City of Strangers

by Ian Mackenzie

  Introductions are made, after which Bernard, in his way, manages to slip off inconspicuously. He's a valuable commodity, and part of the reason he's offered up Claire is surely that he himself cannot be pinned down to one spot.

  'It's a stunning piece,' says the man. His eyebrows jump like squirrels as he points to it with his glass.

  Claire agrees. Sometimes the donors want commentary from her, a taste of the culture that she possesses and they must purchase in discrete lumps; others want not to be lectured, but listened to.

  'Are you familiar with his other work?'

  'Not all of it,' he says earnestly. 'I do like what I've seen. I've been thinking for some time of getting one of his myself, but nothing's come on the market I quite love. Of course Jenny has other opinions. She finds him too masculine.'

  The girl says nothing, but the pause hangs there longer than it should, and Claire sees that she has stepped into one of the private eddies of their relationship, a surfacing difficulty. She interrupts it with a joke: 'If you're interested, I think we could part with this one for around thirty-one million.'

  They laugh gently. He says, 'You must have your own thoughts about it.'

  The usual phrases clutter her mind. She could close her eyes and recite a publishable paragraph of commentary. But to give the appearance of deliberation she stares at the painting, as if seeing it for the first time. They are standing too far from the piece to discuss its finer details, and the man shows no interest in moving closer. Even across a room, though, it exerts a certain gravity. Its quality is beyond dispute.

  But she has her doubts. For one thing, she worries about durability. Its title, Century, is both a promise and an expiration date. Caravaggio and Michelangelo still shake us, hundreds of years after their deaths, and even the cave paintings have a raw, lasting power. In five hundred years what will this piece look like? Art that lasts must leverage the power of symbols, the deep grammar of line and color installed in humans at birth; the images of Century, a mulch of the twentieth century, may, after worse and bloodier centuries have come and gone, pale next to more entrenched, enduring icons.

  Claire ties off this reckless mental unspooling. The man and his girlfriend continue to wait for a response; he scans the room a little impatiently, searching for a graceful exit. She considers telling them what she's been thinking, just to see their reaction, but because it is easier she says what she could have said without ever opening her eyes.

  They drift away. Immediately, she loses sight of them in the atrium, now full of people, people pushed even to its outermost edges. Its high white walls, and the vertiginous feeling they inspire, have always made her think of a cathedral, a building reaching without apology toward heaven. Chatter floats up to the rafters, soaring more than one hundred feet above them. She spots an art dealer she knows – they have met once or twice – but as she takes a step toward him she lands badly on her left foot and the four-inch heel under it turns awkwardly, wrenching her ankle. Cartilage and tissue throb angrily. No one has noticed. But the man she meant to speak to has fallen into conversation with three people she doesn't recognize. Keeping a careful grip on her drink, Claire slips off to the side, where there is a bench, and she sits and rubs the ball of her ankle as if cleaning a piece of glass. She finishes her drink. When she stands and tests her ankle it feels only a little sore, but she finds that she cannot bear the thought of making small talk for another hour. One of the waiters walks by and she snatches a canapé. Chewing the mouthful of dough and salty meat, and wishing she weren't, she decides that she can safely leave. She swallows. Halfheartedly, she looks for Bernard to tell him, and considers pleading illness until she remembers that David did the same thing. It doesn't matter, she decides. Bernard is, anyway, already off somewhere putting his thoughts in order before he speaks.

  She feels better as soon as she steps into the gelid night: what a difference it can make, a sudden change in temperature. It will be a few minutes before the car she called arrives. Only now does she realize how warm it was inside, the heat collecting in her neck and cheeks, and she closes her eyes as the cold rinses it out of her. She just wants to be home. The earlier anxiety about David, and about Paul, returns only briefly; it slides away.

