Outside the French doors, I can see the sun as it drops down behind the trees of Central Park. It grows cool enough outside so that moisture beads up on the edges of the glass. I chew mechanically and swallow my lumps of meat without any real pleasure. After a mouthful of wine, I set down my napkin and step out onto the balcony. The smell of fresh tree bark reminds me of another life, when I would turkey hunt as a boy, sitting motionless in the sea of new green leaves, straining my ears and scanning the gray dawn between the silver and black trunks of the trees for a flicker of movement.
I take a cigar from my pocket, and Bert appears like a genie with a wooden match that he strikes up with his thumbnail.
“Thanks,” I say. I can see the ghost of my breath and I put my cigar to the flame.
“My grandmother used to say that winter always breathes its one last breath in June,” he says before the match goes out and his face is lost in the shadow of a tall potted arborvitae. “You want a coat?”
I look away from Bert and across Fifth Avenue. Beneath their crown of new leaves the tree branches are an inky web. It’s impossible to know where one tree ends and the next one begins.
“I don’t get cold,” I say.
“You don’t get hot either,” he says. “Like the water snake.”
I exhale a plume of blue smoke with a slow nod.
“My grandmother always said to me that every man has the spirit of an animal,” Bert says after a pause. “That when our spirits travel from one life to the next, they remember where they were in the last life.”
“I don’t know,” I say, inhaling so that the end of my cigar glows. “I remember my last life pretty well and I wasn’t cold-blooded.”
“What, a running deer?” he asks. “Like your totem?”
“No,” I say, “a white man.”
A cab jams on its brakes and the driver lays on his horn before he roars off down the street, swerving after a black Town Car. After that, I can hear the rattle of Bert’s breathing above the splash of the fountain out front. Then the lights change and the next wave of traffic sweeps past. The clouds are heavy and low, their gray bellies lit by the city’s amber glow.
“She’s an amazing woman,” Bert says.
“Who?”
“Are there two?”
“Helena?”
“I mean more than just because she’s on those posters all over the bus stops,” Bert says.
“I know that,” I say.
“Then who’s the other one?” he asks.
“I saw Allen’s mother today,” I say after a pause. “I knew her in that past life.”
“You knew all of these people.”
“Yes and no,” I say. “Now I really know them.”
I turn to look at Bert, but he’s gone, and for a moment I wonder if he was there at all.
I go up to my bedroom on the third floor and change into slacks and a thin cable-knit black sweater, then take my limousine to the Garden. The boys are in the box and full of themselves. Helena is magnificent. After the show, we worm our way through the concrete tunnels into the vaulted green room, where I introduce them-wide-eyed-to Helena and the five dancers that accompany the show. After turning over my limousine to Allen and Martin and the dancers for the night, I get inside the long black car waiting for Helena and we go back to the Fifth Avenue mansion.
Helena showers and I strip off my clothes and wait in the dark for her on the bed. When she comes back, her long hair is wet and she’s wearing a red slip. I gently pull it up over her head and run my hands the length of her lean muscular torso.
“Why do you like to stand up?” she says in an amused whisper.
“So I can get three-dimensional,” I say. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Front and back,” she says. Her teeth gleam in the dim light spilling out from the bathroom.
She turns away from me, arches her back, and pulls me close, reaching behind her and snaking a naked arm around my neck. She twists her head around and our mouths find each other.
After, when we’re slick with sweat, I lay breathing heavy with her cheek on my stomach. When I ask her if she’s tired, the only response is a soft snore. I stroke her hair, still damp from the shower but full now and slippery smooth.
I ease out from under her, cross the thick oriental rug to my closet, and pull on a pair of jeans. Wearing a dark T-shirt and driving shoes, I step softly down the sweeping spiral stairs, running my hand along the smooth marble banister. A small table lamp outside the library dimly lights the hall on the first floor. The weight of the bronze door handle is cool and it clanks when I turn it to let myself out into the night.
Past the fountain and the white lights mounted on the stone gateposts, the park across the avenue is like ink. I smell the cigar before I see the orange dot of its glow. The image takes me back to the night I delivered Roger Williamson’s letter. My heart skips a beat and the hair rises on the back of my neck. I walk toward whoever is standing there looking at my home.
As I cross the street, I can begin to make out the enormous shape of the smoker standing in front of the low stone wall that marks the edge of the park. When the cigar glows orange again, my foot is on the curb and I see the round cheeks and narrowed eyes of my friend.
I exhale and say, “You’re up late.”
“There’s lots of things going on in there, you know,” he says, swinging his chin over his shoulder at the murky park. “Bad things. Good things too. I like to walk in there, but not on the path.”
“I bet you scare the hell out of people.”
“They don’t see me,” he says, drawing on his cigar. “I’m an Indian. You’re the one who should be sleeping.”
“Come on,” I say, and turn to walk up the sidewalk toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “When you’ve been where I was, you don’t like to waste time sleeping.”
“Did you get done what you had to tonight?” he asks, stepping along beside me.
“Allen and his friend were impressed,” I say. “Especially when they saw Helena.”
“She’s impressive,” he says. “I’m surprised you let her run around all over the place the way she does.”
“She’s a star, Bert. That’s what they do. Go on tour.”
“You ever see the way she looks at you whenever she gets ready to leave?” he asks.
“I see her.”
“Like she’s waiting for you to stop her.”
“Why would I do that?” I say.
He glances at me, then jams his hands into the pockets of his coat. The cigar ember glows, then he exhales.
“Isn’t just walking like this wasting time?” he asks.
“This is living,” I say. “Especially if you’ve got another one of those Cubans. You hear that wind in the trees?”
“Here,” he says, digging into the front pocket of his jean jacket.
We stop under a wrought iron streetlamp and he lights me up. I draw in the rich smoke and let it linger in the back of my throat before exhaling and watching it hurry away.
We smoke while we walk, not saying a word until we reach the steps of the massive museum. Bright lights shine down on the towering columns and the colorful banners above, each the size of a tractor-trailer. One announces the contents of an Egyptian tomb, another the czar’s Fabergé eggs, and the third a Rembrandt exhibit.
“Can you imagine trying to break into this place to steal a painting?” I say.
Bert looks the building over from end to end, then up and down with a wrinkled brow. The ember of his cigar flares and he exhales a plume of smoke.
“You’d have to think big,” he says finally.
I nod and say, “I knew a guy who thought big.”
“What happened to him?”
I shake my head and say, “In the end it killed him.”
I start back toward the mansion and we walk for a while before Bert says, “Is it gonna kill you?”