by Ann Packer
One Saturday I convinced Kilroy to go for a walk. It was April now, and all of New York was out—the hip and the destitute, but also the people who’d been in hiding all winter: families with small children, the very old. It felt good to be out walking, the sun warming us and warming also the people we passed, so that they seemed slowed somehow, enlarged and happy. Kilroy, who usually strode along quickly and purposefully whether he had a purpose or not, moved today at more of an amble, and even stopped occasionally to tilt his face to the sun. As we made our way downtown I had an idea that we were walking toward ourselves, who we were together and who we could be.
At the corner of Sixth Avenue and Houston, he stopped to watch a bunch of guys playing basketball in a little chain-link park. I stopped, too. As we watched, one of the players—not particularly tall, but lean in his sweats, and fast—stole the ball and dribbled to the far side of the court, where he fired a long shot that hit the rim with a clank and then fell through the netless hoop.
“Nice,” Kilroy exclaimed. He turned to me. “Imagine what that feels like. Having that power.”
“Did you ever play any sports?”
He smiled. “Baseball. I wanted to be a baseball player when I grew up, seriously. I played second base five, six months a year from when I was seven until I got to high school. I had a good arm, but the main thing was I was fast. Not on my feet—I was fast enough like that, but I mean fast-reacting. I’d see a ball coming and I’d already be thinking about my tag or my throw. I was a solid hitter, too, nothing great, but I held up my end. What a game. I loved it.”
“So why’d you stop?” I said. “What happened in high school?”
He shrugged. “You know. Things happen. I sort of lost interest.”
“But you loved it.”
He shrugged again.
Kilroy playing baseball was an entirely new thing to fit into the picture. It was surprisingly easy to see him as an intense little second baseman, skinny in those tiny white pants, a narrowing of concentration in his eyes. Eight, nine years old. Picturing him in high school was a lot harder. I wondered what he wasn’t telling me about why he’d stopped. Was it like Mike and hockey, like Mike’s decision our first year at the U not to go out? He would have made the team, but he would have been a supporter, not a star. Was that what had happened to Kilroy?
We headed across Houston, turned, and then turned again onto MacDougal, where we happened past the bookstore where the woman had stood behind me and said the complacence of extreme beauty. Squinting through the plate glass into the dark recesses of the store, I wondered who she was, where she was now. The connections among strangers in New York lay over the city like a faint grid, fragile as the strands of a spider’s web.
We made our way to the Hudson, where we walked along the crowded riverfront walkway of Battery Park City. There were people zooming along on Rollerblades, people with dogs. Kilroy pointed out Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, as small in the distance as one of the replicas I’d seen for sale around the city. Color leached from the sky and the warmth of the day receded, but we kept going, through the chilly narrow canyons of Wall Street. I was surprised by the massive form of the Brooklyn Bridge suddenly looming overhead, and I stopped to marvel at the sheer enormity of it.
“We’ve never walked across it, have we?” Kilroy said.
I shook my head.
A big smile took shape on his face. “Ready for a thrill?”
I glanced at my watch. We’d been walking for three or four hours already.
“Come on,” he said. “This can’t wait.”
A separate pedestrian walkway ran across the center of the bridge, above traffic level. Couples and families strolled along, a few lone businessmen heading back to Brooklyn after a Saturday at the office. The bridge itself was astonishing, the powerful stone towers, the four huge suspension cables, the dozens and dozens of smaller cables that seemed thin as thread as they soared upward and away.
“Pretty great, huh?” Kilroy said. “I can’t believe I never brought you here before.”
We had stopped, and I bent my neck back and looked up, granite and filigree against the fading, cloud-streaked blue. When I straightened out again Kilroy was watching me, his eyes crinkled against the lowering sun. The expression on his face was—there was no other word for it—soft. His cheeks were rounded, his mouth supple. I had an idea that what he felt was less about me than about himself, some sense of wonder that he was doing this, showing his places to a woman. Smiling, I reached up and touched him just below his eye, and he took hold of my hand and guided my fingertips over his face—down his cheek, around his mouth, and across his closed eyelids. He let go of my hand and looked at me for a moment, then took hold of my shoulders and pulled me close. Standing there with him, I felt the space between us collapse, the feeling of the last few weeks finally thinning and disappearing. Our heads together, I lifted my hand to his hair, tangled and bristly as I stroked it.
