The Empire of the Dead (7 page)

TV. College. A well-edited war. O, what a mix of miracles was a man!

A young girl, leaving the restaurant, said to her friends, “I hear they're tearing down Coney Island. Let's go out there and get high.”

Glancing at Kate across the table, Bern considered communication—even
failed
communication—a minor amazement. “More wine, sir?” asked a passing waiter.

“Yes, please,” Bern said. Accidentally, Kate dropped a clam shell on the floor.

“So,” said Bern. He cleared his throat. “Have you written many new pieces?”

He'd looked for her byline whenever he came across a copy of
Theatre News
.

“A few. The usual. You know.”

“Seen some good shows?”

“Nothing to shout about.”

She was watching him like an animal eyeing a snake, Bern thought.

“Is this what you did, growing up?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Questioning everything. Like, Talmudic study.”

“You feel I'm interrogating you?”

“A little bit. Yes.”

Bern was about to ask why she'd wanted to meet tonight, but she pressed him. “What
was
it like for you, growing up Jewish?”

“Oh, I don't know.”

“Really. I'm curious. We nun-beaten micks don't get outside our circle much.” She laughed, and seemed to relax for the first time. “Your education … did you read the Bible a lot? Or the Torah—what's it called?”

He fingered the stem of his glass. He would have to slow down if she continued to stall. Don't push, he thought. Give her some slack. “Well. The most intense reading I ever did—religious reading—was
in a study group when I was a teenager,” he said slowly, drawing out the words. Filling the social space. “We read the Five Books of Moses with our rabbi.” He took a sip of wine. “He was very good, insisted we pay attention to the literary qualities. Characterization. Narrative arc. Metaphors, repeated images. He steered a course between the way most lay people read sacred texts—looking for heroes, inspiration, that sort of thing—and the Midrash, the laws and meanings rabbinical students are supposed to take from it. We saw Abraham and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, David, all the rest, just as people. Flawed, ordinary people who—granted—did extraordinary things sometimes.”

Kate nodded thoughtfully.

“We refused to draw morals from the stories. We tried to live them, walk with these folks, find parallels with our own lives. It was a very fine education in … empathy, I would say, as well as reading.”

Oh Lord. He was dangerously close to
teaching
again. And he caught himself totting up risks: the suggestion of a movie later this week, a concert, a walk through Central Park? These activities masked his true concerns: his body weight and hers, his middle-aged stamina, the pesky aches in his joints in the mornings, the care he should take with his heart.

She sat silently.

It is what it is, he thought, trying to picture
him
with
her
, a view from above, the two of them sitting at the table. Two characters in a story. A love story. But you don't have to act on it.

Still, he decided, is anything sweeter than two people who genuinely enjoy each other anticipating, moving toward, then consummating new sexual bliss?

How do I let this go?

The waiter passed again. What the hell. Bern asked for another glass of wine.

This seemed to prompt Kate to come to the point at last, before he was beyond absorbing it. “Wally, I need your help. This weekend,” she said. “Two old friends of mine from my New Orleans days
are coming to town. A couple—Glenn and Karen Lindahl. They lost nearly everything in Katrina.”

“I'm sorry,” Bern said.

“They've been living in a Best Western in Houston. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got the idea of throwing a small party for them, inviting some of the theater folks I know, really generous people, collecting money and supplies. Just enough to get the Lindahls through this little stretch of time. I've talked to my friends here. Most of them are willing to give, and so … I'm going to do it. A small gathering at my place on Sunday.”

“That's wonderful,” Bern said.

“Well. I'm calling on everyone I know. I need help getting ready for the party. Shopping. Straightening the apartment. Moving furniture.”

“Sure,” Bern said. “Absolutely. Count me in.”

What was she withholding? Nothing she said explained why she had wanted to meet for dinner. A simple phone call would have done for the party. Her reserve restrained him, as well. He waited patiently, watching her pick at her rice. Her gestures were delicate and contained. Observing her, he understood with some regret (because he wanted to be a better man, more present and giving in the moment) he was intrigued with Kate
philosophically
; that is, he was compelled by her necessity to him as a woman, the need he had for a certain kind of feminine beauty offering grace, grief, acceptance, and lament: qualities he also asked of the architecture he loved and, yes, romanticized.

