The City When It Rains

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know what I mean,” Dr. Rosen said. “That I didn’t have to look, that no one had to tell me. I absolutely knew what had happened to my daughter.”

  At that instant, Corman realized that there would be no book on Sarah Rosen, no exposure on film or otherwise. At the same moment, he saw Lucy in Sarah’s place, standing at the window, staring down as Sarah had, as all daughters did, poised on the excruciating ledge while their fathers watched them helplessly, watched as they retreated further and further from their care until finally they could grasp no more of them than the small white button of a dress.

  Corman walked home to his apartment very slowly, often stopping to peer into a shop window or, more often, into the yellowish interior of a bar. The old city was no more. Like all things held too dear, it had become a phantom. Now there was only Lucy. He felt her like a wreath of smoke around his head, dense, powerful, and yet beyond his grasp, a presence he could neither hold on to nor bat away, and as he continued toward home, he wondered if he would always have to live with her in this new way, love her at a distance, visit only on recommended days.

  She was standing at the window when he came in and turned toward him slowly, her face very solemn. He felt himself quake and shiver, swallowed hard, and gained control.

  “You got a call, Papa,” she said.

  Corman pulled the camera bag from his shoulder and let it fall into the chair beside the door. “Who from?” he asked in a whisper.

  “That home where Mr. Lazar is.”

  Corman looked at her and waited.

  Lucy hesitated a moment, then spoke. “He died, Papa,” she said tenderly. “They want to know what to do with him.”

  Corman’s thought came immediately. “Do with him?” he asked himself silently. “What could anyone ever do with such a man?”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THEY NEEDED a suit to bury him in, as Corman found out early the next morning. As he dressed himself he tried to decide what would look best on Lazar. It was the kind of highly limited detail his mind could concentrate on, and he felt grateful for the way it kept everything else at bay.

  “I guess there’ll be a funeral,” Lucy said quietly as she strolled into the living room.

  “Yes,” Corman said, “but not today. You can just hang around here. I have to get some things before they bury him.”

  She rubbed her eyes wearily. “He was a nice man.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Remember when he gave me that toy typewriter?”

  Corman nodded, pulled on his jacket and headed for the door.

  “I still have it,” Lucy said as she followed behind him. “I don’t play with it anymore.” She considered it for a moment. “But maybe I’ll keep it anyway,” she said at last. “Because he was a nice man.”

  Corman bent forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, carefully resisting his need to pull her fiercely into his arms and rush away with her, as animals sometimes did when their young were at risk, holding them like tender morsels within their open mouths.

  “See you this afternoon,” Lucy said as she opened the door for him.

  He nodded crisply, then stepped into the hallway.

  She drew him down to her again and kissed him very softly on his cheek. “ ’Bye,” she said as she slowly began to close the door.

  He watched her disappear behind it as he usually did, but differently too, in the way he thought must inevitably accompany the dwindling of life, when everything counts more in number than degree, and each sensation asks how many times are left to see, hear, feel or taste it.

  It was only a short walk from the Broadway to Lazar’s apartment on West 44th Street. It was in a rundown five-story building where some of the older tenants, unable to live on Social Security, rented out their rooms for thirty minutes at a time to the small army of Eighth Avenue prostitutes who swarmed over the neighborhood. They were mostly old Broadway types, bit players in the long spectacle, who chatted casually on the stoop while their rooms were being used upstairs.

  Corman rang Chico’s buzzer and waited the few seconds it took for him to come up from his own basement apartment.

  “I need to get into Mr. Lazar’s apartment,” Corman told him.

  “Sure, no problem,” Chico said. “How’s he doing? He doing okay, or what?”

  “He died.”

  Chico’s face remained oddly cheerful, despite the news. “My mother, the same. Sometimes, you know, it’s the best thing.” He smiled quietly. “You his son, right?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “You the only one I ever see him with,” Chico said. “So I figure you was his son.”

  “No. We worked together.”

  Chico nodded quickly. “So, what you want? The key?”

  “I need to get a suit to bury him in,” Corman explained.

  “Yeah, sure, no problem,” Chico said hastily. He pulled a huge ring of keys from his pocket, pulled one off and handed it to Corman. “What’s going to be with the apartment? You going to clean it out, or what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s decontrolled now, you know,” Chico said. “So, the land-lord, he’s going to want to take it back, okay? I mean, right away.”

  “He can have it tomorrow,” Corman said.

  Chico looked unsure. “You sure that’s okay? The old man, he didn’t have nobody?”

  “Nobody.”

  “So, okay if we clean it out?” Chico asked. “You give me the okay to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good, then,” Chico said happily. He slapped Corman gently on the shoulder. “You take whatever you want. The rest, we’ll dump it.”

  Corman nodded quickly and made his way upstairs, then into the apartment.

  It was a one-room apartment which overlooked the street. Long, dark blue curtains hung over a tangle of battered Venetian blinds. The sink was stained and rusty, the toilet ran incessantly, filling the air with a soft gurgling rattle. The bed sat in one corner, its covers rumpled, the torn sheets piled up along the floor beside it like a drift of faintly yellow snow. In a photograph, Corman realized as he walked to the window and raised the blinds, it would look like a stage designer’s idea of a loser’s apartment, a dusty little room in a pathetic has-been of a building full of people who had nothing left to turn a trick with but their beds.

