by Alon Preiss
Eden sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Was there a reason why?”
Alice rolled over on her side and rested on her elbow. “Did you see my husband on TV?”
“No.”
Alice flipped onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. “That’s good,” she said.
Eden said: “Okay, thirty second sprint. Two-minute run. Then repeat. Eight times. Okay?”
Alice nodded.
“And then a five mile cool down. Can you do it?”
“If you can do it,” Alice said, “then I can do it.”
“Hah!” Eden said. “If you tell me what happened with Blake, I’ll let you slice a mile off the cool down.”
Alice shrugged.
She and Eden sprinted beside the Hudson river in silence, the West Side Highway on the other side of them, and they passed in-line skaters and power walkers and bicyclists and unicyclists and casual strollers in love, arms and gazes locked affectionately, all catching the last light of an unusually cool late summer Thursday.
Back at Eden’s apartment, some hours later.
“I’m going to get groceries,” Alice said. “To thank you for your hospitality! I’m cooking tonight.”
She headed to the door. Eden tried to stop her. Then she wondered why she was trying to stop Alice from getting groceries. Then she remembered why, but by then it was too late, and Alice was already bounding down the stairs.
Eden folded up the bed and opened up a square card table and set it in the corner of the room, unfolded two chairs. Alice put a candle in a candle holder and served dinner — salad, then linguine with salmon in dill sauce. They sat there, flickering in the candle light, talking idly about the race in two days, a race they’d been training for all summer. Eden wanted to blow out the candle. Alice’s husband had dumped her. Now here was Alice, in Eden’s little apartment, with a bag full of clothes, and here they were, eating salmon — of all things! — by candle light. Eden just wanted to blow out the candle and turn on the lights. But she didn’t. She wanted to talk about Blake, to ask all about Blake, but she didn’t. So she sat there at the little card table, suffocating under the weight of the heady romantic aura that had filled up her little room.
“So,” Eden said casually. “How long do you plan to sack out here?”
Alice twirled some linguine onto her fork.
“It’s your apartment,” she said. Then, like a stab: “You wouldn’t have asked me that six months ago.”
Eden could think of nothing to say. So she changed the subject. And the conversation, little by little, drifted away into silence.
After dinner, Eden changed into pajamas in the bathroom. Men’s pajamas that she’d appropriated from Roger, which stretched below the knees. She looked herself up and down in the bathroom mirror. She looked like a little soldier.
She turned out the light and slipped into bed and pulled the sheets up to her chin and stared at the blank wall where the TV used to be, while Alice brushed her teeth in the bathroom.
A while later Alice came out of the bathroom. She was naked. She crossed in front of the window, pulled the sheet to the side and climbed into bed. She put her arms around Eden, rested her head on Eden’s shoulder.
“I didn’t think I would need to pack any PJ’s.”
Eden kissed her on the forehead.
Alice fell asleep almost instantly, and Eden lay there for a long time, staring at the wall, Alice’s arms wrapped around her.
The next morning, when Alice woke up, Eden was gone. A note was taped to the bathroom mirror. Left to do some errands, and some research. See you at dinner.
The next day, Alice and Eden woke up early and drove in Alice’s car out of Manhattan. The race was a ten kilometer course that began in the streets then cut into a forest, went along a lake for several miles, then ended with a torturous course up and down almost mountainous hills. The race was scheduled for 9 a.m., and Alice maneuvered through traffic, glancing at her watch about every forty-five seconds.
They arrived just in time, stretched for only five minutes as they stood in the middle of the crowd of intimidatingly athletic women.
“Which of us will finish first, you think?” Alice asked, looking around.
Eden smiled. The idea of either of them actually winning was funny. “We’ll tie,” she said, “and split the ten thousand.”
The race began.
For a while, Eden ran side by side with Alice, but then something clicked inside of her head, and whatever it was flowed down through her body until it surged in her legs, and she felt herself flying, her limbs moving on their own, and she broke away from her friend, and then she moved further and further up in the crowd, slowly but surely edging her way into the front of the pack. After a half hour, there were only three women ahead of her, all world-class runners. The one farthest out front was a professional racer from Africa, about whom Eden had just read a lengthy and fawning article in Outside Magazine. When Eden was two or three yards behind, they hit a hill, one that seemed to explode into the sky like a rocket. But Eden’s speed increased into the hill, and to her shock, the other runners fell behind.
Sometime in the middle of the race, Eden thought of Alice, somewhere back there, far behind, running with elbows and legs all around her, jostling her. It made Eden feel sad. She and Alice should be winning this race together, or losing it together, crossing the finish line hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm. She wished Alice were beside her.
But she kept going.
Soon she could see the finish, and there was nothing in front of her but wind and sun. She pushed, speeding up, imagining how it would feel to cross first. But then she heard a steady thumping behind her, and the African runner passed her, her legs and arms flailing in a mad blur of muscle and sweat. Eden tried to run faster, but she could not. Then another runner passed her, a gigantic blonde from the other side of the world, with legs up to her eyebrows. Eden stared ahead, her body aching with fatigue and terrible disappointment, as the two runners continued to accelerate, and faded off into the distance.
