by Joan Silber
“Know what you need to do?” Jason said. “Go up on the roof and sleep. Sleep the whole thing off in the open air. Listen to Dr. Jason.”
When we got back to the apartment, he dragged up a sleeping bag to use for a mattress and a fresh sheet for a coverlet. He spread them out in the ell of one of the chimneys, and I lay down at once in the same short cotton dress I had worn to work. “You feel safe?” Jason said. “I think you’re safe.”
“I don’t even care,” I said. I looked across at the line of roofs along the sky, and I closed my eyes and that was it, I fell down the well of sleep.
When I woke up later, I had been crying in a dream, something about being left alone on a highway. It took me a while to remember where I was—there was the smell of soot near my head and I heard the shuttling rhythm of traffic noises from the street below. The air around me was dark. I was thinking how much I would look like a corpse now to an airline pilot overhead or a pigeon flying over the roof.
I’m sick, I thought. Why did he put me up here? You don’t put a sick person out where she’s just a sitting duck for the nearest breaking-and-entering maniac. The fever had shaken me out of my sleep. I whimpered to myself over this, and then I felt dangerously unsettled again in my stomach.
The cramp was like a wave of panic, but I was too weak to want to move. I just wanted to wait (I had a little time) until I absolutely had to get up and go back down to the apartment. I didn’t want to talk to Jason anymore. He had the wrong plan, he was leading me down the wrong path.
I’d begun to raise myself off my elbows when I heard a noise at the end of the roof near the ladder, a rustling motion. My body, half unfolded, went stiff with fright. There were footfalls on the tar paper; the feet made a brushing, sandy sound. It could have been someone from the building, just cooling off. The Li twins’ mother, say. When he coughed, it sounded like a man, but how did I know that? I heard what was either his breathing or the distant rush of noises from the street. I kept thinking maybe I didn’t hear anything at all, but I never thought any menace was real—what a slow learner I was. He walked around and stopped near the edge, where I could see his outline next to one of the giant sunflowers the Glowackis’s grandmother had planted in coffee tins. He took a plant under his arm, its big stem bowing in front of him, and he walked off the roof with it and down the ladder.
Another time I might have thought it was funny that I had been so badly frightened by a plant thief. I thought I should wait to make sure he wasn’t coming back for anything else. But I really did have to go down to the bathroom at once.
And then my bowels loosened all by themselves, nothing could have stopped them, and I was lying in a pool of my own shit. I was a broken bag, a disgusting mess, a river of foul smell.
My nice little cotton sundress, a print of hibiscus flowers, was a rag over a flood of shit. I had not expected this so soon—I thought I had years before it happened—this fieldmark of my illness. I wasn’t ready for it. But people always think that about everything. I was glad that I was alone, that no one else was around to see me this way. I’m not used to this, I thought. Me of all people.
Cute young thing awash in her own waste. I was crying a little and my nose ran and I thought, if I start to throw up and I drool too we’ll have almost all the bodily fluids running at once, won’t we? Maybe I can arrange to pee and bleed at the same time.
One thing I knew: all my pretty-girl nerve was going to be no help at all here. Good-bye to all that. All the particulars of my face and shape and age and smartness were beside the point here, not interesting at all. I was going to have to get over myself. Slip out of what I thought I was, like an outfit, that didn’t, as my mother would say, do anything for me.
I knew this was not exactly possible, not in that easy way, but nothing like this had occurred to me before, and for a moment I felt very easy and light. I was like an old person, in my indifference, and I couldn’t imagine why I had been afraid. I had lost Elisa and become something airier and without form. It was only for a moment that I felt this lightness, but I did have it to remember later.
SO I GOT to my feet and I wrapped the sheet around me. I took the stinking hulk of me through the hall back to Jason’s apartment. The sleeping bag was going to have to go in the washing machine too.
“What?” Jason said, when he got wind of me coming through the door. “Jesus. Holy fucking Christ.”
