The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Page 19

  Never mind. It’s a beautiful day, and Weston is in charge. Happy and obedient, his tourists trot past the spot where John Lennon died and into the park on a zigzag, heading for the East side, where the Metropolitan Museum bulks above the trees like a mastodon lumbering away. He keeps up a lively patter, spinning stories as his people smile blandly and nod, nod, nod, all except the man with the scowl, who keeps looking at his watch.

  Weston looks up: Ooops. Like a cutting horse, his ex-Marine has the herd heading into a bad place. Time to get out of here. He’ll walk them south on Fifth, point out houses owned by people he used to know. “All right,” he says brightly, “Time to see how rich people live.”

  “Wait.” The big Marine fills the path like a rhino bunched to charge. “You call this the insider tour?”

  Smile, Weston. “Didn’t I just …” He points to a gap in the bushes; Weston knows it too well.

  “TAKE US THE FUCK INSIDE.”

  No! Behind those bushes, a gash in the rocks opens like a mouth. He can’t go back! Weston struggles for that tour-guide tone. “What would you like to see?”

  “Tunnels.”

  The ground underneath the park is laced with unfinished city projects—tunnels, aborted subway stations, all closed to them; Weston has researched, and he knows. “Oh,” he says, relieved, “then you want City Spelunking Tours, I have their number and …”

  “Not those. The ones real people dug. Nam vets. Old hippies.”

  “There aren’t any …”

  The big man finishes with a disarming grin. “Crazies like me. I have buddies down there.”

  “There’s nothing down there.” Weston shudders. He’s a client, don’t offend. “That’s just urban legend, like a lot of other things you think you know. Now, if you like legends, I can take you to Frank E. Campbell’s, where they have all the famous funerals, or the house where Stanford White got shot by Harry K. Thaw …”

  “No. Down!” The renegade tourist roars like a drill sergeant and the group snaps to like first-day recruits. “Now. Moving out!”

  Weston holds up his placard, shouting: “Wait!”

  Too late. Like a pack of lemmings, the last-ever Weston Walking Tour falls in behind the big man.

  They are heading into a very bad place. No, Weston doesn’t want to talk about it. He waves his arms like signal flags. “Wrong way! There’s nothing here!”

  The Marine whirls, shouting, “You fucking well know it’s here.”

  The hell of it is, Weston does. He is intensely aware of the others in his little group: the newlyweds, the dreary anniversary couple, the plump librarian and the kid in the Derek Jeter shirt, a dozen others are watching with cool, judgmental eyes. In spite of their cheap tourist claptrap and bland holiday smiles, they are not stupid people; they’re fixed on the conflict, eager to see something ordinary tourists don’t see. The authority of their guide is at issue. They are waiting to see how this plays out. There is an intolerable pause.

  “Well?”

  One more minute and the last Weston Walking Tour will die of holding its breath.

  If you knew what Weston knew, you would be afraid.

  His only friend at St. Paul’s vanished on their senior class trip to the city. One minute weird Ted Bishop was hunched on the steps of the Museum of Natural History, shivering under a long down coat that was brown and shiny as a cockroach’s shell and zipped to the chin on the hottest day of the year. Then he was gone.

  Last winter Weston ran into Bishop on Third Avenue, with that same ratty coat leaking feathers and encrusted with mud. It was distressing; he did what he could. He took him into a restaurant and bought him hot food, looked away when his best friend stuffed everything he couldn’t devour into his pockets with the nicest smile. “I went crazy. I hid because I didn’t want you to know.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded.” Weston’s stomach convulsed.

  “At first I was scared but then, Weston. Oh!”

  It was terrifying, all that naked emotion, so close. He shrank, as if whatever Ted had was catching.

  “Then they found me.” Bishop’s pale face gleamed. “Man, there’s a whole world down there. I suppose you think I’m nuts.”

  “Not really.” Weston reached for a gag line. “I thought you’d gotten a better offer.”

  “I did!” Ted lit up like an alabaster lamp. “One look and I knew: These are my people. And this is my place! You have to see!”

