New York Echoes (3 page)

“This is Bob,” the
voice said, hoarse, barely audible.

“Bob?”

“Bob Rainey. I need to
talk.”

“Oh yes, Bob,” she
said cheerfully, suddenly apologetic. “I've been very busy, you see . . .”

Her explanation was
interrupted abruptly.

“Please Carol.  I need
to talk. Now.”

She wanted to correct
her name, but held off. The voice seemed positively desperate.

“Now? I'm in the midst
. . .”

“Please Carol, I beg
you. I'm upstairs in my apartment. 10F. Now. I need you.”

“Me?”

The phone clicked off
and she debated for a few moments on what to do. She was pressed by her
deadline and expected a call momentarily from a client. This was, indeed, an
intrusion, but the man sounded desperate. Finally, after fifteen minutes had
gone by, she went up to the man's apartment and rang the buzzer. She took her
cell phone with her in case her client called.

“It's open,” a hoarse
cracked voice said.

Bob Rainey was sitting
in his pajamas and robe in a darkened living room. The blinds were drawn and
the apartment looked in disarray.

“What is it, Bob?”

He didn't answer. He
seemed disoriented and barely able to speak. She moved closer to him.

“What's wrong?”

He didn't answer, and
his eyes were closing.  Beside him on a table was an open pill container. She
looked at the label. “Take one pill before retiring,” she read. There was a
warning pasted onto the container.

“Oh my God,” she
cried, shaking Bob, who was obviously falling into a deep sleep or coma. “What
have you done?”

Having never
confronted such a situation before, she was momentarily confused. Her first
thought was to call Jules, but when she noticed that Bob Rainey's chin had
fallen into his chest, she called 911. She had never in her life ever called
911 before, but she managed to answer the questions rationally.

“Wait there,” the
woman at the other end of the phone said, after taking her address and the
number of her cell.

Left alone with the
slumping Bob Rainey, she felt uncomfortable and irritated. The apartment was in
chaos and smelled of rotting food. She shook the man again. When he didn't
respond she tried to feel his pulse and couldn't, wondering if the man was
dead.  Clearly, he was still breathing, his chest rising and falling. Suddenly,
her cell phone screamed out a tune, startling her. It was her client.

“I can't talk now. I
have a problem.”

“What?” her client
asked.

“I'll explain later.”

“We have this
deadline, Caroline. Today. I'm sorry. We have to get the copy in a couple of
hours.”

“I'll have it. I
promise.”

A half hour went by. 
She sat on the couch and watched Bob Rainey, concentrating on the rise and fall
of his chest, wondering how long it would take the pills to do its damage.
Would he die in front of her eyes? She felt suddenly panicked and called Jules,
hanging up before he could answer. Why disrupt his day, she told herself,
feeling increasingly panicked and upset. She wanted to cry.

Finally, she heard the
doorman's buzzer ring and she answered it.

“Who is this?” the
doorman asked.

“I'm Caroline Kramer
from 15G. But I'm here in 10F. Is the ambulance here?”

In less than five
minutes, medical people arrived with a rolling stretcher, along with two
policemen. The medical people worked on Rainey and lifted him onto the
stretcher while the policeman took her name and interviewed her. She explained
that she knew the man casually from going up and down the elevator and had met
him at Starbucks. Her explanation sounded confused and, she thought,
suspicious, and she had the impression that the policeman didn't really believe
her explanation although he wrote it down in a little book.

“We might need to
contact you,” the policeman said as they wheeled the body of Bob Rainey out of
the apartment.

“He'll be okay,” one
of the doctors said.

“He called me. I live
in the building. Just a friend,” she explained.

“Potential suicides
like an audience,” the doctor said. “If he was serious, he would just do it.”

When they had gone,
she went downstairs to her own apartment. She was very shaken and poured
herself a glass of wine, which she gulped down. Her hands shook and she could
not concentrate on her work. Finally, she called Jules.

“You sound harassed,”
he said.

She wanted to explain
what had happened, but could not bring herself to do it. “Later,” she told
herself.

“Just wanted to hear
your voice, darling,” she said, meaning exactly that. Hearing his voice
steadied her.

“Are you okay?” he
asked.

“Fine, darling. I'm
fine.”