  The car's here. Pale, fiery reflections swim through the licorice-black surface. It doesn't take long to reach her block, but the one-way goes against the driver, and he would have to circle around to pull up to her building. She tells him not to bother – she can manage half a block on foot. It isn't even eight o'clock and all she can think of is sleep. Maybe after taking off her shoes and changing into something more comfortable, she'll feel better. She'll cook something. Put on the TV. On the sidewalk behind her she hears footsteps, and the sound startles her – she didn't realize anyone was nearby. It's a young man. His head points downward, and he grips a brown paper bag. He doesn't wear gloves. He's just a delivery boy, walking slowly and shuffling his steps, and probably having trouble finding the right address. Claire has a mother's stab of worry: this young man, wearing only a light jacket, isn't dressed properly for the weather.

  At the threshold of her building, not quite having summoned the energy to rummage in her purse for her keys, Claire pauses. She half expected to find Paul drunk and asleep on the step again. The delivery boy is a few doors behind her. He looks at the building in front of him, and at the one across the street; he takes a few paces in the other direction. She's surprised to realize that it is Paul she would like here, only to walk with her these last steps to her door, not David, not anyone else. She would have preferred not to know that. She wants to silence her mind. But she has to think of something. Her restless brain cannot keep quiet. A writer she once read likened the mind to a bowl, but this strikes her as false – a bowl can be emptied and cleaned and put back on the shelf. Some tap in her mind is always open, always running. Only at the end will it leave her alone. Even then it might not. Sometimes she thinks that it seems unlikely we die: such a voluble thing as a mind, surely, cannot simply be shut off. On a different night this might grant her some solace, her proof against death.

  Around her the cold air closes its grip. Claire shivers, and hurries to find her keys.

  He didn't keep track of how long he remained on the train. He changed lines several times, slicing briefly into Queens, and eventually disembarked in the low hundreds of Manhattan. In the harsh, unchanging light of the tunnels, time lost structure, and even though he checked his watch Paul couldn't feel the meaning of the hours as they fell away. All afternoon and into the evening he then wandered on foot, shifting his path between the avenues, switchbacking along the cross streets, as the sky accelerated into darkness. He sat somewhere and bought a sandwich, but his appetite had deserted him, and he was able to finish only a few bites; so he went to a cafe and had a coffee, trying to kill the hours, even as he knew that there was no point: no hour would bring the waiting to an end. So he had another coffee, and another, and when he finally left his veins were tense and his eyes had trouble staying in focus.

  In the wider city anonymity acts as a kind of shelter. Something in Paul sags at the thought; it is a desperate man who must depend on the safety of crowds. Terence has become the lump you avoid having a doctor look at. Finding himself near Central Park, he takes a seat on a bench and watches people emerge from the gloaming. Lamps, firm and white, dot the paths just within the walls, as even as items on a shelf; the deeper recesses – brown, black, purple – swell roughly.

  It isn't his fault. He intervened to protect a stranger and next acted in desperation, on the wrong end of a lopsided fight, then only to save himself. Nor has he done anything, beyond the initial encounter, to provoke Terence, who in his obstinate pursuit is as unpersuadable as a wild animal. But he isn't. He is a person. He has his reasons. Without sitting him down and subjecting him to psychoanalysis, there's no way of knowing what misdirected neural traffic, what traumatic episodes and shaping incident, have created him. Was it a woman? The absence of a woman?
Parental neglect? Poor environment? Damaged genes? It doesn't matter. Terence can't be fixed.

  Inside his jacket Paul's phone vibrates. He reaches for it absently and answers without looking at the number. No one's there. Then a woman's voice surfaces, so faint at first that he doesn't recognize it.

  'Paul? He says . . .'

  There are sobs, and then the sound of the phone falling.

  'Claire? Is that you?'

  'Paul,' she says when she has the phone again. 'Paul, he knows who you are. He says he knows you. Please, please hurry.'

  He can't make out what she says next. Then, with a stat-icky rustle, she is gone. A new voice, a man's, comes on the line.

  'Funny, I wouldn't of guessed you for a Paul.' In the background is the sound of glass shattering. 'Claire and me, we're just having a beer, talking about you. I'm a little clumsy, I dropped the bottle. I'll have to clean that up later, sweetheart. We'll wait for Paul to get here and give me a hand.'

