by Colum McCann
—You’re used to traveling in style?
She is annoyed at herself—she didn’t mean to be so curt, but sometimes it happens, the words come out at the wrong angle, like she’s on the defensive from the very beginning.
—No, not me, he says. Style and I never got along.
She can tell it’s true, the wide collar on his shirt, an ink spot on the breast pocket. He looks like the sort of man who might give himself his own haircut. Not your normal Italian, but what’s a normal Italian anyway? She has grown tired of the people who tell her that she’s not a normal African- American, as if there were only one great big normal box that everyone had to pop out of, the Swedish, the Poles, the Mexicans, and what did they mean anyway that she wasn’t normal, that she didn’t wear gold hoop earrings, that she moved tightly, dressed tightly, kept everything in line?
—So, she says, what did they tell you in the airport?
—Not to make jokes anymore.
McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 328
328
C O L U M M c C A N N
—God bless America.
—The bad- joke police. Did you hear the one . . .
—No, no!
— . . . about the man who went to the doctor’s office with the carrot up his nose?
Already she is laughing. He gestures to the aisle seat.
—Please, yes.
She is surprised by the immediate comfort she feels, inviting him to sit, even turning toward him, bridging the distance over the middle seat.
She is often nervous around men and women her own age, their attention, their desires. A tall, willowy beauty, she has cinnamon skin, white teeth, serious lips, no makeup, but her dark eyes always seem to want to escape her good looks. It adds up to a strange force around her: she strikes people as intelligent and dangerous, an otherland stranger. Sometimes she tries to claw her way through the awkwardness, but falls back down, suffocating. It’s as if she feels it all bubbling up inside, all that wild ancestry, but she can’t get it to boil.
At work she is known as one of the bosses with ice in her veins. If there’s a joke e- mail sent around the offices, she is seldom copied on it: she would love to be, but seldom is, even among her closest colleagues.
In the foundation the volunteers talk about her behind her back. When she steps into jeans and a T- shirt to join them in the field there is always something stiff about it, her shoulders in a controlled line, her demeanor mannered.
— . . . and the doctor says, I know exactly what’s wrong with you.
—Yes?
—You’re not eating properly.
—Ba dah boom, she says, bringing her head alarmingly close to his shoulder.
—
Four small plastic bottles of gin rattle on his airplane tray. He is, she thinks, already too complicated. He is from Genoa and divorced, with two children. He has worked in Africa, Russia, and Haiti, and spent two years in New Orleans working as a doctor in the Ninth Ward. He has just moved to Little Rock, he says, where he runs a small mobile clinic for veterans home from the wars.
McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 329
L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
329
—Pino, he says, extending his hand.
—Jaslyn.
—And you? he asks.
—Me?
A charm in his eyes.
—What about you?
What can she tell him? That she comes from a long line of hookers, that her grandmother died in a prison cell, that she and her sister were adopted, grew up in Poughkeepsie, their mother Gloria went around the house singing bad opera? That she got sent to Yale, while her sister chose to join the army? That she was in the theater department and that she failed to make it? That she changed her name from Jazzlyn to Jaslyn?
That it wasn’t from shame, not from shame at all? That Gloria said there was no such thing as shame, that life was about a refusal to be shamed?
—Well, I’m sort of an accountant, she says.
—A sort of accountant?
—Well, I’m at a small foundation. We help with tax preparation. It’s not what I thought I’d do, I mean, when I was younger, but I like it. It’s good. We go around the trailer parks and hotels and all. After Rita and Ka-trina and all. We help people fill out their tax forms and take care of things. ’Cause often they don’t even have their driver’s licenses anymore.
—Great country.
She eyes him suspiciously, but wonders if perhaps he means it. He could—it’s possible, she thinks—why not, even in these times.
The more he talks the more she notices that his accent has a couple of continents in it, like it has landed in each place and picked up a few sounds in each. He tells her the story of how, as a child in Genoa, he used to go to the soccer games and help bandage the wounded who were in-volved in stadium fights.
—Serious injuries, he says. Especially when Sampdoria played Lazio.
—Sorry?
—You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?
—No, she laughs.
He cracks the small seal on another bottle of gin, pours half in her glass, half in his own. She feels herself loosening further around him.
—Well, she says, I once worked at McDonald’s.
—You’re kidding.
McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 330
330
C O L U M M c C A N N
—Kind of. I tried to be an actor. Same thing, really. Learn your lines—
you want fries with that? Hit your mark—you want fries with that?
—Film?
—Theater.
She reaches across for her glass, lifts it, drinks. It is the first time in years that she’s opened herself to a stranger. It’s as if she has bitten into the skin of an apricot.
—Cheers.
—Salute, he says in Italian.
The plane banks out over the city. Storm clouds and a driving rain against the windows. The lights of New York like shadows of light, under the clouds, ghostly, rain- dampened, dim.
—So? he says, gesturing out the window, the darkness webbed over Kennedy.
