“You probably won’t be so proud of the fact I fell asleep at my desk this afternoon.”
“Oh, I already knew that.”
“You did?”
“You looked like the lurching dead when you came downstairs. No big deal. You didn’t sleep well.”
“How do you know?”
“You were tossing and turning all night. It’s okay. I’m proud of you anyway. Just don’t make a habit of it.”
“Copy that. Look, I’m going to grab a shower, wake up properly, okay?”
“Please do. You smell viiiile,” she drawled, an old joke between them, as she bent to start looking in the cupboards. Then, as he headed out into the hallway, she straightened up again. “Oh, and by the way.”
He turned. “What?”
“I’m pregnant.”
At first he didn’t believe it. He didn’t think she’d be lying or joking, but after the last couple of years it was like being casually informed that black was, in fact, white—look, here’s a picture to prove it. When he sat for five whole minutes, gripping the printed-out results in his hands and staring at them, he finally got it. And it blew everything else away.
“This is it,” he said, folding her in his arms. She was crying, and felt both bulky and fragile, though there was no difference from the woman he’d hugged that morning before she left for work. “This is the one. I can feel it. You’ve done it.”
“We’ve done it.”
“No,” he said, burying his head in the smell of her skin and hair. “You did.”
They foraged supper out of the cupboards, snacks at the counter as they talked and talked. “There’s still a long way to go,” she said. “Nothing’s ever sure. We’ve got to take it one day at a time.”
He couldn’t. David knew this time it was going to work, and the prospect filled his head. It didn’t matter how much you assumed you’d gotten a handle on human reproduction nor how steely-eyed and unromantic about the process you’d become after hours spent in doctors’ waiting rooms glumly listening to the money meter ticking away, it was still a total mind-fuck. Somewhere deep in a hidden crucible in Dawn’s body, magic had occurred. Things invisible to the naked eye had conjoined and as a result something real was growing inside her. An entirely separate being. It had Dawn within it—and David too—but wasn’t merely their product or the sum or averaging of their souls. This wasn’t two plus two making four. It was two plus two making lilac. It was different. It was other. It was—or would be—purely itself.
For the time being it might be attached to her by blood and tissue, but one day it would sit opposite David and call him dad, hopefully with a smile on his or her face rather than a snarl (though both would doubtless happen at one time or another), a being with words and emotions all of its own. And one day it would announce it was getting married. And then—assuming it took matters in the traditional order—announce a grandchild was on the way, yet another being, a further step along the road to infinity. Every act of creation only ever apes the real one: the creation of a new being that one day will walk away from you out into the world to do its thing, forever linked to you by history but the center and sole inhabitant of its own universe. Who cared about the imaginary, when reality could be so magical?
When they went to bed—earlier than usual, with much joking about how Dawn had to sleep for two now—she drifted off quickly, crashing out on her side. David lay next to her in the dark, for once happy to be awake, savoring the experience, in fact—though the sluggish shadows around his internal eye told him that tonight his sleep siren was going to come across for once, and soon.
He turned cautiously, slipped his hand under Dawn’s arm, and placed it gently on her stomach. The shadows gathered, deep and warm, and soon he was asleep.
Chapter 16
It was Kristina’s idea to call Catherine. It came to her after we’d been sitting in a bar in the Village for a couple of hours, which tells its own story. I could tell from what I overheard that Catherine wasn’t wild about the idea of us dropping in, but she agreed if we’d wait a couple hours so she could get to the other side of the dinner/bath/bed routine. Kristina seemed impatient about this, but she’d never had her own kids to debrief and shut down, and didn’t realize how badly the unscheduled arrival of strangers could derail the process. So we waited in the bar some more, during which Kristina called Mario at the restaurant and promised she’d be at work by nine, cross her heart and hope to die. Mario has no defenses against her and said, “Okay, that’s fine, Miss Kristina. See you later.”
Eventually we stepped out into the dark and made our way to Catherine’s house. She opened the door looking well dressed and grown-up. I trooped in behind Kristina feeling like a teenager being let in by someone else’s mom. It was one of those very vertical town houses with black-painted railings and cream detailing around the windows, like the dwellings you’d see in a child’s illustrated tale about life in a big city. There were books everywhere and posters for recent exhibitions and well-framed black-and-white photos of family and relatives and everything looked like it had been tidied recently by a professional. At one point I thought I saw a mote of dust lurking under a chair but then realized it was just a trick of the light. I didn’t have to watch Kristina’s face to judge her take on the house, or see her thinking how jolly nice it must be to live there.
Catherine led us into a kitchen with eating space that took up half of the raised first story. It was bright and airy and the kids’ art on the fridge was better than anything I could have done. A door at the end led onto a sitting room with stripped brick walls, a fireplace on one side and a television of judicious size on the other.
“The girls are in bed,” Catherine said brightly, as if briefing a new au pair. “But Mark’s due back from the airport in about an hour, so …”
Kris glanced at me, but I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure we should be here and had said so. So as far as I was concerned, this was her gig.
“We followed you this afternoon,” she said.
