Connections (10 page)

When the phone rang, Ken Hollis jumped out of the chair and zipped up his beige cardigan with the brown suede pocket flaps and elbow patches. He stuck out his hand. “I gotta be going anyway.” Although it was cool today with a beautiful breeze, it was too warm at this time of year for a sweater.

The phone rang again. Bernie Petris also stood, took the hand offered to him, and shook it. “Thanks an awful lot for coming in. I hope we can work something out.”

“I know we will.” He looked at the phone ringing the third time. “G’head. Answer it. I’ll be in touch.” As he opened the door, he heard Bernie’s fingers snapping several times, and he turned around.

Bernie waved him back, even as he spoke into the phone. “I understand what you’re saying, miss, and I think you’re right, but I…I know there is. As a matter of fact, we’re trying to organize something now, but with all the red tape and then the city…Hey, wait a minute. Let me put a guy on here who would be interested. We were just having a meeting on this very thing, and we’re trying to get a committee started or something just like you’re asking for. But he’s an expert on this type of thing. Hold on a minute.” Bernie put his hand over the receiver as he held it out. “Speak of the devil. Gal at a bank in Yorkville had an elderly woman withdraw a lot of money this morning. She’s sure somebody’s ripping her off. Why don’t you talk to her? You never know.”

“Hello, my name’s Ken Hollis. I’m a consultant to the mayor, and I’ve been working on crimes against the elderly. We’re trying to set up a special task force, but I want you to understand that I probably can’t do a thing right now. Might take months before we get it going.” With that, Ken Hollis sat down and unzipped his sweater, ready to listen.

Rain strumming the air conditioner lulled Laurie. Cars steadily swooshing on the wet street, water slapping rhythmically against the bricks, massaged her nerves. She kept the blinds up, the window open a few inches, and the lights off so she could lie on her bed and enjoy the music of the storm. Even though it was afternoon, it was ominously dark outside.

Sunday was her only day to catch up with herself, and she didn’t feel at all guilty for not finishing her chores yesterday or for going to the office instead of cleaning and doing the laundry. But she missed taking care of herself last weekend, and she promised herself last night, as she shut off the alarm, that she would relax today. She had slept until ten, made bacon and eggs without worrying about the cholesterol, and perked real coffee without worrying about the caffeine. In jeans and a T-shirt, without a bra, she wrapped herself in a plastic slicker and went to the supermarket. She didn’t feel like taking her shopping cart in the rain, so she bought only as much cat food and litter as she could carry. Returning with the papers, which she kept dry under her slicker, she put her nightgown back on and curled up on the couch with another cup of coffee and the
News
. Later, she dusted and vacuumed the cat hairs off the upholstery.

Afterward, she chose to do a little spring cleaning on her body rather than on the kitchen and bathroom. So she gave herself a facial and a pedicure, tweezed her eyebrows, and shaved her legs. It seemed like a very long time since she’d had a day like this all to herself, without any obligations or commitments, and it was delicious. Now that the new system was almost “live,” after all the long and hard hours she had put in, she felt good about goofing off. A little vacation—she felt she was entitled to it.

Felix, who was lying with her after her nap, stretched, with his front paw flicking her cheek. She squeezed him and then rolled him off her chest into the crook of her arm. By the end of June, they’d be all set. “And then,” she whispered into Felix’s ear, “just wait and see Dr. Pomalee’s reaction when I invite him to a complete demonstration.” She stroked his head with two fingers.

Lightning bolted across the sky, momentarily illuminating the room. In the flash, she saw the green eyes open on the dresser and then close quickly, just before Oscar streaked through the air, landing on top of her for protection. “Maybe I’ll give the computer information about myself. My money and things. And it can figure out how I should budget myself. Or my love life; that would be even better.”

Felix hissed at her as she unconsciously wound his fur tightly around her finger. “I wonder,” she mused, “if computers can laugh.”

