Heart of the City (23 page)

Back at her friend’s apartment that evening, after hanging her coat in the closet, she reached into the pocket for the engagement ring. She rooted in the corners, then turned the lining inside out. The ring was gone. She panicked, then just as quickly grew placid, like an operating room patient surrendering to the lullaby of the anesthetist’s needle. She thought of her father and his superstitions. Then she told herself, It’s over.

THE VOICEMAIL made Milton sit upright in his chair. He rushed through work that afternoon and jogged from his subway stop to his apartment, half expecting to find Chesa. All he discovered was the package. Unwrapping it and finding the needlepoint, of those lazy pigs and their pleading eyes, he felt something wet on his cheeks.

In those first weeks after he’d left her at the airport, he had felt bereft. His apartment felt too big. His weekends were once again barren, save for an occasional Saturday night concert. He had for a short time thought about visiting her. But their relationship, with its strange beginning, had come to feel like a dream. And as the weeks passed, the sense of distance, of unreality, grew. To visit her in the Philippines that summer would be to confront the hurt he’d caused her. He would have to say something, do something, to make things better. But how? The damage had been done. It was easier, cleaner, to move on. He could live with the way things ended, he told himself, because they had ended for good. He withdrew into his music and his books, old shelters from loneliness and longing.

That evening, though, as he touched the needlepoint’s soft threads, he found himself shaking. In vain, he scoured the brown wrapping paper for a phone number or an address. He went to see the superintendent, who just threw up his hands. “She didn’t offer. I didn’t ask,” the man said. All Milton had was an old e-mail address. “I have so much I want to say,” he wrote. “But I’m afraid I’ve lost you. Please write.”

Days passed. There was no reply.

THE YEAR before, Chesa and Milton would carry their clothes in baskets to the laundry around the corner. Chesa had made friends with the owners, two young brothers from China. Now
that she was back in New York, she returned. She came on a Sunday because she knew that Milton, a creature of habit, always washed clothes on Saturdays. She told herself she did not want to bump into him. What she didn’t know then was that Milton hadn’t come the day before, because a work deadline had marooned him in the office. That Sunday afternoon, the laundry was jammed. Everyone on the block, Chesa thought, was cleaning their clothes before the Monday crush.

MILTON WAS sitting in a metal folding chair, studying the dry skin on the back of his hands, when he heard the squeak of the front door. He looked up with a jolt. It was Chesa, struggling to shimmy a bulging bag of laundry through the door. Her jug of detergent was so heavy that she was having trouble balancing it all. The Chinese brothers behind the counter loped over to help her.

Milton felt his heart drop in his chest. “Chesa?” he said, standing up. He took a step toward her, trying to smile. But his muscles failed him. The expression came out lopsided.

“I got the pigs,” he said, “the needlepoint, thank you.”

She set her laundry bag on the lid of a washing machine but didn’t move. “Okay.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t know where to find you.”

“You knew.” She studied the doleful turn of his eyes, then shook her head. “But you never came.”

“Work has been really busy,” he said. “I wanted to, but I just couldn’t. I don’t know.”

She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to the side, shaking it again. “No vacation all that time?”

He took a step closer. “I cared for you, Chesa. I do still. But I was, I don’t know, afraid.”

She loosened the strings on her laundry bag and dropped a few blouses into the machine. “Pig, she pushed Goat too much?”

“Maybe a little,” he said, with a small laugh of relief. “But I was an idiot. That’s all.”

When she saw his tears, she reached out with one hand. “Please, Milton.”

He took her hand, and she laced her fingers between his. There was a short plastic bench across from a row of washing machines, and they sat down. For nearly two hours, they held each other, silently watching their clothes tumble and thinking hopefully about the next day, and the next.

Elevation

EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

Claire was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. Even before she picked up, she felt sure it was Chuck. Typically, his voice betrayed no recognition of the late hour.

“Hey babe,” it came, bright as morning. “I’m hopping over to New York this weekend. We gotta get together, paint the Big Apple red.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah?” she said, trying for enthusiasm as she slid beneath the covers. “That’s great, but I don’t live in the city.”

“Where’s Long Island?”

“It’s near, but it’s no Big Apple.”

“Well, that’s why they invented the train, sweetie, right?”

It was September 1969, and Claire Witten had started a yearlong research fellowship at Brookhaven National Laboratory, more than an hour east by rail from Manhattan. She and Chuck had met that summer at a language program in Austria run by the College of Wooster, in Ohio. Claire and Chuck had been the only participants in their late twenties—everyone else was either in college or retired. So despite their differences—Chuck was loud, gregarious; Claire, quiet, reserved—they became friends and travel companions.

Socially fearless and outsized—both in personality and physical girth—Chuck could be winsome company as they drove through Switzerland, Italy, and Southern France. But the man didn’t know when to stop. Often, just as she’d start yawning, Chuck would announce the onset of a second wind. Well past midnight sometimes, he would be driving them down a bumpy back road in search of some obscure historic site. Even more off-putting, especially considering his braggadocio, was a tendency, when low on money, to wire his father for cash.

Claire, twenty-nine, was the youngest of five kids raised on a small Missouri farm that didn’t have so much as mechanical heat or running water. When the family was cold, her dad built a fire.
When she needed a new dress, she and her mother stitched one from the cotton sacks her dad gave them after emptying out the pig feed. She made high school valedictorian through hard work, and after graduate school she took a job teaching biology at Tougaloo College, a historically black school in Jackson, Mississippi. It wasn’t a common career move for a white farm girl of her era. But because of her family’s struggles, she often allied herself with underdogs.

That’s partly why Chuck’s sense of entitlement could be hard to take. He even talked to her sometimes as if she was his girlfriend, which was a bit ridiculous, since she never had anything more than platonic feelings for him.

“So what do you say, babe? We gonna get together?”

AS FAR as Tom Nisonger was concerned, Chuck couldn’t have picked a worse weekend to visit.

Tom was working toward a PhD in political science at Columbia University and had already flunked his qualifying exams once. His next chance was just a few weeks away. If he failed again, Columbia would throw him out. He’d planned to spend every day till then buried in books. An exhausting weekend visit from his overcaffeinated college friend was exactly what he didn’t need.

“I’d love to see you Chuck, but maybe—”

Chuck cut him off. “Hey, old pal, I’ve already bought the tickets. See ya Thursday night, all right? We’ll have a helluva time.”

“Well—”

“Relax, amigo. I’ll introduce you to that chick I was telling you about, the tall, skinny one I met in Europe. Remember? She’ll bring a friend for you. What do you think?”

Tom, who was twenty-five, had long ago learned the futility of resistance. The two had grown up together in the suburbs of Youngstown, Ohio—their dads were school superintendents in
neighboring towns. Tom and Chuck both went to the College of Wooster, where they served as co-equipment managers for the basketball team. But that’s where their similarities ended. Tom was introverted and intellectual. Chuck was a social creature with an outlandish sense of mischief. Tom contented himself with the quiet work of calculating the basketball team’s statistics. Chuck appointed himself driver of the cheerleaders’ van. And because the team was called the Fighting Scots, he took up the bagpipes and began sporting kilts. Students called him Pipes, but teachers were less amused. A professor who found the idea of men in kilts indecent took particular offense at Chuck’s open-legged sitting position in class. “If you’re going to dress like a woman,” the teacher snapped one day, “you’re going to need to sit like one.”

As soon as he hung up, Tom realized that Chuck’s visit to New York that weekend was a fait accompli. The formula for their relationship had always been that Chuck led and Tom followed.