Again she tried to
work, but finding her concentration again was making it difficult. Then, at last,
she found the words and knew she would make the deadline. The phone rang again
and, without thinking, she answered it.

“This is Sandra
Siegel.”

“Not again,” she
muttered.

“My little girl needs
to go out.”

“Does she?” Caroline
said.

“I'm so sorry to ask,
but I just can't make it. Betsy is dying. She needs to go out.”

“Tell you what,
Sandra,” Caroline said, searching for words that would make the point, finding
them, pausing for a moment.

“Why don't you take
that fucking dog out yourself, I'm busy.”

“That's awfully rude
of you,” Sandra Siegel said, hanging up abruptly.

The phone rang again.

“I said I'm busy,”
Caroline snapped, thinking it was the Siegel woman.

“Oh, I'm so sorry.
It's Mary Schwartz, remember? Remember? I dropped off my resume.”

“I don't think my
husband can help you,” Caroline said.

“Figures, nobody wants
people over fifty.”

Caroline hung up without saying goodbye.

When Jules got home,
she embraced him before he could sit down.

“Why the affectionate
greeting?” he asked.

“I am in dire need of
intimacy,” she said, then poured the wine and told him about her horrendous
day.

“No good deed goes
unpunished,” he said. “You have to pick and choose wisely.”

“I suppose,” she
replied.

“Unfortunately, people
don't wear signs saying ‘I'm needy.' I guess it's a matter of luck.”

Instead of dinner,
they made love.

“I was very needy,”
she said in the aftermath. “You must have seen my sign.”

“I always see your
sign.,” he said.

“And I always see
yours.” 

She grew cautious
after her recent experiences, nodding to the various people who came up and
down her elevator bank, avoiding eye contact. One morning Bob Rainey came down
the elevator.

“Hello Carol,” he
grunted.

She smiled, nodded and
turned away.

Sometime later, she
noted that Anne Myers's newspapers were piling up. Instead of throwing them in
the trash, Caroline ignored them. Then she noticed that they weren't there
anymore.

“You let me down,”
Anne Myers said one day as they both waited for the elevator.

“Did I?” Caroline
said, avoiding eye contact.

“You let them pile
up,” she said.

Caroline shrugged. The elevator came and they both
got on. She looked the other way all the way down. Pick and choose wisely, she
told herself.

Mrs. Dickstein, age seventy-five, sat on
her favorite bench in Central Park overlooking the lake on a lavishly sunny May
day reading Stendhal's
The Red and the Black
, which she had read three
times over the course of her life.

A widow, she loved this exercise in
delicious tranquility, and in the spring, when the weather was perfect, she
would revel in this particular spot with the special view of the lake and the
trees in bloom around her. Weekdays were best, for the crowds were sparse and
most children were in their strollers pushed by chatting moms or nannies.

Looking up from her book, she would
observe the rowboats quietly cutting through the slate-colored lake waters and
people reclining on the grassy knolls, lovers embracing and oblivious, a lone
man or woman, lying supine or sitting cross-legged Indian style, perhaps like
her, enjoying the optimism and glory of spring.

All in all, with the exception of the
loss of her beloved Henry three years ago, she could savor the best of times in
her long life. She had made peace with the demise of Henry, who had been a
dozen years her senior, and his departure was long expected to be before her
own.

Her two grown sons lived elsewhere and
were dutiful in their absent devotion, calling her at least once a week to
report on their various experiences in the interim and especially on the antics
of her grandchildren. Each visited a couple of times a year, and she visited
them in sequence during holidays and was both happy to arrive and happy to
depart.

Her children knew too that she was a
habitual and inveterate New Yorker, a native, who would never leave, although
she suspected that they and their wives were happy with her chosen location. An
aged parent and grandparent could be a disruption and an emotional bother,
especially to a daughter-in-law. She had never ever considered a move to be
near her children. Nevertheless, they did worry about her safety. They chose
the next best thing to proximity. They gave her a cell phone as a Christmas
gift, which she used sporadically to call friends and on occasion her sons, who
insisted that she keep it charged and carry it around with her, which she did. 

