Look at me: (34 page)

Hi, I’m Baka, Kanja’s niece. I learned the art of beaded jewelry from my maternal grandmother
…

“This will all be direct mail,” Thomas interjected. “You can order beads, wires, finished necklaces—whatever you want. Plus there’ll be a way to donate money to the family by credit card, which I personally think is going to be the future of charitable giving.” He turned to Irene. “People aren’t moved by abstract concepts anymore,” he said, with feeling. “They’re moved by people’s individual struggles. Save the Children—like, what children?”

He was appealing to us, waving the flag of his altruism in hopes of winning us back, and I felt myself awaiting Irene’s reaction—Irene, who surely knew more about altruism than I did.

Another double-click, and the original warrior was restored to the screen, still heaving up his strange noises with an eagerness that verged on desperation, as if he believed he were singing for his life.

“Anyway, this is a crude mock-up,” Thomas said, stifling a yawn. A heaviness had engulfed us, the passivity of three people in a darkened room, looking at a screen. “The translation’s pretty bad, but you get the picture. Click on his hair, you hear about the hair. Click on his forehead, you get the thought categories: Dreams, Wishes, all that stuff. Want to guess the number one Hope/Aspiration of every single International Ordinary, bar none? Live in America. Even the ones whose governments hate us! And the beautiful thing is, a guy like this might actually get to do it—not the usual way, jammed in a tenement in Queens hawking fake Rolexes outside Tiffany’s, but with the real potential to make it! Casting agents, model agencies, record producers—they’re all going to be scouring our Internationals for raw material. You ask me, this guy could wind up a pop star, easy. I mean, it’s hard to tell if he can actually sing, but it may not even matter. He could rap, for Godsakes.”

“I just wonder,” Irene said, and then stopped. “I wonder if someone might not just visit Kenya instead.”

“Now, absolutely,” Thomas said. “But ask yourself: how long is that going to last? I think the golden age of tourism is basically over, especially for Americans. The coral’s dead or dying, you’ve got weird grass choking out the Med, you’ve got e-coli and flesh-eating diseases all over the place, you’ve got terrorists mowing people down in the Temple of Luxor … I mean, at a certain point, how much are you willing to risk for a two-week vacation? So we’re thinking ahead.”

As we filed back into Thomas’s office, I watched Irene, trying to gauge her reaction. She seemed dazed, subdued.

“I have a question, too,” I said, feeling oddly nervous as they both waited for me to speak. “I know a homeless man, and I was wondering if you might want someone like that in Ordinary People.”

“You know a
homeless man?”
Thomas asked, glancing at Irene in surprise. She mimed her ignorance.

“I met him near the East River by my apartment. He’s a pretty interesting guy.” I knew better than to say unusual; he had to be representative of his type.

“Homeless. Homeless,” Thomas mused, going to his window and looking outside. “We’ve talked about having a homeless Ordinary. But see, a lot of homeless people are crazy, and we already have a manic depressive and two schizophrenics.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “He’s not crazy at all.”

“How do you know he’s homeless?”

“He lives in a tent, he goes through garbage cans, he begs. He’s definitely homeless.”

“What about substance abuse?” Thomas said. “Because again, we have two addicts—heroin and crack—plus an alcoholic.”

“He drinks a little,” I said, playing it down. “Nothing major.”

“Huh,” Thomas said. “Well, there are two ways we could go with something like this. The easiest is to introduce him as part of your daily life and see if people take to him. If they do, we consider setting him up on his own as a kind of spinoff.”

“I’m not sure I see a homeless man being part of Charlotte’s daily life,” Irene told Thomas.

“Oh, but he already is,” I said, thinking she’d misunderstood. “I mean, not a huge part. A small part.”

“No, but Irene has a point, though,” Thomas said. “It may be kind of a stretch.”

I crossed my arms, stilled by a revelation that had been mounting in me ever since our arrival in this bower of poured concrete: that as the “subject,” I was both the center of attention and completely extraneous. The feeling brought with it an eerie, stultifying familiarity; I was still the model, after all. I was modeling my life.

