Specimen Days

  And where, of course, there was no place at all for someone like Cat. Where she’d expire discreetly of loneliness and strangeness, where she’d probably become an ever-more-frequent presence on one of the bar stools at the local steak house, trying to keep her voice down, arranging her swizzle sticks in neat rows in front of her, struggling not to make lists on the cocktail napkins.

  She walked up to Bond Street, turned east. The people on the streets were going about their regular business, but there was a charge in the air. Everyone was spooked by the news. The guy in front of Cat with the attaché case strode along with his shoulders hunched, as if he expected a blow from above. The three Asian girls who paused at a shop window, looked at the shoes, looked at one another, and moved right along—were they thinking of being showered with broken glass? The danger that had infected the air for the last few years was stirred up now; people could smell it. Today they’d been reminded, we’d been reminded, of something much of the rest of the world had known for centuries—that you could easily, at any moment, make your fatal mistake. That we all humped along unharmed because no one had decided to kill us that day. That we could not know, as we hurried about our business, whether we were escaping the conflagration or rushing into it.

  Cat went down Bond, past the stratospherically expensive Japanese restaurant, past the jinxed store where another optimist had put up signs announcing the imminent appearance of another boutique that would be gone in six months or so. She crossed Lafayette and went up to Fifth Street, her block, her home, what she had come to call her home, though when she’d moved there seven years ago it had been temporary, just a few dim, affordable rooms, postdivorce, until she started her real life in her real apartment. Funny how in only seven years it had metamorphosed from fallback to treasure, how people couldn’t believe she’d wangled her way into a rent-controlled, lightless third-floor walk-up on a block where crackheads didn’t piss in your vestibule every single night. It all kept shifting under your feet, didn’t it? Maybe future generations would prize those spangled Orlon sweaters from Nassau Street. Maybe things would fall so far that a pair of cardboard imitation-alligator shoes made in Taiwan would look like artifacts of a golden age.

  She passed among the unnerved denizens of Fifth Street. The two Lithuanian women were out on the sidewalk in their folding aluminum lawn chairs, as always, but instead of watching the passersby with their usual regal weariness, they leaned into each other, talking animatedly in their language, shaking their heads. The punk couple with sunburst haircuts stomped along with particular fury—so, people, you’re fucking surprised that it’s all blowing up in your goddamned fucking faces? Only the old homeless man, at his post in front of the flower shop, looked unaffected, chanting his inaudible chants, the hired mourner of the neighborhood, its own singer for the dead.

  Cat let herself into her apartment. For a moment she imagined it as the boys of the bomb squad would find it if she’d been blown up on the corner of Broadway and Cortlandt. Not so good. Admit it: it was the apartment of somebody who’d let things slide. There were clothes and shoes strewn around; there were dishes in the sink. The books that had long ago overflowed the bookcase (yes, boards and cinder blocks; she’d meant to replace it) were stacked everywhere. Were there spots of mold floating in the coffee cup she’d set on the book pile on one side of the sofa? Sure there were. If you ran a finger along a windowsill, would it come up coated with velvety, vaguely oily dust? You bet it would. It could have been the apartment of a slightly messier-than-usual graduate student. The oatmeal-colored sofa with the broken spring—Lucy had given it to her until she got something better. That had been seven years ago.

  Fuck it. She was busy. She was beat. Cleanliness was a virtue but not a sexy one.

  She checked her voice mail. Simon was the first message.

  Hey, you know anything about the explosion? Call me.

  She called Titan. Amelia, Simon’s secretary, put her straight through.

  “Cat?”

  “Hi.”

  “What’s going on? What do you know about this thing?”

  “I think I talked to him. The bomber.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Three days ago. We’re not sure yet, but I think I talked to him.”

  “You talked to him. He called you.”

  “It’s my job, baby. I’m the one they call.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “Do you want some dinner?”

  “I guess. I’m honestly not sure.”

  “I’m going to buy you a drink and some dinner.”

