Oracle Night Read online

  I nodded, having no idea what to say next. I wanted to get up and leave before I got myself into trouble, but I couldn’t move. The girl was too much, and I couldn’t stop looking at her.

  ‘Tu veux danser avec moi?’ she said. ‘You dance with me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not a very good dancer.’

  ‘Something else?’

  ‘I don’t know. Well, maybe one thing … if it isn’t too much to ask.’

  ‘One thing?’

  ‘I was wondering…. Would you mind terribly if I touched you?’

  ‘Touched me? Of course. That is easy. Touch me anywhere you like.’

  I reached out my hand and ran it down the length of her bare arm. ‘You are very timide,’ she said. ‘Do you not see my breasts? Mes seins sont très jolis, n’est-ce pas?’

  I was sober enough to realize that I was traveling down the road to perdition, but I didn’t let that stop me. I cupped her small round breasts in my two hands and held them there for some time – long enough to feel her nipples harden.

  ‘Ah, that is better,’ she said. ‘Now you let me touch you, okay?’

  I didn’t say yes, but neither did I say no. I assumed she had something innocent in mind – a pat on the cheek, a finger traced across my lips, a playful squeeze of the hand. Nothing to compare with what she actually did, in any case, which was to press herself against me, slide her elegant hand down into my jeans, and take hold of the erection that had been growing in there for the past two minutes. When she felt how stiff I was, she smiled. ‘I think we are ready to dance,’ she said. ‘You come with me now, okay?’

  To his credit, Chang didn’t laugh at this sad little spectacle of male weakness. He had proved his point, and rather than gloat over his triumph, he merely winked at me as I walked off with Martine to her booth.

  The whole transaction seemed to last no longer than the time it takes to fill a bathtub. She closed the curtain around the booth and immediately unbuckled my pants. Then she dropped to her knees and put her right hand around my penis, and after a few gentle strokes, followed by some timely licks of the tongue, she put it in her mouth. Her head began to move, and as I listened to the tinkling of her braids and looked down at her extraordinary bare back, I felt a rush of warmth rising up through my legs and into my groin. I wanted to prolong the experience and savor it for a little while, but I couldn’t. Martine’s mouth was a deadly instrument, and like any aroused teenage boy, I came almost at once.

  Regret set in within a matter of seconds. By the time I’d pulled up my jeans and fastened my belt, regret had turned into shame and remorse. The only thing I wanted was to get out of there as quickly as I could. I asked Martine how much I owed her, but she waved me off and said my friend had already taken care of it. She kissed me when I said good-bye, an amiable little peck on the cheek, and then I parted the curtain and went back to the bar to look for Chang. He wasn’t there. Perhaps he’d found a woman for himself and was already with her in another booth, testing the professional qualifications of one of his future employees. I didn’t bother to stick around to find out. I walked around the bar once, just to make sure I hadn’t missed him, and then I found the door that led to the dress factory and started out for home.

  The next morning, Wednesday, I served Grace breakfast in bed again. There was no talk about dreams this time, and neither one of us mentioned the pregnancy or what she was planning to do about it. The issue was still up in the air, but after my disgraceful behavior in Queens the day before, I felt too embarrassed to broach the subject. In the span of thirty-six short hours, I had gone from being a self-righteous defender of moral certainties to an abject, guilt-ridden husband.

  Nevertheless, I tried to keep up a good front, and even though she was unusually quiet that morning, I don’t think Grace suspected anything was wrong. I insisted on walking her to the subway, holding her hand for the entire four blocks to the Bergen Street station, and for most of the way we talked about ordinary matters: a jacket she was designing for a book on nineteenth-century French photography, the film treatment I had handed in the day before and the money I hoped would come from it, what we would have for dinner that night. On the last block, however, Grace abruptly changed the tone of the conversation. She gripped my hand tightly and said: ‘We trust each other, don’t we, Sid?’

