Dicky wasn't kidding about the paper airplanes.
Having been out late at The Lean-To, the next night we indulged in that sweetest of New York luxuries: a Sunday night at home with nothing to do. Dicky called down to the kitchen for a plate of tea sandwiches. Instead of gin, he opened a bottle of self-pacing white wine. And as the night was unseasonably warm, we took our little picnic onto his fifty-square-foot terrace overlooking Eighty-third Street and entertained ourselves with a pair of binoculars.
Directly across the street on the twentieth floor of No. 42 East Eighty-third was a stifling dinner party at which know-it-alls in smoking jackets were taking turns making ponderous toasts. Meanwhile, on the eighteenth floor of No. 44, three children, having been put to bed, had quietly turned on their light, built barricades with their mattresses, seized their pillows, and commenced a reenactment of the street fighting in Les Miserables. But straight across from us, in the penthouse of No. 46, an obese man in the robe of a geisha was playing a Steinway in a state of rapture. The doors to his terrace were open, and drifting over the faint sounds of Sunday night traffic we could hear the strains of his sentimental melodies: "Blue Moon," "Pennies from Heaven," "Falling in Love with Love." He played with his eyes closed and swayed back and forth, passing his meaty hands one over the other in an elegant progression of octaves and emotions. It was hypnotizing.
I wish he'd play "It's De-Lovely," Dicky said wistfully.
-Why don't you ring his doorman, I suggested, and have him send up a request?
Dicky put a finger in the air indicating a better idea.
He went inside and came out a moment later with a box of fine paper, pens, paper clips, tape, a ruler, and a compass-dumping it on the table with an expression of unusual intent.
I picked up the compass.
-You're kidding, right?
He plucked the compass back from me with a bit of a huff.
-Not in the least.
He sat down and organized his tools in a row like the scalpels on a surgeon's tray.
-Here, he said, giving me a stack of paper.
He bit the eraser of his pencil for a moment and then began to write: Dear Sir, If you would be so kind, please play us your interpretation of "It's De-Lovely." For is it not de-lightful to-nightful?
Your Moonstruck Neighbors In rapid fire we prepared twenty requests. "Just One of Those Things," "The Lady Is a Tramp." And then, starting with "It's De-Lovely," Dicky went to work.
Brushing back his bangs, he leaned forward and stuck the point of the compass into the lower-right-hand corner of the watermarked page. He deftly inscribed an arc, and then, with the precision of a draftsman, spun the compass around on the pencil tip, replanting the needle point in the center of the paper in order to draw a tangential circle. Within moments he had a series of circles and interlinking arcs. Laying his ruler down, he scored diagonal lines the way a ship's navigator sets a course on the bridge. Once the blueprint was complete, he began folding along the various diagonals, using his fingernail to sharpen each crease with a satisfying ssffit.
As Dicky worked, the tip of his tongue pointed through his teeth. In four months, it was probably the longest I had seen him go without talking. It was certainly the longest I had seen him focused on a single endeavor. Part of the joy of Dicky was the ableness with which he flitted from moment to moment and topic to topic like a sparrow in a hurricane of crumbs. But here he displayed an unself-conscious immersion that seemed more suited to a defuser of bombs; and pretty endearing it was. After all, no man in his right mind would make a paper airplane with such care in order to impress a woman.
-Voila, he said at last, holding the first plane on both palms.
But if I enjoyed watching Dicky at work, I was none too confident in his aerodynamics. It looked like no plane I had ever seen. Where the planes of the day had smooth titanium noses, rounded bellies, and wings that jutted out of the fuselage like the arms of the cross, Dicky's plane was a cantilevered triangle. It had the nose of a possum and the tail of a peacock and wings that had the pleats of a drape.
Leaning a little over the balcony, he licked his finger and held it in the air.
-Sixty-five degrees; wind at half a knot; two miles of visibility. It's a perfect night for flying.
There was no disputing that.
-Here, he said, handing me the binoculars.
I laughed and left them in my lap. He was too preoccupied to laugh back.
-Away we go, he said.
He took one last look at his engineering, then he stepped forward and extended his arm with a motion akin to a swan extending its neck.
