by Nell Zink
On Saturday they experimented with staying in bed all morning, getting up only to sneak to the bathroom. Flora brought breakfast at nine thirty on a silver-plated tray. She was proud of her weightless waffles. She had separated the eggs herself.
“My family truly does have the best waffle recipe,” Pam said.
“And the best short-order cook this side of St. Louis,” Daniel said.
“You’re a culinary genius,” Pam told Flora.
“Thanks! I ate two waffles and ham and a kiwi.” She patted her stomach.
“I feel like one of those parents in the Blitz, sending their kids out to live in the countryside,” Daniel said. “It’s like she got picked for the Fresh Air Fund.”
“It’s like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” Pam said. “That’s around here somewhere. Let me ask Mom where she put it. We can read it aloud to her.”
ALSO ON SATURDAY THE FIFTEENTH, PAM FINALLY HAD AN E-MAIL FROM YUVAL. HE HAD ended up in the hospital, unharmed. He didn’t remember anything after the second plane. His camera was gone, and he had no idea when RIACD would reopen. He invited her to take time off.
Daniel’s temp agency made the same suggestion, if only because so many of its contracts had been canceled.
She suggested going to the zoo again, but Ginger wanted to take Flora to a department store in Silver Spring and get her something to wear to church. Pam said that would be a step too far. Habituating Flora to comfort and beauty, she could almost handle; tempting her with God was too much. This particular God came armed with flying buttresses and pipe organs, the Episcopalian double whammy of medieval architecture and the music of the Reformation. The cathedral might make Flora wonder what great things God had done to deserve it.
“Please, Mom?” Flora begged.
Pam envisioned her singing along with the Magnificat and shook her head. That was the most bone-chillingly beautiful song in the service, the responsorial in which Mary declares her devotion to God because he requisitioned her for purposes of childbearing. She mutely considered how to express the idea that there were few things she’d rather protect Flora from than the church. After a terrorist attack, even a little child can tell good from evil. Singing about evil’s hidden goodness is nothing but a straight-up mind fuck.
“It’s her heritage,” Ginger insisted. “If she’s never exposed to it, she’s statistically more likely to join a cult. You went to church every Sunday, and unless you count worshipping that punk rocker, you’re the most devout atheist I know!”
“Won’t you please go shopping with us?” Flora begged.
“Silver Spring is kind of nice,” Pam said, defeated.
She never went to department stores in New York, because they were either packed with third-rate junk or so overpriced and sterile that she wondered whether their real business was money laundering—plastic belts for hundreds of dollars, shoes under glass in the coat department, that sort of thing. The mall anchor stores of Silver Spring were by contrast bustling havens of middle-class pragmatism, where quality and price intersected with near-utopian felicity. Style in the South was personal. A woman who liked plaid could find clothes in plaid. Pam liked plaid. She knew that by agreeing to go shopping she was acquiescing in church attendance the next morning, so she added, “But I’m only going to church if I find a hot outfit to show off.”
THE FEMALES WENT OUT SHOPPING. EDGAR TOOK HIS BIG CLIPPERS FROM THE SHED AND commenced trimming shrubs by hand. Daniel sat in an Adirondack chair next to a glass-topped wrought-iron table to drink coffee and read the paper, lulled by the repetitive shearing sound of clippers opening and closing on late-summer growth and tufts of grass. All the articles were fascinating. He felt oddly happy.
His phone rang. It was Gwen.
She said she was at her father’s place in Great Neck, totally broken up, and that she’d stayed with Joe for a day and a night before she’d decided it was just too much to deal with.
“You what?” Daniel said quietly.
“I left him at my place.”
“Is he okay?”
She sobbed. She sounded drunk. “He wasn’t moving.”
“Was he hurt? Where is he now?”
“He’s still there.”
“You mean he was unconscious, and you left him?”
“He was dead, okay? He was blue and dead. Nobody could have helped him. It was too late, and it was just too fucking much to deal with on a day like that.”
“You fucking bitch.”
“Fuck you! No one was helping me. There were, like, no ambulances.”
