-I'm jealous.
-Sure. The Prodigal Son and all that. But pretty soon you feel like you're the fatted calf.
With some difficulty she sat upright. She reached out two fingers and picked up a small white pill that was almost invisible on the surface of the table.
-I'm gonna find me Jesus one of these days, she said, then she washed the medicine down with her tepid gin.
-Would you like another? she asked.
-If you're having one.
She leaned on the table to push herself up.
-I can get it, I said.
She gave a wry smile.
-The doctor encourages me to exercise.
Plucking the shaker off of its stand, she worked her way toward the bar. She dragged her left foot behind her the way a kid drags a suitcase down the street.
She picked up ice cubes with a set of tongs one by one and dropped them in the fuselage. She glugged out the gin inexactly and then measured the vermouth to the drop. There was a mirror over the bar and as she stirred the drink she studied her face with a certain grim satisfaction.
They say that vampires cast no reflection. Maybe the accident had made Eve some sort of haunting spirit with the opposite property: She was invisible to herself now except for on the surface of a mirror.
She capped the shaker and gave it a lazy toggle as she limped back to her seat. After filling her glass she shoved the shaker across the table toward me.
-How are you and Tinker getting along, I asked after filling my glass.
-I'm not up for small talk, Katey.
-Is that small talk?
-Small enough.
I gestured vaguely to the apartment.
-At least, it looks like he's taking good care of you.
-You break it, you've bought it. Right?
She took a fullmouthed swallow and then looked at me more directly.
-I don't suppose you'd just go home? I'm perfectly fine. And in fifteen minutes I'll be sound asleep.
By way of illustration, she waggled her glass.
-I've got nothing better to do, I said. I'll stick around long enough to help you to your room.
She waved a hand in the air as if to say: Stay if you stay, go if you go. She took another belt and lay back on the couch. I looked down into my glass.
-Why don't you read me something, she said. That's what Tinker would do.
-Would you like that?
-At first it drove me crazy. It was like he didn't have the courage to converse. But it's grown on me.
-All right. What do you want me to read?
-It doesn't matter.
There were eight books stacked on the cocktail table in descending order of size. With dust jackets designed in glossy evocative colors, they looked like a stack of neatly wrapped Christmas presents.
I picked up the book on top. None of the pages were dog-eared, so I started at the beginning.
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay.
"But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail -Oh stop, Eve said. It's dreadful. What is it?
-Virginia Woolf.
-Ugh. Tinker brought home all these novels by women as if that's what I needed to get me back on my feet. He's surrounded my bed with them. It's as if he's planning to brick me in. Isn't there anything else?
I tilted the stack and pulled a volume from the middle.
-Hemingway?
-Thank God. But skip ahead this time, would you Katey?
-How far?
-Anywhere but the beginning.
I turned randomly to page 104: The fourth man, the big one, came out of the bank door as he watched, holding a Thomson gun in front of him, and as he backed out of the door the siren in the bank rose in a long breath-holding shriek and Harry saw the gun muzzle jump-jump-jump-jump and heard the bop-bop-bop-bop -That's more like it, Eve said.
She arranged the pillow behind her head, lay back and closed her eyes.
I read twenty-five pages out loud. Eve fell asleep after ten. I suppose I could have stopped, but I was enjoying the book. Starting on page 104 made Hemingway's prose even more energetic than usual. Without the early chapters, all the incidents became sketches and all the dialogue innuendo. Bit characters stood on equal footing with the central subjects and positively bludgeoned them with disinterested common sense. The protagonists didn't fight back. They seemed relieved to be freed from the tyranny of their tale. It made me want to read all of Hemingway's books this way.
I emptied my drink and carefully set it down so as not to clink the stem against the glass of the table.
There was a white throw on the back of Eve's couch. I draped it over her as she breathed evenly. She didn't need to find Jesus anymore, I thought to myself; he had already come looking for her.
