Claire coaxes the sheet down to his waist, then stops. She wonders whether their small account of nights together has given her the right to do more before he wakes. Then she notices that David has an erection, or the beginning of one. Claire looks quickly at his face, but his eyes are closed; he is dreaming. It would be nice if he were dreaming of her. Are they making love behind those eyelids? Feeling greedy, a little reckless, she presses her thighs together, as the particles of desire collect and condense between them, then slowly tugs away the sheet. Once he is in the open she takes him between two fingers, which she moves delicately back and forth, drawing more blood into his penis; she enjoys the feeling of it, its innocent, programmed response. David is uncut. She likes it. The skin at the top is a soft, extra thing, a novel alternative to the others she has seen, where the blood, at the peak of arousal, beats feverishly in the naked bulb.
He is awake. At first she doesn't realize it, mesmerized as she is by the rare, unchaperoned access to this part of a man's body, and when she glances up to find his eyes upon her, she sees that he isn't startled – her attentions, her audacity in waking him like this, have clearly aroused him, and in an instant she feels lust crash through her. She wants everything at once. Removing her eyes from his – she would be embarrassed to watch him watching her – she takes him in her mouth, moving her hand onto the inside of his left leg. The long cords of muscle in his thigh snap tight. A hand reaches through her arms and takes one of her breasts – wild, wanting him, she clasps her hand over his and presses it against her until the tips of his fingers dig into bone. She has him fully, feeling him in the back of her mouth, even using her teeth, and she stops only at the threshold of actual pain, only when his groans turn against her.
Three nights ago she was in this bed, in the same situation, with Paul, although she did not perform this particular act. It has an intimacy, an importance, that sex itself does not. With Paul she simply fucked. With Paul she simply let it happen. At the time it felt natural, and it did not feel bad, but it felt nothing like this now – now she is the one acting, the one whose blood screams to take more, whose heart rings inside her chest.
Her body is an abundance, and it needs his, it needs skin, the contact and tension of muscle. He tugs on a condom. With quick, precise motions she is astride him, she has him, she is working against him; she pounces at his mouth with her own, finds his tongue, bites his lips; she grips his wrists and pins them above his head; she pushes down on his chest for leverage, scuffs her palms against his nipples; she tilts back, feeling a pleasurable strain burn through the muscles that run from her shoulders to her hips, and reaches around to play with his balls; she doesn't know how much noise they make, and doesn't care; she is, she is, she is.
Claire gasps once more, then falls silent. In the shivering aftermath, the merciless accrual of separateness, warmth and lust fall away like dead skin, drift apart like ash, and she becomes cold, recedes into her own head. The explosions of her heart soften, the last, rattling muscles go quiet. She can see clearly again. It is an absent, exhausted feeling, the death of desire.
She pulls the sheet around herself, and then the blanket, noticing that David's eyes, which search her greedily, want her to remain unhidden, his, available for private visual consumption. His gaze touches her as deliberately, as tangibly, as hands. She itches from it and looks away, her own eyes falling upon the nightstand, the empty glass, the package of birth control, the sleeve of cigarettes. For a moment she considers lighting one, but she has promised herself not to do this inside the apartment. Cigarettes just made sense in the months after the divorce, each a handy envelope of pleasure and self-contained guilt, an ideal distraction. She'd smoked on and off in college. In the gnarled logic of heartache and self-pity it felt perfectly natural to adopt a harmful habit. Claire Metzger wasn't a smoker, but that didn't mean that Claire Brennan, following a period of suspended animation, three years off the map, couldn't be.
Paul. It would be unfair to accuse him of anything, not after it was she who asked him up, but he's the one who arrived at her door, and he knew – he knew! – the effect his presence would have. He wanted it to happen. He planned it.
'You're thinking about him,' says David.
'Who?'
'Your ex-husband.'
'Yes,' she admits.
'Good.'
'Good?'
'It means you aren't getting hung up on me.'
