Asleep or awake, Susan possessed the quietness of a woman who dared not disturb the air around her. She lived in a Section 8 apartment in Clinton in which her big brother could stretch out his arms and touch both sides, when he was at liberty to do so. As a fifteen-year-old, she had written a short story about a girl who did not want to take up any space in the world. When her teacher put it in for a Thomasson Foundation writing prize and it won, Susan ran away from school to avoid the prize-giving, and instead of going directly home she loitered at the bus station and by nightfall she had left Nebraska. She’d reached New York City before her family noticed her absence. She was a mouse of an addict who had turned up at the Club one hot July morning last year and, in a voice one needed to put an ear against to hear, apologised for her atheism, politely refused to inform on her dealer, whom she loved, and asked for help to get off drugs. She wore a pale blue sheer blouse that the pastor could see her ribs through. The church registered her with a rehab programme and assigned William and Joy to visit her every week. At the end of the visit, Joy would ask to use the bathroom and Susan would tell her where it was, as if it was the first time, and as she left the bathroom Joy would leave two twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen cupboard beneath a bag of fruit she and William always brought with them. At the outset they brought her bananas and oranges, but one week Joy bought kumquats, for no good reason she could think of, and the sight of them reduced Susan to hysterics and it became a ritual, an affectionate joke, that Joy sought out obscure and exotic fruit under which to leave the money.
When they talked about Susan, which they did a lot, as well as pray for her every day, William and Joy referred to the first time they saw Susan laugh as the Night of the Kumquats. Nowadays she often smiled with them, and would sit forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands cupping her face, listening keenly to the flow of easy, teasing conversation between Mr and Mrs Fairman (as she insisted on calling them), whose tactile affection towards each other was a thing of wonder to her. To Joy’s amusement, Susan watched William’s every move with adoring puppy eyes. This was in part because he was the man she dreamed of having for a father, but also a consequence of their complicity, for the only secrets in the world that William kept from Joy were his knowledge that Susan was still a heroin user and the sanctuary he offered her at Fountains.
He had visited Susan alone (this Joy knew about; he had a fifty-dollar Fountains gift token from last Fourth of July and rang Joy to suggest he take it to Susan on his way from work). When he had let himself into her apartment, he had feared she was dying, such was the depravity of her fitting and the fear in her eyes. And the desire to put her out of her misery, to give her whatever in the world she wanted, to resurrect that smile of hers from somewhere beneath the wreckage of her features, was so great that he would have done anything for her. When she explained what she needed he went gratefully for her to the address she had given him, where a woman of Susan’s age was waiting for him to say the words ‘Cooked Cura’. He returned as if holding a bomb in his pocket. His heart thumped and his head reeled with fear and lust at the thought that this mythical substance was in his hand, that he was, finally, on the front line of some small drama, that something other than the beautiful routine he had been blessed with was upon him. His fingers felt the shapes inside the bubble wrap, deciphering them as three syringes. They contained a substance he knew nothing about but which he accepted would help her in the way that prayer could not. He took them to her and it thrilled him. She instructed him to put two of the syringes in the refrigerator and he was astounded by her ability to stem her shivering and becalm herself to inject, and he was in awe of the peace that overwhelmed her and the deep, aching smile that took possession of her face as she stepped back from pain and knowledge for a short while. He had never seen such silent ecstasy on a human being’s face. It was exactly how he imagined a good death to be.
Having a secret from Joy amounted to a crisis in William’s life and he had told Leo all that he knew, which was this: Susan’s job with a cleaning company in the Bronx was part-time, three nights per week, a meagre result of a ragged, now defunct back-to-work scheme for which she had used her brother’s address in Mott Haven to qualify. Daytime sleep was a rare commodity in her apartment. The building heaved with people who rarely worked and attracted visitors like flies licking the sticky detritus of indefinable business. Sometimes, Susan was so tired during the day that she went out to sleep in the restrooms of the McDonald’s on Pennsylvania Plaza, where she could sit on the toilet seat and rest her head on her knees. William had told Leo how he had bought an inflatable mattress and with a sense of guilt created a corner for Susan in his office, with cheap floral bedsheets, and a small shelf with some paperbacks and space for her spectacles and a glass of water. His fear at what he was doing had subsided with the belief that he was doing good, if not an understanding of why.
