Dark City Lights Read online

  When I got home from work four days later, the doorman told me that Ms. Sherman had passed. That’s what he said—that she’d passed. He said that when building guys realized that none of them had seen her for a few days someone went up to check on her. The door was chained on the inside, so they called the cops, who busted down the door. She was dead in her bed. The ambulance guy told him that it appeared that she had taken a bunch of Benadryl, tied a plastic bag over her head, and gone to sleep.

  She fucking killed herself.

  I should have been nicer to her. I should have offered to call Mr. Rothstein. I could have sat with her, talked to her. I should have let her tell me about herself. I should have given her a hug. I shouldn’t have left her sitting there.

  A week later the doorman said he that had something for me, and handed me a shopping bag from Galeries Lafayette in Paris. He said that they’d been clearing out Margaret’s room and they found it with my name on it. It was heavy. I took it upstairs and put it down on the table. I poured myself a glass of wine and looked at the bag for a long time before I opened it. I wondered when she’d been to Paris.

  There was an envelope inside the bag, sitting on top of the tissue paper, with my name written on it. The note inside was on a piece of expensive-feeling stationery with her name engraved on the top. In perfect old lady penmanship it said “Thank you for being a friend.” Jesus, Margaret, really? Now I am going to have the Golden Girls theme song stuck in my head for a week. And then I remembered that she was dead.

  The tissue paper was so old, it cracked when I touched it. Wrapped inside it was an Hermes Kelly Bag. Red. Alligator or crocodile or something. It was old, and you could tell it had been used, but also that it had been cared for. It was real. It was so beautiful it glowed. And it was mine.

  I looked up, toward the tenth floor or heaven. I smiled, and said thank you.

  MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK WITH HARRY

  BY JANE DENTINGER

  ONLY CRIMINALS AND MADMEN WALK into Central Park after midnight . . . or, occasionally, an actor. Harry Dillon was the latter. And he didn’t mean to do it, but he had no choice. Harry had been “between engagements” for a very long time. So when he was cast in Shakespeare in the Park’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, manna fell upon his actor’s heaven.

  He was cast as Flute, one of the mechanicals who perform the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play for the king’s wedding banquet. Flute plays Thisbe, so Harry got to do Shakespearian drag, which is a rare, fun thing for an actor. Better yet, Flute is pretty much an idiot. Harry liked playing idiots. He felt comfortable in their skin somehow. But best of all, he got to do Stan Laurel. That’s who he based his Flute on.

  As a kid, Harry loved Laurel and Hardy the way his more athletic friends loved Mantle and Maris. Sure, the baseball stars could hit, catch, and run like demons. But could they do a slow-burn take like Hardy? Could they do Laurel’s scrunched up I’m-about-weep-but don’t-want-to face? Nah. As Oliver Hardy once said, “We’re always on the same page . . . and it’s totally blank.”

  So that’s how Harry played Flute, as the blankest page ever unwritten upon. And it was working. It helped that he had Laurel’s thin, wiry physique, and mobile, hang-dog face. And he was getting more laughs every night. He was even getting fans.

  This was a first for him; finding people outside the Delacorte Theater dressing rooms after the show—some of them girls!—who wanted to shake his hand, pat him on the back, and say ridiculously nice things like, “Dude, you are, like, Steve Martin stupid-funny!”

  It was very gratifying. It would’ve given most actors a big head. But not Harry. He just wasn’t built that way. He was that rare anomaly in the theater . . . a modest nerd. But he was grateful. So every night, he stuck around after the show and thanked every single person who came by to pay his or her respects. Because, hell, who knew when, if ever, he’d get another gig this good.

  And that’s why Harry was often the last person to leave the Delacorte. Other, more important actors would arrange to meet friends later at bars, restaurants, or someone’s swanky apartment. Harry had no head for drink, couldn’t afford fancy restaurants, and lived in a small studio apartment in Alphabet City with an ancient, mangy cat named Murgatroyd—a cat he’d inherited from his ex-girlfriend, Jeri, who had moved out after telling him, “Harry, I don’t mind that you’re not famous. I don’t even mind that you’re not rich. But, damn! You’re an actor—you’re supposed to be hot!”