“I’m going to call the police and have you arrested for murder,” Daniel said. “It’s murder. You murdered him. And he’s in your apartment? Where?”
“On the couch.”
“I meant which of your apartments, you worthless fucking cunt.”
Gwen hung up, and Edgar said to Daniel, “Good Lord! What was that about?”
Daniel slammed the phone down on the table, stood up, and started to cry.
XI.
Gwen hung up on Daniel on the afternoon of September 15, sitting in the tall rocking chair in her bedroom in her father’s house in Great Neck. She felt tempted to open her heart to her dad when he got home. She couldn’t imagine taking any other tack with him but the truth. He had been seeing through her all her life, ever since she had been born with intent to inherit his possessions. She would confess the truth, and he would tell his lawyer. Together they would fix everything and protect her.
But the truth wasn’t something she wanted anyone to know. She didn’t like how it made her look. Joe’s dying went beyond venereal diseases and investing in friends’ failed businesses. There was a sense, she felt dimly, in which it couldn’t be fixed.
She sent Daniel’s return call to voice mail and turned off her phone.
STILL STANDING ON THE PATIO IN CLEVELAND PARK, STILL CRYING, HE PUT HIS PHONE in his pocket and said to Edgar, “I’m sorry about this.”
“Who was that on the line?”
“Joe’s girlfriend. She’s not a good person. He’s in trouble. But I can’t dial 911 from here for an emergency in New York. Can they transfer the call? Shit. What do I do? I don’t know where he is.”
“Get somebody in New York to call them.”
He called Joe’s dad and said, “Hi. It’s Daniel. It’s an emergency.”
“Have you heard from Joe?” Professor Harris responded. “I’m very worried.”
He took a deep breath and declared that he had taken his family to Washington when the planes hit, to stay with Pam’s parents. It wasn’t the most important aspect, but it felt like a necessary finger of blame pointed at himself, before he got to the point, which was that sometime on the eleventh—shortly after he, the paterfamilias, feeling proud of his initiative and ingenuity, fled the bleeding city like a rat—Gwen had abandoned the unconscious Joe in either her larger apartment on West Fifty-Fourth Street or her smaller apartment in Soho. Most likely Soho, because he’d gone to a party downtown, but anything was possible, so could Professor Harris please get the police to break into both places.
“I’m doing it right now,” he answered promptly. His vital systems didn’t miss an audible beat. Daniel could hear that there was no question in his mind that Joe was alive.
He relaxed for a half second, until the connection clicked off and his phone went dead. Then the likely state of affairs came flooding back into his mind. He knew what would happen if he told Pam he was going to New York. She would come along and bring Flora. He didn’t want to take Flora into that mess of a ruined city, plus he didn’t want her to know anything had happened to their friend. If she were at their side, overhearing things, she would catch on fast. Just seeing her parents homicidally angry, with their hearts broken, would tell her. The idea of leaving her in D.C. for a while took on a new luster.
He asked Edgar what he thought of his going home to take care of business while Pam stayed on with Flora. He needn’t have asked. Edgar’s notions of propriety
were untroubled by the prospect of a man’s protecting his wife and child.
Daniel went upstairs to pack his tiny bag. He said, “Have Pam call me in private when she gets in,” and took the red line to Union Station. He caught the next fast train to New York.
WITHIN TEN MINUTES OF TURNING OFF HER PHONE, GWEN TURNED IT ON AGAIN. SHE WAS surprised—almost hurt—to see so few missed calls. She leafed through the Yellow Pages until she found an ad for a funeral home close to her place on Fifty-Fourth. She called it. Excitedly, she told the man who answered the phone that she had found her boyfriend dead in her apartment, an apparent suicide. He had overdosed on intravenous drugs. She had panicked and gone to visit her father, because she couldn’t stand to see his body or enter that apartment ever again. Could the undertaker please get the key from the super and do something about her dead boyfriend?
