“‘And for lunch today I was a good girl. I had an apple and an enema.’”

  “There you go. My next thought was show business. Actresses, possibly dancers, something like that.”

  “But?”

  “But then Danny Boy asked me something, and I replied at some length, and I noticed the way the two of you were listening. Connie in particular was looking right into my eyes and hanging on every word.”

  “And what self-respecting actress would do that?”

  “Except what I got was that she wasn’t really listening. Oh, she was paying close attention, and if there was a test on the material she’d score high on it, but she was managing to look more interested in what I was saying than she really was. Her attention didn’t go any deeper than her eyes.”

  “That’s very interesting. What about me? Or were you only paying attention to Connie?”

  “You were really listening,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “Or you were a cut above her when it came to faking it.”

  “No, I was tuned in,” she said. “From the moment you came over to our table. Oh, he’s a cop, I thought, before anybody said a word, and—”

  “You got that right away?”

  “Instantly. Your eyes, your stance, your whole, what’s the word, affect. I don’t think you’re cut out for undercover work.”

  “Just certain roles. I can get away with posing as a crooked cop.”

  That earned me that laugh again. She said, “So I saw this handsome cop, and I saw the ring on your finger, and I saw the look in your eye, and I knew.”

  “You knew?”

  “That you’d be coming home with me. That if we were both genuinely lucky we’d do what we came here to do, and then you’d hop into your clothes and out of my life, and neither of us would ever be any more to the other than a happy memory.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “No,” she said.

  What she wanted, she said, might not be possible, and that might be true even if I wanted it as well. What she wanted was for us to go on being who we were, a happily married cop and a call girl who enjoyed her work, and for me to be her boyfriend. She didn’t want me to take her away from all this, and she didn’t want to take me away from anything, least of all my wife and children, but she’d like to have someone who mattered to her, someone to spend evenings like this with, someone to be close to both in and out of bed.

  She hadn’t had a boyfriend since her senior year in high school. He’d got her pregnant right around the time she began to realize he was sort of a yutz, and he would have married her, because that went along with being the kind of yutz he was, but thank God she said something to her Aunt Vicki, and Vicki had a cousin who knew somebody, and she had a quick and quiet abortion and that was that.

  And two years later she was working in a Midtown office and one day she had lunch with a girl named Karen, who was showing off yet another cashmere sweater, and something made her ask Karen how she could dress the way she did on her salary.

  “I go out on dates,” Karen said. “I’m a very good date.”

  It took her a couple of seconds, but only a couple of seconds, and what shocked her was realizing that she wasn’t shocked. She was interested, and not because she wanted to fill her drawers with cashmere sweaters. What she wanted was to get away from the house she’d grown up in, and a job she hated, and a future with nothing more interesting in it than a three-bedroom split-level in Levittown and a husband not much different from the yutz she’d come this close to marrying.

  Karen introduced her to Rita, the woman who arranged her dates, and two days later she got a call at work and told her boss she had a migraine. She could have walked the half dozen blocks to the hotel, but she told herself she was now one of those people who took taxis. “The Sherry-Netherland,” she told the driver, and she didn’t need to tell him where it was.

  The john was wearing one of the white terrycloth robes the hotel provided. He’d just taken a shower, which she thought was considerate of him. He chatted with her for a few minutes, told her he was in town briefly from Indianapolis, that his unspecified business brought him to New York fairly regularly. He asked her if she would take off her clothes, and she did, and he told her she was very pretty. I’ll bet you say that to all the girls, she thought, but she kept that thought to herself. Then he sat back and opened his robe, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what he wanted her to do, and she did it.

  She didn’t have to collect payment. That would go directly to Rita, who’d pass along her share. When she’d gotten dressed, she gave him a warm smile and said she hoped she’d see him again sometime, and he told her she was sweet. “Something for yourself,” he said, and slipped her what turned out to be a fifty-dollar bill.

  She never looked back. As soon as she could afford it she moved into a studio apartment in Murray Hill, and by the time the one-year lease was up, she was ready for Fiftieth Street, where she’d been for close to three years now. She still got some of her dates through Rita, but most came as referrals from satisfied clients.

  She’d never had a pimp. She knew girls who did, and they all came across to her as emotionally damaged, if in different ways. A number of them used drugs, which had even less appeal to her than giving her earnings to some uptown clown in a zoot suit and a purple hat. She’d gotten high on marijuana a couple of times, and tried cocaine, and none of that was for her. Nor was alcohol, really. She’d have a glass of wine, but rarely wanted a second.

  So that’s who she was, and that was probably more than I needed to know, but part of what she wanted was someone she could say anything to, and I felt like I might be that person, and if I wasn’t then we might as well find that out sooner rather than later.

  So what did I think?

  I said, “Here’s what I think. If I were wearing a white terrycloth robe, the kind they give you in fancy hotels—”

  “Like the Sherry?”

  “Kind of like that, yeah. And if I were to open it, what do you suppose it might get me?”

  “A good time,” she said. “I think we’re both gonna have a good time.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  We mostly did.