She finished fourth. She didn’t get any money. But she could say that she finished fourth. She wondered what it was that had clicked in her head and then had surged down the rest of her body, and which had allowed her to run like that for ten solid kilometers. She wondered what it was, and she wondered if it would ever come again.
A half hour later, Alice finally found Eden. “You almost won,” Alice said. “I’m so proud of you.”
Eden was shaking with exhilaration, her muscles were still tingling. She felt stymied and excited and her head was buzzing. Alice’s pride in Eden’s accomplishment made Eden angry.
“I don’t want you to be proud of me,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Alice asked.
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” Eden said at last.
Where was Maurow to go? What was he to do now?
Back at the hotel, he made a few calls to colleagues at the company, informally telegraphing his resignation, and saying his goodbyes. People seemed sad to hear that he was leaving. That made Maurow feel gratified. He popped downstairs and into a book store, returned to his room with five books on ancient history, chronicles of dead civilizations from around the globe. Then he sat down and started reading. Thirty minutes after presenting his credit card, he didn’t know why he’d bought these books. But he found them interesting. And they helped him sleep.
Finally, a couple days later, Maurow took a car back to his office — which wasn’t his office anymore — where he made a few phone calls to arrange the terms of his exit from the company. Apparently, a lot of money and stock options and whatnot would be made available to him. His scene in the press conference on top of years and years of half-hearted and undistinguished service had made for a somewhat spectacular payoff. There seemed to be no particular point in hanging around to finish things up. He didn’t think he had much to finish. But he didn’t know where he would go. Back to his hotel, he supposed. Then,
he scoffed, Algeria? Back to Italy, to track down Benedetta? Might he take up painting again? Perhaps he would become a very famous painter. Meet a woman, fall in love, have a child, live happily ever after. Live in an idyllic goddamned cottage atop jagged cliffs, mist floating by the windows. He looked around his office one last time, stood at the window looking at the stunning arc of the city’s towers, then turned out the light and shut the door.
Maurow was in the backseat of a black limo, a small box of memorabilia set in his lap. Maurow saw Harriet’s face in his mind, vaguely disapproving, for some reason that he could not fathom, and then like a psychic wrecking ball, Alice’s face barged in, her eyes wide and trusting, her lips begging to be kissed. With the exhausted acquiescence that Alice must have felt years ago in accepting his proposal of marriage and parenthood and economic salvation, Maurow accepted his love for Alice. He wished that she were here, in the limousine with him, in his moment of deepest and most complete humiliation, waiting to be kissed. Maurow would tell her that he loved her, again and again, as many times as he could say it, if it were really what she wanted to hear.
He wished that the karmic explanation of Harriet’s presence on his little island kingdom could be made finally clear, like jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place, and he wished that her spite and contempt for him now could become equally lucid. Somewhere, in some other dimension, in the sixth chamber of God’s heart, the answer was transparent as glass. But he would die never knowing. So be it. But just as he knew that Harriet, undeniably, hated him, he knew, as certain now as the five minutes he’d spent watching her vanish down the long airport terminal, that they were both madly, passionately and deeply unhappily in love with each other. Again, with his eyes shut, Maurow watched Harriet vanish into a crowd.
The limo charged down Fifth Avenue. He was scribbling away on a yellow legal pad. It began to rain a little bit, tiny droplets pattering on the windshield.
“Stop,” Maurow said. “Right here. By the pay phone.”
The car slowed down.
“Should I wait for you?” the driver asked.
“No,” Maurow said decisively. Then, also decisively, “Yes.” A little doubt creeping into his voice: “I mean, no.” He left the box in the back seat. “Deliver this to my hotel,” he muttered, and he got out of the car, the yellow legal pad under his arm.
Outside, standing in the drizzle, Maurow waved the limo away. After a few seconds of hesitation, the driver pulled into traffic and vanished around the corner.
He heard his own telephone ring, then click away into the network, then Alice’s taped voice, then his voice, then Alice’s again. He typed in 2, then 3, then 2 again, then finally 1. Then he heard Alice say, “You can leave a message for meee ... now.” And a little beep, cutting her off.
Maurow almost spoke, almost stammered, then stopped himself. He looked down at the paper, at his scribbled notes. He almost made a joke about how he was thinking about ad-libbing, but now he’d changed his mind and wasn’t going to ad-lib, but he realized that would be an ad-lib.
While he stood on the corner, thinking about talking into the phone, a recorded voice that he’d never heard before told him that she would be hanging up on him now, and then came a little click, then dead air.
