ALL THE WAY HOME in the taxi, she imagined what might await her. The apartment colonized by a gang of street kids stomping around to ear-shattering music. Converted into a crack house. Trashed and looted, everything stripped from the walls—the calligraphy hangings, the good magistrate spreading a civilizing influence, the long, numbing illness to be pacified by the Great Snow. And the irate neighbors assembled out front....But visions of mayhem were a weak diversion. What she feared most was finding an empty apartment.
She paused to listen before inserting the key. Quiet as a grave: If Gianna was gone, the past few days would become one more troubled dream of the many raining down on the city, last Tuesday’s charred petals still sifting earthward. If the girl was gone, she would not go looking for her. Not any more.
Gianna was sitting on the floor, wearing her new shorts and a T-shirt, a can of Coke beside her. She smiled when she saw Renata. After two nights in a real bed, with a roof over her head, her face was less taut, her eyes less wary.
You look better, Renata was about to say. But she couldn’t speak. For spread out around Gianna were Farmer Blue’s family and their worldly goods—the house, the barn, the silo, the cows and horses on the square of green turf, the trucks, the tractor, the antique plow. Even the faintly suspect Hired Hand was there, not asleep as he so often had been, but setting up a ladder against the side of the barn, perhaps to repair the roof. Claudia had always wanted to make him a villain; she said they needed a villain, everything was too perfect. But here he was, benign again.
“Where did you find that?” she whispered.
Gianna pointed to the closet and the overturned carton. Her eyes narrowed, worried that she’d trespassed. She began gathering up the pieces.
“No, it’s okay. It’s fine. Leave it.”
Renata set down her backpack and knelt alongside her. Gianna was clutching Farmer Blue. Renata picked up Powder Blue, who had been her favorite, and stroked him.
“Do you remember all this?”
Gianna stared.
“Do you remember we used to play with it?”
She looked confused, then finally smiled. A girl who tried to please, who’d learned that was the safest way. Or perhaps she didn’t know she remembered; only her hands remembered how to spread the pieces out.
“His name is Farmer Blue,” Renata said, pointing. “This is Mrs. Blue. And the children—Powder, Sky, and Pastel. You might not remember their names after so long. We used to make bales of hay and pile them on the truck. You liked to make the horses gallop. But they’re not really racehorses. They work in the fields. See? They pull the plow.”
Gianna studied the plow, then attached a pair of horses and nudged it through the field.
“That’s right. That’s exactly how we used to do it. Mrs. Blue used to bake pies in the kitchen. We used pennies and dimes for the pies. You do remember, don’t you?”
Gianna’s fixed smile was blank. She must be embarrassed, Renata thought, to be caught out at such a childish game. It was one thing to have played with Farmer Blue for hours on end when she was five or six or seven. But she was far too old now for a toy farm; no doubt she’d unpacked it out of boredom, poking around for something to do.
“Think,” Renata pleaded. “Think hard. Don’t you remember?” And what she couldn’t bring herself to say: Your father gave it to us, to your mother and me, when we were little children. We loved it. We played with it until she got tired of it and wanted to destroy it. You and I played with it years later. Even after I learned to despise the giver, I loved the gift.
There was no telling whether the girl’s stare hid a rag of memory. Her life, whatever it had been, would have made her cunning. She would have tried to obliterate the past, during the ordeals of the later years. She would have needed every bit of strength for what those years served up. To recall a patch of ordinary childhood might have weakened her.
“You’re safe now. Try to remember,” Renata urged. She couldn’t help wondering if she was doing what the psychologists had done in their stupid mouse-trap experiment. Implanting false memories, wrong words. Were they wrong words if the memories were harmless, even good?
At last, with the plow and horses still in her fist, Gianna nodded. Renata put her arms around her and drew her close. Gianna sank into her. How long since she’d been embraced in safety? How many unwanted embraces had she endured?