  Once, twice a week. Usually at the black and white apartment in Turtle Bay, for as little as an hour or as long as overnight. I’d call, to make sure she was alone and would like company, and when I got there the doorman would confirm that Mr. Matthew was welcome.

  Once in a while, she’d call me, and if she had to leave a message it would be to call my Cousin Frances. That happened infrequently enough that when she left that message some years later I’d forgotten the code, and it took a while before I figured out who’d left the message.

  Sometimes when I’d call she’d have commitments. That was the word she’d use. Sometimes her machine would pick up, leaving me to wonder whether she was in the shower or getting her hair done or servicing some guy in the garment trade.

  Or some lawyer. She got a lot of business from the legal profession.

  And how did I feel about all that? I’m sure my feelings were mixed, and I’m at least as sure that I was largely out of touch with them. That’s pretty much a given when you drink the way I did, and it’s one of the reasons why they put the stuff in bottles.

  Make the next one a double, Joe. I want to get out of touch with my feelings.

  Hard to know, a lifetime later, just what I felt. There was some pride, certainly. There were all these men, richer and more successful than I, and they paid this woman for what she willingly gave to me. And she was beautiful, and whip-smart, and funny, and she chose to spend her time with me.

  So I felt proud, and aware of my good fortune.

  I also got to feel morally superior. No, not that, not exactly. More that I was able to feel on an equal moral footing.

  Because, although I thought about it as infrequently as possible, I was not entirely at ease with the person I had become. I was watching my marriage fall apart. I was a poor father and a worse husband. I was drinking more than I should, and getting away with it, and trying not to acknowledge the possibility that there would come a day when I couldn’t get away with it any longer. I was cutting corners on the job, and breaking the rules that a cop learned he could break, and a few others besides. I was getting away with that, too, but it was something to think about—or, with another drink in me, something to not think about.

  But I was on the right side of the law, wasn’t I? And if my morals were a little lax, well, why don’t you take a good look at her? She broke the law every time she let a paying customer into her bedroom, and she earned a very decent living by leading a life that was anything but decent. For Christ’s sake, she’d do things with strangers that plenty of women wouldn’t do with their husbands. Hey, maybe you were less than perfect as a husband and a father and a cop, but still that’s what you were, a husband and a father and a cop, and she was a whore.

  Not a chain of thought that surfaced often, even as it’s not one I like to recall. But it was there, and some of the time I took note of it, and had to blink it away.

  And mostly we did have a good time, and mostly it felt less complicated than it was. We went to some clubs, heard some good music. We talked a lot, and I’m sure we told each other a few lies, but not too many.

  I don’t think I’d ever had a conversation with a woman where I hadn’t been holding something in check, polishing the image I was presenting of myself. God knows that was true in my marriage. It worked, insofar as it worked at all, because I made myself appear to be the person Anita wanted me to be. With Elaine, I somehow knew I didn’t need to do that. And the more I let her see into me, the more she seemed to like what she saw.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  This morning I’m a little late getting to the computer. I woke up with something bothering me, and the first thing I did was take a book from the shelf and sit down with it. It’s one of the novels, somewhere in the middle of the series, a rather dramatic thriller in which a lot of people get killed and—spoiler alert!—Elaine and I get back together again.

  The novel includes a summation of how we met and got together in the first place, years before the story begins, and the facts are wrong. I join them at Danny Boy’s table, but instead of a downtown jazz club the venue is Poogan’s Pub, one of Danny Boy’s regular hangouts. And there are other inconsistencies, which I guess I suspected, and that’s what sent me looking for the book. Little things, mostly; she had one abstract painting on the living room wall, a splash of red in the black and white room, and in the book there are two paintings. Why make a change like that? One painting’s not enough? It bothered me to read it, but I’ve had an hour or so to brood about it, and I’m able to see that it’s not important.

  The book, as I said, is a dramatic thriller, very much as the writer meant it to be. It begins with someone turning up from the past and changing the present and the future, and I suppose it does its job. The actual events in the book’s present-time narrative are as I recall them, and I can’t explain the other changes, but I guess he thought it would make the story more dramatic and more thrilling.

  I never thought of it as thrilling while it was going on. I sure as hell wasn’t getting a thrill out of it. It was dramatic, yes. I’d have been happy to have it a little less dramatic.

  Never mind. If he could move my date of birth from September to May, I suppose he’s as entitled to shift our meeting site from SoHo to the West Seventies.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Back to early times—which happened to be the brand of bourbon Elaine kept for me. It was nothing special, Early Times, but it didn’t have to be. It went down easy, and did the job.

  We did each other good, and in ways beyond sex and conversation. Once or twice, maybe more than that, she’d been able to recount something she’d heard from a john that wound up making a case for me. She never had to testify or give a statement, and if I cited her at all it was as an anonymous source, but she set some processes in motion, and one of the cases generated a headline or two.

  And what did I do for her? Well, it’s often useful for anyone with a marginal lifestyle to have a good friend with a badge. When a doorman told her a police officer had asked him some questions, I managed to identify the cop in question and have a talk with him. She’s all right, I said. She’s a valued source, and a close personal friend. Say no more, he told me, and that was the end of that.

