31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

Vic laughed.

  “The station was crawlin’ with them today. Cops, I mean. When’s your show open, hon?”

  “Tuesday,” Vic said. “I’ll snag you three tickets for next weekend if you want them.”

  “We’d love ’em. Watching you dance makes me feel hope for the world.”

  Vic’s phone began ringing and she turned to it quickly. “See you, Jackie.” This had to finally be Jonas, but she wasn’t going to jinx it by looking at caller ID.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Victoria.”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Masoud. Masoud al-Zufak.”

  “Oh, yes. Jonas’s . . .”

  “I just wanted to let you know I’ll be mailing you something. Please keep your eye out for it.”

  Vic had begun pacing as Masoud spoke. “An invitation or something?” she asked.

  “It should arrive in three days.”

  “Do you need my address?’

  “Jonas gave it to me.”

  “Jonas?” Her voice rose. “Is Jonas—”

  “May the night watch over you, Victoria.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” she said, but Masoud hung up as she was speaking.

  She went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. She unexpectedly felt like crying. “What the hell is this?” she said aloud as she filled a mug from the sink. Then she inhaled deeply. Get a grip. Jonas doesn’t return a couple calls and you start imagining all sorts of nonsense. After all, you didn’t call him for days, either.

  She sipped her water, looking out the window. The moon, so often hidden by neighboring buildings, was clearly visible, a half-moon that made her think of what she had. She was a professional dancer, and that had always been her dream, ever since elementary school, and although she was not rich she could pay her rent, and she’d tasted this amazing flavor with Jonas, this flavor of profound love, even if it had turned out to be brief, and she had a whole life ahead of her with all kinds of unexpected pleasures, and she was still young and healthy and essentially hopeful, living in this amazing city filled with remarkable people, at the center of the earth.

  NEW YORK: 1:22 A.M.

  MECCA: 9:22 A.M.

  Carol refrained from flipping on the lights in the kitchen, both out of courtesy to Jake, who she could hear softly snoring in the living room, and because she liked working in the semi-dark, by the light of the refrigerator as she removed the milk and then by the light of the stove as she warmed the milk and stirred in a spoonful of honey. After her mug was ready, she slipped into the living room, steering wide of the couch, where she could see his form under the blanket, and moved to a small armchair she kept near the window. Below, she could see the lights of the passing cars and hear their murmur. It was soothing, a citified way of watching the ocean, feeling its timelessness.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  Jake’s voice startled her. It was tender with grogginess. She hadn’t heard that voice in a long time. “Sorry,” she said. “I woke you.”

  He sat up, wrapping the blanket around him. “I wasn’t really sleeping,” he said.

  She laughed softly. “You were snoring.”

  “That’s what I do when I’m not sleeping,” he said. He scooted over to one end of the couch and patted the spot next to him. “Sit here. I won’t bite.”

  She looked down toward the street for another moment, then decided that to refuse would be churlish. “Want some warm milk?” she asked.

  “I’ll have a sip of yours.”

  She sat on the couch and held her mug out to him. “You know, Jake,” she said as he was drinking, “sometimes I wonder if we made a mistake.”

  “Splitting up?”

  “Raising Jonas outside any spiritual tradition.”

  “We decided those spiritual traditions left a lot to be desired, and we were right.”

  “And then we let him take that year and just wander around Europe.”

  “To recharge his batteries. Help him get re-motivated for school.”

  “And then I . . .”

  “He’s a grown man, Carol.”

  “Did I somehow fail to give him enough . . . structure?”

  “Don’t torture yourself,” he said softly.

  “He’s always been probing, as though there’s one right answer and if he just searches long enough, he’ll find it. I think the search has been torturous for him. I think he’s felt alone, and lost. I think he hasn’t been able to turn to us because he feels we don’t understand—and in a way, he’s right.”

  “The young are always searching,” Jake said. “That’s their job. We searched, remember?”

  “Did we?”

