Words are pointless. How to explain any of this, where there was purpose but no reason? Her eyes open and glassed, the straight line of her mouth blue. Santos reaches to touch her face. His lips part to speak, but she puts a finger over them. Her rhythm is slow and exact, calm, her eyes turned inward, mute eyes that seem to be looking at him from the bottom of a pool. As though this lovemaking is more an ambition than it is desire, to right a wrong or at least smooth a way. Claire's thighs tighten and her stomach heaves and she gulps air and she shudders, then she caves into a cloud of their mingled breath. He clutches to her as to a life preserver. Maybe saving him, no matter the consequences, is her ambition. Burying his face in her red hair enormous and everywhere.
Hours later his eyes startle open. He turns his head to his reflection in the window and takes Claire's hand-she is asleep-and places it, like a living mask, over his face. But from beyond the bars her fingers make, Isabel returns his stare. Her eyes are flecked with grains of sand, and they are making demands.
2 A.M.
In an overheated lobby filled with weak and twitchy light, Nathan shoulders open another door and steps into a little apartment where there is no sign of movement, plant life, air. Through the curtains, up in the clouds, lightning, continuous, splits the sky in fiery convulsions, illuminating like signal flares the surrounding apartment towers. A blank grid of wide boulevards named for plants and trees. From behind the walls at the development's edge, trees rise coated in glass, like the hands of drowned giants.
He stands in the opening between living room and kitchen, breathing heavily. Clothes are strewn across the carpet, the door to a highboy unhinged, a shattered bowl, its chocolate-covered candies scattered like birdseed. Against the far wall, the long shelf of opera records that belonged to his grandfather, Joe the plumber, has been rifled through, the old vacuum-tube phonograph below it, long ago burned out, torn from its perch and made off with.
The spotted legs of an old woman surface out of a corner shadow. In a leather easy chair, a gift from Nathan years before, she leans forward, closing her robe at her throat. Her tangled cloud of hair crinkles electrically.
"It's me, Rose," Nathan said.
She reaches, loose and frail, and the hand that clenches at him trembles like a bird.
"What are you doing up?" he asks.
"It's late."
"Surprised I'm here?"
"I didn't say that."
Nathan looks around. "What happened?"
"They were here to fix the pipes."
Nathan looks back at the kitchen table. Her pocketbook has been upended, lipstick, billfold, candies, pennies, three prescription vials spread over the table. A low, continuous murmur of Yiddish pours out the radio.
"Were the pipes broken?" he asks.
"I don't know."
"Did they have tools?"
"I don't know."
"How many of them were there?"
She turns her head toward the kitchen, toward the front door, toward the short hallway to the bedroom, as though sending her memory to rewalk the route. "I don't know."
"Two? Three?"
In the darkness she wrings her hands.
A leak of indignation has sprung in him, but he doesn't know where from, or in what receptacle to catch it. The thieves could well have been his clients. He has fought for and won acquittal for men who have done far worse.
"They take all of Joe's things?"
She says nothing.
"When?" he asks.
She turns her head.
"Two days? Three?"
She nods, little bobbles of her chin.
"You've been sitting here for three days? Why didn't you call Milton?
She shrugs.
"You sure you're all right?" No reply. "How much did they get
Nothing still.
"What was in the purse, Rose?"
She holds out her hand. Her lip is quivering now. Her voice like the cry of a cat. "Maybe five dollars."
He walks back toward the bedroom. His name is called behind him. "Are you hungry?"-an old routine: she hasn't cooked in years.
"I already ate."
"I can heat up some eggs."
He stops along a wall and is confronted with his genealogy, everything aslant, a gallery of faces glowing darkly out from behind picture glass dulled with grease. Everyone dead or ceased breathing in that form. Their various guises: ballplayer, graduate, attorney. Milton in his first days as a T-man, turned to display the contents of his shoulder holster. The child he sees beside him, in the Silver Shadow, heading to school, watches the man's massive shoulders and arms jerkily spinning the wheel. Up the boy goes to his knees and, kneeling high, takes measurements with his hand between the man's head and his own, shifting as necessary and craning his neck if need be to make their heights exactly, precisely the same. It is all the boy can be sure of passing off: from the back and at a distance two heads in silhouette are two heads in silhouette, anything the boy desires, a pair of friends, a couple of cops, two grown men and not the father and his little boy that they are. And this man, this boy's mate, pays no attention to the pesky hand hovering around his head.
She clears her throat in the room behind him. "Which one are you looking at?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're looking at the pictures."
"No.”
"I can hear you."
A baby in his mother's arms. "Third from the right."
"That's you."
"That's not me."
"Yes that is. That's you."
Watery eyes stare out at him. At seven years old a wisp of golden hair. He'd forgotten he started out blond. All night he has tried to raise that child's face in his mind, but all he can remember is an old summer in which the huge hand clamps to his as he is led to the Coney Island carnival and the passing image of his own eyes open to the Wonderwheel toppling, its passengers spinning in place. The tattooed girls writhing. Invisible rockets shooting aloft and scattering in colored spiders and dripping, like the caps of gargantuan fools, into the countless eyes, the faceless sea of upturned heads, heads like his. Upturned to his grandfather, Milton's father, Joe, sweet man.