Since last Tuesday nothing in daily life has seemed as urgent as it used to. Only the essentials matter: caring for the children who’ve fallen into her hands, hearing the latest news, learning how many bodies were incinerated or crushed. That number changes every day and will keep changing for two years before it settles into a definite figure, like the arrow of a roulette wheel, vacillating, hesitating. Of the half-dozen phone messages since Monday, nothing is essential, not even the one from Denise suggesting in her wry way that it might be about time for Renata to return to work. Only the last message matters. “Hi. I’ll be over later, just wanted to remind you. I’ll bring dinner. Hope the trip was okay.” She’d forgotten Jack was coming. Or rather, pushed him and his visit to a far corner of her mind, something at which she’s adept. But now that she’s home, he’s crucial again. If she wants to keep him in her life—and she does, she does—she will have to take his demands seriously.
Meanwhile Gianna’s turned on the TV She flipped past the news and found a Law & Order rerun. It’s one Renata’s seen, a prominent local politician accused of raping a campaign worker. Because of his connections at City Hall, it’s difficult to pin the crime on him. Gianna sits transfixed.
If Jack is coming, she has to hide Gianna. Anything connected to that part of her life must be kept separate from Jack for as long as she can manage it. Jack is new and clear and good; he gives her a chance to be new too.
Henry and Gerald are reliable and would be glad to entertain Gianna, but Renata has a better idea, more mischievous. Cindy. She was so brimming with apology for not helping out all those years. Let her help out now. Let her make her sober amends.
She goes into the bedroom to make the call. “Cindy? How are you?” Not hitting the bottle, I hope? No, that’s not the way to ask a favor. “Good. And Hal?...Oh, that’s great news. I’m so glad....Two weeks? You must be relieved....Yes, I’m fine.” She omits the real news: I went to Houston. I saw him. I told him...He told me...Cindy, I wonder if you could help me out with something. I’d really appreciate it.”
Cindy is slightly puzzled but agrees willingly. “Sure, okay, I could use the company. What’s her name? Jane?” She won’t know who the company is until Renata is good and ready. Unless she recognizes Claudia in Gianna’s face. Renata will take that chance; she almost enjoys the risk.
She waits to tell Gianna until the trial on television is over. She understands the need to complete the arc of justice. Guilty: that’s satisfying. Like Cindy, Gianna is puzzled but agrees. She hasn’t got much choice.
“It’s just for tonight, because my boyfriend’s coming over. Cindy’s an old friend and very nice. You’ll be fine. I’ll pick you up in the morning. Okay? Let’s get your things together.”
Nothing much to stash away to conceal Gianna’s presence. She’s not a girl who leaves many traces. As a matter of fact, the apartment seems neater than Renata left it, and the twenty-dollar bill still sits under the vase on the table.
Thank goodness the trains are running again, after a fashion. There’s just time to get there and back. Cindy’s three-room walk-up in the East Village is a mess and smells of stale smoke and hairspray, but Cindy is good-humored and welcoming. “Your hair, sweetie! Who did that? Maybe I can fix it for you.” She doesn’t remark on any resemblance. Is Renata the only one who sees it? No, the bookman saw it too.
At six-thirty Jack rings her bell, the pressure and duration of the ring meant to chide her for not giving him a key. He lumbers in, holding a takeout bag from the soul-food place around the corner.
“Ribs?” she says. “The way to my heart?”
“The way to something. I need real food, anyway. I was up at Pier 94 this afternoon, eating donuts. You have no idea how many donuts people have contributed to the war effort.”
She reaches up to kiss him and he lets her, but with no enthusiasm. She knows why. He thinks she’s spent the two days with someone else. He’d sully himself.
He’s brought everything she likes. Besides the ribs, collard greens, yams and cornbread. Ice cream. To soften her up. That’s intimacy, is it not? When a man knows what you like to eat.
