I heard sirens outside.
“I want you,” a woman said.
I woke up, flattered. For a second, I had no idea where I was. It felt like years since I’d been conscious.
“You do?” I asked, sitting up, pushing my luck and my back against the wall.
I took in what was before me: the bedroom of my apartment thirty-three flights above the city. I saw the same old clouds past the overpriced air conditioner, through the same smudged windows. The place was the usual endearing and elitist mess, with as many books as dust shot-gunned on every surface.
I checked myself out. I was relieved that I was still young—well, forty—and as fit as I’d ever been, which was reasonably. I also found that I was nearly naked, wearing just jockey shorts. Was that why the young woman standing a few feet away was primly turned, so as not to invade my privacy or offend her sensibilities? Yet she’d said she “wanted” me.
In her sweater set and pearls, she’d begun to look familiar.
“You didn’t let me finish,” she said. “I want you…to find my husband.”
“Oh.”
Was that all? Why me? And who was her husband?
I swallowed, and a rollercoaster car of screaming children cascaded down my throat into my chest. I scratched my face, and long, sharp needles of stubble stabbed me. Since puberty, I had been bad at growing beards, and this suggested just how long I’d been asleep.
I did the woman the courtesy of covering my lower, lustier half with a sheet (which was sticky with, what, sweat? I hoped so). This allowed her to turn and fully face me.
“You have a husband?” I asked.
She acted as if my question was a joke.
“Right. You know how to do things like that, don’t you?” she said.
She meant things like find people. The facts of my life began slowly floating back, like the wispy strands of a burnt marshmallow’s smoke.
“I’m retired from doing that.” Right? Wasn’t I?
“Well…couldn’t you just do it again once? For me?”
From another woman, this might have been a seduction or a tease, but from her it was a sincere question and an assumption I would agree. This made her become both more recognizable and less appealing.
“You’re Astrid,” I said. Astrid North.
“What?”
“Look, Astrid,” I said, embarrassed she’d known me better than I’d known her. “I’ve given all that up. I have a new life now. I can’t just…” Regress? Revert? Words were returning as slowly as the details of who I was. “I can’t just do that.”
My senses were coming back, too, and it wasn’t pleasant. I was famished, heard my stomach grumble like a subway psychopath. I also smelled what seemed the air in those acrid, non-air-conditioned cars. (It was summer, wasn’t it? In 1977? In New York City?) Terrifyingly, it was coming from my armpits.
“I have to…” someone help me out here, “shower, bathe. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t mind me.” Again, it hadn’t been said saucily.
I started to rise. Then one more of my senses stopped me.
I heard weeping. I looked up. Astrid’s face was now hidden by her hands, and her shoulders shook like someone’s in a silent movie.
“Oh, Nicky,” she said.
My name! Nicky…Nick…Charles.
“You’ve got to help me. I don’t know where else to go or who to turn to.”
Her words sounded like the corny title cards in those silent films. When she raised her head, her face was dry, like a bad actress’s. Yet I didn’t know enough to doubt her.
The second I stood, she stumbled into my arms, stinky smells or no.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be.”
“I feel silly.”
“You’re not.”
She held me tight, not just a woman in her twenties but a wealthy matron requesting—requiring—comfort.
“How long has he been gone?” I asked.
“Ty?”
“Of course.”
Ty North? Nothing.
“A day.”
That didn’t seem very long. How many days had I been gone, after all, if only figuratively? It underlined her sense of entitlement.
“I know today’s not the best time to be doing this,” she said, trying to show compassion.
No? It wasn’t?
“I know it only adds to the…” She assumed I would know what.
“Right,” I said.
What would you call it outside?”
“The, uh…”
“Mayhem?”
“Right,” I said. “The brouhaha? The imbroglio?” I was reaching.
“Now you’re getting ahead of me, as usual,” Astrid chuckled through sniffles. “I always learn something from you, Nicky.”
“Do you? I’m glad.”
“I’m sure you are.” She tried to be tough, accepting my indifference or absent-mindedness. She continued in this vein. “Go on Take your shower. You stink.”
Astrid took hold and let go of my face in a chuddy-daydy way, which hurt more than it felt good. She seemed to see me as an employee, and I didn’t feel allowed to let her down.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, a nice way to say goodbye that she was too cloistered to comprehend.
“Thanks!” she said, cheering up.
In the silence that followed, I heard helicopters overhead and not just sirens in the street. When I finished showering, I thought, I’d learn what in the outside world I’d slept through.
I let the hot water cleanse both my body and the days I’d been non compos mentis. Then I heard the bathroom door open and Astrid call: “Thanks again, Nicky!”
