“I didn’t say stop.” He shrugs and sprays me some more, and I absorb it through every pore. “Thank you,” I repeat. “Thank you thank you thank you thank you.” I wipe the water from my eyes and laugh with Luis, the hose once more across his lap. I collect my water bottle and hold it underneath the nozzle, let him fill it with this disgusting water.
When we’re done I sit next to him in the shade and drip dry a little. Luis offers everyone who walks by a turn with the hose but is refused, even with this advertisement for bliss sitting next to him. Don’t you people know what you’re missing? Being sprayed with a hose is the only antidote for today. “I wish more pretty girls,” he remarks, then mimics spraying their ample chests with a hose, somehow making their breasts grow as he soaks them.
“You know what’s happening down there?” I point to our left.
He considers my query. “Nine Eleven,” he replies.
“Really? You think terrorist attack?”
“I know this. Yes.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know.” Ah, so he doesn’t. The man with the hose doesn’t freelance for Reuters.
“Were you here for Nine Eleven?” I ask. Not usually a conversation New Yorkers like to have, but he did bring it up …
He laughs softly in response. “I was right here.” He points to the ground upon which he sits.
“I was at college. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, but I went to school in California. I woke up because my parents were calling me to let me know that they were all right, and then I watched the news with everyone else, sitting on a dorm couch that reeked of bong water and stale pizza.”
“Very sad.” He finishes his beer, reaches into the cooler for another. He offers me one. “A dollar.”
I pass. “I couldn’t escape news that day. Between the television and my classmates and my parents calling every hour, I couldn’t not know every last detail of everything that was happening. And everyone in my dorm knew I was from New York, so they kept asking me for updates, like I had a different news feed, like Giuliani was calling me to give me inside information. I didn’t know anyone who died. I didn’t even know people who knew people, but everyone kept treating me like my entire family was buried. One guy on my floor had a family friend who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. He had a closer tie to the human cost than I did. But he was from Allentown, Pennsylvania. And I was from Brooklyn.”
Luis offers to spray a man in a suit with the hose and the man gladly accepts, handing over three dollars for the privilege. He doesn’t even remove his sport coat, just gratefully takes ten seconds of hosing down, and continues on his way. Luis adds the bills to his roll, smiles again at me. My feet have already dried, so I roll back on my stiff socks and lace back up my shoes. My pockets are even dry enough to replace my wallet and phone.
A man wearing loose-fitting clothing steps out of a van and gets on a train somewhere in Manhattan. He wouldn’t want to be in public longer than he has to. He waits until he is underneath one of the major stations in midtown, major because of the assembled humanity there at every given second of the day, major because of how integral the station is to how people move about the city. There he presses a button, or flips a switch, or whatever one does to set off a vest. The people around him don’t even hear death before it vaporizes them. And out and out it travels, concentric circles of impact, until the last people at the very edge of the blast zone sustain those minor cuts and bruises.
They shut down transit in case the man with the vest isn’t the only one. Because the loss of human life will get digested in think pieces, but the city has to run the cold calculations of fixing a bombed-out train station, of replacing subway cars and buses, of convincing people that Manhattan is not an island that can support anxiety traffic, that if people don’t readily take mass transit daily, a stone will lodge in the city’s throat, choking off a terrifying amount of the world’s economy.
A moment of clarity while I’m drip-drying. My city got attacked again. I’m positive. What’s left is for the details to leak, then get explained, then get muddied, first by conjecture, then by conspiracy.
I rise and nod to Luis. “Thank you.”
“No problem, good luck!” he calls out cheerfully.
The sun instantly wicks away the last droplets of water from my body and a block later I’m once again cooking. I contemplate going back and sitting by Luis in the shade for as long as he’ll let me, offer to be his assistant, someone trustworthy to hold on to the valuables of people he sprays. I won’t even charge him, just as much time with the hose and as many refills of water as I can drink while the trains are being held. It could be days, for all I know, like during that September, when I heard about entire sections of the city being shut down, only those with proof of residency being allowed below Fourteenth Street.
This radio silence is maddening. Yesterday there wasn’t a scintilla of information the tiny computer in my pocket couldn’t access. I have the Library at Alexandria in the palm of my hand dozens of times a day. But not today, when it can’t even call home. I’ve stepped back a decade, into the morass of confusion and unease that is unknowing, that is speculation over even halfheartedly gathered facts.
As I crest 135th the next ten blocks roll out before me. People in California think of Manhattan as being flat but it’s not, especially up in Harlem, where the city rolls in hills only shades less steep than those of San Francisco. I’ve climbed to the top of a precipice and now I gaze upon a new vista, one that reveals nothing so far as midtown, but instead the elevated tracks of the 1 train. A train sits on the tracks, silver and still, like a dead caterpillar. My perspective makes it look small enough that I could pick it up like a toy, hold it in my hands, and slide it back and forth along the tracks.
I continue south, downhill until the next ascent.
Michael Gould
Eleven Months Ago: August 30, 2009
I’ve decided that if Jennifer doesn’t bring up the shower, then I won’t, either. Maybe she’s the type who showers with the door open and doesn’t care who is around, or maybe she thought I had already left. On the train ride over, I come up with dozens of explanations, cataloged and dismissed or considered, ranked by plausibility.
