, yet it seemed more a statement of policy than a request. Here was his chance to start the exit process back to
his house in Clayton, where he could recover from Chris, but instead he said, “Sure, sit down.”

Gene sat in a chair, not exactly opposite him but not next to him either. The furniture here was arranged like a museum of odd angles, Malcolm thought.

Then a leopard, who was probably watching this entire encounter, pounced in front of them and Gene ordered drinks, putting twenty dollars on the small circular table in front of them.

“Well … you're looking good, Malcolm.”

“Thank you,” he said, vaguely aware that he should return the compliment. “By the way, many people call me by my middle name, Caesar. Do you like that name more?”

“Malcolm is just fine.”

“You like it better than Caesar?”

“Caesar is maybe a bit militaristic. I vote for Malcolm,” he said, smiling.

“Oh, OK, then Malcolm it is.”

That was the way their conversation began. It was long on smiles, of one kind or another, but short on wit. Yet, at the same time, it seemed orchestrated by Gene, as if he was keeping his intelligence in reserve, knowing it was a weapon he could use later, whenever he felt the time was appropriate.

“Do you remember the term ‘generation gap'?” Gene said, arching his eyebrows meaningfully.

“Sure, of course. It was the national buzz word once and old buzz words never die, they just grow older.”

“Exactly. So this young man who landed a hard left hook on the table—was it, in retrospect, really more of a generational thing than anything else?”

Malcolm paused and found himself seriously thinking about Gene's question, painful though it was to think of Chris again.

“In a certain sense, I suppose it was.”

“I'm just curious.”

“But in a certain sense isn't everything partially true? Isn't that why we find ourselves in such a wonderfully clear and lucid world?”

“Oh, oh. You're being sarcastic. This can't be good.”

“I read somewhere that sarcasm is the protest of the weak, so I suppose that's true.”

“Are you weak, then?”

“In certain ways I'm afraid I am.”

Gene smiled and looked at him closely.

“Well, I didn't mean to cut you off before when you had a point to make about, how did you put it?—‘everything being partially true.' Is there a point in my asking for an example?”

“Oh, let's say you have a possessive mother, as I actually did, who tried to keep you away from your father and from your friends because of her own need for you. You could easily enough say she was selfish, but it's also partially true that she loved you in the only way she knew how. You couldn't really say she didn't love her child at all, could you?”

“No, you couldn't. And I'm sure she did,” Gene said, smiling earnestly. For a moment he looked like a cat, but a kind he'd never seen before. My mind is working strangely tonight, Malcolm thought, I definitely need another drink.

Life rewards vigilance, he knew that, but no one could be vigilant every moment, could they? He was walking down a hallway in the Ritz, following a step or two behind Gene, the way he used to follow after his father, because Gene wanted to show him his suite at the Ritz. Talk about wanting to feel rich. At least
he hadn't told Gene about his own money, he didn't think. He'd been vigilant enough not to do that, but of course, he did wonder now about what might happen with Gene, and perhaps, more to the point, why he'd agreed to go with him? Was it just because Gene had listened to him babble about his parents then listened further to some of his ideas that were little more than bitterness-induced truisms? Did one derive such power from the mere fact of listening?