Amy Falls Down (27 page)

Patrice Garrotte leaned toward her, extending a spectral arm in front of her face, pointing out the window like the Ghost of Christmas Future. “Look down,” he said. “Look at that.”

Whatever “that” was, Garrotte was pleased about it, but this was hardly reassuring. Something was outside the window, and that was bad. They were six miles above the earth. Nothing should have been outside the window. Against every instinct, Amy faced the window.

“Look down,” said Garrotte again.

Some immeasurable distance below, the width of Amy’s thumb on the pane, a trail of black smoke exactly paralleled the flight of their own plane, like an underline, italicizing them. “What is that?” she asked, though she knew what it was. It was why she never flew.

“It’s a contrail.”

“Contrails are white,” she said. Beneath her feet, the floor felt like exactly what it was, the skin of a tin can.

“They are white,” said Garrotte, “when viewed from the earth.”

“But isn’t it steam?” Amy struggled to keep her voice low.

“It’s frozen smoke,” he said.

“From what?”

“Jet exhaust.”

So another jet had flown underneath them, inches away, in the opposite direction.

“The skies are mobbed, you know,” said Garrotte.

Was he trying to drive her insane? “Mobbed,” not “crowded,” which would have been horrible enough.

“I have a confession to make,” he said.

She could feel, in the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands gripping the armrests, the rumblings of a panic attack, her first since Max died.

“I too am on my way to the Whither Publishing Conference.” As confessions go, this was way too puny a diversion. “I am the managing editor of a small independent publishing house, the Big Reveal Press.” Garrotte shrugged and shook his head. “The name was recently forced upon us by our backers, all of whom are under forty. Its original name was Epiphany Press. Basically, we publish offbeat books for intellectuals. Skeptical science, general debunking, but now we want to branch into out-of-print fiction.” He apparently took Amy’s stare for curiosity. “I’m sure you can guess…” Garrotte blushed, instantly, as though a switch had lit up his sympathetic nervous system, his cheeks and neck turning a shade close to magenta, too much blue in the red to be healthy, but he rallied and persevered. “I’m sure you can guess my mission here, and I only hope you’re not offended by being approached directly, rather than through Ms. Horner.”

Garrotte’s big reveal was that he wanted to secure the publishing rights to all her books. Amy tried to focus on his words, his demeanor, anything but the antics outside her window and the fading surfaces, shapes, and colors of the plane’s interior, that all-too familiar sensation that the construct would not hold, that the ravenous void was pushing against it. She should never have looked. That voids by their nature have no power to push was not enough to interrupt or even slow her freefall. It had come on her so quickly. She could not stop it.

Garrotte lost his dry-eyed serenity as he fumbled with dollar figures, apologizing before and after each suggested offer, as though the market value of her old books would make a bit of difference in a few seconds, when she would cease to be. Amy reached for the second Klonopin in her change purse, but in her shaking hand it danced free of its Kleenex nest and fell to the floor, the non-floor, the anti-floor, and when she went to reach for it, she could already feel icy wind at her fingertips.

Garrotte swooped gracefully and snapped it up, placing the little tablet in her hand, then disappeared and returned with a small bottle of Evian, opening it for her. “You should probably take that with a bite of something,” he whispered. “What would you like? I’ll order it for you.”

Suddenly parched, Amy tipped the bottle to drink, water sluicing down her trembling wrist, and when she looked at the tablet, it was halfway dissolved. There it goes, she thought, watching the little puddle in her palm turn milky, there it goes, and was not startled when Garrotte mopped up the puddle with a white linen handkerchief. Touching her. As though they had known each other for decades. Anything was possible now.

“It’s just as well,” he said. “That might have knocked you out. You don’t want that.”

Loss of control twinkles naughtily at the heart of pteromechanophobia.
This sentence formed in her mind so clearly she could see it all at once and wondered if she had spoken it aloud. She was stretched evenly between two losses, loss of reason, loss of dignity. Loss of life didn’t even enter into it. Did she want to spend her last moments outside of her self, flinging off memory, history, identity, and flailing in the Now like a crazy person, handing over her shell to uniformed children, making it their mess? Or would she expose herself to the stranger on her left, this grotesque miracle of discretion who was plainly ready and able to minister to her pitiful needs? Could she let him hold her? No.

