After
Ted Krever
Published by Ted Krever at Smashwords
copyright 2010 Ted Krever
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons, living or dead, is entirely fictitious.
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Author’s Note
This is a collection of short stories, some of them directly about September 11th, others just reflective of the era. I’ve included the dates they were originally finished because I find it interesting to see the way perspective changed over time.
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After
November 9, 2001
I knew something was wrong when I saw the heavy rubber fireman’s coat on the couch.
I had been up in Washington Square Park, in the garden of candles, swaying and singing with the crowd, watching people holding each other and standing together, praying in the manner of our 21st Century secular grab-bag religion—a little Christian good faith, a touch of Buddhist stoicism, a dash of Taoist centering, strained through a mesh of Jewish skepticism.
The young people were talking, sharing this experience in the hushed tones they’d previously heard only on golf telecasts, talking with the shock and fresh pain of the uninitiated. I, on the other hand, could tick off without effort Francis Gary Powers being shot down, policemen with fire hoses and clubs attacking black people in the streets of Mississippi, Jacqueline Kennedy climbing the trunk of the open limousine, Dr. King on the balcony in Memphis, Bobby Kennedy on the floor of a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, policemen with clubs attacking students in Chicago, Chappaquidick, 4 dead in Ohio, helicopters straining to lift off the roof of our embassy in Saigon with passengers clinging to the skids, Reagan shot, Challenger exploding, Sadat, Indira Gandhi and Yitzhak Rabin. While this shock was deeper and the hole in the skyline much much bigger than I’d ever imagined possible, the shock itself was familiar, the same breathtaking vivid vacuum in my chest that I’d known periodically since childhood. Welcome to the World, kids, I thought condescendingly, and was properly ashamed of myself for it.
So when I got home and saw the fireman’s coat, my stomach started growling immediately.
“What’s with the coat?” I asked Sam. He was in the kitchen in his underwear drinking beer.
“I got lucky,” he said, switching between Conan and some French movie on Bravo. He was watching both simultaneously.
“You used the coat to get laid?” I yelled and he looked over at me like I was some sort of child.
“What is your problem?” he demanded, with the weariness of a combat veteran. Which is obviously what he’d been pretending to be. Sam is the kid who’s renting the third bedroom in my apartment since Maura moved out. He was a volunteer fireman in Staten Island before moving to Manhattan—I saw the coat when he first moved in. He promised he’d get me out alive if the building ever caught fire. Now, for the first time in the four months he’s lived here, the coat had come out of the closet.
“Did you put charcoal on your face to make it look like you just came from the site?” I continued screaming. “Did you tell her the names of the dead men in your company? Did you tell her how you led people down the stairs and just managed to get that one wheelchair victim out as the tower came down?”
“Off the pedestal, please,” he said. “She was upset, she was scared, like everybody else. You think I’m not affected by this? You think I don’t have a heart? I wanted to do something. I went down to the site. They said they couldn’t take more volunteers right now. They said come back tomorrow. So I’m coming back up here and she’s standing on a streetcorner bawling her eyes out. She had three friends who worked there and she’d just gotten off the phone with them, right there on the corner—all alive. They all got out. She needed to be with someone. And so did I, if you want to know the truth. I was really kind of upset they had nothing for me down there. I couldn’t stand not doing anything. So we ended up together. I didn’t go out looking to fool anybody.”
Coming from him, this was an aria of raw emotion. His dullness—his lack of feeling, the old-fashioned John Wayne granite resolve—had struck me from the day he moved in. He had lost his parents just a few months before, and seemed determined not to be touched by anything. Unlike my college roommates—the last time I’d ever had roommates—he refused to be drawn into any conversation that involved feelings. He almost appeared to have no personal aspect at all.
I rendered this judgment even though rendering judgments made me uncomfortable, and guilty in some strange way. I grew up in a generation that obsessed over the shallowness, the condescension, the puritanical straitjacket of the idea of judging others, of boiling down another human’s hard-fought worldview and putting it on a scale. We believed there was always another mile to be walked in the other guy’s shoes. So I tried not to judge Sam harshly for his…whatever it was. Maybe just self-reliance. He was honest, no drugs, a decent roommate who paid his rent on time. Just not particularly blessed—or cursed—with deep feeling. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry I went off.”
“It’s okay,” he murmured, opening another beer. “You didn’t know. There’s probably somebody out there trying that scam right now.” He looked over at the coat lying on the couch—I looked at it too.
“So—can I borrow it? Go check out a couple bars?” I asked, and burst out laughing. It felt good to laugh, funny joke or not.
“Absolutely not,” he said, laughing too.
I drank too much wine while he finished a six-pack. We saw the end of the French movie—it lasted longer than Conan so we stared at the last twenty minutes without channelswapping, not that either of us could recollect a frame of it after. Then I went off to my room with a view of the lights and the smoke, the noise and the smell from half a mile away. I didn’t sleep for a long time. I found myself going through the catalog again, from Francis Gary—a saint’s names—to Yitzhak, the litany of impersonal poundings my heart has taken that have never really faded away.
He did fool her, I thought. She thought he was from the site. She thought he was one of them. Or maybe it didn’t matter, like he said. Maybe she just wanted to be with someone. But that coat was the price of admission, the coat all by itself. That’s why there was no pleasure in it for him. That’s why he was sitting in the kitchen drinking a six-pack at 1 in the morning. That’s why he wasn’t still at her place. Bet he doesn’t even have her number, I thought. And maybe that’s alright with her, too.
