German on her father’s side, Italian on her mother’s. She pronounced it Eye-talian, for effect.

  “The ideal combination,” I said. “Our traditional allies. I just hope you’ve got a Japanese aunt.”

  That could have fallen terribly flat, as I realized halfway through. But her reaction was a bark of delighted laughter, and the way we looked at each other was different after that exchange. She liked that I’d said what I said, that I’d had the thought and voiced it, and I liked that she’d laughed.

  Years later, when some optimist opened a sushi restaurant in Syosset, the two of us had dinner there. This wasn’t long after our move from Brooklyn, and sushi was pretty much a new thing throughout the New York area, although I gather it was already part of the landscape in California. I’d had it a couple of times in the Theater District, a few blocks from Midtown North, and after the usual banter (“Hey, is this a restaurant or a bait shop?”) I discovered, as most people do, that I liked it.

  But it was Anita’s first taste of raw fish, and I wasn’t sure she’d take to it, and expressed relief when she did. “Well, what did you expect?” she said. “Don’t tell me you forgot all about my Japanese aunt.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  By then, of course, it had already gone sour.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Nine words. By then of course it had already gone sour. Nine words typed out in that particular order, then deleted, then typed again. With commas, without commas. Deleted, reworded, restored, and so on.

  Nine words. Command + Save, and Quit Word, and Shut Down, and boot up this morning and here they are, just as they were.

  I don’t want to write about Anita. She’s dead, she died twenty years ago. I’d gone to the funeral, I’d followed the other cars out to the cemetery and watched from a distance as they buried her. She spent ten years as my wife, and they weren’t all bad but they became more bad than good. After the split and the divorce she stayed on in the house in Syosset and raised the boys and made do on what money I managed to send her. And she met and married Graham Thiele, and he was a much better husband for her than I’d ever been, and then one day she had a heart attack and was gone, and I sat in my car at a Long Island cemetery and watched them lower her casket into the ground.

  “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

  That’s Beckett, of course. The line everybody knows, except I had to look it up to get it right.

  He never says why.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Back to Bensonhurst. We finished our pizza and I walked her the eight or ten blocks to her house. Her father owned the three-story row house, and he and his wife and four children lived on the ground floor. He’d installed his mother and an unmarried sister on the second floor, and an elderly Italian widower rented the top floor.

  The house had been recently painted, and I would learn that George Rembauer painted it himself, a task he performed once a year. He took good care of his property, you could see that at a glance.

  We kept up an easy conversation most of the way to her house, but ran out of words in the last block or so. Then “I had a nice time, Matt,” and “So did I,” and a moment that was only medium-awkward, and then a kiss, which turned out to be a little more than perfunctory.

  If she’d lived alone, I think she’d have invited me in.

  Instead she went inside and I walked a half mile to the subway and spent the next two hours getting home to the Bronx. For the first half hour or so I was in the warm afterglow of a very enjoyable evening, and then that wore off as I faced the fact that I would probably never see her again, because what was the point? She and I weren’t all that far apart, but you couldn’t say the same for Brooklyn and the Bronx.

  Then they gave me my badge and my gun, and stuck me in the Middle Village section of Queens. That was almost as remote as Bensonhurst, and even though I knew it was temporary and my next slot could be anywhere in the five boroughs, I didn’t waste any time finding a furnished room within walking distance of the stationhouse. It cost me eighteen dollars a week, which is no money now and wasn’t much money then, and when they switched me to a more permanent slot at the Seven-Eight in Park Slope, I found something a little nicer and not much more expensive on Garfield Place.

  At the end of the month I returned the keys to my landlord in the Bronx. I stuffed everything I wanted to keep into two suitcases and gave everything else to Goodwill. Goodbye Bronx, hello Brooklyn—and within the week I picked up a phone.

  “Hi, this is Matt,” I said. “Matt Scudder. I’m sorry I haven’t called, but things have been busy. I’ve got a new blue uniform, and you’ll never guess where I’m living.”

  She got to see the place for herself. She met me after work at a restaurant someone had recommended, and I don’t remember what we ate, but we drank a bottle of wine with it.

  Afterward, I told her we were only a few blocks from my apartment. Would she like to see it?

  “I thought you said it was a furnished room.”

  “It’s one room,” I said, “and they supplied the furniture. But my partner told me to call it a studio apartment. He said a furnished room sounds like I’m on welfare. What’s so funny?”

  “Well, it sort of does.”

  “Besides,” I said, “I’ve got my own private bathroom.”

  “God, I wish I did. I’ve got two sisters and a brother. Your studio apartment sounds like heaven.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  We’d get together once or twice a week. While we never officially established Saturday night as a date night, it became essentially that; unless something else got in the way, we’d spend Saturday evening together. And, maybe half the time, some weekday evening as well.

  I’d pick her up at her house—it wasn’t too long before I’d met her family, one person at a time—or we’d meet at a neighborhood movie house or restaurant. A couple of times we rode into Manhattan together, once when Mahaffey passed on tickets someone had given him to a Broadway show, Enter Laughing. All I remember about it is that it was funny, and that an audience laughed differently at a live performance than at a movie.

