People in Trouble (4 page)

"That sounds exactly like a man to me.
 
I hate when you say things like that.
 
You're not thinking for yourself.
 
You're just repeating something you heard.
 
Just because Peter isn't brutal doesn't automatically make him a hero,- you know."

"What are you talking about?"

Kate thought about something else then.
 
She had no intention of engaging this kind of thinking.
 
She thought about some other different thing.

"How come you never had children?"
 
Molly had asked her one afternoon as they were kissing by the water in East River Park.

It had to do with her family, but it seemed like too much to go into right then.

"I had one of those families," Kate said, looking for an entertaining detail that would explain them without too much effort, "where we all had first names beginning with the same letter.

Kathleen, that's me, Kelly, Kevin, Kerry was my sister who died, and Keith.
 
We had pillow fights and breakfasts and went to Latin mass on Sundays.
 
My mother was a dentist.
 
The only time she ever touched us was when she worked on our teeth.
 
My dad was more fun, a drinker, a businessman, a little more intimate."

"Doesn't sound too bad."

"No, Molly, it wasn't bad, it's just that I grew up in America and every time I think about having my own kids, I remember that they would have to live there too and be young Americans for at least twenty years.
 
That's when I decide no."

"That's not my America," Molly said, leaning over the railing into gray-green-white smoke backgrounds.
 
"I had one of those families where my mother would say `Children in Brooklyn are starving' and my father would say `Yeah, starving."
 
He always had some friend sleeping on the sofa because my parents could not say no.
 
When I marched in the gay pride march my mother said `You wear your problems like a banner on Fifth Avenue.

And my father said `Yeah, Fifth Avenue."" "When you think back on all that, how does it seem to you?"

Kate asked.

"Old-fashioned," Molly said.
 
"But so am I. That's why I don't want children."

"I don't understand," Kate said, moving closer.
 
"Being Mom is the most old-fashioned thing a woman can do."

"But," Molly answered, taking her hand as they walked along, "it also means entering fully into the modern world.
 
I don't want certain things in my life like computers, pop stars or TV shows.
 
I choose oblivion to all that.
 
With children, the outside world becomes unavoidable unless you isolate them completely."

"In which case," Kate added, "they'd end up totally helpless to defend themselves against a nation of monsters raised on Tang.

Besides, I feel like I already have a husband and a child or a mistress and a son or a mother and a father but mostly two children."

"Shows what kind of parent you would be."

"What's that supposed to mean?
 
That I would seduce my own daughter?"

Kate was surprised by the matter-of-fact perversity that had crept into her conversation but then felt pleased at being able to express it so easily.

"Listen," Molly said.
 
"You do not have a maternal relationship to me.

I'm your lover.
 
I'm just younger.
 
But you don't take care of me, so don't pretend that you do."

When Molly spoke to her that way, Kate didn't want to listen.

She heard the challenge, imagined the reason and knew enough to let it go at that.
 
It didn't mean that her feelings never changed.

They did, but not because Molly said they should.
 
So the tensions continued, slightly under the surface.
 
This one was resolved some months later in an afternoon when they were ready for love.

"Kate, take my earrings out for me, will you?
 
I don't feel like doing it for myself."

Kate felt the silver slide through Molly's ear, casting shapes on her neck like Indonesian shadow puppets.
 
Then the pieces of metal were lying still in her palm.
 
Kate surprised herself by thinking, How could two women ever be closer than this?
 
Later she realized it wasn't so much a sudden closeness but that she had grown to love Molly.
 
She hadn't loved her at first, but she did now.

"What are you thinking about?"
 
Molly asked.

"Thinking about you."

"What about?"

"That you are becoming more real to me."

"Good," Molly said, holding her, holding her head against Kate's chest, so girly and soft.
 
"Now I don't have to be your child anymore.
 
From now on I'll be your mistress."

It didn't feel like a threat.

All summer, every single person had been uncomfortable.
 
It was not unusual for the city to smell of baking garbage and decomposing bodies.

But most New Yorkers found a point each season when they begrudgingly accepted the heat.
 
They no longer tried to defy it.
 
They picked out the air-conditioned subway cars, knew which banks to stop in to cool off between the subway and work.

They slowed down their pace of accomplishment in order to accommodate it.
 
But this summer had been different.
 
There had been a suffocating brutality that seemed brand-new.
 
It was the absolute lack of relief that put each person into a private state of wondering if it would ever get cool again.
 
This year Peter noticed that the air had stayed so warm there was a creeping sensation of melting polar ice caps and a lot of speculation about the greenhouse effect as seasons came to an end as a concept.

Peter was past forty and intended to live as long as possible.

He took care of his body, but more importantly, he had developed an approach, a way of facing the world that left him enough room to breathe.
 
He never scheduled one event on top of another, so there was always extra time to do new things on a whim, like run that strip of land along the Hudson River where developers were demolishing the piers.

It is so important to have flat, open space by the waterfront, he thought, inhaling the salt.
 
It was the only place a man could go to get between the city and the sea.

All along the route someone had spray-painted the word Justice inside stencils of pink triangles.
 
