'Wrong word,' she said. 'A tom-tom's a drum. Dammit, what's the word I want?'
'Where are you going?'
'To look it up in the dictionary.'
'How can you look it up,' I wondered, 'if you don't know what it is?'
She didn't answer, and I drank the rest of my coffee and went back to my notes. 'Ha!' she said, a few minutes later, and I looked up. 'Tontine,' she said. 'That's the word. It's an eponym.'
'Is that a fact.'
She gave me a look. 'That means it was named for somebody. Lorenzo Tonti, to be specific. He was a Neapolitan banker who thought it up back in the seventeenth century.'
'Thought what up?'
'The tontine, although I don't suppose he called it that. It was a sort of a cross between life insurance and a lottery. You signed up a batch of subscribers and they each put up a sum of money into a common fund.'
'And it was winner take all?'
'Not necessarily. Sometimes it was set up so that the funds were distributed when the survivors were down to five or ten percent of the original number. Others, smaller ones, stayed locked up until there was only one person left alive. People would be enrolled by their parents in early childhood, and if the investments did well they could wind up looking at a fortune. But they couldn't collect it unless they outlived the other participants.'
'You got all this from the dictionary?'
'I got the word from the dictionary,' she said, 'so I'd know what to look up in the encyclopedia. I knew the word, I just couldn't think of it. Fifteen or twenty years ago I spent a weekend at an inn in the Berkshires. There was this historical novel on the subject, I think it was even called The Tontine, and somebody had left a copy there and I picked it up. I was only a third of the way through it when it was time to leave, so I stuck it in my bag.'
'I think God'll forgive you for that.'
'He's already punished me. I read it all the way through, and do you know what it said on the bottom of the last page?'
' 'Then she awoke and found it had all been a horrible dream.' '
'Worse than that. It said, 'End of Volume One.' '
'And you were never able to find Volume Two.'
'Never. Not that I made searching for it my life's work. But I would have liked to know how it all came out. There were times over the years when that's what kept me from jumping out the window. I'm not talking about the book, I'm talking about life. Wanting to know how it all comes out.'
I said, 'You really look beautiful tonight.'
'Why, thank you,' she said. 'What brought that on?'
'I was just struck by it. Watching the play of emotions on your face. You're a beautiful woman, but sometimes it all shows- the strength, the softness, everything.'
'You old bear,' she said, and sat down on the couch next to me. 'Keep saying sweet things like that and I've got a pretty good idea how tonight's going to turn out.'
'So have I.'
'Oh? Give me a kiss, then, and we'll see if you're right.'
Afterward, as we were lying side by side, she said, 'You know, when I was saying earlier that the club was a real guy thing, I wasn't just making war-between-the-sexes jokes. It's very much a male province, getting together to work out a relationship with mortality. You boys like to look at the big picture.'
'And girls just want to have fun?'
'And pick out drapes,' she said, 'and exchange recipes, and talk about men.'
'And shoes.'
'Well, shoes are important. You're an old bear. What do you know about shoes?'
'Precious little.'
'Exactly.' She yawned. 'I'm making it sound as though women's concerns are trivial, and I don't think that for a minute. But I do believe we take shorter views. Can you think of a single female philosopher? Because I can't.'
'I wonder why that is.'
'It's probably biological, or anthropological, anyway. When you guys finished hunting and gathering, you could sit around the campfire and think long thoughts. Women didn't have time for that. We had to be more centered on home and hearth.' She yawned again. 'I could formulate a theory,' she said, 'but I'm one of those practical broads, and I'm going to sleep. You work it out, okay?'
I don't know that I worked anything out, but a few minutes later I said, 'What about Hannah Arendt? And Susan Sontag? Wouldn't you call them philosophers?'
I didn't get an answer. Ms. Practicality was sleeping.
6
In the morning I deposited Lewis Hildebrand's check and walked over to the main library at Fifth and Forty- second. A young woman with the unfocused energy of a marijuana smoker got me set up at a table and showed me how to thread the microfiche rolls into the scanner. It took me a couple of tries to get the hang of it, but before long I was all caught up in it, lost in yesterday's news.
The next thing I knew it was almost 2:30. I bought a stuffed pita from one sidewalk vendor and an iced tea from another and sat on a bench in Bryant Park, just behind the library. For several years the little park had flourished as the epicenter of the midtown drug trade. It got so no one went into it but the dealers and their customers, and it had degenerated into a nasty and dangerous eyesore.
Just over a year ago it had been born again, with a couple of million dollars spent to re-create it. An architect's heroic vision had been brought to life, and now the park was a showplace, and an absolute oasis in that part of town. The junkies were gone, the dealers were gone, the lawn was lush and green, and beds of red and yellow tulips made you forget where you were.
The city's falling apart. The water mains keep bursting, the subways break down, the streets are cratered with potholes. Much of the population is housed in rotting tenements, scheduled for demolition sixty years ago and still standing. The housing projects that went up after the war are crumbling themselves now, in worse shape than the hovels they were built to replace. Living here, it's very easy to find yourself seeing the decline as a one-way street, a road with no turning.
But that's only half of it. If the city dies a little every day, so is it ever being reborn. You can see the signs everywhere. There's the subway station at Broadway and Eighty-sixth, its tile walls bright with the paintings of schoolchildren. There's the wedge-shaped garden in Sheridan Square, the pocket parks blooming all over town.
And there are the trees. When I was a kid you had to go to Central Park if you wanted to stand under a tree. Now half the streets in town are lined with them. The city plants some and property owners and block associations plant the rest. Trees don't have an easy time of it here. It's like raising kids in the Middle Ages, you have to plant half a dozen trees to raise one. They die for lack of water, or get snapped off at the base by careless truckers, or choke to death in the polluted air. Not all of them, though. Some of them survive.
It was a treat to sit on a bench in that little bandbox of a park and think that maybe my town wasn't such a bad place after all. I've never been too good at looking on the bright side. Mostly I tend to notice the rot, the collapse, the urban entropy. It's my nature, I guess. Some of us see the glass half full. I see it three-fourths empty, and some days it's all I can do to keep my hands off it.
I went back to the library after lunch and put in another three hours, and that was my routine for the rest of the week, long sessions looking up old newspaper stories interrupted by lunches in the park. At first I concentrated on those members who had unquestionably been murdered, Boyd Shipton, Carl Uhl, Alan Watson, and Tom Cloonan. Then I went looking for any sort of coverage of the thirteen others who had died, and then I started in on the living.
I took the weekend off. Saturday afternoon I spelled Elaine while she scouted out thrift shops in Chelsea and a
