Park Lane South, Queens (3 page)

Zinnie stretched as though she didn't give a hoot. “God, I'm tired,” she moaned. “I just get used to one shift and they put me on another. Say, Claire? Whatever did happen with that duke guy?”

“Wolfgang? The last time I saw him he was leading some Brahmanic heiress around by the nose.”

“You still hurting?”

Claire's eyes went out the window and all the way up Park Lane South. “It's difficult to describe. I feel lighter. After I left Wolfgang in Delhi, I spent six months on my own in the Himalayas. In a place called Dharam Sala. McLeod Gange, Dharam Sala. It's a sort of refugee camp for Tibetans. Anyway, after one sort of difficult but illuminating month, I couldn't figure out why I'd stayed with him as long as I had. In Dharam Sala, I started looking at things in a different way, you know?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Those Himalayas'll clean your eyes right out.”

“Aw, c'mon Zinnie. Not you, too.”

“All right, go on. The Himalayas cut your cataracts. And then?”

“And then I decided that as long as I was changing half of my life, I might as well change the rest of it. No more working for travel brochures or fashion magazines. I didn't have too much money left over so I sold my pearls—”

“Those luscious pearls from the German doctor? How could you?!”

“They didn't exactly go with my life-style anymore,” Claire laughed. “They hadn't for a long time.” (No sense mentioning all the other things she'd had to sell.) “Anyway, to make a long story short, without Wolfgang's expensive tastes to support, I figured I could do what
I
wanted for a while. You know, the ‘virtue of selfishness' and all that.”

“That doesn't sound like you. You usually bolshevize everything.”

“Not anymore I don't. Not after Wolfgang.”

“Tell me something. Did he do coke?”

“Sure he did coke. That's why his allowance from home was never enough.”

“Did you?”

“Oh, God no. I got high on my mantras.”

“Huh?”

“Meditation.”

“Oh. Well, just don't go doin' none a that stuff around here,” Zinnie warned. “Bad enough Mom's got Michaelaen going to church with her.”

Claire stood up and paced to and fro. “I don't pray anymore,” she scowled. “I'm so full of self-congratulation when I do that I disgust myself. It's like, I've done this, so now I deserve a reward … or … or progress, at least. My motives are all egotistical and self-serving, which is not the point at all, or it shouldn't be.” She threw her arms up in a hopeless, almost comical gesture. “I'm much better when I'm not so good.”

They looked at each other.

“And,” she added, “I did used to smoke hashish occasionally. Does that make you feel better?”

“Not really. So then what happened with Wolfgang?”

“I guess I started seeing him for what he was.”

“Yeah, a pimp.”

“I wouldn't call him a pimp.”

“I would. He sent you out to work and he collected, right?”

“He helped me, Zinnie. I have to say that. He got me lots of clients and he can be very charming. He kept things running smoothly on the shoots.”

“Like I said. A pimp. What are you defending him for, huh? So you wised up and got him out of your life. Next?”

“You're funny. You really are a cop, aren't you? Okay. I thought I'd start all over, you know? Back to go. I've been trying to get a book together for years. Only my best stuff. When I came home I started looking around me. Zinnie, the Himalayas are magical, but this is real life. This place is a photographer's dream.”

“I get the idea. Real life is what you photograph after you've photographed all the dreams. But you don't wanna go along even on a day tour with me. And how are you going to support yourself while you're being artsy-craftsy?”

“I've got enough money saved to pay Mom and Pop rent, and I thought I'd ask Mom if I could make a small darkroom down in the cellar.”

“In all that junk?”

“I only need a sink and darkness, Zinnie, not atmosphere.”

“So make a darkroom. Maybe you'll meet some nice guy in Manhattan when you try and sell your pictures.”

Vexed, Claire rummaged through a little bin of blueberries. “I don't want to meet anybody,” she said. “I want to stay around here and shoot pictures that tell stories without words. I want to shoot anything I well please and not what some art director thinks will sell.”

“And the first time you hear someone mention they're going to clean up Michael's grave … you'll hightail it off to some ashram and not come back for another ten years.”

