ONCE SHE’S COME HOME from visiting Grace and settled Julio in for his nap, Renata finds several surprises. Not pleasant. Blasts from the past, as Linda would say. Messages she could do without.
She’s given Jack’s phone number to several people, so it’s only natural to play his messages. She’s living here, isn’t she? At any rate for the duration. The first three are business, skippable, but then comes a woman’s voice, light, trembly, cajoling.
“Jack? It’s me. I know it’s been ages and you probably aren’t thrilled to hear from me but I just had to find out....I’ve been obsessing about you ever since it happened. Are you okay? Please, Jack, could you forget everything that happened at least for now and give me a call, okay? I’ve had visions of you down there and...Well, so just please, please call? I’m praying you’re okay. I’m fine, in case you want to know.” And a Manhattan number.
The fabled ex-wife. Pamela the petulant, the impossible to please, the faithless, who left her wedding dress on a shelf in the closet and her tampons in the back of the bathroom cabinet. Renata, not usually the jealous type, has to sit down, she’s shaking so. She almost misses the next message and has to play it again: her neighbor Gerald of the dreads and stuffed-animal collection. “Renata, love, I hate to tell you this but the news is not good. Or only half good. The couple upstairs? He came home but she didn’t. Call back if you want to know more. Hope the little guy’s doing okay.”
While the little guy sleeps she leafs through her folders for solace. No Mrs. Stiller on the QE2 today, nor the exuberant Letitia Cole. They make her envious. Instead she reads about the mermaids. The mermaids provoke envy, too, but they are so far beyond anything she might attempt that the envy remains abstract. Ever since Claudia was dredged from the Hudson River, Renata hasn’t been lured by water. Looking at the ocean is fine, only not getting wet. Too many imaginings, the sensation of struggling, unable to move her leg, the sinking, the disbelief, then the panic, then the knowing.
In a tiny town off U.S. Highway 19 in central Florida, tourists can watch through acrylic panels as mermaids in colorful, glittery fishtail costumes swim and cavort acrobatically in an underground spring, dodging fish and the occasional turtle. The whole act takes months to learn: the trick is using the air hose properly. In a photo accompanying the story, the mermaids look quite beautiful as they sit chatting around the tube from which they enter, their long hair streaming, their legs tightly swaddled. How do they get into this line of work? Renata wonders. She’d like to go and see the mermaids; she’s even planned a fantasy trip, driving down, maybe with Jack, to watch women who can endure underwater, far from the strains of the upper world. Frolicking in the medium that killed Claudia.
Since Tuesday, though, travel is no longer enticing. She slams the folder shut, irked at her own idleness. There’s so much she might be doing while Julio sleeps. Cooking a real dinner for a change. Reviewing the Arabic alphabet; she found a dictionary and an elementary-level grammar in Rashids bookstore, showing four columns of variations for each of the twenty-eight letters, depending on their position in the sentence. In normal times, this discovery would delight Renata, but in a national emergency and with a baby to boot, it is dismaying.
Visiting Grace always saps her energy. All she manages to do is turn on the television, just in time for the replay of the President’s speech at the memorial service in Washington earlier today, words he must have spoken right about when Grace accepted Julio in her arms and wept. “Our response to history is already clear. To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” While Renata is dutifully trying to wrap her mind around that ambitious project, ridding the world of evil, she’s distracted by the bulletin slithering across the bottom of the screen; the crawl, they call it, and she has to admire the apt name. The crawl says the representatives of fifteen Arab nations were instructed that “the time has come to choose sides.” Presumably between good and evil. But what if they have different notions of good and evil? That’s something to think about, for sure, but the crawl doesn’t permit thinking. It’s designed to fracture attention and ensure that nothing lodges in the mind long enough or firmly enough for thought. “Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time,” the President continues. “Goodness, remembrance and love have no end,” and the camera pans the somber, familiar faces of many political leaders at the service. She can identify a handful and is working on the others, but again the crawl grabs her attention: the State Department demands that the Arab nations “wrap up and prosecute terrorists on your own soil.” She’s a trifle dizzy; the crawl has had its inevitable effect; her mind is in little pieces.
