Fearless

by Rafael Yglesias

  “I’ll be happy to get out of here,” Carla told him. She walked out, passing the silver-haired mother. Now she was the one who hung her head, ashamed. “Take my advice,” Carla said to her. “Go home. He can’t help you. He’s a witch doctor.”

  In the corridor outside the conference room she could hear the slow traffic grumbling toward the tunnel. Her heart pounded with rage. But she felt good. She felt better than she had for a long time, maybe the best she’d felt since it happened. As she walked to the front of the lobby, her legs—even the damaged one—had spring and energy. She was eager to find Manny and go.

  She saw her husband’s back leaning against the half partition of a public phone. He was always on the phone since the crash, either talking to Brillstein or telling his friends about the lawsuit.

  She hurried to him, dancing across the blue carpet. The prospect of being alone with her husband was thrilling. She imagined them returning to New York in the car with the whole day ahead of them. They could go to a movie. She hadn’t been to a movie since the crash. Was the Rockefeller rink open? She had taught Manny how to ice-skate—a passion of hers—and she imagined skimming on the big-city ice with her husband, just having fun for no reason at all.

  She was stopped by a strange ugly sound. She looked around to find its source. It frightened her when she realized the noise came from the phone booth.

  “Manny,” she called faintly. She hung back, afraid to touch him.

  He had on a tan windbreaker. Huddled forward in the booth, his head was bowed. He hadn’t heard Carla. His muscular shoulders flexed and stretched the material to the limit. It quaked from his sobs.

  “Oh baby,” he moaned into the receiver. “I can’t take it anymore. You can’t leave me. I can’t handle this by myself. I need your help, baby.” The words were yawned out of his weeping.

  He’s crying, Carla comprehended, amazed. He had never cried in front of Carla, not for his dead mother, not for his dead son.

  “Don’t leave me, baby,” he blubbered.

  The lobby was cold. Chilled air leaked in from the glass doors. Her throat closed. She knew in her bones that he was talking to another woman, crying for her. Crying for a woman! All those whispered phone calls; Manny acting so strong, rushing around doing things for the lawsuit, concerned only about the money, all of it, bullshit and lies—he was chasing after another woman.

  “I can’t do that to her,” he spoke abruptly, supposedly in answer to something the bitch on the other end of the line had said. His voice had cleared.

  Think of what kind of person she must be. To sleep with the husband of a woman who had just lost her baby. But that’s exactly what makes the world so disgusting: they tell you they feel sorry for you, that they care about you, but everybody is only out for themselves, relieved that it didn’t happen to them, that you’re the one with the bad luck.

  Carla walked right up behind her husband and grabbed his straight shiny black hair, his bastard mulatto hair. She pulled as hard as she could. He yelped like a dog.

  Manny twisted out of her grip, cursing. His hand was up, ready to punch his attacker. At the sight of Carla he looked terrified.

  “You fucking bastard,” Carla said. “You’re going to burn in hell.”

  Manny must have agreed with her. He let go of the phone and fell to his knees. He pleaded silently with Carla, begging with his black eyes. Only for a moment, though, before, scared by what he saw in Carla, he shut them to whisper, “Oh Jesus.”

  She wanted to kick him in the face. She was going to but she couldn’t breathe and her legs buckled. She tried to call out to Manny to help her. Instead she fainted onto the Sheraton’s blue carpet.

  16

  Max closed the business Thanksgiving week. Gladys continued to believe he would change his mind up through the last day. She didn’t seem to be convinced even then.

  “Max, I won’t look for a job until the summer. But if you need me, just call.”

  Max found Warren a job at Turner Construction, where Max had worked when he was fresh out of graduate school. Young Betty was going West with her boyfriend and didn’t plan on looking for work until the spring. Scott stuck to his plan to use his unemployment insurance and his savings to fund another go at painting. Warren’s new situation meant he was secure (as was Gladys, who didn’t need to work; she needed to be out of the house to escape from her retired husband) and yet Warren was the most upset and nervous.

