IT FELT, FOR SO long, as if it had happened yesterday. The blue sky, the burst of fire so high up, the pillar of cloud, the rain of paper, the macabre dancers drifting down hand in hand. It refused to assume its proper location in the artifice of linear time—three weeks ago, six weeks ago, eight—demonstrating just how artificial is the notion of linear time. Every morning was the morning after.
That only-yesterday vividness lasted for a good while, and yet bit by bit, distance has begun edging its way in. What makes for distance is weather. It’s cooler now, some days even cold, even gray. It’s early November. Wisps of smoke still rise from the site; the fires will burn into the winter. The heavy machinery keeps clawing through the mounds; the newspapers chronicle the lives forever lost, whose numbers change every day—ashes are infernally difficult to count. But the sky and the air—their changes are undeniable. They prove time’s passage. And that makes it worse. It’s definite now. It really happened. Each day that the city wakes to the fact, the fact is firmer. Written in shattered stone.
If tragedy has improved the national character, the change is not yet evident. We are more somber, yes, and more angry, but those are not virtues. Like millions of others, Renata sits on her couch waiting to hear the President’s speech to the United Nations. He’ll talk about the war, naturally, about hunting down the evildoers in their caves, maybe the very caves where Bodo and Zuna once raised their family, and about liberating the people of Afghanistan and dropping parcels of food to show our goodwill. He’ll mention bioterrorism, since for several weeks now anthrax has been turning up in the mail and killing people at random. At the library there’s been talk of inspecting packages, particularly those from overseas. Denise even suggested rubber gloves, but Renata and Linda and the others didn’t go for that idea.
While she waits, she rereads a new clipping in her Transformed Lives folder. It doesn’t quite fit with the others, with Franco or Letitia or Mrs. Stiller, since it doesn’t describe a change in profession or way of life; it properly belongs in a different folder, one that might be called Lives Restored, but Renata’s filing has grown lax. The article is about Carmela Ortega of La Paz, Bolivia, who believed that four of her children, undocumented immigrants living in New York City, were killed in the attacks on September 11. She had good reason to think so: they all worked in or near the World Trade Center. “If you could only see the twin towers like we do,” her daughters would say when they called, and Señora Ortega would think, “How beautiful they must be.” Her children hadn’t telephoned that week as promised, and the money they sent regularly to support the grandchildren stopped coming. Then, in October, her fears were confirmed. She received word from her government that two of her children were dead. Señora Ortega managed to get a visa so she could attend an October 28 memorial ceremony in New York for the families of the victims. Once she arrived, she called a friend of her son’s and learned that he was alive. He came to her hotel in Queens and told her the other three were alive too. “Were suffering, we’re bitter, but we’re alive.” Señora Ortega visited each of her sons and daughters in turn, “was tearfully reunited with them for the first time since they had left home years ago.” Four happy, tearful reunions: Renata can easily picture them. But why hadn’t they called their mother? “All four were in shock,” the article says. One son is quoted: “I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to speak with anybody. I was left with nothing. I was in very bad shape.”
Here he comes. The speech is about to begin. First there’s applause, then a hush in the august chamber. He’s learned to control his face much better now; he doesn’t look perpetually on the verge of a grin. He speaks about the war. “We choose the dignity of life over a culture of death. We choose lawful change and civil disagreement over coercion, subversion and chaos.” As usual, he pauses an extremely long time between sentences. So long that it seems maybe his mind is roaming off somewhere else, somewhere more pleasant, as Grace’s used to do at her worst moments. Linda, who knows everything, once gave Renata an explanation for those long pauses. He’s got a little thing in his ear, she said. It’s telling him what to say. He finishes one sentence and they feed him the next. Just a few words at a time, you know how it is. The pauses give Renata time to think about Señora Ortega and her children. Her story is a transformation tale after all, she decides, a before-and-after tale. And just as Renata has seen herself as Franco Donati becoming one of his homeless subjects, or Mrs. Stiller traversing the broad deck of the QE2, she can see herself in this story too. She and Celeste Halloway both. Celeste is like Señora Ortega after, tearfully united with her lost child. Birthing Renaissance. And Renata is Señora Ortega before, not knowing for sure, but fearing that her child is dead.