Still she listens politely till the end of the speech, then goes into the kitchen to forage for a snack. When she returns it’s playing again, from the top: “We are here in the middle hour of our grief,” he says. And she has just enough of her mind left to know that although the words have a nice ring—good job, whoever came up with that line—they are quite mistaken. Make no mistake, she thinks, we are nowhere near the middle hour of our grief. We’ve barely begun. Is she splitting hairs again? Does it really matter, so long as the sentence rolls along well and offers comfort? That’s what Jack might say. Linda would understand. She’ll have to call Linda later just to hear her exclaim, offended to the core, The middle hour of our grief? The middle? Give me a break! In the calligraphy hanging in Renata’s apartment, the fortune-teller said it would be around the Great Snow before the illness was pacified. This may take many Great Snows.
She can’t watch anymore, she’s so sleepy; the crawl has conquered, pulverized her brain. Her body is leaden, her eyes drooping. She’ll take a nap, like Julio. But first, she might as well pick up her own messages.
“Renata, now don’t keel over in shock, but it’s Cindy. Long time no see, right? Are you okay, I mean, I hope you weren’t anywhere near...you know. Isn’t this just the pits? Look, could you give me a call, please? I, uh...” The bright voice quavers and dissolves. “I need some help, is the thing. I really need some help.”
Cindy. Renata’s once-aunt, her Uncle Peter’s wife, who split for unknown parts after Claudia’s death. No way was Cindy ever auntlike, a giggly, daffy girl with a mop of red curls. Lucille Ball, Grace used to call her behind her back. Silly Cindy, Renata and Claudia called her to her face, even though she was their occasional chummy babysitter who fixed their hair in the styles she’d learned in beauty school and let them play with her makeup and taught them the latest disco dances and joined them in cooking gross concoctions involving peanut butter and flour and apple juice. Even though she gave them the precious book about the cave family. If Cindy happened to, drop by at the right moment—after she’d finished at the hairdressing salon in town, say—she’d curl up beside them on the floor to watch Gilligan’s Island or Batman, and she begged them to let her play with Farmer Blue and his family, but that they could never allow, for it would mean admitting her to the sanctuary of the private language. Renata might have succumbed, but not Claudia. “Even if we wanted her,” she said, “she’s too dumb to learn it.” Silly Cindy, always with a glass in her hand.
Eighteen years since Renata’s heard that piping Southern California voice, though not for lack of trying. When she was nineteen and got Gianna back and wanted someone—anyone—in the family to see her, wanted to create some facsimile of a family for Gianna, she had looked in the phone book, tried a dozen beauty salons, but Cindy had disappeared without a trace. Maybe returned to San Diego. Later, after Gianna was gone, when the stifled suspicions began creeping into Renata’s nighttime vigils, when she thought back to the time Peter ran his finger along her spine in the garage as she bent over her bike—the dreadful, unspeakable thrill of it, and the shame—she realized that Cindy, of course, silly Cindy who took off like a shot, would be the one to know for sure. And she looked again. Nothing. And now? Cindy needs help? Who doesn’t, now? Renata jots down the phone number, kicks off her sandals and curls up on the couch. After eighteen years, a few more hours can’t make much difference.
She wakes to the sound of Julio’s loud happy nonsense syllables coming from the next room, the mystery tongue no linguist has yet decoded, though Renata believes if she had the time and patience she might decipher something from those gurgles. It’s only another language. Indeed, speakers of Cochandi, who live in the Amazon jungle, believe that a baby’s inchoate burblings are the fading remnants of the language used in the spirit world before birth, among those waiting to be born. The physical shock of birth erases much of the language, clearing the mind for its destined earthly speech. If those few vestigial sounds could be deciphered, they would give valuable clues to the world of the spirits, but no one has yet succeeded, which suggests that we here in the earthly realm are not meant to know.
She’s just finished changing Julio and is snapping up the denim overalls when Jack comes in, sweaty and grimy. It must have been the office first, today, then the rubble.
“So, how’d it go?”
