The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  “Excuse me, miss,” he said. “You have a phone call.”

  Puzzled, she slid from the booth and followed him back into the kitchen, but just inside the door he turned and smiled at her. He was tall and handsome with a dimpled chin. His eyes were sparkling and blue.

  “I lied,” he said. “There’s no phone call. I just wanted to meet you.”

  It was hot in the kitchen, a stifling August night made worse by the humidity of boiling water, and she swooned, literally. She had never swooned before in her life, but there is no other word for what happened in that moment. He reached out a hand to steady her.

  “Careful there,” he said. “So, could I get your phone number?”

  She gave it to him. Of course she gave it to him, then went back to the table, back to the date. It was the most mysterious and romantic thing that had ever happened to her. The rest of the night was a dull blur in comparison. Joe called the next day. They met for coffee. He told her the story, how he’d been out to dinner with some friends after a show, how he’d seen her sitting there with her date and she was so beautiful. How he turned to his friends and said, watch this. They sat at a café in the West Village and he told Doris about his life. He came from Ohio, a tight-lipped Protestant family. He’d been in the army. Now he worked in advertising, inventing log lines for dishwashers.

  “But who cares about me?” he said. “You’re the doll.”

  The waiter came by the table. He ordered a beer. She asked for an ice cream sundae.

  “With chocolate and nuts and whip cream,” she said.

  The ice cream came and she ate it like it was her last meal. She was as skinny as a pencil. He had two beers, watched her go.

  “I like a girl who’s not afraid to pack it away,” he said.

  She was a girl who’d been raised by her aunt, a girl who’d spent two decades living a lie, unwanted, unrecognized. Half the time she felt invisible. And now this man was watching her eat ice cream on the corner of Bleecker Street and Bank, and the way he looked at her, she felt seen, maybe for the first time. Like he was looking through her skin into her meaty brown organs. Like he had X-ray eyes and he could see everything, every secret, every insecurity. She felt like bolting from the restaurant, dashing out into traffic. It was 1961. Nineteen sixty-one. Thinking of it now, she can’t believe those numbers ever went together. New York was a different city then, lower, wider, a brick labyrinth. Even her memories of it are in black-and-white. It’s amazing how the past recedes. You can’t hold on to a second of it. In 1961, Joe Henry sat in a café on the corner of Bleecker and Bank and lit a cigarette. He sat back, crossed his legs, and laughed smoke. He was the man she would marry eight months later on an April afternoon at City Hall. His teeth were white and straight and he smiled at her the whole time she ate. Truly in his life he had never seen anything more beautiful.

  In the hotel she rises unsteadily to her feet. She is almost sixty-five years old now. If she were a comic book, she’d be vintage. If she were a car, she’d be classic. If she were a song, she’d be a golden oldie. Her hair is frizzy. Her bones are kindling. She sits on the edge of her bed holding the box of ashes in her lap. She is afraid of it, but she can’t put it down. It is her own death, but she needs to be near it. She is too old to cry, she thinks, all dried up. Instead there is just numbness. More than anything at this moment she wants a cigarette.

  So stupid, she thinks. To be thrown out of a hotel. How humiliating. And for what? One lousy smoke? It’s fascist, that’s what it is. Absurd. But what do people expect? She’s not strong enough to take care of herself, not strong enough to resist the temptation. The cigarettes will kill her, sure, but what’s the point in sticking around?

  There she was in the plush interior of her room at the Hotel Bel-Air, a hotel ten times classier than this dump, with tasteful floral curtains and a puffy leather sofa, and all she wanted before bed was a cigarette. Just a drag, two puffs, and then she could turn in for the night. Is that so much to ask, something to steady the nerves? She took the pack from its hiding place, looked around for a place to smoke. She could have gone outside, she supposed, but it was a long walk to the elevator and then across the lobby and out onto the patio, and she was tired, having traveled all day. All she was going to have was one puff, maybe two, so she stepped into the bathroom, but there was a sign on the sink that clearly read no smoking, and a smoke detector on the ceiling, so she went back into the bedroom and opened the window. Maybe if she kind of half leaned out to exhale, she could just smoke in her room like a civilized person. This whole crusade against smokers was ridiculous, anyway. It was a charade, a witch hunt. She didn’t live to be this old just to be persecuted by a bunch of humorless zealots.

