She said: How long have you had this place?
He got up and went to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Honey Stone waited a long time without moving, watching the lights in the fog. Finally she propped up the pillows against the wall, leaned back and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke rings and watching them fade. She looked at the bathroom door, as if by staring hard enough she might make him reappear. But the door was flat and white as an empty page, and Honey Stone knew that the page would remain empty, simply because so many things that could have been written there hadn’t been. She tucked herself under the covers, turned off the light, and closed her eyes. The foghorns made her sleep feel safe and relaxing.
When she woke the clock on the wall said half past nine. The fog was still thick. It took her a while to figure out that she wasn’t in her own room, even though a portrait of her father was framed on the wall. She looked at the bathroom door and slowly remembered Harry Knight, how he’d gone to the bathroom and never come out. She figured he must have been drunk and passed out on the floor, even though he seemed sober the night before. But when she opened the door he wasn’t there. She assumed he must have gotten up earlier and gone out, so she got back under the covers and waited.
The street was quiet. The fog was thick enough to swallow all the noise of the city, making her feel that the room was the only place in the world. Thoughts came slowly. Each word stretched out for fifteen minutes, losing its verbal form and becoming a fish. She spent the whole day underwater. The fog was getting dark. Soon she lay back down and went to sleep.
When she opened her eyes, the day was cool and bright and the street was full of sounds. She saw the lower Manhattan skyline through the window, the Manhattan Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the towering space that had once been the World Trade Center. The clock said half past eight, and she was due at work by nine. She picked up Harry Knight’s phone and called in sick. There was still no sign of him, but she was hungry, so she put on a pot of coffee, took bacon and eggs from his refrigerator and made herself a delicious breakfast. Then she went downstairs and wandered around the neighborhood. Honey Stone had never been to Vinegar Hill before, and she liked what she saw. Much of it was industrial, battered brick warehouses with broken windows, but the old residential buildings, cobbled streets, and sleepy cafés made it seem like 1900. She knew she would have liked it even more fifteen years ago, before the artists came and the place became chic, before the yuppies came and the place became unaffordable. But something about the neighborhood still felt immune to gentrification.
Honey Stone got a ham sandwich from a place with a sign that promised Hot Meals! but otherwise had no name. Then she went back to Harry Knight’s apartment. He still wasn’t there. She noticed that he’d left his wallet on the nightstand, and she decided to go through it and find out who he was. But aside from four one-dollar bills, the wallet was empty—no credit cards, no ID cards, no pictures of smiling relatives. She opened the drawer of an old wooden desk and examined his personal papers, which told her only one crucial fact, that Harry Knight wasn’t paying rent on his apartment. Apparently, it had been in the family for decades. When his mother died in 1980, Harry Knight got a free apartment, except for the $50 a month he paid in property taxes.
She couldn’t resist a strange but seductive thought: What if Harry Knight was gone? What if she could stay in his apartment, reducing her housing expenses to $50 a month? She lay down on Harry Knight’s bed and did some delicious math. With the $25,000 she’d managed to save in the ten years she’d been working in the city, she could pay his taxes for ten years and still have almost $20,000 left over. If she lived carefully, she could get by without working!
She soon fell into a sleep that felt like falling asleep a thousand times, and when she woke up to another cool clear morning and Harry Knight wasn’t there, she called her boss and quit her job, took one of the books on Harry Knight’s desk and went to a small café on the corner, happier than she’d ever been in her life. Honey Stone took a table near the open doorway, looking down the street toward the docks and the river, paging through the book and reading passages here and there. The book was called Eat Pork!—a memoir about the death of the author’s mother—but nothing that she read explained the title.
The waiter put a menu on the table. The prices were low by Manhattan standards, and though she knew on her limited budget she couldn’t take many meals outside her apartment, for now she wanted to celebrate her new situation without fussing about money. The waiter must have been over seven feet tall. He was standing in the light coming in through the windows, eyebrows raised and pencil poised above the pad in his giant spider-like hand. She managed to say that she wanted eggs Benedict and coffee, but felt too overwhelmed by her new situation to say anything else, which was fine with the waiter, who as a rule had no interest in conversations since they made him feel awkward, as if he were suddenly in a room that was only large enough to contain his head. So he smiled at Honey Stone and turned toward the kitchen, took one step, took another step, and stopped.
Silence made the café seem like an answer on a final exam, as if he were solving a difficult calculus problem without writing anything down, doing it all in his head, not even using numbers, picturing the elements of the problem as a pattern of images: a cage in a research lab, a shack made of junk in a desert canyon, a half moon above mountains framed by a casement window, a classroom surrounded by teeth on burning billboards, a tower piercing a windy afternoon sky—images arranged and rearranged, mixing with and replacing each other, passing through each other, falling into place and falling out of place, as if the two motions were the same thing, as if all numbers were secretly other numbers, or became other numbers at high altitudes and low temperatures.