“Peace will only come when all have sworn off forever incitement, violence and terror,” the President finishes. She could really turn it off, there’s nothing much to be learned from the fawning analyses to come, but he induces such paralysis that her finger won’t move. In the midst of the applause and the standing ovation, the phone rings.
“Renata? Did you see him?”
“Jack?”
“Well, did you?”
“Yes.”
“I knew it was coming, but somehow seeing, hearing him...At least if he understood what he’s getting us into.”
“You called me up to discuss politics? Whether we should go to war?”
“Well, not only that, but,...I just had to talk to someone about it.”
Jack offers a geopolitical analysis, apparently forgetting that they haven’t spoken for over six weeks. How difficult it is to root out terrorists with conventional military apparatus....How volatile is the situation....She might as well have listened to the commentators, and says so. What she doesn’t say is that she likes hearing his voice again, never mind the words. She feels suddenly warmer, more alert; the hairs on her arm actually tingle, as in a Harlequin romance.
“I’m sorry. Maybe you’re not as bothered by what he said. You’re more into revenge than I am. You were probably concentrating more on his grammar, right?”
“His grammar was pretty good, as a matter of fact. Not a bad speech, as far as grammar goes.”
“How’re you doing, Renata? Are you okay?”
“Fantastic.”
“Okay, I see you’re not thrilled to hear from me. I wanted to ask you something, though. I’m going to see Julio this Sunday. I just arranged it with his grandmother. Teresa, remember? I kind of miss him. I want to see how he’s doing. For Carmen’s sake, too. Do you want to come?”
Julio. The name conjures up the seventeen-pound weight in her arms, the nub of terry cloth, the dark eyes under long lashes, the softness of his cheek under her knuckles. It seems so long ago, that brief idyll with Julio, a prelude to Gianna and her silence. Sure she’d like to see him.
“Why should I go anywhere with you, Jack?”
“That’s not the question. The question is, is it better this way? Apart? Tell the truth.”
“No, it’s not better. But you made me give her up. How can I ever forget that?”
“You don’t have to forget it. You can get past it.”
“You mean like a roadblock? It’s kind of large. I can’t see the edges.”
“You would have taken her back yourself after a while. You know that. You just saved her parents a few days of anguish.”
“What about my anguish? You cared more about theirs than mine. You could have waited.”
“How did it go? You never told me. Except for that e-mail. That was a punishment. You’re very punishing, you know that?”
“She was adopted.”
That keeps him silent for a moment. Good. Just as she’s beginning to doubt her willed conviction, he’s starting to doubt his rational certainty. Very good.
“When?”
“Three years ago. From foster care. Before that, the streets. So you see—”
“Do you still think—”
“I don’t know. I try not to think too much.”
“I’ll help you if you want to look into it.”
“Oh, thanks. Thanks a lot. Now you’ll help me. You’ll bring the full weight of your wealth and bureaucratic savvy to bear on this ambiguous case—”
“Would you cut it out, please? Will you please remember we spent almost a year together? We slept together. We loved each other. Is this a way for us to talk?”
“Of course.” She may not know much about love, but she knows this much. “Only people who loved each other talk like this. I would have thought you knew that. You’re the one who was married. Speaking of marriage, how’s Pamela? You still seeing her?”
“Not any more. I saw her a few times. It was something to do. A diversion.”
“Oh, was time hanging heavy? With all your other rescue work to be done?”
“You’re jealous.” He has the gall to chuckle. “That’s a good sign.”
“You used her as a diversion?”
“We used each other. When we had enough, we stopped. Desperate times, desperate measures.”
“I see. Did you give back the dress?” Or did you cut it in strips and piece it together and cover up under it for love?
“The dress? Oh, the wedding dress. No. I forgot all about it. Maybe she did too. She never mentioned it. So, what about Sunday?”
“I’ll come.”
“Great. I’ll pick you up around two.”
“I’d rather meet you there. What’s the address?”
The twenty-dollar bill Renata picked up from a mound of paper on September 11 has been under the vase on the dining-room table for two months and she’s tired of seeing it. If it meant anything at all—an inscrutable message? an assertion that the past is never over?—that meaning has drained away. The chance of its being the same bill her sister stole from her when they were eleven was always statistically nil, less, even, than the chance of Gianna being the real Gianna. It’s time to get rid of that bill. Throw it away. Donate it to the survivors. Spend it. Sunday afternoon, just before setting out to meet Jack, she tucks it into her purse.
