Jonas didn’t know about Lorenzo but probably wouldn’t care if he did. What would anger him was Carol’s visit to Vic’s. He’d consider it inexcusably intrusive. He’d say she’d crossed a line, taking her fears to his friends. She was acting out of concern, but she also had to admit that what she longed for, what she missed with a poignancy that ached in some dense middle part of her, was the easy intimacy she’d shared with Jonas for years. They’d always gotten along well, until recently. None of the typical teenage trials or rebellions. Their relationship revolved around shared conversations and meals and movies and books.
He’d been a talker practically from birth. When Jonas was a toddler, she used to say, “Let’s listen to music for a little while, sweetie,” just to take a break from his babbling voice. He kept talking, even as he got older. When he was depressed, his voice grew deep and heavy; when he was angered by perceived injustices in the world, he grew loud, but he didn’t stop talking. Even after he moved out, he called or dropped in, and usually he was like a faucet she couldn’t turn off even if she’d wanted to. So when their conversation had suddenly dried up a few months ago, she’d felt her own loneliness like a lumpy, dust-filled couch she’d owned so long that she’d almost stopped seeing it, only now there it was, an eyesore in the middle of the room, too cumbersome to move.
She could admit all that, but loneliness was not what had driven her to Vic’s door. She was willing, she was, to let Jonas go and to let her life move on to the next stage, challenges and all. What she was unwilling to do was live with this fearful feeling that clung to her like a bad scent, a worry frustratingly undefined but so strong she’d woken up a dozen times in the middle of the night, wrapped in murky dreams or covered in goose bumps, sensing something was wrong.
Ever since adolescence, Jonas had suffered from periods of overcast internal weather. He asked for so much from life. He demanded the stripping away of the skin; he insisted on seeing all the way to the muscles and veins, but if those muscles seemed insubstantial, the veins too paltry to carry the essential rush of blood, he was as disappointed as an old man finished with his days. At those times, when he spoke, his voice would catch on some random word, as if everything was about to be too much for him. Sometimes, in those depression periods, she felt Jonas was almost lost to her, wandering alone in a bitter night, carrying only a flashlight with a beam too hesitant and shallow to guide him home.
She swiped her MetroCard and entered the station. Two cops lingered near the turnstile, chatting and stamping their feet to keep warm in the clammy underground. A young woman with pierced lip and baby carriage stood at the top of the stairs leading down one level to the uptown A and C. “Need help?” Carol asked.
The woman gave a loud sigh. “See, that’s what I’m talking about,” she said, tipping her head toward the police officers. “Not a single uniform steps up. Takes a ma’am to offer.” Carol smiled, taking hold of the carriage’s front end, and together the two women descended, carting the carriage and the sleeping baby inside.
“Boy?” Carol asked, leaning over to look at the tiny, fresh face of the well-bundled infant.
The woman nodded.
“How old?”
“Ten months.”
“Keeping you up nights?”
The woman shrugged. “Sleeps all right. And thank the Lord, ’cause I got work in the morning, and no idea where his father is anymore.” She reached to stroke the infant’s cheek. “This sweet baby the single sole best thing that man and I ever did together.”
“You know . . .” Carol hesitated. “Well, it’s a cliché.”
The woman cocked her head. “What?”
“About it going fast. But my God, it goes fast.” Carol took a deep breath. “I have a boy, too.”
“Yes?” The woman looked at Carol through narrowed eyes. “How old?”
“Oh, old. Old. But I still remember. . . . We change, but they change more.”
Carol suddenly couldn’t say anything more; her voice would have been drowned out anyway by two trains approaching on parallel tracks, each going the opposite direction. The trains shuddered to a halt and paused before the doors swung open simultaneously. The woman was headed one direction, Carol the other. “You take care, now,” the woman said.
