Flesh and Blood (2 page)

2

“I didn't hear you come back last night,” Karen said as she turned toward him. Her hair shimmered in the light that streamed in from the large bay windows at the front of the room.

“I didn't want to wake you,” Frank said. He sat up and rubbed his eyes wearily.

“How long were you out?”

“Almost dawn.”

She ran her fingers up his bare arm. “Why don't you stay home today? I could have Felix handle the gallery. We could go to the park, or to a movie, anything.”

He shook his head. “No.”

She looked at him worriedly. “Frank, I'm beginning to get a little concerned about—”

He stood up quickly, silencing her, and walked to the window. He could see a large blank canvas reflected in it, and a little stool and an artist's palette. They had all been resting together unmoved for several months, the colors unmixed, the canvas smooth and white.

“Why don't you stay home,” he said cautiously, knowing that she did not want to be reminded of it. “You haven't painted anything in a long time.”

Karen's body stiffened visibly. “I'm not in the mood,” she said, a little sharply. “I'll know when I'm ready. You don't have to keep pushing me.”

Frank drew back the glass door that led to the terrace and felt a cool winter breeze sweep across his body. In Atlanta, she had painted in a dark, windowless room, and he could see it very well in his mind, spattered walls and stacked canvases, an old desk covered with sketches, a rickety wooden easel. It was a place where something happened, and in its willful disarray it had given off something he admired, a deep and unimpeachable commitment.

“Well,” Karen said as she got out of bed, “if you don't want to stay home today, I'll go to the gallery.” She walked stiffly into the bathroom and closed the door.

Once again he heard the shower. Once again, he imagined the water as it flowed over her. There had been a time when the sound of it had lifted him toward a strong and furious ardor. But now, he could only think of the bare canvas, the unmixed paints, and the listless life they represented, the fact that she no longer put her hands to anything that mattered. He could feel a kind of dull anger building in him at the thought of such privilege, and to choke it off, he simply did what he had always done.

“I'm going to work,” he said.

An old woman was sleeping soundly at the bottom of the stairs when Frank got to his office. She was wrapped in a thick tangle of old clothes, worn one layer on top of another, her body serving as the only closet she had. He had found her in the same place for the last few mornings, and he'd gotten used to stepping quietly over her and then moving down the narrow brick corridor to the door of his office. By nine in the morning, when he officially opened for business, she had already gathered her few belongings in her arms and crept silently up the cement stairs. A few days before, he had stood at the small window and watched her leave. For a few minutes, she had picked at her clothing, meticulously preening herself for the new day, and as he'd watched her, Frank had wondered at the kind of appalling personal history which had finally landed her on the streets. Whose daughter was she? Whose mother? Whose sister? What web of binding ties must have been severed for her to end up so alone?

A wave of warm, musty air swept out into the corridor when Frank opened the door of his office. It was pungent and faintly sweet, as if, during the night, a strange jungle rot had eaten into everything. He held the door open to clear it out, then closed it against the outer cold.

His desk sat at the back of the room, gunmetal gray and solid as a monument. Several manila folders were scattered over it, and for a time he busied himself going through them. They were the files on cases he'd completed and for each of them he calculated the remainder of his fee, then typed up a letter asking for payment. The money usually came in full and without complaint a few days later, each check in its own monogrammed envelope. Sometimes there was even a polite little thank-you note on embossed stationery. During all the time he'd been a homicide detective in Atlanta, he'd never received a formal thank-you note from anyone. But from time to time, he remembered now, after he'd finally tracked down and convicted the one who'd killed a mother or husband or child, after all the evidence had been presented and all the appeals exhausted, someone would walk slowly up to him in the corridor outside the courtroom and without a single word draw him into a grateful embrace. At such moments the world had seemed to open up, and he'd been able to know with an absolute certainty that he had done something good.

The phone rang as he was putting the last of the folders into the green metal filing cabinet behind his desk.

He picked it up immediately. “Frank Clemons,” he said.

“Frank?”

“Hello, Sheila.”

There was a moment of silence, and Frank could tell that she was trying to keep herself together.

“This is always the hardest time for me,” she said finally.

“I know.”

“You, too?”

“Yes.”

“She would have been twenty yesterday, Frank.”

“I know.”

“I went out to her grave. I took some flowers.”

They had buried her in a small cemetery outside Atlanta, his daughter, Sarah, who, at sixteen, had walked off into the woods along the Chattahoochee River late one summer afternoon and swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills.

“Twenty, Frank,” Sheila repeated.

“Yes.”

Sheila started to say something else, but broke it off.

Frank could hear her crying softly from a thousand miles away.

“Are you in Atlanta now?” he asked after a moment.

Sheila cleared her throat gently. “Yes. I just came over for a couple of days.”

“Still living with your father?”

“No. I got a small apartment near the courthouse. I finished stenography school. I have a job.”

“Good.”

“I'm glad I left Atlanta. It was never right for me.”

She'd moved back to their hometown in the Appalachian foothills of Alabama, and sometimes Frank imagined her still young and restless among their speckled granite cliffs and narrow twisting streams.

“I'm glad you moved back, Sheila,” he said.

“I'm a country girl, I guess,” Sheila said with a small, painful laugh. “I can't believe you live in New York City now.”

Frank said nothing.

“Are you happy there?” Sheila asked tentatively.

“You know me, Sheila.”

“I'll never get over it, Frank.”

“No one ever does.”

“But this week, it was worse than it's ever been.”

Frank shook his head in the dense gray air of his office. “There's nothing to do about it.”

“But go on living.”

“Nothing else, Sheila,” Frank told her. He didn't know what she wanted from him, only that she wasn't getting it. It seemed best not to string it out. “Well, say hello to your father for me,” he said.