One night early that winter at seven, during the first impressive snow of a winter of impressive snows, Joe and Rose came to stay the night and were given the master bedroom. This was in Queens, before Milton's big cases, before Central Park West. Their modest row-house on a street of row-houses. Nathan's mother moved to Nathan's room and Milton and Nathan moved downstairs to the convertible couch. The actual incidents of the visit are gone from his memory, but Nathan assumes them, as one can: the moments spent passing a fragile coexistence, a faint hostility; ice clinking in glasses, a shiny and crowded dinner, a fire.
Then a blundered moment. A little after midnight, Nathan woke beside his father on the pullout couch and opened his eyes to a succession of threatening sounds. He checked his body with the body at his side, unconsciously mimicked it, calculating the required adjustments. But Milton was sitting bolt upright, yards, hundreds of feet, above him, as still and as silent as though this was the position in which he'd fallen asleep.
The boy, Nathan, reached up. Hands clenched in rage, Milton warded off the touch. There was something deeply wrong. The room gyrated with snow shadows, rained with the blue streetlight. Tree branches and ice chips slid in sinister silence along the walls. Table and chairs turned and danced and all the storm was silent, as though mimed, its fierce howls chained somewhere safely outside. Camouflaged, wrapped by the arms of light, Nathan could not escape if he tried. So he turned, as Milton had turned, toward french doors where beyond there was groaning, whistlng, snorting, and a soliloquy in a strange language. Through the spinning trees and snow in the next room moved the faint image of Joe with an overcoat wrapped perilously around his shoulders. His head bowed, he stuttered, stopped, gestured wildly, then stumbled forward, dragging his feet across the living room floor, and again stopped in a deliberate sort of hesitancy. Milton,
no longer immense but merely unwieldy, clumsy, did not scoop and cradle the boy in safety. He did not save him. Instead, the boy watched his father's watching and his grandfather's confused slog into the interpretation of old dreams. In a month the old man was dead.
In the bedroom doorway Nathan finds himself shoulder to a column of pencil markings in the wood, random dates beside each in his grandfather's scrawl, the last just below shoulder level: Mr. Nathan, nine-years-old.
His grandmother's bed is made but the cover is askew, the pillows fluffed and misaligned. The bureau drawers lie overturned on the floor, underwire brassieres and stockings and pennies crushed beneath them. A coffee tin, her secret stash for phantom grandchildren and rainy days, lies empty on its side, its top flung away. Nathan stands looking at it.
"Good thing they didn't get to the coffee can," he calls down the hall.
"They'll never find that."
He squats over it. "How much do you have in here?"
"I'll never tell."
Nathan straightens his leg to get at his billfold and what change he has. He peels off a few bills and restuffs the can.
He returns to the living room and when he grabs her her shoulder seems to come apart in his hands. "You mind if I put on a light?" He tries one lamp then the other. He bends to peer under the lampshades. There are no bulbs.
"When was the last time you had bulbs in these lamps?"
"When was the last time you were here?"
Nathan can't remember. "Hasn't Milton been to visit?"
She says nothing.
"He says he comes every few days to see you." Nathan waits but still no response. Then he didn't tell you about the new case.”
"New case?
"He's a bastard," Nathan says.
"He's my son."
“He's my father."
“You don't talk that way about a father."
"Well."
Nathan sits across from her and stretches his feet before him. He reaches for the back of his head and holds it steady and yawns.
His grandmother cocks her ear toward the hissing drone in the radio.
“You like that," he says.
"Stories for old women. Can't I get you something to eat?"
"I'm all right."
"Here, let me."
“I will. I'll do it. You sit."
In the kitchen he stands before the refrigerator he has known all his days. It once bloomed with life, leaves and fruits and wrapped y meats and eggs with candies and bottles of sugary drinks. Blood sacs of golden yolk. Tonight, a brown banana sits on a wire shelf, kinked and shriveled like a link of old sausage. Nathan rattles around, makes noises.
"Thank you," he says.
"Good?"
"You sure I can't get you something?"
He eyes the phone, considers the call, the money.
“I couldn't eat a thing, honey," she says.
Ashamed, Nathan leaves the phone, walks on.
He takes from his jacket an envelope. He takes out a half dozen sheets of paper and holds them up to the window. Maria Rosa, Last Will and Testament.
His grandmother cocks her head, her eyes blankly attentive.
"What do you have there?"
"Just something I want you to sign for me."
At her side he kneels and sets her fingers around the fountain pen and leads it to the line at the bottom below a signature already there, his. The pen droops, and he sets it upright again and kneads her fingers back into place. Her other hand he takes and straightens, pressing her fingertips to the space she is to fill, guiding her to guide herself.
"What is this?" she asks.
"You're my witness."
"To what?"
Nathan opens his mouth to answer, then shuts it.
"Is it a will?" she asks.
He smooths the papers on his grandmother's knee. "For my corporation.”