She cried. The selfishness of her egomania allowed her to embody the purest sorrow without a trace of regret. She found the undertaker sympathetic and even cute, if a bit depressive. He’d probably lost some friends or something. She surmised that the whole city was going to be on the rebound for a while—easy to get, but not much fun to be around.
What he said, in terms of informational content, was that it sounded to him like a case for the police. When she objected that the deceased was past all help, he suggested an ambulance. When she insisted he was dead, he said he would go take a look.
He really was tempted. After all, it would have been a job. The terrorist attacks had proved disappointing in the corpse department.
He asked her for information on Joe’s next of kin. She said she would prefer anonymity. He asked again, saying it was for billing purposes, and she gave him Joe’s father’s name and address.
Now firm in his resolution not to touch the job with a ten-foot pole, because she was upper class and drunk, the undertaker called his local precinct, which dispatched a car to West Fifty-Fourth Street.
A separate law enforcement detail met Professor Harris in Soho. They couldn’t gain entrance to the building courtyard until a resident happened to let herself in. The studio had a thick steel door with a long, old-fashioned bolt. By the time they gave up and headed to the other apartment, it was sealed up with red tape and a crimped metal tag, and Joe was in the morgue.
PAM CAME HOME TO PORTER STREET TIRED AND HAPPY, STUFFED WITH CINNAMON BUNS and cappuccino. The mall had been relatively empty of people, with lots of seasonal markdowns. She’d gotten a great deal on a tailored plaid pantsuit that was funkier than its creators intended, along with a bottle-green velvet dress with a lace collar for Flora, whose mental state approached nirvana. She called Daniel from the guest room as his train was rolling northward through Newark, Delaware.
When the phone rang he huddled against the window and stared at the distant water. The neighborhood outside was stained gray and black over every surface, but beyond it lay green trees and the blue of the northern reaches of the Chesapeake. He heard Pam say “hello” and “Daniel” several times. Finally he said, “Hi.”
“Are you somewhere else?” Pam asked. “Dad said you just up and left.”
“Are you lying down in the fetal position?”
“No.”
“You will be. Gwen called to say she left Joe for dead a few days ago. He was unresponsive and his skin was blue. I can’t imagine why. She didn’t really say where. I’m on my way to team up with his dad.”
She felt her consciousness take a leap and fall, as if it were trying for an out-of-body experience but couldn’t reach escape velocity. Her mind was wiped blank, except for an afterimage of Joe, like a photographic negative, with all the colors wrong.
Culture came to the rescue. Like a Möbius strip revolving, her mind twisted into eighties hipster mode. Their conversation after that was pitched low and on the inside, knowing and hopeless, every clause meaning and mourning its opposite. There was no need to make anybody cry by saying anything true.
She said, “He was so obsessive about shooting up heroin all the goddamn time.” That is, they both knew he had never tried it.
“The wages of sin is death,” Daniel replied, a reference to Joe’s innocence.
“Well, don’t bother getting off the train, because I’m heading up there right now to put a Bowie knife up her nose and twist it until her eyes pop out, and I don’t want you involved.”
“Don’t do that,” he said, acknowledging her desire never to see Gwen again. “Kid needs her mother out of jail.”
“She’s not going to like this,” she said, starting to cry.
She let him go. She entered the Temple of Ian, lay down in the fetal position, and stared. Thoughts of Flora made her cry. Thoughts of Joe made her imagine a golden flaming sword, the one she would use to kill Gwen if life were more like D&D.
All Washingtonians sometimes imagine golden flaming swords, because of the Second Infantry Division memorial on Constitution Avenue. A golden hand holds it upright like a torch. It serves to remind God’s children that there is no appeal for their entrapment by the serpent. They can’t visit paradise one last time. It’s too late.
On the train, Daniel punched the seat back in front of him several times, after making sure it was empty.
