The Empire of the Dead (6 page)

Kate crossed her arms over her breasts. The dish towel hung from one of her hands and covered her torso, demurely. “I think you should go, Wally.”

He made a formal bow. A bobbing punch-clown. “I'm sorry, Kate.”

“I'm sorry, too.”

“Thank you for dinner.”

She nodded.

Only steps away from Kate's he felt his shoe crack—a slapstick flapping of the worn right heel—as he crossed Seventh where, apparently, the new St. Vincent's would be built. Bern went through shoes at an alarming rate: three pairs in the last six months. Shoddy craftsmanship, he thought. Then: Of course she doesn't want me. I'm just an old curmudgeon.

In the middle of the avenue, a crumpled Starbuck's cup blew against his instep.

His heart beat fast again. His hands smelled of salt and cayenne, and faintly of the flower he'd cut for Kate.

The western sky was glassy violet with a smear of orange. From the shadows of the hospital a dirty, khaki-clad figure reeking of gin and onions lurched at a pair of girls. “Cigarette,” he said. “Fuckface. Fuckface.” The girls fell back against a wall. Bern thought of stepping in—but why? To do what? Assert himself? At his age? These girls were old enough to stroll around the city on their own, to cope with whatever the streets tossed up at them. One of the young ladies fished a cigarette from her purse.

Bern started to head up Seventh toward a subway station. On
Kate's corner, a raucous party erupted out of a brownstone's doorway, down the building's concrete steps. Young people laughing and drinking beer from silver cans. Many of them appeared to be interns at St. Vincent's—they wore wrinkled green medical smocks. A basket of blue paper slippers, the kind doctors pull over their shoes for sanitary purposes, stood on the stoop. The revelers seemed to be using the slippers as party favors, wearing them on their heads or hands, or stuffing them into their pockets so they resembled boutonnières. Inside, the crowd danced to laborious hip hop while dressed to treat gunshot wounds, burns, and lacerations.

Bern glanced back one last time at Kate's place. Would she let him in now if he showed up, hangdog? Probably she'd gone to bed. He veered away and, thinking of her, missed the subway station. Well, it felt good to walk. It always felt good to walk. His shoe heel clattered on the street like the ceramic tiles hung on a chain-link fence, three or four blocks back, commemorating 9/11. The tiles came from New York well-wishers: “Oklahoma City is Thinking of You!” and “Arizona Says God Bless NYC!” When wind blew and shook the fence, the tiles rattled like seed-filled gourds.

Tomorrow he would telephone Kate. Yes. He was the mature one here: it was up to him to make things right. They
would
forge a friendship, by God—against all odds. Men and women: it could be done. Belfast, right?

Don't get carried away, Bern told himself. After all, “making things right” meant taking small steps. Building a hut one mud brick, one pole, at a time. An apology. A design for a fire escape. A poster for a missing cat. He had learned his lessons from Lodoli, had
become
Lodoli, watching the great cities of his time wax and wane, and wax again. Live lightly on the earth, he thought, and leave all pages blank.

On a sidewalk grating Bern paused impulsively, then steadied his feet as a subway train thundered beneath him.

The cabbie pushed a button and rolled down the windows rather than ease out of his coat as he drove. Shivering in the back seat, Bern concentrated on an ad posted in front of him in a small silver frame: a Lincoln Center staging of the Romeo and Juliet ballet. A few years ago, he had seen a production of
Romeo and Juliet
. The show's second half featured few dances because, by intermission, most of the characters had been killed.

Not the best story line, perhaps.

Like his little pirouette with Kate. He was eager and afraid to see her now.

The cab dropped him near the Dakota. A boy with skin as dully textured as Miracle Whip led a knot of tourists to the corner of Seventy-second Street. “The ghost tour begins in five minutes!” he called. “Spirits of the famous dead …”

Bern slipped into the park across the street, between idle horse-drawn carriages. In a tiled circle inside a small plaza, a mosaic spelled the word
Imagine
. People sat on benches gripping Met bags, eating pretzels the size of babies' fists, or reading papers—“Celtic Tiger!,” a piece about Irish entrepreneurs snatching up Manhattan real estate. A bald man with a blue dragon tattooed on his neck sat by a tree reading a biography of Einstein. Bern found a spot on a bench next to a Jamaican woman, apparently a caretaker hired to watch an elderly lady. The lady shook violently in a wheelchair, precisely in everybody's way. Her companion waved a bagel in her face. “But I dropped it on the ground!” the old girl said. “Well then, I guess you can't
eat
the damn thing now, can you?” said the nurse.

