The Ups and Downs of Being Dead Read online

  A businessman in overcoat and leather gloves dashed for the first cab in queue at the curb. A woman in high-heels staggered sideways when a gust of wind slammed into her.

  It wasn’t until they’d hit the main terminal, that Robert had stopped spilling his guts about his family. Suzanne never batted an eye when he told her Rachel was gay. In fact, she told him about her great-auntie Ruth who never got married.

  “She had a companion—that’s what my parents called her friend—who shared a house with her for nearly forty years. But if you’d suggest that she was a lesbian, my parents would have had a fit. In fact, they’re adamantly opposed to same sex marriage.” Suzanne shook her head. “I guess people only see what they want to see.”

  Now, standing at the curb, they had some decisions to make.

  “We may as well stay at the Plaza,” Robert said. “I’m sure you’ll want to see Central Park. And it’s on all the bus lines.”

  “The Plaza Hotel? Like the movie?”

  “That’s the one. Sorry I couldn’t call ahead for a limo,” Robert teased.

  Suzanne was so excited about being at the Plaza that she stepped off the bus before it even stopped out front. And as Robert had suspected, she leaned way back to get a look at the hotel’s façade. Then she took it a step farther by floating up the front of the building, peeking in rooms that had their curtains open.

  “Get down here!” Robert called.

  And she did suddenly swoop back to the sidewalk, but by the expression on her face, it wasn’t his angry command that had brought her down.

  “My goodness,” she said, her voice a bit breathless. “I didn’t know old men had that kind of stamina.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to use the front door, like a normal person,” Robert said. “And please try to remember that this is the Plaza, and act accordingly.”

  She guffawed like he’d just told the funniest joke.

  The cavernous lobby with its Baccarat chandeliers and elegant split staircase to the mezzanine held Suzanne spellbound, but only for a moment. She zipped from the gold filigree elevator doors to the champagne bar, then up the staircase so she could glide back down, her left arm cocked and palm up like some snooty duchess.

  Even if people had been watching, Robert imagined that she would still have strutted through the lobby.

  At the bell captain’s stand, she requested a wake up call.

  “For a fee,” Robert told her, “A butler will come to your room, deliver coffee, open the drapes, draw a bath and lay out your clothes.”

  “He would not.”

  Robert nodded, suppressing a smile.

  Suzanne insisted on snooping through every room in the hotel.

  “You go right ahead,” he told her. “Just don’t leave the building. If you get lost, you can’t stop someone and ask for directions.”

  She saluted him. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Robert meandered to a secluded corner of the lobby and pulled a Bela Lugosi. He’d gotten used to the idea that he never got tired or slept, but sometimes when things got really slow, he’d just shut down, tuning out sights and sounds. He began referring to it as a ‘Bela Lugosi’ because it reminded him of a bat hanging upside down in some darkened corner.

  At the crack of dawn, Suzanne was back in the lobby, raring to go.

  “So how was your tour of the hotel last night?” he asked.

  “A little disappointing. Most of the rooms were dark, and the heavy drapes were drawn, so I couldn’t see anything. I peeked into the Grand Ballroom, but there wasn’t much to see.”

  “No, I don’t suppose. You’ll have to wait until they’re setting up for an event.”

  She didn’t appear satisfied with that answer.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll get back here before dark this evening and you can snoop then.”

  She smiled, totally missing his dig.

  Rush hour was in full swing outside. Cabs were lined up two-deep in front of the hotel. Robert gave a man in a Kenneth Cole cashmere-blend topcoat a wistful sigh as the man slipped into the back of a cab and was whisked away to a meeting somewhere.

  Suzanne had already darted across four lanes of traffic and was standing at one of the horse-drawn carriages at the park.

  “Let’s go for a ride!” she said.

  First Robert looked up the sidewalk, then made a turn to look the opposite way.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone’s interested in hiring a hack this early in the morning.”

