by Jill Ciment
Life returned a second time, as soon as the typhoon season had ended. The plane touched down in our cove again, but no one turned off the propellers. They’d brought a rubber dinghy this time. I was standing in my place at the far left of the Tapestry, holding a small packed satchel. I have so few possessions of any importance, except, of course, my skin.
When the dinghy came ashore, Brooke and Jack didn’t climb out. Brooke shouted to the islanders over the roar of the engine, “We can’t stay and visit this time, but we’ll be back soon. With gifts.” She motioned me to hurry aboard. “There’s just enough daylight left to make it back to Port Moresby, Sara.”
I stepped away from the others. Laadah’s daughter kept hold of my hand, but eventually let me go. I climbed into the dinghy. Jack offered his arm to steady me, as if I hadn’t been climbing in and out of dugouts for thirty years.
We approached the airplane from the rear, needles of salt spray stinging our eyes. The cabin wasn’t much bigger than an automobile’s. Brooke helped me into a jump seat behind her, then strapped me in. I looked back at the beach through my tiny oval window. Beads of seawater ran sideways across the scratched glass. The Tapestry leaned into the man-made wind and hurried forward to the water’s edge. I hadn’t seen my composition in its entirety since I’d become a part of it. A panel was plainly missing from the far left, but my absence hardly marred the grand design.
The youngsters tried to spot me in one of the plane’s four windows. I waved, but they couldn’t see me through the spray. Then the far-left fringe of the Tapestry knelt down in the shallows and clawed at their necks with their fingernails. I hammered on the window to try to get them to stop. I shouted that I’d be back before the full moon. But no matter how many times I had told them I’d return, they still believed that I was leaving for the afterworld.
And, perhaps, I was.
PART FOUR
ON DISPLAY
A limousine awaited us at LaGuardia Airport. Life had booked me first-class all the way from Port Moresby. A chauffeur stood at the bottom of the plane’s steel staircase, holding out a fur coat for me. (On loan, I later learned, from Saks.) The temperature was near freezing. I saw my own breath for the first time in decades. For a Ta’un’uuan that’s tantamount to seeing one’s own soul. Brooke helped me on with the coat, then hurried me into the warm car. She eased herself in beside me, while Jack sat on the jump seat opposite us and reloaded his camera.
We’d been traveling for thirty-six hours. It was 5:30 a.m. by the limousine’s clock. The chauffeur backed us away from the plane, then veered off the tarmac. The airport was practically empty, save for an occasional taxi. The model had changed, but I’d recognize that yellow anywhere.
“You ready to see New York again?” Brooke asked.
The limousine windows were so dark I could barely see out. “How do I raise and lower my window?” They’d done away with crank handles.
She reached over and pressed a silver button on my armrest to demonstrate. The glass fell and rose, fell and rose. We were now speeding past the airport’s vast parking lots, then the row houses of Flushing, then the cemeteries of Queens. The first spokes of sunrise were silhouetting the gravestones. I’d forgotten how big the city of coffins was.
“You want to go straight to the hotel, Sara? Or is there anyplace you’d like to stop first? Are you hungry? Should we get something to eat?”
“Can we take the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan?” I asked.
“Why not?” she said, smiling. She signaled the chauffeur, and we branched off the highway onto the great cabled expanse of the Brooklyn Bridge. I could sense her watching me closely, trying to read my expression through my tattoos so that she could accurately record my emotional state upon seeing New York again. But the tattoos Ishmael had engraved on my face simply wouldn’t allow for that. Had she only known what to look for, she would have realized that the tattoos Ishmael sentenced me to wear expressed exactly what I felt at that moment—fear, wonder, shame, sadness, rapture, laid one atop another.
Jack focused his lens on my face. I lowered my window and did something I hadn’t done before, and haven’t done since. I posed for the camera, my tattooed profile against the skyscrapers of Manhattan. It was a picture I wanted.
The skyline was red. The Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building were still standing, but the gaps between them had been mortared in with new buildings— taller, wider, devoid of human ornament, covered entirely in mirrors. Giant upended glass coffins for titans.
