The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  Irina’s lines from her monologue in the first act. Leia was back on track, and I should have sighed with relief, but my body was as tense as hers as she assumed the pose. She was all sinews and muscles and nearly transparent skin.

  ‘Oh! I long to work the way one occasionally longs for a drink of water when it’s very hot. If I don’t start getting up early in the morning to work, you’ll have to end your acquaintance with me, Ivan Romanovich!’

  ‘Hurry up now,’ I told her, and then went straight to the production office, shutting the door almost all the way, and burying my face in my hands.

  Don’t cry, don’t show any sign of weakness. That was such a deep part of my psyche that I hardly knew how other people did it. Those people who cried.

  ‘Have you heard anything from Patrick?’

  Benji had opened the door. Now he stood there, giving me a searching look.

  ‘I need to go through all this stuff,’ I said, looking down at the desk. I picked up a pile of receipts that needed to be entered in the books. Props and nails and fabric.

  ‘Are you starting to worry?’ Benji persisted. ‘Haven’t you got hold of him yet?’

  I slammed the stapler with my hand as I fastened the receipts to pieces of paper. Benji caught sight of the postcard and snatched it up.

  ‘Aha! Tour d’Eiffel,’ he said. ‘If he was my husband, I would never have let him go off to Paris.’

  ‘You don’t have a husband,’ I said.

  ‘It says here you don’t need to worry.’ He waved the Eiffel Tower and smiled. ‘He probably just wants you to miss him. That’s why he hasn’t called.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s not what this is about.’

  ‘Isn’t that what it’s always about?’ said Benji. ‘About who does the calling and who does the waiting? And the person who doesn’t call always has the upper hand. That’s what’s so unfair.’

  Benji’s perfect pronunciation of Tour d’Eiffel rang in my head.

  ‘Do you speak French?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oui, bien sur,’ he replied, smiling. ‘I spent a year in Lyon as an exchange student. I love that country.’

  ‘France is a shitty country,’ I said, and I meant it. It occurred to me that I’d been feeling annoyed ever since Patrick had announced that he was going there. Maybe my antipathy had been all too evident. Maybe that was why he’d told me so little. And why I hadn’t asked any questions. I had once lived in France, in a hovel out in the country, during several dark years of my childhood. I remembered almost nothing of the language.

  ‘Listen to this.’ I concentrated hard on recalling what Patrick had shouted on the phone while I was standing in that stairwell in Boston.

  ‘Mais qu’est-ce qui est en feu?’ I said the words slowly so as not to leave out a single syllable. The words meant nothing to me. ‘Quoi? Maintenant? Mais dis-moi ce qui se passe, nom de Dieu!’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Do you know what it means?’

  Benji ran his hand through his hair, black and styled in a blunt cut that made him look slightly Asian, which he was not. But he’d explained it was the current fad in the club world now that we were entering the Asian era. He asked me to repeat what I’d said.

  ‘But what’s burning?’ he translated haltingly. ‘What do you mean? Now? But tell me what’s going on, in God’s name!’

  He scratched his hand, which was chapped from all the washing of delicate fabrics.

  ‘Although actually we might say “for God’s sake”, or “what the hell is going on”. What’s this all about?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘This has something to do with Patrick. Am I right?’ Benji squatted down so he was looking me right in the eye as I sat at the desk. He put his hand on my knee. ‘Has something happened? You can tell me. Come on, Ally. It’s me. Benji.’

  ‘Benedict,’ I said, getting up.

  Benji made a face.

  ‘If he was my husband and I hadn’t heard from him, I’d go find him in Paris,’ he said. ‘I’d walk through the streets and put up signs on the lamp posts all over town, searching for him.’

  I pushed past him and went out into the hall.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Benji. ‘I don’t have a husband.’

  Gramercy was a bland district on the east side of Manhattan.