I knew I was turning mental cartwheels , but that was nothing new for me. Again, I didn’t want to be judgmental, to attach any moral stigma to these thoughts. I wasn’t thinking badly of Sam—I was just weighing the scales as some sort of exercise. It was abstract, almost random, but somehow, it felt important to me at the moment. It was something I needed to do. Some impulse was tugging at me, something that felt fresh, that required new muscles to be exercised, muscles I’d neglected for a long time. There was a change of routine here that had less to do with the past than the future, if we had a future.
Sam went back to the site the next day and worked, worked there for over a week. He returned to the apartment every couple of days, and then he’d drink and stare at the television and sleep, which is all anybody could do.
I went to work each day, sprinting from morning to night, putting out the news. I’m an operations executive in the news division of one of the television networks, and all any of us could do at first was try to keep up.
It took several weeks, but we almost regained routine. Every morning on the way to work, I ticked off subway stations and store names and floors on the elevator, listing them for myself by rote, from habit, rebuilding each morning the reassurance of familiarity. We had just enough of a respite to begin to relax.
Then the first anthrax attack hit—at another network. Over the next few days, several networks got the innocuous letters.
I bought a gas mask one afternoon on lunch break, at an odds-and-ends store down the block from the office. Sam laughed when I brought it home. “That’s useless,” he informed me. “If it’s anthrax, all you need is antibiotics anyway. If it’s sarin, the mask won’t help.” He was back at his job by then, at a newsstand in Rockefeller Center—where the first tainted letter had arrived—so he had studied up on the subject.
I tried to keep my mind on subway stations and elevators and the price of overpriced coffee. In time, there were new encouraging signs— my friends began gossiping about each other again, partisan politics returned in fits and starts to Washington, big businesses began poking each other in competition for bailout money. Normalcy was returning, I was able to tell myself, despite the couple of threatening powdery letters received by the competition.
Then I got the phone call.
“Can you come to Don’s office?” Don Masters is, of course, our anchor, veteran of thirty years in the news wars, an esteemed journalist, expansive late-night talk show commentator on world affairs, obsessive visitor to tarot and numerology readers and a man who insists on riding the same expensive quarter horse that’s thrown him three times and almost killed him once. One approaches Don at the best of times only when summoned, and then discusses only the topics he raises—any other course can quickly throw this very finicky expensive train right off the tracks.
“What’s up, Don?” I said, leaning against his doorpost, trying to appear nonchalant.
“Come in,” he said tensely, not even pretending to be social. “Close the door.”
I settled into the buttery leather chair next to his sea captain’s desk, piled with horsy knickknacks and model sailboats, the detritus of a man who always needed to be reminded of his own vitality. Don paced behind the desk for a few moments, his TV-blue shirt open at the collar, the tie—dramatically casual—loose around his neck.
“We need anthrax,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“All the other networks have anthrax. We’re falling behind. Bin Laden’s decided we’re irrelevant. What’s that going to do to us as an organization?”
One of Don’s obsessions is his role in the history of the network, his special place in ‘the organization.’ The most venerable news organization in the history of television—he’d learned the phrase so well it rolled off his tongue at the end of every show, and whenever he’d had a few drinks. But I didn’t smell alcohol on his breath. It didn’t even sound like competition was concerning him at the moment.
“Don, I don’t think anyone’s keeping score in quite that way,” I ventured.
“Don’t be naïve,” he muttered. “Everything counts. Everything registers somewhere inside the minds of human beings. If the other networks all have anthrax letters and we don’t, it diminishes us forever.”
“Okay—so what do you have in mind?” I asked, giving him a second chance to state his goal, a chance to back away from what I was afraid he meant.
“We have to get some,” he insisted, without a second thought. “We have to find someplace that has some and get it on a letter here. And I think we need to do this today, so it can be discovered no later than tomorrow. We’re already lagging behind.” He looked at me with the tension I’d seen on his face in national crises when he’d ‘taken charge’ of the newsroom—not among my favorite memories.
“If I were thinking of myself,” he said, “it would be nice if the letter made it as far as my personal assistant. Look at the mileage Brokaw got out of that—it probably bought him five more years in the chair. But I don’t want to take chances with anyone’s health—they can find it in the mailroom.”
“Uh-huh,” I stammered, because I couldn’t think of another reply. “Have you talked to anyone else about this? Anybody from upstairs?”
“No,” he said, wheeling around from the window and leaning over the desk. “And neither will you. This is not an operation anyone can know about. I don’t know about it and neither does anyone else. Neither do you, for that matter. As long as you get some powder and get it on a letter, nobody ever has to know anything about it. You drive out to Trenton and mail it tonight. I know a doctor who’ll give you Cipro today—you can say you’re nervous, working at a network. Tomorrow you’ll look like a genius.”
I could see he was serious. But apparently he wasn’t sure yet that I saw it, or that I was clear as to just how serious he was.
“I’ll break you,” he said, “if you speak about this with anyone.”
This was no idle threat, coming from Don Masters. He’d done it before—everyone knew the stories.
In the past ten years, as the world have become ever more centered around the United States, Don Masters had become ever more centered around Don Masters. He threw fits over promos that didn’t include his picture in the first two seconds. He remade the set of the Seven O’Clock News twice at the advice of his numerologist, with 7’s (for success) and 9’s (for profundity) stitched into the pattern of the chairs. This was fine until the late 90’s, when we had to prepare for HDTV and the engineers found that the pattern could now actually be read—by the three civilians in the country with an HDTV set and sending station. Nonetheless, this required another set rebuild, with smaller and more obscured numbers still present in the stitching.