He gives a crimped little smile whose meaning is unclear. Is he joking? She hears in his voice the shred of bitterness he can't help. David rolls halfway toward her and possessively touches her bare shoulder; while his touch lingers there her skin revolts, as if it can feel each groove and notch of his fingerprints. What is this inside her? The feeling is intense, private and almost palpable, a physical object materializing within her that she alone has access to. Its value is uncertain. But it gives her one important piece of information: she owes him nothing.
Hastily, she lifts herself from the bed. He doesn't ask where she is going, pretends he isn't staring as she wanders naked through the bright bath of morning. She wants to dress, start the day. In the space of three nights she has slept with two men, one of them her ex-husband, and it troubles her how comfortable she feels within shifting, multiple roles – this isn't a person she wants to be. Indecision seizes her. From next door suddenly comes a familiar sound – a baby's crying, muffled by the wall. She listens. Forgetting the man in her bed, forgetting her own nakedness, forgetting everything, she closes her eyes and strains to hear. After a moment she realizes her mistake. It isn't a child, only the hysterical yelping of channels changing quickly from one to the next. Someone has turned on a television.
Paul goes underground.
From his jacket he retrieves two pieces of paper. One was cut from the newspaper this morning – torn, actually, he didn't take the time to find a pair of scissors – and folded in two. He's read his father's obituary once already, and now peruses it more carefully. An obituary in the newspaper is normally something a family can be grateful for, an exercise in light hagiography; in this case printing one at all seems unfair, even bloodthirsty. It is Paul's fault – the death notice he allowed Wolff to send out must have alerted the newspaper. Even so, he assumed the bar for infamy would be set much higher. His father was hardly James Earl Ray, Lee Harvey Oswald, George Wallace. He wasn't one of the seminal villains of American history; the collective memory has let go. The obituary comes to three paragraphs in length; limns the scope of his father's deeds; notes that he is survived by two sons, both of whom live in New York City and one of whom is Ben Wald, the manager of a hedge fund and currently the subject of a government investigation.
That would be Ben of the solid nuclear family, of the regular visits to a house of worship, of the many colleagues and subordinates, whose years of work in the financial industry have insulated a patiently built life. Even a heart attack can't tear him down. And it is Ben who is the intended recipient of the second piece of paper – an index card addressed on one side with only two pieces of information on the other: the time and place of Frank Metzger's funeral.
It won't do any good; Ben has made that clear enough. He will destroy the card. This morning Paul even tried calling his brother's mobile. Three times; no answer. But he isn't ready to let the occasion pass without his brother knowing that it is going to happen. Ben's arrival at the hospital likely doesn't indicate a change in him, but Paul can't stop himself from wanting it to. Some remnant of the younger brother, in love with the older, is always there.
Eeling out of the tunnel, the train emerges in the light of an aboveground station, and all at once half a dozen people dig phones out of purses, coats, jeans. They snap them open and begin striking the buttons. Paul folds the obituary and slips it back in his pocket with the card. Its importance rests not in who reads it today or who remembers it tomorrow, but in its place in the public record, proof of its enduring truth, baked forever into the labyrinth of searchable databases in whic
h all the world's knowledge now resides, cities of hard drives buried underground, hot, humming, and smug.
At the apartment, he studies himself in the mirrors that panel the elevator and, feeling a familiar displeasure at his own appearance, exits the lift to find Beth standing in the door frame.
'Is Ben home?'
She pauses. 'No – it's Wednesday, Paul. It's a weekday. Is everything all right?'
'Can I come in?'
Beth deposits him in the living room and returns with two steaming mugs of coffee. He accepts one and without taking a sip lowers it onto the glass-top table, careful not to let a drop escape, then promptly forgets about it. Beth holds hers with two hands, dearly, like a reliquary. She sits opposite him, her back straight, her demeanor wooden. She's a proper-looking woman, dressed in slacks and a pale blue sweater; her silvering brown hair is cut just above the shoulders. The difference in their ages is great enough that Paul can't help but think of her as maternal – having never known his own, he has a habit of seeking out temporary mothers. He has always been comfortable in her presence. Beth's eyes blink rapidly, especially when she listens to another person speak, and their arrangement, set far apart, accentuates an unusual size and gentleness.