Susan came often, needed no persuading, craved the rest it offered her, almost wept the first time she woke and William made her hot tea before she went to work. She would call, and meet him at the goods entrance. She slept in her clothes. William liked the company and felt sure he was doing the right thing.
Leo had asked his brother-in-law if he was in love with her and William had replied with a clear conscience that he was not.
‘Then why is this a problem?’
‘Because it’s a secret and we promised no secrets.’
‘When you were both five?’
William had smiled, and laughed a little.
‘Everyone has private stuff, Will.’
We are such able advisers when it comes to each other’s lives. Both of them had thought it then. And William had admitted to himself that it was the chaos of Susan’s life that drew him in. In Susan he could watch the world’s disarray writ large, dabble in it, taste the exotica of it. But it was a different thing which he admitted to Leo.
‘Occasionally,’ he had said, ‘on a certain sort of day, it feels like having a child.’
‘Why need that be a secret?’ Leo had asked, and had seen by the way William’s shoulders dropped that it needn’t be. Joy would be wonderful about it all. But William wanted this to be his own.
‘There’s a difference between keeping a secret and telling a lie,’ Leo had said, ‘and you’re not in love with her.’
‘I’m not,’ William had agreed, ‘but once, she woke in the middle of the afternoon and I didn’t hear her come to me. I was sitting in the window smoking and she joined me on the ledge and took the cigarette from my fingers and dragged on it, and it almost felt a little as if…’
William had allowed the words to fall off the ledge of his conscience.
‘I bet that felt nice,’ Leo had said. ‘It’s impossible to be kind and not keep secrets.’
In that moment, William had considered the true scale of this man’s sanctioning of him, which seemed endless.
The garret was dark and quiet, and made Susan’s sleep the greatest presence in it. William switched on a light and filled Susan’s glass with water and woke her, tenderly. They moved like a whisper to the elevator on the floor below and parted out of sight in the long shadows of the cargo ramp on 17th Street.
‘Thank you, Mr Fairman.’
William strode out, and felt God’s presence in the warming Hudson breeze and in the rusty hues of the abandoned High Line. Weeds sprouting from the disused elevated railway flashed glimpses of flowering colour and, try as he might, he could not imagine the thing renewed the way people were talking about. He liked it as it was, familiar and obsolete.
Joy was waiting for him outside the Club. He watched her shiver a little at the same breeze that had ushered him gladly through the streets to her. She grinned at him from a distance and wiggled childishly. Her granite-coloured raincoat hung loosely from her shoulders, suggesting a desire to jump into puddles rather than join the weekly vigil of the ‘Drugs Deal Death’ group.
William and Joy did not read Pastor Edwin’s daily blog, nor h
ang around after Sunday worship for the discussion forum. They did not believe in turning to prayer for banal or material requests, made sure they never caught themselves saying things like ‘Jesus loves you’ despite being firmly of the opinion that he did, and they maintained an irreverent sense of humour about religion. But they did like those church groups that dealt in black and white and marked out the boundaries of the nation state they called right and wrong. The Drugs Deal Death group and the recently created Campaign Against Victimless Crime were the twin cities of that nation state.
As always, the volunteers were divided into three groups, and William and Joy were in the same group. Once, and once only, Pastor Edwin had separated them, as he thought it would be healthy for them to interact with the other parishioners as individuals. The following morning, Edwin had received a phone call from William making it clear that he was not to indulge in such an experiment again.
Joy and William helped each other on with the standard issue luminous orange Drugs Deal Death bibs and kissed on the lips. William suspected they were the only members of Drugs Deal Death to kiss on the lips in public, and possibly in private too. He offered his arm to Joy as the group walked up Eleventh Avenue. They took up position at the entrance to a seven-storey building on West 44th Street, with a realtor’s office at street level and a known drug-dealer on the fifth floor. A pale young man emerged from the building, and sighed at having to navigate the high-visibility posse. ‘Must be that time again.’