We came ashore on Water Street. I recognized the fishmarket. Gray herrings and gray mackerels on gray ice. Horns and whistles kept blowing. Geysers of steam erupted from manhole covers. Taxis whizzed by. A tumult of coats, hats, and umbrellas waded in front of our hood. During a break in the human flotsam, we turned onto a great avenue of sludge and ice, and rolled with the current of traffic through downtown’s sunless canyons. Men in galoshes and women in pumps were funneling into big black caves of polished stone. A bow-backed man, probably my age, was pushing a hot-dog cart across a gusting square—Chatham, I think. Garbage swirled in the updraft. We were heading for lower Broadway. Nothing had changed, and everything had changed. The tin garbage cans were now plastic. The Hebrew signs had become Chinese. The automobiles looked like cheap rockets in a Buck Rogers movie. There were no more streetcars. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were tearing from the frigid wind in my face or from a source I thought had long ago gone dry within me. I pressed the button on my armrest and the smoky glass silently ascended over modernity.
“Life’s putting you up at the Waldorf-Astoria,” Brooke said.
“The Waldorf?” I couldn’t help but smile. Philip and I had protested its being built. “May we go by way of the Lower East Side?”
“We can go and do whatever you want.”
I rapped on the chauffeur’s partition. “Avenue D, please.”
He turned north on Bowery. Ragged men still warmed themselves around trash fires. Along Houston Street, the crooked little tenements were still intact, veined now in new pipes, the roofs thick with aerials. Laundry, albeit of a more colorful variety, still snapped from clotheslines.
On the river side of Avenue D, where the smithies once lived, grim brick barracklike structures had been erected, all the windows barred: to lock the people in or out, I couldn’t tell.
“Washington Square, please,” I said. The limousine made a left toward Cooper Union, the same route I had strolled every Saturday night in my Gypsy skirt and red stockings, my shopgirl heart hammering with hope. The marble arch was blanketed with snow. A new fountain had been built. The spout was a spray of ice. On University Place, where the Brevoort once stood, was a Chock full o’Nuts. Or maybe the Brevoort wasn’t on University? I couldn’t remember. We began rolling north toward Union Square, past the statue of George Washington on his prancing horse, under whose marble hooves Philip and I had marched, chanted, locked arms, raised fists, sung with our comrades for a just paradise on earth. It was now edged by department stores. We veered onto Park Avenue South and sailed toward the maw of Midtown.
“Could we go by way of Fifth Avenue?” I asked.
“We’d have to turn around. I’m afraid it’s a one-way street now,” Brooke said. She started to alert the driver, but I stopped her. Between two low office buildings, I could see the vaulted, silver cupola of the Chrysler Building, steel eagles perched on steel shoulders, the triangular windows alive with the yellow fire of the sun. It looked like a deity.
A cave opened up where none had been, in the middle of Park Avenue, and we tunneled through the bowels of the city only to emerge again beside Grand Central. The sidewalks were black with umbrellas, the sky full of pigeons.
On the north side of the train station, where Park Avenue fronted the wealthy, a hoarfrosted, wrought-iron, tree-lined divider, the width of a tenement building, appeared. Women in furs walked poodles in wool sweaters on bejeweled leads. From between parked cars, uniformed, white-glo
ved, whistle-blowing doormen stepped into traffic to summon taxis. Evidently, Philip’s and my dream of a Marxist utopia hadn’t quite come to fruition.
We pulled up to the Waldorf. It wasn’t much shorter than the mountain behind my village. A flashbulb flared, then fizzled away on the far side of my dark window. A rush of wan faces crowded around my door, trying to peer in.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to it,” Brooke said, lowering her window just wide enough to stick out her hand and wave to the doormen. “You’re a celebrity. You were featured in Life, Sara. A copy’s waiting for you in your suite.”
The doormen roped off the small crowd, and I was ushered inside. The concierge introduced himself, then ordered a bellhop to carry my bark satchel for me. I told him it wasn’t necessary. The hotel guests, men sitting in wingback chairs, women sipping coffee from china cups, surreptitiously studied my tattoos from over their morning newspapers. They were more disturbing than the gawkers outside.
