The Empire of the Dead (8 page)

Through an open window, he heard clattering forks and plates, the rattle of trash bags. Three old friends from the Easy. One of them, he couldn't tell who, cried.

Three days later, he met Kate at Grand Central to see the Lindahls off. Glenn and Karen had witnessed enough of New York. “Your city's still here,” Glenn said. “But, I mean, it can't be said to
work
, in any sense
I
understand.”

Beneath the figures of the Zodiac, painted on the blue-domed ceiling, Kate hugged and kissed her friends. Then they ran to catch their bus to La Guardia.

Bern took Kate to the oyster bar downstairs. In the vast, open
room, under coils of light bulbs wrapping stone arches, they wolfed clam chowder. At the table next to them, two delicate Japanese women struggled for dignity while wearing oversized lobster bibs, then gave up and tore ravenously into their lunches. Shells sprayed the hard, cold floor.

“I feel accused,” Kate said.

“Of what?” Bern asked.

“Betrayal, I guess. Glenn's indictment of Manhattan. Like, why am I living here when New Orleans needs me?”

“Number one: your friend's still in shock. Two, you
do
have a life here, Kate. A job, a network of pals.”

“But with Gary off the rez—”

“And
three
, you've got to take care of yourself. Volunteer workers are swarming the streets of N.O. What could you add?”

“A while back—when we first met, remember?—you urged me to go. As a friend. Reconnect, you said. It'll do you good.”

“Well—”

“It broke my heart, hearing them talk. Did you
listen
to Karen? Muddy beds in the alleys. Cars stacked against walls. Sea straw, broken trees …”

“You knew this, Kate.”

“But I hadn't faced it. You were right about that. And the clean-up …”

“I know.”

“A trailer or two, a little fiberglass, a little plasterboard, and FEMA's finished for the day. How are Glenn and Karen
ever
going to get home? What do they have to return to?”

“I agree. But Kate, please, concentrate on what's in front of you.”

“The baby, you mean.”

“The baby.”

In the next few days, they developed a sweet ritual. After work, Bern met her on Ninth Avenue, at the Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theatre. She had enrolled in a beginning ballet class taught by one of the company dancers. “Pregnancy-friendly,” Kate said. “I can push myself as hard or as easily as I like. It'll keep me limber before I'm too huge to move.” Bern sat on the building's front steps or on an egg-shaped concrete stool just inside the revolving door during the hour and a half Kate sweated in class. Through a slender window he watched her bend, stretch, roll her arms. Live piano music rose from a small room at the bottom of a stairwell. On most nights, dusky blue rain-light poured through the building's front glass walls. Bern became enamored of the storklike young ladies passing through the lobby. Chatting on cell phones, they dropped to the gray carpet in front of the elevators to stretch their legs. Gay black boys in old Tupac or Jimi Hendrix T-shirts pressing the lift buttons with long fingers were the essence of grace. The sensual mix of ethnicities—Hispanic, Asian, black, white, in-between—made the place shimmer. It seemed everyone here was on a path to purification, in body and spirit, with discipline and great good humor: preparing for some higher level of evolutionary development. It got so Bern felt an erotic charge whenever he saw from a distance the orange banners—“Ailey!”—on the side of the building.

Each day after class, he walked Kate to an unpretentious Italian place, Puccini's, for dinner. Only a dozen or so tables; an old brick wall along the back. It was early March: evening mist shrouded the streets. The fresh scent of invisible blooming things softened the chill in the air. The restaurant was BYOB. Bern would settle Kate at a candlelit table and walk up the block to a liquor store for a bottle of Chianti. By the time he returned, their salads had arrived.

He and Kate recovered their mutual ease, their
friendship
—though Bern was afraid to touch her. And though he basked in her company, longed for her when she wasn't with him, he wasn't sure what he wanted from this arrangement.

One night after dinner they strolled past a Middle Eastern restaurant. Loud Israeli men lingered by the door. Each spoke into a cell phone, authoritative in some obscure capacity. Around the
corner, Bern and Kate spotted half a dozen black limos displaying government plates, and three or four taxis parked on the street, the drivers smoking cigarettes next to their cars. “What is
this
?” Kate whispered. “A call-girl neighborhood for the fucking high and mighty?”