And the piece de resistance was surely the news magazine piece that required a new voiceover during Don’s monthlong vacation in the Hamptons. Don refused to come back to town, even when the network proffered a helicopter to make the trip quicker. Instead, he forced the brass to send a mobile recording truck three hours out to the tip of Long Island, to camp outside a local radio station in order to re-voice his 3 minutes of track. And every time Don was unhappy about something, not only did he get his way, but someone lost their job.
I wondered sometimes if he didn’t pay people to repeat these stories in the halls—they did a lot to bolster his reputation, and the reputation of having such power conferred that power. I’d been with the organization myself for twenty years—I had a pension and child support payments—it was hard to think of leaving, and especially to go out over this.
And when I started looking at things his way, he actually had a point: the lack of a letter did make us look bad. We’d been lagging in the ratings for several years, our demographics showed our audience getting progressively older—and now this. I found myself wondering at the fact that I hadn’t thought about it myself. I assumed we could weather this storm—the only network not to receive an anthrax letter—but maybe I was being naïve. At the same instant this thought occurred to me, it struck me as rank insanity. Hannah Arendt would have a field day here, I thought.
I needed to think. I needed to get out of the office. Besides, even if I decided to do it, how the hell was I going to get ahold of anthrax? On a few hours notice? I searched my memory for scientists who might work with the stuff—friends of Maura’s or people I’d interviewed over the years. It was all a blur. And something was nagging at me, some impulse in my chest that felt off-kilter, like a drumbeat that’s a half-step off.
After prowling the halls aimlessly for ten minutes, I decided to talk to Sam. He was a disinterested party and an honest man. He’d keep his mouth shut, come hell or high water, and he wasn’t a judgmental sort, not one to take positions or draw moral distinctions at such a time. He’d fooled the girl with his fireman’s jacket, after all. He’d listen, I’d talk, and I’d figure out what to do. And then he’d forget it, go home, watch movies on television and drink beer and not bother me about this ever again. Maybe, with luck, he’d know someone who had some anthrax.
I went to Rockefeller Center, to his newsstand, but he wasn’t there. The owner of the newsstand said he’d gone home sick. The owner stood in a corner of the tiny cubicle in front of a stack of yesterday’s newspapers. He was short, swarthy, mustached and accented—Lebanese? Afghan, maybe?
I scanned the wall racks. I hadn’t read a magazine in a month. Now I saw all the special issues, the pictures I’d seen before, many I hadn’t. The owner held up one commemorative issue to me. “You want this one?” he said.
“Yes, that’s what I was looking for,” I told him. It was the magazine we read in my parent’s home thirty-five years ago, when my litany of bad memories started. Now it was a comfort to see the disturbing pictures beneath the familiar banner.
He held the magazine up for me, but before I could take it, he pulled it back and opened to one of the center pages, the centerfold with the graphic of the Trade Center, the trajectory of the planes, the timeline of their impact and the general geography we all know so well.
He pointed to the base, the ground floor, of Tower 2. “I worked here,” he said, chewing on the words a bit. “I worked the newsstand here,” he said, pointing again. I knew that stand, one of the biggest downtown. I’d probably given him money many times. “I was there when it hit,” he said. “I was fixing up my stack,” and at first I didn’t understand what he meant. Then I looked at the pile of newspapers in front of him, the banners cut off for return to the jobber. He’d been preparing his merchandise for return.
“I stayed,” he continued. “I heard the noise but I fixed my stack. Then I closed up.” There was no irony in his voice, no self-reproach. It’s just the way things happened. It was like, all these weeks later, he still had to tell the story in order to discover what he thought about it himself.
“I headed this way,” he said, still with the diagram, pointing at a doorway now. “They stopped me—they said ‘No—can’t go this way. Go over there.’ So I go over there. Ten minutes later, I’m back at the same place. I made a circle. I go outside, and the whole thing comes down. Dark cloud all over, in my face in my eyes my mouth my nose. I can’t breath to speak.” He opens his mouth and puts his hand in, hands as scoops. He moves them in and out of his mouth a few times, showing me how he worked to be able to breath again. “I scoop the dust out. Then I yell ‘HELP!!’ A man comes—fireman—from ten feet away. He takes me. His head is bleeding—my head is bleeding, my shoulder is bleeding. His blood is on my shirt, here on the shoulder. I can’t wash it now.”
They took him to Liberty State Park, he said, for hospital. Then, when they found out he had no way to return to Brooklyn, the police drove him to a New Jersey police garrison, where other policemen drove him to Brooklyn. That was nice of them, he said. He didn’t expect such courtesy from policemen, especially in New Jersey.
“My shoulder still hurts,” he says. “I can’t lift heavy weight now.”
“But you’re here,” I said.
“I’m here,” he repeated, hollowvoiced and paused for a moment, staring out into the busy lobby. “I have a friend, he got a job in the restaurant on the Tower, at the top? His first day—“ he stopped.
“That was his first day?”
He nodded. “His first day. He’s gone.” He was staring at me, without visible feeling, with no response to what he had just said, looking at me as though I could tell him what he should feel, what he should do.
I had nothing to say. I could feel those unfamiliar muscles flexing inside me, those inactive muscles that needed exercise. I could feel them working away, but to no end I could determine as yet. Considering the mission I was on, I was in no position to tell anyone which way was up.
He went back to doing what he could do, all he knew to do at the moment. Six weeks after his world exploded, he was back at work, slitting the banners off the tops of newspapers, slitting them with a boxcutter.
