Ghosts of Manhattan (27 page)

Still staring at William, I wonder what will be his happiest day. He's made it clear it won't be his wedding. For the birth of a son, I imagine he will spend the hours of his wife's labor with friends in a bar around the corner from the hospital and be very drunk when the baby arrives. His happiest day will not be connected to anything external to himself. It will be the day he consumed the most. The day he gets a ten-million-dollar bonus or a twenty-four-hour stretch in Las Vegas when he wins at the craps table, covers the spread on the Super Bowl, takes a few hits of ecstasy, snorts a gram of blow, and has sex with five strippers who are all sisters.

I know I can feel more than this. I can feel good and bad on an order higher than what is only primal, away from a virus eating through flesh.

I look away from William as though I'm coming out of a trance, trying to decipher the images that have just come to me and not conscious of how long I've been under.

On William's desk is the Jenny McCarthy
Playboy
centerfold spread over his computer keyboard. “William. We actually have a few women working here.”

He seems to acknowledge but draw no conclusions.

“Why don't you put that in a drawer before someone has to fire you.”

“Sure, Nick. Sorry.”

I want to sit up from my desk as though I sense it causing an allergic reaction, constricting the air passageways in my throat and making my breathing weak and shallow. I feel like I'm cracking up. I need a vacation from this place. The days away have shown only that I need many more.

“Hey, Nick.”

“Yeah, Ron?” He's gotten out of his chair and walked over next to me and is speaking in a quiet tone.

“Can I ask you something?” I can never get over the irony of this question.

“Sure.”

“Do you think that it can be the same person for both love and sex or that the two things are different enough that it would have to be two different people and that to make it one person necessitates a compromise?”

I give Ron a look that I hope says I want no part of this conversation, but I make the mistake of not actually cutting him off. He somehow interprets it as curiosity.

“See, what I mean is, with love there's this trust and intimacy. That's all great but it's kind of safe and it's not the person you lose control over and want to tear her clothes off. With the best sex there's total abandon and maybe some risk and doubt and then physical heights. It can be aggressive and conquering and not so safe and trusting, with everything already explored and understood. It's wilder and dirtier and probably not with the person who would then be your first choice to talk about your favorite books with. And the person you talk about books with may not
be the first person you want to have crazy sex with. I'm not saying one person can't be good at both things. I'm saying one person can't be number one in both things. There has to be a compromise to choose one person. Right?”

“Jesus Christ, Ron. I don't want to know you like this. Go ask William. He seems to have all this figured out.”

He looks at me wide-eyed and blank. Of possible responses, this is not one he had anticipated. “You're an ass.”

“Exactly how you should feel about me. Get back to work. Go sell some bonds.”

I stand up and walk away before he can leave. I think Ron may not be such a terrible kid and has about a year left to be saved from all this. I could fire him but that wouldn't be enough to do it. He needs to fire the industry.

I grab my coat and walk to the elevator and leave the building. I decide to walk to the subway station for the 6 train and the walking feels good, like I'm occupied and getting somewhere. The sidewalks are full of brisk walkers, but each is closed off from the others like letters dropped through different mail chutes. Their eyes are ahead and slightly down as they travel over a path they have beaten many times before. Their focus is entirely on delivering themselves to the destination and not on what they may encounter along the way. There is no interaction among people, but possibly because there are too many people. To pass a single person in an entire block would require a hello. To pass one hundred people in a single block requires efficiency and skills of self-preservation.

When I stop at a street kiosk to buy a newspaper, I see the most closed of all. His eyes averted, he looks ready to collect my change and move me on like a package on a conveyor belt. But in response to my smile and hello, his veneer cracks. In one moment
he mentions the plight of the Knicks, the NFL playoffs, and the weather. His pent-up niceness comes bursting through like a volcanic eruption through the crust of the earth. Each of the people on the sidewalk may have their own lava to come out with only the prick of a pin.

I tuck the paper under my arm and walk down the steps to the subway trains.

In my subway car alone I see East Asian, Indian, black, Hispanic, and white people, from young to ancient, from suits to tattoos. The mixing process is so complete that even in this car of thirty people, they're all here. This is the real New York, all the rest that is outside the walls of the investment banks. It reminds me how small and pathetic my life inside those walls can be. Rich but pathetic. I can't remember the last time I rode the subway.

I climb out of the subway near Union Square and start for the Cedar Tavern for an early lunch and a drink. I haven't spoken with Julia in a few days now, and I pull out my cell phone to call her. I dial her cell phone so she'll see my number on her caller ID and she can decide whether or not she wants to pick up.

“Hi, Nick.”

“Hey. How are you?”

“Okay.” She pauses. I guess we both do. “Where are you?” Her question is not accusing or demanding. Just soft and curious.

“I'm back in the city.”

“How was your trip?”

“Fine.” There's another long pause. I start to regret having called. It's too clear that we're talking without saying anything.

“Are you coming home tonight?”

“Yes, not till late, though. There's a dinner I have to go to.” This is part truth, part lie. There's no work dinner but I intend to stay at Cedar Tavern drinking by myself until late before going home.

“Okay.”

I clear my throat. I want to change the conversation but I can't begin to put the words together.

“Nick.” She says my name but seems also to fail at the next words. She leaves it hanging in the air, and my instinct is to help it the way a person sees a pencil rolling off a table's edge and flashes a hand toward it by reflex.

