City of Strangers

by Ian Mackenzie

  A moment elapses during which he is pinned on his back by the warm weight on his chest, the shock: he is a desperate man, he stands at the mercy of others. This was never supposed to happen. He meant to live ambitiously but carefully. A trial – even the threat of one and the agreement to a plea, if it comes to that – would be a slow-motion catastrophe. One way or another it will leave him reduced: if not with nothing, then certainly with less. He flops onto his stomach. It does nothing. The anxiety has entered his arms and legs, they twitch and crinkle, and he would like to be free of his body, the labor of his heart. The difficulty is that he's not moving, he's not doing anything. What can he do? That is the problem – there is nothing he can do.

  He breathes through the fabric of the pillowcase, faintly sweet from the laundry – even the simple enjoyment of a simple thing is threatened; he cannot think of fresh laundry without thinking that he might lose such a privilege. Yesterday Paul provided him with an easy target for this frustration. It wasn't truly his brother's fault. For perhaps an hour last night after leaving the restaurant Ben was furious with him, but the feeling quickly subsided; it was replaced by something unfamiliar, a soft embarrassment at having allowed himself to be so easily provoked. He'll call his brother, if not tomorrow, then next week, maybe not to offer an apology, or to ask for one, but just to talk. It will be easier now, with their father finally gone.

  He shuts his eyes, tries to push it all down, not wanting to burden his wife with his woes.

  They had a small fight, if it can even be called that, on the drive home from dinner tonight. Voices weren't raised. Obliquely she mentioned once more her displeasure that he hasn't spent more of the day with her, since he isn't at the office, and he tried to explain, again, that it isn't easy for him, that he needs to boil off the adrenaline he'd otherwise use up at work. She's still upset, too, that he asked her not to come to the funeral – another exclusion whose necessity he had tried and failed to illuminate – which made it difficult to win her commiseration over Paul's behavior afterward. After a period of brittle silence, he made an attempt to change the subject, bringing up their son, whom he'd wanted to mention anyway.

  'I spoke to Jake today. He aced his first paper in that European history class.' When his wife did not respond, he added, 'I miss him.'

  'He visits too often,' she said. 'He needs to have his own life. We need to have our own lives.'

  'I know, I know, I know.'

  He is restless. He pushes back the sheets and glides from bed, and at the window his eyes snag on the view of the city. It would be possible to calculate down to the decimal point the value of this view when considered among the many other desirable elements – street address, floor space, ceiling height – that determined the price he paid for the apartment. That number wouldn't be a small one. He paid it to be able to look out upon the city that's his. He loves New York. At night the steel and glass vanish and all that remains is light. Towers blaze, vanilla and silver, and below them, like impure runoff, are lesser lights, rough and granular: the blue beer logos in bodega windows, the lamps coming on and off in taxis, the slurred glare of intersections. Further on is the great neon confusion of midtown, where digital semaphores flash and bicker, just below Central Park, that one reservoir of darkness. It is a view replicable nowhere else in the world. He is looking down at all of this, this city of light, but feels instead as if he is a former angel gazing up.

  Just as he returns to bed, lying once more on his side, he hears his wife emerge from the bathroom, and, before he can turn to face her, she says: 'I'm sorry.'

  Beth sits on the edge of the bed, still dressed in her robe. Her hair glistens under the light. Ben realizes that he didn't hear the hair dryer; when she showers before bed, his wife usually comes out of the bathroom already wearing her nightgown. Tonight, it seems, she's been diverted from long-held routine by the need to make peace. A pinch, a tiny convulsion, grasps him from within.

  'I'm sorry too. Let's just forget it. We'll have lunch tomorrow.'

  'I'd like that,' she says, touching his arm. Then, reaching behind her head and twisting her wet hair into a rope, she says, 'Stephanie's become a striking young woman, hasn't she?'

  Stephanie is their friends' oldest daughter, a senior at Columbia. She made an appearance tonight at dinner, wafting through on a self-contained breeze, eating a few forkfuls and having a glass of wine before going off to rejoin her roommates, or work on her thesis, or see a film downtown; Ben wasn't really listening and cannot remember. His wife's question doesn't appear to require an answer. They might as well be talking about the weather, as far as he can tell, which is fine by him, an easy conversation to release the earlier tension.

