Attachment

by Isabel Fonseca

  “Yo, man, thanks for the ride,” called the kid from the way back. “Where you from?”

  Jean turned to look at him, the smudge of fluff on his upper lip, and downgraded his age to fifteen. As for his question—this was complicated enough on a normal day, so she was relieved when Larry said, “We’re turning onto the West Side Highway at Forty-fourth Street. Where are you headed?” His question was for Melba.

  “Forty-fourth is fine; I’m on Fifty-first and Eighth—I can walk the rest of the way.”

  “We’ll take you home—and the rest of you will have to get out there, too, I’m afraid, unless I have anyone for Washington Heights.”

  The small, possibly related Hispanic women murmured assent, saying “Fifty-first okay, Fifty-first good,” but seersucker piped up.

  “Look, I’ll give you a hundred bucks to take me to Eighty-ninth and Park.”

  “Sorry, pal. We’ve got to get up to the hospital.”

  “Fine. I’ll give you two hundred.”

  Larry looked in his rearview mirror to assess the face of this man sitting, uninvited, in his backseat. “I said, we’re going to the hospital.”

  “Five hundred bucks!” He was screaming. “Come on, man.”

  Jean didn’t dare look around. Larry pulled over—not a simple maneuver in this swollen river of hot metal—and he turned around and considered the sweat-streaked face, and the briefcase he was still clutching as if it was lined with gold bricks.

  “Do you want to get out here? Or at Fifty-first Street?”

  “Fuck you, man. What do you want? I am not fucking paying more than five hundred.”

  Larry got down and, calm but clench jawed, opened the passenger door. “Get out,” he commanded, not raising his voice.

  The sweaty man stepped down, taking his time. “Asshole,” he said, knocking Larry on the arm as he pressed by, vanishing into the crowd.

  Larry smiled at Jean as he climbed back in, and looked over his remaining crew. “Onward, citizens!” His amused tone let everyone know they were safe, though Jean felt only she and Larry—the grown-ups in the front seat—had anything like real apprehension about what was being done, and not just to their day. If it was the worst case, what exactly would that mean—the entire Eastern Seaboard a mass hostage? And how soon in this heat before things got ugly?

  She’d focus on immediate need—Dad, Phyllis, and, oh my God, Melba. Melba was panting, practically hyperventilating. Her head hung down as if she was looking for something she dropped. Was she working on some learned breathing?—although, as far as Jean could remember, her breaths should have been longer, deeper. Jean touched her arm and asked her if she was all right. She nodded that she was and swigged from the bottle of mineral water Jean pressed into her hand.

  “Maybe you should come with us to the hospital,” Jean said, briefly touching Melba’s wrist, trying to tell if she was a good judge of her own condition.

  She vigorously shook her head. “Better just get home.”

  The tiny women kept quiet; the boy twiddled the dimmer lights on the passenger ceiling, absorbed like a kid in a cockpit. “Keep your eyes peeled for a gas station,” Larry said to no one in particular. They’d passed two, but one was closed, and one had a line around the block. Most had electric pumps, electric registers; self-fill, self-pay, only credit, no cash. In Times Square crowds gathered outside the big hotels, in front of the theaters. Larry glanced over. “They’re kicking them out because of the smoke alarms. Those people probably have rooms and they can’t use them because it’s against the law if the smoke alarms are down.”

  She saw people lying in doorways, using water bottles for pillows. It wasn’t late but it was broiling, and the shady spots were being staked. They looked like people queuing for prized concert tickets, hunkering down for a long night—many of them in pastel outfits and tracksuits, as if by some tourist voodoo they’d all gone out that morning in their pajamas. The gas tank was less than a quarter full. They pulled up at Fifty-first and Eighth.

  Jean tried one last time. “Melba, are you sure you won’t come with us to the hospital?”