Catherine blinked, and I was reminded of an incident from childhood. I must have been about twelve, wandering around town with a couple of buddies, and we’d climbed up the big tree at the back of the library, as we sometimes did. Once there, we realized an older girl we kinda knew—she worked Saturdays in the general store, a regular stop on our wanders-around-town—was studying at the desk in the window, about ten feet away. So we hooted and waved and eventually she looked up and saw us.
I guess we’d been expecting … I’m not sure what we’d been expecting … that she’d be pleased or flattered or at least amused to see us. She evidently did not feel this way. She responded in a fashion that in retrospect made absolute sense. She reacted like a girl realizing she was being spied upon by a bunch of younger boys to whom she was polite in the store but whom she possibly somewhat dreaded seeing; boys who (and she was old enough to get this, even if we were not) would one day, and maybe soon, become even more interested in her.
Her face showed shock at first and then anger. We didn’t wait to see what happened next. We scooted down the tree and walked away talking loudly about other things. We felt dumb and embarrassed and as if we’d had something revealed to us about ourselves that we hadn’t previously understood. There’d been no harm in what we’d done. None intended, anyway. But we cut the store out of our Saturday routine for the rest of that summer.
When Catherine looked at us, I felt the same way.
Kristina didn’t seem to notice. “We’ve been worried about you,” she said. “And then it looked like Thomas wasn’t the guy after all …”
“Yes,” Catherine said. Her voice was clipped. “So?”
“Well, we thought we’d take another look today, see if we could see anyone.”
“When were you doing this?”
“After you picked up Ella and Isabella.”
“You waited outside the school? Hiding?”
“Well, not exactly hiding, but … yes.”
“I’m sorry if that was inappropriate,” I said. “My fault. I felt bad after I spoke to you yesterday. I wanted to give it one more try. Macho pride, I guess.”
Catherine seemed to soften. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been tense all day and Isa did not go down easy. Do you want coffee?”
We said we did, and she got to work with an expensive-looking machine on the counter, and it seemed like all was going to be okay.
Though in fact it got worse, and pretty fast.
Kris and I didn’t speak all evening at the restaurant. I understood why I was pissed at her, though not why she was pissed at me, but I guess that’s the bottom line in most disagreements and she probably felt the exact same way. Wrong though she was.
The idea of her follower being a woman evidently hadn’t occurred to Catherine. She asked what she’d looked like. We told her. She frowned, trying to make something of this, but gave up, looking a little scared.
“Was she pretty?”
“Yes,” I said.
Catherine stood nodding, eyes turned inward. Kristina apparently didn’t have anything to say, so I asked Catherine the obvious question. “Are you going to talk to your husband about this?”
Two minutes later Kristina and I were back out on the street. Catherine had abruptly realized there were a lot of very important things she simply had to get on with and while she was very grateful for our efforts she needed us to go, right now. She’d be in touch with Kris.
Real soon.
As the door closed firmly behind us, Kristina hissed at me and stomped down the steps. I followed, not understanding what the hell her problem was. She apprised me of it soon enough. She ranted at me all the way back to the East Village, in fact.
“What kind of an asshole question was that?”
“About talking to her husband?”
“Yes. I mean, Jesus, John. What the fuck?”
“A young woman stalking an older married one—do you have a better explanation?”
“Of course he’s not having an affair. Christ, John, you can’t go around making assumptions like that. I know you don’t like Catherine, but I do and I’ve spent a lot more time talking to her.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So I know her marriage is solid and that Mark’s a good guy. For God’s sake—you saw that house.”
“Kris, that’s the most naive thing I’ve ever heard. Yes, it’s a lovely house. So what? Having expensive taste and an efficient maid doesn’t mean everything’s immaculate underneath the water line.”
“Don’t judge people by your own mistakes. Just because you fucked up a marriage doesn’t mean everyone else is busy doing the same dumb thing.”
There was enough truth in this—after Carol and I fell apart I entered a liaison with Bill Raine’s wife, which he knew about, and we’d worked through, but it remained the most damaging thing I’d ever done in my life—to make me as angry as Kristina.
This led me to snap that she was not experienced enough in long-term relationships to know what the hell she was talking about. She shouted back that she had more experience than I knew and further-more was tired of me treating her like a kid all the time, which was so out of the blue I’d had no idea it was coming, and I didn’t handle it well, and after that …
Well, CNN didn’t actually cover the rest of our stomp back to the restaurant, or give us our own logo, but it was loud.
In the end I got tired of sitting at the bar being ignored by Kristina while she was bright-eyed and charming to everyone else. I left, reasoning that she knew where we lived and also, well, fuck, whatever.
As I stomped out onto the street I saw Lydia at the end of the block. She was facing traffic and, to be honest, I tried to slip past without her seeing me.
“Don’t worry,” she said, however, without turning. “I ain’t seen him.”
“Okay,” I muttered. “That’s good.”
“See a lot of others, though,” she added thoughtfully. “Lot of people on the streets tonight.”
I looked around, confirming what I already knew—if anything, it looked quiet for the small hours of a Thursday night. “Okay,” I said again.
