Excerpt from "Revenge Is a Sucker's Game"

The Subway Book Club

Thursday was my day for writing reports.

 I could have picked any day. So why Thursday, I don’t know. Could be I just wanted to be back on the Island early on Friday nights. Maybe no reason. The company rule was four days in the field and one in the office. Most of the guys regressed to four days in the office and one in the field. I played by the rules. Reports on Thursday.

On my field days I drove. Thursdays I took the Long Island to the City and then subway to the office. The A train to 14^th Street then change for Broadway-Nassau and then a foot race to Fulton. So it was on a Thursday that I first saw her.

At the end of the rush hour there were usually seats, but I chose to stand anyway. Being tall, I always hesitated to give up one of my few advantages by sitting. I was reading a paperback novel intermittently keeping a New Yorker’s customary vigilance. When the train made its next stop I looked up and noticed, for the first time, sitting directly across from me, a young woman also reading, reading very intently, and as she turned what were the last few pages of her book I could see tears streaming down her cheeks.

How could I not wonder what provoked the waterworks? Who said New Yorkers were cynical and uncaring? Looking at her book jacket it was obvious to me why- she was reading The Eighth Day and, by rough estimate, had ten pages to go. I was definitely rattled. I knew the book. Actually, I had read it twice, the last time just a month ago. Those last pages were powerful stuff. Knowing what she was reading I also knew, or thought I knew, what she must have been thinking. And feeling. I closed my own book and tried to imagine what was going on here. It had to be a sign, an omen. I believed in omens. I felt an intense impulse to speak to this person, an impulse I did my best to stifle. She had made an unexpected connection with me, as she might never do with anyone else, ever, and we needed, I needed, to figure out the why of it.

Slow down Billy. Aren’t you going just a wee bit overboard? This is a stranger. More to the point, a stranger on a train. Maybe she’s crying because her feet hurt or her cat got lost or her purse just got stolen. No. I could see she still had her purse, but what did that prove? The cat theory was still viable, and her shoes did look a little tight. Was I supposed to get up and speak to her, and then, if I did, what was I supposed to say. That I recently read the same book and wasn’t the ending touching and, by the way, don’t worry, I’m sure Boots will be found? 

The mental debate went on for several minutes and ended in a stalemate when the train stopped at Chambers Street where she closed the book, dabbed the tears, and left the subway. A few minutes later I was above ground myself.

When I got to the office the first thing I did was to locate my own copy of the Eighth Day and re-read the last ten pages. Then, without talking to anyone, I went downstairs, stepped out onto Fulton Street, and took a dozen deep breaths of pungent, fish-perfumed city air before I dived back into my own life and routine.

Certainly I had been attracted, but the premise of the attraction seemed silly. I hadn’t even gotten a good look at her, just the book and the tears. Even so, I could not shake the gnawing feeling that I was supposed to talk to her and had missed my chance.

Rather than dwell on incident that couldn't be recaptured, I concentrated on my reports, ignoring the usual temptations to procrastinate. I stacked the files on the right side of my desk, methodically studying and dictating, as the stack got smaller and smaller. By 11:30 I was done. More wonders. Usually, I would skip lunch and still finish the day with a slight backlog for next Thursday.

Choosing not to puzzle more about the book lady, I went downstairs to the dayroom where, every hour of the day, someone could always be found creatively wasting company time. The room was full as usual. Vic Dudley was dealing his umpteenth game of solitaire when Maureen Monahan came in caterwauling and weeping like a widow with no life insurance. Maureen was redheaded and did nothing by halves.

“What is it this time Mo?”

“The foot. I got the foot. I’ve been footed. He footed me.” So that no one risked reading any ambiguity into her plight, she did a pantomime of a field goal kicker putting one through the uprights.

She stopped crying abruptly. “Ya know, I never saw it coming. That’s the hard part. That’s what hurts.”

“Mo, you must have had your pupils dilated for the last six months, because Helen Keller could have seen it coming from Brooklyn.”

“Thanks for the sympathy Vic.”

“Why did you get fired Mo?” If not concerned, I was at least curious.

“Well you know how the Skipper’s office looks out on the subway entrance. Well, a guy I met on the train invited me to The Chatterbox for coffee, and the boss happened to see us come out of the subway and head down Dutch Alley toward William Street. What a dirty mind. For all he knew we could have been on legitimate office business.”

Tom Snootly spoke up gallantly. “That does it. He’s gone too far this time. Maureen, we’re taking you out for beers. See you at Mack’s about three. O.K.”

