Wally James snaps the broadsheet crisply and attempts to fold it back and into the flat, narrow quadrants that a crowded subway car dictates—even though it is ten o’clock on Saturday morning and the car is nearly empty—and as usual ends up with a bulky, mangled sort of tetrahedron. He will never perfect the art of fitting neatly into modest spaces. A vestige of his childhood in the more rural expanses of Dutchess County. Alice used to tease him about this. At dinner parties she actually used to do an impression of him folding the newspaper. She was always very clever with physical comedy. And back when she’d loved him, he’d loved her doing him. The impression itself had seemed a most intimate expression of love, partly because it verged on cruel: if she could afford this public display of unkindness, what depths of counterbalancing love that implied!
He gives up on the paper and looks about the subway car. Another giveaway that he’s not native to this city: his habit of drinking in unguardedly the presence of people around him. This morning these include two women with pink plastic shopping bags, a generation apart, speaking Mandarin and eating yogurt; a young white man in a Yankees cap with a baby strapped to his chest; a teenage couple, the boy lying with his head in the girl’s lap, both dressed in last night’s club gear; a person of indeterminate sex and age inert under a heap of gray blanket. The train rocks them all along in its crashing, heedless way. Wally feels good this morning, which is to say wistful and awake.
Beneath this, though, something nags: Ann. He has not quite admitted to himself that he is concerned. Not about her heels: X-rays have determined that both fractures are minor and healing quickly, and she has adapted to the wheelchair, slideboard, and commode they rented from a medical-supply company with almost arrogant finesse. It is Ann’s account of how it happened that bothers him. He cannot really see it: someone falling spontaneously off bleachers. There would have to be a cause, Wally believes. Either horseplay, which Ann flatly denied, or something medical, which is too preposterous and scary to consider (also, Ann scoffed at inquiries about dizziness or blacking out). Then there is what the resident in the emergency room called as they were leaving: “Promise you do not jump more off high things!” He’d had a strong accent, and Ann’s claim that he misunderstood her had seemed perfectly plausible, but Wally has not forgotten these words. Perhaps he would have if Ann hadn’t been so oddly moody these past few weeks, not so much bored or depressed, which he would understand, as brightly, rawly on edge.
But, then, fathers are supposed not to understand their teenage daughters, aren’t they? What if this is all routine stuff, and only looks alarming because of the coincidence of broken bones? Surely coincidence is all it is, happenstance, unfortunate but meaningless—what, for example, if there was some horseplay and Ann’s covering up for the friend who jostled? Ordinary adolescence, that: both the horseplay and the denial. Wally’s own youth is a litany of this kind of thing: cherry bombs thrown at passing cars on the Taconic; illicit trips downriver in a “borrowed” canoe; sneaking into the abandoned breading factory, which had once manufactured the coating for fishsticks and chicken patties, and hand-cranking the rusted-out gears into life. None of the escapades, even this last, which had resulted in Chris Petroni’s losing his right ring finger after the first knuckle, had ever been revealed fully to adults (certainly not the fact that Chris’s brother had dared him to climb the moving machinery). Nor had any of the escapades (even given what now, in adulthood, strikes Wally as the frighteningly stupid games they played inside the breading factory) ultimately seemed at a remove from the generally wholesome task of growing up.
If Alice were here, she would know whether or not to be worried about Ann. But is that true? Perhaps it’s the inverse: if Alice really knew such a thing, she would be here. Awful, to doubt what you once knew you knew. He wishes there were someone else he could ask.
Ann was still asleep this morning when he left. The wheelchair won’t fit through the bedroom doorway, so she continues to sleep on the red velvet couch, which is shorter and narrower than her bed; she invariably appears each morning less tucked in than flung open: one or both blue casts dangling over the side, an arm as well, pillow bunched or canted or slipped entirely off. She has always slept in fierce, exhausted postures. When she was little, she used to insist that she slept with her eyes open, that she could see around her room even as she dreamed. Two worlds at once. This morning she’d been sleeping with a slightly furrowed brow. Wally had smoothed her forehead lightly with three fingers, and the frown had only deepened.