  “That’d be so nice.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Someplace unchallenging. You pick.”

  “Right. How about Le Blanc?”

  “Great. Perfect.”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Half an hour.”

  He hung up. While they were talking, Cat had done it again. Picked up a pen and written in her spiral notebook:

  Fortress of solitude?

  Does dirt = filth?

  Where’s the little house?

  She tore out the page, crumpled it, and tossed it away. When had regular note-taking turned into…whatever this was? Free association. Had it started after 9/11? She hoped so. Cause and effect were always comforting.

  She got to Le Blanc in exactly half an hour. She was the first to arrive, as she’d expected. Simon could never just put down the phone and walk away, not even in an emergency. He lived in an ongoing state of emergency. He traded futures. (Yes, he had explained it all to her, and, no, she still didn’t understand what exactly it was that he did.) Fortunes flicked across his computer screen, falling and rising and falling again. He was the man behind the curtain. If he failed to take care of business, Oz might dissolve in an emerald mist. He’d be there as soon as he could.

  Cat herself could not overcome her habit of punctuality. She’d tried. It wasn’t in her to be late for anything, ever.

  A place like Le Blanc was Simon’s idea of unchallenging because it wasn’t cool anymore. Three years ago it had been a Laundromat, just a dingy hole on Mott Street, and then somebody cleaned the hundred-year-old tile walls, put up yellowed mirrors, installed a zinc-topped bar, and poof, it was a perfect Parisian bistro. For a while it was an epicenter, then it faded. Regular people could get in now. At a front table sat a couple who were clearly not from the neighborhood. He was all gold jewelry; she’d draped her faux Versace over the back of her chair. Moscow-riche. A year ago, they’d have been stopped at the threshold. Cat’s idea of unchallenging was more like…well, okay, an entirely unchallenging restaurant was not coming immediately to mind.

  She passed through a moment with the hostess, a new girl, mega-smiley in her confusion over what exactly to do with a black woman who’d arrived alone. Before the girl could speak, Cat said, “I’m meeting Simon Dryden. I believe we have a reservation.”

  The girl consulted her list. “Why, yes,” she said. “Mr. Dryden isn’t here yet.”

  “Let’s get me seated then, shall we?”

  The queenly bearing and the schoolmarm diction, the smiling ultraformality. You did what you had to do.

  “Absolutely,” the hostess chimed, and led Cat to the second booth.

  As Cat settled in, she locked eyes with Fred. Fred was one of the legion of New York actors who impersonated waiters while they hoped things would break for them. He wasn’t young anymore, though. He was becoming what he’d once pretended to be: a wisecracking waiter, brusque and charmingly irreverent, knowledgeable about wines.

  “Hello, Fred,” Cat said.

  “Hey,” said Fred. Perfectly cordial, but glassy somehow. Caught up short. For Cat, sans Simon, he had no banter strategy.

  “How are you?”

  “Good. I’m good. Can I get you a drink?”

  Funny how hard it could be, sitting alone in a restaurant. Funny to be someone who could calmly talk to psychopaths but had trouble being a
n unescorted woman who made a waiter uncomfortable.

  She had Fred bring her a Ketel One on the rocks. She looked at the menu.

  Cattle fed on bonemeal?

  Slaughter of the innocents?

  Poison in the walls?

  Well, now. Apparently, at moments of stress, she didn’t need to write them down anymore.

  She was on her second vodka when Simon arrived. It still shocked her sometimes, seeing him in public. He was so unassailably young and fit. He was a Jaguar, he was a goddamned parade float rolling along, demonstrating to ordinary citizens that a gaudier, grander world—a world of potently serene, self-contained beauty—appeared occasionally amid the squalor of ongoing business; that behind the blank, gray face of things there existed an inner realm of wealth and ease, of urbane celebration. She watched the hostess check him out. She watched him stride with the confidence of a brigadier general to her table, stunning in his midnight-blue suit. It might as well have been spangled with tiny stars and planets.