I hadn’t closed the shower curtain, and I was completely exposed, the steam not enough to cover me. I was an old man to Astrid, an underling in whom she had no interest or someone with whom she’d already been intimate. All three? Before I could reply, the door closed again.
I walked out, clad in a towel.
There was another woman in my apartment.
My wife, Nora.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi. I didn’t hear you get up and go.”
“No kidding.”
She looked as bright-eyed and adorable as ever. I recalled she had been through the same (enjoyable, I now believed) mill as I, who looked worse for wear.
“Look what I got,” she said.
To my delight, she toted a bag of hot bagels, the smell of which was dizzyingly good.
“From Bagel Nosh, up the street.”
“Great,” I said.
“Half plain, half sesame.”
“I’m so hungry, I’d even eat the plain.”
“And look at this. Who knew?”
On our coffee table, she slapped down that morning’s New York Times—that day’s, since it was already two o’clock.
“Look what we missed,” she said.
“Wow.”
“New York’s Power Restored Slowly; Looting widespread; 3,3000 Arrested; Blackout Results in Heavy Losses.”
It was the front page of Friday, July 15th, 1977, which was apparently where we were in time. Puzzled and impressed, I flicked the light switch in the living room.
“Seems okay,” I said.
“It says: restored. It happened Wednesday.”
“Ah. See any looting outside?”
“On East 52nd? Not likely. Though people were still a little tender, you might say. The bagel guy threw in a free one.”
“That happens to you all the time.”
“That’s true.” She dug a tin out of the plastic bag. “I got a smear, too.”
“A schmear.”
“That’s what I said.”
I’ll skip the next part, where we stuffed our faces. Nora was even more gluttonous than I, which looked better on her, as everything did, her being fifteen years younger.
“I saw Astrid North leave,” she said.
“She was here when I got up. You must have left the door open.”
“Did I? Damn.” Nora stabbed her tongue at a spec of smear or schmear on the side of her mouth. It was an action weirdly erotic, as everything was with her, too. “You had the energy for her? Even now?”
“Please. She’s a kid.”
“So was I.”
“So are you. But she seems older. Besides, she wanted me for something besides sex.”
“What else is there? I’m imitating you.”
“Right. Sure you are.”
I remembered now: I was having an affair with imperious young Astrid North. Nora knew all about it. That was our deal: total honesty.
“She wanted me to find her husband,” I said.
Nora paused, after a swallow.
“Ty?”
“Yes. Do I know him?”
Nora stared at me, incredulous.
“Maybe you’d remember if we hadn’t been stoned off our ass since Tuesday.”
“I’ll get there,” I said. “I don’t bounce back as fast as you. I’m older.”
“Ty’s the new guy at work. The other new guy besides you. Astrid’s married to him.”
“And he’s nowhere to be found?”
“So you said she said. It’s news to me. But…” from her place on the couch, Nora lightly kicked the nearby newspaper with a foot now bare, “what isn’t?”
“How’d she know I was a whatever I was?”
“Detective?”
“Yes. How’d she know?”
“You must have told her at some point. To impress her and get in her pants.”
“That doesn’t sound like me.”
“The hell.”
“I can do better. I have done.”
I pressed a finger into the soft white mound of cream cheese on Nora’s bagel, brought it between my lips and ate it. The next fingerful of cheese I scooped up was placed softly in Nora’s mouth and, after I leaned in, chewed and swallowed together.
“I told her I was retired,” I said.
“Astrid is family,” Nora said. “Part of the family firm, anyway. Which is your firm now, in case you don’t remember.”
It came back to me: King Cash was the 1950s brainchild of Nora’s father, now deceased. His third wife had hired me to follow him and confirm his infidelities, something I could never do, much to the old goat’s delight. I met Nora while trailing him or maybe I had begun trailing her once I saw her with him. At any rate, right before his death, Mr. King had given his blessing to our marriage and my joining the firm, to which in a weak moment I had agreed. Nora had been worried about my continued well-being in my line of work. I would have done anything for her.
Doing a finance job, though, had made me antsy.
“Ready yet?” Nora asked.
“Ready for what?”
“To get back in the saddle, as they say?”
“You mean…?” Nora was already nodding. “I have a new position, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“And you’re doing it so well, aren’t you?”
I started to stammer, which gave Nora the chance to answer for me.
“You’re bored to tears, and you know it.”
“You’re bored,” I blurted out.
This caught Nora by surprise. She smiled, enjoying as ever being teased and trumped, especially if it was with the truth.