Over the bar hung four studies of gas stations by Stuart Davis. The only art in the room, they were painted in primary colors that contrasted nicely with the furniture. In front of the liquor bottles was another silver deco piece. This one had a little window and a dial you could turn that flipped ivory cards one over the other in the fashion of a railway station timetable. Each card had the recipe for a cocktail: Martini, Manhattan, Metropolitan-flit, flit, flit. Bamboo, Bennett, Between the Sheets-flit, flit, flit, flit. Behind the bottle of gin there were four different kinds of scotch, not one of which I could afford. I poured a glass of the oldest and wandered down the back hall.
The first room on the right was the small dining room where we used to eat. Behind that was the kitchen, well outfitted and rarely used. There were untarnished copper pots on the stove and earthenware jars for FLOUR, SUGAR, COFFEE and TEA, all filled to the brim.
Beyond the kitchen was the maid's room. By all appearances, Tinker was still sleeping there. A sleeveless undershirt was on a chair and his razor was in the bathroom propped in a glass. Hanging over a small bookcase there was a rather primitive social realist painting. The image looked down on a freight dock where longshoremen were assembling for a protest. Two police cars had pulled up to the edge of the crowd. At the end of the dock you could just make out the words OPEN ALL NIGHT in blue neon. The painting was not without its virtues, but in the context of the apartment, I could see why it had been relegated to the maid's room. Victims of a similar exile, the bookcase was filled with hard-boiled detective novels.
I doubled back past the kitchen, past Eve's sleeping figure and went down the opposite hall. The first room on the left was a paneled study with a fireplace. It was half the size of my apartment.
On the desk there was another fanciful deco piece: a cigarette caddy in the shape of a race car. Each of these silver objects-the shaker, the cocktail catalog, the race car-fit nicely into the international style of the apartment. They were finely crafted like pieces of jewelry, but unmistakably masculine in purpose. And none of them were the sort of item a Tinker would buy for himself. They suggested the work of a hidden hand.
Between two bookends, there was a small selection of reference books: a thesaurus, a Latin grammar, a soon to be extremely outdated atlas. But there was also a slender volume without a title on the spine. It turned out to be a book of Washingtonia. The inscription on the first page indicated it was a present to Tinker from his mother on the occasion of his fourteenth birthday. The volume had all the famous speeches and letters arranged in chronological order, but it led off with an aspirational list composed by the founder in his teenage years: Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation Etc.
Did I say et cetera? There were 110 of them! And over half were underlined-one adolescent sharing another's enthusiasm for propriety across a chasm of 150 years. It was hard to decide which was sweeter-the fact that Tinker's mother had given it to him, or the fact that he kept it at hand.
The chair behind the desk was on a pivot. I spun around once and came to a stop. The drawers could all be locked, but none of them were. The lower drawers were empty. The upper side drawers were stuffed with the usual accessories. But sitting on top of a pile of papers in the center drawer was a letter from Eve's father.
Dear Mr. Gray [sic], I appreciate your candor in the hospital and I am prepared to take you at your word that you and Evelyn are not romantically involved. In part, that is why I must insist above your previous objections that I cover the costs of my daughter's stay in your apartment. I have enclosed a check for $1,000 and will follow it with others. Please do me the honor of cashing them.
An act of generosity rarely ends a man's responsibilities toward another; it tends instead to begin them. Few understand this, but I have no doubt that you do.
If things should develop between you and my daughter, I can only trust that you will not take advantage of her condition, her proximity or her indebtedness-that you will show the restraint that comes natural to gentlemen-until such a time as you are ready to do what is right.
With Gratitude and Trust,
Charles Everett Ross
I folded the letter and returned it to the drawer with a heightened respect for Mr. Ross. In its stark factual prose, businessman to businessman, I think his letter could have stymied Don Juan. No wonder Tinker left it there-where Eve was sure to find it.
In the master bedroom, the drapes were open and the city glittered like a diamond necklace that knows exactly whom it's within the reach of. The bed had a blue and yellow cover that complemented a pair of upholstered chairs. If the whole apartment had been designed pitch perfect for a wealthy bachelor, here there was just enough color and comfort so that a woman who lucked into the room wouldn't feel herself on alien ground. It was the hidden hand again.
