* * *
In the morning, I lay in bed for a long while, staring at the white tin ceiling. I ought to become more self-reliant, I thought. I shouldn’t depend so much on others anymore. From now on, 4C and I would lead more separate lives. Resolute, I went out for milk. From the front steps I could see the deli and the park. The dogwoods bloomed. The world seemed very manageable to me. I had my keys. Then I realized I’d forgotten my wallet. I was just about to turn back to retrieve it when I was stopped by the purple streak of a woman in a windbreaker. It was Claire, sudden as a breeze. She collided with my shoulder. I felt her fingers press into my skin. Had I seen him? Who? I said. Her face was swollen with lack of sleep. The fabric of her jacket draped and sang. Harold hadn’t come home the night before, and she was ready to call the police. I gently extracted her nails from the flesh of my arms. I’m sure he’ll turn up, I said.
* * *
In Morningside, tenants were always moving in and out. Students shuffled cargo up and down the stairs, they stayed for nine months, six. Then they were gone. People, in other words, were constantly disappearing, but never quite permanently. They turned up again in delis, subways, in line at the grocery store. Harold’s absence, I was sure, would be of a similarly reversible order. Of course, there were exceptions. The self-help author had passed along a cardinal rule: never let a man follow you through the door or up a set of steps, rather, make sure you are in a position to push him, in self-defense. This was all fine in theory. But from the stoop, where the storm door swung wide without regard for locks, and cathedral bells bellowed and rolled uptown, bright yellow sounds that blurred in the avenue, and where children played at recess across the street, I had trouble taking Claire’s fears seriously. She was convinced: Harold had been kidnapped. I followed her inside, certain he’d be back within the night.
* * *
Harold didn’t turn up that night, however. Nor the night after that. In the weeks that followed, and at my behest, those of us who could convince Claire to open the door brought her dinner. Dishes piled in her kitchen like morbid trophies as she sat by the phone, making calls to the police. I encouraged her to eat. I lifted a foil corner from a casserole, inserted a fork. Tenants lingered in the halls. Everyone seemed to know something about the case. One woman recalled seeing a man who walked with one leg and ran with the other, at war with himself—could he have been the culprit? No, the self-help author said. That’s only Buck. The notary public found it strange that Harold had forgotten to take down his trash. Meanwhile, the lock on the front door had broken the very evening of his abduction. This seemed a crucial clue. The police, however, were unconvinced. To them, Harold’s disappearance wasn’t a disappearance at all. These were the facts: His bank account had been emptied just days before he vanished, his assignments at the magazine wrapped up. His crayons and sketchbooks had absented themselves from his drafting table, whose proximity to the window afforded a comprehensive view of our Morningside street, a perfect vantage, the police pointed out, for departing at a moment when there were no witnesses. Finally, men of familiar size and shape and disposition had been sighted boarding planes at JFK. Statements described a certain felt jacket, olive-green, a misplaced ticket, tortoiseshell frames. Lighten up, the man had said, searching through his pockets and holding up the line. By all accounts, Harold had gone of his own free will. At night, I stood in the street, looking up at the facade. I studied the opaque windows for some sign of life. Claire was never up so late.
* * *
It was hard to say which outcome was worse for Claire, the one in which Harold endured who knows what in an outer-borough basement, or the one in which he was alive, safe, and no longer in love. Years later, when Misha moved in, she was still refusing to give up hope that Harold had been taken. She installed new bolts on the door and kept it locked. For a while we knocked in vain, then we stopped knocking at all. And I suppose that is how casually one version of reality detaches from the truth; it peels away naturally, like damp wallpaper in a neglected room.
* * *
These days, returning home from the hospital, or jazz, I often paused for a moment in the stairwell before letting myself through my own door. I wondered if something of what had happened to Harold was happening to me. Perhaps he’d woken up one night to find he didn’t recognize his partner, he hardly recognized himself. He fled. Except I loved Misha, I loved Morningside. I had nowhere else to go.
* * *
One night, in early December, the nebula now ten weeks along, I ran into the self-help author while I was waiting for a sandwich at the deli. I was just counting out my change when she rushed in, breathless and wrapped in multiple layers of down. I was surprised. The self-help author wasn’t usually out at this hour. For a moment I thought maybe I had missed an appointment, there was an emergency, I’d forgotten to show up for work. It had happened before. A jug of laundry detergent dangled from her hand, leaking blue fluid onto the floor. She tightened the cap. Guess what, she said. I didn’t guess. She told me anyway. I think I saw Harold in the laundromat.
* * *
She stood before a wire rack of Hostess Honey Buns, bouncing one package against the rest. I watched the icing smear inside the plastic. This was the first Harold sighting in some time, and I was skeptical. Was she sure? Quite sure. Felt jacket, corduroy pants. And he had a pen in his pocket, she said. One of those illustrator’s markers with the tapered, felted tip. I said, You could see all that? She nodded. I swear it’s him.