‘Must be…’ one of the group replied.
‘Have a good night,’ the man said, walking away. Someone called after him, ‘God bless you, child,’ prompting Joy and William to wince and catch each other’s eye.
The posse had been William and Joy’s idea. William had read about a community group in Fairlawn, Washington DC, whose experience had been that dealers moved on quickly when bugged by regular vigils, not because they felt intimidated (drug-dealers tended not to feel intimidated by the Church of the Disciples of Christ and their like), but due to what Fairlawn called the BPF – the ‘butt pain factor’. He and Joy had presented the article to the Club and felt a drop shadow of gravitas added to a life lived in lower case.
He glanced at her now. She looked wonderful to him tonight and he was surprised by a surge of disappointment that, with her in that coat, they were not out with Leo. After three years of standing passively on the sidewalk in prayer, his appetite for the vigil had deserted him without warning, explanation or apology.
Pastor Edwin turned to Bob Kelly, the most physically forbidding man in the group, and asked him if he would like to ‘do the honours’?
‘I’d like to volunteer tonight,’ William said, taking a half-step into the circle. ‘Bob or Kevin or any one of the big guys always go inside, and it’s unfair that they have to do it because they happen to be six feet tall.’
Joy reached out to tug on William’s sleeve, but he was already out of reach. This was news to her. The others nodded their approval, with the exception of Randall Hicks, who at five foot six was the same size as William and didn’t like this change to the accepted wisdom. The way Randall Hicks was seeing things right now, thanks to that short-arse do-gooder William Fairman, he’d now feel obliged to volunteer next week or look like a pussy.
‘Would you like to rehearse it with me,’ the pastor said, ‘as it’s your first time?’
‘Yes. Good idea,’ William replied.
William faced the pastor. ‘Good evening. Well, I just wanted to wish you a good day and to say that Jesus…’ William hesitated, ‘Look, I’m not gonna act it out properly, I’ll just run through the lines to check I know them, but I can’t do it for real until I’m, you know, up there…’
‘In the theatre of war,’ someone said, irritating and worrying Joy in equal measure.
William cleared his throat. ‘Good evening. Jesus Christ our Lord loves you deeply. The caring and attentive ear of Pastor Edwin at the Church of the Disciples of Christ is available to you should you wish to seek spiritual guidance and forgiveness for the lives you are blighting. With love in our hearts, we ask you to remember the children in your life, and to ponder the fact that those to whom you sell cocaine, heroin and ketamine were innocent children once, and are still somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son. We will return again and again to keep vigil outside your door and pray for you. I wish you peace and happiness and the love of our Lord.’
A modest applause rippled through the group. Joy watched as a couple of the men patted William on the back and he disappeared inside.
William switched the church camcorder on to record as he walked along the fifth-floor corridor, which, like the stairwell, was surprisingly clean. Opening the door to the apartment, the dealer did a slight double-take at William’s height, looking initially at the blank space above William’s head where Bob’s face would normally be. The dealer slouched in the doorframe and sighed, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his pale, flabby chest. He stared at the camcorder.
‘’Sthat on again?’ He had a stoner voice and a strong lisp.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Go ’head then. Do your sthpeech.’
Riding the elevator down, William felt disappointed. He had volunteered somewhat in the hope of some glamour, but he now suspected that the bigger guys had been slightly embellishing the danger factor up there on the front line.
‘How d’it go?’ someone asked.
‘Fine.’
‘Was he aggressive?’
The temptation to paint a little drama into his life was great, but he resisted. ‘He was non-hostile.’
‘Well done you,’ Pastor Edwin said, and signalled to the group to bow their heads while he asked the Lord for fortitude to rid the neighbourhood of its vestiges of addiction and gave thanks for the reduction in drug use in Clinton (Joy and William’s millennium petition to return the Club to using the name ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ having fallen on stony ground).