  “I’ll try.” He did; he followed the poor bastard to the entrance; it’s right behind these bushes, he knows—and stopped … “Wait.”

  … and heard Ted’s voice overlapping, “Wait. I have to tell them you’re coming. You will wait for me, right?”

  Weston wanted to be brave, but he could not lie. “I’ll try.”

  He couldn’t stop Ted, either. The tunnel walls shifted behind his friend as if something huge had swallowed him in its sleep. Its foul breath gushed out of the hole; Weston heard the earth panting, waiting to swallow him. Forgive him, he fled.

  Awful place, he vowed never to … But they are waiting. “OK,” he says finally, plunging into the bushes like a diver into a pool full of sharks. “OK.”

  With the others walking up his heels, Weston looks down into the hole. It’s dark as death. Relieved, he looks up. “Sorry, we can’t do it today. Not without flashlights. Now …”

  “Got it covered.” The veteran produces a bundle: halogen miners’ lamps on headbands. Handing them out, he says the obvious, “Always …”

  Weston groans. “Prepared.” He stands by as his tourists drop into the tunnel, one by one. If they don’t come out, what will he tell their families? Will they sue? Will he go to jail? He’s happy to stand at the brink mulling it, but the Marine shoves him into the hole.

  “Your turn.” He drops in after Weston, shutting out daylight with his bulk. The only way they can go is down.

  All his life since his parents died, Lawrence Weston has taken great pains to control his environment. Now he is in a place he never imagined. Life goes on, but everything flies out of control. He is part of this now, blundering into the ground.

  Weston doesn’t know what he expects: rats, lurking dragons, thugs with billy clubs, a tribe of pale, blind mutants, or a bunch of gaudy neohippies in sordid underground squats. In fact, several passages fan out from the main entrance, rough tunnels leading to larger caverns with entrances and exits of their own; the underground kingdom is bigger than he feared. He had no idea it would be so old. Debris brought down from the surface to shore up the burrow sticks out of the mud and stone like a schoolchild’s display of artifacts from every era. The mud plastering the walls is studded with hardware from the streetcar/gaslight Nineties, fragments of glass and plastic from the Day-Glo-skateboard Nineties and motherboards, abandoned CRTs, bumpers from cars that are too new to carbon-date. The walls are buttressed by four-by-fours, lit by LED bulbs strung from wires, but Weston moves along in a crouch, as though the earth is just about to collapse on his head—which might be merciful, given the fumes. Although fresh air is coming in from somewhere, there is the intolerable stink of mud and small dead things and although to his surprise this tunnel, at least, is free of the expected stink of piss and excrement, there is the smell that comes of too many people living too close together, an overpoweringly human fug.

  At first Weston sees nobody, hears nothing he can make sense of, knows only that he can’t be in this awful place.

  Dense air weighs on him so he can hardly breathe: the effluvia of human souls. Then a voice rises in the passage ahead, a girl’s bright, almost festive patter running along ahead of his last-ever Weston Walking Tour as though she and the hulking Marine, and not Weston, are in charge.

  Meanwhile the mud walls widen as the path goes deeper. The tunnels are lined with people, their pale faces gleaming wherever he flashes his miner’s lamp and it is terrifying. The man who tried so hard to keep all the parts of his life exactly where he put them has lost any semblance of control; the
orphan who lived alone because it was safest is trapped in the earth, crowded—no, surrounded—by souls, dozens, perhaps hundreds of others with their needs, their grief and sad secrets and emotional demands.

  The pressure of their hopes staggers him.

  All at once the lifelong solo flier comprehends what he read in Ted Bishop’s face that day, and why he fled. Educated, careful and orderly and self-contained as Lawrence Weston tries so hard to be, only a tissue of belief separates him from them.

  Now they are all around him.

  I can’t. Every crease in his body is greased with the cold sweat of claustrophobia. I won’t.