  That was almost three years ago and Harry had felt tepid ever since. Part of the problem was his eyesight—which was lousy. In his daily life, he wore the kind of glasses that Michael Caine wore as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress Files. Caine’s Harry had worn those glasses with an effortless élan. Harry Dillon wore them as what they really were—coke bottles. But that wouldn’t do for his acting career, so he’d spent much time and money he could ill afford to get state-of-the-art contact lenses, really amazing contact lenses . . . and one of them had just popped out in the dressing room.

  So after his fellow actors had left, after the audience had left, after even the stage crew had left, Harry was still on his hands and knees, like Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, feeling the floor for his lost lens. Helen would have had better luck than Harry. The lens was nowhere to be felt or found. Worse still, Harry had forgotten to bring his glasses along that night.

  He was going to have to walk out of the Park with one good eye only. And alone.

  Or so he thought.

  “MANNY, GEEZ, I GOTTA TAKE a leak, man!”

  “So what? Damn, Jo, it’s Central Park, asshole. The world’s your toilet.”

  “Well, yeah, I know . . . but I don’t wanna, you know, show my stuff.”

  “Show your stuff? Are you fuckin’ crazy? It’s black as your ass in here. And there’s bushes every damn where.”

  “Oh, sure, I know that. But ya know, ya hear stuff . . . like what if there’s a faggot hiding in one a those bushes, man?”

  Thirteen-year-old Manny Ruiz plopped down on a nearby bench and gave a heavy sigh. Clearly his incipient life of crime was not going as smoothly as he’d planned.

  “Jo-Jeff, how damn out of it are you? Don’t you know those queers can marry each other now? Why the hell would they want your skinny black ass?”

  Joseph Hardy Jefferson, two years Manny’s senior, but his junior in most ways, slumped down beside his friend and said, “Yeah, I know that—but ya hear things, know what I mean?”

  “Oh, fuggedaboutit. You down for this action or not, man?”

  “Yeah, no—I mean yeah, I’m down for it, Manny.”

  “Good! So keep your eyes open for an easy mark—then we roll him, right?”

  “Yeah . . . right.”

  BUT JO-JEFF WASN’T SO SURE. It had sounded like a good plan when they were up on the roof of their building, feeding Manny’s pigeons and smoking some of his brother’s weed. They could hear the ugly fight going on below in Manny’s apartment as his parents went toe to toe about all the same old shit.

  Jo-Jeff was kind of amazed that Manny’s parents hadn’t managed to kill each other . . . yet. While Manny, for his part, was mildly surprised that Jo’s mother, a single woman on welfare with two kids, hadn’t opted for throwing herself off that same roof. God knows she’d threatened to enough times.

  This was how they had grown up together—in families with too little money and way too much angst and rage. They were both sick of it. And Manny had figured the way out—money.

  So they had taken the subway from the Bronx down to West Eighty-sixth Street at a late hour. Manny knew about the free Shakespeare plays in the Park. In fact, he’d even gone to one once with a teacher who had actually cared about her pupils . . . before the system broke her back. The play had been Hamlet and Manny had dug it, even when that crazy Ophelia bitch drowned herself.

  But he’d been more interested in the audience. Because he could smell the money in the house. Afterward he watched the audience strea
m en masse out of the Park. Most of them heading westward, past the Diana Ross Playground, to hop on the C train or the M10 bus or grab cabs to places nicer, lovelier than he’d ever seen. But he’d also seen the stragglers, the ones who left later and by themselves.

  That’s what he was looking for now. A late-leaver with money. An easy mark.

  Manny was slight and small for his age. But Jo-Jeff was tall and bulky. Normally Jo-Jeff wouldn’t hurt a fly. But Manny thought he could change that. He knew how to get Jo-Jeff mad.

  That’s what he was counting on when he saw, from a distance, Harry Dillon leaving the Delacorte.

  “Jo! That’s him—that’s our pigeon.” Manny said, nodding toward Harry, who was now heading east.

  “Uh, I dunno, Manny. He’s kinda tall.”

  “So what? There’s two a us and one a him. And he’s headed toward the underpass. We can nail him there. C’mon!”