So he tried again, heard Alice’s voice, then his voice, then Alice’s voice again, then he pushed all those numbers again, then he heard Alice’s cheerful greeting. Before he could think about it, he began reading from the legal pad, probably sounding too rushed, and so he tried to slow down, but that didn’t work, so he sped up. He was not nervous, not really, just embarrassed at all the emotion he was expressing these days, and he wished it could all end. He told Alice that he wanted to come back, and that he would tell her that he loved her each morning when they woke up and each evening when they went to sleep, if she wanted him to, and he would also tell her more often, if she wanted him to. Or less often. If she wanted, he would just surprise her with the announcement, so that it would always seem special. He listed off a few more things that, from years of observation, he thought probably she wanted. Just little things that seemed small and pointless, but maybe she’d appreciate the effort, who could tell. He said, “I told you that I love Harriet, but I love her with the memory of a young man in love, and who would not prefer being a young man to an old man? Maybe someone, but not me. Anyway, what is love?” He stopped and took a deep breath. He’d actually written that on his yellow legal pad: What is love? “Still, Alice, whatever love is, I know that I love you, very deeply, and my life, now, will be devoted to your happiness; and mine too.” He almost strayed from his script to say that they should adopt a baby, find a little baby that looked just like Alice and a little bit like him too. But he didn’t say that. Then he called Eden’s apartment, heard the machine click on. “Eden,” he said. “This is Maurow. I’m calling to make up with Alice. I’m going to wait thirty seconds so you can get her and maybe, if you would, leave the room, and let her listen to this.” Then he looked at his watch, waited exactly thirty seconds, and began speaking, reading his speech again. He hoped that it wouldn’t sound rote, like a bad Broadway actor running through the same play for the five hundredth time. And he said good bye, and he hung up the pay phone.
Maurow stood on the street in the rain, the yellow legal pad clutched in his left hand. He peered up the avenue, and then down the avenue. Then he walked over to the side street, squinted as he looked east and west, his head bobbing back and forth. Yellow cabs passed by the dozen, each one carrying a passenger. He spotted a cab with its light on driving towards him from the north, and he began waving furiously, but the cab stopped and picked up a woman one block uptown. After twenty minutes of futility and several near misses, Maurow realized that he would have to do something he hadn’t ever attempted in New York. He would take the subway.
He’d tried this in Paris, anyway, and also in London, and it had worked out all right, after all. He descended into the moldy, humid darkness, bought a token, spent a moment trying to figure out how to insert it into the turnstile, then creaked over to the other side. He hunted for his train, looked around, and spotted far off in the distance a sign with the number “6” on it, and an arrow pointing straight up. Maurow ambled over to the end of the platform, then up an empty escalator and around a corner. He saw a sign pointing: “6” like some endlessly broken promise. He followed the sign, and soon he was facing a long, straight corridor with a sudden turn many many yards away. The fluorescent lights hummed, and the humming bounced off the walls, again and again, multiplying the original hum a thousand time over, and then again, until it rattled inside Maurow’s head. Maurow was all alone in the corridor.
Off in the distance, he heard someone screaming, a woman’s voice screaming, and a man’s voice yelling, both voices echoing from all ends of the corridor. Maurow couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He started to run, hoping that he might be able to help. But then the screams died away.
When he reached the crowded platform for the number 6 train, he called out, “Did anyone hear that screaming? Does anyone need help?” but everybody ignored him, except a couple of teenagers, who looked over at him and burst out laughing. Embarrassed, he walked through the crowd. Never before had he so strongly encountered the smell of people; it was the smell of subway people, not the smell of above-ground people, and he wondered how such a thing could be, as though every fifth person he passed today simply lived down here, never venturing up into the world.
The train arrived, its brakes squealing painfully, and he covered his ears, and while he was still standing white faced on the platform with his ears covered, he was swept into the car in the crush of the crowd, almost without his feet touching the floor. Inside the car, he just stood there, held up by the warm bodies of the passengers around him. The woman behind him reached up and clutched the pole, squashing her left breast against his shoulder blade, and she just left it there, as though it were the most normal place to put her left breast. This sensation —
a tingle in his back, the rumble of the subway up from her feet through her body and out her left breast — was both gently erotic and distinctly uncomfortable, and it left Maurow numb, confused and blank. The subway lurched, and Maurow was pushed leftwards by the impact; but the bodies of the passengers around him held him snugly in place.
A Chinese man passed through the car, selling little electronic doodads, a doll with eyes that glowed and a head that spun around, a bell-like contraption that made a piercingly plastic noise. He wore a shirt that displayed a faded yellow ribbon and the equally faded slogan, “Bring ‘em Home!” and he managed to slip through the car like a snake, sliding between the other passengers without creating the slightest nudge or hint of friction. Like Magic.
After one stop, there was a sudden commotion at one end of the car. Maurow looked up, and he could see passengers spilling in from the car behind him, white-faced men and women and children running, their eyes wild. People on Maurow’s car started screaming, and they started running also. Someone shouted, “What’s the matter?” and someone else shouted, “It must be something! Run!” and then everyone was running, and once against Maurow was lifted up by the crowd, and this time he had no volition. He floated along, as though on a river, and they flowed through the open doorway into the next car, and then into the one after that, picking up in each car newly terrified New Yorkers, until hordes of bodies were crammed into the very last car, and Maurow could barely breathe, and he worried that his ribs would crack. The subway screeched to a halt, and Maurow tried to cover his ears but he couldn’t move his arms. The conductor made an announcement over the loudspeaker that blared incoherently right next to him for only a few seconds before feedback set in and a terrible screeching screamed into his brain. He worried that his eardrum had popped and blood was running down the side of his face.