“Don’t be so cute,” she said.
Apparently, Nora’s dislike of marriage to an investment advisor had beaten back her fear of marriage to a detective. As for myself, I wasn’t ready to give up the first to return to the second. As boring as it was, I liked being able to pick up a paycheck for doing, as the expression went, squat.
Or was I just not willing to be responsible and—as went another expression—present for anything yet? In fact, I felt the need to be absent again, deliciously and with Nora.
“Look,” I said, “I’m calling Chutney.”
Chutney was our new source providing us with ways to disappear for days on end, as we had just done. It had been our first time using heroin. Despite its extreme effects, neither of us wished it to be our last.
Nora was taken aback and tempted.
“Really?” she said. “Already?”
“Yes? No?”
Perhaps it was cowardly to make Nora pull the trigger. Not to mix metaphors like martinis, but I knew the route to her heart by heart and was willing to take it.
“Okay,” she said.
“Great!”
Yet I couldn’t get Chutney on the phone.
“Was there looting uptown?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then we might have a problem with Chutney.”
“Oh.” She was crestfallen. “So that’s that.”
Nora was never one to whine or dwell, and I wanted neither to let her down nor deny myself.
“No,” I said. “I’ll go and get some.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“I’ll come with,” she said.
“You don’t have to.”
Nora was at once annoyed, offended, chagrined, and grateful.
“Okay, sweetheart. Be careful,” she said and kissed me. “And come back soon.”
***
As I hailed a cab on First Avenue, I could see what Nora meant. There were no busted store windows or hoisted goods but the neighborhood had become dazed and shaken in our drug-addled absence.
I’d left our car at home. My address for Chutney was in the South Bronx, the center of the looting. Giving everyone there a glimpse of our new Porsche 914-6, a snappy two-seater in sun-shocked yellow, might not have been the best idea. I had the cab drop me off at the brownstone.
There I heard more sirens. Much of the block on either side had been devastated. I couldn’t count the amounts of broken glass and missing windows, boarded and taped-up storefronts, flipped garbage cans or strewn trash. Residents milled around looking dazed, angry, and miserable. I avoided their accusatory or curious glances as I disappeared into the vestibule.
After I pressed a button, there was a click and then the carved-up and graffitied door expressed a sclerotic buzz. I pushed it open and dashed inside.
I heard several locks being undone down the virtually unlighted hall. I moved in that direction toward an apartment, the slashed door of which was left open no more than an inch.
“Chutney?”
Then someone punched me in the back of the head.
I fell forward. My knees hit the floor, and my face was buried in a cloth runner smelling of pot and hot sauce.
“You’re Nick Charles?” someone asked.
“Not necessarily,” I said, an old punchline, but this time the joke was on me.
“Shut up.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
It was true: my head splitting, I’d been sitting silently in the police precinct near my home. I was before Chet Graver, the burly, square-topped detective to whom two patrolmen had delivered me, after following me and knocking me cold.
I’d had run-ins with Graver before, but that was when I was a private investigator and so a pest. I’d never been a respectable investment advisor in his presence.
I’d never been a heroin user, either. I hadn’t had time to buy any, which was for the best…in one way, at least.
“How do you know Lester Harris?” Graver asked.
“I don’t.”
“You were heading to his apartment.”
“Oh.”
So, Chutney had a last name. And a real first one. Even though I assumed Graver knew why I would be in his apartment, why should I admit it?
“P.I. business,” I said. It had been kind of true, right?
Graver looked up from the legal pad on which he was pretending to write.
“You’re still doing that hustle?”
“That’s the name of a dance, or so I’ve heard.”
“Hey, I never realized. Nick Charles. Like in the old ‘Thin Man’ movies.”
“Just a coincidence. I really don’t do that kind of work anymore. I just like to keep my hand in.”
“That suit says you got your hand someplace else. Your finger, I should say.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Your finger is in another pie. It’s a double entendre.”
“A what?”
“Never mind!”
In truth, Graver’s French accent had been so poor I could barely make out what he said. But why not piss him off, for good measure?
“I meant: your suit says you’re doing well.”
“Much obliged.”
The jacket was a little dusty and wrinkled thanks to Graver’s friends, but it was still Cardin.
“New clothes, new wife, new job. Or should I say ‘job’?”
He crooked his fingers for quotation marks.
“So you think you’re better than me now,” he asked.
“No…”
“Because you married your way out of your lousy life. It’s not going so well anymore, is it?”
“It’s fine. I said I was just keeping my hand in.”
If Graver hadn’t thought I’d been buying drugs, why was I here?
Then I found out.
