City of Strangers (10 page)

'Fine,' he says. 'I'll come back some other time.'

He looks once more at Paul – a strong, slow gaze – then turns and walks in the other direction, fighting to disguise the limp.

Watching until he is out of sight, Paul doesn't move. At last he feels the pressure of his brother's hand against his back, guiding him through the door of the building. They go upstairs. Paul immediately sits, and Ben, who doesn't, moves about warily, stalking along the walls.

'You shouldn't talk to people that way,' Paul says.

'And you shouldn't let some idiot kid bother you like that.'

Ben disappears into the office. Paul can deduce his actions from the sounds they make: turning the pages of a book; rattling the pencils in a cup; knocking his knuckles against the wood of the desk. He calls from the room: 'I take it you're working on something.'

Paul's mind races, afraid that Ben has seen the page about their father – but he put that in a drawer before leaving for the hospital. He answers: 'I've been writing a little about those riots. The ones over the cartoons.' He doesn't know why he lies; perhaps he does so because he can guess that his brother will approve.

'Yeah,' Ben calls back. 'It's awful. Just insane.' He re appears. 'So are you planning to explain to me what that guy downstairs wanted with you?'

At first, Paul isn't sure that he even wants to tell Ben about what happened. He is exhausted already, sick of it. But as he begins, a desire to talk collects within him, like a broken thing that has begun to repair itself, and the story pours out. He doesn't mention that he was returning home from Claire's. Ben listens patiently. Near the end he walks to the room's other chair and lowers himself into it.

'It's a miracle you weren't killed.'

Paul nods. He has grown used to the communal anxiety, worrying from time to time about nuclear annihilation, that no longer unimaginable decimation of New York, but he can't acclimate himself to this new, more private fear.

He looks out the window, surprised to see that the light is gone. It is still winter – dusk is a blink; night falls at once. Ben speaks.

'That was the hospital, wasn't it, the one where Frank is.'

When Paul doesn't answer, he goes on. 'No one said anything about that; they just explained your condition. That you were fragile. It didn't occur to me until just now, how close you brought me to seeing him.'

'Would it have made a difference,' Paul asks, 'would it have changed anything for you, if Dad – if Frank had apologized?'

Ben looks sharply away, then stands. 'The question is irrelevant,' he says. 'He didn't and he wouldn't have.'

He crosses the room, passing his mute brother on the sofa, until he is right by the door.

'You have no idea what it was like to turn my back on my own father. I was seventeen – think about that. I knew what I was doing and I knew I had to do it, but there was still no way I could have prepared myself for the feeling of it. I was calm, I remember, when I told Frank that I wasn't going to visit him, not ever again. But then, when I left, it hit me all at once. I was crying.'

He abruptly stops. 'I don't know what you're trying to do,' he says a moment later. 'Why you think I should want to see him. I don't get it, Paul.'

As soon as the words are out he opens the door, then shuts it quietly behind him. From the hall comes the withdrawing sound of footsteps. They are unexpectedly delicate and slow.

Less than an hour after his brother leaves, the phone rings; Paul speaks briefly with a nurse. Nothing is said outright, but he understands what is meant. He calls a car to take him back to the hospital.

On the way he speaks to the funeral director to make the final arrangements; it is not quite six and he catches Wolff at his desk. They will hold the service on Thursday, two days from now – short notice, but the space is available and, as Paul insists, there is no reason to wait. At Wolff's exhortation a brief announcement will run in the newspaper tomorrow and on the morning of. Paul has explained once before that such a gesture may be customary but in this particular case is futile, yet as he stares through his own reflection in the car's window at the breeze of passing lights, he hasn't got the energy to renew his objection. Yes, he says. Yes; fine. Publish the notice. You're right, of course. You never know who might turn up.

At the hospital Paul signs some papers without which the body cannot be moved. The nurse explains that he can have as many as two hours before his father is taken to the morgue. Paul won't need nearly so much time, but is glad to know such a thing exists, a customary interval that separates the dead from the living, and gives to each its dignity. At a safe remove, before he must sit in the same room as his father, he toggles the pronouns: he, it. A father is a he, a body is an it. Determining this instant of transformation is no easier than determining the instant life becomes life.

