4.

Claire had promised to meet her friend Mary for an event at the Reuben Gallery and she couldn’t come up with a decent excuse to cancel. Already running late, she hailed a taxi going south instead of north. Her dress, cowl-draped black satin, caught in the car door as she slammed it shut behind her on East Tenth, and she had to beat on the passenger window to get the driver’s attention. He almost pulled away with her—she could have been dragged for blocks through city traffic with her dress around her head and it would have hurt and would it have killed her?

Mary was waiting in front of her building. She pouted at Claire’s tardiness and pretended that kissing both her cheeks was a very big chore. Claire was so nervous she barely said hello. What could she talk about when all that ran through her mind was an open ocean, the painting afloat like a life raft? What if Mary asked about it?

Mary had obviously been drinking before she arrived. This didn’t stop her from looking sternly at Claire and asking, before anything else, “What is it? Who died?”

Since Claire could not say, “Me,” she said, “What? Why?” and attempted a laugh.

“You’re all right, then? We don’t have to go,” Mary said.

“I’m perfectly normal. I would tell you if I wasn’t. Stop asking please,” Claire said as lightly as she could.

She couldn’t fool her friend, but at least Mary knew her well enough not to press. Mary, willingly, did most of the talking. She was a ghostwriter for little-known politicians’ autobiographies and she profiled larger personalities for the Village Voice. Mary always wanted an ear for whatever new person or project she was working on.

“Buckminster Fuller,” she said, linking arms with Claire as they walked east. “He’s staying in the Village. I’ll be in your neighborhood for the next week following him around. We should get lunch and you could meet him. He always wants to meet new people. I thought he was only interested in meeting my women friends, but men, too. He wants to know everyone. It’s part of his work, knowing people. He’s trying to save the world, and how could he save the world if he doesn’t know the people in it?”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Claire said.

“Of course you haven’t. You live under a rock.”

“That’s why I have you. Without you, I wouldn’t know Elvis.”

“You know I love feeling important. I asked him to come tonight. Bucky, I mean, not Elvis. But I doubt he will. He doesn’t like this kind of art.” Mary smiled at her, shimmering under the street lamp like her black jacket was covered in dew. Only Mary could pull off toreador pants and that ruffled blouse.

“Are women allowed to wear pants here?” Claire asked.

“They wouldn’t care if you came nude.” Mary laughed with her mouth wide open. She looked fantastic.

“You look fantastic,” Claire said out loud.

Mary hummed, so easy to please. “So do you.” But then she stopped smiling, stopped walking, and twisted her mouth. “Well, no, Claire, you don’t. Really, what’s wrong? Is it Freddie again? You look like you haven’t slept in days.”

“I can always count on you—”

“To be honest? Yes. And happy birthday,” Mary said, kissing Claire’s cheek before they started walking again. “Your thirtieth.”

“Thirty-fifth,” Claire said.

“Shh.”

The wind ripped through their coats and they laughed at it. Claire hadn’t laughed in so long; she almost forgot she was upset. Mary was a giddy drunk. She said she felt like taking off her shoes and skipping, but she didn’t. She put her arm around Claire and squeezed her shoulder and Claire felt like crying.

The gallery was on the ground floor of a loft on Tenth Street. The people spilled out onto the sidewalk, swimming in a pool of yellow light. Claire was overdressed, she could see that immediately. Most of the men were in jeans or trousers—the women too. Claire was surprised, though she tried very hard not to be, by how many American Negroes were present at an art gallery. “This is quite the eclectic crowd,” she said to Mary.

“Oh, Claire! I can’t take you anywhere.” Mary guided Claire inside by her forearm, then immediately recognized someone and flagged him down, leaving Claire alone.

The gallery was crowded and everyone looked horrible in the bright light. Sheets of stiff, semitransparent plastic hung from the rafters like laundry, sectioned so they formed smaller rooms. Red, yellow, and green paint was scratched across the mock walls. The word Fluxus rotated around her, painted or scribbled along every surface. Plastic fruit littered the ground. She stepped over fake bananas and kiwis to get to the drinks in the back. Just a glass or two of the sweet brandy punch. She poured generously.

Rows of folding cane chairs faced a screen in the front of the room. Projected on the screen were the words Escape Velocity. Big, black block letters. The words sounded like a magic incantation to Claire. A code to nothing, yet Claire wanted it. She wanted to own those words and use them, do something terrible to them.

She downed her punch.

