Stay (13 page)

T
he red-breasted grosbeaks lifted
from the clearing just after dawn. Three hours later, I lifted from Asheville regional airport, on my way to New York. I’d left Tammy with the truck, a brand-new cell phone, and a list of things she could attend to in the cabin and clearing, if she felt confident to do so. “I should be back tomorrow or the day after, but I’ll call.”

The flight was uneventful, and this time when I checked in at the Hilton I remembered to ask for a king-size bed. King beds are often put in corner rooms so that any noise the occupants might make is less likely to disturb other guests; the greater distance from the elevator means less foot traffic, and so more peace and less danger. They are also very handy to the emergency exits. This time, too, I remembered to bring underwear. Unpacking took longer.

At four in the afternoon, the hotel’s corner coffee lounge was largely deserted—just me, the baby grand in the corner that looked as though it hadn’t been played for months, and the solitary customer who sat with his back to huge windows onto Sixth and stared morosely at a legal pad covered in scribbled figures. I took a seat in the corner, facing out, where I could watch both the room and the three pigeons strutting in and out of the shadow on Fifty-third Street. In the sun their neck feathers shone green and purple, in the shade their tiny eyes glowed brilliant orange. Eventually a server in black trousers and white shirt came over to find out what I wanted. I ordered a latte. He ambled off.

Tammy had given me Karp’s cell phone number. “He always answers it, if he’s at home If he’s working, or with a client, he keeps it switched to voice mail.”

“Always?”

“I was with him for nearly four months, I never saw an exception. He takes that phone with him to the bathroom, the bedroom, when he’s emptying the garbage. He has four batteries: it’s always on. It’s the only phone he uses.”

“What about when he’s out, but not at work?”

She had frowned as she thought back. “I’m not sure. I don’t remember it ringing when we were out eating dinner or at a movie or anything.”

I took my own cell phone from my pocket and dialed his number. It went straight to voice mail. “This is Geordie Karp. Leave a message.” He was working—but where, and for how long. A lot of the initial work on any project would be informal, she said. He would sit and watch for hours, not even taking notes, then he would talk to the client—again, usually informally; he liked cafés and food courts and bistros. It was only after that that he made detailed notes, and set up his cameras to record data. Then he analyzed the video data and drew up recommendations He could be anywhere, at any stage in the process.

My latte arrived. It tasted like Starbucks; not a patch on Dornan’s. Two of the three pigeons took flight and landed on the verdigrised metal sculpture at the corner, on Sixth. I had no idea what it was meant to be, but from the back it looked like an enormous green dildo. Perhaps the artist had been making some kind of statement about prostituting her art. I tried to estimate its size, ran through scale comparisons in my head: it would have to be wielded by a person about the same height as the Hilton. Assuming that person was having sex with someone of the same proportions, and that they were enjoying themselves and thrashed about a bit, they’d do more damage to Manhattan than Godzilla. For a while I had fun with film titles:
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Couple. Dyke! They Came from Bikini Atoll
… The body doubles would have a hard time of it, take after take rolling naked on tiny model buildings. Perhaps they would be paid time and a half, to make up for all the bruising.

It took me a while to realize Julia had not appeared to join in the fun. I tried not to think about it.

Karp liked to eat out, he liked to party, and when he had the choice he rose late and worked late. I could either check out his favorite haunts, one by one, or I could relax until tomorrow; he would be in or out of the loft at some point and I could track him from there.

I walked south under an early evening sky: violet and strawberry and peaches-and-cream, like some fanciful layer cake. I ate at a restaurant in the MetLife Building, where the haricot soup was better than mediocre, the service impeccable, and the highly polished marble floor slippery. One old man with frail skull and wrist but strong chin, too proud to use a cane although it was clear he needed one, nearly fell three times just getting to the bathroom. Perhaps the food was so expensive because of all the lawsuits.

It was still early, so I walked the fifteen blocks to the hotel. It was about nine when I got back, and the downstairs bar was filling up. I found a seat near the stone sphinx and snagged a harassed-looking server. I’d been drinking Syrah with dinner, but here they didn't have anything decent by the glass. I asked for brandy instead, and it arrived at the right temperature, and more swiftly than my afternoon latte.

When I brought the glass to my mouth, the fumes punched right into my hindbrain and the memories there: sitting in the restaurant in Oslo, stomach full of good food, sipping Armagnac while Julia leaned across the table and put her hand on my arm, her lovely hair swinging across her jaw, smoky sable in the low lighting. She wore the gorget I’d just given her, and her smile was lopsided, patient, because she knew I’d bought the gift because I loved her; it was just that I didn’t know that yet, and she would have to wait a little longer for me to work it out.

I sipped, and the hot liquor eased the pain in the center of my chest, warmed the unfallen tears, made me long to bury my face in a woman’s hair. In Julia’s hair. I sipped again, and breathed more easily, and knew I wouldn’t curl up and weep in the bar of the Hilton.