“I didn’t like the roof,” I said.
I threw the bedding on the bathroom floor and I took off my clothes and I got under the shower. For a second the hot water made the smell stronger, and then it turned into the great sought-after solution, the wetness without taste or odor or color. While I was under the water I was really quite happy.
12
Gabe: A List
In all the long hours I spent missing Elisa, I had more time than I needed to think about my life and what didn’t happen in it.
1. If I’d Never Hired Steve
I went to high school with Steve but I never liked him all that much. Why did I hire him? If I hadn’t, I might have kept on as I was, making steady money as a dealer, getting older.
I was always good at saving money. In the life I never got to have, people wanted me to invest in their leather clothing stores, their juice bars, but these ideas had no appeal for me. I lent money to my brothers, but otherwise I didn’t spend much.
Every few weeks I went to the bank to put my cash in a safe deposit box. I was a little coarsened by the money, after so many years as a dealer. I walked around in my thousand-dollar sports jacket and I expected people to listen to me; I expected that any inconvenience wasn’t going to be mine.
On my thirtieth birthday I took all my friends and subcontractors out to a restaurant. Lobster and sangria, a hip menu at the time. At the end of the night, people thanked me lavishly and I went home in a glow of pride and vague lonesomeness.
The next day I got a phone call saying that my father was in the hospital, he’d had a stroke. He was all hooked up to machines when I got there, and one side of his face was slack and unmoored; he blinked at me miserably from the pillow. My mother was talking in a loud and useless way to my brothers, who were nodding dumbly, and I saw that I was going to have to do everything. I had a talk with the nurses, who found me the doctor, whom I cornered into answering our questions. I did the things that had to be done.
All my silky resolve and my practice in not being crossed were good here. I got my father more attention, a different doctor. I paid for a private room. The nurses, whom I always tried to be nice to, started calling me the sweetheart son, although my brothers are both much better looking. Even in my unled life, I wasn’t a handsome man.
I had just stopped seeing a woman named Lois, a daffy, pretty girl who got sharp-tongued when she drank. The first night I went home from the hospital, Lois called and said she wanted to meet me for a talk. What kind of talk? She was pregnant, she said, and maybe we needed more than one talk.
Although I was probably not in love with Lois just then, the glory of rising to the occasion was on me. “Shocking news,” I said. “Great news.” I was full of strength and loftiness. Lois was hugely surprised.
If my parents knew where my money came from, they never said, and I covered my father’s home care when he got out. He lived for another six years. I took the rest of the money and went off with Lois, who had always been smart and interesting and who softened considerably through motherhood, and we moved to Vermont, where Lois had friends. The first summer, I biked around the roads and helped with the baby and I thought it was not so bad around there. I set myself up in a bicycle store, which took a while to take off but did very well after a year or two. In winter I closed down the store and spent the days indoors reading, like a gentleman farmer in the cold months.
We built our own house, with a deck and a view and a garden the size of a football field. When our second son, Francesco, was in junior high, we were involved in a local battle about asbestos in the walls
of the school, and before I knew it I was running for mayor. It wasn’t that hard to get elected. My family in Brooklyn thought this was a riot, but I sort of liked the job. My oldest son, Lorenzo, said, “You’re the earl of the peaceable kingdom.”
2. If I’d Gone Back to School
In the years after I got out of prison, I got involved with two perfectly nice women, first Judy and then Yvonne. Yvonne had the idea that before it was too late, I should go back to school. I was selling futon sleep sofas at the time. “Your mind is going to turn to kapok stuffing,” she said.
I had never gone further than the first semester of college, so there I was, a full-grown man in his thirties, taking out loans to cover my night studies at Hunter with classes full of girls in Farrah Fawcett hairdos and platform shoes. I overcame my embarrassment by saying nothing in class.