He’s going in early today for a couple of reasons: One, since Ann’s accident, he hasn’t been putting in the hours at Game that he should. He’s behind on payroll and ordering. Two, Ann’s teacher left her engagement calendar at their apartment last night. She’d been apologetic on the phone when he’d called this morning, as though it had been blocking their way around the room or something, and she nearly took his head off when he offered to drop it by. Maybe not quite his head, but she really insisted, “Please don’t,” in the tone his high-school teachers might have used to insist, “No talking during the test.” But Ann had been equally insistent last night, when he got home from work, that he do it. “You can do it on your way in tomorrow. Please?” And she’d added almost shyly, “I want you to meet her.”
Esker’s name has cropped up often in the past few weeks, and Wally is curious to meet her himself. Probably he has met her, at a school event, but he cannot for the life of him picture her face. So on the phone he did his affable thing, what Alice used to call his “innkeeper dance,” and simply informed Esker, quietly so as not to wake Ann, that it was no trouble and he’d drop it off on his way to work.
“We should do something for her,” Ann had proposed, “for all this tutoring.” It seems clear, though no one has spoken of it, that Esker is more than meeting the expectations of a teacher, even of a department head, even at the special request of the headmistress and the father of one of the best math students at The Prospect School. “Invite her to dinner,” suggested Ann, when Wally had gone to kiss the top of her head good night. She sat up brightly, bumping his mouth. “Not at the restaurant!”
Wally, with the natural vanity of a parent, is not surprised that Esker has elected to tutor Ann into the winter holiday, but he is struck by Ann’s enthusiasm for Esker, and feels slightly anxious about meeting the woman. Putting away his mangled paper, he notices the top of her engagement calendar protruding from his bag. He pulls it out.
It is a plain thing, brown and inexpensive, spiral-bound. It is of course wrong to look, but also human nature. Nine out of ten people probably would. Wally turns it over, turns it back, fans the pages with his thumb. He looks around the subway car. The Chinese women got out at Wall Street; a stooped man in a tie has got on, and a girl with a safety pin through her lip. Fellow travelers. Wally turns again to the book. After all, they are going to be friends. Hasn’t Ann practically ordained it? He opens the book.
It’s all mundane or indecipherable. Faculty meetings, assignments due, a phone number or street address jotted here and there, and most of the o’clocks are during business hours. The handwriting is plain, brusque, ballpoint. He looks in a choppy, fleeting manner, as though that cancels any crime, pausing only when he comes across his own familiar address and phone number in green pencil, and then, recurrently on the next several pages, “ANN 4:30.”
A jarring sensation, to come across one’s own personal information in a stranger’s book, in a stranger’s hand. It’s his not entirely unpleasant comeuppance for trespassing. Wally rubs his nose and shuts the book, wedges it firmly back inside his bag.
At Chambers Street he leaves the subway car, along with the safety-pin girl and, surprisingly, the person (still of indeterminate age and gender) who’d been wrapped prostrate under a blanket, and rises into a morning suddenly bright, suddenly yellow. A sweet, un-December-like smell of mud hovers in cracks between the dull, stolid smells of buildings and street. Wally stops into a greengrocer’s and buys two mangoes. He is thinking of Ann’s decree, “We should do something for her, for all this tutoring,” but the truth is, Wally gives gifts all the time, at the drop of a hat, little, odd ones. The gift not so much in the item itself as in the transaction, the act of passing something along.