  Our evenings always wound up on Garfield Place, and two or three times they started there; I’d call her at the end of my shift, we’d meet at my apartment and go straight to bed, and we’d get something to eat after.

  Before I made the move to Brooklyn, I’d led what I suppose was a normal enough life for a man my age and in my position. There’d been a couple of girls I’d gone out with enough times that the sex act was a natural consequence, and once we’d managed that we seemed to be done with one another. And I don’t want to forget a woman a few years older than I, a regular at a bar two blocks from my house; for years I would think of her every time I heard the song “Queen of the Silver Dollar.” There were three nights when I was the one who got to take her home, and it was always an uncomplicated good time, but that was all it ever was or would be.

  So it’s safe to say Anita was my first relationship. I don’t know what I thought we were doing, exactly, but it was clear that we were doing it together.

  And I suppose I was her first relationship.

  It depends, I suppose, on how you keep score. She kept steady company her senior year in high school with a classmate at New Utrecht High, a boy whose first name I’d been told but have long since forgotten. They’d have long make-out sessions that were as frustrating as they were exciting, and that might well have led to intercourse if they hadn’t managed to discover hand jobs. That took the pressure off—well, some of it—and they talked about going all the way, and it was something they knew they’d get to eventually, but instead he went to college at Stony Brook and that was the end of that. They ran into each other once when he was home for Christmas or spring break, whenever it was, and found themselves with nothing to say.

  I suppose you’d have to call that a relationship, but because they did not in fact go all the way, it would go in the record book with an asterisk.

  Going all the way. Jesus, the world was different then.

  And in fact she did go all the way once, almost a year before Corinne played matchmaker, and that was the farthest thing from a relationship. At the time it was a clear case of caddish behavior, and nowadays it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it date rape. A man she’d never met picked her up at a party where she’d already had a little too much to drink, and managed to get a couple more drinks inside her, and took her to the Seth Low playground just off Bay Parkway and got her skirt up and her panties down.

  And so on, and she was either passed out or in a blackout, because when she came to an hour or so later she knew what had to have happened but didn’t have any real memory of it.

  Until she told me this, one night on Garfield Place, she’d never said a word about it to anyone. Who could she tell, and what could she say? Early on she was terrified he might have gotten her pregnant, and was hugely relieved when that proved not to be the case, and once she was able to relax about that, all she wanted to do was forget the whole thing. She didn’t know his name or anything about him beside the fact that he was a son of a bitch, and she wasn’t sure she’d recognize him if she saw him again, and hoped she’d never find out.

  I’d known she wasn’t a virgin, but hearing what had happened let me see myself as the only man in her life. The boyfriend didn’t count because all he ever got was a hand job, and Mr. Date Rape didn’t count because she hadn’t had much say in the matter. So I was her first, really, her first and only, and knowing this probably made it that much more inevitable that we’d wind up getting married.

  For a while, I had the occasional fantasy of encountering the fellow. I imagined us walking down the street, and a startled Anita clutching my arm: “That’s him! That’s him!”

  And so on.

  He never did turn up, and the fantasy itself faded before too long. With time, my view of the incident has gone through changes. At first I saw it all one way: he was a bad man who’d done a bad thing, and more than deserved whatever punishment I might fantasize handing him.

  But how exceptional was his behavior, really? “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” as an old Tammany Hall hack said, talking about the graft he regarded as an entitlement. And wasn’t it at least as natural for a man to take note of a woman who’d had too much to drink—and to see his opportunity and take it?

  Over the years, God knows there were women I slept with who’d had a lot to drink, though not often more than I’d had myself. On at least one occasion, during the years after my marriage ended and before I got sober, my partner du noir had been in a blackout, although there was no way I could have known it at the time, and when she awoke she admitted she had no idea who I was or what we’d done.

  Still, she didn’t seem traumatized, or even rueful. Or in a hurry to get up and get on with her life, and in fact we stayed in bed another half hour, and she said, “Now this way I’ll have something to remember.”

  Was that date rape?

  Maybe. I don’t know. Standards evolve over time. A few centuries back, rape involving actual physical force was often labeled gallantry, especially when the gallant was of a higher social class than his victim. And, while it might be the sort of behavior one hoped a young man would outgrow, well, boys will be boys, won’t they? And shouldn’t she have known better than to be alone with him? Really, what did she expect?

  Different times. I read somewhere that the swoon originated as a means for a woman to make herself available to a suitor without acting like a slut.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  George Washington Plunkitt. That was the Tammany guy who saw and took his opportunities. A hard name to forget, and no wonder it came back to me.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  One other thought, and then I can turn the page on Anita’s virginity and the loss thereof. It was years later, when we were well settled in Syosset, that I wondered if she’d been telling the truth.

  Because it was a handy way to explain her loss of virginity. Not that I required an explanation, not that I’d have been likely to ask for one.