She had been a professional nurse in her
time and since her retirement had invariably volunteered to help, as she
phrased it, “the less fortunate.” She assisted in serving Thanksgiving meals at
homeless shelters, was active in those groups that helped orphaned children,
and was one of the numerous gray-haired single ladies who volunteered at Mt. Sinai hospital, wheeling carts of books to patients or completing other chores to
lighten the burden of the needy.

She believed implicitly in charity and
caregiving, which had motivated her to become a nurse many years ago. Since
Henry had gone, she spent most of her time with friends in her own widowed or
single situation, pursued her charitable work, went to lectures at the Met and
the 92nd Street Y, and generally lived what she characterized to herself as the
life of the heart and the mind.

She supposed in retrospect that she had
lived a good life, respecting her fellow man, avoiding all the pitfalls of
mean-mindedness that seemed to afflict human endeavors, both in the past and
especially now. She prided herself in not having a mean streak in her, taking
the burden of affliction on herself rather than hurting other people. Not that
she was self-conscious or dwelled inordinately on her goodness; she was, as she
told herself, built that way.

Nor was she the type who fed squirrels
and pigeons or mourned over the loss of an insect she had stepped on, but she
did pride herself on her innate sense or compassion and decency. At times, when
she felt wronged, she chose the path of avoiding confrontations, probably more
out of fear than conviction.

Sitting here on her
favorite bench, lifting her eyes to observe her favorite view, and reading a
classic novel, was her version of nirvana.

There were times, of course, when her
expectations had been dashed by people getting to the bench before her. When
such a situation occurred she walked about the park for awhile, checked the bench
again to see if there was room for her, and, if not, she would go home. Such
were the limitations of habit. Thankfully, it did not happen very often.  

It did not happen on this particularly
glorious day, and she was able to plunge deeply into the lives of the novel's
characters.

A red-haired woman sat down next to her
and immediately fired up her cell phone. She chattered incessantly and, after
awhile, the sound disturbed Mrs. Dickstein's concentration and tranquility. She
made it a point not to decipher the specifics of the woman's conversation since
that seemed an intrusion on her part on the privacy of the caller.

Of course the woman's conduct was rude,
she reasoned. On the other hand, she did not feel she had the right to
intervene, since there were no legal restrictions of talking on a cell phone
and she was not one to complain about such things. Moreover, she figured that
sooner or later the woman would stop and her peace would be restored.

Unfortunately it didn't and Mrs.
Dickstein, despite herself, could not avoid the substance of the woman's
conversation. She was apparently making a series of calls to change the venue
of a party of some kind from one restaurant to another.

To further exacerbate
the situation, the woman's voice was harsh, loud, and vulgar, interspersed with
strings of four-letter words. Peripherally, she noted that the woman wore large
sunglasses and smeary red lipstick. She was dressed in tight jeans and wore
high heels. She struck Mrs. Dickstein as snarling and hard.

Despite herself she
could not avoid hearing that the new venue was Danielle's and not Cipriani's,
which, for some reason, was not suitable. The party was called for tomorrow at
eight and the woman was contacting all the invitees, who apparently were
considerable.

When those she called were in, a
conversation ensued that went on for a long time. When those she called were
out, she repeated a long explanation and asked that she be called back. Mrs.
Dickstein caught her name. “Molly Harkins.” Interspersed between the call-ups
and the callbacks were some musical renditions that signaled that a call was
coming in.

After some considerable debate with
herself, Mrs. Dickstein finally reacted.

“Please excuse me, I hate to suggest it.
I know these are important calls, but would you mind making them elsewhere,”
Mrs. Dickstein said timorously, looking around her. “There is lots of open
space around.”

At first the woman merely frowned, since
she was in the middle of a conversation, but when she hung up she turned to
Mrs. Dickstein.

“Why don't you change your seat, then?”
the woman asked.

“I don't mean any offense,” Mrs.
Dickstein said, politely offering a smile. “I can understand one or two calls
but . . .”

“Why don't you mind your own fucking
business, lady,” the woman cried, eyeing her with obvious contempt.

The rebuke seemed so hostile that Mrs.
Dickstein was silent for a long time, not knowing how to react. Yes, she could
go to another bench or walk around until this woman vacated and avoid any
confrontation altogether. She felt frozen in place, unable to react.

The calls continued, and Mrs. Dickstein
had completely lost her concentration but still felt constrained from moving.
Finally, summoning up all residue of courage, she reacted again.

