Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

The combined decibels of the buskers drowned out, for all but the most attuned city ears, the approach of the train whose delay had been so indistinctly bruited. Featherwaite, like all these Englishpersons who were breeding like wood lice in the rotting log piles of the New York literary industry, was no slouch at pushing ahead, through the malleable ex-colonials. Though there was hardly room to place one’s shoes on the filthy speckled concrete, Featherwaite had shoved and wormed his way to the front of the crowd, right to the edge of the platform. His edgy profile, with its supercilious overbite and artfully projecting eyebrows, turned with arrogant expectancy toward the screamingly approaching D train, as though hailing a servile black London taxi or Victorian brougham. Featherwaite affected a wispy-banged Nero haircut. There were rougelike touches of color on his cheekbones. The tidy English head bit into Bech’s vision like a branding iron.

Prolix, he thought. Voulu. He had had to look up “voulu” in his French dictionary. It put a sneering curse on Bech’s entire oeuvre, for what, as Schopenhauer had asked, isn’t willed?

Bech was three bodies back in the crush, tightly immersed in the odors, clothes, accents, breaths, and balked wills of others. Two broad-backed bodies, padded with junk food and fermented malt, intervened between himself and Featherwaite, while others importunately pushed at his own back. As if suddenly shoved from behind, he lowered his shoulder and rammed into the body ahead of his; like dominoes, it and the next tipped the third, the stiff-backed Englishman, off the platform. In the next moment the train with the force of a flash flood poured into the station, drowning all other noise under a shrieking gush of tortured metal. Featherwaite’s hand in the last second of his life had shot up and his head jerked back as if in sudden recognition of an old acquaintance. Then he had vanished.

It was an instant’s event, without time for the D-train driver to brake or a bystander to scream. Just one head pleasantly less in the compressed, malodorous mob. The man ahead of Bech, a ponderous African-American with bloodshot eyes, wearing a knit cap in the depths of summer, regained his balance and turned indignantly, but Bech, feigning a furious glance behind him, slipped sideways as the crowd arranged itself into funnels beside each door of the now halted train. A woman’s raised voice — foreign, shrill — had begun to leak the horrible truth of what she had witnessed, and far away, beyond the turnstiles, a telepathic policeman’s whistle was tweeting. But the crowd within the train was surging outward against the crowd trying to enter, and in the thick eddies of disgruntled and compressed humanity nimble, bookish, elderly Bech put more and more space between himself and his unwitting accomplices. He secreted himself a car’s length away, hanging from a hand-burnished bar next to an ad publicizing free condoms and clean needles, with a dainty Oxford edition of Donne’s poems pressed close to his face, as the whistles of distant authority drew nearer. The train refused to move and was finally emptied of passengers, while the official voice overhead, louder and less intelligible than ever, shouted word of cancellation, of disaster, of evaluation without panic.

Obediently Bech left the stalled train, blood on its wheels, and climbed the metallic stairs sparkling with pulverized glass. His insides shuddered in tune with the shoving, near-panicked mob about him. Gratefully he inhaled the outdoor air and Manhattan anonymity. Avenue of the Americas, a sign said, in stubborn upholding of an obsolete gesture of hemispheric good will. Bech walked south, then over to Seventh Avenue. Scrupulously he halted at each red light and deposited each handed-out leaflet (GIRLS! COLLEGE SEX KITTENS TOPLESS! BOTTOMLESS AFTER 6:30 P.M.!) in the nearest city trash receptacle. He descended into the Times Square station, where the old IRt’s innumerable tunnels mingled their misery in a vast subterranean maze of passageways, stairs, signs, and candy stands. He caught an N train that took him to Broadway and Prince. Afternoon had sweetly turned to evening while he had been underground. The galleries were closing, the restaurants were opening. Robin was in the loft, keeping lasagna warm. “I thought MOMA closed at six,” she said.

“There was a tieup in the Sixth Avenue subway. Nothing was running. I had to walk down to Times Square. I hated the stuff the museum had up. Violent, attention-getting.”

“Maybe there comes a time,” she said, “when new art isn’t for you, it’s for somebody else. I wonder what caused the tieup.”

“Nobody knew. Power failure. A shootout uptown. Some maniac,” he added, wondering at his own words. His insides felt agitated, purged, scrubbed, yet not yet creamy. Perhaps that needed to wait until the morning Times . He feared he could not sleep, out of nervous anticipation, yet he toppled into dreams while Robin still read beneath a burning light, as if he had done a long day’s worth of physical labor.

“English Critic, Teacher Dead in West Side Subway Mishap,” the headline read. The story was low on the front page and jumped to the obituaries. The obit photo, taken decades ago, glamorized Featherwaite — head facing one way, shoulders another — so he resembled a younger, less impish brother of George Sanders. High brow, thin lips, cocky glass chin. “...according to witnesses appeared to fling himself under the subway train as it approached the platform... colleagues at CUNY puzzled but agreed he had been under significant stress compiling permissions for his textbook of postmodern narrative strategies... former wife, reached in London, allowed the deceased had been subject to mood swings and fits of creative despair... the author of several youthful satirical novels and a single book of poems likened to those of Philip Larkin.. born in Scunthorpe, Yorkshire, the third child and only son of a greengrocer and a part-time piano teacher...” and so on.

“Ray Featherwaite is dead,” he announced to Robin, trying to keep a tremble of triumph out of his voice.

“Who was he?”

“A critic. More minor than Mishner. English. Came from Yorkshire, in fact — I had never known that. Went to Cambridge on a scholarship. I had figured him for inherited wealth; he wanted you to think so.”

“That makes two critics this week,” said Robin, preoccupied by the dense gray pages of stock prices.

“Every third person on this island is some kind of critic,” Bech pointed out. He hoped the conversation would move on.

“How did he die?”

There was no way to hide it; she would be reading this section eventually. “Jumped under a subway train, oddly. Seems he’d been feeling low, trying to secure too many copyright permissions or something. These academics are under a lot of stress, competing for tenure.”

“Oh?” Robin’s eyes — bright, glossy, a living volatile brown, like a slick moist pelt — had left the stock prices. “What subway line?”

“Sixth Avenue, actually.”

“Maybe that was the tieup you mentioned.”

“Could be. Very likely, in fact.”

“Why are your hands trembling? You can hardly hold your bagel.” The poppy seeds were pattering on the obituary page.

“Who knows?” he asked her. “I may be coming down with something. I went out like a light last night.”

“I’ll say,” said Robin, returning her eyes to the page.

“Sorry,” he said, ease beginning to flow again within him. The past was sinking, every second, under fresher, obscuring layers of the recent past. “Did it make you feel neglected? A young woman needs her sex.”

“No,” she said, preoccupied by the market’s faithful rise. “It made me feel tender. You seemed so innocent.”