To begin then, begin at the beginning.
The very beginning. Construct a scenario, one scene at a time, follow it through to the final curtain, and if you don't applaud-if you don't stand up and give it a goddamn ovation, start over.
If it's too much to swallow, Jean used to say, spit it out.
He was home now. Back in his apartment. And though he'd only been gone three days, it felt like three years. At least. He hadn't just come back older either, maybe wiser too.
No one had been there to greet him, which was just as well, since he hadn't been in the mood for it, and wouldn't have had anything to say. They, however, would have had a lot to say to him; Mr. Wilson had died. Chalk up another one for the carnivores. They weren't there because they were all at his funeral. It was, he heard later, a dignified, if sparsely attended, affair.
To begin then, begin at the beginning.
The first thing he'd done, the very first thing, even before unpacking or taking a shower or knocking one back, was enter Mr. Wilson's room like a thief in the night.
He knew Mr. Wilson had died the moment he walked into the room. Someone had put all of his possessions into boxes, one on top of the other, forming a kind of poor man's pyramid. His Harlequin collection took up two boxes by itself. His pictures had been taken off the walls, his clothing wrapped in plastic sheets, the floor swept clean. Mr. Wilson's death hadn't been tidy-he'd lasted for over a week, in and out, up and down-but what he'd left behind was. You could wrap it with a bow, you could give it the white glove test-it was suddenly as antiseptic as a newly available hospital bed.
William was there for a purpose, and even though his sudden knowledge of Mr. Wilson's death made him feel more like an intruder, and not less, and also, by the way, made him feel diminished, diminished by one fewer person who would ever share his bridge chair, purpose stuck. Mr. Wilson had been a collector of sorts, not just of Harlequins and Senior Citizen Workshop pamphlets, but of everything else. Like phone books, maybe. Not just this year's, but last year's, and even the years before that. That was his reason for being there, to see if Mr. Wilson's collection of knickknacks included Ma Bell.
He had to sift through several boxes, three in fact, before he found it did. The phone books went back fifteen years. Even the Yellow Pages. William put those aside, and carried the regular listings back to his room. He should've made two trips but he did it in one, groaning and grunting all the while (his shoulder was tormenting him with particular vengeance today and arthritis had settled into his knee joints like an irritating relation that has no intention of leaving).
To begin then, begin at the beginning.
It didn't take long to find what he was looking for. Even though he had to go back ten years before the list was complete. Then he had it, laid out before him in black and white, another expression Santini was fond of using, and understandably, since that was very much the way he saw the world.
The phone book from ten years ago had them all. Kop- pleman to Winters-every last one of them. Shankin dropped from the phone book a year later. Waldron and Timinsky a year after that. Mrs. Winters-our lady of the Christmas card-was next. Then a banner year-every- one exiting except Koppleman, who lasted until just two years ago.
There-everyone present and accounted for, sir. Black and white.
It suddenly seemed to him that he'd gone on a long trip only to walk downstairs. They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, but he'd managed to turn the aphorism on its head. His journey of one step had begun with a thousand miles. The answer had been in Mr. Wilson's phone books all the time, resting one floor down while he sweated his way through southern Florida like a tourist with a limited timetable. So much to see and so little time to see it.
To begin then, begin at the beginning.
The beginning was Shankin. Chronologically speaking, it began with him. So that's where he began too, starting the very next day after a very bad night, beginning there, then going through the list with chronological precision, excepting for Mrs. Winters, whom he tried third due to a hunch of his. By then, of course, the pattern was set in stone, and it wouldn't have mattered what order he'd gone in, the order being irrelevant, since the results were, in each and every case, the same.
They were all, each and every one of them, in Flushing. He took the same bus he'd taken a week before to Jean's funeral, and that he'd taken again to visit Rodriguez and Weeks. They were becoming old friends, the bus driver-a fat black woman-and him. She just about smiled at him when he climbed aboard. She nearly said hello and asked him where he got such a fancy tan. She almost refused to accept his money. Okay, so maybe they weren't that good friends, maybe he was taking a little license here, but a few more bus rides and who knew? This Flushing thing, after all, was getting to be a habit.
