'Well,' Mr. Brickman said after several moments of dead silence, dead seeming to be the theme of the day, 'I will pray for Eddie.'
'Yes, Mr. Brickman. That's a good idea.'
And Mr. Brickman left, got up and left, peering into the hall first as if crossing a street in the middle of a block and searching for oncoming traffic.
Which left William alone again, savoring the last bit of glass number five before he embarked on glass number six. Only when he went to pour it, he committed the unpardonable. He knocked his good friend Jack right off the armrest.
Whoops.
Whiskey ran across his pitifully worn-down carpet like a flash flood, rolling out toward the door, and-what's that?-by way of innocent proximity-toward the box, Jean's box.
William sprang into action. Okay-crawled, stumbled, staggered, making it there just in the nick of time-lifting up the box before it was hit by a wave of eighty-six- proof alcohol.
The box seemed heavier than before; of course he was drunker than before. He dumped it onto the bed where it sank into the mattress with a slight groan.
What was he doing with it anyway? What would Rodriguez try to give him next-Jean's ashes? Ashes, drapes, and pictures. William sat down beside it, looking it over, assessing the damage. Everything more or less shipshape. He opened the top flaps and peered inside.
Yeah, it was junk all right.
In Jean's box: a small retractable umbrella, a pair of black rubbers, a library card, sunglasses-one lens slightly cracked-a key chain-no keys-salt and pepper shakers with the words Lake Tahoe painted on the bottom of each, a novelty pen which when held upside down transformed a sweet demurely dressed girl into a sweet undressed girl, three packets of dental floss, several utility bills from Con Edison, several threatening letters from Con Edison, a campaign flyer, a baseball program. And a phone book. He dumped it all out onto the bed.
Of course it was the phone book he was drawn to; old habits die hard. A small black phone book, the kind bachelors in the fifties were supposed to carry around with them, little black books filled with conquests. But this little black book was filled with empty pages, mostly empty pages, and little proverbs that were printed at the top of each page-one to a letter. A rolling stone gathers no moss was one of them. Don't judge a book by its cover was another. Little pithy sayings, the kind of thing they started putting in fortune cookies when they stopped putting in fortunes. William wondered if Jean had read them, if they had amused him maybe, even caused him to laugh out loud. Probably not. Jean never laughed, certainly not out loud. Am I laughing, William? William guessed that he'd stopped laughing the day they turned his family into a picture. And now, looking down at the contents of the box spread helter-skelter like a rummage sale across his bed, William wondered just where that picture was, because it wasn't here. Maybe all that Scotch tape had simply grown as brittle as the picture itself, finally splintering into a kind of dust, becoming, in a way, like Jean. Maybe one day Jean had simply looked at it and not known them anymore, the way a childhood picture becomes, after a while, just a picture of a child, any child or every child, but not you. William didn't think that likely, but then, it was hard to say. He suddenly wished he'd known Jean then, back when he was helping his Jews across the border, before they'd tattooed his arm and scarred his soul, back before the fall, because then maybe, just maybe, he'd feel sad that Jean had died. But that was crying over spilt ash, wasn't it. William put the pen, the bills, the shakers, the flyer, the baseball program, put it all back into the box; he left out only the phone book.
He barely made it back to his chair, not so much sitting down on it as flopping into it. The room was kind of spinning on him, a little like a carousel just before it comes to a halt, when nervous parents are already madly racing to grab their children who only want another go- round. William, of course, wanted off.
He began to leaf through the book again, to take a leisurely stroll through Proverb Land. Under P-People in glass houses should not… -was Sam's Pizzeria 8723490. The page was worn, covered in thumbprints, pizza being a staple of sorts for solitary people who don't cook and don't go out, which in New York means half the people over the age of seventy. William had eaten his fair share of pizza. Under R, under Rule your emotions and they won't rule you, was Rodriguez: janitor, funeral director, and executor of the will. Under D, Don't judge a book by its… were a few names, an Alain, a Marie, a Michelle, but all without numbers, as if Jean had written them down to remind him of something, and under I, It's the bad wheel that does the most squeaking, was a number with no name: 873- 5521.
If William hadn't been drunk, or at least so drunk, if he'd had, say, two drinks instead of five, he would have put the phone book back into the box then and drifted into sleep, or at least collapsed into a stupor. In the morning he would have carted the box out to the garbage in front and dumped it in. Then he would have gone to OTB and laid a bet, laid several bets, starting with Gold's Sheet, but quickly moving on to horses whose names began with hard consonants. In this way, he would have eventually lost all his money, all being a relative term, since all his money wouldn't fill a regulation piggybank, unless his luck turned, of course, which from time to time it did, but with no regularity he could depend on. Then, either so much richer or so much poorer, he would have made his way back to his room. Just your average day, in which he would've hurt no one and, with a little luck, no one would've hurt him. But okay, he'd had five drinks, not four, and certainly not two. The room wasn't spinning anymore, but it wasn't exactly standing still either. And being five drinks stiff to the wind, being just a little sorry for himself, grappling with this notion that there'd been a serious omission in the matter of Jean's death, because there'd been only two mourners there when there should have been more, and both mourners had mourned nothing, he stared at the lone number for more than a minute, then called it.
A woman answered.
'Hello,' she said. 'Who's there?'
'A friend of a friend,' William said.
'Uh huh,' she said in a tone completely devoid of surprise. 'A friend of what friend?'
'Jean. Jean Goldblum.'
'Oh.' Pause. So maybe she knew, had already scanned the obits and knew. 'You'd like to see me I guess?'
Well yes, he would.
'Sure. Why not. I'd love to see you.'
'Sure. Let me see… wait a minute… how about, oh, nine o clock? Is that okay with you?'
More than okay. Terrific actually. Couldn't be better.
'Tonight? Nine o'clock tonight?'
'Yes. Would you like to come another night?'
He'd have to consult his schedule on that one. Nope. Sorry, all booked up tomorrow night, it'd have to be tonight.
'Tonight's fine.'
'Okay. Why don't you write down my address.'
'Sure. Go ahead.'
'Thirteen-eighty-one Yellowstone Boulevard. Apartment 9D. That's Yellowstone. A friend of Jean's, huh?'
'That's right. A friend.'
'Yes. Well, we're all friends now, aren't we.'
Absolutely. All of us, friends.
'I'll see you at nine,' William said, then he put the phone back in its cradle, smacked it down hard, and wondered exactly what it is that he'd done.
SEVEN
He told himself on the way to see Jean's friend that he was just being friendly, that he was on a mission of mercy, a comforting angel here. After all, wasn't it right for the bereaved to seek out the bereaved? And if he wasn't all that broken up himself, perhaps she was, and if she wasn't, then perhaps he was merely tying up loose ends, paying his respects to Jean's memory. And then there were other reasons: that he was maybe just a smidgen