Paul takes out the card and, handing it to Beth, says: 'I don't mean to intrude. I just came to give this to Ben.'
She stares at it. 'I'll make sure he gets it.' She adds, quickly and quietly, 'I'm so sorry, Paul.'
That concludes their business. But he hasn't had his coffee, and, oddly, he doesn't want to go. The good order of things, the cleanliness, the brightness, make Paul want to stay; it feels so remote from his own apartment, the life he's allowed to collect around him, the loneliness there, the congealed silences. He reaches for his coffee and sucks up two abrupt sips before asking: 'How's Jake?'
Beth smiles gratefully. 'He's good. He's a sophomore now.'
'Ben told me.'
'He was thinking of majoring in economics, but his father wants Jake to study history or philosophy, something like that. He wants a college professor for a son.'
Paul finds the idea almost humorous, Ben discouraging his son from becoming a hardhearted businessman like he is. He wants to be a good father, the kind of father they didn't have – a thought that makes Paul admire his brother, in a roundabout way, though it can't help but sadden him a little, too.
'And what do you think?'
'I think Jake should do whatever makes him happy.'
Strange to remember that he once knew his nephew as a baby – a little tablet of possibility, bonelessly soft, made easily glad by the most mundane trinkets of the world. This was back when he was not quite twenty and Ben tolerated the occasional visit. It has been years. Paul wonders what kind of man his nephew has become. Surely he's tall, strong, and in full bloom, exhibiting his father's many physical gifts. Confident and well-liked. Ben wouldn't have any other kind of son.
He asks, 'Is Ben going to be all right?'
For what seems like a long time she doesn't answer. When she does speak, her sentences are broken by long, uneven pauses. 'He's never not been all right before. What they say about him – it's hard to take. The issues aren't ones I really understand. Ben hasn't been himself. It hasn't been easy. I don't know.'
'You don't talk to him about it?'
'We talk about other things. With all this going on, Ben's been concentrating on other things. Family. Temple. He's on the phone a lot with Jake.'
Holding the coffee mug, Paul stands and begins to walk slowly around the room. It is a little chilly and for the first time he notices that the sweater his sister-in-law wears is quite heavy. He moves toward the glass shelves, ornamented with photographs.
He looks at a picture of Ben and Beth with a woman he doesn't recognize, but who could be Beth's sister. He says, 'I always wondered if you asked Ben to convert before you married him.'
She makes a quizzical face. 'No, not at all. It was his idea, actually. And once he gets going... My father had a brother who married outside the faith. Someone on my mother's side, too, I think. We weren't that kind of family. I was in love. I would have married him no matter what.'
Paul glances out the window at the clutter of buildings in the distance. 'I didn't mean to pry.'
She says, 'It always surprised me.' Paul looks at her. 'The strength of his faith, I mean. Maybe it's always that way, if you convert to a religion instead of growing up with it. Maybe it belongs to you in a way I don't understand.'
'He insisted on converting.'
'It's funny. I think that over the years my own faith has grown stronger because of him. I think differently about God. He's made me more serious about Judaism. More serious about all of it, I suppose.'
She grows silent, her expression like that of a woman snapping shut her purse to prevent a stranger from seeing inside. The reason for Paul's visit has drifted away during their conversation, but the present silence offers no resistance, and it returns, poisoning the air between them.
'Let me warm you up.' Beth takes his coffee, which Paul has barely touched, and heads for the kitchen.
'I should go, actually.'
Beth stops and nods. There isn't an established ritual for parting from his sister-in-law; they have had too few opportunities. He wavers, unsure if he's supposed to embrace her, and then realizes that because of the two mugs in her hands it would, in any case, be impossible.
