Лоуренс Блок - A Time to Scatter Stones

The four of us — Kristin and Mick, Elaine and I — stood on the stoop of their brownstone for the ritual round of hugs. Mick and I settled for a manly handclasp.

“Safe home,” he said.

It was a crisp Sunday night late in September, the sky free of clouds, and if we’d been in the country we would have seen stars. But there’s always too much ambient light in the city for stargazing, and I suspect that’s also true metaphorically. Ambient light, softening the darkness even as it prevents our seeing the stars.

Mick and Kristin’s house stands on West 74th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. It’s on the south side of the street, so when we reached the sidewalk we turned to our right and walked the half block to Columbus Avenue, which magically becomes Ninth Avenue when it crosses 60th Street. Under either name, the thoroughfare is southbound, and there’s a bus that would drop us right across the street from our apartment.

It was pulling away as we neared the corner.

Elaine said, “What do you want to do? Flag a taxi? Call a Via?”

Via is like Uber, except with shared rides and correspondingly lower prices.

“Whatever you want,” I said.

“How’s your knee?”

We’d walked up earlier. The Ballous live just under a mile from us, and in good weather we both prefer to cover that distance on foot, but my right knee had ached on the way.

“It’s okay now,” I reported. “On the way up, it stopped bothering me around the time we crossed 72nd. You feel like walking?”

“I wouldn’t mind. But what if your knee decides to act up on the other side of 72nd?”

I said something about crossing that bridge when we came to it, and she said I meant crossing that street, and we walked along chatting like an old married couple, which in fact we had somehow become.

We’d gone a few blocks, with no complaint from my knee, and had lapsed into a companionable silence. I broke it to say, “When she served raspberry tart for dessert, I got the feeling you were going to talk about your group.”

“You picked that up? I almost did, and then I didn’t.”

“What stopped you?”

“Oh, the conversation took a turn.” She fell silent, then broke the silence to say, “No, that’s not what it was. I decided the conversation would take a turn if I broached the subject, and it was a turn I didn’t want it to take.”

I nodded, and she said it was a beautiful night and she was glad we’d decided to walk. I agreed with her, and we crossed another street, and my knee begged to differ. You get old and things hurt and then they don’t and then they do again.

She said, “I guess I decided to keep it private.”

“That’s fair enough.”

“I could have talked about it without breaking anybody’s anonymity but my own. And my misspent youth is nothing Mick and Kristin aren’t aware of. But the Tarts, I don’t know—”

“You don’t have to overthink it,” I said. “It’s how you felt.”

“Your knee’s bothering you, isn’t it? Let’s get a cab.”

I shook my head. “It’s not that bad. And as close as we are—”

“I married a stubborn man.”

“You knew that going in,” I said. “And I think ‘persistent’ is a better word than ‘stubborn.’ It’s less judgmental.”

“I was already cutting you some slack with ‘stubborn,’ ” she said. “The first word that came to me was ‘pigheaded.’ But I decided that really would be too judgmental.”

“We’re almost home,” I said. “See how easy that was?”

“Judgmental or not, you can’t say it was inaccurate.”

“You’re cute when you’re judgmental.”

“Is that a fact. And we are almost home, and the first thing you’re gonna do is elevate that leg, and I’ll fetch an ice pack. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said.

I’ve been sober a while. I’d marked thirty-five years in November, as I mentioned at a meeting a day or two after the actual anniversary date.

Whenever anyone expresses surprise over my continuing attendance at AA meetings, I think of the shampoo commercial:

“You use Head & Shoulders? But you don’t have dandruff.”

“Riiight.”

I don’t go as often as I did early on, but I still manage to turn up more often than not at the 8:30 meeting Fridays at St. Paul the Apostle. When we resumed keeping company — and that, astonishingly, was 28 years ago — Elaine began attending Al-Anon meetings, but the program never really reached her, and she didn’t find the companionship there that I did in AA. One night she came home with a definition of an Al-Anon slip: “An unanticipated moment of compassion. And they’re pretty rare.”

So you could say it wasn’t a good fit for her.

Then, a couple of years ago, she heard about the Tarts. It wasn’t an acronym for anything, nor was it an official name for the group. It was what some of the members called it, for lack of anything else to call it, and what it was in essence was an anonymous program for women with a prior history of prostitution.

Elaine was in the game when we first met, and that was a lot more than 28 years ago. She was a sweet young call girl and I was a detective with the NYPD, and along with my gold shield I had a wife and two sons in Syosset. I suppose we were in love from the start, although neither of us quite knew it at the time, and it lasted until it ended, and years later when circumstance threw us together again we were ready for it. I had already stopped drinking, and after a year or two she stopped entertaining clients, and now we were this nice elderly couple who still seemed to take delight in one another’s company.

I first heard about the Tarts when she came home after her third meeting. “There’s this group I started going to,” she said. “Girls who used to be in the game.”

“A 12-Step program?”

“More or less, but without the twelve steps. One dame tells her story and then we go around the room. I don’t know if I really belong there.”

“You do,” I said, “and you know it.”

“Oh?”

“You said, ‘And then we go around the room.’ ”

“ ‘We’ and not ‘they.’ ”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think you’re right. Actually I think we’re both right. I belong there. It’s funny, I thought I’d dealt with all of this.”

“Tricking.”

“Yeah. I’ve always said that prostitution did a lot more for me than it ever did to me.”

“That’s just about word for word what Churchill said.”

“Churchill? As in Winston Churchill?”

“So I’m told. I wasn’t there to hear him say it.”

“Winston Churchill was turning tricks?”

“God, there’s an image. No, he was talking about booze. ‘I know that alcohol has done a good deal more for me than it’s ever done to me.’ ”

“Oh, that’s right. I always picture him with a cigar, but he was a heavy drinker, wasn’t he? Do you think he was right? About his drinking?”

I said I had no idea. She nodded and got back on track. “The conventional wisdom is that turning tricks lowers your self-esteem, but it elevated mine. I didn’t have any self-esteem until I got in the life.”

“The game, the life...”

“Euphemisms,” she said. “Some of the members use them. Others are more in-your-face. ‘Until I started selling pussy.’ Like that. What are you smiling at?”

“ ‘In your face.’ ”

She rolled her eyes. “When I walked into my first meeting, a couple of weeks ago? I was so much older than everybody I thought I was out of place. They were all nicely dressed in skirts and sweaters or tailored jeans. And they didn’t look like hookers.”