  He handed her the mug. “We weren’t happy with the lives our parents led. What children are? We thought them stilted, boring, corrupt. That was before we recognized the fragility of human judgments.”

  “But there’s something more desperate about what Jonas seems to feel,” Carol said. “And I don’t remember us being so depressed.”

  “It’s all more serious now,” Jake said. “We had a certain innocence; we had that gift. This is the end of the empire. Innocence has already been killed off.”

  Carol sighed and leaned back into the couch. “You remember Jenny?”

  “Your old roommate Jenny?” Yes, he remembered. Jenny had had a son, three years older than Jonas. The summer he was thirteen, they were vacationing somewhere in the Midwest, and he dove into a quarry full of water, hit his head, and drowned.

  “I saw her a couple years ago,” Carol said. “She told me there’s no recovery when you lose a kid. There’s only a before and an after.”

  “Carol.” Jake reached over and touched the back of her neck.

  “And blame. She talked about blaming herself, that she should have discussed quarries with him, warned him somehow. That she was, in the end, a bad mother, because she failed at the really only important job. She couldn’t keep her child safe. And I understand. If something were ever to go wrong with Jonas—”

  “Don’t. Don’t talk about this now.”

  She turned to him. “He was the first thing, Jake. That little baby: the first thing besides ourselves we were ever responsible for.”

  “I’m just,” he hesitated, “I’m just going to rub your neck. Okay?”

  Carol willed her shoulders to soften; nothing could be done tonight. And in the end, everything would be fine, wouldn’t it? Kids scare their parents, but it would all be fine. She dropped her head and felt herself breathe. Jake massaged the back of her neck for a few minutes and then began moving his fingers into her scalp.

  “Feel good?”

  “Hmmm,” she murmured.

  Jake’s hands. Carol remembered many things about those hands. Maybe she remembered everything about them—although he’d be a little too self-satisfied if he knew that. She used to love to massage his hands, seek out pressure points, tug gently on his fingers. She loved, too, watching those hands when he painted. And he’d taken up carpentry at one point—she still had in her bedroom a little table he’d made. He had capable hands—capable in every way.

  She remembered how vulnerable she’d felt when he’d left, and how that vulnerability had remained with her for months—for years, actually. It had taken her a few months just to recover from the surprise that they actually weren’t going to make it, that she’d chosen someone with whom she couldn’t last, and then she’d lost faith in her own judgment. She’d hidden it, though, because she had Jonas. Without Jonas, she might have fallen apart and climbed into bed for weeks, maybe months. Jonas had saved her from that.

  “I feel better, thank you,” she said, and straightened her head.

  He dutifully pulled his hands into his lap. “Thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Letting me stay tonight.”

  She sipped her milk, now cool. “It’s nice having you here, Jake. For tonight.”

  “You’re magnificent, Carol. You really are.”

  She mad
e a scoffing sound. “I was more magnificent at thirty-two,” she said, “when you left me.”

  “You know . . .” He hesitated. “You know what that was about, don’t you?”

  “Oh, Jake. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “Let me say it,” he said. “Let me say it because I want you to hear it. I promise I’ll only say it once, and then I’ll never say it again.”

  She rotated her shoulders. “My neck is clenching again,” she said with a short laugh.

  “I left because . . .” He took a deep breath. “Because I found out I couldn’t paint. I wasn’t a painter.”

  Now she laughed harder. “That feels like a reason that required some hours to invent.”

  “We went into adulthood together, you and I,” he said. “And like Jonas, we had our idealism. Our dreams. You realized yours. You became a successful potter, it seemed like in a matter of weeks. You had that show Lily sponsored, and then you were off.”

  “I always loved your work,” she said.

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t going anywhere. I realized I didn’t have an artistic vision. How could I? I didn’t know where I wanted it to go. I saw I was better at appreciating art than producing it.”

  “Jake,” she said, “I really don’t want to spend much time here, but for the sake of honesty—all blame aside, after all it’s been years—what you realized you appreciated was that painter. What was her name?” Only that last line, Carol thought, was dishonest. She knew the painter’s name, though she wished she could have forgotten. Sarah Lyster.

