31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

  He was also a bit stunned, during the months of divorcing, by the speed with which one could go from being part of a unit to being an individual human quite insistently separate. He later thought that if only his parents had been able to wait until he was a teenager, eager for detachment, it might have been easier on him. He might not have had the sense of betraying both of them even as they betrayed him. But by the time of the burned bacon, Jonas was already well beside the point for Carol and Jake. Just as, he guessed, Vic’s little sister was beside the point now. He felt for Mara; he knew—better than Vic, he suspected—that she was having a hard time right now. He would have visited Mara once or twice more over the last few weeks if there’d been time. If things had been different.

  The woman who’d reminded him of his mother had walked on, but Jonas had been standing long enough to turn cold again, so he slipped into a pharmacy and wandered up and down the artificially-lit aisles, thinking and not thinking. Images floated by: the agitated man on the bicycle outside the Peshawar madrassa, the bearded one in the training camp who’d cut a sheep’s neck to prove he would not shy from necessary violence. Masoud instructing him, a hand resting on his shoulder. His mother’s expression when she looked worried, his father’s corny jokes. Vic, of course. Vic, with her muscular thighs and her endearing habit of touching her tongue to her upper lip when concentrating. He gave each memory and every thought a nodding but passing acknowledgment as he distracted himself by reading the backs of drugstore products, dropping some into his cart.

  Then he went to the cash register and paid for the items he’d collected. He left with a packet of razors, a pair of tweezers, some nail clippers, a package of college-rule loose-leaf, a set of three blue pens, two postcards showing the Manhattan skyline, a box of business-sized envelopes, two chocolate bars, some juice, tape, a magazine, mouthwash, Saltine crackers, and first-aid cream. On his way out, he stopped at a stamp machine and bought half-a-dozen stamps, each one adorned with the image of the American flag.

  NEW YORK: 1:04 P.M.

  MECCA: 9:04 P.M.

  At the Broadway-Lafayette stop, Vic exited and climbed to the street. On frigid days, she thought, the city’s inequalities stood out in sharp relief, and she found herself wondering how Sonny Hirt survived. Most panhandlers she’d come to know by sight over the years vanished when temperatures headed south. They went someplace, she supposed, where it was easier to be homeless in winter. Sonny always stayed.

  “Shouldn’t you be in Florida?” she’d asked when she’d handed him a dollar earlier that day, and then she’d thought maybe the question was insensitive or he’d take offense, but Sonny had just smiled.

  “You sure talking truth,” he said as he shuffled on.

  And so he was still working the metro, and probably would be for many hours, while she was rushing home to a warm cup of tea, warm shower, warm food. This was the kind of disparity that could set Jonas to ranting. He always felt distant problems as if they were his own, and while she could admire that, ranting was not her favorite thing about Jonas. She believed she was helping him mellow. But she suspected she was in direct competition with someone she barely knew. Jonas didn’t talk about Masoud a lot, but every time he did, his admiration was obvious. She’d met Masoud once in an Italian restaurant. She listened to him speak eloquently about his home in Saudi Arabia, nights spent in the dry, crisp desert around the city, gathered with family or friends inside an open tent or sometimes outside under cloudless skies on a thick carpet, eating rice and lamb with his hands from an oversized platter shared by all. After the meal, the men played cards under the moon until the muezzin’s call to morning prayer. If they couldn’t make it to the mosque in time, they would stop by the roadside to pray. He made it sound romantic, timeless, and she watched Jonas’s face grow more entranced as he listened to the stories.

  Masoud also mentioned his older brother, who went to western Afghanistan in October 2001 to help the wounded and was killed ten days later when American rockets hit a military hospital. “My brother was a gentle and conciliatory man,” Masoud said. “His life was dismissed as collateral damage.” The edge of fury in his voice convinced Vic that Masoud encouraged a self-righteous, moody part of Jonas she hoped he’d outgrow.

