The Reflection (16 page)

“I remember it now. Le Zinc.”

“It’s not there any more. I walked down that street the other day. It’s around the corner from where I work. The café’s gone.”

“What’s there now?”

“Just a bar and grill. They changed the decor. It doesn’t look anything like the old place. It was strange going in.”

Marie was silent for a moment. She reached out, gently put her hand to my cheek. I flinched; her touch had sent a tiny shock through my body. It was the first physical contact I’d had with a woman in a while.

“How did that happen?”

“Accident. I fell onto the rails at a subway station.”

“It’s changed you.”

“It’s disfigured me.”

“You don’t have the same face. You’re different, that’s all.”

Her hand was still on my cheek: I put my own over hers. My scar, which had never healed properly, didn’t seem to displease her. Before, I’d been ashamed of it, but on hearing her words, I understood that it could be seen from another perspective. Perhaps it could even be appealing, under a certain light. After all, there were women who liked imperfection in a man.

“I haven’t asked why you left.”

“I don’t know how I could explain it.”

“It doesn’t matter now. I guess you called at the right time. If I’d heard from you even a week earlier, I might have put the phone down.”

I grabbed the waiter as he passed, ordered more drinks, and pulled out the wallet I’d pickpocketed from a dozing drunk on the subway ride up—it was full of bills, two weeks’ wages worth at least. All the time we’d been sitting in the booth by the window, Marie had been staring at me, and I’d turned away, hiding behind my hands, behind my drink. I’d been looking through the glass front of the bar, and had allowed myself to become fixated on a man loitering on the other side of the road; I’d entertained the absurd fantasy that he was spying on me. But my intuition that Marie wasn’t repelled by my disfigurement freed me up. Now I felt I could bear the ferocity of her gaze. I, in turn, examined her properly for the first time. Dark hair, olive skin, trim figure. Her face was careworn and she was probably younger than she looked. I had the impression that she’d undergone a major trial, and despite pulling through, had remained diminished by it.

We’d both been acting stiffly and awkwardly, me even more markedly than her. But by the second drink we’d eased up, leaning into each other over the table. The past, real or imagined, was the silent backdrop to a conversation that in itself remained determinedly in the present. I listened to Marie as she talked about her work as a maid, at the midtown apartment of a divorcé and his young son; I told her something of the life down by the docks. The talk was muted, effortless. All too quickly it was time to go. Marie glanced at her watch: “I’ve got to see someone. I told you I only had an hour.”

I helped her out of the booth. Outside the bar, we stood on the sidewalk looking at each other. The strain of melancholy, admittedly there from the moment I’d heard her voice on the phone, was now all too palpable.

“The French café. The last time we met there, the very last. We talked about living together. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“And then you left.”

“I’ll make it up to you. If you want me to.”

By way of answering, she kissed me briefly on the cheek. There was a pause, as if we both knew it wasn’t enough. I embraced her, and at the same time felt her hands pressing into me. We must have been in each other’s arms for a minute or so before she eventually disentangled herself.

“I’ll always want the best for you.”

“I know.”

She strode off without looking back. I stood there on the sidewalk for quite some time, staring at the corner around which she’d disappeared. Eventually I wandered back into the subway. I put my hand to my cheek: it felt wet. I wasn’t sure whether they were my tears, or hers, from when she’d put her face to mine.

On the ride home, I felt in a daze. I’d thought of walking
back to the hotel, despite the cold, but the bar Marie had asked me to meet her at was somewhere way up on the Upper West Side, and it was too far. The melancholy lingered the length of the subway trip. It was coupled with an uneasy, exhilarating sensation of once more being thrown into the middle of a story I’d only half-understood. I couldn’t work out what might have gone through Marie’s mind when she’d first caught sight of me. She’d seemed to recognize me. Perhaps, with the distancing effect of my facial injuries, she’d convinced herself that I really was whoever she’d mistaken me for. In my gut I knew that wasn’t the case. It was more complicated than that. Stories I’d made up in the hospital about Smith had seemingly taken on a life of their own. Why shouldn’t they have? After all, I’d simply put together the hard-luck clichés of any number of my patients. That they should be collectively true, for someone, somewhere in New York, didn’t strike me as unlikely. It was an illusion, this feeling that Smith was warping the surrounds.