Claire shook her head slowly. “No, Zin. I came to terms with Michael's death a long time ago. I carry it always, in my heart, like you do. New York doesn't bring me any closer to it.”

Zinnie, angry and embarrassed by her own emotion, blurted, “It's New Yawk, jerk! This ain't no David Niven film.”

They laughed together at themselves, relieved not to speak about Michael. Zinnie sighed. “I don't know. Maybe this is a David Niven film and I'm the one going off the deep end.”

Impulsively, Claire threw her arms around Zinnie and held her. “Of all of us, I think you're the one who's the most together.”

“That's not saying a hell of a lot,” Zinnie smiled.

“You'll be just fine,” Claire said. “Although I'll never understand how you can be a cop. You're so beautiful and smart. You did so well in college. Why don't you go to law school?”

“I don't want to, Claire,” Zinnie pulled away. “You're not the only one who loves what she's doing, you know.”

“I know. Those aren't the reasons why I don't want you to be a cop, anyhow.”

They watched each other carefully, each checking the other one out for emotional scars from Michael's death. Claire knew that a good part of Zinnie's joining the force had been because of him. She hoped there had not been too much revenge in her reasoning. Zinnie, on the other hand, remembered just how devastated Claire had been at the time. She wondered how difficult it was for Claire to watch her go out the door with a gun. Whatever she felt, that pain would always be there between them as a bond, and there was nothing either of them could, or wanted, to do about it.

Zinnie touched Claire's hair. “What about you? You wanna come out with me tonight? Do a little trip the light fandango up at Regents Row?”

“Me? Oh, no, thanks. I've had it with men.”

“Is that right? And how do you expect to hold them off, eh?”

“Don't you worry about me. I've got castration toxins leaking out of my eyeballs.”

“I'll bet,” Zinnie sneered.

“Anyway, I've got no time. I want to finish my black-and-white series as soon as possible. The colors around here are just too tempting in this season. Look at the dog! He's playing catch all by himself! Look!”

“Oh, he's just showing off. So. You think this neighborhood is great, eh? Let me see. You've got the old Jews and the young Israelis north of the park. You've got your mafia fledglings along Lefferts. And you've got your Puerto Ricans, Colombians, and Indians down on Jamaica. You've got some taste, kid.”

Claire didn't say anything then, because she couldn't describe what she felt when she saw an Indian woman in a shocking-pink sari gliding past an el train covered with graffiti. She'd have to shoot the scene and show it to her. Claire's heart swelled when she thought of all the ideas she had for portraying the neighborhood. She'd show the standing-stillness in all the flurry of transition. She'd achieve something true. And then maybe Zinnie wouldn't look at her with that suspicious, worried face. “Look, Zinnie,” she said, “I want to get one thing straight. No, listen to me. Don't look off as if you weren't listening. I just want to tell you that I'm not running off again. Not anywhere. And I won't have you and Mom and the rest of them pussy-footing around me as if I were a ghost. When I said I was over Michael's death, I meant it. Will you tell them that? Will you help me try and make them understand?”

Zinnie pried a perfectly good cuticle up with her teeth and bit it off. “Sure,” she said. She would have said more, but then Stan came back into the kitchen, lilly-legged in his bermuda shorts, and announced that he was heading on up to the woods to see what all the commotion was about.

“Wanna come?” he asked.

Claire shook her head no.

“I was looking out the bathroom window. They've got the brass up there,” he tempted Zinnie.

“Okey-doke,” Zinnie agreed.

I'll not be left out of this, the Mayor thought, and he hoisted his broad beam up on all fours.

Claire wandered around the old house while they were gone, sipping her bowl of coffee, enjoying the dark rooms and the full sun blasting against the screens. She sat up in the dining room, window seat, always her favorite place, and felt the house—just her and the house. This was where she'd curled up as a child and pored through each new issue of
National Geographic
, struck with wonder at the glossy, important-looking pages alive with color and exotic cultures. This was where it had all begun for her. The tall-ceilinged rooms were littered with dusty books and her father's homemade cannons. All of these things, she thought, so long in their same old spots that you forgot they were there. She bet nobody in the family ever saw the stained glass window over the pantry anymore. Well, maybe Michaelaen did.