“So what are you gonna do now. Clean out your desk?”

“Naw. I’m too tired. I’ll do it next week. Well, I’ll see you guys at four. I’ve got a hair appointment at three.”

Dudley again. “Hey Mo, three o’clock is company time. Did you have that appointment before you got the foot?”

“Of course. Didn’t I tell you I never saw it coming?”

As she walked out, considerably calmer than she arrived, Snootly spoke to me. “Boss wants you in his office right away.”

“What’s that about?’

“Well, he booted Maureen with the right foot. Maybe you’re getting what’s left.” Everyone broke out laughing and kept it up as I answered the summons.

The Skipper was in his office smoking and scribbling in the margins of a typewritten letter. Taller even than me, he also usually preferred to stand but not today.

“Have a seat Billy.” He called me Billy instead of Bill or William as a kind of private joke between us. In casual clothes I looked eighteen or nineteen and in a dark suit not much older. The Skipper said I had the face of a man with a clear conscience, but how little he knew. He was deceptively young looking himself for a man of fifty, and a soft drawl and perpetual tan, both of which he had picked up from ten years in Louisiana, reinforced the impression.

“What’s up Chief?”

“New assignment. You know Tarrytown?”

“I know how to get there and how to get back. Been over the Tappan Zee Bridge a dozen times, once at the end of a towrope. ”

“Crisis experience. That’s good. You’re our expert. Here’s the background. We’ve got a restaurateur, d.o.b. 2-4-31, who took a speedboat upriver, and the next day woke up drowned. Might be an accident, might be suicide, and might even be some other kind of ‘cide. Mortal remains found upriver, the boat tied up downstream. So that’s a mystery.”

“Suicide or accident? That’s a life insurance issue. Since when are we hired by a life company?”

“No. It’s the boat manufacturer. There’s a claim it was unseaworthy and capsized in a storm. Trouble is the boat was found with lines tied and secured, and it was the sunniest day of the summer according to a copy of the official weather report that I picked up at Rockefeller Center. I want you to drop whatever you’re doing, get up there and, excuse the expression, cover the waterfront. Forget our interest in the boat, and just get the facts. See the people, the scene. Find out what made the guy tick. This is a big claim, so take whatever time you need. You’ll need to keep current here, but I expect you’ll be spending a day or two a week on this indefinitely.”

I stood up. “Chief, one last question. No foot for me today?”

“Not today”

Next Thursday I was upstate inspecting where the boat had been found and talking to Police, Fire and Coast Guard. I had compiled a list of prospective contacts, family of the deceased, neighbors, boat sales, engineers, and local residents and there would be more. This would take a while so I decided to go to the office for reports every second Thursday. I still had a raft of other open cases.

My next day on the train she was there again.

 As usual I was strap hanging, and I could see clearly the title of her current reading, The Tin Drum. She looked to be halfway to finishing. I think I had read The Eighth Day and the Tin Drum in the same sequence. This was getting freaky. From the angle at which I stood I saw her in profile, dark, petite and serious. Elegant. This trip the desire to speak was intensified, but the reasons not to loomed ever stronger.

“Excuse me Miss but I’ve been watching you, and it seems we like the same book titles.” No. I wouldn’t be saying that today, not today, not ever. But why not? This wasn’t Shakespeare with feuding families separating us. The obstacle was me. Death by pocket veto, self-inflicted. That was the saddest aspect of this sad situation.

I spent The following Thursday talking to the neighbors of our drowning victim. According to every neighbor within two blocks in any direction from his home, he had been the reincarnation of Saint Francis and Mahatma Gandhi. Gentle, generous, and without sin. That’s why they were all flabbergasted when three months ago his wife had packed a small suitcase, got into a taxi, and left for parts unknown. Why hadn’t he seen it coming? Were his pupils dilated?

The business was not good, but it had limped along for years. Every time he had gotten slightly ahead of creditors some friend or distant relative or stranger would put the bite on him, and he would slide back into trouble. Ironically, two weeks before he drowned, he had loaned money to a neighbor to pay his way to Alabama for a funeral. To all who had known the man, except maybe the ones who owed him money, his death was a genuine loss

My lady of letters was in her customary place the next week, lovelier than I remembered, and, after that, in the same seat, at the same appointed hour, and without fail for the next two months. During that interval I would see her move through a perfect replica of my own bookshelves at home. She read rapidly and probably finished a book a week. That meant that half her choices were unknown to me, and, although I wondered what they might be, the titles I saw were beyond familiar, they were clairvoyant. She read The Tontine, a favorite, and The Thibaults, an extremely serious book that I had smugly believed I was the only reader to tackle since the 1930s when the author had won the Nobel Prize. There had even been a work by Arthur Train, an author near and dear to my tiny scaly heart and no longer a household word.

