Just sex, the young man thought to himself.
“But Connie,” Eric said after she professed her love. “I’m just on vacation. I’ll be going back to L.A. soon. I’ve got a girlfriend back there.”
“Stay with me until you have to go,” she said, giving him a coquettish smile. “Maybe I can change your mind.”
“What about my brother?”
“He can stay with us. The girl can stay too if you want.”
Eric stared at her face and saw Christie when the first bullet hit her in the abdomen. She had let out a terrible cry that he had heard even through the thick glass of the revolving door.
O n that f i r st night Thomas and Clea had found Connie’s condoms and used one.
“You come like a woman,” she said to him as they lay there side by side in the unlit room looking through the glass wall out on the lights of New Jersey. “I thought that you were hurting, and your eyes looked scared.”
“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “I really am. It’s just, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about that for so long, and I never knew it would feel so, so . . .”
“So what?”
“I don’t know. It was like you were all silk and all I ever knew was rocks. And when you looked at me and nodded I felt so powerful that I was scared that I’d hurt you. I don’t know.
I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, curling around him. “It was really wonderful what you did. It was like I had your soul in my hands, like I was hurting you but it was okay.”
2 7 1
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“I don’t know, Clea,” Thomas said. “I never knew anything like that before. But you know, maybe you shoulda gone away with that other guy.”
“I don’t want to be with him.”
“Yeah, but you see how it is with me. Here I can’t even walk down the street without getting arrested. I don’t even hardly know how to read, and you can read things in four languages.”
“So? We’re not getting married or anything. We’re just havin’ a good time.”
She put her hand on his forehead the way his mother did when he was overtired and couldn’t sleep.
Thomas dozed off and dreamed that he was floating on a pink-and-blue ocean with the sun all around him and fish swimming on top of the water.
Th e boys move d their things out of the Y and brought them down to Connie’s. Eric felt funny about it, but he had been honest with his mentor. They had a good time together, and she taught him all about Wall Street.
Two weeks went by, and Thomas learned about love from Clea as Connie did from Eric. The boys spent their afternoons together exploring the city.
One cloudy morning Eric brought Thomas to deliver one of Connie’s antique watches to a watchmaker whose office was on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building.
They entered the Russian’s office a little after nine.
“Yes?” the burly man asked. He was frowning at Thomas.
“I brought a watch from Constance Baker,” Eric told him.
This took away the scowl.
2 7 2
F o r t u n a t e S o n
“Let me see it.”
It was a tiny pocket watch with gold-filled numbers and a shiny blue lacquered back.
“It’s lovely,” the watchmaker said.
Thomas wandered over to the window at the back of the shop. The sky outside was opaque white, pure and unfathomable.
Eric exchanged the watch for a receipt.
“Let’s go, Tommy,” he said.
“What’s with this window?” the young black man asked.
The watchmaker, Mr. Harry Slatkin, smiled.
“Open it up,” he said.
Tommy pulled the old-fashioned window wide. The dense white mass hovered outside.
“What is it?”
“The clouds,” Slatkin told him. “We are in the clouds.”
Thomas talked about it all the way down in the Art Deco elevator.
“We were actually in a cloud, Eric. I never did anything like that before.”