Kola’s back legs bicycled furiously; high-pitched yelps forced her mouth open; strenuous gasps made her chest heave up and down. In her nightmare, she could not recreate the cold, the hunger, the lost-ness; she could not picture the man who kicked her or the truck that drove away and left her. She couldn’t imagine the grief of her old woman dying. She couldn’t feel the metal rungs denting her snout or her paws pushing against a cage trying to get out. She couldn’t hear the clamor of animals in the kennel howling at the scent of death just beyond the steel door.

Kola couldn’t remember the specific feelings or faces. But they all came together in shadows of giant monsters and terrifying evils swooping in and out of focus. Just as a demon descended, its outline moving to define its shape, just as hundreds of tentacles of fear reached down for her, held her still, her eyelids fluttered, straining to open.

It was dark and quiet. Her breath moaned through her ribs in a soft cry. She swiveled her head enough to see the gentle face emerging from the mound under the blanket. She inched upward until her back was pressed into the boy’s back. She lay motionless for a long time, her head bent in an awkward angle, just looking at him, her eyes melting with all the love and possessiveness and gratitude of her being. Then she rolled on her spine, her belly exposed, her four paws folded over her, in a primal wolverine gesture of subordination.

The light touched the tips of the buildings in the distance like a copper wand, lifting the veil of darkness hovering over them. At 6:40, more than an hour later than usual, Louise had already done eight blocks—three more to go in one direction and then head back—which would be her morning mile. It was something between a jog and a brisk walk with an energetic dog that helped her work up a sweat, and now that she’d been doing it for a few months, she felt trimmer and firmer, although she worried that her thighs and buttocks were going to become more muscular and make her look even heavier. Only during the last few weeks had she felt the sense of freedom that came with turning the clocks ahead and being outside when it was light. In the winter she didn’t like walking at that hour—she was usually out by 5:30—which seemed like the middle of the night.

People who knew thought she was crazy, that it was unsafe to be on the streets that early. But she knew better. The city might not be fully awake, but there were plenty of bodies out there. If she walked anywhere near Lexington, there were a lot of people, mostly men, who scattered in different directions from the express stop on 86
^th
Street on their way…somewhere. Private sanitation trucks picked up garbage from stores and fast-food places. Oriental grocers cut up melons and fresh fruits and doled out portions into plastic boxes. Two-way radios squawked unintelligibly from identical cars waiting by the curb for a call, the drivers either sleeping or doubled up in the front seat, playing gin. Sidewalk breakfast vendors unhitched their wagons from the cars that brought them and brewed their first urn of coffee. Bundles of the
Daily News
and the
Post
and the
Times
were tossed out of trucks with clever slogans painted on the sides to wait in front of office buildings for cigar-stand owners to bring them in. Janitors hosed their sidewalks while the doormen stretched awake. Dellwood drivers stacked cases of milk outside all-night markets. East Indians unlocked their newspaper kiosks on every other corner.

Regardless, Louise had her big, fierce watchdog with her.

The sound of metal gates rolling up, garbage grinding, things hitting the sidewalk were like a cock-a-doodle-doo to Louise. The only thing that interrupted the music and her gait was Honda stopping every once in a while to bark at some homeless person curled in a doorway.

She felt invigorated and even though she was late—according to her regular schedule; early for everyone else’s—she needed a cup of coffee, an extra jolt of caffeine. She needed it before her shower, with her T-shirt matted to her skin, her hair stuck to her scalp with perspiration, and her armpits sticky with deodorant and sweat. She needed it sitting at a counter, mingling with taxi drivers and construction workers on their way to a job. She was afraid to tie up Honda, not that anyone would dare approach her big killer, but she couldn’t relax with him howling outside, tethered to a hydrant or a pole. She’d drop him off first and go right back out.

🙧

Ken Hollis grabbed his suit jacket as it started to slide on to the seat. He made a hook of two fingers, hung it out, and then laid it over the back of the seat, keeping his eyes straight ahead. What a great morning! With the temperature a pleasant 72 degrees, he didn’t bother with the air conditioner. He was more comfortable driving with his elbow resting in the open window anyway. At seventy-one miles, the Long Island Expressway was not even that long, especially on its most heavily traveled segment, but normally, by measuring speed in feet per hour rather than miles, it took forever to get into the city. Or out of it. One hundred fifty thousand cars travel over it daily, but, as many commuters would swear, 149,000 of them always decided to drive on it at precisely the same time.