“Snakes, fog, thunder, and bees,” Patrice Garrotte was saying, his voice low and companionable. “
All
winged insects, really, but especially the ones that buzzed and stung. Heights, needles, children’s balloons…” He smiled wistfully. “I was her only child,” he added, as though they had been talking at length about his mother and not the publishing needs of Big Reveal. Perhaps they had. “My father had no stomach for it, but I got brilliant at arranging and anticipating. I was a magician of misdirection. Once I got her through three consecutive days without a phobic incident. But I couldn’t foresee every trigger.” He paused and leaned toward her. “Moonlight,” he confided, “on a white bedspread.” He pretended to see on her face an expression of sympathetic understanding. She could see him do that. “Really,” he said, “I was not an unhappy child. Not at all. Just a busy one.” Again he disappeared from view, again returning in a flash, this time with a tray of food that he placed in front of her.

“They look rather excessively imagined, don’t they?” he said, still pretending that she was engaging in their conversation, that she had just gotten off a light remark about the contents of the tray, which was littered with what looked like doll food, arranged whimsically in tiny inappropriate containers. There was a shot glass half full of crimson foam topped with a rose blossom of artfully folded prosciutto. A cone of Emmenthaler secured a spray of shaved asparagus around a cube of some kind of raw fish on a stick, like a lollipop. What looked like a cup from a little girl’s tea set held a placid, pale yellow broth, and in its depths either a quail egg or a human eyeball. The tray was mobbed with edible nonsense. “It’s the amuse-bouche assortment,” he said, arching his sketchy eyebrows.

We are not amused, thought Amy, except that she must have said it, because she could just make out her own croaky voice over the apocalyptic hum and whine.

“I’ll take it away,” said Patrice, preparing to stand.

“Leave it,” she said. Of course it had to be an egg, but she decided to believe it was an eyeball. Gazing down at it had a calming effect. This didn’t make sense, but she was so grateful for the calm that she embraced it fully. “Tell me more,” she said, without lifting her eyes to him. “Tell me more about your mother. About your magical ways.”

“She was a wonderful storyteller,” he said, “which was a good thing, since she was a very poor reader. My earliest memories are of her reading to me from picture books, beautiful books she got from the library, but in truth she was fabricating. Her stories always went along with the pictures. She made them up on the spot. When I got a little older, I began to correct her, because the stories were always changing, and children don’t want that. They want them to stay exactly the same. So we told them to each other, together.”

Perhaps it was a bleached radish with a disk of black olive pasted on one end with cream cheese. The surface of the liquid barely rippled. No turbulence there. Patrice spun a seamless tale about his dyslexic mother, or maybe it was something else, he was never sure, but she was of course a beautiful, soft, delicate woman, and he her champion from birth. Amy listened closely, more closely than she had ever read anything, and she heard that some of it was false, but in the way that mattered it was all true. Patrice, child and man, was the real storyteller, and she admired the choices he made now, describing his ingenious strategies for anticipating and thwarting his mother’s panic spells, laying them out matter-of-factly, injecting neither pathos nor hilarity, letting them stand alone. She pushed him for details, making him name the children’s books, recount the alternative stories. He was up to it. In Mother Garrotte’s version of Wanda Gag’s
Millions of Cats,
an old woman drove away her son with her incessant nagging, and when he came back armed with millions of cats, she was so afraid that she let him in and stopped complaining. All the cats save one went back home, their mission accomplished.

Though he never said, he must have lived with his mother until she died. No summer camp for Patrice Garrotte, no dormitory life, no fifth-floor walkup in a strange new city. No dangerous lovers, no wife and child. He was too busy glazing her windows, monitoring her television access, vetting her visitors. He taught himself internal medicine so she wouldn’t have to deal with physicians. “Not literally,” he demurred, “I just collected a long shelf of medical reference books,” but clearly—after all, he had identified Amy’s Klonopin from an impressive distance—he had used his PDR as more than a doorstop.

