Alternate Side(15)
“It’s Saturday, Charlie. Ricky doesn’t work on Saturdays.” But of course that wasn’t true. Ricky worked whenever anyone needed him. Sherry Fisk had once called him at home on a Sunday night when a pipe in her basement was spewing water all over the floor, and a half hour later he was downstairs, his toolbox and a Shop-Vac on the steps, taking care of business.
Obviously Jack Fisk had forgotten all about that. He’d come out one morning to take his car from the lot and found Ricky’s van blocking him in. Or at least that’s what he said. It was only a day after the junker had finally been towed, and Jack was still in a bit of a rage, which was more or less his natural condition. When he finally tracked Ricky down at the Rizzolis’, where he was fixing a garbage disposal in which a teaspoon was thoroughly jammed, Ricky tried to argue that Jack had room to get around his van, which made Jack only angrier. “Don’t tell me I can get around you,” Jack screamed while Ricky stood with rounded shoulders on the stoop. “It’s not my goddamn job to get around you. It’s your job to stay out of my goddamn way.”
Sherry had apologized to Nora for her husband. “Predictably, of our two sons, one has a volcanic temper, and the other is so conflict-avoidant that if you ran him over with a tank he’d say, Oh, sorry, I was in your way,” she said sadly. “Andrew and his wife want to have kids, and I suggested that before they do, he try anger management classes.”
“What did he say?” Nora asked.
“What always happens when you suggest a man take anger management classes?”
“He gets angry?”
“See, and you’re not even a therapist,” said Sherry, who was.
Linda Lessman, who always saw the world in black and white, which Nora imagined must be a useful quality in a criminal-court judge, unless you were a defendant, had once said she didn’t understand why anyone who was a therapist would put up with a man like Jack. But Nora had always tended to see most things in shades of gray, and she had noticed that logic and marital relations often seemed at odds with each other.
Nora also understood the genesis of Jack’s immediate rage: in her experience, nothing made a man angrier than being told that he couldn’t drive like NASCAR. She remembered one terrible day when Charlie had been trying to get the car into a tiny street space on the way to an open house for a co-op apartment. It had taken so long that Oliver, whose toilet training was a bit dicey well into kindergarten, had wet his pants. When Charlie zoomed away—because the space was far too small, Nora had been sure that if you’d used a tape measure you would have discovered their car was a good foot longer than the space was—Rachel had made the mistake of saying, “Aren’t you going to try again, Daddy?”
That had been one to remember.
And so it went on the block, mishap by misadventure. After the broken windshield, the junker, and Jack’s tantrum, a transformer blew in a Con Edison grate and the entrance to the lot was temporarily blocked while it was repaired. Charlie, Jack, George, Harold Lessman, the oldest Rizzoli son, and two of the guys who lived in the SRO were standing that Sunday morning at the edge of the hole the utility workers had made. Nora had stopped to look into it when she was out with Homer. The improbable guts of New York lay exposed below her in the kind of filthy trench she imagined you could find anywhere from Lexington Avenue to Wall Street. Peering into the hole made by the Con Ed guys, Nora thought it was amazing that anything held together at all, that water came out of their taps, that power went into their outlets, that their houses didn’t all tumble to the ground. The dirty little secret of the city was that while it was being constantly created, glittering glass and steel towers rising everywhere where once there had been parking lots, gas stations, and four-story tenements, it was simultaneously falling apart. The streets were filled with excavations and repair crews, the older buildings sheathed in scaffolding cages.
“Scaffolding,” Charlie had muttered one day not long ago. “That’s the business I should have gone into. If I owned a scaffolding firm I’d be a rich man today.”
“A lot of salt damage,” she heard the older of the SRO guys say now as the men clustered around the hole. Despite what they had all believed when they moved onto the block, most of the SRO guys worked, the kind of journeyman jobs that once used to allow for a small apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and now only provided for a room with a hotplate in a single-room-occupancy hotel. Rumor had it that Sidney Stoller owned the SRO, too, but no one had ever been able to determine if that was true. There was no point in looking at the deed; there would surely be some corporate title obscuring the name of the true owner. All real estate in Manhattan now seemed to change hands under the cover of an LLC. No millionaire ever sold his duplex on East End Avenue to another millionaire. It was always Blair Holdings LLC to Sadieland LLC, or such like, the names of children being popular covers for the true identities of their parents.
Down the block the men were squatting at the edge of the hole, desk guys pretending they knew what it took to work with their hands. Nora remembered how contemptuous she had once been of couples who drove in the car with the two men in the front and the two women in the back. The men and women on the block now did the same when they got together to talk. The women were talking about people, the men talking about things. It was why so many of the men prospered on Wall Street and in the big law firms, where things could be turned into money and people were interchangeable and even insignificant, and there were hardly any women running the show. The night before, she and Charlie had gone to have dinner with Jenny and the man with whom she was currently sleeping, and Nora and Jenny had decided that they were giving boy-girl seating up because Charlie and Jasper spent the entire evening talking to each other, and Nora and Jenny the same, which was fine with everyone involved.