Manhattan Nocturne Read Online Free Page A

on the porch and inside the front door, we examined the bedroom, trying to imagine ourselves sleeping and waking in what was then only a small vacant room, the floors dusty, the air stale. The seller had seen to it that the old plaster walls had been patched and repainted. We stood on the wide pine planks, thinking of the unknowable lives lived in that room, the voices of laughter and sexual pleasure and anger, the babies and children, the suffering and death.
    It was this diminutive house, with its three cramped bedrooms, that somehow had kept me honest, or so I believed, reminding me that the city had been here a long time and would remain a long time after I was gone. My children could be growing up in an Upper West Side apartment with a uniformed
doorman and the groceries and the dry cleaning and the videos delivered, and there was nothing wrong with that, but something about our little apple-tree house was memorable, and I knew that Sally and Tommy already loved the crooked brick passageway, the sloping roof, the low beams of the ceilings. (Other children had lived here, of course; my wife found hundred-year-old buttons fallen between the floorboards, tiny lead soldiers buried in the garden, and, when we redid the kitchen, the plastic head of a Barbie doll, identifiable from its hairstyle as circa 1965.) When my children became adults, I hoped, they would understand that their home was something remarkable. I wanted, more than anything, for them to know that they were loved, and for this knowledge to find its way, molecularly, into who they were. You can always tell, I think, with adults, who felt loved as a child and who did not; it’s in their eyes and walk and speech. There’s a certain brutal clarity. You can almost smell it.
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    Back at the paper, I slipped along the wall of the long rectangular newsroom, carrying my tuxedo box past the managing editor’s office, past various plotters talking in low, disaffected tones, past the sports guys eating their afternoon breakfast, past the bright cave of the gossip columnist. She was flicking through an electronic Rolodex, talking on the phone. Big hair, big attitude, today’s shipment of hype—E-mail printouts, press releases, promo-videos, movie posters—piled atop her in-box. She has two assistants, both young men of postmodern sexuality who are happy to crawl through half a dozen downtown clubs every night, cellular phone in pocket, tipping doormen, scrounging for perishable scraps of celeb-gossip. And then my own office, which resembles not so much a place where a man works each day as an experiment in chaos, old papers and coffee cups ringing the desk and phone and computer.
    Demetrius Smith, the dead young man in the Brownsville Houses, had been a gymnast in high school, according to his sister, whom I reached in North Carolina. All kinds of trophies,
and a college scholarship that he never cashed in. This tidy little fact could be used to melodramatic advantage, and after a few more calls I reached the man’s high-school gymnastics coach. No, Demetrius never had any talent, barked the coach, certainly no college scholarship—who told you that? I’m sorry he died, but he really wasn’t much of a gymnast. Too afraid of heights, as I remember.
    This was a twist on the twist, but hack newspaper columnists can work irony like phone wire. I slipped the coach into the piece, as well as the fact that the average income per household in the Brownsville Houses was $10,845, according to the Census Bureau; but by then the time was 5:27. The city editor was rushing around worried about his cover story, but sooner or later he’d give me a look. I shipped the copy to the city desk, glanced through my mail, separated the bills, then closed my door and pulled on the rented tuxedo. Apparently a lot of cheap-tuxedo renters lied about their size: the waist, like the column I’d just finished, had a bit of elastic in it.
    Then out