  The woman shook her head again and set about stepping down from the car, gripping a headrest as she felt her way with a foot she couldn’t see. It was five-forty when Larry and Jean turned west toward the highway. The two little women smiled and said, “Thank you—thank you,” making Jean think for a flash of Mark and his double-strength good-byes. He’d be worrying about her—how could she contact home? If he was home. As they trundled on, Jean thought of the Latino kid with his jeans belted so low they cleared the buttocks altogether, and wished she’d asked his name. Unbidden, he’d lifted the little women down out of the Defender, one at a time, before reaching back in again for his jacket and to say thanks, giving Larry a high five.

  “That boy was sweet, wasn’t he,” she said.

  “Not very, no. He stole my tennis racket,” Larry said, shaking his head, laughing. “Right out of the back.”

  “What? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I didn’t see till he was already gone. Didn’t even try to hide it once he was out of the car. Son of a bitch, high-fiving me like that, too. Pulling together in a crisis, you see. Welcome to New York.”

  It was only when they arrived at the hospital, to find it barricaded shut and no sign of Phyllis among the dozens of people milling around outside, that Jean started to panic. In the crowd, faces came close to hers, worried eyes mirroring her own, scanning for help. How could she have lost track of both her parents? No one in the hospital would speak to her, though finally she got a mouthed no in response to her written question, Are there any visitors still in the building? The guard moved away from the glass door before she could ask anything else. She had to assume Dad in intensive care was among the city’s coolest, and safest.

  “We’ve got to find Phyllis,” she said to Larry, insistent, as if he was disagreeing. “She must have gotten a lift. My mother is not going to walk a hundred blocks home.” She tried to remember Phyllis’s footwear that day: rope-soled apple-green mules, high.

  “No point staying here,” Larry said, guiding her from the small of her back, interposing his body between hers and the crowd. Once he’d installed her, he helped five others into the car. Crammed as they were, Jean barely noticed. Larry decided to go through the city streets and not along the highway in case they ran out of gas. There was more honking than earlier, and more wild driving, many people sitting on the sidewalk, still a river of moving people, walking, walking, walking.

  It was past seven-thirty when they arrived at Seventy-fourth Street and, right outside, they found Phyllis, chatting with the doorman, Manuel (whose name Phyllis pronounced manual, as in labor). Jean didn’t think she’d ever been so happy to see her mother—apple-green feet in a wide, first-position V—or so irritated.

  “Mom! How’d you get here? Wish you’d left us a note or something.”

  “A note? Honey, you have no idea of the scene. Where have you been? My God, you look dreadful. Thank goodness you were with her, Larry. Let’s get her inside.”

  Upstairs, recovering from the seven dark unventilated flights, they drank lukewarm ice tea in the twilit living room, and Phyllis told of her miracle lift in a taxi. There was still no news of the outage’s cause.

  “I felt rather guilty. I mean, why me, all alone in this taxi, while people are shouting and slamming on the roof to get in? I didn’t even run when this cab appeared out of nowhere—how am I going to compete with all those eager beavers? Fabulously pushy, a lot of them. Frightening, really, and quite a few in hospital uniform, I’m sorry to say. But the driver singled me out, he pointed and called me over: he chose me.”

  “Why do you think he did?” Larry asked her.

  “Well, once we were on our way I asked him just that. And you won’t believe what he said. He said, ‘You remind me of my mother.’ And—did I tell you?—his name was Mustafa Sherif.”

  They all laughed, but no one dared ask: Who i
s responsible? Jean said, “Any news about Dad?”

  “There’s no getting through. Nothing to do but wait.”

  Larry stood up. “I think I’d better go out and try and find some gas—or how are you going to get up to the hospital tomorrow? If I get lucky, I may buzz out to Connecticut and see my folks tonight. Knowing Pop, they’ll have been well prepared, a basement full of baked beans, but they’ll be worrying about all of us trapped here in the city.”

  Jean noticed he didn’t mention his wife. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “To find gas, I mean.”

  “Maybe you’d better rest, Jean. You do look tired.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to live with that because I’m going with you.”

  “Well, okay,” he said, looking pleased. “What about food, Phyllis? Can we bring you back something? They’ll be giving it away, all those restaurants with no fridges.”

  “I am not budging from this apartment until I get through to the hospital. See that fruit bowl? That’s my dinner you’re looking at. Don’t you worry about me.”