* * *
I followed her into the laundromat, where the infomercials were going strong. Above the dryers, the row of TV screens flickered: electric can openers conquered tins of pinto beans and tuna, one by one. I watched a woman lift a gray sock from the floor. There was always someone in the laundromat, no matter the hour, and as I took a turn through the machines I spotted a few other people sorting clothes and change. None of them was Harold. The linoleum tiles were streaked with salt and mud from winter boots, and the sharp scent of powdered soap transported me to the snowcapped mountains of a detergent box. The coin machine was decorated like a Christmas present—at the top, a bow. I peered into an alley off the main room, which held an overflow of dryers and steel tables for folding sheets. It was uninhabited. I rejoined my employer with a shrug. She shook her head. I could have sworn it was him, she said. I guess he’s already gone. The overhead lights were harsh. I closed my eyes. I tried to remember Harold as I’d known him. His uneven, swaying gait. The pen. The soft echo of milk cartons gathered in the hall. The self-help author slipped another quarter into the slot, and I waited with her for a set of curtains to dry. She reached for the remote. The infomercials cut away to a press conference where the mayor was reasserting that everything was just the same as it had always been: in spite of recent anthrax scares, we refused to be afraid. I turned to the self-help author, suddenly too tired to disagree. Maybe you’re right, I said. Who was I to undermine her certainty?
* * *
Outside, warm drapes pressed against our breasts, the self-help author and I turned up the avenue. We passed the playground, the church, the former chapel with its chocolate brick. As we mounted the stoop, I glanced at Harold’s former window. A single lamp was on. The self-help author frowned.
By all means, she said, don’t mention this to Claire.
* * *
I helped her loop clean drapes onto brass rods. Then she stood me in the doorway and sprinkled something in the air above my head: a parting charm. The scent of her laundry followed me upstairs, into the kitchenette, where, at the credenza, I separated the deli sandwich into two half-moons of silver foil. Tomato-egg-and-cheese on rye, for Misha and me to split. I set his half aside. Then I sat down at the computer to search. I typed in Harold’s name. Portfolios of his cartoons appeared. Here was the essence of a man reduced to an image bank. I scrolled. It occurred to me that whether or not the self-help author had been mistaken, Harold was, in many ways, more present than I. In some ways he hadn’t vanished at
all. He could be summoned forth, reproduced in a few keystrokes. As for me, when I entered my own name (NOT “porn” NOT “NIH” NOT (“cancer” OR “science”)), the results page returned a blank. It might have even stayed this way. Then the package arrived.
4
That morning, I’d gone out to buy a set of knives. The idea to update my cookware had come to me suddenly, as I was standing in the kitchenette. The pantry doors were open, and I gazed in, unmoved by what I saw. The jars of kimchi, the sacks of grain, the pair of apples to which I’d so looked forward had all completely lost their aura. I poked at a package of dehydrated noodles. Though I was hungry, I seemed to have lost my appetite for everything I loved.
* * *
I looked down. At the open neck of my T-shirt, my veins ran blue and bright across my chest, diverting nutrients to the nebula. What do you want? I wondered at it. Then I grabbed my keys and stepped outside.
* * *
At the kitchen store, caches of cutlery hung from temporary hooks. I perused the blades. I had in mind something simple and elegant, something suited to slicing the long spine of a leek, say, or chopping walnuts into chalk. For me the path to becoming a better cook would begin with soups and stews and crudités, plenty of chopping vegetables into bits, and so I went from store to store, handling the more discreet and delicate blades. I learned the meaning of “to spatchcock” and indeed witnessed a demonstration at an upscale cooking store. (Christmas was weeks away, and people had ducks in mind.) I learned what any cutlery enthusiast will tell you, that against the skin of a tomato, a dullish knife is no better than a spoon. I met a man who vacationed by the sea and who always traveled with his own set of knives, so anathema to him were the blunted instruments one finds in an ocean turnkey. I saw stiff boning blades with titanium tips, steak knives designed to slice through even the thickest cut of meat, electric butter knives that warmed to cube the coldest stick of butter. I became distracted, for a moment, by a stack of lovely colanders that nearly toppled when I touched it. Can I help you? No, no—I was only here for knives.
* * *
The last shop I visited was small and dim and specialized. The knives shone on velvet trays and under glass, like rings. A saleswoman led me up and down the darkly glinting aisles. So, she said. What is it you like to cook? I glanced at a row of cheese guillotines strung with wire. I told her the truth. I honestly don’t know. But I am about to have a baby, I said. I aimed to be prepared. She nodded. Is that right? I wondered how it was she’d done her hair, if she ate her breakfast over the sink, how it is, really, that someone finds herself in the business of selling knives. She drummed her fingers on a case of fluting blades. Come with me, she said.