“Or maybe a bunch of foreign dignitaries, holding a hush-hush meeting,” Bern said.

The intrigue (even if Bern and Kate only imagined it), the hint of secrecy and money, titillated them. Kate grabbed his arm and giggled, pressing her breasts to his side. Bern's face flushed. Then, as they stood there, a fire truck stopped silently at the corner. For the first time, Bern noticed a crumpled figure on the sidewalk. An ambulance arrived, then two police cars. “Some billionaire who had a heart attack in a hooker's bed?” Kate wondered, squeezing Bern's arm. “A Russian mob hit?” he countered and they walked, laughing, up the street, prickled by deepening mist and the warmth of each other's bodies.

Kate asked him to stay the night.

“You're sure?” he said.

“It'll be the most innocent night of your life, believe me. I'm sure.”

She made a pot of chamomile. “That's nice,” she said. He'd been stroking the back of her hand. “You know, so far, the worst thing about pregnancy …” She squeezed her thighs. “It's what it does to your conception of yourself. As a woman, I mean. I watch others in the dance class. I look in the mirror and think, any day now, what a bloated, ugly …”

“No,” Bern said.

“I didn't think he'd really leave.”

“I know.”

She turned to him. “Do you think I'm—”

He placed a palm on her belly. “I think you're exquisite, Kate.”

Tears came. She tried to laugh. “I'm being vain.”

“Shhh.”

They watched part of a Tracy-Hepburn movie on TV. Affectionate repartee, romantic wit. Kate wanted him in her bed. Chastely. He stripped to underwear and a T-shirt. They spooned beneath the sheet. Bern asked himself what he was doing. Kate needed care. And him? Maybe he was needier than he'd dreamed. A baby? A little girl or boy? Kate slept. Delicately, he rose and stood by her bedroom window.

In the street, a young couple jogged past a pizza place. Bern watched them in the neon bath of a Pepsi sign. I'd like a small deep-dish, extra cheese, with pepperoni and X-Y chromosomes, please.

He lay back down, wondering what good, if any, remained in him. Here he was, clinging to a woman for ease and assurance, when
she
was the one needing attention. A fine thing! Tomorrow morning, he would get up, shower, towel himself off … pretend he was just another decent man!

That night he dreamed pregnant dreams: rising dough, hot-air balloons, great windy dirigibles.

The Village Cinema just down the street was showing Jean Cocteau's
Beauty and the Beast
. Bern talked Kate into going with him. She wore a yellow smock. She'd tied her hair in a lazy bun; it wasn't going to stay, and he found himself gleefully eager, waiting for the soft and sexy tumble.

The film—an old, scratchy print—broke twice, blurred. Beauty looked as bristly as the beast. The crowd booed. Bern didn't care. He was happy, holding Kate's hand. He cried at the end when the handsome lovers kissed.

Afterward they walked to a hamburger shop to split a basket of fries (“I'm craving grease,” Kate said, “platters and platters of grease”). Kitschy paintings of Marilyn and Elvis lined the light-green walls, old 45s (“Telstar,” “My Boyfriend's Back, “Love Potion Number Nine”) stocked the restored, ancient jukebox, and a pair of fifties car fins crowned big silver doors marked “Guys” and “Gals.”

The Cokes came in thick glass cups with paper straws.

Bern loved the good-old-days décor, the laughter, the talk. Men and women at play. “They do nostalgia very well here,” he said. “Kind of romantic.”

Kate nodded.

“Anything wrong?”

“No. Well. Gary and I used to come here.”

“Oh,” Bern said. “Of course. Of course. We can go somewhere else.”

“It's not the place, Wally. Really. I like it. It's … when you mentioned nostalgia …”

“What?” He touched her arm.

“That was Gary's whole deal. I mean, look around.”

He considered the tables, the curved booth seats, plump leather angles spilling people into each other, accommodating the body's desires. “I'm not a kid. But here I am, in this neighborhood, right in the middle of the Nikes and the back-assward baseball caps. Why?” She shook her head. “Gary wanted to ‘stay young.' He liked living like these New School students. Reminded him of his best days, as a fraternity jock.”

“Football?”