I watched him, watched the blade—almost a visual pun—for what seemed like several minutes. Then I walked back across town, tasting the air and the smells of the city. I went up the elevator and walked right into Don’s office.
“We shouldn’t do this,” I said to Don.
“No?” he said. “And why not?” His mouth was working and his eyebrows got that twitch I’d seen every once in a while during major breaking news stories. We’d even sent him to a consultant several years earlier to try to get control of it, but to no avail. Now I took it as a hopeful sign, that maybe he was feeling a little pressure from me, from inside himself, from some memory or dormant feeling that might now be nagging at him.
“Because it’s wrong. Because it’s a bad idea.” I paused, to see if the words might penetrate. They felt funny coming out of my mouth. I wondered when I’d last used the word ‘wrong’ in adult conversation—clearly, it had been a long time.
Don was chewing on this, but it was clearly a battle for him, a battle against at least ten years of his own history, his comfort level of familiarity and routine and certain levels of authority he’d worked hard for. I decided it would be better not to wait for him to come to a conclusion.
“Besides,” I said, looking him firmly in the eye, “it betrays a lack of faith in the organization.”
He stiffened at this. “What do you mean?”
“It’s there, Don,” I told him. “It’s in our mailroom. It’s probably addressed to you. Somebody down there just bungled it. They put it in the wrong pile. If they go looking for it, they’ll find it.”
I could see his jaw stiffen. I could see the old resolve return, the pride and bravado that made him accept the anchor job in the first place, back when he was a field reporter who didn’t want to get stuck behind a desk.
“You’re right,” he said. “Can you make that happen?”
“Sure,” I said. I called the mailroom and told them to initiate a complete search of the entire facility, with workers wearing protective gloves, and to call the instant they found anything suspicious.
And of course, it was there. It was even addressed to Don, like I’d promised. I was surprised to see how many executives around the office seemed heartened by this news. They called a press conference immediately to make the announcement. We might have been last, but we were still in the game.
When I went home that night, Sam was on the couch, flipping the channels. A very pretty young woman was feeding him soup.
“I pick up the shipments in the mailroom,” he explained. “I tested positive today—they think some of the powder got on a pile of newspapers. So I’m taking Cipro. Shouldn’t you?” he asked. He looked positively chipper about it. The girl kept bringing soup from the kitchen.
I must have had a look on my face. “What?” Sam demanded.
I went back to my room and looked out the window. The smoke was gone now, though I knew I’d see it out my window again sometime. I could feel those muscles working inside again, working hard now, trying to get accustomed, trying to achieve the level of familiarity, of routine.
Sam came into my room with the girl.
“I’m moving out,” he said. “You’ve changed.”
I nodded and helped them call a cab. Then I went back to watching out the window, watching where the smoke used to be.
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Missing
May 6, 2004
The Halls of Justice looked like white whales in a winter storm. Superior Court, Family Court, Hall of Records. Chalky-coated and glinting dull, they loom ghastly against the charcoal clouds. No other footsteps echo the square. No other faces in sight, just a few slim forms on the balconies and rooftops of Chinatown staring south, staring downtown like everyone else in the world.
I’m going to Chinatown. That’s the address on the card in the wallet in my jacket pocket.
There are newspapers blowing around the street, though it doesn’t feel like a breeze anywhere else. There was a primary today. Did I vote? One more question I can’t answer. One of many. Maybe I’ll know more at the office.
At the office. The phrase feels familiar. I worked at an office. But this one? We’ll see. See if it looks familiar when I open the door.
Even Chinatown is deserted. A few men in their white shirts, slacks and aprons stand around the doorways. Every eye strains above street level, watching the clouds, the clouds from downtown.
The keys in my pants pocket don’t fit the street door. But the ones in the jacket pocket do. The dimpled key on the same ring fits the deadbolt of Room 306. Ned Schindler, Investigator. That would be me, I suppose. I’ve got the keys. I’ve got the wallet.
It doesn’t look familiar, but not much does. I know New York. But then, I could be a tourist from Salt Lake City and know what New York looks like, even today, even on the day when it least looks like itself. But I knew this was Chinatown before I could read the signs. I knew how to find Mott Street. I know Little Italy is a few blocks away. I can distinguish the subway tokens in my pocket from the change. So I know the city. There’s just nothing anywhere that feels like mine.
Drawers locked. The small key on the jacket ring opens it. It’s a top drawer. Files and pens, envelopes and candy, a hundred notes on scrap paper, a few dollars and a few photos and a few more keys.
I leaned back in the seat and then it was morning. Light was pouring in the windows, I could hear at least a few people on the street chattering in Cantonese and I was stiff as a board when I got up.
I looked at the room for signs of the owner. A few photos but totally generic—a zeppelin over the Empire State Building before the TV antenna spire, an autographed picture of Keith Hernandez in Mets blue and orange and a certificate of completion of the Investigator’s Preparedness Program in Drug Recognition and Compliance at SUNY Downstate. I’m not connecting with any of this. Now in the light of morning, I see the small television wedged into the middle of a bookshelf. I turn it on and of course it’s full of the hole in the city, the hole downtown, the hole that created the cloud.
I came from there. I don’t have to watch this to know that. Watching doesn’t help though—nothing gets clearer. I don’t know how I got there or what happened to me. Obviously I got out but I don’t remember a thing. The anchors show the footage of the cloud of dust. I walk to the bathroom and look in the mirror. I’m coated in the stuff. So is the windowsill outside, like the courthouses were. They say it’ll take weeks to clear. It takes me half an hour and twenty-five paper towels to clean myself off. There’s another set of clothes hanging on the back of the bathroom door—they fit. Of course. This is my office. What else could it be?
