The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  Sarah closed the door, leaned over to turn on the tap, hot, the way we liked it. I leafed through a warped paperback of The Portrait of a Lady. I felt panicky. The ringing persisted. Maybe I hadn’t been lying when I told Janos I wasn’t feeling well and left the ballet. Maybe the age difference between us was shrinking—that happened with men, the younger one seeming to age more quickly than the older one, trying to catch up. While Sarah ran the bath, I thought firmly: It’s all right. There’s still time. There’s plenty of time. I took off my jacket, my shirt. “Oh, hey,” I said. “I brought you a present.” I handed her the picture of May taking her last sequined bow.

  Sarah studied the picture. “Look at her! She’s beautiful. Thank you, honey.” She stuck the photo in the corner of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. “Where did you get it?”

  I shrugged, winked. She laughed. We got undressed. I unlaced my boots, pulled off my button-down shirt. Sarah took off all her bracelets and rings and put them in the aqua ceramic dish that rested on the windowsill next to the rabbit skull, the rialto with its happy little skeletons playing guitars and an accordion, and a tiny painting she had done of a man she’d loved years ago. The blob of white paint that was the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I added the signet ring to the ceramic dish. The curve of Sarah’s long pale back as she stepped into the tub was like the opening note of some song I’d known forever. I knew that mole, too, and the other, lighter one just near it. The stretch mark on her hip.

  “Have you lost weight?” Sarah eyed me as she held out her hand. “Come on.”

  I climbed in behind her and she lay back against me, splashing the water’s heat over us both. Our two sets of legs looked so easy together, so domestic, my rougher ones around her smoother ones, like parentheses. Her back against my chest was warm, firm, and damp. Her topiary hair was like thin, soft ropes.

  She clasped my hand in the water. “I’m glad you’re here. What’s up with Janos?”

  “He’s at the ballet with his mom. I’ve seen it before.”

  “Yeah.” The curve of Sarah’s ear, near my lips, was delicate. Her face was damp from the steam. I could hear the wind outside the house, pushing and knocking at the old walls. In the quiet bathroom, in the clawfoot tub, it was as if we were in a berth on a ship at sea. I felt snoozy, attenuated. “How’s your old lady?” murmured Sarah.

  “Still paying me. I’m her man.”

  “That’s cool. That’s good.” Sarah reminded me that it was time to send in our slides for the juried show in Queens. “We can’t be late, Gabe.” She sighed. “And, God, did I tell you?”

  “What?”

  “They promoted me. I’m an art director.” She made air quotes around “art director.” Sarah worked as a graphic designer for a fashion magalog aimed at preteen girls. She made beguiling things for the catalog on her computer; she knew all about fonts, and tiny invisible measurements that apparently changed everything, and how to make preteen girls feel special.

  “Cool.” I made the money sign with my wet thumb and forefinger. A pang troubled my wrist. I lowered it into the hot water.

  Sarah splashed an aimless splash. “I guess.” I soaped her back. Janos was probably helping his mother into the limo about now. The driver was folding the walker. Margit would be very happy; she adored the ballet. I was thinking that maybe I should turn around and join them at dinner when Sarah began to cry. She felt so terrible, she said. She’d been mean to some other man, an avant-garde puppetmaker, in this very tub, just the night before.

  “Jesus, Gabe,” she said. “Am I a monster? Am I?”

  Of course not, I told her, and to prove it I held her tenderly for a long time in the bath, my penis as silky and limp as a calla lily. Unlike, I had no doubt, the wooden penis of the puppet-maker. Sarah’s men were generally assholes. Sarah cried for a while, adding salt to the bathwater. I turned on the hot tap so she wouldn’t get cold, kissed her high forehead, her thin, wet fingers. I rocked her in the way she liked. “Shhhh,” I said. “Shhhh.” The ringing in my ears stopped, as if I had soothed it, too.

  “Gabe,” she said tearfully, “am I going to end up like Mrs. Wieznowski?”

  “How is that even possible?” I said, but I knew what she meant. I tried to sound sure of what I was saying. “Of course not.” I held her close while she cried about the puppetmaker. Janos and Margit, at La Giraffe, would be ordering from the bald waiter. How old, I wondered, did I look to the waiter? I should ask him, in a joking way, the next time we went. Janos would be having the duck, longing to turn on his cell phone. I ran the hot water until it ran out.