At the corner of the table, tacky cocktail forks were spread beside a plate of cheese loaf and celery stalks. Claire looked around. Then she slipped a fork into her purse. At that moment, the music rose. She started, felt she’d been caught.

“You look lost.”

Claire turned to find a man a decade younger than she and a full head taller staring down at her eagerly. Acne scarred his upper lip, which he tried to hide with a thin moustache, but he had a confident air.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Claire said. “How could I be lost?”

“May I?” He gestured toward her empty cup, and she handed it to him. “Are you an artist?” he asked. “It seems like everyone here is.”

“Yes,” Claire said quickly. “Or, I used to work in film. But I gave it up.” It was not hard to lie to this man she’d never see again. And she had, years ago, appeared in one film.

“Why’s that?” He filled her glass and handed it back.

“Oh, a number of reasons. This painter I know thinks I want to jump off a bridge.” She sipped her punch quickly.

“Thrilling. Don’t you? Most people I know do,” said the man.

“That’s awfully flippant,” Claire said.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s no laughing matter.”

“Do you? Want to jump off a bridge?” she asked, cup half empty.

“Sometimes.” The music rose and he had to lean in close to her ear to speak. “Perhaps this is an odd question, but did I see you put a fork in your bag? I’m just curious.”

“That.” Claire felt herself blushing furiously. “That is for an art project.”

He had a kind smile. “I thought you’d given up on all that.”

Something was about to begin, it was brewing in the air. She quickly poured herself a third glass of punch before the man walked her to Mary, who’d saved her seat, but there was no free chair nearby for him. It was a relief to see him go. What a stupid thing, her forks. What a lie. And not only what she’d said to the man. She felt embarrassed of herself in front of herself.

Mary had called this night a Happening. “Visual poetry,” she’d said. Over a hundred expectant faces surrounded them, and more people were milling in, late and chairless. The crowd was still rustling and mumbling when a woman in the front started reading in a loud monotone. “A Hart Crane poem,” Mary said. A woman dressed all in black and wrapped messily head to toe in white gauze bandages stood up from the middle of the audience. She also started yelling the poem loudly, competing with the other woman. A third player yelled at the spectators to take the programs from beneath their seats: they were to do as their card said when a bell was rung. Claire’s card had a different number than Mary’s but Claire did not tell her so. She followed her friend like a child. She was too old for this. And overdressed. She stumbled over a chair leg. The chattering of the crowd, shouts of the performers, music clawing its way out from a radio—each noise continued to cover itself with another, layer after layer.

She scurried to refill her cup—the punch was very easy to drink—before men in butcher jackets covered in fake blood ushered them around the gallery. Others wore football helmets and tried to sell them bottles of water owned by the US government. Astronauts danced the hokey pokey. Someone yelled, “Duck and cover, the bombs are falling, duck and cover!” It became a song, a chorus lilting over the mock walls. And they ducked, people were actually ducking and covering all over the place. Something pulled at the hem of Claire’s skirt, it was Mary on the floor, grinning, and Claire knelt, too, but not all the way, and tried to smile, bent her arms around her head.

Above the noise, above all that current, Claire heard a name. Whipping around, searching the crowd, the confusion of faces, desperate. Nicolette. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Of course Nicolette would come to an event like this. She was everywhere.

And then there were chicken feathers falling through the air—hundreds and hundreds of chicken feathers. They fell on her hair, her dress, on her wool coat that she’d draped over a chair somewhere. She tried to brush them off. But they wouldn’t unstick themselves, each feather coated in a drop of glue. A foot away, a woman popped, popped, popped open umbrellas. One flew open right beside Claire, swiping her cheek. Someone laughed.

Claire pushed her way to her coat, her cheek burning. She could hardly see the exit through the crowd spinning around. Her chest rubbed against strangers’ backs, her back against their chests.

Outside, in the streetlight, she tried to pluck away the fluff, but it only stuck to her fingers. And that’s how she walked home—covered in chicken feathers.

She trudged nearly twenty blocks in the new cold, the smell of damp wrought iron and Sunday garbage cooling. She’d have to explain her abrupt departure to Mary, but she’d worry about what to say tomorrow. Claire could hear herself clicking down the pavement. Then, a heel caught between cobblestones. She stumbled forward. People might think she was drunk. She was. It made her feel vulnerable. The streetlights hummed, accompanying her home, except for the dark corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue—had it burned out or was there never any light? She looked around, expecting every shadow to morph into a predator. She held her bag tightly. There were footsteps behind her, but when she turned, there was no one.

