He took his coffee black with a stab of rye in the morning, a nip, a pin drop, and with anisette in the afternoon or early evening, a shot, a jolt of the licorice sap, and maybe a beady tongue-taste of rye again before retiring, without coffee this time, medically forbidden of course but just a driblet, a measured snort, the briefest swig in the history of guilty drinking.
"You have to tell me. So I know." "I will tell you. I promise." "This way I know," "This way you know." "If you tell me, then I know." "That's right." "That's right, isn't it?" "Yes, that's right." "But you have to tell me. That's the only way I know."
He cleaned the kitchen windowsill, dust, hair, fly heads, flakes of plaster-stony little spalls.
When they made dinner together she hit Albert's hand every time he got in the way, a jurisdictional tap on the back of the hand.
He set his three pills next to his plate on the table, lined up for consumption. His heart pill, his fart pill and his liver pill.
He spent more time indoors when there were people in the halls. He'd seen a hypodermic syringe on the second-story landing and now there were people in the halls, busy and inert at the same time, busy inside their eyes but also body-dead, barely able to drag a hand through the air. When it stops raining, he thought, they'll go to the playground or empty lots. And the elevator was stuck between floors so he was better off not leaving the apartment anyway because it was not a good idea for him to be climbing stairs.
He slipped her glasses off her face and cleaned them with a tissue and put them back.
And when he went out they were on the front stoop muttering something that sounded like Wall Street and Albert finally surmised this was a brand of heroin for sale, Wall Street, Wall Street, and he could hear them in the halls, strangers in the building, breathing in and out.
He told her he was calling his daughter Teresa long-distance. He announced every phone call to keep Laura involved, including weather and time, and because he liked to make announcements.
His daughter ran a child-care center in a small city and had expenses and two children of her own and a lapsed husband trying to start a new career and Albert sent her a little money now and then, out of his teacher's pension.
A long-distance call was an act of predeliberation that filled a span in his mind much more extended than the length of the call. He planned an evening around it, waiting for the hour of the rate change and then placing a chair by the telephone and working the numbers carefully, his face down in the rotary dial.
He heard them breathing in the halls and knew he had food for two days easy and when the milk went sour he could open a can of peaches and dump the fruit and syrupy juice on the breakfast cereal. Clingstone, flesh that clings to the pit, to the stone, as with a peach. He heard them late at night and knew he could stretch the chopped meat, bulk up the tomato soup with macaroni, and they didn't live in the building and would find another place.
When his daughter answered the phone he looked across the room to Laura and nodded-contact made, the century of progress marches on.
Apples and cheese, they had apples and cheese, that was a meal in itself.
He was taking a book back to the library, another spring or early summer, a mild-hearted day, and he saw a familiar figure crossing the street and going toward the convent that was part of the Catholic grammar school. Anciently familiar, a figure from the land of the past. He hadn't realized she was still alive, Sister Edgar, how remarkable, the same blade face and bony hands, hurrying, a spare frame shaped by rustling garments. She wore the traditional habit with long black veil and white wimple and the starched clothpiece over the neck and shoulders, an iron crucifix swinging from her waist-she might have been a detail lifted from a painting by some sixteenth-century master.
He watched her open the convent door and disappear. This was a nun who'd been notorious for the terror she spread among the children, fifth-graders or sixth-graders, beatings, vituperations, keep them after school, send them out to clap erasers in a rainstorm. He'd never exchanged a word with Sister Edgar but felt half an urge to knock on the convent door and speak to her now, find out who she was after all these years. He'd been proud to teach in a public school, never mind the lax discipline. He worked among humane colleagues and heard stories about this nun and her routine cruelties.
He walked with a cane now and it gave him a feeling of professor emeritus. At the local library, named after Enrico Fermi, there was a photograph on the wall showing the scientist with an early model of the first atomic bomb. Years ago Albert used to entertain the idea of certain affinities between himself and the great Fermi. Illness in early childhood, marriage to a Jewish woman, science itself of course, cultural heritage-the allowable flush of Italian pride, only not so rousing in this case, attached to such destruction. The library was a movie-house then, known to neighborhood kids as the Dumps for its sour odors and unswept debris. Let's not forget how some things get better, he thought. Books now, the hush of decimaled stacks.
He walked to the social club where he played cards sometimes, less than he used to, and took an occasional glass of wine. Some pictures on the wall, old days, fishmongers in aprons and caps, waiters outside a restaurant with sharply parted hair, dignified by time. He heard the church bell at Mount Carmel, half a block away, and poured himself a glass of red. He sat alone at a formica table and studied the legs of the wine, the trickles of swirled liquid that run down the inside of the glass and tell you how much body the wine has. This wine had legs. It was all legs. It had the legs of a sumo wrestler.
The videotape was running on the TV set in the corner. He'd seen the tape only once before, right here, and knew that they would keep running it until everyone on the planet had seen it. And when they started running it again after an interval of not running it, he knew it meant the shooter had shot someone else, someone new, and because there was no film or tape of the new shooting, they had to show the old tape, the only tape, and they would show it to the ends of the earth.
Steve came over, Silvera, one of the Silvera brothers, he wore a suit and drove a hearse. Albert always asked, Who died?
"You drink that wine?"
"I tried talking to it but that didn't work," Albert said. "Sit down and join me."
"I got a funeral."
"Who died?"
"What's-his-name, from the fish market."
"Bury or cremate?"
"They put them in a wall nowdays. It's a popular thing."
"Encrypted," Albert said with satisfaction.
When the church bell rang again Steve hurried out. Albert could lean a bit and see the other drivers and pallbearers put out their cigarettes and start up the steps. It was nearly time for them to carry out the coffin. Another fishmonger, one more photograph that will seem decades hence to be an emblem of a certain stately innocence, some old lost sweet-tasting time. How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence.
Later he went into the empty church and sat in the last row to spend a moment alone with Eddie Robles. A pigeon flew across the transept and landed on the edge of a swivel window near a bank of candles. He admired this old church. Corinthian columns and niched saints. Lighted candles in rosy glass containers. The neighborhood changes, the church remains the same. In the days that followed Eddie's mass he began to see again how the loss of a friend, how any loss was an aspect of Klara's departure, repeating the impact, the devastation.