Invasion of the Blatnicks Read online

  “How could you?” Cindy asked. “Without even asking me? You don’t expect me to follow you, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “You hadn’t really thought about it? Steven, we’ve been going out for over a year. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Steve shivered and turned up his collar. “I’m sorry. But you have to understand how I felt. I wasn’t thinking about you, or us. I was just desperate. I couldn’t face telling everybody I’d been fired.”

  “You weren’t fired,” Cindy said. “You were just laid off. You can’t go around telling people you were fired or no one will want to hire you.” The traffic problem had escalated to full gridlock. Cars from 66th, including a blue and white bus full of Orthodox Jews, were stretched completely across Broadway, but the cars on Amsterdam kept going downtown, so the westbound traffic could not clear the north and south-bound lanes.

  “Cindy, I’m not looking for another job. I’m taking this job in Florida.” He looked earnestly at her. He did like her, and they always had a good time together, but was that enough? Was she the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with? Why hadn’t he thought of her when he accepted the job with Thornton?

  Cindy sat back against her chair, her hands out in front of her on the table. Her nails gleamed with a fresh coat of pink polish, and she wore just one ring, a pearl set in gold, on her right ring finger. “I have to think about this,” she said. She stood up. “I’ll give you a call.” She turned and began to stride away, sure and confident.

  The waitress, wearing a Shetland sweater and earmuffs, finally skated over and said, “Would you like to see a menu?”

  Steve shook his head and said, “No, thank you. I think I’ll just sit here until frostbite sets in.” He watched Cindy walk down the street. A dozen Orthodox Jewish men had gotten out of the bus and taken up positions throughout the intersection, directing the traffic. The ends of their long black coats swirled at their knees in the light breeze, which also threatened to blow away their black hats. Steve could see directly into the bus, where a group of women remained inside, separated from the men in front by a yellow curtain.

  Traffic had begun to clear as Cindy reached the corner. Just as she did, she caught the heel of her left shoe in an ornamental grate around a tree. She fell, wrenching her leg, and cried out sharply. Steve jumped up and ran toward her. She was crying and sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. Her briefcase had popped open and papers were skittering around in the light breeze.

  “Cindy,” Steve said. He started to pick up the papers. “Are you OK?”

  Cindy’s mascara was running in little black lines from her eyes. “Go away!”

  Steve put the papers back in her briefcase and snapped it shut. He reached down to her to pull her up. “Come on.”

  Cindy wouldn’t get up. “Just go away,” she said. “Go away!”

  People were starting to stop and stare at them. Steve stood back up and looked around. “It’s not my fault,” he said.

  A heavyset black woman walking by said, “Never is,” and Steve and Cindy looked at each other. They both started to laugh.

  “Come on, let me help you up,” Steve said. He gave her his hand again and this time she took it.

  Cindy dusted herself off and took her briefcase back. Traffic cleared, and the Orthodox men returned to their bus. “I really do need some time to myself to think about this,” Cindy said. “Will you call me before you leave?”

  “Absolutely,” Steve said, nodding.

  He walked across Broadway to the subway entrance. The station was warm and brightened by multi-colored splatters of graffiti. He stood in a well-lit area near the token booth, watching for weirdos and leaning out over the tracks as if, on seeing him, the engineer would accelerate through the tunnel and roar to a stop at his feet, gratefully throwing open the doors. In this way he kept himself from thinking about Cindy.

  But once on a train, rolling remorselessly uptown, he could no longer concentrate on the hemorrhoid ads in Spanish, the tendrils of graffiti that snaked around the seats, up the side walls of the car and across the ceiling, the scuffed tile floor and the smooth silver poles by the doors. The truth was, he realized, if he could pick up and leave New York without thinking of the consequences to Cindy and to their relationship, then he did not love her. And the idea of taking this job moved him in a way he did not understand.

  At 72nd Street a tall, thin man stepped into Steve’s car. As the train began to move, he announced, “Ladles and jellyspoons, may I have your contention.” He began to juggle three red rubber balls as he spoke.