  “She was a consolation prize, nothing more,” Jake said. “I knew I was going to fail you, and then lose you.”

  “You make me sound like a shrew-wife. I never put that kind of pressure on you.”

  Jake held his head in both his hands and rubbed his scalp. His blond hair was graying, but he still had a full head of it. And in the moonlight that overflowed through the window, he looked so much like a little boy that, for a second, Carol felt her heart break. She looked down into the mug of milk, trying to harden herself. He’d always had the ability to affect her this way, to turn her to liquid. The fact was, she’d known all along that she was the best thing he’d ever find. That they fitted together in ways that went beyond logic, beyond words. And still she had to stand aside and watch him screw it up. And then she had to patch herself back together. And she did it. But even though the glue held, the crack remained visible—to her eye, at least.

  “We’d created this dream about what we were meant to be together,” he said, “and I could see that, because of me, it wasn’t going to play out as we’d envisioned. I’d have ended up disappointing you.”

  She cleared her throat and drained her voice of emotion. “And your having an affair was supposed to be less disappointing than giving up painting and opening an art gallery?”

  “Look, I don’t say I handled it well; I don’t say I handled it with complete self-knowledge. But a few years of therapy later, at least I understand why I squandered what I had. Why meeting your eyes suddenly became so difficult. And—I’m sorry, Carol.”

  This apology was a first, and something Carol hadn’t anticipated. They sat for a few minutes, silent. Carol listened to a siren from below. She heard the elevator pass her floor on the way down. Thinking about the time lost with this big, foolish, brilliant bear of a man beside her, she felt a flood pushing at the back of her eyes. She was glad it was too dark for him to see.

  “I don’t think you have anything to be ashamed of in the choices you made,” she said when she could talk normally. Then she clarified: “The professional choices, I mean.”

  He laughed. “The personal ones are another matter, then?”

  She sighed. “If it weren’t that, you know, it might have ended up being something else that came between us. How many people stay together decade after decade in this country?”

  “Mmm.”

  “We’re lucky we shared what we did; I still feel that. And we had Jonas.”

  “Jonas.” Jake nodded, reaching out to squeeze Carol’s knee.

  “And now.” She rose. “I should try to get to sleep. So should you.”

  He stood up with her and held out his arms, and she let herself sink into them, and she let him embrace her. She felt how the shape of him had changed since he’d last hugged her like this, how he’d thickened and softened, and she put her head against his chest and felt his breath, and she joined him, one, two, three, four, five breaths. She gave herself that. And then she disengaged herself and touched his cheek and said good-night and went to bed, not to sleep but to lie and think and talk aloud and wait until the morning brought what it would.

  NEW YORK: 3:14 A.M.

  MECCA: 11:14 A.M.

  Sonny tugged down his ski cap until it met his eyebrows and then, trying to steal heat from within his own body, breathed heavily in the direction of the scarf circled twice around his neck. The moist air from his mouth landed mainly on his beard, where it did little more than add to the slender icicles already dangling from his chin-hairs. Thank God, at least, for that last serving of hot stew Ruby had dished out before he’d left, and the knitted scarf she’d handed him on his way out the door. “Blessed scarf,” he’d called it, kissing it and bowing before her, and she’d laughed. Swathed in maroon wool, his neck felt itchy but cozy enough. The rest of him, though, was plenty grateful when he spotted the green symbol of the metro station ahead. Home. Hurrying past white steam rising thickly from the darkness of a manhole, he scrambled down the stairs, a squirrel diving for its burrow.