  He kissed her on the lips. Yes, people, I’m his date. I’m his girlfriend, okay?

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

  “You’re fine. Is it crazy at work?”

  “You’re asking me?” Simon frowned compassionately. His brows bristled like a pair of chocolate-colored caterpillars. Cat had an urge to stroke them.

  “Crazy is a relative concept,” she said.

  “Mm,” he said. “So, you think you talked to this guy.”

  Simon was going to be stern and unhysterical, even a little casual in this, his first secondhand crisis. He was going to be someone who could manage the news of a random bomber with the same grave suavity she knew he must bring to his business deals.

  “Let’s get you a drink, and I’ll tell you about it,” Cat said.

  He sat down across from her. Fred came right away.

  “Hey, Fred,” Simon said. He’d been a regular since the restaurant’s glory days, was adored for continuing to come.

  “Hey, homeboy,” Fred answered, fluent in manspeak.

  “Heard the news?” Simon asked.

  “Scary.”

  “You know Cat, right?”

  “Absolutely. Hey, Cat.”

  “Cat’s with the police department. She’s working on this one.”

  I live in a world of danger, Fred. I’m deeper inside of things than you can possibly know.

  “You’re kidding,” Fred said. Cat watched him go through an intricate reassessment. All right, she had a real job and quite possibly an interesting one. But bottom line, didn’t this make her one of those grim black women, the sticklers for protocol who torture the populace from behind civic counters and post-office windows?

  “Not at liberty to discuss it,” Cat said.

  “Right, right.” Fred nodded sagely. He was up to the challenge of playing a waiter who could be trusted with a little inside information. He was more than up to it.

  Cat said, “Simon, why don’t you order yourself a drink?”

  Simon paused, then said, “Right. Just a glass of wine, I think. Like maybe a Shiraz?”

  “The Chilean or the Sonoma?” Fred asked.

  “You pick.”

  “Chilean.”

  “Good.”

  Fred nodded again, in Cat’s direction. Undercover waiter. Good in a crisis. He went off to get the wine.

  What was it with men? Why were they so eager to impersonate someone brave and competent and in the know?

  “Simon, baby,” Cat said, “you can’t say things like that. Not to waiters.”

  “Got you. Sorry.”

  “You can’t be showing me off to people. Besides, I’m not Foxy Brown. I’m just a grunt, really.”

  “It’s because I’m proud of you.”

  “I know.”

  “So. What happened?”

  “A kid called in with a bomb threat. That’s all.”

  “And you think it’s this kid who blew the guy up?”

  “Possibly.”

  “The kid must have known the guy, right?”

  She hesitated. She had to give him something, didn’t she? He was her boyfriend. And—admit it—this was part of what she had to offer him.

  “It would seem that way. My guess is, it’s a sex thing. Odds are we’ll get a missing report from somewhere in the vicinity of Dick Harte’s neighborhood, and we’ll find that he’d been blowing the perpetrator in the backseat of his BMW.”

  Cat knew the word “perpetrator” would be exciting to Simon. She’d promised herself to stop acting extra coplike to turn him on. Screwed that one up.

  “Right,” Simon said. His brows bristled. It would have been nice to peel them gently off his face, hold them in her palm, then put them carefully back again.

  “What do you want to eat?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. The tuna, I guess.”

  Simon was Atkins. High protein, no carbs. And really, consider the results.

  “I’m going to have the steak au poivre,” she said. “And mashed potatoes.”

  Momma’s had a very hard day. All right?

  They went back to her place that night, and never mind about the mess. She was rattled—she realized how much she wanted her own bed. Simon didn’t mind her crappy apartment every now and then. He claimed to like it, actually. Although she’d never come out and asked him, it was likely that until he met her he’d never been to East Fifth Street.

