Fall Love

by Anne Whitehouse

  Paul's words echoed in his own ears afterwards. How easily Bryce's return had been arranged! Nevertheless, he found himself looking forward to the reunion with less a whole heart than with conflicted feelings.

  Though pleased, he was also anxious. On Saturday morning he found it a relief to clean the apartment from weeks of accumulated clutter. He arranged Bryce's mail in an orderly stack and discarded the rest—catalogues, pleas for donations from worthy causes, announcements of events already past. He vacuumed and dusted, changed the sheets on the bed, and even scrubbed out the bathtub. He phoned in an order to the grocery store and had it delivered. But there were special delicacies that he wanted to buy at favorite shops in SoHo and Greenwich Village which he used to patronize in his downtown days.

  The housework took longer than he had anticipated. It was early in the afternoon by the time he set out on the shopping expedition. He took the subway to Houston Street.

  As he climbed the steps from the station to the street, he was greeted by sparkling, brisk air. The heavens were a contrast of bright sky and clouds, ever shifting and on the move. It seemed to him, as he walked past the neat brick rowhouses on King Street, that the light was rich and complicated, ripe with an unrevealed promise.

  The day seemed so serene that Paul was unprepared for the cold, wet splash that suddenly struck him in the shoulder. Stopping instantly, he peered up at buildings around him, trying to find the culprit, but he didn't even see an open window. It was as if the splash had fallen out of nowhere, aimed only at him.

  Twisting his neck, he stared at the stain that had spread on his jacket. He touched the spot. It had no smell; it wasn't sticky, slimy or greasy. Probably it was only water. Shrugging his shoulders, both the wet and the dry, he continued on his way.

  He went to buy goose-liver paté flavored with truffles, French goat cheese wrapped in vine leaves, expensive raspberries out of season. He bought a chocolate mousse cake decorated with candied violets and a good bottle of Champagne. Then he was done. Everything else—the bread and salad, the grilled vegetables and smoked salmon—he had assembled at home. There was enough for a light snack before the performance and an after-theater supper.

  A display in a gallery window caught his attention, and he stopped in to see it. The show, called "The Subject Moving" was of photo-montages, collages of color Polaroids cut in strips and pasted together. There were perhaps two dozen of them, quite large, both landscapes and interiors. Paul liked the effect of exaggerated vistas and flattened panoramas. "Buy for pleasure only, not recommended for investment," read the legend on one of the photo-montages, and on impulse he almost did, but on second impulse changed his mind.

  Heading north on Seventh Avenue, he paused at a florist's. Inside the shop, refrigerated behind panels of sliding glass, were long-stemmed rosebuds so chiselled they seemed carved from stone. In fact, they were delicate enough to bruise. He purchased a half dozen of these roses, velvety red. Their fragrance was slight. It would concentrate, the florist told him, as the flowers opened, a claim Paul didn't quite believe.

  As he left the shop, laden with light packages and the Champagne, he suddenly remembered an estate garden on Long Island which he and Bryce had visited over a year ago. It had been late summer, and the roses were in full bloom. The most beautiful, Paul remembered, was without scent. It was a hybrid bloom, huge and thickly-petalled, peach-pink and blood-red. He didn't know why he recalled its name, but he did. It was "Sweet Surrender."

  After inspecting the roses, Bryce, suddenly fatigued, had sat down to rest on a stone bench, as warm as flesh in the afternoon sun, and closed his eyes. Paul had sat down beside him. The garden was deserted, except for buzzing insects. The air shimmered with heat. All seemed tremulous with suspense. Then Paul kissed Bryce. As he inhaled the scent of Bryce's skin, his slightly harsh breath, Paul almost swooned.

  Bryce, appearing asleep in the brilliant garden, received the kiss blindly yet knowingly, with closed eyes and half-parted lips. His tongue intruded on Paul's, and, not expecting it, Paul nearly gagged. It was as if he were the one asleep and Bryce was kissing him awake, and the taste of Bryce's mouth was milder than his breath.