  Harry Dillon liked the Greywacke Arch that ran beneath the road that went by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a short tunnel, but it had great acoustics. That’s why street singers always hung out there during the day.

  He went up to the mouth of the tunnel, stuck his head in, and let loose with a few lines from Othello: “He who steals my purse, steals trash.” Which, in Harry’s case, was pretty much the truth.

  Jo-Jeff grabbed Manny’s arm. “Shit! He saw us coming. And he’s tellin’ us to back off.”

  Manny shook off Jo’s grip and hissed, “He ain’t seen nothing, man. He’s just one a them crazy-ass actors. Move!”

  But before he could get Jo-Jeff moving, Harry swung away from the tunnel and headed up the slope to the road above.

  “Nope. He seen us.” Jo-Jeff shook his head. “Thas why he’s goin’ for the road. He’ll be outta the park in no time.”

  BUT HARRY DIDN’T HEAD DUE east to walk out past the Met. Instead he turned south. And Manny grinned. “Aw, the dumb fuck, he’s takin’ a goddamn stroll. We got him.”

  However, there was a vague method to Harry’s apparent madness. He wanted to walk by the Loeb Boathouse Restaurant. His old girlfriend waitressed there. He knew the restaurant was closed by now, but he also knew the wait staff often hung out after hours to kick back a few. Maybe Jeri would still be around. Maybe he’d get to see her. Maybe Jeri would even be glad to see him. Maybe.

  And lo and behold, there was a dim light on in the bar area. Harry made a stealthy approach and peered through the glass door. Then he saw her.

  Jeri was seated on one of the tall bar stools surrounded by four other people, all chatting and laughing like old war buddies, in the way that a wait staff does after surviving another night of diners who expect the New York restaurant “experience” to waft them to the heights of Valhalla.

  She looks tired, Harry thought. And she did. Her auburn hair was matted with sweat and there were dark shadows under her blue eyes. But those eyes still danced with laughter as she tilted her impossibly cute, freckled nose up toward a guy with smooth, olive skin and jet-black hair—long hair that he wore in a ponytail.

  “Aw, no, not a ponytail guy.” Harry moaned. As someone who religiously checked for follicle loss every morning, he hated ponytail guys. They were just flaunting it. And Harry suddenly wanted to rip that particular ponytail out by its roots. The guy had one arm casually thrown around Jeri’s shoulder. Harry knew that move and there was nothing truly casual about it.

  Through the glass door, he could hear Mr. Perfect Olive-Skin say, “Oh, you must come, Jeri! Mah fren has zees great house in the Hamptons.”

  “Fuck the Hamptons! I hate the Hamptons,” Harry seethed. “She hates the Hamptons. What’s wrong with the goddamn Berkshires?”

  But he couldn’t hear Jeri’s reply as she picked up a paper cocktail napkin to wipe sweat from her brow. That was one of the things he’d always loved about her. Jeri didn’t do standard girlie stuff. She didn’t powder her nose; she just wiped sweat off. God, it was so sexy. And that little waitress outfit with the black vest and string tie . . . oh, it was killing him!

  He wanted to knock on the glass, get her attention, but Harry found himself frozen. What if she frowned, instead of smiled, when she saw him? He couldn’t bear the thought. It would kill him.

  So he backed away from the glass door and stumbled blindly toward the Boat Lake—but he bumped into one of the outdoor tables, which made a loud clanking noise. He could see the heads inside the restaurant jerk round. Then he ran.

  And Manny and Jo-Jeff, who had been lurking in the shadows, ran after him.

  It was just at this same moment that the statues in the Poets Walk began to move. Of course, they normally moved at this same hour, but it was never seen.

  THE POETS WALK—OR THE LITERARY Walk, if you prefer—is the only intentional straight line inside Central Park’s walls. Just south of the Naumburg Bandshell, it is framed by a glorious row of American elm trees that create a cathedral effect over the walk, which is punctuated with statues of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Fitz-Greene Halleck, William Shakespeare, and, oddly, at the southern end, Christopher Columbus.

