The Address(9)
“For God’s sake, Peggy. No one drops in like that in the city. And they’re not my relatives, remember?” The conversation came to a halt as Jack slammed on the brakes, narrowly missing a bicycle messenger. They’d eaten soggy fries and overcooked burgers in a diner to kill the time instead.
Bailey didn’t see the city as a ruin. She saw important people going to important places. She’d wanted to be one of them.
For a while, she had been. But now her fall from grace was complete.
As Bailey got deeper into the park and away from the grid of streets, the air became noticeably cooler. A light wind blew in from the west—thunderstorms were predicted for the afternoon—and the rhythmic whispering of the leaves helped slow the beat of her heart and her desire for a drink. She took a deep breath.
The park was a mess still, that was true. But a private group had taken over the maintenance, and the place was getting spruced up. The trash situation seemed better than ever, no more overflowing bins with rats leaping out of them. Progress.
An ugly chain-link fence lined the north side of the Seventy-Second Street park entrance. Bailey was breathing hard from the walk and the heat and she stopped for a moment, clawing the metal with her fingers and pressing her face into the diamond pattern like a child. The area, recently dubbed Strawberry Fields in John Lennon’s memory, was due to open to the public next month. Five years since he’d been gunned down. Every one of her generation remembered where they were when they found out, as if it had just happened yesterday.
A shout from one of the workers brought her out of her thoughts. A couple of the guys at the base of the excavator stared down at something in the dirt, then called to what seemed to be a supervisor, who ambled over, coffee cup in his hand. The supervisor motioned for the excavator driver to cut his engine and wiped his forehead with a red bandanna. They all stood in a circle, necks craned downward, as if in prayer.
Bailey moved on. The Dakota loomed large as she waited for the light to change. The sides were gray, coated with a century of soot, but it still stood out from its neighbors. No subtle art deco motifs here, this was pure decadence. Gables, windows of all shapes and sizes. A filthy, aging dowager of a building. Bailey counted up four stories and located Melinda’s apartment.
When she was a child, Bailey and her parents had visited Melinda, her twin brother Manvel, and their mother once a year, usually around the holidays. The twins’ mother, Sophia, was a throwback to the old days, encrusted with jewels, even at breakfast, her manner cold and officious. The early family gatherings had always been awkward affairs, the tension between Bailey’s dad and her “aunt” palpable, the economic divide an enormous chasm. Once, Melinda had insisted Bailey stay for an overnight visit. They’d raided the kitchen in the still hours of the early morning, cramming Lucky Charms into their mouths straight from the box while Melinda whispered the gory details of the murder of her great-grandfather, the architect Theodore Camden, in that very apartment. They crept into the dark library and Melinda pointed to the far corner, near the window.
“He was killed by some woman who used to work in the building,” Melinda whispered. “She stabbed him, and he bled to death on this very spot. Begging for mercy. She was crazy, they say. Cut off his finger and kept it as a souvenir. Look closer, you can see the blood.”
Bailey leaned forward, squinting, to make out a dark pattern on the floor. Melinda suddenly tweaked her on either side of her waist, making her jump and scream, and they ran back to the safety of Melinda’s canopied bed, crying and laughing at the same time.
The girls had gotten closer once Bailey moved to the city for college, the two of them gradually increasing the dosage and frequency of banned substances in their systems. Manvel, meanwhile, graduated from Yale and headed to the Deep South to do a dissertation on self-taught artists, only returning a few times, including when Sophia died seven years ago.
Melinda had a brashness that Bailey envied, and together they measured their lives by the number of parties attended. But every so often, usually as Bailey’s body expelled the toxins ingested the night before through cold sweats and vomit, she recognized that her mother, had she still been alive, would have been dismayed and worried. Peggy would have taken Bailey aside and given her a thoughtful lecture on her extended absence from their New Jersey home and the sallow, unhealthy tone of her skin. She would have held her accountable. Jack wasn’t up to the task. He’d retreated into his shell as soon as they put Bailey’s mother in the ground.
In rehab, the counselors had asked her lots of questions about her mother’s death, suggesting that Bailey “process” it. She’d fought back, insisting that being left alone at eighteen had toughened her up. There was no need to process anything. The facts were the facts: drunk driver plus Garden State Parkway equaled Bailey packing up her things and starting freshman year at Parsons with hardly a peep from her dad. She’d kept busy with classes and socializing and exploring every dark crack of the city, until Tristan hired her and pulled her into the fabulous world of Crespo & O’Reilly.
Cafe Luxembourg was practically empty this time of day, the waiters standing in pairs chatting in order to fill the empty hours between the lunch and dinner crowds. Melinda wasn’t there yet, so Bailey took a booth seat where she had a good view of the door. It wasn’t long until Melinda swept in, wearing a jumpsuit with enormous shoulder pads, her blond hair in perfect swirls down her back, as if she walked in a bubble that protected her from the humidity that plagued the common man. She threw the Barneys bags she was carrying on the floor and held out her arms.