Manhattan Nocturne Page 2

  Did you know the family involved? I asked the woman. Yes, I be in that apartment a hundred times. How did you find out what happened? I didn’t need nobody to tell me, ‘cause I saw the whole thing myself. I be washing the dishes and I seen the smoke and everything out the window, and I told myself that don’t look good, that look like Benita. So I call the emergency, and then I went downstairs. The woman glanced at me. She had more to tell me, and I waited. I don’t usually press. People will say what they have to say. But when they get stuck, you can go back to the chronology. What time was this? I asked. Almost twelve o’clock noon. Okay, you were washing the dishes; what did you do when you saw the smoke, were you surprised? I was so surprise I drop a dish, matter of fact. What happened when you got outside? I was looking up at the window hoping that the fire department gonna make it pretty soon and then I’m looking up there when Demetrius, he come jumping through that window. He on fire, burning like, all over his shirt and hair and pants, and he holding Benita’s kid, uh, Vernon, he only four months, and then Demetrius fall, he just fall and fall and fall, and I can tell that he gonna land on top of the baby, and I was worrying about that, and then just before Demetrius land, then he like, he do this little kind of flip, and he land on his back holding the baby up, like, I could see he did that on purpose so the baby be okay. Like, that was the last thing Demetrius ever did in his life, do that little flip and hold that baby up, ‘cause then Demetrius, he land on his back, just like that—and here the woman slapped one black hand smack flat on top of the other—and he lay real still like, and I go running over and pick up Vernon ’cause I see Demetrius, he not gonna make it, and I check that baby over good, and then I thank the Lord, ’cause Vernon, he not hurt. Little shook up’s all. He cry only a little bit and I put him up in my arms. But Demetrius look bad. He got blood coming out of his ears and then I saw how he was all shot up by them boys. Then I just hope that Benita, don’t she come jumping …

  The woman stopped and looked away, back toward the window. She shifted her baby, gave the bundle a pat on the rear. Anything else? I asked. Nuh-uh. I waited a moment more, looking her in the eyes. Thank you for your time, I said. The woman just nodded. She was not shocked or distraught, at least not apparently. The events in question did not violate her view of the universe, they were just further proof thereof.

  I see a lot of this, to be honest, and there was no time to stand around and be mystified by the brutalities of urban life; the story was due in the paper’s computer system by 5:30 P.M.—about three hours. I had what I needed and was heading back toward the car, already composing the lead paragraph in my head—when my beeper trilled against my leg. GIVE THE CHICK A CALL, it said. Lisa, phoning from St. Vincent’s Hospital, where she operates. A lot of reporters carry cellular phones, but I hate them; they tether you to other people’s agendas and can interrupt you at the worst moment, ruin interviews. I walked around the corner to a little Dominican luncheonette, and when the bell on the door tinkled, a couple of the regulars turned around, and one boy of about eighteen slunk coolly out the back, just in case I was somebody he needed to worry about. They see a big white man who isn’t afraid to be someplace, and so maybe I’m a cop.

  There was a pay phone on the wall.

  “You’re due at that cocktail party tonight,” Lisa reminded me. “I put your tuxedo in the trunk.”

  The annual party, thrown by Hobbs, the billionaire Australian who owned the newspaper. As one of its columnists, my presence was obligatory. If he was the circus, I was one of the trained monkeys wearing a tight little red collar.

  “I can’t go,” I said.

  “You said yesterday you have to.”

  “You’re sure it’s tonight?” I checked my watch, anxious about the time.

  “You said six-thirty.”

  “All the management people will be there, sucking up to Hobbs.”

  “What can I tell you?” she said patiently. “You told me you had to go.”

  “Kids are fine?”

  “Sally has a play-date. You’re up in the Bronx?”

  “Brooklyn. Fire. Guy jumped out the window with a baby.” I noticed the restaurant regulars watching me. Yo, white motherfuck, what you doin’ here spittin’ fuckin’ white-boy saliva on my pay phone? “Anyway, I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Late or early?” Lisa asked.

  “Early.”

  “If you get home early enough, there’s a chance,” she said.

  “Oh? A chance of what?”