The bar was almost full, but the conventioneers—the Sixth Annual National Minority Business Conference—were easy to spot. They sat in tight groups of three or four, mostly men, mostly in black or charcoal suits with pin-striped shirts and silk ties. It was clear from the volume that most were meeting for the first time: as strangers, they didn’t know who was the most important, so they had to seem comfortable, to take up space physically and verbally; they were defining their places in the hierarchy. Laughter and booming voices rose and fell in unpredictable patterns, accompanied by lots of backslapping and gaze-meeting. The occasional woman in these groups showed the same affinity for solid primary colors—sky blue, bright red—as women in politics used to.

A young Japanese woman stood as three sober-suited Japanese men approached her table. She bowed quickly, a test bow, to which they bowed in fast response, but a fraction more deeply, and now they had each other’s mettle. She held a business card in both hands and bowed again deeply, committed, and they followed suit. Bow, bow deeper, straighten, bow more deeply still, back and forth. Inverse hierarchy: allow me the privilege of abasing myself more than your most illustrious self!

The conventioneers laughed loudly in their corner. I wondered how each group would manage in the other’s culture.

The Japanese eventually sorted themselves out, and I judged by the body language that the woman was some lower-level employee pitching something to three superiors. She did not seem to be having much success. Somewhere in the back of the room, someone lit a joint. No one would call the police; the charge wouldn’t be worth the negative publicity. An extra loud burst of raucous laughter rolled over the room from the front, followed by a higher-pitched but longer-lasting version from the back, where the joint was being smoked. It would just get worse. Time for bed.

I woke, slick with sweat, at four in the morning. “Julia?” She had never been gone so long. I sat up. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean it.” But I had, I’d wanted her to shut up, just for a moment, and now it seemed she had shut up forever. “Julia?” I listened, but all I could hear were sirens in the street below, the hum of the fan, and the churning of blood through my veins.

Sitting at the table by the window with my tea and toast the next morning, I found it hard to believe that it was autumn. It seemed more like spring: puffy white clouds scudding by, sunshine, spits of rain. Even shackled by miles of road and pinned by monstrous glass and concrete towers, nature was exuberant. Karp, assuming he was tucked up in his windowless loft, would be missing it.

I finished my breakfast, wiped my mouth, and called him. He picked up after five rings. He sounded annoyed that the caller wouldn’t respond, or maybe by the lack of Caller ID. I folded the phone. Time to hunt.

SoHo’s huge, cast-iron-framed buildings were originally erected in the middle of the nineteenth century to house companies such as Tiffany’s and Lord & Taylor; the lower floors were designed as display windows, perfect for the art galleries and boutiques and upscale stores of today. Across the narrow cobbled street from the building that housed Karp’s loft were two cafés, a gallery, and a bar. Surveillance here would be easy and comfortable. Although Tammy had told me Karp never, ever left before eleven in the morning, I took a window seat in the first café at ten-thirty. The place was empty, and seemed likely to stay that way until lunchtime. I hung my jacket over the back of the chair, ordered mineral water, and opened the paperback I’d bought at the hotel—a best-seller, nothing too engrossing. If the elevator doors across the street opened, I wanted to be able to catch it with my peripheral vision. Good surveillance and good books don’t mix.

It was eleven forty-five and I’d reached page 182 by the time the café began to fill up and the server started asking me every two minutes if I wanted to order anything else. She was new at her job, reluctant to push me, but an older woman at the counter kept punting her back in my direction. There was nothing on the menu that appealed, so I left her a twenty-dollar bill—about a four hundred percent tip—and walked over to the next café. They didn’t have a table by the window, so I moved on to the gallery. Which was a mistake.

Like most galleries, most of the time, it was empty except for the owner in a tiny, glass-walled office that was really no more than a cubicle. He gave me about forty seconds on my own with the installation closest to the window—what looked like a rag doll impaled on a tripod with a nearby video projector beaming a moving face onto its cloth head—before he couldn’t stand it any longer and came beetling over the Swedish finished maple floor, smile glued on, opening his hands and mouth, about to launch into some gushing praise of the art, and I felt reality shudder and stretch, and a stream of alternate worlds purled forth from this one, like soap bubbles when you blow through the filmy circle on the plastic wand. In one bubble world, Julia was still alive, and might be entering this gallery to talk to this man about buying the art on display for some corporate investment team. In another, she had never discovered corporate art investment and was running the place herself, and it was she who stood before me, looking me up and down, trying to judge whether I was good for the outrageous prices she was asking, tilting her head to listen, then tossing it back to swing her hair out of the way, smiling at something I said—because I would say something to make her smile, to see those indigo eyes glow and flicker like night-lights—checking my hand for a wedding ring. In yet another, we walked in together, trading a knowing look, having made a bet on how long the owner of
this
gallery would give us before rushing over. Then the owner spoke, and the words clapped like quick, vicious hands on every bubble until it was just a second-rate gallery in SoHo, empty of Julia.

