She shook her head. She sat down in my chair, too, and put down the shell. “Princess Margaret’s working with him on this. She got that job starting at the botanical garden, she gets off at three, I don’t like her at home by herself. He’s gonna pick her up when he has a drop-off over at the projects, then she goes home with me, keep her busy all day long.”
“Give the girl a break, Tequila. During the school year all she does is study.”
“My second one, Armand, got this friend named Marvin, always hanging around the house, coming by, picking Armand up to go out to KFC, whatever it is. But every time I see him he’s looking at Princess Margaret.”
“Beautiful girl,” I said. Tequila nodded. That was just what she was thinking. A beautiful brilliant girl, one year away from changing her life as magically and as utterly as though a lamp had been rubbed, a jinn summoned, an improbable wish granted. I knew in her mind’s eye Tequila could see it all, just slightly out of reach: the salary, the apartment, the professional man, the business card. But the pitfalls were considerable, and the greatest was a boy and a baby. Not so much a sleazebag who would beat and leave her, like Tequila’s first husband; Princess Margaret was too smart for that. But an ordinary boy, someone who would go to work for the Transit Authority or Best Buy, wear a name tag, grow old without moving out or getting rich, the kind of man who would help lift her daughter a couple inches out of the projects when Tequila wanted her to fly, fly across the river to Manhattan, into a life where her own mother might sometimes be an embarrassment. That was the sacrifice she was willing to make. Children blow up your life, and then they leave.
I spent the afternoon amid the wreckage. One of the women in transitional housing was in danger of having her parental rights terminated because of some miscommunication between the courts, the child welfare workers, and her own attorney. She wanted her three-year-old daughter back, and foster parents out on Long Island wanted to adopt her. “You know what they’re thinking,” she said wearily. “Nice white couple with a house and a yard.” When she left to go meet with a landlord who had a small apartment in a walk-up building, Annette was sitting in the chair outside my door. “Where’s Delon?” I asked, and she started to cry. She ripped through a handful of tissues and explained that Delon’s father’s girlfriend had just given birth to a second girl in as many years. Delon’s father had decided that his best chance for a son was the one he already had, and he had stopped by Sunday to mention that he was figuring Delon should come and live with him. And his girlfriend.
“He’s all, like, that boy growing up to be a sissy, all those women around. But he’s all about bad business, Miz Fitz, and he is always using his hands. He say, ‘spoil the rod and spoil the child.’ ” I wasn’t going to correct her; I got the idea, and when the weather was warmer I’d get another look at the scars on her upper arms, which had been made with her own curling iron by Delon’s father.
“Just keep the baby close, Annette. We’ll tell everyone in the house he can’t go with anyone but you. Where is he now?”
“He’s watching the chest.” It turned out that most of the residents thought we had a chest club now.
A letter about one of our kids who had a bad TB test, a letter about another who’d never been inoculated, a recommendation the charter school needed to enroll a boy whose mother was in transitional housing. When it’s so cold in my back office that a decorative rime of crystalline frost appears around the edge of my window, I don’t dare use a space heater. It’s not just that the space heater is the official instrument of death and disaster in our neighborhood, that nearly every fire story includes the words “sparked by a space heater,” with the lit oven in the unheated building and the candle flame for those without electricity running close behind. It’s that we have so much paper in our offices, the vast written record of the nit-picking and inhuman social welfare bureaucracy. Our families do not have millstones, except in the metaphorical sense. They have great unyielding piles of paper that chronicle their broken hearts and broken promises.