They sit at her folding table in the kitchen, and he rolls up his sleeves as if preparing to assault the food. The thick, hairy arms remind her that she’s missed him. She’d like to reach out to touch, but he’s not in the mood.
“So how was your trip?”
She thought he’d give her more time, but evidently Jack angry, Jack threatened and in distress, is not the patient man of every day. She’s rarely seen him angry, and even now he speaks casually, as if she’s been on vacation. But his face is unforgiving.
“Fine.”
“Oh. Fine. So that’s how it’s going to be.”
“Can’t we slow down a bit?”
“How slow? After dinner?”
“Look, I...First tell me how it is down at the site. Were you there this week?”
“Yesterday. Still chaos, but more organized chaos. No one’s expecting to find survivors anymore. They’ve cleared a road for the trucks so they can get the debris out quicker. That helps. Soon they’ll be demolishing what’s left of the smaller buildings. It’s hard to keep the construction guys in shoes. The shoes get soggy and stiff after a few hours. Some of the firemen don’t even wear masks, some kind of macho thing, I guess. They keep coughing. They take risks they shouldn’t, but so far so good.”
“I want to go down there and see. Now that I don’t have Julio, I can go. Maybe you can get me in.”
“It’s not a tourist site, Renata. There are too many people already. And it’s dangerous. You can’t tell where the ground might give way. Or things could fall. The worst is underground—the engineers aren’t sure what’s going on down there. Like if the walls are cracked, the river could start pouring in. A group of them went down to have a look Monday, a couple of engineers and two guys I know from the Port Authority. I hung around until I saw that they got back okay. Like going into an inferno. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Tell me about Julio, then. Did he get off all right?” All the while they keep passing the food around, filling their plates, reaching for the cornbread, gnawing at the ribs like famished people.
“I met Teresa and Carmen’s sister, Pilar, her name is, at the daycare place around three. I didn’t want to go in the worst way. I had to drag myself.” He tosses aside a bone and takes another. “I knew I’d have to tell them I was the one who sent her there.”
“But how could you know—”
“Let me finish, okay? I went. It was one of those dreadful scenes like I’ve had at the office for days, only this time I was right in the middle of it. Julio cried. They cried in Spanish. I didn’t cry. I’m not sure he remembered them. Do you think babies that age remember?”
“I don’t know. Probably a little. Did you tell them...what you said?”
“Yes. They’re very decent people. They tried to make me feel better. They said the kinds of things you keep saying.”
“And did you? Feel better?”
“No. But at least I could tell them what to do, you know, to get around the red tape. I can make that easier. But in the end, dead is dead. I can’t get around that.”
He’d like to, though. Beneath the amiable manner, such a lust for power. Not money, not high office, just control over life and death.
“Do you want some more collards?”
“Okay. So how was your uncle? You did say it was your uncle, didn’t you?”
“Yes. He’s half-dead. But we managed to talk some.”
“I’m sorry he’s so sick. But why the big secret?”
“You don’t need to be sorry. I don’t like him. I loathe him.”
“Then why’d you go? I don’t get it.” He leans back and begins folding his napkin into small and smaller squares. “Why, just at this moment, when I need you, did you have to go see someone you haven’t seen in years and you loathe besides? I’m not sure I even believe this uncle story.”
“Come on, am I in the habit of lying to you?”
“That’s a joke. If you don’t lie it’s because you don’t go near anything worth lying about. You just sort of leave out everything important.”
