Then they were gone.
Bronfman did not move or even breathe, and left his trousers puddled around his ankles. But then the spell was broken, and he pulled them up, belted them, and walked back into the bar, back into the cacophony of other people’s lives. Lucy and Shawn were gone, nowhere to be seen. And there was Crouton, at a high table against the sheet-metal wall, talking to a young woman who, Bronfman could see now, was desperate to get away from him. What a jerk. Bronfman fixed his stare on Crouton like a laser beam until Crouton felt it and looked up, and their eyes met, and with all his cerebral might Bronfman tried to impart to Crouton what had just happened, the magical experience he’d just had. Maybe he did impart it, or maybe he didn’t, but at least Crouton stopped talking long enough for the girl to say good-bye, and she left, and then Bronfman left, too, a soldier bravely entering the mysterious night.
What a day. He would never forget it. How could he? He had been wrong about himself forever. He was good enough, and good enough was great. This was Bronfman, becoming defined.
DAY
THIRTY-SIX
ONE
It was the first week of May. For the past few mornings it had felt like summer already, the way the dew steamed in the rising sun. A thin wall of heat greeted Bronfman when he opened his door and stepped out into the day, his brand-new penis in tow. He felt the presence of another and glanced to his right. There he saw Thomas Edison’s friend Coco, sitting on his next-door neighbor’s stoop. He could see now what a small woman she was, and yet one fully grown, wearing old cutoff jeans and a sleeveless yellow blouse with rows of flowered ruffles along the front. It might have been made for a child. Long black hair braided into two identical tributaries, reflecting the light like vinyl, her skin tinted as if in an old photograph, sepia-toned. Bright dark eyes.
She was smoking, of course. No one in Thomas Edison’s cluster cared about what smoking did to your heart, lungs, life expectancy, breath. Either they thought they were immune to it or it didn’t matter that they weren’t. Bronfman wasn’t sure which was worse.
“Good morning,” he said. “Coco.”
She glanced at him, smiled briefly, and lifted one of her hands, approximating a waving gesture, and then went back to whatever it was she was doing—smoking and thumbing through a fashion magazine, turning the pages much too quickly to read. She was just looking at the pictures.
“Are you waiting for Thomas?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, without looking up. “He’s inside.”
Normally, with that he would have moved on, but whoever he was today did not move on. Today he waited for more. The pound dogs were howling lazily, as if they didn’t really care about howling; it was just their job as dogs. He scanned the grassy-patched dirt beside the stoop: four cigarette butts, half smoked; a gum wrapper; a chewed piece of gum. How reprobates marked time.
“Coco is an interesting name,” Bronfman said.
She turned another glossy page but, when she felt him staring at her, said, “Nickname. Short for Yoshiko. Japanese descent, and, like my parents say, I’ve been falling ever since.”
“Ah. So you’re just sitting here?”
She sighed and dropped her half-smoked cigarette into the dirt, where it smoldered. “I’m—you know.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I’m on lookout,” she said. She gave the word air quotes. “He doesn’t want anyone coming in while he’s doing whatever he’s doing with—whoever he’s doing it with. I don’t know. I’m not a part of it. He said something happened. With you.”
Bronfman nodded. “Something did. A man almost killed me.”
“No, he didn’t,” she said. “Not what I heard, anyway. He just implied that he would, to scare you. That’s Jimmy. I shouldn’t say he’s harmless but—he’s harmless.”
“So I shouldn’t worry.” Bronfman smiled.
“Don’t worry about a thing.”
Bronfman decided to acknowledge the elephant in his brain. “You were wearing my hat,” he said. “The other night.”
She pretended to think about it. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
Boldly, he pressed on. “That was definitely my hat.”
She sighed, as if she had been finished with this conversation long before he had. “Why would I be wearing your hat? That doesn’t make sense. If I was wearing a hat it would be mine, not yours.”
“The hat was stolen. Someone stole it. I saw you with it on.”
Then there came some angry voices from inside Thomas Edison’s apartment. Something shattered, a door slammed. Coco lifted her head, her small face empty of expression, listening. But all was quiet now. She turned her gaze to him.
