Despite all the worry, Jean was looking forward to lunch. But where were they? At two o’clock the lunchers on the steps began to thin out, drifting back into the chilled tower. At two-fifteen people came and went, but nobody sat—just Jean, staring at the street with its steaming manhole, that quintessential New York item.
She thought, People routinely say of a crisis, any crisis, you find out who your real friends are. So who were hers? This was the question the whole nation had been asking for the past twenty-two months, not just Jean. And as she sat transfixed by the slow ascent and dispersal of the city’s ghostly vapors, she remembered the smoke surrounding the collapsed Twin Towers, still rising nearly a month after the attack—and how she’d felt then the same helpless urgency of this visit to Dad in the hospital, that she absolutely had to get home to New York, and what she’d seen three weeks after the event was like this: a vast, steaming, theatrically lit manhole, so evocative of that whole swath of the population—vaporized.
“Please let him live.” Jean, not sure with whom she was pleading, could explain: she wasn’t ready for a greater loneliness.
“I haven’t figured out who my friends are yet!” Now she was appealing directly to her father. He would understand; he would intercede. “I know I’ve been stupid.” She thought of Bill’s marriage-ending affair. Was it really Auntie Eu—certainly a person who could understand what he was saying. Did that make any difference? She felt sorry for Phyllis, already a mother at eighteen, her entire young womanhood turned over to her husband and children. At the same time, Jean could now understand what Bill had done, and the important information it could deliver: that you weren’t dead. Maybe it didn’t matter so much who it was. Stripper, stewardess, or an infinitely subtle legal mind, what you wanted to know was: am I truly alive, and am I truly loved? Of course, in addition to yes, what everyone also wanted was one name, the same name, signing up to answer both questions.
Jean felt hot and miserable out on these sparkly steps. Greater loneliness was exactly what she was feeling already—and, she realized, what she’d been feeling for some time. First brotherless, then husbandless, and now almost fatherless—what happened to all the men? She was stunned she’d been quite so stupid. Just when she needed to prepare herself for her effective orphanhood (sorry, Phyllis) she’d distanced herself from Mark with his idiotic infidelity and even, however briefly, allied herself with his enemy; wouldn’t Mark, if he knew, call Dan that—his enemy?
She wondered if Mark could be a comfort now, or ever again. Recently, in his great alarm, he’d been eager, palpably concerned, as when they were waiting for the news from Scully, though of course he hadn’t actually been with her when it came. When he was there, he was distracted, or drunk. Including the time they made love after Chez Julien gassed on champagne—like last night at the bistro: champagne to celebrate not being dead. And what about his rush to be off that morning; when did Mark last linger? Never apologize, never explain; he pecked his wife good-bye and then took his giant steps to the front door and got the hell out.
Of course he’d been meeting Giovana in Germany—why else would he have gone to such legendary trouble over his hair? Jean could laugh to think of that baby pompadour. But Giovana—now there was one hell of a man-size running joke. She thought of a sentence from Larry’s book, a quote from Nietzsche: A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling. As she waited on the hospital steps (thinking this was why both her parents pushed their credo and their call, Be Busy! Be Useful!), it was Mark she saw in the jimmied metal bed, the side bar lowered not to let her in but to let his feet hang over—it was much less clear who sat beside him, massaging his calves: Aminata or Gladys? Giovana or Jean? Jean or Mrs. H.? Mrs. H. or Phyllis? Noleen or Dan? Victoria or Sophie? Mark definitely didn’t know who his real friends were.
When the Defender finally rolled up, Jean began to tell Phyllis about the tube before she was all the way down out of the car, and for a moment her mother, in a crisp white shirt, the collar upturned, paused on the high galvanized-steel step. She was leaning precariously forward like a bistro mirror. Jean told her carefully, wanting to preempt any feelings of guilt following her uncharacteristic outburst the night before, now that Bill had undergone a traumatic intervention—but there was no stopping the regret that flooded her mother’s face, her lightness left behind in the Defender like an empty paper cup as she rushed up the stairs without saying good-bye.
