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I DECIDE TO GET away for the weekend.
Alone.
It means leaving Rip the dog with Dr. Ben and heading for the city, and my apartment on Christopher Street, for the first time in months.
Despite Rob Jacobson’s objections, on Monday I’m going to formally petition Judge Kane to allow me to step away from my client and the case.
I’m aware that it’s far from a sure thing that the request will be granted, so soon after she granted my motion to have the trial date moved up.
I’ll worry about that on Monday and try to turn off my brain on what Jimmy has told me about Anthony Licata and Joe Champi, and how Licata might have been even better at hiding in plain sight than Champi.
“For the next couple of days,” I tell Jimmy, “I’m going to see if I remember how to show a girl—this one—a good time.”
I am treating my trip to the city like a well-earned vacation, the accommodations being an apartment I love, in a neighborhood I love, in a city I still love, even though I no longer spend enough time there.
I drive in on Friday morning, park the car at my old garage up the block, let myself into the apartment, let in some fresh air.
Then I turn off my phone and take the subway uptown to 50th and Eighth, the stop next to the Winter Garden Theater, make my way to Central Park from there. I wander the park aimlessly and happily after that, trying not to get clipped by runaway bicycles. When I get hungry at lunchtime, I walk up to Gray’s Papaya on 72nd and Broadway, thrilled that it’s still there, and order what is still one of the best hot dogs in town.
Maybe the entire planet.
Ralph Nader, that old priss, once called hot dogs America’s most dangerous missile.
What’s one more going to do, kill me?
I’ve always loved walking the city, from the time I was renting my first elevator-car of an apartment in Murray Hill, its one redeeming characteristic being a view out the living room window of the Empire State Building. That was back when I thought, we all thought, we hit the big city not just walking but running: thinking we were all going to live forever, at least until the planes hit our buildings and everything changed.
I have no interest in shopping Columbus Avenue, but then I never really did. So now I go over to the American Museum of Natural History and spend an hour there. Then over to Lincoln Center to stand in front of the fountains, then back over to the park and down to 59th Street before I start to fade, at long last.
When I’ve taken the subway back downtown to the apartment, I turn on my phone and see several missed calls from Rob Jacobson and some all-caps texts telling me to call him. But no messages from Jimmy, which means no fires we need to put out, at least not today.
I take a shower, pour myself a small white wine, put on a nice dress, one that doesn’t hang quite right because of lost weightbut I can still carry it off, and take a cab to Sistina, one of my favorite Italian restaurants, in the space it moved into on 81st several years ago.
Henry, the maître d’, remembers me, and asks if I’m waiting for someone.
“Mr. Right.”
“Still?” he says, formally kissing my hand.
We both laugh before I tell him I’ll be happily dining alone.
I decide to enjoy the beautiful evening and walk off the pasta primavera before heading home. No one waiting for me. No one knowing exactly where I am. I feel like I can breathe again. Like the city has taken me back in, told me all is forgiven.
Then I do have one more destination, as much as I hate to admit that to myself.
I make my way over to Third Avenue, the block where the Red Blazer, one of the places where my father had tended bar, once stood.
Right across the street from Elian, the second restaurant my ex-husband had recently opened. I wasn’t sure how he could afford that. Maybe he’d found the money for it under his bed.
I know he’s there, because they told me so when I first called Café Martin.
Ten o’clock by now, the East Side night just beginning to rise up and even roar.
There I am, standing across the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of him through the window the way I used to stand across the street from Café Martin after we broke up.
I spent the whole day feeling as if I’d been drawn back into the past,mypast, and now here I am.
Not even knowing why I’m here.
