Outside Grand Central, Elaine is smoking a cigarette. It’s summer, and it’s raining, and Elaine finally found a bridge to hide under. She is an invisible old woman, with stark-red hair and slumping arms. Her cigarette is a beacon for the taxi-drivers in a city full of darkness, a shaman lighting the way for the directionless, spoiled citizens of Manhattan (or so she thinks). Heck, she’s one of these citizens herself! But that doesn’t matter. She is their messiah, their Jesus—sitting on a banister with her feet dangling a foot off the ground, she knows that her dot of ember is not another corporal Times Square advertisement, not another meaningless, free serendipity—oh no.
Elaine is Jewish. Her son is a cruciverbalist, an epicure, and dead. She misses him very much. He died only ten years ago, when he was 50 and Elaine was 80.
Murdered.
Elaine thinks it was murder, anyway. The police called it an overdose, but Elaine never gave her son any cocaine, never even taught him to like cocaine, and the entire cocaine conspiracy is just a red herring in a whole investigational spectrum that the assassin planted to hide his identity.
Elaine is proud of her son. As she lights another cigarette, she remembers her wrinkled pride. Her son was a journalist. A famous journalist, a food critic, a womanizer and a fellow New Yorker, one of those preternatural intellectuals who wore berets and fur coats. Never married, never single. He was going to outlast his mother by at least fifty years, if not more, and her love for him could not have been surpassed by any other maternal love.
And then he was murdered.
A man is approaching Elaine. A black man, a strange man. His legs stride crookedly, heavily, not bouncing but more like yanking, lugging. He halts by her and pulls out something from his jacket, which is soaked with rainwater. She is staring at his hand, trembling.
In the pink flesh of his palm is a gun. The blackness of the gun blends in with his skin, which blends in with the night. Her ephemeral fear is substituted for a quick, painful jolt into action, and with a springing, youthful arm she hands him her purse.
The black man doesn’t shoot her. He doesn’t speak. He takes the purse and runs away. He is an egregious black man, stealing an old Jewish woman’s purse.
Elaine knows who killed her son. She is absolutely sure of the assassin’s identity. As the men and women of Grand Central pour by, and tourists from across the Atlantic, study the purseless, assaulted detritus of past civilizations, Elaine organizes facts in her mind.
A rushing cabdriver sprays mucky water on her pants. The feeling of the wet, smooth, gossamer fabric on her legs is very voluptuous, and she chortles out loud, not caring how many pedestrians turn their heads to see what made that awful cackling noise.
They don’t live under a bridge. They don’t know who killed her son. They didn’t get their purse stolen. That man is egregious, black, evil, stealing an old Jewish mother’s purse for one woman, one high, one moment of sudden, ephemeral euphoria (and how many people did he already harm? how many people did he already steal from?).
She is disappointed in life. Maybe because she knows the answer to it, an answer that isn’t very promising. It has something to do with a son, and a man, and a purse. She knows who killed her son. She knows who stole her purse. And that purse meant so much to her; it was her beacon of light, her messiah, her serendipity.
Even though all she had inside were her cigarettes.