Well, the thing of it is-Dicky's streamlined triangular fuselage may not have mimicked the planes of the day, but it perfectly anticipated the supersonic jets of the future. The plane shot out over Eighty-third Street without a tremble. It sailed through the air for a few seconds at a slight incline, leveled, and then began to drift slowly toward its mark. I scrambled for the binoculars. It took me a moment to sight the plane. It was drifting southward on a prevailing current. Ever so slightly, it began to wobble, and then descend. It disappeared into the shadows of a balcony on the nineteenth floor of No. 50-two addresses west and three floors shy of our target.
-Drat, Dicky said, with enthusiasm.
He turned to me with a touch of paternal concern.
-Don't be discouraged.
-Discouraged?
I stood up and smooched him on the smacker. When I pulled back, he smiled and said: -Back to work!
Dicky didn't have one paper airplane-he had fifty. There were triple folds, quadruple folds, quintuple folds, some of which were doubled back and reversed in quick succession, creating wing shapes that one wouldn't have thought possible without tearing the paper in two. There were those with a truncated wing and a needle nose, others with condors' wings and narrow submarine-like bodies ballasted with paper clips.
As we sent the requests across Eighty-third Street, I began to slowly understand that Dicky's proficiency lay not simply in the engineering of the planes, but in his launching techniques too. Depending on the plane's structure he would use more or less force, more or less incline, showing the expertise of one who has launched a thousand solo flights across a thousand Eighty-third streets in a thousand weather conditions.
By ten o'clock, the ponderous party had come to an end; the young revolutionaries had fallen asleep with the lights on; and we had landed, unbeknownst to our fat pianist (who had waddled off to brush his teeth), four musical requests on the tiles of his terrace. With the last plane launched, we too decided to pack it in. But when Dicky bent over to pick up the sandwich platter, he found one last piece of stationery. He stood up and looked out over the balcony.
-Wait, he said.
He leaned over and wrote out a message in perfect cursive. Without relying on his tools, he folded it back and forth until he had one of his sharper models. Then he carefully aimed and sailed it out over the street toward the nursery on the eighteenth floor of No. 44. As it traveled it seemed to gather momentum. The lights of the city flickered as if they were supporting it, the way that phosphorescence seems to support a nocturnal swimmer. It went right through their window and landed silently atop a barricade.
Dicky hadn't shown me the note, but I had read it over his shoulder.
Our bastions are under attack from all sides.
Our stores of ammunition are low.
Our salvation lies in your hands.
And, ever so appropriately, he had signed it Peter Pan.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.
Now You See It.
The first wind of the New York winter was sharp and heartless. Whenever it blew, it always made my father a little nostalgic for Russia. He'd break out the samovar and boil black tea and recall some December when there was a lull in conscription and the well wasn't frozen and the harvest hadn't failed. It wouldn't be such a bad place to be born, he'd say, if you never had to live there.
My window overlooking the back court was so crooked you could stick a pencil through the gap where the frame was supposed to meet the sill. I caulked it with an old pair of underpants, set the kettle on the stove, and recalled a few sorry Decembers of my own. I was spared the reminiscing by a knock on the door.
It was Anne, dressed in gray slacks and a baby blue shirt.
-Hello, Katherine.
-Hello, Mrs. Grandyn.
She smiled.
-I suppose I deserve that.
-To what do I owe the pleasure on a Sunday afternoon?
-Well, I hate to admit it-but at any given moment, we're all seeking someone's forgiveness. And at this particular point, I think I may be seeking yours. I put you in the position of playing the fool, which no woman like me should do to a woman like you.
That's how good she was.
-May I come in?
-Sure, I said.
And why not? When all was said and done, I knew I couldn't bear much of a grudge against Anne. She hadn't abused a trust of mine; nor had she particularly compromised herself. Like any Manhattanite of means, she had identified a need and paid to have it serviced. In its own perverse way, her purchase of a young man's favors was perfectly in keeping with the unapologetic self-possession that made her so impressive. Still, it would have been nice to see her a little more off her axis.
-Would you like a drink? I asked.
-I learned my lesson the last time. But is that tea you're brewing? That might hit the spot.
