(Sunset over D’Agostino’s. Crosstown wind off the Hudson. Michael thinks he can still smell ash. Exiting shoppers cut like tailbacks toward the end zone of the subway entrance. Celery stalks blossom from the tops of brown bags. Soup season is here. Michael stares at what may or may not be Wendy’s window. The way the sun hits the window makes it difficult to tell if lights are on in the apartment. Michael gives the horn another honk.

Wendy strides from the building in burgundy heels that match her hair. She says sorry she’s late, though she’s not. Her mother always insisted on making men wait. It’s one of the few shards of wisdom that Wendy remembers. This is why Wendy, a naturally punctual person, still follows it.

Michael’s truck smells like Slim Jims. His breath smells like cigarettes. He sweats and taps the wheel, accelerating rapidly out of green lights and braking hard into red ones. Wendy fastens and refastens her seatbelt. Their first date was nearly two months ago, and this thing that happened since makes it feel like even more time has passed. Michael turns onto Ninety-Sixth Street. The radio is off. He debates playing his demo. On the one hand, it’s tacky. On the other, Wendy, who majors in English, might pick up on his allusions and use of enjambment.

“You have any music?” Wendy asks, and before he can stop himself he’s inserted the tape. Web MD comes in over the car’s tinny speakers:

 

I got love for the doctors

And medicine men

Who pen scrips and pen rhymes

From the tips of blunt pens

Who roll blunts out of dimes

Like Proust’s madeleines

 

“Check it,” says Michael. “That’s me.”

The restaurant is a small Portuguese place that will soon be out of business. Rents rise in the wake of the attacks despite predictions of mass exodus. On date number one, Wendy had mentioned a summer she spent in Lisbon with her father.

The restaurant’s walls are covered in woven tapestries depicting battles and sex acts. Stringed instruments that look like mandolins but aren’t, exactly, hang between the tapestries. The waitresses wear bandannas and gauzy print skirts and black boots and dangling earrings and beaded necklaces. Entrees are in the twelve-to-fourteen-dollar range, which is all Michael can afford, but he’s hoping the warmth of the waitstaff, and the authenticity of the decor, and the deep pork odor coming from the kitchen, and the fact that he remembered about Lisbon, will give Wendy the impression that he chose this restaurant for its Old World ambience and not because he’s on a budget.

“Nice place,” says Wendy.

He reads her flat affect as that too-cool-for-anything attitude prevalent among upperclassman whose initial enthusiasms for the city have hardened into stone-faced opacity. Wendy, however, was being sincere, though the restaurant doesn’t remind her of Lisbon so much as a childhood summer—one of the last with her mother—spent at a seaside rental in Little Compton, Rhode Island. She recalls the rocky coastline and the vein-green shade of her mother’s forearms; lunches at the local pub, eating steamers and burnt linguiça. At night Wendy would write in her journal, attempting to re-create, in prose, the town’s clammy odor and sea-salt air. To get the experience on paper was a way of freezing time. It was also the beginning of a new identity: Wendy, aspiring author. Only recently, under the tutelage of an eager nonfiction writing prof, has she come to understand that recapturing the past means reliving its traumas. She interviewed for an internship at an ad agency last week.

Their waitress arrives, a voluptuous woman of indeterminate age in a low-cut blouse and candy-apple lipstick. Her name is Bernice, and there’s something overtly sexual in her demeanor: the way she poses with hands on hips, elbows cocked, bracelets piled at her wrist. Bernice asks if they’d like anything to start, bread and olives, perhaps, or the house special jamón croquettes?

Michael hesitates. He was hoping to be quick with dinner so they can get to part two, a quiet cruise around the neighborhood, listening to slow jams and not spending money. He brought his dad’s truck down from the Berkshires to help Ricky move, and he figures he might as well milk the novelty.

Wendy senses her date’s discomfort. She knows he’s on financial aid and that he’s embarrassed about it. She tells the waitress they’re ready to order their entrees.

Wendy will have a salad. She actually wants shell steak with herb-roasted potatoes, but she won’t order it in front of a guy. This is not something learned from her mother, but from Rachel Kirshenbaum, her semi-anorexic roommate and so-called best friend. Wendy’s not meant to finish her entree either, but rather to take five or six rabbit bites, then cover her salad with a napkin.

