“What brings you to the party?”
Another flourish of her fingers. “My fiancé's bank does some kind of business with the big company that I guess owns your paper. Something like that.”
I glanced at her fiancé. Again, there was something of the youth about him; perhaps it was in the slenderness of his neck, or the way he nodded vigorously, confidently, with his executive pals. I wondered if this Caroline Crowley might be a bit older than him; on the other hand, women in their late twenties are, I think, generally wiser than men of the same age, and so it might simply have been that her manner was more mature. But there was something else. If she was not
actually older, then she seemed to have been
made
older.
“ ⦠oh, I don't mean to disparage your paper,” she was saying, kicking one of her crossed legs back and forth. “It's a
marvelous
paper really. I kind of like the ⦠the
feel
of a tabloid. I mean I read the
Times,
of course, for the national and international news, but I read your paper for something elseâto sort of get the real city, you know? The
grit.
You don't get that in the
Times.”
She glanced back at her fiancé, who appeared to be telling a story that had to do with tennis, for he was pantomiming a forehand.
“Your fiancé plays tennis.”
“Charlie?” she asked. “Yes. May I ask you another question?”
“Sure.”
“Don't you think what you do is sort of predictable by now?”
I looked at her carefully. We were having a dialogue, but it didn't have much to do with what was being said.
“I mean, it's the same old thing, isn't it?” she asked, lifting her dark eyebrows. “Some poor sad person has some poor sad thing happen to them and it's for all the usual reasons,
simple
reasons, and there
you
go getting the quotes right or whatever reporters worry about, and then the next day it's pretty much the same again, right?”
“I find the stories interesting.” I sipped my drink.
“But I heard you used to be this big
investigative
reporter and do these stories where you actually dug into some lurid, sordid, horrid past of somebody, a politician or somebody, and found out something important, something
investigatively
importantâ”
“Is this supposed to be a serious conversation?”
“Well,” she began, her voice coy, “if I'm being rude, it's because I think rude questions are often the most pertinent ones.”
“You like rude questions?”
“Mm-hmm.”
I felt the liquor trumpeting inside my brain.
“I
could well ask
you
why in the world you are going to marry such an
obviously upstanding, intelligent, handsome, healthy, and soon-to-be-prosperous fellow like your fiancé, when you could pick any useless, misbegotten psychopath with mossy teeth, yellow T-shirts, no money in the bank, and a brain stuffed with pornographic impossibilities, who, nonetheless, might be more interesting to talk to and better in bed.”
She drew back in surprise, her pretty mouth open.
“Yes”âI noddedâ“that is a
rude
question. Maybe I'll ask another. Maybe I'll ask you how long I'm supposed to pretend that flirtatious conversation such as ours has no outcome, no
purpose.
Women who look like you don't just walk up to strange men at parties and first insult their appearance and then their livelihood under the protection of their own charming loveliness and the presence of a fiancé. Without some
good
reason, right?”
Now she gazed into her lap.
“Look,” I went on, my voice softening, “I'm just saying that if you want to
play,
if you want to get
into
something here, some kind of
real
conversation, not the usual cocktail-party crap, fine. I'll do that. I deal with bullshitters all day long, with great interest, I might add, but I'm on my own time here, so do me a favorâget to it, okay? Get to whatever it is you want with me.”
She looked up then, straight into my face. I hadn't scared her at all. Perhaps a hint of amusement passed through her eyes. “I was hoping I might talk to you about something important, actually,” she said in quite a different voiceâa calm, clear voice.
“What is it?”
“It's complicated ⦠I mean, it takes a while.”
“I see.” But of course I didn't.
“Could we talk about it?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Tonight?”
“Are you serious?”
She nodded. “We could leave right now.”
“And where would we be going?”
“My apartment, about fifteen blocks from here.” She stared at me. “Charlie wouldn't be coming along.”
Her eyes, I realized, were the blue of a mailbox. “I don't know, Caroline Crowley, maybe I shouldn't be left alone with you.”
She touched a finger to her pearls, smiled to herself. The girlie act was gone, and she looked up at me, eyes unblinking. “Am I to understand,” she said huskily, “that we're protecting
your
virtue, not mine?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
But this, I told myself, was not about sex. She had something else in mind. And maybe it could be a story. I've learned that you have to put yourself in the way of opportunity if you want to get the good stories. I told her I needed a few minutes, and then found a phone and called Lisa, knowing it was just late enough that she might have turned off the ringer so that the kids would not wake in our small house. The answering machine came on. I muttered something into the receiver about running into some people, that we were going out for a drink. Was this a lie? Yes, sort of. I had not done anything to feel guilty about, nor did I expect to, but my lie seemed easier than explaining that I was leaving the party with some woman in a peach gown whom I'd just met. So I said I was out for a drink. My wife is used to thisâit's definitely part of the jobâand only expects, ultimately, that I keep my underwear on and be home by the time the kids climb into our bed in the morningâabout five-thirty or six. Sally and Tommy stumble sleepily into our room and crawl into the blankets and get between us and then sometimes fall asleep again, with the sweet stink of their breathing, and more often they flop around and everybody is forced to wake up. Or I fall asleep againâa troubled, shallow sleep, alwaysâand Sally lies there awake, thinking of something, and then rolls over and asks me directly, right in my ear, something like this: “Daddy, does LaTisha have hair on her bottom?” LaTisha is Josephine's daughter, a sullen black girl of fifteen, almost six feet tall. I quite imagine that she has hair “on her
bottom,” as Sally refers to it, and I have little doubt that the whole area has been thoroughly pawed over by some boyfriend or another. And then I push my eyes open and there, at 6:02 A.M., or whatever the time, is my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, with her eyes clear and awake, watching her unshaven dad rise from the grave of sleep (maybe she sees the heaviness of my eyes, the flecks of gray in my stubble, maybe she can already intuit that I am closer to death than she), and to see her face like that, so close to mine, is the sweetest thing in the world. And then here comes her brother in his fuzzy yellow one-piece sleeper, eighteen months old, in love with his penis already, a rapist of teddy bears, chuckling fatly as he throws himself on top of me, and then I have both of them in my arms and am making growling monster noises that scare them a little and make them happy, while my wife steals the chance to go to the bathroom, and such moments I would protect with anything, even my life.
