5:50 p.m. Lew Forrest. Chelsea Hotel, Manhattan.
He signed the papers without being able to see them clearly. Jerry from the front desk guided his hand to the place where he must sign. Jerry, my personal banker. The lawyer said, Yes, that’s it, Lew, and Forrest scribbled the name. He did this on three more copies. Then Jerry stamped each copy with his notary machine, signed his own name, and it was done.
He had called the lawyer around one o’clock, told him he wanted to change his will, fast, because who knew at his age? He dictated the changes, and the lawyer came to the Chelsea around five. He took the elevator with Jerry. They sat at the big table. The lawyer filled in the names and addresses of the people, and the phone numbers. Lew Forrest signed. They left. As simple as that.
And now, sitting in the room, longing for the aroma of oil and turpentine in a time of acrylics, he is filled with a sense of relief. Everything is now settled. There are clear instructions to the gallery that handles his work. The lawyer knows his role, which is to defend Forrest’s intentions. Even Lucy from ARTnews and Jerry from the front desk will have their shares. Of what’s in the bank. Of what might come into the bank from future sales. Forrest knows there’s always a bump in sales when an artist dies. He has nobody else on the planet to take care of. And most important, Consuelo Mendoza will be safe for the rest of her life.
The growing silence tells him that snow is falling. He hears an iron shutter banging gently somewhere, so there must be wind. For me, he thinks, snow is the most treacherous condition, even with Camus taking me for my walk. Maybe Lucy can take him, and I can wait in the lobby. I wish I could see the snow.
Then in his mind he sees Consuelo’s kids heading for Sunset Park, lugging a sled. And he knows she will call. She has to explain the money to her husband. He might think there was something shameful that brought this windfall. He thinks: I will have to come up with a consoling lie. That I failed to pay her when I left Mexico. Something like that. Like a book that’s overdue at the library for fifteen years. And tell Consuelo to bring her husband and the kids to visit me. Once the husband sees me, his jealousy will die. I’m a fucking wreck. Maybe the kids could take home some of the books. Maybe, if I die first, and they have a yard, they can take Camus home too. Like all Labs, he loves kids.
Then thinks: If she comes here with her husband, I’ll have to take the painting of Consuelo off the wall. Hide Consuelo when she was young and in my bed, with her golden skin, her hard dark nipples, her silky pubic hair, the hair beneath her arms, the hair on the back of her neck, the delicate calligraphy of hair. Her heat seeping into me. Warming me. Heating my heart and my blood.
Hide all that, he thinks. Save it here in my head, in the cave of memory, like a secret pulse. To die when I die.
6:15 p.m. Consuelo Mendoza. Sunset Park.
The lock clicks. Raymundo is home. The girl starts shouting, Papi, Papi, Papi, and the two boys leave the television set to greet him. Raymundo is smiling, and hugs each kid, then turns to Consuelo, and hugs her too.
— Ah, mi amor, cómo estamos? he says.
She whispers in his ear: Good news, mi amor.
She pulls away, while the kids race around, and Raymundo removes his coat and looks at her. He makes a move with his head, raising it an inch to say, What’s wrong?
She takes his coat and says, Ven.
They go to the bedroom together. She hangs the coat, then opens the top drawer of the bureau, her drawer, and removes the envelope.
— There’s a story here, she says, holding the envelope.
He looks puzzled. And she tells the story of the old gringo she worked for in Cuernavaca, a sweet man, old then, older now, blind, a painter. Señor Lewis. She does not say what they did in bed. She never will. But she tells Raymundo that she reached out to the gringo viejo today. For help, finding a new job. The first time she had seen him in fifteen years. Then she hands him the envelope.
— Open it, she says in Spanish. He takes it, a wary look on his face. Then opens it.
— Hijole, he says, holding the thick wad of hundred-dollar bills in thumb and forefinger. Then he falls back on the bed. He looks up at her.
— This is true? he says in a soft doubting voice. Not a lie?
— You know me better than anyone in the world, Raymundo.
— I just, I mean, who does such a thing?
— A good man. Old now. With no children. We can go over to see him tomorrow. Bring the kids. You can meet him. We can bring him flowers. Help him clean up. Make him eat.
She sits beside Raymundo on the bed. There are tears in his eyes.
— How much money is it? he whispers.
— Five thousand dollars.
He grabs a pillow and sobs into its soft thickness.
Then Marcela pushes into the bedroom.
— Papi, let’s go to the snow!
He pulls the pillow away.
— Sí, mi querida, pero primero la comida, he says. Yes! But food first!
He starts to laugh then, and sits up, and hands the envelope back to Consuelo, and hugs the little girl, and says in English, Food first! And then the snow.
Consuelo thinks, Yes, the snow. All of them. And thinks: Then we can return exhausted to sleep in our own beds.
6:20 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. The A train.
He holds the pole in his gloved right hand, the other World guys close around him. They are packed together in the rush-hour train, maybe eight of them, including Helen Loomis. Murmuring jokes. Chuckling. Fonseca is silent. Thinking: I get a double wood and the paper folds. Fuck. He flashes on the faces of the night: Harding, Watson, the woman whose son had been killed. Remembers a professor at NYU, an old reporter, telling him: Ya gotta learn to forget. Ya gotta leave all the pain in the city room. Report it, write it, and go home.
Not that easy. Maybe if I had Victoria Collins with me every night. Maybe then it would be a home, instead of a place to sleep. Now it’s a fixed-up Brooklyn tenement full of college kids, with a view of a red-brick factory turned into condos. Growing up in New Jersey, Fonseca imagined Brooklyn before he saw it. From movies. From photographs. Saw its light. Its beautiful brownstones. He found his pad in his last year at NYU, paid $350 a month for a chopped-off slice of a railroad flat. Too much, for a place the size of a small attic in Montclair. Still, it’s bigger than Victoria’s place. The bathroom has a sink, for fuck’s sake.
His father and mother came once to visit and his father said, “For this, I spent all that money?” And never came again. But it was Brooklyn, in a neighborhood renamed the South Slope by the real estate guys, with the subway three blocks away and places to eat on all the corners. It just never became a home, even after I got hired at the World. Where I wanted to work fifteen hours a day. For the rest of my fucking life.
He hears Barney Weiss mention CelineWire and that nasty shit Wheeler who writes it. That asshole probably even thinks he brought us down. Not the recession and the loss of ads. Not the delivery system. Him. Well, at least I had it for a while. He remembers what Mr. Briscoe told him when he handed Fonseca his first working press card. When I got mine, Briscoe said, I wore it to bed for a month, like it was a dog tag. Fonseca did the same thing. And that first week his father called, after seeing Fonseca’s byline in the paper, and said, “Damn, Bobby, I am so goddamned proud of you.” He could hear a tremor in his father’s voice, and then heard him say, “Maybe now you can get a decent place to live.” And Bobby Fonseca laughed.