Fearless

by Rafael Yglesias

  Debby confronted him as he turned past the living room into the hall leading to the front door. “Max, are you okay?” she said.

  He moved into her tall body, leaning the side of his face against hers. It was strange and infuriating that he lived with this elegant and intelligent woman who said she loved him and yet couldn’t salvage the wreck of his life. “I’m going out for a walk.”

  “Now?” she whispered in his ear. Her hot breath made him shiver.

  “If I don’t I’m going to stab them all to death with Flora’s carving knife.”

  “Max,” she sighed and squeezed him. “Don’t leave me alone with them.”

  “You can handle them better than I can.”

  Debby hugged him, pleading into his eyes. “Before I met you I was lost in the world. I know everybody’s bugging you, everybody wants your comfort. But I really need it. I need you to really be with me.”

  He remembered the man she missed, the patient cheerful husband who always understood her nerves, her shyness, her fragility. He could almost see that husband in her eyes. But it had been a performance. How could he tell her that? How could he say: you’ve been married to an imitation?

  “You weren’t happy with me.”

  “That’s not true. I love you,” Debby said.

  “You love me, but you aren’t happy. I couldn’t really comfort you.”

  “You don’t have to comfort me. You’re confusing me with Nan. I’m not a widow.”

  Max tried to pull away—there was no explaining it, not talk that she could hear.

  Debby clung to him. “You should tell Nan to get off your back. She’s making you miserable. She’s making us all miserable.”

  “None of this is Nan’s fault,” Max said and he stepped out of his wife’s unenthusiastic arms. “I have to go for a walk.”

  “Fine. But we have to talk tonight.”

  Harry appeared, moving with his head down, his thick eyebrows lifting and falling as if in time to some inner conversation. “Oh,” he said as he nearly bumped into Max. He looked from Debby to Max and back from Max to Debby. “Am I interrupting?”

  “No,” Max said to him. “What are we going to talk about?” he asked his wife.

  “Later,” Debby said.

  “I’m interrupting,” Harry said and resumed his shuffle down the hall. “I’m just going for another bottle of wine,” he mumbled.

  “About what?” Max asked. If it was something truly urgent he had better know right away before answering became impossible.

  “Well, for one thing what are you going to be doing now that you shut down the office? You keep saying you don’t know, that you’ll decide later. It’s time to make a decision. I think having no plan is upsetting you.”

  “No,” Max said. “It’s upsetting you. I’m going now. Maybe I’ll think up something while I’m out.”

  “I hope so,” she said and turned her back on him, walking away in her ex-ballerina’s posture, dignified and disapproving.

  Max left the apartment without any more goodbyes. The farewells were worse than staying.

  The halls smelled of all the Thanksgiving feasts. Max ignored the elevator, attracted by the interior fire stairs. The games of his childhood took place on a similar set of stairs: hiding behind the banisters and shooting at his friend Gary, from whom he drifted apart when they had to move to the Upper West Side after his father’s death. He couldn’t remember Gary’s face. But he could still hear the sound of Gary’s feet rushing up behind him on the tiled hallway floor firing his water pistol and screeching, “You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead!” And his own, as he wheeled and fired back, spraying Gary’s chest. “You missed, you missed, you missed!” What a banal memory. I wasn’t a very smart kid, Max thought, comparing himself to Byron with his ambitions and his awareness of the grown-up world. When did I ever get the idea I was more than an ordinary person? Max wondered. From Ma? Because my father died and that made me unusual?

  He sat down on the steps while thinking all those dead-end questions. They weren’t really his own questions; they were asked or provoked by his psychiatrist. His shrink’s medicine used to work so well. You’re entitled, Max. You have a right to be happy. You’re a good son and a good husband and a good father. Good, good, good. I am Max Klein: I am empowered and glowing with self-esteem. I am worthy and deserve to be middle-class in a society where being middle-class is the nearest thing to godliness.