"Your corporation."
"Yes.”
"I can't see it," she says.
"You don't need to see it. Here it is."
"But I don't know what it says."
"It says just what you'd expect."
A pulse of sight surfacing one last time through her dead pupils holds him where he kneels, as though to assess and decide. For months after she insisted she could no longer see she gave directions from the backseat of cars and never failed to distinguish the denominations of her money. But now her eyes, drifting, are off by a degree, as though she is searching for something in the next room, for something, an answer, written on the ceiling, to make itself known.
He bears down on her hand, guiding it toward the page.
Meekly: "Who is in your corporation?"
“Me.”
"Just you?"
"Just me."
"Can you have a corporation with just one person?”
"Yes, you can."
"Why would you want that?"
Nathan breathes. "To protect me. They can get to the corporation but they can't get to me."
She reaches out for him and misses. "Who wants to get to you?”
"I wouldn't bother you with it."
They sit for a time in silence. In her presence, an ease of routine gestures and automatic rhythms. The dark and dry heat of this old apartment like a dreamroad in which everything that has gone wrong has not yet begun and everything that will be right is yet to come. The window, he knows, faces east, and beyond the landfill and the harbor lie open water and the horizon. They sit a long time facing that direction. The night, lightning-struck, cracks like glass and is mended back again.
"It will be light soon," Nathan says. He looks nervously at his watch. "Just a few hours."
After she signs she does not pull away, and Nathan does not let her go. Her hand is cool and slack, and they sit holding each other, waiting. He watches the window, she the cei'ling, as if they are bracing for the thunder.
Sometime later she pats his knee. "You're a good boy," she says. "It's a good day when you visit. It's going to be a good day."
MONDAY
6 A.M.
He falls in sleep into the windless pocket of a rowboat, squinting one eye then the other, seesawing the pale gray light across the bridge of his nose. It is midday, or seems to be. The sun, what he can see of it, is a high dim peephole into a suspended furnace. The surf slides away against the rocks, pinching white geysers into the air. Strewn about in the seawrack the green faces and the splayed legs of women dragging their toes in the foam, their robes pooling beneath them. Their breasts afloat on the rocks. Ropes of hair fanned as if to dry. A cloud of frenzied gulls darkens the sky. The birds shuttle back and forth from their midair float to the bodies below, gangs of them carrying out coordinated sorties on one and then the other. Amongst them, on no particular rock, a sandwiched pair scuffles, the woman beneath gulping, the man on top arching rhythmically, doughy buttocks and head bucking. The man turns his head toward the sea. It is Nathan himself. Nathan watches himself smile menacingly, turn away, concentrate downward. jammed in the last of the boulders lining the beach the first of three rows of crosses faces the ocean, the crosspieces like the arms of irritable fathers hoisting their dozing sons, picking at their sagging elbows to keep their eyes on the show. The wind is stiff and wet and when it drops he can hear the cries from the back row of crosses where the blood-oiled wood glistens in the sun. The heads tick-tock like metronomes. Pinned wrists and ankles pry at the iron tacks. He sees himself stand from the rock. The woman below is not moving. He knows that face, he knows her name, and he can see himself clearly, can see himself clearly-
What time is it when he senses someone or something nearby? Nathan opens his eyes to the cloth ceiling of the car, fingering a birthmark on his own neck. His blazer is laid over his chest like a blanket, the steering wheel crowding him, the dashboard clock blinks its odd hour in incandescent green, while outside nothing at all is clear. The growing dawn-if that's what this is-is violent and webby. It is still sleeting, or sleeting again.
He wipes
away his stale breath from the glass and looks up to the high parlor windows of 11 Cheever Place. Its sweeps of white curtain, the soft glow of the lamppost. The flower boxes are empty, which he thinks strange until he reminds himself again what month this is. Here and there the stoop lights have been kept on, beacons of happiness, ways home. Furry tinsel rims the windows; plastic reindeer graze the little yard of blue-stone slate a few doors down. A young father in an undershirt leans out a doorway, bending for the morning paper in the snow as though offering the invisible authority of the day his freshly washed head. Nothing seems to have changed. The same beaten trash cans, a few more cracks in the sidewalk. The same neighborhood on the wrong side of the edge of respectability.
Claire must be up. She'll have court, she'll prepare notes at the table letting out on the little garden, pour herself a second cup of coffee then let it grow cold and leave it for the office-
"Honey," she will say. "Look at me-there's nothing keeping us here anymore."
Nathan is sweating, his whole frame trembling.
"What are you afraid of?"
"Everything.
"Let's go. Let's go today."
He puts his arm around her for support, dropping his damp head on her shoulder like a child. A shield of tenderness and guardianship has fallen around them. "Why not," he says. "Let's get away now while we can."
– piercing the wild sky, the roiling clouds, toward the perfect golden yolk of sun, the crisp mountains stretching end to end along the horizon-
"Do you mean it?"
"I mean it. I mean this. But, Claire-I've fallen, somehow. I won't be the same."
Sweetly, a hurried whisper: "Never mind."
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