“He asked me to give you this,” I told Thomas, and dug Pluto’s homemade business card out of my purse.

Thomas frowned. “The guy has an E-mail address?”

“He uses the computers at Kinko’s when he can afford it. He’s trying to improve his life.”

“God, I love that,” Thomas said, his voice full of tenderness. “It’s so moving. This poor guy. Is he relatively clean?”

“Immaculate.”

“Well, I’ll send him an E-mail,” Thomas said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Irene and I gathered our things and Thomas walked us to the elevators. As we waited among the poured-concrete walls (blotched aquamarine, like undersea stone), a silence opened among us and spread. Irene fingered the worn strap of her shoulder bag and stared at the elevator doors.

“Look. I know you have doubts,” Thomas finally said. “Even I wonder about this project sometimes—will it really improve people’s lives, or am I just kidding myself? Couple of weeks ago I approached a guy—heart surgeon, actually—about becoming an Extraordinary, and he tells me, exact words, ‘You’re turning people into shopping malls.’ I hardly slept the whole night, thinking about that. But finally I decided, you know what? If that’s where it’s going then I want to be there, making sure it’s done responsibly. I invented this product, sure, but I’m not so unique—I’m part of a Zeitgeist. If I don’t do it, someone else will. And maybe there’s a positive to it, you know? Maybe the more interested we get in learning about each other, the less reason we’ll have to do things like fight wars—we’ll all be on the same side. So the next morning I come in here, no sleep from obsessing about this thing, and guess what? There’s already a message from the guy. The surgeon. He wants in.”

The elevator came and I turned, intending to board, but Irene was listening to Thomas. The door slid shut. “See, it’s the future,” he went on, with a kind of apology. “It’s going to happen with or without you. But if you go with this thing, if you give yourself to it, you’ll own that future; you’ll be right in the heart of it. If you resist, that’s when it rolls over you, and whatever you have now, you’ll have less.”

He was speaking to Irene, and she listened with a look of panic. Thomas pled his case with a rueful energy quite apart from his usual zeal, as if he suspected that this future would elude us despite his best efforts. We weren’t up to it. And for the first time that day, I glimpsed his shadow self—the awkward, overlarge boy I’d befriended two months before, peeping from the recesses of Thomas Keene. Not in fear, as I had expected (even hoped), but in empathy. For us. The big, softhearted boy had been summoned from the shadows by worry. And for all my queasiness about the future Thomas and his poured-concrete office embodied, worse was the thought of having no place in it—of being left behind.

Irene and I lurched from the building into skittish sunlight. “Oh, God,” she said, as we made our way toward Union Square.

“I know.”

It was market day in the square, bright, towering piles of lettuce, squash, marigolds, asters. I felt as if they were stabbing me. Too many colors, too much sunlight and joyous human traffic. Too many dogs on leashes and babies in strollers.

We went to an empty bench and sat. The perennial old kook was parked a few benches down with a sack of bread, which he tossed in limp handfuls to several hundred clamoring pigeons. A few overeager birds leapt onto his arms and knees, flapping their dingy wings in gratitude. If I had no place in the future, I thought—I, who had spent my life awaiting it—what was going to happen to the pigeon guy?

“He says such awful things,” Irene said, “but with the gentlest look on his face.” She was slumped against the bench, her face tipped to the sun. After a moment she turned to me. “Charlotte,” she said, with crisp resolution, “I can’t do this.”

I didn’t answer. What I had to say to Irene—that I knew she would do it, she had no choice but to do it—seemed cruel and unnecessary. It wasn’t just the frightened expression she’d worn when Thomas invoked the steamrolling future; it was the safety pins and masking tape I’d glimpsed holding up her hems, the clumsily patched moth holes in her sweaters and cheap strawberry shampoo I’d smelled on her hair. It was the telltale orange tint of her generic panty hose; the broken plastic hairbrush in her purse, the fake leather wallet, the gold peeling off her earrings, the Bic pens. The tired circles under her eyes. Her bleeding cuticles. Irene had no choice. She would have to go through with this thing, much as she might loathe it. And loathe it she did. She was a kind and honest person (a reporter!), a person who would visit her emphysemic father in Arizona if she’d had one, despite the fact that being near him made her feel lousy and sad; she was devoted to her husband and (I had no doubt) friends, most of whom she’d probably had for years; she was immune to appearances, oblivious to the mirrored room, incapable of dissembling, fakery or bullshit, and knowing someone who had these qualities was the closest I was ever going to get, I figured, to having them myself.