  He walked to the single, nearly empty closet at the back of the room. The door was already ajar, the upper hinge pulled nearly free from the wall so that it slumped to the right. There were two suits, five shirts and four pairs of trousers. A cracked leather belt hung from a wire hanger, along with a scattering of ties. Corman picked the dark blue one, then added a white shirt and a black suit. The world could hardly contain the vast irrelevancy of his shoes.

  A large suitcase rested on the upper shelf of the closet, and as Corman pulled it forward, he felt its unexpected heaviness suddenly shift toward him, then stood by helplessly as it tumbled over the edge and slammed into the floor below, the top springing open as it fell, spilling hundreds of photographs in a wide, black-and-white wave across the bare, wooden floor.

  Reflexively, he dropped to his knees and began sweeping the scattered pictures back into the gutted suitcase. At first he returned them in large handfuls, then slowly, one by one, taking a long, lingering moment to stare appreciatively at each of them. These were what the old man’s soul had needed, and as Corman continued to look at them, staring longer and longer at each one, he knew that this was his way of paying homage to a life he’d only come to know in its final years. All through the morning and then into the afternoon, he sat on the floor and looked at the photographs Lazar had saved through his long career. While the air grew steadily darker, he peered at pictures of children playing in the park, women leaning from their windows, men slumping against parking meters, cars and brick walls, and over and over, in one picture after another, in a theme that seemed to have developed slo
wly throughout the old man’s life, pictures of people huddled beneath awnings, in doorways, under the fluttering batlike wings of a thousand black umbrellas, but all of them staring out toward unseen open spaces, as if still searching for some break in the unrelenting rain. And as Corman returned the last picture to the suitcase, it struck him that this was what had been missing from Groton’s apartment, that there’d been no photographs hanging from the walls or stuffed into his bag, not one picture after all those years to stand forever as something he did right.

  He was still in Lazar’s apartment when he called Pike. “I’m going to pass on Groton’s job,” he told him quietly.

  “Suit yourself,” Pike said casually. “It’s not a job I’ll have any trouble filling.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Too bad, though,” Pike added nonchalantly. “The fag liked you, said you were a pretty good shooter.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Said you had an eye for things.”

  “An eye,” Corman repeated unemphatically, then with more significance. “Lazar died yesterday.” He tapped the side of his camera bag. “I’m taking some of his clothes up. For the body.”

  “He was good,” Pike said, “a good shooter. But he was weak, Corman. What the Irish call a harp.”

  “He seemed tough enough to me.”

  “How tough’s that?”

  “He drank it down to the worm,” Corman said. “He didn’t fake anything.” If he’d been a sculptor, he thought as he hung up the phone, he would have etched the same proud words upon the old man’s stone.

  * * *

  Corman laid the bag on the desk beside a tray of hospital plates. “This is for Mr. Lazar,” he said.

  The attendant recognized him immediately and gave him a quizzical look. “Did anyone call you?” she asked delicately.

  Corman nodded. “I know he died,” he told her. “I brought some clothes for him.”

  “Oh, I see,” the woman said. “Well, Mr. Lazar is … we have … I mean he’s downstairs.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to see him?”

  Corman shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  The woman smiled softly. “He died in his sleep,” she said. “Very quiet. We didn’t know anything had happened until we made our regular rounds.” She glanced at the bag for no reason, then returned her eyes to Corman. “He was sitting up. I mean, when it happened. I guess he was listening to the radio. He had it propped up against his ear.”

  “Yes, he was probably doing that,” Corman said. He could feel a strange restlessness somewhere deep within him and worked to keep it down. “As far as a funeral, I’ll make the arrangements. He owned a plot in a cemetery in Brooklyn. The one you see from the train on the way to Coney Island. It’s very crowded. He liked that, crowds.”

  “I know the one,” the woman said with a sudden cheeriness. “I live near it.”

  “They would know about the plot,” Corman added. “Where it is. That kind of thing. I’ll call them, make the arrangements.” He slid the bag over toward her. “I guess you can take these now?”

  She pulled them toward her, peeked in. “Looks fine,” she said.

  Corman placed his hand on the suitcase. He could feel the many miles it had traveled, smell the hotel beds where Lazar had flung it, see the roads, tracks, rails it had been hustled down. “Yes,” he said as he spread his hand across it, left it there a moment, then drew it achingly away.

  Lucy had left a note on the door telling him she’d gone to Mrs. Donaldson’s, so he trudged back down the hallway to get her. She answered the door immediately.

  “Why are you here?” she asked, surprised.

  He smiled quietly. “Just to pick you up.”

  “I thought you were going out with Mom.”

  “I am, a little later.”

  “And I’m going home with her tonight, right?”