  He wondered about his in-laws’ roof. He had always wondered about their roof. It must have a great view, he thought. Not only of the river (the view he knew from his in-laws’ living room window) but also back toward the city itself. The sun, on this cool November day, was already going down, and Max climbed up the two flights, hoping to get on the roof and see the colors spread across New York.

  He reached the top and found the roof door’s lock broken. The metal door squealed and tottered at his touch. The city was right there as it opened, glowing pink and red, just as Max had imagined. He stepped out. New York shimmered at him: glistening glass and dignified stone. Here was the criminal who had perverted Max. Not his father’s death, not his mother’s Oedipal transfer of sex into ambition for him, not his own rampaging id. No, Doctor, I didn’t get the idea I should be more than a second-rate, gray-haired balding Jew from your villains. I got it from this beautiful and evil city I love, this floating strip of greedy and defiant buildings.

  His feet didn’t want him to be on the spongy tar surface. He had lived afraid of height, skin crawling in retreat if he advanced toward the edge of any precipice. He had almost fainted when taking a cousin of Debby’s up to the observation floor of the World Trade Center even though he had stayed inside, a good ten feet from the barricaded glass windows. He was sixteen stories up now, out in the open.

  He felt the terror in his knees, sparking into his thighs, trying to shock him back away from the edge. But he stepped through the alarms, away from the raised safety of the door, until he was a solitary target atop the building. The wind fired at him, whipping his kinky hair flat against his skull and a few ticklishly forward at the temples. He didn’t mind the cold: it was refreshing. His legs were in a panic and what he had eaten of the meal seemed to dissolve. His stomach felt empty and afraid. The building’s roof wall was obviously new. The simple concrete barrier, about a foot wide and flat on top, had probably replaced something more ornate that had threatened to fall, and this was the cheapest substitute that would satisfy city ordinances and the co-op’s insurance. It was four feet high, gray everywhere, except for splotches of pigeon droppings on top and streaks of tar to patch fissures on the side.

  Max ignored his terrified thighs and went up to the wall, pressing his belly against it. The cold wind blew into one ear unless he turned his face north. He leaned over the wall and looked down into the frightening drop.

  The window ledges were lined up symmetrically. A trick of vision separated them by shorter and shorter distances as his eyes looked down. Below, the deadly sidewalk was a bleached strip bordered by the humped charcoal street. What would have been a smooth line of ledges was broken by the occasional dirty air conditioner. His head was woozy from the sight. Max imagined himself fall, spin, and smack on impact, embedded in the roof of a parked car.

  He had always been afraid of heights, of falling. His fears were clichés. Everyone had them. Everyone knew what they meant. Did that help? No.

  What am I truly afraid of? Dying? Not loving my wife and son? Loving them? Who cares what the real fear is?

  It was the cowardice itself that appalled him.

  He stretched his arms out, flat along the top of the wall, and swung his right leg up, maneuvering so he was lying on the wall along its length, the right side of his body exposed to the great fall, the left side facing the safety of the roof. He still wasn’t completely on the wall. He kept the toes of his left foot touching its reassuring tar. He pressed his cheek against concrete, looking out at the sad red-stained water towers, the sullen
blank faces of stone, the walls of hostile glass and curved above them all the dark sky, a slice of deep blue bleeding at the edge, struggling to be as vast and interesting as the New York it covered. He was inches from a free-fall to the street.

  He lifted his toes from the roof and hung for a moment balanced on the wall with his belly. He raised his feet in the air. A gust of wind pushed at him. His hairs blasted off his skull. He saw one gray curl straighten over the deadly ground. His legs crawled with fear. His right eye shut against the vision of the unimpeded drop, but he fought and kept his left one open.

  Get to your feet, Max.

  He grabbed the sides of the wall with his hands and brought his knees up. He was clinging to the wall. A roll to the right and he would be gone.

  He shut his left eye and was blind. The wind deafened one ear. He arched his back up, still holding the sides, and put both feet flat. He felt stupid, his ass high in the air like a submissive monkey. He got angry at himself and suddenly he was standing up straight, hands away, a thrill in his heart, an equal to the sky, standing beside it with nothing to hold him there.