  “I’ll probably get fired in six months,” he mumbled whenever someone congratulated him or encouraged him to be cheerful.

  The funniest part of the shutdown was the reaction of clients, old and new.

  “Why?” prospective clients asked. They sounded appalled and nervous.

  “I’ve decided to retire early.”

  “How old are you?” one astonished woman asked. When Max said forty-two, she said, “Well! Lucky you.”

  Another man who wanted Max to design a house for him—“Just like the house you built for my brother-in-law, only better”—was more persistent. “How the hell can you afford to retire at forty-two?”

  “I was in a plane crash,” Max answered.

  “They pay you for that?” the man asked.

  “Yep,” Max said. “Big dollars.”

  “Were you hurt?”

  “No,” Max said and smiled at the thought. He didn’t want to bother to explain the insurance money was for the death of his partner.

  “They pay you even if you don’t get hurt? Gee, I would think it would be kind of exhilarating. Living through something that horrific without a scratch. Maybe even a positive experience.”

  “It was,” Max said, “and one of the things that makes it so positive is that they’re paying me.”

  “Well, I’m glad it’s so nice for you,” the man said, anger joining his surprise. “But frankly this is the kind of cockamamie arrangement that’s destroying this country.”

  Old clients were hurt or concerned. “Are you okay?” one asked and then added, with a nervous laugh, “Guess you’ll be glad to be rid of your pain-in-the-ass customers.”

  “Yes,” Max agreed, calm and unimpressed by their reactions. He moved through conversations and day-to-day errands as if he were a passenger on an express train watching small towns go by; they blocked his vision for a moment, only to be quickly forgotten by his steady, armored progress.

  He took a final walk through the empty offices on Thanksgiving morning to make sure everything had been taken. Shutting the door behind him, he decided to leave it unlocked since there was nothing to steal. He had a moment of fear, the bitter taste of cowardice rising from a hollow stomach, and then bursting through it came happiness: he was walking away from the scene of so much compromise and frustration.

  Thanksgiving dinner was held, as usual and as required, at his mother-in-law’s. Required because her self-satisfaction and family fame came as a cook. Flora shared Debby’s height, excellent posture, and slow, graceful movements; but decades of dinner parties for her husband’s academic colleagues and family celebrations had thickened her body and given her face the warm, well-fed appearance of mothers in children’s book illustrations. And she played the role as well, treating her forty-year-old daughter as if she were six and maintaining a quiet but ominous presence about her grandson’s health, like that of a Secret Service agent guarding the President.

  Shortly after two in the afternoon Max, Debby and Jonah walked to his in-laws’ apartment on 103rd and Riverside. It was a dangerous neighborhood when Max and Debby first married. Harry and Flora bore the danger because their ten-room apartment with a high unblocked view of the river and a working fireplace was cheap and kept cheap by rent-control laws. Besides, his father-in-law Harry could walk to work at Columbia University—even though he was mugged once a year. He once went to the hospital to be stitched but otherwise was not badly hurt.

  The indiscriminate renovations and conversions of the 1980s had changed the area. It was now an expensive dangerous neigh
borhood. Since their building had gone co-op, they paid a large monthly mortgage and an ever rising monthly maintenance. Of course on paper, at the height of the real estate boom, they could have claimed to be millionaires. Boom or bust, however, Harry continued to be mugged yearly.

  Max was not happy about this year’s gathering. In line with tradition, Max’s mother and sister were both coming, but this year Nan and her two fatherless boys would also be there because Nan had quarreled with her own parents. She insisted on living in New York City rather than moving in with them in New Jersey and saving money. This combination of people didn’t seem promising, but that wasn’t the worst of it. As they walked up Riverside Drive, Debby told Max that her mother had also invited Byron and his parents at the last minute. That was odd. Even odder was the fact that they had accepted.