  She put her thumb and forefinger into the pack, rooted out a cigarette. Her mouth watered a little at the dark scent of tobacco that rose from the foil interior. She put the cigarette between her lips. How many times had she done this in the last fifty years? Thousands? Literally hundreds of thousands? An average of thirty cigarettes a day for over fifty years, that’s an easy half million cigarettes. Half a million. It is the single defining gesture of her life, to place a cigarette between her lips, to light it. She has done this on five of the seven continents of the world, has done it at sea level, at thirty-five thousand feet, on an airplane, in a desert. She has smoked a cigarette in the capital of every major European country. Cigarettes are her landmarks. They are the second hand on the clock of her life. Out of the thousand-odd pictures that have been taken of her in the last fifty years, only seven show her without a cigarette, either in her mouth or between her fingers. Only seven.

  She flicked the lighter, cheap, disposable, and a blue flame sprung up, licked the tip of her smoke. With the first puff she knew she had done the right thing, as nicotine was absorbed by the soft tissue of her lungs, as chemicals in her brain were triggered, releasing a flood of relaxing endorphins. Sure, there was tightness, a certain sense of suffocation, but it was manageable. Can you blame me, she thinks, for wanting a moment of peace, serenity? This is what cigarettes were for her, a respite. A moment out of time, where everything felt balanced. She exhaled a cloud of smoke, placed the cigarette to her lips. How many times during Joe’s illness had she taken refuge in a cloud of blue-tinged smoke, camouflaged by it, hiding behind a literal smokescreen from all the pain, all the humorless projections of disaster? In the end what was left that resembled her old sweet love? In the end what remained of the vibrant, intelligent man who’d smiled at her while she ate ice cream? He was a shell, a tenth-generation Xerox, degraded, smudged, illegible.

  Above her head the smoke alarm started wailing. The volume of it, the sudden shriek, almost gave her a heart attack, and for a few moments she had no idea what was happening. It felt like the end of the world, the dire sonic beeping of the apocalypse. Then it hit her, what it was, and she threw the cigarette out the window, started waving at the air. If she could stop the sound, if she could silence it quickly, maybe no one would notice. Never mind it was just before eleven and the hotel was as silent as a tomb. Never mind that the piercing shriek of the alarm could probably be heard in the basement, she was convinced that if she could silence it fast, she could escape detection. What she didn’t count on was the fact that in a control room somewhere a light had gone on that corresponded to her room. What she didn’t count on was that at the first cry of the alarm an automated call went out to the dispatch center of the local fire department, and that as she waved frantically at the ceiling with a folded magazine, fire engines were already on their way.

  When they arrived, when seven burly firemen in heavy, all-weather gear, carrying oxygen tanks and axes, burst into her room, they found it empty. They were accompanied by the hotel manager, a fastidious man in a designer suit, who rung his hands and fretted. He told them to be careful, please. The drapes were delicate. The furniture was antique. The firemen checked the bathroom, looked under the bed, but there was no sign of Doris Henry, the guest who had checked into Ro
om 314 this evening, accompanied by her eldest son. It was the hotel manager who noticed the thin plastic line leading from the boxy oxygen machine as it threaded across the brown Berber carpet and into the closet. It was the hotel manager who stepped forward, calling Mrs. Henry? Mrs. Henry? and opened the door to the closet, only to find Doris Henry crouched down behind the ironing board, wide eyed, terrified, her oxygen line looped over her ears and under her nose. She had forgotten she was wearing it, had lit a cigarette an inch from the flow of pure, flammable air. Dumb luck was all that had kept her from going up in flames. Dumb luck and the strong, dispersing wind from the air-conditioner. Gazing up at the gang of hulking firemen, Doris Henry was convinced that they were the gatekeepers of hell sent to bring her down. As they reached in to help her up, as the paramedics stepped forward to check her vitals, she told herself that these men had come to kidnap her, to take her hostage. She was certain her sons had called the authorities and had her committed, that her life from here on out would be lived in institutions. Doris Henry had left the confines of rational thought. She was born again into a world of confusion and paranoia. All the recognizable markers had been removed, and she was, for the first time in years, at sea, truly unmoored. And everything that came after threatened to be unrecognizable.

  Born again. What a beautiful sentiment. Who doesn’t want a second chance? And all we have to do to get there is renounce the past and beg forgiveness.