These ad hoc meetings of “The Fortnight Literary Society” continued to alternate with my fact-finding on the river drowning. I actually began to imagine a connection between the two. I felt sure that the boat capsizing would be solved definitively, and I also began to grow confident that, one day soon, the Book Lady of Manhattan and I would meet under thoroughly logical and comfortable circumstances and become friends, perhaps very close friends. And, I quite believed that if I had asked her, the Book Lady could tell me exactly what had happened on the Hudson River near Tarrytown.

In strict obedience to Murphy’s Law my apple cart took a hard left turn. Across traffic.

When my next Thursday for reports arrived the long stream of respectable, serious fiction was interrupted by the disconcerting appearance of a book of poetry, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Good grief. A boyfriend. I worried about this change in condition, and two weeks later the prognosis worsened. Khalil Gibran. It wasn’t that I disliked this one, it was just the sickening deduction that she had not chosen it for herself. Some ill intentioned male had given it to her.

Jealous and hurt, I gave up making a point to take the same train and did not see her again for a month when, against schedule, she was on a later train with no book at all but a midwinter tan which was still light enough to be the likely side effect of a honeymoon in Puerto Rico. I had read the move to poetry correctly, and, illogically and irrationally, I felt jilted and betrayed, though we had never exchanged even a word.

Rather than act out my disappointment in unoriginal acts of self-destruction like getting drunk and crashing the company car or overtipping the hostesses at the Nassau Bar, I went on to the office, and, for the second time in modern history, caught up all my dictation before noon.  Slightly recovered, but still cynical about life, I grabbed a sandwich at the Blarney Castle and took it back to the day room on the eighth.

Dudley was dealing solitaire as expected and the ever morose Rodney Banks was studying the scratch sheet and calculating with the stub of a pencil how much he could afford to donate to the bookmakers this week. Minor surprise. Maureen Monahan was there, large as life and twice as lively, chewing on a sandwich and guzzling orangeade. “Glad to see you back on board Mo, or are you just visiting the scene of the crime?’

“Snoot’ got the foot.” Maureen took another giant bite of her roast beef. “We’re going out for beers at four.” Apparently Maureen did not consider that her pardon came with any kind of probation.

“What did Tom do this time?”

Dudley answered. “He was working a second job. The Skipper found out. So Snootly got the foot.”

“So he was moonlighting. Is that a capital crime?”

“It was a day job.”

 “That is awkward. Four o’clock you said?”

“Billy, you still milking that floater boondoggle.” This from Banks.

“Still at it. One of the life companies paid. One is balking. There’s no lawsuit yet, but it’s coming, so our client wants everything done.”

The fact is that about everything had been done. There were just a few reinterviews left, so I would be in the office next Thursday without fail.

When the day came, I realized too late I had taken my habitual train and, confirming this fact, directly across from me was my Book Lady, back on schedule. My lost love I thought, now the happy bride. Wrong again. I saw her bent over her book and witnessed a transformation that had gone from infrared to ultraviolet. No tears now, but her hair was unwashed and bedraggled. She whispered nervously to herself as her forefinger moved back and forth across the pages of her book which looked like a Bible. She wore no makeup even though she should have. The orbit of her right eye was black and yellow and she had a similar bruise on the opposite cheek in the same color scheme and twice the size.

It’s frustrating to be angry when you can’t tell at who or what. Was I angry with her for foolishly choosing the wrong person for her, at the man, if you could use that term, who would blacken her eye, or at myself for not ever having even spoken to her? With no good reason other than being blazingly furious, I decided to postpone my report on the river death another week and revisit the scene. I needed to get out of the City, and I had my excuse.

I wasted the next day plowing old ground and several more after that. I already knew there was nothing fresh to learn.

The boss called me at home to ask me to come in Wednesday, to talk about the boat investigation, I guessed, assuming that I would dictate a final report the next day. When I got to the office at 3 o’clock the Skipper was the only one left in the office, and I deduced the obvious, that everyone was at a beer valedictory for Maureen or one of the other habitual offenders. I walked into his office without knocking. I really had meant to knock.

“You’ve put in a lot of hours on this case, and it’s time to close it. The client wants to know where they stand. Do you have an explanation of what happened?”