  His voice has grown distant: he's moved his mouth away from the phone and is speaking directly to Claire.

  'What do you want?'

  'You just better get over to your girlfriend's place before I get clumsy again and slice out her eyes.'

  9

  The taxi driver, braked at a red light, asks three times for the exact address before Paul, incensed at the man's poor memory, responds. He told him when he got into the cab, or at least he assumes he did. He boils inwardly with frustration. Up the avenue, as far as the eye can see, glows an endless hovering parade of red signals, crisp and clear in the foreground, and scuzzily indistinct further south. Midtown traffic rises to the level of moral atrocity. He feels the agony of ambulance drivers, immobilized in a tideless sea, staring into the indifference of hundreds of taillights, and considers abandoning the cab, running all the way to Claire's. But fifty blocks stand between here and there; he hasn't run that far in years. The cab sneaks ahead through another two intersections. At the next red light Paul's teeth clamp down automatically when the driver jerks to a stop. He should be using this lull to his advantage. He should make a plan of attack. But he has difficulty concentrating; the only coherent thought that will form is shame at how helpless he's become.

  He tries Claire's phone; no answer. He briefly considers calling the police, but if they rush into the apartment, Terence may act rashly – he promised as much. Paul's one chance is to offer up himself and lure this maniac away from his wife. He doesn't know what happens after that. Traffic clears and the car begins to move. His heart tears itself apart as they approach Claire's block.

  Paul thrusts two twenty-dollar bills across the divide, much more than is owed, and jumps out. In front of the building, he calls Claire's phone again: still no answer. The quiet of the street makes it impossible to think that anything is happening here. Someone comes out, and Paul uses his chance, squeezing in before the door can close. He climbs the stairs two at a time. Only when he reaches the apartment does it strike him that Terence might be armed; he may have a gun. Surely he knows how to get one on short notice. But the time for thinking, for hesitation, has passed. Paul tries the knob and finds the door slightly ajar. As he quietly pushes it open, he realizes that he doesn't know what to do with his hands, how to hold them, what posture to assume.

  The room is dark; his eyes adjust slowly. Illumination comes only from a far doorway, where he can see a patch of tiled floor – the kitchen. Hardly breathing, Paul steers himself there, moving as quickly as he can while remaining silent, nearly silent. As he approaches he hears breathing, and, as it thickens and condenses, he recognizes the sound of quiet sobbing. Only when he's about to step into the room does he see how foolish he's been. Terence isn't going to wait in the light. This new fear starts as a little throb and then rises up, spreading under his skin, thrashing around in his blood. He turns abruptly. No one's there.

  'Claire?'

  In the other room, the sobbing rises in pitch, broken by loud moans. It is a mark of exhaustion, a sign of someone who has been crying a long time, who must use a certain amount of muscular effort to continue. Then the sound stops altogether. Paul steps inside. On the floor is a spray of green glass. A second bottle of beer sits on the table, open but still full. He scans the room, expecting Terence to come leaping from behind the door, from inside a cupboard. The air bristles with his presence. From a woodblock on the marble counter he pulls out a medium-sized knife; then he finds Claire.

  She is a knot in the corner, a gnarl of anguish. She's wearing a coat and appears to want to swallow herself in it; with her head buried in arms and bent knees, she doesn't hear him. Paul, afraid to touch her, waits. Lifting her head from its nest she starts: on her face is a look of horror, as if she can see no difference between Paul and the man who was just here. He sets down the knife and helps her up.

  'Where is he?' asks Paul. Every part of him is coiled, tight, hard. Claire makes no reply.

  'Claire?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Where is he?'

  'He left. I think he left.'

  Paul steps into the darkened living room again, then makes a circuit of the apartment. He opens the closet in her bedroom. Terence is gone.

  'Are you hurt?' he asks when he returns to the kitchen. He searches her for signs of physical vandalism. 'Did he do anything to you?'

