by Hugo Wilcken
On the ride home, I felt in a daze. I’d thought of walking back to the hotel, despite the cold, but the bar Marie had asked me to meet her at was somewhere way up on the Upper West Side, and it was too far. The melancholy lingered the length of the subway trip. It was coupled with an uneasy, exhilarating sensation of once more being thrown into the middle of a story I’d only half-understood. I couldn’t work out what might have gone through Marie’s mind when she’d first caught sight of me. She’d seemed to recognize me. Perhaps, with the distancing effect of my facial injuries, she’d convinced herself that I really was whoever she’d mistaken me for. In my gut I knew that wasn’t the case. It was more complicated than that. Stories I’d made up in the hospital about Smith had seemingly taken on a life of their own. Why shouldn’t they have? After all, I’d simply put together the hard-luck clichés of any number of my patients. That they should be collectively true, for someone, somewhere in New York, didn’t strike me as unlikely. It was an illusion, this feeling that Smith was warping the surrounds.
Not quite ready to go back to the hotel after all, I got off the subway at a random station and found myself somewhere in the theater district. It was a glacial Saturday night. The crowds were out, milling about in their various tribes. The dinner-and-show people, the out-of-towners, the sailors on leave, the neatly dressed guys outside hotels waiting for their dates. Intensely familiar scenes, ones I felt disconnected from. I stopped outside a bar for a few minutes. In a booth on the other side of the glass I spied a love-struck couple in earnest conversation. It had always beguiled me, when you could see people converse but not hear them, like in a silent movie. I watched them for quite a while until the man looked up at me, questioningly. I walked on, down Forty-Second. I thought of Marie touching my face, and put my hand to my scar. “Hows about it mister,” murmured a thin girl from the side exit of one of the theaters. A low light cast her infinite shadow down the street.
A block on, and I was outside the Century. The last time I’d been there, Abby had been smiling at me from a poster of a show she’d been in with the Lunts. Now there was another show on, still with the Lunts. Perhaps it was even the same play, but with a different sidekick. Abby, too, had been excised, erased. Finally, I realized, she was gone. So absent that it was almost as though she’d never been there. Now there was Marie. I knew that I wanted to go to bed with her. I looked down at my feet. A little plaque had been embedded in the sidewalk, a memorial to those who’d lost their lives in a theater fire.
Marie. Somehow you could tell that as a young girl she’d been plain and gawky, although she wasn’t now. She must have grown into her face, the way men often did, but which was rarer for a woman. What mattered to me right now was that for Marie, our encounter in the bar had probably signaled the end of something—the final scene. Whereas I was determined for it to be a beginning.
5
“Why did you want to get off here?”
“Can’t you guess?”
Marie and I were climbing out of the subway on East Broadway. It was the next day, Sunday. Streets that would normally be bustling and animated—filled with stalls and street peddlers—were now deserted, sinister. We made our way through the grids of tenement blocks, down to Manhattan Bridge, then walked for a half hour or so along the river, past the old oyster houses and piers—most of them in a state of decrepitude since the switch of shipping traffic to the other side of the island.
“There. You came out from there.”
Marie was pointing to a door that hung limply from its hinges. After the wordless wandering, we’d stopped by an old warehouse fronted by an abandoned office, and a peeling sign that said COIMBRA SHIPPING. I pushed through the door, unsure of what I was supposed to find. Inside, a mess of broken furniture, beer bottles, piles of paper and garbage, floorboards pulled up to reveal mud and dirt. The vestiges of an office, now crumbled away into a nighttime refuge for the homeless. A calendar was still pinned to the wall, marked with faded, handwritten scribbles and annotations. Mold had eaten half of it away but there was enough detail to tell that it only dated from the year before. It surprised me that this could have been a working office as recently as that. The space was dead. It smelled musky, as if its abandonment had happened decades and not months ago.
I went back outside. For a second I couldn’t see Marie but then I spotted her on the sidewalk, sitting on a tattered case that she must have pulled from a nearby pile of refuse.
“Do you remember?”
I had the feeling of our relationship mysteriously coming back to me, piece by piece. It wasn’t the first time I’d caught myself thinking of her as someone I’d been with, and had inexplicably let go. As I watched her sitting on the case I couldn’t help imagining her naked on a bed, propped up on an elbow, looking up to me. It was like a memory.
“Come on, let’s grab some coffee.”
She nodded. We turned from the river and walked down streets I didn’t know, our hands interlaced although I had no sense of how or when they’d become so. We found a coffee place on a street corner in an Italian enclave and sat looking at each other intently over the cups. A welter of thoughts came to me but I was waiting for Marie to say something first. I realized that we’d hardly spoken since we’d agreed to meet that morning.
“You’ve changed … I’ve changed too.”
“You seem the same to me.”
She shook her head: “When I met you, I could hardly speak English.”
“It didn’t matter, though, did it? We went to a movie together that first time. You seemed to enjoy it.”
“I couldn’t understand it. I remember you miming the story to me afterward. I’d dreamed up a completely different version in my mind.”
