I’m way ahead of myself here, but I might as well finish the thought, or the chain of thoughts.

  We were friendly, Nan and I, and I liked her looks, and I guess she found mine tolerable. One night a look passed between us, not for the first time, and outside on Ninth Avenue I said I’d walk her home, and fell into step alongside her.

  I read somewhere that there were two things you shouldn’t tell in a memoir, how much money you made and who you slept with; unfortunately, it went on, those were the two subjects people were most interested in. I already broke the first rule when I told you what Perlstein paid me, but I don’t expect to write more about money. I never cared all that much about it, which was just as well, as I was never destined to bring home a whole lot of it.

  I broke the second rule, too, when I wrote about the consequences of knocking on Shirley’s door in Parkchester. And I’ll say now that Nan and I were in unspoken agreement as to how the evening would end. I didn’t have to ask to go upstairs with her, and everything else followed as if we’d done it all before.

  As we had, if not with each other.

  I suppose we were together half a dozen times. Only one occasion might almost qualify as a date; she’d been given a pair of tickets to a workshop production of The Play’s the Thing, the Ferenc Molnar comedy, and would I like to keep her company? I took her to dinner afterward and listened to her semiprofessional take on the performance we’d seen. The restaurant, long gone now, was Brittany du Soir, and we followed a light meal and bottle of wine with small snifters of brandy.

  No, not brandy. A cordial. Drambuie, in fact.

  Funny—or not funny—how I almost always remember what I drank.

  We wound up at her place—the restaurant, at 53rd and Ninth, was halfway there. There was only one occasion when I took her back to my hotel room, and that was at her suggestion.

  Her insistence, really. I was at Armstrong’s, and she had the night off. If I’d been at my usual table I might have seen her come in, but I was at the bar with my back to the door, and wasn’t aware of her until she was standing next to me, waving away the approaching bartender.

  She said my name, just that. “Matthew,” she said, although she always called me Matt. I read what I could in her face and got up from my stool, and she was already in motion, heading for the door.

  Outside she asked if we could go to my place. We did, and without a word. The fellow behind the desk was professionally expressionless, but his face rarely showed much; he was always riding a light buzz of terpin hydrate and codeine, and I guess it must have worked for him, because I don’t believe I ever once heard him cough.

  My room was neat enough, but it could have been a mare’s nest and I don’t think she’d have noticed. When I closed the door and turned the lock she sighed, as if giving herself permission to relax.

  She said, “Could you just fuck me? Could we make everything go away?”

  Sometimes that’s the point. Sometimes it’s like whiskey, it’s not the bouquet or the aroma, not the richness of the amber color, not the burn of raw moonshine or the complex peaty flavor of a premium single malt. Sometimes all those elements provide is assurance that the remedy is likely to work, that the drink will function as a solvent, smoothing and softening the sharp edges of the awful present moment.

  That it—a drink or another person—will make everything go away.

  I liked her enough to want to pour her this drink, as it were. And her charms were more than enough to make my role a labor of lust, if not of love. And so for a spell we couldn’t get our fill of each other, and then we could and did.

  I may have dropped off to sleep, but not for more than a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes she was on her feet and gathering her clothes. I said I’d walk her home, and she said I was sweet but not to be silly, that it was early and anyway she’d take a cab. I didn’t argue, and when my eyelids dropped I didn’t trouble to open them.

  And that was that, and a day or two later we were friendly waitress and regular customer, the mixture as before. I had a case I was working, don’t ask me which one, and it was heating up and getting more of my time and attention. And Nan was seeing somebody, most likely whoever it was whose behavior—brutal or distant or whatever it may have been—had been sufficiently upsetting to drive her to my bed.

  We were together one more time. Her shift ended and she picked up a drink, a glass of red wine, and brought it over to my table, sat down and had a sip or two. Then she said she thought she owed me an apology. For what? For using me, she said. I assured her I’d had a good time, and that I’d never felt ill-used.

  “Even so,” she said, and giggled. What was so funny? “I was just thinking,” she said, “that I picked you up like a dildo.”

  “I’ve been called worse,” I said.

  And then we were talking, and it was loose and easy. I finished my drink and she finished hers and we left the bar together and headed downtown. It had rained earlier, and it was still drizzling, but not enough to matter.

  “This’ll just be fun,” she said.

  And it was. It was also our last time together, and I think it was the last time I laid eyes on her. I spent much of the next few days in the Elmhurst section of Queens, where the proprietor of a diner on Queens Boulevard was pretty sure one of his cashiers had declared himself an unofficial partner. What complicated things was that my client had tried to prevent just this sort of thing by hiring relatives, and the leading suspect was a nephew on his wife’s side of the family.

  I don’t remember the details, let alone the names. I had lots of cases like this, most of them easily solved, even if the parties weren’t necessarily thrilled with the outcome. I think one of them, possibly this one, found its way into one of the books.

  It doesn’t matter. I could see right away that my guy’s guess was right, and the motivator was either a heroin habit or gambling debts, and I can’t remember which. I did what I did, and I got paid and went back to Manhattan, and to Armstrong’s.