Construction
always
fell short of its promise. Okay. So what?

Kate pulled a chicken bone from her mouth and set it on the table next to her plate.

In his contemplations of beauty, he was only seducing himself. Oh, for the lightness of a Ladder to Heaven, he thought. My life weighs too damn much.

“Gary left me,” Kate said quietly, setting aside her fork.

He removed his fingers from his wine glass. “What did you say?”

“He's gone.”

And just like that, gravity seemed to drain through a hole in the bottom of the earth.

“First things first,” Bern said. He steered Kate past a circle of people milling in the halo of their collective breath on the sidewalk outside the International Film Center. He took her down bright lanes, warmed by quickly moving bodies, skirting Washington Square Park. “The party on Sunday. Let's get through that. If you'll give me a list, I'll do the shopping. Food, drinks, whatever. On Saturday I can come over and help you arrange the apartment. Your friends, the Lindahls, will stay with you for a while, right, so that'll be a comfort. After that, Kate, whatever you need, however I can help …”

“He said he couldn't handle the baby,” Kate said. “Can you believe that? I expected him to be nervous about it—hell,
I'm
nervous about it—but …”

“I know.”

“Wally, I didn't think he'd leave.”

He patted her back. Near the park's south entrance, a man sold jewelry, clothing, and books. He prowled behind loose boxes wearing a gray sweatshirt and furry Sherpa boots. At his feet, spread across quilts, turquoise, a lifelike baby doll, a broken-spined volume,
Journey of a Soul
, written by one of the popes, and a Jimmy Durante album.

The park shone under spotlights mounted on spindly metal stands; a portable generator growled among twiggy bushes. Perhaps someone was filming a movie scene or a television commercial. Under the arch, a klezmer band performed a Tom Waits song. The spotlights burnished dancers. Swirling shadows moved against the limbs of the trees, a large half-moon above.

Kate pressed her body against Bern's left arm. “I'm scared,” she said. “Raising a baby alone …”

“A lot can happen in the next few months.”

“And I'm scared about us.”

“I understand.”

“I need you, Wally. I need you to be my friend.”

“I
am
your friend, Kate.”

Laughter and applause for the players. Wooly dogs on leashes. Leaden air. A man sold individual flowers from purple buckets: irises, lilacs in green water. A car backfired as the band began again. Lemon light through the trees. The rasp of an airplane engine broke the moon-tinted darkness beyond the boundaries of the park, at first as soft as a grasshopper whirring, then louder as the plane came into view. Everyone stared, as though its appearance signaled something uniquely important to each of them. What does it mean? Is my life going to change?

Bern watched the bobbing heads. Against all odds, we're bred to endure, he thought. He reached for Kate's hand. At first unsure, she relented, and offered a tentative squeeze of the fingers.

The Lindahls were delightful. Easygoing, down to earth. Glenn was a tall man in his early thirties, pale and blond. Karen's shoulders swayed as she talked. Her eyes glistened like chicken broth in a pot, verging on boil.

Kate's smart-talking actor-friends could lead a parade. Loud and gaudy. One young diva wearing … what
were
those godawful things—toreador pants? … glared at the CD player as if soldering its parts with the heat of her gaze. A middle-aged woman, clearly used to attention, wore a tall, wiry wig: like the whirling brushes in an automated car wash. In the kitchen doorway, an old woman squeezed past Bern, her face a welter of marks. Time had chewed her up and spit her out.

Kate stood across the room from Bern, plainly exhausted. He circled the dining room table, served himself salad. The spoon in the bowl was hot to the touch, the handle slightly sweaty. On a blue dish, slices of lime, their delicate curves reminding Bern of the planet Venus, the green crescent he had seen once through a planetarium
telescope. Next to the dish, melon rinds, tossed like dentures in a stainless-steel bowl.

Three young men, exuding a powerful musk, huddled near Bern, discussing the Tonys. “Brian F. O' Byrne,” said one. “
Coast
is going to sweep this year.” “No no,” said another. “If Frank Langella doesn't win it, I'll eat my Equity Card. As for Vanessa Redgrave, I mean, really honey, doesn't she get
enough
adulation?”