I have no idea what that man said to me. or I to him, but eventually he went back to his box and I closed my eyes. Years, Dornan had said. Dear god.

Sometime later, the owner cleared his throat behind me and I realized I’d been standing, eyes closed, for a while. I walked onto the street. Rain spat cold on my face. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes. I fumbled out my phone, hit the redial button, and only had to listen to it ring three times before Karp snapped “Yes!” He must be waking up.

The second café now had a window table vacant. I tripped in the doorway, caught my elbow on the chair sitting down, and when I tried to make sense of the menu, found I was holding it upside down. Once I had it the right way up, I ordered a lamb and leek sandwich with mesclun in balsamic vinaigrette. I tried to breathe evenly, tried to remember to watch Karp's door, tried to remember why it was important.

But then my sandwich came, and the act of reaching out and picking up the sturdy bread and thick meat, and lifting it to my mouth, all in logical sequence, helped the world make sense again.

I ate the sandwich methodically, followed by every leaf on the plate, then returned to the paperback. It took forty minutes to get through the next hundred pages, forty minutes of ridiculous plot culminating in two wet-behind-the-ears lawyers scooting on skis through snow-paralyzed city streets being shot at while their boss digs with her hands like a dog in the sand at some beach house location. By two o’clock I’d finished it and was leafing through the beginning again, marveling that any editor would countenance such stuff or that so many readers would buy it. Then again, I had.

The elevator doors opened.

Without taking my eyes off the elevator, I put the book and a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and stood.

“Hey, you forgot your book,” my server said. I ignored her.

Tammy had described Karp as tall, about six-two, and the man walking north up West Broadway was six feet at most. But it was Karp. The hair was the same, reddish gold in boyish curls, as was his walk, eager and on his toes, almost bouncy, a walk much younger than his age, which Tammy had told me was late forties. The clothes were younger, too, sharply cut khakis, leather jacket, boots, shirt, saddle-stitched laptop case, the
Details
magazine look of a twenty-five-year-old making real money for the first time. I kept to the opposite side of the street, about thirty feet behind. We walked along at a brisk pace through streets full of that mix of tourist and resident which, along with the flowers and iron railings and small shops, reminded me of Knightsbridge.

Every now and again he stopped and looked in a shop window to check his reflection in the glass, but he never ran his hand through the curl that fell just so over his forehead, or tugged at the waistband of his trousers to look thinner. Odd. He walked for three blocks before turning right on Prince and buying coffee from an espresso stand. His manner with the stand owner was easy and confident. They both smiled. His smile switched off abruptly as soon as he was out of the owner’s sight. Two empty cabs cruised by as he passed the mural at Prince and Greene. He walked on, sipping every now and again, avoiding pedestrians with relaxed, easy steps, frowning at a woman carrying two bags who bumped his laptop as she passed. The frown, too, was gone an instant later. Another empty cab going in his direction. He was walking all the way, then. I walked behind him, on the same side now, still thirty feet away, loose-muscled and relaxed, watching, assessing.

When he turned onto Broadway proper, which seethed with pedestrians, I shortened the distance to fifteen feet His boots, brown nubuck, either were brand new or lavished with extraordinary care; his jacket was still uncreased; his hair bounced gently and shone whenever the sun poured out from behind the clouds. No rings on his hands, which were strong and well manicured and quite hairless. Half a block from a large store with a checked flag hanging outside, he stopped dead on the sidewalk and just stood there. There didn’t seem to be anything to see except for the people and traffic. I stepped into the doorway of an antique shop until he nodded to himself, and walked on. I was still twenty-five feet behind him when he turned into the store with the flag. I followed him in.

Cheap stoplights, huge floor space, a jumble of racks, plain-looking signs advertising jeans, army-navy clothes, and club gear: nothing like the upscale emporiums Tammy said he usually patronized or consulted for. At any other SoHo store I would have waited by the door, but there were several levels here, and probably more than one exit. I’d have to follow him This was not easy; I couldn’t stay in his blind spot, because I couldn’t predict where his gaze might fall. One minute he’d be walking along slowly, looking at the floor, the next he’d stop and turn and watch the tourists goggling at vinyl fetish clubwear, then he’d go at the pillars with their mirrors, at the mannequins in their cargo shorts and caps. After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn’t see people as people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way, and he wouldn’t notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit. I stayed about twenty feet back and watched.

His face while he worked was empty, removed, like that of an Olympic springboard diver as he sets his toes on the edge, spreads his arms, and begins the bouncing jump. When he stood still, his body canted slightly to the left, with his head tilted to the right in compensation. He kept his hands clasped behind him, like male members of the British royal family, and I doubted—even if he had not had to carry his laptop—that he would ever put them in his pockets. Judging by his posture and musculature, he was not a physical person; there were no laugh or frown lines on his boyish face. A man who lived in his head, or in the heads of others.

