Red Hook (7 page)

“You ever hear of a guy named Sidney McKay, Sonny?”

“Yeah, sure, everyone knew McKay, wasn't he the city editor at the
Times
once, something like that? He worked for some of the other papers, TV, did books, a black guy, right? He still alive?”

“Yeah, why wouldn't he be?”

“I don't know why I said that, yeah, I don't know, man. Something. Some kind of trouble. So open the fucking box, man,” Sonny added. “I need to sit down.”

We sat on a couple of chairs. Sipping the drink, Sonny waited while I unwrapped the gift. His eyes never left me as I opened the box, pulled out some tissue paper and then lifted out a Lucite cube.

“Fuck, Sonny, I mean, I don't know what to say.”

“It's OK. You don't need to get all fucking teary-eyed, man,” he said and drank a little of his Scotch. “I wanted you to have it. You'll be around after I'm dead and I couldn't trust anyone else with it.”

I held up the Lucite cube and turned it around so I could see the baseball suspended inside. Signed by Jackie Robinson, it was a ball Robinson actually hit during the first season he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the first black man in major league baseball. He was Sonny Lippert's childhood idol. He had showed the ball to me a million times in his office, talking with a kind of religious fervor about the Brooklyn Dodgers and Robinson.

When Sonny split up with his wife Jennifer and moved into an apartment by himself, all he brought were his books and the baseball. Lately he'd been drifting backwards into his childhood more and more, talking about Brooklyn when he was a boy. I was pretty amazed that Sonny would give me the ball.

I said thank you and reached for his arm, and patted it because I didn't know what else to do, and he looked uncomfortable, but pleased.

“Yeah, OK, so I'm glad you like it,” he said and changed the subject. “You believe people living in this fucking Meat District over here? I had an uncle named Stanley who was in tongues, you know that? He made tongues here, I ever tell you how they make a tongue, man? They used to take these shrivelled tongues and they pumped them up with water so they were four times the size of a normal animal tongue, and they sold them like that. I worked summers at the tongue plant.
We used to pump them full of water, all the tongues. Listen, man, your lady's waving at you. I like her, Artie. Did I tell you? She's good, your Maxine. I need a drink.”

Old Maxine—Max had been named after her grandmother—was sitting on a chair, her face red, looking as thin and glazed as a piece of wax paper.

“She had a few too many,” Max whispered. “I'm going to take her downstairs. We have a car waiting to take her home.”

“I'll go,” I said.

“Thanks, Artie.”

We rode the elevator silently, me propping up old Maxine, her concentrating on staying upright.

In the street, I found the car and driver, a shabby beige Towncar, and I helped her in and gave the driver some extra money. Then I tried Sid on my cellphone.

I stayed out on the street, watching people parade up and down the streets of the Meat District, preening, looking for action and waited for Sid to call me back. He wasn't a guy who panicked. He had covered war zones and race riots. He was plenty tough and I didn't get why he was so scared.

I tried calling a friend from a station house out in Brooklyn, but he was in midtown overseeing barricades going up around Madison Square Garden, then I got through to someone else; he put me on hold. I waited a couple more minutes, and then Maxine came out of the building. I closed up my phone.

“Hi.”

“I got worried about my grandma,” she said.

“She was fine. I put her in the car. I was just thinking. Come on, let's go back up.”

There was a crack of thunder, and a brief flash of lightning over towards New Jersey, but instinctively Maxine turned her head south. It was almost three years, but sudden noises in the city made her look south.

“It's just thunder,” I said. “Maybe I should go AWOL, honey, and come out to the shore with you tomorrow. I could find someone to cover for me. I could try.”

“You can't do that. We'll be fine. You'll meet us, and anyway we could use the overtime. You'll come out in a few days like we planned,” she said. “I know. I still get jumpy when I hear something. We all fake being OK, and then you hear something. I know girls I work with who drink now who never had a drink before 9/11. I think about stuff and I think, I can't do it again, Artie. That's what scares me, that I don't have anything left if it happens again. I figured that out during the blackout last summer, that I couldn't go through it again.”

August 14, the summer before, we were originally supposed to get married, me and Maxine. The day before we planned it, the city went dark. The lights went out.