He walked down the same crowded streets, even recognized a few of the Chinese merchants, Korean fruit sellers, and Cambodian newsstand vendors. Old friends now, all of them. Even his fellow pedestrians seemed, well, a little pedestrian now, a little familiar, save for the fact they seemed to be moving a bit faster than before, as if they were running from the thunderstorm that was hiding somewhere in the inky clouds and cloying humidity. There were no shadows today, William noticed, but there should have been. Twelve shadows at least, maybe more.
Arthur Shankin. He'd lived in a modest building of red brick. A woman lay out in front on a green lawn chair; maybe once there'd even been a green lawn to go with it, but not now. It was all dirt and crabgrass now.
Yes, the woman said, she'd known Mr. Shankin. But no, she hadn't known him well. Try Mr. Greely, she said, Mr. Greely on the second floor-he and Mr. Shankin were friends.
He checked for Mr. Greely's name on the mailboxes- 2E-then went up the elevator.
"Glad to see you," Mr. Greely said, when he opened the door, a man of about eighty with a fairly nasty squint, "who are you?"
William explained: lawyer, inheritance, last address.
"Of course," Mr. Greely said. "Anything I can do."
Mr. Greely was, of course, his first stop of the day, but as it turned out he could've closed shop right then and there. For though he would make twelve other stops that day, twelve destinations on the William Express that would leave him tired and very wet-the rainstorm was but minutes away-he would learn no more and no less than he would from Mr. Greely. For each stop had its own Mr. Greely-the woman next door, the man downstairs, the friend down the hall, and the story Mr. Greely told would turn out to be pretty much the story they all told.
"He went to Florida," Greely said, "some time ago."
"Do you know where? Did he give you an address?"
"Oh sure." And Greely got it for him. It matched the address in Jean's file to a T, just as the other addresses he'd get from the other Mr. Greelys would too. Which wasn't really surprising, since that's precisely where Jean had gotten them from too.
"It seems like I did this before," Mr. Greely said, "but I don't know why? You know… deja vu."
No, William thought, just dejd Jean.
It was Florida all over again. For he'd arrive at a place only to discover that Jean had been there first. He was still working backup, still following taillights in the dark.
"Do you keep in touch, Mr. Greely?" he asked. "Do you ever hear from Mr. Shankin?"
"Not really. He sent me a postcard after he got down there. The weather's fine, he said. The weather's fine and I'm fine."
"Was he?"
"Was he what?" Mr. Greely squinted at him.
"Fine?"
"I suppose."
"Did you answer him back?"
"What for? He knows what the weather's like up here."
William didn't know if Mr. Greely was trying to be funny or just was-funny in the head maybe, no one home, bats in the belfry, all those quaint terms for something so clearly terrifying. But he thought maybe Mr. Greely was neither-just funny by accident, like someone who's always slipping on banana peels.
"Is that why Mr. Shankin went down to Florida? For the weather?"
"I suppose."
"And you haven't heard from him since?"
"Nope."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do you think you haven't heard from him? After all, you were friends, weren't you? Wouldn't a friend write you again?"
Mr. Greely didn't seem to understand.
"I never thought about it. He's down in Florida. I'm here."
"Yes, you're here." But he's not in Florida, William wanted to add. I've been there, and he's not. You're here but he's nowhere. He's missing. But he didn't say that, any of it. Instead he asked: "Do you still have the postcard?"
"I suppose."
"Could I see it?"
"What for?"
"An example of his handwriting. A formality where large sums are concerned." Funny how lies came so easily now, lies that you speak out loud as opposed to lies that you tell yourself. He'd always been good at one, now he was good at the other, a complete liar now, becoming more polished with each "lawyer," "inheritance," and "sum."
"Arthur's gonna be rich, that it?"
"You never know."
