Fin & Lady: A Novel (11 page)

“So that’s the story. Pretty bad, huh?” Fin said as they sat in the coffee shop.

“Love,” said Biffi, “is bondage.”

“Lady likes freedom.”

Biffi put his chin in his hands.

Fin did the same. “Do you want to go to the World’s Fair again? Or something?”

“The world,” Biffi said, “is not a fair.”

“No, the World’s Fair is a fair.”

“You are very young, Fin.”

“God, you’re as bad as her.”

“No one can compete with Lady,” Biffi said.

After the hamburgers, they walked back to the house and sat on the stoop.

“If your sister finds me here on her doorstep, I am a dead duck.”

He sighed. He took out his pipe, rubbed the bowl on his nose, then pulled out a yellowing tobacco pouch. “Here,” he said, handing both to Fin. Fin filled the pipe, used Biffi’s little tool to tamp it down the way Biffi had taught him, then watched the flame of the lighter sucked down into the bowl as Biffi puffed. The smell of the smoke was sweet and dark. Biffi’s hands were large. How long had it been since Fin had held his father’s hand?

“Sometimes I miss my father,” he said. “Although I guess he wasn’t such a nice man.”

“I miss my father every day, and he was a terrible and selfish man.”

Biffi puffed on the pipe. Fin closed his eyes.

“You’ll tell me what goes on with this unworthy uncle?”

Fin opened his eyes. “Like a spy,” he said.

“Like a friend,” said Biffi.

Spies

He asked Phoebe if she would help, and she immediately produced a pair of binoculars from a closet. She positioned herself at her window, which faced Lady’s window across the street.

“I don’t want to look in Lady’s window,” Fin said. “What if she’s getting dressed or something?”

“You’re such a pervert.”

“No, I said I
don’t
want to…”

“Only a pervert would even think of that.”

Fin said, “Just aim them downstairs, okay?”

And they looked through the living-room windows and watched Mabel emptying ashtrays.

“This guy has got to be removed from the picture. We have less than a year. Our mission is clear.”

“We will not fail,” Phoebe said.

That night, they met in the space beneath Phoebe’s stairway where the door to the kitchen was.

“They just left,” Fin said. “They went to the Café Au Go Go. Can we get in there?”

“What did you
do
all summer, Fin?” It was a coffeehouse, of course they could get in, Phoebe went all the time. Sometimes she just listened from outside, sometimes she had ice cream inside.

They stood outside this time. Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto were performing. “The Girl from Ipanema,” soft and seductive, floated out to them. At about ten o’clock, when Fin and Phoebe sat sleepily on the sidewalk, backs against the wall of the building, Lady and Jack walked out. Jack had his hand on the small of Lady’s back. As if he owned her. Phoebe put her finger to her lips. Fin watched Lady put her head on Jack’s shoulder.

“Criminy Dutch,” he whispered to Phoebe when Jack and Lady had turned the corner.

“That was close.”

“Come on,” he said. “We have to follow them.”

They kept at least a block behind Lady and Jack. They followed them home, home to the house on Charles Street. Watched them stop abruptly. Heard Lady’s voice: “What the hell are you doing here?” Heard a male voice: “Thought I’d stop by.” It was a drunk male voice.

“That’s
him
,” Fin said.

“Who?”

“Uncle Ty.”

“I thought it was Uncle Jack.”

“No, the other one.”

“You broke my heart,” Uncle Ty was saying. Loudly. “Do you know that?”

“Yes, of course I know.”

“It’s still broken. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“Of course I know that, Ty. Am I blind? Now, come on, let’s get you home.”

“I hope someone breaks your heart, Lady,” Uncle Ty said.

“I don’t have a heart.”

“True, true…”

“Jack!” Lady said, as Tyler collapsed against her. “Help me, for God’s sake.”

“Who is he?” Jack said.

“Just someone.”

Jack put Ty’s arm around his neck and hauled him away from Lady.

“Who are
you
?” Tyler asked Jack.

“He’s no one,” Lady said.

“Hey!” said Jack.

“Are you going to help me or not?”

Uncle Jack pulled Uncle Ty toward Seventh Avenue.

“Taxi,” Lady called, and a cab stopped at her feet. She unloaded Uncle Ty into the backseat and slammed the door.

“Taxi!” she called again, and another cab pulled up, like magic. She opened the door and motioned Jack to get in.

“Where’re we going?” he said.