“I’ll see you at home later,” she called, looking over her shoulder, remembering them. “I’ll leave when they kick me out at six. Larry, you’re a darling!”
He held up his loosely open hand—something between a wave and a fist of solidarity. He didn’t need to be told this was not the day for visiting his old boss. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, helping her up. “Can you be at all hungry?”
“I’m ashamed to say I’m absolutely ravenous—where were you guys?” She didn’t quite realize how much she’d been minding until the words came out, carrying with them knotted feelings, like ropes of seaweed on an anchor.
“Well, we were on our way and then had to go back to the library. Your mother forgot her bag. She’s a little distracted, isn’t she? Understandably.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Jean said, glad he didn’t seem to expect a replay of last night’s revelation. But he’d worked in the firm at that time, and she wondered. “Was it general knowledge in the office—it was Auntie Eu, wasn’t it?”
“Nobody else knew,” he said, “or so I thought.” At least he was able to confirm her hunch—and to keep a secret. Jean saw that Phyllis had forgotten her tortoiseshell sunglasses, and she immediately put them on. They were cool in the bright sun, the brown tint ice tea for the eyes, but soon she took them off again—she did not want to look like her mother.
“How about the River Café—if you can hang on all the way to Brooklyn. Should be quick at this hour, straight down the West Side Highway.”
“Perfect. This must be what Friday afternoon feels like to people with real jobs.”
Larry smiled, his heavy engine straining into gear.
The hot wind along the highway, the bright green slivers of park, the sun on the Hudson—by the time they got to the bridge Jean was feeling light and free and weirdly alert. She’d forgotten that about Larry; his natural athlete’s ease masked a lethal sharpness. Just being near him made you feel smarter, his expectation of it maybe, his confidence in her, or was it just him spilling over? Of course it helped that the conversation never waded into the dull waters of design and marketing, but Bill always said he had it; he called him a diabolical debater.
Despite last night’s dinner and, with Phyllis’s moment, the inevitable deepening of their intimacy, they were slightly nervous, alone and facing each other across a restaurant table. Jean heard everything she said played back, like an echo on a long-distance phone call. They drank bitter lemon pressé, and Jean swore this was the lightest omelette that was still buttery enough to be worth eating: unreproducible at home.
“It’s like air,” she said, “buttered air. This simple thing that is in fact incredibly hard to do. Like shaving Dad.”
She told Larry about her failed attempt, making it more comical than it was, and he listened quietly, his expression amused but also apprehensive as if his pleasure came not from her little story but her proximity. A woman shaving a man—maybe that was a pretty intimate thing to do. Larry mentioned Milton, as a blind old man, being read to by his daughters, and this led to the etymology of “amanuensis”: “A handwriting slave,” Larry said, “like a law clerk.” From the way he moved his whole head to take his eyes off her, she judged that he too was experiencing seesaw impulses: spontaneous contact up against an adult dread of consequence. What was this, her continuing will to flirt—just the flip side of intensive care, or the backwash of her Olympic dive into the porno pool? Whatever it was, she’d never let him see it.
Larry told her Princeton was trying to lure him back. “A great course and
timely—Civil Liberties and Foreign Relations, at the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs. Mercifully,” he said, “known as Woody Woo.”
“Do you think you’ll take the job?” Wouldn’t that say something about where he intended to live?
“Well, there are other possibilities,” he said vaguely, “perhaps something in the philosophy department at NYU. More and more, my interests lie in pure philosophy. Not even jurisprudence. First causes—epistemology. My version of a midlife crisis, you might say. Maybe so—but one thing’s for certain. After this case, I’m going to give up private practice.”
Behind him on the terrace the magnificent bridge sprawled over its heavy foundations, webbed rays of spangled cables, the solid and the soaring. Beyond Larry and the bridge, in rich afternoon sun, lay Manhattan.