He falls onto the bed. “Come keep me company.” They all three lie down together, Julio on top of Jack, belly to belly. Today he dished out food in the Red Cross tent and handed out a shipment of heavy socks donated by a sporting goods store in Delaware. A few bodies turned up; he saw them go by. A fireman was unearthed. When the firemen’s remains are carried out everyone stands at attention, helmets off. Not so for the civilians, hierarchy persisting even in immolation. The engineers discovered that the careening steel beams punctured the subway tunnels and possibly through to the water mains. No one can yet gauge that damage. Four construction crews are on the job. It’s not clear who’s in charge, if anyone, and the construction workers, firefighters, and cops don’t get along all that well. But somehow the work is getting done. Slowly. “It has to be slow, because of the, you know, the remains. They can’t just go in and blast. They have to pick it apart by hand. I doubt if they’ll find anyone alive at this point. But no one wants to believe that.”
People can still say “lost” or “missing” for their loved ones, Renata thinks, implying that they might be found. If they spoke Bliondan (though this attack would never have happened in Lapland), they would have to distinguish between lost-but-may-still-be-found and lost forever. Their loved ones would be in the process of turning into tanfendi-noude from the more optimistic tanfendi-oude.
The air is very bad, Jack goes on. Everyone’s coughing. A volunteer herbalist—God knows how she got through the barriers, maybe a construction worker’s girlfriend—came around distributing homeopathic pellets supposed to be good for the lungs. Everyone wants to do something. Oh, and the President dropped by, after the memorial service in D.C. Jack didn’t see him up close but heard that he spoke a few encouraging words, standing shoulder to shoulder and hard-hatted with the mayor, the governor, all the election-winners who got more than they bargained for.
“Did you catch that on TV?” he asks.
“No, I wasn’t here. I went up to see my mom. I took your car. I forgot to ask, I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, that’s fine, but where’d you park it?” Like many in the neighborhood, Jack is obsessed with finding parking spots. So community-spirited in other ways, when it comes to parking he’s tooth-and-claw competitive.
“Just around the corner. No restrictions, remember?”
“Oh, right. So how was she?”
“The same. She held Julio for a few minutes.”
“Really? That’s something, isn’t it? Could be a good sign.” Just as Renata finds signs in language and speech, down to commas and pauses, he finds signs in tiny permutations of behavior. Good signs. One day soon he may even unearth a good sign from the attack: besides unrestricted parking, how well-behaved and generous New Yorkers have become in crisis. Already, several among the glut of newspaper articles have suggested that tragedy will improve our moral fiber, wean us from our addiction to the lifestyles and court trials of the rich and famous, catapult the entire nation into sobriety and adulthood. This notion Renata dismisses. She distrusts those who are so ready, so soon, to assemble and package their thoughts for public delivery. But newspaper pages have to be filled, obviously. She has not yet read (it’s a few days too soon) the New Yorker—the cover showing the barely discernible black towers fading into deeper blackness—with its collection of responses from famous writers, but when she does she will toss it down in disgust. The soon-to-be-famous words by Susan Sontag, attacking the “self-righteous drivel...being peddled by public figures and TV commentators,” will make her cringe. Not because the words are not true. They are true and Renata thinks the same thing. Their placement is what makes them cringe-worthy. She knows from her own past. It’s not so much what you say. It’s what you choose to say first that reveals character. Even when a voice speaks truth, it can speak it in a tone that destroys trust.
As far as her mother, she shrugs. Good signs, bad signs, she can’t tell anymore. And since she can’t, or won’t, tell Jack how or why her mother wept, there’s nothing to say. “I got a message from Gerald. You know, my downstairs neighbor? The woman on the top floor is missing. I had a feeling she worked there.”
They’ve run out of words for these exchanges. He squeezes her hand. “Did you know her well?”
“No, hardly at all. But still. There’re a few other messages. One of them...I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,...I was just listening in case there was something for me. One was your ex, I think.”
“What!” He rolls Julio off him and sits up. “What?”
“You heard. At least I think so. Unless there’s someone else.”
“Oh, Christ. Is she all right?”
“Yes. She’s worried about you.”