“I shouldn’t have stayed,” she said. “I shouldn’t have listened. I shouldn’t have come in the first place.”

But you did, I thought. You did and you will. Which means it must be all right.

Two pigeons had alighted on the pigeon man’s head. His hair, I thought, must be full of birdshit. “How about a drink?” I asked.

To my surprise, Irene agreed. It was four-thirty. We crossed the square to the Coffee Shop, a perennial hangout for models and their devotees, one I’d patronized perhaps six or seven hundred times over the years, and yet, as I passed with Irene into the swill of its dance beat, strangely, arrestingly new. Something had changed, I thought, as the pigtailed hostess seated us, her bare midriff leading the way. Some restructuring had occurred beneath the surface.

My back was to the room. As we waited for our drinks, I turned and made a quick, habitual scan for familiar faces. My gaze stubbed on Oscar, seated with four people I didn’t know, two of them models, in one of the prominent booths along the wall. I had walked past his table without even seeing him; more shockingly, without Oscar noticing me, flesh trader that he was, the whole of whose expertise lay in his ability to see. My impulse was to jump to my feet and bolt to his table; the inclination moved up and through me, lifting me halfway out of my chair. Then it passed, leaving me behind.

The inept waitress arrived (they were always inept), two martinis quavering on her tray. I relaxed into my drink, the incongruously buttery, milky, cream-swirling yet coldly medicinal flavor of a martini, the flavor of liquid freon as I imagined it. There was nothing more delicious in the world. “That’s Oscar over there,” I told Irene. “The black guy.” I pointed with my chin so as not to look again.

Irene carefully set down her drink and moved her chair for a better view. Without taking her eyes from Oscar, she fumbled in her bag for her notebook, shimmied it out, flipped it open, found the page she wanted and jotted a few notes in her parsimonious style. I longed to see exactly what she was writing, to witness the alchemy whereby Irene and I merged into a woman who owned a dog and had recurrent dreams of geese.

“He looks exactly the way I imagined,” Irene said. “You described him well.”

“He’s my best friend.”

She set down her pen and looked at me. “Charlotte, we know this thing is rotten,” she said. “But it’s still in our hands, we can still walk away. All we will have lost is some time!” I saw the martini in her eyes—the heat, the conviction. And a strange feeling overtook me then; it flared at the word “we,” a kind of vision—myself and Irene moving together into another kind of life: a life in which my choices were all different, in which
I
was different. The life of someone else. I glimpsed that woman rushing somewhere, engaged, engrossed, and a fat knot of hope snaked through me and jammed in my throat. And then she vanished. I was thirty-five. I’d made my choices long ago.

“It’s too late for me,” I said. “As you know.”

Irene slipped her notebook back into her bag and rose unsteadily from her chair, the one drink visible in her gait as she headed for the restroom. She looked beaten. I felt it, too, but fought the feeling back. I looked at the notebook in her bag. After the briefest deliberation, I yanked it out and opened it. But my unease at violating her privacy, compounded by fear that she would catch me in the act, made me too anxious to read anything. I wedged the notebook into my purse, but it jutted conspicuously from the top. I pulled it out with the intention of returning it to her bag, but now Irene had reappeared and was heading toward me. Panicking, I jimmied the notebook back into my purse and used the silk scarf around my neck (a lingering habit from the days when I’d had bruises) to camouflage it. As I turned to wave for the check, I saw that Oscar was gone. Not even Irene had noticed.

