“I have nothing to brag about,” I say. “And no one to brag to.”
He gives me a hard, troubled look. “This ain’t no more than what it is,” he says. “Just because you show us some respect don’t mean we got no problem with you. The reason tonight played out like it did is because you had this coat, and because you made a good choice with it. Lots of folks, they wouldn’t have that choice. You think about that before you go feeling too good about how you handled yourself.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t understand shit, old lady. Maybe it ain’t all your fault that you don’t. But you don’t.” He looks me up and down, as if taking me in for the first time. “You best get on home,” he says. “Before a real criminal shows up to mess with you.”
“You best do the same, Keith. Maybe I’ll come up and visit one of these days. The South Bronx, you said?”
Keith laughs. “Yeah, that’s right,” he says. “South Bronx. Hunts Point, Tiffany and Randall. You curious? You come on up. You’ll learn a lot. You gonna wear my jacket when you come?”
I shake my head, tap my hand against the zippered leather over my heart. “I’m gonna wear my jacket when I come,” I say.
The three of them walk quickly to the west without another look back. I continue east, toward Seventh Avenue, then down Thirty-Fourth to R.H. Macy’s.
The jacket is still warm from having Keith in it, and the smell it exhales is strange, but strangely comforting: coconut oil maybe, and marijuana, and sweat. I forgot to take my gloves out of my coat when I traded it, so I stick my hands into the jacket pockets, and in the right one I feel a scrap of paper: a fortune-cookie fortune that Keith had been saving for me unwittingly.
You think that it is a secret but it has never been one, it says.
There are a few more people on the street now that 1985 is underway. Partygoers have begun to trickle from wherever they were to wherever they want to be, seeping like water into the cracks of the city.
I stand in front of the main entrance of R.H. Macy’s, the one with the clock face and the caryatids staring at the now-closed A.S. Beck shoe store across Thirty-Fourth Street, the carved women acting as pillars for the World’s Largest Store.
Hats and frocks and shoes and cold creams and perfumes and pots and pans—the parts and parcels of people’s lives. I can’t see all of these items through the plate-glass windows, but I know they’re inside.
I am suddenly so tired, I think I may already be asleep. The structure of the city is the structure of a dream. And me, I have been a long time drifting.
A white-collar girl who came to New York and hit the top. The first kiss of the city—I remember it, and so many after. But nobody can remember the last kiss, the final handclasp. When one leaves for good, one cannot recall the leaving.
There have been so many times in my life when I found the actual world to be completely unsuitable. I have done my level best to remedy that, through poetry and through advertising, and I’m glad my efforts were appreciated.
I am proud that I fought so hard against the world, relieved that I made my fragile truce with it. I can greet it now, from time to time, as it really is.
And I’m glad that I’ve stopped by R.H. Macy’s, but I know I can’t stay. I look at my reflection in the plate glass: the same check-in I made sixty years ago, on my way to interview for the job that gave shape to my life. The face I have now is hardly the same. Neither is the city.
As I turn and walk toward Murray Hill and home and purring Phoebe, I suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.
Walking East on Thirty-Sixth Street, my street, I can’t see the moon anywhere, but I know it’s up there.
Somewhere under it is Gian, are the children. Somewhere under it is Julia—or not. I think back to the handful of greeting cards that she and I exchanged over the years, and her unrealized wish that she and I be friends. I always wondered what else she wanted from me, having already taken Max. I kept my guard up. And she cared for my ailing ex-husband, my only true love; she nurtured my son, and helped nurture his children, even after Max was gone. She gave of herself joyfully, in a way I could never manage, could never conceive. What else could she have wanted except to make amends, to care for us, to help when she was needed? Why did that never occur to me?
So many careers and fortunes are made by expecting the least and the worst of people. And yet people are rarely so disappointing. The city has taught me that.
A long black car pulls up next to me, engine sighing, a bass voice booming from the window, “Lillian! Is that you?”
And even though the voice has yelled my name, I jump, shaking with surplus adrenaline.