  She shakes her head, then says: 'He – he touched me.' With her finger, Claire marks a soft path from her eye's bottom pout to the corner of her mouth. Paul waits, and then places an arm across her shoulders.

  They go to the living room. She sits on the sofa. He wanders around in search of the light switch, and when he looks at Claire, she offers no direction. He gives up, and, anyway, he can see well enough by the glow from the kitchen. The place looks nothing like those they shared during their years of marriage, and the years before that. The furniture has the vague ordinariness of apartments in films. The art on the walls, which he didn't notice when he was here Sunday night, must have been acquired since the divorce. A pair of unwashed wineglasses stands on an end table.

  They sit in the dark. Slowly she recovers her composure, and the story starts to come out. She held the front door for Terence, who because of the bag in his hand seemed to be a delivery boy, although she already felt a little wary of him, and when his footsteps followed her up the stairs, her wariness brightened into fear.

  'I told myself I was being silly. I've lived in this city long enough not to become afraid every time I hear someone walking behind me.'

  She reaches for one of the glasses on the table and drinks what's in it, screwing up her face at the taste, but drinking it all the same.

  'When I tried to shut the door, he was there. His foot was. This heavy black boot, like a dog's snout, jammed into the door. I screamed, or I tried to, but he put his hand across my mouth. Suddenly we were in the kitchen. I was sitting. He put that bag on the table. I could hear glass inside, the sound of bottles, and even as this was all happening, I was thinking, "Why on earth has this man brought drinks into my home?" I had no idea what he planned to do.'

  Claire turns the wineglass in her hand, then sets it back on the table.

  'And he wouldn't stop talking.'

  'What? What was he saying?'

  Claire shakes her head, brushing away his question. 'He only left after Morris knocked.'

  'Morris?'

  'He lives upstairs. You don't know him. Sometimes he stops by after work. That man told me to stay here and answered the door. I was so terrified he'd do something to Morris. They spoke for a minute – I couldn't hear what they said. God knows what Morris thought. That man waited for him to go, then he left. Maybe he thought Morris would call the police.'

  After a moment Paul asks, 'Did he have a weapon?'

  'I don't know – I assumed he did.'

  'No knife? No gun?'

  'What is your point, Paul?'

  He realizes how he must sound. 'I'm sorry.'

  Claire waits before continuing. 'When he left, he said
, "See you around." God, I can still hear him.' She closes her eyes as a shiver blows through her; one after another her limbs and features mutter with common disgust. 'I feel sick just thinking about it.'

  She grows silent, then looks at Paul.

  'I don't think I'll ever be able to get him out of my head.'

  Ben listens to the sound of his wife showering. They got home an hour ago from Shabbat dinner with friends; feeling extravagant and insatiable at the end of a tiring – an unbelievable – week, he ate too much and drank more wine than he meant to, and now he feels the exhaustion sink through him. Next week has to be different. He has to make a change, find some other use for his time. Beth has left the bathroom door slightly ajar, which isn't a habit of hers, and the gap is wide enough almost to seem intentional. He considers crossing the room and closing the door, in case she merely forgot, but decides that it doesn't matter.

  Rolling over in bed, he stares out the window, not really seeing. On the phone today his lawyer explained that the government will likely move forward with its case. He remains steadfast in his claim that events will unfold in Ben's favor, but his statements brim with the overzealousness of false confidence. Twisting the sheet between his hands, Ben fiddles with the notion of guilt, as if contrition can be a choice. Once again he can't feel it; it eludes him. He's no different from hundreds of other men, his deeds – small exchanges of information, routine chatter – indistinguishable from theirs. His happened to come to the government's attention at a bad moment. He had a piece of knowledge; he used it. That, he wants to tell his inquisitors, is how the world works. The city is full to bursting with rapists, killers, drug dealers, ordinary hoodlums, the jails aren't big enough to hold them all, and instead they come after him, a man with a career and a family, a belief in God, and want to make him pay. Because of them he may lose the ability to give his wife and son everything they deserve. For doing his job, for doing it better than most. For success. For that.