Outside, the unseemly sun was still grinning down at us. “I’m drunk,” Irene announced, and looked at her watch. “No!” she cried. “I’m a half-hour late to meet Mark. He’ll think I was hit by a bus.”

“He’ll think you’re having an affair,” I said.

She looked so stunned that I genuinely regretted having said it. “Oh, God,” she said. “He knows I’d never do that.”

Chapter Thirteen

Eventually, when Anthony
Halliday refused to leave the brownstone stoop despite two requests from Mimi and one from Leeland, her lover, who tapped on the glass and spoke from behind it as if Anthony’s instability made opening the door a risky proposition, as if he might attack Leeland in a feverish attempt to right the imbalance between them (namely, the fact that Leeland was living in Anthony’s apartment with Anthony’s wife and twin daughters); after two hours of ringing the buzzer at ten-minute intervals and reiterating, quite calmly, his refusal to depart, Mimi finally opened the door and came outside. She sat beside him on the stoop, a compact woman, athletic, a runner of marathons. Colombian. She had become a citizen when they married.

“Tony,” she said. “This is not good for anyone.”

“You’d do the same,” he said, “if I wouldn’t let you see them.”

“The situations are not comparable.” She accented the middle syllable of that word in a way he found sweet.

They looked together at St. John’s Street, exhausted in advance by a conversation they’d had too many times, playing out the moves like a game of telepathic chess. Orange streetlight soaked the leaves. “Seven months today,” he said. “Not a drop.”

She touched his back. “That’s fantastic, Tony.”

It was the longest abstention of his adult life, excepting the five years when he hadn’t drunk at all, five years that had included (it was true) the period when he’d courted and married Mimi. But the present abstention had come a year too late. A year ago, without warning—or rather, after a warning that had seemed no different from the thousands of other warnings Mimi had delivered—she had stopped loving him. It amazed Anthony how distinct that feeling had been, like someone leaving a room.

“They’re my children,” he said. “They trust me. You have no right to stand between us.” But he couldn’t bring himself to go on, so belabored and oratorical did it sound.

“They trust you, yes.
I
don’t trust you. Seven months—why should I believe that? I should demand a urine test!”

Anthony took a certain grim delight in listening for the moments when the voice of Leeland, a law professor at Fordham, broke through Mimi’s speech like clicks on a tapped phone line. The last time they’d spoken, she had actually used the phrase, “In any event.” Yet his fascination with this audial commingling of Leeland and Mimi failed to salve the hopelessness it made him feel. Leeland Wile, a dispassionate, bearded pipe smoker whose toes pointed out when he walked, had forced himself into every crevice of Anthony’s life—was speaking to him through his wife’s mouth!

“Drinking isn’t illegal, Mimi,” he said.

“Drinking is not illegal, no. But what about reckless endangerment?” (Leeland) “What about scaring our girls half to death with your negligent” (Leeland) “drunkenness and your wild hallucinations? What about the fact that I couldn’t reach you, I had no idea what was going on and the girls were panic-stricken while their daddy slept off a binge? I could sue you for emotional pain and distress and I’d probably win!” (Leeland, Leeland, Leeland).

“Stop,” he said. “Please.” It gave him physical pain to listen. He couldn’t remember any of it, couldn’t remember why he had been drinking with the girls there in the first place.

Mimi hove a sigh. “In any event—”

Anthony held up a hand and she stopped, her eyes moving over him in the orange, leafy darkness. He imagined she was looking right at the gouge of his loneliness, which he felt able to hide from everyone but Mimi. He saw the shame of it in her face.

“Can I watch them sleep?” he asked, taking advantage.

She stood without answering and opened the door. This was their compromise, the concession that, every few weeks, he was able to wrest from her. Together they climbed the carpeted stairs, every bulge in the plaster wall familiar to Anthony’s hand. She turned the shiny new Fichet lock (Leeland). The musk of his pipe tobacco filled the apartment.

“Let them sleep,” Mimi warned as he pushed open the girls’ bedroom door.