“Are you saying I stole your shitty fucking hat?”
Bronfman wouldn’t say that. He had tried this once before with Thomas Edison, and it had almost gotten him killed.
“No,” he said.
“Then what?”
“Nothing.”
“Whatever,” she said. She turned away.
All the good feeling he’d woken up with was now entirely gone, as it always was after being filtered through reality.
“You have to admit it’s a coincidence,” he said, “that you would have a hat exactly like the one I had, which was stolen.”
“I will admit that,” she said. “It’s eerie. It’s one of those things that happen and you think, I mean, Wow! You couldn’t make this shit up, you know?”
“I’ve had that hat all my life. Since I was a boy. It means … it means a lot to me.”
This moved her. She closed the magazine and, for the first time, really looked at Bronfman. They were connecting. It felt like a connection. Her eyes softened and she almost smiled.
“I had a doll once,” she said. “My dad had gone on a business trip somewhere, and he brought it back. It was a Raggedy Ann. My first white doll. ‘All the little American girls have this doll,’ he said. ‘You are American.’ It seemed like that was the first time he’d really realized it. That I was born here, that I wasn’t really Japanese, like he was.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What happened to the doll?”
She shrugged. “Lost it,” she said. “Or maybe it was stolen by some other American girl? I don’t know. So I get it, how you feel about the hat. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” he said. He blinked a couple of times and dropped his chin. “I guess I’ll survive.”
“I hope so,” she said. “The hat, it’s just a thing. A thing you used to have. Better to look ahead to other things, the things you haven’t got yet.”
He raised his head and looked at her. She wasn’t who he thought she was. She was something more.
“Well,” he said, “have a nice day.”
He waited for her to say the same—You, too, Bronfman. But she went back to her magazine, and lit another cigarette, and brought her knees up to her chest and held them there, and flipped through the magazine until she came to the end of it, at which point she started again from the beginning.
TWO
An office has a mood, a personality, a soul. It’s a single organism made up of dozens of smaller organisms whose individual experiences contribute to the whole, creating either a buoyant can-do attitude or a beleaguered pessimism that can last the whole day through. Today the office was magnificently bleak. Skip Sorsby had again lost the IKEA invoice in a digital quagmire, and his frustration spread like a virus, affecting everybody. Bronfman, already battling a characteristic despondency, needed a pick-me-up.
That pick-me-up was Goldstein’s, of course.
Goldstein’s Deli and its Famous Reuben. Never failed to satisfy. Goldstein’s made the best Reuben Bronfman had ever known. There was a secret sauce of some kind, one invented by Ira Goldstein, who was at least a hundred years old now and sat behind the cash register like a shrunken effigy of himself, incapable of even a smile. He looked as if he wished he’d died a long time ago. His son Cal
eb ran the place now. A pleasant, heavy man. A younger version of Ira. He had a spark, an eagerness to please, that Bronfman appreciated. He knew Bronfman well, and always greeted him with excessive enthusiasm. Caleb knew Bronfman’s order before he placed it—“One Reuben, the works!” Caleb would call out, sometimes just as Bronfman walked in the door. This made Bronfman unaccountably happy. And when Caleb said, as he so often did, “One day they’re going to change the name of this sandwich to the Bronfman. From my mouth to God’s ears! Not a Reuben anymore—the Bronfman!” Bronfman soared into thin stratospheric air, where he found it hard to breathe. He had at least half-a-dozen Goldstein’s pens.
Today was different. Caleb was there, taking orders, same as ever. But there was no spark, no zest. His shoulders slumped into his chest. Bronfman hoped his presence might brighten Caleb up, but even as he approached the counter there was no greeting, no suggestion to God that the name of the Reuben be changed to the Bronfman—nothing. Bronfman wondered, as always, if it was something he had done, or hadn’t done. Maybe he should come in more often. Maybe he wasn’t being the sort of customer Caleb wanted him to be.