  “A chance you’ll get to make out.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Oh, it’s good all right.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know,” Lisa said.

  “How?”

  “Certain testimonials have been entered into the records.”

  “Whose was the last one?” I asked.

  “Oh, some strange man.”

  “Was he good? Did he float your boat?”

  “You lose your chance after eleven,” she said. “Drive safely, okay?”

  “Right.” I was about to hang up.

  “No! Wait! Porter?”

  “What is it?”

  “Did the baby live?” Lisa asked worriedly. “The baby who went out the window?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “You’re horrible! Did the baby live?”

  I told her the answer, and then I was gone.

  There is, in the West Village, on one of the old narrow streets (I won’t specify which one) lined with three-story, Federal brick row houses, a wall. A certain wall, located in the middle of the block, about thirty feet long, connecting two houses. It’s made of glazed brick and is a good fifteen feet high. The brickwork itself is topped with an ancient, black wrought-iron fence about five feet high that gracefully billows outward and is impossible to climb. Above this fence, and in many places grown through it, are the thick branches of an ailanthus tree, a weedy, fast-growing nuisance of a plant, much given to the city’s empty lots, that will contort itself into any shape in order to survive. It must either die by disease or be rooted out completely. This particular ailanthus is so tenacious in its reach toward sunlight that it seems to conspire with wall and fence to keep people out.

  I’ve spent no small amount of time standing on the other side of the street with my arms folded, looking first at the tree and its tangle of branches, then at the fence, and then at the brick wall. Until last winter, examining the wall gave me some measure of reassurance. The wall is virtually impenetrable, and this is important, because set within it is a narrow doorway secured by a gate—not the usual rectangle of vertical iron bars but a solid steel-plate door that extends down to within a quarter inch of the brick walkway. You could slip a weekday paper under that gate with a bit of effort, but you couldn’t push a Sunday edition through. The gate is an exact replica of one that hung there for more than a century—iron, brittle with age, rusted here and there, repainted black fifteen times. I hired a sixty-year-old Russian welder from Brooklyn to duplicate it in steel. Then the two of us tore out the old gate, hinges and all, and set the new one in its place, repointing the brickwork. I remember how pleased I was, thinking that it would be damn tough to get through—you’d have to have a sledgehammer and a hacksaw, you’d have to back a large truck against it, attach a couple of chains, and pull forward in low gear.

  But it’s where the gate leads that is important. Beyond it, surprisingly, a narrow, arched tunnel doglegs seventy feet back from the sidewalk. Rising and falling, the tunnel passes along the rear foundation walls of three houses dating from the 1830s, all of which have their formal entrances on the next street. This arrangement was written into the original deed of each of these properties, and, according to my real-estate lawyer, represents quite an anomaly in New York City real-estate law. Most residential property, of course, is defined or surveyed from a bird’s-eye view, the footprint of the property or building a matter of lengths and widths. Not so with the tunnel. Legally it is three dimen
sional, “an arched passageway, of a height of five feet and nine inches,” says the original deed, “with slight variation thereof as it extends westerly.” It is a quiet and mysterious conduit, and on evenings when there is little traffic, you can hear water gurgling down the soil pipes of the adjacent buildings, or a piano being played in one of the rooms upstairs. Or the indistinct sounds of conversation. Thus does the tunnel feel like a dark umbilicus, passing closely and secretly past separate lives before opening at the other end into an irregular lot, twenty-one by seventy-four feet, opening upon what my wife and I fell in love with—here, with the lighted twin towers of the World Trade Center looming not so far away, is what we were amazed to see: a small wooden farmhouse.

  There it stood, despite rotted sills, termite-eaten joists, and a sagging cedar-shingle roof—a fragment from Manhattan’s lost age, built in 1770 when the island was to the south a port for English merchants and to the north a landscape of streams, dirt roads, and farms owned by Dutchmen and even a few Quakers. The house’s ceilings were low and the windows off-plumb, and the original bubbled glass rattled in the old frames during a storm, but for some reason the structure had never been torn down, perhaps because the walnut cabinetry was too beautiful, perhaps because of a stubborn owner, family discord, chance—the reasons had been lost to time. We didn’t care. We wanted it, and the little patch of green in front, which even included a small gnarled apple tree. Anywhere else, such a house would have been mundane; in Manhattan, it was a miracle.