  The statues had been there for many, many decades—but Halleck’s was the first to get antsy. You could hardly blame him. He had been the most renowned writer of his day—i.e. from 1790 to 1867. Not to mention the only American author on the Walk. Damnation, President Rutherford B. Hayes and his entire cabinet had come to unveil his statue to the acclaim of thousands in 1877! But after that—bupkis! Worse still, his statue didn’t even rate one of those piddling green boards on plinths that stood before his literary fellows, describing their life and works in white knock-out print. No, the elitist Central Park Conservancy hadn’t seen fit to give him even that.

  So he spent his endless days watching passers-by pass him by with nary a glance. Or if they did deign to look his way, they’d squint to read his name on the pedestal and then mutter, “Fitz-Greene who?” Then shake their heads and move on. Or they’d mistake him for someone else. But the unkindest cuts came from tourists who misidentified him. One horse’s ass from San Francisco had confidently told his family that he was James Fenimore Cooper. Egads—Cooper!

  Now days no one remembered a word from his poem “Fanny” or, for that matter, anything else from his Alnwick Castle collection. Halleck blamed that drunken bastard Edgar Allan Poe, who’d said of “Fanny”: “To uncultivated ears it is endurable, but to the practiced versifier it is little less than torture.”

  Oh, yes, Poe had died ignominiously—and deservedly, Halleck thought—in a gutter. But still people quoted “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” and all his other sodden rot. And all those endless film adaptations! It was hard to bear. Harder still for Halleck was the company he kept: There was smug Robbie Burns, who every damn day heard some passerby quote, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley.” Who would ever imagine you could get such mileage out of a mouse! And Walter Scott and his damned Ivanhoe and Rob Roy . . . and, again, the movie deals that followed.

  And then there was Shakespeare . . . the insufferable Bard of Avon. This was and had always been the hardest pill for Fitz-Greene to swallow—because Will, frankly, did not give a damn. Why should he? He had statues and busts of himself scattered all over the globe. Halleck had only his one statue in the Poets Walk.

  That’s why he had decided, some one hundred years ago, to rise from his granite pedestal and strut about at night. He had suffered from lumbago in his lifetime and being cast in stone hadn’t helped matters. A little exercise was in order. And whom did it hurt, really? The Poets Walk was never much frequented at night. During the Depression, the desperate folks living in shanties in the Park were too hungry and miserable (or drunk) to pay heed. In the sixties, the hippies were too stoned to believe their psychedelic eyes. And of late, crack cocaine had made the matter moot. So, gradually, the other statues had begun to join Halleck for a midnight stroll—except Shakespeare, the damnable snob!

  Of course, the two Scotsman, Robbie and Walter had hit it
off right away, gleefully swapping haggis recipes. Their description of the haggis ingredients had so horrified Columbus that he had finally been forced to come off his stone throne to upbraid these literary nincompoops with, “You do na know nuthin’ bout food! I’m gonna tell ya how to make a real nice Bolognese.”

  But still Shakespeare didn’t move . . . until tonight.

  While the other four were cavorting—well, cavorting isn’t an apt description, not when you’re made out of granite, let’s say shuffling up and down the Poets Walk—Will, from his pedestal, sensed rather than saw Harry Dillon running up the steps from Bethesda Fountain.

  Methinks an actor approaches, he thought. While there was nothing overtly theatrical about Dillon, the Bard could sense a fellow thespian from afar. And then he sensed something dire—the two youths sidling out of the shadows of the underpass just as Harry was passing by the Bandshell. And methinks he is pursued by villains!

  For his part, Harry had no idea he was being followed. He just wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the image of Jeri with Ponytail Guy.

  For their part, Manny and Jo-Jeff were having a harder time than expected keeping up with the long-legged actor as they fumbled in the pockets of their baggy pants for their box cutters. Manny had tried to score a zip gun earlier with no luck. And Jo-Jeff had tried to borrow his big brother’s switchblade—that hadn’t gone so well either. And he had the bruised ribs to show for it. So box cutters it would have to be.

  MEANWHILE, HALLECK, BURNS, SCOTT, AND Chris Columbus were oblivious to the approaching trio. So Shakespeare whistled. (Well, again, you can’t really whistle with stone lips. He made more of a slow, grating sound with his mouth. Still, it got their attention.)

  “Huh?” Halleck stopped and looked up at Shakespeare. “My stars! Is that really you, William, deigning to address us?”