"Hmmm…" Mr. Greely murmured, as if that explained a lot. Then he went looking for the postcard, which he returned with in his hand; he blew a layer of dust off it.
"All yours," he said.
Mr. Greely was right. The weather's lovely, Mr. Shankin had written. And I'm doing fine. That, more or less, was it. It was postmarked Florida-dated ten years ago almost to the day.
"How rich is Arthur going to be?" he asked.
William ignored him; he had another question.
"Mr. Greely, Arthur have any family?"
"Don't think so."
"There was just you then. And he sent you a postcard and he said I'm fine."
"Right," Mr. Greely said. "So how rich exactly…?"
But William was already on his way.
The other Mr. Greelys:
Where Mrs. Timinsky used to live-stop two on the Express to Nowhere-it was the lady in the next apartment over. One Mrs. Goldblatt, who offered him tea and cookies and two pillows which she insisted he put under his ass when he sat down on the couch.
She'd gotten a postcard too, but she didn't have it anymore and didn't remember what it said.
"It's the best thing for her," she told William.
He didn't understand.
"Florida. The very best thing."
Mrs. Timinsky had suffered from a liver disorder, she went on to say. Not to mention psoriasis, palsy, lumbago, and a general lack of anything to do.
"Florida's got lots of elderly people," she said, as if she was talking about people she had absolutely nothing in common with, though she couldn't have been younger than seventy. Well, age is a state of mind, they say. What they don't say is what that state of mind is exactly, which is generally poor, generally, unrelentingly miserable, as a state, akin to, say, the State of Nevada, half of which was bombed out and chock-full of radioactive half lives. Mrs. Goldblatt however was still in the state of cheeriness, or perhaps in the state of self-denial, just passing through on the way to the state of lunacy where Mr. Koppleman now resided.
"She'll fit right in there," Mrs. Goldblatt said, still talking about the State of Florida.
"She went there for her health, then?"
"Thank you very much-you look in good health too." Mrs. Goldblatt, apparently, was blessed with the one ailment that came in handy in the New York of the late twentieth century: encroaching deafness. William finished off his lemon butter cookies and his cup of tea; he left. And so it went. Halfway between Mrs. Goldblatt and the place where Mrs. Winters used to live, the rainstorm hit. It came like a slap in the middle of a quiet conversation, followed by deathly silence, then tears. Marble-sized raindrops knocked him back and forth across the sidewalk; he began to stagger. When he finally reached Mrs. Winters's old haunt, a boarding house not unlike the one he lived in, he was very cold, very wet, but also, he supposed, very pitiable. And pity wasn't too bad a thing to have going for him, he thought-it was, after all, a staple of beggars, and what was he but a beggar in nice clothes. Okay-decent clothes, clothes just this side of Goodwill. He'd picked Mrs. Winters third because of his hunch that if there was a Mr. Greely here, his name would be Raoul, instead of say, Sam. It was. He was, as it turned out, the landlord. Sure, he remembered Doris, he said, as he worked on a washing machine in the basement. Doris Winters. Nice old lady. She'd lived there for years. Then? She took off to Florida. He was a sort of friend of hers? No, not really. But they kept in touch? No, not really. Never wrote her a postcard? Not once? Well, now that he mentioned it, yes, once. A Christmas card. Any answer? No, now that he mentioned it, no answer. Not that he remembered, anyway. Though he did remember someone else asking him about Mrs. Winters-friend of his, perhaps? Perhaps. Washing machines were the worst, he said. Can't fix them. Never could. Any idea why she went to Florida in the first place? In the first place, it wasn't his business. In the second place-he thought her doctor had recommended it. That's what he thought. And any family to speak of? There was family. But not to speak of. A kid on the West Coast somewhere, maybe some grandkids too. A Christmas card every year and maybe they called her if she was lucky. Family, but not to speak of. So she didn't. Just another old person with nobody. He told Raoul thank you. He told him he'd been very helpful. If you say so, Raoul said, going back to his washing machine. William went back to the street.