Rachel and Wendy are an unlikely duo. They were paired freshman year, and have stuck together because neither is good at making friends. Wendy because she’s shy, and Rachel because her Long Island accent is grating. Rachel wears her eating disorder like a Tiffany’s tiara, bragging about skipping dinner, and constantly quoting the Kate Moss maxim that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. It makes Wendy sick on the inside, and not particularly hopeful for the feminist cause. Still, Wendy guiltily envies both Rachel’s self-discipline and sculpted abs. Wendy is not a size zero, but she knows how to dress for her body. Men find her attractive, but often look disappointed when she disrobes by the light of her desk lamp. She’s learned to turn it off. Fuck these men and their porno fantasies. Michael orders the shell steak.

“You smell ash?” he asks.

“I smell seared flesh,” Wendy says. The words come out snarkier than intended. Her defensive stance is so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to turn it off. “It smells good, though,” she adds, to clarify.

“I keep smelling ash,” Michael says. “They say the smell should be gone by now but I can’t get it out of my nostrils.”

“The royal They,” says Wendy, holding up air quotes.

“Maybe it’s a phantom smell at this point,” says Michael, ignoring what she thought was her scalpel-sharp insight into the media’s post-9/11 paternalism. Wendy’s been watching the news for weeks, though by this point it’s all recycled material, the same slideshow of the rubble and the chisel-jawed firefighter and Bruce Springsteen sweat-soaked at the benefit concert; the same news anchors, and human interest stories, and teary interviews. And yet, despite her awareness that this barrage of imagery has been consciously arranged for maximum emotional manipulation, at certain moments Wendy is able to suspend her cynicism and find comfort in imagining this messy tragedy as a well-plotted serial drama populated by heroes and villains, and moving toward some kind of narrative resolution.

It might be the survivor interviews that make her feel this way, interviews with those who escaped from the burning buildings or lost loved ones, yet still manage to face the camera and answer questions designed to make them cry. Because even if these people are faking optimism and faking patriotism and faking the can-do resilience that comes from living under God’s real or imagined grace, the fakery itself is an act of courage.

Michael continues: “Maybe I’m imagining it. Normally I can’t smell anything because of my sinuses. Did you know that phantom smells are a symptom of strokes? People smell burning right before they stroke out. Or maybe it’s heart attacks, not strokes. I can’t remember. Either way, I wonder if people thought they were having heart attacks when the towers came down. If they smelled the burning buildings and thought they were stroking out.”

“It’s strokes,” says Wendy. “My grandfather had one.”

“I’m sorry,” says Michael.

Wendy says, “I was two at the time.”

She sips her water. Michael drums with his spoon, then becomes aware that he’s doing so and stops. He tries to change the subject but they can’t land on anything. Instead, he focuses on the swinging kitchen door, willing Bernice to emerge with a bread basket. His leg has returned to its prior state of restlessness and Wendy finds herself clutching the edge of their table to hold it in place.

“That’s a nice shirt,” Wendy says.

Michael takes the compliment as cue to further unbutton, freeing a carpet of Ashkenazic curls. Sweat drips from the freed curls onto his placemat. The shirt is an L.L. Bean plaid his mother gave him for Chanukah, gold and green and iron-scorched around the collar. It brings out Michael’s eyes.

“So tell me,” says Michael, but then can’t think of anything to ask. He has go-to topics: eighties comedies, secular Taoism, his interest in urban farming, plus an anecdote about the community service trip he took to the Carolina Sea Islands in high school that mostly involved smoking pot and complaining about having to do community service. The latter usually gets a laugh, then leads to a self-critical discussion of privilege. Instead of playing up the humility of his working-class upbringing, Michael points out that even he, son of a laid-off factory worker, is relatively wealthy in the grand scheme of the global class system.

None of these topics are right for Wendy; he senses she’d see through to his calculating heart. She says, “Tell you what?”

Before Michael can answer, Bernice is back with their entrees. The waitress places the shell steak in front of Michael, though he appears more interested in the pendant nestled between Bernice’s breasts. When Wendy catches him looking he turns away with an exaggerated swivel.