Where was Kate? Making him wait. Punishing him for that terrible night last week.

Of course, he deserved it. He had known she was living off and on with a guy. He had learned she was carrying Off-and-On's kid. How could he have violated their friendship?

We're buddies
, Kate had always said to him.
Yes
?

He was too damn old for this. And she was far too young to tolerate his sorry needs (midtwenties? she'd never said). The perils of the city. This is what happened when you packed people tightly on an island. It was impossible not to feel the
warmth
of the body beside you.

What the hell, he thought. In a few more years, maybe at sixty-five, sixty-six, I'll get prostate cancer. Maybe
that'll
put an end to this miserable daily ache.

Dried flowers formed a circle around a splintered guitar lying on the sidewalk. People dropped coins into the instrument. “Peace and love. Yeah, right,” said one boy to another, walking past. They wore Harvard Business sweatshirts. Japanese teenagers pushed through the crowd, snapping digital pictures of each other, whispering, “Beatle John! Beatle John!” Nearby, a fiftyish-something husk slumped in a wheelchair, a more ragged contraption than the bagel lady's. He held a German Shepard on a leash. A Cat-in-the-Hat top hat wilted on his head like a Neapolitan ice cream cone. “Welcome! I'm the Mayor of Strawberry Fields!” he called to the strollers. “Oh yes, oh yes, we loved Johnny Rhythm, didn't we?”

He pointed to the dark apartment building towering above the trees. As an architect, Bern knew he was supposed to love the structure's ornate grandeur. But it was
fussy
. Thick. “See that black railing in front of the white shutters … up there on the seventh floor … that's where he lived. Yoko still sleeps there. Wasn't it just the greatest love story of the century, folks?
Wasn't it?
“

A few minutes later, with a lull in the sightseeing, he wheeled his chair to the scuffed guitar, picked it up, and shook the money out of it. He stuffed the coins into his coat. “Hey! Fuck! I need me
some juice!” he yelled at a small Hispanic man sitting on a bench. “You! Pancho! What say you push me on down to the corner store?”

“Man, I got no time for this!” the fellow said.

The Mayor said, “Fuck you. You got the fuckin' time. What are you? Late for a fuckin' Security Council meeting at the fuckin' UN?”

Bern rubbed his eyes. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he should just slip into a coffee shop, warm up for a few minutes, and take a subway home.

Then Kate appeared, hunched and flushed, from around a curve in the path leading to the street. She wore a long wool coat, charcoal gray, and a green scarf. “Sorry I'm late,” she said, squeezing next to Bern on the bench. It occurred to him she had chosen a popular spot to fend off intimacy.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“Nausea. You know.”

“Should we—”

“I don't have the strength for a long discussion, Wally, but I needed to see you.”

“Me, too.”

“I didn't want us to end on that badness from the other night.”

“We don't have to end, Kate.”

“We do.”

He stared at his hands. “I'm a grown-up. I can control myself.”

“Of course I know you have the best intentions, Wally. And I miss spending time with you. I enjoyed our friendship. But what's there is there … actually, I'm glad you confessed your feelings … it's good to get them out … but I'm not strong enough …
you're
not strong enough …”

Wait, he thought. Had she just admitted
she
was attracted to
him
? Or did parsing her words prove her case: despite his good will, he'd always press her for more?

“No, Kate.”

Her cheeks, already crimson from the cold, reddened further.
“You're never not sure, are you?” she said. “But that's not the point. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The point is—”

“Katie, please—”

“… the point is, your certainty is another reason we're
wrong
together, Wally. You're the teacher. The expert on everything.”

“No, no, no.”

“Absolutely. That's how you see us. That's how
I
saw us, too, at first. I liked it. Your little lectures to me. From that very first night we met at the bar.”

“I thought they were conversations.”