At the bottom of the pile were papers that had come in the previous Monday asking for the whereabouts of a girl named Alezabeth Johnson. I remembered her vaguely, a chubby kid with dozens of little braids, a bow barrette at the end of each one, so that when she ran she made a clinking noise like dice being rattled in the hand. She, her mother, and her five brothers and sisters had stayed with us, sent from one of the city shelters. That had been maybe two years ago. The report I had was of her mother’s suicide at Rikers Island. She’d cut her own throat with a Bic pen that had been sharpened into an ersatz blade. Three of the kids were in the foster care system. Two had been located living with her sister in Alabama. Poor people in New York City have sent their children south for decades, to get them away from the filth and the crime and the guns and the drugs, to get them back to wandering through fields, picking berries off bramble bushes, and going to church with a big Sunday supper after. None of them have realized yet that all the bad things from the city have migrated south, like birds, and that the biggest difference between Biloxi and the Bronx is that in one place their kids will wind up doing crack, and in the other it will be crystal meth.
But no one knew what had happened to Alezabeth, with her clicking head of hair, her poor mangled phonetic name. Sitting looking out my office window, I could let my imagination run wild. I was tired or perhaps I would have thought of the sunnier scenarios: sharing a room with a friend from school whose mother had decided to keep her on when her mother was busted, sent off to an aunt in Cleveland or Detroit or somewhere with an Indian name upstate that the system didn’t know about. In fourth grade, in the choir. Instead all I thought was the worst. Killed by one of the men for whom her mother ran dope. Used as a sex toy for assorted pedophiles. Dead in the ER of one of the city hospitals of an asthma attack, undocumented, waiting in the morgue for the clock to run so some Rikers inmates on cemetery detail could toss her in one of the mass graves on Hart Island. I put my head down on the paper, on my desk, next to the shell with its infinite whorls, its secret spaces inside. I had figured having a baby was going to make me sick, and tired. I hadn’t imagined how it would make me feel about the wreckage of little lives I saw every day in my work.
There’s one thing I’ve never figured out about Irving Lefkowitz, and that is why he always shows up when you least want him. Have your hair highlighted and blown out by Mr. Victor of West Fifty-eighth Street, and Irving will be handling the local TV mokes for five days after a cop killing. Develop cold sores so bad that everyone suspects you have the syph, as Tequila once charmingly opined, and he’ll be at the door with a bottle of good wine and a sex jones that very night.
So it was only natural that when I dozed off on my desk, then raised my head, the outline of a paper clip imprinted on my cheek, he would be standing in the doorway. In the interval between my waking and his sitting, I understood that he was angry. Cops tend, like old sinks, to have a hot tap and a cold one. It takes some doing for them to work it out to warm. He wasn’t trying. If I’d been a criminal, I would have been terribly afraid.
But his voice was soft as he began. “Here’s the thing we can never figure out. The bad guys don’t even try most of the time. We get a line on someone who has capped a couple of people, and we find him asleep in his own bed, and in his sock drawer we find a loaded weapon. And it’s the same weapon used to cap the victims. Or there’s a couple thousand dollars’ worth of stolen goods, and they’re stacked neatly in the closet. It’s like it’s immaterial to them. Or maybe they’re so delusional about apprehension that it never occurs to them.”
I like the way Irving uses police jargon. I don’t like it when his voice is low, slow. I think of it as his interrogation voice. He used a sweeping motion of his hand to indicate his clothes, the polo shirt, the neat slacks.
“So I’m at Midtown South and I have to get changed for the game, which I’m taking Leo to tonight. It’s too long a distance to go to my apartment. But I recall that
I have all the right clothes at your apartment from that trip to Coney Island. I change, I go to the bathroom. And what do I see in the bathroom?”
“What?”
“In the trash. Right there. Like it doesn’t matter. Of course the real evidence has been hidden. But there’s the box.”
Irving said nothing as the silence dragged on. Again, a cop thing. Guilty people love to fill up a silence.
“A pregnancy test is not evidence of a crime,” I finally said. “And I didn’t hide anything. I put it away.”
“That’s not hiding?”
“You’re talking about the little stick thing. I put it away.” Then I was angry, too, angry and sick at heart. “I put it away to put in the baby book someday.”