On the stairs she runs into Philip, the man from upstairs whose wife is somewhere in the rubble. He’s sweaty, been out jogging again, and still can’t manage more than a meager nod. She holds the door open for Mrs. Stavrakos, who’s lugging a full shopping cart and has reverted to her usual surliness. Her mumbled thank you sounds resentful. Well, something’s back to normal. Outside, it’s brisk and bright, the streets bustling with people. The trauma they’ve suffered is not evident except for a suspicious, vulnerable cast in their eyes, a tautness in their downturned mouths. Strangers might not notice, but the locals do.
As Renata heads for the subway she knows all at once how she’ll use the money burning a hole in her pocket.
Nestor is busy with a customer, so she waves and looks over his wares. They have the casualness of intimacy now, of family, after what they witnessed together. There’s nothing too. intriguing on the table, but she’ll buy something, anything, to get rid of the bill. It’s weighing her down, heavier every minute. Books about Islam and the Arab world are everywhere, all of a sudden, rushed into print or retrieved from the past. She picks one that might be useful for her translations. She takes one of last year’s best-selling novels. She finds a tattered copy of The Guinness Book of World Records, twelve years old; that will make a nice surprise for Linda, right up her alley. At Nestor’s rates these will add up to only three dollars, far short of twenty, but more books would be too cumbersome to haul around all day. For who knows, maybe she’ll be spending the day with Jack. The night. Maybe she’ll have a change of heart. He’s persuasive. Why not use him as he used Pamela?
“I’m off to visit Julio,” she tells Nestor when he’s free. “Remember, the baby I had for a week back in September?”
“Oh, the one whose mother—”
“Yes. He’s with his grandmother. I haven’t seen him in so long. I’d get him a book but he’s much too young.” Together they laugh at the very idea.
It’s a relief to hand over the twenty and watch it disappear into his pocket. As he counts out her change she says, “You really should keep the change, Nestor. I’ve bought so many books at these ridiculous prices. You’ve practically given them to me for nothing.”
“No. A dollar apiece is all. You take the change.” He puts the bills firmly, soberly, into her palm.
Perhaps she’s offended him. Does he think she meant to pay him for his help, for the trip to the Halloways? If only she could explain how much she needs to get rid of the money, to spend it where it would become innocuous. And how much she would like to spend it all in one swoop.
“It just doesn’t seem right.”
“No,” he says, smiling. He’s not offended. Mas valen amigos en plaza que dineros en casa. “Buy Julio a present for me. God bless you.”
Of course. Why didn’t she think of that? Julio must have a present, and there’s a toy store right around the corner. What was it the Vice President said—not to let what happened “throw off the normal level of economic activity”? And yet Renata, despite her taste for nice clothes, has barely shopped at all. Aside from the few things she bought for Gianna, nothing. It’s high time to start contributing to the war effort. But no slyly symbolic toys, nothing that would burden Julio with her history or assign him a role he shouldn’t have to play. Nothing reminiscent of the toys she used to buy for Gianna, and definitely no Fisher-Price farm.
It’s familiar, being back in a toy store after a decade. She and Gianna used to stroll through toy stores looking at dolls and stuffed animals and jigsaw puzzles. After the first year of her absence, Renata put all the toys into a closet. After three years she gave them away, for even if she were found, by then Gianna would have outgrown those toys; she’d be ready for...what? Renata didn’t know what a big girl might want. Her expertise ended with age seven. A computer, most likely. CD player? For Julio, she selects a large stuffed giraffe, elegant and comical in the manner of giraffes. Gianna never had a giraffe.
Toys have gotten expensive. She has to spend more than what Nestor gave her back in change. Meaning she has to mix those seventeen dollars—three fives and two ones—with the ordinary bills in her purse. Oh, never mind. That seventeen dollars is simply money, like any other. She hands it over happily to the clerk.
“Could you gift wrap it, please? Make it look really nice?”
“You’re late.” Jack’s greeting. “I thought maybe you changed your mind.”
“Sorry, I had a few stops.”
“What’s that?”
“A giraffe.”
“Oh, you got him something. Good idea. I should have thought of that.”