Not pleasant words to hear, but he’s correct. Just now she’s leaving out the important fact that she picked up a stray girl on the street and decided it’s her long-lost niece who disappeared ten years ago at the age of seven from the Central Park carousel, where she rode a rearing white horse with a red and black saddle and halter, not stationary but the better kind that goes up and down; they’d had their eye on that very horse and raced to get it when the music stopped. Disappeared—kidnapped, lost, evaporated into thin air, transformed? how do such things happen?—under Renata’s very eyes, though her eyes were averted at the crucial moment, a fact she’ll never forget. She also can’t forget that although she wanted to go on the carousel too, on the green horse beside Gianna (duller, stationary), the child begged to go all alone—“You always come with me. I want to go myself! I’m big enough!”—and Renata relented. “Okay, I’ll wave when you pass. Hold on tight.” She watched and waved, hardly ever looking away, only now and then glancing at a dirigible up in the sky advertising tires. Round and round spun the carousel. She’d promised Gianna ice cream from the cart a few yards away as soon as the ride was over. Gianna had wanted the ice cream first, but Renata was afraid the motion might make her sick. She turned away from the whirling carousel to gaze at the cart; the crowd around it had dispersed. The sign showed the varieties of ice cream, so vividly she could almost taste it on her tongue. The ride must be nearly over. She’d get it now, when there was no line, and have it ready when Gianna came off. By the time she returned holding the ice-cream pops, the carousel had slowed down. The parents milling around to collect their kids made it hard to find Gianna on her horse—it was on an inside row. When she couldn’t spot her the next time around, Renata leaped onto the moving carousel and raced to find the rearing white horse. She bumped into a child climbing down and dropped the ice cream. There was the horse at last, but it was riderless. She yelled Gianna’s name. She lost time, running frantically around the carousel while it circled in the opposite direction. She called for the operator to make it stop. Stop it, stop it! My niece! But it took forever to stop, and all the while she elbowed through the crowd screaming Gianna’s name. When the crowd thinned out there was no Gianna anywhere.
It was June, a week before school would be out for the summer. Gianna was finishing first grade. Another important fact she’s left out is that for nearly four years before that day, she had been virtually the child’s mother, taking over from the adoptive parents (unofficial, no papers, Peter said; it’s simpler that way), having had motherhood thrust upon her when she was nineteen and hardly knew how to begin. She learned by doing. That for nearly four years Gianna was her reason to live, her closest blood relative, not counting her mother of course, who could not be counted on for much in those days, less even than now. And that for over ten years the child has been one of the missing (though Renata never thought to walk around the streets holding up a photo as everyone’s doing now), a child in a police dossier who merited a brief article in the paper: more notice than if Renata had been a poor ghetto mother on welfare, less than if she’d been a rich and prominent corporate executive. One child of many, the police told her, as if that were any consolation.
She’s left out that even now, every month she phones the precinct, Captain Sheridan who took over six years ago from the retiring Captain Riley, to be told ruefully that nothing has turned up; there are sophisticated new techniques nowadays but unfortunately the trail is quite cold. It was never warm. Still, never say die, Captain Sheridan says. Where there’s life there’s hope. In other words, still tanfendi-oude, lost-but-possibly-not-forever. That she’s registered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and although the woman who answers the phone is invariably sympathetic—it was just three weeks ago, in fact, that Renata last called—the news is always the same. No leads have turned up. She calls from the library, where there are people around, where she can’t dwell on the fact that while Gianna was being whisked away in the crowd, she, Renata, had deserted her post, too impatient for her ice cream, busy making up her mind—pop or cone or sandwich? No, she hangs up fast and dashes into Linda’s office for a bit of diversion.
Incredible, how a child could vanish into thin air in the midst of a boisterous, jostling Sunday afternoon crowd, the first nice Sunday after weeks of rain and gloom, everyone in the city, it seemed, converging at the merry-go-round. “It sometimes happens that way, in crowds, the confusion,...” the husky black cop with the mustache said after Renata had screamed her head off and people nearby ran to call the police, not so easy in the days before cell phones. He bundled her into a cruiser and they sped through the park while cops on foot fanned out (she remembered that phrase, “fanned out,” and pictured them later as she lay in bed, dark-blue-uniformed men streaming out from the carousel like spokes furrowing the park), but they found no one furtively carrying a seven-year-old child, and no bodies in the bushes, as they regularly turn up on Law & Order. “What will they do with her?” she cried in the station, and the husky cop patted her shoulder. “How could this happen? I haven’t got any money, they can’t want money.” “We don’t really know, miss.” “Who would know? Who can I ask?” “We’re the police. We’ll do what we can.” “But how can I go home without her? How will she find me? She’s too young to find her way around.” She told them about Peter—even then she suspected him—and she told them about the Jordans, but they couldn’t find them, either. What were they good for, then, these obliging policemen? Whom could they find? They’re brave, they’re staunch, they pulled bodies from under the concrete beams of the towers, but they couldn’t find one seven-year-old.