A sad, brittle laugh. “The gap between Venturi and … who was it? … Gehry? Pediments and dormers … I'm sorry, Wally, what were they? …”

“I'm no expert, Kate. Especially about … you know. I'm a fool. I'm ashamed. I apologize,” Bern said. He felt for her fingers. “Really. I won't say anything more about my … my …”

“You don't understand, Wally. I
crave
your certainty.” She smiled. “It's comforting, so different from people
my
age, and I don't want you to change. But given what's happened …”

“No, no, no.”

“Stop ‘no-noing' me!” She puffed her cheeks. Then she doubled over, holding her stomach. She's right, Bern thought. The body will have its way.

Without speaking, he seized her hand and pulled her out of the park. Down the block he spotted a Greek deli, not too crowded. He pointed to the facilities in back. “I'll wait for you here,” he said. A roast pig turned slowly on a wooden platter in the window. Several minutes later she joined him again on the sidewalk.

“Can we get a cup of coffee?” he said.

“No. I have to meet Gary,” she said.

“Ask him to take you straight home. You need to lie down. Kate. Can I call you? Please? We need more time. I
am
your friend. I won't try to be anything more than that. I promise.”

“Wally. No. I—”

A carriage driver passed them, whipping his horse. The animal did not respond to the blows: its exhaustion seemed saintly, beyond the possibility of pain. “Hey! Stop it! Stop it!” Kate yelled at the man. He glanced at her contemptuously and raised his whip again. Kate turned to Bern, outraged, as though
he
had staged this incident for some unfathomable reason. She looked dangerously weak and pale. “I'm going to be sick!” she muttered. She scurried away.

Bern felt certain he would not see her again.

The perils of the city.

He stared after the carriage at the spot where he'd got his last glimpse of her. The horse whinnied. Any minute now, Bern thought, this beaten brute will crumble to the street. At least its agony will have ended.

He laughed bitterly at his self-pity. A self-pitying man is not capable of being
anyone's
friend.

Oh, now—
that's
self-pity, too, he thought.

He turned for his apartment.

Too much. He was talking too much.

Conscious of the need
not to teach
, he tried to keep his mouth shut. But Kate! A week after their last meeting, she had called and asked to see him again, yet now she sat glumly in the restaurant, twirling her fork, poking at the head of a langoustine in its bed of yellow rice.

Nervous, Bern gulped his first glass of wine, asked for another. He stared at the crab meat on his plate. It glistened warmly. Waiters bustled around him in the narrow aisles between tables where diners came and went, bulked up in wool coats and floppy cashmere wraps. Every now and then, cold gusts from the opened door swirled the caramel-cocoa odors in the air.

Bern's nose ran. He dabbed at it with his napkin. Kate's usually clear gray eyes seemed drained of color. “Are you feeling better?” he asked her. “The nausea?”

“Fine,” she said forcefully, as if this was the last word she ever meant to utter.

So Bern—halfway through his second glass of wine—described for her a recent walk he'd made past the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. A work crew in green caps and maroon coats maneuvered quiet machines across the blade-scritched ice, glazing it with water, he said, while impatient skaters huddled around the ring, chatting, laughing, munching bagels or hoagies. Bern stood and watched the scene from the sidewalk, dwarfed by the shiny metal statue of Prometheus.

“Sounds nice,” Kate said, clearly underwhelmed.

Bern nodded. What had been the point of telling her this? Honestly. Was he suggesting they go skating sometime, like a pair of young lovers? No. No point, really.

The things that struck him that day at the rink were so private, so completely beyond sharing, and so fleetingly insignificant,
awareness
might as well take a hike, he thought.

It was ridiculous.
He
was ridiculous.

How could he tell Kate—and why should he—he had stood there, that afternoon, recalling the frozen lake in Dante's
Inferno
, one of his favorite books in college? Satan brooding in the center of the earth. Then he'd noted the joke (were the center's architects and designers in on it?): Prometheus, the bringer of fire, guarded the ice. Then his mind swelled with jigsaw scenes from silly old television shows—visual bric-a-brac as tangled as the ice tubes, electric wires, and water mains invisible beneath the street. Only later did he realize he'd thought of these shows because RCA, Rockefeller Center's old tenant, had churned them out from its studios here when he was nine or ten years old. Somehow, deep in his brain, he had made a connection … just as, moments later, he underwent an auditory hallucination—chopper blades. Vietnam. Cambodia. And why? Because General Electric, maker of napalm—the bringer of fire—also lived in the Rock.