“How do you know Ty North?” he asked.
I was thrown and quiet for a second.
“He works in my wife’s firm,” I said. “My firm. I know him and his wife, Astrid. Why?”
“Ty North is dead.”
I didn’t reply, not knowing what to say. At last, I sputtered out…
“How?”
“His head was bashed in. The night of the blackout. He was found behind the wheel of his car, parked in midtown.”
My eyes were blinking as if pulled by a puppeteer. Graver couldn’t miss my naked reaction.
“You look surprised.”
“Well, I am. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Because your number was found on a crumpled-up piece of paper in his glove compartment. Sorry. Your wife’s number.”
Graver opened a folder and pushed a Xeroxed page across the table at which I sat. It was black except for the copy of a torn white memo paper in the center. I saw my home address and phone number, plus the words “Nora Charles” beside scribbled hearts, stars, exclamation points, and fireworks. After a second, I pushed it back.
“Ty could draw a little,” I said. “Who knew?”
“You didn’t know a lot of things about him.”
“Not the subtlest work, but a very promising draftsman.”
“He was talented in many ways. Your wife knew better than you.”
“You’re full of…” I mimicked his accent, “double entendres.”
Graver grew red, steamed about my refusal to respect him. It shut him up for a second. Then he said…
“Hey. Nora. Nick and Nora. I never realized!”
“Well, you know now.”
He didn’t laugh for long.
“You’re in big trouble, Charles.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got a motive. Your wife. was screwing the victim. Where were you during the blackout?”
“I don’t remember.”
Why lie when I didn’t have to?
“Right. Well, his neighbors saw your wife coming in and out of North’s place at, shall we say, inopportune times.”
“We shall say.” This time I mocked his Britishism. “It was very inopportune. Quite, we shall say.”
If it was possible, Graver grew even more annoyed.
“No wonder you were going back to your sleazy business. Your new gravy train’s come to a screeching halt.”
“Screeching halt” was also affected, but I let it go. I was bitterly amused that Graver suspected me of something I hadn’t done. He had no clue I’d ever bought drugs from “Lester.”
I tried to favor the amused over the bitter.
“Are you arresting me for something?”
“Not yet. It’s no crime to be a cuckold. Except in the mind of every other man on Earth.”
“It’s pronounced ‘cuckold,’ not ‘cuck-old.’”
He was quiet: We were both letting things go.
“I’m going home,” I said and stood.
“I hope you’ll stay in town,” Graver said. “In fact, I’d recommend it.”
“Thanks. Can you also give me the name of a good Chinese restaurant? Not too spicy?”
“Go to hell,” Graver said. “But not yet. Stick around.”
There was a stalemate, which I didn’t like, but I was too tired to fight. I left without agreeing, without in fact another word.
When I entered our apartment, Nora was already in bed, passed out. I felt lots of things, only one of which was disappointment at not scoring us any dope.
I remembered our visit weeks before to a new place recommended by friends. It had been in a hotel called Kenmare on Twenty-Third between Lex and Third.
“Plato’s Retreat,” Nora wondered, as we walked in, responding to the Helenic sign and setting, which were pretentious and tacky at the same time.
“It’s in a nothing neighborhood, no?”
“It’s moving uptown, to the Ansonia, on Central Park West.”
“Wow. Fancy,” I said.
“It’s been a hit.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
We entered a dim interior, part club, part tunnel, part steam table. Nora and I stood out, if only because we were thin, our clothes fit, and neither of us wore too much perfume or cologne.
“Nice crowd,” Nora said, under her breath.
“Salt of the earth.”
“More like the squeezed out Ketchup packet.”
“Snob.”
We passed and peeked in at rooms off the main hall. There was a sauna, a makeshift waterfall, and a dance floor over which a glittery disco ball spun. In each were unsightly couples in various states of undress and embrace.
“What’s in here?” Nora asked, stopping outside an entryway.
“What does it look like?” I asked, rhetorically.
“It’s the mattress room,” someone passing on someone else’s arm said, without stopping.
And in fact there were mattresses laid out on which naked and unattractive couples were coupling. Small round tables were in the near distance besides chairs on which other people drank, watched, or patiently awaited their turns.
“Unappetizing,” Nora said.
“You think?”
“Maybe I’m just hungry.”
Clearly, we were both reluctant to do more than observe. So, like her…
“I’m starved,” I said.
We walked until we found the food room, a cafeteria-style spread more tasty than the clientele. Quiche Lorraine, Buffalo Wings, pasta primavera, General Tso’s Chicken—even fondue! Plato’s Retreat had it all.