I head back to the desk and sit. I turn off the TV. I pull the wallet out of my pocket. The picture on the driver’s license looks something like me. Why shouldn’t it? The address is in Staten Island. I couldn’t get there anyway—the ferry’s not running. Or do I have a car? I call 411 to get my own phone number. The phone rings a long time. No answer, no machine, but no one picks up either.
I should just go home. I should get a cab. There have to be cabs running. I’d have to walk above 14th Street—they aren’t letting anyone downtown. But I could get a car to the address. I have lots of keys. Something will fit. Why do I doubt this? Why don’t I feel anything for the address? Why do I doubt that I will know it either when I get home?
Because everything is strange. I acknowledge the overview, the world I live in, but everything has changed simply because familiarity has disappeared. I’m not talking about familiarity with something in particular—the whole concept of familiarity is gone. Everything is at a distance, removed, detached from me, from any associations, from feeling or pleasure or dread or pain. Pain floats over the city in a cloud. It takes no effort to identify. But you can’t touch a cloud. It communicates nothing. It offers nothing on its own. It’s just there.
Just as I’m about to feel something—just as the fear and fright begin to become palpable—there’s a knock at the door. I left it hanging when I came in, so all she has to do is push on it to get it open.
“I need help,” she says, sitting in the chair across from me. “I’m trying to find a missing person.”
“Aren’t we all?” I answer.
~~~~
Bridge and Tunnel People
March 31, 2003
“Bridge and Tunnel people.”
“What is this?”
“This is what they call us—bridge and tunnel people, like everyone should be able to afford Manhattan.”
“It’s status,” S replied. “The Manhattan people look down on the Queens people, the blacks think the Jews are cheap, the Irish think the blacks are lazy, the hip-hoppers think the punk people are not hip, anybody making over $100,000 a year hates the Democrats, and someday the Natives are going to hate the guys who put up the casinos for taking all their money.”
“We won’t live to see that one,” said M.
“Thanks be. But I see it every day in the store. They all come in talking about everybody else, like nobody knows as good as them. And like I’m not there at all.”
“That’s because you’re bridge and tunnel people. Nobody sees us anyplace. We’re below everybody.”
“Take the upper level or the bottom?”
“The top makes better pictures. Don’t you pay attention?”
“This is not about me,” S replied. “Things will happen according to plan, despite my weakness.”
“Where do you get this nonsense? You watch Oprah too much.”
“It’s a good show. She at least helps people sometimes. Did you leave food for the dogs?”
“Lots of food,” M assured him.
“The ones from the Towers, they sent out people to their houses to save their dogs. We should have that,” S said.
“Are you comparing yourself?”
“No, no, it’s the dogs I’m thinking of.”
The line of cars was stacked up along the approach ramp. Two trucks were moving slowly in adjoining lanes, which held up everyone behind them.
“This is rudeness,” S said. “They know people are in a hurry.”
“Yeah—this is New York. Everybody has very important travel plans,” his passenger echoed and they both laughed. “Watch the pothole.”
“No problem at this speed,” S assured him. He was able to steer around it in any case. The van lumbered carrying the weight in the back but he had practiced for a week with sandbags and cinder blocks to simulate it and the handling was pretty much what he expected.
“I saw two American girls in the neighborhood wearing burkas,” S said. “You think this means something?”
“They’ll be wearing them with miniskirts this summer,” M answered. “They take nothing seriously.”
“Nothing?”
“They fight a war on terrorism and on the front page of the newspaper for weeks is ‘Joe Millionaire.’”
“That won’t change, you don’t think?” S asked. M heard the twinge in his voice and recognized a destructive sort of doubt seeping into his driver’s resolve. This could not go unanswered.
“I think over time, things must change,” he said. He could see S considering him between glances at the traffic, which was further snarled by an accident ahead. “When people are comfortable, they want to stay comfortable. When all the real choices are uncomfortable, they watch television instead. They have to be made uncomfortable so that their minds adjust. Then making a choice becomes a necessity.”
S seemed to be considering this, considering it at greater length than M liked.
“How do we know they’ll make the right choice?” he asked.
M stifled the temptation—it was strong in him—to squash this altogether. This is the wrong question, he thought, but did not say.
“It is not for us to know the results of our work. The world goes the way the world goes,” he added, thinking this might appeal to S’s Oprah-watching side. “All we can know is our role.” He smiled. “We’re bridge and tunnel people, that’s our role.”
S laughed, and the tension eased. They passed the accident and now they were climbing the ramp with a small group of cars, heading for the tall bridge towers and the broad roadway over the river. The sun came from behind a cloud and gleamed on the stanchions.
“Look at the new Mercedes,” S said, always watching the machines. He wasn’t good for much but he knew his machines.
“Yeah—see the look he’s giving us,” M added.
“Bridge and tunnel, that’s what he’s saying,” S said. “We’re almost there.”
“Roll down the window,” M suggested, climbing into the back of the van. “Tell him if there’s no bridge, there’s no bridge and tunnel people.”
He mouthed a prayer and bent to push the red button.
~~~~
The Lawyer’s Story
February 20, 2003
I used to be a matrimonial attorney. You think it’s all guys who’ve beaten up their women and they come in with sunglasses to cover the bruises, the bums. But we also had a gold digger club.