  “You know,” she said, sounding foggy from crying, “sometimes I want to go back to Arizona.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It’s so much cheaper there. We could both have huge studios out in the desert. Live in pod houses we built ourselves from a kit.”

  “That would be so great.” A tear straggled down her cheek. “Why don’t we do that?”

  “Okay. We’ll go back to Arizona.”

  “After we get into the show,” Sarah added.

  “Yes. Okay. I didn’t finish my piece yet, did you?”

  She nodded, still crying. “Yesterday.”

  I clambered out of the tub and held up one of Sarah’s thick towels. “Don’t cry.” I dried her off, helped her into her grandmother’s tattered red silk robe that always hung on the back of the bathroom door. One of my old T-shirts hung on the same hook. I put it on.

  Looking into the steamy bathroom mirror where May was now bowing in her sequins, Sarah quickly retwisted her hair into its outer-space twirls. Had May played an instrument? Did she have any talent? Rosy from our bath, we went downstairs, and by the light of the leprechaun lamp Sarah played me her latest variation of “Goodnight, Irene,” her tattered red silk sleeves gently fluttering as she pushed the keys, her topiary hair with the magenta streak at the part falling over her shoulders. She looked pretty and strange and something else—angry, maybe. Combustible. She had a sharp chin, tended to have dark circles under her eyes even if she was in a period when she was sleeping well.

  My Sarah. She was one of those constantly dissolving women, like sugar in vinegar in a jelly jar. I hated it that from certain angles I could see the woman whom men were drawn to, slept with, and ran from: the smart, edgy, artsy girl with the accordion, in the wacky little tumbledown house behind the house. She had been so excited to find it; she loved living in the footnote house. She had found it the same week I had found mine, on Pineapple Street, though she actually lived in hers, of course. She had footnote men, too—their main text was usually about someone or something else. The worst of her suitors, in my opinion, was Rodney, the married civil rights lawyer who called her from airports to talk dirty on his cell phone and liked to fuck standing up. He was much worse than any drug-addicted drummer or arrogant artist. Not that I had the right to comment, but still. He was.

  I hated it even more that from certain angles I could see what we looked like, how we were fading away, disappearing from the land of the living. Once upon a time, we went to parties or gave parties where we were the two people, our shirt cuffs dangling unbuttoned over our wrists, who whispered in each other’s ear, two not quite good-looking people exchanging superior glances. Castor and Pollux. From certain angles, angles that were more spiritual than strictly physical, we looked as if we might be brother and sister, or at least cousins. We were the sort of people who looked as if we were saying mean things about other people at the party, and usually we were. But not always. Now we didn’t go to many parties, and we both worked at fake magazines, ironically doing fake jobs that seemed to be becoming ominously real. My bull was bolted down to the middle of a traffic island.

  Why was I so moody tonight? I smoothed down the curling edges of the Band-Aid. That little blue goddess had really fucked me. Or maybe May was haunting me, playing a trick on me. The dead had to find something to do with their time. Maybe I shouldn’t
have stolen her picture.

  Sarah proudly held a note, her long fingers tensed. The song was sadder now, something she’d changed in the phrasing. The sound of the new accordion was as silvery as its fittings, fine, resonant. It sounded like it was distilling the fresh sorrow of the world as she played, humming along softly. I clapped again.

  We made a huge amount of spaghetti with olives, the good kind that Sarah savored as if they were truffles. After dinner, we ate marshmallows out of the bag and watched three Law & Order reruns we’d both already seen. I rolled my panging wrist around. There seemed to be pins in it.

  During a commercial, she said, “I feel like hell. Will you stay? Is that all right?” She bit her lip. “Maybe you want to go to Janos’s.”

  “No.” I felt very tired all of a sudden. “I’ll stay. Is my toothbrush still here?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well then.”

  After watching the local news, we went up to bed, tumbling into the creaky loft that was like the crow’s nest of a ship at sea. The white sheets were cool and soft as leaves; like the towels, the sheets were where Sarah spent her money. The rest she saved; like me, she was a hoarder. She was saving for her future. She tucked up her long legs and slid quickly under the covers beside me in her tattered red silk robe. Drafts, like ice fairies, skittered across our faces. Sarah turned out the rickety light that was clamped to one side of the bed.