  Still, she might have felt it was a way to tie off a loose end. Maybe she didn’t want to say that her high school boyfriend had gotten more than manual satisfaction, maybe there’d been another fellow in the picture she didn’t care to admit to. Easy enough to make up an opportunistic stranger, conveniently nameless, a man she’d never seen before and would never see again. And the act itself? Well, she couldn’t remember it, and was very likely unconscious at the time, so it was almost as if it never happened.

  But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Who cares what truths she might have shaded, or what untold adventures she might have had before I met her, or even after? She wasn’t perfect, but she was a better wife than I was a husband, and a far better mother than I was a father.

  Jesus, the woman’s dead.

  I didn’t want to start writing about her. I’d a lot rather write about Mahaffey.

  Vincent Mahaffey.

  I’d a lot rather write about Mahaffey, I wrote, and now I can’t find a way to get started. It was as his partner that I learned how to be a cop, and truly became one. They taught me enough at the Academy to make me qualified to wear a uniform, and my fill-in assignment in Middle Village enabled me to wear it with a certain amount of confidence, but until Vince got ahold of me I wasn’t really there yet.

  Much of what I learned at his side I’d have learned from any veteran officer. How to look at a street scene, how to make sense of what I saw there. How to ask questions, and when to wait through a silence for the next response, and when to push, and when to let it go.

  How to access your instincts, and how far to trust them.

  You couldn’t learn this in a classroom, or out of a book. You could only pick it up on the job, and if you were doing the job right you couldn’t help picking it up. But who they partnered you with made a big difference in what you learned and how well you learned it.

  The first thing he taught me was how to drive a car. I sort of knew, I’d had occasion while working construction to get behind the wheel of a car or small truck and move it to a better spot or run a short errand. I’d even filled out a form and picked up a learner’s permit once, shortly after I turned sixteen, but I never did anything with it. I never had a lesson, formal or informal, and a vehicle with standard transmission was a challenge; I could get it from Point A to Point B, but not very smoothly.

  I remembered a couple of cars my father had owned, but that was all before the shoe store failed, well before I reached driving age. I wasn’t about to go buy a car, so what did I need with a license? I figured it was something I’d get around to sooner or later, but I was in no rush.

  Our first day in the squad car, Vince drove. An hour or two into our shift we stopped for coffee, and when we got back to the car he tossed me the keys. I explained, in a couple of quick sentences, that I didn’t have a license, or any real experience behind the wheel. He thought about it, said it was no problem, retrieved the keys and drove around until a radio call gave us a place to go.

  The next morning, he tossed me the keys again. I started to say something and he held up a hand that cut me off in mid-sentence. I knew how to start an engine, didn’t I? And how to pull away from a curb?

  But I didn’t have a license, I said.

  “And that’s a violation,” he said. “Driving without a license, but who’s gonna pull us over and ask to see yours?”

  I started up, pulled away from the curb, headed off down the avenue. Braked for a red light, waited for the green, kept driving. Turned right when he said to turn right, left when he said left.

  “You know how to drive,” he said after we’d gone maybe a dozen blocks. “You’re not easy with it yet, but that’ll come soon enough. Same as everything else on the job, what you start out knowing in your head needs some time to get down into your bones. A week or two and we’ll see about getting you a license.”

  Okay.

  “Meantime,” he said, “try not to hit anything. Especially a nun. You run over a nun in an Irish neighborhood and you just know some prick’ll want to see your license.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I didn’t hit anything, and I guess I did know how to drive, in my head if not yet in my bones. I’d been in enough cars driven by other people, and paid enough attention, and I guess Yogi was right about this as well; I had observed a lot by watching. And I had Vince in the car, and while he may have been casual about it, part of his attention was always on my driving, and he’d let me know when I did something wrong.

  Early on I’d picked up a new Learner’s Permit at DMV, so it wasn’t entirely illegal for me to be driving as long as I had a licensed driver in the car, although I’m sure it went against department regulations. And one day a couple of weeks in he had me drive to Marine Park, where he knew an older guy named Leo who road-tested applicants. I got to jump the line, and Leo took Vince’s place in the passenger seat and told me to turn left and turn right and pull up next to a particular car and parallel park behind it.

  And so on. He had a clipboard but I never saw him look at it or make any notes, and when we were back where we’d started he told Vince I did fine. “It’s all experience,” he said, “and Matt here’s had some, and it shows. Ninety-some percent of what I get is high school kids, and I got a policy I keep to myself of failing any kid who’s taking the test for the first time. He don’t have to do anything wrong. He can do everything right and he’s still short on experience, so let him and his dad go practice some more, and the second time around he’ll pass. Matt, you already took the written test, right?”

  I hadn’t known there was one.

  He had a form and gave it the top spot on his clipboard. “Here you go. Ten questions, and six right is a passing grade.”

  I hadn’t studied, but a glance at the questions made it clear this wasn’t a test you had to study for. I did get one question wrong, something about braking distance, but the rest of the answers struck me as self-evident. I remember one true-or-false question: In a three-lane highway, the middle lane is used for parking.