These unexpected intersections of lives: she loved them. Did it make her pathetic that at least once a month, a conversation shared with someone on a subway ended up being the highlight of her day? She loved the subway, too, for being such an equalizer. Some moments couldn’t be romanticized: the morning the hungover young man, slumped in a seat across from her, suddenly straightened and threw up on her shoes, for instance. Nevertheless, it was the world’s finest people-watching gallery and a classroom in tolerance. Where else could a suited businessman sit between a homeless derelict and an immigrant Chinese tailor? Forget Broadway and Times Square. It was the subway that displayed New York at its best, its forbearance, its liveliness, its effort to overcome the Tower of Babel collapse of a common tongue. For all its flaws, the subway was the city’s jewel.
The train was nearly full, but she got a seat next to a teenage boy listening to music through earphones. Many of the passengers, by chance, were parents with children—or maybe she just found herself noticing them. Across from her, a father with a broad, Irish-looking face sat next to a little boy who looked very much like his miniature, both of them expressionless. Next to him, a woman in traditional Islamic dress held a babe in arms.
Initially Jake had been the one who’d pressed for a baby; Carol had wavered, her concerns like stripes on a feminist flag. What if she lost her independence? What if she became just someone’s mom? What if her own work vanished beneath diapers and report cards and high school dances? But then: Jonas. He’d been such an empathetic child, feeling everything from Carol’s pain at the breakup to the loss of a belly-up goldfish that had to be flushed.
So of course, with all this sensitivity, when he reached adolescence, he began questioning. He went through periods of doubting the values of everyone around him, from the principal of his school to the director of his theater group to the artists Jake represented, and finally to her, his mom. And she was fine with that. She could stand up to a bit of close examination, she told herself; she wasn’t that bad. Besides, how much worse if she’d raised a little Republican who bought into it all without any reservations?
Still, it was hard to see him so confused and then disturbed and ultimately angered by the compromises people had to make in order to get along in the modern material world. At least, the compromises they made in the West, and in America, and in New York City, and on his block, and in his home.
“We’re all terrorists,” he’d told her a few weeks ago in what had been their last real conversation. “Every single one of us. The only difference is, some of us recognize it and others don’t.”
She’d started to disagree with him, to explain the falseness built into the very extremity of that viewpoint, how it held many accountable for the actions of few and failed to take into account the moderating influence of community and family, let alone one’s own personal honorable efforts to control rage, be kind, make amends. Then she’d decided not to argue. This perspective sprang from nothing more than the rashness and absolutism of youth. He’d outgrow it. She thought about getting him a T-shirt imprinted with the slogan: “I’m twenty-one. This isn’t who I really am” but discarded the idea. It was so true—he would be very different in another decade—and once he might have recognized the truth in it. He might have laughed. Now she wasn’t sure.
Truth be told, part of what nagged at her now was a fear that he’d stopped calling not out of forgetfulness or busyness but as an intentional act, that he’d lumped her in with all the rest, all those he thought were shells of beings, committing or acceding to violence in their half-sleep; those he disdained; those he was sure he would never resemble. And though she knew they could survive this, the two of them, and that he would mature and pass through it, still it h
urt, and it worried her not to know what he was thinking.
Three stops from her own, she heard a panhandler giving his spiel at the other end of the train. “If you ain’t got it, I understand, ’cause I ain’t got it. But if you have a dime, a quarter, a piece of fruit . . .”
She didn’t normally give to panhandlers—there were too many of them, and who knew what they used the money for? She had her own favorite charities. But now, because she was worried about her son and because she knew Jonas would pull something out of his pocket to give to this man if he were here, she fished into her bag for a dollar.
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy next to her said with a grin as he stretched out a leg to reach into his own jeans pocket. “We def got to give it up for Sonny Hirt.”
“That’s his name?”
“Huh?” The boy removed one earphone and let it dangle over his shoulder.
“His name is Sunny Hurt? Really?” she asked. “That sounds like a contradiction.”
The boy looked at her curiously. “You never seen Sonny before? He’s an institution, yo.”