  “Okay, we’ll have a gander and see what we can find.”

  The sky was an unremitting pewter: cloud cover like a lid over the city, shutting out the starlight, sealing in the heat. How easily Larry had slipped into Phyllis’s dated way of speaking. It wasn’t conscious mimicry, she thought, or remotely patronizing, just Larry making things easier for the next person, finding the right idiom. He had that gift, like St. Francis talking to the animals.

  “God,” she said, “it hasn’t cooled off at all. It’s going to be a very dark night.” But back in the car, she felt invigorated: they were resuming their mission. Judicious circling led them to the West Side and one hour waiting in line; by ten-thirty they had their gas. Both tried their cell phones. “Look at us,” she said. “If you add us together we’re almost a hundred years old and here we are, calling our mothers. Or trying to—it’s the thought that counts. What do you say we park and take a stroll? See what it’s like on the streets.”

  Finally on foot, they turned down Seventy-seventh Street toward Columbus, Jean clutching Larry’s arm. The night was a solid, velvety dark; the only perceptible figures were glowing in torchlight—faces from Flemish paintings dotting the steep stoops of brownstones.

  “They look like worshippers at an altar, on their special saint’s day,” Jean said, “each stoop’s a peculiar shrine.” Assemblages of candles, paper bags with candles hidden inside, a blue-glow camping lantern, the smell of kerosene and paraffin. People walking in the dark appeared suddenly; Jean was not aware of them until they were no more than a foot away, often announced by a pungent urban reek.

  “Great night for crime,” Larry said, and Jean expected the sound of shattering storefront glass. Her fear was irrational. It was dark, but the mood had never been more friendly, a block party on every street.

  “Do people on the Upper West Side sit on their steps every night singing folk songs?” Jean asked. “Look what we were missing in our tiled high-rise on the East Side. I knew it. Actually, it reminds me of St. Jacques. Just sitting on the porch steps at night, that’s what people do for entertainment, strumming and singing or just smoking and talking.”

  “Sounds incredibly civilized,” Larry said. “I could use a lot more strumming and singing.” He sighed. “And talking.”

  “They sing to keep away the darkness. So they say.”

  A radio broadcast technical talk of grids. Down the block, on another radio, the nasal promise of a tired-sounding city official; from still another, a tally of the intifada groups who were already jockeying to claim credit, promising more and worse.

  “Imagine taking credit for a massacre you didn’t commit,” Jean said, unambiguously frightened now, glad when he took her hand in his and squeezed it there, no chance of her slipping away. “It’s like the death of people you love. Terror, I mean. Each fresh affront stirs up the previous one, amplifying the earlier fear, the older grief…”

  “I’m sure you’re right—nothing is ever lost,” Larry said. “People can be brutalized, but, maybe surprisingly, they’re never really inured.”

  On Columbus, the scene brightened. “Apparently safer to stay open than to go home,” Jean said as a small Japanese man outside his wood-faced sushi bar tried to stop them, put his hand on Larry’s forearm.

  “Thanks, pal, we’re just walking.” When they’d moved on a bit, he said, “You wonder how much a person can charge for a piece of rotting tuna tonight of all nights. Though even if it were free…somehow I just don’t feel like raw fish.”

  “How about cooked cow?”

  They stopped outside an Argentinean steakhouse. Through the open windows, a collapsed bonfire gave off light and heat—over the flames on a pulley, a grill the size of a twin bed, angled just like Dad’s. The fire was nursed by a sweating man in white, his jumpsuit smeared with blood. Half a cow, sausages, coiled innards, a whole pig’s head—all across the great rack they sizzled and spat.

  “I can’t believe these places are open—what about your smoke-alarm theory? Or is this just too much carnage for a doggie bag?”

  “Counting on the cops having better things to do—and we’d better hope they have. In fact, there isn’t the police presence you might expect on such a night.”

  Then they noticed the two policemen leaning against the building, gnawing on some ribs in the dark.

  “Zgots to eat,” she whispered to Larry as they approached, gripping his elbow.

  “Evening, gentlemen. Any news?” he asked.