  He has forgotten how to breathe. One more minute and … He doesn’t know. Frothing, he wheels, cranked up to fight the devil if he has to, anything to get out of here; he’ll tear the hulking veteran apart with teeth and nails, offer money, do murder or if he has to, die in the attempt, anything to escape the dimly perceived but persistent, needy humanity seething underground.

  As it turns out, he doesn’t have to do any of these things. The bulky vet lurches forward with a big-bear rumble, “Semper fi.”

  In the dimness ahead, a ragged, gravelly chorus responds: “Semper fi.”

  The Marine shoulders Weston aside. “Found ’em. Now, shove off. Round up your civilians and move ’em out.”

  Miraculously, he does. He pulls the WESTON WALKS placard out of the back of his jeans and raises it, pointing the headlamp so his people will see the sign. Then he blows the silver whistle he keeps for emergencies and never had to use.

  It makes the tunnels shriek.

  “OK,” he says with all the force he has left in his body. “Time to go! On to Fifth Avenue and …” He goes on in his best tour-guide voice; it’s a desperation move, but Weston is desperate enough to offer them anything. “The Russian Tea Room! I’ll treat. Dinner at the Waldorf, suites for the night, courtesy of Weston Walking Tours.”

  Oddly, when they emerge into fresh air and daylight—dear God, it’s still light—the group is no smaller, but it is different. It takes Weston a minute to figure out what’s changed. The bulky ex-Marine with an agenda is gone, an absence he could have predicted, but when he lines them up at the bus stop (yes, he is shaking quarters into the coin drop on a city bus!) he still counts thirteen. Newlyweds, yes, anniversary couple, librarian; assorted bland, satisfied Middle Americans, yes; pimply kid. The group looks the same, but it isn’t. He is too disrupted, troubled, and distracted to know who …

  Safe at last in the Russian Tea Room, he knows which one she is, or thinks he knows because unlike the others, she looks perfectly comfortable here: lovely woman with tousled hair, buff little body wrapped in a big gray sweater with sleeves pulled down over her fingertips; when she reaches for the samovar with a gracious offer to pour he is startled by a flash of black-rimmed fingernails. Never mind, maybe it’s a fashion statement he hasn’t caught up with.

  Instead of leading his group to Times Square or Grand Central for the ceremonial sendoff so he can fade into the crowd, he leaves them at the Waldorf, all marveling as they wait at the elevators for the concierge to show them to their complimentary suites.

  Spent and threatened by his close encounter with life, Weston flees.

  The first thing he does when he gets home is pull his ad and trash the business phone. Then he does what murderers and rape victims do in movies, after the fact: he spends hours under a hot shower, washing away the event. It will be days before he’s fit to go out. He quiets shattered nerves by numbering the beautiful objects in the ultimate safe house he has created, assuages grief with coffee and the day’s papers in the sunlit library, taking comfort from small rituals. He needs to visit his father’s Turner watercolor, stroke the smooth flank of the Brancusi marble in the foyer, study his treasure, a little Remington bronze.

  When he does go out some days later, he almost turns and goes back in. The sexy waif from the tour is on his front steps. Same sweater, same careless toss of the head. The intrusion makes his heart stop and his belly tremble, but the girl who poured so nicely at the Russian Tea Room greets him with a delighted smile.

  “I thought you’d never come out.”

  “You have no right, you have no right …” She looks so pleased that he starts over. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live in the neighborhood.” She challenges him with that gorgeous smile.

  How do you explain to a pretty girl that she has no right to track you to your lair? How can you tell any New Yorker that your front steps are private, specific only to you? How can you convince her that your life is closed to intruders, or that she is one?

  He can’t. “I have to go!”

  “Where are you … ”

  Staggered by a flashback—tunnel air repeating like something he ate—Weston is too disturbed to make polite excuses, beep his driver, manage any of the usual exit lines. “China!” he blurts, and escapes.

  At the corner he wheels to make sure he’s escaped and gasps: “Oh!”

  Following him at a dead run, she smashes into him with a stirring little thud that splits his heart, exposing it to the light. Oh, the chipped tooth that flashes when she grins. “Um, China this very minute?”

  Yes, he is embarrassed. “Well, not really. I mean. Coffee first.”