“Hi, Caleb,” Bronfman said, a bit sheepishly. “Long time no see. Buried in paperwork, really busy—you know how it is.” Caleb nodded, pen in hand, waiting for Bronfman’s order. It was so weird. It was as if the real Caleb had been replaced by a fake composite Caleb who was identical to Caleb in every way, a clone who had only one flaw: he didn’t know Bronfman; he didn’t know Bronfman’s sandwich. A minor detail that had been overlooked when this replacement was made!
“So what can I get you?”
“Ha! You know what I want, Caleb,” Bronfman said.
He sighed. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Why don’t you just tell me. Order something. There’s a line.”
“Caleb.” It was important that Caleb knew what Bronfman wanted. It was so important that Bronfman wasn’t going to tell him—he couldn’t. He was going to make him figure it out. He was going to make him remember. “I want what I get every time I’m here.”
Caleb sighed. “Okay, give me a hint,” he said. “Like maybe tell me the name of the fucking sandwich you want.”
Bronfman was crushed. Caleb saw that, and softened, and for the first time really focused on the face before him.
“Oh, Bronfman,” he said. “Bronfman, I’m sorry. The Reuben, of course.” He wrote it down on the little pad and shook his head.
“Are you okay?”
Caleb shrugged, as if considering it. “My father, Ira. He’s in the hospital. Pneumonia. At his age, you know … you have to worry a little bit.”
“Oh, my God.” Bronfman sounded surprised, but he wasn’t really. Ira had been hanging by a twig from a cliff for a decade. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” Caleb said. “Wish I could be with him, but we have a business to run,” he said. “Customers. They count on us. Ira never missed a day of work in his life. The day I was born, he was here. I was born on a Wednesday, and he didn’t see me until Thursday. Whatareyougonnado? Mama’s with him.”
“That’s good,” Bronfman said.
“You know how long they’ve been together? Sixty-five years. Sixty-five years! And they still love each other. Would that we were all that lucky.”
Sixty-five years, Bronfman thought. If he found someone today who loved him like that and stuck with him that long, he would die at ninety-nine.
“You got someone, Bronfman? You got a wife?”
“No,” Bronfman said.
“A girlfriend, then.”
“No,” Bronfman said. “I don’t have a companion of any kind.”
“Well, get one,” Caleb said.
“That’s my goal,” Bronfman said. “I have forty-three days.”
Caleb nodded, though he seemed confused now. “Good to have a goal, I guess. But you don’t want to put a timer on it. You never know how long it’s going to take.”
“But I know exactly how long I have. I won a prize. I won it here, actually. A trip to the beach.”
But Caleb had lost interest, was looking over Bronfman’s shoulder to the customer behind him. “Whatareyougonnado?” he said. That was his go-to phrase. “Next!”
* * *
Sandwich, bag of chips, and sweet iced tea on the brown plastic tray, Bronfman made his way over to a table—a two-top, it was called by professionals in the business. It was against the wall beneath a black-and-white photo of Goldstein’s at its original location, about a block from here. It burned down in 1959, so Ira moved it, made it bigger and more “modern,” which appeared to mean a truckload of stainless steel and Formica. This is where Bronfman sat to eat his lunch, in solitude, just as he had last week, and the week before that.
What happened next was, like electricity and automobiles, another mystery.
The tables at Goldstein’s were set about a foot apart; slipping between them was a challenge. It was easy to knock against a table and create all kinds of havoc, especially for some of the patrons, who were heavy. More than heavy. Some were big. Some people were simply enormous. But none of them would ever even have attempted to slip through the narrow corridor of tables. Only the slimmest of people would think such passage was remotely possible and attempt its negotiation.
Such a person did attempt it now. She was slim. Small. Almost petite. She wore a yellow-and-white sundress neatly cinched at the waist, the hem of which stopped an inch or so above her knees, her arms and shoulders so delicately white you could have sifted half a cup of flour on them and no one would have been the wiser. On her tray was some chicken salad—a round mound scooped out and plopped there by an ice-cream scooper—and a wedge of iceberg lettuce and a dill pickle and a corn stick, which was like a corn muffin but instead of being muffin-shaped it was shaped like an ear of corn. The corn stick was something Goldstein’s was moderately famous for. Her purse—huge, almost like a backpack, and stuffed with what appeared to be one of every thing there was in the world—swung dangerously from one of her lovely arms.