“That’s a nice necklace,” Wendy says to Bernice, encouraging the waitress to lean over the table and further diminish the distance between Michael’s nose and the perfumed expanse of her cleavage. Wendy’s not sure why she’s doing this, if it’s cruelty, perhaps, or a test of Michael’s chivalry, or maybe, perversely, because a sense of competition seems necessary in order to heighten the stakes of her date. If there’s one thing Wendy will learn over the long years in marketing that lie ahead of her, it’s that all action is transaction, and that nothing—not sex, not romance, not marriage—can be completely extricated from capital exchange. But though this might sound cynical to a romantic like Michael, Wendy will come to understand that the transactional nature of these arrangements does not fundamentally degrade them. She will come to understand—and perhaps, unconsciously, she already understands, as Michael attempts to avert his eyes from Bernice’s breasts by craning his neck to look down at his steak—that love’s status as a narrative construct doesn’t detract from its intensity of feeling. It doesn’t make it any less real.

Bernice says, “Saint Francis of Assisi. I got it for my confirmation. I’m not religious or anything, but I’m so used to it, you know? Most of the time I forget it’s there.”

“I know what you mean,” Michael says.

Bernice leans her cocked hip toward Michael and stares intently at his face. “Sorry if this is weird,” she says, “but aren’t you, like, that medical rap guy or whatever? I think I saw you do a show at the Knitting Factory.”

It’s a miracle that Michael doesn’t fall from his chair.

“That was me,” he says.

“That’s so cool,” says Bernice. “You guys were awesome.”

“We were?”

“Totally.” She winks at Michael and walks away. Michael consciously avoids following Bernice’s path across the room, but Wendy notes the way the waitress’s feet hardly seem to leave the floor, gliding around patrons and tables as if she’s wearing slicked socks or roller skates. She wonders whether Bernice sees something in Michael that Wendy’s missing. Could his rap group possibly be good?

“Well that was random,” says Michael, trying to play it cool, though he secretly hopes Wendy will want to harp on the subject and push toward a more in-depth discussion of his musical ambitions.

“Random indeed,” says Wendy. She inspects her salad: skimpy. Rachel would approve. She sips her wine. Michael cuts into his steak. He feels Wendy watching and tries not to make noise. As a child, he was always being reproached for chewing too loudly. Wendy pokes at her salad, takes a long sip of wine. She says, “So where were you?”

“I was outside your apartment,” says Michael, realizing as he says it that there’s still food in his mouth. He finishes chewing, which takes a moment because the pressure to finish makes his throat feel swollen shut. “I was circling your block until you came out.”

“No, I mean where were you? You know, where were you?”

“Oh,” says Michael. “You mean then.”

“Then.”

Michael wonders if he should lie and say he was downtown, sleeping off a hangover at Ricky’s new place. He could say he heard the first plane and saw the second, and though he didn’t run into any burning buildings to save strangers from the flames, he at least, like, assisted rescue workers by doing whatever people do when they assist rescue workers, presumably standing slightly out of the way, like a spectator at a marathon, handing small bottles of water to the firemen.

“Sleeping,” says Michael. “I actually slept right through it.”

“I went to class,” says Wendy. “I knew already, I saw it online. But then I didn’t know what to do, so I went to class.”

This is not exactly accurate. In a purely intellectual sense she understood the protocol, understood upon passing the Lerner Student Center and seeing the dozens of students huddled around a television, that she was meant to join in their nervous pacing and hugging and futile attempts to call anyone who might be downtown. And yet, Wendy refused to accept the campus’s instantaneous transition. To accept it was to concede the proximity of the attacks, to concede the very real impact of what had already become a world-historical event. So she went to class.

“What class?”

“Do you know Professor Green?”

“Elizabeth Green, yeah.” Everyone knew Elizabeth Green, the hotshot young lit prof.

“Everyone knows her.”

“I have her for Brit lit,” says Wendy.

“Huh,” says Michael.

“Huh what?”

“I don’t know,” says Michael. “Is it a good class?”

“Well she hates Brit lit. That’s basically what I’ve learned so far.”

This is not a dig against Elizabeth, so much as a statement one might apply to most professors in the English department who share an unspoken antagonism toward the source texts—novels—that they treat as data sets. Wendy’s not opposed to theory in theory, and she finds her lit classes more substantive than, say, her wishy-washy nonfiction workshop in which the students read aloud from their choicest sufferings and cry on each other’s shoulders, but there is something about the deconstructionist view of literature that she finds unsettling. It feels to Wendy that her classes provide a whole-earth satellite view of the books they read, and that, by attempting to see the larger picture, they’re sacrificing a truer, more complex comprehension to be gained from a series of close zooms.