She’s leaving out the fact that the girl reappeared on the street a few days after Tuesday’s disaster, reborn from the big bang. Five thousand people killed and one returned to life. Found. Find her, Grace said, and she did. That the girl has spent the past three days here in this apartment and was sent over to Cindy’s tonight precisely so Jack wouldn’t tell Renata she’s lost her mind, how can it possibly be the same girl, half the city’s hallucinating in one way or another. Poor Renata, the attack’s driven her round the bend, he’s been so busy he didn’t realize. Now he’ll get “help” for her.
All she said in her defense, lamely, was, “I’ve told you about my parents.”
Jack stood up. He looked so tired, slumped and creased. “You haven’t told me about you. You have no idea how frustrating...it’s like being with someone who came out of nowhere. It’s...I only know there’s something, you’re obsessive, with these words pasted all over the place. As if the way people talked were some kind of moral issue. You think this administration would be better if they all took a course in grammar? I doubt it. But never mind that. All this time I was waiting. I thought it just took patience. Because I loved you. But what did I love? Look, I’m not at my most patient. I’m exhausted. Maybe I should go.”
“Please sit down. Please.” Already he was using the past tense. Loved. She couldn’t watch him walk out. “It’s nothing like what you’re thinking. You think all women...because of Pamela. There’s no one from the past. It’s really my uncle. I had to see him. I wanted him to see me.”
He’d leave if she didn’t give more. He hadn’t even hung up his jacket; it was draped over the sofa, his battered briefcase beside it. She threw the remains of the dinner in the garbage while he stood waiting, then straightened up and leaned on the sink. This was the moment she’d dreaded since the first time they went to bed. She’d known then that if she ever took her clothes off with him again, it would eventually come to this. Everything in between had been postponing.
“You’d better sit down,” he said. “You don’t look too good.”
She sat. “I’m not the person you think you love. I’ve made so many mistakes.”
“Well, what does this uncle have to do with it?”
“It’s because of him that Claudia’s dead.”
“I thought your sister drowned.”
“She did. But he was there with her, down by the river. He saw it happen. She fell through a broken pier and hurt herself, and he just watched.”
Jack had heard a lot. He was used to weeping women and their sad tales. He found them lawyers or doctors, jobs or apartments. He knew how to talk to them. The last thing she wanted was to hear his kindly, professional tone. The kindness would be real, but kindness can be the hardest thing to bear.
He didn’t go professional. “Let’s go into the bedroom,” he said. “Tell me lying down. Everything is easier lying down.”
So they went into the bedroom and took their shoes off—no more than that; she didn’t want to be any more naked—and she told him. Selectively. The suburban life. Claudia’s pregnancy. The baby. The bloated body in the river. Not the hours spent trying to reconstruct the scene, with Peter a blurred shadow on the margins. Not the secret language, not the stolen money. The loss of her sister to death by drowning, yes, but not the loss while she was still alive. “I can’t talk no more about how I came up. It hurt to think about it.”
“She had a baby?” He looks around at the clippings on the wall about the lost or abandoned or abused children. “You never mentioned any baby before.”
“Yes, well, there was one. A girl.”
“What happened to her?”
“We gave her up for adoption. My uncle arranged everything. He had connections, he said. We didn’t understand then what he meant by connections. We didn’t know half the things he was into. My father was an innocent. He didn’t want to know. Peter was his baby brother and he always took care of him, ever since their parents died. He couldn’t let himself think anything bad about him.”
