Anita grinned. “Ask me anything,” she said.
“Okay. What are you doing after dinner?”
“Going to bed with you, I believe,” she told me. “Your place or mine?”
“Well, we’re here.”
“And your place is all shut up,” she pointed out. “Will you stay the night?”
My meeting on the lawsuit wasn’t until ten in the morning, and my New York place was, as Anita had said, closed up. Robinson was still back in L.A. “Love to stay the night,” I said.
As it turned out, that was a very lucky choice.
25
Anita owns that four-story-high corner building on Abingdon Square, facing the little park full of preschoolers by day and homeless drunks by night. The restaurant, Vitto Impero, takes up the ground floor, with two apartments on each floor above, Anita’s being in the rear one flight up, accessible either through the public hall and stairway or via the circular staircase up from the restaurant’s kitchen to her living room.
The apartment itself is odd in one respect; it has no kitchen. Anita has the restaurant, of course, one flight down, and in any event she has such little interest in food that for her a kitchen would be a severe waste of valuable space. For ice and mixers there’s a small refrigerator built into the cabinetry in the outer part of the bathroom.
What used to be the kitchen, at the rear of the apartment, is now the bedroom, complete with working fireplace and two sets of french doors leading out to the terrace. When she’d bought the house, there had been merely a tarred roof back there, created by the ground floor’s being twelve feet deeper than the stories above, but now the space was duckboarded and, in summer, full of plants. In February the potted plants were inside, crowding the bedroom, and the larger planters outside were merely dead earth streaked with aging snow.
I wasn’t due to become a New Yorker again until April, so this was an oddly askew twenty-four hours. When I’ve been in California awhile, living there seems comfortably open and relaxed, and New York feels awfully cramped, whereas after I’ve adjusted to my East Coast life, it seems snug and cozy, while L.A. looks disjointed and barren. I was in my western mind right now, and wouldn’t be back here long enough to adjust, so I simply tried to ignore the fact that Anita’s circular staircase was so awkward and narrow, that her entire apartment was small enough to fit in half my garage out in Bel-Air, and that, with summer’s plants brought inside, her bedroom was so crowded I didn’t dare stretch without looking first to see what I was going to hit.
I was still on California time as well, meaning that my body clock thought it was barely nine P.M. when we went to bed, and not much later than ten when Anita said, “Enough.”
She didn’t mean sex; she meant the conversation that had followed sex, she bringing me up-to-date on the goings-on of mutual friends, people like Brett Burgess and Dr. Bill Ackerson, who would drop in to the restaurant from time to time. We’d been talking about Bill Ackerson’s habit of dating his beautiful show biz patients, and how all his girls seemed to be equally pretty and vacant and interchangeable, with names like Muffin and Bunny, when all at once Anita’s eyes glazed over, her head lolled back on the pillow, and she said, “Enough.”
“Are you pooping out on me?”
“You say you want to get up at eight,” she pointed out, “and that’s seven hours from now.”
“Oh, all right.”
So we turned off the light and Anita curled up against my right side and went immediately to sleep, while I lay awake for some time longer, looking at the faint gray rectangles of the french doors, with New York outside. The city never sleeps. Neither do I, I thought, refusing to turn my head the other way to see the illuminated numbers of the digital clock.
So strange to be here in this fashion. I’d been with Bly yesterday and I’d see her again tomorrow, and here I was with Anita. My two lives are usually more distinct and disparate than that, me spending months or at the very least weeks in one place or the other, adjusting gradually.
But what else should I have done? If I’d gone home to Tenth Street instead and hadn’t seen Anita at all, or if I’d just dropped by for dinner and then gone home to sleep alone, she would have become very annoyed, and I wouldn’t blame her. But it was this hit-and-run aspect of the thing, the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, that made my odd life suddenly stand out for me in unusually stark relief.
In every part of my life, it now seemed to me, the story was the same, I was neither one thing nor the other and yet both. I was neither a New Yorker nor an Angeleno, but I was both. I was neither Bly’s fella nor Anita’s, but I was both. I was neither a true star nor a has-been, but somehow I was still both. What frequently seemed to me a good and rich and rewarding life now seemed, in this wakeful February night in Manhattan, merely a life of well-controlled vacillation. “Indecision is the key to flexibility,” read a sign I’d once seen over a producer’s desk; it was meant to be a joke.
As time went on, and the dim light through the french doors didn’t change, it was almost a relief to find myself fretting about Ross Ferguson instead, and what might or might not be happening in his life during my absence. God knows I hadn’t been particularly useful or brilliant on that front so far, and yet I couldn’t help the feeling that my being away, even for this short a time, would make things worse. I shouldn’t have left; I should have insisted on a delay in the discovery proceeding. I should be there when Ross and his lions do whatever it is they plan to do.
Eventually, the grayness of the french doors blurred, and I slept.
26
Next morning I thought I saw Tabari in the back of a cab. I’d left Anita’s place, weary but awake, at eight-thirty, walking across the Village toward my house, surrounded by overcoated people hurrying to work through the cold and the dirty remnants of snow. As I waited for the light at Sixth Avenue, the cab passed me, headed uptown. It was gone before the image sank in, and I couldn’t be exactly sure it was Tabari I’d seen, but I was less than a block now from home, and if it really had been him, I wouldn’t call that coincidence, either. I’m going to find something at my house, I thought, and walked a bit faster.
I was right. I saw the two police cars and the ambulance from half a block away, and as I neared the house, its front door opened and two dark-uniformed men came out, awkwardly carrying by its straps a body bag.
Who? Robinson flashed through my mind, but, of course, he was home in Los Angeles with Doreen. There was no one in residence here. Except me.
The body bag was carried over to the ambulance, and I went up the stoop to talk to a uniformed cop in a parka standing guard outside my closed front door. He gave me an extreme fisheye as I came up, not recognizing me, clearly believing I was a reporter or worse, and before I could say a word he told me, “Nothing’s going on, pal, just keep walking.”
“Well, no,” I said. “I live here.”
He frowned, but then his suspicion switched to astonishment. “Jesus Christ, it’s you!” he yelled.
“Always has been.”
I would have brushed past him to talk to whatever higher-ranking person might be inside, but he preempted me, turning, pushing open the door, yelling into the house, “Sergeant! It’s him! He’s back!”
“Could I go in there?” I asked.
“Just a second.” He didn’t make a big show of blocking the doorway, but it wouldn’t have been easy to get around him. And standing still, wearing over my California clothing only the light topcoat which was all I’d had waiting at Anita’s place, I became aware of just how cold it actually was.