I had one woman who came in—hot little number. She’s around 40, he’s 68. He’s a bum, she says, he cheated on me, I want everything he’s got. We hire a detective—he’s an off-duty cop, he gets a couple hundred a week to follow people for us, take pictures, you know, the usual kind of thing. So he follows the old guy around. He walks stooped over he’s got his lunch in a paper bag, you can see the apple at the bottom of the bag yknow. So after a couple of days, we have the detective follow her. She comes out of a health club in Bay Ridge, kind of a ritzy place, you know and she’s coming out with the personal trainer, who’s like a Fabio type with dark hair and he’s got one hand on her tit and the other down her back pocket. And our guy gets the picture.
So I ask her to come by my office and she’s like Oh I’m kind of busy and I say it’s important. So she comes by and I leave the one photo on the desk in an envelope and I tell her I have to go to the bathroom, being an old guy—I’m 61—would you please just have a look at this while I’m gone and tell me what you think. You know, I don’t’ have to rub it in, right?
So I come back, her whole jaw is on the table, she’s like “Ohhh.” I say, “Now look, I don’t sit in judgment, that’s not my job. But if we’re going to court, it’s a war and if you take the bullets out of my gun, we get killed. So I need to know what’s coming—is there anyone else?” She finally says, “One other.” So of course, since we caught her lying already and she’s admitting to one other, there’s probably a few more someplace. So I ask her, “What do you want?” And she, without a second’s hesitation, says, “$15,000 a month, the primary residence, the Mercedes and sole custody of the kids.” I tell her “Well, I will go to the other side and talk to them, but I think that’s unlikely. But I’ll try.”
So I call the other lawyer, he says ‘Come down tomorrow at 10.’ I get to his office and he says, “Okay, here is what I will propose and what your client will accept. $60,000 a year, the primary residence, a car—unspecified, and sole custody with liberal visitation.” Then he looks at me and he says, “Tell your client that, between the waist and the knees, she’s not the best and not the worst, but she’s way too liberal about the entry fee. It’s been nice talking at you—welcome to the big leagues.” He was a tough guy, this lawyer.
So I went back and gave her the offer. I didn’t tell her what he said, cause how could I? This didn’t seem to get through. She said, “That’s a third of what I wanted.” I said, “Okay, but look at this way: You’re getting $60,000, the house paid for, the car paid for, you’re getting 25% of his income for child support and you work two days a week. So you’re going to end up with about $100,000 a year. The other thing to remember is: they’ve got detectives just like we do. My advice is: take the deal.” It took her five days but she took it.
Every once in a while, the shoe is on the other foot. One guy, I was representing his wife, he called me and said, “Can I come down and talk to you?” I said I can’t do that, it’s against the Code of Ethics. So he shows up at the office and plants himself in the door and says, “Let’s just go to lunch. Just eat with me.” So I go like an idiot. And he says, “This is going to cost me a lot of money.” I say, “Well, that’s what you have a lawyer for. You can fight it and maybe bring it down a little, but you should find a way to make it work for the both of you.” He was in the waste management business, you know? One of those guys. So he had a 42 year old wife who he’s dumped for a 40 year old number a little hotter than the wife and he wants out. But he repeats, “This is gonna cost me a lot of money.” And then he says, “I think maybe I should get somebody to bump her off.” And I knew I was in trouble then, so I told him, “Look—I’ve got an account here, but we’ve got to leave now because I can’t hear this, and I have to report it, understand?”
So we left and I went back to the office and we dropped her as a client, because now I had guilty knowledge of both of them, and I called the District Attorney. I told him what the guy said and he said “Oh shit—why were you having lunch with this guy?” and I said “He planted himself in the office and wouldn’t take no.” So they dragged him in and he said he had a little wine—he only had a Diet Coke, but I wasn’t going to contradict him—and just got loose and said things he shouldn’t have but he didn’t mean it. And he got off on it. But the DA turned him over to the IRS, who discovered he hadn’t paid his taxes in nine years. I saw him a year later and he comes up to me and I thought, O God, he’s going to deck me but he puts his arms around me and says Pallie, I should have listened to you and settled, I should’ve taken your advice. The IRS got me and she took me to the cleaners and the girlfriend doesn’t want me anymore. I should have listened to you. And I thought, this is what got me a heart attack—caring too much.
~~~~
A Shiver and a Crack
March 29, 2009
Mark and Susan met at Danny’s on Saturday morning, five days after September 11th. There were several customers waiting for booths to free up for breakfast when Mark said, “Why don’t we just eat together?” He and Danny pulled a couple of tables together in the back room, the walls mounted with pictures of zebras and rhinos, baboons and elephants Danny’s son had taken on vacation two years earlier, in the peaceful years following the end of history.
Pam and Tom joined them but neither talked a whole lot. Pam had lost her husband aboard one of the jets that crashed into the Towers. Tom wasn’t her husband but he had the same name as her husband and he’d already moved in with her. All of this information was readily available from Danny’s waitresses, Consuela and Lucy, who knew everything about everyone, all over the world, just ask.
With the other two not talking much, Mark tried amiably to fill the gap, bringing up the weather—it had turned colder the previous day. That topic died, without much effort to preserve it. Susan responded with a comment about Bob Dylan’s new album, which he hadn’t heard. After a few more dead ends and fleeting attempts at comments by Pam—Tom just smiled and listened to the others—Mark said, “Did you hear about the hijacker? The one who actually lived in this neighborhood?”
Susan smiled a tortured smile. “He lived in my basement, actually,” she answered.
