The Best American Noir of the Century

land you’re looking to find.”

“So, I give her my home number and go about the rest of my day,” Tony said. “I had no doubt she would make use of it down the road a bit, maybe get a few more sessions under her garters before she made the move.”

“Let me take a stab at a guess here,” Joe said. “She dialed your private line right about the start of the second period of the Rangers game. Right or not?”

“If that’s about eight or so, then yes, you win the stuffed bear,” Tony said. “She was very upset, needed to talk, and couldn’t make it wait. I offered to do a free phone consult, but she wanted a face-to-face. An hour later we were down a half bottle of red and doing a wild roll on the water bed.”

“I didn’t think anybody still had a water bed,” Steve said. “Or that they even made them. You don’t have a lava lamp, too, do you?”

I brushed Steve’s question aside with one of my own: “This woman, was she married or single?”

Tony stared at me for several seconds before he answered. “Would it make a difference either way?” he asked.

“It might,” I said, “to her husband.”

“She is married,” Tony said with more a sneer than a smile. “Truth be told, most of the women who come to me for help are bound to the ring. If they weren’t, then maybe they wouldn’t be so damn unhappy and I wouldn’t be pulling down seven figures to dole out my pearls of acquired wisdom.”

“Does any of that ‘cause you concern?” I asked. “I mean, forget about the doctor-patient mumbo-jumbo crap. I’m talking here as a man. Does it bother you one inch to be taking another man’s wife into your bed?”

“It never has.” Tony stared right at me as if his measured words were meant for my ears alone. “And it never will.”

“Is there any more pie?” Jeffrey asked. “I don’t know what it is lately, but I can’t seem ever to get enough to eat.”

“That may well be because you’re celibate,” Tony said. “You need something to replace what the body most needs. If you took my advice, which I rarely offer for free, you would switch gears and reach for a warm body instead of a warm plate.”

Jeffrey hated to talk about sex or at least that’s the impression he wanted to convey. He was a Jesuit priest when I first met him, waiting in line to see Nathan Lane go for laughs in a Neil Simon play— an original, not a revival. It was a cold and rainy Wednesday and the matinee crowd was crammed as it usually was with the bused in and the walk-ins. We both should have been somewhere else, doing what I was paid to do and, in Jeffrey’s case, what he was called to do. We made a valiant attempt at small talk as we snaked our way up toward a half-price ticket window and were surprised when we scored adjoining orchestra seats. “Now if the show is only half as funny as the critics claim,” Jeffrey said, “we will have gotten our money’s worth.”

We stopped by Joe Allen’s for drinks after the show and I had just ordered my second shaken-not-stirred martini of the afternoon when I invited Father Jeffrey to join the poker game, eager to fill the void left by Sal Gregorio’s spur-of-the-moment move to Chicago to tend to his father’s meatpacking plant. Even back then, Jeffrey seemed to me a troubled man, grappling with the type of demons I would never be able to visualize in the worst of my black-dog moments. I came away with the sense that he had reached the top of the well when it came to his chosen vocation, not sure whether it was the pedophile scandal rocking the church that did it or just the very fact that he was a modern man forced to live a sixteenth-century life. “Do you miss it?” I had asked him that day.

“What, the women?”

“We can start with that,” I said, trying my best to make light of what would have to be considered a serious deal-breaker in any contract talks that brought into play a lifetime commitment.

“There are moments,” Jeffrey said, “when I don’t think about it. It is, by a wide margin, the biggest obstacle a priest must overcome. At least it has been for me. But hidden beneath the cover of misery, a silver cloud often lies.”

“What’s yours?” I asked, maybe crossing deeper into the holy water than I should.

“That it’s young women who draw my eye and not innocent boys,” Jeffrey said, the words tinged with anger and not regret.

“Are you one of those rebels in a collar who think Christ and Mary Magdalene were more than just pen pals?” I asked, doing what I could to steer the conversation away from the uncomfortable.

