Elizabeth recognizes the dark-haired woman from block patrol taping something up in the hallway outside Dr. Constantine’s office. “Oh,” Elizabeth says. “You did it.”
“What?” the woman says.
“Who We Are,” Elizabeth says, pointing.
“We’re all somebody,” the woman says, which reminds Elizabeth of that Dickinson poem. She thinks to make a joke and say, I’m nobody, who are you? but the dark-haired woman seems in a hurry, smoothing tape on the photograph of her family as if trying to make it stick: two young children, one of them much fairer than the other, stand in front of a Ferris wheel at dusk. Behind them stretches a long horizon, pink at the edge, beautiful. She would like to read it but that feels wrong, like sneaking a peek at a diary left out on a bedside table. She shouldn’t be too interested—she doesn’t know why she is so interested but she finds the stories fascinating: rappelling down cliff walls, sailing the Atlantic: women and women, men and men, single women, exotic places, colors, family pets—who knew?
Does everyone else have a composed life? Is everyone else sure of how things should be? The choices they’ve made?
Why do I always question? she asks Slotnik on one of her regular Wednesday sessions, to which Slotnik, predictably, says, I don’t know, why?
“Have you written yours?” the woman asks.
“Writer’s block,” Elizabeth says.
“I hear you,” the woman says, walking away.
* * *
“They met at the top of a Ferris wheel,” Elizabeth’s saying. She’s on a date with Pete, the Vietnamese place. “So naturally, that’s where he proposed. They were both doing fieldwork in Central America and decided to combine forces. Or that’s what she wrote. It’s amazing. They’ve opened some kind of school there for the indigenous. They’re only there, or here, half the year, hence her disappearance after block patrol.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Pete says. He’s wearing one of his old frayed button-downs and the lights are dim, candle-lighted lights. She remembers how nice it is to be with him in a crowded place—she might lean against him later, they might walk arm in arm. Within the restaurant bamboo shadows are cast on the screens that line the walls in elaborate illumination; every once in a while a parrot, or some such bird, shrieks as if chased by a parrot-eating monkey.
“I know it doesn’t make sense,” she says. “It’s got to be totally exhausting, here to there, there to here. I mean one day we’re patrolling Bleecker for pedophiles and the next day, poof, she’s gone.”
“No, no, I mean meeting on top of a Ferris wheel. How would you meet on top of a Ferris wheel? You’re either in the same carriage or not, and if you’re not, then you wouldn’t be shouting across the void.”
“Well, maybe they did. Maybe they shouted across the void,” Elizabeth says. “What’s wrong with shouting across the void?” She wraps her vegetable roll in a lettuce leaf, or frond—it’s huge—and takes a bite, spilling most of it.
“I smell a rat,” Pete says. He crunches and chews.
“Central America, too?” she says.
“A pack of lies,” he says, pressing his folded napkin to his lips, smiling. “A Who We Are fantasy.”
* * *
Later, they walk the bike path home, the new Chelsea pulsing, the High Line a rising, parallel path, too crowded on a night as balmy as this one to maneuver. Elizabeth leans on Pete and links his arm, smelling the wool smell of his coat against the briny Hudson, the smell she’s always loved. He bought the coat years ago in a thrift shop in Paris, in an arrondissement of a higher number not known for anything in particular—they were lost, actually, had gotten out at the wrong Métro, the coat right there, a dusty gray hanging on a long sidewalk rack of old wool coats. For a while Pete said he felt sure his new coat had been worn by a member of the Résistance, not an important member, but a member nonetheless, a smallish guy, maybe, like him, a guy who mostly assisted the others, rolling cigarettes, running messages, humping pots and pans and supplies for the meager meals he and his comrades would eke out in the woods, his wool coat his one good thing until, maybe, he was caught and killed. Most of them were, Pete said. The Germans executed all the men of the closest town when their munitions trains were attacked—like the famous one, Les Vroon, near the Boulogne woods. Maybe he had been part of that operation, left his wool coat and his comrades in the woods, Pete said. This, in May, the war almost won. He might have been part of that, the coat presented to his mother by his comrades, the coat along with the change in its pockets, a few francs, a saint’s medal from his first communion; an empty coat for a boy.
“Wow,” Elizabeth had said hearing Pete’s made-up story. “I guess maybe,” she had said, and then, for the rest of the evening or at least until they returned to their hotel, a crappy walk-up in the Sixteenth, she had called him amour, Pierre.
Across the street the brownstone windows look dark. Inside Ben watches television or sits in front of a computer screen, newly thirteen and allowed to stay home alone. Still. There’s a sudden secrecy to her boy. She imagines scaling the brick around back or shimmying the mulberry next door to where she might peer in through their kitchen window and see.
What If he’s no longer there?
What If he’s disappeared?I
A shallow light leaks from Marie’s garden-floor windows. She doesn’t sleep much, Marie. Sometimes Elizabeth hears her hobbling around downstairs, late at night. They are both awake, owner and renter, and why not? The neighborhood’s suddenly too loud, sirens and helicopters and the frenzied revelers packed on the sidewalks, in the bars, the restaurants. The electronic pulse everywhere: on the new screens on top of taxis and over subway entrances, on the bigger screens that dwarf the skyline, encircle the buildings, the skyscrapers; the one on Macy’s like Orion’s belt—a constellation of flashing explosions, crashing automobiles, detonating bridges. The male actors hold guns the size of Mack trucks and the women, their nipples taut in bikini tops or push-up bras, smile out into the chaos as if looking for a good fuck. Someone has tilted the globe and everything’s rushing in, or down, wrenched from the hand.
“I’m going to stay here for a while,” she calls to Pete, sitting on the stoop. “Just a minute,” she says.II
“Elizabeth?” Pete says. He is inside, just beyond the front door, waiting; he must not have heard. “You coming up?” he says.
“Hamster trance,” Elizabeth says. “Sorry,” she says. She climbs the stoop to where Pete waits and holds out her arms.
“Carry me,” she says.
I. Ben has disappeared. He is no longer Ben, his body turned inside out, wrong. The ugly part of him out though he doesn’t give a shit about that because what he mostly gives a shit about is his dick. It’s like an itchy sweater. That’s how it is now for Ben, Ben would say, if he ever had the nerve to answer Ms. Kim, the incredibly hot ethics teacher’s question of How is it for you? How is it for me? I don’t understand French for shit. The coach thinks I suck. How is it for you, Ms. Kim? Or his mother’s: the way she opens the door and stands in the doorway of his room, looking. “What’s up?” she’ll say but it’s rhetorical because she just stands there looking like she can’t quite figure out where she is even when he says bye-bye, or get out, or yells to next time knock, looking like there’s something she’s trying really hard to see and it isn’t him, or isn’t who he is, or was.
II. As a little girl, she would fall asleep in her mother’s lap on drives home from adult parties, parties where she had been sequestered in the basement rec room with the older kids, a hodgepodge of blemishes and hairstyles arguing over a Foosball point. She sat by herself on the mildewed sofa, a book in her hand, something advanced and a little shady, Love Story or Black Like Me. She was waiting for the adults to be finished, waiting for the moment to go home, again. In the car her father smoked his pipe; her mother smoked her cigarette, her mother’s hand absentmindedly stroking her hair until the eventual bump and stop in the driveway. Then she could open her eyes and sit up to see her father raising the garage door in the headlights, or she could keep her eyes shut, still pretending to sleep, her breathing timed to her mother’s hand.