He slammed his hand down on the desk and leaned forward. “What have I said a hundred times? A hundred goddamn times? What have I said over and over again, Bridget?”
“I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened, and here we are. Can’t you be happy at all?”
“Do I get any say in this?”
“Irving, I’m forty-three years old. I’m too old to have an abortion.”
He stood up, rubbed his hand hard over the bottom of his face like he was trying to get his mouth, his chin, into some particular position. There was a Yankees hat sticking out of his back pants pocket.
“I’m too old to have a kid,” he said.
“Just think about it. Don’t make a snap decision.”
“You think I haven’t thought about this for years and years? I’m sixty-seven years old. You know how many times I’ve been asked if I have kids? I am not cut out for it. That’s all there is to it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I’m sorry, too,” he said, shaking his head. “You have no idea how sorry I am.” And then he left for the game. The Yankees lost, 4–3. Later Leo said Irving took it hard.
GOING OUT TO dinner with the Borowses would be funny if the maelstrom that develops around you did not feel so frantic, so desperate, so much like that news footage of people putting up plywood and throwing their dogs in the car to escape a hurricane. It’s much worse even than going to a restaurant with Meghan, which usually results only in an assortment of unasked-for tastings and wines, and an obeisance so marked that it makes you feel a little dirty. But Kate, in her ever-present tribal jewelry, and Sam, with the trademark Hanes T-shirt and Levi’s jeans beneath a thousand-dollar raw silk sport coat, are to a New York City restaurant what the pope is to a parish church. One slip and you’re done. Or so all the restaurateurs believe. In fact the Borowses pay little attention when they are not working on their restaurant guide. They simply want decent food and good conversation. What they get is a waiter for every diner at the table and a recitation of specials that have appeared out of nowhere, in chef haiku:
The arctic char
Sautéed with baby capers—
Served with mesclun salad.
When I first met the Borowses and began to dine out with them, the secret ingredient was always shiitake mushrooms, but that was a long time ago. In the course of our friendship, we have passed through pumpkin risotto, balsamic reduction, and peach salsa. “Please God, no lemongrass,” Kate had muttered the last time we had dinner at a place that described itself as French-Thai.
So when they merely want to eat and relax, the Borowses always go to a venerable midpriced French restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street that they’d been going to since they were young. It has a middling rating in their guide because it has middling food, although like most French restaurants in New York it serves a good salad, good steak au poivre and tartare, and good liver. When we eat there, it is like eating normally instead of being Olympic judges at a skating rink. No figure eights. The elderly waiters pull their lips tight when we order something of which they disapprove, and then we change our orders. Unfortunately, now people go there because they have heard it is where the Borowses eat when they’re not working.
“Oh, no,” Kate muttered under her breath when she saw a woman approach our table with a bright white Chiclets smile and a cashmere shawl draped around her shoulders.
“Just the person I’m looking for,” she said, bending for the air kiss. “Or people. I love you, too, Sam, as you know.”
“And I appreciate it, Lisa,” Sam replied. I didn’t know the woman, but she must be truly awful for Sam to have taken that flat dry tone. He even manages to be nice to the mayor.
“I know you don’t talk business at dinner, and neither do I, it’s my new policy. Lunch, yes. Dinner, no. But I just wanted to give you my card because I have a young couple who are very interested in a certain apartment in a certain building that I keep hearing will go on the market soon. And I know you’d be the first to know when that happens, and I just thought I could make it easy for everyone. Cut out the second broker, all the look-sees. I know high-profile types hate having people traipse through their homes, and in certain situations, you don’t know, instead of real prospects you might have reporters, although we try to screen and prequalify, as you would imagine—”
“I’ve got the card, Lisa. I’ll call if the occasion arises.” Kate’s voice would have frozen a daiquiri. I suppose New York real estate agents are immune to that.