And a lot of it was horseshit—mentally dowdy professors trying to be bright and sparkling. My freshman comp teacher thought I was a genius, my poli sci teacher thought I was a misguided toad. In my second year I wrote a paper on the Pantheon in Rome, and from this I understood that what I wanted to be was an architectural historian.
Meanwhile my loans were piling up. But I had a mentor, for the first time in my life, a brisk and motherly art historian who, in the end, got me funding in a graduate program in the coldest state of the Midwest. Yvonne refused to go with me and I was lonely as a stray dog but I worked long hours, in a trance of eyestrained rapture, in my icy carrel in the library. I lived as the pale and under-aired troll my family always thought I was.
My one romance, with a smart nineteen-year-old, almost cost me my fellowship, but to everyone’s surprise I got picked for a prize to study for a year in Italy. I could not believe how Rome looked when the plane landed in the morning—the umbrella pines in the distance, the toasty skies. The ugly modern housing on the train into town did not take away my amazement, which was later tinged with a familiarity and vexation quite sweet in itself. I fell in love with Pina, a beautiful and lively art restorer, and I married her in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, in front of the mosaics of the life of the Virgin. I never left Rome, much to the delight of Pina’s family. At first I scraped by, leading student groups on tours, and then I wrote a book and got a job teaching in an American college program in the city. I wrote three more books, all pretty good, and then a very fine one on Bramante in which I was almost able to say what I meant about the religious properties of space. Our two boys, Francesco and Lorenzo, grew up bilingual, feverish soccer fans and propagandists for hip-hop music to their Euro schoolmates.
3. If I’d Stayed in Prison Longer
I might have gone to prison for a much longer time. If I’d had a meaner judge—someone who hated my quiet manners and my nice suit, who thought my composure was an affront. Or if the laws had changed for the worse a little sooner. With a longer sentence, I would have been sent somewhere entirely different, a medium- or a maximum-security prison.
What could I do in this kind of place? I only knew how to sit tight and shut up. I kept to myself as much as I could, but people didn’t leave me alone just because I wanted it. I was tested over and over by other inmates, with an audience for every test. Men who had been in the place longer offered to be my protectors—more than one came forward to advise me—and it was easy to guess wrong about which ally to pick. My instincts about people went only so far in this place. I had to think about what I was doing all the time. I had less time to read, less unguarded time in my own head.
After a few years like that, I was a hardened version of myself. My face got bony around the jawline and my eyes looked dead, although on the inside I was often quite sentimental and childish. I hadn’t wanted anyone from my old life to contact me here, but now I wrote letters. They were intelligent letters, I hadn’t turned into a goon. I wrote to Joel, my old college friend, that being in prison was like being the Burrower in Kafka’s story, a creature with fresh sources of paranoia at every turn. What did Joel think about the design for the World Trade Center, did the twin towers change the scale of everything? I asked him to write and tell me how they looked.
The topic I really wanted to know about was Steve, my ex-friend, the undercover cop who had sent me to this prison, but I didn’t want to indulge myself in this curiosity. Maureen was the only person with any connection to this scene that I could even ask. In Maureen’s second letter she said that she had no information about Steve because neither she nor anybody she knew would have anything to do with him and if it were up to her, all [this word was blacked out by the warden’s office] and informers would have their [word blacked out] cut off and stuffed in their [words blacked out]. Even in censored form, this was much uglier and more violent than what I had been thinking.
I wanted Steve to come to a bad end, that was all. However hardened I was by now, I was not a man who had a really vicious imagination. I wanted Steve to be fired from the police for something stupid like repeated drunkenness, to be two-timed and mocked and ditched by whatever woman he was with, to grow fat and discouraged and spinelessly depressed, to know himself as a spectacle of shame and cowardice before the world. I wished him failure, not torture.
So I didn’t write to Maureen after that. When I came out of prison, I worked for a while for my brother Rich, who had a limo rental business, and I got involved with a woman named Rita who was kind of bad news. When I wasn’t with her, I read.
