You Are Free: Stories

by Danzy Senna

  When the weeping finally stopped, Rodney said, “Eight minutes. It took all of eight minutes.”

  Wednesday night—date night—Rodney and I drove west on the 10 to meet Soleil and Greg for dinner. I hadn’t thought we’d ever see them again, but here we were.

  Oscar had not wanted to be left behind with Betty tonight. She hadn’t been able to distract him with finger puppets as we were leaving the way she usually did. She had to physically restrain him, and he thrashed and wept as if we were sending him to the gas chamber. The sound of his wailing was still echoing in my bones as we drove along the crowded freeway.

  Rodney had organized the dinner behind my back. He’d sprung it on me just before Betty was due to arrive, as if it was the thing I’d always wanted, a date night with Greg and Soleil.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he’d said, smiling at himself in the mirror as he buttoned up his linen shirt. “Guess what we’re doing tonight?”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to dinner with Greg and Soleil.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “How do you think Janice would feel if she knew we were hanging out with them? I mean, coming to get the mail is one thing, but—”

  “Janice is gone,” he’d said, examining his nose in the mirror. He glanced back at me and shrugged. “Anyway, you never really liked Janice. She was a bore. You said so.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Yes, you did. I remember your words. You said, ‘Every time she opens her mouth I get sleepy.’”

  I didn’t remember saying anything like that. I didn’t remember feeling it either, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “She wasn’t boring,” I said, then repeated it for emphasis. “She wasn’t boring.”

  “Name one interesting thing about her,” Rodney said, turning to face me. “She said she was going to design handbags but she never did. Then she wanted to become an events planner. That was her goal. Events planning. I’m sorry, but if Greg didn’t want to stay trapped in a Lifetime movie, more power to him.”

  I’d never thought Rodney paid that much attention to Janice, but he remembered more details about her than I did.

  “Why are we even discussing this?” I said.

  He shrugged, turned back to the mirror, and began adjusting his slacks. “I just don’t want you to be so judging. We’re all adults here. Let’s have a nice evening.”

  They were waiting for us outside the restaurant.

  Soleil was wearing something that looked like red satin pajamas. She came toward me and hugged me tightly before I could stop her. “You look beautiful,” she said. “I love that color blue on you.” I could feel her body, bony and lithe, the body I’d always wanted, beneath the pajamas. She smelled like a church. Greg hovered beside her, waiting for his turn to hug me.

  “I’m so happy you decided to join us!” he said, gripping my arms and staring at me in the eyes before he embraced me.

  Over dinner, Rodney asked Soleil questions about herself. She told us she was a healer. She practiced Reiki and taught yoga twice a week at a local studio. She was studying to become a “spiritual counselor” at some New Age center with a pseudo-African name. She was writing a screenplay too, a magic realism coming-of-age story based on her childhood in Nevada.

  I looked across the table at Rodney, waiting to see the sarcastic smirk on his face. He liked to say about L.A., “Everybody wants to be a fucking guru.” But he was watching Soleil talk, nodding, totally serious. And when she was done telling us about her work, Rodney said to her, “You should teach Tracy yoga. She needs to relax.”

  I listened, wondering about Janice and Bryant, what they were doing in D.C., where it was snowing.

  During the main course, I asked, “How’s Bryant adjusting to his new life?”

  Greg’s face stiffened slightly at the mention of his son, but he recovered with his enormous grin. “He’s great. Just fantastic. He’s in this amazing new school. Montessori. Their Toddler Twos program. Super-high-tech.”

  He started telling us how they had a video camera in all the classrooms, and you could log in on their Web site to watch, in real time, your child playing throughout the day. “Like a surveillance camera,” he said.

  “Is that strange,” I said, “watching him through a computer screen?”

  Greg paused. “I haven’t actually tried it yet.”

  I nodded and looked into my water, trying to picture Bryant through a video surveillance camera, the kind that makes everything look seedy and criminal, imagined him tiny and distant and grainy, crawling across a classroom. I wondered if he’d ever learned to walk.

  In the parking lot, Soleil hugged me again, tighter this time. She said, “I’m so glad you decided to come, Tracy.” She asked if we could have coffee next week, just the two of us. She said she would give me a private yoga class if I liked.

  I hesitated, thinking distantly of Janice, but I couldn’t remember her very well now. I remembered other details about her, things she’d said, details she’d told me, intimate and sad, about her and Greg. Other things too—the slight bemused smile she wore all the time, always planted on her face, whether she was talking about something sad or something happy—how disconcerting I found that smile. And I remembered her outfits—the white jeans and the flowing brightly colored tops and her hair, a coil of black curls. I even remembered that her toenails were always painted a muted shade of burgundy, long toes peeking out from her strappy low-heeled sandals. But I couldn’t remember her face, only all the context around that face, facts and figures, colors and sounds, but not the face itself.

  It was like a sad dream you wake from feeling intensely, as if it really happened, but within moments the details of it have evaporated, leaving the feeling of grief but not the reason for it.