On his way back to the subway, Paul passes a row of white news vans waiting along the street like ambulances. The locus of interest seems to be one of the apartment buildings on West Eighty-second Street, perhaps a private disgrace made newsworthy by the identity of one of its principals. It could be a death. In any case, nothing is happening at the moment, and the only activity on the block is a reporter, dressed in a suit, having a cigarette and jawing with the cameraman.
He could have left the city after his divorce. Nothing holds him here; he could have gone anywhere. The work he does is moveable. Other cities are inexpensive, intimate, uncrowded; they have different seasons, new people, unfamiliar streets. He could have gone to San Francisco. He could have gone to a place like Denver or Minneapolis, one of those smaller cities in the middle of the country routinely praised as 'livable' – able to be lived in. Is he able to live here? People often leave after a personal loss; people will move out of grief. Then again, those same things can make people stay put. He has never thought of leaving, not seriously. Not even to pursue one of the old post-college dreams, taking up life as an expatriate, in Amsterdam, Budapest, Buenos Aires. Berlin is supposedly cheap these days.
They are tearing down a building on West Seventy-second Street. He looks inside, through its stripped face, at floors where workmen carefully pull back unwanted beams and pieces of stone. Pink, fluffy insulation swells in the gaps like an infection. The building is being remodeled then, not torn down; the destruction moves too slowly for a demolition. He gets on the subway, gets off.
Who would he tell, if he left?
He stands on Madison Avenue. Paul hasn't been this busy in weeks, even months. Fresh from delivering the card to Beth, he now has a meeting, arranged on short notice, with this editor, Bentham, a man whom as little as forty-eight hours ago he firmly intended never to see again. He dislikes Bentham and knows that a second encounter won't change that. But earlier today, in the period of clarity that often follows sleep, he sat for a long time, drinking coffee and staring out the window, only vaguely aware of the movement of buses and people, and made a decision.
It would be good, Paul came to think, if this morning's obituary were not the last comment on his father's life committed to the public record. A book of the kind Bentham has proposed wouldn't, in and of itself, constitute an act of disloyalty; it would all depend on how he handled the material.
And there lay a second idea – Ben. Without fully understanding the charges facing his brother, Paul recognizes how much worse it has been made by the past the newspapers have exhumed: Ben Wald, né Metzger, a pract
icing Jew no less, is the son of a Nazi. It fits the picture they want. One buried secret stands as proof of others. Even Paul feels a growing sense of umbrage at this turn of events. He cannot judge Ben's innocence or guilt, although it isn't hard to imagine his brother forcing the system to abide by him instead of the reverse – but that isn't the point. Using their father was shameless. The papers have erased forty years of tireless effort. No matter what his crimes, Ben has earned the right not to be a Metzger.
A book about their father would give Paul the opportunity to make this fact loudly known, to pump it into the public chambers of information. He may be deluding himself. But if there is a chance to have his brother understand that he doesn't judge him for turning his back on their father, that though he doesn't agree with it he recognizes the integrity in it, then perhaps Ben will soften his own judgment of Paul for not doing the same. In print it might be possible – mightn't it? – to revise the terms of their brotherhood by making Ben a figure of sympathy: a man of highest principle who made a terrifying choice, at the cost of his own father, because it was the only one he felt was right.
And if Bentham isn't lying, or irrationally optimistic, this book could restore a basic aspect of dignity to Paul's life. It could sell. He could, more than notionally, be a writer. In time he could move out of his lonely apartment, his distant neighborhood, into somewhere brighter, fuller, busier. In time he could even afford to live in Manhattan. Would it impress Claire? It seemed until recently that his chances were gone. He would have to be truly mad to reject, on the basis of a vague, shifting principle, the only one that has come along in years.
An assistant takes Paul immediately to Bentham's office. He is sitting behind the desk, writing in an appointment book.
'I've reconsidered your offer,' says Paul after the editor invites him to sit.
City of Strangers Page 10