“At the very least,” she said. “You
could talk less volubly.”

“Jesus,” the woman said. “Get out of my
face.”

At that moment, the phone trilled again
and a conversation began.

“I know. I know. I do sound pissed off.
Some old bag is giving me a bad time.”

Mrs. Dickstein, having heard the
reference, seemed to poke her nose deeper into her open book. The words swam
without meaning in front of her unseeing eyes. Still, she could not rouse
herself to the confrontation. Finally, the best she could offer was a shrug of
the shoulders and a whispering, “How rude.” But she refused to budge from the
bench.

“Why?” the woman on the cell phone said,
turning a bit to avoid looking at Mrs. Dickstein. “Because they gave me a
better deal at Danielle's. I was lucky as hell. Usually they're booked for
months. They just had a last-minute cancellation. It will be one helluva party.
And will Harry be surprised. They made a cake and the menu is to die for.”

“Yada yada,” Mrs.
Dickstein said under her breath. At that point the best she could muster was
what she decided was “a dirty look.” The woman beside her paid no attention.

“I will not surrender,” Mrs. Dickstein
told herself, forcing her resolve to endure the harassment of the woman's voice
and appearance.

Mrs. Dickstein found herself contemplating
ways in which she could counter the woman. She opened her bag and took out her
own cell phone and punched in the number of one son, then the other. Neither
answered. In retrospect she was relieved. Their conversation would be personal
and she had no desire to let this terrible woman into her private life.

She toyed with the idea of singing a
song or making unnatural noises, but that seemed childish and unworthy and
would subject her to embarrassment. She turned to face the woman and, although
she held the pose for a minute or two, the woman merely looked up and offered
an expression of contempt. Finally she turned away, fearing that the woman
might take it into her head to call a policeman and tell him that she was being
annoyed and harassed by a crazy old lady.

Instead, she tried concentrating on the
content of the book, which proved impossible. Also, the tranquil view of the
lake and softly rowing boats offered no solace for her anger. She was, she
decided, genuinely upset. The woman's voice went on and on, grating, vulgar,
and never-ending. 

It became, then, a silent endurance
contest, although Mrs. Dickstein was not such a fool to believe that the battle
was joined. At best, she decided to sit there, offering occasional side-glances
of annoyance, which hardly made a dent on the woman or her incessant
conversation.

On and on it went as the morning wore
on. It must be one big party, Mrs. Dickstein thought. And expensive.
Danielle's, she knew, was one of the priciest restaurants in Manhattan.

One of her sons had
taken her and her husband there for her seventieth birthday. It was too fancy
for her tastes, and the food she found much too rich, and a brief glance at the
check informed her that it was extravagant. Her husband had told her privately
after the meal that the expense was in direct proportion to their son's guilt
at being neglectful of their parents. She did not agree, but then she was not
given to ascribing such bad motivation to people, especially her own son.

The battle to endure and not surrender
went on for what seemed more than an hour. She considered herself brave and
valiant to suffer through the ordeal.

Then finally it was over. The woman
snapped shut her cell phone and turned an arrogant smile toward Mrs. Dickstein.

“Now you can play with yourself,” the
woman said, bouncing along the path in her high heels and tight pants.

Mrs. Dickstein sat for a long time,
still unable to concentrate. Then an idea penetrated her mind and she giggled.

“Yes,” she decided, saying aloud. “I
will play with myself.”

She dialed information and got the
number of Danielle's. The phone rang for an annoyingly long time until finally
someone answered in a French accent.

“This is Mrs. Harkins,” she said. She
wanted to sound harsh and grating but was unable to be less than polite. “I
have reservations for tomorrow night.”

“Oh, yes, I see that. Four tables. Yes,
Mrs. Harkins, what can I do for you?”

“Please cancel my reservation.”

“Cancel? On one day's notice?”

“I think your restaurant is overpriced
and the service is bad. Please cancel.”

“But Mrs. Harkins . . .”

“You heard me, buster. Cancel. I
wouldn't be caught dead in your shithouse.”

Mrs. Dickstein hung up
the phone. It took her awhile to regain her tranquility. She smiled to herself,
opened her book, watched the rowers on the lake, then lowered her eyes to read.