Maxine was stuck at work downtown, the girls were with her mother in Jersey. My car was in the shop and I was on the subway, sweating.

That afternoon, getting ready to go home and get ready for our wedding the next morning, the electricity goes and I'm trapped. People around me get edgy
first, then frightened; panic sets in. We wait in the dark and the heat. I start talking to the crowd, telling them it's OK. I talk to them through the dark crowded train. Afterwards, I help people out of the car and along the narrow path in the low black tunnel and up metal stairs on to the street. I do it because I'm a cop and I have to do it; they cling to me. I feel their sweaty hands.

It's dark by the time I start home on foot, no lights, the streets jammed with people, some of them, people who missed trains, lugging suitcases. Everyone mills around, yelling into cellphones, gathering near yellow cabs that pull over to the curb.

Dozens of cabs everywhere, their radios turned up loud, have become mobile communications centers. Parked everywhere, the drivers lean out of their windows and pass news along to people who listen intently, convinced at first that it's terrorists. The next big attack, we all think; the one everybody's been waiting for. I look up. I look for a plane.

“Holy shit!”

I say it out loud: holy shit. It was the first thing we heard, the first piece of TV footage when the plane hit the Trade Center, before the ball of fire. Holy shit! This time it's only a blackout. A summer storm, power outage, a cascade. Whatever; just a fluke.

I get home that night thinking about my first blackout in the city. 1977 was my first year in New York. I'm uptown near Columbia, people crowding around the university, everywhere the sounds of breaking glass and screaming and sirens. Feral kids roam the streets, looting
stores. I see a man hump a TV set out of a store window; another carries five radios.

I have applied to the Academy; I want to be a cop, I want New York. But that night I wonder, for the only time, if I should have gone somewhere safe and bland, Australia, Canada.

A girl walking by takes me by the hand and we go up on the roof of her building and there are maybe twenty other people, students mostly. I spend the night there on a blanket next to the girl whose name I never learn. When I wake up, I see the others, on blankets, plastic deck chairs, sleeping bags. Their faces are young and sweet in the early light. I look out over the city and watch the sun come up. I'm hooked.

All night long, through a kind of boozy haze, I kept thinking: who are all these people? The party swelled up with them, some I recognized, others seemed familiar as if from another life. By midnight, it was crowded and chaotic, and I loved it.

“You collect people, Artie,” Lily Hanes had once said to me. “You are a wanton collector of friends. Women, but not just women. Promiscuous,” she said, laughing. “It makes you feel secure, having so many friends and you do things for them, and you ask them for favors and there's always a trade-off, isn't there, but you know that, don't you?” I remembered her saying it now, and then someone tugged at my sleeve; it was Millie Crabbe, and I turned to talk to her, and thought to myself: It's your wedding, let it all go!

“Artie! Artie, hi! Artemy.”

More people. People speaking English. Russian. People I knew from Brighton Beach, and their children, little kids, kids in their teens who trailed out on the terrace for cigarettes, Millie and Maria, following the
bigger girls and looking awestruck by the attention they got. In a pack, they moved outdoors and their laughter seemed to linger in their wake.

The laughter grew. There was a rise in the voices, and the heat from the crowd and the band playing something Brazilian. I was hazy with wine and trying not to think about Sid when I heard a familiar voice.

Ricky Tae.

It was Ricky, wearing a perfect black summer suit, incredibly handsome, smooth and lean, now in his late thirties. He lived upstairs from me. His parents had owned the building, they had helped me buy my loft. We had been close, Ricky and I, but we had somehow drifted apart. He was always on and off planes, always doing business in Asia. I hugged him. I missed him.

“You got married,” he said. “You really did it.” He handed me a package wrapped in red paper. “From the parents,” he added. “My pop was too sick to come and my mother won't leave him. My mother was miserable, though, not being here.”

“I know. I talked to her. Listen, I didn't ask anyone to the ceremony, you know, no one, it's how Maxine wanted it.”

“Darling, I know that,” he said. “Lot of people here,” he added, scanning the room.

“Yeah, it's great.”

Rick hesitated.

“By the way, is Sid McKay coming?” he finally asked.

I was startled. “Why?”

“I'm just asking. You're friends with Sid, aren't you? Pretty good friends. I thought he'd come to your
wedding. I just thought you'd have asked him. Or maybe your Russian pal, Sverdloff, doesn't like aging faggots.”