Jennifer opens the door and walks back into her apartment, smoking a cigarette. “I made you cookies,” she says over her shoulder by way of greeting.
“You made me cookies?” I parrot back.
She points to a plate on the counter. Standard chocolate chip disks, by the look of them. I take the smallest one and bite into it. It’s a little like hardtack; she didn’t use enough butter, inevitably by following some flawed recipe, but she doesn’t pick up on the hard crunch my teeth make. She still looks at me expectantly. “These are delicious,” I say through crumbs.
She rolls her eyes and takes the rest of the cookie out of my hand, chucks it in the trash. “I’m going to go work unless you need me.”
“Actually.” I lay my backpack on the counter. “Today is all about you. I have some wood samples for the shelves and some paint samples for the walls.”
“Just ask Paul. Whatever he wants is fine with me.”
“He said to ask you, and whatever you want is fine with him.”
“Then we leave it up to you.” She turns away from me and I grab her wrist. Gently. This is the first time I’ve touched her; we didn’t shake hands when Rebecca and I came for dinner. She came into the room late. This wrist in my hand is the first moment. She doesn’t break away from me, but she doesn’t seem upset by this transgression either, merely turns and looks down at my hand curiously, as if it has detached itself from my body, or she put on a gaudy bangle in the shape of a human hand. I take it back and we let the room settle. “Go ahead, then,” she prompts. Jennifer cocks a hip petulantly, still smoking, such a ridiculous image I smirk while opening my backpack. “Shouldn’t we do this in there?” she asks.
“That would make more sense. Is it okay with you if we do?” She flips t
he faucet on and rinses off her cigarette, throws it in the trash, then motions for me to follow.
I open the door and step aside. Light spreads buttery across the floor. We’ve picked the perfect day for sample testing; this is the exact light I hope the room will get, that I hope it will absorb. “After you,” she says gruffly. I walk to the window, stare out, give her the space to cross her personal Rubicon in her own time. When I turn around she has both feet in. The light catches her dry eyes; she’s prettier than I’ve given her credit for, whatever this unsolicited, internal, wolf-whistle praise is worth.
We sit on the floor and I set all of the wood samples out before us, and then lay the paint samples over them, like a giant fan. There’s oak and birch and pine, in different finishes, matte and gloss, made to look slick with oil or burned. My color samples avoid the studious and austere. The room draws in too much free sun to make deep maroons or rich greens make sense. This room’s original purpose for Jennifer and Paul was to house a child, and nothing I can splatter on the walls is going to change that. The best I can do is keep it happy and inviting, a good place to curl up with a book, or to write one.
While she paws at the samples, getting incrementally more involved, taping some swatches up to the wall to stand back and envision, I inquire, “What kind of writing do you do?”
“The kind that doesn’t get published,” she finally replies. “What kind of painting do you do?”
“The kind that doesn’t get hung.” That garners a smile.
She sits down across from me, the samples between us. The light follows her, reveals the lines on her face, the pale translucence of her skin, veins prominent on her neck and jaw, like tributaries off an unseen river. “What is this costing us?” she asks.
“Very little,” I reply. “You’ll pay for the materials.”
“Because you pity me?”
I don’t know how to answer in a way that isn’t pitying. “Paul is a nice guy. Seemed like he could use a break.”
“And some shelves and a paint job is going to make up for his wife killing their child?”
“Not sure how he has this budgeted out.”
“Not sure that’s the right place for a joke.”
I roll my eyes, straight out of the frosty teenager playbook. “How many people have fallen for this routine?”
She sits up. “Excuse me?”
And then immediately, I retreat, chastened. The line to not cross with Jennifer Sayles sits a few feet behind where I’m standing. “Forget it,” I mumble. “Not my place.”
“To passive-aggressively judge me and then be a fucking coward about it? No, it’s not.”
I pause, study the wood samples intently. “You know,” I finally say, “normal people don’t seek out confrontation. That’s not cowardice.”
“All the fucking same,” she spits.
“Same what?”
“Forget it,” she sneers. “Not my place.”
“Rebecca does this too. When she’s just aching for a fight.”
“Glad you menfolk are past such adolescent tantrums.”
I throw up my hands. “It’s just such bullshit. It’s tragic enough, you losing a child. That’s what I meant. You don’t need to season it with additional tragedy. This is so clearly not your fault unless there’s something you’re not telling us. Maybe when you were pregnant you did enough cocaine to kill a horse.”
“I … No,” she sputters.
“Yeah, everyone knows that and no one assumes otherwise. So saying that you killed your kid—it’s finding a way to make it worse. It’s already the worst. What happened to you and Paul is the worst thing that can happen to people. There is no lower point. And it doesn’t need you”—I search for the metaphor—“rubbing salt on your own wounds.”
I think she’s going to yell at me to get out, or slap me, or cry. But while her jaw is set, her face has lost its fight. “You’re very perceptive, Michael Gould. I’m crying inside. Inside of that, I’m screaming. Then wailing. Then shouting. I’m a Matryoshka doll of emotion.”