—Excuse me?
—New York. You staying long?
—Oh, I’m going to see an old friend, she says.
—I see. How old?
—Very old.
—
When she was young and not so shy, she used to love going out on the street in Poughkeepsie, outside their small house, where she would run along with one foot on the pavement and the other on the road. It took some gymnastics: she had to extend one leg and keep the other slightly bent, running at close to full pace.
Claire came to visit in a chauffeured town car. Once she sat and watched the trick for a long time, with delight, and said that Jaslyn was running an extended entrechat, half on, half off, half on, half off, half on.
Later, Claire sat with Gloria on wooden chairs in the back garden, by the plastic pool, near the red fence. They looked so different, Claire in her neat skirt, Gloria in her flowered dress, as if they too were running on different levels of pavement, but in the same body, the two of them combined.
—
At the luggage carousel, Pino waits beside her. He has no suitcase to pick up. She rubs her hands together, nervously. Why, still, this small feeling McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 331
L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
331
of tightness at her core? Not even her own two gin and tonics have done their work. But he too is edgy, she notices, as he moves from foot to foot and adjusts his shoulder bag. She likes his nervousness—it brings him down to earth, makes him solid. He has already suggested that he can share a taxi with her into Manhattan, if she’d like. He is on his way to the Village, wants to hear some jazz.
She wants to tell him that he doesn’t look like a jazz man, that there’s something folk- rock about him, th
at he might fit well into a Bob Dylan song, or he might be found with the liner notes for Springsteen in his pocket, but jazz doesn’t fit. Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them. If only she could turn to Pino and say that she’ll come with him tonight, to a jazz club, sit at a table with a tasseled lamp, feel the saxophone trill through her, stand and move to the tiny dance floor and align her long body against his, maybe even allow him to rub his lips along her neck.
She watches the line of suitcases tumble from the conveyor belt onto the carousel below: none of them hers. A group of kids on the far side jump on and off the carousel, to the amusement of their parents. She waves across and mugs a face at the youngest, who is perched atop a giant red suitcase.
—Your children, she says as she turns to Pino. Do you have photographs?
A silly, awkward question. She has spoken without thinking, leaned too close to him, asked too much. But he pulls out a cell phone and scrolls through the pictures, shows her a young teenage girl, dark, serious, attractive. He starts to scroll again for a picture of his boy, when a security guard comes right up beside him.
—No cell phone use in the terminal, sir.
—Excuse me?
—No cell phones, no cameras.
—Not your day, she says, smiling, as she leans down to pick up her small traveling bag.
—Maybe, maybe not, he says.
Across the way, a high yelp. The kids riding suitcases on the moving carousel have fallen afoul of the security guard too. She and Pino turn to McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 332
332
C O L U M M c C A N N
each other. She feels much younger all of a sudden: the thrill of flirtation, her whole body shot through with lightness.
—
As they step from the terminal he says that they’ll take the Queensboro Bridge, if that’s okay with her. He will drop her off first and then go downtown.
So he knows the city, she thinks. He’s been here before. This place belongs to him too. Another surprise. She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours.
—
Sabine Pass and Johnson’s Bayou, Beauregard and Vermilion, Acadia and New Iberia, Merryville and DeRidder, Thibodaux and Port Bolivar, Napoleonville and Slaughter, Point Cadet and Casino Row, Moss Point and Pass Christian, Escambia and Walton, Diamondhead and Jones Mill, Americus, America.
Names in her mind, flooding.
—
Rain outside the terminal. He stands under a small ledge, pulls a packet of cigarettes from his inside pocket. He tamps the pack with the heel of his hand, shifts a cigarette upward, offers it. She shakes her head no. She used to smoke, not anymore, an old habit from her days at Yale; almost everyone in the theater smoked.
But she likes the fact that he lights up and lets the smoke blow in her direction, that it will get in her hair, that she will own the scent of it later.
—
The taxi slides through the rain. The last of the storm has blown over the city, a final exhausted bow, an endfall. He hands her a card before the taxi pulls in by the awning on Park Avenue. He scribbles his name and the number of his cell on the back.
—Fancy, he says, surveying the street.
He picks her small bag out of the back of the cab, leans across and McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 333
L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
333
kisses her on each cheek. She notices with a smile that he has one foot on, one foot off the curb.
He fumbles in his pocket. She looks away and she hears a sudden click. He has taken her photograph with his cell phone. She is not quite sure how to respond. Erase it, file it, make it his screen saver? She thinks of herself, there, pixelated, alongside his children, carried around in his pocket, to his jazz club, to his clinic, to his home.
She has never done this with a man before, but she takes her own card out and tucks it into his shirt pocket, taps it closed with the palm of her hand. She feels her face tighten again. Too forward. Too flirtatious.
Too easy.