  Vic’s investment in what Jonas would become was, of course, new. The camping trip changed everything. The sex had been surprising after all those years of friendship, and awkward, too, not because they were inside a tent but because they were doing it at all, touching one another in these ways. This is Jonas, she kept reminding herself, pausing to brush his familiar face and hands and then, like a blind woman, reaching for his unfamiliar inner thigh and the place where the small of his back had always disappeared into his jeans. She imagined he must have had the same confusing, thrilling sensation. After that first time, their lovemaking grew to feel different on different occasions. Sometimes she experienced it as a journey and lost all sense of time or place. Often it was tender. Once it was excitingly rough.

  Now, on the street, she wiped her left palm on her jeans and rolled her shoulders back. Her legs were sore from the long rehearsal hours. Alex had been driving them so hard over the past week that she’d nearly lost contact with the outside world, with everything except her own dancing limbs and the members of the company. She imagined Jonas in her apartment, hopefully in just a few hours’ time. She would put on an old Tina Turner CD, low—I’m your private dancer—and stretch him out on his back and dive her fingernails into his collarbone. Then she’d draw them gently over his chest, skirt his thighs, and move them down to the soles of his feet, like finger-painting. Imagining each finger a different shade, long strips of wavy color, all the while taking in the texture of his skin with her own. She would turn him over then and do it on the other side. Deep inside her, something coiled in anticipation.

  She exhaled a puff of air made visible by the cold and experienced the deep, private happiness of knowing that in a few minutes, she would be standing in a stream of hot water, massaging her muscles with lavender-scented soap, feeling aches slide off her body. Preparing for Jonas, as she thought of it. Purifying for Jonas.

  Turning the corner, she saw a woman standing on her stoop, arms crossed over her chest against the cold. Jonas’s mom: that was who it looked like. But it couldn’t be; what would she be doing here? Vic’s fantasies about Jonas were making her imagine parts of him everywhere.

  As Vic got closer, though, the woman waved, and Vic saw that it was Jonas’s mom, which she immediately decided was a strange coincidence. Jonas’s mom would never come to visit Vic—Vic doubted Jonas’s mom even knew where she lived. She must be here to see someone else, someone in Vic’s building, and what a fluke, here came Vic.

  But no. Jonas’s mom was striding toward her, one hand reaching out, saying, “Vic, hi, hon, sorry for the intrusion, I was hoping to catch you; do you have a few minutes?” For some reason, those words sent fear shooting through Vic’s body, and even as Jonas’s mother was in midsentence, Vic was interrupting: “Is Jonas okay? He’s all right, isn’t he, Mrs. Meitzner?” and before Vic could finish speaking, Jonas’s mother was answering, “Carol, honey, I’m just Carol, surely, after all this time, heck, I’m not even married to Mr. Meitzner anymore, and yes, Jonas is fine, at least I think so, I mean, nothing’s happened, nothing specific, but that’s what I want to talk with you about.”

  Vic was so startled she couldn’t even think of how to respond properly, and then she realized they were still on the street, where it continued to be frigid, and then she wondered how messy her place was—Mrs. Meitzner kept a neat apartment, she knew—but how could she even think of that? How many times over the years, during high school and beyond, had Mrs. Meitzner welcomed her, made her dinner, even insisted that Jonas walk her home if it got too late?

  “Come on in,” Vic said. “Yes, please. I’m just surprised. I didn’t even know that you knew my address—”

  “Your mom . . . I called . . .”

  Vic unlo
cked the first door to the building, and then the second door, and Mrs. Meitzner followed her up three flights, and Vic unlocked the apartment door and flung it open to the living room, which wasn’t too cluttered, a pair of boots by the door, a plate, a coffee cup and a partially read newspaper on the floor in front of the couch, two wineglasses on a table to the side, and a small pile of clothes in the corner. “What can I get you to drink, Mrs. Meitzner? I have some herbal tea?”

  “That would be perfect on a day like this, thank you, but please call me Carol, okay?”

  Vic nodded mutely, and they both stepped into the open kitchen—really just a counter, a stovetop, an oven, and some cabinets for glasses and dishes.

