I suppose, he said. What is wrong with me?
Where would I even start? she said.
“Blue in Green” ended and Jane turned the record over. My father’s eyes were closed. The needle popped, dropped into the groove, played a few bars of dust before the piano and the drums came sliding in like something out of a heist movie and Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley came in behind them, saxes crackling with spittle, and then Davis, restrained, creeping over the shoulders of his bandmates. “All Blues.” My father let himself back into that old apartment on 77th. The landlord had installed his own mother in a top-floor unit one winter. Because he ran the boiler only enough to keep the pipes from freezing, she’d contracted pneumonia and died. That’s how my father had heard it. He had trouble remembering her face. She was a black sweater and gray skirt, a column of dust planted in orthopedic shoes. She wheeled her supplies around in a squeaky folding grocery cart scrounged from a dumpster. She scrubbed the lobby floor on hands and knees, her phlebitic legs sticking out hideously like marshland maps cut and crossed by violet creeks and streams, the central rivers in cerulean. More than once he’d had to step over them to get to the stairs. Always mumbling to herself in Polish. My father could have spoken to her, but he hadn’t. On weekdays she cleaned her son’s other buildings. On Sundays, she cleaned the one where my father lived. Saturdays she went to synagogue. When her neighbor on the eighth floor had fallen ill, she’d made a pot of krupnik, wasn’t that what someone had said? Things he’d heard after she was dead. She hadn’t been old. Another thing he’d heard was that she’d been in the camps, but that she’d managed first to get her son on a train to Spain, then a boat to the U.S., and he’d grown up with his aunt and uncle on Long Island.
My father had lived on the second floor, in a studio with a mattress, his books, the Olivetti, and a portable record player. Some days he listened to “Blue in Green” three hundred times, at the tune’s end his hand automatically reaching for the arm, fingers casually dropping the needle back at the beginning while their twins waited patiently atop the keys. This fine synchronization of body with machine rendered him calm enough to write, the repetition silencing the demon voices and tics that sabotaged his concentration.
That song was the score to his first book, a companion and an ally, and the Vornados had boiled it down to tar to patch holes in their conversations. The old woman was ingrained in the music, down in the grooves of his memory, her scrub brush, the swish of the brushes on the drum kit, her voice whining with the horn, with the sirens, the slamming of doors above and below, the concrete footfalls of his upstairs neighbors, the bass, the hissing of the radiators, the street, the snapping of the Lettera’s typebars. How romantic it could be in retrospect. Why not also pretend that she might have been a beautiful woman before the war, a woman of culture? Of course she hadn’t been.
Feeney was arguing that increased sales of nude pantyhose correlated with the increased availability of pornographic films. He was trying to get a rise out of the women, employing the genial lechery men used to compete with the detrimental effects of women’s lib, the main of which, as any male of the species could tell you, was a complete loss of humor in the fairer sex. My father wanted to hear “Blue in Green” again, this time loud enough to drown out Feeney, but it wouldn’t do to get up and flip the record over. Earlier, he might have had the right, but now he had to make an effort not to be such a grade-A prick. Instead he went and got another drink, waving the bottle, a peace offering, at everyone, who shook their heads no, and when he came back he sat on the other side of my mother, closer to Feeney and the Vornados, and when there was an opportunity, he apologized, bumblingly, with a convincing degree of sincerity that he felt at the time was genuine. Bo patted him on the leg and Jane waved him off again, just as she waved off everything, it seemed, that might impede the progress of her personal narrative.
My mother stitched the patterns in the bathrooms, Bo said. She loved Frost.
Jesus Christ, my father thought. She loved Frost. Frost! What a riot she must have been. I bet she threw herself down the staircase every Easter morning.
My father nodded. One of the greats, he said.
On Saturday, at an hour so early the darkness was heavy as a slab of stone, the alarm clock by my parents’ bed, conveniently set by Bo the day before, went off clangingly, prompting my father to thrash wildly in the direction of the noise, taking out an ashtray and a glass of water before he found the clock. My mother muttered something indecipherably profane and he dragged himself from the bed and into the black bathroom, where he and Doppler tried to hit the bowl. He picked his way downstairs. Bo and Feeney were already at the espresso machine, a chrome-piped contraption covered in pressure gauges, its chassis enameled in Ferrari rosso corsa. It was so early there was not even a pale line at the horizon.
The transistor radio on the windowsill was tuned to the local AM, which at that hour broadcast the time, temp, and NOAA forecast on a five-minute loop. In Bo’s estimation, a good morning to be on the boat. Temperature in the teens. Nothing serious, atmospherically speaking. The storm was still making its way up the coast from the Carolinas but nothing to worry about today. None of them had slept more than three hours, and Bo’s eyes felt like someone had attacked them with a melon baller.
Bo was a pioneer in the nascent world of leveraged buyouts, the spread in Montauk a minor facet in his crown. There was a castle in Ireland he had his eye on. A storage facility in Mahwah for his collection of buffalo hides. A separate facility on East 72nd Street for his paintings. Mountains of money: a phrase never far from his consciousness. He’d never felt a need to apologize for or curb his desires. If his confidence grated, that wasn’t his fault any more than it was a tree’s fault it provided shade.
He’d been chewing on my father’s drunken rant from the night before. As another sign of my father’s jealousy, it pleased him—it pleased him far more than all the obscene praise piled on him by men who wanted to fawn their way into his good graces. Bo understood that all men wanted what he had. His stuff, his power, his ability to ignore the problems that plagued their minds and forced them to tell themselves lies about their worth in the world. To Bo, my father was no different from the rest, except in the way he expressed his jealousy, which was honest, even soulful. Maybe this was how kings felt about their jesters: a fool was one whose disdain for the king’s power was so pure that he could be trusted to tell the truth from time to time.
Doppio for you, Bo said, pushing a cup of espresso toward my father, who was still wobbly, unsure whether he’d slept or only rolled around the bed for a few hours searching for sleep, and he threw it back in one shot.
Vile, Feeney said. Americano for me.
We don’t serve your kind, Bo said.
The hell, Feeney said.
Macchina italiana, speak no Americano, Bo said.
Goddamnit, Vornado. Just give me something with a set of balls on it.
This fine fellow passed out on the couch last night, Bo said to my father. Now I have to burn the thing. Bo slid an espresso cup across the counter. Doppio.
May you have only daughters, you son of a bitch, Feeney said.
Beware your half-wit sons, Bo said.
The way they talked, they could have been a pair of former college roommates, ever bound together by the barbed wire of competitive urges, surrogate brothers still capable of squabbling for hours over baseball stats. They spoke to each other in the tones of fraternal derision common to trading floors and golf clubhouses, fangs dulled just enough to allow them to sink their teeth into the other’s hide without drawing any blood. But they’d known each other only a few years, since Bo and Jane had bought the house.