It will be another few minutes before Paul is allowed to see him. Something about preparing the room. Waiting at the nurses' station, he notices a book and picks it up. Heavy. Someone has left a Bible sitting out. The nurse hasn't returned. He strums the pages, thumbing through it backward: an improbable seam in the sea repairs itself; Moses unwisely returns to Egypt. Paul arrives at Genesis, where he finds the story of Abraham and Isaac, whose fascination, in his youth, was primal. He wasn't ever able to place his allegiance with Abraham, where the authors of the Bible want it to be – his imagination offered up too graphic a picture of Isaac's terror. Every time he returned to the story Paul held onto the wish, undiminished by the knowledge of what was to come, that Abraham's hand would stop short of killing his son, not through the intervention of an angel but by its own will. That the selflessness of fatherhood would triumph over the egoism of piety. There's a touch on his shoulder, light, like an insect. He can go in.

The room. The bed. Everything clean, white, straight. It is there, his father's body, though he can't see any difference between it and the thing that has been lying there these past weeks, except for the silence; the machines have been switched off. It is the impersonal hush of a museum or a cathedral. Through the door the nurses watch him, each as they pass, a quick look – quick because to them this isn't an extraordinary sight, a son, a dead father, but it is still a moment that demands a look, even a brief one – and then they are gone, hurrying to attend to different tragedies. Like all temporary figures in life they appear and disappear with breathless speed. Paul stands there for several minutes, minutes that feel like minutes, not unduly long or short. He hardly looks at his father. At one point he considers touching his hand, perhaps holding it, but his own hand refuses to move, paralyzed by the thought of the gesture, by how tender or not tender it would seem, by how cold the skin would be, by the complete absence of sensation in the hand it would be holding, the absence of the possibility of sensation, and Paul knows he can't do even this, perform even this small act of filial tribute, this touch, not for his father, even now that he's dead. God, who isn't there, doesn't care; the nurses, who have troubles of their own, don't care; his father, who is dead, doesn't care. The only one to whom it would matter is Paul, and he cannot lift his hand to touch that of his father's corpse.

He stares at the body and reflects that death is in fact the final limit of the imagination. It is a thought he's had previously. You can imagine another's death – his absence from your life – but not your own; you cannot know what it is like to be a corpse. A corpse has no capacity for thought, desire, or boredom, it has no conception of the future: you cannot truly empty yourself of these things: the imagination isn't strong enough, it cannot cancel itself. When someone speaks of imagining his own death, what he really means is that he has imagined looking at his own dead body, as if from above, which is not at all the same thing.

He first considered death when he was eight or nine. His mother had already been dead for several years, but she existed in an atmosphere of the abstract, of things he took on faith but couldn't see or touch – dinosaurs, his own heart, Russia. He hadn't spent much time contemplating a part of himself that might occupy a realm outside the physical, and upon hearing the word
soul
he pictured a coat with hundreds of pockets, both inside and out, in which you stored all the small treasures you didn't want to lose and, in some cases, meant to keep secret. Once he discovered the fact of death he became obsessed. Everything was death, everything would die. It was so astonishing in its universal application that it failed even to scare him. He can still picture a Civil War battlefield he visited with his father, where he looked out upon endless tides of mist across a field littered with ghosts, where he read the names and dates on monuments. Like all boys he was fascinated by the idea of such violence, such volume of bloodshed. Frank displayed little interest, and it was impossible not to catch his impatience as Paul explored and ran around, his indifference to the things outside his own head. They were driving to Florida, a trip that Frank had announced suddenly and without explanation. Paul was happy to go anywhere that wasn't Brooklyn. On their second day after reaching Florida, Paul's father dressed more sharply than usual, putting on a dark brown suit and taking special care to comb Paul's hair. When Paul asked where they were going, the answer was: 'To pay a visit.'