  “I come before you, to stand behind you,” the man said, in a strong British accent, “to tell you something I known nothing about. Yes, friends, I too was a middle management cog in a corporate wheel. Until I discovered the wonders of juggling.”

  The train lurched back and forth, moving faster, then slower, but the juggler kept his balance. “It is a higher calling,” he said. He walked slowly forward in the car, towards Steve. “A matter of following your own path to enlightenment. But that path is strewn with many dangers. The world doesn’t stop just because I want to juggle. I provide pleasure, but they ask me for money! The grocer. The landlord.” He paused, savoring the sound. “The telephone company!”

  He continued walking. “Anything you can contribute toward this worthy cause would be appreciated,” the juggler said. “Look into your hearts and pocketbooks and give me what you can. And remember, someday you may want to juggle, too.” He stopped, turned, and tossed a red ball to Steve, who reflexively batted it back to him. The juggler caught it deftly, pulling the ball back into its cycle as if it had never left. A few passengers applauded. When he got off at 96th, Steve dropped a five-dollar bill into the man’s cap and smiled.

  The next night, Steve met his friend Dan Farber at a yuppie bar at South Street Seaport for drinks. Dan managed a bookstore at the Seaport, and had been Steve’s friend since their high school days in Pennsylvania. “I don’t see how you can do it,” Dan said, shaking his head at Steve at the crowded bar. “You’re trading New York City for a place in the sun where old people go to die. Who needs museums, Broadway, libraries, poetry readings? You can go to the beach.”

  “I can also afford a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony,” Steve said. “No state tax, no city tax. That much more money in my pocket.”

  “That much more for somebody to steal,” Dan said. “The crime’s gotta be worse there than it is here. I mean, you ever watch Miami Vice? You get blown away just walking down the street there.”

  “I can get blown away here, too, and at least there I’ll be warm.”

  “I think you’re crazy. You had a good job. I mean, I wouldn’t want a job like that, but you made about twice as much as I did. How did your boss take the news?”

  Steve looked around. It was Friday night, and the bar was filled with young men and women in business suits, all of them presumably gainfully employed in the concrete canyons of Wall Street. How would any of them react to being fired? Steve shrugged. “He was nice,” he said. “He said I’d done a good job, and he was sorry I was leaving.”

  Dan shook his head. “I couldn’t take that, stuck behind a computer, never talking to anybody except to say hand me that printout please.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Steve said. He’d hated the job, but it was his job, and so he felt compelled to defend it. “I mean, after all, it’s what I was trained to do.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ll never see me in business school, either.” Dan leaned close to Steve. “Look around. All these lemmings. It’s such a group mentality down here. As soon as some other bar opens and a few people discover it, the yuppies will all swarm over there and this place will look like the morgue.”

  “You don’t look that different from them,” Steve said. Dan was wearing a gray tweed blazer, a light blue oxford cloth shirt, and a nubby blue tie. Steve was wearing a sport shirt and a windbrea
ker, which excluded him from consideration.

  “It’s all in the details,” Dan said. “A jacket, but not a suit jacket. Look around you. All suits. And the ties. Power ties. Red, yellow, paisley. Silk, not wool or cotton.”

  “Like that guy over there,” Steve said, nodding toward a thin man with horn-rimmed glasses and hair tightly plastered down. “Mr. Repressed. He probably has button-down underwear.”

  “And how about that woman down the bar?” Dan asked. “With the high heels.”

  “The better to step on you on her way to the executive suite.”

  “Ouch! Heel prints in your cheek.” Dan mimed pain.

  “And a knife in your back,” Steve said. “Jesus, it’s good to be out of that.” He drained the last of his beer. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  They had dinner at a fish restaurant a few blocks away, and then walked back towards the subway as the Fulton Fish Market was opening for the night.