“What's with you? Sure I asked Sid. He said he didn't feel like coming into the city. Of course I asked him. I didn't even know Sid was a friend of yours anyhow,” I said.

“I'm sorry. I'm a little bit drunk.”

“So you know Sid?”

“You introduced us.”

“What? When? I don't remember that.”

“Forget it,” Rick said.

I leaned closer to him.

“Listen to me. I saw Sid this morning. He called me, he was worried, there was a guy who died off Red Hook, you know anything about it?”

“No,” Rick said, making to move away. “How would I know? I need a drink. Talk to my sister, she came all the way from Hong Kong just for you.”

“Darling, Artie. Congratulations!”

Her face near mine, her hand on my arm, the heavy sexy smell of Joy that she had always worn clung to Dawn Tae.

“Dawn.”

“Hello, Artie.”

“We kissed and then she drew back slightly and I saw how much she had aged. The incredible girl I'd once known was now a middle-aged woman. She glanced around and a waiter appeared with her drink. Dawn was still imperious, a commanding presence.
People noticed when she wanted something. She kissed me again.

I smiled at her. “Hello, Dawn, I can't believe you made it!”

“I came back for this,” she added, keeping hold of my hand. “And the parents. And I thought Rick needed cheering up. There he is,” she said, gesturing towards the bar where Ricky was standing.

“Is Ricky happy?” Dawn said. “He doesn't talk to me about his life anymore. I feel he's so solitary, so obsessed with work. Is he seeing anyone? Does he have anyone? Is there a guy in his life at all?”

“He doesn't talk to me much, either,” I said. “How are you?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “I'm, well, I am what you see,” she added, her tone wry now.

When she married a rich guy who turned out to be an asshole who abused her, Dawn had been an exquisite ambitious girl, a brilliant trader on Wall Street. The creep she had married dealt in illegal immigrants and baby sales, and drugs on a global scale, including Hot Poppy, the worst junk that ever got into the system; Dawn got hooked on it. It was years before anyone picked him up and even then he got off on appeal. I never really felt easy about him being out on the streets.

I had been crazy about Dawn right from the beginning when I first moved into my loft and sometimes we sat out on the fire escape and fooled around. By the time we had a desperate fling in Hong Kong she was strung out on drugs. She got clean, settled over there, quit her job as a high-powered trader, and bought a
house up on a hill looking out over the water where she raised her adopted kids.

Dawn was probably in her forties but she looked older now: she was stocky and her face was thicker than I remembered and there was gray in her hair. She wore a plain gray silk suit, very severe, very expensive, and flat shoes and big diamonds in her ears. Only her eyes looked like the girl I knew. But I could still smell the Joy she had always worn, that drove me crazy the first time I smelled it at her own wedding. Long long time.

She said, “I'm just like some old Chinese lady now, don't you think? I look at myself in the mirror, I see my Auntie Petal.”

“You had an aunt named Petal?”

“Yeah, they ran out of flowers. It was a fashion, you know, Chinese girls, little flowers,
Flower Drum Song,
fuck that shit,” Dawn added. “They were already into weather and stuff when I came along. Dawn. I'm lucky it wasn't dusk, you know? Or evening. I could have been called Evening. I've had too much champagne.”

She saw me looking at her, and she said, “It's OK, I have a mirror, you know? And I don't care anymore. I really don't care. I don't have to worry about getting old. It's a relief.”

“You look great. You always look great.”

“Give me a cigarette, Artie, honey, You're such a liar, and so am I. Actually, it depends. Some days I'm glad it's over, sex, men, business. I take care of the kids, I hardly ever go shopping, I read a lot, I listen to music. I've fallen in love with opera, weird considering what a rock chick I always wanted to be. So I'm OK. It's just when I see
old friends, when I see you, I hate the way I look, but what the hell, let's get drunk.” She looked around. “Where's a waiter? You know, my Auntie Petal always said everything starts and ends at weddings, maybe it got to Ricky, you getting married, maybe he feels left out, maybe he feels he'll never find anyone, and he never will, you know, because he can't let anyone get close, no man, no woman,” she said. “I should talk. Go celebrate.”