“The awards will never recognize them, but the best shows this year were all south of Fourteenth Street. Those little storefront theaters?” the third fellow insisted. He tried to snatch an apple from the table, couldn't manage it around the bulk of one of his pals. Bern reached over and handed it to him. He glowered.

A producer. Who else would suspect kindness?

He had a thrusting tongue—warping his teeth—and a splashy heart, no doubt, pumping his body full of blood. A man whose business probably involved legal robbery. Just what the GNP demanded. He turned away from Bern; a whiff of cologne, dusty, like walnuts.

How do I appear to these people, Bern thought. Do I hide my feelings well enough?
Too
well? Can they tell I'm adrift in abstractions? Behind on my taxes?

He leaned against a radiator next to a window. The glass was strangely discolored as if streaked with English tea. Light filtered through it, turning, near the ceiling, the green of felt on a well-worn billiard table. Bern saw a truck in the street, moving laboriously, burdened, it seemed, by a weak heart. He believed he could smell the block's wretched garbage, lolling in plastic bags up and down the curb, but perhaps it was his own panic he smelled, the sense of not belonging. He had felt it the last time he'd come to Kate's apartment.

We're friends. Yes?

Grand gestures, frantic talk. Makeup, piercings: tribal markings. Men and women poised to ambush one another. In every corner, sexual etiquettes clashed: the courtly and the cool. Pressure. Languorous flirtation. Romeo and Juliet. John and Yoko.

Right in front of him, neuroses simmered to erotic excitement, like the reduction of rich sauces over a burner's high heat.

He inched toward the Lindahls. The producer had herded them into a corner. “
Godot
,” he was saying. “In the Ninth Ward. Staged on the rotting porch of a flooded old house. Now wouldn't
that
present a powerful message?”

“All due respect,” Glenn told the man, “it's hard for me to see the city as a theatrical backdrop.”

“Well, but art can be a powerful healing force.”

“Well, but money is better.”

Bern overheard Kate speaking to a woman whose diction was a mix of College Drama Department and
Sex in the City
. He was relieved to see annoyance cross Kate's face. Was she, like Bern, always out of place, no matter where she was? Lines etched the drama woman's chin. A pale space, like an inoculation mark, separated her eyebrows. These genetic dispositions would look unflattering soon, but for now (she was
just young enough
) they gave her an off-kilter beauty.

The producer, failing to elicit from the Lindahls the awed response he sought, stepped away. Bern approached them and told them he was sorry for their losses. They thanked him for his kindness. “How
is
the city?” he asked.

“Mildewed. Putrid. Gone,” Glenn said.

And then Kate stood beside him. “I'm bushed,” she whispered. They stood in a corner in candlelight.

“Your party is a great success,” Bern said. “You've done a marvelous thing for your friends.”

“Yes. I'm happy. I just wish I could sneak away and rest for half an hour.”

“Come home with
me
.”

Kate patted his arm—impatiently, he thought. Why couldn't he keep his damn mouth shut? He had no business at a party. If he had ever possessed social skills, they had long since eroded.

One by one, the actors made their exits.

Kate assured Bern the Lindahls would help her clean the mess. They'd stay for another couple of days. She'd call him after that.

“You're sure?” he said.

“Yes, thank you, Wally.”

He said goodbye to Glenn and Karen. No idea what to wish these sweet people.

Evening had chilled the sidewalks. St. Vincent's upper-story windows blazed yellow down the block. The actors vanished up the street, in search of Zoloft, in search of fame.

“Good night!

“Good night!”

“Good night!”

Bern lingered on Kate's front stoop, its top step spilling him gently toward a raucous noodle factory next door. He felt deflated; his pre-party expectations had leaked away, into the ether. Was he disappointed now? No. He had fulfilled the function of friendship, the best thing he could do for Kate. It's what she wanted of him: right behavior.
Reasonable
. A tepid substitute for
passionate
—a bland leftover, like something cold and soggy smothered in Cling Wrap. Still, it was a takeaway from the party. Possibly, now, he'd be invited to the next celebration.