“I can translate for you. Do you want me to do that?”
Lily ignored my question.
“She was still a believer, of course. The Communist Party,” said Lily. “She gets to the U.S., she joins the Party here. I can’t believe she’s dead, just like that.”
“I know you feel guilty about her meds or something, but it wasn’t your fault. I tried to tell you this morning.”
“How do you know?” Lily looked at me desperately.
“Tell me about the meds. How come you were at the drugstore?”
“I was just tying up loose ends, you know, closing Marianna’s account, stuff like that.”
“You said you were getting meds for her?”
“Did I? I must have been out of my mind. I feel I could be going nuts, you know, Artie?”
I held her hand.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Do you mind? Is that OK,” said Lily. “I’m just so tired.”
I stood up. “Fine,” I said. “Sure. Whatever you want.” I was tired, too, tired of the deceptions.
“You can’t let it go, can you?” she said. “Even when Lionel was here, you had to know, you had to keep asking him questions like he was a suspect.”
“Why didn’t he tell me he knew she was dead early this morning, when I saw him out on his terrace? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“For God’s sake, you don’t think Lionel’s involved, do you? He was her friend.”
“I’ll let it go if you want me to.”
“Let what go? What is there to let go?” she said. “You need to let go of being a cop, but you can’t, can you- it’s like it’s in your genes, asking questions, finding the place where it matters. Just like your dad,” she added. “Like in the KGB.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I kept my mouth shut.
“But that’s your genius, the way you get people to talk to you, isn’t it?” Lily said. “Isn’t that your thing?”
I turned away and walked across the room to the window again. The pane was cold. After a minute or two, Lily came and stood beside me. She put her hand on my arm.
“Artie? I didn’t mean to be cruel,” she said. “It’s a talent, asking questions, getting the answers you want. I know. I have it, too. It’s what reporters do. Same as you. Sometimes I hate myself for it-you just keep on asking and asking, pushing at people, and sometimes it’s when they’re hurting.”
“Was it the cop stuff that got in the way with us? I know it bothered you. I know you hated the stuff I had to do.”
She was silent.
“But he’s a cop. Radcliff.”
“Who you are is a cop; right at the very core of your being you’re a New York detective. It’s what you wanted and you got it, and it’s who you are,” said Lily, both of us standing at the window, our faces pressed against the glass, looking out at the snow.
“And him?”
“It’s something he wanted to do. But he’ll get it out of his system and then he’ll go on to something else.”
“I see.”
“I feel happy with Virgil right now.” She looked at me. “Shit, I’m sorry. You know I could never lie to you. I’m sorry.”
“Didn’t you feel happy with me?”
“It was different,” said Lily. “It was a different kind of being happy. With you and me it had to be the whole thing. We were too connected. We both spent some of our lives in hellish places seeing horrible things. We shared that. You brought it home. So did I.”
“We shared other things,” I said. “We shared music, and the city, and trips to Montana, and friends. For a long time, almost fifteen years,” I said. “What happened to us?”
CHAPTER 20
F ifteen years since the hot summer night outside St. Vincent’s, where I’d first met Lily. I’d been waiting for somebody to die. There had been a shooting and I was on the corner of Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue, staring up at the hospital and smoking. It was after midnight, a sultry New York night. Lily was waiting, too. She asked for a light, or maybe I asked her for one.
That night, we smoked and waited. She’d pointed out the school across the street, where she’d gone when she was a little girl. There had been something about her-hair, eyes, voice-that made me want her bad right then. Our first date, we went to Bradley’s to hear music. She already loved my music, Miles, Ella, Stan Getz. I taught her to love Louis Armstrong.
I knew right away, but for once I had let things take a little time, time for us to listen to music some more, time to go for a walk, stop for a drink, or dinner. It was a week, maybe two, before we’d gone to bed together. It was so good.
Lily had been born in New York and still lived in the apartment on Tenth Street where she grew up. I had fallen in love with the city as soon as I got off the plane, or maybe before. I think I was in love with New York before I ever saw it. As soon as I met Lily, I’d felt she was New York. With her, I felt I had come home.
That summer, we walked over the Brookyn Bridge, we took picnics to Central Park, and rode the Staten Island Ferry late at night. She came to ball games with me at the stadium and cheered like a crazy person. We haunted the city’s bookstores.
Reading was Lily’s obsession. She read everything-she had five, six books on the go at one time, novels, history, whatever she could get her hands on, and she could read a book in an evening. She told me she had once had a dream, a half-awake kind of dream, that she could eat books, and that if she could she would be able to read everything; one of her worries was that she’d never get through them all, all the books that remained, the ones she hadn’t read, the ones she had to read again. She read like a hungry woman.
Lying there on my sofa, she’d devour the book in her hand, still glancing up at the TV to comment on a ball game.
She had learned how to fish for my sake, though our first time out on the Yellowstone River in Montana she cast her hook into my neck. We couldn’t stop laughing. She was a lousy cook-she said so, and didn’t care, so long as we could get some decent takeout, Chinese, Thai, Indian-and her driving was worse, though she thought she was a hot-shot behind the wheel. When she drove, I held my breath or just looked out the window as if the scenery interested me.
Lily had worked on TV, for newspapers and magazines. She had covered wars, she had been to the Soviet Union-she understood the place I had left, and why. She had taken on tough stuff like the sex trade, and she had a do-good streak a mile wide, which she admitted, but she could laugh at herself. If there was a guy begging on the street, she’d give him money and ask how she could help. She was particularly fond of a guy on my block who used to panhandle for “The United Negro Pastrami Fund.”
“Anybody who makes me laugh gets an extra five bucks,” she always said.
Of everybody I knew, had ever known, she was the most generous. She gave more than she could afford, she bought presents for people, she found them jobs, she helped their kids. And then forgot about it. Oh, did I do that? she’d say, astonished and pleased.
Restless as she was, her friends were the most important thing in her life; it was sacred to her, this friendship thing. It mattered more than any belief system or politics or job. You were Lily’s friend, it was forever, for good. The only time I ever saw her cry was when one of her oldest friends simply disappeared from her life and never told her why, though I would have liked to kill the bastard for hurting her.
I had proposed to Lily once, one New Year’s Eve, but she’d refused. I never knew if it was my job, or because she wanted her freedom, as she saw it. We both, Lily and me, let other people get in the way, but it was mostly my fault, I had fucked it up. I’d been a jerk. I didn’t know if I could get her back, now or ever.