“I think I can give you one that holds water. Might leak a little but not much.”

“Let’s have it.”

“O.K., you read my prelims. I’ve got statements from twenty-three neighbors and friends and almost as many relatives, Police reports, Coast Guard…”

“Just give me your conclusion.”

The claimant was in bad straits, money, family, health. Wife left him, creditors beating down the door, bad ticker. Serious problems, but survivable. So he decides to take a break. Spend a day on the river. He persuades our boat dealer to let him take their biggest and baddest river rocket for a test cruise. He goes up river, fishes, and drinks a beer or two and gets back to basics. It helps. You know, tomorrow is always another day. Then a storm comes up.”

“Wait, wasn’t the weather report clear?”

“It was, but a small localized storm hit nonetheless. They happen in the summer up there.  It ruined the garden of a nice little old lady I met. Smashed her dahlias and peonies. She gave me pictures. Thunder, lightning, hail, wind. A tempest. Our man puts the boat to shore to wait it out and ties the bowline to a tree. Nearby is an iron drainpipe coming out of the bank. The drainpipe goes under a roadway for about a quarter mile to an old factory building that’s been boarded up since the Great Depression. High voltage power lines had gone down in the area. One of two things then happened.  Either a power wire fell onto the copper drainpipes on the factory building or a lightning strike sent a surge of high voltage through the drainpipe. Our claimant had the misfortune to be holding or touching the pipe, maybe standing in rainwater in the boat’s bilge or maybe in water at the bank.”

“What a coincidence. Let’s say I buy it. Two questions. Would that be enough voltage to kill him, and why wouldn’t the current reach ground before the drain outlet?”

“Second question first. The drainpipe was wrapped with some kind of rubber wrap where it was buried so it wouldn’t ground along the way.”

“Now the first question. It was an old iron pipe. Conductive yes, but not very, and the juice would step off drastically over a quarter mile, amps and volts. He was a very big man. Unlikely that he would be electrocuted, but he would get a stiff jolt, possibly enough to make him jump back. He falls in the river getting away from the pipe, the river current catches him, and the rest, as they say, is history. It’s also possible that the heat created by the lightning generated a short burst of steam or super hot air which vented where the boat was tied.”

“So if the boat was tied and, assuming for the moment, that the river flowed downstream, as most rivers do, how did he get upstream?”

“His body gets snagged by a barge bound upstream, and, at some point upriver, he comes loose and floats to shore.”

“Are there still barges on the Hudson?”

“Not like the days of the Erie Canal but, yeah, still some.”

“So the whole thing was a freak accident?”

“Not necessarily.”

“But you just gave me the explanation.”

“An explanation consistent with the facts, but, in my opinion, not the only explanation. But you didn’t assign me to form an opinion, just to find facts. You don’t want my conjecture.”

“Let’s hear your opinion anyway.”

“My opinion. You’ve told us many times yourself, Chief. We deal with nothing but the casualties of the world. We’re never looking at the whole canvas. Lightning striking somebody is no supernatural coincidence in our business, but in reality these things are as likely as Snootly hitting the number. Our man was depressed. Heart very bad, wrestling with debt. He helped anyone who asked, everyone loved him but nobody show any gratitude. Maybe he’d lost his faith in the future. One of his neighbors said he had lost his “happy side”. I think he was tired and disillusioned, and that he wanted to experience something uncomplicated one last time, a day on the river. He had his day, tied up the boat and walked, took a taxi, or hitched a ride to the bridge. Then the squall came up. With a freak storm nobody would be too curious about someone walking on the bridge.”

“So maybe it was not an accident. But our question is the boat. Either way, is there any possible defect in the boat?”

“Only one.”

“That being?”

“The price tag.”

“How much?”

“As Commodore Vanderbilt said, “If you have to ask…”

“I know. Don’t ask.”

“Good work Billy. Why don’t you take the rest of today off. Go have a beer at the firing party. Tomorrow is Thursday. Get in early, and write up the report. Let’s go with the electrical version.”

“Chief, the man made a big mistake. There was more left in life for him. He was a good guy. I didn’t need to statementize two dozen neighbors to realize that.”

“I know Billy. Don’t take it so hard. You’ll go prematurely gray.”

“Chief, no foot for me today?”

“Not today.”

“Will Snootly be back?”

“You just said it. In this business, lightning strikes everyday. Besides, Snootly’s my best man. Present company excepted.”

“Chief.”

“I thought you were done?”