“Now your English is so good—how did it get that way?”
“There was an old woman at the refugee bureau. She gave classes for free. She took an interest in me. I was seeing her every day. I decided I had to learn properly, if I wanted to make a life here.”
“And you did learn. So why are you still working as a maid?”
“It’s not hard. It doesn’t take up much time. I owe it to the man I’m working for. He took me in. After you’d left me with nothing.”
I was silent for a moment.
“The man. Tell me about him.”
“He’s kind. He’s alone. Divorced. His ex-wife lives in Brooklyn. She has medical problems. Sometimes his young son is there with him, sometimes not. Sometimes he travels, and then there’s no one in the apartment.”
“You stay there?”
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“Mr. Stevenson.”
“Are you sleeping with him?”
“No. I share a room with the little boy.”
“What do you do when they’re not there?”
“I have the place to myself. I get up, do a little housework. Hang the clothes on the line. Smoke a cigarette on the balcony. I get dressed. I study.”
“What are you studying?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“I will take the medical exams, when I’m ready.”
“How can you afford to do this? Is Stevenson paying for you?”
“Yes. He’s paying for me.”
“Don’t you think he’ll want something in return, eventually?”
“He’s already getting something in return. I’m looking after his son. I’m looking after his apartment.”
“Is he there now?”
“No.”
“What about his son?”
“He’s upstate, with his grandparents.”
“Why don’t we go to the apartment, now?”
“All right. If you want.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Not a word was spoken in the cab. But where the silence of the river walk had been easy, it had now become taut with expectation. As if our final exchange in the coffee bar had constituted a binding contract, and
there was nothing further to be done. My mind was jolting forward, replaying scenes to come as if they’d already happened. We passed through streets I thought I knew, but when I looked out the window to identify something specific—a store, a building, a landmark—I couldn’t come up with anything. We weren’t holding hands now; Marie’s rested on her lap. A thick woolen scarf obscured her neck and the lower half of her face.
“This is the place.”
The cab halted outside a new, well-heeled block that I recognized from some former incarnation. I paid off the driver, and a liveried doorman stepped out onto the sidewalk to open the door for Marie. She nodded briefly and we entered the lobby, whose plastic opulence recalled to mind my old office building on Park Avenue. We rode up to a middling floor. Once we’d gotten out, and the operator had pulled the elevator doors shut, Marie fiddled about under the carpet for the key.
We were inside. With a single, sweeping glance, I felt I’d understood all I needed to know. Neat, functional, the apartment was smaller than I’d thought it would be. It was the home of a tidy, methodical man, in no great need of a maid. I had the image of an ordinary-looking, middle-aged professional, whose uneventful life had been broken open by the unexpected departure of his wife. In the wake of that catastrophe, he had no doubt turned inward. When not caring for his child, I imagined, his life would have become consumed in a series of increasingly private routines and rituals. Things might have gone on terminally like this, but for a singular encounter. Perhaps he’d been eating at his usual place, the one he went to every day without fail, and then he’d spotted a striking, forlorn young woman, sitting on a suitcase across the street. Perhaps it had started like that.
All of this had come to me in a second. Impossible to imagine a man and a woman living here, in this smallish space, without sleeping together, it occurred to me. You could feel it in the walls. But I didn’t find the thought particularly troubling. Marie had gotten out of her coat; she’d thrown it over a chair and now turned to me.
“Do you remember this dress?”
Simple, patterned, demure, it was nothing out of the ordinary, and it took me a moment to work out why the dress looked strange. It was a cotton summer outfit, and we were in the depths of winter.
“I remember.”
The heavy coat had betrayed nothing of her body. She slipped the straps from her shoulders and put her arms around my neck. I kissed her and she pulled away, kicking off her shoes and shimmying free of her dress. As she undid her bra I glanced toward the balcony with its French windows that were slightly ajar, despite the cold. When I looked back, Marie was in her stockings, otherwise naked. She stood framed by an inner doorway, its straight lines accentuating the contours of her breasts and hips. It was how I’d imagined her; the erotic pull felt familiar.
She was gazing through to another room that I couldn’t see at first. I thought she was looking at someone, even signaling to him, but when I walked over to her, there was no one. Only an empty space, save for two narrow beds. We hurriedly pushed them together. Marie reached down to unbutton my pants. She whispered something, too softly for me to catch it. My hand was on her breast, her hand on mine, my head full of the smell of her skin. Inside the moment she seemed barely recognizable, her flesh almost liquid to touch. But behind the distorting excitement I was aware of something else, an almost comfortable intimacy. As if this were something we’d done a hundred times before.
“When’s he back?”
“This afternoon.”
“I’d better leave, then.”
“Don’t go just yet. He’ll call first.”
Marie had propped herself on her elbow. She was looking up at me, and her face had a radiance that startled me. I put my hand to her neck, and traced the faint white line that ran from below her ear down to her shoulder blade.
“What’s this?”
“From an operation.”
“What for?”
“I had a tumor. Years ago. But you knew that.”