It was Sheila McNabb.
“Sheila,” Bronfman said, not for her to hear but for him. He said it as if it were an incantation. She didn’t see him. She tried to slip by, so he pushed his tray toward the opposite edge of the table to give her extra room. But there still wasn’t enough room. Her purse knocked against his tray and his entire extra-large glass of sweetened iced tea fell, and was dripping from his lap now, the front of his shirt, seeping into his boxer shorts, and soaked up by the rest of him until he was wet all over. The tea at Goldstein’s was also moderately famous and served in bucket-size red plastic cups.
“Oh, my God!” she said, as if she had accidentally severed one of his arms. People turned to see who was dying. “I am so sorry!”
“No, no,” he said, softly, evenly. “You didn’t do anything.”
“I knocked your glass over. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have tried to get through here. I thought—optimist that I am—I thought I could make it through.”
Bronfman took a napkin and pointlessly tried to pat himself dry. “My fault,” he said. “I moved to one side to give you more room if you needed it, and my arm hit the glass. It was my fault, not yours, Sheila.”
She had been examining the damage, the swamp his lap had become, and then, for the first time, she looked at him.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my goodness. You—you’re Edsel. Edsel Bronfman. From the Cranston Building.”
Wow. Just wow. She remembered his name. Like a magic trick.
“So I’m going to sit down with you,” Sheila said. “May I sit with you?”
“Of course. Please.”
She sat, and set her purse down on the floor beside her feet. It was as big as a two-year- old.
“Edsel,” she said. She let the sound of his name hang in the air. “Well, that’s—. What do you know. How long has it been? Like a month, right?”
“Thirty-four days,” Bronfman said, and regretted it immediately. It wasn’t as if he had been
counting the days since he had last seen her, but obviously, without even knowing it, he had. As if he had a calendar in his heart.
“You look great. You seem, I don’t know—”
“More defined?”
“I already defined you. You’re a giraffe, remember?”
“You remembered.”
“Of course I remembered,” she said. “No one forgets an ungulate.”
She unwrapped her fork and knife from the tightly wrapped napkin.
“This is where I’m supposed to say I’ll pay for your dry cleaning.” She paused. Deep breath. “I’ll pay for your dry cleaning.”
“But it’s just tea,” Bronfman said. “It’s mostly water. It won’t stain. I’m just … wet.”
She shook her head. “I wish I were on crutches so no one could blame me for anything.” She laughed, and leaned in toward Bronfman. “I didn’t mean that. I’m going to hell.”
“No,” Bronfman said. “Sometimes I wish I was on crutches, too. People are nicer to you when you’re on crutches.”
“Do you love this place? I love this place,” she said. “I’ve been coming here since the Truman administration.”
“That’s a long time.”
“I’m a hundred and five years old,” she said. “My secret? Organic vegetables. That’s how I keep my looks. And the blood of a virgin, of course. Spoonful a day, and I’m good as new.”
“Ha-ha,” Bronfman said, thinking that would probably be funny to someone who wasn’t Edsel Bronfman.
She removed her salad from the tray and set the tray down at an empty table to her left. Now the food was displayed as if she were at home, or at a restaurant where it was served by a waiter. Bronfman never took his plates off the tray; he never thought about it. It looked like a good idea, though, now that he had seen her do it. Next time.
“It’s great to run into you,” she said, and laughed. “Stupid pun completely accidental. Like almost everything I do.”
Bronfman wondered if it was an accident, though. As he felt the tea inching toward his neck, he realized that this was one of life’s large moments. He was sitting at his favorite restaurant with a woman he hadn’t stopped thinking about since the day he last saw her. An immense spotlight from the heavens seemed to be shining on them. This little table at Goldstein’s was the center of all creation. His heart was a ball of tangled yarn. It wasn’t love—he would not allow for that. But, at the very least, it was a robust and bright-eyed emotion, impossible to ignore.