  “Can we do that, Trace?” Soleil was saying. She was all lit up by the streetlight, ethereal, with her sepia skin and her shiny black curls, the exotic beauty I’d always hoped to become.

  Behind her the two men stood, pretending to talk to each other, but I could see their eyes were on us. They were waiting to see what I’d say, if I’d join Soleil for lunch, a yoga class. Waiting to see if I’d be her friend.

  “Sure,” I said, my mouth dry, hollow, airy as the dead now. “Let’s do that.”

  We drove home on the freeway, the hills a dark shadow hovering in the distance beneath a cloud of smoke. You couldn’t really tell at night, but there were fires raging in those hills, the way they did every year, devouring the living and the dead. If you breathed in too deeply, it hurt your lungs.

  Rodney spoke beside me. “Soleil’s nice, isn’t she? I mean, interesting.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I have a feeling you two are gonna hit it off,” he said, and he reached over and squeezed my knee.

  I was quiet, thinking about Janice again. I tried to remember her face, but it was disappearing now. It was almost gone.

  “What did she look like?”

  “Who?”

  “Janice. What did she look like?”

  Rodney glanced at me. “Don’t you remember?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  I didn’t ask him what he meant. Instead I looked out the window beside me and tried to see my own reflection there in the dark glass, but all I could see was what was behind it, the other cars moving past, and beyond them, distantly, a stucco housing development. I rolled down the window and let some of the outside air blow in on me.

  “Could you shut that?” I heard Rodney say, as if from a great distance. “I’m cold.”

  But I left it open, my eyes closed, letting the burning air fill my lungs as we moved east across the city.

  There, There

  I see the headline after lunch.

  It’s on the Internet—a newswire report about something that happened just this morning. TIME MAGAZINE EDITOR DIES IN FALL.

  My boyfriend is an editor at Time magazine, so I can’t h
elp but feel a tightening in my throat as I click on the headline.

  The article opens and I am relieved to see that it was a business editor—somebody in a totally different department from my boyfriend. A forty-two-year-old business editor who wrote an occasional advice column on personal investing. He is survived by his wife, Deborah, who is a business writer for a different magazine. The police suspect suicide. He jumped at ten a.m. from the fifteenth floor of the Time magazine offices, which the article says is the highest floor in the building. I am surprised by this detail. I have been inside the lobby of this building and somehow imagined it to be a lot taller than fifteen stories. Maybe a hundred and fifteen. He landed on the roof of a garage next to the building.

  When I’m done reading, I call my boyfriend at his office. Even though I already know it wasn’t he who jumped, I’m happy when I hear his voice. He sounds harried.

  “What’s up?” he says. I can hear his fingers tapping away on the keyboard in the background.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I was just calling because—”

  I hesitate. I decide to let him bring it up.

  “Just calling to say hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” he says. “How was lunch?”

  “Pretty good.” I tell him about my lunch, the noodle shop I went to, the guy at the table across from mine who ordered the same thing I did, how I pretended not to notice and avoided his eyes. But I can tell I’m babbling and I can tell he is distracted.

  “Really,” he says.

  “Really,” I say. “So what’s going on over there?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “I’m just pressed for time. Sorry. I have to close this article in the next hour.”

  “No, don’t worry about it.”

  After I say it, I realize I’m nervous. I really want him to tell me about the man who fell.

  But the next thing he says is, “Are we still meeting later?”

  “Yes, for bibimbap.”

  I wait a beat, give him one more chance.

  But he doesn’t say it. He just says in a clipped voice, “Listen, I gotta run. Can we talk later?”

  I am sweating now. “Okay, bye.”

  “Bye,” he says, and hangs up.

  My roommate is home—the one who never uses the kitchen, the one who seems to be disappearing. She might be in her forties, but it’s possible she is much younger. She looks both very old and very young, like a stooped grandmother and a prepubescent girl. It’s hard to tell with somebody who doesn’t eat, because the bones show through the skin. It is surprising to me every time I see her. I think it’s not possible to get any thinner, and then she gets thinner.

  I go to her room and stand in the doorway, watching as she rifles through a drawer.

  She is only half dressed in a red skirt and a black lacy bra. All the vertebrae in her back are visible when she leans forward.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She looks up and smiles.

  “Yes,” she says. “Ask me something.”

  “Do you think this is strange?” I go on then and tell her what happened, the article I read on the Internet, the conversation I had with my boyfriend afterward. “What do you think it means?”

  “That’s old-school,” she says. “To go to work and jump out a window. I didn’t know people did that anymore.” She finds what she was looking for in the drawer, a pair of scissors, and slices through the air as if cutting an invisible cloth.

  “But don’t you think it’s strange he didn’t tell me?”

  “Yeah, that’s weird too. Maybe he doesn’t know about it yet.”

  “Impossible,” I say. “A colleague jumping out a window? A colleague with the same job title? It’s in the newswires already. He knows. He’s just not saying anything.” I pause, cross my arms, then ask, “If somebody jumped out the window of your office, wouldn’t you call your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “But you know what I mean. If you had one.”

