Anne Turner is murdered-stabbed to death in broad daylight by an escaped mental patient, right on Fifty-seventh Street in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers. The Post prints a front-page photo of her body lying on the sidewalk, blood pooling beside her, the wound on her neck dark and hideous. In the wrenching months that follow, Emma is there for Charles. He comes to depend on her, at first to handle all the prosaic details of his life, but slowly his need becomes emotional. And then one day it goes further-they make love, fall in love. He takes care of her, she nurtures him, his writing regains its former power. They rarely go out; it’s just the two of them in this beautiful apartment. Marriage becomes inevitable. On a perfectly ordinary morning, a Tuesday, they go down to City Hall for the simple, poignant ceremony. She becomes Mrs. Charles Davis-Emma Davis, Emma Davis, Emma Davis…
Emma drags herself back to reality and takes the rubber band from around the thick pile of the day’s mail. Suddenly there’s a jangling beside her ear. She looks up to see Charles standing in the doorway, holding a single key on a metal ring.
“See this key?”
Emma nods.
“I want you to take it and lock me in this room for six hours.”
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t want you to let me out, no matter how hard I scream, pound, or wail. Understood?”
Emma looks from the key to Charles. He actually wants her to do this. “All right,” she says.
She takes the key. Charles walks into his office and turns. They look at each other. There’s something in his eyes, something yielding, teasing, that excites Emma. She slowly closes the door, inserts the key, and turns it. An unfamiliar sense of power pours over her, of having control over another human being. She likes it. She sits down and attacks the mail.
Emma is completely absorbed in making notes to herself on a yellow legal pad when she hears a rapping on the door behind her.
“For Christ’s sake, jailer, have you checked the time?”
Could six hours really have passed? Emma slips the pad into her bag and unlocks the door. Charles stands in the doorway, hands gripping the lintel above him, looking like an athlete who’s just stepped off the field.
“How was it?” Emma asks.
“Excruciating… strange… maybe a little exciting.”
Emma feels a blush rush up her body. She turns away from Charles and busies herself with some papers on her desk. “Your wife called. She won’t be home for dinner.”
“Then you and I will go out.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right, really,” Emma says, making a great show of finding a letter on the desk and taking it to the file cabinet.
“Do you have other plans?”
“Well, not exactly,” she says, searching through the file drawer for the right folder.
“Emma, we’re going out to dinner.”
The way he says it, that tone in his voice, the finality, the command. “I’m not very hungry,” she mumbles, still paging through the drawer.
Charles leans in, forces her to meet his gaze. “Would you feel better if we went Dutch?”
“Probably.”
“Dutch it is, then,” he says, going to get his coat.
Emma closes the file cabinet, crumples up the letter, and drops it in the trash.
About twice a year Charles rides the subway, as much to remind himself that it still exists as to get to his destination. So when Emma insists that they not only eat on her turf but take her means of transportation to reach it, he’s willing. Sitting beside her on the train, Charles feels loose, slightly ecstatic. The six enforced hours were good ones. The truth is, he didn’t spend them writing. He pulled down a first edition of Irreparable Damage — the book that Emma loved so much-and reread it from beginning to end. He was caught up in the book in a way he hadn’t expected to be, and now he feels inspired. But is it by his own words? Or by the young woman sitting beside him on this rocking train?
The Lower East Side, that city of ancient tenements, is a foreign land to Charles. As they walk down the battered streets, past old Jews, young Hispanics, and downscale artists, Charles is reawakened to what a huge and wondrous city he lives in. Emma leads him to a bare-bones Cuban restaurant tucked away on a teeming corner. They take a window booth and she orders for the two of them: avocado salad, black beans, yellow rice, and chicken that’s been cooked in a chunky tomato-onion sauce until it falls from the bone, as tender as love. After savoring the earthy food, they sit and look out the window, slowly eating dessert-silky flan with a burnt-sugar bottom.
Charles feels that he’s in a different world somehow, a place where he isn’t Charles Davis, where he shucks that mantle, that burden, and is just another face on the street, just a man. He loves being led into this new land, eating this simple food. He can’t remember the last time he’s felt so unencumbered, as if he might be getting back to something important. He thinks of Portia, of how much she would enjoy this neighborhood, this restaurant, and, he ventures, this young woman.
“I’d forgotten how satisfying rice and beans could be,” Charles says.
Emma smiles at him and, in the glow from the streetlight coming in through the window, he notes again what lovely lips she has, how sensual the lower half of her face is. There’s even the hint of a pout about her mouth, a pout that the rest of her face isn’t sure what to do with.
“I used to come to places like this when I first moved to New York and had about fifty cents to my name. Funny how you work your ass off until you’ve priced yourself out of the things you really love,” Charles says.
“Sometimes I sit here for hours, just looking out the window. I find it soothing.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard the Lower East Side described as soothing.”
“It’s the anonymity. I love the feeling in New York of being invisible. Small towns can suck the life out of you.”
“So can big towns. Be careful, little girl.”
“But don’t you find it stimulating? As a writer? I mean, look at those two.”
Charles follows Emma’s gaze out the window to a storefront across the street where a raven-haired middle-aged woman in stretch pants and flip-flops is exchanging heated words with a much younger man with slicked-back hair and a gold stud in one ear. Charles watches them for a moment.
“A lonely woman and her Don Juan son,” he says. “He hasn’t been home in three days. She’s telling him she’s been tearing her hair out, lighting candles at church. What she really means is that she’s insane with jealousy that some other woman is more important to him than she is.”
Emma considers Charles’s words for a moment, not taking her eyes off the couple. “I think they’re lovers,” she says.
“You do?”
“I think she’s married to a seventy-year-old grocer who brought her here from Santo Domingo. She has a Pekingese and a pet hen she keeps in a cage in the kitchen. One morning she was walking the dog in the rain and decided to take him around the block again even though her umbrella was broken and her hair was getting wet. The young man was coming out of a coffee shop-the one he eats at every morning, even though the food is bad.”
“Why does he keep eating there?” he asks.
“He’s a creature of habit. There she was with the Pekingese, her hair plastered down with the rain. Something about her touched his heart-the shoes she was wearing, the way one spoke of her umbrella was bent out of shape. He knelt on the sidewalk and petted the dog. Rain soaked through his T-shirt. He looked up at her and he was lost.”
“Why lost?”
“Because he knows he’ll never forget her. On his deathbed it’s her face he’ll see. He wants her to leave her husband, but she can’t. He’s seventy, he brought her here, there’s the hen. She’s telling her lover to leave her, even though every drop of blood in her body wants him.”
Charles looks at the couple and sees what Emma sees.
“Is there a happy ending?” he asks.
“He’ll leave her. His pride. He’ll marry a younger woman, move to Brooklyn; they’ll have babies. One day he’ll be in the city. He’ll see her across the street, walking her dog. Her hair will be gray, but he won’t notice. His heart will stop. It might start to rain.”
Emma has lost all self-consciousness, is radiant in the dim light of the coffee shop. Her story over, she’s quiet for a moment. Across the street, the couple is gone. Emma turns and looks at Charles, as if she is stepping out of another world. She is suddenly aware of herself again, and her small frame stiffens.
“I want to see where you live,” he says.