  Afterwards they had visited the family graveyard on the property. A rose was carved on one of the tombstones. On closer inspection they discovered that "Rose" was the name of the woman buried in the grave. She had died in the 1920s at age twenty six. Under the carving was inscribed, "And Rose she lived, as roses live, for only a morning." The sentimental epitaph merged in Paul's mind with the kiss, which had repelled him at first and then turned to pleasure.

  He had almost forgotten about that afternoon when, buying roses for Bryce's return, the memory returned to him. Yet it seemed to him to cast no great radiance. Just yesterday Bryce had said that he'd see Paul at home, as if he still assumed that his home was Paul's home, too. And Paul had been happy to hear the words, though the joy was in pieces in him.

  The stain on his jacket had almost dried. He had walked from SoHo into the Village. Off Seventh Avenue he encountered a walking tour. They were close to the corner of Grove Street, looking at Marie's Crisis Cafe. "This is where Tom Paine died, ardent pamphleteer and activist in the cause of political equality and freedom," their guide was explaining pedantically. "On the second floor. And it was also from this block that Aaron Burr set forth to meet Alexander Hamilton in their infamous duel across the Hudson on the Palisades. You all know the outcome- Hamilton was dead, and Burr's political career was virtually finished."

  The group listened respectfully, absorbing history on the spot with a slight air of boredom. The brisk punctuations of a jackhammer breaking through the asphalt on the avenue emphasized the constant, ongoing destructions and reconstructions of the present. On Grove Street, past Tom Paine's last abode, a man was scrubbing down the awning of a club whose featured comedy acts were advertised by framed photos forming an uneven border around the entrance.

  Farther down, dwarfing the street, were two very large parked trucks. Workmen were assembled on the sidewalk below a brick apartment building. On the fourth story, a double window wrapping a corner had been entirely dismantled, leaving a gaping hole in which a man was standing. Suspended in the air in front of him was a system of two ropes which hung from the roof. Paul had stumbled upon the preparations for a hoist.

  Idle curiosity such as Paul had experienced innumerable times in the past infected him once more. He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter after three. If Bryce's plane was on time, he wouldn't arrive from the airport until about four thirty, Paul calculated. He could afford to linger for a few minutes. Nor was he the only spectator. A woman wheeling a stroller had also paused. Its young passenger, confined, raised an uproar, and one of the workmen, fiftyish, with jowly cheeks, dark eyes, and a hangdog air, knelt beside the stroller to cajole the child. This was his diversion. "Don't cry, wee lad," he urged. He spoke gently, his creased face softened, and the charm worked. The child stared at him and stopped crying, while his mother held the stroller, not quite involved nor quite apart. With a reserved, polite smile, she thanked the man, and, not taking her good luck for granted, she resumed wheeling the stroller down the sidewalk.

  Meanwhile Paul was standing by the stoop of the house next to the apartment building, looking at the dangling ropes. One end hung free. The other was fastened to a winch on the outside of one of the trucks. Men were bringing out a king-sized headboard and footboard from the other truck and wrapping them in protective quilts.

  For the time being, Paul was as idle as if he had nowhere to go. "Mind if I watch?"

  "Why not?"

  He was answered by the youngest member of the crew, who was carrying some clamps and lengths of stout cord.

  Two teenagers walked past, stepping over the ropes, not bothering to detour. They were boys about fourteen, one thin, with glasses, the other chubby. Still, they were nimble as they ignored what was going on around them. "Now Rochelle's a dreary girl," the smaller one was saying.

 
; "Yeah, dreary, dreary." Their voices, still unsure of their pitch, hung for a moment in the air.

  As the fleeting encounter went by Paul, he had the vague impression that this was familiar, that somehow all this had happened to him before. Yet, how could it have? Clearly, it hadn't, and still it wasn't at all clear… . He saw his shadow cast on the sidewalk, climbing the wall. It bulged beneath him, beyond him, and for an instant it appeared as mysterious to him as when he was a child and had imagined that his shadow grew out of him, or he into it.

  In this moment he was that child again, and his shadow was like a representation of the unknown. It was as if he were suddenly on the other side of a looking glass; it was his perspective on the world that had changed, not the world. The world was the same. Still, it didn't seem like a great revelation.