Joy linked her arm through William’s as they wandered away and whispered in his ear. ‘My hero… After dinner I’m gonna take you home to bed.’ She said it in a southern drawl. ‘So don’t eat anything heavy.’
New York City remained gripped by a schizophrenic season of mild spring days and bitter nights, and William and Joy walked among a people uncertain that they had yet seen off winter. They linked arms on Tenth Avenue and he asked her to marry him and she rested her head on his shoulder and consented. Somewhere in their quarter-century together, they had swapped accents. Her Englishness suited his workplace to a T, while the taste for the exotic she had shown traces of possessing before settling in marriage seemed sated by becoming a New Yorker, accent and all.
Outside the Amish supermarket they stopped to take a closer look at the exotic fruit and she touched the sandpaper skin of the sapodilla.
‘It’s from Mexico. Ripens after it’s picked.’
‘Perfect.’
They bought two, and headed across to the Italian eatery, where they met Di and Jeff McGuire for dinner every week, after the vigil. They were joined later by Adele, a single mother of an eight-year-old boy, who had been working in the health store with Joy for fourteen years. Adele had become a part of their gathering five years ago when she divorced, but still felt she merited a place there only in tandem with Joy. For this reason, she would always arrive late so as to give Joy, William, Di and Jeff the time without her which she presumed they coveted. (They did not. They loved Adele to bits, and considered her a lousy time-keeper.)
Di and Jeff Maguire said they had news. They shuffled forward on their seats to share it. Di pressed the palms of her hands on the table and straightened up. Jeff looked proudly at his wife, prompting her to speak. William’s instinct, in this demi-moment between Di opening her mouth and being interrupted by Adele, was that it had to be cancer or a new apartment, and it didn’t feel like cancer.
‘I already know…’ Adele said.
‘It’s true, I came into the shop yesterday and spilled the beans to her
,’ Di said.
Mung beans, William said to himself. He found it extraordinary that anyone bought anything from the shop Joy and Adele worked in.
‘Know what?’ Joy asked. She hated news.
‘We are going…’ Jeff said.
‘… away…’ Di said.
‘… for a yeeeeear,’ Jeff and Di said, in an elongated fashion. Di stamped her feet excitedly and grinned.
‘I already knew,’ Adele repeated.
‘I don’t understand,’ Joy said, with a nervous laugh, and looking at William helplessly.
‘Where to?’ William asked.
‘Everywhere,’ Jeff said. ‘We’re going travelling. Europe, the Middle East and Asia.’
‘Travelling!’ Di reiterated, marvelling at the word, and its application to her life.
‘The Middle East?’ William was bemused. ‘Have you joined the Marine Corps?’
‘Very funny,’ Jeff said.
‘What about our weekly meet-up?’ Joy asked. It just came out.
‘It’s wonderful!’ Adele exclaimed. ‘It’s awesome. Well done, you two.’
Despite his confusion, William made a genuine attempt at taking an interest. It was beyond Joy to do so and, feigning a migraine as the food arrived, she left abruptly. William followed and they walked home in one of the many forms of silence available to the wedded.
By night, the cherry blossom on West 36th Street was a hostage to the shadows above the street-lights and to the rumble of tyres ramping down into the Lincoln Tunnel. William looked out from his living room. The street seemed gloomy. He noticed the blackness of the windows on the South Clinton Community Hall and remembered his fear of empty buildings as a child, of apparitions at dark windows if he looked at them too long. He heard Joy lock the bathroom door and sensed that, contrary to her earlier promise, she was not going to take him to bed and make like a Tennessee hooker. He listened to Mr Coonan’s footsteps in the apartment above. The old man had lived there for half a century. He might nod at you but he never said a word, as if the gunshot wound on his neck prevented it. William opened the sash window and leaned out to peek at the partial view of the upper reaches of the Empire State Building, a view that had excited them greatly when they viewed the apartment in the fall of 1980. From the other side of the street a man’s whistling came from a warehouse entrance draped in slatted plastic sheets that glowed orange. This was a nightly sound, a part of the inventory of familiar things in which William and his wife had unwittingly invested the graspable truth.
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