He’ll straighten out, Dan used to tell Grace when she complained about Peter’s irresponsibility, his laziness, shiftiness. That was Grace’s term, quaint but apt: shifty. Never any real job, though he was always driving into the city. Appointments, interviews. Give him time, Dan said. He’ll come around.
“It took me a long time to figure it all out myself,” Renata says.
This is the part she wants most to omit: how long it took. She doesn’t even have her father’s blind affection as an excuse. She simply willed herself to remain ignorant, while Grace willed herself into darkness. For surely Grace figured it out, and when she couldn’t look at what she knew, she chose the dark.
Renata’s ignorance took a more canny path. Even with her sister’s belly growing every day, she kept the scene in the garage in a separate niche of memory, a place to store anomalies, mistakes, exaggerations. But the truth lodged in her chest like a stone and grew, a living stone that got heavier all the time. She might have yanked it out, but she was afraid of what it would look like. What she would be once she’d seen it. She got used to the weight of it. She can still feel the touch of the fingers whispering down her spine, and the feeling makes her shudder and reflexively shift her body an inch away from Jack lying by her side.
“I should have known from the beginning. That it was his child. I don’t know how I didn’t. That was another reason I needed to see him, to tell him I knew now. And to find out what happened, that last night.”
“So did you? Find out, I mean?”
“Yes. Sort of.”
“Was that good? A relief?”
“Relief? I don’t know about that. What he said,...I’m not sure how much to believe. But I can put it together better.” Come on, I dare you. What are you afraid of? Yes, she believes that.
“What about the child? Did you ever see her afterward?”
“Oh, yes.” And she tells him how, after Claudia died, her mother sent her to see how Gianna was doing. Just check things out, Grace said, sitting in front of the mirror absently brushing her hair. She’d let it grow very long and wild, until she looked like a witch. Why don’t you go yourself, Renata said, but Grace only kept on brushing.
“She didn’t have the guts so she sent me. The parents—I hate to call them that but I guess they were her parents—they were okay with my visiting, once they realized I wasn’t trying to take her away. They lived on the upper West Side. They seemed okay. They had nice things. Expensive stereo, furniture, stuff like that. She was a secretary, I think, at an interior design business, and he worked in a store that sold musical instruments. What did I know? I was sixteen, seventeen years old. I didn’t pay much attention to them. I just wanted to see her.”
Jack shakes his head slowly. Though he must have heard far worse, he didn’t expect anything like this.
“I know what you’re thinking. How could we do that? But people do. We did. You have to imagine how it was. My mother couldn’t take it all in. At the beginning, she even wanted me to go and take the PSATs for Claudia when she stopped going to school. She wanted me to pretend I was Claudia. I could have pulled it off, too. But I wouldn’t.” Not because she was scared of lying or of being caught. Because she didn’t want to be Claudia, even in pretend. It was complicated enough being herself. Grace was angry. We have to stick together, she said. You’re not doing your part. Renata felt guilty, and then in the end Claudia didn’t need any PSAT scores.
“We didn’t even realize there must have been money involved, at least I didn’t. But there must have been. Some kind of deal.”
“Ah,” says Jack, and reaches out to touch her, not a light finger running down her spine—he knows better than to do that—but a broad hand stroking her back, hard. Not someone testing her but someone who knows her. “I see now, about Julio. I’m so sorry.”
No, he doesn’t see at all. He only assumes he does. She can’t bring herself to tell the whole story, the stages of collapse, the family caving in not all at once but buckling stone by stone. Claudia. Then Cindy left and Peter moved away, and her father started drinking and her mother unraveling. But she accepts Jack’s caress. She wills him to keep his hands on her skin; it makes it easier. He knows something now, and this should hold him for a while. I can’t talk no more about how I came up....