  'She must get such looks,' Beth continues. 'It has to be nice.'

  'She isn't the only one who can get a look,' says Ben. He enjoys this, the gentle banter of people whose relationship can be measured in decades, and even feels at the corners of his eyes the first, soft tug of sleep. At last: the evaporation of difficulty, the return to normalcy. Thinking of the sturdy marriage he's been a part of putting together, he can picture the years ahead with uncomplicated pleasure.

  She murmurs something he can't hear. He rolls onto his back. A flash of white billows into his peripheral vision. Beth has removed her robe, and wears nothing underneath. He watches her by a slight angle of his head: she is sitting with one knee hoisted up onto the bed, her skin still pink from the shower. She hides her eyes from him; they are looking down at herself. He can see the profile of one of her breasts, which have always been full but which the decades have made increasingly pendulous. When he senses melancholy or distress, he normally reaches out to touch his wife, but he finds he cannot.

  He asks, 'You aren't wearing your pajamas tonight?'

  Beth sits there as she releases a long, powerful breath, more than a sigh, and then draws back the covers on her side of the bed. She slides underneath them as if just now conscious of her nudity. 'I'm hot,' she says, rolling away to face the other side of the room, and Ben is suddenly wide awake, alert to his thoughts but unable to arrange them; he can't clear away the confusion of what has seemed like a very rapid shift in the marital weather. Ben dangles between thought and speech, suddenly in the fierce grip of an unfamiliar longing for the things he already has. He hears his wife's voice again.

  'I'm tired. Will you please just put out the light?'

  Moments pass. They do not move. Paul's arms make imperceptible adjustments as they find the old places: his body is remembering how to hold hers. In the weak light he can't read the titles on the bookshelf but recognizes most of the spines, their colors and dimensions, the white splinters of distress on the fatter paperbacks; the avulsion of his books from hers, after they'd lived in uncontroversial confusion for the better part of four years, had been one of the most arduous episodes of the divorce. After a while Paul's leg falls asleep. He delays, then unbends it, upsetting their pose on the sofa. Claire blinks, as if coming out of a long nap, and stands. She takes off her coat, underneath which she is wearing a flattering black dress, and Paul tenses at the sight of her bare arms, the delicate camber along each of her sides, the plush suggestion of her breasts. Was she on a date? He feels guilty for doing so, given all that has happened, but it is impossible not to stare. Without a word she crosses the room to the kitchen. The sound of the tap running. There he finds her, still trancelike, ruminating upon the broken bottle on the floor, perhaps unable to force away thoughts of how else the night might have ended. With her toe she pushes a piece of glass.

  'Don't,' says Paul. 'Let me clean it up.'

  He has taken control of the situation, it seems, but his confidence quickly shrinks after checking the two cabinets beneath the sink, then the closet next to the refrigerator, without finding so much as a dustpan. He looks around helplessly; Claire is unable to make words or even to look at him. Finally he asks: 'Is there a broom?' She sticks out her chin, in the direction of the living room, a vaguely pugilistic facial gesture tha
t isn't usually part of her physical vocabulary. The closet there is carelessly full of the things that fit nowhere else. He takes the broom and returns to the kitchen, where he stoops to clear the glass; heat pours into his lower back until he can't maintain the position and, with an exhausted, half-dizzy swoon, falls to his knees to finish.

  Paul feels himself go slack. At first he assumes it's the last dregs of fear evaporating. Because Claire doesn't speak, and because he has nothing to say, he can dwell within the silence of himself and more carefully palpate the emotion, testing its shape. It is hardly relief, but rather disappointment. His nerves are tight wires, anticipating combat, a mortal test – not broomwork. Paul didn't get the chance to prove himself. To save Claire's life. His arms shake a little. The smallest shards resist the clumsy bristles and impatiently he corrals them with the open edge of his hand. He's aware of Claire's presence above him, but she isn't quite there; she's more a nimbus than a person. He sweeps the remaining bits into the pan and in doing so presses down with his full hand, running it the wrong way over an innocuous-seeming pebble of glass. It draws blood. Only a drop, but at the sight of red Claire's senses return.