He wondered if that was just another rock band, but then got lost in the feeling of the open city over his left shoulder and the sea breeze on his right.

He was having a good run until the air between him and water started to get more complicated and cluttered with the beginnings of various constructions.
 
There were ditches, then pipes and strips of metal until, surprisingly, there was no more water at all.
 
Instead he came upon an incongruous addition to the island of Manhattan.
 
It was stuck on like some clumsy extension or unsightly tumor that had grown where the borough was once sleek and symmetrical.

The sign said: Welcome to Downtown City Ronald Home, Developer Then he remembered from his newspaper reading that this was created land.
 
It was invented real estate.
 
He had recently skimmed an article about this in The New York Times business section.
 
Manhattan was running out of property, so Ronald Home had extended it by filling in the water around the island, piece by piece.
 
Eventually a person would be able to walk to New Jersey and Ronald Home would collect the toll.
 
In the meantime, Peter decided, he'd better keep on top of zoning laws if he wanted a grasp on his own future.

Downtown City's main drag was called Freedom Place.
 
That was the perfect name for this morally slipshod era-meaninglessly patriotic and so crass.
 
The buildings were mostly sky-rise condominiums, although there were a few newly constructed waterfront townhouses reminiscent of Henry James's Washington Square.
 
That way the truly wealthy could stare out at Ellis Island through their bay windows as they drank down their coffee every morning.
 
The only visible storefront was Chemical Bank.

Peter jogged past the playground filled with black maids watching white children, past the stretch limos and sportier imports.
 
But when he got to Liberty Avenue he just had to stop and stare.
 
There were two huge brand-new office buildings of identical design with their names emblazoned in gold: New York Realty and United States Software.
 
These were Ronald Horne's largest and most profitable holdings, according to all the profiles and interviews Peter had seen of the billionaire.
 
The guy was on TV more often than Walter Cronkite.
 
Was Walter Cronkite still on TV?
 
Looking around him at all that wealth, Peter saw immediately how Downtown City was advanced capitalism's version of the company town.
 
It was like those snowy corners of the Northwest that he'd passed through on tour, where the Wallace Company Store was on Wallace Avenue and everyone worked at the Wallace Mine which all added up to Wallace, Idaho.
 
Only, in this case, Downtown City was a huge barracks for investment bankers.
 
Even though the complex had only recently been inaugurated, Liberty Avenue was designed to replicate the solid turn-of-the-century Rockefeller-style riches usually found on Fifth.
 
There was a square, preDepression, oldmoney austerity; an impenetrable magnificence.
 
No expense had been spared and yet there was nothing garish; imported marble, tasteful ironwork, elegant windows.
 
It had all the elements of a made-to-order American shrine.

It is design machismo, Peter thought, deciding to share this observation with Kate later.
 
It is intimidation architecture.
 
He had to be sure to tell her that one too.

Peter ran on through Battery Park past all the signs warning of rat poison and past all the homeless people avoiding the lines of tourists waiting to see the Statue of Liberty.
 
He sprinted through the South Street Seaport, Manhattan's only shopping mall, down around the big Pathmark where every morning black men and old Chinese women in straw hats stood together on line waiting to cash in the empty cans they had collected for the fivecent deposit.
 
The river smelled of abandoned cars, old fish and stale beer.
 
Peter turned up East River Park, under the Manhattan Bridge, and jogged slowly back over to the West Side.

That morning, everything had been white; his T-shirt, his jock, shorts, socks and running shoes.
 
Now they were soaked in his sweat and covered in the city's filth.
 
He was happy.
 
He was a dirty, sweaty man.

He stopped in a restaurant for an iced tea, and leaned back in the booth, feeling his blood pulse.
 
At the next table were two young men, overdressed in fashionable new wave suits and short haircuts showing clean necks with equally pristine ties.

"Look, you stop talking about Rick and I'll stop talking about the goddamn cat."

Peter watched them whine like two suburban matrons.
 
He hated to see men act like that.
 
No, he corrected himself, he hated when anyone acted like that.
 
A third man joined them then, just as overdressed and just as slight.
 
Peter noticed that his own chest was twice the size of theirs.

"There you are, did you find them?"

"Yes I did," the newcomer snapped, tired and annoyed.

"Here you go."

He dumped a pile of black ribbons onto the table, then picked out one to wrap around his upper arm, finally extending it for a companion to fasten.

"I tried to tie it on myself," he said.
 
"But I couldn't get the ribbon to lie flat.
 
Will you pin it?"

Peter drank down his tea and thumbed through a discarded copy of New York magazine.
 
The Home family was featured on the cover seated around a bountiful dinner table.
 
The men all had oversize heads with receding blond hairlines and Quasimodo postures.
 
There were huge portions on their plates.

Some art director's idea of political commentary, thought Peter.
 
The women were uniformly thin-lipped over plates of diverse lettuce.
 
They smiled, watching their husbands eat.

"We have a close family," Home told the reporter.
 
"My children never have to make appointments to see me."

On the next page Home was in the backseat of his limo talking on the phone and printing out on his mobile fax machine.