And
yet.
And yet when I hung up the phone and turned back toward the roar and music of the party, with Caroline Crowley standing to her advantage under a light, holding her coat check and ready to go, I was interested in something much different. It was not as if I was not myselfâoh no, I
was
myself, I was my
other
self, the self that wishes to carry on a secret dialogue with all that is evil in human nature. Some men do not struggle with this in themselves. They seem to have a certain grace. They are happyâor rather, they are content. They swing tennis rackets in the sunlight and get the oil checked regularly and laugh when the audience laughs. They accept limits. They are not interested in what might come up from the dark, cold hole of human possibility.
Â
Â
The backseat of the taxi was an intimate space, warm against the night, both of us huddled in our coats. Caroline looked ahead, almost as if I were not there, and directed the driver brusquely. Then, from her purse, she removed a pouch and a small packet of rolling papers, took one paper out and pinched
a dab of tobacco onto it. This she distributed along the length of the paper, which she then rolled into an even tube. She licked the last eighth of an inch of the paper and sealed it off with a quick, sliding fingertip.
“I bet you use wooden matches,” I said.
“What a smart man you are.”
She pulled a box of wooden matches from her purse, took one out, and with the wooden end, poked the tobacco at one end of the cigarette. This would be the smoking end. She looked at me, the lights outside the cab passing crazily across her blue eyes. “Girls don't like tobacco in their teeth.”
“Guess not.”
She cracked the window on her side, then lit up. I realized that her voice was clear and measured, untainted by the whining vowels and hurried nasalness I heard all day; this and her habit of rolling cigarettes suggested she was not originally from the city or even the East. But before I could think further, we had pulled in front of an apartment house on East Sixty-sixth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, and she leaned over the seat and paid. The doorman, who with his brass buttons and epaulets looked like Napoleon Bonaparte, smiled at her familiarly and gave me a scowl. I followed Caroline across the marble hallway. She took long strides, I noticed. We entered the small space of the brass and mahogany elevator.
“I hate parties, actually,” Caroline said, unbuttoning her fur, the cigarette in her mouth.
The elevator opened to a small foyer with a glossy black door. On the tiled floor stood a pair of Western boots; several umbrellas hung neatly from a brass hook.
“Here we go,” Caroline said, turning the lock.
Inside, Persian rugs on the floor, white walls, a few pieces of art that did not interest me, a huge window that showed off the Manhattan skyline to the west. The place appeared to be professionally cleaned, but I was not looking at big moneyânot forty or fifty or a hundred million.
“Do we have polite chitchat,” I asked, “or get right to it?”
“We get right to it. I want you here.” She pointed to an
overstuffed reading chair, and as I sat down she turned on a floor lamp, the brightness of which made her gown even more translucent.
“Before we begin whatever it is we're ⦔
“Yes?” she said.
“You came to the party and saw me and spontaneously decided to engage me in conversation, figuring that, curious idiot that I am, I'd be willing to listen to whatever it is I'm about to hear?”
“Yes.” She watched me.
“I see.”
“I believe in spontaneity.” There she stood, the light falling on her head and shoulders and breasts.
“You better tell me what you have to tell me.”
“Fine. But before the tell comes the show.”
“I'm going to get a show?”
She drifted toward the fireplace, her back turned. “Don't you want one?”
“I want one very badly.”
“Good. That means that despite your recent drinking you'll be attentive.” She took two large manila envelopes off the mantel and held them before her. Then she looked toward the window. Before her stretched the snowy dark box of the park and, beyond, the lights of the West Side. “You know nothing about me, right?” she announced, to the night before her as much as to me.
“Nothing,” I agreed. “You're about twenty-eight, you have a few million dollars, you wear nice peach gowns to parties, you don't like my picture in the newspaper, your fiancé plays tennis and knows almost nothing about suffering and grief, and Napoleon Bonaparte, your doorman, is gladdened by your existence but not by mine. Other than that, nothing.”
“It must be paralyzingly fun to be as clever as you are.”
“Hey,” I told her, “I'm here.”
She was silent, and for a moment I wondered if the whole strange interaction was now about to collapse; if that was true, I'd catch a cab downstairs, try to forget about it, and put the taxi receipt on my monthly business expenses. But then she
moved away from the window and handed the envelopes to me. I chose the thinner one first and set the other aside. I unwound the red string that held the flap and shook out two dozen eight-by-ten color photographs. The first showed what seemed to be a male body in dirty clothes facedown in rubble. I flipped through a few more, variously taken from ten feet and five feet and two feet and, most unhappily, from twelve inches.