  He opened his eyes and screamed. He saw only the city flowing away from him. He was alone. He couldn’t feel his feet or his legs. He screamed again. It was gobbled into silence by the raw wind.

  Something hot oozed from his forehead. Blood?

  A warm flow spread at his groin and down his right leg. He was peeing. He took a step forward. The mean wind blew at him, trying to knock him off.

  He bent with it, swaying out over the street with his right hip. When the wind gave up for the moment, he righted himself and then he was not scared.

  He scanned the slain city, standing over it, master at last of his vision. He walked on the wall, one foot after the other, walking the perimeter of the building. When the cold wind tried again to shove him off, he swayed with it, a small skyscraper that gave but did not break.

  He took the corners with a smile, knowing that for a second most of him was out in the air, suspended over the fatal earth. He was glad. He moved faster on the wall, pushing back sometimes at the wind, daring it to try harder to defeat him.

  I am Max Klein, he thought, death’s survivor.

  The terror was gone and in its place there were calm resolutions. He would talk to Jonah about his silence. He would stop playing substitute Daddy to Byron. He would tell Debby that he would never again be the beacon for her darkened life. He would attend no more dead celebrations. He would tell Nan that her unhappiness belonged only to her and he wanted no portion.

  He turned the last corner. He was ten feet from where he had begun his walk. As he stepped toward the finish the wind came at him from a new direction. For a moment he was interested in the change.

  And then he realized he had stepped into the air.

  He didn’t scream. There was no terror left in him to be expelled. He saw the walls of hostile glass jerk and the water towers tumble. He grabbed at them with his arms as he fell straight down.

  He felt the pain in his knee first. His left shoulder was yanked hard, so hard he thought it might break off. Then he was hit in the jaw as it whacked into brick.

  He had caught himself on the wall, hooking it with his left arm. The rest of him dangled in the air. He reached with his right hand for the wall and got only the tips of his fingers on it. The skin scraped off as his weight pulled him toward the street.

  For a split second he saw it all so clearly: I’m suicidal and I’ve goofed and I’m about to die.

  No! His body talked back. From his stomach he pushed up at the dead weight of his body with all of his energy. His left arm contracted, his feet kicked at the rough bricks. He was reminded of pulling himself out of a swimming pool in Florida when he was a child, his mouth filled with chemical water, afraid of the deep end he had wandered into. Max put everything he had into one single jerk of power in his left arm. Something punched him in the stomach.

  He groaned. It hurt and made him wish to give up. He was lying on top of the wall again, spinning it felt like, and he had only a little energy left, a last bit of himself with which to decide his fate. The wind was furious and powerful.

  He had to get off the wall. He couldn’t see from the pain. He pushed himself off the wall without considering that he didn’t know if he was headed for a short drop to the tar or the long battering fall to the street.

  The suspense lasted only a second.

  Immortal Max landed on the roof and laughed.

  CRASH

  LANDING

  17

  Max hadn’t been in Little Italy, that he could remember, since he was a young man romancing Debby. They used to have cappuccino and cannoli in the sidewalk cafes after delicious, cheap meals in Chinatown and walk north arm in arm, talking all the way to her apartment on Washington Square. Hadn’t lasted long. Only a few months later she was injured and eventually moved in with him uptown. They were no longer sixties lovers but that ungainly thing of the seventies—a relationship.

  He met Perlman on the corner of Mulberry and Canal. It was late morning on a December Monday, the last week of the year before Christmas. It was cold. The therapist’s breath flowed out of him in a long arched white column of smoke, curling up past the tenements to the sky, as if he were a little chimney that had bolted from the buildings. The streets were dirty from last night’s tourists. Attached to every lamppost was a gaudy and, especially in the morning sun, tawdry white and red Christmas bell decoration. Lights were strung between the bells; sometimes they became overgrown and smothered an awning or a tenement’s banisters. On one staircase leading down to a basement, where the garbage cans would normally be, a Nativity scene of miniature figures was displayed; the steps made a steep descent for the Wise Men to Baby Jesus at the bottom. Max stepped on a green Michelin guidebook that was soggy and broken. Only one shopkeeper was out sweeping. In this cold, the quick way with a hose wouldn’t work. The other store owners must be sleeping late. Or maybe hoping the bright sun would eventually warm things up.