He looks ready to spring up, then lies back again. “I’ll listen later.” He strokes her hair absently for a while. “I got a call from Carmen’s mother today, in Puerto Rico. I must have told you I’ve been trying to reach her.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Well, anyway, she called back. I had to tell her about Carmen. It was terrible.”
“I’m sorry.
“She sort of knew anyway because she hadn’t heard from her. But now it was definite. At least I could tell them Julio’s okay. She and Carmen’s sister are coming back as soon as the planes are flying.”
Renata is silent. She knows what this means.
“So next week they’ll be coming to get him. You can go back to work. You’ve really been great about—”
“No!”
“What, no?”
“We could adopt him,” she says wildly. “I mean, maybe they can’t take care of him.”
“He’s theirs, Renata. Why shouldn’t they take care of him? It’s not like they’re impoverished or anything. Carmen’s sister is a nurse. Her mother does something in an office, I forget what. Look, you knew it was only for a few days. Don’t you want to get back to your life?”
That’s what the mayor keeps counseling on TV: get back to your life. Its imprecision grates. Whatever you’re doing at the moment is your life. You can’t get back to your life because you can’t have been away from it. “It’s not fair,” she cries. “I’m taking such good care of him. He loves me.”
“Renata, you’re not making any sense.”
“Why does everything have to make sense?”
Love should not categorize, but even Jack, lavish in love, cannot help thinking the obvious: a thirty-four-year-old woman, childless, with hermit-like tendencies, obsessive, eccentric. Surely a child is what she’s been needing all along.
“Okay, so you’ve gotten attached to him. It’s only natural.” And there Julio lies between them, discussed in the third-person invisible, looking very fetching as he kicks his bare feet in the air. Jack gives him an absentminded tickle on the chest. “But we can’t keep him indefinitely. Babies don’t just get passed around like...He has a family. You can visit him, they’re nice people, I’m sure they’ll appreciate all you’ve done.”
She just weeps.
Finally: “Look, Renata, if it’s a baby you want, we can have a baby. We’ll get married and have a baby. If that’s what you want.”
“It’s not that I want a baby!”
He’s never seen her cry like this. He’s never seen her cry at all. Except for Tuesday, but that doesn’t count; everyone cried on Tuesday. “I don’t. I mean, I don’t long for a baby. I just don’t want them to take this one away.”
He studies her curiously, almost professionally. “What is it? You had an abortion? A miscarriage? What?”
She shakes her head. Stupid, stupid. Sometimes his simplicity makes her want to scream. It comes from the supply-and-demand principle of his work. No, demand and supply. If someone turns up hungry, give him food. Ignorant, give him schooling. Sick, find him a doctor. Need, gratification. Problem, solution. She can’t bear to give up the baby, so he’ll give her a baby of her own.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you must have known all along,” he says. “Listen, everyone’s half out of their minds right now. You’re stressed out. You’re irrational.”
“You don’t understand!”
“No, I don’t. Maybe you can explain it to me.”
Just what she doesn’t want to do. She doesn’t want that to be part of Jack and her. She doesn’t want Jack to be part of it.
“Okay, I tried.” He goes into the kitchen, returns with a can of beer, plops down in front of the TV flicks it on, pops the can open, and yet again: “We are here in the middle hour of our grief.”
Renata dries her tears and begins composing a letter in her head. Dear Mr. President, With all due respect, I must point out that your phrase, “the middle hour of our grief,” is inaccurate. This is the third day after the attack. If this is “the middle hour of our grief” and if the stages of our grief will be roughly equal, it logically follows that the end of our grief would fall somewhere around the sixth or seventh day after. You know as well as I do that this is not true, and that our grief will last much longer. Granted, the beginning, middle, and end stages of our grief (assuming it has an end) may not be equal. The middle may last longer than the beginning, which your words suggest is now over. Even so, my point still...