Taking the car at all had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, and now that he was whizzing along as if he were on a country road, he was glad he’d made it. He had agreed to meet Donna Griffen before the bank opened so she could feel free to talk to him. Actually, that was easier for him too, since it was all so unofficial. But when he started thinking about taking the subway uptown to the coffee shop on 85
^th
Street she’d mentioned, then going all the way down to City Hall for a meeting, getting back uptown for an evening class he was teaching, and finally going back to Penn Station, he thought the hell with it. He’d rather sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic, worrying about the car overheating and paying through the nose for a garage. He never expected to be driving along at 45 miles an hour. He might do this more often. Even though it would be more convenient to park near Hunter so he’d have the car close by, the rates would be much cheaper in Yorkville. And if his luck held out, he might even find a spot on the street up here.

It made all the difference, leaving before seven—unless he considered that leaving an hour early to avoid the traffic would give him an hour to kill when he got there. He could always pick up a paper and have a pre-breakfast cup of coffee. As a matter of fact, the topic of conversation at many a social gathering in his area was always how backed up the traffic was on the LIE. Someone would brag, trying to win the most-harrowing-drive contest, “Would you believe it took me an hour and a half to go for a twenty-minute ride?” But then, there was always someone else who occasionally had to go somewhere in the middle of the night, probably between 12:30 and 5:00 a.m., and would boast, “It only took me twenty minutes to do what usually takes me an hour and a half.” The truth was that since construction first started on the Long Island Expressway in 1954, nobody ever took a twenty-minute drive on it in twenty minutes. In broad daylight.

Ken hadn’t noticed that the lights were all out. It was just something that he knew was there. And the next minute it wasn’t, and he didn’t know when the change had taken place. When he first started, he began counting the lights, nodding his head as he passed them, like an animator flipping life into cartoon characters. He made it to fourteen and never realized that he had stopped counting and that they were all off now. Ken read that in 1975, when the city had to cut back, they had taken out almost 500 of the lights on the Expressway, leaving a total of 1,220 in operation, with every other one lit. With an astronomical time switch that automatically adjusted to sunrise and sunset, a backup photoelectric control was added so the light of day would strike the on and off switches. They were well prepared for a power failure.

Ah, I spoke too soon
, Ken thought about the traffic moving, as his lane slowed and a line of red brake lights punctured the gray dawn. He felt in the console caddy for the E-Z Pass and clicked it onto the windshield.

He fiddled with the radio knob to get rid of the static and heard “hazy, hot and humid, with the highs reaching near ninety. Alternate side of the street parking is in effect today.” The cars ahead of him came to a standstill and then slowly fanned out toward the seven toll booths. When he saw two uniformed attendants crossing the plaza, about to open the additional booth for the morning rush, he stepped lightly on the gas pedal and swerved the steering wheel. His left arm was stretched outside, his hand bracing the roof of the car and his fingers tapping the fiberglass impatiently. He waited, watching three men in bright orange vests set up bright orange cones to add a new path into the Midtown Tunnel, leaving only one in the opposite direction.

“Sure, we have mechanical wonders to let nature control our machinery,” he complained to nobody, “but they still haven’t been able to figure out how to squeeze nine lanes into three.” Ken leaned to the right and looked in the rearview mirror. He put his hand through his hair and unconsciously pulled on the curls, like he’d done when he was a kid, trying to straighten them. He used to worry that people would think he was a sissy because of his curly hair, that they’d think he had it permed. And the blond made it worse; he was sure everybody thought he had it done in his mother’s beauty parlor. But it didn’t bother him at all anymore. Then again, he had the small bald spot on the back of his head to bother him these days.

He examined his reflection and thought that now, with the gray coming in, it made his hair look gravelly. Rough. It went well with his dark skin tone.