  Vic put on the water and pulled out three boxes of tea bags so Jonas’s mother could choose, and while they fussed together in the kitchen, Jonas’s mother asked about the dance company, and how practice was going, and when the performance would be, and how Vic’s parents were, and Vic answered on autopilot, wondering all the while what this could be about. She wondered if Jonas’s mother knew about the unexpected outcome of the camping trip, and how it had changed the status between Jonas and Vic, and if she would say, “You’re not good enough for my son; stay away from him.” But those were lines from some B movie, and Jonas’s mother was nothing like that; she was much more tolerant and classy. Besides, she liked Vic; Vic was sure of that; she always had.

  Freshman year. Jonas and Vic were in a physical science class together. He’d skipped a grade and was the smartest kid in that class, but he didn’t look the part. Jonas was not nerdy. Yet he had the face of a scholar. His eyes were set a little too close together for beauty, but it was the ideal flaw because it made him look focused. Which he was. He also had no idea how attractive his shyness made him. And then there was his curly blond hair—who could resist that?

  Vic already loved dance, and that contributed to her indifference as a student. She was one of those you-have-such-potential students. When she needed help in science, as she inevitably did, she asked the guy who sat two seats in front of her. Jonas. She found out they lived near one another, and that was how they started. Study partners. Two times a week for the rest of that year, and they kept it up over the next three years. In the beginning, Vic was sure heads bent over a book would develop into something else. And then Jonas didn’t seem interested, which surprised her. Vic was accustomed to boys’ interest. But she accepted Jonas’s indifference. He was too moody and serious for her, anyway, she decided; she had wild oats to sow. Besides, he was a great friend. She was glad to have him for that. Still, every now and then she would become aware of the golden skin of his forearm or the way his back curved sweetly before it reached toward his legs, and a lusty thought would pass lazily through her mind. But mostly, before August, she’d just thought of him as study-buddy, steady-buddy Jonas.

  Finally with the tea ready, Vic puffed up the pillows on the couch and the two women sat together. Vic couldn’t call Jonas’s mother Carol, so she decided to just call her nothing. They pointed their knees in each other’s direction, and Vic waited.

  Jonas’s mother sipped her tea, then took a deep breath. “I feel a little silly,” she said, stumbling over her words a bit. “I’ve been worried, and maybe I worry too much, but then I thought, Well, if anyone would know, it would be Vic, because you two are so close and you’ve been that way for so long.”

  She looked expectantly at Vic, but so far there was nothing for Vic to reply to, so she just nodded encouragingly, aware of her heart moving up into her throat even though she couldn’t say why.

  “Well, okay, here’s the thing, I don’t know, Vic, but I don’t think he’s going to any classes anymore, even though he told me a couple weeks ago that he was. And Jonas doesn’t normally lie to me, at least I don’t think so.”

  “I . . . I thought he was going to classes,” Vic said. She knew Jonas considered many of the classes to be “dishonest”; that was how he’d put it. But he hadn’t mentioned to her that he wasn’t attending at all. It wasn’t impossible to imagine. Jonas had already dropped out once, midway through freshman year. He’d spent a year traveling around Europe—the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Italy, and France—and then he’d returned and begun to work at that center he loved so much—the World Understanding Center or something like that—answering phones and preparing class cards in return for a small salary. He studied comparative religion and meditation there, Ayurvedic medicine, Kabbalah and Sufism and who could keep track of what else—searching for something, a quality Vic found endearing. Then his parents insisted he start classes at NYU full time again in September. It seemed to be going pretty well, although, come to think of it, he never mentioned classes. But after all, it had only been—what? Ten weeks? They’d had other matters on their minds, the two of them.

  “It’s not only that,” Jonas’s mother said. “He’s been strange, distant. Oh, I know it’s normal for young men to pull away from their mothers. But this feels bigger than that. I mean, I can’t reach him, and . . .” She pulled a little on the fabric of the couch. “He came over two weeks ago, and he didn’t look good,” she said, almost as if she were speaking to herself, her gaze on some middle distance. “His face was gray. He carried his body like it weighed a hundred tons, though he looked like he’d actually lost weight. I asked him how he felt. He said fine. ‘Any fatigue or anything?’ He turned angry suddenly. He called me a nag—” She cut herself off, and Vic could see a flash of hurt in her expression before it cleared. “Later he was in his room—his old room, I mean—he was looking out the window, and I came and stood behind him and grabbed his waist, tried to scare him, playfully, you know, and I guess I did scare him because he jumped and turned. He was hanging on to that old stuffed elephant of his, and he looked so worn. God, he looked ancient.”