Not quite ready to go back to the hotel after all, I got off the subway at a random station and found myself somewhere in the theater district. It was a glacial Saturday night. The crowds were out, milling about in their various tribes. The dinner-and-show people, the out-of-towners, the sailors on leave, the neatly dressed guys outside hotels waiting for their dates. Intensely familiar scenes, ones I felt disconnected from. I stopped outside a bar for a few minutes. In a booth on the other side of the glass I spied a love-struck couple in earnest conversation. It had always beguiled me, when you could see people converse but not hear them, like in a silent movie. I watched them for quite a while until the man looked up at me, questioningly. I walked on, down Forty-Second. I thought of Marie touching my face, and put my hand to my scar. “Hows about it mister,” murmured a thin girl from the
side exit of one of the theaters. A low light cast her infinite shadow down the street.

A block on, and I was outside the Century. The last time I’d been there, Abby had been smiling at me from a poster of a show she’d been in with the Lunts. Now there was another show on, still with the Lunts. Perhaps it was even the same play, but with a different sidekick. Abby, too, had been excised, erased. Finally, I realized, she was gone. So absent that it was almost as though she’d never been there. Now there was Marie. I knew that I wanted to go to bed with her. I looked down at my feet. A little plaque had been embedded in the sidewalk, a memorial to those who’d lost their lives in a theater fire.

Marie. Somehow you could tell that as a young girl she’d been plain and gawky, although she wasn’t now. She must have grown into her face, the way men often did, but which was rarer for a woman. What mattered to me right now was that for Marie, our encounter in the bar had probably signaled the end of something—the final scene. Whereas I was determined for it to be a beginning.

“Why did you want to get off here?”

“Can’t you guess?”

Marie and I were climbing out of the subway on East Broadway. It was the next day, Sunday. Streets that would normally be bustling and animated—filled with stalls and street peddlers—were now deserted, sinister. We made our way through the grids of tenement blocks, down to Manhattan Bridge, then walked for a half hour or so along the river, past the old oyster houses and piers—most of them in a state of decrepitude since the switch of shipping traffic to the other side of the island.

“There. You came out from there.”

Marie was pointing to a door that hung limply from its hinges. After the wordless wandering, we’d stopped by an old warehouse fronted by an abandoned office, and a peeling sign that said
COIMBRA SHIPPING
. I pushed through the door, unsure of what I was supposed to find. Inside, a mess of broken furniture, beer bottles, piles of paper and
garbage, floorboards pulled up to reveal mud and dirt. The vestiges of an office, now crumbled away into a nighttime refuge for the homeless. A calendar was still pinned to the wall, marked with faded, handwritten scribbles and annotations. Mold had eaten half of it away but there was enough detail to tell that it only dated from the year before. It surprised me that this could have been a working office as recently as that. The space was dead. It smelled musky, as if its abandonment had happened decades and not months ago.

I went back outside. For a second I couldn’t see Marie but then I spotted her on the sidewalk, sitting on a tattered case that she must have pulled from a nearby pile of refuse.

“Do you remember?”

I had the feeling of our relationship mysteriously coming back to me, piece by piece. It wasn’t the first time I’d caught myself thinking of her as someone I’d been with, and had inexplicably let go. As I watched her sitting on the case I couldn’t help imagining her naked on a bed, propped up on an elbow, looking up to me. It was like a memory.

“Come on, let’s grab some coffee.”

She nodded. We turned from the river and walked down streets I didn’t know, our hands interlaced although I had no sense of how or when they’d become so. We found a coffee place on a street corner in an Italian enclave and sat looking at each other intently over the cups. A welter of thoughts came to me but I was waiting for Marie to say something first. I realized that we’d hardly spoken since we’d agreed to meet that morning.

“You’ve changed … I’ve changed too.”

“You seem the same to me.”

She shook her head: “When I met you, I could hardly speak English.”

“It didn’t matter, though, did it? We went to a movie together that first time. You seemed to enjoy it.”