No. No, no, what is she thinking? She’d never send a letter like that. Jack is right, she must be out of her mind. It’s not only crazy but probably dangerous as well. Wasn’t someone fired from a TV network for challenging the President’s use of the word “cowards” for the hijackers? Didn’t they pass some law just yesterday, increasing the government’s surveillance powers? Soon it might be illegal to criticize his prose. Soon it might be illegal to say anything at all that might be construed as less than thoroughly vengeful. Even to belly-dance might be construed as unpatriotic. Watch out, Letitia! What was that story she heard on the radio two years ago: in Argentina, during the worst of the despotism of the 1970s, a wildly popular singer was banned from singing his signature number, a political protest song called, “All I Ask from God.” The song was so well known, though, that he didn’t have to sing it: he could simply sit onstage and strum the chords on his guitar and the audience would sing it for him. Soon we all might be speaking to each other through silence.
She goes over to Jack and rests a hand on his shoulder, a halfhearted gesture toward peace. “I didn’t get around to cooking anything. How about if I phone for some Indian food?”
“Sure. Whatever.” He’s so hypnotized by the screen, she might just as well have suggested elephant dung: “Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end.”
They eat in front of the TV while Julio lolls happily on the floor in a round, cushiony contraption Aruna brought over. The news, like the Indian food, is a melange of sour, bitter, tangy. Caves, rumors of war, vows of revenge, more assaults on Arabs, and scenes from the Armory in midtown, where relatives of the missing fill out forms and have the soft inner tissue of their cheeks swabbed for DNA samples. A psychologist urges parents to hug their children more than usual and assure them that they’re safe; Renata picks Julio up and holds him on her lap, lets him taste a few grains of basmati rice. The crawl continues but she tries not to look, to preserve her brain cells. At intervals the mayor appears at the site in his hard hat. He’s ennobled by tragedy, all his notorious sins gone up in smoke, his mind far from elephant dung. Go to restaurants, he says. Go to theaters. Go shopping. It’s good for the economy. The covert message: shopping can distract, alleviate pain, maybe even ward off further disaster. Shopping is the best therapy.
“I’d better get him changed and into bed,” she says. “Then I have to make a call.”
It must be money Cindy wants, she thinks as she settles Julio in the bassinet. (On his back to avoid Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—she’s noted the warning signs in the subway.) What else, after so long? Okay, she’ll give it for old times sake. But as it happens, her thinking, like Jack’s, is too simple: problem, solution; problem, solution.
“Can you stay with Julio tomorrow?” she asks after she’s hung up. He’s on his second beer, or maybe the third, his eyes still fixed on the screen. “It’s Saturday. You won’t be going to work, will you?”
“We’ll be open but I can take a few hours off, sure. What’s up?”
This takes a bit of explaining. First of all, she has to explain who Cindy is. “I just spoke to her. She wants me to meet her tomorrow.”
“How’d she find you after all these years?”
Exactly what Renata had asked. “In the phone book, she said. But it seems she knew all about me through my uncle. They’re still in touch on and off. It’s weird—I’ve tried to find him myself over the years, but I never could. And all along he was keeping track of me.” Weird is hardly an adequate word, but she’s too dazed to find a better one. It’s frightening, enraging, sinister, like something out of film noir. How could he know all about me? she asked Cindy. People like Peter have their ways, she said. Trust me, it’s better not to know.
“So why call now, all of a sudden?”
“It’s about her boyfriend. He’s been missing since Tuesday. He works at a deli right near...” She can’t bring herself to say “Ground Zero,” which sounds like a computer-game locale. Nor can she use Jack’s term, “the pile.” That’s an insider’s word, for the initiated. She hasn’t earned it. “She wants me to help her look for him, in the hospitals for starters. She has this idea that I’m competent. She may not know many people who are.”
“You mean to say she hasn’t done anything about it in three days?” Such negligence rouses Jack’s interest. Just as a senator is declaring, “We should be prepared to take warlike activities,” he clicks the mute button, leaving the senator’s mouth working in vain.
“She says she’s been out of it. Knowing Cindy, at least the old Cindy, that could mean drunk. She’s the sort of person...She doesn’t know how to do anything. Except cut hair—that she does very well. I don’t know how she’s managed all this time.”
“I’d try St. Vincent’s first. It’s the closest,” says Jack. “And go there rather than call.”
“Okay. What about Pamela? Are you going to call her?”