A little later we started walking again. In Brooklyn Heights we went to the Promenade and looked back at Manhattan, the downtown skyline sidelit by the setting sun. It was cold now, and we were both gloveless, shivering in light jackets. We found a bar, the Royal Ascot, and drank beers under a scarred dartboard while Frank Sinatra sang from an ancient jukebox. A pair of thick-bodied men in their forties stood near us holding pints of Guinness, foamy and black as espresso.
It was dark when we left. We found a subway station and went down to the platform. We stood there for a long time, until we’d been waiting for so long that we had to wonder just how long it had been. The platform filled steadily behind us. An indecipherable announcement flickered over the loudspeaker, and a groan went through the crowd. Fifteen more minutes went by, twenty. Finally I heard the train rumbling, still far off, and from behind people pressed against me. They were mostly dressed for Saturday night in the city, pushing forward with their perfume smells, their cold leather jackets. I reached for Kilroy’s hand a moment too late and we were separated. The train came in with a roar, and before the doors had opened I was pushed to the side, my shoe nearly twisting off in the process. The car was crowded already, too full for everyone who wanted on. I stepped across the opening between the platform and the train and somehow got squeezed to a position between a seat edge and a tall man with sausage breath. I had no idea where Kilroy was. “Stand clear the doors,” the conductor said, and the doors slid shut. Lurching a little, we took off and quickly gathered speed. I could see a side of head here, a shoulder there—not much more than that. Then there was a shift—someone squeezing into a new pocket of space—and suddenly there was Kilroy, ten feet away, his hand up for a pole. He was in profile, staring at the black window. I remembered a game I used to play, back in high school, when Mike and I were still new: I’d look at him from across a room—the cafeteria, or a class we had together, or even the lobby of a movie theater—and try to surprise myself into seeing him afresh. What about him? I’d wonder. What would he be like? I closed my eyes and shook my head a little. I thought that with the train noise and the people and the smells I might just be able to catch myself reacting to Kilroy as if he were a stranger. I thought that would tell me something. But when I opened my eyes he’d found me, and as I watched he smiled at me, then raised his hand and waved.
It seems to me that we learn each other in stages: facts first, meanings later, like explorers who stumble on to bodies of water without knowing at first whether they’ve encountered fog-shrouded rivers or vast oceans. We press on until we know, but as we go something is lost: the new becomes old, and then taken for granted, and then forgotten. With Kilroy I wanted both to speed my way along and also to hold on to each separate moment of revelation.
That was what had gone wrong with Mike. I’d known everything about him but had failed to preserve the pleasure of discovery. Instead, I’d absorbed him. The landscape of his past, his mind: they were my landscapes, I’d traveled them so often. They were like Madison itself, the lakes pleasing a
nd familiar, the Union terrace, the tree-lined neighborhoods where my friends lived. It was the same with Jamie. Jamie was my childhood to me: the plum tree in her parents’ backyard, the ten-block walk from my mother’s house, every Saturday afternoon at the mall. She was a certain smell, of mix cakes combined with Tide, that you got at the precise moment that you passed from the Fletchers’ mud room into the kitchen if the door down to the basement happened to be open and Mrs. Fletcher had baked that day, as she nearly always had.
Our senior year of high school, Jamie and I talked and talked about whether or not we should room together at the U. We were in the Fletchers’ kitchen picking at her mother’s confetti cake, or we were whispering in the school library, or we were sitting at a hockey game watching Mike and Rooster sail across the ice while the crowd around us yelled. She wanted us to room together, and I saw the appeal—just move my life a mile away, Jamie in my room and Mike right there—but even then I felt there was something not quite right about it, something too easy. I thought our lives should change, that there should be a surprise ahead. Finally I said no, convinced it would be better to go into it like everyone else: if not without a safety net, then with less of one.
