Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison Page A

Requiem soaring and dropping, the stations and riders flashing by, mesmerizing, exhausting, Vanessa’s eyes seeing them and yet not, her face sorrowful and mysterious.
    It was, indeed, a quietly brilliant movie, and, remembering the photographs I had seen the night before, Simon Crowley’s fate seemed continuous with the bleak vision of Mr. Lu.
Crowley’s death was now, oddly enough, a small matter of grief for me. Cultural hype aside, here had been someone with something to say.
    Â 
    Â 
    At two, sobered by the movie, I rode the elevator up to Caroline Crowley’s apartment with Sam Shepard. He was going a couple of floors higher, perhaps visiting someone equally glamorous. He stared ahead, hoping not to be recognized. He was still handsome yet looked like hell, the skin loose under his chin, the eyes tired. He saw me staring at him.
    â€œHey, man.”
    The elevator opened then, and I stood in front of the black door for a moment, feeling odd that I was here again, not twelve hours after staggering out the previous night. It was both strange and deeply logical to me; our compulsions are always evident to us, I think, even if we fear them.
    Caroline pulled the door open as soon as I knocked, her hair tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in jeans and a white cashmere sweater.
    â€œI rode up in the elevator with Sam Shepard,” I said.
    â€œHe’s got a friend upstairs.”
    The apartment was filled with pale winter light and seemed larger than it did the night before. I saw fresh vacuum-cleaner tracks on the carpet.
    â€œI made us a little lunch,” Caroline said.
    I followed her into the dining room, where a spread of soup and sandwiches was laid out on a long mahogany table. In the middle of the table was a bowl of the largest oranges I had ever seen.
    â€œLast night—” I began.
    â€œLast night was just right,” she interrupted.
    I didn’t know what she meant.
    â€œYou weren’t expecting to meet me,” she said. “I saw you across the room and just thought I’d talk to you. I know it’s—it’s strange, but I figured you had heard about every crazy story people can tell and this was very —well, you have to understand my—Charlie—is very much of a businessman,
very dependable and everything, but not much interested in what happened with me and Simon …” She took an orange from the bowl and began to peel it. “I guess I have a little problem, and it’s pretty embarrassing.” She lifted her eyes. “I mean, if it was just embarrassing, then it wouldn’t be a big deal. But it’s more than that.”
    We did not know each other, but already a strange intimacy existed between us. She seemed to feel a great pressure to tell me certain things, some essence of a predicament, and it occurred to me that perhaps she had decided that these were things her fiancé might be better off not knowing. For if she could tell him, then why would she need to tell me? I also was beginning to wonder whether Caroline Crowley might simply be lonely. Not in the sense of unaccompanied, for a woman such as she would always be accompanied, but fundamentally solitary; I wondered, too, if she did not trust herself to keep out of trouble. She was bright and beautiful and yet appeared unmoored. That she wanted to tell me of her “little problem” was proof of the randomness of her life and, I suspected, proof that her problem was not little at all.
    Caroline began to move the plate of sandwiches around. “Last night you may have noticed that the articles I showed you on Simon don’t mention me: See, we didn’t have a public wedding, and also I didn’t meet him until just about the end of his life. The fact that we were married came out after he died, and I just flew to Mexico and stayed a few months in order to avoid the television people, people like that.”
    â€œPeople like me.” I