“I don’t know. Not tonight. What do you think? You think I should call?”
“All she wants to know is if you’re dead or alive. That’s pretty simple. It shouldn’t take long.”
“With her nothing is simple.”
“Oh, are you afraid of getting back in her clutches?” An odd dialogue to be having, she thinks, while the silent screen shows two dozen firefighters lined up, hats off, hands on hearts, forming an aisle down which four more firefighters carry a stretcher. It’s pointless to let the coolness between them continue when Jack is the only source of pleasure around. She sits on his lap and reaches inside his shirt.
“Her clutches,” he says. “You’re really funny. She’d have to get me out of your clutches first.”
“You could be lucky and get her machine. Do you want to go to bed, maybe?” They haven’t made love since it happened. It has seemed an impossible act. Not since before the blue-sky Tuesday morning when he was late for a meeting. She should have made him stay; it was within her power, she just didn’t try very hard. Then he might not have gotten on the subway at all. She wouldn’t have been alone that whole morning. Wouldn’t have met the bookman (which might have been worse for him), wouldn’t have found the twenty-dollar bill. Like a uchrony, what if, what if? But the important facts wouldn’t have changed. The planes would still have crashed, the buildings fallen, the kaleidoscope shifted. Suddenly she wants Jack just as he is, not at his most appealing, can of beer in his hand, unshaven, surly, gray-faced. “Come on. It’s better than arguing.”
“Coax me.”
“All right. Turn that thing off, though.”
He targets the disaster site with the remote and she pulls him to the floor instead of bed. It wouldn’t do to wake Julio. Even though it’s very quiet love, very muted, no talking. They’re different, not the lovers they were. Like Bodo and Zuna, maybe, after a strenuous day of hunting and gathering. No, that was probably a quick, grunting grappling. This is ponderous and silent, not mechanical, only enervated. It takes a long time, like a slow-motion dance, or like climbing a mountain. The view at the top is as grand as expected, but its been so arduous, you almost can’t appreciate it. You almost wonder whether it was worth the climb.
Afterward, when Jack is in bed, she can’t sleep, so she wraps herself in a shawl and curls up on the living-room couch with a magazine. Global warming, faulty voting machines, the elusive Pinochet—last month’s magazine. All from before. All these matters sound prehistoric. At last something catches her interest. A group of psychologists at Cornell designed a series of experiments to study whether the testimony of children in abuse cases could be trusted. “Some say children can recall events very accurately. Others say their memories are unreliable....Research psychologists deliberately set out to plant the seed of an imaginary event in the minds of young children, to see if it would take root and grow into a false memory.”
A group of three- to six-year-old children were asked, individually, if they’d ever gotten their hands caught in a mouse trap. Ninety percent of the children said no, which was the correct answer. A week later they were asked the same question again. “We want you to think real hard, did this ever happen to you? Now it’s not quite ninety percent, it may be eighty-five get it correct.”
By rights Renata should grab a pencil and fix the errors, but her heart is pounding too hard for that.
“We bring them back a third week. We ask the same question. We bring them back a fourth, a fifth, an eighth, a tenth, a twelfth week, each time just asking the same question. Think real hard, did this ever happen? By the tenth, eleventh week, the majority of 3- and 4-year-olds will claim that getting their hand caught in a mouse trap really happened.”
In a related experiment, “over 2000 professionals—pediatricians, psychologists, social service workers, judges, lawyers—were asked to watch videotapes of these children....The professionals were unable to pick out which children were describing true memories and which were describing a false implanted memory.”
Apart from strangling these experimenters with her bare hands, what Renata would enjoy is waking Jack to vent her fury. Telling children deliberate lies? Mindfucking in the service of justice? Even Bliondans abundance of terms for every variety of wrong words, prashmensti, is not adequate for this outrage. But telling Jack would bring no satisfaction. Jack the ever-reasonable, even after sex, would point out that yes, while the experiment might be morally dubious, its goal is worthy. Consider the falsely accused, blah, blah...Arguments of means and ends. Who first made that up anyway, about the ends justifying the means? Who ever thought of separating means and ends? Every means becomes an end. There is no end to means.