The Constant Heart (19 page)

“What's that?” said my father.

“Sara McGill,” she said.

“Sara McGill,” he said. A statement, not a question.

“You made me a chocolate soufflé once,” she said. “I can still taste it.”

“What a place you were living in,” said my father. “What did you call it?”

“The Gulag,” she said.

“Sure. The Gulag,” he said. “Spam. Instant mashed potatoes.”

Sara bit her lip. A black eye, purple and like the darkness at the bottom of a deep hole, showed on the left side of her face. Some of the dark colors ran into her cheek. I touched her nose, and she pulled away. My father's eyes moved to the rearview mirror, swept over the black eye, and then he gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead.

“Maybe you want to come fishing with us?” said my father.

“I think I would, Mr. Brady,” said Sara.

“Call me Jason,” said my father. “You know what they've got these days? Freeze-dried chocolate ice cream. Not as good as a soufflé but close. We'll stop to get some.”

My father touched his back.

“And you know something,” he said. “I owe you an apology. I never answered the letter you wrote to thank me for the lawyer. So at least I can take you fishing.”

“It's what you and Jake do when you're having trouble, right?”

My father nodded.

“Then count me in,” said Sara.

Sara shoved the pile of Xeroxed papers further into the back. She put her lips next to my ear so her words came in quiet puffs as she said, “So this stuff is about, you know, the lining of the esophagus? And marrow transplants.”

“Yeah,” I said.

My father cleared his throat as though some small thing had gotten in there.

“Jesus Christ,” said Sara.

Judah turned and put his hand in that plastic hair of his. It was as though he thought that by getting ball bearings to fall into the right holes in his head he could understand what was happening on the way to his mother's funeral, and so he moved his head from side to side to make sense of a young woman, with a black eye, who had been hiding in the back of the car. You'd think that a man who ran a business like his would be able to understand things like this, but he kept moving his head back and forth as he considered the young woman with red hair, freckles, and a black eye, in her soccer mom skirt and blue blouse who now sat next to me.

“Who gave you that?” said Judah. He touched his eye.

“A business associate,” she said.

“What business are you in?” said Judah.

“I'm not so sure anymore,” she said.

The car made a hum. The gauges were all steady. No overheating. Good oil pressure.

“I'm sorry about . . . ,” said Sara to my father.

“It's OK,” said my father.

“I meant about being sick,” said Sara.

“It's OK,” said my father. “If I don't think it's a big deal, it's not a big deal.”

“That German piece of junk,” said Judah. “Supposed to be so reliable. Mercedes, schmercedes.”

Sara said to Judah, “I can get you an Outback, all-wheel drive, leather interior, low mileage, still under warranty, for way, way below sticker price.”

“What about a trade-in?” he said.

“I'll have to have a mechanic look at it,” she said.

“Hmpf,” he said.

“Here's my card,” said Sara. She passed over one of those business cards that seemed like a small tombstone. Judah thumbed it and stared out the window.

“Go up to the corner and take the first right,” said Judah. “I'll tell you after that.”

“Great mileage, good rubber, great air,” said Sara. “We can set up your iTunes with it.”

“Maybe I should have bought a Chevy. You can never go wrong with that,” Judah said. “Worst mistake I ever made was to buy that German thing. We don't have to buy that stuff. But it's everywhere. Have you bought a TV recently?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Not too long ago.”

“I bet you bought a Samsung, didn't you?” said Judah.

“Yeah,” I said.

“See? Just what I mean. Everyone is selling the country out,” said Judah. “But you know, we should get out of hardware and into software.”

It took a minute, but I realized that he meant that those women who danced at the Palm were hardware.

“Like a screenplay,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Sara, although it was hard to tell whether she was trying to sell a car or was up to something else.

“Like, imagine this. See, we do a film where the pope is a vampire,” said Judah. “Now how about that?”

“Yeah,” said Sara. “A natural. You can't go wrong.” She ran her finger over her black eye and flinched. Still tender. “But I've got an idea.”

“What's that?” said Judah.

“Add a character, a woman, who is getting ready to be the first woman pope,” said Sara.

“Yeah. Sure,” said Judah. “Great. She can wear a low-cut thing, you know, make her cleavage show. Now that's a pope. We have to get a costume designer to work on the, you know, those things the pope wears.”

“Vestments,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Judah. “And the vampire stuff stands in for all those priests who are buggering all those altar boys . . . and just think of all those women who want to be pope. Why, they'd line up in droves.”

“You know what?” said Sara. “There's an agency in New York that is looking for such a script. TUM. Right there on 57th Street. Have you got a couple of bouncers? You know, guys from your club?”

“Yeah,” said Judah. “I got a couple. One's an ex-prizefighter. Light heavyweight. Buster. He can open a beer bottle with his teeth.”

“Well,” said Sara. “Take him along with the other bouncers. The security guys at the agency won't let you talk to anyone. The one who really will push you around is a guy by the name of Peter Mann. You might ask for him.”

“Sure, I never forget a name. Peter Mann,” said Judah. “He'll talk to me after I've let Buster let them know what's what. What's the address?”

Sara wrote TUM's address on the back of her card.

“Yeah,” said Judah. “I'll take a couple of meatheads.”

“Peter Mann,” said Sara.

“I'll look out for him,” said Judah. “Go up to the corner.”

The afternoon shadows began to fall across the blacktop, like geometric shapes, and the sky, now a darker blue, had all the ominous and yet perfect promise of fall. The air had the first glow of dusk, too, something that seemed to linger with a softness that always gave me a moment's pause, an instant when I have a longing for what is just beyond possibility. My father began to sweat, and he wiped his forehead with a blue handkerchief.

“So?” I said to Sara. I put my lips against her ear.

