The Last Romantics(83)

I stopped. Joe? I asked, scanning the signage atop storefronts for something, anything.

Joe?

Joseph?

Joe—

Blam—a man ran flat into me and dropped what he was carrying. He spun around and looked at me, and despite my shock and pain—he quite literally knocked the wind out of me—our eyes held for a moment, and I saw that his were black, bottomless, containing an empty wildness.

“Fuckin’ A, lady!” he said. His hair hung lank and greasy around his pale face, purple shadows beneath his eyes. A stench of unwash and urine.

“You dropped—” I said, and when I bent to pick up the package, I saw it was a woman’s purse, brown and large and battered.

The man looked at the purse, looked behind me, and began again to run. There were distant shouts drawing closer, and at last I understood what was happening. The man turned the corner and disappeared. From the opposite direction came two figures: one man, one woman, both coming quickly but neither seeming of an age or condition to run. I held the purse with both hands and looked up to the sky, where there was no suggestion of Joe, only sparse clouds, wan sun, and a blue, brittle sky.

“You . . . you got it!” the woman called from half a block away. “You’ve got my bag!”

I held up the purse. “I’ve got it!” I called back.

The woman smiled at the man, both of them seventy, or perhaps eighty years old. Old in the way that for me back then was difficult to gauge specifically. When hair and bodies have fallen, when every step trembles.

“Thank you,” the woman wheezed as she reached me. “I can’t thank you enough for stopping that man.”

I handed her the purse. “He just kind of ran into me,” I said. “I didn’t really do anything.”

“Oh, but you did,” she replied. “You were right here. Standing right here. Thank you.”

“You okay now, Mrs. Diaz?” the man asked the woman. She closed her eyes briefly and breathed yes. He clasped her hands, gave me a curt nod, and then headed back the way he had come.

The woman bent to the purse and went through it quickly, with sharp eyes, taking stock of its contents. She sighed, satisfied. “Now let me give you something, dear,” she said. Her breath came in plumes of frost as she removed from the purse a long wallet with a tarnished bronze clasp.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Really, you don’t have to do that.”

“But I want to. That young man was high on something. Did you see his eyes? What a waste. What a godawful waste of a life.”

“I don’t want anything. Really.” I put up my hands. “Thank you anyhow. I’m glad you got your purse back.”

I turned away from the woman and retreated quickly, not wanting any further gratitude. My left side hurt where the man had crashed into me, and my right hip, which had struck a mailbox as I spun, now throbbed. I forced myself to keep a steady pace. There were no other people on the cold sidewalk. The only sounds were the dull thumps of my sodden boots striking the pavement and the slushy splash of a car passing on the road. When I had walked two full blocks, I allowed myself to pause and look behind me, but the woman was gone. She must be on her way home by now, I thought. Rattled but okay. This would be a story she’d tell her husband, her friends and neighbors, a cautionary tale to watch out for hollow-eyed young men with fleet feet, to hope for dazed young women who do not look where they are headed, who search the skies and rooftops for signs of dead brothers, lost worlds.

I continued walking. I remembered then a hardware store somewhere in Brooklyn. Where? A hardware store where Joe had purchased for me a beautiful hammer with a solid red handle, heavy, strong. You need essential tools, he had told me. Nothing fancy. A hammer, a screwdriver. Preferably a wrench, too, though that can wait. The hammer. The last gift from my brother. Where was the hardware store?

The last conversation. Please, cheapen, love, someone.

Joe

Joe

JOE

Joe

JOSEPH

Joe

Four more blocks, maybe five, and there was no hardware store, nothing at all familiar. I stopped because my hip now pulsed with pain. I’d made several turns and seemed to have crossed over into a different neighborhood. The smell of cooking was stronger here, a steel-drum kind of music spilled down a stoop. I hobbled a bit, testing out my range of movement. Ouch, ouch. Looking up, I realized I was blocking the doorway of a coffee shop. I considered for a moment the possibility of entering: inside, the walls were painted yellow, and a black woman with long glossy braids stood at the counter. Perhaps she could direct me to a hardware store, I thought. There was a glass case laden with swirls of pastries, fat round bagels, bottles of juice in sunny colors, and it seemed a world away from the grim sidewalk, the bitter cold, my feet, which were damp in my old boots and had begun to ache from my wandering. My throbbing hip. I could feel the rise of a bruise.

I placed a hand on the door and stopped because there was Will. Man #23. The man I saw at Joe’s engagement party. That night had marked the last of so many things I couldn’t possibly name them all. Everything returned to me: Kyle, Sandrine, Ace, the poem, the woman with strawberry-blond hair, the window and its impossible expanse of green smack in the middle of a gray, cold city.

Will sat alone at a small, round table. I stared at the reddish curl of hair around his pale neck, at the yellowed paperback he was reading. The white cup and saucer on the table. His freckles. His strong, square shoulders. The book was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.