Lady closed the door on him, too.

“
You’re
going. Home.”

“Hey!”

“You said that already. Off you go.”

Fin and Phoebe ran home to get there ahead of Lady, Phoebe peeling off to go up her steps, Fin bolting up his.

“Lavender Jesus, what a night. What are you doing up, Fin?” Lady said when she came in.

“Nothing.”

She mixed herself a martini, and Fin got up to go to bed. His heart was still pounding from running.

“Stick around,” Lady said. “Keep me company.”

They sat beside each other on the couch.

“Sometimes it gets to me,” she said.

“What?”

“It.”

“Yeah,” Fin said. “Me, too.”

“What if I really don’t have a heart?”

“Like the Tin Man. But he really did.”

She put an arm around him and drew him close.

“I do love
you
, that’s for sure,” she said.

“I guess you have a heart, then.”

But how could you have a heart when everyone wanted to tear off pieces? And everyone did, until there was nothing left, that’s what she meant. Everyone tearing like wolves. Except him.

“I’m still only twenty-four,” she said. “You know? So how am I going to do everything I want to do in one year? How?”

Fin sleepily closed his eyes. He already had Lady’s heart. In his own heart.

“We have half the same DNA,” he said.

“Poor you,” she said.

*   *   *

It had gotten hot again, so hot that it seemed as though summer wouldn’t be able to end even if it tried. Fin was at Phoebe’s house, sitting as usual between her open window and a large, noisy fan. The binoculars rested on the windowsill. He and Phoebe took turns looking through them.

“Maybe we should be out seeking clues. Instead of just sitting here,” she said.

“We could go observe the uncles,” Fin said. “In their native habitats.”

“Yeah, not your sister, who sleeps all day.”

“Tyler came over again.”

“Crap. She has a complex, I guess.”

“She’s still seeing that dumbbell Jack, too, but she won’t even speak to Biffi.”

Phoebe said, “Did you ever think that maybe Lady was just sowing her wild oats?”

“That’s what guys do. Not girls.” Fin lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling, which Phoebe had painted with yellow stars. Jewish stars.

“Those stars are sort of depressing, Phoebe. Like concentration-camp depressing.”

“No kidding.”

Fin went home and flipped through his sister’s address book, which she kept in the kitchen on the counter below the wall phone. Beneath the ballpoint doodles and pencil squiggles, he found Tyler Morrison; Morrison, Frost and Morrison, attorneys-at-law.

“Do you know which bus to take?” he asked Phoebe.

“I shall not dignify your inquiry with an answer. Of course I do.”

They sat side by side on the bus, the window open, the air streaming in hot and heavy, almost solid. The night before, Tyler had come over and told Fin if you wanted to get ahead you needed to go to prep school. “You want to get ahead, right?” he said.

“Ahead of what?”

“Ahead of this,” Tyler said, raising a fist, laughing.

Then Lady came downstairs and Tyler handed Fin a wrapped box. It was a G.I. Joe doll. “You like toy soldiers, right?” he said.

“He doesn’t know the difference between a toy soldier and a doll,” Fin said to Phoebe.

When he’d asked Lady what Uncle Ty was doing skulking around again, she said it had just happened, the way things do. “I don’t know, Fin. Tyler is a part of my past. Sometimes history makes you feel more…”

“Historical?”

She laughed. “Wretched child.
Young.
It makes you feel young. No, that’s not it, either. Secure? No. What am I trying to say? I guess it’s that I remember him. Which is okay, until he reminds me of Hugo Hadley, Esquire. History can only take you so far, I suppose.”

“To the present,” Fin said to Phoebe. “Which Tyler Morrison occupies too much of.”

“This has something to do with an Electra complex,” Phoebe said. “But don’t worry too much. Lady is a drifter.”

Would Lady just drift and drift, he wondered, down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, bumping one shore, then the opposite shore, with another little leaf following in her wake, floating past her on its way to boarding school? Fin used to place the curled leaves of a tulip tree in the stream near his grandparents’ house and watch them navigate. Until they sank. He remembered the dappled shade for a moment, the sound of the stream. It was a treat, sometimes, to look back, to savor the loss, as if it were something sweet to eat. The sadness. His mother’s voice. The smack of a cow’s tail against its side, swatting away flies. Even the flies. Flies were different in the country. Lazy. Slow. Maybe that’s what Lady meant about history.