“He doesn't let me talk about you, Frank,” Sheila said flatly. “He doesn't let me mention your name.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Well, you know how fathers are.”

“Yes, I do.”

There was a long pause. He could hear her breathing, almost feel her breath in his hair.

“I have to go now, Sheila,” he said finally.

“All right,” Sheila said, “I'm sorry. I just wanted to …”

“I know.”

“It's the one thing we'll always have together, Frank.”

“Yes,” Frank said as he hung up, but he wondered what else could be said of two people who had nothing left in common but their grief.

The old woman was still curled up in her swirl of ragged clothes when Frank left his office a few minutes later. Her shoulders twitched painfully as he stepped over her and moved up onto the street.

It was nearly eight in the morning, and the construction site across the street was already spewing out a deafening noise. Huge cranes lifted tons of steel girders from the trucks that lined the street, their diesel engines roaring steadily over the normal din of traffic and street cries. Within two years it would be completed, and a huge luxury condominium would rise over the squat brick tenements which now surrounded it. It would tower over everything, transform dilapidated candy stores into chic boutiques, festoon the adjoining streets with fancy restaurants and gourmet bakeries, line the sidewalks with limousines from Ninth Avenue to Broadway. From their littered stoops, the people of the old neighborhood watched in dismay as the colossus approached them. In a little while they would all be gone, swept away like driftwood before a tidal wave.

The sidewalk along 49th Street was decked with battered metal cans and huge black garbage bags, and like everyone else, Frank had to walk down a narrow stretch of walkway to keep from wading into them. Some had already been cut open and rifled during the night by people looking for the beer and soda cans they could redeem at the local food stores for five cents apiece, and because of that, waves of soiled paper and rotten vegetables sometimes swept all the way to the gutter. Each morning the street looked the same, and every time he walked along it, Frank remembered the sedate, tree-lined neighborhoods of Atlanta, remembered their gently swaying dogwoods, and wondered why—compared to this—he could not stand them.

At the corner of Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, Frank stepped into a small deli, took a table in the back and ordered a cup of coffee. Across the street he could see the local liquor store, its windows crowded with bottles, and he felt the old hunger again, as he always did in the early morning. To keep it down, he glanced to the left, trying to focus his attention on something besides his need. Two men were sitting at a small table, one gray and somewhat chubby, the other young and very thin.

“You think I don't know, Paulie?” the older man asked resentfully. “Huh? You think I don't know where it went?”

The young man said nothing. He had a long ponytail of light brown hair and it swayed rhythmically across his back as he shook his head.

“I'll tell you where the fuck it went,” the older man cried. “Up your fucking nose, that's where my goddamn money went.”

The young man remained silent, his eyes averted, staring at the small glass of tomato juice that rested on the table in front of him.

“What happens to you is your business, Paulie,” the old man said. “But nobody takes me down with them, you understand?”

The young man nodded slowly, but did not look up.

The older man took a deep breath, as if to calm himself, and when he spoke again, most of the anger had left his voice.

“Paulie,” he said, almost pleading. “Paulie, you got to be so fast to keep out of the shit, you can't believe it. You can't believe it, Paulie. Christ, you stop a second, it fucking buries you.”

A few minutes later, Frank walked back out onto the street. The noise swept over him. hard, thundering, and for an instant he thought of the dogwoods again, so white and pink in the Atlanta spring. Nothing in his life had ever seemed more false.

For a while, he walked aimlessly along the avenue, glancing into the shop windows or watching the people as they lounged about or walked hurriedly by. He wanted to begin something, but he did not know what, and it struck him that he had already lived too long in a state of helpless waiting. He didn't know what he'd been waiting for, but only that when it came, it would be wrapped in something else, that he wouldn't recognize it until, like a hand in the dark, it suddenly gripped him from behind.

It was after ten by the time he headed back down 49th Street toward his office. The garbage cans had been emptied by then, and the swollen black bags were gone. The old lady who slept at the foot of the stairs wasn't there anymore, either.

But Imalia Covallo was.

3

She was standing stiffly against the brick wall at the bottom of the stairs, and if it hadn't been for the pale white skin and luminous black eyes, Frank would not have recognized her. The sleek velvet dress of the night before had been replaced by a long denim skirt and matching jacket. Her hair was no longer pulled tightly along the sides of her head and gathered in a small bun at the back of her neck, but fell loosely across her shoulders. The pearl necklace was gone, along with the gold bracelets, and Frank could not help but notice that she looked better without them, less the figment of someone else's imagination.

“Good morning,” she said quietly. “I took your advice, I looked you up in the book.” She noticed the faintly puzzled look in his eyes. “My street clothes,” she explained. Then she smiled tentatively. “You do remember me, don't you?”

“You were at the party last night,” Frank said.

“That's right,” she said. “Imalia Covallo.”

Frank said nothing.

She looked at him with an odd, almost childlike, innocence, and despite the fact that she was over forty, he thought instantly of his daughter, Sarah, of that bewildered look she'd often had as she gazed silently out the front window.

“I suppose I look as if I'm in disguise,” Imalia said, then looked at him so strangely that for a moment Frank suspected she was precisely that, a creature hid beneath another face.

“Well, not exactly in disguise,” Imalia added quickly. She glanced toward the narrow corridor that led to his office. “This is where you work, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Most people get to work at nine,” she told him in a voice that was gently scolding, yet straining to be light, playful, to warm the air around them.

Frank said nothing.

“It's not exactly the high-rent district, is it?” she added. “For a moment I thought I must have gotten the address wrong. You know, with your living with Karen, I thought …” She stopped, as if against the wall of her own awkwardness. Her eyes darted downward quickly, then back up to him. “I didn't mean to suggest that …”