Had Amy been the sort of person who scoured the perceptible world for signs, who believed in cosmic zoning, she would have recognized Patrice Garrotte as some sort of messenger sent to usher her safely through the skies. That she and Max and his mother had shared a fear of doctors would glisten with meaning. That both Amy and Patrice had in youth closed the door on risk and adventure, opting out of their own lives, would make them star-twins, would have foreordained their meeting. But their meeting was a happy accident. That was all, and that was enough.

We tell stories to fashion sense out of chaos: we crave order and achieve it with narrative. As long as she had been writing, Amy had taken this as an article of faith. Until this moment, though, she had not realized how urgent this need could be. Patrice was saving her with a story. Outside her window, beneath her shoes, the accidental universe howled and buffeted without sentiment or purpose. Inside, Patrice wrapped her snugly in a blanket of narrative threads. Amy, who had never enjoyed being read to, just let herself sink down and away.

She was with Max and Patrice and Maxine and other people and millions of cats in a great airy cottage on the banks of Lake George, where she and Max had summered once. It was some kind of rooming house now. Apparently it was hers. Catamarans and sunfish skimmed the diamond surface of the glacial lake. On the porch, Max was grilling scallops on the double hibachi, and also asleep, smiling, on the bamboo couch in the living room, and then pulling up to the cottage in their old Volvo, loaded down with groceries. “You’re everywhere,” she said. “I keep running into you,” and they were going to play charades later. They both smelled of coconut oil and Marlboros and cedar. The cottage wheezed and bumped and danced and settled down like Baba Yaga’s house on stilts. Patrice’s mother gripped a lace handkerchief and whimpered softly. “It’s just a little earthquake,” Amy said. “We get them all the time.” The rooms were countless, warm, and full of morning light, and underneath the quiet she could hear the muffled scolding of a million tiny birds. “Birds my ass,” said Maxine, looking well and rested. “That’s typewriters. Everybody’s typing. Look what you’ve gone and done.” Amy laughed. “We’re here,” said Max. “I know that,” said Amy. “Give us a minute,” he said. “Stop saying that,” said Amy. “It’s time to go,” he whispered.
Stop saying that.
“Leave us alone for a bit longer,” he said, but they wouldn’t, and she opened her eyes to the sight of an annoyed flight attendant bending over her. “As you can plainly see,” said Patrice Garrotte, “she’s awake. Give us room.” She had landed. She was down. She was alive. He walked her out of the empty cabin.

“Was your mother afraid of earthquakes?” she asked him.

“She was afraid of everything.”

“We have them all the time,” said Amy. I dreamed about her, she thought to say, but they didn’t know each other that well. He wanted to stay and help with the bags. If she’d let him, he would have taken her to the hotel and run a bath. She waved him off. “I’ll see you at the conference,” she said. She watched him disappear behind a throng of reunited families, and while she waited at the carousel she took out her notebook. “The Storyteller,” she wrote. Of course she would sell him her book rights, and of course Maxine would kick and scream. But Amy owed him. She could still see, almost, the lake from her long white porch, the Mohican Steamboat turning around midwater, heading back to Bolton Landing. Remembered light suffused the terminal, and beneath the echoes of arrival and departure the white noise, the happy sound, of typing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Veal Piccata

Amy hadn’t been to Manhattan since 1965, when she came on a whim with her college roommate. They had trudged through the public library and the Met, attended a Fugs concert on Christopher Street, and for some forgotten reason eaten exclusively at automats. Although she read the online
Times
regularly, Amy, a true child of New England, had on some level expected everything to be more or less the same. She remembered now how much she loved the reckless belligerence of New York cabs. From her window, Manhattan looked and sounded reassuringly familiar, tall and bright and boisterous, but when she reached her hotel, she recoiled from sensory overload. This was not New York. It wasn’t even America. Times Square looked like Tokyo, or how she had imagined Tokyo on the basis of disinterested glimpses on TV. The whole neighborhood was a colossal arcade, and the hotel lobby was featureless—nothing like the Taft, which she remembered as white-tiled, candelabraed, and within hailing distance of seedy. This lobby was unnecessarily huge and aggressively rectangular.