XXVIII
THEY HAD A STORY in the paper the other day,” Jim said. “There’s this new Chinatown out in Flushing. You take the Shea Stadium train clear to the end of the line. Main Street, Flushing—that’s the name of the stop. And there’s blocks of Chinese restaurants with different cuisines from the different sections of China. Stuff you wouldn’t get here.”
“Stir-fried panda,” I suggested.
“Including parts of the panda it would never occur to you to eat. So I was thinking we really ought to get out there, just walk into the first restaurant that looks good and see what they serve us.”
“Good idea.”
He refilled our tea cups. “And then I thought, Hell, who am I kidding? The old established Chinatown’s ten minutes away on the A Train, and we never get there, so why would we chase out to Flushing?”
“They wrote up this Taiwanese restaurant, not two blocks from the subway stop. It sounded pretty good, I have to say. And yet we’ll never get there.” He took a bite, chewed, swallowed. “Creatures of habit,” he said. “You’re in the habit of getting laid on Saturday night, and if one woman disappears you just go find yourself another.”
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“No, I don’t suppose you did. Donna, huh? Fine-looking woman.”
“She cut her hair.”
“So you said. But you didn’t let that stop you, did you?”
We were two of the seven customers at the Lucky Peony, a recent arrival on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-first Street. Until I walked over there to meet Jim, I hadn’t left my room all day, and the sesame noodles were my first nourishment since last night’s liverwurst sandwich.
And Jim, when he called to pick a time and place for our Sunday dinner, was the first person I spoke to. I didn’t say much, but those few words were the only ones that passed my lips.
I never made a conscious decision to spend the day walled off from the world. I kept thinking I’d go out for breakfast in a few minutes, and held on to the thought after I’d changed the meal’s name to lunch.
Jan and I generally went to a Sunday morning meeting in SoHo, and I knew I wasn’t going to show up there, but there were plenty of other meetings available, all over the city and all through the day, and I thought I’d drop in on one of them. I checked my meeting book, and worked out a plan that would let me fit in a couple of meetings, or even three if I pushed it.
And didn’t go to any of them.
Instead I stayed in my room. I had the television set on more often than not, switching back and forth between a football game and a golf tournament, sometimes caught up in what I was watching, sometimes not.
I thought of phone calls I could make, and didn’t make them. At one point I remembered the mysterious Mark who’d called a couple of days ago and left a number, which I’d wound up tossing in the wastebasket. I wondered who it was, since I’d determined it wasn’t Motorcycle Mark, and I looked in the basket, but it was gone. As one of the hotel’s permanent residents, I get weekly maid service—my bed made with clean linen, my bathroom cleaned, my carpet vacuumed, my wastebasket emptied. My room got this treatment every Saturday, so I was a day late as far as Mark’s number was concerned, but that was all right, because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have called him anyway.
My phone rang a couple of times. But the calls came after I’d already spoken with Jim, and there was nobody I wanted to talk to, so I let it ring. If it was important they’d leave messages, and I could collect them on my way to dinner. If I remembered to check.
“Afterward,” I said, “I walked all the way home.”
“Whistling a happy tune?”
“You know what ran through my mind? Jesus, am I going to have this woman around my neck for the rest of my life?”
“Because how could she possibly let a fine fellow like you get away?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Here’s what happened,” he said. “Just so you know. Donna just got out of a relationship she never should have gotten into in the first place. So she did two things to prove she was done with it. She got her hair cut and she got herself laid. And, to make sure she didn’t wind up back where she started, she picked somebody unavailable.”
“Because of Jan. But nothing would have happened if Jan hadn’t broken our date. That’s when Donna got interested.”
“Before that she was just grabbing your arm out of friendship.”
I had to think about that.
“Look,” he said, “she liked you. She wanted to go to bed with you. Then she gave you a sandwich and sent you home.”
“She said I could stay.”
“ ‘Darling, please stay, and in the morning we’ll go out for brunch, and then we’ll come back here and make love some more.’ Is that how she put it?”
“Not exactly.”
“The message you got, and the one she intended to give, was you could stay if you wanted, but she’d just as soon you didn’t. Does that sound about right?”
“She was probably thinking, Am I gonna have this guy hanging around for the rest of my life?”
“Well, she’s an alcoholic, the same way you are. And she just got away from the Pride of Bensonhurst, so yeah, I suspect she was thinking something along those lines. But brighten up, will you? Here’s this great-looking woman with a nice apartment, and you’re the one she picked to share her canopy bed.”
“How’d you know it was a canopy bed?”
“Jesus, who are you, Lieutenant Columbo? You described it.”
“Oh.”
“And the Oriental rug, and the portrait over the marble fireplace.”
“It was a landscape.”
“Thanks for clearing that up. She didn’t have to pick you, you know. She could have dragged Richard upstairs.”
“Richard’s gay.”
“You think that would have stopped her?”
“Jim—”
“All right, I’ll grant that you’re a little more available than Richard, and a little more suitable. You’re not in love with her, are you?”
“With Donna? No. I like her, but—”
“No fantasies about moving in?”
“No.”
“Good, because that’s not what she wants either. Donna’s got a good job, makes decent money. She works downtown somewhere, doesn’t she?”
“She’s at an investment bank. I don’t know exactly what she does there.”
“Whatever it is, it pays well. And the next man she hooks up with, and it’s not going to be anytime soon, won’t be a guy like Vinnie, a knockaround guy from South Brooklyn who stays sober between drunks. And you know who else he won’t be?”
“An unlicensed private eye living in a hotel room.”
“There you go. You had a good time, and you didn’t have to spend Saturday night alone.”
“Right.”
“And you came out of it two hundred dollars to the good. What’s the matter?”
“Is that what the money was for?”
“No, of course not. The money was so that she wasn’t sleeping with you to pay you back for helping her out. Merry Christmas, kiddo.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t know the joke? Mailman brings the mail to this one house and the wife invites him in, gives him a fresh-baked brownie and a cup of coffee. Next thing he knows she’s taking him upstairs to the bedroom. Afterward she hands him a dollar.
“And he says, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ And he tries to hand it back, but she won’t take it. ‘It’s for you,’ she says. ‘It was my husband’s idea.’ ‘Your husband’s idea?’ ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I asked him what should we do for the mailman for Christmas, and he said, Fuck him, give him a dollar. The brownie and coffee were my idea.’ ”
We went to the meeting at St. Clare’s, and afterward I walked him back to his place. On my way home I remembered that I’d walked right past the desk earlier without seeing if any of my callers had left messages. This time I checked, and there was nothing. I went upstairs, picked up the phone, put it down without dialing anybody’s number, and went to bed.