  “Great ribs,” one of them joked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “They’re sounding pretty confident we’re going to have power tonight,” said the other.

  “Hey! So what are they saying?”

  “It’s the grid. Three hundred fifty-five thousand volts of power were downed east of Cleveland, on the Lake Erie loop—that’s the series of transmission lines that run around the lake.”

  “Fantastic news—what a relief. Come on,” she said, her stomach remembering the heaps of tarred ribs. “Let’s get some grub. Before they run out.”

  An injection of red meat and strong red wine from the Andes, and they walked back uptown toward Larry’s car, draped in darkness and again locking arms. The world for the moment was holding steady—dark, but steady—and they felt as if they’d just escaped a disaster on a biblical scale. But until the light returned, how could they be sure? She thought if she didn’t hold on to Larry she might fall down or bump into something or lose him. On the corner a man was selling T-shirts, laid out on top of a duffel bag, illuminated with a flashlight.

  i survived the blackout, the shirts said, white stenciled on black, and black stenciled on white.

  “That great entrepreneurial spirit, undimmed even in darkness—it is wonderful, isn’t it,” Larry said. “Wish I had more of it.”

  “ We haven’t survived it yet,” she pointed out.

  He squeezed her hand, and they strolled on in silence, slowly, in no rush now to get back in that car.

  Which, anyway, they couldn’t find. Unworried (it must be here somewhere), they walked the block up and back twice before they finally found it. She leaned against the door, waiting for Larry to work the keys, sad too that this strange evening was nearly at an end, unable to believe quite how long ago the day began. The door was unlocked, but neither one of them moved to get in. Then Larry leaned over and kissed her—emphatically, briefly, fully, and unreturned, so sudden and spontaneous was his landing. Time to go home—that’s what that was, she thought: punctuation and nothing more. She could hardly ask him, speechless as she was, settling on the high seat as he started the engine. The streets were lit only by headlights, and Jean—eager now to be unstirred by that no doubt meaningless blackout kiss—worked up her feeling, as they made their way cautiously across town through the park, of being on a country road.

  “Wouldn’t it be great,” she said, shutting her eyes, letting the rocking of the high c
ar lull her for a while, “if we really were heading out, on a great trip across the country—manifest destiny.”

  Larry was approaching Phyllis’s building. He pulled in at the curb just beyond the entrance and, with deliberation that Jean thought might be taken for regret, or at least ceremony, he turned the key. They sat not talking, safe in the car from the darkness, quiet cast over the city like a net.

  He lifted her hand; it seemed that he was going to kiss it but instead turned it over as if he could read her palm in the dark; he smoothed it, patted it, and gave it back to her. Again he looked out the front window, and she thought she could make out that blunt profile.

  “We made a really good team today,” he said at last. He leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. Jean turned her head to meet him, so that he kissed her on the very corner of her mouth.

  “Good night, partner,” she managed to reply.

  Human beings are responsible for the choices they make. Typical of Jean to think of something like this, from his book, while actively not kissing him. She knew she should just get out of the car, but instead she turned her whole body toward him, which meant sitting on her feet, a position like an egg spinning on its end, or a dithering kite in the moment before being carried upwind: provisional. Active or not, that kiss hovered between them and she wanted to explain. But she couldn’t possibly recount how she’d already used up the line of credit even married people might be extended in extraordinary circumstances—though she thought she could make out the blue of his eyes, or maybe like a lake or a pool it was refreshing just to know it was there.

  She didn’t want to say anything—disclosure, apology, promise, a single word. Surely he knew what she was feeling. Can I trust you? Can we really be thinking we can go back in time? We both know we cannot—we’re grown-ups; we’ve made our choices. But Larry in his still intensity seemed to choose only the darkness. He didn’t have to get the message. Not tonight. But she did have to insist. She turned away. There is still time to get out, to avert a crisis. Jean thought he must understand. You’ve brought the wrecked plane in and we’re safe; we’ve done this, so let’s not crash now. But he didn’t move. He just waited, or waited some more, for her to look back—bravely indifferent in this precipitous drop to the earth rushing up to meet them.