Eric had heard words like this before from women and girls, but he was surprised at Constance. She seemed so in control of herself, so in charge. He didn’t mind when she said that she wanted to sleep with him. He thought that it was just sex.
“I told the doorman to call me if you came by,” she’d told him when they closed the door to her bedroom. “I told Jim that something had come up at the office and I had to go have a meeting.”
Just sex, the young man thought to himself.
“But Connie,” Eric said after she professed her love. “I’m just on vacation. I’ll be going back to L.A. soon. I’ve got a girlfriend back there.”
“Stay with me until you have to go,” she said, giving him a coquettish smile. “Maybe I can change your mind.”
“What about my brother?”
“He can stay with us. The girl can stay too if you want.”
Eric stared at her face and saw Christie when the first bullet hit her in the abdomen. She had let out a terrible cry that he had heard even through the thick glass of the revolving door.
On that first night Thomas and Clea had found Connie’s condoms and used one.
“You come like a woman,” she said to him as they lay there side by side in the unlit room looking through the glass wall out on the lights of New Jersey. “I thought that you were hurting, and your eyes looked scared.”
“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “I really am. It’s just, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about that for so long, and I never knew it would feel so, so...”
“So what?”
“I don’t know. It was like you were all silk and all I ever knew was rocks. And when you looked at me and nodded I felt so powerful that I was scared that I’d hurt you. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, curling around him. “It was really wonderful what you did. It was like I had your soul in my hands, like I was hurting you but it was okay.”
“I don’t know, Clea,” Thomas said. “I never knew anything like that before. But you know, maybe you shoulda gone away with that other guy.”
“I don’t want to be with him.”
“Yeah, but you see how it is with me. Here I can’t even walk down the street without getting arrested. I don’t even hardly know how to read, and you can read things in four languages.”
“So? We’re not getting married or anything. We’re just havin’ a good time.”
She put her hand on his forehead the way his mother did when he was overtired and couldn’t sleep.
Thomas dozed off and dreamed that he was floating on a pink-and-blue ocean with the sun all around him and fish swimming on top of the water.
The boys moved their things out of the Y and brought them down to Connie’s. Eric felt funny about it, but he had been honest with his mentor. They had a good time together, and she taught him all about Wall Street.
Two weeks went by, and Thomas learned about love from Clea as Connie did from Eric. The boys spent their afternoons together exploring the city.
One cloudy morning Eric brought Thomas to deliver one of Connie’s antique watches to a watchmaker whose office was on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building. They entered the Russian’s office a little after nine.
“Yes?” the burly man asked. He was frowning at Thomas.
“I brought a watch from Constance Baker,” Eric told him.
This took away the scowl.
“Let me see it.”
It was a tiny pocket watch with gold-filled numbers and a shiny blue lacquered back.
“It’s lovely,” the watchmaker said.
Thomas wandered over to the window at the back of the shop. The sky outside was opaque white, pure and unfathomable.
Eric exchanged the watch for a receipt.
“Let’s go, Tommy,” he said.
“What’s with this window?” the young black man asked.
The watchmaker, Mr. Harry Slatkin, smiled.
“Open it up,” he said.
Tommy pulled the old-fashioned window wide. The dense white mass hovered outside.
“What is it?”
“The clouds,” Slatkin told him. “We are in the clouds.”
Thomas talked about it all the way down in the Art Deco elevator.
“We were actually in a cloud, Eric. I never did anything like that before.”
“You never flew?” Eric asked.
“Where I’ma fly to? The soup kitchen?”
Then one morning Eric got a call on a bright-red cell phone that Raela had given him.
“Hi, Eric,” the raven-haired girl said into the line. Her voice was exultant.
“Hi, honey,” he said.
Connie, who was lying next to him in the bed, sat straight up.
“The governor of California has commuted Thomas’s sentence, and he’s persuaded the district attorney to drop all the other charges,” Raela said. “You can come home. Daddy’s sending a plane tomorrow to pick you up at Stewart Airport.”
“What time?”
“Three in the afternoon.”
“We’ll be there.”
When he disconnected the call, Connie said, “You’re leaving?”
“Uh... yeah.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow... at three.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I told you we were going back.”
“But just one day’s notice?”
“We’ve got to go. That’s where we live. I have a daughter there.”
“You’re married?”
“No. But I told you about my girlfriend.”
“So you take advantage of me and then walk out with hardly a good-bye?”
“Connie.”
“Get out of my house.”
Telling Clea was somewhat easier. She cried a little.
“Will we ever see each other again?” she asked Thomas.
“I’d come back if you want me to,” he said. “I could maybe get my GED and a job at the museum. I could stay at the Y.”
“Maybe I could come out to California in the summer,” she said. “Then you’d have time to see your family awhile. I mean, it sounds like you haven’t had a break in years.”
“I love you.” Thomas hadn’t remembered using those words since he was a boy with Branwyn.
“Go back home, Thomas, and call me. If it’s right I’ll come out this summer and we’ll see.”
“I don’t want to leave you, but I want to go home too.”
“Go.”
18
Kronin Stark sent a private jet — his own personal 767, in which he had never flown — for the boys the next afternoon. Connie didn’t even say good-bye to Eric. She just slammed the door after telling him that he had destroyed her life.
“I don’t see how you did that, Eric,” Thomas said as the jet gained altitude. “I mean, you told her that you were going back to California and that you had a girl. She’s twice your age. I mean, damn — what more did she need?”
“I shouldn’t have led her on.”
“You didn’t.”
“What do you know about it, Tommy? Nobody ever threw herself at you and then fell out of a window instead.”
“Maybe not. But so what? You think that means I’m too stupid to know?”
“No. Not that. But I have problems that you wouldn’t understand. I have to be careful how I treat people. You have to be careful how people treat you. She said that I ruined her life.”
“You didn’t do nuthin’ to her, man. All you did was go along for the ride. You don’t know what you did to her. She don’t know either.”
“She knows how she feels.”
“Maybe. But she broke up with that boyfriend, right?”
“Yeah.”
“She probably needed to do that. She needed to leave him, and she told herself that she was in love with you to do it. Of course she’s gonna be mad. But she’s mad at her boyfriend, mad at herself for bein’ with him. It don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ you.”