Rita wanted me to have more money. She was a silly woman but being in bed with her was amazing to me and for a while I was in thrall. On a day when I was struck with great loneliness I went to see the man who had been my mentor in prison and who lived in the Bronx now. I didn’t even like him all that much but he was the closest thing I had to a confidant. One morning after Rita and I had a fight, she called my parole board to tell them I was consorting with a former inmate, and they arrested me for breaking parole. I had to go back in for another year.
After I came out the second time, my aunt Angie let me live with her. My parole officer found me a job as a porter in an office building. I would read all day and then go mop the floors at night. I had nothing to do with women or with dating. I was done with that. My aunt was nice to me. She fed me great dinners and played poker with me at night, and every now and then got me to go to Mass with her. I got fatter on her food, and I wouldn’t answer when she said I shouldn’t be so discouraged and depressed. You could have been more, she said. You still could be.
13
Elisa
Gabe was never home, no matter how many friendly messages I left on his machine. I called the camera store and a man told me he wasn’t in that day, did I want to speak to someone else? I called the next day and a woman said, “Oh, no, he’s not here. He’s on vacation. I think maybe he went to Switzerland.”
“Where?” I said.
Gabe never went anywhere—he spent his vacations at home reading. He hadn’t told me he was going on any trips. And Switzerland was an expensive country, way over budget for him. So where was he really?
“He totally needed a rest,” the woman said. “We all do, you know.”
I thought that Gabe’s friend Ed could tell me where he was, but the woman said Ed was gone too.
I HAD BEEN so happy making those phone calls. “Maybe you’d like to go out for a drink,” I was going to say when he called back. He would say yes in his usual measured way, but he would be quite pleased, quite glad.
Not so, apparently. Why was I always sure he was there for the asking? The whole four years I spent with Gabe, I thought of my young and adorable self as a lavish bit of bounty I was gifting him with. I don’t know that Gabe ever saw it that way, but the idea of this had been quite a pleasant thing for me to live with. My diagnosis wiped that out—that feeling of being a flouncy little blessing to him. Things sat differently between us, once I was a princess without a fortune. Then it made me squirm to be on view in my fallen state. Then I behaved as badly as any displaced royal.
FOR A WEEK I pho
ned his apartment, though by the fourth day I stopped leaving any messages. Where was Gabe really? Who was he with? I was still not feeling great, and the disappointment was hard on me. I had been thinking about our wedding.
I had been thinking that if we had the ceremony at Saint Agnes, then maybe Fiona and Ira would let us have the reception in their loft. We’d get some nice caterer who did delicious and playful food—carved vegetable landscapes, portraits of us in lobster salad. But how would everyone get from the church in midtown to the loft in Brooklyn? Could we hire a fleet of limos? How much would a bus cost? A bus could be fun.
Dream on, I thought to myself. I would not have said I was the sort of woman who planned imaginary weddings, spun forth those puffballs of girlish longing. I would have said I was not stupid in that particular way. Anyone would have said that about me.
WHEN I FIRST went outside again, after six long days of being sick in bed, I was glad to be on the street, away from the smell of turpentine, away from Jason. The morning sky had a white, early brightness and the air hadn’t turned steamy yet. I felt light on my feet and free, stepping neatly along the sidewalk, looking into all the store windows, and I thought that my night on the roof had given me this freedom, just a little of it. I walked across Avenue A with the floaty sensation of being hollow and weightless from not having eaten much for days, and thinking, whose body is this? My body, I thought, but as if it were a skulking child I wanted to be nice to, as if I were claiming it only to be kind. This flimsy bone-cage was making its way down the street with me in it, but I sort of saw through us both.
I DID TRY to think, whose body, the next day when I was waiting in the doctor’s office, clenched and scared. This was a clearer idea to me than it sounds, and it let me summon my better style for the not-so-pleasant conference I had to have with the doctor. I didn’t have prayer so I had to rely on what incantations I had in me.