Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [128]
You look back with the benefit of age upon the dreams of most children and what makes them seem so endearing is their unattainability—this one wanted to be a pirate, this one a princess, this one president. But from the way Tinker talked you got the sense that his starry-eyed dreams were still within his reach; maybe closer than ever.
When it grew dark, we retreated to Hank’s room. In the staircase, Tinker asked if I wanted to get a bite. I said I wasn’t hungry and he looked relieved. I think we’d both had our fill of restaurants for the year.
Without any chairs on hand, we made do sitting face-to-face on two overturned produce crates: HALLELUJAH ONIONS and AVIATOR LIMES.
—How are things going at the magazine? he asked, enthusiastically.
Up in the Adirondacks, I had told him about Alley and Mason Tate and the search for our first cover story. So now I told him my idea of interviewing the doormen and some of the scuttle we’d dredged up. As I was describing it, for the first time I felt a little squeamish. Somehow, the whole notion seemed more unseemly here in Hank’s flophouse than it had in the back of Mason Tate’s limousine.
But Tinker loved it. Not in the way that Mason loved it. Not because it was going to peel the New York potato. Tinker just loved the ingenuity of it, the human comedy of it—that all those secrets of adultery and illegitimacy and ill-gotten gains—secrets which had been so closely kept—had all the time been floating freely across the surface of the city unheeded, just like the little boats that boys fold from the headlines and sail across the ponds in Central Park. But most of all, Tinker loved that I had come up with the idea.
—We deserve it, he said with a laugh and a shake of the head, classing himself among the secret keepers.
—You certainly do.
When we both stopped laughing, I began telling him some funny story we’d learned from an elevator boy, but he cut me off.
—I encouraged her, Katey.
I met his gaze.
—From the minute I met Anne, I encouraged her to take me on. I knew exactly what she could do for me. And what it would cost.
—That wasn’t the worst of it, Tinker.
—I know. I know. I should have told you at the coffee shop; or upstate. I should have told you everything the night we met.
At some point, Tinker noticed that my arms were wrapped around my torso.
—You’re freezing, he said. I’m such an idiot.
He leapt up and looked around the room. He unfurled his blanket and put it over my shoulders.
—I’ll be right back.
I heard him trounce down the stairs. The door to the street slammed shut.
With the blanket still on my shoulders, I stamped my feet and wandered in a circle. Hank’s painting of the protest on the pier was lying on the center of the gray mattress, suggesting that Tinker had been sleeping on the floor. I stopped in front of Tinker’s suitcase. The inside of the lid was lined with blue silk pockets sized for different items—a hairbrush, a shaving brush, a comb—all of which presumably had borne Tinker’s initials and all of which were gone.
I knelt to look at the stack of books. They were the reference books from the study at the Beresford and the book of Washingtonia that had been given to him by his mother. But there was also the edition of Walden that I’d seen in the Adirondacks. It was a little more scuffed around the edges now, as if it had been carried in a back pocket—up and down the trail to Pinyon Peak, up and down Tenth Avenue, up and down this narrow flophouse stair.
Tinker’s footsteps sounded on the landing. I sat on his crate.
He came through the door with two pounds of coal wrapped in newspaper. He got down on his knees in front of the stove and set about lighting the fire, blowing on the