The smell of them nearly overpowered him, a smell he missed so acutely that he forgot it instantly each time he left. The milky, waxen, fruit-tinged smell of his children. Apples, or apple juice. Damp cookies. They were asleep in their beds, six years old, red curls. His twin girls. Anthony lowered himself cross-legged onto the floor between their beds. The room was shadowy and small, neatly stacked toys and books seeming to float on the tide of his girls’ breath, its peaceful rise and fall, and Anthony felt like an interloper, someone who could never belong in such a place. But gradually he relaxed into the aquarium of their sleep, their breath, their very white skin, their nearly identical faces. He spread his arms and placed one hand gently on each girl, Laura’s arm, the little fin of Fernanda’s shoulder blade, feeling the life under his hands even through pajamas and bedclothes, warm frantic life thrusting against them from inside. And he had helped to make that life.

For the first time in days, the first time since the last time Mimi had let him come inside and watch them sleep, Anthony felt a kind of peace, as if some perpetual discomfort, a discomfort so unrelenting that he no longer noticed it, had finally eased. They were still here, still alive, still breathing softly, and Anthony felt their life enter him through his two hands, strengthen him. Yes, he thought, yes he would hold on, he would win them back. His girls and Mimi, too. Why had it felt so impossible before? They were warm, almost hot. Laura wore her Orphan Annie pajamas, Fernanda wore Madeline. Very gently he touched their faces, kissed their folded, velvety ears.

At the sound of Mimi outside the door, he got up. He didn’t want her to come in.

He left the apartment without ever seeing Leeland.

Back in Park Slope, the peace Anthony had felt among his daughters stayed with him for perhaps a block, then began to dissipate. After three blocks, he felt like doubling over. The discomfort was back, with the difference that now he was aware of it—keenly, agonizingly. He took the long way home to avoid a particular bar he didn’t trust himself to resist in such a mood, then opened the door with his key and ascended three flights of steps to his new apartment, an aerie surrounded by spreading trees that reminded him of hands holding playing cards. He loathed it. On his desk lay a legal pad full of notes he’d taken earlier that day during a visit to his friends at Immigration. They’d had a few ideas about Z, nothing definite. Of course, the pictures Mitch and Hassam had given him were practically useless: a man whose eyes were always closed or averted, a man about whom the only thing you could say for sure was that he didn’t want to be photographed.

Anthony’s interest in Z had engaged (he’d felt it distinctly, a bolt sliding into place) during his first conversation with Mitch and Hassam, when they’d told him the address of Z’s office: the same Seventh Avenue building where Anthony’s own office was. Five floors down. What were the chances of that? In a space virtually identical to his own (shared among several anxious looking men with import-export connections), he’d found Z’s desk and computer, all of it empty, bereft of files. Anthony dusted for prints, knowing he wouldn’t find Z’s; it had all been carefully wiped. Not a single ragged edge, not a clue as to who had been there. Except one: a business card placed neatly inside the top middle desk drawer, a card that read, “Z,” the letter tiny, a phone number leading to a voice-mail box that had turned out still to be active. He’d called it right there, on Z’s still-connected phone, sitting in his chair, and had been greeted by the man’s voice, his light, indistinguishable accent. He sounded as if he were smiling. As if he had known Anthony would trace his steps this far, and meant to say, Yes, I was here, there’s no mistake. He was a man who didn’t make mistakes. And Anthony was all mistakes, mistake after mistake, and the damage they had wrought would surround him forever.

He unlocked a drawer in his own desk and pulled out the birth certificate he kept there, its county seal in relief. Ralph B. Goldfarb, a Caucasian two years younger than himself. Born in Pittsburgh. Murdered six years ago, walking his dog on the West Side highway. Anthony had snagged the birth certificate in his first year as a detective, going through the man’s possessions. That was shortly after he was fired from the DA’s office—one of his biggest mistakes. Fired for drinking, of course, the single mistake that underlay all the rest. Except that it wasn’t a mistake. It was the thing he loved most.