“I am one of those rebels in a collar who think Christ was too much of a man not to be in love with a woman as beautiful and as loyal as Mary was to him,” Jeffrey said.

One year later, just about to the day, Father Jeffrey turned his back on his vows, handed in his collar, and walked out of the church life for good. Yet, in the time from that eventful day to this, he stayed celibate or, at least, so he claimed, though not from a lack of effort but more from a lack of experience. Now, of all the guys in the poker group, he was the only one Dottie liked, the one she didn’t roll her eyes or mumble beneath her breath if we ran into on the street or in a local restaurant. She even mentioned once that she had gone to church to see him celebrate mass and listen to one of his sermons.

“How was he?” I asked her that day.

“He looked like he belonged up there,” Dottie said about Jeffrey in the same awed tone I would have reserved for Frank Sinatra or Johnny Cash. “But then again, it’s not like it was his first time.”

“Full house, kings high,” Jerry said, resting his hand flat on the table and reaching over to drag a small mountain of different-colored chips his way.

“Was that deck even shuffled?” Adam asked, shaking his head, thick hair covering one side of his thin face. “I mean, really, just look at all the face cards that are out. I don’t think it was shuffled.”

“You only ask that when I win a hand,” Jerry said. “There a reason for that?”

“That’s because the only hands you ever win usually come off a deck that hasn’t been shuffled,” Adam said.

Adam and Jerry hated one another and I never understood why one, if not both, didn’t just walk from the game. It wasn’t as if the city was lacking weekly poker gatherings, and God knows most of them served better food and had a nicer selection of wines to choose from than what I offered and set out. Adam was a doctor and a noted one, often cited in medical journals and in the Science section of the New York Times as the gold standard in regard to matters pertaining to women and their bodies. He was handsome, with an easy smile and a scalpel-sharp sense of humor, except of course when he found himself sitting across a table from Jerry, cards in hand and a stack of poker chips resting between them. And while I could never quite put a finger to the pulse that got the feud started in the first place, in many ways I felt myself to be the one responsible. After all, as with the rest of the group, I was the one who brought Adam into the game. And I would just as soon bring the weekly session to an end than to see it go on without Adam holding his usual place at the far end of my table.

Dr. Adam Rothberg had saved Dottie’s life.

Three years ago, after a long bout with a flu that wouldn’t quite surrender the fight, Dottie, fresh off a five-day siege of heavy-duty antibiotics mixed with cough syrup and aspirin, collapsed on the floor of our tiny barely walk- into-it-and-move-around kitchen. She was doubled up and clutching her stomach, foam thick as ocean spray flowed out of her mouth, and her body shook as if it were resting on top of a high-speed motorboat. I was about to jump for the phone and dial 911 when I remembered that the new face that had moved in down the hall during the last week belonged to a doctor. I rushed out of the apartment and ran out into the narrow hall, banging at a door two down from mine. I felt like a boy sitting under a tree crammed with packages on Christmas morning when I saw Adam’s face as he swung open his apartment door.

He saved Dottie’s life that day, and we have been friends ever since.

In that span of time, Adam’s practice flourished and his stature rose, while mine pretty much hovered at the same level it had been for years. I don’t hate the work I do really, it’s just that I don’t love it, either. I look around this table and don’t see anyone happier at their chosen work than I am, except maybe for Adam, who truly loves putting on the white coat and playing God twelve hours a day. I am good at what I do, bringing a financial balance to the lives of my clients, despite the fact I can’t seem to accomplish those same goals for myself. I could never get it to where I was a step ahead, with all the bills paid and some money set aside. And I could never figure out where the hell it all went, especially since we didn’t have the financial burden of kids and had lived in the same apartment for more or less the same rent since we were first married and, except for a two-week splurge in Italy during our first year together, seldom took long or expensive vacations.

It bothered Dottie — I knew that. Not that I was an accountant, but that I was one without money and minus