  “She knows you’re the Good Samaritan,” redheaded Perlman said as they walked to Carla’s apartment. He had grown a beard since their last meeting. It wasn’t as red as the hair on his head, but it was full. Max thought that with his bulk Perlman would make a good Santa Claus. He sounded like one; and in the nearly empty streets the therapist’s deep bass had even more resonance and volume. “It doesn’t impress her, that’s not why she agreed to meet with you. She agreed to meet you because she wants to ask if you saw her child while inside the wreck. I’ve told her no. But she wants to hear it from you. She’s completely obsessed and very—I don’t know—primitive about the whole thing. She’s very Old World, very Catholic, you know?”

  “No, I don’t.” Max no longer bothered to guess at the meanings hidden in everyone’s talk. He insisted they be explicit or he would be deaf to their half-speeches.

  “I don’t know. She’s filled with guilt and shame. You know?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m filled with guilt and shame. How is that Old World?”

  “We’re here.” They were in front of two unlocked glass doors, leading to a small tiled vestibule with an intercom and a locked door. “You judge for yourself. I wanted to warn you. She could do anything. They tell me she’s been almost catatonic for weeks. But that could change. She could scream at you. Hit you. Her mother is there and she’ll keep an eye out. Carla doesn’t want me to go up. I’ll be across the street visiting with her priest. He’s actually the one who first called me about her. But we’ve never met, only talked on the phone. Would you ring the bell at that door”—Perlman pointed to a small wooden door in a building next to Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral—“after you’re done and let me know how it—?”

  “Isn’t that where the first black American saint is buried?” Max asked. He gestured at the long wall around an adjoining cemetery. “I was reading about it in yesterday’s Times.”

  For a moment Perlman was ready to laugh. He checked that, however, and
looked at the top of the wall as though he might be able to vault it with his vision. “I don’t know. I didn’t see the piece. I’ll ask the Monsignor. Give us something to talk about.” He opened the outer glass doors and pointed to the fake gold buttons of the intercom. “It’s three A.”

  After he was buzzed in, Max paused in the small area at the foot of the stairs, too cramped a space to be called a lobby. He smelled a kind of cooking and mustiness that reminded him of something. What was it? He waited there until he remembered it was the smell in the halls of his childhood building in Washington Heights. After his father’s heart attack, thanks to the insurance money and his uncle’s help, they had moved to the Upper West Side, which, although it was decayed in those days, was still more definitely middle-class than his old neighborhood. Certainly the buildings smelled different and sounded different. You didn’t know who lived behind most of those doors or what they felt about each other; in Washington Heights he knew what everyone was eating and whether they loved each other. Not that he missed it as a thirteen-year-old. He had preferred the relative bourgeois dignity of the Upper West Side, despite its heroin-addicted muggers and demented rent-control elderly.

  Max winced at the fact: his father’s death had improved his life. He was indulged; they lived in a better neighborhood; he was sent to a private school. Max breathed deep of the unventilated odors of ancient garlic and detergents that had worn away the tiles to a smooth rubbed finish and he had to admit it to himself—Dad’s death was boom times for me. He had confessed this to his shrink years ago, but its clarity had been muddied when the good doctor forgave the observation as a generic feeling all sons are liable to. In the vestibule Max looked at the truth, admitting to himself that it belonged to him as an individual characteristic. His shoulder still hurt from his latest struggle with death the month before and he sometimes shuddered at the memory of what he had dared, but the truth stayed with him, that death was his friend, had always been his friend, and now was the source of his strength.