* * *
There was a demonstration room in the back with a butcher’s block set with large bowls of fruit and vegetables and rows and rows of cutting boards. Together, we began to chop. We sliced apples and pears and taut tomatoes, transformed handfuls of parsley into shredded chiffon. The saleswoman showed me how to rock the blade from point to handle and back again, so that the silver edge sank, without protest, into the leather of an aubergine. She chopped like someone who never needed to eat. I was drawn to her indifference. After me, she said, and I looked on as she divided the round moon of an onion into many crescents. I learned the difference between dicing and mincing. Flecks of garlic flew. I was only just getting the hang of things when she gathered all this ostensible refuse into a tall pile with the flat of her blade and swept it into the bin. I stood stunned. Then I slowly set down my knife. I peered in at the literal fruits of our labor, the apples and onions and garlic and limes. Tomato steaks and undone aubergines. An incoherent stew. I was vindicated—certainly it was stranger than anything I’d made.
* * *
Outside, the streets were slick with ice and shoppers walked with care. On the train platform, I lingered, making all kinds of promises to myself. I lit my remaining Camels one by one and tossed them to the tracks. I wouldn’t be a smoker and a mother, not like mine. I wouldn’t forget my keys. I would be sensible, strict, warm, I’d keep the floors extremely clean. I glanced into the white paper bag that held my knives: I’d cook. Aboveground, I paused at the vegetable stand on the corner, for onions. Their weight felt human, cradled in my arms.
* * *
Earlier that week, someone had smashed through the bottom pane of the building door, and now the vestibule was full of glass. The upper pane was also frosted with cracks, and so as not to dislodge what remained, I had taken to threading myself through the ruined lower half. I did so now, clutching knives and onions to my breast.
* * *
The package was there when I emerged, settled in the slush of window shards.
* * *
Over the years I have received all kinds of mail meant for former tenants: Barbaras, Vincents, Pierres, fans of interior design and environmental-protection funds, apocalyptic newsletters whose predictions I could not support (though they seemed less alarmist to me, that winter, than they had before). This package, however, arrived without any name at all. The way it was placed, on the pretty mosaic tiles and surrounded by glass, it might have been the culprit behind the shattered door. I lifted the envelope, blew away the dust. We did not often get deliveries. Who would send something to Misha or me? All our friends lived right inside, or just around the corner. They could have saved the postage. Shards fell from the folds in the paper and trickled to the floor. The flap was sealed with professional-grade glue. There was no recipient named—just an address. The apartment number was definitely ours.
5
I stood for a while in the vestibule, package in one hand, onions in the other, trying to think of anyone who might want to target me with anthrax. Except that biowarfare came in average correspondence, not in hefty envelopes—I’d seen the photographs. I wondered next if I’d ordered anything online. Or perhaps Misha had? He was as off-the-grid as a computational mathematician can be, but even still. People change. I hesitated, traced the neatly suffocated seal. Then I tucked the package under my arm and stepped inside. I had committed my fair share of marital transgressions, but I was not yet the sort of woman who snooped through her husband’s mail. One can only stoop so low.
* * *
Upstairs, the apartment was empty. A rent check fluttered to the floor when I maneuvered the key into the lock. I retrieved it from the mat. The bed was made. The pantry doors were open, and I closed them again. I arranged the knives in a row. The fruit bowl, as usual, was out of fruit, and I tossed the package over its rim. Then I tore open the net of onions. They tumbled to the floor.
* * *
Bulbs retrieved, I peeled away the papery skin and fixed a rind beneath a blade. It cleaved, and the kitchenette filled with its crisp, clean smell. I turned one raw cheek to the tile top of the credenza and sliced the pearly hemisphere into concentric loops. The net emptied and the pile of rings grew. I was pulling ahead. To think that a few weeks ago I’d been suffocating my husband, and now I was chopping vegetables—for soup! It was undoubtedly a step in the right direction. By the time I ran out of bulbs to chop, the light in the kitchen had faded yet another shade toward evening, and my breasts were heavy and sore. I set down my knives. A wave of nausea passed through me like a ghost.
* * *
When I recovered, I typed “onion soup” AND “how to make” into Explorer. I began to despair. I read the recipe. I read it again. The will withered within me, like an old fruit. It had been quite enough to slice the onions without having to caramelize them as well. Then there was this business with the roux. And besides, I didn’t have all the ingredients at hand. I pillaged the drawer where Misha kept vials of spices and herbs, but neither thyme nor sherry was to be found in there. I searched “sherry” AND “substitution,” but the answer, apple cider, was no help at all. I drifted, as one does, to AOL, where the home page blitzed with deals. I checked in on the waxing kit. Some patient souls had replied:
The Exhibition of Persephone Q Page 3