“Please don’t think I’m trying to jump the gun. But this young couple have a toddler and another on the way, and the place would be perfect for them. He’s a Wall Street guy, so they’d pay the full asking price. Honestly, I think she’s a fan. You know how it goes, she’ll tell her friends, Guess whose apartment we’re buying? It’s absurd, but it can jack up the price. Two years ago I remember that singer’s apartment was on the market, what was her name—”
“I have the card,” Kate said, and now the tone of contempt and dismissal was unmistakable. Sam had his foot atop my instep.
“Did that woman just try to sell my sister’s apartment?” I said as Lisa Real Estate crossed the room, adjusting the shawl.
“Jesus Christ, people are unbelievable,” Kate muttered from between her teeth. She took the card and stuffed it in the bread basket, then took it out again. “I’m not going to take the chance that someone will find it and actually call her,” she said.
“That’s the third one this week,” Sam said.
“The third what?”
“The third real estate agent. It’s a big apartment with good views. On Central Park West.”
“Someone lives there!” I said.
“I know, but Leo’s in college, she’s out of a job. And people have seen Evan out—”
“With a woman?”
“That’s what I hear.”
“God, I hate New York. Don’t you hate it sometimes? Hate it and love it at the same time. That’s what’s so infuriating.”
“Just like your relationship with Meghan.”
“Oh, stop, Kate.”
“Okay, I know. Bridget doesn’t hate Meghan. Bridget loves Meghan. She loves Meghan, and Meghan makes her totally crazy. I feel exactly the same way. And if anyone else tries to talk to me about buying Meghan’s apartment, I will personally kill and eat them. None of them seem to realize that it could be them, that all it would take is one misstep and suddenly your name is wiped off of every benefit committee list in New York.”
“Is that happening?”
Kate shrugged. “A bit. Who cares?”
“That’s weird. I’m supposed to go to a dinner next week at the home of one of our board members and I tried to weasel out because I hate those things. And she really really wanted me to come. And she knows Meghan is my sister.”
“God, Bridget, you are an innocent. She’s thrilled you’re coming. She’s telling everyone you’re going to be there. They’re going to read you like tea leaves. By the next day there will be women all over Manhattan having coffee and describing you as a good friend and saying that Meghan is fine or Meghan is terrible or whatever the hell they can divine from whether you eat dessert o
r take cream with your coffee. Or maybe not. Maybe you’ll wind up at an entire ladies’ lunch made up of decent people. Yeah, that’ll happen. Speaking of which, guess who I ran into the other day on the street? That woman Ann Jensen.”
“I remember her. She chaired that dinner for Manhattan Mothers. Oh, God, please don’t tell me she wants to buy the apartment. That night she was acting like Meghan was the greatest thing since the face-lift!”
“Honey, no offense to your sister’s place, but Ann Jensen is strictly East Side. And I believe she has a triplex with a lap pool.”
“Isn’t she the one who was a call girl in L.A. and then married somebody really rich?” said Sam.
“I don’t think so. I think she was somebody’s assistant, then somebody’s girlfriend. Then the wife of somebody.”
“So she’s not the one whose husband died in some weird accident and there were rumors that she or her trainer, I think, were involved?” I said.
“I know who you’re talking about,” Kate said. “That’s somebody else.”
“My God,” said Sam, “this conversation is surreal.”
“So what did she say?” I asked.
“Well, she has this annoying way of leaning in as though she’s going to tell you the secret of life,” Kate said. “And she told me about the Manhattan Mothers event, and how great Meghan was that night, and how it was only two days before what she called ‘the incident.’ And I was standing there thinking, What the hell will Sam say if it says in the tabs that I punched this woman’s lights out on Fifty-seventh Street? So she leans in really close and asks if I’m touch with Meghan, and before I can answer she says in this really tough voice, not at all like the way she usually talks, ‘Tell her not to let the bastards break her.’ And she got into a Bentley with a driver at the curb. Believe me, she meant it. It was as though her real self popped out right in front of Bergdorf’s.”