Manhattan Nocturne Read Free Page B

“I put your tuxedo in the trunk.”
    The annual party, thrown by Hobbs, the billionaire Australian who owned the newspaper. As one of its columnists, my presence was obligatory. If he was the circus, I was one of the trained monkeys wearing a tight little red collar.
    â€œI can’t go,” I said.
    â€œYou said yesterday you have to.”

    â€œYou’re sure it’s tonight?” I checked my watch, anxious about the time.
    â€œYou said six-thirty.”
    â€œAll the management people will be there, sucking up to Hobbs.”
    â€œWhat can I tell you?” she said patiently. “You told me you had to go.”
    â€œKids are fine?”
    â€œSally has a play-date. You’re up in the Bronx?”
    â€œBrooklyn. Fire. Guy jumped out the window with a baby.” I noticed the restaurant regulars watching me. Yo, white motherfuck, what you doin’ here spittin’ fuckin’ white-boy saliva on my pay phone? “Anyway, I’ll see you tonight.”
    â€œLate or early?” Lisa asked.
    â€œEarly.”
    â€œIf you get home early enough, there’s a chance,” she said.
    â€œOh? A chance of what?”
    â€œA chance you’ll get to make out.”
    â€œSounds good.”
    â€œOh, it’s good all right.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œI know,” Lisa said.
    â€œHow?”
    â€œCertain testimonials have been entered into the records.”
    â€œWhose was the last one?” I asked.
    â€œOh, some strange man.”
    â€œWas he good? Did he float your boat?”
    â€œYou lose your chance after eleven,” she said. “Drive safely, okay?”
    â€œRight.” I was about to hang up.
    â€œNo! Wait! Porter?”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œDid the baby live?” Lisa asked worriedly. “The baby who went out the window?”
    â€œYou really want to know?”
    â€œYou’re horrible! Did the baby live?”
    I told her the answer, and then I was gone.

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    There is, in the West Village, on one of the old narrow streets (I won’t specify which one) lined with three-story, Federal brick row houses, a wall. A certain wall, located in the middle of the block, about thirty feet long, connecting two houses. It’s made of glazed brick and is a good fifteen feet high. The brickwork itself is topped with an ancient, black wrought-iron fence about five feet high that gracefully billows outward and is impossible to climb. Above this fence, and in many places grown through it, are the thick branches of an ailanthus tree, a weedy, fast-growing nuisance of a plant, much given to the city’s empty lots, that will contort itself into any shape in order to survive. It must either die by disease or be rooted out completely. This particular ailanthus is so tenacious in its reach toward sunlight that it seems to conspire with wall and fence to keep people out.
    I’ve spent no small amount of time standing on the other side of the street with my arms folded, looking first at the tree and its tangle of branches, then at the fence, and then at the brick wall. Until last winter, examining the wall gave me some measure of reassurance. The wall is virtually impenetrable, and this is important, because set within it is a narrow doorway secured by a gate—not the usual rectangle of vertical iron bars but a solid steel-plate door that extends down to within a quarter inch of the brick walkway. You could slip a weekday paper under that gate with a bit of effort, but you couldn’t push a Sunday edition through. The gate is an exact replica of one that hung there for more than a century—iron, brittle with age, rusted here and there, repainted black fifteen times. I hired a sixty-year-old Russian welder from Brooklyn to duplicate it in steel. Then the two of us tore out the old gate, hinges and all, and set the new one in its place, repointing the brickwork. I remember how pleased I was,