It used to bother her terribly, as a teenager, that her mother and grandmother had worked the streets. She thought it might rebound on her someday, that she would find herself too much in love with love. Or that it might be dirty. Or that her friends would find out. Or, worse, that she might ask a boy to pay for it. She was the last of her high school friends to even kiss a boy: a kid in school once called her the Reluctant African Queen. Her first kiss ever was just after science class before social studies. He had a broad face and dark eyes. He held her in the doorway and kept his foot on the frame. Only the constant knocking on the door from a teacher separated them. She walked home with him that day, hand in hand, through the streets of Poughkeepsie. Gloria saw her from the porch of their small house and smiled deeply. She and the boy lasted all the way through college. She had even contemplated marrying him, but he went to Chicago to take a trading job. She went home to Gloria then, wept for a day.
Afterward, Gloria said to her that it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
—So you’ll call me, then? she asks him.
—I’ll call you, yes.
—Really? she asks with arched brow.
—Of course, he replies.
He extends his shoulder playfully. She rocks backward as if in a cartoon, her arms spread wide, flailing. She is not sure why she does it, but for a moment she doesn’t really care—there is an electricity to it, it makes her laugh.
McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 334
334
C O L U M M c C A N N
He kisses her again, this time on the lips, quickly, smartly. She almost wishes her co- workers were here, that they could see her, bidding good-bye to an Italian man, a doctor, on Park Avenue, in the dark, in the cold, in the rain, in the wind, in the night. Like there might some secret camera that beams it all back to the offices in Little Rock, everyone looking up from the tax forms to watch her wave good-bye, to see him turn his body in the back of the cab, his arm raised, a shadow on his face, a smile.
She hears the hiss of the taxi tires as the car pulls away. Then she cups her hands out beyond the awning and runs some rainwater through her hair.
—
The doorman smiles, although it has been years since she’s seen him. A Welshman. He used to sing on Sundays when she, Gloria, and her sister came to visit. She can’t quite recall his name. His mustache has gone gray.
—Miss Jaslyn! Where’ve you been?
And then she remembers: Melvyn. He reaches for the small bag and for a moment she thinks he’s going to say how much she’s grown. But all he says is, in a grateful way: They put me on the night shift.
She is not quite sure if she should kiss his cheek or not—this evening of kissing—but he solves the dilemma by turning away.
—Melvyn, she says, you haven’t changed a bit.
He pats his stomach, smiles. She is wary of elevators, she would like to take the stairs, but a teenage boy is there with his hat and white gloves on.
—Madame, says the elevator boy.
—You staying long, Miss Jaslyn? asks Melvyn, but already the gate is closing.
She smiles at him from the back of the elevator.
—I’ll call up to Mrs. Soderberg’s, he says through the grille, and let them know you’re here.
The elevator boy stares straight ahead. He takes great care with the Otis. He doesn’t engage her in conversation, his head tilted slightly to the ceiling and his body as if it’s counting out rhythm. She gets the sense that he will be here ten years from now, twenty, thirty. She would like to step up behind him and whisper, Boo! in his ear, but she watches the panel and the sma
ll circular white lights as they rise.
McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 335
L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
335
He pulls the lever, aligns the elevator and the floor perfectly. He slides his foot out to test his workmanship. A young man of precision.
—Madame, he says. First door on your right.
—
The door is opened by a tall Jamaican nurse, a man. They are momentarily confused, as if they should know each other somehow. The exchange is rapid- fire. I’m Mrs. Soderberg’s niece. Oh, I see, come in. Not her niece, really, but she calls me her niece. Please come in. I called earlier.
Yes, yes, she’s sleeping now. Step inside. How is she? Well . . . he says.
And the well is drawn out, a pause, not an affirmative—Claire is not well at all; she is at the bottom of a dark well.
Jaslyn hears the sound of other voices: a radio, perhaps?
The apartment seems as if it has been sunk in aspic. It used to terrify her and her sister as children, on those occasions when they came into the city with Gloria, the dark hallway, the artwork, the smell of old wood.
She and her sister held hands as they walked down the corridor. The worst thing was the portrait of the dead man on the wall. The painting had been done in such a way that his eyes seemed to follow them. Claire would talk about him all the time, that Solomon had loved this and Solomon loved that. She had sold some of the other paintings—even her Miró, to help pay the expenses—but the Solomon portrait remained.
The nurse takes her bag and settles it in the corner against the hat stand.
—Please, he says, and he motions her toward the living room.
She is stunned to see six people, most of them her own age, around the table and on the sofa. They are casually dressed but sipping cocktails.
Her heart thumps against the wall of her chest. They too freeze at the sight of her. Well, well. The true nieces, nephews, cousins, perhaps? Song of Solomon. He is dead fourteen years but she can see him in their faces.
One, almost certainly, is Claire’s niece, with a streak of gray in her hair.
They stare at her. The air like ice around her. She wishes that she had taken Pino upstairs alongside her, so he could help take control, calmly, smoothly, or at least draw attention. She can still feel the kiss on her lips.