She looked at me, a wistful smile on her face. For a moment her eyes were clear and I got the sense that, were it not for the lines and layers of grime, I’d be seeing in her what a man might have forty years before.
Then they went dead. “Frankie was a dad bitch whore.”
“What?”
“What? What? What?” She took a fast step toward me, raising her bony fist to wave it in my face. “Fuckers everywhere, that’s what,” she snarled. “You ain’t going to steal from me, motherfuckers. I’ll cut you bad.”
“Whatever you say, Lyds.”
“Fuck you, asshole. I’ll fuck you up too.”
“Okay then. See you tomorrow.”
I walked away, simply not in the mood for New York tonight.
Kristina got home at two thirty. We talked. We did not kiss and make up—neither of us regard sexual intercourse as an effective means of arbitration in matters of serious dispute—but we did start to laugh at ourselves, and she eventually fell asleep in my arms. I lay waiting to follow her. The city below seemed quiet, far away, as though we were in a tiny room at the top of a stone tower in some other world. The wind was strong. We’re always aware of it here up in the garret, but this was rowdier than usual. It sounded as though someone was bouncing little objects across the roof.
I don’t like arguments. They always feel like a failure, which I presume must be mine. Pretty soon my head began to feel crowded, and it felt like a fight not to open my eyes.
Then I heard a real noise, from out in the main room. I carefully lifted Kris’s arm off my chest and slipped out of bed.
The source of the sound was obvious and mundane. Kristina’s cell phone lay on the counter, as usual, and the screen was glowing. A little red number on an icon in the dock said she had e-mail. At this time of night it would only be spam and so I put her phone facedown on the cushion on the sofa instead, where further vibrations wouldn’t make the thing rattle so audibly.
I stood aimlessly for a moment before deciding to enact the only ritual that’s ever helped me to sleep—a weak coffee and a cigarette. I know two stimulants taken together should do the opposite, but … they don’t.
I made the drink on autopilot, trying not to worry about the problem of Catherine’s follower. There was now only one credible explanation and it was down to Catherine to chase it down. I still found it hard not to keep thinking about, though. It was this that had been keeping me awake, along with dregs of the adrenaline occasioned by arguing violently with a woman whom I knew, increasingly, that I loved pretty hard.
The image that kept coming into my mind was the face of the girl in the coat when we’d cornered her. So much of our experience is mediated and cushioned. Car crash–style interactions are unnerving, cracking the paper-thin shell around our lives. Who was this woman? What did she want? Was she basically a good person, or a certifiable whack-job? What did she think would come from stalking Catherine, even if there was something going on between her and Mark? Was being confronted on the street going to make her back off, cause her to be more stealthy, or possibly escalate her behavior? Where was she now?
Abruptly I shook my head.
Whatever. I was done. For real this time.
I took the tea and a cigarette over to the window. It was the middle of the night and so I wasn’t going to actually climb out onto the goddamned roof, but I’d at least open the windowpane and blow the smoke out.
As I started to pull up the sill, something happened outside. I don’t know what it was, but it was fast and large and dark. It was as if a huge crow had been roosting on the roof area and took sudden, chaotic flight. In
the fraction of a second in which I saw it, it seemed to split into two, maybe even three shapes—twisting shadows that disappeared or dispersed like a storm cloud ripped apart by the wind.
I heard noises, too—more of the pattering sounds I’d heard while in bed, the sounds I’d put down to the wind clattering objects over the roof.
My chest beating hard, I pushed the window up the rest of the way. I stuck my head cautiously out and saw the scrap of flat roof. The wooden chair. My heavy glass ashtray. The chair had been knocked over. It was windy, but nowhere near enough to have done that, nor for the ashtray to have somehow been upturned or broken in half.
“What’s happening?”
Kristina’s voice nearly gave me a heart attack. I whirled around to see her yawning in the doorway to the bedroom. “What are you doing up?”
“Heard a noise,” she mumbled, turning on a table lamp. “You opening the window for a crafty smoke, it seems. Couldn’t have done it a little more quietly?”
“Sorry,” I said, pulling the window back down again. “But … something weird just happened.”
I was about to say more but realized she was no longer looking at me, but at the window.
“What the hell is that?”
I looked where she was pointing and saw there were marks on the glass, revealed by the light now on in the room. I leaned closer and ran my fingers over the pane. The marks were on the other side of the glass, spidery tracks through layers of dust and airborne dirt that neither we nor the last ten sets of tenants had made any effort to clean.
Kristina was standing beside me now. I think we realized at the same time that the marks on the window, though faint and jagged, were letters, and that they spelled out three words.
They said:
Chapter 17
David never saw how they began. He watched for the beginnings like some Midwest stormchaser, but they were invisible to him. He was learning with most things that you could observe cause before effect. Careless elbows knocked cups off tables. Mouthing off to teachers got you exiled to stand in the corner, head lowered, the shame of punishment evenly balanced by the welcome change it made from sitting at your boring desk. Shouting at Mom got you smacked—and in this case effect came lightning fast on the heels of cause, and hurt a lot. Cause and effect often came so close together there, in fact, that from time to time the order seemed reversed.
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