Beautiful Lies

I was quiet on the train and on the walk back to our building, and if Jake minded, he didn’t show it.

I’d made a decision. I was being tossed around in this situation like a skiff in a hurricane and I was sick of it. All I had so far was the information other people had given me. The mysterious freak sending me mail, my parents, my brother, even Jake. Everyone was telling me his version of the truth, and all of it was different. The only way to make any sense of what was happening was to find out for myself what the truth was. So I decided that it was time to head up to the Bronx. I told Jake. He didn’t think it was a good idea and tried to be polite about it.

“It was your idea,” I said as we stood at the door to his apartment.

“Yes. It was my idea for me to go. Not you. Not we. Me.”

“Why is this your problem?” I asked. “Why do you care about this?”

He turned and looked at me, put his hands on my shoulders. I could have melted, really, beneath the intensity I saw on his face.

“I don’t care about this. I care about you. A lot. More than I should this soon, I guess.” He paused here, sighed, and looked down at the floor. I saw the color come up in his cheeks. “But I can’t let you do something I think is dangerous without at least speaking my mind. For Christ’s sake, Ridley, someone’s watching you. Have you forgotten that? He’s been at the pizzeria, in the building.”

“Right. So I’m not even safe here in my home. So what difference does it make if I go to the Bronx or not? You can come with me.”

Does my logic sound a bit shaky? I guess it was. But I didn’t have a lot of experience with this sort of thing. I was just consumed all of a sudden with a desire to know what was happening to me, to find out for myself, not to be told or lied to or manipulated by people with an agenda that might or might not conflict with the truth. I told him this much.

“Ridley, be reasonable.”

This made me angry. I didn’t like being talked to like a kid. Be reasonable? Like just because I disagreed with him that made him reasonable and me unreasonable? How typical.

“No, fuck you. Don’t patronize me,” I said. Temper, temper.

He sighed. “Okay.”

He walked into his apartment and I followed, closing the door behind me. He took off his leather jacket and flung it on the couch. I tried not to look at how the black shirt he wore clung to every ripped muscle on his chest. He sat down.

“You’re on your own, then,” he said, and looked at me. “I go alone or I don’t go at all.”

He was bluffing.

“That’s it? What’s the point of that?”

“I won’t willingly put you in a situation that I think might be dangerous for you. If you want to put yourself in harm’s way, fine. But I won’t be a part of it.”

Isn’t it just like a man to pretend that trying to control you is the same as trying to protect you?

His jaw tightened and I could see a muscle throbbing there. He was bluffing. I was sure of it. I didn’t really want to go it alone, by the way.

“Great. Good. See you later.” I was definitely bluffing.

But he didn’t move, just kept those eyes on me as if expecting me to come to my senses. So I left the apartment and slammed the door. All the way down the stairs I expected him to come after me but he didn’t. Then I was on the street again. I took a left onto Fourteenth Street and caught a bus to the West Side. I took the 1/9 to 242nd Street in the Bronx, out of sheer stubbornness. All the way up there, a long train ride, for nearly an hour I wondered what the hell I was going to do when I got there.

The New York City subway system is pretty mythic, don’t you agree? Whether you’ve ridden it or not, you probably have a picture in your head of what it’s like. And it’s probably not a pretty picture. When you close your eyes, you probably see these old red cars that rattle and shake their way beneath the streets of Manhattan. In your mind’s eye, they’re covered with graffiti, lights flickering and going dark around corners. In your imagination, they are likely the habitat for every rapist, mugger, murderer, gang member, and serial killer in the five boroughs. Old New Yorkers, the people I know who grew up on these trains, have told me that once, in the not-too-distant past, that description wasn’t too far off. But in my New York, the subway is just another way to get around, probably the fastest way in most cases. The new cars are graffiti resistant and regularly maintained. The most offensive thing about them is the unfortunate beige-and-orange color scheme that seems to dominate. Between the homeless people, the rush-hour crushes, the odd, often inexplicable and interminable delays, and the fact that the stations themselves are not air-conditioned (making them feel like the first layer of hell in the summer), the subways are probably one of the most unpleasant places on the planet. But I’ve never felt unsafe on the trains.

You can usually count on people all around you, no matter what time it is, but by the time the local 1/9 train passed Ninety-sixth Street and was crawling up to the Bronx, there were only a few people in my car. A young kid in a private-school uniform carrying a bulging backpack listened to a Walkman, rocking to a beat that I could just hear over the rumble of the train. An old woman in a navy wool coat and flowered skirt read a romance novel. A bald (as in shaved, not as in losing) guy in a leather jacket and faded jeans dozed, his head back, mouth agape. By 116th Street I was nodding a bit myself, not sleeping but slipping into a reverie, thoughts of my uncle Max circling my consciousness.

For all his joviality, my uncle Max was a powerful man in New York City, but it wasn’t the kind of important that makes much of an impression on you as a kid. When you’re twelve it’s not a big deal that your uncle plays golf with senators and congressmen or that you see his picture in magazines like Forbes rubbing elbows with Donald Trump and Arthur Zeckendorf. Maybe if he’d been hanging out backstage with Bono or Simon LeBon, I might have paid more attention. But real-estate development isn’t exactly sexy, if you know what I mean.

Later on, after my first foundation ball, I started to get the idea of the kind of influence my uncle had, the kind of people he knew. He was a major campaign contributor to people like Al D’Amato, George Pataki, and Rudolph Giuliani. The guy was connected in a serious way. He had to be in his business. You had to have a way to part the sea of red tape, a way to get around zoning laws—and if not, a way to see that those zoning laws get changed. There were whispers, too, of other, shadier connections. And if you think about it, as a real-estate developer on the East Coast, there was no way he could do business without associating with the people who controlled the construction industry. The fact that my uncle’s business interests sometimes coincided with the business interests of less-than-reputable characters had always stayed in the periphery of my mind. I mean, my uncle’s lawyer was Alexander Harriman, a lawyer known for his notorious client list. But I’d never devoted any serious thought to it. Until now.

I always think of him just as my uncle Max, never as the man that he was separate from our family. A powerful businessman, rich, influential, lonely, and the only women around him seemed, I don’t know, transient, hollow in their affections, going through the motions. Were they call girls? I wondered now. Or were they just gold diggers, women who spent time with him for the gifts he could buy, the places he could take them, the other people he knew and had influence over? Uncle Max, I said in case he could hear me, I’m sorry, but maybe I never knew you. It’s funny how the titans in our lives, the people who have the most influence over our childhoods, over the people we become, never seem like people, flawed and separate from us. They’re like archetypes, The Mother, The Father, The Good Uncle, existing only as characters in the movie of our lives. When other facets of their personalities come clear and other elements of their lives uncovered, it’s shocking, as if they suddenly peeled their face off and revealed another. Does it seem like that to you? Well, maybe it’s just me.

The train jerked and rocked and I opened my eyes to find that I was alone in the car with the sleeping man wearing a leather jacket and faded denims. Just one more stop, I knew, and the train would move from the underground tunnel to the elevated tracks. I closed my eyes again. Then I thought, Wasn’t that guy all the way on the other end of the car before? The thought made my belly hollow out and my throat go dry. I opened my eyes just a crack and saw that the man was now wide awake and staring at me with a strange half-smile. My breathing came deeper and I tried to keep my chest from heaving. I noticed a long case on the ground beneath his legs. It looked like it might hold some kind of instrument. I felt a little relieved at the sight of it. I’ve always had this theory that you have nothing to fear from people who have something to carry. The murderer, mugger, rapist, even your