  No Nan, and I asked the guy behind the stick if she’d been in. All he knew was she’d quit and he didn’t know why. Someone else did; an audition had paid off, and she’d hurried off to join the road company of some play.

  Gigs like that don’t last forever. I figured she’d be back. And maybe she was, maybe she was waiting tables somewhere else, maybe she’d come home with a few extra dollars in her purse and found a nicer place to live. A studio apartment in Chelsea, say, a step up from a roach motel in Hell’s Kitchen.

  Switch neighborhoods in New York and your whole life changes. You have to find a new laundromat and a new dry cleaner, a new pizza stand and a new Chinese restaurant.

  A new place to drink. New people to sleep with.

  Funny. That last night, after our passage had indeed been fun, just as she’d predicted, she told me I could stay over. I don’t know that she’d made the invitation before. As usual, though, I put on my clothes and walked home.

  It had stopped raining, but the pavement was still damp and the air was fresher than usual, as if cleansed by the rain. I felt good, and found myself thinking of Nan and wondering if there was anything there for us.

  Probably not.

  If her name was ever in lights, I never saw it. Or in print, either. If, like most waitresses with dreams, she’d settled for a less glamorous life, she might well have returned to her original less-glamorous name.

  I could probably track her down, and without leaving my desk. That’s how most private investigators do most of their work these days. You can Knock On Doors without Getting Off Your Ass, and professionals can access subscription data bases that make it easy.

  But toward what end?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  How did I get so far off track?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  From an email received this morning, in response to one I wrote last night:

  “For God’s sake, so what if the narrative’s disjointed? Let it go where it goes. The sequence doesn’t matter. This isn’t a case report, it’s just you putting down whatever comes to mind. What you want to do is let it flow without worrying what comes out of the faucet. So don’t stop, and don’t look back over your shoulder. When you’re done we can decide if it needs editing.

  “My guess is it won’t need much. You’re a good writer. Wasn’t that what got you started on the track to a gold shield? All you have to do now is stay out of your own way.

  “And no, I don’t want to see what you’ve written, not until it’s done. Don’t send it to me. If you do I’ll delete it unread. Don’t show it to anybody, not even Elaine. And quit going back over it yourself. Trust the process. Trust yourself.

  “What you want to do here is be the moving finger, and I know you remember the poem. You write and you move on . . .”

  LB

  Just like that.

  And yes, I know the poem. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and I didn’t have to Google it to get the words right because we own a copy.

  Here’s the quatrain in question:

  The moving finger writes; and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

  Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

  Hard to argue with that.

  While I was weighing the pluses and minuses of life as a union plumber, and the security that came with it, something made me think of Stan Gorski. I hadn’t seen him since I walked away from the gym at St. Margaret’s, and my only thoughts of him over the years were fleeting. On a construction job, it might occur to me that I was better at swinging a hammer or toting a bucket of joint compound for the hours I’d put in working the heavy bag.

  Stan hadn’t said much during training sessions, aside from urging me to step into a punch, that sort of thing. But one day I was standing alongside him, both of us watching a likely Golden Gloves entrant working the double-end bag, and from out of nowhere he started talking about being a cop, and how great it was.

  “You wake up in the morning and know you’re gonna spend your day making the city a little bit better than it’d be without you. You walk down the street and the good people are glad to see you and the bad ones are hoping they saw you before you saw them. Long as you do your job you’re gonna get to keep that job, and you won’t get rich but you won’t miss any meals, either. And you won’t ever want to hang it up, but when the time comes there’s a decent pension waiting for you.”

  That’s not word for word, but it’s probably close.

  And that’s how it came back to me, while I was considering a life of opening drains.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I looked for him at St. Margaret’s, but not everything stays the same forever, and I couldn’t find anyone who remembered when a cop trained teen-age boxers in the school gym, let alone had a clue where the program might have moved to. I couldn’t find him in the phone book, either. I decided it wasn’t meant to be, and I let it go for a day, and then it occurred to me to go to the nearest precinct house.

  I left a message, and a day or two later we were having a beer. The PAL program had found a new venue after whoever was in charge pulled St. Margaret’s out from under them. “We had a colored kid come around, a lightweight, a lot of natural ability and he picked things up in a hurry. Nice young man, and he might have a career as a boxer, but he was the wrong color for the priest in charge. Not that the son of a bitch would come right out and say it. ‘The wrong element,’ was the phrase he used. The program was bringing the wrong element to the school. Now of course it was possible we could change the complexion of our program—and he gave me the side eye to underline the word ‘complexion.’”

  So they’d moved on, but by the time they found a new venue he’d lost his heart for it. I told him what was new in my life, and he was sorry to learn about my mother. I said I’d been steered toward the plumbing trade, and we talked about its merits, and I said, “Stan, the reason I got in touch—” and he said, “You’re thinking it might be more satisfying to swing a nightstick than a pipe wrench. Am I right?”

  I’d sought him out so that he could sell me on it, and he did. And he told me what I had to do, and when and where I had to do it, and I’m sure before I started at the Police Academy he called ahead to tell somebody I was worth looking out for.