THE CASE LEFT A COMPLEX AFTERMATH BEHIND. BUT IT WOULD NEVER BE INTERESTING for a police detective. The cause of death was not in question. There were no signs of a struggle. Daniel and Professor Harris tried to convince the detectives that Joe would never have struggled against anything, because he was as trusting as a lamb. In separate conversations, the detectives explained to them that while murder is murder and manslaughter is manslaughter, criminal indictment is also criminal indictment, and no prosecutor could expect a grand jury to believe a groupie killed her meal ticket. Gold diggers murder husbands, but why would a junkie hanger-on kill an unrelated rock star? Such a woman might attack a rival, but not the goose who laid the golden eggs. They needed to admit to themselves that Joe had used heroin and that he died of routine risks attendant on using heroin.
He hadn’t made a will. He had second cousins in Denver whom he’d never met. Everything he owned, and every cent he was owed, would go to his father.
Inheriting tortured Professor Harris. He cried soundlessly at odd moments. He felt passive and sad. Whenever he made up his mind to lie down, his mood plummeted and his alert level rose to DEFCON 2. Sitting upright in an armchair at night was less terrifying, less like surrender. Objects and purchases frightened him. There might be anthrax on a parking meter, or a gladiola, or butter.
He fit right in—better than most. His son really was gone. He was immune to the pandemic of disaster envy that was turning the lower forty-eight into an endless phone call from a distant noncombatant with a tale of near-proximity to a marginal feature of the very bad day, such as Logan Airport.
Gwen likewise was upset about Joe’s death. Just a wreck. Being wrecked was inconspicuous in those days. Everyone was emotional and reaching out. Everyone was vulnerable and wounded. Everyone expected, and got, tremendous generosity and tolerance. The air in New York was thick with smoke and love. Love poured into a city whose inhabitants were not used even to being liked. People drank oodles of liquor and hugged on a whim.
It was a relief to Daniel when the conspiracy theories surfaced, reviving the blood libel with tales of Jewish office workers who stayed home that day. He had come to the city for its reputation as Sodom, Gomorrah, and Hymietown. If Amerikkka—as an all-American boy he knew his country well—suddenly appreciated New York, something was wrong. Racist conspiracy theories were its way of taking notice and correcting its error.
In New York in those days, Daniel felt alone in being consciously animated by a spirit of cynicism and hatred.
BECAUSE PROFESSOR HARRIS WAS INCAPACITATED, IT WAS DANIEL WHO DID THE DEATH-RELATED legwork, organizing Joe’s interment. On the street in the West Village, he ran into a session guitarist who told him of having bought Joe’s gold Les Paul for $5,000 directly from Gwen. She had t
old him the proceeds would benefit an as yet nonexistent charity, the Joe Harris Foundation.
Daniel knew the guitar. It was beat up and mutilated, with a replacement neck and the pickups switched out for custom-wrapped magnets so Joe could sound more like Queen. He knew the guy had overpaid by about $4,500. He thought, She’s testing the waters.
He wasn’t fixated on keeping Joe’s possessions together like some kind of archive or his property inviolate. But he knew Gwen. He knew Joe hadn’t left her any money. But she had the keys to his apartment, and she had two options. She could keep herself in extra drugs for a few years by working her way through his stuff slowly, or she could fledge her wings and fly up a level, leveraging his fame to enter the nonprofit world. Instead of selling relics below cost, junkie style, she could generate media sympathy and clear $50,000 in an afternoon.
Joe’s father resented her enough to agree that something had to be done. Mostly, though, he was depressed. He admitted he would have waited two years to ask her for the keys, if he ever thought of asking. He told Daniel, “It doesn’t matter to me what that woman does or doesn’t do. I don’t care. I don’t.”
“I know you don’t care,” Daniel said. “I have a kid. I don’t want to know what you’re going through, because I couldn’t handle it. So let me handle hating Gwen. I can hate Gwen for you.” Here he could see that even the idea of a younger person handling something made Professor Harris cry, because he had once had a kid who might—had things been different—have handled things. With cruelty toward all involved, he added, “Joe has nothing left to lose, but Gwen can still win. She took everything he had, so let’s not let her turn it into everything he had and more. Let’s stop her winning. It’s basic justice.”
“Justice,” Professor Harris said.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “We make her stop.”