He turned the last corner. He was ten feet from where he had begun his walk. As he stepped toward the finish the wind came at him from a new direction. For a moment he was interested in the change.
And then he realized he had stepped into the air.
He didn’t scream. There was no terror left in him to be expelled. He saw the walls of hostile glass jerk and the water towers tumble. He grabbed at them with his arms as he fell straight down.
He felt the pain in his knee first. His left shoulder was yanked hard, so hard he thought it might break off. Then he was hit in the jaw as it whacked into brick.
He had caught himself on the wall, hooking it with his left arm. The rest of him dangled in the air. He reached with his right hand for the wall and got only the tips of his fingers on it. The skin scraped off as his weight pulled him toward the street.
For a split second he saw it all so clearly: I’m suicidal and I’ve goofed and I’m about to die.
No! His body talked back. From his stomach he pushed up at the dead weight of his body with all of his energy. His left arm contracted, his feet kicked at the rough bricks. He was reminded of pulling himself out of a swimming pool in Florida when he was a child, his mouth filled with chemical water, afraid of the deep end he had wandered into. Max put everything he had into one single jerk of power in his left arm. Something punched him in the stomach.
He groaned. It hurt and made him wish to give up. He was lying on top of the wall again, spinning it felt like, and he had only a little energy left, a last bit of himself with which to decide his fate. The wind was furious and powerful.
He had to get off the wall. He couldn’t see from the pain. He pushed himself off the wall without considering that he didn’t know if he was headed for a short drop to the tar or the long battering fall to the street.
The suspense lasted only a second.
Immortal Max landed on the roof and laughed.
CRASH
LANDING
17
Max hadn’t been in Little Italy, that he could remember, since he was a young man romancing Debby. They used to have cappuccino and cannoli in the sidewalk cafes after delicious, cheap meals in Chinatown and walk north arm in arm, talking all the way to her apartment on Washington Square. Hadn’t lasted long. Only a few months later she was injured and eventually moved in with him uptown. They were no longer sixties lovers but that ungainly thing of the seventies — a relationship.
He met Perlman on the corner of Mulberry and Canal. It was late morning on a December Monday, the last week of the year before Christmas. It was cold. The therapist’s breath flowed out of him in a long arched white column of smoke, curling up past the tenements to the sky, as if he were a little chimney that had bolted from the buildings. The streets were dirty from last night’s tourists. Attached to every lamppost was a gaudy and, especially in the morning sun, tawdry white and red Christmas bell decoration. Lights were strung between the bells; sometimes they became overgrown and smothered an awning or a tenement’s banisters. On one staircase leading down to a basement, where the garbage cans would normally be, a Nativity scene of miniature figures was displayed; the steps made a steep descent for the Wise Men to Baby Jesus at the bottom. Max stepped on a green Michelin guidebook that was soggy and broken. Only one shopkeeper was out sweeping. In this cold, the quick way with a hose wouldn’t work. The other store owners must be sleeping late. Or maybe hoping the bright sun would eventually warm things up.
“She knows you’re the Good Samaritan,” redheaded Perlman said as they walked to Carla’s apartment. He had grown a beard since their last meeting. It wasn’t as red as the hair on his head, but it was full. Max thought that with his bulk Perlman would make a good Santa Claus. He sounded like one; and in the nearly empty streets the therapist’s deep bass had even more resonance and volume. “It doesn’t impress her, that’s not why she agreed to meet with you. She agreed to meet you because she wants to ask if you saw her child while inside the wreck. I’ve told her no. But she wants to hear it from you. She’s completely obsessed and very — I don’t know — primitive about the whole thing. She’s very Old World, very Catholic, you know?”
“No, I don’t.” Max no longer bothered to guess at the meanings hidden in everyone’s talk. He insisted they be explicit or he would be deaf to their half-speeches.
“I don’t know. She’s filled with guilt and shame. You know?”
“No, I don’t. I’m filled with guilt and shame. How is that Old World?”
“We’re here.” They were in front of two unlocked glass doors, leading to a small tiled vestibule with an intercom and a locked door. “You judge for yourself. I wanted to warn you. She could do anything. They tell me she’s been almost catatonic for weeks. But that could change. She could scream at you. Hit you. Her mother is there and she’ll keep an eye out. Carla doesn’t want me to go up. I’ll be across the street visiting with her priest. He’s actually the one who first called me about her. But we’ve never met, only talked on the phone. Would you ring the bell at that door”—Perlman pointed to a small wooden door in a building next to Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral—“after you’re done and let me know how it—?”
“Isn’t that where the first black American saint is buried?” Max asked. He gestured at the long wall around an adjoining cemetery. “I was reading about it in yesterday’s Times.”
For a moment Perlman was ready to laugh. He checked that, however, and looked at the top of the wall as though he might be able to vault it with his vision. “I don’t know. I didn’t see the piece. I’ll ask the Monsignor. Give us something to talk about.” He opened the outer glass doors and pointed to the fake gold buttons of the intercom. “It’s three A.”
After he was buzzed in, Max paused in the small area at the foot of the stairs, too cramped a space to be called a lobby. He smelled a kind of cooking and mustiness that reminded him of something. What was it? He waited there until he remembered it was the smell in the halls of his childhood building in Washington Heights. After his father’s heart attack, thanks to the insurance money and his uncle’s help, they had moved to the Upper West Side, which, although it was decayed in those days, was still more definitely middle-class than his old neighborhood. Certainly the buildings smelled different and sounded different. You didn’t know who lived behind most of those doors or what they felt about each other; in Washington Heights he knew what everyone was eating and whether they loved each other. Not that he missed it as a thirteen-year-old. He had preferred the relative bourgeois dignity of the Upper West Side, despite its heroin-addicted muggers and demented rent-control elderly.
Max winced at the fact: his father’s death had improved his life. He was indulged; they lived in a better neighborhood; he was sent to a private school. Max breathed deep of the unventilated odors of ancient garlic and detergents that had worn away the tiles to a smooth rubbed finish and he had to admit it to himself — Dad’s death was boom times for me. He had confessed this to his shrink years ago, but its clarity had been muddied when the good doctor forgave the observation as a generic feeling all sons are liable to. In the vestibule Max looked at the truth, admitting to himself that it belonged to him as an individual characteristic. His shoulder still hurt from his latest struggle with death the month before and he sometimes shuddered at the memory of what he had dared, but the truth stayed with him, that death was his friend, had always been his friend, and now was the source of his strength.