by Robin Kirman
They’d arranged to make an exchange of suitcases the following Sunday. To remind him, she left a message on Nick’s cell, letting him know that she’d drop by around five. When she arrived and no one answered, she used her key. Inside Nick’s doorway, Mary was standing there wide-eyed, in the rumpled green shirt Alice had bought for Nick at Barneys. She turned, darting away from Alice, flashing her bare ass and a thong.
“A thong, now that is a surprise.”
“Nick,” Mary called; her voice was small and choked. He emerged from the bedroom, in his boxers, scratching his bed head.
“Alice, you completely slipped my mind.”
She ignored him, addressing the half-naked girl crouched behind the sofa. “Forgive my ignorance, but I want to get the rules right. I thought the Mormons are the ones with the magic underwear, but is there an Amish thong version too?”
“Mary, be cool,” Nick advised her. “She’s just trying to upset you.”
Staring straight ahead, Mary rushed across the room, ass tiny as a child’s, to shut herself inside the bedroom. Nick went after her, calling across the door, and Alice headed for the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. A moment later, Mary stepped out in her own clothes, a floral dress and sneakers.
Keds, just like Alice had worn in the sixth grade. “Jesus, Nick, do you fuck her in her Keds?”
“Shut up, will you? Just shut the fuck up.” Nick had begun to shout; he checked himself, continued more civilly. “I don’t see why you need to degrade her. This isn’t her fault.”
“Me? You film this girl on the toilet, and I’m the one degrading her?”
The front door slammed; Mary was gone.
Cursing under his breath, Nick hopped into a pair of pants, grabbed a shirt, and jogged out to the hall.
Alice was alone in the apartment; slowly she sipped her water, calming down, then strolled into Nick’s bedroom, averting her eyes from the tangled sheets. A suitcase lay open in the corner—packed with her things, though not all of them. Never mind. She didn’t want to be here when the two returned; she didn’t want to risk an even nastier display. Nick was still in a position to hurt her if he wanted: not just personally but professionally, too. She had her share of competitors and enemies, people who would thrill to read of her humiliations. The cachet she’d established over the past four years could be lost in as many days. Already she’d begun to feel her confidence was slipping: she’d contacted one of her editors that morning and he hadn’t yet returned her call.
Paranoia. She must fight it off, hop in a taxi, and go home. Get in the bath and take a Valium and, in the morning, call the therapist she’d gone to for antianxiety meds a few times before.
She dragged the suitcase to the elevator; Nick hadn’t thought to provide her one with wheels. Outside the building entrance, the doorman whistled for a taxi, but few ever ventured down Nick’s narrow, cobblestone block. Finally, Alice chose to lug the bag up to West Broadway.
A woman was standing at the corner: blond hair, floral dress, Keds. No sign of Nick nearby. Mary was alone, apparently; her face was tear-streaked, her expression dazed. She seemed oblivious to everything around her: a random man peering at her with concern, then looking her up and down; Alice, dropping her bag and coming up beside her; the rushing traffic, the van barreling toward her.
Just a small shove—Alice was sure she’d hardly touched her—until she heard the thud and saw Mary staggering back. The man standing at Mary’s side came forward to catch her arm.
“Miss, my God, miss? You okay?”
Dragging the man down, Mary crumpled onto the gutter. Her mouth was open; she was in shock. A deep cut crossed her cheek and a flap of skin hung down like a page.
If she’d wanted to, thought Alice, she could have shoved her harder—another few newtons of force and Mary would have collided with the windshield, not just had her face slapped by the rearview. She would have been joining Vasily that week. It was a matter of restraint on her part—that was what Alice told herself as she wandered the streets for the next hours, afraid of going home. When she couldn’t walk anymore, she returned to her apartment: a notice from the police had been taped to her front door. She went inside, wedged a chair against the knob, took the two remaining Valiums in her bathroom, and then sat down at her desk to call a lawyer. She did make calls that night—a few stuck out in memory—to her mother and Vasily’s wife and Peter, insisting she’d need money right away; there were other calls, too, maybe many others. By morning she’d lost track. The next thing she knew, Strauss’s Salome was blasting and two large men in uniform were holding on to her, dragging her out of her apartment to the hall. There, inexplicably, Charlie Flournoy stood waiting for her, dressed in a suit and assuring her in a steady, adult voice that everything was going to be all right.