The silence reminded Honey Stone that she’d left her purse on Harry Knight’s bed. She got up and left. But the waiter, Lance Boyle, stood there smiling, caught between seconds, eyes halfway between the words on his waiter’s pad and the double doors of the kitchen. There was no way to know how long he stopped. Everything around him stayed exactly as it was. There was no one else waiting for breakfast, and the cook in the kitchen had gone to sleep. The moment was free to cast aside its temporal disguise. It was no longer simply a dot on a line, so now it began to expand above and beside and below that line, relaxing into unlimited space in every direction, except that now it could no longer be called a moment—it was taking too long for a moment—which meant that it was left without a name, without a way to hold itself in place, and it fell and smashed on the floor like a broken egg, forcing Lance Boyle to bend and clean it up, since he knew his boss would be there soon. His boss would go berserk if the floor was a mess.
He’d always hated bending to clean things up, not because he thought he was too good to clean up his own mess, but because bending always reminded him of how tall he was, how his height had always been a problem. Lance Boyle wasn’t good at basketball and thought he looked like a jerk when he walked. This feeling had been with him since he was five, when he started getting taller than everyone else, and all the kids on the block began making fun of the way he walked. Things got even worse later, when the one girl he’d ever taken out on a date giggled and said that he looked like the mast of a ship in a storm when he walked. Though she’d apologized when he complained about how bad the analogy made him feel—she told him she didn’t really mean it and was just trying to be clever, seeing if the simile worked well enough to include in a poem she was working on—he still never got over it. He never wanted anyone to see him walking again. He’d always felt better sitting down so no one could tell how tall he was. But he couldn’t wait on tables sitting down, and it was the only job he could find, since studies had shown that extremely tall people made smaller people nervous. Few employers wanted people over seven feet tall working for them.
But something about the way Honey Stone had sized him up made Lance Boyle think that she might want to be his friend. So he went outside to see if he could find ou
t where she’d gone. The street was empty, but there was a footprint on the sidewalk. When he went down on all fours to get a better look, he picked up a scent and told himself that it had to be Honey Stone’s. Lance Boyle had a great nose, and he followed the scent down the street, walking quickly on all fours, around a corner and down another street, sniffing carefully, wagging his tail, around a corner and down another street, sniffing his way through patches of light and shade on the filthy sidewalk, around the corner and down another street, sniffing and wagging his tail, until a woman jogging in a black sweatsuit caught up with him, scratched behind his ears, kissed the top of his head, circled his neck with a collar, hooked a leash to the collar, and took him down the block, unlocked a steel door, took him up three flights of stairs to a small apartment with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. He circled three times on the sky-blue oval carpet, settled down and looked up at his master, who scratched behind his ears again. Then she got up and went to the bathroom, threw off her sweats, and took a shower.
She’d never loved anything more than taking showers. In fact, she jogged every day in winter and early spring not because keeping in shape was crucial, but because she liked getting sweaty on cold mornings and having to take long showers, warming the grime and exhaustion out of her body. Dawn Wakeman worked in the towel section of a department store in downtown Brooklyn. She liked the work because towels reminded her of taking showers, and she thought constantly of all the showers her customers would be taking. No two showers were alike. The sounds and caressing motions of the water, the interplay of light and steam, the scented soaps and shampoos and conditioners, the patterns of relaxation unfolding in every part of her body—all of them happened in different ways each time she took a shower. Dawn Wakeman was convinced that if people could learn to appreciate all the differences in the showers they took day after day, boredom would become a thing of the past. She’d even thought of offering classes in the art of taking showers, but she had cancelled the idea when she realized that formalizing the process into a sequence of lessons would destroy the pleasure that played such a strong part in her life each day.
Besides, she knew that guys would sign up for the class for the sole purpose of taking showers with women, and Dawn Wakeman couldn’t imagine showering with anyone else. She’d never understood why people thought it was sexy to shower with lovers. A friend once told her that if you weren’t happy showering with a guy, you better find someone else. But lovers had become a thing of the past for Dawn Wakeman. Men had always been too selfish and mean, and she no longer thought about going to bed with a woman. She much preferred the company of Lance, her five-year-old Great Dane. He was never anything but affectionate, and she loved the way that he slept at the foot of her bed. She’d even gotten a larger bed to make room for him when he grew from being a sweet little puppy into a sweet enormous adult. Though sometimes he got lost and wandered around the neighborhood, his large size made him easy to find, especially when everyone in Vinegar Hill knew whose dog he was and would quickly return him if they found him alone on the street.
Dawn Wakeman often wondered if there wasn’t something weird about her preference for a dog. But five years back, right before she adopted Lance from the dog pound, she had an experience that clarified everything. She’d been taking a vacation in southern Oregon, walking the cliffs and enjoying the cold gray skies, taking three showers each day in the inexpensive room she’d found five miles outside a town that no one had ever heard of. Everything was desolate and deserted, until one day she saw someone sitting on a rock at the foot of the cliffs, carefully watching the sea and making sketches in a large black book. At first she had no reaction. But as the days passed and she kept seeing the man sitting one hundred feet below making sketches in his book, she became curious. Finally she descended. She found a rugged pathway winding down the side of the cliff. It wasn’t entirely safe, but she took the risk anyway, telling herself to be careful. Measuring every step, she finally got to the bottom, only to find that the man was no longer there.