  Lisa and I were in our early thirties then and had been married only a few years. The house was terrifyingly expensive, but Lisa, who is a hand surgeon, had come home one day with disbelief on her face and told me that the city’s premier thumb man, a conceited maestro in his late fifties, had asked her to join his practice. There was a certain urgency to his offer; after marrying a third time, the good doctor had impregnated his childless, forty-year-old wife, knowing that she had reached the age of desperation but not that she had been taking fertility drugs on the sly. Result: three tiny yet strong heartbeats on the ultrasound. The prospect of so much new life had nearly scared the man to death; like a lot of the grizzled heavy hitters in the city, he had suddenly reached the point where he needed a young person to carry the load. And for this he was willing to pay—big. He knew Lisa would soon want children of her own; that didn’t matter; he trusted her skill and youthful stamina. “What will I do with all that money?” Lisa had blurted. And here the older surgeon gave her a fatherly but potentially wrong lecture about the gigantism of the federal debt and the government’s inevitable need to print money: “Buy as much real estate as you can,” he advised.

  Like a farmhouse in New York City. After stepping up on the porch and inside the front door, we examined the bedroom, trying to imagine ourselves sleeping and waking in what was then only a small vacant room, the floors dusty, the air stale. The seller had seen to it that the old plaster walls had been patched and repainted. We stood on the wide pine planks, thinking of the unknowable lives lived in that room, the voices of laughter and sexual pleasure and anger, the babies and children, the suffering and death.

  It was this diminutive house, with its three cramped bedrooms, that somehow had kept me honest, or so I believed, reminding me that the city had been here a long time and would remain a long time after I was gone. My children could be growing up in an Upper West Side apartment with a uniformed doorman and the groceries and the dry cleaning and the videos delivered, and there was nothing wrong with that, but something about our little apple-tree house was memorable, and I knew that Sally and Tommy already loved the crooked brick passageway, the sloping roof, the low beams of the ceilings. (Other children had lived here, of course; my wife found hundred-year-old buttons fallen between the floorboards, tiny lead soldiers buried in the garden, and, when we redid the kitchen, the plastic head of a Barbie doll, identifiable from its hairstyle as circa 1965.) When my children became adults, I hoped, they would understand that their home was something remarkable. I wanted, more than anything, for them to know that they were loved, and for this knowledge to find its way, molecularly, into who they were. You can always tell, I think, with adults, who felt loved as a child and who did not; it’s in their eyes and walk and speech. There’s a certain brutal clarity. You can almost smell it.

  Back at the paper, I slipped along the wall of the long rectangular newsroom, carrying my tuxedo box past the managing editor’s office, past various plotters talking in low, disaffected tones, past the sports guys eating their afternoon breakfast, past the bright cave of the gossip columnist. She was flicking through an electronic Rolodex, talking on the phone. Big hair, big attitude, today’s shipment of hype—E-mail printouts, press releases, promo-videos, movie posters—piled atop her in-box. She has two assistants, both young men of postmodern sexuality who are happy to crawl through half a dozen downtown clubs every night, cellular phone in pocket, tipping doormen, scrounging for perishable scraps of celeb-gossip. And then my own office, which resembles not so much a place where a man works each day as an experiment in chaos, old papers and coffee cups ringing the desk and phone and computer.

  Demetrius Smith, the dead young man in the Brownsville Houses, had been a gymnast in high school, according to his sister, whom I reached in North Carolina. All kinds of trophies, and a college scholarship that he never cashed in. This tidy little fact could be used to melodramatic advantage, and after a few more calls I reached the man’s high-school gymnastics coach. No, Demetrius never had any talent, barked the coach, certainly no college scholarship—who told you that? I’m sorry he died, but he really wasn’t much of a gymnast. Too afraid of heights, as I remember.