  When we took our first walks together, Patrick had tried to make it seem more interesting than it was. He pointed out where Uma Thurman lived, in a corner building by Gramercy Park. He’d once run into her ex, Ethan Hawke, and the guy had actually said hello to him. Humphrey Bogart had been married in the nearby hotel, and Paulina Porizkova lived somewhere in the neighbourhood, but that was all. There was nothing more to brag about, no matter how much he wanted to impress me. Gramercy was mostly the home of office workers, doctors, and employees of the hospitals that were scattered about. It was an anonymous district without soul, and I thought of it as a blank slate.

  The doorman was dozing as I came in, just past eleven p.m. The rehearsals had gone on late at the theatre.

  ‘That husband of yours isn’t home yet?’ he said inquisitively, leaning over the counter so he could watch me walk past.

  ‘Not yet,’ I replied.

  ‘Still in Europe?’

  Patrick always talked with the doormen. He was on a first-name basis with all of the nine men who took turns working the shifts in the building. After three years of living there, I still wasn’t used to the fact that somebody always noticed when I came and went.

  ‘Goodnight,’ I said, and slipped inside the elevator.

  I didn’t breathe easy until it passed the twelfth floor and then stopped at the fourteenth. There was no thirteenth floor. I was glad the builders were superstitious, because it meant one less floor, and the ride in the enclosed space was a few seconds shorter.

  I unlocked the door and stepped into silence. In my fourteenth-floor apartment, there was no time and no reality. It was a void floating high above 23rd Street. Through the window I looked down at the cars racing past like bright little toys far below. To the north I could glimpse the top of the Chrysler Building lit up in white.

  There were no windows facing south. Otherwise, I would have been able to see the Lower East Side, or Lo-i-saida, as the Puerto Rican kids had called it when I was growing up. It was only ten blocks away, but it was another world. That was where Mama and I had lived when I was nine years old, in our first rented one-room apartment in Alphabet City, where all the streets were letters instead of numbers. I learned to fight and to swear in Spanish before I could even speak English properly. Seven years later Mama thought she had realized the American dream when she was able to move across the street into a tiny, rundown, two-room place on First Avenue. Over there the baker was Polish and she had neighbours with whom she could speak Czech. By then I’d forgotten the language, or maybe I just didn’t want to speak it. I don’t know. When she died I took over the apartment and stayed there until I met Patrick.

  My email was flashing when I sat down at my desk.

  Eleven messages in the inbox. None of them from Patrick.

  Instead I logged onto the website of our Internet bank. Richard Evans’s words had been echoing in my head all night.

  We haven’t paid him any advance.

  We had two joint accounts. That was Patrick’s idea, in order to keep track of our finances. Personally I was used to living hand-to-mouth. I’d never shared a bank account with any man before. It almost seemed more intimate than sharing a bed.

  There was a total of $240 in the account we used for daily expenses. Neither of us had deposited any money yet for the next month’s bills. Everything was as it should be.

  Then I looked at our joint savings account.

  The baby money.

  He was the one who had dubbed it that. I called it our savings capital. We regularly deposited funds, and Patrick’s parents contributed at Christmas and on birthdays. At the moment we were up to just over $16,000. We hadn’t
touched the money, not even last autumn when Patrick had posted a negative income from the story he’d written about the new losers in the current economy.

  I stared at the numbers that were dancing in the grey glow on the screen.

  The total in the savings account was $6,282. On 17 August, a withdrawal of $10,000 had been posted. Transferred to Patrick’s personal account.

  I dropped the mouse and grabbed the armrest of my chair, rolling backward to create a distance of two metres between me and the screen. An air pocket. As if the deception wouldn’t be able to reach me there.

  I thought back to the day when he had packed for his trip. Six weeks ago, in the middle of the summer’s worst heatwave, when the air was motionless and scorching, and the asphalt was melting outside. I had been lying on the sofa, wearing only a long, thin tank-top. ‘It might take a little longer,’ he’d said after closing up his laptop. ‘We want to run the article as the cover story in October, so I need to be done in mid-September, or at least no later than the end of the month.’ He gave me a light kiss on the cheek as he slipped past to go into the bedroom.