“You’re joking by not joking.”
“I …” Her gears spin. “I’m tired of talking about this.” She adds, as a happy discovery, “I don’t need to talk about this with you.”
“No, you definitely don’t.”
She stands up. “Fuck it. Come have a drink with me.”
“It’s early.”
“I know. Come have a drink with me. I’ve seen all your samples and I want a minute to think. I’ll be nice. I won’t be crazy. Come on. Have a drink with me and I’ll pick samples after.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“Very true,” I concede, following her out of the room. She instructs in a small voice, one that leaks out from someplace buried deep and dark within her, to leave the door open.
Jennifer plucks a bottle of Campari from a cabinet under the sink. She takes out two glasses and drops ice cubes into each. “I buy a bottle of Campari every year in June and for the entire summer I drink Campari and soda. It’s all I drink. Usually I go through three or four bottles but this year, because I was pregnant, this is still the June bottle. Paul had to get it because I was embarrassed to be showing and in a liquor store. We’re drinking the last Campari and sodas of the year.”
“The bottle still has about a third left,” I point out.
“Then we can’t stop at one.” She layers the red, syrupy liqueur over the ice and slowly unscrews the cap on a fresh bottle of club soda. It still bubbles over and she rushes to get most of it into the sink. “What’s being a father like?”
I lean on her island and assess, both the question and the questioner. After she makes our drinks, she hoists herself onto the counter, cheers me from a distance, and lights another cigarette, ashing into the drain. What’s the answer I could give her that sounds honest but not banal, or hurtful, or bragging. Being a father is great, and it’s terrifying, and it’s frequently boring, because Jackson spends most of his day sleeping and all of his day needing. He needs one thing or another, and one of us always has to be with him, so it’s like house arrest whenever Rebecca goes out. And if one of us is going out, it has to be for work, or on an errand. It’s never to go out just to have a drink, even the last Campari and soda of the summer, because you don’t leave the other person shackled to the kid for selfish reasons. So I don’t see friends anymore, and I relish the time I spend on the subway, or in my workshop. It’s my time. I didn’t anticipate that I’d stop living my life by my early thirties. That it would no longer be mine to live. If they could distill that and find a way to puncture a thick adolescent skull, that’s how they’d keep kids from getting knocked up.
“I thought I would be happier,” I admit. It leaves my mouth like vomit.
But she takes it in stride. “Happier how?”
“That’s a weird thing to say. I guess I mean I thought every day would be family portrait day. It’s just a slog.”
“Imagine how it must be for Rebecca.”
“Oh, I’m not comparing. She has to keep the restaurant open twenty-four seven. She has the harder job. If you asked her you’d probably get a different answer.”
“Maybe not one as honest, though.”
I sip my Campari. It tastes of liquid rind, or the syrup they make orange soda with. But it does pair nicely with summer. “No, maybe not.”
“You deserve to be happy,” Jennifer says.
“I’m not not happy. How did this become me bitching to you about being a parent?”
“I don’t mind. It’s like you said—I’m already dealing with the worst.”
“I’m happy. I promise, I’m happy. It just feels preordained.” She doesn’t prompt me, but I explain anyway. “Like when Rebecca buys fifty pounds of sugar, she knows how long that will go for. Whatever else happens, barring something unforeseen like … flooding, like a flood coming through our apartment and dissolving all the sugar, she knows how long it’ll last.
She’s comforted by reassuring thoughts. That’s not how my mind works. I like the uncertainty. For me, it’s like cigarettes. You buy a pack of cigarettes, and unless you are super disciplined and only have x number of cigarettes a day, you don’t really know how long that pack will last you. Maybe it’ll only last you a really hard day, or it could last a month until that last cigarette is plain disgusting. But I like the unknowing, of having to make that decision with each cigarette whether you have enough to get you through before you have to buy another pack. Having a kid is like buying enough sugar for the rest of your life. I was hoping it would be more like cigarettes. And maybe it will. Just not yet. I’m just not there yet.”
Jennifer hops down from the counter and puts her cigarette out in a coffee cup. She pushes our glasses aside and leans forward, wraps her arms around my neck. Her body pressed against mine, chest against my chest, thighs against my thighs. My pelvis instinctively shifts back, an I’m hiding my erection maneuver learned and perfected in sixth grade. Something flickers on for me, this closeness, the feel of a woman mashed against me, her hands clutching my shoulders. But it’s reflex. Or it’s the blind old lech in my pants, ready to get it up for anyone worth whistling at. I’m downgrading this hug, even as it extends itself, as it goes longer than a friendly, jovial, or commiserating hug should go. Jennifer asked me a question and I sounded pathetic answering, so childish with my complaints. So she’s hugging me in a there there way, her version of a weary pat on the head for my whiny existential crisis. Right now, she’s thinking better a dead kid with Paul than a live one with this sad sack. It occurs to me that I’m not hugging her back, that her arms still break around my shoulders, pulling me into her, and mine are at my sides, stiffly, like hers were when Rebecca hugged her. So I lower my arms, make the hug easier on us both, and hold her around her waist, keeping my hands light and firmly on her sides, at the north end of her hips.
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