Max and Debby approached the weeping child together. She talked while they moved, saying things to both Max and Byron. Her eyes looked scared. Max was curious whether the marks from his slap would still be on Byron’s face.
Byron lifted his head from the door. He looked at Debby. He paused his sobbing and shouted: “I wanna go home!” There were no marks, only tears.
“Okay. Max will take you home,” Debby said soothingly.
“He’s angry,” Byron said and sobbed again.
“You take him home,” Max said to Debby. Even he was shocked and frightened by the cold fury in his voice. “I don’t want to have anything to do with him.”
Carla was downstairs waiting for him the next day. She smiled at the sight of his black Saab, bleached gray in spots by cold and dirt. Her eyes were lively and her hair was organized somehow — although still looking wild, black and lustrous. She likes me, Max thought and felt as proud as a teenage lover.
“So where are we going?” she said, bustling in, her down coat swishing. She pulled the door shut with a bang and grabbed the seat belt, pulling it across her chest in a hurry. Today, all of her movements had energy.
A dark-skinned man came out of her building, walked up to the curb, rested one foot on a fire hydrant and stared at Max. He was short and broad; his hair was a dulled black, straight and slicked back as if it were a skintight cap. He wore a gray uniform with a name sewn in script over his breast pocket. He didn’t have a coat in the freezing air and he didn’t shiver or blanch. He was still and ominous.
“Who’s that?” Max said although he knew.
Carla had to look; she didn’t know he was there. She had been concentrated on fastening the seat belt. She glanced up and frowned a little. She said in a disparaging tone: “That’s Manny.” She finished buckling herself in and said: “So where to?”
Max returned the stare of her sentinel husband. He wondered: Will I have to fight him to get her?
He drove to the Staten Island ferry.
“Is this safe?” she asked with a sly smile as they were being guided in to park their car in the ferry’s wide belly.
“No,” Max said, not smiling. “It’s had accidents. I think there are more boating accidents than with any other kind of vehicle.” He reached the spot where the attendants wanted him to park. He shut off the engine.
“I can’t swim,” Carla said. She wasn’t smiling anymore but she didn’t sound scared.
“I’d like to make this ferry sound especially dangerous, but it isn’t. I wanted to show you the dockyard on Staten Island where old ships are hauled to be scrapped for junk. Besides, we’ll get a good view of the city on the ride.” Max opened his door.
“I know that. My girlfriend lives on Staten Island,” Carla said and for a moment seemed not to be willing to move.
“Do you want to visit her?”
“No,” Carla laughed. She opened her door. “She’d ask me a million questions about you later and that would drive me crazy.”
They got out. The other passengers were heading for the enclosed deck. Max took Carla’s arm — he could feel her fragile elbow inside the down of her coat — to the open area at the back of the parked cars so they could see Manhattan retreat as the ferry moved into open water.
A gust of wind blew across them. His face felt paralyzed by the cold.
“We’re gonna freeze to death,” Carla said but she didn’t make a move to go inside.
Max had spent all night alone in a hotel waiting to be with Carla, expecting that she would make him feel happy. He had spent the night alone in a hotel because when Debby returned from taking Byron home, they had a fight and Max had walked out.
Debby had come in, stood at the closet and told Max right away, “His mother was very angry. I think you’re going to be hearing from them.”
Max didn’t answer. He studied his wife to see if the mean truth he had told her had left a mark on her face. She was composed.
“I want you to call somebody,” she said, turning her back on him to hang up the dramatic black cape she wore for a winter coat. She was angry. Everything about her posture and face and tone of voice told him that, but, as had been true since the crash, she was unnaturally holding it in, holding it like a position on the barre. “It doesn’t have to be your psychiatrist,” she said to the closet and then faced Max again. “Maybe you should call Bill Perlman.”
“Bill? You call him Bill?”
“I told you,” she had to swallow to contain her exasperation. “I’ve seen him a few times. He’s helpful to talk to. But it doesn’t have to be him. It can be your mother. Or maybe a friend. You haven’t spoken to Larry or Paul—”
“They’re not real friends.”
“Then who is?” Debby insisted.
Jeff. Jeff was the answer. He was the person Max would have talked to.
“You’re getting worse,” Debby said.
“I talked to somebody,” Max said.
“Who?” Debby asked. Curiosity wrinkled her high forehead.
“You,” Max said. He reached past her and took his coat from the closet. He held it in front of him and looked at her, asking her to give him a reason not to go.
She tried to hold her calm pose. “I can’t help you,” she said but the words were churned up and suddenly she lost her grip on the barre. She yelled: “You tell me you’re in love with a woman you just met! What am I supposed to say to that!” She seemed relieved for a moment and then sagged into despair. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she added in a low note of resignation.
“I’m going to a hotel,” Max said. “Just for tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.”
He had checked into the Carlyle. He had fantasized spending the night there since his youth when he learned that it was JFK’s favorite hotel in New York. Later on he read that Kennedy put Jackie in one suite and had his mistress in the adjoining room. That fact didn’t make him less curious.
Max asked for and got a room four floors down from the famous suites in the tower. It was a disappointment. Although the elegant room wasn’t pompous like the Plaza, it wasn’t the good old days either. It had the modern luxury of a video recorder and a CD player. The desk told him a fax machine could be sent up if needed. All that made Max think of business, of what travel had become in the modern world.
He hardly slept, dozing off near dawn and yet waking early. He spent most of the tedious night staring out his window at lights in nearby buildings that stared back at him. All night he waited anxiously to meet Carla.
But he wasn’t happy now that he was with Carla.
They leaned against the rail of the ferry and watched the city first grow bigger and wider as they pulled out into the water. Gradually the huge buildings shrank against the widening water and sky, their tops narrowing into needles lost in the clouds, their foundations revealed as resting on only a thin sliver of support. Manhattan was merely a wafer floating on the steel water. The massive works of the city seemed to be a carefully drawn miniature at the bottom of a huge canvas. He felt himself shrink.
“It is beautiful,” she said wonderingly, as if she had never seen the skyline before.
Max looked at her face, her young skin even tighter as it clenched against the freezing wind. He didn’t have her really. Any more than he had anything. Maybe he was dead after all.
“I had a fight with my wife,” he told her.