She turned about so I could no longer see the scar. Perhaps the fact of having one herself had softened her toward my own. She’d worn her scarf high up on her neck, just as I tended to push my fedora down over my face.
It felt like the greatest luxury to watch Marie as she dressed without hurry. She disappeared into the bathroom. I put the beds back to how they’d been, then wandered out into the small corridor, at the end of which was another bedroom, its door half open. The man’s room. Perhaps Marie’s as well. Without thinking, I walked in. Double bed, a chest of drawers, a small writing table, a wardrobe—just by looking around I felt I already knew him. What kind of man would call his maid to say he was on his way home, I wondered. No kind of man, evidently. I opened the wardrobe: a dozen or so white shirts hung neatly off a railing, seemingly all the same. Had Marie ironed them? I took one off the hanger and put it on; it fit me perfectly. I’d torn my own shirt in my haste to get undressed. Some ten-dollar bills, maybe a dozen of them, sat on the bedside table. For what purpose? I picked up a couple but then put them down again. I didn’t want to get Marie into trouble.
I turned around to see her watching me from the sitting room. She was no longer wearing the summer dress, but a more seasonal woolen skirt and cardigan. Her hair was smoothed down, makeup applied. She was different again, her face more serious, and in her difference, our sexual encounter of only minutes before seemed inconceivable. As if to reassure myself that it had happened, I walked up to her and put my hands around her waist. I started to unbutton her cardigan.
“There’s no time.”
“Will we see each other again?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know, why did you go to bed with me?”
She turned away and sat down in the one armchair in the room. Beside it was a small table on which lay some medical books.
“You disappear completely. Suddenly you’re back again. I’m angry with you. Very angry. But not quite finished with you. Remember the time we met outside Radio City?
“Yes.”
“You knew a way to get into the show without paying. We couldn’t afford to eat out, but you had flowers for me. Later you told me you’d spent an hour picking them in Central Park.”
“I remember.”
She nodded to herself. It all made strange sense to me. Manne had been cold, austere, driven by routine; Smith was different: gregarious, impulsive—even romantic, it seemed. As Marie excavated the details of our affair, it came alive for me as well, the scenes playing in my head like a movie reel. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her, a refugee, arriving in New York, knowing no one, utterly alone. But then someone eventually takes pity on you. He makes an effort to help you. It almost doesn’t matter who he is, or that he barely shares a common language with you. In fact, the greater the distance between the two of you, the better it is. After all, passion is not a meeting of minds, it’s an entanglement of fantasies. Only later, as the unknown is gradually, dismally translated into the known, does the disappointment come.
The ringing phone cut through my thoughts. Marie hurried over to the sideboard and picked it up.
“Yes … yes … Anatole … yes.” She put down the receiver and turned to me. “You’ve got to go now.”
“That was Stevenson?”
“Yes. He’s at Grand Central.”
“Anatole … you’re on first name terms with him?”
“That’s his son’s name.”
“He has a French name?”
“No. It’s just my own name for him. A kind of joke.”
“What sort of joke?”
“A silly thing. It’s not important.”
She put her arms around my neck again, and I could feel her breasts against me. She had a pet name for the boy, one that she shared with his father. Even in the unlikely event that she wasn’t sleeping with Stevenson, it demonstrated a certain domestic intimacy. I had an image of her here in the apartment playing with the boy, the man looking on indul
gently, like an illustration for an ad.
“Will we see each other again?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll see each other again.”
6
It took me quite a while to find the hospital again, despite the midtown location. When I finally came upon it, practically by accident, its modest facade seemed to slot perfectly into a faceless New York. Through the doors I found myself in an atrium, with a reception desk at one end manned by a young man, no doubt a medical student earning a few extra bucks. I remembered little of the day of my discharge, only a couple of months before, although it felt like the distant past. Now I took the opportunity to look about and absorb the details. Fresh paint, shiny carpet, new chairs—and yet, in my mind, the hospital had been quite shabby. It must have been renovated in the months since I’d left. Nobody about, which was odd as well. As if to contradict that thought, a woman suddenly appeared from behind the receptionist’s desk and then walked out the front door. For a bizarre moment I thought she was Marie, although on second glance the resemblance was quite superficial.
I was in a waiting area just off the atrium. I’d had my misgivings about coming back to the hospital for the appointment. I had this image of it as a sort of cocoon. A place of flickering ambiguity, into which a dying Manne had entered, and a reborn Smith had exited. It should have disappeared and crumbled away as soon as I no longer had any use for it. Now I wondered whether Dr. Peters might even get me committed again. I had a desire to melt back into the city, to become yet another of its anonymous faces. Instead, I’d kept my word. I didn’t really know why, except that it was to do with Manne, not Smith. I couldn’t entirely shake Manne off, not on my own.
“Dr. Peters will see you now.”
A nurse had appeared. She led me down a long corridor to an elevator. As we walked, I continued to look around, surprised at how perfect everything seemed. Even the nurse herself was immaculately groomed, as if she’d just stepped out of a makeup department. We rode the elevator, walked down another pristine corridor, and then the nurse said: “This is Dr. Peters’s office.”