She had a hard time freshman year. Her courses were too difficult, and she had complaints about her roommate, a private-school girl from the North Shore of Chicago who Jamie claimed was a snob. The great dream of college was still outside her grasp—she was still herself, still Jamie. Late one November afternoon I returned to my dorm and found her lying in the corridor outside my room, actually lying on the grungy carpet, her backpack under her head like a pillow. Walking down the hall from the elevator, I thought she’d put herself in the position most likely to arouse my sympathy, although I wasn’t being as cold-blooded as it sounds: it was more that I figured she needed me, was letting me know as best she could. When I got closer, though, and she didn’t raise herself up on one elbow and look at me with red-rimmed eyes, I began to wonder. Was she hurt? Was she sick? I picked up my pace a little, and it turned out—it turned out she was asleep. Lying there at four o’clock in the afternoon, in a highly trafficked corridor of a busy undergraduate dorm, asleep. It gave me the strangest feeling, seeing her like that: honored and disturbed. I’d forgotten all about it until she called me in New York and asked me to come home.
It was a few days after my walk with Kilroy, and I was at the brownstone, fresh out of the shower and standing in my room getting dressed when Greg knocked on my door and told me I had a phone call. She wasn’t crying at first—she said my name clearly—but then she started, a deep, terrible weeping. I said, “What? What is it?,” but she cried on, and I thought it must be that she’d been dumped by Bill, the whole thing over before she’d ever gotten a chance to tell me about it.
But it had nothing to do with Bill. Her sister Lynn had been assaulted—in the parking lot of a bar on the far west side, beaten up by a man driving a Cutlass. She had a black eye, bruises by her mouth, fingermarks on her neck. The Alley, that was the name of the bar, a seedy place out by the restaurant where she worked. And Jamie’s mother—Jamie’s mother had flipped out. Jamie was hysterical, but that was the essence of it, and I didn’t know what to say, because all I could think was that the Alley was the place I’d seen Lynn all tarted up. Standing out in front, her hair teased, her face so made up that she had to have been asking for something: trouble, excitement, rescue, something. I’d known it then, as surely as I’d been too self-absorbed to do more than note it and move on. Listening to Jamie cry, I remembered Lynn sitting next to me in my car, defiant and tipsy, her chubby legs and her big silver hoop earrings: Don’t tell Jamie, she’d said, and I hadn’t. I hadn’t.
“Oh, Jamie,” I said. “Oh, God.”
“I’m scared,” she sobbed. “I’m really scared.”
“I know. I’m sorry—I’m so, so sorry.”
I heard her blowing her nose, the sound of the tissue brushing against the phone.
“I need you,” she said. “I know I haven’t called you at all, and we’ve been, like, distant, but—” She started crying again. “I need you. Could you come? Could you come home?”
I’d been standing, the phone on the floor at my feet, and now I moved to the futon, pulling the phone after me like a recalcitrant little dog.
“Carrie?” she said.
“You mean now?”
“I was thinking tomorrow. Or this weekend?”
Tomorrow was Piero’s class—one of his former students, now a knitwear designer for a major label, was coming to talk to us. She’s fabulous, Piero had said. She’s my role model. I didn’t want to miss her visit, and beyond that I simply didn’t have the money—a plane ticket on such short notice would cost a fortune. It was a bad time. That’s what I said to Jamie: “It’s a bad time for me right now. But I can talk—can’t we just talk on the phone?”
There was a long silence. When she finally spoke, I knew I’d breached whatever remained of our friendship. Very coldly, with no trace of tears, she said, “I should have known. I don’t know why I even asked. Someone who dumps her boyfriend right after he breaks his neck? Forget it, of course you wouldn’t come.” And then she hung up on me.