14
Charlie had never seen the city so empty, so still. Walking through Times Square, to his office, he’d paused to stand on the island between Broadway and Seventh, under the flashing ads and lights, to stare out at sidewalks free of tourists and vendors peddling Big Apple souvenirs, closed his eyes, and heard not a single shout or honking car.
Many had simply fled Manhattan; those who remained ventured out only for work and then burrowed away at home. All the presidential speeches and all the mayor’s imprecations couldn’t make the city buzz again, and though word was that the terrorists would win if we abandoned our capitalist habits, and shopping sprees and sushi dinners were deemed small patriotic acts, for this brief time, the crowds could not be roused onto these streets, and Charlie could step out every morning into this strange, desolate, concrete island.
A few people he knew (one of his neighbors, a secretary at the office) had gone, in the weeks following 9/11, to visit what was now being called Ground Zero, but Charlie didn’t feel that he needed further proof of the horror. With his apartment window open, on days when the wind blew from the south, he could smell the chemicals and smoke. At night, looking out from his office, he could see the lighter patch of sky from the fires that still burned at the site.
In the halls of Warren Welch, no one dared speak about anything else: I was this close to taking a job at Lehman…My buddy’s roommate got out just in time. During two companywide meetings, Welch offered the firm’s official statement on the matter. The world had changed, though business, it seemed, would go on much as before; the only salient difference for Warren Welch employees was a new focus on investing in security technologies. Welch had asked Charlie, in particular, to seek out projects relevant to the moment: x-ray systems, retinal scans.
Such projects—though doubtless poised to turn huge profits in the coming months—seemed to Charlie to have very little to do with what had gone wrong that gruesome Tuesday in September. Udi’s take on the disaster felt far more pertinent: 9/11 was the result of an intelligence failure—specifically a failure to synthesize intelligence. They’d talked about it, for long hours over the phone, how big data-mining systems, as ambitious as those Udi wanted to implement, could be a central line of defense in what was being called “the war on terror.”
Now was the time to think on a grand scale, according to Udi; and Charlie, shaken by the events of that fall, craving a change, couldn’t help but be stirred by his friend’s boldness. To balance it, though, he proposed bringing Roger in as a fourth partner. After Harvard, Roger had gone on to law school in Chicago; he’d trained in contract law, which would prove useful to them in negotiating future deals, and he could offer what Charlie felt he and Udi needed most—a cautious perspective. If Charlie were to give up his job at Warren Welch, he told both Udi and Roger, he needed Roger on board with him. He would await his friend’s decision.
But whatever the outcome in this case, Charlie already sensed his days at his firm were drawing to a close. He’d lost his enthusiasm for the work and, especially, his patience with Terrance Welch and his demands; flouting his boss’s instructions, he’d taken to leaving the office early or slipping out for several hours at
lunch. Either he went walking through the quiet Midtown streets, or else he took the train up to Washington Heights to visit Alice, who’d by now spent almost the last month in the hospital.
Those hospital visits became points of respite in his hectic week. Once he’d passed into the psychiatric unit, it was as if there had never been any national catastrophe; no one chattered about the city’s most vulnerable targets or stammered ingenuously about the cruelty of the world. Nurses kept the TV tuned to the Disney Channel; the patients hummed and muttered and moved slowly; their focus was soft and drifting. Those white ward halls really might seem a quiet refuge—if not for the dreadful door that barred the exit, the sort of heavily secured, elaborate contraption worthy of being financed by Warren Welch.
During his first meetings with Alice, Charlie made a point of sitting at a distance from that door—for her sake, not to insist upon the fact of her confinement. But it turned out Alice didn’t miss her freedom all that much: the ward suited her, she admitted, and her appearance bore this out. She looked healthier, cheeks plumped up by hospital food.