“Yes?” I've helped. I wait again.

“I miss us.”

I'm silent now, thinking about those three words, and in particular the last one. She didn't say that she missed me. She didn't say that she missed the Nick Farmer who is walking on Fourteenth Street on January 31, 2006. She said she misses “us,” an entity neither of us has seen in a long time and which is possibly irrecoverable. She doesn't say she wants me to come home. She seems to say she wants me to go back in time and recover something I've lost, then for that person to come home. I don't know how to respond to this and so I tell her the truth. “I don't know what to say to that, Julia.”

“No.” She utters this, it seems, more to herself than to me. “Well, I guess I'll see you later.”

For a moment I wonder if my interpretation of her words is too negative. She had reached out and I shut it down the way I shut down every other person's attempt to reach me. “Yes, I'll be late tonight, so maybe in the morning.” She still seems able to open a door for us. I need to pull myself together and walk through it before it's too late.

“Look, I'm sorry. I just had to tell the assistant district attorney that a guy who is a piece of crap is actually all right.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Can we talk later?”

“Okay. Bye.”

I put the phone back in my pocket and I see the sign for Cedar Tavern a block away. I feel more tense than ever and fear that I've just made a colossal and avoidable blunder by not going to Julia right now, and the consequences are already falling on me like lead weight. I can feel the muscles in the back of my neck.

Cedar Tavern is so dark inside that it's a strange place to enter in the middle of the day. I walk to a booth in the back while my eyes adjust. I pass by the bar stools. I don't want the persistent and stalking presence of a bartender while I pass the hours. I slide across the leather seat of the booth and angle my back to the corner against the wall and settle in with my first drink. I get only a beer as I want a drink but also want to make it the whole day here and not pass out.

The booth feels safe and comfortable to me. I don't have another place to escape to. There's no home and no place of work I can run to. Like DiMaggio in his late years trying hopelessly to make a home of an upstairs room at the Olympic Club with not much to do but meet a dwindling number of old buddies and admirers for a drink in the club bar. I'll make it home eventually, but I think late enough and drunk enough to avoid a conversation.

My cell phone buzzes with a text message and I assume it will be Julia but I recognize it as Rebecca's number.

lost in the village—come help me

I think about dropping everything and getting a taxi to wherever she is. Then I think about what I would do tomorrow. I think most single or married guys I know would jump at this, but I'm already so dejected with myself I can't handle the idea of it. It
would be great for a few hours, then I'd feel miserable and trapped in a prison I made for myself. William's theory on this is right. If I feel that urge, it's safer and easier just to get a hooker, but I don't want to do that either.

out of town. ur on ur own

I stare at the phone in my hand like a woman waiting for the double lines of a pregnancy test and wishing I hadn't shortened
you're
and
your
to
ur
because it looks so ridiculous.

some hero you are

Right. I turn off my phone for the night and get a bourbon. I sip it and think of my phone turned off and feel that I've conquered some small thing. I start to drink a silent toast to myself and then decide screw it, I need to say it out loud like taking an oath. With bourbon at eye level I say, “You're a good person, Nick. You deserve better. Settle for more.”

Anyone overhearing this would think I'm speaking to a departed friend, and I hope it does signal a death and rebirth. It's up to me.

I stare at the bourbon left in my glass and issue a silent challenge. In a violent sip I finish it. I don't only finish it, I vanquish it. I don't want any more, and I think in a few minutes' walk from this bar I can be to St. Vincent's Hospital to visit Jack. I haven't seen him in a while and I need to.

It had been a massive heart attack, and I know from William that Jack is still in the hospital getting tests. I hadn't thought of visiting Jack as something I would do, but now I'm certain it will make me feel better and might be good for him.

I walk into the cardiac ward and ask at the nursing station for Jack.

“Oh, Mr. Wilson,” the nurse says, smiling. “He's made quite an impression on us already.”

I take her meaning literally. I could make a joke here but hospitals always make me so damn uncomfortable. I feel like I'm supposed to be sad and respectful, so I don't say anything.

“He's in three forty-two. He's awake.”

“Thanks.”

I walk into Jack's room and he's lying in one of those mechanical beds that has his head slightly elevated. There are all sorts of wires connecting his body to machines that are beeping like crazy. He's watching TV and looks as white as the sheets.

“Hey, buddy.”

“Nick!” He lights up seeing me but his voice is still weak. I'm watching the numbers on the machines like a hawk and I see one of them start to rise. I think it's the heart rate.

“You've looked better.”

“Yeah. I feel fine.”

“Good.”

“Thanks for the help. I appreciate the soft landing.”

“I didn't have a choice. You had a hell of a grip on me.”

There's a chair under the wall-mounted TV and I sit. The room is all white with a little window looking over Seventh Avenue. We could probably squeeze two more people in here with all the machines and crap. “What did the doctors say?”

“They say I'll recover. I need to take it easy.”

“Yeah? You're going to take it easy?”

“I am. No booze, no coke.” He pauses. “No work.”

“For how long?”

“For however long I have left. Hopefully a while.”

“You're quitting?”

“Already did. Only took a phone call.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

I lean back in the chair trying to digest this. Jack is delivering this like happy news. It also feels like genuinely happy news. “Great.”