As I readied the pot she looked around my apartment. She wasn't taking an inventory of my belongings as Bryce had. She seemed more interested in the architectural features: the warped floor, cracked moldings, exposed pipes.
-When I was a girl, she said, I lived in an apartment a lot like this one, not too far from here.
I couldn't hide my surprise.
-Does that shock you?
-I'm not exactly shocked, but I assumed you were born rich.
-Oh. I was. I was raised in a townhouse off Central Park. But when I was six, I lived with a nanny on the Lower East Side. My parents told me some nonsense about my father being sick, but their marriage was probably on the verge of collapse. I gather he was something of a philanderer.
I raised my eyebrows. She smiled.
-Yes, I know. The apple and the tree. What my mother wouldn't have given to have me take after her side of the family.
We were both quiet for a moment, providing a natural opportunity for her to change the subject. But she went on. Maybe the first winds of winter make everyone a little nostalgic for the days they're lucky to be rid of.
-I remember the morning my mother brought me downtown. I was dropped in a carriage with a trunkful of clothes-half of which wouldn't do me any good where I was headed. When we got to Fourteenth Street it was crowded with hawkers and saloons and trade wagons. Seeing how excited I was by all the commotion, my mother promised I would be crossing Fourteenth Street every week on my way to visit her. I didn't cross it again for a year.
Anne raised her cup of tea to drink, but paused.
-Come to think of it, she said, I haven't crossed it since.
She started laughing.
And after a moment, I joined in. For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.
-Actually, she continued, crossing Fourteenth Street isn't the only thing I've revisited from my youth because of you.
-What's the other?
-Dickens. Remember that day in June when you were spying on me at the Plaza? You had one of his novels in your bag and it triggered some fond memories. So I dug up an old copy of Great Expectations. I hadn't opened the book in thirty years. I read it cover to cover in three days.
-What did you think?
-It was great fun, of course. The characters, the language, the turns of events. But I must admit that this time around, the book struck me as a little like Miss Havesham's dining room: a festive chamber which has been sealed off from time. It's as if Dickens's world was left at the altar.
And so it went. Anne waxed poetically on her preference for the modern novel-for Hemingway and Woolf-and we had two cups of tea, and before she had overstayed her welcome, she rose to go. At my threshold, she took one last look around.
-You know, she said as if the thought had just occurred to her, my apartment at the Beresford is going to waste. Why don't you take it?
-Oh, I couldn't, Anne.
-Why not? Woolf was only half right when she wrote A Room of One's Own. There are rooms, and there are rooms. Let me lend it to you for a year. It'll be my way of settling the score.
-Thanks, Anne. But I'm happy where I am.
She reached into her purse and pulled out a key.
-Here.
Ever tasteful, the key was on a silver ring with a leather fob the color of summer skin. She put it on a stack of books just inside my door. Then she held up her hand to stay any protest.
-Just think about it. One day during lunch give it a walk-through. Try it on for size.
I swept up the key in my palm and followed her into the hall.
I had to laugh at the whole thing. Anne Grandyn was as sharp as a harpoon and twice as barbed: An apology followed by childhood memories of the Lower East Side; a tip of the hat to her philandering roots; I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd read the whole works of Dickens just to frost this little eclair.
-You're something else, Anne, I said with a lilt.
She turned back to face me. Her expression was more serious.
-You're the one who's something else, Katherine. Ninety-nine of a hundred women born in your place would be up to their elbows in a washtub by now. I doubt you have the slightest idea of just how unusual you are.
Whatever I'd thought Anne was up to, I wasn't ready for compliments. I found myself looking at the floor. As I looked up again, through the opening in her blouse I could see that the skin of her sternum was pale and smooth; and that she wasn't wearing a bra. I didn't have time to brace myself. When I met her gaze she kissed me. We were both wearing lipstick, so there was an unusual sensation of friction as the waxy surfaces met. She put her right arm around me and pulled me closer. Then she slowly stepped back.
-Come spy on me again sometime, she said.
As she turned to go, I reached for her elbow. I turned her back around and pulled her closer. In many ways, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever known. We were almost nose to nose. She parted her lips. I slipped my hand down her pants and deposited the key.