Page 5 of Playworld

“Doesn’t everybody?” Oren asked.

“Yes,” Dad said, shaken by the question’s obviousness, “but it’s not that simple.”

“Mr. Shah said,” Oren continued, “that reducing top rates would incentivize investment, which would spur the economy and bring down unemployment—take the ‘stag’ out of ‘stagflation.’ ”

“What’s your point?” Dad asked.

“It sounds straightforward to me.”

Dad, anxious to change the subject, said to Mom, “I think Sam was quite taken with you.”

“Ugh,”she replied, “he just went on and on about his orchids and his wine cellar.”

“If you’d married a man like that,” Dad said, “he’d’ve given you the royal treatment.”

“You’d definitely be going home in a nicer ride,” Oren said.

“A man likethat,” Mom countered, “treats his cars like women and his women like cars.”

Oren wouldn’t have it, but Dad was delighted by her turn of phrase. That her witticisms might get a rise out of anyone, let alone my father, always surprised her, and this always made me slightly sad for her.

When Oren asked what Mr. Shah did for a living, Dad said, “He’s in theschmattabusiness.” And then more bafflingly, added: “Rags. Seconds.” He often alluded to further explanations that he never supplied. Because my brother and I had inherited his fear of not seeming in the know, Oren refused to press, although I could tell he’d filed this away for further investigation. Inmymind, I pictured Mr. Shah as a dealer in washcloths or, somehow, time.

Dad, who’d noticed my silence, eyed me in the rearview mirror.“Naomi said you two had quite the conversation.” He glanced at Mom, barely suppressing a smile. “She said you told her all about the people you’d worked with. Several of the actors and…crew.”

Oren, smelling blood, gave me a sharky grin.

“And?” I said.

Mom turned around. “She said you struck her as being exceptionally mature.”

I glanced at Dad in the rearview mirror, then back at Mom. “That’s it?” I asked.

After a shrug, she added, “That’s all.”

Mom never lied to us. This characteristic cut two ways: you had to be careful what you asked her. I faced out my window so that only I could see myself smile.

We were crossing the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge on the lower roadway. Its traffic was often worse than the Midtown Tunnel, but Dad preferred this artery into Manhattan, partly because there was no toll. I did too, especially at night. After you passed Roosevelt Island and traversed the East River, you descended from many stories toward Second Avenue, so that it seemed you were a pigeon come flying between the skyscrapers’ twinkling lights. Up here, I caught glimpses into corner offices and onto rooftop gardens, of the tenants in their luxurious apartments. They were each a promise of some greater future in which you might revel in height, in roominess, from a purchase wherein you might regard all you had achieved, once you’d decided where to land. Even now, when I find myself returning to New York after a long absence, I feel that same thrill, that sense of ownership that I did then, and one that particular view conferred.

And then a tram rose toward us. Within its hospital-bright interior, there stood a woman, alone, leaning on the railing and facing the bridge. Right before we flashed past each other, in that stilled clarity conferred by speed, she caught my eye and, I was certain of it, smiled at me. And in that instant, when one stranger notices another and somehow agrees they’ll keep that glance to themselves, I swear it was as if Naomi had sent a telepathic message through her that said,We’re safe.It came so loud and clear, this confidence between us and the mercy she’d showed, thatI was overwhelmed with gratitude.So this is how adults communicate.I pressed my temple to the window, my breath fogging the glass. When, I wondered, would I see Naomi again?

Oren nudged my arm. In the streetlights’ flash, he flapped something on the seat between us: Sam Shah’s driving gloves.

Voiceover

The death in the family I caused occurred in 1973, when I was six and Oren four, but it took decades until I learned what truly happened that night, the blast radius of that conflagration, and its attendant consequences, widening to this day.

At the time, Al Moretti and his lover, Neal, were our neighbors at Lincoln Towers, a residential complex on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Its eight buildings were an agglomeration of nondescript gray brick high-rises, each thirty stories tall, though Oren and I always subtracted the absent thirteenth. They were a bit sandier and brighter than cinder block; on certain days, if the light was right, the sunset turned them gold. The higher floors enjoyed views of the Hudson and midtown’s landmarks, like the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, but our fifth-floor view was more claustrophobic, looking onto the complex’s other towers, whose windows filled ours and blocked the sight of the river or the sky, and its parking lots, circular driveways, and green spaces below. It was only at the property’s northernmost edge, above Seventieth Street, that West End Avenue took on its legendary character. There the cupola-topped walkups abutted buildings with rusticated limestone facades, blackened by car exhaust but magnificent despite the grime. Their ironwork was inset with decorative lions or tritons, and their awnings, tautwith the occasional gusts, snapped their canvases like expensive kites. Their marble lobbies, where a plush couch and wingback chair might be set beneath a nineteenth-century landscape, seemed more like a rich man’s smoking room than a place to wait before the doorman permitted you upstairs.

Our building’s modern, high-ceilinged lobby, meanwhile, had all the charm of an airport concourse, with a wall, opposite the mail room, covered with an ugly mosaic, the abstract image its tiles formed as large as a stegosaur but so nebulous in shape that it resisted any attempt to morph it into something I could categorize as animal, vegetable, or mineral. Our hallway was two bowling lanes long and similarly narrow, its floor tiles the hue of a neglected aquarium. As I passed each apartment’s heavy steel door, I’d catch snippets of our neighbors’ lives: the Von Wurtzels practicing their harps, the angry yap of Miss Kapner’s Chihuahua. In Al and Neal’s case, what could be overheard through their door was often shouting and, when things got really bad, the sound of a flung plate shattering or a piece of furniture thudding against a wall. Al always made a single-knuckled knock at our door afterward—three gentle taps—as if to apologize for the ruckus.

“Lily,” he’d ask my mother before she answered, “are you there?”

I made it a point to get a look at Al during these visits. The result of one brawl: his lip, swelled until its underside was exposed. After another scuffle, his plum-colored eyelid glistened so brightly it looked shellacked. Once he showed up with a gash above his hairline, the blood spidering across his forehead. He pressed his palm’s heel to his scalp to stanch it, but the wound leaked in rivulets so fast-moving it was as if he’d squeezed a soaked sponge atop his crown.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said to my mother, then shut his eyes in shame before she took his elbow and led him to the dining table to clean him up. When she was done, she poured him a drink, and they spoke in hushed tones. Al rambled, sobbing occasionally, while my mother, who was naturally reticent, listened patiently, waiting while he once again talked himself into leaving Neal. When Mom urged him to stay the night, Al said, “I can’t impose,” but then stood and walked shakily toward the couch. “Maybe I’ll just put my head down till I getunfercockt.”

I liked watching Al outstretched on our living room sofa, an ice packpressed to his cheek. All adult pain seemed gigantic to me. With one arm draped over his eyes, the other would reach for the highball’s rim, its base leaving a circle of condensation on the floor whenever he lifted it and loudly sipped his vodka rocks. He was always gone when I woke the next morning, the only proof of his presence the ring his glass had left on the parquet.