either.' He decided not to go back to America, he said, so he found a better job, not in a bar, where the smoke bothered him, but teaching American conversational English to Saudi princes located in London. A strange job, but not one he minded. All he had to do was talk. 'They were very well educated,' Jay said, 'much better than me. Oxford, usually. Some had gone to school in the States. But they wanted to get the American idiom, the flavor.' When one of the students, a young woman, saw him coughing and heard the story of his accident, she took him to her father, a doctor. The man put Jay on a course of steroids that changed his life. The steroids shrunk the swollen lung tissue and his coughing subsided. The chronic infections could clear and he began to gain back weight. Within three months he'd put on thirty pounds, and his color was better. Now a little older, back to nearly his full strength, much of his natural substantiality restored, and with a little money to spend, he began to explore London.
'I think there are women in the next part of the story,' I said.
'Yes.'
'You were feeling better, your mood was nihilistic, you didn't mind having a good time.'
'Something like that,' he said. 'That's when I learned to like a good cigar, actually. Pubs. The young Brits, the traders and bankers, were giving up pipes and hitting the cigars.'
A couple of years followed, Jay continued, in which he met dozens of young professional women in London, a few American, many European, and simply enjoyed himself. He dated two or three women at a time, sometimes seeing older women who were in unhappy marriages. So much money was washing around London that the collective euphoria rounded away the ends of these affairs. 'It got a little crazy,' he said. 'I got a little crazy. I was sometimes sleeping with three or four different women a week.'
'You're lucky you didn't get anyone pregnant.'
'I was very careful about that,' Jay said. 'There are tricks you can use.'
'Besides a rubber?'
'You don't come.'
'You pull out?'
'No, you just don't come. You teach yourself not to.'
'You're a weird fucking guy, you know that?'
'You can have sex with a lot of women if you never come,' Jay noted. 'Or not often, at least.'
'It sounds pretty hostile,' I said, 'a way of having control over women. Also a way to make sure you didn't have another child taken from you.'
'Thank you, doctor.'
'Shit, Jay, it's obvious.'
'I know that. I mean, I know that now.'
'Keep telling me,' I said. 'I want to hear about how you found Sally again.'
London was a spinning carousel of money, he went on. 'The boom happened there, too, just like in New York,' he said, 'and I got into a real estate firm that was relocating people into London. Offices, apartments, the whole thing. All you had to do was wear a suit.'
'You met a lot of people. It was an education.'
He nodded. 'Five years. I ran some rehab jobs, I took a few architecture courses, that kind of thing. Learned the lingo. Everybody's a faker in this business. I was working the investment and sales side, in a very minor way. Little projects, nothing big, nothing where my complete lack of knowledge would show. Usually I hired some old boozed-out carpenter to run the site for me. I made some money, and I kept a little of it.'
'Stayed in touch with the farm, with your father?'
'No. Not much.'
'Your mother hadn't communicated.'
'My father told me that he was pretty sure that she'd gone to Texas, because her father was from there. She'd always wanted to know him. I had to think whether I wanted to chase after my mother in Dallas or Houston or someplace or stay in London.'
'You were waiting for Eliza to come back.'
He was, he said, at least subconsciously. By now he had the business connections to track David Cowles, had even met a few of his associates socially. And then one day he heard that Cowles had moved back to London. 'I found his office and followed him home. Sunglasses and a hat. Easy, right? He didn't know my face. There had been no direct communication and I'm sure Eliza never told him a thing. He had no idea. By then he owned a very nice house in the suburbs. High bushes, mansard roof, casement windows. He'd made a lot of money in Tokyo. I spied on him a bit. I saw Sally. She was almost seven now. A little Eliza. Looked just like her, the hair and eyes and legs. Of course, now, she really looks like Eliza at twenty. I mean, it's disturbing. But even then, it killed me to see her, Bill, it broke me up. That was my daughter. My daughter. Then-'
He stopped talking.
'What?'
'She died.'
'Eliza?'
'In a car, with a man.'
'An accident?'
'He was driving, driving too fast, and they rolled over, in a Jaguar. Roof collapsed.'
Ripped from life. I wasn't sure what question to ask next.
'The guy lived,' Jay narrated. 'The fucker, though there's not much left of him.'
'Who was he-?'
'They knew each other. Were driving at a high rate of speed to London from the country late in the afternoon. That's about all I could find out.'
'Who was he?'
'Some guy, also in the financial community. I looked him up, he'd been in Japan the same time she'd been. Same age.'
'An affair, hurrying back to town?'
'Yeah, maybe. Hard to say. She was capable of it. After all, that's how she got pregnant with Sally.'
'People have secrets.'
'Yes,' Jay said. 'Always. I couldn't go to the funeral, I couldn't do it. I should have. Fucking inexcusable. I was very messed up. It was on a Sunday afternoon, and I was passed out in some girl's apartment.'
Jay stood, as if wanting to move away from his last thought, and walked to his refrigerator and opened the door. He shook three pills out of a bottle and swallowed them. 'That was the beginning of the end,' he muttered.
'What do you mean?'
He meant, he said, that he could no longer survive in London. Could not function. He lost his job and floated back to New York City. The boom was starting to age. He'd saved enough money to rent the apartment we sat in, and he found work rehabbing brownstones in the better neighborhoods of Brooklyn. And then the day came he woke one morning to find himself short of breath, not suffocating, just working harder than ever. 'Your lung capacity is really dropping,' the doctor told him. 'And will keep on dropping.'
So he told me about the oxygen. 'I stayed off it as long as I could. Once you start, even a little, your body likes it, wants more of it. I'm okay most of the time. If I get tired, it gets harder. Like you saw out at the farm that night. I was really wasted that night.'
As he reached thirty, his health began to fail. He felt it in the slightest of ways. He couldn't climb steps the way he used to do. His lips occasionally turned bluish and his fingertips hurt, he said. He had to think about breathing in a way he never had before. What this meant is that the natural decline of his lung capacity, which happens to everyone, was beginning to carry him into the zone of breathlessness. We are born with almost twice the lung capacity that we actually need. This is why people may survive on one lung and also why smokers dying from emphysema take so long to expire. As total lung capacity falls toward forty or thirty percent, problems set in. Breathing becomes labored, the lungs can't clear the mucus they make. In Jay's case, he said, he was told by the pulmonary specialist that he had the lung capacity of a man who'd been smoking sixty to seventy years, or, expressed differently, the lung capacity of a man who had never smoked and who had somehow lived to the age of one hundred and twenty.
His life span was now limited to the declining slope of his lung function; barring an accident, he'd die of
