Erica pictured the Florida office as a gleaming new building overlooking white sand, surf, and palm trees. She imagined Ethan sitting amid reflected sunbeams, perfecting his algorithms while somewhere nearby Don Johnson leaped onto a docked yacht, which would speed off, kicking up exhaust and spray. Such a light-infused image, so opposite from these dusky and mysterious streets. She found it difficult to hold both places in her head at the same time.
“Tell me about this Josh, again,” she said.
“He’s a trader. One of our sharpest ones. One of the few guys who truly understands my system.” He extracted a crumpled Post-it from his pocket with Josh’s address on it. “He’s a talented musician too. He plays keyboard for a band in his free time.”
Josh Hendrie lived in a renovated factory by the Lincoln Tunnel. Around the corner, cars funneled into the dark maw of the tunnel like an army of fireflies. Erica and Ethan rode up eight flights in an old-fashioned freight elevator, which creaked to a halt a full foot below floor level. They stepped through a propped-open door into a loft space with refinished wood plank floors and exposed rafters bleached white. Again Erica experienced that tantalizing ripple of excitement, that lightness in her veins.
“This is Josh,” Ethan said, introducing her to a tallish, thirtyish man, fit, with sandy hair and a round baby face, wearing white cotton pants and a tight lime-green scoop-neck shirt. There were about fifteen other people present, all in their twenties or early thirties. Preliminary introductions revealed that they all lived in downtown Manhattan or just over bridges in Hoboken or Brooklyn. Erica sat down next to a woman wearing a knit princess-waist dress over tight leggings. She worked in advertising and told Erica that she and her husband wanted to get pregnant but that the birth of their child needed to coincide with the end of the sailboat-racing season.
“That sounds challenging,” noted Erica, hoping the conversation would soon slide toward more exotic realms, perhaps those movies and plays she hadn’t seen or music she hadn’t heard of. She asked Josh about his band.
“We do light jazz, some jazz fusion,” he said.
“Did you ever hear of a band called Bloody Tampax?” Erica sipped the standard-issue chardonnay that was the only drink on order other than diet ginger ale and sparkling water.
“No, I don’t believe so. What kind of music do they play?”
“Heavy metal, I guess. Sort of punk heavy metal.”
“Sorry, not my thing.” Josh’s eyes glazed over with faint distaste and significant disinterest. He initiated an intense discussion of the New York Marathon with two skinny ladies in designer running suits. Everybody in the room was discussing physical fitness: optimum heart rate, lower-ab exercises, caloric intake versus energy output, their personal levels of body fat. Even Ethan got in on the game, talking about how he’d dispensed with the golf cart and now walked the entire eighteen holes down in Florida. Erica felt the excitement dissipate from her bloodstream.
“My aerobics instructor has the most amazing body and a sexy Israeli accent,” she said. “He’s got these groupies who always set up in the front row and apply eyeliner in the middle of class.”
“Who said nothing exciting happened on Long Island,” said Josh Hendrie, sarcasm evident.
“Did you work before you had children?” asked Knitted Dress.
“Not nearly as hard as I do now,” thought Erica, but what came out of her mouth was “I was a nurse at Brigham Young Hospital in Boston.”
“Oh?” Knitted Dress smiled brightly. “When was that? I know a cardiologist there.”
“Ten years ago.”
“Oh.” More eye glazing. Knitted Dress turned her attention to her husband, a lanky man with a shock of black hair who was describing a yacht race off of Connecticut.
“I’ve developed a fear of blood,” Erica said to no one in particular. “Kind of weird for a nurse, huh?”
No one gave evidence of hearing her. Erica poured herself some more chardonnay, even though it tasted like wood pulp. She looked around for something to eat. She was hungry, her last meal a yogurt at noon. The only food option she could see was a platter of crudités with onion dip that a couple people were picking at listlessly. The last thing she needed was onion breath.