  A cold of a clammier sort circulated underground, but it felt more bearable than above, where the greedy wind tried to strip naked anybody foolish or desperate enough to be out. A cop stood on the other side of the turnstile, holding a nightstick in his right hand and tapping it against his left palm, beating a nameless tune like a musician with a mission. It was O’Neil, a middle-aged sergeant with a worn face plenty firm, but generous, too. Sonny had grown to like O’Neil over the years and thought the feeling was mutual. Dutifully, and a little showy-like, Sonny pulled a MetroCard out of his back pocket and ran it through the machine, trying to look virtuous. O’Neil shook his head with a slight smile, silently signaling that Sonny wasn’t putting one over on him, that he knew Sonny had used a dime to crease his card and get in for free, just like they all did. No way O’Neil could bust him, though, since there was no proving it.

  “Morning, officer,” Sonny said. “Awful cold and early for you to be out.”

  “Sonny.” O’Neil nodded a greeting. “Still kicking, I see.”

  “Yessiree. Ain’t your usual hours, are they, O’Neil?”

  “Ain’t hours I want, either. They’re a bit jumpy at headquarters this week. They got us doing all kinds of crazy things.”

  “These times,” Sonny said, shaking his head sympathetically. “How’s the family?”

  O’Neil smiled. “Oldest boy got a scholarship to SUNY-Purchase,” he said. “Happy as he can be. Studying philosophy or some damn thing, but the wife is happy, too, because he’s so close.”

  “Kids heading out into the world. Means you done well,” Sonny said.

  O’Neil shrugged. “Hey, Sonny,” he said, “you hear they’re doling out blankets next Saturday morning at the Church of the Redemption, right above the Atlantic Street station?”

  “Can’t say I did.”

  “Might get yourself on over there. Farmer’s Almanac says it’s going to be a cold one.”

  “Just might do that, thanks.” Sonny nodded and headed downstairs toward the uptown F-train. Another officer stood on the platform. He wasn’t anyone Sonny knew, so he shuffled on by and sat on the bench.

  Weekends, the platform would be crowded at this hour, full of clubbers headed home. Sonny didn’t mind the late-night company, though it did bother him that his visitors, after hours spent yelling over music, were often still speaking in too-loud voices. It was the time and place, after all, to be respectful—if n
ot of other passengers, at least of sleeping children and the dead.

  Weeknights were a different, quieter story. Tonight, except for the officer and Sonny, only one other person stood on the platform: a young Hispanic woman wearing fingerless gloves, black pants, and a thick jacket embroidered with the initials TSA. Transport Security Administration. Sonny guessed she was headed home after a shift at one of the airports, checking bags, looking for terrorists. She probably wasn’t much over twenty years old. Pinned to her jacket was an inch-high plastic teddy bear, the kind of trinket you might expect to see worn by a little girl. Her eyes were sleepy slits, and her lips seemed welded together. She’d clogged her ears with tiny headphones, listening to some beat pumped directly into her brain to cut out the rest of the world. Sonny didn’t like those machines. Especially when he was working, because the digital music players made it too easy for people to overlook both his need and the opportunity he offered them.

  But his objection to these devices was larger and less self-serving than that. He appreciated that this was a cauldron of a city and that sometimes, especially trapped in the subway—the bowels, some called it—folks were forced to stare straight at something that might be jarring or even alarming, something they thought they should escape from. But in Sonny’s view, it served better to consider the subway as a pot of the most delicious soup imaginable, warming the soul on the cold night and chock-full of ingredients both exotic and common. Some people were the garlic or pepper—unpleasant when eaten by itself. But they were just as necessary to the soup as the chicken and carrots. And having to eat a spoonful of that soup broadened folks, taught ’em tolerance, gave ’em appreciation for folks living closer to the edge, or higher on the hog, or whatever was the opposite of their understanding of life. To Sonny’s mind, those earphones flat weren’t good for the human race.

  Sonny sat on a bench and considered his evening plans. He wasn’t too tired because he’d taken a nap at Ruby’s. Still, given the right spot, it would suit him to catch a couple hours. A place that smelled harmless enough and offered protection from drafts but wasn’t so far out of the way that he might be jumped. Underground held a fair share of good sleeping spots. Tonight he felt in the mood for the 4th Street station. One particular stretch of concrete, in fact, that he knew would give him privacy while supporting his weary body for a bit.