“Where is she now? Do you still see her?”
The man is insatiable, but she answers calmly, evenly. “No. Look, this is enough for one night.” She reaches out to touch his face. “And now will you stay?”
He pulls her close and she lies with her head on his chest. His arm is around her; she can feel his slow, steady heartbeat. Even after what he’s heard, he still wants her near. He murmurs the generic, soothing words you say to someone who’s just unearthed a boulder from her chest and is feeling too weightless, too excavated, to move. “It’s all right, it’ll be all right.” Meaningless words; it’s the voice that matters, and she loves his grainy, sexy voice, that odd, bumpy New York mixture of rough and smooth. She’s so soothed, it’s such a peculiar feeling to have cast off some of the weight, that her usual discipline is faltering. It’s like the lassitude after love, where you have to be careful what you say, you might be sorry later, you might be giving someone ammunition....She even thinks...She can hardly believe it, but she thinks she might tell him about Gianna, the almost grown-up Gianna staying in her apartment. Maybe he wouldn’t find her crazy after all. Maybe he’d help. He could be the dad. Or something close to it. Not “uncle,” though. That is not a role or a term she can even consider.
It’s so peaceful, lying here with him, she won’t plan whether to speak or not. She won’t shape any words. She’ll wait, and if words come out, fine. They may be assembling themselves on their own, as she rests. There’s more, she might say. Or maybe not. There’ll be plenty of time now. There’s something I need to tell you, she might say.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Jack says, as if he’s so close he can echo her thoughts. That would be the closest she’s ever been to anyone, since Claudia.
“What?” she says lazily, and smiles up at him.
“It’s about Pamela.” His voice is all grain, no smoothness.
“Oh, did you call? I totally forgot. Is she all right?”
“I saw her.”
“So?”
“I, uh, went to bed with her.”
Renata can move after all. She can spring away so they’re not touching at any point. “You...what? What’d you do that for?”
“I, uh,...I don’t know. She wanted to. I was pissed because you went away like that. Everything’s so crazy these days. She was so...distraught.”
“Distraught? Distraught! You fucked her because she was distraught? Waved the magic wand? So did it help? A mercy fuck? Was she less distraught when you finished? Traught? No, maybe tractable. How thoughtful of you. Always ready with a good deed.”
“I’m sorry. It didn’t mean anything, really.”
“Oh, please. Everything means something. How was it? Good? Great?”
“Not bad. I mean, I do know her....It was better than right before we broke up but not as good as when we—”
“Stop! Do you have to be so literal? Oh, Jack.” She’s sitting up cross-legged, and very glad she’s fully dressed.
“I thought it would be better to tell you,” he says sadly. “Because you were so open with me.”
“Open!” she spits out. “Well, you thought wrong. It’s always better not to tell. Silence is better than wrong words.” Emenast, any time, rather than prashmensti.
“No,” he says in that tone of utter certainty, a tone she both loves and hates, depending on the circumstances. When he says, No, forcing people to sleep in a shelter or leave their kids to work for a minimum wage is not a good idea, she likes it. Just now she hates it. “You feel that way right now, but in the long run—”
“Don’t tell me what I feel, okay? Just go away. You couldn’t bear to keep your stupid little secret so you had to lay it on me. Ease your conscience at my expense.”
Restraint is like a muscle. It requires exercise. If you train it, it will carry heavier and heavier weights. “It’s harder to keep your mouth shut than to spill it out. Believe me.”
“I understand,” he says. “But I wanted things open between us.”
“Will you stop saying that moronic word? You sound like a parody, you know? Next thing you’ll be talking about your inner child. Plus your timing is awful, to put it mildly. After what I just told you? Now?”
“I see that. I shouldn’t have said it just now. You’re right about that.”