Josh’s apartment was as spare as his food and drink offerings. Milky-white walls, the exact tone no doubt selected by a decorator; a pair of tasteful modern oil paintings; two modular sofas in complementary cream and brown; a Tibetan throw rug; a gleaming black baby grand piano in one corner. Off to the right she saw a kitchenette with doll-size appliances, sandy granite counters, and a microwave. There was none of the clutter that accumulated in Erica’s house as naturally as breathing, not even the framed needlepoints, globe paperweights, and lemon air fresheners of Debbie’s house.
She tried imagining such a stripped-down life, a life simplified to work and workouts and carefully delineated hobbies, not complicated exponentially by the needs and desires of five other human beings. By bedtime your slate would be wiped as clean as these cream walls. You’d think such freedom would lead to a bigger life, but given these people, and their limited conversations and appetites, it seemed, strangely, to diminish them.
She needed to pee, not desperately, but enough that it seemed like an excuse to leave this boring situation and explore Josh’s still mysterious bedroom, separated from the rest of the loft by a bamboo screen.
Hidden behind the screen, Erica took inventory. A double bed with a Hawaiian-print bedspread. A television on a stand at the foot of the bed. A night table, a slightly scummy water glass, and a book entitled Fitness or Fatness: The Choice Is Yours. A door to the bathroom, which was closed, and sliding doors leading out to the balcony. After a few minutes, the bathroom door opened, and a short, slight guy with horn-rim glasses stepped out holding something and smiling at her like they shared a secret. She recognized him: Stephan Langston.
“I met you at the Don Johnson party,” she said, returning the smile. “You made some strange remark about soft drinks. You work with Ethan, don’t you?”
“Tired of those health freaks?” he asked.
“You’d think they could find something else to talk about,” Erica agreed.
“You want this?” he whispered, as if needing the toilet was a desire as potent and suppressed as a craving for Oreo cookies, and Erica nodded yes, even though she still didn’t need to go that badly. Stephan hovered by the bathroom door, and as she walked in, surreptitiously shoved the something he was holding into her hand.
It was a thimble-size snifter of cocaine, with a miniature silver spoon on a chain.
Erica had never done coke before, never even seen it except on TV and movies. This was the type of thing that was supposed to go on at parties all the time, she knew, but never at any party she’d attended with Ethan, on Long Island or in the city. All people ever did was sit around and talk about home renovations, summer camp, or diet and exercise routines. People talked about boring stuff and went home by midnight because they were tired from the workweek, or tired from their kids, or tired from running around like chickens without heads, or tired on general principle. But now, in her sweaty palms, lay an opportunity to transcend all that.
Leaning on the vanity, she tentatively filled up the little spoon and sniffed it, half expecting it to scatter over the floor and reveal her for a fool. But no, the powder went neatly up her nose like she was an old hand at this. Her nostril grew numb, and she felt slightly light-headed, nothing more. She sat on the toilet, producing a trickle to authenticate her presence there, flushed the toilet, walked out of the bathroom, and not quite meeting Stephan’s eyes, passed him the snifter. She stood by Josh’s night table, leafing through Fitness or Fatness, and in a few minutes Stephan came out and handed her the snifter again. For the next half hour or so, they did a little dance, in and out of the bathroom. A steady hum of conversation issued from behind the bamboo screen. She k
ept expecting others to feel the urge of nature and poke their heads in, but perhaps people who didn’t eat or drink didn’t eliminate either. After a while, she ceased to care.
“Sayonara.” Stephan grinned, vanishing back into the living room. Erica stepped out on the terrace and into an amazing revelation. The outside world for once in her lifetime was moving at the same pace as her interior one. No background noise, no to-do lists, no blood, no hurricanes or kidnappings, just this glittering perfect alignment. Down at street level, everything was fog and shadows, stretching past the filthy Hudson River to the green expanse of Staten Island; up here on the top of the city, she stood on the cusp of a sea of light.
She’d felt like this when each of her four children were born, but that was earned ecstasy, colored with pain and sweat. This evening was a gift. She feared she didn’t deserve it. She reached deep back in her childhood, and like that evening at the World’s Fair, New York City blinked on for her, stretching to the horizon, sparkling like jewels.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Erica felt a hand on her shoulder, a kiss on the back of her neck. The kiss felt really good. She waited for more.
