Innocent monster

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Katy’s blood was no longer fresh on my hands and after 9/11 people seemed to stop taking notice. I stopped trying to scrub it away. With all due respect to Lady Macbeth, there isn’t enough soap or hot water to get those stains out and scouring brushes are impotent at guilt. Jews know from guilt. So do Catholics, but they know it differently. Jews know you can’t pray it away or confess it away and that there is no number of good acts that will balance the ledger sheet. Guilt is a tattoo and, if you’re lucky, it will fade. 9/11 faded my tattoo. Besides, in a world awash in blood, what’s one life, give or take?

Even my daughter Sarah started talking to me again, if only once a week and then with a robotic detachment that hurt me more than her year of silence ever did. In the wake of 9/11 all of us New Yorkers were really just robots there for a little while. So it was that the pain of my divorce from Carmella and the dissolution of our partnership barely registered. It had taken twenty years of secrets to destroy my first marriage and about twenty minutes to destroy my second. I wondered if there were Las Vegas odds on how fast I could fuck up a third? I missed Israel, Carmella’s son by another man and, for a very brief time, mine in every other way that mattered. But he was less than a year old when Carmella moved up to Toronto and I doubt he misses me. At my age, on the other hand, you start to spend a lot of your time missing people: some living, some dead, some just gone.

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