  All around them, men in black rubber aprons were unloading crates of fresh fish covered with ice. The cobblestones around the fancy new buildings were slippery with fish entrails, and all the old shuttered warehouses in the blocks north of the Seaport were open. Bright lights on poles gave the whole area an eerie look.

  “Think of what you’re leaving behind,” Dan said, waving his arm expansively. He was not as tall as Steve, but had the same slim build. Someone who did not know them might have thought them brothers. “Congestion. Smog. Urban blight. And fish guts.”

  “I’m sure there are plenty of fish guts in Florida,” Steve said.

  Dan began to sing a silly song about fish that they had learned in elementary school. What am I doing? Steve wondered. The only thing he knew for sure was that when he talked to Max Thornton, when he walked around the trailer and the construction site, something felt right. That was all he had to go by. He joined Dan at the chorus, and they sang all the way to the subway station.

  The next morning the movers arrived to pack. Steve had already delivered a few bags of clothes and books to the Salvation Army, disconnected the stereo, and emptied the refrigerator. On the kitchen table there was a small pile of things that belonged to Cindy. A Max Factor lipstick in a shade called Coral Pink. A book she had lent him called 21st Century Hot Careers. A crew-necked Fair Isle sweater in pastel green and blue that he found at the back of his closet. A can of hair spray, a toothbrush, and a bottle of her contact lens cleaner; she’d called it her “overnight kit” and left it in his bathroom cabinet.

  He called her office number. “Hi, it’s me,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “I found some of your stuff when I was packing. I’d like to get it back to you.”

  There was a pause while Cindy considered this. “All right. Can you come over tonight? I don’t have to work too late. I should be home by eight.”

  “Then I’ll see you then.”

  The packing was finished by late afternoon and the men began loading the truck. Steve put Cindy’s things in a plastic grocery bag and piled it next to his luggage. Just before eight, the movers hauled the last box out to the truck. Steve dropped his key with the superintendent and took a taxi to Cindy’s apartment. When she opened the door he was standing there surrounded by suitcases, holding the grocery bag. “I guess you’re really leaving,” she said.

  “I’ve got a ten o’clock flight.”

  She took the grocery bag from him and then stood back to let him come in. “Do you want a Perrier?” she asked.

  “Sure.” Her kitchen was an alcove off the living room, and he watched while she went to the refrigerator, took out the small green bottle, opened it, and handed it to him. “I really hope we can stay friends.” He took a drink of the cold fizzy water and remembered that he hated it.

  “People always say that.” She walked to the window, which looked out over a dead-end alley. She closed the blinds. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us,” she said. “Maybe we can be friends, maybe we can’t. You’ll be so far away.”

  “Not that far. It’s only a three-hour flight. And we could talk on the phone, and text, and IM.” He drank some more water, and then put the bottle down on the coffee table.

  “I’ll think about that on a cold Saturday night, when I want to cuddle up and listen to music,” Cindy said. “I’ll just pull that phone right up next to me.”

  Steve looked at his watch. “I guess I should go.”

  Cindy came over to open the door for him. “I will miss you,” he said.

  “I’ll miss you, too.” She offered her cheek, and he kissed it.

  A cab passed by within a few minutes, and he made his flight with plenty of time to spare. He looked around at the other passengers, wondering if they knew any more of their futures than he knew of his. As the plane lifted off he looked at the lit skyline of Manhattan in the distance, beyond the flat suburbs of Queens and the dirty water of the East River. It looked like Oz, and Steve felt like he was Dorothy just before Toto jumped out of her arms, ready to leave the Emerald City and search for his real home in a hot-air balloon piloted by a crazy wizard.

  6 – Dancing Bear on Speed

  Steve didn’t want to disturb his parents by arriving so late at night, or have to drive so far in the morning, so he spent the night at a motel and arrived at the site at nine. The flat amber plain stretched away from him for acres in every direction, broken only by the trailers, the steel skeletons of the unfinished buildings, and a few pockets of native vegetation that had not yet been bulldozed. Unlike New York, where he could only see tiny slivers of sky between high-rises, the sky here was vast and uninterrupted except for thin trails of cirrus clouds and the occasional hawk, floating on updrafts high above.