  “Yeah, I’d call him,” she says, smiling strangely for a moment, as if imagining the kind of boyfriend she might have in such a scenario. “I’d call him the second I found out. But that’s just me.”

  She starts applying her makeup in front of this little mirror with lights on either side. There’s a lever at the bottom where you can adjust the lights to different “settings”: Natural, Office, Evening, Disco. She has it on Disco. She always has it on Disco. She’s applying the makeup very carefully. On her boom box she’s playing a song from the eighties, Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes.” She hums along as she works on her eyes.

  I can see she isn’t interested anymore, that she’s distracted. “Maybe he was just busy,” I say, more to myself, then leave her alone with her mirror.

  That night I meet my boyfriend at a Korean restaurant. He is sitting at the table already, reading an article in the Wall Street Journal. He is wearing the same thing he wears to work every day. Literally every day. A white button-down shirt and khaki slacks. He has lots and lots of each hanging in his closet. Nothing else.

  When I sit down across from him, he tells me about the article he’s just finished reading. It’s about how food products are often misnamed to make them sound better than they are.

  “Like Key lime pie,” he says. “It is never really made from Key limes, because they cost too much to import. It’s really just made of ordinary limes. Or Chilean sea bass. It’s not even related to bass. It’s actually called a toothfish.”

  I nod, then pick up my napkin, unfold it, try to sound casual. “So what happened at work today?”

  He shrugs, looks away briefly out the window, as if he’s considering something, and then says, “I finished editing the cover story on pesticides. It’s done.” He holds up his water glass in the air and says, “Hear, hear. To completion.”

  I clink my glass against his and say, quietly, “Hear, hear.” We both take sips.

  The waitress comes to the table and he orders bibimbap with beef and I order it with tofu and then he asks me if I wrote anything today.

  It’s a bad question for him to ask.

  I am supposed to be writing a second novel. A long time ago I wrote a first novel. It was golden. The girl in it was easy to like. The book brought people together. Everyone agreed on its merits. Now they—we—are waiting to see if it was a fluke, if I can do that again. I’ve been trying to finish the follow-up for almost four years. Actually, it’s more complicated than that. I did write a second novel several years ago and even submitted it for publication. But my editor said it was dark, depressing. My agent hated it too. He said there was “nothing redemptive” in it to make anybody care.

  Now I am supposedly reworking it, trying to make the main character more sympathetic, but I’m not doing a very good job. Every time the opportunity presents itself to make the character’s humanity shine through, I make her do something awful or say something cruel instead. I’ve already spent the money they gave me to write it. My boyfriend is paying for dinner.

  I shrug. “No. Mostly I just read news reports on the Internet.”

  “All day?” he says. “That’s what you did all day?”

  “No,” I say. “Just part of the day. I got distracted by the news. You know, real stories about real lives.”

  After I say it I search his face.

  “Hmm,” he says, frowning. “When do you plan to send a draft to your editor?”

  “When I’m finished making it redemptive, I guess,” I say, and look away out the window. On the sidewalk a man is leaning against a car with his shirt up while his girlfriend inspects something on his back.

  When I look back, my boyfriend is looking at me a little sadly, like he feels sorry for me.

  The bibimbap comes in big steaming bowls and we eat it and talk about everything except the editor who jumped. He doesn’t mention it, no matter how many times I steer the conversation back to his day at work.

  When we are finished eating and paying the bill, he stands
up and says, “I’m excited to go to sleep.”

  We leave the restaurant and he links his arm in mine as we walk back toward his building.

  On the way, we pass a newsstand. From a few feet away I can see the late edition of the Post. The headline screams out, TIME EDITOR IN DEATH PLUNGE over a photograph of the building itself, with a little black arrow pointing to the window the man jumped from and a little dotted line showing the arc of his descent onto the parking garage twelve stories below.

  I pull him to a stop in front of the paper so that there is no way he can miss it. From the corner of my eye, I watch his face. His eyes seem to rest for a beat on the cover of the Post but then, abruptly, he reaches forward and picks up a different newspaper, two racks away, the wide flat pink one. He skims the front page, smiles at something, then replaces it on the stand.

  “Shall we?” he says.

  He pulls me forward, toward his apartment.

  The second book, the one I already wrote but that they won’t accept, poured out of me like something already formed. I wrote it entirely in my pajamas. I rarely left the house during that time except to go to yoga class, where I would simultaneously laugh and weep while lying in corpse pose. Every morning I would drive to the supermarket in my pajamas, where I would purchase my breakfast: a large black coffee and a to-go container of macaroni and cheese. I would consume both in my car in the parking lot with the engine running before driving back home to work more on the book.

  At some point I taped the pages of what I’d written all over the walls of my little workspace like wallpaper and paced around, laughing as I read it to myself.

  When I handed it in, my editor said, “What is this?”

  My agent coughed and said, “Now would be a good moment to explain yourself.”

  I promised them both I would work on making it more hopeful. I haven’t spoken to either of them since.