Day after day, the same thing happened. She saw the man sketching and carefully made her way down the cliff, finding herself alone when she got to the bottom. She saw no other way up the cliff, saw no caves that the man might have been hiding in, and from above had seen no boat that he might have used as a means of escape. She tried to keep her eyes on the man while climbing down the path, but this was impossible, since the way was slippery and difficult. If she’d lifted her eyes at any point, she might have fallen to her death. Whenever she stopped and steadied herself to look down he was still there sketching. But whenever she got to the foot of the cliff he was gone, as if he existed only when seen from above.
She would have given up if something hadn’t been wrong with the sea. She couldn’t say what it was at first, except that the light on the water looked fake. Then she became convinced that the man was responsible, that he’d been taking the waves and sketching them into his notebook, appropriating the ocean with pencil and page. She knew the thought was insane, and the more she let it circulate the more insane it became. She had to make it stop. But each day the ocean was smaller, two percent smaller, five percent smaller, shrinking and sinking, wrinkling up like shriveled skin or a yellowing page, fading away from the sound it normally made when it crashed on the shore.
She knew there was only one thing to do. Stuffing a knapsack with food and blankets, she found a hiding place behind rocks at the foot of the cliff, waiting for the man to show up with his sketchbook. Day after day, the result was the same: He never came, and the ocean stopped getting smaller. Even the missing waves came back to crash on the rocks and return to the sea. She never saw the man again. She went back to her daily walks on the cliff and felt proud of herself. Her showers were even more beautiful than before. She flew back to Vinegar Hill convinced that she’d saved the Pacific Ocean.
She told her girlfriends that men were a thing of the past. When they asked why, she shrugged and said that men were too destructive. The result was a burst of agreement. Her friends agreed that men were too destructive, but they also agreed that this was nothing new, and they also agreed that men were convinced that women were too destructive, which meant that nothing would change, that they couldn’t imagine themselves without men, and so they agreed with each other that Dawn Wakeman would soon be dating again, that she wasn’t meant to spend her life by herself. She agreed that she wasn’t meant to spend the rest of her life by herself. But she saw no reason to settle for human companionship.
At first, the absence of men was strange. When she’d sworn them off in the past, she’d always imagined herself with women. But now she wasn’t imagining much of anything. Instead, she was stepping out of one of the ten most relaxing showers she’d ever taken, drying herself off with one of her many towels, laughing at the very thought of forcing herself again to accept the confusions and frustrations of an intimate human relationship. In fact, she’d even tried to write an essay for Ms. Magazine denouncing the process of couple formation. But writing always made her insecure, and besides, she’d already saved the Pacific Ocean from the human race. She didn’t also need to save the human race from itself.
She was just about to scratch Lance behind his ears and run a brush through her long black hair when the sight of the Brooklyn Bridge out the window made her pause. It often made her pause. But this was different. Something about the light on the river made food seem tempting. Something about the light on the river made food seem disgusting. The two feelings couldn’t exist at the same time, so both disappeared. She took a step, another step, and stopped.
Silence filled the room like every sky she’d ever seen. She felt like the Brooklyn Bridge at five in the morning. She felt like she’d spent the last five years of her life with Friends of Silence, an underground society of mental ecologists who spent their free time eliminating media noise, cleverly and politely convincing the owners of bars, restaurants, pharmacies, laundromats, and supermarkets to remove all radios and TVs fro
m their places of business, liberating huge expanses of mental space from commercial interference, an event of even greater importance than the removal of cigarette smoke from public places. Her entire life seemed to be an ongoing series of interventions in the name of silence, and the thought that she could continue this work for the rest of her life was beautiful enough to make her take a step, and another step, leashing her dog and going downstairs to the street, eagerly searching out her next intervention.
She found one quickly. A few blocks away, through the window of a small café, she could see a TV above the bar, the face of President Bush, then a beer commercial. Dawn Wakeman tied her dog by the leash to a parking meter, went inside, and asked to speak to the owner. As it turned out, he was tending bar.
Dawn Wakeman said: Can you turn the TV off?
The owner smiled: I could, but I don’t think I will.
Dawn Wakeman said: Why not?
The owner’s smile disappeared: Why should I turn it off?
Dawn Wakeman said: It’s making noise. It’s bullshit.
The owner said: My customers don’t think so.
Dawn Wakeman said: Why don’t we ask them?
He said: Studies have shown that people like eating in places where stupid music plays in the background. I assume that my customers are the same as the people in the studies.
Dawn Wakeman said: Fuck the studies! Why don’t we ask them?
Dawn Wakeman turned and looked at the people drinking coffee at the tables. She said: How many of you would be upset if we turned the TV off?
No one said anything.
Dawn Wakeman turned back to the owner and said: So turn the TV off.
Changing the Subject Page 13