  ‘Of course we do. We wouldn’t be able to live together if we didn’t. The whole idea of marriage is based on trust.’

  ‘People can go through rough times, can’t they? But that doesn’t mean things can’t work out in the end.’

  ‘This isn’t a rough time, Grace. We’ve been through that already, and we’re beginning to pull ourselves together again.’

  ‘I’m glad you said that.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re glad. But why?’

  ‘Because that’s what I think too. No matter what happens with the baby, everything between us is going to be fine. We’re going to make it.’

  ‘We’ve already made it. We’re cruising down Easy Street, kid, and that’s where we’re going to stay.’

  Grace stopped walking, put her hand on the back of my neck, and pulled my face toward her for a kiss. ‘You’re the best, Sidney,’ she said, and then she kissed me once more for good measure. ‘No matter what happens, don’t ever forget that.’

  I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but before I could ask her what she meant, she disentangled herself from my arms and started running toward the subway. I stood where I was on the sidewalk, watching her cover the last ten yards. Then she came to the top step, grabbed hold of the railing, and disappeared down the stairs.

  Back at the apartment, I kept myself busy for the next hour, killing time until the Sklarr Agency opened at nine-thirty. I washed the breakfast dishes, made the bed, tidied up the living room, and then I went back into the kitchen and called Mary. The ostensible reason was to make sure Angela had remembered to give her my pages, but knowing that she had, I was actually calling to find out what Mary thought of them. ‘Good job,’ she said, sounding neither greatly excited nor terribly disappointed. The fact that I had written the outline so quickly, however, had enabled her to pull off a high-speed communications miracle, and that had her gushing with excitement. In those days before fax machines, e-mails, and express letters, she had sent the treatment to California by private courier, which meant that my work had already traveled across the country on last night’s red-eye. ‘I had to get a contract off to another client in LA,’ Mary said, ‘so I hired the courier service to come by the office at three o’clock. I read your treatment right after lunch, and half an hour later the guy shows up for the contract. “This one’s also going to LA,” I said, “so you might as well take it too.” So I handed him your manuscript, and off it went, just like that. It should be on Hunter’s desk in about three hours.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘But what about the idea? Do you think it has a chance?’

  ‘I only read it once. I didn’t have time to study it, but it seemed fine to me, Sid. Very interesting, nicely worked out. But you never know with those Hollywood people. My guess is it’s too complicated for them.’

  ‘So I shouldn’t get my hopes up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. Just don’t count on it, that’s all.’

  ‘I won’t. But the money would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Well, I do have some good news for you on that front. I was just going to call you, in fact, but you beat me to it. A Portuguese publisher has made an offer on your last two novels.’

  ‘Portugal?’

  ‘Self-Portrait was published in Spain while you were in the hospital. You know that, I told you. The reviews were very good. Now the Portuguese are interested.’

  ‘That’s nice. I suppose they’re offering something like three hundred dollars.’

  ‘Four hundred for each book. But I can easily get them up to five.’

  ‘Go for it, Mary. After you deduct the agents’ fees and foreign taxes, I’ll win
d up with about forty cents.’

  ‘True. But at least you’ll be published in Portugal. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. Pessoa is one of my favorite writers. They’ve kicked out Salazar and have a decent government now. The Lisbon earthquake inspired Voltaire to write Candide. And Portugal helped get thousands of Jews out of Europe during the war. It’s a terrific country. I’ve never been there, of course, but that’s where I live now, whether I like it or not. Portugal is perfect. The way things have been going these past few days, it had to be Portugal.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it some other time.’