  When her mouth turned into a frown, he mumbled, “Maybe later.”

  As they strolled under the bare trees of the famous mall, Suzanne gushed, “I’ve seen this so many times in movies. And now I’m actually walking right down the middle of it.” She spread her arms wide to take it all in.

  “Perhaps you’d like to twirl with your arms out wide,” Robert said.

  It served him right when she actually did spin.

  She saw a large banner for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and immediately wanted to go there.

  “Mmmm,” Robert stalled. “Don’t you think Maggie will want to go, too?”

  “You’re right,” she nodded. “Better wait on that.”

  He blew out a silent breath at that near catastrophe. It had taken hours to tour the dinky museum in the suburbs of St. Louis. He imagined it would take days to get through the MET.

  He also steered Suzanne away from the zoo, knowing that she’d want to gawk at every animal in the place. Instead, he took her to the park’s classic carousel. Hot or cold, rain or shine, there were always children riding the painted horses.

  Suzanne paused to watch the children’s faces as they rode by, smiling and squealing for their mothers or nannies to watch.

  A young boy raced to his mother, sitting on a park bench, and stuck his foot forward for her to tie his shoe. The instant she bent over, a young punk appeared from nowhere, reached over the back of the bench, snatched the woman’s purse, and tucked it under his jacket.

  She never saw a thing.

  “Oh, my God!” Suzanne cried as she ran toward the woman. “Your purse! He’s got your purse!”

  But the woman was oblivious to Suzanne. She sat up with a smile on her face, then finally glanced down and realized what had happened.

  “He’s right there!” Suzanne screamed, her finger pointing at the kid as he ambled away. “Right there!”

  Frustrated, she wheeled around to Robert.

  “We’ve got to do something!”

  “Like what?”

  Clenching her fists in frustration, Suzanne growled at him, then turned and ran after the punk. She caught up with him, skirted around in front, and skidded to a halt. The kid walked right through her, of course.

  She leaped onto his back and tried pounding on his shoulders, but it was useless. Robert followed her halfway to the ice rink before she finally gave up and slid off the thief’s back.

  Robert sidled up to her.

  “Feel better now?” he asked.

  “I wanted to help.”

  “I know.”

  A look of utter frustration furrowed her brow. He braced himself for a tirade. Why didn’t you stop him? You should have done something. Or perhaps she would sulk for the rest of the day.

  She did neither.

  “How awful to live in a city where you have to be on your guard every second,” she said. “I used to leave my purse in the grocery cart all the time while I shopped.” She clicked her tongue. “I wouldn’t last a minute in New York.”

  As they strolled back towards the south entrance, she clapped her hand to the side of her head.

  “I can’t believe I jumped on his back. You must have thought I’d lost my mind.”

  ‘No!” Well, maybe.

  “I suppose I looked pretty ridiculous slapping and kicking at him like that.”

  “You reminded me of Catwoman.”

  “Catwoman? Really?”

  Oh, great. Now Suzanne would get all defensive, looking for some d
eep, hidden meaning in his comment. But she had a smile on her face, like she was flattered. Robert took a chance.

  “Yeah. She kind of pounced on people, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t watch the show.”

  “Me either.”

  Suzanne giggled.

  “You never saw her?”

  “Well, I’ve seen pictures. You know, in the cat suit. And the way you were clawing and hissing at that kid, it’s what I imagine she did to the bad guys.”

  She meowed, then pretended to lick her hand.

  At the entrance to the park, Suzanne asked, “Where to next?”

  “I thought we’d catch one of those double-decker buses and take the tour.”

  “Great! For someone who doesn’t know much about New York,” she said, “you know a lot.”

  They were waiting at the curb when Suzanne turned to Robert.

  “So, am I more of a Julie Newmar Catwoman, or Lee Meriwether?”

  “Neither,” Robert said, going for points. “Michelle Pfeiffer, definitely.”