The panhandler shuffled forward. He had warm eyes. Carol thought of this man’s mother, who’d surely doted on him when he was a baby, had probably worried herself sick when he was an adolescent. Had he been wild? Done drugs, cut school? Had that been when everything began going wrong? Or had it been much later, after he’d had a job, maybe even a wife? Something had fallen apart. Maybe distrust of the system, not unlike what Jonas felt.
At her stop, she emerged from the train to see two more officers; this was a lot for a Sunday, and she wondered if someone special were in town, visiting the UN or dining with the mayor. Police officers barely looked at her now—middle-aged, middle-class white women were virtually invisible to them, off the radar, unlikely to be criminals and too old for flirting. When she was young and running around with Jake, it was a different matter. They’d both looked free and flamboyant in those days, they’d looked like trouble, and to top it off, they were always laughing. Carol used to feel police officers following her and Jake with their eyes, suspicious, waiting from them to slip up somehow.
Jake. There it was, the thought she’d been avoiding, because she knew. It was time for Jake. This worry about Jonas was too strong, and she needed to share it with Jonas’s father. Jake used to be a little intuitive, and so, who knew, maybe he’d felt something, too. Or maybe Jonas had confided something in him, although that would be a switch. Still, every other path had dead-ended. As soon as she got home, she’d fix herself a cup of tea but also pour something stronger so she could take a sip if Jake became obnoxious. And then she’d call him. It was time to talk to Jake about her worries over the best thing they’d ever done together.
NEW YORK: 2:58 P.M.
MECCA: 10:58 P.M.
In the back office of his gallery, Jake’s laptop was open to Craig’s List, missed connections on the subway, his favorite frivolous reading.
No. 5 Train to Bowling Green: You were wearing light brown boots, and something green on top. I was the guy with glasses. We sort of exchanged glances through the people standing in the subway car. You were awfully cute and I don’t see many gals with your sort of style around here. Maybe lunch? Or more?
Last Friday night on the downtown F-train. Me: The brunette with the low-cut black dress whose chest you kept staring at (yes, I noticed). You: Light brown hair with goatee, blue shirt, and more of a chance than you gave yourself credit for. Wanna see ’em in person? So holler back, cutie!
He didn’t have a goatee, but maybe he could still respond to that one—nah, he surely hadn’t sunk to that. He pushed the laptop away and had begun running his finger down a row of figures on a spreadsheet when the phone rang. He reached for it immediately, pleased for another distraction from issues of money and also tantalized by the possibility that the caller might be bearing good business news. Maybe a client wanted to buy a piece from a recent show—one of the big paintings, please God, because would that ever take a weight off. Or maybe it was a new artist, some undiscovered talent looking for a place to hang his work. Even if it were only one of his regular artists checking on sales, that was fine; Jake would strike up a conversation that might lead somewhere productive—at least more productive than reviewing financials, or even reviewing Craig’s List.
He glanced at the phone number casually and then held the receiver away from his ear. 212-566-1382. His number. Or rather, his old number. Or rather, Carol’s number, now that Jonas didn’t live there anymore. And Carol didn’t call him, not ever.
He put down the receiver without answering, and, waiting to see if she’d leave a message, he let his eyes rest on the painting in his office. It was a cityscape, showing Manhattan’s skyscrapers as though they were on fire and beneath them a red curve that was the Hudson. It was not one of his favorites; he preferred more abstract, but he always rotated paintings in and out of his office so that none of his artists would feel slighted.
Either she wasn’t leaving a message, or it was a very long one. He waited another minute, and the phone began to ring again. Damn her. She knew he was here, somehow. She had this extra sense when it came to family members, even ex–family members, apparently, and she wasn’t going to let up. He answered the phone.
“Hello, Carol,” he said.