They’re standing in front of an eight-story beige brick building, functional, nondescript, and severely respectable for this fraying, maverick neighborhood. Across the street is Tompkins Square Park, the scene of countercultural escapades years ago, before Renata’s time. Now it’s merely shoddy, yet lively. Skateboarders skitter along the paths, dodging a few homeless stragglers, and adolescents with blue and purple hair cluster here and there like forlorn relics of a more colorful era. The trees appear in a state of partial dress, having shed half their leaves, which lie in unruly drifts of orange and yellow.
It’s easier to gaze at an unfamiliar neighborhood than at Jack, so familiar. But she must. He takes both her hands so that they’re face to face. The feel of his warm hands evokes the feel of his whole body: synecdoche, she thinks, the part for the whole. And despite herself, she flushes with pleasure. He looks the same, blunt, heavy-featured and powerful, and he’s wearing a suede jacket she’s never seen before. Been shopping, Jack has. Always the useful citizen.
“It’s good to see you.” He makes the banal words sound like something more intimate, like something he’d say in bed. He runs his hands up her arms, to her shoulders, to her face. “Your face is warm,” he says. “I miss you.”
“Let’s go in. Teresa, right? And Pilar?”
“Pilar won’t be there. She’s a nurse. She works weekends. Teresa works at Met Life, she told me. Administering some department or other.”
“Shh, he’s sleeping,” Teresa says as she opens the door, finger to her lips. “I’ll wake him in a little while. Come on in.”
Teresa is a surprise. Renata hasn’t thought much about her—her thoughts were all of Julio—but she must have been expecting someone different, someone stout, grandmotherly, like Mrs. Stiller, or a female version of Nestor, old, lined, and mysteriously wise. Wise Teresa may be, but hardly old, fifty at the most. And already she’s lost a daughter. Nonetheless she’s quite chic, coiffed and made up and perfumed. Renata can’t help wondering where she got the velvet burgundy jeans and the slate gray pullover. And could those silvery streaks in her black hair be natural?
Her apartment, compact, neat, and blandly furnished, is more comforting than the Halloways’ verdant, book-lined loft. On this visit, Renata accepts the coffee that’s offered, and as soon as it’s poured out, Teresa goes into another room to fetch Julio.
Renata gets teary when she sees him. “Why, you’ve grown up,” she says as she takes him in her arms. “You’re a lot heavier. You’re a big boy.” He settles cozily into her embrace, but she can’t be sure he recognizes her. Jack leans over them both, making silly noises. “Do you think he knows us?” she murmurs to him. “What do you think? I think he might.”
“Sure he does,” says Teresa. “Sure he does.”
She’s just being kind, Renata can tell. How good she seems. What a good grandmother she’ll be for Julio. She lost her daughter—one of her daughters—but at least she has the grandchild. Grace wasn’t so lucky. She lost more. All Grace has left is Renata, and that doesn’t seem to comfort her much.
Thoughts of mothers and children are inevitable, the thousands lost and those remaining.
“Carmen...” Jack begins, and clears his throat. Her name must be spoken, and he takes on the task. “Carmen would have loved to see how he’s growing. He’s even starting to look like her. Around the mouth and chin.”
So then they’re all three weeping, Teresa with restraint because her grief is farthest from the surface. The only one who’s not crying is Julio. He’s supremely contented, passed between Jack and Renata, and when she gives him the gift he’s ecstatic, swiping at the noisy wrapping paper.
“Oh, and he can crawl now,” says Teresa. She sets him on the floor for a demonstration; he scoots across the living room, then tries to pull himself up using the legs of a chair. “See, he’ll be walking soon. Any day now, right, Julio?”
It’s a good visit, good as could be, even if Renata isn’t absolutely sure Julio remembers them. The coffee is good too, and the cinnamon cookies. What she feels for Julio is good: she loves him, but has no trouble saying goodbye and leaving him. She loves him because of the days they spent together, not because he represents an opportunity for redemption. It’s not fair to lay any such burden on a child. Briefly, again, she recalls the Halloways, who chose Gianna to shoulder the gift of their wounded love.
It’s been so long since she’s found anything unreservedly good—like sleeping with Jack, also unreservedly good—that she nearly weeps again at the door.
“Come back soon.” Teresa holds Julio and makes his hand wave goodbye. “Come any time. Then he’ll start remembering you.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jack says. “I can’t tell you how sorry—”
“No more of that,” says Teresa. “No more. How could you know? You were good to work for. She always said so.”