“Where the hell have you been?”
She turned around. Ethan’s suit jacket, now past its fifteenth hour of service, hung limp and linty from his shoulders. His pinstripe shirt had worked its way loose from his waistline and bubbled over his leather belt. He picked at his ear in a tired, abstracted way.
“I’m looking at the world transformed.” She nuzzled close to him, hoping he would kiss her neck again.
“It’s quite the view!” Ethan agreed, but Erica knew he didn’t see what she saw out there, the bouncing electrons, the dusty light. She almost spilled her secret, tossed it into the sky and let it sparkle, but a residual caution residing in her brain told her that was not a safe idea.
“Stephan Langston told me you guys got into a long conversation.” Light glinted on the tendrils of dirty-blond hair at the base of Ethan’s neck and the reddish scab on the curve of his ear.
She’d almost forgotten about Stephan. “Oh yeah! We talked about soft drinks, you know, the health effects.” She turned back toward the lights. “Look! Can you believe that galaxy of lights over there is Staten Island? Does that remotely resemble Staten Island?”
“In the morning it’ll look like Staten Island,” Ethan said. He steered her indoors. “C’mon, hon,” he insisted. “I’m all zonked out from the week, and now I’m all revved up for the marathon. That’ll give me a goal, to finally quit smoking and get into fantastic shape. I want to go running first thing tomorrow morning.” The pressure of his fingers sent sparks through her arm. The floorboards bounced like rubber under her ankles.
Josh sat at the piano, playing a lush rendition of “Uptown Girl.” All the guests save Stephan had left, and the room was a quiet mess: sticky glasses scattered here and there, a cucumber wedge stuck in a puddle of fat-free hummus, a forgotten jacket. The whole mundane scene shimmered with a glow that, as Erica noted with dismay, was already breaking off into golden droplets and floating away. “It was nice meeting you,” said Josh, his fingers not straying from the piano keys. “Same here,” said Erica.
Stephan was traversing the limited length of the kitchenette, practicing tai chi kicks. She waved good-bye to him and bestowed what she believed was a warm and meaningful smile. He gave her an odd little salute in return and kept on kicking.
“What’d you find to talk about so long with that guy?” Ethan said, as the door closed behind them. “He’s a major weirdo.”
“I told you, soft drinks.” Erica said. She and Stephan hadn’t exchanged more than a few words. “And yoga. He takes yoga classes. Oh yeah, and he wanted to know about our vacation in Jamaica.”
“Would you believe he made three million dollars last year?”
“I read that in the Times. Which department does he work in?” Erica asked. The freight elevator creaked too slowly down the eight floors.
“He’s a trader. Josh’s boss. He’s another big fan of my systems.”
Erica concentrated on the diamond filigree of the elevator door. The shine was off, but her mind still felt extraordinarily clear, all information and sensation neatly shelved and accessible, like a giant mental library. Stephan must have approached her at the Don Johnson party, and again this evening, because he recognized a commonality between them, something longing and vulnerable.
They stepped out of the lobby onto the sidewalk. “Why wait until morning? Let’s run right now!” Erica said. Her legs felt like springs. She leaped through the air, the front of her foot only lightly touching the sidewalk.
“Hey, slow down,” Ethan said. “I’m tired.”
In the street, a rush of steam shot up from a manhole, dispersing a spray of white vapor. Under the streets, water rushed through pipes. Trains rumbled through tunnels. Who knew what mysteries lay at the heart of the city, while she ran above it all on the illusion of solid ground? She could keep running forever, through the yellow vaporous night, the canyons of towers, the shadowy caves of industrial space, all the way to the lapping waves of the filthy Hudson. If only she could keep running. But, there, obstructing her path, sat Ethan’s trusty Mercedes.
“You’ll drive, hon?” he asked, climbing expectantly into the passenger’s seat.
She averted her eyes from the giant stone archway as she powered over the Manhattan Bridge and through the dodge game of shooting stars that was the BQE, shifting seamlessly to the Grand Central, the Northern State, the LIE, all the way to the West Meadow exit. She couldn’t place the precise moment when her sense of extraordinary clarity dissolved all the way down to sludge.