  'It isn't serious,' says Paul. He shows her the cut.

  'Let me get a bandage.'

  'I don't need one.'

  Claire takes his hand. The glass punctured the meaty ridge below his thumb; she presses down around the cut until a bright bead of blood wriggles out.

  'See? It's nothing.'

  'Still.'

  He expects her to release his hand, but she doesn't. The air between them shrinks, he greedily breathes in the familiar scent of her hair, and his heart obliges: it is the response common to sex and danger – at once he can feel the movement of all the blood in his body, he's aware of every drop in his veins, a warm, weeping sensation cascading through him. He puts his hands on her arms, and they slide up to touch the cool, dry skin of her shoulders – it is almost painful how soft they are, and he's filled with delirious possessiveness. He holds her cheeks. Her eyes close, her lips drift apart.

  They press together. A fumble of mouths. He touches her stomach but avoids her hip, where he knows she is ticklish. The kiss has no true pleasure in it, nothing sensual or passionate – only a shared desperation. Bursting with heat, sex, and terror, he murmurs the old three words, and at this Claire's fingers, which have been dragging at his face, relax, brushing him now with an almost maternal tenderness. He's kissing her without being kissed in return. He withdraws. It doesn't mean for her what it does for him: for her the kiss is only a necessary comfort, an uxorial reflex. They pull apart. She sits at the kitchen table, then stands and picks up the other chair. 'It doesn't belong there,' she says without quite addressing him. She places it on the opposite side of the table. 'He moved it when he sat down.'

  On the white of her cheek is a fleck of red where he touched her. Paul sits, resisting the urge to reach across and wipe it away, recalling that Terence's hand was already there tonight. Without looking at Paul, she says his name, her voice faint and mildly scolding. Then: 'You still haven't told me. That man said he knew you.'

  He gives her a puzzled look: he's forgotten that Claire knows nothing of the past week, knows nothing of the reason this man chose her apartment to burst into. She is suddenly very distant. The kiss they just shared could have been a month ago, a year. He offers an explanation of events, telling her what happened after he left her apartment on Sunday night, and describes Terence's intervening appearances. Claire struggles to restrain an expression of outrage. By his involvement, albeit accidental, in so awful an episode, Paul admits culpability for the man who just invaded her home; she watches him as if studying a stranger. At some point she interrupts: 'And you didn't call the police?' Paul chafes at her tone; it is disapproving to the point of condescension. He explains that in fact he did call the police, that it accomplished nothing and in his opinion calling again would have done as little good. When he finishes, she gets up to refill her glass. He's aware of the process at work within her, an attempt to restore an inner balance, her orientation in the world. Claire asks if he wants something to drink, then fills a glass for him without waiting for an answer.

  'I'm sorry,' Paul says. 'I had no idea—'

  She shakes her head. 'There's no point. We shouldn't.'

  'Shouldn't?'

  Again she shakes her head. Light bounces around the glass of water on the table. She slides away her hand when he reaches for it.

  'Shouldn't what? Shouldn't kiss?'

  Claire makes no reply.

  'Shouldn't talk about us, then?'

  'We weren't talking about us, Paul. There is no us.'

  'Why did you invite me in last week?'

  'God. Must you?'

  'You expect me to pretend it didn't happen?'

  'That would be easier, I think.'

  'You're saying you regret it.'

  'I'm not saying anything. Forget it. It doesn't matter.'

  He wants Claire to meet his gaze. She doesn't. An impulse strikes him to reach over and lift his wife's chin, manually to fix her eyes to meet his. Instead, he stands.

  'Are you leaving?'

  'Are you asking me not to?'

  She sucks in a long breath. Then she methodically collects the remaining open bottle, empties it in the sink, and returns it to the brown paper bag Terence brought. 'Please take that with you.' Paul's arm sags slightly as he accepts it. When he moves, the sound seems to come not from under his foot but from the other room. He looks at Claire, whose eyes are alive with dread. They speak in whispers.

  'Didn't you lock the door when you came in?'

  'I thought so.'

  'Maybe I imagined it.'