  And one time one of the things every working girl dreads happened to her. A john had a heart attack or stroked out, whatever it was, and died in her bed.

  Since then I’ve seen a T-shirt that said, A friend will help you move. A real friend will help you move a body. I got an urgent message to call Cousin Frances, and that gave me the chance to prove I was a real friend.

  That’s in the novel. And it’s letter-perfect there, too, down to the street in the Financial District where I dropped the corpse, and the $500 I took from his wallet, and shared with the patrolman who gave me a hand. I figured the dead man would want me to have it, for sparing his wife the knowledge that he’d taken his last breath in a prostitute’s bed.

  So we played a variety of roles in each other’s lives. And, when a real threat came along, I was the one who figured out a way to deal with it.

  That was probably something that I could have handled better.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It’s all in the book, accurately enough and in detail, and the last thing I want to do is relive it all here. But it was pivotal, and a summary seems to be called for.

  A man named James Leo Motley, a sadistic psychopath out of a nightmare, decided to move into her life—and the lives of a few other women, Connie Cooperman among them. I got Elaine to file a complaint, but there was no real way that was going to stop him, and the best thing I could do was set a trap for him.

  It worked, but not as well as I’d hoped. We wound up in hand-to-hand combat, and I don’t know that I’d have come out of it well if he hadn’t turned out to have a glass jaw; my elbow found it, and that was all it took.

  He’d entered her apartment illegally, of course, and on an earlier visit he’d committed a brutal anal rape, and he’d hurt her on more than one occasion with his unaccountably powerful fingers. There was a whole list of offenses he’d committed and laws he’d broken, and there was no way they added up to a case that any District Attorney would rush to prosecute. She was a whore, for God’s sake, and I was a cop who spent a lot of time with her, and even the greenest Legal Aid lawyer could make me and Motley look like two rival pimps. Or he’d offer to plead it out, and the DA would congratulate himself for sticking the son of a bitch with ninety days in Rikers.

  What I wanted to do, of course, was kill him, break his neck and dump him somewhere. But it was one thing to relocate a corpse after a heart attack and another to do the same for a murder victim. And, while I had in fact shot a man dead without being greatly trouble by the act, that had happened in what I guess you could call the heat of battle, and in the course of performing my duties as a police officer. With Motley I’d be killing a man who wasn’t even conscious. There was no way it could be anything but murder.

  So, having remembered the man I shot, I remembered too how Vince Mahaffey had improved the optics of the crime scene, moving the cast-aside pistol so that it was where it would have been had its owner been holding it when he fell. I frisked Motley, and was pleased to find a gun; I wrapped his hand around it and used one of his powerful fingers to pull the trigger, firing a couple of rounds into the living room wall. (And didn’t miss the painting by much.)

  Then we figured out our testimony, but in the end nobody had to testify, or undergo cross-examination. I made my report, and Elaine and Connie gave statements, and a charge of attempted murder of a police officer got plea-bargained down to aggravated assault, and Motley stood up in court and drew the agreed-upon sentence of one-to-ten in Attica.

  I wish to God I’d killed him when I had the chance.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  What we’d gone through with Motley was the sort of thing that would either bring two people closer together or push them apart. In our case, I think it probably did a little of both.

  We had been in a dangerous situation together, and had come through it unharmed as a result of our joint efforts. In the course of so doing, we had perjured ourselves and falsified evidence and put a man in prison—not an innocent man, it would be hard to find a less innocent man, but nevertheless a man who had not done what we’d sworn he’d done.

  I’d perjured myself before. I won’t go so far as to call it part of the job description, but it’s a rare police detective who’s spent much time in the witness chair without tailoring the facts to fit the requirements of the case. Exactly what you saw, precisely what you heard—well, you were there, and you know what happened, and there’s no question the sonofabitch did what he’s accused of, so why leave a two-inch gap that some prick of a defense attorney can drive a tank through?

  Nor did Elaine’s line of work entail a reverence for truth. If she did her work well, every man who left her bed did so convinced she’d enjoyed their time together, that she’d found his conversation fascinating and his lovemaking thrilling. Many of her clients were in fact interesting men, and every now and then she’d actually allow herself to go with the flow and genuinely treat herself to the orgasm she’d otherwise feign—but that was only once in a while.

  Our sort of shared experience dissolves barriers. I’ve sometimes thought it was like a presence—an elephant in the room, if you like—visible only to the two of us. It gave us something to talk about, but it was always there, whether we wanted to talk about it or think about it or not.

  One immediate effect was that we found ourselves with a need to keep our relationship hidden. Now I’d been a married man all along, so it’s not as though we’d run around town looking to get our names in the tabloids, but we’d been comfortable enough in a restaurant or a jazz club. Now we saw each other only in her apartment, and those visits were infrequent until Motley was on his way to Attica. And, even in a cell, he cast enough of a shadow to keep us conscious of a need for discretion.