The house was a dreary two stories, the shingling coming apart all over the roof, and along the shady side were nervy patterns of neglect in the paint, buckling wood, and bent, rusted gutters. It was a house at the end of a slow decline – much like his own, in fact. But there were differences. Corridors of lawn – actual grass – separated this home from its neighbors, and by the front door, in a small planter, bloomed flowers he had never seen.

His father pressed the bell; a woman appeared. She was old, too, but her face had a softness his lacked. She wore her wrinkles more lightly: they were lines traced in sand, not chiseled in stone. Paul studied this unfamiliar figure, but at first she didn't seem to notice him; she looked only at his father.

'I didn't want to show up like this,' his father began. She didn't let him finish.

'Then why did you?'

She was about to say more, then registered Paul's presence. He felt uncomfortable under her gaze, assuming that she found his hair amusing, since to him it looked foolish after his father's ministrations. 'He seems nice,' she said.

They went inside. It was an interior marked by an abundance of soft things: rugs, blankets, pillows. After letting himself be swallowed in a large armchair Paul was given a glass of whole milk. On one side of the room the shelves were stocked with framed photographs. In many he spotted a familiar face, younger than the version he knew but still easily recognized as his older brother. From his perch he surveyed the rest of the house. Clutter didn't dwell in corners, as it did in Paul's home. The piles of newspapers from last year and the year before were nowhere to be found. Pictures were hung, and hung straight. Surfaces were dusted, carpets swept. Someone lived here, and wanted to live here.

But Paul had found himself in the middle of a curious situation: two adults, sitting opposite each other, not saying a word. He was accustomed to his father's silences, but in his experience when you put two grown-ups in a room they usually found something to talk about. This woman and his father weren't even looking at each other.

'Why do you have all the pictures of my brother?'

The woman smiled. She held Paul's eyes, then looked at his father. 'He's very dear, isn't he?'

His father looked at him. Then he turned back to the woman and asked, 'How is Ben?'

'He's got a good job, a very good job.'

'Where's he living?'

The woman stared back at him and said nothing: her face was as expressionless as a plate.

'I just thought—'

'I know what you thought, Frank. But this won't change anything. There's nothing to change.'

'You don't have to talk to me like that. I haven't been here a minute, already you're back at my throat.'

Her eyes filled. 'You brought your own damn throat here for me to get at.'

She paused. 'I understand why you came. I've read your letters. As for Ben . . . it's a shame when a father and a son can't find some common ground. He's a grown man. It's his decision.'

The woman rose from the sofa.

'Look, Paul's finished his milk. I'm glad I could meet him. But you both should go now. I know you've come a long way, but the best thing now is for you both to leave.'

She took the glass from Paul and placed it on the table; then with her thumb she wiped the last chalking of milk from his lip. Together they walked to the front door. Frank, every piece of him hanging in a posture of lethargic surrender, at last stood and followed. At the door the woman put her hand on Paul's head and told him to be good. To his father she said only: 'Goodbye, Frank.' A closed door at their backs, father and son returned to the car without speaking; nor would they speak of that afternoon in the years to come. Paul later had to calculate its significance on his own. He knew only that he'd never seen his father like this: he'd never seen another person cow him into acquiescence. His father had always been a single, unvarying concept, an inscrutable brick of obstinacy and measured silences; now he had another side which had been there all along. Now he was much, much more. Of all that she did, this woman, who even took the care to wipe the milk from his face, was most remarkable for showing him this. The man whose hands now gripped the steering wheel wasn't the man who'd parked the car. Even the sound of Paul's door shutting couldn't be the same as before. The air around him vibrated. His small heart raced.