  ‘Do you have money for the bills next month?’ I’d called after him. I wish I’d said something more loving, but I knew he was having a hard time making ends meet financially. He’d had so few assignments, and the pay was worse than before. Paris sounded like an expensive expedition. I was annoyed that he was so enthusiastic about leaving me behind.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I got an advance from the magazine so I have enough for the next two months.’ Another kiss. ‘This story is going to turn everything around. I promise.’

  I spun in my chair and looked at Patrick’s corner of the workroom. His desk was dark and neat. Against the wall was the external keyboard, looking lonely and neglected with the cord dangling idly in the air.

  What else had he lied about? Was he even in Paris at all?

  He could just as well have gone to Palm Beach with a lover. I pictured our savings being frittered away on champagne. But I quickly dismissed such a stupid idea.

  He had in fact sent me an envelope postmarked Paris. And he had written that he loved me.

  I placed my hand on my stomach, thinking I could feel it growing inside. Only a tiny sausage, a worm, a growth. So far.

  Of course he was in Paris.

  The next second I pictured another woman, pretty and chic and elegant, like the girl who played Amélie from Montmartre, or some other big-eyed, dark-haired, petite and secretive Frenchwoman.

  I got up and walked through the apartment, pausing in the kitchen to drink a big glass of iced water. From there I looked at his side of the bed, which was neatly made. Mine was chaos, with the covers sagging partway onto the floor.

  When I closed my eyes I could almost hear his footsteps as he came into the kitchen and opened the cupboard where we kept the coffee, and then the plop when the vacuum seal released its hold.

  We had torn down the walls between the rooms when I moved in, opening up the place to make it into an airy and bright loft space for our life together. At first I was bothered by his presence whenever we sat and worked. The clattering of his keyboard behind me, the faint creaking of rubber against wood as he rolled back his chair, and his footsteps as he paced around the room, trying to come up with the right wording. Later I’d learned to block him out, to focus on my computer screen and not think about sex as soon as he came close enough for me to feel the eddying air when he moved, and the smell of him: wool, olive soap, and a light aftershave. I suppose that’s what people call daily life.

  The biggest problem had been to merge our record collections. He arranged everything alphabetically, while I put the most important ones first. In the end we bought two identical bookcases from IKEA in Newark, and I was allowed to keep my Doors albums in peace. ‘Strange people, strange lyrics, strange drugs’ was all he had to say about them.

  Behind the bed a glass door opened onto a small balcony. Out there, from a certain angle, I was able to see the Empire State Building. I could also see that our three potted plants had withered. Patrick was the one who usually remembered to water them.

  I opened the door, letting in air, the faint sounds of the city below, and a chilly streak of reality that passed through me.

  Why the hell was I thinking of doubting his love? I’d made him a promise, back when I’d suffered one of my first attacks of jealousy, convinced that he was going to leave me. I was not the sort of person who could hold onto anyone. They always left me.

  ‘But I love you,’ he’d said. ‘I’m the one who can’t understand why you want to stay with me.’

  I took in a deep breath. Crisp and fresh September air. The skies had cleared during the evening, the stars had faded and vanished in the lights of the city.

  I couldn’t believe my ears when he proposed to me. I stared at him while all sounds stopped abruptly and a chasm opened up beneath the floor of Little Veselka.

  Little Veselka isn’t exactly what most people would call a romantic setting. A smoky, noisy deli in the East Village that has stood on 9th Street since the 1950s. It has an open kitchen, so you can hear the Ukrainian cooks screaming at each other as they grill their steaks in full view of all the customers.

  It was there we met for the first time.