  This was a twist on the twist, but hack newspaper columnists can work irony like phone wire. I slipped the coach into the piece, as well as the fact that the average income per household in the Brownsville Houses was $10,845, according to the Census Bureau; but by then the time was 5:27. The city editor was rushing around worried about his cover story, but sooner or later he’d give me a look. I shipped the copy to the city desk, glanced through my mail, separated the bills, then closed my door and pulled on the rented tuxedo. Apparently a lot of cheap-tuxedo renters lied about their size: the waist, like the column I’d just finished, had a bit of elastic in it.

  Then out and away. Good-bye and good luck—even if the president is assassinated by a movie star, don’t touch my column. Other reporters were finishing up and the night editors had arrived to grind the hamburger for tomorrow’s meal, and I passed them all without saying much. We get along in the usual way. Some of the older reporters sort of hate me, I know, because my stories don’t get killed at the last minute, and I make a lot more money than they do. I actually negotiated a contract with the paper’s executives, whereas the regular staffers are shackled by whatever meager scraps. the newspaper union won in its last collective bargaining agreement.

  Out on the sidewalk, buttoning my coat against the cold, I thought for a moment about skipping the party, simply going home to dinner with the kids, watch them throw macaroni on the floor. I should have done it. Yes, you fucker, I tell myself now, you should have gone straight home. Instead I found the car and crawled uptown through the rush-hour traffic. It was past dusk and I had to keep my eye on the streets; I don’t know the city so well that I don’t need to be attentive as I drive. As I said, I didn’t grow up in the city, and for a reporter, this is a disadvantage. All of New York’s great columnists came from its streets, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill among them. I’ve had to overcome the fact that I was raised three hundred miles north of the city, almost in Canada, in a farmhouse on ten acres, under a wide sky. In the winters the icy expanse of Lake Champlain stretched before me, and I’d spend hours in the small fishing shack my father dragged out onto the ice behind our pickup truck. Other days my pals and I would tramp through the birch and pine to the tracks that ran by the water and wait for the afternoon train headed south from Montreal to New York; when it would come, huge a
nd terrifying and whirling snow alongside, we’d suddenly stand, ten-year-olds in winter coats and boots, and fire off a good dozen snowballs each, aiming for the flashing faces in the windows, whom we imagined to be rich and important personages. It was 1969, 1970. My boyhood was indisputably small-town, suffused with a certain happy innocence that later drew me toward all that is soaring and marvelous, all that is scuttling and decadent about New York City, where, in the density of possibility, what is strange is not measured against what is normal but against what is stranger still. I’ve seen beggars with AIDS holding signs specifying their T-cell counts, I’ve seen a naked man on a bicycle thread the center lanes of Broadway against traffic, I’ve seen Con Ed men working in the sewers while listening to Pavarotti. I’ve watched detectives with French fries drooping from their mouths wiggle the toes of the dead to estimate the time of death. I’ve seen a fat woman kissing trees in Central Park, I’ve seen a billionaire adjust his toupee.

  And how odd, then, that after I dropped the car in a garage and traveled the last few blocks toward the party on foot, I witnessed another thing I’d never seen before—not exactly an omen for all that followed but memorable perhaps as an emblem of the starkness of human desire. Yes, let us decide that this image is significant: It was a dark block, Seventy-ninth or Eightieth Street, I think, with some renovation going on inside one of the town houses, judging by a looming Dumpster next to the curb. In the cold I suddenly realized that there were two figures in the Dumpster, atop the debris, moving, struggling. A fight? I cautiously walked closer and, simultaneous with my recognition of the ragged coats and wild matted hair of the homeless, was my apprehension of the rhythm—the cadenced stroke—of the figure on top. They were fucking. Grandly. Two homeless people in the cold. Someone had thrown an old mattress into the Dumpster, and on a mountain of torn-out lathing and pipes and ceiling plaster, eight feet above the street, there they did it. The woman, who had hoisted her heavy layers of coats and dresses, struck the man on his bare ass with her fist, and for a moment I worried that she was being raped. But she cried aloud hoarsely in pleasure and struck him again and again, such that I understood that her heavy blows fell on the back-stroke to urge the man’s rapid reentry of her, to encourage him to use a measure of force. Happy pervert that I am, I lingered a few feet away. They didn’t notice. I watched for a moment, then for another, then moved on through the shadows of the street