Like she does every morning, she uses her fingernail to burst the dimple on the back of the foil packaging and then to scrape out the small blue pill, which scrambles her hormones and ensures that her body remains uninhabitable. The bed is too hot. She kicks up the covers and spends a moment looking at what they have exposed, her long, naked legs. They seem unnervingly white. Half a glass of water sits on the nightstand, poured maybe a day ago; bubbles climb through it like ivy. Next to her, David is still asleep, and she can hear his soft, tapered breathing. Claire, reaching for the water, sits up, and the sheet slides away from her breasts; with the pill in her mouth and the glass perched on her lips, she looks again at this body beside her own, its hard splinter of collarbone the only fragment visible above the sheet, and cues up a memory from last night. Then she grins, sighs, and swallows.

She's still hot. It has been a long time since she was used to sharing a bed, and she twists away from David, the radiator of another body. Pushing the covers further from her draws them off her companion as well. She lightly touches his stomach. He's slim and well-built, especially for a man in his forties; Paul isn't out of shape, but his body is nothing like David's, which makes her think of a slivered almond, that same soft white, that precision along the edges. She loves the feeling of him between her legs, his small hips locking into her thighs, the sense of being able to enclose his body, fully, in hers. Comparing his form to Paul's makes her feel guilty, a little mean, as if she's abusing a private reservoir of knowledge. But guilt has a half-life; Paul quickly exits her mind. Her hand, still too gentle to wake this man who is not her husband, grazes downward: she imagines that the backs of her nails are a fine mist against his skin.

Last night they went out. It was Valentine's Day, but that was a coincidence – they hadn't realized the significance of that particular Tuesday when they made the plans. There was dinner, wine. An old-fashioned air of courtship. They ordered a second bottle. And then a glass of port with dessert. She was drunk in the taxi that carried them to her apartment, her thoughts as loose as her hair, the lights of the avenue graphed in blurry lines and dots across her vision. David held her hand. His bones stuck like pebbles between her fingers.

Claire coaxes the sheet down to his waist, then stops. She wonders whether their small account of nights together has given her the right to do more before he wakes. Then she notices that David has an erection, or the beginning of one. Claire looks quickly at his face, but his eyes are closed; he is dreaming. It would be nice if he were dreaming of her. Are they making love behind those eyelids? Feeling greedy, a little reckless, she presses her thighs together, as the particles of desire collect and condense between them, then slowly tugs away the sheet. Once he is in the open she takes him between two fingers, which she moves delicately back and forth, drawing more blood into his penis; she enjoys the feeling of it, its innocent, programmed response. David is uncut. She likes it. The skin at the top is a soft, extra thing, a novel alternative to the others she has seen, where the blood, at the peak of arousal, beats feverishly in the naked bulb.

He is awake. At first she doesn't realize it, mesmerized as she is by the rare, unchaperoned access to this part of a man's body, and when she glances up to find his eyes upon her, she sees that he isn't startled – her attentions, her audacity in waking him like this, have clearly aroused him, and in an instant she feels lust crash through her. She wants everything at once. Removing her eyes from his – she would be embarrassed to watch him watching her – she takes him in her mouth, moving her hand onto the inside of his left leg. The long cords of muscle in his thigh snap tight. A hand reaches through her arms and takes one of her breasts – wild, wanting him, she clasps her hand over his and presses it against her until the tips of his fingers dig into bone. She has him fully, feeling him in the back of her mouth, even using her teeth, and she stops only at the threshold of actual pain, only when his groans turn against her.

Three nights ago she was in this bed, in the same situation, with Paul, although she did not perform this particular act. It has an intimacy, an importance, that sex itself does not. With Paul she simply fucked. With Paul she simply let it happen. At the time it felt natural, and it did not feel bad, but it felt nothing like this now – now she is the one acting, the one whose blood screams to take more, whose heart rings inside her chest.

Her body is an abundance, and it needs his, it needs skin, the contact and tension of muscle. He tugs on a condom. With quick, precise motions she is astride him, she has him, she is working against him; she pounces at his mouth with her own, finds his tongue, bites his lips; she grips his wrists and pins them above his head; she pushes down on his chest for leverage, scuffs her palms against his nipples; she tilts back, feeling a pleasurable strain burn through the muscles that run from her shoulders to her hips, and reaches around to play with his balls; she doesn't know how much noise they make, and doesn't care; she is, she is, she is.