  He was impressed at the level of activity. He’d never worked at a place where things were so lively on Monday morning. He had to wait for ten minutes while three other crises were solved before anyone paid attention to him.

  The receptionist, Celeste, was finally able to sit back at her desk and light a long, thin cigar. Steve reintroduced himself and asked for Max Thornton, who it turned out was in Washington bothering the staff at the home office. He had not told anyone to expect Steve.

  “Since Uncle Max is not here, can we do anything else to help you?” Celeste asked.

  “I’m here to start work.”

  She looked him over. “We don’t really have any positions open. But you can always leave your resume.”

  “I’m not looking for a job,” he said. “I have one. Here. Mr. Thornton hired me.”

  “That Uncle Max,” Celeste said, shaking her head.

  “What?” Steve asked. “What do you mean?”

  Celeste rested her thin cigar in an ashtray shaped like an alligator that bore the Everglades Galleria logo. “I don’t know whether he thinks this is funny or he’s just confused,” she said.

  Steve felt a hollow place at the bottom of his throat. Max Thornton had never put anything in writing, after all. He said he hated paperwork, that they’d get everything in order when Steve showed up in Florida.

  Celeste picked up her phone and pressed an intercom number. “You won’t believe it, Miranda,” she said. “There’s someone else here saying Uncle Max offered him a job.” She listened to the phone for a minute and laughed. “I know, I know,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”

  “But I gave up a rent-controlled apartment,” Steve said when she had hung up. His voice broke. “I have to have a job here.”

  Celeste laughed again. “Oh, don’t worry, you can work here,” she said. “I wasn’t saying you couldn’t. But Uncle Max hates to tell anybody what he’s thinking. You’re the third person he’s hired without telling anyone else. Have a seat and we’ll get this sorted.”

  She turned to a base radio station and spoke into the microphone. “Come in, Junior,” she said. “Base to Junior.”

  After some static, a voice said, “Come in, base.”

  “Uncle Max has hired us a new friend,” Celeste said. She turned to
Steve. “Did he say what your job was going to be?”

  “Assistant project manager?” Steve asked meekly.

  “An assistant project manager,” Celeste said into the radio. “Looks like this one’s for you.”

  “About fucking time,” Junior said.

  “Now Junior, remember what the FCC said about that language.” Celeste put her hand over the microphone and giggled. Then she said, “What do you want me to do with him? And remember, I’m a married woman.”

  “Send him out to building A,” Junior’s voice crackled. “And since when did being married ever stop anybody?”

  “Base out.” Celeste switched the radio off and turned back to Steve. She pointed out building A to him on a large map of the site on the wall behind her. “You can’t miss Junior,” she said. “He’s about six feet six and he’s wearing a tie that looks like it ought to have an extension cord.”

  “I think I can find him,” Steve said.

  It was swelteringly hot as he walked across the site, and he unbuttoned his shirt and loosened his tie. He was sweating by the time he reached Building A and found Junior.

  “Steve, this is Bill Benzakry,” Junior said, introducing him to a short man in his early sixties whose arms were covered with faded purple, green and blue tattoos. “Bill’s the chief superintendent. Anything gets fucked up, it’s his fault.” They stood between a stack of steel girders and the crane that was lifting them up to the top of building A, and Steve kept worrying about the sway of the crane arm and the big hook holding a girder high above their heads.

  Steve noticed, when he brought his attention back down to the ground, that Bill was missing the top joint of his right index finger. “Don’t mind Bill’s finger,” Junior said, watching Steve. “He just got too close to a band saw one day. That’s when he decided he’d make a better superintendent than a carpenter.”

  Bill inhaled on his cigarette, and said, in a Southern drawl, “Junior, you’re full of shee-it, you know that?”