“Another tchotchke,” Alice used to say, to deliver, when he presented something to her. Even when it wasn’t a tchotchke, even when it was impermanent, a Gerbera daisy or a length of licorice, she’d tease him. “You don’t always have to bring me things. You don’t have to woo me.” He wasn’t wooing her. It wasn’t even mostly about her, it was mostly about the daisy or the licorice, the good thing he’d found and, having found it, needed to pass on. Tucking the flower behind her ear, biting into the candy, she’d wrinkle her nose at him. Or once she’d quoted, “‘She prizes not such trifles as these are: the gifts she looks from me are pack’d and lock’d up in my heart.’” “One and the same,” he’d protested, but she missed it, kissing his shoulder and laughing, and then plucking some fuzz from her mouth. He recalls this with that mixture of fondness and annoyance—is there such a thing as fond annoyance?—that always informs his thoughts of Alice. But no. “Fondness” and “annoyance” are only code for something else. The words he chooses are as always too mild.
Wally is surprised when he locates Esker’s address. It’s more like a tall wood-frame house than an apartment building, incongruous somehow, the wrong scale or city or century, maybe. He’s not even sure what neighborhood this is, not Tribeca, not the West Village, not even the meat-packing district, really. At first he thinks it’s depressing, and then he thinks it’s lovely. There is no buzzer, so he knocks on the door. It makes a soft, dull noise, ineffectual on this street of big warehouses. He raps again, this time on one of the glass quadrants at the top of the door, and shatters it.
In almost comical slow motion, one jagged segment of the pane sways out and drops at his feet; more tinkle to the floor inside. Then a crunching glass sound, and the door opens. Esker is wearing leggings, and a giant gray confusing thing, a pilly, fleecy kind of sweater or tunic or jacket (or bathrobe?), and (fortunately) sneakers, and whatever look of petulance she wore on coming to the door is quickly mixed with something like confusion now, as she takes in the bits of glass on the floor. “Oh. Did that happen just now?”
“Yes. I’m Wally James, Ann’s father. I won’t offer my hand.”
They both look down to see blood dripping from his knuckles.
“I’m sorry,” says Esker.
“What? No, I’m sorry, I broke your door.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Well, come wash it.”
In this way they manage to avoid ceremony completely, and Wally finds himself standing over the bathroom sink with his hand under a cold waterfall while Esker rummages unsuccessfully in a linen closet for first-aid cream and bandages.
“It’s all right,” he says, drying his knuckles and examining them. Crisscrosses of blood well again immediately.
“Anyway, wrap it in this.” She sticks out a dish towel, pale yellow with purple starfish all over it. “I use it as a rag,” she says, when he hesitates. “I mean, but it’s clean.”
He winds the pretty cloth tightly around his hand and feels embarrassed. “I feel like I’m getting ready to box,” he says.
“Now, after all that, you have to stay and have a cup of tea,” says Esker, surprising him. “Do you drink tea?”
So they go back out into the main room, where Esker puts the kettle on in the galley kitchen, and Wally remembers the bag of mangoes and extends it, and she looks inside (suspiciously, he thinks) and then laughs, a sudden, free sound that he wouldn’t have expected from her. “How tropical.” She considers them, one in each hand. “Oh. You have a restaurant,” she says, as though arriving at an explanation.
“Yes. But the mangoes are different.” What is he saying? “I mean I might’ve brought them anyway.”
“Thank you.” She takes out little dense-walled mugs. “Now is when I should be reciting the list of fifteen teas you could choose from. However . . .” and she completes the sentence by holding up a box of Tetley and shrugging.
Is she making fun of him for having a restaurant? “I’m not picky,” he says. “I used to clothespin tea bags to the light pull to save them for the next time. When I first moved to New York.”
“Where from?”
“Upstate.”
“Me, too. Where?”
He gestures vaguely with his starfish-bound hand. “Grange Hill. A tiny place kind of near Rhinebeck. You?”
“Delos. A tiny place kind of near Lake Placid.”
“Huh.” This feels like a coincidence, although he’s not sure the relative proximity of their upbringings is rare enough to occasion the label. The city is rife with emigrants from upstate. On the other hand, the city is rife with emigrants from everywhere.
“Huh,” says Esker, too.
Coincidence or no, it feels significant.
She places the mangoes on the sill over the sink. She looks quite grave, and for some reason this pleases him.
They wait, in considerable silence, for the water to boil.