Ghost Town
Page 15
But he was not happy with this idea. He wanted to discharge the full awful burden of the thing and he made this very clear. I saw his frustration and his annoyance. There were groans and sighs, rubbings of face and skull. Then he returned to his original question, the question that had brought him to my apartment on Riverside Drive late at night and against his better judgment, and the tone of voice was one of utter bafflement and perplexity.
—So why did she do it?
—Why do you think she did it?
I had known even before Dan arrived at my apartment that night that if I could bring him this far then much might be accomplished. I had made him tell me how she was put together, this beguiling, dangerous creature, and he had answered me thoughtfully and frankly. I had led him from there into the affair with Jay Minkoff. Now the question: what else was there in Kim Lee, that she would behave as she had with the guy’s father? I gave him time to think.
—Because she’s the devil.
Inwardly I exulted. He may have barked with bitter irony as he said it, but that was not the point. He was turning.
—Go on.
—Christ, I don’t know! Because there’s that thing in her we all have, that drive or whatever you want to call it to work against our own interest. The self-destructive urge. To tear down whatever we’ve managed to build, whatever’s good.
—And where does that come from?
—You want me to say the death instinct but I don’t believe in the fucking death instinct. Maybe she just wanted to have sex with him and thought she could get away with it.
—She could have had sex with anyone. She did.
He fell silent. Again I said nothing. I had brought him face-to-face with an aspect of Kim Lee he had deferred confronting until now. I had no great confidence that an epiphany was about to occur; insight is never a guarantor of behavioral change. At least let him see her clearly, this devil who’d infatuated him so utterly, at least let him define the element in her nature he had so far avoided or denied.
But he was allowing me no access to his thoughts.
—All right, I said, let’s talk about what happened next. Paul Minkoff comes down to her loft, ostensibly to look at her art, and they have sex. Then what?
He stared at the ceiling, and the lamp on the table beside him, the only light I had lit in the room, threw his face into a wild terrain of chasms and gullies: he was all pain. The big dome of the forehead was scored and slashed with his suffering.
—He paid her and he left.
—Did they make another appointment?
—I guess so. It didn’t end there.
—They established a pattern. A structure to the thing.
—Yeah. The kid went to work and an hour later the old man showed up.
Oh, and the bitterness, the hollowness of the laugh that accompanied that bald statement of fact—!
—Then one day they got caught, I said.
—Yeah.
—You think they wanted to get caught?
He was at the end of his tether. He would have given up at this point, stood up, stormed out, whatever—but he didn’t. I wouldn’t have let him, and he knew it.
—Did they want to get caught? I guess they must have. It’s very sick.
—They both wanted it?
—I guess he was as sick as her.
—Why?
—He knew the risk they were running.
—But where did his sickness come from?
—He must have hated his son. I don’t know why. You tell me.
—Why do fathers hate their sons?
He grew fractionally less hostile when I made a question general, moved away however minimally from the fraught local specifics of the thing.
—They’re threatened by them. They arouse the fear of death in them. They resent a potential which no longer exists for them. I don’t know the fucking man!
—Do you think she’s still having sex with him?
Again I had pushed him to the edge. I saw him struggle with it. I could not know exactly how deep his true feelings were for the Chinese prostitute. It was possible he would throw in his hand, shake his head and walk away. As far as I was concerned that would be the best outcome of all. But if he refused to let go of her—
Again he would not reveal his thoughts to me. Enough that I had forced him this far.
—Alright. So they got caught. What happened, Jay came by the loft one morning and found his father there?
—Something like that.
—Go on.
So he told me what he knew. They were in bed, Kim Lee and the old man. They heard the buzzer. They might have ignored it, but Jay had a key. She buzzed him in. The elevator opened directly into the loft so the old man had nowhere to go. He stayed in the bedroom. Kim Lee was at the door in her robe when Jay stepped out of the elevator. She made him coffee.
Listening to Dan narrate all this in a flat, tired voice, step by weary step, I could not help but be suddenly urgently engaged by the scene he described. I imagined in Kim Lee an excitement of which she revealed nothing, as she moved around in her kitchen in her robe, making coffee for her lover. She had never been more alive than she was at that moment, in that state of exquisite tension, with so much hanging on what happened in the next few minutes, and Jay languidly murmuring to her, unaware that his world was about to be devastated.
The tension was too much for the old man, apparently. Growing bored of hiding in the bedroom—he had never in his life had to hide from anything, power exempts one from having to hide—he stepped into the kitchen. The astonishment of the son.
—Daddy! What are you doing here?
The silence that follows. The stillness. The three figures frozen in space as they await the sickening impact of whatever it is that is coming at them at unimaginable speed—
Ground Zero has now shrunk to the extent that I can stay within two or three blocks of the ruins on all but the west side of the site. As I thread my way along narrow streets that once lay obscured in the shadow of the towers, new perspectives are suddenly apparent. That gothic remnant of the south tower, five stories high, is now visible in its entirety from the stub end of Greenwich Street just off Rector. Beyond it, from high pipes, water pours ceaselessly into the ruins, where subterranean fires still burn, and smoke lazily drifts up among the tilting cranes into a cloudless October sky.