  Wrinkling her nose in a sneer, Suzanne said, “Let’s try and keep our flattery in the right decade at least.”

  The bus had just turned onto Seventh Avenue when the driver announced that Times Square was coming up, and right away Suzanne wanted to get back off.

  “We just got on,” he said.

  Next was the theater district and Suzanne got antsy for a closer look.

  “Matinees aren’t until two o’clock. There won’t be anything to see this morning,” he told her.

  Then, of course, she saw Madison Square Garden in the distance.

  “Maybe we should just get off the bus and walk,” she suggested.

  “Maybe we should take the whole tour so you can see where everything is you want to visit.”

  Good God, she’d be dragging him from one end of the city to the other for the next eight days. He had to come up with an excuse to ditch her, quickly.

  She squinted her eyes at him. “You don’t like sightseeing, do you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Why not? Did your parents drive away and leave you at the Grand Canyon?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you go on vacations when you were a child?”

  Robert shook his head.

  Suzanne slapped at his knee. “Are you going to make me drag a conversation out of you, one syllable at a time?”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  Now her shoulders sagged and her eyes rolled up nearly under her eyelids.

  “Did you ever go to the beach with your cousins and aunts and uncles? Or spend Christmas with your grandparents?”

  Puffing his cheeks out, Robert blew a breath.

  “Okay. I never met my grandparents on my mother’s side until her funeral.” He bobbled his head as evidence that he found the conversation annoying. “They weren’t really there to bury their daughter, though. They came so my grandmother could retrieve some ‘family heirlooms’. Jewelry that had been handed down through the generations.

  “You should have seen the way she tiptoed through our house like an old frump, turning her nose up at our furniture, even the drapes. She had her hands balled at the waist so she wouldn’t touched anything and catch a horrible disease, like poverty. She even used my grandfather’s silver pen to lift the lid of my mother’s jewelry box.”

  “My God!” Suzanne exclaimed. “What a bitch.”

  “Yeah. The worst thing was they way she looked at me, like I was dog shit on the bottom of her shoe. I was only fourteen, for Godsakes.”

  Much to Robert’s dismay, his voice cracked. He turned and peered over the railing of the bus at Macy’s gigantic department store.

  “There you go,” he said without turning to look at Suzanne. “You be sure and come back and check out the parade next Thanksgiving. You can stand in the freezing cold with millions of tourists waiting for a giant balloon to pass overhead.”

  He didn’t feel it, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw her lay her long fingers gently on his knee.

  “Why was she so hateful?”

  “She was mad at my mother and decided to take it out on me, I guess. I can still see that pinched mouth, those wrinkles all around her lips, while she spewed out the story of my mom. I’d never been told the whole story, but evidently, she was a wild child out on Long Island where she grew up. When she got pregnant at seventeen, her mother was too ashamed to let her stick around. So they sent her to my aunt’s home in Kokomo where she was supposed to have the baby, give it up for adoption, and be back in time for high season the next summer.”

  “But she didn’t,” Suzanne said.

  He shook his head. “She wanted to keep the baby. Me. There was a big row at the hospital, I guess. Screaming, crying, who knows? In the end, my aunt told my mother she was on her own. I’m sure they all thought my mom would come to her senses.

  “Instead, she somehow met my dad and he made an honest woman out of her.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “He never said anything about it. But my mom told me bits and pieces. I knew he wasn’t my real father. I think she told me as a way of justifying why he didn’t seem to care about me as much as she did.”

  “Do you think he loved your mother?”

  “Oh, yeah. At least in the beginning. I remember when I was just little, how he loved to brush her hair. You could see it in his eyes. But not in hers.”

  “She didn’t love him back.”

  “I suppose she tried. Mostly, I think she felt obligated, you know, since he’d practically taken her in, adopted her child.”