This ability to be in the wrong and feel undiminished is something else she usually loves about him. He’s firmly rooted. Admitting a mistake won’t make him topple over. Only right now all his lovable traits are turning ugly. To be so firm is maddening. Is there no way to get at him? He can’t be torn to shreds as she’s torn other men, just to be rid of them. He’s like some miracle fabric designed for heavy-duty wear.
“I thought you went away to see someone. Not that that explains anything, I know. Look, Renata, is it really such a big deal? Considering how we are together?”
“I’m not sure. It was a big deal for you, wasn’t it? When you thought I was with someone in Houston?”
“Okay, so I’m inconsistent. At least I’m telling you. So it won’t come between us.”
At this piece of idiocy she can only roll her eyes. “Where did you do it?”
“Where?”
“Yes, where?”
“At my place. In my bed. Why?”
“I just wondered. Look, I’m exhausted.”
“Me too. Let’s go to sleep and deal with it in the morning.”
“It’s too early to sleep. I have to do the dishes. In the morning I have to go to work. Denise called, she wants me back. What does that mean anyway, deal with it? Get used to it?”
“Get past it. In the scheme of things—”
“If you say ‘the big picture,’ your life is in danger. Maybe you want to get back together with her.”
“No. I don’t even like her anymore. What I really want to do is sleep.”
“Go home to your own bed, then. Maybe its still warm.”
“You don’t really want that.”
“I don’t?”
“No.”
He’s right. She doesn’t want him to go home. She also doesn’t want to tell him anything ever again. Just let him stay. Don’t leave me alone with the words I dredged up. Drown them out, she thinks. Fuck me like you fucked her. Ram me into oblivion.
“You want me to stay and hold you all night. That’d be much better.” She lets him hold her. It is better. After a few minutes he says, “This is the longest, this last hour, that I’ve gone without thinking about...you know. It’s almost a relief to have a fight. At least you remember there’s a private life.”
“Mm.” It was that way when she saw Peter in the hospital, too. Exactly as the President predicted, in his words that leach gravity from all they touch. “There’ll be times down the road... But she doesn’t feel any relief. Being held in his arms is a pleasure and a pain. She did as he asked, told him what he wanted to know, so he would stay. And in return, look what she’s had to hear. Now he has his hand on her breast, he wants to make love, and in a moment he’ll be murmuring in her ear, he’ll be making her pulse and quiver. She’ll be rocking and gyrating like a belly dancer, slithering all over him like a mermaid, and that will be a pleasure and a pain too. A way of forgetting, however brief. And a way to ensure sleep.
The dream offered itself as a gift of color and motion, as if to compensate for the somber colors of the past week. She was part of a crowd gathered on a great lawn transformed into a fairground: balloons, streamers, music, booths where sausages were grilled and brightly colored fruit drinks were churned, and of course, rides. A Ferris wheel, a parachute, a carousel with prancing horses. She had on her favorite flowered skirt, brand new again, and she stood waving at the children on the carousel. Suddenly everyone stopped and turned to watch a new attraction, an enormous, slender rectangle made of particles of mist, or perhaps it was tinsel or glistening raindrops, suspended in the air, hovering a few yards above the ground. In the midst of it, a couple held hands and danced, kept aloft by the mist, swirling and dipping, their clothes billowing. It was so splendid and magical an image, so alluring, a tower drifting in air, its shimmering vertical streams like a delicate waterfall, that other couples ran to dance inside it too. Hand in hand they leaped up and were gathered into the tower of raindrops. Renata began running toward it, but something held her back. She was reluctant to make the leap alone and she retreated, disappointed in herself, her lack of adventurousness. She couldn’t accept her own dare. The tinsel rectangle rose and rose, with the floating couples dancing inside it, and gradually disappeared into the upper air. Everyone who’d remained below waited eagerly for it to return, to drift back down; they waited to hear the dancing couples describe what they’d found in the upper air. They waited and waited, Renata among them, until after a while they grasped that the tower would not reappear, and the dancing couples were not coming back. And then a wondrous horror came over them, at what they had witnessed.