She felt a grim satisfaction from the sudden intake of breath around the table—it’s the way she’d been feeling the whole week. Pam went even whiter than usual and seemed entirely unable to speak. Susan felt sorry for her in particular. If there had been another way to answer—or a way not to answer—Susan would have taken it. But there wasn’t, not really, not for her. What Susan felt, she would say, eventually, inevitably. She was a creature of limited control. It was just the way she was.
“When was this?” Mark asked, actually sounding a bit out of breath.
“About a year ago—that’s when he left. He lived in the house about a year. He really didn’t talk much—that’s always what people say, isn’t it? Serial killers, child molesters, the neighbors always say ‘Such a quiet person, kept to himself.’ That’s how he was. I could hear him praying sometimes—he prayed a lot more at the end. He gave me just a couple of days notice moving out but he wasn’t the first to do that.” She was looking at the food on the table, her half-eaten egg, the yellow running across the plate under the home fries and those little round sausages Danny liked. “He liked motorcycles. Remember Bill Truitt, the guy with the handlebar mustache, was always in here? Worked for the Bridge and Tunnel? He had a Harley and…well, they’d always be talking out on the street about the bike. But he’d never take a ride—Bill offered him a couple times that I saw. He was afraid to ride on the back of the bike.”
“But he flew a plane,” Mark offered and she nodded. Pam winced and the conversation drifted immediately in other directions. When they’d all finished eating, Mark insisted on paying. “Just this once,” he said. “I instigated so it’s my party.” When they stepped outside, the clouds parted just enough to let a few rays of sunlight through and the waitresses said they walked away together.
There were lots of people on the street despite the weather gone cloudy and gray. They were milling at the window displays and clustered around the park fence near the playground, talking and greeting each other, seeking company. Mark and Susan walked the long avenue next to each other without acknowledging in any way that they were together. But they already were, somehow. The decision not to separate was an unusual one for them and they were both very aware of it.
“The sun’s trying to break through,” Mark said finally.
“Optimist,” she sneered.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing wrong,” she said. “You’re just more courageous than me. I don’t want to be disappointed so I always expect the worst.”
He smiled at that. “I figure if I can’t imagine something good, it can’t happen. That doesn’t mean I expect it.”
She was running her hands through her the streaks of gray in her hair, he noticed, self-conscious maybe, but also playing with it, flirtatious. That was a sign, he knew, he remembered, a sign she was interested. He would have jumped on this when he was younger, he knew, fastened on it, gotten all lathered up about it. He’d have fashioned ten wild fantasies in three seconds out of that falling hair. Was she aware of it, of his noticing? Were women ever not aware of men noticing? Even if they weren’t interested?
They walked two more blocks without speaking. He was aware of feeling relaxed, of not feeling the need to say anything. He was aware of that but not more than aware, not self-conscious himself. That was surprising, it was unusual for the last few years. He hadn’t relaxed in an attractive woman’s company in a while. Then again, he hadn’t been in an attractive woman’s company in a while either.
He found himself watching what she was watching, taking note of the things she paid attention to. She didn’t seem much interested in clothes in the store windows but she did stop a few times to glance at fabrics, sashes on chairs and curtains ruffling the corners of store displays. People’s faces passing—he was used to staring discreetly, fixing an image of someone in just a momentary glance and he noticed she seemed as aware of the striking faces as he was. And then, as they approached President Street, they both stopped spontaneously, independent of one another, to stare at a painting in a window. It was representational, just an interior of a back yard garden with sunlight cutting through at an angle. It appeared simple, almost naïve, at first, the surfaces barely modeled, the shadows almost opaque. But the coloring was superb and the whole effect somehow touching, almost heartbreaking. He stared at it for almost a minute before he noticed her face, the look she was giving it.
“You want it,” he said.
“No—uh, well, who knows how much it is?” she answered.
“Tell you what—let’s share it,” he said. “Split the cost, you get custody for a month, then me.”
She looked at him for a several seconds, the smile growing across her face despite her attempts to suppress it. “What a really horrible idea,” she marveled and then they broke up laughing.
“Okay—I’ll race you for it,” he said. “Whoever gets inside and offers the guy the price first. But then we can’t haggle him down. He’ll play us against each other.”
“But I don’t want it,” she said.
“Oh please,” he said. “You’re a terrible liar. It’s all over your face.”
“I get it the first month,” she said and they went inside.
He carried it to her house and went in to help her hang it. She removed a Mary Cassatt print over the fireplace in her living room and placed it carefully in the closet. “It’ll come back out in a month,” she said as he hung the new painting. “This is the first real painting I’ve ever owned.” She looked at him for a reply.
“I’ve been buying originals for a few years,” Mark said a little sheepishly. “I saw a painting in a gallery window, just like we did here and I didn’t buy it. I went home and dreamed about the thing for two nights in a row—that was it for me. I knew this one would stick with me too.”
“I guess I’ve had those too,” Susan mused, “but it never occurred to me to buy them.”
“So I’ll be a bad influence on you,” he shrugged. “You won’t be the first.”
She smiled. “Any particular style you buy?”
“Cheap,” he answered, laughing and she laughed too despite her reserve, both the reserve she maintained with men and the reserve she maintained against her own feelings. A look passed across her face nonetheless, a kind of grateful surprise at his humor. He recognized that look and the heat behind it and then followed a moment of real confusion, the two of them grappling with the obvious attraction between them that had become too obvious to ignore. “Listen,” he offered, “I’d like to buy you dinner if you’re interested.”