Safe in her elevator, she remembered Freddie for the first time that night. He would be home by now. They hadn’t seen much of each other since the painting. And she missed him. Did she miss him? She avoided him at home now, running errands in the evening so she was gone when he came back from work. He said he was coming down with something, wasn’t feeling himself. She was afraid he’d be too sick to go to the office and would be home all day.

She pushed the button for the ninth floor, though she’d already pushed her own. The doors opened on the third, but she stayed where she was. The elevator moaned, as if it were some great annoyance to carry her up again.

On the roof she could see her breath, it led her to the edge. She stumbled over the big bubbles of tar roofing rising like waves. Claire bent low and leaned her hands on the cement ledge, noting the path she had just taken. A movement in the shadows. Dark shapes. There were men out there after all. Tipsy still, it was possible she could fall from the ledge and land on her cobblestone street, just like in the painting. Was there courage in falling? Was that what Nicolette had seen in her?

Claire pushed herself away from the ledge, as if pushing away the thought, and stood erect. It was a childish notion, selfish. Did she take pride in her own misery? She certainly did not want to die—if she felt otherwise, it was only pretending. She loved tromping around town with Mary. She loved her martinis, and her view, and her street. It was such a nice street, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t want to ruin it, and it would be terribly gauche to have people see her body splattered over the cobblestone. All those people who would stop to whisper and point, long after she was scraped away, saying proudly because they were in the know, “Remember how that simple woman jumped?” Claire hated those whispering, hissing women gaping over her remembered body. She hated them. She leaned again over the ledge and spit wide, spitting on those women. She could give a damn what they thought. It was her choice. If she wanted to fall, she would fall.

At any rate, she knew she would be the best at it. You could always be the best at something, even if it was at falling. Falling fastest, falling farthest.

Freddie was asleep by the time she entered the bedroom, the cold still on her. There was a brandy-induced sway to the darkness. She crept toward her side of the bed. He coughed in his sleep and she stopped.

With the smallest movements, she climbed into bed beside her husband, careful not to disturb him. She watched closely to see that his chest rose and fell—he was alive.

In the dark, looking to the ceiling, she made a face like she had just been told Freddie had died. She flattened out her expression, then molded it again—the devastating news rushing over her features, crinkling her brow, an open frown, but not too quickly or it would seem she’d been expecting it. Often, when Freddie left the house, Claire imagined a phone call from his sister or the hospital. Some horrible accident, carelessness on the verge of suicide. She would say it was her fault, for the sake of the family. She saw herself mourning in a tailored dress of black AlenÇon lace at the edge of his grave, wearing that face, and she tried to gauge what she was thinking based on that expression alone.

When she found herself imagining the details of Freddie’s death, it came as a headline reel at the cinema—Adulterous Husband Struck By Fluke Airplane Crash On Riverside. She was ashamed of these thoughts. But, she told herself, it was fear that compelled her to fantasize over his death—if she articulated a given scenario, it would not happen. It could not happen. She was protecting him. That was the magical thinking Nicolette had said she used with the notion of Claire’s suicide: she’d painted it out of being.

Claire remembered her own juvenile sense of power clearly—hiding in a closet, thinking up all the horrible things a boy she loved might do—spit at her, call her names, always blocking from her mind his kiss, the stolen words he’d whisper in her ear: You’re beautiful. To think them was to erase them. Though perhaps Claire had performed these rituals for the opposite result—thinking up misfortunes not to dispel but to conjure.

And if it were real, if Nicolette had saved her, without her permission—

A wave of gratitude shook Claire so fully she could have cried. A supreme gratitude like nothing she had felt before. It flattened her.

She covered her head with her pillow and closed her eyes. It wasn’t real. Nicolette was a fool, clinging to a weak childhood magic. It was pretend. Nicolette was nothing more than a schoolgirl hiding in a closet. She simply never grew up. Perhaps there was something admirable in that; it was somehow better than the mere hot air of an artist. In the cradle of her pillow, Claire rebreathed her own breath, damp and very much there.

Freddie’s shuffling and blanket-pulling and showering—it was morning already, but Claire kept her eyes closed and willed herself back to sleep. When she opened her eyes again, he was gone.

Her head rioted against last night’s sweet punch. Lying in bed, she distracted herself from her headache by making up shapes from the paint and shadows on the ceiling—sailboats and rabbits and the Empire State Building. And then Claire saw how terribly the paint was chipped and she marveled that she’d never noticed before.