He held the birth certificate in his hands and let his mind run. To disappear, leaving not one single ragged edge. To clear out, as Z had done, whoever Z actually was (and Anthony would find out eventually—he was a good detective, despite everything). To begin again with a new name, in a new place, a place where he hadn’t made a single mistake, and wouldn’t. He could do it. All you needed was a birth certificate.

One birth certificate. It could spawn a whole life: Social Security number, bank accounts, credit cards, loans. All of it, from so little. Almost nothing.

The fantasy of disappearance had been with Anthony for many years, but since his abrasion with Z it had become more insistent. He found himself clinging to the search even now, when Mitch and Hassam had decided to cut their losses and stop paying his retainer. He had something to learn from Z, he was convinced. Something that would help him.

He brought the phone to the next room, lay on his bed and called Charlotte. He had no idea why the urge to call her overtook him so often at night—was it her connection to Z, or a sense that she occupied the same dark stratum as himself?

“Hi,” she said. She always seemed to know who it was.

“Did I wake you?”

“No. I was watching
Unsolved Mysteries
.”

Her voice, rough from cigarettes in a way that reminded him, incongruously, of a child’s, had the power to relieve him. Even when she lied, as she nearly always did.

“How was your day?” he asked.

“Busy,” she said. “I’m a TV anchor now.”

“Think I saw you. Six o’clock news?”

“That was me.”

“You move fast,” he said, closing his eyes.

Charlotte laughed. She had the saddest laugh he’d ever heard. “What about you?” she asked.

“The usual. Trying to separate the good guys from the bad guys.”

“Is there a difference?”

“I have to think so,” he said. “It’s a matter of faith.”

There was a lengthy silence, a silence of several minutes. He heard the match as she lit another cigarette, heard the voice of the
Unsolved Mysteries
guy in the background.

“Sweet dreams, Charlotte,” he finally said.

34

July. Z was everywhere. I looked for him in the crowds of people waiting to cross Sixth Avenue. Short dresses, gold lamé sandals. Men in shirtsleeves, jackets hooked to one finger. Gold mist dusting the air
.

I searched for his outline behind the windows of limousines slowly turning corners. The streets were riotous. He was everywhere, places I couldn’t imagine him going. Sitting in outdoor cafés. Applauding a bawdy comedian in the fountain at Washington Square. Looking down from fluorescent cubes of office windows against a neon-blue dusk. Looking down. Instantly picking me out
.

I did the things I’d always done, but with a new excitement. A fever that reminded me of childhood. Adulthood as children imagine it
.

Dinner at ten with a man visiting from Europe. I’d known him for years. Added my bit of color to parties at his villa in Antibes. At lunchtime, an old English servant would wheel a cart to the water’s edge. Starched tablecloths thrown over yellow rocks. Grilled fish, white wine. The Mediterranean went purple in the afternoons. Twice I was burned by a stingray
.

This man was married now. A father. But still eager to see old friends, as he put it. While the others laughed around us, his hand drifted to my leg. “When are you going to get married?” he asked
.

“
Never,” I said
.

The hand wandered, inquisitive. “Then what? This, on and on
?”

“
Of course not
.”

Something else was going to happen. I was right up against it
.

37

Z and I pretended we were strangers. No one knew. That secrecy was the hidden pulse. The buried engine
.

We were at our best with a room full of people between us, linked by a glittering strand of mutual awareness. His presence made the air sing. Made me loopy. Buoyed me up on a reckless swell of freedom I hadn’t felt in many years. I threw my arms around people and shouted into their ears. I jumped onto tables and danced. I expanded, trying to fill my exaggerated outline
.

He watched me. I was showing him something, but I didn’t know what it was. I was leading him someplace
.

He came to my apartment a few more times. Alone in a room, he was hard to take. Too goddamn serious
.

I was getting impatient. To begin! To play my part, whatever that was! I imagined drugs, crime. Spy missions. Weapons trading. But only in the most sketchy, cinematic terms. None of it really made sense. I think I didn’t want to know. Even as I boiled with frustration
.

I’d never liked mysteries. Except on television
.