“I was right here when it happened,” Larry said as inevitably the talk turned to September 11. Usually unnervingly direct in his gaze, he was focused on the middle distance. “I was staying in Brooklyn Heights—this was before I got use of the firm’s apartment—at a friend’s, right over there, a penthouse on Montague Terrace. I’d just stepped out onto the deck with my coffee when I saw the first plane go in, and then the second plane.”
“God. What did it feel like?”
“For a couple of days I kept going to the bridge, or walking along the promenade. I’d just watch the papers fly—office papers, spiraling and fluttering and falling through the air like ash from a chimney, brilliant against the blue. Well, you’ve seen it. A part of me became loosened as well. Unhinged. Unfixed. Though anything but light. Like half the city, I suppose. Some weird chemical change took place… I could have sworn my feet actually weighed more. But I kept going back. And going back. And I’d watch the fluttering office papers some more. You know, it felt insanely personal. Like all the papers of my life thrown up in the air.” He paused, but Jean remained silent.
“The thing is,” he went on, “and I think this has been a part of my difficulty with that day and all that it’s come to mean. I’ve always believed in justice—given my life to it, you might say, with”—and here he laughed—“the regrettable exception of our amigos in the field of shipbuilding.”
“Ah yes, the Dirtbags.”
“But what, by this act that I after all witnessed…was made of our tools for the administration of justice? The question has of course gained terrifying point in the past few months. With the preemptive strike. Entirely illegal—a grotesque evolution, this new kind of warfare. All we have is the law. It’s all I have. It’s all you have, too—all society has. We live in and by the law. Of course, I’m quoting here. The law makes us what we are. Citizens, husbands, people who own things. It’s both sword and shield. And yet it’s abstract—our ethereal sovereign. We argue, endlessly, about what the law has decreed—I argue, I’m a lawyer, that’s what I do. But if even we don’t know—if our commitment is instead to interpretation—how can we persuade others? Especially this other. The moronic certainty. And what might reasonably be called a commitment to death. How, then, can we persuade ourselves? And for how long? Suasion—my talent and my belief—was in one single morning, a glorious, blue morning…eviscerated.”
Larry told her that, for a while after September 11, he couldn’t speak to his children—he’d reassured them immediately, and for the first time ever he felt his words were hollow. “What in honesty was there to reassure them about? What is to be their future? And how on earth are we supposed to protect them, our job. Nearly two years later, this may sound extraordinary, but at the time all I could do was walk the bridge, walk the promenade, look up at the sky. No more planes, only paper. Then no more paper. Only sky.”
It made her uneasy to hear Larry talking in abstractions—using his hands and a wide-eyed blankness of face to convey what he couldn’t clearly describe. Not so different from Dad just now. Larry’s too-blue eyes took on an evangelical sheen when he was talking, the spirograph irises of the lately converted. But he was a precise man, precise as a surgeon—and this helpless comparison made Jean more uneasy, and more frightened. How precise was a surgeon?
Instinctively, to lighten the mood, she reminded him of their undercover mission in New Jersey. “And your shirt—it got ripped on that fence.”
“Did it?” he said, smiling. Was it possible he didn’t remember? Well, naturally the sudden sight of his own brown torso wouldn’t make the same impression on him, but she kept this thought to herself.
“Ripped halfway up your back, your shirttails glowing in the sun… And I want to tell you—no one who was that guy can be depressed for long.” She hoped he wouldn’t think her flirtatious, or dense, because she believed it. Not for his body but, once again, for his clarity of purpose. And as on that distant day, Jean felt remarkably content and not in need of anything. She was staring across at the big, light-catching city of her youth while Larry pried a credit card out of his thin black wallet.