“Tyler didn’t really do anything yet, did he?” Phoebe’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “He didn’t sell your livestock.”

“They’re not livestock. They’re cows.”

“They’re alive. And they’re stock.”

“They’re cows.”

And no, Tyler hadn’t sold them. Yet. Fin called Mr. Cornelius, the music teacher renting the property, every two weeks to make sure, no matter what Lady said trying to reassure him. Mr. Cornelius said the cows were all doing beautifully, though they missed Fin.

“How can you tell?” Fin asked.

“A mournful moo,” said Mr. Cornelius, who was considered artistic and therefore, pardonably, eccentric.

“Let’s wait till Tyler comes down for lunch,” Phoebe said. “They go to lunch and drink martinis.”

“Who?”

“Lawyers. My father told me. Then they’re too tired to do any work in the afternoon. So they go see my father. Because they can lie down. Because he’s a shrink.”

“Sure.”

“Well, the martini part is true.”

“Sure.”

Tyler appeared and left the building with two other men. Five blocks later, the three men went into a restaurant. Fin and Phoebe stood uncertainly outside, watching through the plate glass as the trio sat down.

“See?” Phoebe said when martinis arrived.

“Are you children lost?” a woman asked them. Several lavender shopping bags hung from her arms. She carried a large pocketbook, too. She stopped and placed her packages on the sidewalk, obviously glad for a break.

“Oh no,” Phoebe said. She pulled a compass out of her pocket. “See?”

“We’re waiting for our mother,” Fin said. Why had he said that?

“She’s in the ladies’ room,” said Phoebe.

“Would you like me to wait with you until she comes out?”

You will have a long, long wait, Fin thought.

“I’ll go tell her to hurry up.” Phoebe disappeared into the restaurant.

Fin looked down at the sidewalk. Splotches of ancient chewing gum, cigarette butts, spit, heat. I’m sorry, he thought to his mother, to have used you in a lie.

“You’re very nice to wait,” he said to the woman. “But you really don’t have to. I see my mother coming.” He pointed to a woman walking through the restaurant. “But thank you very much.” He lifted the woman’s bags and handed them to her. A funeral phrase drifted through his mind. “For your concern,” he said.

“You have very nice manners, young man. Tell your mother that.”

Fin nodded and watched the woman walk on, lavender shopping bags banging against wide thighs.

The sun beat down, and the woman who was not his mother exited the restaurant and walked north, leaving behind a quick air-conditioned breeze before the restaurant door swung closed. He stood on one leg for a while. Then the other leg.

Phoebe came out a few minutes later trailing the same air-conditioner chill wind.

Fin said, “What took you so long, anyway?”

“Ladies’ room,” she said. “They’re talking about baseball, by the way, if you’re interested, since that was the whole reason we came here.” She looked disgusted.

“So?”

“Yankee fans.”

They walked over to the bank where Jack Jordan worked. Two blocks. The suitors were conveniently concentrated in a small area. Even Biffi’s gallery was close by. If someone wanted to surround them, to lay siege, someone could. The suitors would slowly starve. Eat their own children. If they had children. Which the suitors did not. So they would kill each other, feed on their own freshly slaughtered flesh, and disappear.

“We’ll wait here.” Phoebe stood behind a tall potted plant. She gestured for Fin to join her.

When Uncle Jack returned from his lunch, his seersucker suit coat was slung over his shoulder. His tie was loose. He said, “Richard! Poker tonight,” to a man who had come in just after him. “Jim’s place.”

“Bring your wallet,” said Richard.

“Yeah.” Jack laughed. “But tonight I’ll win back every cent. My wallet will be bulging.”

And they both were whisked upstairs by the elevator.

*   *   *

“Uncle Ty is a Yankee fan,” Fin told Lady.

“I’m sorry, Fin.”

“And Uncle Jack is a gambler.”

“What is it you want me to do, Finny? Send them to bed without any supper?”

Yes, Fin thought. Why not? “
Perché no
? You said I should help you find the lemons.”

“But I didn’t say you should spoil all my fun.”

Fun was important to Lady. It was one of the seven virtues. She never mentioned what the other six were.

One night Fin followed Lady and Uncle Ty to a Spanish restaurant. Phoebe didn’t want to come. She had decided that spying was dull. “And babyish.” And it was too hot. “I’m going to write some ‘Embarrassing Moments’ and ‘Bright Sayings’ and send them to the
Daily News
and get five dollars instead.”