  She curled up, fast as a wingbeat, against me in the dark. I held her slender body in my arms. She hooked her leg over mine. I pulled her close, stroking the long curve of her back. I twined one of her soft ropes of hair around my hand. She sighed, resting her head on my chest. We were who we’d always been. Her shoulders were small, silken, narrow. She was much more naked under her robe, somehow, than a man could ever be. I felt like her brother; like an animal in a den with another animal; like I was keeping watch. I needed Sarah without wanting her, and maybe to some people that would be a kind of sin. Worse than me and Janos. But she felt so real, the fact of her, her hard heels, her surprisingly strong arms. We had been friends, star twins, for such a long time. She pulled my arm around her, firmly interlacing her fingers with mine. It wasn’t as if I wanted to go home that night, anyway. My wrist began to ache again.

  Sarah breathed against me. We warmed up. The thing in me unlatched; the thing in her unlatched. Drowsiness began somewhere at the nape of my neck, seeped through me from the inside out, submerging my sore wrist. Her fingers, spread against my ribs, released, opened. I could smell the damp warmth of her hair. The short strings of time, of schedules and trains and deadlines, unraveled. Janos, in his townhouse near Gramercy Park, turned out the lights, turned on the security system. Sarah grasped one of my fingers, murmured something about Arizona; she, who usually slept so badly and whose dreams were bad, too, was already asleep. In the millisecond before I fell asleep, I heard that sound again, the ringing of a bell. I thought that a bell had rung, in fact, somewhere in the house. But Sarah didn’t have a doorbell. The bell—though it was more like the echo of a bell—rang again, more faintly. I pushed at my ear, shook my head. Silence. I returned to basking in sleepiness, in the warmth and endless roll of it, the clean scent of Sarah’s neck. With her so near me, I knew that there was plenty of time. Oceans of it. We were already rich. We’d both get into the new artists’ show. We were going there, to the warm island, together.

  Much later, sometime toward dawn, I opened my eyes in the gray light to see Sarah, in a sweatshirt and socks, at her desk. Her long runner’s legs were bare. She was busily writing, with the aid of a pocket flashlight, on a yellow legal pad. I hung over the edge of the loft for a few minutes, watching her. “What are you doing?” I finally said. The bell was ringing in my ear again, making my temples ache. Maybe it was telling me I needed more money.

  “Writing a letter.” She didn’t look up.

  “Who to?”

  “Shhh. I’m concentrating.”

  “Is it to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, it’s to you. Be quiet.”

  “Can I read it?”

  “No. I’m not done.”

  “Can I read it when it’s done?”

  “Maybe. Hush, I need to finish. I have to work tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Come back to bed.”

  She didn’t answer, intent on her task.

  “Sarah,” I said, “Sarah, do you love me?”

  She turned her head and regarded me seriously. “Yes, Gabriel,” she said. Her ropes of hair had come undone, and her hair hung down her back in long crimped strands, like a girl’s hair, or a grandmother’s. In this light, the magenta streak looked like unnecessary emphasis, like an arrow pointing out where she was. But she was right there, as always. “I do love you,” she said. The bell went still. Then Sarah returned to her letter.

  The next morning, Sarah and I drank too much coffee until she was late for work at the magalog, then we pushed our way onto the jammed L train. Back across the river, dutifully, in the ordinary way, like ordinary mortals. But the sensation persisted that I was fading, that I was losing density, that my bones were going hollow, open to the winds.

  Maybe this is why, or how, I started to change. Maybe it was my way of trying to remain in the world, to turn from fake to real.

  Of course, I could blame it all on Fleur and her stolen girls.

  On a chilly afternoon a few days later, I sat in my usual place on the hard, spindly chair with gold legs. Fleur was in her usual place as well—on the divan, a grand piece of furniture that was like the inside curve of a conch shell, tremendously magnified. The divan was upholstered in a gold brocade so dense that it looked as if a thousand suns had conspired to weave it. Scattered over the divan were various little oddly shaped pillows in gold silk with gold and silver tassels, and cashmere and mohair throws that over the years appeared to have grown together, like kudzu. Somewhere underneath all the throws was the cat. A white cat’s paw or tail would appear from a curve of mohair from time to time, then disappear. I had never seen the entire cat—for all I knew there were two cats, or six—and I had never sat on the divan myself; I think that if anyone besides Fleur had reclined there, spontaneous combustion would have been the instant result. The room was otherwise empty except for an ancient, no-color metal file cabinet in the corner and a dirty glass ashtray on the floor. Venetian blinds hung lopsidedly in the two small windows. My cut finger, still healing, hurt. My ears were ringing again. I shook my head like a wet dog, but then I felt dizzy.