Claire gasps once more, then falls silent. In the shivering aftermath, the merciless accrual of separateness, warmth and lust fall away like dead skin, drift apart like ash, and she becomes cold, recedes into her own head. The explosions of her heart soften, the last, rattling muscles go quiet. She can see clearly again. It is an absent, exhausted feeling, the death of desire.

She pulls the sheet around herself, and then the blanket, noticing that David's eyes, which search her greedily, want her to remain unhidden, his, available for private visual consumption. His gaze touches her as deliberately, as tangibly, as hands. She itches from it and looks away, her own eyes falling upon the nightstand, the empty glass, the package of birth control, the sleeve of cigarettes. For a moment she considers lighting one, but she has promised herself not to do this inside the apartment. Cigarettes just made sense in the months after the divorce, each a handy envelope of pleasure and self-contained guilt, an ideal distraction. She'd smoked on and off in college. In the gnarled logic of heartache and self-pity it felt perfectly natural to adopt a harmful habit. Claire Metzger wasn't a smoker, but that didn't mean that Claire Brennan, following a period of suspended animation, three years off the map, couldn't be.

Paul. It would be unfair to accuse him of anything, not after it was she who asked him up, but he's the one who arrived at her door, and he knew – he knew! – the effect his presence would have. He wanted it to happen. He planned it.

'You're thinking about him,' says David.

'Who?'

'Your ex-husband.'

'Yes,' she admits.

'Good.'

'Good?'

'It means you aren't getting hung up on me.'

He gives a crimped little smile whose meaning is unclear. Is he joking? She hears in his voice the shred of bitterness he can't help. David rolls halfway toward her and possessively touches her bare shoulder; while his touch lingers there her skin revolts, as if it can feel each groove and notch of his fingerprints. What is this inside her? The feeling is intense, private and almost palpable, a physical object materializing within her that she alone has access to. Its value is uncertain. But it gives her one important piece of information: she owes him nothing.

Hastily, she lifts herself from the bed. He doesn't ask where she is going, pretends he isn't staring as she wanders naked through the bright bath of morning. She wants to dress, start the day. In the space of three nights she has slept with two men, one of them her ex-husband, and it troubles her how comfortable she feels within shifting, multiple roles – this isn't a person she wants to be. Indecision seizes her. From next door suddenly comes a familiar sound – a baby's crying, muffled by the wall. She listens. Forgetting the man in her bed, forgetting her own nakedness, forgetting everything, she closes her eyes and strains to hear. After a moment she realizes her mistake. It isn't a child, only the hysterical yelping of channels changing quickly from one to the next. Someone has turned on a television.

Paul goes underground.

From his jacket he retrieves two pieces of paper. One was cut from the newspaper this morning – torn, actually, he didn't take the time to find a pair of scissors – and folded in two. He's read his father's obituary once already, and now peruses it more carefully. An obituary in the newspaper is normally something a family can be grateful for, an exercise in light hagiography; in this case printing one at all seems unfair, even bloodthirsty. It is Paul's fault – the death notice he allowed Wolff to send out must have alerted the newspaper. Even so, he assumed the bar for infamy would be set much higher. His father was hardly James Earl Ray, Lee Harvey Oswald, George Wallace. He wasn't one of the seminal villains of American history; the collective memory has let go. The obituary comes to three paragraphs in length; limns the scope of his father's deeds; notes that he is survived by two sons, both of whom live in New York City and one of whom is Ben Wald, the manager of a hedge fund and currently the subject of a government investigation.

That would be Ben of the solid nuclear family, of the regular visits to a house of worship, of the many colleagues and subordinates, whose years of work in the financial industry have insulated a patiently built life. Even a heart attack can't tear him down. And it is Ben who is the intended recipient of the second piece of paper – an index card addressed on one side with only two pieces of information on the other: the time and place of Frank Metzger's funeral.