  If this moment offered him a culmination, he was only aware of it in retrospect, and so he never possessed it. Forever afterwards he would yearn to have had a sense of himself then, in his prime. But there was no such shining recognition for him to claim, and there was no one else to look at him and know it either.

  He was free to go; he ought to have gone, but he stayed for what he supposed would be just a little while to watch furniture being lifted through the air into a fourth-story apartment. There was nothing compelling his pause; it turned on a whim.

  Smooth and massive, the headboard was now completely wrapped in quilts bound by cords and grips. To these were fastened the hoisting rope and two additional ropes for guidelines. Men on the sidewalk were communicating by walkie-talkie with men on the roof working the hoist. The winch began to turn, and the burden began to lift. The headboard went higher and higher; it was above them, on a level with the little-leaf lindens that were the block's street trees. As the headboard was raised, it swayed ever so slightly, but was controlled by the ropes and the men. Soon it disappeared, engulfed all in one piece through the window.

  Together the headboard and footboard would make a bed of heroic proportions, Paul thought, as he watched the footboard being hoisted in the same way. He would have gone on his way then, having seen enough, had he not been truly amazed by what came out of the truck next. It looked like—and was—the back half of a car. Not just any car, but an American classic, a Ford Thunderbird in two-tone aqua and cream from the late 1950s. It was a car that he remembered well from his own childhood, for his grandfather the tenor had owned a similar model in black.

  What he saw now was half of a car, and that half was revamped for a second life, an existence off the roads. The front end, the doors, and the roof had been cut away. What was left was the bench seat in cream-colored leather and, behind it, the trunk and distinctive tail fins. Soon it, too, would soar through the air.

  For it was to be household furniture. "A sofa that's a conversation piece for someone who has everything." This information was offered to him by a woman who had just appeared on the scene. She looked both businesslike and sophisticated in a black silk suit with a collarless jacket. She was, he thought, exotically beautiful, with tanned skin and Oriental features. The dark blue-rimmed glasses she wore and the notebook she held were like props supporting her serious manner.

  "Are you the owner?" asked Paul, though certain she wasn't. Idle curiosity again prompted him. Something to tell Bryce about later, he thought. He was aware he was making a rationalization to justify what he wanted to do. But it seemed harmless.

  "Oh no," she said, "not me. I'm working."

  "You're the decorator," Paul said, confirming what he had guessed, and then he guessed some more. "You do things like this car sofa? It's not a New York style. It's pure California-esque."

  "Well, it was shipped from California," the woman admitted. "We're based in Los Angeles. And it's for a Californian, a television celebrity." Her sing-song lilt conveyed that English was not her first language. Paul was enjoying himself and was about to ask her who the celebrity was, when she seemed to sense she had said too much and changed the subject. "We work all over. I'm going to West Palm Beach next week."

  "Seeing the world?" asked Paul. "Where are you from?"

  "Indonesia."

  Her syllables infused a tropical warmth into the cool November air. While they conversed, the men were hoisting the footboard. Then another man arrived on the scene, large and burly, with dark hair and snapping dark eyes. A camera dangled from a strap over his shoulder. He gestured to the woman, and her slightly flirtatious manner instantly vanished. She excused herself, and, accompanying the man, she disappeared through the entrance of the apartment building, leaving Paul feeling disappointed.

  He was amused by the Thunderbird sofa, though. I like it, he thought, because it's surreal, because I just happened on it, and because it made me remember my grandfather. It certainly got a bigger response from the workmen than the bedstead had. He observed their reaction as they prepared to lift it. Some of them were appreciative, others were contemptuous. To console himself, Paul decided to remain for the hoist. He thought, Why not be spontaneous? So what if I'm a few minutes late? Bryce may be delayed, too.

  He waited, and after a little while, he saw the car begin to lift. Then, in a curious instant of disregard, he dropped his eyes, shifting the packages in his arms. From above him, a bolt dropped on the sidewalk, a small splat of warning which came too late. In a split second, the bumper from the car fell out of the air and crashed to the pavement, then bounced up and struck Paul's right foot.

  First there was an instant of blindness. Then pain spread through Paul's consciousness, blotting out everything else. He hadn't seen what was coming, and he didn't realize what had happened. The pain was realization enough. His mind went blank from it. Thus was he struck down in his unknowing prime.