  Jonas’s mother’s eyes were shiny. She took a sip of tea. Vic thought about patting her hand, but that seemed the wrong gesture between them. “You know how he is,” Vic said. “Sometimes he carries around the world’s problems like an overstuffed suitcase.”

  Jonas’s mother didn’t seem to hear. “I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing, and then he got mad again, then apologetic, one right after the other. Then he left.”

  Vic sipped her tea. “Well,” she said after a minute.

  “I know.” Jonas’s mother ran a hand through her hair and kind of laughed. “Oh, I know, it doesn’t add up to much, the way I’ve told it. But a mother can sense things. Something is wrong.” She worried the fabric of Vic’s couch a moment more, hesitating. “Do you think, could it be drugs or something?”

  Vic smiled; she even felt some relief because this was beginning to feel like a typical parent conversation. “No, Mrs. Meitzner. Jonas doesn’t even drink.”

  “Of course. You’re right. But something is . . .” Jonas’s mom trailed off and reached her left hand back to rub the right side of her neck. “For three days, I’ve been calling, leaving messages, and he doesn’t answer and he doesn’t call back. That’s not like him, either. And today I went by his apartment and—no answer. So I thought maybe . . . maybe you would know something. When did you last talk to him?”

  “I think it was . . .” She’d thought of Jonas often, for sure, and made repeated calls, but how long exactly had it been since they’d spoken? With dance rehearsals, and then the drama with her mother and Mara, the days had begun to blur. She couldn’t sort it out right now, not with Jonas’s mom staring at her. “Last time I talked to him,” she said, “he seemed—” Tired, maybe, and busy, but mostly he’d seemed romantic every time she’d spoken to him over these past few weeks. And intense, and passionate. And full of life and desire and longing, and now she suddenly remembered the last time, a week ago Tuesday—longer than she’d realized. It had been a quick conversation, and she’d been on the street headed to rehearsal, but still she’d felt it all when she’d heard his voice on the phone, and she’d wanted to see him, to hold his face in her hands, and would have found a wa
y to do that, to meet him at least on some street corner and kiss him, kiss him in some private place, if she hadn’t already been late. “He seemed fine,” she said.

  “Okay. Well, good,” Jonas’s mother said, though she sounded unconvinced. She was silent a moment and then made a motion as if dusting off the palms of her hands on her pants. “Enough. You’ve probably got plenty to do on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “No, no,” Vic said.

  Jonas’s mother rose and took her cup into the kitchen, set it in the sink. “He was such a funny baby,” she said. “So serious, even then. But one time, he was maybe eleven months then, and he was sitting in his high chair in the kitchen, and suddenly, out of nowhere, he started laughing, and that made me laugh, and then he laughed at me laughing, and on like that, as if the laughter itself were an entire conversation.” She gave a small, sad smile. “If you . . .” she hesitated, “if you talk to Jonas in the next day or so, Vic—I don’t want to sound pathetic, but tell him to call his old mother, okay?”

  As soon as she was gone, Vic tried Jonas again on his cell. It went immediately to the message, so he either had it off or was underground somewhere. She tried to remember whether it had rung when she’d called him from the theater. She dialed his apartment phone, and there was no answer—but she knew he rarely answered his landline; it was just something his parents had asked him to do, to put in a phone. She called his cell again to leave a message.

  “Hey, you, it’s me. Me on Sunday afternoon. Maybe you have time for an early dinner tonight? Even if you don’t, call me, okay? Your mom was here, which was a surprise, but nice, except that she thinks you’ve dropped out of sight for too long. She’s worried, Jonas. Give her a call. And then, busy or not, call me.” She hung up and then dialed Jonas’s number again. “If I don’t answer, I’m in the shower. So leave a message. Or better yet,” she dropped her voice, trying for comicseductive, “come on over. Quickly.”