Michaelaen saw a lot of things the others didn't. He was an intense child, very involved in his four-year-old world of animals and mechanics. Michaelaen seemed to have inherited his grandpa's love of junkyards. That's what the two of them would do for fun: visit junkyards and collect “treasure,” odd bits of copper and brass and all sorts of rubble that could only attract little boys and old men. It was a good education for the boy, Stan swore. He was learning the value of real resources, he said. There was some question as to who enjoyed these jaunts to the junkies more, Stan or Michaelaen.

The cellar was so full of their accumulations that a ragged path was all you got when you had to make your way through. Stan and Michaelaen found enough place to do things down there. They would hammer and fiddle and come up the stairs all covered with dirt. Stan would dust his knees off proudly and say, “He's all boy, that kid.” The only trouble was, he'd say it over and over again, as if he were trying to reassure himself.

“Shut up, Pop, willya?” Zinnie would finally look up from the TV and snap at him. And Michaelaen would busy himself with some toy car, pretending not to understand for fear their feelings would be hurt.

Claire smiled to herself. Six days home and already she knew their ways. Any minute now they'd all be back and full of the news from the park, bubbling and scandalized, each with his or her own private theory, clattering in and out and filling up the now-still rooms.

White sheets hung on the line in the yard. A small breeze rippled, and the spaces revealed the distant figure of Iris von Lillienfeld, ruby red across the street in her own very green backyard. Claire froze. Then, like a huntress stalking her prey, she crept across the room to her camera bag, whispering to herself, “Please, God, don't let her move”; and hurriedly, trembling, she attached a zoom lens to her camera, expertly and swiftly loaded a thousand ASA color film, and turned to wait. “Come on, God, now give me back that little breeze. Oh, come on, don't let me down.” And framed by a sudden ripple of the weightless white and sturdy clothespins was Miss von Lillienfeld, now close through the magic of zoom, standing still with brittle grace and contemplation and a pigeon on her pillbox hat.

All the mantras and the prayers and even the gange Claire had smoked trying to lose herself, and always her consciousness had been there, a leering monkey on her back, an ever-present watching, observing her efforts and plaguing her sincerity. Now here she was doing what she loved, and this was what she couldn't feel because she wasn't there. She was lost in what she was doing, looking out instead of in and only coming to herself when she was through—when all the frames were full.

Claire was just putting away her camera bag when they came back. Anticipating their excited chatter, she was surprised when her mother came speedily in gripping Michaelaen, her lips pressed into a hard, drawn line, her face white as chalk, the Mayor trotting busily behind.

“What's going on?” asked Claire.

Mary, making a sign that consisted of nothing more than a nod of the head but that meant, “Not now, Claire,” and “Not in front of Michaelaen,” and “What in God's name is the world coming to” all in one movement, marched through the rooms with a determined gait and left her standing open-mouthed and alone once again in the kitchen. A moment later Stan came in solemnly, shaking his head as he sat down at the table.

“Gee, Pop … what's—”

“It was murder, Claire. Up in the woods. Jeez …” He covered his face with a great freckled paw.

“Who—” she whispered. “Who was murdered?” Claire remembered with fresh, cold pain the moment they'd told her that Michael was dead.

“A boy,” Zinnie answered dully from the doorway. “A little boy. It was really bad, Claire.” Zinnie looked as though she were going to be ill.

“Sit down, Zin,” Claire's heart beat with morbid curiosity. “Did you see?”

“Yeah, I saw. The rest of them had to stay down by the monument, but they heard enough. It was up in the pine forest. An old man found the body. One of your old Jews, Claire. Taking his morning stroll. He was wailing like a banshee when we got there. They had to take him to the hospital for shock. Christ, that kid was really messed up.”

“Nothing like this ever happened before in this neighborhood,” Stan murmured. “I've never heard of anything like that around here.”