  Presumably they had said yes because Byron was still fixed on Max as a living security blanket, even though four months had passed. The boy didn’t make any demands on Max; Byron simply wanted to be in his company. His parents had arranged for Byron to be dropped off at Max’s office after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays—Mondays he had after-school French lessons; Wednesdays he took a course for kid chess whizzes taught by a Russian émigré; Fridays his parents left early for their country house in Connecticut. He liked to sit at Jeff’s desk, near to Max, do his homework and then play chess against a portable computer outfitted with a tiny board and miniature pieces. He promised to be quiet. He was. But he was still there, occasionally exclaiming with dismay or triumph, his machine beeping whenever it made a move and playing songs of victory or dirges of defeat.

  Max got tired of the sounds of intellectual combat and had recently set up Byron with art materials. The idea really came from Byron’s father, Peter Hummel. Peter had taken Max aside to say that Byron was obsessed with painting and drawing before the crash but had given them up since. He expressed surprise that Byron hadn’t asked to borrow Max’s colored pencils. He told Max he hoped Byron would go back to his artwork soon. Next visit Max put out all the drawing materials on Jeff’s desk. Byron didn’t want to draw, however, at least not people or things. He wanted to design buildings like Max. He pored through architectural manuals and Max’s finished designs. That impressed Max, but Byron’s haste didn’t. He scanned the manuals, absorbing images impatiently, eager to make his own. Lately, he had sketched a prodigious number of elaborate complexes that Byron said, “People will live in someday, when there’s no more room on earth for homes.” In fact, they reminded Max of medieval fortresses, with cramped quarters and a central court ringed by grim defenses.

  Peter was pleased and undisturbed by his son’s renderings. “What a complicated and intricate mind,” he commented to Max while Byron gathered his school things, out of earshot.

  “I think it shows a desire for security,” Max said.

  Peter spread his hand possessively over the onionskin paper Max had laid over Byron’s design. “Oh, I don’t think so. I think he wants people to live communally. This stuff is really neat,” he said and added casually, “I guess your son must have been drawing plans like this since he was a baby.”

  “No,” Max said. “My son has no interest in architecture.”

  Peter made no comment. He raised his eyebrows in surprise and looked slightly pleased. Max suspected him of thinking something was superior about Byron for showing such interest. Suspecting Byron’s parents of having a feeling was as close as Max could get to hearing them express one. They had an odd, detached manner. They continued to be grateful to Max, but diffidently. Sometimes their thanks even took the form of a teasing rebuke that Max was easily duped.

  “Thank you again,” Peter said one afternoon as he and Byron left. “You don’t mind if tomorrow I bring my senile grandmother? The adult diapers have great capacity. She only needs to be changed twice a day.”

  The Hummels had attempted polite material compensations, inviting Jonah to share their box seats to Mets games, inviting Max and Debby to use their spare Phantom of the Opera tickets. Since tickets to me show were sold out for months into the future and were known to cost hundreds of dollars if bought through scalpers, the adjective “spare” caused Debby to laugh, then flush, and finally mumble to Max, “They must be richer than God.” And the Hummels had attempted a more integrated family friendship, inviting Max, Debby and Jonah out to Connecticut for the weekend. Debby wanted to go, but Max declined. He resisted any attempt at forcing a friendship between his son and Byron; and he had no interest in knowing the parents. Besides, he believed Jonah didn’t like Byron. He didn’t know what he felt about Byron for that matter. He only knew that he couldn’t ignore the child’s need for him, that he was responsible somehow. Nevertheless, Max didn’t think he had to take on the parents as well, and especially not on national holidays.

  “I don’t want to go,” he said, coming to a stop on the corner of One Hundred Third Street.

  “Come on,” Debby said and ambled on. She reached for Jonah; her long dancer’s arm, even in a down coat, made an elegant hook in the air.

  “It’s absurd,” Max said, resuming his steps. “We don’t know these people.”

  “You know Byron,” she said, capturing Jonah’s head with the crook of her right arm. Since the crash they were closer than ever. Jonah seemed to snuggle with her more than he used to as a toddler. “You see more of him than you see of us.”

  That wasn’t true, although it was the truth as Debby knew it, only camouflaged so Max couldn’t answer bluntly. He tried anyway. “You see? I’m already being blamed for other people’s weaknesses. That’s exactly why I don’t want to go.”