  She tugs down the sweater sleeves, beaming. “Let’s! I’ll pay.”

  By the time they finish their cappuccinos and he figures out how to get out without hurting her feelings, he’s in love.

  How does a man like Weston fall in love?

  Accidentally. Fast. It’s nothing he can control. Still he manages to part from Wings Germaine without letting his hands shake or his eyes mist over; he must not do anything that will tip her off to the fact that this is the last good time. He even manages to hug goodbye without clinging, although it wrecks his heart. “It’s been fun,” he says. “I have to go.”

  “No big. Nothing is forever,” she says, exposing that chipped tooth.

  Dying a little, he backs away with a careful smile. To keep the life he’s built so lovingly he has to, but it’s hard. “So, bye.”

  Her foggy voice curls around him and clings. “Take care.”

  They’re friends now, or what passes for friends, so he trusts her not to follow. Even though it’s barely four in the afternoon he locks his front door behind him, checks the windows, and sets the alarm.

  That beautiful girl seemed to be running ahead of his thoughts so fast that when they exchanged life stories she saw the pain running along underneath the surface of the story he usually tells. Her triangular smile broke his heart. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be,” he told her. “It’s nothing you did.”

  “No,” she said. “Oh, no. But I’ve been there, and I know what it’s like.”

  Orphaned, he assumed. Like me, he thinks, although she is nothing like him. Named in honor of her fighter-pilot father, she said. Art student, she said, but she never said when. Mystifyingly, she said, “You have some beautiful stuff.” Had he told her about the Calder maquette and forgotten, or mentioned the Sargent portrait of his great-grandfather or the Manet oil sketch? He has replayed that conversation a dozen times today and he still doesn’t know.

  At night, even though he’s secured the house and is safely locked into his bedroom, he has a hard time going to sleep. Before he can manage it he has to get up several times and repeat his daytime circuit of the house. He patrols rooms lit only by reflected streetlights, padding from one to the next in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, touching table tops with light fingers, running his hands over the smooth marble flank of the Brancusi because every object is precious and he needs to know that each is in its appointed place.

  Day or night Weston is ruler of his tight little world, secure in the confidence that although he let himself be waylaid by a ragged stranger today, although he ended up doing what she wanted instead of what he intended, here, at least, he commands the world.

  Then why can’t he slee
p?

  The fourth time he goes downstairs in the dark he finds her sitting in his living room. At first he imagines his curator has moved a new Degas bronze into the house in the dead of night. Then he realizes it’s Wings Germaine, positioned like an ornament on his ancestral brocade sofa, sitting with her arms locked around her knees.

  “What,” he cries, delighted, angry and terrified. “What!”

  Wings moves into his arms so fluidly that the rest flows naturally, like a soft, brilliant dream. “I was in the neighborhood.”

  They are together in a variety of intense configurations until Weston gasps with joy and falls away from her, exhausted. Drenched in sense memory, he plummets into sleep.

  When the housekeeper comes to wake him in the morning, Wings is gone.

  By day Weston is the same person; days pass in their usual sweet order, but his nights go by in that fugue of images of Wings Germaine, who hushes his mouth with kisses whenever he tries to ask who she is and how she gets in or whether what they have together is real or imagined. No matter how he wheedles, she doesn’t explain; “I live in the neighborhood,” she says, and the pleasure of being this close quiets his heart. He acknowledges the possibility that the girl is, rather, only hallucination and—astounding for a man so bent on control—he accepts that.

  As long as his days pass in order, he tells himself, as long as nothing changes, he’ll be OK. He thinks.

  When Wings arrives she does what she does so amazingly that he’s never quite certain what happened, only that it leaves him joyful and exhausted; then she leaves. His nights are marvels, uncomplicated by the pressure of the usual lover’s expectations because they both know she will be gone before the sun comes up. She always is. He wakes up alone, to coffee and the morning paper, sunlight on mahogany. Their nights are wild and confusing but in the daytime world that Weston has spent his life perfecting, everything is reassuringly the same.