“No.” He smiled. “Very good. Mmm.”
“More, then?”
“Yes,” he answered, and Ella held the cup to his lips.
Ella took back the cup, and she felt even more shy than she had before. He noticed this and began talking rapidly about the annual campaign. He related funny stories about donors and volunteers they knew in common. She felt she could listen to him talk for the rest of her life. They walked up to Mount Sinai, and in no time they reached the hospital, where they found his mother sound asleep, having taken her pain medication earlier than usual. David kissed his mother on the brow. She was snoring ever so quietly, and he felt happy that she was resting. The monitors and equipment were beeping rhythmically, and they left the room. He took Ella to the cafeteria, where they ate pastries. Neither mentioned Colleen, how it was possible for her to turn up at any time. Ella couldn’t finish her cruller, feeling as though she were swooning. An hour later, she walked him back to school, then walked some more to her father’s office on Park. The walking helped to steady her thinking in a way. If David married Colleen, Ella thought, her heart might break completely.
7 JOURNEY
GEORGE ORTIZ, THE DOORMAN and occasional weekend porter for 178 East Seventy-second Street, had worked for most of his life. Ever since he was sixteen years old, he’d managed to keep a fat roll of twenties in his eelskin wallet. To his surprise, he was now forty-three—that seemed old to him. George was married to Kathleen Leary, a thirty-three-year-old schoolteacher with a master’s in English, but before her, he had known all kinds of girls. He’d plowed through all shapes, sizes, ages, and colors before getting down on bended knee with a one-carat diamond ring bought with cash from Kravitz Jewelers on Steinway to ask Kathleen to have and to hold his pitiful high school dropout ass till death do us part. Anyway, this girl that Unu Shim—his buddy as well as resident of 178 East Seventy-second—had been dating for the past two months was a trip. Her outfits were sort of out there, like from magazines or the movies. He liked her tough-girl stroll, because it reminded him of his baby sister, but the hats were a little crazy.
Today, she was wearing a black one, like the kind that Laurel and Hardy wore, and a black dress that looked like a tight bathrobe made out of a long-sleeved T-shirt. It wrapped across her waist and hips and was secured by a belt made out of the same fabric. There was only one thing a guy could possibly think of when a girl put on a dress like that: one knot kept him from a naked girl. Damn. But George Ortiz was a married man who had danced a lot of salsa—if you know what I mean—and he felt he was above any excessive ogling. A light-skinned Puerto Rican with a head full of wavy black hair and innocent deer eyes, he was proud of the fact that despite the number of honeys from his old neighborhood who called out to him from the street, saying, “？Oye, Jorge, qué tal?” he did little except to toss out an occasional “Hey, mami!” George never took down the digits or touched los regalos. Kathleen Leary—a small brunette with sharp shoulders and an unforgettable pair of tits—was the wheel and sliced bread and Christmas rolled up into one, and he’d never fuck that shit up.
Casey was a nice-looking girl and not stuck-up, so it made sense that she and Unu got together, but what made George laugh was watching his boy Unu act as though this were no big thing. Unu claimed that he was finished with love.
“The divorce took all the juice out of me, man,” Unu said to him after shooting pool one night at Westside Billiards. They’d each had four or five bottles of beer and a wine cooler that tasted like apples that the bar was handing out for free. “Women are great, but I will never be shackled again. No disrespect to Kathleen. She’s an angel. The very last one. Almost worthy of my hombre George.” Unu patted George’s back. Thump, thump. Then a high five followed by two fist bangs—top and bottom. The alcohol had made Unu’s face red and his eyes watery. When Unu, the Upper East Side resident and Wall Street guy, hung out with George, the doorman from Rockaway Beach with the perfect biceps, Unu spoke in a kind of frat-boy vernacular left over from his days at Dartmouth mixed with the street lingo picked up from riding the subways and watching television shows about New York City. George thought it was silly of Unu to try to talk this way, but he sensed that Unu wasn’t mocking him but was merely trying to connect. Unu was a good guy. You could count on him.
Naturally—about women—George let Unu think what he wanted to think. There were rules in Rockaway: Don’t talk shit about someone’s girl, and never tell a guy who to like or dislike. Those were all what you called lose-lose propositions. You let your boy make his mistakes （everyone invariably did）， then go for a beer when he says jump. His brother had been married to a skinny girl who drank too much for like way too long, but hey, that was his thing. Sometimes a man liked to suffer. Besides, Eileen made the best sausage and peppers in the neighborhood. That was another thing George had learned in his forty-three years: Everyone had their good points. Anyway, he knew what a boy in love looked like. He looked a lot like Unu.