The concierge escorted me to the front desk, where the manager ceremoniously turned the guest book around and handed me a fountain pen. Jack clicked away. “Would you care to sign the registry, Mrs. Ehrenreich?”
I plied the inky nib to the gilt-edged book and signed my name, so curious to see if my signature had changed after so many years. It was remarkably the same.
“May I show you to your suite now?” the manager asked.
“Please,” I said.
He and I waited for an elevator, along with Brooke, Jack, the bellhop, and a preoccupied gentleman who was so upset his umbrella wouldn’t close that he didn’t notice a tattooed old lady in the fur coat and bark sandals beside him.
“I don’t know about you,” Brooke whispered to Jack, “but I can’t wait to take a hot bath.”
We ascended to the forty-second floor. I was shown my home for the next two weeks—foyer, living room, bedroom. On the coffee table, in a silver bowl, apples, oranges, pears, grapes, and gold-wrapped chocolates formed a centerpiece. An issue of Life, evidently featuring me, lay beside the bowl.
“May I show you where everything is,” the manager said. He opened the drapes to unveil my Park Avenue view, then pointed out the wet bar, the marble bath, the vast, pillowed bed, the dressing area with its triptych of full-length mirrors, and my three telephones, one on the Queen Anne nightstand beside my bed, one in the bathroom, and one on the foyer wall. There were no rotary dials on any of them.
“If there’s anything you need or want, just push zero for the front desk or triple zero for my direct line.”
Brooke opened the bedroom closet. A dozen or so dresses, the price tags still on, hung in a row. Shoes in open boxes were lined up below them. Though styles had changed, I recognized the timeless uniform of an old lady. “If they don’t fit, we’ll get others tomorrow,” she said. She opened her purse and gave me a folded piece of paper. “It’s Alice Bronsky’s number, if you want to call her. Would you like me to stay for a while, Sara, until you’re used to everything? Are you hungry?”
The manager quickly handed me the room service menu, a leather-bound tome as thick as a novelette. “If you don’t see anything you like on the menu,” he said, “we’ll make something special for you.”
“Or we can send out for anything you want,” Brooke added.
I could have asked for beluga caviar and French champagne, or a thick steak and a glass of Hennessy, but ever since we’d passed the fishmarket, I’d been craving herring.
“I’d like a piece of pickled herring,” I said. “And a Bermuda onion, and a boiled potato, please.”
The bellhop was sent to fetch my order. Twenty minutes later, a cart was rolled in with an assortment of herrings, a Bermuda onion and a white onion, and four steaming potatoes on three china plates. There was also an array of pickles and sprigs of parsley.
“Bon appétit,” Brooke said.
Shadowing himself against the drapery, Jack tried to get a better angle.
“I’d rather not be photographed while I’m eating, if you don’t mind,” I said. Then I assured Brooke that I’d be fine, that she had seen to my every need. I thanked her and the manager and the bellhop and said, “I’d like to be alone now.”
“We’ll see you in a few hours. After you get some rest.” Brooke smiled, but I could see how disappointed she was that I wouldn’t pose for her picture. She hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on my door, then shut it behind her.
I looked around the suite, out the window. Manhattan heaved and pulsated below me. The room service cart stood near the sofa. I sat down before it and leaned forward to admire the feast, to feel the steam rising off the potatoes. I eased the white linen napkin from under the silverware, then spread it across my lap. I picked up the fork and dinner knife, patterned with the Waldorf’s monogram, then sliced off a morsel of fish, a sliver of Bermuda onion, and a wedge of potato. I carefully speared each item onto my fork, then opened my mouth and bit down. Along with a burst of peppercorn, sweet wine, and onion, the taste released a spark or two of memory. Nothing specific. Just palatable déjà vu. But the second bite unleashed a tenderness of such visceral urgency that it almost seemed hallucinatory. To whom was this tenderness directed?
The peppercorn and acidic wine were boring down inside me. They had to bore very far down to actually find me. They had to bore past my years on Ta’un’uu, past my years with Philip, past my shopgirl ambitions, until they reached my parents’ kitchen table, on which a plate of pickled herring, a Bermuda onion, and a steaming potato are set in the feeble light of an air shaft window.