It was wonderful to reach the age of thirty-four and not give a damn what anybody thought of you.
There’s nothing that attaining maturity can’t heal
. Ken smirked and then added out loud. “That, and twelve thousand dollars’ worth of therapy.”

🙧

Louise scraped off some of the cream cheese with a knife. She’d asked for a “shmear” and got what looked like half a pound. She probably would have eaten it all if she hadn’t been feeling so virtuous about the extra ten blocks she did after dropping Honda home. She licked her upper lip while she was smoothing out the cheese, admiring the well-done, toasted everything-bagel in her hand. She opened her mouth and bit down hard, savoring the crunchy noise.

“Well, well, well. So this is where the movers and shakers dine out!” Ken Hollis said as he slid onto the stool two seats from her.

Louise’s teeth stuck in the thick dough; the bagel sprang like a seesaw onto her face, leaving a glob of cream cheese hanging from the tip of her nose. Even though she meant to turn the other way to hide, she was so startled that she looked Ken Hollis right in the face. For a second, unable to chew, she couldn’t recall where she’d seen those deep brown eyes before.

He stopped laughing when the counter man put a heavy mug in front of him while holding the glass pot in a question mark. “Got any decaf?” Ken asked, adding, “I’ll have a toasted English with it.” He watched the man change pots for the one with the orange lid and pour his coffee, which gave Louise a chance to swallow the piece of bagel, not thoroughly chewed, and wipe her face with a napkin. Although she was now neater, she was sure she smelled and could have kicked herself for not showering and dressing. But if it bothered him, that was
his
problem.

“Come here often?” She grinned, acknowledging that she remembered him and his line and that yes, she was a mess. “No. As a matter of fact, this is the first time.”

“I didn’t realize you lived in this neighborhood.”

“I don’t. I drove in from the Island.” He looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to meet someone here for breakfast, and I’m real early. Do you live around here?”

“Nah. I just put on this disguise when I go slumming. You know, the sweaty old clothes, the dirty sneakers. So nobody will recognize me.”

“I don’t blame you. Your father—the commissioner—must be very careful so nobody kidnaps you.”

They both laughed.

“Actually, I live practically around the corner, on 88
^th
Street. I jog every morning. Well, not quite jog; more like brisk walking. I take my dog with me so he gets his exercise too. I brought him home, and I was just dying for a cup of coffee.” Louise didn’t know why she was explaining or why she cared. He wasn’t good looking. Not with that long crooked nose. And he was much too thin for somebody so tall. She hated thin men. Even sitting, he looked lanky. Skinny, with curly hair. The only nice thing about him was his voice.

“This is a real treat for me,” Ken said. “A good old-fashioned coffee shop. A good old-fashioned
Greek
coffee shop. I thought they’d all gone the way of the candy store.”

“There are still a lot of coffee shops left.”

He shook his head. “Not downtown. They’re all salad bars now. Serve yourself. I hate that for lunch.”

“You don’t like salads?”

“Yeah,
with
my meal, not
as
a meal. I don’t find them very filling. Besides, I don’t like serving myself and sitting at a cramped table with strangers.”

“Come to think of it, you’re right,” Louise agreed. “But around here, maybe since this is so residential, there are still a few of them left.”

Ken swept his arm at the cracked vinyl booths, the worn Formica tables and broken tiles on the floor, and smudges of hardened grease on the grill. “You can’t get this in a salad bar. Even in the suburbs, the diners have all gotten so ritzy. You need a reservation, or you have to stand on line for a table. You know, sometimes you just feel like having bacon and eggs for lunch or grilled cheese or a real hamburger and French fries, not the kind that comes from McDonald’s.”

“You have something against pasta too?” she asked.

“You mean cold noodles in weird shapes and colors?”

Louise did her imitation of the old spaghetti-sauce commercial: “Dat’s-a pasta. Basta with the pasta!”

Although it was all very logical to progress from talking about lunches to talking about dinners to making a date to have one together, Louise didn’t understand later how it actually happened. Or why, as she was vigorously washing herself in the shower, she was singing.