“MD sent a surgeon or a doctor to shop for a car,” she said. “But all he wanted to do was give me a physical . . . you know, blood pressure, pulse, stuff like that.”

“What did he lose his license for?” I said. “I mean the doctor.”

“He didn't say,” said Sara.

“What about the cops?” I said.

“I'd stay away from cops,” said Judah.

Sara put her lips against my ear and said, her breath moist and hot, “Two guys were watching my house.”

We went down an avenue of gas stations and chain stores, the accumulation of them having that same feeling as always, a kind of weight that is left when the familiar has been replaced by the commercial, or by things we only know through advertising and TV. The burned-out buildings here and there seemed more like rotten teeth than ever and they made the chain stores seem ominous. As though the chains were the zombie versions of the dead hair salons, hobby shops, and hardware stores that had been in a family for three generations before they had been torched for the insurance.

Judah turned to my father and said, “What do you do?”

“I'm a biologist,” he said. “I work in wildlife management.”

“Like animals?” said Judah.

“Birds, fish,” said my father.

“I bet they don't give you the kind of trouble you get running a strip bar,” said Judah.

“I don't know,” said my father. “It's hard to say.”

“What about you?” Judah said to me. “How did you get into astrology? My mother used to like to sit outside and look at the stars. We went to the planetarium and saw a show about the Big Boom.”

“The Big Bang,” I said.

“Well, she liked to sit out there and look at the sky. My mother was always wondering how far away the stars were. Like the stuff that was left over from the beginning.”

“We all are,” I said.

“You haven't got that figured out yet?” said Judah.

“We're getting better at it,” I said.

“You know the universe is expanding,” he said.

“Not only that,” I said. “It might be accelerating.”

“Why is it doing that?” he said.

“I don't know,” I said. “Not yet.”

“What kind of trouble do you have in the astronomy business?” said Judah.

“Money. And then I'm trying to get time on the Hubble Telescope. There's a guy in Maryland, a kind of godfather, who can dole out the time. Either you do what he wants or you are in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble do you have in your business?” said my father.

Judah looked over.

“I don't know,” said Judah. “This guy comes in the other day, and says he is looking for models. They had to be healthy, you know, like good kidneys. He'd pay me money.”

“What did he look like?” said Sara.

Then she described the doctor who had come in to look at an Outback.

“That's the guy,” said Judah.

“So,” said Sara. “MD is getting out of cars.”

The engine made a constant rumble and the fishing things still had the air of the stream on them, which was a relief, a perfume I wanted to depend on.

“This afternoon. I was thinking about my mother,” said Judah. “She was really good at getting women to come from Eastern Europe. My mother never let anyone put anything over on her. Except once. That's what I was thinking about.”

“So,” said Sara. “She made up some stories for those women? To get them to come here to work for you?”

“My mother just died,” said Judah. “I'd be careful what you say.” He stared straight ahead. “You don't have to make up any stories for young women who are living in Estonia. Just send them a ticket.”

“I'm sorry to hear about your mother,” said my father. Was that a little quavering in his voice? Not a bit. All balls. He was genuinely sorry.

“I'm sorry, too,” I said.

“Me too,” said Sara.

“You want to tell me who did that to your eye?” said Judah. “You want me to take care of it for you?”

“No,” said Sara. “Just go down to New York and talk about your script.”

Judah took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose and then put it away, looking straight ahead. “The only time someone put something over on my mother was when she died. Someone came into her apartment and took her TV. I figure it was a friend of hers. But it's hard to tell. She liked that TV. We used to get tapes from Eastern Europe, demos, but now we do it with the Internet. We get AVIs, and you can look at a prospective stripper right away. My mother was always good at finding a place in the world where the women were desperate. But in the old days, it was just the TV and a VCR. Sometimes my mother and I would watch a ball game and sometimes we went to a baseball game. My mother was good about convincing women in Eastern Europe to come here, you know, tell them they were going to be a tennis coach or a personal trainer or something. That is, if they weren't in someplace as bad as Estonia. That's an argument in itself.

“So that's my problem. That's what I was thinking about this afternoon. How the hell do I find out who took the TV?”

“That might be hard,” I said.

“You just have to think about it,” said Judah. “You got to go through it like a science. Then you get to the answer.”

“How did you go about getting the answer?” my father said.

“It was pretty obvious,” he said. “I had to establish some facts first. You got to have them. Everything becomes obvious.”

“How is that?” I said.

“Well, the first fact is that the guy who took the TV didn't have any money, because if he did, he would have bought his own. Isn't that right?”

“That's right,” said Sara.

“And there's something else, too,” said Judah, “which is that the guy who took the TV probably has been broke for a long time and has been thinking about the TV. So how do you catch a guy like that? I thought he would come to the funeral because he would be feeling bad, and the way to go about it is to offer money to everyone, you know, like I'd say, ‘Thanks for coming to my mother's funeral. It would mean so much to her. And if you ever need anything, like money or anything, you've got a friend right here.' You look for the one who takes you up on it.”

“Well, anyway, I'm sorry,” said my father.

“That's the place right up there,” said Judah. “See the white sign with the black letters. Pull up.”

The place had been built in the twenties, and originally it had been a private house, three stories with a porch all around. Like a big wedding cake. Something about the extravagance of the scale, the oversized windows and wide porch, suggested unstoppable hope that the boom would go on forever. A big awning came from the front of the place, with a drop in it where it went down the steps, and then out over the walk and up to the curb, where we pulled up and stopped. Judah got out and stood in front of the place: Was it worthy of a ceremony for a woman who trafficked in women from Eastern Europe? It was like one of those houses out on Long Island, built years ago, and even now the place still had an air of the ocean around it, a kind of resort-like quality. Maybe it was just the awnings.