The waiter returned and said he was sorry, he couldn’t process the card because the power was out. “Should come back on in a minute. Sorry for the delay, Mr. Mond. These are on the house.” He set down two flutes of champagne. As they sat and sipped and talked—the need to create diversion for Phyllis in the coming days, the chances of Bill being released before too long, Larry’s case looking like it would drag on through the summer, the usual plans to spend late August with his children falling through because suddenly they all had plans of their own—they heard a voice from inside the restaurant saying the power was off everywhere. What was going on? A Brooklyn blackout?
“What happens if the power failure reaches the hospital? Could it?” She was asking Larry because Larry would know about grids, how they worked, how they were organized.
“Doubtful. But even if it did, a big hospital has big backup. They have enormous generators. Hospital like that, they could probably supply the city.”
It was nearly four-thirty, and Larry gave the waiter a check.
In the cave of the indoor parking lot it was going to take some time to find the car—in fact the attendant looked convincingly occupied, standing on the sidewalk with his hands on his hips, frowning at a small transistor on the ground as if it was a disgraced dog (broken antenna tail jauntily angled, playing cute for forgiveness). The attendant was shaking his head.
“I doan know. They saying the power’s out all the way from Canada on down to Florida and over west to Detroit.” He gave Larry a significant look. “You do the math.”
“What does that mean?” Jean asked, squinting at him and then at Larry. Neither answered her. Larry tried his cell phone: dead. Eventually the attendant was persuaded to leave the radio and get the car.
“Come on. Let’s get up to the hospital,” Larry said, overtipping the man and clapping him on the shoulder. “You take care of yourself!” He steered his heavy rig out onto the street, heading round the corner for the bridge access. For now Jean felt safe only in the Defender, biting her lip so as not to ask him again about the grids and generators, about Dad, about Phyllis, about everyone in the city, peering up through the broad glass windshield into the deep blue air.
The clock over at city hall said four-eleven, and so did the next one they saw, at Greenwich Avenue and Sixth, Jean’s old haunt where the women’s prison used to be. Four-eleven, the hour and the minute the plug was pulled. Buildings were lined with people. A tentative atmosphere filtered through the crowd: the abruptly unmanned feeling reminded the entire city of only one other day in its history. Wary store owners pulled down their metal grilles; still, this universal knowledge also ushered in a new friendliness—one aided by the suspension of cell phone service in addition to the suspension of light, chilled air, and jammed underground travel.
A third clock confirmed the time at Fourteenth Street, on the corner bank. The tide swelled with greater purpose, people and cars, office workers heading home. Volunteers were directing traffic: at Sixteenth Street, a beefy redhead with rolled shirtsleeves and a batter’s swag
ger; at Twenty-third, another doing what he did most days, only this time more people seemed to be listening. Let my people come, the black man beckoned, his hair like a hook rug and both arms raised, looking above them to the vanishing point where the towers should have been, Moses before a Red Sea of gleaming lancing cars, his shopping cart full of unreturned cans and bottles, smack in the middle of the honking avenue.
“Will Mom be allowed to stay in the hospital?” Jean said, punching Marianne’s number into her cell phone, hoping somehow to press it into life. “Oh, look,” she said, twisting to see through the window. “Let’s stop.” A heavily pregnant black woman in heels and a red dress was staggering wide legged down the street, leaning back, not seeming to notice or care that the sweater in her hand was trailing behind her on the sidewalk. Larry pulled over as Jean rolled down the window and yelled.
“Excuse me! Miss—ma’am! Can we give you a lift?” The woman looked over and nodded gratefully, too stunned or too hot to speak. She waddled over with no increase in pace and climbed up into the car whose back door Jean contorted herself to open. Four other people pushed in after her and Jean reached out an arm to protect the bursting woman.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m Melba.”
“Hi, Melba,” Larry said, nodding to Jean to shut the door. The heft and elevation of the Defender was a boon. Jean looked outside for evidence of plunder and pandemonium. “Everyone all right back there?” In addition to Melba, they were carrying two very small middle-aged Hispanic women; a young seersucker-suited man hugging his briefcase; and, in the very back, a Latino boy of about nineteen.
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