Nathan's lateness was less forgiven than sanctioned, as though they wouldn't have him any other way. And what was to be celebrated, a birthday, a holiday, was instantly forgotten, and the party they had been waiting for to begin, with Nathan's arrival, began. And the time would grow late, it would reach two, sometimes three, with Nathan sitting on the opposite end of the couch from Santos's father, both of them with their eyes closed, listening to selections from their favorite operas, highlights they would have chosen together from Mr. Santos's vast collection. Half drunk with wine and half with the opera, upright on the couch together, they lifted their hands in concert, conducting the same passage in the score.
Nathan seduced them all. The family's love for him, its dismissal of all the questionable things it collectively suspected-the things Mrs. Santos could confirm-was almost sexual in its blindness, in its ability to look past all they did not want to see-the already sordid, the bordering-on-criminal-to see straight through to what they'd known as chaste and pure, all that he was born with. His soul. They all looked on him, went to him, with the adoration for a lover returned to them after a long absence. Nathan Stein the celebrity. As though in his presence you felt-as Errol did, always, even at the end of that time-that there were things, so many things, you had yet to do or be.
Still, after Nathan left, Santos's own father would stand, unsteady with exhaustion, and point through the closed door, down the creaky stairs, into the night, between the tail-lights fading down the street. "Beware that," he said, about the boy he'd watched for years. "He sees everything and nothing."
Soon opera became Santos's own need. Not the music, but something else. He listened on his shitty little stereo with the librettos before him, as Nathan instructed. Santos wanted to learn it, to duplicate the cultured and intelligent sides of Stein. The studied knowledge of Stein. Stein. Something redeeming, something tragic. Something Downtown, something Village, something Upper East Side. To do justice to a tenement life. The deficiency being himself. He was envy. He lacked the words to describe the fundamental. He needed Nathan Stein's good looks, even their deadliness, to gain vicarious thrill. Toward Stein, toward his looks, toward the agency maids and waitresses and barrio queens he was blind devotion. Even after he married, toward Nathan's lovely fiancee, toward Claire, he was desperation. The larger reward being forgiveness. The two young men pass silently the spotlit marble of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera House and its pink and blue illuminated fountain, the rainbow arcs of water; through the pre-opera dinner crowds chaffing in their sweat-soaked evening wear, discouraged by the blundered nighttime promise of cooler temperatures; the happy-hour crush unknotting their ties and letting down their hair. Santos follows a half pace behind Nathan through these crowds and up Columbus Avenue while into Nathan's left ear he calls out his list of inconsequential questions. Blindly he chases Nathan toward a banner and through a door and into an air-conditioned vestibule, beyond which clumps of besuited and coiffed young men and women lean on white linen and a high mahogany bar. The customers are perfect, outrageously alive, monstrously vital. The vastness of their futures. And Santos, like a dog hanging off a backyard gate, panting toward the tall grass across the road. The night is young, is always young, its possibilities limitless. And they, he and Nathan, a couple of greyhounds in pursuit of the unseen and unnamed that lay ahead in the night. A man and his spic apprentice-
Santos has gone to the bathroom. The knocking almost brings the door down. "Errol, you all right in there?"
Santos bends over the little sink and kneads his puffy hands. In the dim glass his face cracks into the geometric shapes of fatigue.
Barbados is standing in the open door, Schreck a few paces behind him, looking contrite. Santos wipes his mouth. Barbados says, his voice flat, "I think there's someone else we have to talk to."
The doorman is asleep in his greatcoat and epaulets like a Red Army soldier.
"Ivan," Nathan calls.
The doorman rushes the door and Nathan enters the plush, cavernous atrium. "Ivan. Good to see you again." Nathan tugs on the man's epaulets.
Ivan stands back, heavy-lidded, swollen-faced. He smiles a gold-capped smile and presents Nathan with a double thumbs-up. "Senor Nathan, you have grown very thin. Very strong. Like a hard bull." He jabs the air with his fists. "Like when you were a young man. You exchange last year's costume for a better model. It's the senoritas, no? Keeping my boy in fighting condition?"
Nathan shakes his head, smiling. Compadre. "Only bad luck with the sefioritas, Ivan."
Ivan scoffs and waves him away. "You? Please, Nathan. Look who you are talking to please."
The two men set their feet and exchange mock blows, ducking and fending off flurries. Like old friends who have made good their bond in rougher places and harder times. Nathan lets out a little laugh, as genuine a discourse as anything he's let pass all night.
Then Ivan connects, a little slap to the side of his head. A small twinge and the lobby tips back. Nathan staggers. Ivan's hands are on his shoulders but still Nathan spins.
"Are you drunk?"
"I'm fine," Nathan says, brushing off his coat.
"Your eyes are yellow."
An edge of cold slips through the cracks of the door into the lobby. Outside, the padded silence of a car passing through the quilted streets.
How's my father?"
Ivan wags his finger. "We men have to take care of our fathers. In the end there is no one to understand but other men."
Nathan eyes the doorman warily.
"Senor?" Ivan asks.
"No, nothing. Forget it."
"Your father is very fine. Now he is a famous man. Tonight the sexy TV ladies were waiting for him." Ivan extends his arm and sweeps it through the lobby, indicating where they stood waiting. "You are working on the big case with him?"
"Of course," Nathan says.
Ivan smiles broadly. "Then you will be famous."
"Of course."
"Like that other case."
"That was a long time ago."
"The big victory."
"Ten years ago, at least."
"And your face, it was everywhere." He takes Nathan's shoulder in his strong hand. "I used to lift you to my shoulder and take you upstairs like a package of groceries."
Ivan shakes his shoulder once, but still Nathan will not raise his eyes. Ivan opens his fingers and Nathan walks out from under them toward the elevator.
"You need sleep," the doorman calls.
He tries four or five keys from his ring before he finds one that fits his parents' door. But the door is unlocked to begin with, and when he turns the knob he stumbles in, and, stepping through a patch of streetlight to a foyer of herringbone wood, instantly regrets having come. A living room of fluted columns, teakwood newel and finial beginning a balustrade that swirls like the hem of a woman's skirt to a second level. Furniture scattered amidst a garden of low potted trees. Cherubs watch from the high corners. Nathan stands as in a small cluttered room, as though he can turn this way and that and touch the things and the people he knows, dead and alive and in various stages in between, ghosts of themselves, led by himself, the chief ghost, at eight, ten, fifteen, a package of promise and possibility.