“Maybe he just fell out of the boat.”

Even though it was to be an office day the next day, I decided to drive to the City passing by the station where I would usually park, but I was exhausted mentally, so I parked at Centre Avenue Station and got on the train anyway. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t, and I read a bit, but mostly I thought about the two people I had been studying for the past five months. I had gotten to know a man who deserved the life he wanted but who fell into despair from which there would be no rescue. Then there was the woman who I thought I knew, at least intellectually, who seemed now as desperate as the other. For her too, there seemed no rescue. Such a waste. For a moment I fancied that I could have made a difference for both of them but that was hubris pure and simple. What could I have done? Given the depressed man a copy of Huckleberry Finn or even the Eighth Day and told him there was a brighter day on the horizon. He had taken his sunny day on the River and didn’t want anymore. As for the woman, wasn’t it idiocy to think I could have diverted her from an abusive marriage by trying to pick her up on a subway train? More than likely she would have told me to shove off or impaled me with a knitting needle. I had never even heard the sound of her voice, nor had she ever heard mine. And funny, the limitless humanity available in the classics she had seemed to love, the humanity that had bought her to tears when she read, had ultimately been of no solace.

That idea was depressing. The train was passing the big electrical equipment yard in Ozone Park. Looking at the stacked spools of electric cable I tried to imagine again that the man truly had died by accident, by a lightning bolt on a long improbable detour from a stray thunderhead to a drainpipe on the Hudson. In the same instant, I thought that maybe my poor lady had simply bruised her face walking into a glass door and not a clenched fist, and I wished more than anything that I were wrong.

By the time I reached New York City I was finally ready to take up my novel and escape to the 19^th century, at least for a few subway stops. So I read, and, for a few moments, I was not on a train underground in New York City but at the barracks at Nancy.

The station sign scrolled across the train window as the car squeaked to a stop. Momentarily I saw my reflection in the train window, and a somber, sober adult had replaced, at least temporarily, the perennial nineteen year old. I got up from my seat, left the car, and had taken just a few steps when I felt my left arm tugged back abruptly. I wheeled around ready to deal with whatever the City of New York had planned for me this morning.

It was a young woman, a stranger. She had dark brown eyes, darker brown hair, and a terrific, slightly crooked smile, which she suppressed almost immediately when she was sure of having my attention.

“Look before you say anything, please please listen to me. It will only take a minute, but if you interrupt I’ll lose my nerve and leave.”

I nodded.

“I saw you reading on the train and I recognized your book, Lucien Leuwen. I love that book, and I don’t know anyone else in the world who has read it or would want to read it, or has even heard of it. So it seemed like a sign, like we were connecting with a special telephone all our own. Like two tomato cans with a string between. It seemed like we were supposed to meet or talk or something. And I got the overwhelming feeling that I had come to a signpost with my name on it and an arrow pointing toward you and it freaked me. Obviously you’re not my type. No offense. I mean you look like some kind of drab insurance guy. So maybe it’s not you I’m supposed to meet but your twin brother, or you’re supposed to meet my sister or maybe we are supposed to be boyfriend and girlfriend or maybe just friends or maybe nothing. But the sign seemed so clear and explicit. I mean I could see where you were in the book and I knew what was happening in the story and what you might be thinking and I even thought for a moment that the author had written that book for the sole purpose of bringing us together. But it wouldn’t happen unless I stopped you because you might never ride this train again and we would get off on our different stops and go our own ways and marry someone else or never marry or maybe something not quite so tragic but still bad. So that’s why I got off and stopped you because it would have been a mistake not to, and well, cowardly. Don’t you think so?” All that without taking a breath.

I was silent and she said, “You can speak now. I’m done.”

“Any sensible person would have done exactly the same.”

“ Well, I’m definitely late.” She smiled the crooked smile now in full glory. “Can we have coffee, and, at least find out one another’s name. How about the Chatterbox? ”

I nodded again, and she grabbed my arm and walked with me as we climbed the subway stairs toward the enlarging rectangle of gray daylight that was Nassau Street. To the annoyance of the surging crowd behind us, I stopped with a few steps left.

“One question. What are you reading now?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, I was reading this, but I stopped with about ten pages to go.”

She had reached into her bag and withdrawn a thick paperback. The Eighth Day.

“I got close to the end, but I had to stop for a while.” She added, “ It was breaking my heart.”

This time I grasped her arm, and, as we resumed our climb, I decided to change my day for reports to Friday.

The End

By William G. Schweizer