“There are certain advantages to being here,” she said, though she refused to be specific until Charlie’s fourth visit, when she had a reason to confide. She’d been writing again, she let him know: twenty to thirty pages every day. In less than a month, she’d already filled every page—front and back—of the three notebooks she’d had her mother bring her. She’d hidden them under her bed, but one of the nurses had found them and confiscated them, and so she’d raised the subject with Charlie in order to ask him to sneak in several more.
“You’ll need to do it quietly. Dr. Baum disapproves. Apparently, he should be the only one permitted to have thoughts here. That I might be able to reflect on my own personal history—on things he doesn’t know and might not see—it drives him crazy. To be honest, I think he’s even intimidated by me.”
She laughed, gleefully, and Charlie suspected she wasn’t altogether wrong.
“Notebooks, okay; I’ll get them.”
“And if you could do me one more favor.” She paused, looking right and left, making certain none of the nurses was in hearing range. “When I’m done, if you could slip the completed notebooks out, hold on to them for me. But you have to swear, you can’t read anything I give you, and you can’t show it to anyone—especially not Georgia.”
He agreed, refraining from asking the question that nagged him: What were these subjects that Alice was so determined to keep private, from her old friend above all? To ask about such things would be unfair, he felt, with Alice so confused, and she must be confused if she imagined he still kept up such close contact with Georgia.
It seemed as though, for Alice, the friendships between them were unchanged since college, as if she’d simply erased the last four years of their estrangement. Perhaps such details were of no interest to the mad imagination, Charlie thought, which struck him then as the most faithful kind: a place where relationships that mattered could never come to an end.
—
The next week, when Charlie dropped in to see Alice after work, the nurse at reception told him he’d have to take a seat: Alice was occupied with another visitor.
“Are you sure?” To his knowledge, Alice never had any other visitors, not since her mother and her brother had vanished back to Cleveland after just a few days in New York. He checked the sign-in sheet, set out on a clipboard and tied in place with purple ribbon; two lines above his own was a signature he recognized: Georgia Calvin.
“I’ll come back another time.” He signaled to the desk nurse to let him out and was waiting for the steel door to unlock and click open when he heard a woman’s voice.
“Charlie.”
Georgia was unhappy—that was his first reaction to the sight of her, though he couldn’t have said precisely why; she was smiling and composed, dressed in a womanly beige linen skirt and with her hair cut to her shoulders. She stepped toward him, leaning in as if she meant to touch him, then she stopped short: “I should have called to tell you I’d be here.”
“Why are you here?” His tone was rough, but Georgia had caught him off guard; it was an aggressive move, he felt, turning up here, breaking her promise to him, intruding on what had become his business, thanks largely to her.
Georgia dropped her smile and crossed her arms: “I am the one Alice chose to call.”
Though not in her right mind, he might have pointed out, and this still didn’t explain why Georgia had chosen to respond. Presumably her friendship with Alice had ended the night Alice had shown up with two suitcases in tow at his door. Now, despite whatever argument they’d had then and despite all that came after—Alice’s article and the hurt it must have caused—Georgia had made this trip to visit: there must be some motive behind it. Loyalty to an old friend in distress was the generous interpretation, but Charlie hadn’t yet resolved how generous he meant to be.
Regardless, he didn’t want to get dragged into the past—or into anything—with Georgia now. “Fine, you’ve come all this way, go ahead. I’ll visit her another time.”
He didn’t wait for Georgia to reply: signaling the nurse to get the door, he exited the ward. After a moment, the door behind him opened, and Georgia stepped out again, to stand beside him at the elevator bay.
Alice was napping, she explained; the orderly in charge had recommended returning in an hour. “Is there some place nearby to grab a bite?”
—
Charlie led her to the same coffee shop where he’d sat waiting for Alice her first night in the ward. He had every intention of depositing Georgia there and leaving, but when, outside the entrance, she inquired if he’d had dinner, he found himself agreeing to sit down.