I lifted my head. The light was funerary gray. On the far side of a glass opening in the face of a concrete mountain, snow was falling. The dark windows reflected nothing but me in a strange room, on a strange sofa. The clock on the end table read 6:05. Morning or evening, I couldn’t say. All three phones were ringing at once. I picked up the closest one. “Hello? Hello?”
“Did you have a good rest, Sara?” Brooke asked. “Do you see the snow? It’s your first evening back. Any particular place you’d like to go?”
When I failed to name a single place, she said, “Anyone other than Alice you’d like me to get a phone number for? Anyone you’d like me to call tonight to let them know that you’re here? Back?”
I said I wasn’t yet sure where I was, that I would see her in the morning. I set the receiver back in its plastic cradle and crossed the carpet. I turned on the bathroom light, then quickly shut it again. I wasn’t yet ready to see my life’s work reflected back at me. I filled the tub and bathed by moonlight or street-light, I couldn’t tell which through the curtains. I found a robe and slippers and stood by the living room window, my wet hand starfished against the glass, over the city’s tireless glow. There was no moon, no stars, no planets, no sense of eternity. How had I lived here? How had I not?
I went to the closet, intending to get dressed and go out alone. Uptown, downtown, it didn’t matter. I would just keep walking. After all, it wasn’t yet seven in the evening. New York was only now coming alive. In my old bohemian life, Philip and I might just be waking up.
The dresses looked like hanging skins. I tried to imagine myself slipping into one, then pulling on stockings and shoes, then buttoning up the fur coat, then tying a scarf around my mouth to mask my face, and striding across the lobby, past the curious concierge, into the frigid New York night. The blood began banging in my ears. I had to sit down on the edge of the bed. What was I so afraid of? The cold? The hubbub? The stares? Negotiating an icy curb? Getting lost in my own home-town? Or was I afraid that the moment I stepped outside I would feel at home here, and then what would all those years on Ta’un’uu have meant?
I shut the closet, then picked up the note with Alice’s number on it. I needed to talk to someone who knew me as I once was. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was about Julien, wanted her to know that Philip had died, too. I pushed the buttons on the telephone and heard unearthly, musical tones, then the drone of a ringing line.
A
hoarse, shaky voice answered, “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?”
The voice sounded so old, I hung up.
The phone book sat next to the phone. I started turning pages. Had the print gotten so much smaller or the city so much larger? I wasn’t even sure who I was looking for. I simply needed to know who was still alive. I ran my finger down a column until I thought I recognized a name. Alex Auffenberg. Wasn’t he the Dadaist poet who wrote without ink in his pen? What would I say to him if it really turned out to be him, if the old poet picked up the phone? Are you still writing? Or would I just hang up on him as I had Alice? What had prompted me to come back at my age?
I opened the wet bar. Miniature bottles lined the shelves. Bourbon. Brandy. Vodka. Scotch. Rye. Cognac. Why switch now? I uncapped the Hennessy, drank it right from the spout. Aside from the hum of the little refrigerator and the thumping pulse of my irrepressible existence, the suite was tomb-silent. I’d forgotten how deafening an empty room can be. I turned on what I thought was a radio in a big wooden cabinet, just for the company, and a moving picture appeared. In color. A close-up of a pretty actress. I watched with complete fascination. They’d found a way to bring motion pictures into the home. They’d sent a man to the moon. What other wonders have they come up with? The actress touched her fingers to her temples in the universal gesture for “I can’t go on.” It turned out to be an advertisement for Bayer aspirin. I turned off the picture and stared at the glass screen, a mirror really. I switched on a lamp and picked up the Life magazine. I so needed to be with people who know me as I am now. The table of contents read Mrs. Crusoe Among a Lost South Seas Tribe. I opened to a centerfold of the Great Tapestry. Even without the natural billowing of swaying bodies to animate the design, it looked remarkable, exquisite. I’m the only one on Ta’un’uu who has ever witnessed the full display of the Great Tapestry from without. I must ask Life for enough copies to bring back with me as gifts.