When she interviewed at the ad agency last week, one thing that struck her was the deceptive simplicity of the poster campaigns that decorated the office. One ad in particular has stuck in her mind, a magazine spread that somehow managed, with a single photograph of two kids eating ice-cream cones on a brownstone stoop, to capture the exact feel of a New York summer day, and to create an indelible link between that feeling and the brand of ice cream being advertised. It was the details—the perfectly achieved messiness of the girl’s hair, or the way the boy had one sock pulled halfway up his knee while the other bunched by his ankle—that made the image not just familiar but some kind of ideal, a snapshot that, instead of representing a single moment, encapsulated the paradox of a childhood lost to time, yet somehow still alive in the milky promise of this particular ice cream.

“Oh,” says Michael, who wonders if he, himself, should offer an opinion on the validity of Brit lit as a subject, and, if so, what that opinion should be.

“Anyway, nine eleven was our second class meeting,” continues Wendy. “Only a couple people showed up. I was one. Elizabeth was the other.”

Michael is trying to eat and listen to what Wendy’s saying at the same time, but multitasking is not his forte, and it doesn’t help that Bernice is in the background, slightly swaying as another of the waiters, or maybe a cook, tunes one of the mandolin-like instruments and shuffles out a test melody. Bernice appears to be looking at Michael, but it may be an illusion, some trick of shadow and candlelight. He focuses on Wendy.

“So it’s just you two in class?”

“It was just the two of us. But we didn’t acknowledge it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought it was her job to say something. But she just started lecturing.”

“So what did you do?”

“I took out my notebook.”

“That’s crazy,” says Michael, though he’s become distracted again by Bernice, or if not by Bernice, herself, then by the future she’s opened, a future in which he’s a recognizable celebrity and women approach him in public to flirt.

Another of the staff has set up a drum and is beating it in time with the not-mandolin. Bernice laughs and shakes her shoulders. She waves jazz fingers at the men.

“Fado,” Wendy says. “That’s the name of this music. I remember that from Lisbon.”

Bernice is now, without doubt, staring at Michael. Wendy can’t believe the waitress is even remotely interested—from what she heard in the car, Michael’s rapping is amateur at best—but she must admit that anything’s possible. And, maybe it’s the wine, but Michael’s looking more attractive than earlier, having stilled the nervous tapping and un-stiffened into someone seemingly capable of having a good time.

“Wait, so what happened in the rest of the class?” asks Michael.

“It doesn’t matter,” says Wendy.

“No, tell me,” says Michael.

“Forget it,” says Wendy.

“No, no,” says Michael. “I want to know.”

“Okay,” says Wendy. “Well, the class is a seminar, right? Class participation is a part of our grade. And Elizabeth tends to talk a lot, but every once in a while she’ll pause and ask the class a question. There are these two guys who always answer. They think they’re smart. But then Elizabeth will put them down and explain why they’re wrong. The guys go nuts for it. Anyway, I was sitting there alone, and she asked a question.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, nothing at first, but after a few seconds it became clear that she wasn’t planning to continue until someone else spoke. So I raised my hand.”

Wendy raises her hand. Tentative, like she’s not sure she wants to be called on. She mimes the professor looking around the room, trying to decide which student to choose. Michael laughs.

“Did she call on you?”

“Well yeah, she called on me.”

“What did you say?”

“I gave my answer.”

“Which was?”

“It wouldn’t make sense outside the context of the class.”

“Okay,” says Michael. He wonders if she thinks he’s dumb.

“I mean, it was something totally specific to something she asked about a particular scene in To the Lighthouse, and about this thing Woolf does, which is sort of not making a big deal of these characters’ deaths by making the deaths happen within parentheses. Like, the deaths are just announced in parentheses without commentary, as if it’s no big deal. Anyway, I think what she was asking was something about how we decide when death is significant and when it’s just death.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said death is significant to the dying.”

“Huh.”

“Elizabeth had the same reaction. I finished my answer and she just kind of stood there for a long minute without saying anything. I could hear the buzz of the overhead light.”

“That sounds awful.”