  “Then don’t go.” Debby and Jonah staggered up the hill together, pretending indifference, unbalanced in each other’s arms like drunken lovers.

  How long has it been? Max asked himself. Two weeks? Three? He felt sluggish. Must be three, he decided. Maybe he shouldn’t go to his in-laws. If he waited much longer before another joyride, perhaps he would lose his nerve. Watching his wife and son enter his in-laws’ courtyard, he thought: That would be worse than anything: to live scared like them.

  “Come on, Dad!” Jonah called cheerfully. He made a dumb show of urging Max, waving his right arm with sweeping movements as if his father were an ungainly truck he had to maneuver into a narrow loading dock.

  Crossing his in-laws’ pretentious inner central court to the recessed lobby Max was reminded of Byron’s medieval renderings. Since high school, when Max first learned all he could about the building of the city of his birth, he had known that the then-disreputable upper Riverside Drive apartment buildings were originally built for the prosperous new middle class of the turn of the century. Perhaps the cracked cement courtyard, painted a dark dull red by the co-op board, had once been colorfully tiled, probably with the bright yellows and blues of Mediterranean Europe. Max had seen photographs of one building from the period with such romantic flourishes. And there had almost certainly been a water fountain in the center where now there was only a discreet drainage grate. At the four corners of the courtyard that had once been overseen by cherubim statuary, there were security mirrors to help tenants spot potential muggers. For Max, these were banal observations about the frightened utility of the modern world, but that didn’t prevent his eye from making note each time, and to feel disappointed each time. He couldn’t shake the thrilling and eerie sensation just as he entered the courtyard that this time he would find 370 Riverside Drive restored to its petit bourgeois elegances.

  Harry opened the door to them. Flora’s cooking accompanied him.

  “Smells great,” Max said over Harry’s hellos. “Let’s eat right away. No drinks in the living room. Show me the bowl of stuffing and I’ll put my face in it.” One of the many marvelous aftereffects of the crash was that Max could eat without restraint and without gaining weight, whether he exercised or not. It’s my crash diet, he told Debby. She was appalled by the pun.

  “That would be appetizing for the rest of us,” his wife
commented. She embraced and kissed her father with the abandon of a little girl, even though she was his height, taller in the heels she had on and broader in the shoulder. “Hi, Daddy,” she said, her consonants as soft as a two-year-old’s.

  The sound of a child running came at them from the long hall that led to the living room. It was Byron. A color printout of a design fluttered behind him. “Look what I did.” He waved what appeared to be another elaborate fortress. “My dad got me a MAC and a color printer and Architron.”

  They were rich. The computer, printer, and architectural design software must have cost them at least six thousand dollars. Max had wanted to get one for the office but Jeff—never a fan of speediness—had said, “For what? We should buy an expensive machine and get our work done faster so we can bill them for fewer hours?”

  Byron pushed his way between Jonah and Max. “Isn’t it cool? You can design anything with Architron.”

  “Rad, man,” Jonah said in a soft, mocking voice. “Real rad.”

  “I taped the Civil War,” Harry said. He waved the back of his hand dismissively at the floor, scrunching his thick gray and black eyebrows together. “Despite its flaws. I’ve set it up in the bedroom with the video recorder. I thought the boys might be interested.”

  Jonah lowered his head, a child turtle, hiding in his protective shell, staying dry from the downpour of his grandfather’s love of imparting learning.

  “I’ll be happy to watch the Civil War,” Max said. “But I’m sure the boys would rather have molten lava poured down their throats.”

  Startled by the joke, Jonah laughed hard. His head popped out and his teeth showed. The unrestrained pleasure lasted only a second. Embarrassed, he covered his mouth and moved beside his mother, glancing nervously at Harry. Harry was upset. His face had widened at Max’s comment, dense eyebrows untangling, eyes shocked open. And he flinched at Jonah’s laughter.

  “I want to!” Byron said, bouncing in front of Harry. “I’m interested.” He turned to Max: “If you watch and explain stuff.”