  It must have been three, four weeks in that the two of us got together for a beer, and he told me one of the instructors said I struck him as a kid with a future in the department. He dropped this in very casually, and he didn’t say which instructor, but it was encouragement, and came at a good time. My own view of the matter tended to swing back and forth, from I’ve found the life that was always meant for me to What the fuck am I doing here?

  In a sense that mental two-step—you could probably label it bipolar if you wanted to see it as pathological—never entirely stopped, but after that conversation with Stan my future was never in question. I was a cop, that was where I belonged, and however I felt about it was just a feeling.

  Years later someone in an AA room said, “Feelings aren’t facts,” a phrase I was to hear again and again, in that room and others. But the first time I heard it I had a sense of recognition, as if it was something I’d long since learned and forgotten.

  Something else I learned that day. The bond that led Stan to show up at my dad’s funeral, and to initiate that first conversation about boxing, had been forged when Charlie Scudder got in a punch-up with some other drunk at one of his regular joints. Nobody went to the hospital, but it was enough of an incident that the cops were called, and Stan was one of the responding officers.

  The next stop could have been Central Booking, but this guy Charlie was a guy Stan knew by sight, and if he’d been in trouble before Stan didn’t know about it. He was a frequent customer at the bar with no history as a troublemaker, and it was unclear who’d started the fight, or what it was about. So Stan had used his judgment, and settled my dad down, and, after he got a cup of coffee into him, walked him home.

  And they’d run into each other a couple of times after that. Friends? Probably not that, but friendly enough so that Stan had shown up at Gleason’s.

  Look at it in a certain light and you could say that it was my father’s drinking that steered me to the NYPD, even as my own drinking floated me out of it. Sometimes I see it that way. More often, though, it all seems to me a matter of destiny. That all rivers go where they’re meant to go, and that it’s gravity that determines the direction of flow.

  That sounds deeper than it is.

  Never mind. There’s a ceremony when a class graduates from the Police Academy, and family members generally attend. My parents were gone, obviously, and none of my other relatives showed up, though a few might have come by if it had occurred to me to tell anyone about it. But it hadn’t, and they didn’t.

  Stan Gorski did. He came over after for a handshake and the predictable back-and-forth: “See what you got me into?” “Hey, you look good in blue. Don’t be too quick to disgrace that uniform, okay?” Then he drifted away to talk to one of the instructors, and I wound up joining a couple of my classmates for drinks around the corner on Lexington Avenue.

  I never saw him again.

  We spoke a few times. I called him—a time or two for advice, but also just to report in. We talked about getting together. Every year there’s a card of six or eight bouts, NYPD versus FDNY. “Cops and firemen taking punches at each other, Matt, which is nothing new, but once a year they actually do it with gloves on.”

  But we didn’t go, and we lost touch, and I was already in plainclothes when I overheard part of a stationhouse conversation: “And the priest kept saying Stanislaus, which I never knew was his name. I always thought it was Stanley.”

  I asked who they were talking about, and it was Stan, of course, and one of them had been to his funeral a day or two earlier. He’d been home alone, he’d lived alone for the past ten years, ever since his divorce, and he’d been cleaning his gun, and it discharged accidentally.

  As noted, by the time this happened I was already out of the uniform, and a lot less green than the first time I put it on. So I knew that he hadn’t been cleaning his gun, that something had moved him to put it in his mouth and pull the trigger.

  I don’t know why he ate his gun. Does anyone, including the featured performer, ever really know?

  If I’d heard in time, I’d have been at his funeral. For all the good that would have done either of us.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  What I remember most about the early days in my new blue uniform was how conscious I was of it when I was out in public. You put it on and you felt different, but even after you’d grown used to it, when your body took for granted the weight of the gun and the cuffs and the nightstick and the bulk of the pocket notebook, you still had to get used to the way people looked at you, and the way they tried not to look at you.

  I was fortunate in that the uniform they gave me was the closest thing to a perfect fit. That’s not always the case. There were at least two of my classmates who found a tailor to do a little nipping and tucking. Most of us made do with what we got, and in my case that was no hardship.

  If I was self-conscious about my new blue suit, I was also pleased with how I looked in it. Posing in front of the mirror on my closet door, admiring my reflection. Well, it was sixty years ago. If I want to be embarrassed about the man I was back then, that touch of closed-door narcissism is the least of it.

  No question the uniform changed the way citizens looked at me; it also changed the way I looked at them. Staring was no longer something to apologize for. It was now my job to look at the people around me, to size them up, to get a sense of what was going on and what might happen next. Anyone in my field of vision might collapse and need my help, or draw a weapon and need my quick response.

  By the time a new patrolman gets used to being in uniform, he’s generally looking forward to getting out of it. Most never do, not until they put in their papers and start drawing their pensions, and that’s true even for most of the men who move up the ranks. Desk sergeants and lieutenants are uniformed officers, and even the top brass spend most of their on-duty hours wearing blue, albeit their uniforms have been tarted up with a few yards of gold braid.