Walking to the car, Jack takes her hand and she lets him. Not for the future. For the past. That way she can justify holding his hand. For what we lived through together, Julio, and Carmen, and now Teresa. For what we saw and felt that day, for what it was like to discover we were each alive and unhurt.
They sit in the front seat of the car but Jack doesn’t make a move to start the engine. “So?”
“So what?”
“So there’s only one issue here,” he says. “Is it better together or apart?”
“That’s it? So simple?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s not better apart. That’s not hard to answer. The hard part is...I’m not sure I can do it. I’m not sure I want to.”
Since she’s resumed her usual tasks at the library, she’s gotten to know Etinoi, her favorite language, pretty well. It has a word that perfectly mirrors her condition. Tsubari, a noun for an emotional and intellectual state (the language does not strictly separate the two), means harboring feelings so conflicted as to produce an impasse, a paralysis of the will. People gripped by tsubari want two mutually exclusive things equally, and they can find equally compelling reasons for either choice. It’s a word with a humorous cast, although the situations in which it applies are not always humorous. Those who tend often to be in such a state are called tsubarendi, unable to distinguish between the essential and the extraneous. Jack would never find himself in a state of tsubari; he would always cut through the extraneous and make the sensible choice. Therefore people like Jack, earnest, well-meaning, and so pragmatic as to be oblivious to the finer points, are judged to be good administrators but poor at diplomacy, on the large and small scales. People like Renata, prone to tsubari, who think far too much and too tortuously, are judged to be useless in the public or practical sphere, yet are respected for their subtlety and may be consulted on matters requiring close analysis. Often these are matters concerning ahmintu, the principle of engaging thoroughly with one’s fate. Everyone wants to honor ahmintu, but how to do so, which choices to make and which to refuse, is not always clear.
Such as now: If she cedes herself to the future and gives up clinging to the past, would it be a betrayal? What about her dead father and sister, the lost Gianna, her anger, her remorse?
We have to live as if we have a future, Jack said, the last time they really spoke. Even if the future is an endless war, as the government promises? She could ask Jack, but she knows exactly what he’d say. Sure, war is terrible, but it has nothing to do with whether you’ll have dinner with me and then come home and sleep with me.
There is a connection between the public and private life, but Renata knows that that connection, just now, is merely a distraction. It’s not what’s causing confusion and making her a tsubarenda. Something else is working its way through her, a creeping vibration in her cells, an uneasy humming, but one that may lead her out of paralysis. It concerns what is finished and what is not. For all her anger against Jack, his obtuseness and simplicity, for all her hesitation, the vibration now undeniable as a pain or a hunger tells her she’s not finished with him yet. Simple: they haven’t come to the end of each other. There’s more they have to find out, more common life to partake of, more to relish or suffer at each other’s hands. As for the rest, the past, there’s nothing more there.
“Well, do you want to go somewhere and have a drink? Maybe even dinner later? It’s not a lifetime commitment.”
“Let’s start with a drink.”
They get out of the car and walk, no longer holding hands. “Are you still reading the Arabic newspapers? Do you sound like a native speaker yet?”
“Nowhere near. I sometimes talk to the waiters in the restaurants on Atlantic Avenue. They think my pronunciation is pretty funny, but they’re very helpful.”
“So you’re going to restaurants without me,” he says wistfully.
“Well, I have to eat. Did you expect me to waste away?”
“Okay, say something in Arabic, then. Let me hear if you sound any better.”
“Nothing can ever be the way it was,” she says in flawed Arabic, echoing what her mother told her weeks ago.
“And that means?”
She tells him.
“You mean the world can never be the same? Is that what they’re saying in the papers over there? That’s what they say here, too. But, really, we have no perspective yet.”
He can be so dense, it makes her laugh. “I wasn’t thinking on a global scale.”
“Oh. I see. Okay, say something else. See if I do better this time.”
“Make me love you again,” she says.
“Wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess. That sounds like, ‘I can’t forgive you but I still love you.’ ”
He’s close, very close. Remarkable, to be so known. She hasn’t felt so known since Claudia was alive. “Not quite. It means, okay, let’s have dinner.”
The light starts fading earlier now, in November. There’s a chill in the air. She puts her arm through his, for the warmth.