  She woke up at 3:30. She didn’t have to look at the clock. She knew this abrupt and arid consciousness, this jump from deep dreams to a wakefulness that was not so much having slept enough as having suddenly lost the knack for sleep. On the nights it happened, it always happened between 3:30 and 4:00. She had a little something for it in the medicine cabinet, but she’d never even opened the bottle. She seemed to prefer insomnia to simulated sleep. Control thing. Fucked up, really, but what could she do?

  Simon breathed steadily beside her. She let herself stare at him as he grimaced over a dream. He was a true classic. Big, broad anchorman face, vigorous thatch of sable-colored hair beginning to be threaded, here and there, with strands of sterling silver. He could have been fresh off the assembly line of whatever corporation produced the Great American Beauties. The corporation would be somewhere in the Midwest, wouldn’t it? And yes, he came from Iowa, didn’t he? Great-great-grandson of immigrants who’d escaped New York for the prairie, he’d returned in triumph a hundred or so years later, the exiled prince restored to his true home by way of the Ivy League. Rich and healthy, thirty-three years old. Practically adolescent, in man-years.

  Maybe it was time to quit the unit, though if she did it now it would look like she was running away. In fact, she’d been thinking of quitting for some time. You got a little crazy, working the nuts. You listened to every lunatic with the same patience; you reminded yourself over and over that any one of these people might really and truly be about to torch a grade school or blow up a store or kill somebody just because he was well-known. Bartenders must start seeing a world full of drunks; lawyers must see it as largely made up of the vengefully injured. Forensic psychologists got infected by paranoia. You knew, better than the average citizen, that the world contains a subworld, where the residents do as most people do, pay rent and buy groceries, but have a little something extra going on. They receive personal messages from their television sets or are raped nightly by a sitcom star or have discovered that the cracks on the sidewalk between Broadway and Lafayette spell out the names of the aliens who are posing as world leaders.

  The most surprising thing about these people, as it turned out, was their dullness. All their human juices flowed in one direction; they cared about nothing, really, beyond their fixations. Anyone’s sweet old aunt in Baltimore was more vital and various, even if her life was only watching television and clipping discount coupons out of magazines. You sat in your crummy police department office—which resembled nothing so much as a failing mail-order business—and listened to them. You logged them in on you
r five-year-old computer. You hoped none of them would follow through. You hoped, on your worst days (no one liked to talk about this), that one of them would.

  She got out of bed, careful not to wake Simon, and went to the window. It wasn’t much of a view, just three floors down onto Fifth Street, but still. Here was a slice of the city; here was the old homeless man, still chanting in front of the florist’s (he was out later than usual tonight); here were the orange streetlights and the brown housefronts, the dark-clad pedestrians, the whole smoky, sepia-stained semireality of it, this city at night, the most convincing stage set ever devised, no ocean or mountains, hardly any trees (not, at least, in this neighborhood), just street after street, bright and noisy under a pink-gray sky pierced by antennas and water tanks, while down below, across the street from Cat’s building, a flame-blue sign buzzed CLEANER.

  In the morning she made coffee, brought Simon a cup while he was still in the shower, got to spend a moment watching him through the clouded glass, the vague pink of his back and legs, the paler pink of his ass. Was a man ever sexier than when he was taking a shower? Still, this business of sneaking looks at Simon as he slept or showered wasn’t such a good sign, was it? Did he do the same with her? She couldn’t picture it. She set his coffee mug on the back of the toilet tank, wiped steam from the mirror over the sink, took a look. Not bad for thirty-eight. Firm chin, good skin.

  Backless dresses, how much longer?

  The melting ice cap of sleep

  It’s a pig’s heart you hold in your hand

  Simon emerged, brightened and water-beaded, kissed her, picked up his coffee. He said, “Work’s not going to be any fun today, is it?”

  “Probably not.”

  He grabbed a towel, dried off. The towels hadn’t been washed in, what, two weeks or more. Time flew.

  “Call me. Let me know what’s going on.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ve got that damned client thing tonight. I can be done by around ten.”