Free Red Hook by Reggie Nadelson Page B

doesn’t tell me. She’s nineteen, she had a place at Harvard, but she wants to be a model. She goes out to clubs all night until next morning, all night, Artyom, with men.”
    â€œThat’s what she should be doing. She’s a girl.”
    â€œI don’t like him,” he said coldly. “I don’t want. You understand? This doesn’t work for me.”
    â€œLet it go,” I said. “You could dance with me if you want.”
    It made him smile, and then I said, as casually as I could, “So have you heard from her?”
    â€œWho?” he said.
    â€œYou know who.” I tapped a waiter on the shoulder and asked him to get me a drink. “Scotch,” I said.
    â€œShe’s in New York,” he said. “You knew she came back, I told you.”
    â€œI didn’t know she stayed. You said she came back, but that was a year ago, more than a year. Is she here? For good?”
    He was silent.
    It was the elephant in the room, the eight hundred pound gorilla, but I had refused to see it, or notice, and now I had crashed into it. Jack Santiago thought that I’d married Lily.
    I had tried not to think about her. She had gone away. After 9/11, she left me and New York and got married and went to London. For a while, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like someone stepped on my oxygen.
    It was almost three years since Lily, sick of what she saw as relentless patriotism that both bored and scared her to death, found someone to marry and take her away. And I felt dead. For a year, I felt dead. But that was all over, and even thinking about Lily felt like a betrayal. She was out of my life.
    I saw that Tolya was only half listening to me, focused on Jack and Val.
    â€œLet it go, OK? Let them be.”
    â€œOK,” he said. “OK. So go dance with Maxine, Artyom. Dance with her.”
    It was getting late. I opened my phone and found another message from Sid, and called my machine and found two more, the last one left around eleven, more stuff about the dead guy near the docks, Maxine was waiting for me.
    â€œDance with her,” Tolya said, this time in Russian.
    So Maxine and I walked out to the middle of the floor and the piano player called out to ask us what we wanted him to play and I said to Maxie, you choose, and she called over to the piano player and asked for “I Love You Just the Way You Are”.
    The trio began to play. Max was a really good dancer and had taught me some steps, and we began to dance, and I concentrated hard.
    â€œAm I singing?” I said in Maxine’s ear.
    â€œYes,” she whispered, smiling into my face, and I smiled and kissed her all over, eyes, mouth, ears, everywhere, and for a while I almost forgot everything else.

6
    I have something to tell you, Sid McKay said softly, haltingly, on the phone the Monday morning after my wedding. I need to tell you this, I need you to know just in case. I need to see you. I lied before. I lied when I saw you yesterday morning. I did call it in, it was me. I called the cops.
    I told Sid to talk to the detective on the case, and he said, it isn’t simple, Artie, please.
    Go, Maxine said sleepily. We had gone to sleep around four, and she barely opened her eyes when the phone rang. Go, you won’t feel good unless you go, she said, and turned over, still smiling, and went back to sleep.
    â€œI knew him,” Sid said as soon as I got to him at his place in Red Hook.
    â€œWho was he?” I said. “In case of what? You said ‘in case’ on the phone. In case of what?”
    â€œPlease sit down.”
    I leaned against the desk near the window that overlooked the water.
    â€œI thought you said you were getting out of here yesterday?” I said.
    He didn’t answer me.
    â€œSid, please, talk to me. I can’t keep coming back. I’m working this week and then I’m going on vacation. Honeymoon. I want to give you some phone numbers. Two.