“It was at first. But after a second I realized something crazy, which is that Elizabeth was actually thinking about what I’d said, which, it occurred to me, is the exact thing most professors don’t do. Usually they already have a kind of automated response, you know? Like they’ve heard all your answers before and they’re just waiting for someone to provide the right one so they can move to the next part of the lecture. Maybe that’s what makes Elizabeth a good teacher. And when she finally responded, she didn’t, like, really respond, she just kind of said, “That’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it like that.”

“Cool,” says Michael. “So what happened in the rest of the class?”

“It just kept going. She kept lecturing, and occasionally asking questions, and I would raise my hand and answer, and she’d either engage with my answer and we’d have a short discussion or else she’d pause and say ‘huh,’ and move on. At some point I got up to go to the bathroom. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to raise my hand and ask or not, but I just got up and sort of mouthed bathroom and she nodded and I went. When I got back it wasn’t like she’d kept on with the lecture in my absence or something creepy like that, but she was just standing there, perfectly still, and I got the sense that she’d remained kind of frozen while I’d been gone, and that as soon as I re-entered the room she’d broken back into motion. Maybe I was imagining it.”

“Weird,” Michael says.

There’s more to the story that Wendy can’t get at, something beyond weird. She’s felt an unacknowledged intimacy with Professor Elizabeth in the month since, a feeling as if, although they don’t talk or otherwise interact, they are bound in an almost familial way, both complicit in something neither completely understands. Some days she thinks of going to Professor Elizabeth’s office hours and sitting silently opposite her desk, maybe taking out a book and reading while Elizabeth grades papers.

Music plays in earnest now. Bernice sings in a wilted, mannish voice that suits the thin strum of the instrument. The rest of the waitstaff have cleared tables toward the front, and the large party in back, probably friends of the waiters, has moved into the table-less space and begun to dance. They’re all on the young side—twenties or thirties—but they dance in the hand-holding style of old, men leading ladies, dips and spins.

Bernice’s voice cuts through with a depth of emotion one wouldn’t expect. Wendy wonders about the waitress’s world, both the world inside her brain, and the one beyond these restaurant walls; the local traumas that imbue her song with a certain beauty, sultry and melancholy, but also something else—pure, maybe—a voice that rises, in its highest registers, above the bullshit of our armored public selves.

“Pretty good,” says Michael. He nods toward Bernice.

“Makes you wonder,” says Wendy.

“Wonder what?”

“I don’t know,” says Wendy.

Bernice spots Michael and enthusiastically motions him over. Michael worries he’s being teased.

“Go on,” Wendy says.

“I shouldn’t,” says Michael.

“I don’t mind, seriously,” says Wendy.

The band continues to play, instrumental now. Michael half stands as if still undecided, and Wendy says “go on” again. Michael walks over to Bernice who takes him in her arms.

Michael’s eyes are on Wendy, watching for a reaction she refuses to give. Instead she inspects one of the tapestries, coming to the slightly buzzed insight that the love scenes and fight scenes are more or less interchangeable. She turns her eyes from the tapestry to catch Michael in periphery. Bernice has a finger through one of his belt loops. Wendy knows she’s in one of those magical New York moments when something out of the ordinary will become, in the form of a dinner party anecdote, an emblem of American resilience, evidence that in our darkest hours, people must and will come together to take comfort in the small things that make life worth living: a minor-key melody, fingers through belt loops, feet moving in unison. Wendy’s never a participant in these stories, and she’s not now either, eight feet away in her chair.

So even though it’s out of character, Wendy stands from her seat. She walks over to Michael and tugs at his elbow, loosening him from the waitress. Bernice goes without argument and begins again to sing.

Later, in Michael’s parked truck, overlooking the Hudson from the edge of the West Harlem docks, Wendy will lean uncomfortably across the truck’s wide center console and lay her head on Michael’s shoulder. The windows will be cracked, and the river will smell of fish and refuse, New Jersey on the other side, a shimmering mass of white light, so close you could swim if you had to, launch yourself into the black water and let the current take care of the rest.

Wendy will try to recall Bernice’s voice, its tone and timbre, its breathy texture. She will place a hand on the damp unbuttoned area over Michael’s breastbone. She will hold her palm to his sternum. She will twist a lock of his chest hair so that it loops around her finger like a ring.)