She navigated through the dense molecules one at a time. Thankfully, these dark roads were etched into the crevices of her brain; she could drive them in her sleep. She pressed the electronic garage opener, and the door went up on her own home where her kids were sleeping. Mrs. Lutock blinked herself awake on the family room couch, a late-night horror movie rambling dumbly on. Erica dug into her purse and handed her a couple twenties; Mrs. Lutock hauled herself upright on her arthritic knees and out to her car.
Erica stripped off her washed-silk dress and left it on the bedroom floor. She heard Ethan in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, flushing the toilet. Sophia, no doubt sensing her presence, started to cry. Erica nursed her, feeling a vague guilt that she was polluting her baby’s body with drugs, thinking that maybe she should substitute one of those cans of formula they’d given her in the hospital. But that would mean giving up their intimate embrace, that absolute trust that exhilarated her and crushed her at the same time. If only she could get back to that shiny place again, that point of light receding so rapidly, like a bubble drifting into outer space.
Back in her bedroom, Ethan gently snoring, she ran her fingers over the rumpled surface of her dress, searching for remnants of white powder. She thought she found a trace and inhaled, but it was only lint, or maybe some particulate from the Manhattan air. Disgusting. She was disgusting. Lacking an alternative, she fell into bed and slept.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The alarm clock jangled her awake long before she was ready. She detected a familiar cool emptiness on Ethan’s side of the bed—he was out running, no doubt—and stumbled downstairs into a world propelled by noise: cartoons, Nintendo, pillows thudding into the family room walls, and Dylan, reminding her of his Saturday morning basketball party.
She felt unusually jerky and unsure on the road. Even Jefferson Starship, which bore the character of a floating dream, failed to calm her down. She slammed on the brakes too hard, took the turns too wide, and parked so close to the neighboring Ford Taurus in the parking lot that she and the kids had to slide out sideways.
In the gym, basketballs pounded against the floors. She engaged in driblets of conversation with the women who darted in and out, moving between watching the party and buying grape juice
at the supermarket, going to the bank, and working on the seating arrangements for their sons’ bar mitzvahs. Conversation was an effort. All these women, her friends and neighbors, struck her as trivial-minded drips.
When Erica got home, Ethan was pulling on his weekend sweatpants, showered and refreshed from his run.
“I might go for a run myself,” Erica said. “Can you watch the kids?”
“Sure,” said Ethan. “Maybe you could even train for the marathon with me.”
Hey, maybe she could train for the marathon and beat those fitness freaks at their own game. She was a fast runner, probably faster than Ethan, though she hadn’t run consistently since high school. She’d trained on these very streets for the West Meadow cross-country team, temporarily released from the confines of the stuffy classroom, her long legs exploding with seemingly infinite energy.
But in the current day her legs had lost their spring. The cold dry winds of the spring afternoon slapped at her but couldn’t penetrate her torpor. She was slow. She tripped on the curb. She replayed the events of the previous evening—the dark, mysterious streets; Stephan and his knowing smile; their dance in and out of the bathroom; her illuminating moment on Josh’s balcony—but the entire experience felt like something that had happened a long time ago, in a different country. In West Meadow, everyone’s lawns looked identical: carpets of grass, rounded hedges, the occasional purple or yellow crocus, an early azalea, damp patches of dirt awaiting the obligatory May visit to the nursery. It all seemed so predictable, so pointless. Her heart beat hard against her chest.
When Dylan was four years old, he’d scraped his leg on a shard of glass in the Bar Beach surf and who knew what toxic slime was in that water. He’d scratched and picked at it until it swelled up into a red, angry boil, which Erica lanced with a sterilized needle. Blood and pus gushed out. No doubt the same river of blood and pus ran underneath Debbie’s bruises, despite how their faded colors, rose and gray and lavender, almost blended with her pastel pantsuits. Erica sat down on the street curb with her head in her hands. She didn’t understand what had happened to her, how she’d lost her sturdy implacability. She wanted to scrub her brain cells with Ajax.
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