  Two days later they are back at the airport, Doris and Scott and David, the last remaining members of the original Henry family. Scott is wearing sunglasses indoors. He is listening to music on his iPod and speaking only in monosyllables. David is similarly subdued, checking his e-mail on his BlackBerry. Doris can tell that he feels naked without his wife and children to protect him. The last time the three of them were alone together was in New York, for Joe’s sixtieth birthday.

  As they’re sitting in the boarding area waiting for their plane—surrounded by fat people, men with mustaches, screaming bratty children—a company of soldiers disembarks from a neighboring gate. They are veterans returning from the Gulf, men and women in uniforms, some in wheelchairs, all of them missing an arm or a leg or both. All the bustle of the airport dies down. Doris watches them go, her heart in her throat. This is what she feels like, a veteran of some foreign war, missing some vital part of herself, learning to live off-balance, reaching out to people only to find her hand isn’t there, her arm. In the waiting area a man stands and starts to clap. Soon everyone is standing, applauding. What are they clapping for? Doris wonders. It seems depraved. We send our sons and daughters to fight and they get blown to hell and we applaud, as if to say, good show. It’s sick. You survive things in this world that you have no business surviving and people clap you on the back and say well done, like there’s some kind of future, like you are moving on to bigger and better things instead of just looking for a dark hole to curl up in. What happens after the ovation stops? Where will these people go? And if the war continues and our children keep getting blown to hell, then we will one day live in a society where an entire generation is missing something. We will be a nation of paraplegics. And who will take care of me then?

  On the plane she drinks scotch from little bottles. Scott has won the coin toss and is sitting in the back of the plane, while David sits next to her in first class, pretending to sleep. She wonders where he came from, this officious, corporate man-child of hers. He is nothing like her, nothing like his father. He was such an angry boy, always smashing things, always hitting other kids and running away. Where did it come from, that rage? And then, as quickly as it had arisen, some time around college it disappeared. He bottled up his anger, transforming into this tight-lipped withholder, always in control, and so smug. The way he talks to her, like she’s a child, worse than a child, a retard, someone incapable of understanding the simplest points. Does he think she’s deaf? She can hear the disdain in his voice when he calls (which is rarely), the guarded affect, like she’s a ticking bomb and he will only get so close. You give birth to a child, you nurse it and raise it only to have it turn on you once you are no longer needed. To turn, not with hatred or venom, but ambivalence; how did she end up in this place again? Sixty years later and here she is being ignored by someone she loves, someone she needs. When she looks at David all she sees is a wall, towering, impenetrable, and in a high parapet, a solitary guard looking down with insulated disdain.

  Fuck him, she thinks. This is her approach. The best defense is a good offense. Do unto others before they do unto you. She sips her scotch and adjusts the oxygen line under her nose. Every twenty minutes a flight attendant comes by to check it, make sure the tank is still full. She tries not to think about New York, the chaos of it, the import, all the relatives she will have to face at the memorial, their hangdog faces, their hollow, sympathetic words. She didn’t want to do this. It was the kids’ idea. Every day is a memorial service to her, and besides, she doesn’t want to share her husband with anyone, even in death. She and Joe always kept a level of distance between themselves and their families. Even their kids were kept at arm’s length once they left home. They were two people of singular focus. But once he got sick the cocoon fell apart. Joe’s family stepped in and tried to wrestle him away from her. They swooped in with their constant visits, their calculated kindness. Once he was in the nursing home and out of the house, he became exposed, an easy target. This is how she feels. Like her poor, sick husband became the pawn in some kind of demented family power struggle. And now, in death, she knows they will try to claim him fully, to steal his memory, turn him into something he wasn’t. They will deny her her proper place, her proper respect.

  Scott comes up from the back.

  “Just checking in,” he says. “Everything okay?”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  “You’d think your brother hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in twenty years,” she says, looking at David, his body curled and pivoting away from her, eyeshades on, earplugs in, his head turned to the window.