  Another sound comes from the living room. It isn't the imagination. Claire, operating evidently by instinct, a childlike part of herself taking over in the face of terror, reaches quickly to switch off the light – as if they can simply be made invisible – and plunges everything around them into darkness.

  Paul moves first. But this initial act – a footstep – doesn't immediately suggest a next course of action. It compels him only to take a second step, and then a third, toward the black rectangle of the door, the threshold of the other room, in which the darkness thickens with unwelcome possibility. He looks back, trying to see Claire, but his eyes haven't adjusted to the sudden absence of light, and he makes the next step blind.

  For a single, suspended moment, nothing happens. Then, bursting out of the darkness, a scribble of kinetic energy, Terence appears and grabs Paul by the jacket, throwing him halfway across the room with a twisting, apelike improvisation. Paul – lifted, light, a projectile – lands awkwardly on a low wooden table. Terence is quickly upon him: a blow across his face, followed promptly by another; high on his cheekbone the flesh immediately starts to swell, a concentrated purse of pain.

  The pain means he is conscious. Throwing a punch feels cramped and hurried, but he lashes out with his fists, firing wildly in Terence's direction. It has the desired effect – Terence backs off – and, emboldened, he tries a kick. The weight of his shoe at the end of his leg feels promising, but as it pushes through air it meets no resistance: he misses. Hands lock onto his leg, below the knee, and drag him from the table in a single, gliding motion that ends with the back of his head on the hardwood floor.

  'Don't you wish you hadn't fucked with me? Don't you, Paul?'

  Terence stands over him, an outline, his face unevenly slashed across by shadows: his mouth emerges most prominently, a tense rictus above the white shelf of his chin. A second shape moves behind him. Terence turns before Claire can react, and Paul cries out in helpless anguish.

  Terence strikes at her with an open hand. The motion is rash and imprecise, meant to deflect rather than injure Claire. She is hurled back against the far wall and Paul hears a crash of glass. When he looks he sees her slumped on the ground and, as if carried up by unseen hands, he stands, lowering his shoulder and leaning into the blow, driving this man away
from Claire. They fall across the sofa; his legs go out from under him as he tries to keep a grip on Terence, to use this surge of anger. Paul is hit once, then twice. A mustardy odor fills his nose. He's prepared now for the sensation, the fat pulse of pain, and is able to answer in kind, aiming for the face, the bridge of the nose, places he has heard are especially susceptible to harm. It is difficult to move – they are pressed belly to belly, the cushions sliding and bucking beneath them as they struggle – and to concentrate on delivering blows while also avoiding them. He grabs Terence and plants his left foot on the floor for leverage; then, in a single action, he stands while pulling his opponent to the ground, flipping him in the process, so that Terence lands in a prostrate position. But Paul hasn't got a clear sense of how to use this unexpected advantage, the set of instincts that would allow him to bring the moment to its resolution. When Terence tries to rise, he sits on him.

  Below him the man twists and gropes around – a ghastly sensation of aggrieved, writhing muscle – as he tries to find some piece of Paul, a point of immediate vulnerability. He becomes aware of a tingling on his inner thigh, revolting because of its familiarity, its connotation of pleasure. Terence has wormed a hand around and now it slithers up Paul's leg, grazing the tightly bunched, ultrasensitive nerves there; in another second or two those fingers will have hold of his balls. Something crackles in his blood. Without thinking, he grabs Terence's head with both hands and lifts it up, allowing the spring of the neck to smash it back into the floorboards; he repeats the action, feeling a wild thrill of power, a freedom from consequence. He thinks once more of Claire: he draws up Terence's face again, this time simply by gripping the back of his head, and again delivers it in a stroke against the wood. By now he's ceased to struggle.

  It's a temporary solution. Paul can still feel the gruesome heave of air going in and out. A single thought seizes him – the decisive thing. The knife. It would shift the balance of power, eliminating Terence's advantages in muscle, youth, temperament. By degrees he lifts himself off Terence, testing the response: the body below doesn't stir. He goes to the kitchen where it still sits on the counter. When he returns he sees Claire, fallen in a posture of incidental rest, and drops to his knees beside her, pressing his fingers into her neck. She has a pulse: firm spasms in the skin, one after another, like a series of tiny gulps. A flutter of consciousness agitates her eyelids.