Around me, shoppers moved in miniature flocks of four or five, doing a lot of looking and talking, in German and Japanese and Portuguese, but not much buying. No doubt Karp had been called in to remedy that.

He spent hours inside the store, watching, listening, absorbing. I followed him from floor to floor. At some point he decided he was done: his face tightened, then curved in a practiced smile which made his eyes twinkle, and he walked purposefully to the second floor, and across to the far wall, where he talked to a woman behind a counter. She obviously did not respond as quickly as he felt was his due, because he put his bag on the counter, leaned forward, and spoke forcefully, until she picked up the phone. Less than a minute later, a door marked PRIVATE opened, Karp shook hands with a young man wearing jeans and a hundred-dollar haircut, and they went through the door, shutting it behind them. The room was built against a sidewall; it was unlikely that it led to another exit. I settled myself behind a row of mesh T-shirts to wait.

When he emerged half an hour later, he was still smiling, still twinkling—at least until the door closed behind him, when his face smoothed. I followed him onto the street, with its rush-hour traffic of frowning pedestrians and honking cabs, where he stepped behind a lamppost, put his laptop between his feet, and pulled out a phone. I moved closer.

“—about, oh,” he looked at his watch, “an hour? Two? Okay, eight o’clock. Yeah, yeah, or we can order in at my place if that’s what— Sure. We can decide later.” Not a business call.

He went back to his loft, walking briskly. This time I watched from the bar, drinking mineral water. He came out after only ten minutes, minus the laptop, wearing corduroy trousers and a sweater under his leather jacket. I followed him two blocks to Greene Street, and a restaurant and cocktail lounge paneled in dark wood, where he sat at the bar and nodded to one of the bartenders but didn’t speak. I took a table against the wall right behind him where he wouldn’t see me. A margarita appeared on the bar in front of him. He came in here a lot, then. It hadn’t been on the American Express bill. He sipped, smiled appreciatively—the same curving, twinkling smile I’d seen him assume at the store—and said something to the bartender, who laughed. The other bartender, this one a man, came over and said something. They all laughed. Lots of exaggerated head tilting, smiling, hand movements: flirting body language.

I ordered a Heineken.

For the next hour and a half I watched him flirt indiscriminately with men and women, couples and groups and singles, flashing out that smile, hooking them in, dismissing them after a sentence or two when it became clear he could have them if he wanted. Geordie Karp did not add up.

The first eighteen months I worked for the Atlanta police force it was as an ordinary patrol officer. One of the most frequent calls my partner Frank and I’d get would be domestic violence. The abusers came in every size and shape and color, every background and political stripe, but the vast majority had this in common: somewhere inside, they were afraid. The bigger and louder and richer they were, the easier it was to overlook that fear, but in the habitual abuser—cases where a onetime psychosis or injury or other unusual circumstance was not to blarne—it was always there. It might be fear of losing control, or of not being loved, of being ridiculed, or separated, or of being less somehow, but you could see it. Something in the way they held themselves, in the way they tried to fast-talk the officers who arrived, even, sometimes, in their misplaced pride.

Geordie Karp did not add up as an abuser. I could see no fear in him; I could see no genuine emotion at all. Everything, the smiles, the flirting, the frowns when he had been bumped into on the street, the peremptory attitude towards the woman behind the counter in the store, was fake: gone the second he no longer needed it. Learned behavior. I went through all the things Tammy had told me: the good sex, the confusing signals— treated as an equal one minute and raped the next—and his rapid, all-too-plausible explanations. There had been no putting Tammy on a pedestal, no overly fast discussion, when they first met, of them marrying or spending their lives together—none of the classic profile pointers of abuse. Tammy had been an experiment, an amusement, one of many, most probably.

The SoHo bar was overlaid with an image of a bar I had gone to many times with Frank. He would hitch his gun belt to a more comfortable position, order a draft and a bowl of pretzels, and expound upon the three kinds of crazy. “There’s your basic loser, some guy whose wife maybe tells him his dick’s too short so he goes on a toot and picks the wrong pansy to beat on. There’s your psychos and sickos—oh, excuse me for breathing, your
sociopaths
—who are screwed up from crap in their childhoods. That looniness goes way deep, they’re just fucked. And then there’s your As-Ifs, what they call borderline personality disorders, and these guys aren’t human. They look normal, but they don’t feel a goddamn thing, don’t know happy from sad from a hole in the ground. They walk around smiling and frowning and pretending to feel shit, and think everyone else out there is pretending too. No one’s real to these guys, you know what I mean? I don’t mind telling you, Torvingen, they scare the crap out of me.“