It won't do any good; Ben has made that clear enough. He will destroy the card. This morning Paul even tried calling his brother's mobile. Three times; no answer. But he isn't ready to let the occasion pass without his brother knowing that it is going to happen. Ben's arrival at the hospital likely doesn't indicate a change in him, but Paul can't stop himself from wanting it to. Some remnant of the younger brother, in love with the older, is always there.

Eeling out of the tunnel, the train emerges in the light of an aboveground station, and all at once half a dozen people dig phones out of purses, coats, jeans. They snap them open and begin striking the buttons. Paul folds the obituary and slips it back in his pocket with the card. Its importance rests not in who reads it today or who remembers it tomorrow, but in its place in the public record, proof of its enduring truth, baked forever into the labyrinth of searchable databases in which all the world's knowledge now resides, cities of hard drives buried underground, hot, humming, and smug.

At the apartment, he studies himself in the mirrors that panel the elevator and, feeling a familiar displeasure at his own appearance, exits the lift to find Beth standing in the door frame.

'Is Ben home?'

She pauses. 'No – it's Wednesday, Paul. It's a weekday. Is everything all right?'

'Can I come in?'

Beth deposits him in the living room and returns with two steaming mugs of coffee. He accepts one and without taking a sip lowers it onto the glass-top table, careful not to let a drop escape, then promptly forgets about it. Beth holds hers with two hands, dearly, like a reliquary. She sits opposite him, her back straight, her demeanor wooden. She's a proper-looking woman, dressed in slacks and a pale blue sweater; her silvering brown hair is cut just above the shoulders. The difference in their ages is great enough that Paul can't help but think of her as maternal – having never known his own, he has a habit of seeking out temporary mothers. He has always been comfortable in her presence. Beth's eyes blink rapidly, especially when she listens to another person speak, and their arrangement, set far apart, accentuates an unusual size and gentleness.

Paul takes out the card and, handing it to Beth, says: 'I don't mean to intrude. I just came to give this to Ben.'

She stares at it. 'I'll make sure he gets it.' She adds, quickly and quietly, 'I'm so sorry, Paul.'

That concludes their business. But he hasn't had his coffee, and, oddly, he doesn't want to go. The good order of things, the cleanliness, the brightness, make Paul want to stay; it feels so remote from his own apartment, the life he's allowed to collect around him, the loneliness there, the congealed silences. He reaches for his coffee and sucks up two abrupt sips before asking: 'How's Jake?'

Beth smiles gratefully. 'He's good. He's a sophomore now.'

'Ben told me.'

'He was thinking of majoring in economics, but his father wants Jake to study history or philosophy, something like that. He wants a college professor for a son.'

Paul finds the idea almost humorous, Ben discouraging his son from becoming a hardhearted businessman like he is. He wants to be a good father, the kind of father they didn't have – a thought that makes Paul admire his brother, in a roundabout way, though it can't help but sadden him a little, too.

'And what do you think?'

'I think Jake should do whatever makes him happy.'

Strange to remember that he once knew his nephew as a baby – a little tablet of possibility, bonelessly soft, made easily glad by the most mundane trinkets of the world. This was back when he was not quite twenty and Ben tolerated the occasional visit. It has been years. Paul wonders what kind of man his nephew has become. Surely he's tall, strong, and in full bloom, exhibiting his father's many physical gifts. Confident and well-liked. Ben wouldn't have any other kind of son.

He asks, 'Is Ben going to be all right?'

For what seems like a long time she doesn't answer. When she does speak, her sentences are broken by long, uneven pauses. 'He's never not been all right before. What they say about him – it's hard to take. The issues aren't ones I really understand. Ben hasn't been himself. It hasn't been easy. I don't know.'

'You don't talk to him about it?'

'We talk about other things. With all this going on, Ben's been concentrating on other things. Family. Temple. He's on the phone a lot with Jake.'

Holding the coffee mug, Paul stands and begins to walk slowly around the room. It is a little chilly and for the first time he notices that the sweater his sister-in-law wears is quite heavy. He moves toward the glass shelves, ornamented with photographs.