She looked out the window, surprised to see the sun nestling near the horizon across the river. She felt her cheeks redden. “I…I can’t,” she stammered. “I can’t date.” He colored too and she felt terrible. She was trying to figure out how to explain what she meant as he backed toward the door, offering unnecessary apologies and let himself out. How old do I have to be, dammit, before I get these things right? She had just enough time to really regret her actions before she heard knocking just where he’d left.
Mark stood smiling like he’d just wandered by. “You’re right, now that I think about it,” he said. “I’ve been on so many horrible dates lately. It just doesn’t work, does it?”
“No,” she rushed to agree, to make sure he understood that this was what she meant, that she hadn’t meant to throw him out. She was surprised and shaken about how happy she was to see him.
“I mean, I go to dinner and sit there trying to figure out how to be charming and attractive. Which is what I did when I was twenty. And the only problem is, I’m too old for that now. I know better. If I just genuinely have a good time, I’ll be plenty charming and attractive. I just want somebody to like me the way I am anyhow. But that’s not what a date is about, is it?”
“No, it’s not,” she said, a little breathless over his explanation.
“So, you’re right, no date. I’m not buying dinner under any circumstances. What if we cooked something together some night? Would that be okay?”
“That would be very nice,” she said, feeling her cheeks flush again and not caring a bit.
“Okay,” he said, breathing as though filling his lungs after a climb. “So we just have to figure out what night.” His eyes were bright, a young man’s hungry eyes. On her. It had been a long time since she’d made a man that hungry. She basked in those eyes.
“Well,” she said, making the decision in the middle of the sentence, “we have to eat tonight, don’t we?”
He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.” He was trying to remain low-key, to make it all very nonchalant. When she was younger, this would have made him seem disreputable somehow. Now, it just seemed futile and kind of cute—and hopeless. Maybe it was cute because she could see that he knew it was hopeless as well. “So—can I come in?” he said finally, having stood in the doorway awkwardly through this four-second simultaneous epiphany. She laughed and let him in and everything changed, because they both knew at that moment how the evening was going to play out.
He took her direction in the kitchen gracefully and was reasonably good—but not too good—with the tasks he was assigned. They were passing back and forth in close quarters, bumping into each other at first and then exchanging more purposeful touches as time went on. Mark in the middle of cutting carrots became very aware of the smile on his face, that it kept igniting all by itself, igniting out of nothing. Glancing sheepishly in her direction, he realized she was doing the same and a warm current immediately started at his fingers and toes and spread all through his body like dye in cotton. He felt like cotton suddenly, like he was made of cotton—light and airy, the breeze passing right through him. Lightheaded. They were talking to each other constantly but none of it sounded like anything—just words, assurances, I’m still here and so are you, we’re here together. None of it meant anything as words but the message was outside the words—you don’t feel this all alone, I’m with you, we’re having this moment together. Both of them were wrapped up in the feeling of the moment, willing to wallow in it—but neither expected anything more than the evening. If you’d asked, neither would be sure they wanted anything more. Too complicated. Too much to deal with. Have my life the way I want it. I’m too hard to live with. I don’t want to compromise.
But, just after dumping the chopped vegetables into the sauce, he turned and put his arm around her waist and she turned as though she’d been waiting for him. The kiss was more than they’d been expecting, though they’d been anticipating it every moment since he returned to the door. It led immediately to a kind of adult groping, skipping the intermediate steps and proceeding immediately to the pleasure zones. She was stunned at what she was letting him do and even more by what she was doing herself—she’d never gone after a man the way she did now. His touch was electric—he wasn’t the first to have that effect on her but this was different simply because she’d taken for granted long before that she’d never feel that way again. The way he looked at her was a wonder—she remembered men looking at her that way but that memory came to her through more recent memories of men looking through her and past her, the vivid miserable experience of being invisible. She was thrilled to be exciting again and she was not foolish enough to think that she would have many more such opportunities.
Eventually, he leaned over her and flicked off the burners. “Later,” he said and she led him into the bedroom.
The lovemaking was new for both of them. He hadn’t been with a woman in over a year and was thrilled to find that everything still worked. But she was thrilled because he was slow and sensitive, focused on her pleasure instead of his own, intent on making her shiver and shake and lose control. Once he succeeded, she was determined to return the compliment and she took him with a hunger she didn’t know she had, a hunger she’d never felt for her husband. She wondered if that was his fault or hers but she was too busy and happy to wonder for long.
They returned to the kitchen eventually to finish cooking dinner. She was wearing a pajama top and he the bottoms—he didn’t ask whose they’d been originally. Once everything else was cooking, she mentioned she needed pasta. When he didn’t react, she said, “It’s downstairs.” This didn’t throw him either so she stood a while in the doorway until he turned to look at her—he still had that magical look on his face—and added, “Can you come with me?”
They went down the narrow staircase. It wasn’t until they were down to the bottom floor and she’d slowed to a crawl, feeling in the dark for the light switch and then moving uncomfortably between the cardboard boxes marked with pre-printed labels ‘Property of the United States of America’ and her own food stores on countertops and shelves that he understood what she’d meant, what this place was.
She shrugged at the first box. “They took all the stuff that was actually relevant to the…case,” she said. “At least they said they did. They said they’d come back for this but, in the meantime, I’m doing storage for the Federal Government.”
“They won’t let you move it?”
“Who do I ask?” she said.
“Well, who’s in charge? The FBI?”
“When they come,” she said, “they come in a group with badges and they don’t tell you who’s in charge.” She looked at the boxes. “They wanted to know why he’d left so much stuff behind. He said he was going to come back for it too. And then I got used to not locking up down here so I didn’t hurry to find someone else.” She found the pasta and turned for the stairs again.
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