  Apparently no one had checked the Thunderbird to discover that bolts fastening the bumper were missing, and the remaining bolt was so loose that when the bumper scraped against the window sill as the car was being pulled into the apartment, the bolt dropped out and fell. The bumper came hurtling after. First the ground and then Paul's foot broke its crash. In the secondary impact, his foot was horribly broken.

  He would never know why he had looked away in the second before the bolt fell: whether the glance was utterly meaningless, or whether it was an unconscious impulse towards self destruction. For years to come, he would relive that moment in his mind, until it dilated to hold all of time, until time dropped out to nothingness. Through that instant he had passed, and in it he died and was born anew.

  He would never get over the absurdity of it: the bumper from a classic car, revamped for a sofa as a conversation piece, fell off as the car was being hoisted into an apartment. If the bumper had landed on him directly, it could have killed him. Instead it glanced off the pavement and crashed into his foot.

  Forever afterwards, the event would be called "the accident," its cause traced to what had been overlooked. Yet Paul wouldn't be able to avoid the ironic realization that this was the unalleviated reality to which had come all the dancer's imagined fears of falling. He had always assumed that he would be the one who fell, but this time he hadn't even shared in the flight.

  Chapter 20

  "I don't know if I feel up to visiting galleries after all," Althea admitted to Jeanne after they had only travelled a couple of blocks. "Why don't we just take a walk?"

  She expected Jeanne to resist. She considered that she might be willing to let Jeanne convince her again. She might even enjoy being persuaded.

  But Jeanne capitulated without a fight. "Whatever you like," she proclaimed flatly.

  Althea felt relieved, yet somehow deflated. "Perhaps another time," she hedged.

  "If you want me to come with you, I will."

  Jeanne's offer was stated so blandly that Althea looked at her sharply. But Jeanne had turned away and was gazing in a shop window. Before her was a dazzling display of handmade kites spread open and pinned against a screen. Seeing them, Althea thought of butterfly wings.

  Jeanne was reminded of other kites whic
h she wanted to describe to Althea. "Have you seen the kites at Jones Beach, three and four at a time fastened together with fishing tackle?" she asked her. "Maneuvered by two controls, they swivel and turn, with thirty-foot tails."

  Althea shook her head. "No, but I'd like to."

  They resumed walking. "Where are you leading me?" Althea wondered.

  "We started out going towards the galleries. Now I guess we're just wandering, though we're still headed in that general direction."

  "I like this part of town," Althea commented as they strolled. "I like the narrow streets and the ways they intersect at irregular angles. It's almost like a maze."

  "Yes, I like it, too. It's an escape from the relentless right-angled grid of the rest of Manhattan. It seems a more human scale, yet it's also inhuman in a way."

  "What do you mean?" asked Althea, mystified.

  "Mazes repel as well as attract. I never thought this was true, until it was proved to me."

  "When was that?"

  "Remember the summer I spent in Spain, between sophomore and junior years in college? I was enrolled in a study-abroad program. At the end of the term, a friend urged me to stay on for a couple of weeks and work with her at an exposition. It was a trade fair called the Feria de Campo. My friend said, 'Why not stay and earn a little money?' I said, 'Why not?'

  "So there we were, standing in our uniforms, smiling and looking silly, trying to get people to come into our exhibit. The exhibit was a labyrinth, and we soon realized that it was a very bad choice for an exhibit. People would come by, glance at it, and when they couldn't see their way through, they would decide not to come in at all. Despite our efforts, we weren't very successful. I discovered that most people are averse to risks. They reject what they don't know."

  "How curious," Althea remarked. "I think I would have entered your exhibit."

  "I hope so."

  They had turned the corner at Christopher and Hudson Streets. As they walked south, they heard a song wafting on the air, sung by a chorus of mixed voices. "He's got the whole world in His hands"—it was the spiritual. They heard the line repeated three times, with emphasis and energy. Then the wailing siren of an ambulance hurtling up Hudson Street drowned out the singing. The ambulance screeched to a halt right across from them, at the corner of Grove Street.