gradual asphyxiation. The rate of decline was variable; it could speed up, it could slow, but it always moved in one direction. He had to have his lungs checked every six months, during which time the forced expiratory volume, the FEV, would be measured, the number always trickling downward. The disease was particularly cruel in that he could be stable for periods of time yet wake up with another percentage of his breath gone.
'And then somewhere in here, you found out that David Cowles had moved to New York?'
'Yes.'
'How?'
'I got curious and called his London office. He'd gone to a new company. I called them. Got a forwarding number. I sweet-talked some people, said I had a deal for him to look at. You know, bullshitted the situation. I felt sorry for the guy. His wife had been killed and probably because she was sleeping with another guy. I admired him, to be honest. He'd pulled himself together, remarried. Had enough capital to relocate here.'
'And once you knew he was in town?'
'Cold certainty.'
I stared at him.
'About finding Sally.'
'You bought his building.'
'I did.'
'Why?'
His eyes went hard. 'Curiosity.'
It was an unnerving answer, and I remembered Jay's ostensible friendliness when he'd been meeting Cowles in his office after buying the building. That performance was the height of fraudulence, I now realized, and furthermore, I remembered that Jay had allowed Cowles to negotiate for a lower rent.
'Did you tap Cowles's phone?' I asked. 'In the basement?'
'That's what you would do? If you were me?'
'Yes,' I confessed.
He nodded. 'Sure. You splice into the phone box. Buy the hardware out of an electronics catalog.'
'And?'
'It's boring stuff, mostly. But sometimes I hear Sally talking. Cowles and the new wife talk about the kids' schedules constantly, baby-sitter, birthday parties, school stuff, doctors' visits, you name it. The woman is a good mother, by the way. He married a good woman.'
Hearing this made me think of my own lost life with Judith and Timothy, and so his words had a doubled sadness for me; both of us, it seemed, were pathetic, emptied of everything but yearning. Yet Rainey and I were different, too. I felt it. And saw it, in the bright urgency in his eyes. Some aspect of Rainey's character was eluding me, not anything having to do with the old farm and what might be buried there, but a more essential element that was concentrating his focus, pushing him to do risky things like shadow Sally Cowles at basketball games and piano concerts.
'So- that's why you bought the building, to listen to a few phone calls? I think it's more than that.'
He didn't answer. He didn't want to answer.
'This isn't good, Jay.'
'I know what I'm doing,' he said obliquely. 'I think out every move.'
Ask another question, I thought, slide off the moment. 'And Allison? This is why you started with her?'
'Man, you are good.' Jay smiled, releasing tension, and if it was not a malevolent smile, then nonetheless it had a kind of coldness in it that worried me. 'It wasn't too hard, really. I pretended to be a buyer two floors above. The real estate attorney showed me around. But the place was a little too high, you can't see right. But the second time I was there I saw the elevator man delivering the mail. I saw her last name. It was the right floor. So I had the last name and the floor. Her name is in the phone book. A. Sparks. No other name listed. Probably single. I sort of bet myself that if she was under fifty I had a shot.'
'But you had to figure out who she was.'
Rainey laughed, but it was at my expense. 'Doorman. Hundred bucks.'
'How'd he go for that?'
'Told him I was a cop. Said it wasn't her I was checking out, it was one of her friends.'
'I have a feeling she's got a lot of guys going in and out of there, on an annual basis.'
'That's what the doorman said, too. Once he told me that, I knew I could do it. I watched her, saw she has breakfast in the same place a lot. It was easy. A good suit, sit there with the newspaper. Not too hard.'
'You two see each other a lot?'
'Afternoons, mostly.'
Jay shrugged away the matter, and in his gesture I realized why Allison had fallen so easily for him; his indifference toward her was thrilling, somehow, and returned her to a more primitive part of herself, the position of a child with a stern father, perhaps. I wondered if she ate the fish with him as well, but this seemed unlikely, given how infrequently it was available.
'So your health now?' I ventured.
'You mean, how fast am I going?'
'I know how fast you're going.'
'You do?'
'I guessed earlier you're at thirty-five percent FEV.'
He smiled. 'Pretty good.'
I shrugged.
'But not good enough.'
'What do you mean?'
'I'm at about twenty-four percent.' He gave a little cough, as if to emphasize the point.
'You're supposed to be in an oxygen tent.'
'Yeah, probably.'
'Well?'
'I got things to do, Bill.' He picked up the oxygen mask then, and, breathing its sweet stream, closed his eyes.
He was, I suddenly understood, preparing to contact his daughter. His desire to see her, if only occasionally, had become the desire to know her, which itself had become the desire to talk with her. It was the organizing principle, the gravitational pole. The more Jay knew about Sally, the more he wanted to know. To hear her talk on the phone with Cowles must have been an exquisite torture to him. It's in the nature of men to want what they cannot have, but it must have seemed to him, with his daughter's voice piping innocently in his ear, that if he had come this far, then all things were possible. And maybe they were. Only that same evening, in the Steinway store, Jay had stood behind his daughter, fingers grazing her shoulders, looking down on her shiny combed hair; it was a kind of triumph, actually, it proved that he was not utterly disconnected from his former self, proved that part of his youth and vigor and own innocence lived on. That Sally at fourteen genuinely resembled Eliza Carmody at twenty must have been further irresistible torment for him, to see the past and the future simultaneously in his daughter's face. The girl's mother was lost, but here she was, a perfect child without her natural parents. How could he turn away from this? How could he not be drawn closer and closer to look and then choose to look longer? To cut off the simple powerful truth of the matter would constitute a death in itself, one that followed the death of Eliza and presaged Jay's own. And who could do that, who could not look at his own child? Many times I had fought off the desire to hop on a plane to the West Coast and drive a rental car right up into Judith's new mansion, wherever the fuck it was, crash through the garage, and race along the hallways to Timothy's bedroom and crush him in my arms. That I did not do this was proof of my own damnable weakness, and I realized now that Jay was teaching me something, that very moment, about what might be necessary to hold on to one's child. You had to be a little crazy, you had to be insanely devoted to the idea of redemption. I felt my own frozen yearning crack apart; I needed to have Timothy back, I needed him like I needed air, and I would get him back, no matter what.
So I did not judge Jay harshly that evening, hearing his story, not at all. I was scared for him, but I admired the truthfulness of his intention. All of his manipulations and lies, the maze of his own devising, were in pursuit of the one good thing he could yet imagine for himself, the recognition that passes between father and child.
'So,' I ventured. 'Where's all this go now?'