Fleeing her would be cowardly, he thought, and at least this coffee shop was a kind of announcement that he didn’t mean to make a fuss out of their meeting; otherwise, he’d have suggested they walk a few blocks farther in search of cooler music, better lighting. To make his lack of commitment clearer still, he kept his order limited to just a Coke, though he was actually hungry, and though Georgia was having split pea soup and a large side of coleslaw. She hadn’t eaten, she told him, since she’d gotten on the train.
She studied him across the table; he was embarrassed by the intimacy of her gaze: Finally a proper tie and not a bow tie, finally a suit that isn’t from the Salvation Army.
Georgia had changed in small ways, too. Her cheeks were sleeker; in place of the berry gloss and blush she’d used at school, she was made up in subdued browns, gold swept under the brows. The plainer clothes she wore now—no beads or embroidery, not showing as much skin—were even sexier than the girlish cutoffs and open-necked blouses of her college days.
“It’s really so good to see you, Charlie.”
He nodded, afraid of offering her encouragement, afraid she might say something to shrink the distance between them he was at such pains to sustain. In the halls of the mental ward, he might have just told her good night; one of the doctors should have stopped him. It was his sickness: sitting here with Georgia once again.
“So then,” he began, trying to sound disinterested. “You’ve been living in D.C.?”
Since graduation, she said, despite her distaste for the city; she’d moved down for a job at the National Gallery of Art. “I’m sort of a fund-raising geisha; also not what I planned. But sometimes things just happen, don’t they?”
Already Charlie felt the gaps in her explanation. Storrow had worked in D.C. once and, back at Harvard, had bragged about the many opportunities that awaited him there still. “Four years is a long time to spend somewhere you don’t like for no good reason.”
She offered him a sideways glance, one he knew well: Can’t keep anything from you.
“You’re right, of course. And I’ve asked myself a hundred times why I’m still there. Maybe I’ve been hiding; maybe I’ve been stuck. At one point, I almost came up here; there was a position at the Soho Guggenheim, but I was—am—having problems with
my dad. He’s living over in Williamsburg now. Considers the city interesting again—especially since the towers.” She pressed her lips together, a bitter expression Charlie had never seen on her before, certainly not while speaking of her father. “I doubt you’d know about it, but he’s had a resurgence; it started with a show three years ago—some old photographs of me—I think I showed you once, maybe you’ve forgotten.”
As if he could have forgotten: those perfect nudes, that perfect mix of sympathy and desire she’d managed to arouse from the first day of their acquaintance. He supposed she was up to the same game now, going on about the show in Chelsea, the family argument over those pictures being exhibited again.
“My mother was appalled, but my father wasn’t going to miss his chance. This was the year of Monica, mind you, and any artist with a prayer of succeeding has to have a genius for timing, my father says, mistaken by us laypeople for luck. One year later, no one would give a shit about those pictures, but I’d just been in the news and there was interest in the whole scandal, still.”
It was the closest they’d come to acknowledging the events at Harvard, and the effects Georgia had endured in their wake.
Her food arrived; she stirred her soup in large circles and stared out of the window. An old woman was passing by, dragging along a grocery cart.
“I thought about you,” Georgia said, “when I heard about the towers. Where your offices were, if you were okay.”
“I’m okay.”
“Yes, you clearly are.” Another close-lipped smile.
His first impression had been right, he thought. Georgia was unhappy.
But so what if she was? Why should that matter to him? Twenty minutes with her and he felt himself getting drawn back into the old familiar drama: battles between her indignant mother and her self-indulgent father—a man for whom Charlie felt no pity, less even than he felt for Storrow. The longer he and Georgia sat together, not saying Storrow’s name, the more Charlie’s thoughts went to him, and to what he still didn’t know about Georgia’s feelings for the man: if she’d loved him and suffered with him—if she’d feared him and avoided him, if Storrow had anything to do with why she’d come here to see Alice and was sitting with him now.