The spare paint was in the basement storage. She didn’t bother getting dressed, just threw on her robe, a short silky wrap, because who would be in the basement in the middle of the morning? And barefoot, why not? The stairwell was the color of an old bruise. She wrapped her body about the turns, almost enjoying herself, her speed. As if she couldn’t get there fast enough. Just before she reached the basement, something sharp pricked her foot. She yelled out, quick and birdlike. She looked at the arch of her foot, and at the stair, but there was nothing.

The basement cement was cool on her feet. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling—dull fists of light. The radiators whistled off-key—a wet, demanding cry, shushing her. Through the high, street-level windows at the end of the hall she could see the scuffed shoes of a man pause on the sidewalk. Both sides of the hall were lined with storage lockers, and every wall a gate. If she stood inside her own, she could see into her neighbor’s, and her neighbor’s neighbor’s—every forgotten possession.

She tucked the purple drape up and over the canvas in her locker. There she was again. Claire stared at her image under the shadow-swing of the bare bulb. She studied her own repeated and fragmented face, stroke by stroke, as if for a clue, and again found herself, to her great surprise, beautiful.

She could not hate it, not the way she wanted to. But she could destroy it.

There are moments when the skin is a circus. When the skin serves as warning. Tightening, loosening, grabbing hold of the muscles. She heard footsteps, a voice on the stairs, a song obscured. The clang of the metal gate.

Tomasz.

First his shadow and then him entering the dank hallway of storage units, stopping short when he saw Claire standing mutely in her cage.

“You look like a canary in there, Mrs. Bishop. A very cold canary.” He eyed her in her thin robe.

She did not drop the drape over the painting. She opened the gate as if ushering him into her home and Tomasz brought a warmth to the cramped space. She blushed. She kept her eyes on the painting. He stared at it and said nothing. Claire looked at him looking at her painting. This stranger staring at her painting, all that exposed flesh. It made her own, real flesh buzz and heat.

“Don’t,” she said.

It hurt her, physically, to be seen like this. It felt raw and true and laughable, the way she felt in the painting. She wanted desperately to make him stop looking.

She didn’t know Tomasz. She didn’t know if he had a family in Queens or Poland, an ex-wife or a wife waiting for him at home or what home meant. But she’d watched him sitting on the stoop during his lunch hour, fastening a piece of felt to the bottom of a chess piece he’d carved himself. She wondered if he spent his free time at the chess houses down the street, the all-night men battling one another with wooden queens and coffee mugs. He was just a stranger.

She touched his arm. “Please.”

He turned to her briefly, then back to the painting. His lips parted. He was trying to say something. “What is this?” Looking down at her hand on his arm. “The painting.”

Now she touched his shoulder. This is my storage and this is my hand. She looked at her hand. Was it hers? A surge inside her, something old, tapping. The ocean. Tapping inside her like water against the side of a glass. Her stomach ought to ache, but it didn’t. She reached and touched his face, his beard, and he flinched, looked at her confused, and she reached again. The bare bulb magnified his brooding face. He was full of shadows, his arm was strong. “Tell me what you want,” he said. His accent was thick on her face and his big hands were dirty. What she wanted? He touched her neck and rolled his fingers over her eyes to close them. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” he said as if she were crying but her eyes were so dry they stuck and burned. She forced them to remain open as she kissed his mouth. Her hands were ice against his chest. Her jaw was tight. He said no, and she said yes and he said yes. They did it all while standing and leaning against the stack of suitcases and boxes, and when that didn’t work he pushed her against the gate and she felt the metal shapes of it pressed into her back through the silk robe. Then beside them the painting racketed against the metal. She did not say a word. She flattened her palms on his back, felt his muscles slip along them. She did not want to move them. As he finished she pushed him out of her. She was angry and didn’t know why and then she calmed. Calm, she watched as he mopped up after himself with the rag that was always in his back pocket, but a dark spot remained on the cement. She laughed curtly at the thought that perhaps this had always been the purpose of the rag, the other married women in the building.

“I’m sorry,” he said—rising, buttoning.

He was about to leave when Claire called his name, almost a whisper.

“Yes?” There was—wasn’t there?—a hint of annoyance in his voice.

“I’ll pay you to destroy it.”

He raised his eyebrows, then nodded. He did not have to ask what she was referring to.

“I don’t want to know how you’ll do it, but you’ll do it,” Claire said, surprised by her businesslike tone. “Bring me proof? I have to know for sure.” It was crazy, he must think her crazy.

But Tomasz did not roll his eyes. He nodded dutifully, as if she’d asked him to replace a light bulb, then he left her standing there, staring at the wet mark on the cement.