PART THREE
KILROY WAS HERE
CHAPTER 31
From the plane I could see the end of winter coming. The snow at the edges of the fields looked tired and gray, and the farmland south of Madison was black with wet, cut into squares by county roads. I imagined I could smell the earth, the scent of it ripening day by day with the thaw.
I took a cab from the airport. The buildings I passed seemed squat, the streets wide open and empty. It was the middle of a Thursday afternoon, and after the morning spent flying and the previous night spent making arrangements to leave, I felt dazed. The quiet in the cab had a dreamy feel, just me and the driver sweeping across a barren landscape. I looked out the window and saw the turn to my apartment, but I didn’t feel anything, not a bit of longing to see my old place.
My mother’s house gazed blankly at the street. I dropped my bag in the front hall and went into the kitchen. The chairs were pushed close to the table, the salt and pepper centered perfectly. On the refrigerator, a magnet held her grocery list: rice, tomato paste, seventy-five-watt bulbs.
I opened the refrigerator and reached for a carton of orange juice. I drank a glassful and put the glass in the sink, then changed my mind and washed it properly, setting it in the drainboard. My mother had a dishwasher but she used it rarely, only when she had company.
I went to the phone and dialed Jamie at her parents’ house. I didn’t have much hope that she’d speak to me, and she didn’t: she hung up the moment she heard my voice, as she had six times now, four yesterday and two today. I called Kilroy.
“I was just thinking of you,” he said.
“What a coincidence.”
“Not really.”
We both laughed, and I thought of how he’d kissed me that morning on Seventh Avenue, kissed me and said, OK, go now.
“So?” he said. “You’re there?”
“Yep. Jamie just hung up on me again.”
“Before or after you could say you were back?”
“Before.”
“So what’s plan B?”
“Go over there, I guess.”
“Keep me posted.”
“I will.”
I hung up and left the kitchen. It would be a cold walk to the Fletchers’, and I stood in the front hall and looked out the window, not wanting to leave. Ten minutes, I thought, five, and I turned and climbed the stairs, then wandered around my mother’s second floor. Her bedroom caught the late-afternoon light, a bar of weak sunlight lying on her neatly made bed. I went over and sat down. The house was cold and I tucked my hands inside my sweater, then pulled them out at once, frozen by my own touch. I lay back on the bed. I’d been away less than a day but my body felt bereft of Kilroy, a jangle of untouched skin. I wanted his hands on me, his scratchy face against my bare shoulder.
He hadn’t understood my coming back. “Why not write her a long letter?” he’d said.
It was getting dark when I left my mother’s, the early-evening dark of early spring, a high, cool dark coming down from the trees. An eerie silence. The Fletchers’ house was ten blocks away, but I didn’t pass a single person on the sidewalk. At one point a car drove by, its lights flashing over me for a moment, and when it was past I stopped walking and closed my eyes, overwhelmed by how still the evening was, how vast.
The house was completely dark; even the porch light was off. I used the brass pineapple knocker to knock, then rang the doorbell for good measure. No one was home. From my purse I withdrew a little pad of paper and scribbled Jamie a note. I came home. Please call me at my mother’s.
When I got back my mother still wasn’t there, and I went into the kitchen and put a pot of water on to boil. One of Kilroy’s favorite things to make when there didn’t seem to be anything at hand was spaghetti with olive oil and garlic, and I found a box of spaghetti in the pantry, even some fresh parsley in the crisper to sprinkle on top. When the water boiled I turned it to low, not wanting to cook the noodles until she’d arrived.
But she didn’t. After a while I decided she was having dinner with a friend, and I cooked a single finger’s worth of spaghetti and sat at the table, looking through the morning paper as I ate. Back in New York, Kilroy was reading in his living room, or maybe reading in bed. Or would he have gone to McClanahan’s? I didn’t like to think of him there, sitting alone at the bar while the place grew noisier and noisier.
My mother came in a little before ten, her hand going to her throat in the split second between seeing me and seeing it was me. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Good Christ, you scared me.”