“Pretty good,” Nora said, sucking the meat of a shapely wing.
“Let’s not overdo,” I said, licking my own sticky fingers.
“Why not?”
“We might get sleepy.”
“So?”
I kissed off the hot sauce dribbling onto her chin. “We might need our energy.”
“For what?”
“You ask too many questions.”
I picked a pepper from her pasta and decapitated it with a bite. Then, with two swallows, we finished our beers.
“Maybe we should work off our meal,” Nora said.
“Maybe,” I said, “we should.”
Nora and I said nothing more specific. We wound up not at the entrance to the mattress room but the disco.
“There are lots of ways to work it off,” I said.
“Right,” Nora answered, both of us relieved.
In the small and sweaty space, couples—clothed—moved to whatever songs were hits this summer. We entered in the middle of “I’m Your Boogie Man” and imitated the other guests as best we could.
“Any clue what you’re doing?” I asked Nora, who as usual moved much better than me.
“The Hustle?” she said.
“Could have fooled me.”
“Thanks.”
Nora spun around, and the twinkles from the disco ball covered her like constellations, which was stirring in all ways to see.
The song abruptly switched to “Got to Give It Up” by Marvin Gaye. This one had less of a disco than a R & B sound, which played more to my strengths (such as they were).
“Hey,” Nora said. “There you go. Not bad!”
The others slowly began to ease up on their efforts and pay attention to us, even applauding.
“We’re a hit,” I said.
“They feel sorry for us,” Nora said, but she knew it wasn’t true and was excited by their approval.
“Go! Go!” somebody yelled.
A regular at Plato’s—pudgy, with a bad moustache, wearing a shiny bowling jacket—had been watching us, inspired.
“Do it to it!” he yelled. “Go!”
The song switched again, catching us idiotically off guard and in mid-groove. It became “The Right Time of the Night” by Jennifer Warnes. Here was a romantic tune, made for slow dancing. Nora and I moved into each other’s arms and swayed as awkwardly as teenagers at a small-town prom. The others returned to their own Terpsichore.
“It’s the right time of the night.
The stars are winking above.
It’s the right time of the night
For making love.”
Nora placed her head on my shoulder like that tenth-grade girl.
“Cop a cheap feel,” she whispered. “I want you to.”
Excited as that boy would have been, I began to move my hand up and onto Nora’s breast. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Nice job, you two,” a deep voice said.
I looked up, my fingers just reaching my wife’s hard nipple. The guy in the bowling jacket was behind me. In his open palm were two capsules, blue on the bottom, white on the top.
“My gift,” he said. “Enjoy.”
I took my hand from Nora to retrieve the Quaaludes. Then I turned and saw Nora’s eyes, which had been half-closed from arousal, now flash wide open, reflecting the stars overhead, or so it seemed.
“Yes,” Nora said, hungrily, and filled my mouth with her tongue as if for the first time.
From there, it wasn’t far to the mattress room.
Nora led the way, though I didn’t have to be dragged. The drug had made us drowsy, as well as other things.
“Quails,” Nora said, affectionately, about the pills.
She was on one of the beds by now, going beneath the covers as if underwater in a dream. “The love drug,” I said, joining her.
“Is that what they call it?”
“Apparently.”
“Who says?”
“The New York Times,” I said, abashed.
Those at the tables were watching us, but we didn’t mind; we were too far into our own story, like method actors in a play. After we finished, Nora had her eyes on a presentable pair (a man and woman. There were no men with men allowed: not our call).
“Ask them what their names are,” Nora whispered, her tongue in and out of my ear.
“Not you?”
“I’m too shy.”
“Oh, right. Does it matter?”
“Does what matter?”
“What their names are.”
“Of course not. Why are you worried about that?”
“You asked me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“If you say so.”
While this Socratic dialogue was going on, I got the other couple’s attention over Nora’s bare shoulder. They started to stand and approach us.
Remembering, it was as if nothing had changed, no one had been murdered, and Nora and I had never awakened on Friday, July 15th, 1977.
Sitting on a chair, rubbing my neck and lower back, I watched her sleep. A small pile of used Kleenex sat on the nightstand. Had she cried herself unconscious? It seemed so.
Why hadn’t she told me about seeing Ty? That wasn’t our agreement. What else didn’t I known? Had I become a detective again to investigate the two of us? Who was hustling whom?
It was as if I’d awakened in another world.
I crawled in beside Nora and fell asleep, as if trying to return to the day before yesterday.
[Image credit : Photo by Hammad Siddiqui on Unsplash ]
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- The Hustle - July 4, 2022
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