  I made it to Trause’s apartment on the dot of one. As I rang the bell, it occurred to me that I should have stopped off somewhere in the neighborhood and bought take-out lunches for the two of us, but I had forgotten about Madame Dumas, the woman from Martinique who managed the household. The meal was already prepared, and it was served to us in John’s den on the second floor, the same room where we had eaten our Chinese dinner on Saturday night. I should note that Madame Dumas was not on duty that day. It was her daughter, Régine, who opened the door and led me upstairs to Monsieur John. I remembered that Trause had called her ‘nice to look at,’ and now that I’d seen her myself, I was forced to admit that I, too, found her remarkably attractive – a tall, well-proportioned young woman with glowing ebony skin and keen, watchful eyes. No G-string, of course, no bare breasts or white leather boots, but this was the second twenty-year-old French-speaking black woman I had met in two days, and I found the repetition jarring, almost intolerable. Why couldn’t Régine Dumas have been a short, homely girl with a bad complexion and a hump on her back? She wasn’t the heart-stopping beauty that Martine of Haiti was, perhaps, but she was a fetching creature in her own right, and when she opened the door and smiled at me in her friendly, self-assured way, I felt it as a reproof, a mocking rejoinder from my own troubled conscience. I had been doing everything in my power not to think about what had happened the day before, to forget my sorry peccadillo and put it behind me, but there was no escape from what I had done. Martine had come to life again in the form of Régine Dumas. She was everywhere now, even in my friend’s Barrow Street apartment, half a world away from that shabby cinder-block building in Queens.

  As opposed to his unkempt appearance on Saturday night, John looked presentable this time. His hair was combed, his whiskers were gone, and he was wearing a freshly laundered shirt and clean socks. But he was still immobilized on the sofa, his left leg propped up on a mountain of pillows and blankets, and he seemed to be in considerable pain – as bad as the other night, if not worse. The clean-shaven look had thrown me. When Régine brought the lunch upstairs on a tray (turkey sandwiches, salads, sparkling water), I did everything I could not to look at her. That meant focusing my attention on John, and when I studied his features more carefully, I saw that he was exhausted, with a sunken, hollowed-out look in his eyes and a disturbing pallor to his skin. He left the sofa twice while I was there, and both times he reached for his crutch before maneuvering himself into a standing position. From the look on his face when his left foot touched the ground, the slightest pressure on the vein must have been unbearable.

  I asked him when he was supposed to get better, but John didn’t want to talk about it. I kept after him, however, and eventually he admitted that he hadn’t told us everything on Saturday night. He hadn’t wanted to alarm Grace, he said, but the truth was that there were two clots in his leg, not one. The first was in a superficial vein. It had nearly dissolved by now and posed no threat, even though it was causing most of what John referred to as his ‘discomfort.’ The second was lodged in a deep interior vein, and that was the one the doctor was worried about. Massive doses of blood thinner had been prescribed, and John was scheduled to have a scan at Saint Vincent’s on Friday. If the results were less than satisfactory, the doctor was planning to admit him to the hospital and keep him there until the clot disappeared. Deep-vein thrombosis could be fatal, John said. If the clot broke loose, it could travel through his bloodstream and wind up in a lung, causing a pulmonary embolism and almost certain death. ‘It’s like walking around with a little bomb in my leg,’ he said. ‘If I shake it around too much, it could blow me up.’ Then he added, ‘Not a word to Gracie. This is strictly between you and me. Got it? Not a single goddamn word.’

  Not long after that, we started talking about his son. I can’t remember what led us into that pit of despair and self-recrimination, but Trause’s anguish was palpable, and whatever concerns he had about his leg were nothing compared to the hopelessness he felt about Jacob. ‘I’ve lost him,’ he said. ‘After the stunt he’s just pulled, I’ll never believe another word he says to me.’