  I was with a bunch of people from La MaMa, one of the little theatres down on 4th Street, off-off-off-Broadway, where I was working at the time. My whole life took place in that neighbourhood. I ate take-out from the Indian restaurants on 6th Street, and I lived in my mother’s old apartment on the corner of 4th. Rumour had it that the building was due to be torn down soon, to be replaced by twenty storeys of luxury apartments, but those sorts of rumours about old buildings were always rampant in the East Village.

  I noticed him as soon as he came in. He was with Arthur Nersesian, an Irish-Armenian writer who knew everybody. They sat down and he introduced Patrick as a freelance journalist who was writing a story about the last Bohemian in the East Village, meaning Arthur. All the others had been driven away by the rising cost of housing. They now lived in Brooklyn.

  If Bohemians even existed at all. A heated discussion ensued at the section of the table where I’d ended up with Patrick, and a director who was practically horizontal, his arm around an eighteen-year-old student actress. Wasn’t there a better name for people who loafed about and did no work? Who were incapable of pulling their life together and feared responsibility? Or were the so-called Bohemians the vanguard of the future, the first truly free human beings?

  From a purely statistical standpoint, Patrick said, it was possible to ascertain that in the Bohemian belt, which extended straight across Manhattan and eastward into Brooklyn, there were more of those types of people than anywhere else in the world. People who worked freelance and had no permanent jobs, who had chosen to live that particular lifestyle.

  He explained that he was actually a reporter of social issues, and he believed that words could change the world. ‘Words are more powerful than most people think,’ he said, and looked me in the eye after we’d finished off the seventh or eighth or God knows how many bottles of wine at the table, while the director was in the process of drowning between the breasts of the student actress.

  ‘Plenty of people have no idea what a responsibility it is to be a writer. They think it’s all about winning fame and respect, but for me it’s about taking full responsibility for the world we live in.’

  I was fascinated by his serious demeanour. He wasn’t trying to show off; he actually believed what he was saying. There was also something so extraordinary about the way he was dressed. He wore chinos and a shirt and a blazer — which was extremely unusual in that district, where everyone worked so hard to present a unique style.

  When he walked me home and took my hand, he did that too with the greatest seriousness. ‘Never would I allow you to walk home alone in the middle of the night.’

  ‘But I’ve walked this same route thousands of times and survived.’
<
br />   ‘I wasn’t here then.’

  Outside the shabby entrance on First Avenue he kissed me gently, and after that I simply had to take him upstairs with me and roll around with him in the bedroom that was so small it held nothing but a bed within the four walls. I wanted to penetrate deeper into that alluring seriousness, all the way to its core to find out if it ever ended.

  The next morning I didn’t want to get out of bed. I couldn’t remember that ever happening before. On similar mornings with other men, I’d made a point of fleeing as soon as possible. I didn’t want them to start groping for my soul.

  But lying next to Patrick, I stayed in bed. I ran my finger over his cheek. ‘Are you always like this?’ I asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘So serious. Genuinely serious. Are you like that all the way through, or is that just your way of picking up girls?’

  That made him laugh. ‘I had no idea it would work so well.’

  A year later he proposed. At Little Veselka.

  He must be teasing me, I thought at first. Then: I’m not the sort of person anyone marries. Then: Help. This is really happening. What do people do when this happens?

  I said yes. Then I said yes two more times. He leaned across the table and kissed me. ‘Hell,’ he swore as his lips touched mine. He jolted back in his chair.

  ‘What’s wrong? It’s OK to change your mind, if you want.’

  Patrick covered his face with his hand and groaned.

  ‘The ring! I forgot about the ring. What an idiot I am.’

  He’d been so preoccupied with mustering his courage that he’d forgotten that little, classic detail. Could I forgive him? Could I give him another chance to do it over, according to the rulebook?

  I took his face in my hands. I ran my finger gently along his jaw line. I said that I didn’t want any other proposal. This was the best one I could have imagined. If he was so nervous that he’d forgotten the ring, that meant something. It was something I could believe. It was far more important than any bit of metal that existed on earth.

  ‘But if you insist,’ I went on, ‘the shops are still open on Canal Street.’