Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

An hour later I got Allison to sit up once and have a little water, and she muttered something half coherent and told me thank you, she was fine, please forgive her, and fell asleep again, this time holding me tight- as if I mattered to her.

I woke a little after six, bolt upright, and for a moment didn't know where I was. Then I saw Allison next to me, clutching a silk pillow. She breathed easily, and had put on a nightgown. Or had I put it on her? I couldn't remember. I studied her. She was fine now. Warm, breathing easily. I eased out of the bed, feeling a ghost of that old domestic rhythm. Man, woman, bed. Coffee, sunlight, and where are my pants? It had been a weird night, and I wanted to retreat to my apartment, get a shower and shave. In the kitchen I nabbed a few swallows of orange juice in the refrigerator and incidentally perused Allison's books, which seemed to lean toward Catholic mysticism and novels by the tough-chick literary crowd.

I drifted along the bank of windows in the living room, watching the day begin outside, the sun hitting the bricks and rainspouts, the taxis denser on the avenue. I confess my melancholy in this moment. You reach a certain age and you know that jumping into bed isn't as simple as it used to be- not that it ever was. But now reality seeps in more quickly. People grind against each other, expectations limited, patience provisional. She'd lured me back to her apartment so that she could get a fix of her dangerous fish, getting fucked as she dropped off to sleep. Fish-fucked. Did this explain the parade of kindly, ineffectual men she'd seen before Jay Rainey? Guys who could be depended upon not to take advantage of a tripped-out Allison Sparks?

And how much did I mind? I wasn't sure. I dropped my forehead against the cool glass, fogging it a bit, and let my eyes drift to the other side of the street. Across from me I saw a woman in a white robe pouring coffee into a mug. The morning light was such that I could see her rather well. Young, but not that young. She was not my wife. But she might have been, once. The demographics weren't far off. I watched her pour milk into her coffee. She reached into her kitchen cabinet and pulled down four cereal bowls, one after another. Here was a mother, dutifully meeting the day. Not a woman who dragged in lonely fish-fuck partners. Her wholeness saddened me, made me think not only of Judith in the good days but also of little Wilson Doan's mother. I'd killed her son. Who can measure a mother's grief? Who can find its bottom? Now the mother looked at her wall clock and left the kitchen. What had happened to my life? That expected trajectory, the planned vector, was abandoned, a weed-cracked highway to nowhere.

Yes, the domestic tableau across the street filled me with longing and misery- there it was, as close as balcony seats at a Broadway show- and I was about to turn away when I saw the woman enter a room two windows down from her kitchen. She leaned softly over a bed and seemed to be waking someone, who then got up, shrugged on some clothing, and left the bedroom. A light went on in a larger window closer to the park. The figure appeared, wearing a man's oversized plaid flannel shirt, and sat down before a piano. She was a young woman, a girl, really — Sally Cowles.

Yes, that was Sally Cowles, sitting down at a piano, in profile to me. The woman- her stepmother, I assumed- appeared again with a glass of juice, encouraging, nodding, pointing to a page of music. Sally Cowles was practicing the piano. Sally Cowles lived across the street from Allison Sparks. Jay Rainey was obsessed with Sally Cowles. I remembered Allison's story about how she'd met Jay in the little breakfast place near her apartment. He'd told her that he was in the neighborhood because of a deal he was doing nearby. But what reason would Jay have to be in this neighborhood, except for Sally Cowles? He had no deal, other than the building on Reade Street, no reason to be on the Upper East Side.

Now Allison came out of her bedroom in her silk gown.

"Morning!" she called cheerily.

"Hi."

She came up to me from behind, rubbed her hands across my chest. I turned. Allison smiled up at me, searching for my mood, as if in a kind of penance. Don't be mad at her, I told myself. It's just loneliness. The whole goddamned thing. On her part and on mine.

"Oh, you men are all alike."

"We are?"

"Well, mostly."

I made some sound. "And why are we all alike, mostly?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just that Jay used to do this, too."

"What?"

"Stood here and looked right across the street."

Yes, of course, I thought, all my anxieties amping back through my head, of course he did. That's why he let you think you seduced him, so that he could come up to your apartment and watch young Sally Cowles.

I hurried out of Allison's apartment a few minutes later, wondering which was more disturbing, Allison's calculated seduction, or the fact that Sally Cowles lived directly across the street from her. Allison had seen me stare at the girl, seen it all too well, and after her initial banter about Jay doing the same thing- a naked attempt to reassure herself- I'd said nothing, had only glanced stupidly at her, then stared again across the street. At this, Allison took two shocked steps backward, arms suddenly crossed in front of her, eyes jittery and defensive, as if she'd been struck in the face. Why had the two men who'd recently come to her apartment both been fixated on a teenage girl living across the street? For a moment I thought Allison was going to run to the phone and call the police. But she was frozen where she stood. We were both stunned, in factrevealed as strangers to each other, silhouettes caught in Jay's strange psychic machinery. I almost blurted out that the girl was the daughter of one of his tenants, and that he appeared to be obsessed with her, but I stopped myself.

Allison, however, had seen me nearly tell her. "You know who that girl is!" she said. "I can see it in your face!"

I picked up my coat, feeling the Derek Jeter ball in the pocket. "I better go."

Allison didn't like my overly calm tone. "What's going on?"

I didn't tell her, because I couldn't. What was going on? On my subway ride home, pressed between commuters headed downtown, I didn't know what to worry about more, H.J., or Marceno, or Sally Cowles. It made for a jangled journey, and only a block away from my apartment, hunched against the morning's cold, did I remember my lunch with Dan Tuthill that day. He was a connection to my old life, one I wanted to keep. I'd take a long shower, pull myself together, and at lunch subtly pump Tuthill for possible job leads. I quickened my pace, and as I did I saw an old man pass by on the sidewalk wearing a spectacular red silk tie that looked a great deal like the one Judith had given to me many Christmases past, back when I didn't move dead men in the night or sleep with women addicted to psychedelic fish flesh. The man lurched along in an army jacket and a wool cap, a certain triumphant energy in his eyes, as if he had stuffed his pockets with contraband, and the incongruity of the red silk tie should have warned me that, indeed, this was what had happened.

When I turned the corner I saw a swarm of homeless people, office boys, and garment workers in front of my building, several fighting over a pile of junk in the street. Someone had pulled a car up and was shoveling clothes and other household items into the trunk. I got closer. The stuff looked like- like my stuff. I glanced up at my apartment window. It was shattered, frame and all.

I broke into a run and flew into my building and up the stairs. On the third floor, I found my apartment door ajar, ripped off one hinge, the lock splintered. The sight was so improbable that I thought I'd entered the wrong apartment. They- whoever they were- had emptied the place, literally thrown everything I owned out of the two windows: the bed, the tables, the chairs, the clothes, the pots and pans, my old tennis racquet, long unused, the bank account records, the checkbook, the divorce papers, the food in the refrigerator, just all of it, the bath towels, the books, pillows, the rug, the CDs, the cleanser under the sink, the stereo, the clean socks, all the cheap junk of an ever cheaper life. I checked the closets. Empty, not a coat hanger. I checked under the sink. Nothing. In the corner the radiator whistled as the steam rose in the building's pipes. Newly naked, the apartment was reduced to its essence: pathetic, dirty, small. A hole.