“Soccer and track.” She slurped her Coke. “And fucking.”

Bern squeezed her fingers.

“I knew of at least a couple of affairs he had after we were together. He's probably having one now.” She rubbed her eyes. “He doesn't want a baby because he's an immature little piss-ant.”

“A deadbeat.”

“A son of a bitch.”

They laughed together.

Anyone who'd strand ample Kate …

“Well,” she said. “It's a weary old story.”

“Not to you. It's your life.”

She looked at him over the cooling basket of fries. “You're a nice man, Wally.”

“I like you.”

“I know.”

They walked back to her place in misty, prickling rain, bright from reflections of buzzing curbside signs. On the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, her bun finally unraveled, a shock, a gift. “Kate,” Bern whispered, and kissed her lips.

In bed she rubbed his thighs. He spread almond oil on her belly. “That's wonderful,” she said. She closed her eyes. “My doctor says some women, when they're pregnant, lose all interest in sex.”

Bern tickled her navel: a pink, oval bloom. “Yes?”

She took his face in her hands. Fertile Kate! “Wally. We're still going to be chaste, okay?” she said. “But bring that oil over here.” She lay back and unbuttoned her blouse. “My breasts are a little sore. Go easy.”

“How's this?”

“Mmmm.”

“Yes?”

She nestled in his arms.

On Saturday morning, Bern took Kate to the Irish Hunger Memorial. She had always wanted to see it, to “get in touch with my heritage … you know, especially now the baby's on its way.”

From Vesey Street it appeared to be a castle's ruins. Up close, it resolved into a craggy, manmade hilltop overlooking the Hudson on one side and the financial district on the other. Plants native to Ireland hugged low granite walls surrounding a two-room cottage shipped from County Mayo. It had been reconstructed, stone by stone, as a tribute to New York's Irish immigrants. A small turf fire burned between four flat rocks, lighting the slim, grassy slope.

Kate wept silently, walking the winding path around the cottage. She looked peaceful. Wistful. She folded her hands on her belly. She was just beginning to show. Bern followed her at a respectful distance, leaving her alone with her thoughts. Words carved into the memorial's walls commemorated the Declaration of Human Rights.
Irish ballads were chiseled into the stones, and Gaelic proverbs:
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine
(“People live in each other's shelters and shadows”). Sparrows nested in moist niches.

Afterward, Kate stayed quiet as she strolled with Bern along the river, past a children's park with a wading pool and a fountain, a merry-go-round and a pair of slides. Jersey City and Ellis Island rose in the distance. A helicopter passed overhead, reflected in the glass wall of a tall mortgage firm. Bike paths and new construction—the city was hustling to lure people back down here.

They meandered past Stuyvesant High School, up Chambers to the Soda Shop, a pleasant breakfast place with dark wooden walls, showing just a touch of brick, and an old-fashioned bar topped with white marble and glass cases full of candy. From his seat, Bern could see across the street—the Mudville 9 Saloon (“Wings/Ribs”) and a rickety fire escape festooned with potted purple flowers just beginning to bloom. Above it all, painted on the side of a building, an ad for beer: a sweating green bottle.

The room smelled of lightly seared chocolate.

“Wally, thank you,” Kate said. “The memorial … it reminded me of my summer visit to Derry, a few years back. My
first
crack at my roots.” She laughed and brushed her hair. “There was a genealogy center a few kilometers from the city—a larger version of the cottage we just saw. I went there one day hoping to find information about my family, but the only person I met, the caretaker, was shit-faced. At nine in the morning! He begged me to help him lock the place up and drive him down to Lough Derg, in County Donegal. He wanted to visit Purgatory, he said, and atone for his sins.” The waitress brought them coffee. “Apparently, it's an old legend—the mouth of Purgatory is said to be on Station Island. Anyway, I kept trying to get away from this guy without hurting his feelings. Finally, I said, ‘What sins?' And he said, ‘Well now, what did you have in mind, missy?'” She laughed again but her eyes remained cloudy.

“Are you feeling all right?” Bern asked.

“Fine.”

“No discomfort?”

“Don't nag, Wally. I'll let you know, okay?”

The conviction remained: she was teetering on a precipice. He'd try to keep her moving. Laughing. Relaxed.