Last week on Broadway, close to Wall Street, I came upon a store that I had never noticed before. It is called THE NEW YORK STOCKING EXCHANGE. It used to sell underwear of a sexually provocative variety; patronized by the likes of Kim Lee, I imagine. Behind a metal grille the plate glass of the store window has cracked, and large shards of glass lie among the disordered display. A limbless, headless mannikin’s torso clad in a skimpy red teddy dangles from a string, turning gently in the breeze. The legs of mannikins thrown down by the blast and still sheathed in fishnet are covered in thick gray ash. And there is a large sign that reads: 20% OFF ALL BRAS AND GIRDLES.
Bush has signed the Patriot Act, much to the disgust of those who believe it gives federal authorities powers far beyond anything conceivably necessary for our national security. That is not all. Ashcroft has pushed through a change in prison regulations which will allow federal agents to listen in on defendants’ conversations with their lawyers. This sounds to many people like an egregious violation of the attorney-client privilege, and it’s been said that the Justice Department is becoming insatiable in its desire to destroy the Bill of Rights. I would have said the same myself, once. Not now. Not after what I’ve seen. But Dan and I have not talked about any of this, in fact Dan and I have not spoken face-to-face since the night he told me about Kim Lee’s betrayal of her lover, and their subsequent reconciliation: it seems Jay Minkoff in effect refused to absorb the pain his father attempted to cause him, and decided instead to try to understand the impulse behind the injury. Then he went back to Kim Lee to salvage their relationship.
—It was the last act of his life, Dan had sa
id. Probably the best.
I’d been frankly skeptical. It may or may not have been the last, best act of Jay Minkoff’s life, but I was certain of one thing: the prostitute Kim Lee did not deserve such generosity. I said this to Dan. He lifted his big head and fastened his weary gaze on me. For several seconds he silently stared at me, and I began to grow distinctly uncomfortable. Then he spoke.
—I don’t think you’re much use to me anymore, he said.
We have had a number of telephone conversations, but he is adamant: he wishes to discontinue his therapy. He says he does not need me. This is a worry. He is not strong. He may have succeeded in the short term in suppressing his terrors but they have not disappeared. They will come back, and when they do he will run away, convinced that Kim Lee is suffocating him, just as his mother suffocated him when she was alive; then he will need me. In our last phone conversation he told me he was moving in with her. I asked him if he thought this was wise. What would happen to the apartment on Twenty-Third Street? Surely he’d be keeping it, in case everything went wrong with Kim Lee? But no, he was selling it. He said it was full of ghosts.
Battery Park City is open again, though strange in its emptiness, the absence of the usual convoys of strollers and nannies, joggers and rollerbladers. The apartment buildings in this affluent development at the southern tip of the island suffered extensive damage when the towers came down, and a number of moving vans are in evidence as tenants, perhaps with small children, and worried about air quality, head out for the suburbs. There is an esplanade along the Hudson here, and very peaceful it is on a fresh autumn day. Many of the workers from Ground Zero eat their lunch here, gazing out across the river at the large construction projects clearly visible on the Jersey shore, these in stark contrast to the grisly demolition going forward on the Manhattan side.
I saw them once. They were coming out of a restaurant on Greenwich Street. They didn’t see me, or at least I don’t think they did. They gave no sign. He shambled along beside her, and at one point threw an arm around her narrow little shoulders. They looked happy enough. I miss my big bear but I think he will come back to me when the affair collapses. He knows I am here for him, I don’t have to tell him that. For now, just to catch the occasional glimpse of him is enough. I wonder what he’s doing. I wonder about the woman from Battery Park, the one who wanted a funeral for her husband but had no body to put in the coffin. I would like to know if he got her a funeral. Did she find closure? Did she, Dan?
A Note on the Author
Patrick McGrath is the author of a short-story collection, Blood and Water and Other Tales, and six novels, including Asylum, Dr Haggard’s Disease, and Spider. His Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution won the Premio Flaiano Prize in Italy. His most recent novel is Port Mungo, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2004. He lives in New York.
By the Same Author
BLOOD AND WATER AND OTHER TALES
THE GROTESQUE
SPIDER
DR HAGGARD’S DISEASE
ASYLUM
MARTHA PEAKE
PORT MUNGO
CONSTANCE
STELLA
TRAUMA
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‘A work of utter brilliance’
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Throughout their privileged but highly eccentric childhood Jack Rathbone has enjoyed the constant adoration of his sister Gin. When both attend art school in London, Jack plunges into a passionate affair with Vera Savage, a painter some years his senior, and they soon run away to New York. From a bruised and bereft distance Gin follows their southward progress to Miami, then Havana, and so to Port Mungo, a wilting swamp town on the steamy Gulf of Honduras. There Jack devotes himself to his art, and works with a fervour as intense as the restless, boozy waywardness to which Vera succumbs, which even the birth of two daughters cannot subdue. As the tension builds, a tragedy occurs that will tear apart not only their world but that of Jack’s watchful sister, Gin.
‘Gothic elements have been woven into a story of delicacy and not a little humour. The result is that literary rarity: a page-turner of real intelligence … A master storyteller has done it again’
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First published 2005
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Copyright © 2005 by Patrick McGrath
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