  “Let’s go,” she said. Her s’s were very soft these days, almost completely melted. Fleur—I never called her Becky—was slight, a pencil sketch. Her hair, cut just below her ears, was sharply gray, definitive. I think she was seventy-five, though she admitted to being only sixty-six. Sometime in the past, she must have had work done, but the work had slid, unevenly. It was like her not to have it redone, or repointed, or whatever it is that they do. She cultivated a certain ferocity, even now. The immobile curl of her left hand lay on one of the mohair throws. Her right hand was poised on the keyboard of a laptop computer that rested on what I assumed was her tiny, scrickety lap, like a bird’s nest, far underneath all the expensive bedding.

  I took out the pages and the flash drive from the breast pocket of my suit jacket, which I always wore when I went to Fleur’s. I read the pages aloud to her in a clear, strong voice. Fleur pecked at the keys vaguely, as if she were typing, smiling with the half of her face that could smile.

  “And listen,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about how Miranda could get out of the nuclear reactor.”

  Fleur listened hard, a charged filament. She held out her hand for the flash drive.

  I had met Fleur by accident, when she was full-strength. Her sister the congressman’s widow had died, and Fleur—though I didn’t know she was Fleur then, I thought she was Rebecca—was the last of the four gorgeous, poor, fast-talking Sharp girls. They got around, those Sharp girls. When I fir
st phoned from the paper, we hit it off. We met for coffee, then dinner, then another dinner; she would send a car for me; since she never mentioned having had any sort of job, I thought she must have marriage money, maybe divorce money, like her sisters, who had all married or divorced well. She was clever and tough in ballet slippers, with a lingering trace of a Brooklyn accent.

  “I was born Becky Sharp,” she said over chanterelles at Chanterelle, “can you beat it? My grandfather’s name was Abe Sharpstein, but who’s counting?”

  “Not me.” I gave her my best crooked, wolfish smile. I figured she probably liked a touch of the rogue. I winked.

  Maybe because of the wolfish smile, or the wink, or maybe because she felt like it, she revealed to me that night who else she was. I was astonished. Fleur Girard! The Stolen series! You couldn’t get on a subway or bus without seeing someone, usually a tired woman in pantyhose and sneakers, reading one of the Stolen books. There were eight of them out then, eight installments of the adventures of the Stolen girls: Miranda, Leah, Natasha, Anna. (Stolen, Stolen Again, Stolen Victories, Stolen Moments, Stolen Blossoms, etc.) People couldn’t get enough of them. I told Fleur that—not that she was surprised that I said it, but she seemed as blushingly pleased as if she’d never heard it before.

  “They’re my muses,” she said unironically. “We’ve been through a lot together.” She shook her head, as if remembering things she couldn’t say.

  I was impressed. “I’ve read them all,” I blurted out, and then regretted it. It was almost too much, on top of everything else, to let her know I was a fan. It embarrassed me. And the Stolen series, of all things; it was so uncool. Of course, that was exactly why the tired women in sneakers and pantyhose, reading their way from Queens to midtown and back again every day, liked it. And why I liked it. Those four dewy coeds—now, eight books later, young women with demanding, super-high-powered jobs that involved much clicking of high heels over expertly polished marble floors and cream-colored La Perla lingerie cupping pert breasts under tight-fitting business suits—had been abducted by white slavers from their college suite, driven to revenge, reabducted, tortured, driven to revenge, cyberstalked by international cartels linked to white slavers and worse, and driven to revenge yet again, more than you might think was possible in fifteen or so years. But the women on the subway didn’t care. I didn’t care. Entire forests vanished so that Miranda, Leah, Natasha, and Anna could click-click, or crawl in silk lingerie, through the hidden seraglios, dark alleys, and boardrooms of the world.