  Robert tilted his head back, thinking through his past. “I wonder when he finally gave up hope that she would love him back.” He chewed thoughtfully on the corner of his lip. “What a putz. Here was this hick farm boy from Indiana, hoping that this gorgeous brunette—a wealthy socialite from the Hamptons—would fall in love with—”

  He stopped. The photo of Amanda on the chaise lounge in the champagne gown, her arm tossed overhead, slashed through his mind like a bloody claw.

  Standing abruptly, Robert muttered something about checking out the Empire State Building, and slipped off the top of the double-decker bus.

  Suzanne ran after him, calling his name several times before he stopped.

  “What just happened?” she asked.

  He turned and kept walking, his stride long and fast.

  “I was a dumb putz, too.”

  “What?” she asked, trotting to keep up.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  Inside the building, he waited at the elevator with a gaggle of tourists, thinking she wouldn’t talk in front of other people. He was wrong.

  “Whatever it is,” she insisted, “ it seems quite important to you.”

  As the crowd pushed to get onto the elevator, Robert rose through the ceiling and sat on the edge of the elevator itself. He stared up the shaft.

  “Did you love your husband?”

  Suzanne sat next to him. “Yes I did.”

  “Did he love you?”

  “Yes.”

  Her quick answer irritated Robert. “How do you know?”

  A slow smile rose on her face, with a flicker of sympathy tucked behind it.

  “I’d like to say ‘I just know’,” she said, “but I think that would make you even more irritated. So…”

  She rubbed her hands together as though she was searching for a comment. The elevator wooshed up through the dull light, passing floor numbers.

  “Okay, here’s one,” she said as they shot by the seventh floor. “Phil wasn’t great about complimenting me if I’d spent a lot of time on my hair, or maybe I was wearing a new skirt. But he never cringed either when I was dressed like an old bag lady. Or when my breath smelled. He loved me.” She tapped her chest. “Not all this.” She swept her hands down from her head to her feet dangling off the side of the elevator.

  “If I was going to t
he grocery store, he wanted to come along. If he was working in the yard, I grabbed my gloves and joined him.”

  Robert shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like love.”

  “Sure it is. If you’re happy being with someone, no matter what they’re doing, that’s a big part of love. I mean, flip it around. If you’re NOT happy being with someone, you do everything you can to avoid being with them, don’t you?”

  “You’re making it sound too simple.”

  “No.” She pointed a finger at him. “You’re trying to make it much more complicated than it has to be. What do you want me to say? That love is passion, and hot, steamy sex, and candle-lit dinners?”

  “Why not?”

  “Okay.” She held her hands up in defense. “I agree that nights like that can be a lot of fun. But it’s only a fraction of the whole life you have together. Most of your time is spent earning money, and keeping a house. And usually raising kids.”

  The elevator reached the top of the shaft, but Robert made no effort to stand. So neither did Suzanne.

  “Maybe it’s easier to talk about love if you talk about kids,” she said. “You love them even when they cry all night long, or when they use a permanent marker on your walls. When Angie was thirteen, she screamed that she hated me. It hurt my feelings, but I didn’t stop loving her.”

  “What about Robbie shooting his mother?”

  “Well, now, that’s up to you,” Suzanne said. “You made it sound like the girl instigated the robbery and your son just got caught up in it. So if you want to forgive him—”

  “Fat chance of that!” Robert snapped. “I hope he goes to jail for a long, long time. Maybe he’ll finally see what life is really all about.”

  Suzanne puckered her lips, like Robert was some cantankerous old bastard, but she didn’t say anything.

  “He’s twenty-six years old and he’s never done anything,” he complained. “I don’t mean just a job. He’s never put a dirty plate in the dishwasher; he’s never picked up a wet towel from the bathroom floor. And you know what’s really funny? He just killed the golden goose that made it all possible.”

  Once the elevator stopped again at the ground floor, Robert pushed through the gray cement wall to the lobby, and then lumbered out to the sidewalk. As he stood wondering which way to go, Suzanne slipped up beside him. Now, he figured, she’d harp on him for not being a better father.