  Corman nodded. Tonight and forever, he thought, and ever and ever and ever. And he would be away as she grew tall and her voice changed by imperceptible degrees. He would be away when she failed at this, triumphed at that, away when she woke up with a start, when the cat died, the bird escaped, away when she fell, away when she got up again. And in the end he would no longer feel familiar with the shape of her leg, the length of her hair, because, by some formula the world took powerfully to heart, he had failed to be what he should have been.

  “So when are you meeting Mom?” Lucy asked.

  “Around eight,” Corman told her. “Mrs. Donaldson will stay with you until we get back.”

  Lucy turned excitedly and called to Mrs. Donaldson that her father had arrived, and that she was going home. “Is it okay if I eat with her tonight?” she asked as they headed toward their apartment. “She cooks better.”

  “Yeah, it’s okay.”

  Lucy slapped her hands together. “Great,” she said happily, then rushed away, bounding down the corridor ahead of him for a few yards before she stopped abruptly, as if caught by a sudden thought. Then, for no reason he could understand, she returned to him slowly, her eyes oddly tender, tucked her hand in his arm and walked beside him silently to their door.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  LEXIE ARRIVED almost exactly at eight. She smiled tentatively when Corman opened the door, then came slowly into the small foyer as he stepped back to let her pass.

  Lucy rushed from her room to greet her. “Hi, Mom.”

  Lexie pulled her into her arms, smiled warmly. “Hi. How are you?”

  “Fine,” Lucy said. “I’m staying with you tonight.”

  “Absolutely,” Lexie said. She looked at Corman, then spoke to him finally, her voice already a bit strained. “Hello, David.”

  Corman nodded.

  “You left the party quite early.”

  “The shoot was over.”

  Lucy tugged Lexie’s hand. “Did Papa tell you?”

  “Tell me what, honey?”

  “Mr. Lazar died.”

  Lexie’s eyes shot over to Corman. “I’m sorry, David.”

  “He’d had a stroke,” Corman said, almost dismissingly, carefully controlling himself. “He wasn’t in very good shape.”

  “Still, it’s …”

  “Yes, it is,” Corman said, cutting her off. He reached for another subject. “Well, this restaurant we’re going to, do I need a tie, jacket?”

  “Well, yes, I think so,” Lexie said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Corman shrugged. “No, I don’t mind. Where are we going?”

  “I thought we’d make things a little classy tonight,” Lexie told him. She smiled. “If that wouldn’t bother you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “He’d like it,” Lucy said enthusiastically. “He eats pizza most of the time.”

  Lexie’s eyes remained on Corman’s face, as if she were trying to determine exactly what was left between them, affection, amusement, just the pull of years.

  “I’ll be ready in a minute,” Corman told her. He turned, walked into the living room and pulled his jacket from the table. He could hear her moving toward him, stepping cautiously into the room, as if odd things might be lurking in its shadowy depths.

  “Okay,” he said when he turned back toward her. “I’m ready.”

  For a moment, she didn’t move. Her eyes scanned the room, surveying its stained walls and battered furnishings, the way everything seemed crippled by age and wear, the downward tug of squandered chances. She looked like a lawyer taking notes, building a case for impermissible disarray.

  “I said, I’m ready,” Corman repeated.

  “Oh, good,” Lexie said, coming back to him. She looked toward the door, smiled at Lucy as she headed toward it then hugged her once again when she got there. “See you later,” she said lightly.

  Corman stepped around her and opened the door. “ ’Bye, kid,” he said to Lucy. “I’ll tell Mrs. Donaldson to come right over.”

  “She’s bringin
g dinner,” Lucy said to Lexie. “Pot roast. It’s great.”

  Lexie smiled thinly. “Sounds wonderful,” she said, her voice faintly distant, as if it were coming from a better part of town.

  Corman headed down the corridor, stopped at Mrs. Donaldson’s door and knocked lightly.

  The door opened immediately.

  “Lucy ready for dinner?” Mrs. Donaldson asked.

  Corman nodded toward Lexie. “This is Lucy’s mother,” he said. Then to Lexie, “Mrs. Donaldson.”

  They shook hands quickly.

  “You have a wonderful little girl,” Mrs. Donaldson said. “Such a sweetie.” She smiled sympathetically at Lexie, as if in commiseration for all the times she’d had to put up with a rootless man.

  “Well, we’d better be going,” Corman said to her. “We should be back fairly early.”

  Mrs. Donaldson waved her hand. “Take your own sweet time,” she said expansively. “Me and Lucy always have a grand old time.”

  Lexie led the way to the restaurant, walking briskly, as she always did, until they’d made their way silently across town to a place called Pierre-Louis on East 56th Street. Pierre himself was standing at the door as Corman followed Lexie in. For a few minutes, the two of them stood together, talking of mutual acquaintances and the state of things in the Hamptons while Corman shifted awkwardly just to Lexie’s right, silent, patient, one of her retainers.

  “Well, it’s very good to see you again, Mrs. Mills,” Pierre said in conclusion. “Mathieu will show you to your table.”

  Mathieu did precisely that, then directed a few other people around until the table had been served with drink, bread and butter. The bread was good, like the butter. Corman recognized the scotch as the same Jeffrey had ordered for him at the Bull and Bear.