  Until the latest crisis, Jacob had been an undergraduate at SUNY Buffalo. John was acquainted with several members of the English Department there (one of them, Charles Rothstein, had published a long study of his novels), and after Jacob’s disastrous, near-failing record in high school, he had pulled some strings in order to get the boy accepted. The first semester had gone reasonably well, and Jacob had managed to pass all his courses, but by the end of the second term his grades had fallen off so badly that he was put on academic probation. He needed to maintain a B average to avoid suspension, but in the fall semester of his sophomore year he cut more classes than he attended, did little or no work, and was summarily booted out for the next term. He went back to his mother in East Hampton, where she was living with her third husband (in the same house where Jacob had grown up with his much-despised stepfather, an art dealer named Ralph Singleton), and found a part-time job at a local bakery. He also formed a rock band with three of his high school friends, but there were so many tensions and squabbles among them that the group broke up after six months. He told his father he had no use for college and didn’t want to go back, but John managed to talk him into it by offering certain financial incentives: a comfortable allowance, a new guitar if he kept his grades up in the first semester, a Volkswagen minibus if he finished the year with a B average. The kid went for it, and in late August he’d gone back to Buffalo to play at being a student again – with green hair, a row of safety pins dangling from his left ear, and a long black overcoat. The punk era was in full bloom then, and Jacob had joined the ever-expanding club of snarling, middle-class renegades. He was hip, he lived on the edge, and he didn’t take crap from anyone.

  Jacob had enrolled for the semester, John said, but a week later, without having attended a single class, he returned to the registrar’s office and dropped out of school. The tuition was returned to him, and instead of sending the check to his father (who had provided him with the money in the first place), he cashed it in at the nearest bank, put the three thousand dollars in his pocket, and headed south to New York. At last word, he was living somewhere in the East Village. If the rumors circulating about him were correct, he was deep into heroin – and had been for the past four months.

  ‘Who told you this?’ I asked. ‘How do you know it’s true?’

  ‘Eleanor called me yesterday morning. She’d been trying to get hold of Jacob about something, and his roommate answered the phone. Ex-roommate, I should say. He told her Jacob had left school two weeks ago.’

  ‘And the heroin?’

  ‘He told her about that too. There’s no reason for him to lie about a thing like that. According to Eleanor, he sounded very concerned. It’s not that I’m surprised, Sid. I’ve always suspected he was taking drugs. I just didn’t know it was this bad.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re the one who used to work with kids. What would you do?’

  ‘You’re asking the wrong person. All my students were poor. Black teenagers from tumbledown neighborhoods and broken families. A lot of them took drugs, but their problems have nothing to do with Jacob’s.’

  ‘Eleanor thinks we should go out
looking for him. But I can’t move. I’m stuck on this couch with my leg.’

  ‘I’ll do it if you like. It’s not as if I’m very busy these days.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t want you getting involved. It’s not your problem. Eleanor and her husband will do it. At least that’s what she said. With her, you never know if she means it or not.’

  ‘What’s her new husband like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him. The funny thing is, I can’t even remember his name. I’ve been lying here trying to think of it, but I keep drawing blanks. Don something, I think, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘And what’s the plan once they find Jacob?’

  ‘Get him into a drug rehab program.’

  ‘Those things aren’t cheap. Who’s going to pay for it?’

  ‘Me, of course. Eleanor’s rolling in money these days, but she’s so fucking tight, I wouldn’t even bother to ask her. The kid chisels three thousand bucks out of me, and now I have to cough up another bundle to get him clean. If you want to know the truth, I feel like wringing his neck. You’re lucky you don’t have any children, Sid. They’re nice when they’re small, but after that they break your heart and make you miserable. Five feet, that’s the maximum. They shouldn’t be allowed to grow any taller than that.’

  After John’s last comment, I couldn’t hold back from telling him my news. ‘I might not be childless much longer,’ I said. ‘It’s not clear what we’re going to do about it yet, but for the moment Grace is pregnant. She had the test on Saturday.’

  I didn’t know what I was expecting John to say, but even after his bitter pronouncements on the agonies of fatherhood, I figured he’d manage to come out with some kind of perfunctory congratulations. Or at least wish me luck and warn me to do a better job than he’d done. Something, in any case, some little word of acknowledgment. But John didn’t make a sound. For a moment he looked stricken, as if he’d just been told about the death of someone he loved, and then he turned his face away from me, abruptly swiveling his head on the pillow and looking straight into the back of the sofa.