I glanced at Jay's shadow behind the snowy window of the truck cab. 'I thought the evening was going so well, the real estate deal and everything.'
'It was. We were having a great time. He was fine ten minutes ago, fine.'
She didn't seem as drunk as she'd been on the phone and I wondered if it had been an advertisement of happiness. 'What happened?'
Allison leaned close to me, hunched in her coat. 'Your phone call, Bill.'
'Did he say what the problem was?'
'No, but he got upset after you called. I could see it.'
A blast of snow cut down the street and we huddled closer. 'He wants me to drive out to the East End of Long Island with him.'
'Will you help him?' she asked. 'I'm worried about him driving alone.'
'I was hoping you'd get me back into the Havana Room, see the circus trick or whatever goes on.'
She blinked at the snow in her eyes. 'Who says it's a circus trick?'
'What happens? Ha and the black woman do something?'
Allison frowned in disgust. 'It's real kinky, Bill, yeah.' She checked her watch. 'They must have started without me. Ha must have gone first.'
'I want to go back in.'
'If you've missed Ha's first part, then it won't be any good.'
'I don't understand.'
She nodded. 'I'll get you back in, don't worry.'
'When?'
'Another night. Soon.' She glanced back at Jay's truck, its hazard lights blinking, as if waiting for me. 'He says he's driving out there no matter what.'
She was appealing to me to help Jay for the second time that evening, and I could not help but hope that this commended me to her. I looked into Allison's face with frustration and unexpectedly sensed her own. The whole evening was a piece of unfinished sexual business to her. With the snow pattering softly on her hood, there she was, lungs and lips, eyes and breasts, and she wanted, she wanted very badly, she wanted him or me or it or everything, and that desire made me want her, too. 'Please, Bill?' she whispered. 'Will you help him?'
'I should go home to bed. I'm tired.'
She studied me a moment. 'You don't look tired.'
'I am. Tired and old.'
'Girls have been known to like old men,' Allison said. 'They find their wrinkles interesting.'
I thought of Judith and Wilson Doan, his strange eyes, standing in a black coat at his son's funeral. I thought of this and it reminded me of other things and I found myself thinking of Timothy in a Tuscan villa, kicking a soccer ball against an old stone wall by himself. I hoped that his stepfather was good to him, loved him, wasn't too caught up in how to spend three quarters of a billion dollars. I needed not to think about this, however, anything but this, and the prospect of a late night errand to Long Island had new diversionary value.
'Okay,' I muttered. 'I'll do it.'
'Thank you.'
'But you'll get me back into the Havana Room?'
'Promise.'
'I really want to see what-'
'I know, yes. I promise, Bill.'
'Then it's a deal.'
'Please drive safely,' she said. 'For both of you.' She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. 'You'll come by tomorrow?'
'Sure,' I said.
'Good. I'd like that.'
And then Allison was gone, swirling through the door, the snow following her.
There was still time for me to open the truck's door and make awkward apologies to Jay, but I didn't. Instead I just stood there under the steakhouse's awning feeling the wind slap my cheeks. I've had reason since then to wonder why I resisted the correcting action, the prudent retreat. I was tired, and I should have gone to bed. Certainly I'd responded to Allison, sensed something genuine in her voice, some muted distress call perhaps. But the reason I walked through the gathering snow to Jay's truck is more than that, and it doesn't reflect well on me: I sensed animal weakness in Jay, and I wanted to find out what it was. To be more precise, I sensed a problem, and not necessarily the one that was worrying Poppy. I sensed edges and change and conflict. A real problem wanting a solution. A solution requires a stratagem, and a stratagem means a game. I'd once been good with problems and stratagems, as I'd proven earlier in the night, and something in me welcomed another challenge.
In this I was a fool. I'd forgotten that any true game is played versus an opponent, or even two simultaneously, against the indifferent backdrop of chance. Who has won and who has lost is often difficult to know, or undecided, or, at the last, reversible. As Wilson Doan Sr. himself had learned, for one. Yes, I'd forgotten all this, and so I walked around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. Jay had on the same good coat and suit he'd been wearing a few hours earlier. He looked up at me, his eyes a little dull, I thought, his hands hanging on the steering wheel.
'Really appreciate this,' he breathed.
I settled in, and noticed a baseball on the dash. I picked it up. A baseball always feels good in the hands. 'Not what I expected to be doing tonight.'
'That makes both of us.'
The box of cash was behind his seat. 'Sounded like you were having kind of a great drive with Allison. Sorry I interrupted.'
Most men would have smiled in reply, either in embarrassment or pride. But Jay blinked at the thought of it, lips closed. I had the distinct impression that Allison was not the kind of woman he preferred. He pointed to the glove compartment. 'There's a little thing of pills in there. Would you hand it to me?'
I opened the compartment, found an unmarked container.
'Thanks.' He shook out three pills and swallowed them. Then he slipped the container into his breast pocket.
'You want me to drive?'
'No, it's all right.'
And it was. By the time we'd crossed through the tunnel into Queens, he was sitting up straight and driving with crisp aggression.
'Those pills are pretty good,' I noted.
'They are.'
'You all right?' I asked.
'I'm fine, man, just tired.'
He wasn't interested in talking, so I let it rest. The Long Island Expressway, always a dragway of insane drivers, becomes genuinely otherworldly on a snowy night, and to stay with the traffic we popped up to eighty, flying east past the billboards and shopping centers and exit signs, Jay seemingly noticing none of them. His eyes showed no sign, in fact, that he'd inked a real estate deal that evening or had to break his celebration with Allison, and I found myself remembering the oddly deadened sadness I'd seen in his face when he'd embraced her. In the pin-light darkness of the truck, his mouth was set, his gaze fixed on the road, and I thought I recognized in him a certain kind of man, a man who is damaged and yet unflinching. I've met a few. Because he has taken pain, such a man knows he can take more. In fact, he expects it; suffering, so far as he sees, is in the order of things, the logic of the universe. Usually such men are hard, even self-punishing workers, capable of long periods of isolation or aloneness, and suffer bouts of crippling melancholy. They refuse to take antidepressants, they refuse to talk too much; instead they wait and wait, with the patience of a cat, for the mood to turn. They drink coffee alone in the morning, they smoke cigarettes on the porch. Jay was like this. Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age