  Scott shrugs, eyeing the collection of tiny bottles lined up on his mother’s tray table. He is easier to place. He has his father’s romanticism and his mother’s cynicism. A little lost maybe. A little unfocused. Less judgmental certainly, and yet this son, too, is lining up against her. She can feel it. He’s stopped looking her in the eye, a sure sign that some dark conspiracy is brewing. They will make their play in New York, whatever it is. She can feel them aligning against her, ganging up. Now that their father is gone, they will cut her loose, leave her to fend for herself. They will put her in a home and throw away the key. The thought of it makes her lungs constrict. It is a terrible thing to find yourself slowly suffocating to death, to get winded simply by sitting up in the morning. A flight of stairs, forget it. She may as well be stuck at the bottom of a mountain. Time is not her ally. She knows that. Her lungs may as well be a fuse, slowly burning. She is right on that edge. A bad cold is all it would take to push her over, bronchitis, pneumonia. There is so much panic at the thought of it. She remembers waking up on the respirator, the invasive pressure of the tube down her throat, her hands strapped down so she couldn’t pluck it loose. She remembers the transition to the oxygen mask, and then the startled panic when they tried to remove it, the way she felt like she couldn’t get enough air in the open room, no matter how hard she tried. This is what it feels like to drown on dry land. You suck and you suck, but nothing comes. Her body has become her enemy. This is what old age is, the betrayal of the physical. She knows now that, as designs go, the human animal is deeply flawed. We are like tins of meat, set to expire on a certain date, our bodies spoiling, our brains breaking down.

  It is proof of the non-existence of God.

  She saw it in the nursing home whenever she went to visit Joe. The men died young, the women went crazy. She remembers hallways filled with drooling old ladies in their wheelchairs, the clock slowly ticking away the hours, maddeningly perky music playing over the loudspeake
rs. She remembers the forced jocularity of nurses, the removal of human dignity as you succumb to an infantilizing institutional existence, the return to baby food, diapers changed every hour. A nursing home is like kindergarten, except the joy of youth has been replaced by the creaky surrender of old age. If these are her options, she will take suffocation. Except she is scared, and the fear keeps her up at night. She doesn’t want to die. She’s not ready, and yet what is she living for?

  She thinks of the memorial service, all the distant cousins come to pay their respects. They will be there, of course. Her cousins. Her mother’s other daughters. They will cluck their tongues and say how awful. All these years and they still don’t know the truth. That would shut them up, she thinks. To know that she is really their sister. What a scandal. Doris is the only one left who knows the real story. Think of their faces, their scandalized confusion, disbelief turning to horror. I am one of you. The pilot comes on to announce that they are beginning their final descent into the New York area, and for the first time in months, Doris finds herself looking forward to something. There will be chaos, anarchy. Let them all try to take her husband away from her. She will rise from the ashes and smite them all, because she has the truth on her side.

  She still has the power to surprise.

  February in New York. The temperature drops. Arctic Canadian air sinks down through the Hudson Valley, sweeping across the river from New Jersey. Picture the glacial emptiness of Eleventh Avenue, as wide and foreboding as the tundra, steam rising from the moist, hungry mouth of the Holland Tunnel. Walking the streets, your cheeks freeze from the windchill. Snow falls in the dark of the night, white, angelic, and, as if by magic, turns black by morning. In fifth-floor walk-ups and elevator buildings across town, radiators clang and rattle, keeping people awake. The subways are like ovens, cooking commuters alive in their heavy coats. When the temperature drops below freezing, the normally kinetic city speeds up even more. Surfaces harden, shrink. The city becomes brittle and everything in it turns to a smooth, frictionless pinball shooting through slick corridors, racing against time and weather. Riding into Manhattan in the back of a cab, David feels the smug satisfaction of a Californian. He feels the moral superiority that comes with a healthy tan. He doesn’t miss New York at all, doesn’t miss the competition for cabs, the crowding, the daily brawl for space, respect. He doesn’t miss the zero-degree winters, the humid summers. Once you leave New York, you discover that life doesn’t have to be a fight. Such a thought would never occur to you otherwise, but standing in a green field or a small town, it is a revelation, not unlike a religious epiphany. There is such a thing as privacy. When he first went West, he was stunned by the wide-open spaces, vast stretches of land where a human being could actually hear himself think. Not that L.A. doesn’t have its problems, the traffic, the smog, but unlike New York, in Los Angeles you are not jammed into a sea of sweating, cursing bodies every time you leave the house. There is distance, privacy, respect. You sit safely inside your car, moving in measured intervals. It’s not like New York, where three times a day you are surrounded, fleeced and cursed.