“I couldn’t understand it. I remember you miming the story to me afterward. I’d dreamed up a completely different version in my mind.”

“Now your English is so good—how did it get that way?”

“There was an old woman at the refugee bureau. She gave classes for free. She took an interest in me. I was seeing her every day. I decided I had to learn properly, if I wanted to make a life here.”

“And you did learn. So why are you still working as a maid?”

“It’s not hard. It doesn’t take up much time. I owe it to the man I’m working for. He took me in. After you’d left me with nothing.”

I was silent for a moment.

“The man. Tell me about him.”

“He’s kind. He’s alone. Divorced. His ex-wife lives in Brooklyn. She has medical problems. Sometimes his young son is there with him, sometimes not. Sometimes he travels, and then there’s no one in the apartment.”

“You stay there?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mr. Stevenson.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“No. I share a room with the little boy.”

“What do you do when they’re not there?”

“I have the place to myself. I get up, do a little housework. Hang the clothes on the line. Smoke a cigarette on the balcony. I get dressed. I study.”

“What are you studying?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

“I will take the medical exams, when I’m ready.”

“How can you afford to do this? Is Stevenson paying for you?”

“Yes. He’s paying for me.”

“Don’t you think he’ll want something in return, eventually?”

“He’s already getting something in return. I’m looking after his son. I’m looking after his apartment.”

“Is he there now?”

“No.”

“What about his son?”

“He’s upstate, with his grandparents.”

“Why don’t we go to the apartment, now?”

“All right. If you want.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Not a word was spoken in the cab. But where the silence of the river walk had been easy, it had now become taut with expectation. As if our final exchange in the coffee bar had constituted a binding contract, and there was nothing further to be done. My mind was jolting forward, replaying scenes to come as if they’d already happened. We passed through streets I thought I knew, but when I looked out the window to identify something specific—a store, a building, a landmark—I couldn’t come up with anything. We weren’t holding hands now; Marie’s rested on her lap. A thick woolen scarf obscured her neck and the lower half of her face.

“This is the place.”

The cab halted outside a new, well-heeled block that I recognized from some former incarnation. I paid off the driver, and a liveried doorman stepped out onto the sidewalk to open the door for Marie. She nodded briefly and we entered
the lobby, whose plastic opulence recalled to mind my old office building on Park Avenue. We rode up to a middling floor. Once we’d gotten out, and the operator had pulled the elevator doors shut, Marie fiddled about under the carpet for the key.

We were inside. With a single, sweeping glance, I felt I’d understood all I needed to know. Neat, functional, the apartment was smaller than I’d thought it would be. It was the home of a tidy, methodical man, in no great need of a maid. I had the image of an ordinary-looking, middle-aged professional, whose uneventful life had been broken open by the unexpected departure of his wife. In the wake of that catastrophe, he had no doubt turned inward. When not caring for his child, I imagined, his life would have become consumed in a series of increasingly private routines and rituals. Things might have gone on terminally like this, but for a singular encounter. Perhaps he’d been eating at his usual place, the one he went to every day without fail, and then he’d spotted a striking, forlorn young woman, sitting on a suitcase across the street. Perhaps it had started like that.

All of this had come to me in a second. Impossible to imagine a man and a woman living here, in this smallish space, without sleeping together, it occurred to me. You could feel it in the walls. But I didn’t find the thought particularly troubling. Marie had gotten out of her coat; she’d thrown it over a chair and now turned to me.

“Do you remember this dress?”

Simple, patterned, demure, it was nothing out of the ordinary, and it took me a moment to work out why the dress looked strange. It was a cotton summer outfit, and we were in the depths of winter.

“I remember.”

The heavy coat had betrayed nothing of her body. She
slipped the straps from her shoulders and put her arms around my neck. I kissed her and she pulled away, kicking off her shoes and shimmying free of her dress. As she undid her bra I glanced toward the balcony with its French windows that were slightly ajar, despite the cold. When I looked back, Marie was in her stockings, otherwise naked. She stood framed by an inner doorway, its straight lines accentuating the contours of her breasts and hips. It was how I’d imagined her; the erotic pull felt familiar.