In the closet there were some new additions to Eve's wardrobe. They must have been bought by Tinker because they were not inexpensive and not Evey's style. As I ran my finger along the dresses, flitting through them like the cocktail recipes, a blue flapper's jacket caught my eye. It was mine. For a moment, I wondered how it had gotten there, since I was the one who had unpacked Evey's things. But then I remembered-Evey had been wearing it the night of the accident. Through a miracle of Civility & Decent Behaviour, it had been salvaged and cleaned. I hung it back in its place and closed the closet door.
In the bathroom Eve's medication sat on the sink. It was some sort of painkiller. I looked in the mirror wondering how I would bear up in her place.
Not so well, I reckoned.
When I went back to the living room, Eve was gone.
I went to the kitchen and the maid's room. I doubled back to the study. I began to worry that she had actually run from the apartment. But then I saw the living room curtain rise and fall and the white silhouette of her dress on the terrace. I went out and joined her.
-Hey Katey.
If Eve suspected me of snooping, she didn't show it.
The sleet had stopped and the sky was starlit. The East Side apartment buildings glimmered across the park like houses on the opposite side of a cove.
-It's a little cold out here, I said.
-But worth it, right? It's funny. The skyline at night is so breathtaking and yet you could spend a whole lifetime in Manhattan and never see it. Like a mouse in a maze.
Eve was right, of course. Along whole avenues of the Lower East Side the sky was blotted out by elevated tracks and fire escapes and the telephone wires that had yet to be put underground. Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.
-Tinker doesn't like me out here, she said. He's convinced I'm going to jump.
-Would you?
I tried to put a hint of jest in the question, but it didn't come off.
She didn't seem particularly annoyed. She just dismissed the notion in four words.
-I'm a Catholic, Katey.
About a thousand feet off the ground three green lights entered our field of vision heading southward over the park.
-See those, Eve said pointing. I'll bet you a good night's sleep they circle the Empire State Building. The little planes always do. They just can't seem to help themselves.
As on those first nights out of the hospital, when Eve was ready I helped her back to her room; I helped take off her stockings and her dress; I tucked her in; I kissed her forehead.
She reached up, took my forehead in her hands and kissed me back.
-It was good to see you, Katey.
-Do you want me to turn out the light?
She eyed the bedside table.
-Look at this, she groaned. Virginia Woolf. Edith Wharton. Emily Bronte. Tinker's rehabilitation plan. But didn't they all kill themselves?
-I think Woolf did.
-Well, the rest of them might as well have.
The remark caught me so off guard that I burst out laughing. Eve laughed too. She laughed so hard that her hair fell over her face. It was the first good laugh the two of us had had since the first week of the year.
When I turned out her light, Eve said that there was no point in my waiting for Tinker, that I should let myself out; and I almost did. But he had made me promise.
So I turned off the lights in the hall and most of the lights in the living room. I settled down on the couch with the white throw over my shoulders. I pulled a book from the middle of the pile and started reading. It was Pearl Buck's Good Earth. When it bogged me down on page 2, I turned to page 104 and started again. It didn't help.
My gaze settled on the pyramid of books. I considered the selection of titles for a moment. Then I carried the stack down the hall to the maid's room and swapped the lot for ten of the detective novels. When I put them on the living room table, there was no need to arrange their vertical order because they were all exactly the same size. Then I went to make myself some closed-kitchen eggs.
I cracked two eggs in a bowl and whisked them with grated cheese and herbs. I poured them into a pan of heated oil and covered them with a lid. Something about heating the oil and putting on the lid makes the eggs puff upon contact. And they brown without burning. It was the way my father used to prepare eggs for me when I was a girl, though we never ate them for breakfast. They tasted best, he used to say, when the kitchen was closed.
I was eating the last off my plate when I heard Tinker calling my name in hushed tones.
-I'm in the kitchen.