“Jake.” Her voice sounded deep and husky, and God save him if it didn’t bring back a rush of memories; God save him if he couldn’t suddenly imagine her, twenty-one years old, on her back by the lake that one afternoon, her traffic-stopping legs askew; God save him if he didn’t recall the precise and precious taste of her and that tiny, pristine hotel room in the French Quarter the time they barely saw the city, and the intoxicating night they slipped away from a fancy summer party and made love behind the cabana and again in the shallow end of the swimming pool, and even that time right near the end when they passed in the hallway after another fight and abruptly found themselves doing it jammed into the bathroom while Jonas slept.
“It’s Jonas,” she said.
“Jonas?” Jake felt sluggish, like he was being awakened from a dream. “Jonas? What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing; he’s fine, I mean, I think so; at least, it’s nothing specific,” she said. “It’s just that he’s, oh, God, Jake. Something’s going on, even though I’m having trouble articulating it here. He’s in trouble, or troubled—I don’t know what because he’s been, well, he’s been not-Jonas.” Carol paused, and it sounded like she took a sip of a drink. “I think he’s cutting classes,” she said. “He hasn’t called me. I call; there’s no answer. I went to his apartment today, and he wasn’t there. I haven’t heard from him in more than a week.”
“How much more than a week?”
“It’s been nine days.”
“Carol.” Jake leaned back in his chair. “Nine days?”
“So I guess you haven’t spoken with him any more recently than that?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it, but no, I guess not. I wasn’t particularly worried, though.”
“This is Jonas. It isn’t like him not to call one of us—usually me, granted, but at least one of us—for this long.”
Jake decided to ignore Carol’s slightly snide tone. “Yes, this is Jonas,” he said, “but this is Jonas growing up. I mean, my God, he’s twenty-one. Isn’t he?” Jake calculated quickly. “That’s right. So it’s time.”
“Jake,” she said. “Something is wrong, I know something is wrong, and I don’t know what to do.”
Jake sighed. “Do you remember,” he said, “when you and I began seeing one another?”
“Jake,” she said, and he knew by her tone that she thought maybe he was going to begin with the sex talk, which he used to do sometimes when they had to be apart, and which he did a few especially lonely times after they split. But it had been years, and besides, even he wouldn’t do that now. Not when they were talking about their boy. Not when she was so distracted.
“It was all new, Ca
rol. Every time we touched one another, every word we exchanged. It was all we could think about, all we could feel. Neither one of us was keeping in close contact with our mothers.”
“Jonas is neither you nor I. He’s something else altogether, something so pure and fine and idealistic and . . . and when he stops calling for this long, something is wrong.”
“Pure and idealistic is all well and good, but Carol, he can still be in the throes of some lustful relationship—”
“I went by Vic’s,” Carol said. “That’s how worried I am, Jake, so hear me out. I went by Vic’s, even at the risk of sounding like the crazy possessive mother, but Vic didn’t know anything, either.”
“Vic?”
“You know. His friend from high school.”
Jake wasn’t a hundred percent sure if Vic was male or female, but he decided to keep that piece of ignorance to himself. He stood up with the receiver tucked against his ear and peeked into the gallery. Except for Sundays and Thursdays, when he invited the public, he was opening the gallery these days only for shows and by appointment. He hadn’t heard the bell that signaled the door opening, but he thought he might have missed it. He hadn’t, though. No potential buyer was browsing the paintings; no one had been browsing so far all day, which was not good for a Sunday, even a cold Sunday, especially given the figures he’d just been studying.
“Carol,” he said, “what do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. You’re a guy; he’s a guy.”
“Yes.” Jake drew the word out.
“So can’t you just go find him? Call, leave a message on his machine, and maybe he’ll call you back if he doesn’t want to talk to me. Go to his apartment, and if he doesn’t answer the door to you, either, insist that the landlord let you in. The landlord will do it if you demand it. If he is in bed with some girlfriend, you can make some hearty male joke and then back out and call me right away. But just, for God’s sake, make sure he’s not lying in bed with a fever, too sick to answer the door. Make sure he hasn’t spent four days throwing up in a pot. If he’s not there, leave a note telling him to phone us straightaway. And if he doesn’t turn up in twenty-four hours, Jake, I’m calling the police.”
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