spire by day and the white iceberg at night. I tried moving around the room, shifting perspective. At angles, the nineteenth-century glass distorted the light, but she kept moving with me. Wispy hair, blue eyes, paler than in life, and a small, sad smile that grew sadder every day as the lines around her mouth deepened. “Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked one morning. And that night, “You knew he wanted to hurt me.”
After a couple of weeks of her, I called in a broker for a hint of what I could get for the place. He liked it, at first. I didn’t have much furniture yet, but my piano made it look lived in and there were the fireplaces and the killer view from the front windows. All of a sudden he shivered.
“Weird feeling in this place. Like something’s here? You ever notice? Hey, is this where that woman got killed?”
He didn’t wait for my answer.
Samantha was waiting in the window. She said, “The thing that makes me saddest is that I had finally found a great guy. My friends were asking me, does he have a brother?”
I said, “I can’t sell this apartment. I can’t move. I can’t change what I did to you. So I guess I’ll have to get used to you. With a view like this I’ll get used to anything. If I have to live with you, I will. If you can stand it, I can too.”
I awoke the next morning to a mind-shattering screaming roar echoing in the street, looked out the window, and saw a bunch of guys with chainsaws and a crane lopping branches off the plane tree.
I raced downstairs in pants and socks. Across the street sawdust was flying from the main trunk. Marcy Stern was on the sidewalk, taking people’s business cards and handing out pictures of model apartments slated for a new twenty-story residential tower. Each had a wonderful view of the Empire State Building.
“You can’t build here!” I and several panicked neighbors screamed. “The seminary is landmarked.”
“Not this part.”
“The whole block.”
“Not the new part.”
“But-”
“We found the same loophole they did when they built the new part.”
Steel rises quickly in New York. The last Samantha and I saw of my view was a hard-hatted iron worker silhouetted against the Empire State Building like King Kong.
THE LAST ROUNDBY C. J. SULLIVAN
Danny Stone woke up angry. He sat up in his lumpy double bed and felt a rage tearing through him. His fists were clenched and he was breathing hard. He knew it was the dream. It was always the dream.
He shook his head and tried to erase the images of his long night. He knew he threw punches in his sleep and that is why he slept alone. Since he lost his wife, every woman he went to bed with woke him yelling that he was hitting them while he was dreaming. Sleep boxing, he told them, he suffered from sleep boxing. He said it as a joke but none of the women found it funny. Or slept with him again. In his waking life he had never struck a woman, and even in his dreams it wasn’t a woman he was trying to hit.
He got out of his bed and stretched his tight body. The cold linoleum felt good on his bare feet as he walked over and looked out his bedroom window down to Sherman Avenue. A cold blast of wind blew brown leaves around a fire pump. Danny watched an elderly man carrying a plastic black bag and rummaging through a garbage can looking for beer and soda cans for the nickel reward.
Danny turned away from the window. He felt a lump in his throat. He blocked that out with another long stretch. His muscles and bones popped and then he dropped to the floor to do one hundred sit-ups followed with fifty push-ups. Some men woke up to coffee, some to brushing their teeth. Danny Stone woke up and worked out. He did this every morning since he could remember. As a young boy he wanted to be a boxer and that is where it began. It took him through his fighting career and it would now take him into retirement.
He tensed up on his last ten push-ups as he heard those words in his mind. His trainer, Victor Garcia, had said that to him at Obert’s Gym yesterday when Danny floated the idea of one more fight.
Too old? How is thirty-five too old? he thought. Thirty-five is the prime of life for most men. But for a boxer? He knew the dirty secret of his profession. You didn’t slowly lose your skills in the ring. They deserted you in seconds, and a contender for the middleweight crown-which is how Danny thought of himself, although
Those words.
Cutting and cruel.
He knew there was something to them. Age for a boxer is deadly. It is like a door you pass through, and when it closes behind you there is no going back. A part of Danny Stone knew that was true, but like most boxers he thought he could go one more time. He figured he could get a $50,000 pay date as an under card at the Garden. Good enough for a stake.
Start a business. Maybe use it as a down payment for a condo. Take on some rising young kid and drop him on his cocky ass with his still-powerful left hook.
He could see it as he laced up his running shoes. The bright lights. The blood. The crowd yelling. The punch as Danny stood over the kid with his gloves raised. Danny smiled as he threw on his gray Champion sweat suit and burst out of his third floor apartment and ran down the stairs.
“Hey, Champ, what are you doing? Lock your door!” Mr. Ruiz, the super, yelled at him as he swept the floor.
“Nothing to steal,” Danny called back with a laugh.
He ran out of the lobby and his legs tightened up as they pounded on the cement. The cold air hit his lungs like he had inhaled pipe tobacco. He put his head down and ran along the street toward Inwood Hill Park. The first ten minutes of every run was a killer for him. Even when he was young he hated the start of the run. But after ten minutes, even now, when he found his rhythm and groove, it got good. Real good. Running and boxing are what kept him sane all these years and he wasn’t ready to let go of them. If no one else believed in him, Danny thought, at least he did.
At least he did. Those words comforted him as he ran up Dyckman Street. He passed the Alibi Inn and a white-haired man waved to him from the window. Danny smiled and waved back. Everyone in Inwood knew him as “Champ.” He thought not many knew anything about him other than he was a boxer. The furies that drove him. He passed Sherman Avenue and made a right to avoid Pitt Place.
Danny knew that was where the ghosts lived. 209 Pitt Place. The last time he had seen his wife and baby daughter alive was in their tidy two-bedroom apartment there. He was deep in training out in the Poconos when the house was hit by a crew of home invaders. They came for the money they knew he had hidden in the closet. He had made some offhanded comment to a
That the men were arrested, tried, and convicted with life sentences never gave him peace. That he won the fight was no solace. The only time he felt good was when his fists were pounding another man.
He shook his head to chase that ten-year-old memory away. He turned into the park and picked up his pace as he ran up the first hill. A mother pushing a baby carriage smiled at him when he huffed by. He kept going deeper into the park, deeper into his run. Away from the cruelty of life in New York City. Where the streets can snatch your whole life from you for a few thousand dollars. He went faster. His body felt good. He threw a few punches and let out a grunt.
