City of Strangers (2 page)

She doesn't, of course – no one does any longer. The nurse stares again at the man in the bed, as if to see something she hasn't yet, perhaps cycling through a mental list of minor television actors and local politicians. Paul tries to decide if he will tell her. Even the barest facts would make her face go hard and her body snap tight. It isn't the sort of thing one explains casually. When she's certain she has no idea who he might be, other than Frank Metzger, a patient in the hospital where she works, one of the many dried-out bodies lying here to record the final ragged beats of their hearts, her eyes come back to Paul and ask, as they must, one question:
Who?

Ten months into the lease and he can almost say he's used to the place: its speckled, run-down bathroom, the loose fixtures in the kitchen, the odd configuration which, like many prewar Brooklyn apartments, has been harshly renovated, indifferently carved and divvied to create as many units as possible within a single building. Its abiding virtue is price. Paul could find nothing cheaper. He knows and can mostly ignore its idiosyncrasies. The radiators, for instance. In winter they hiss like deflating tires, and the air feels like an extra layer of clothing. At least the place is tidy. One benefit of having few possessions is that clutter is nearly impossible. He wasn't always like this. In the last months, living again on his own has among other side effects disciplined him. Very few objects here have a history. There are his books, but, apart from an old coffee mug or the odd souvenir, the things he owns wouldn't tell a visitor much about him. The walls are bare.

On an end table he finds a single wineglass, in which swim the tepid dregs of last night's bottle – red and cheap – consumed in the company of a book and a recording of a Thelonius Monk concert purchased earlier that day, something they found in a library basement and remastered. He remembers thinking, around midnight, as alcohol and boredom were carrying him off to sleep, that he should take the trouble to wash the glass. Paul, stripping off his jacket, now makes a point of plucking it up by the stem and taking it to the kitchen, where, bent over the sink, he sponges the fingerprints from its fat underbelly.

Next he goes to the small office. It is meant to be the bedroom, but Paul, who sleeps on the pullout sofa in the living room, hasn't ever used it as such. He hears shouts and looks out the window. The snow has stopped. Some tall, rangy boys, a mix of ages and ethnicities bang around a soccer ball in the empty street. They scramble and taunt. Whites are moving into the neighborhood, prices are climbing, but as the avenue along the park bends and slopes southward from Windsor Terrace the families – Latin American, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, Chinese – still illustrate a larger atlas.

He watches until they are gone, as the bump and scrape of ball and pavement diminish, then vanish altogether. Their ease of movement has made Paul conscious of his own body, his thirty-six years. He's fine, he's in good shape, a lean six feet; he has all his hair. But he hasn't been inside a gym since his twenties, and for years the hair has been fading, like something exhausted, to an early gray. The difference is within. Paul has begun to sense the limits of his own life, a claustrophobia of aging: he feels trapped inside a failing piece of equipment. Routine physical effort – a flight of stairs, a heavy box – can now leave him short of breath. He can't locate when the change occurred, when his body first betrayed him. All he knows is that he can't do what these teenagers do.

On the roll-top desk in the office is a shambolic still life: pencils, pens, a broken watch, paper clips, a laptop computer, books, a calendar open to the wrong month, a lamp, paper, photographs, dust. This is the one zone of permitted disorder in the apartment. He moves a pile of books from the chair. In one of the drawers – he pretends not to remember which – are the pages of half a novel, something he was working on in his spare time last year. It was one of the few things Paul made a point of bringing with him when he moved, but he rarely thinks about it now. Lately he's had steady work, but as always he has to worry that it won't last. Editors are less generous than they used to be. He gets by. The articles come and go in a blur; it is difficult to recall the details of a thousand-word piece he submitted last month. Paul sits, retrieves a pen, seesaws it between his fingers. He stands again – there's no use pretending he's going to get anything done – and replaces the books on the chair.

In the living room he switches on the TV and turns it to one of the news stations. Another report on the rioting that has erupted overseas in protest of some cartoons in a Danish newspaper mocking Islam. It has been more than a month, and the demonstrations have only grown fiercer. People are dead. Muslims are inadvertently killing other Muslims while defending their prophet, incidental casualties during hazy, violent episodes of unrest. Every day Paul sees more images of clenched wild faces, flaming cars. It fascinates and horrifies him. He has put down a few thoughts on the subject, none of which has clotted into something he likes, and he's even mentioned the idea to a few editors. No one bit.

A reporter talks over footage of a rippling crowd. They scream in Arabic, Farsi; Paul wouldn't know. Protestors have called for the artists' heads. They alarm him even more than the advertised terrorists, the suicide bombers and sleeper cells. Terrorism, like road accidents and pickpockets on the subway, has become part of the basic weather of living. What he perceives as the roots of extremism – humiliation and hopelessness – make sense, in a way. But these protestors are ordinary men. They are unschooled in radicalism and otherwise not inclined to want murder. Some childish drawings have spurred them to demand it. Whatever name one prefers to give the turn of global events in the last five years – perhaps it is already a world war – it certainly hasn't ended. He was certain of that last year when London was attacked. Then Egypt. And now every conflagration – Iraq, Afghanistan, car bombs, soldiers, martyrs, beheadings, vandalized mosques and collateral damage, nightclubs and train cars ripped apart by explosives – the growing list of cities terrorized and disfigured – all of it has been reduced to a handful of childish drawings, a set of competing ideas: on the one side, a belief that some things do not belong to the corporeal world, to something as mundane as pen and paper, as coarse as human laughter; and, on the other, the principle that there is nothing which cannot be thought, printed, ridiculed.

Daylight has relented by the time he leaves the apartment again, and evening spreads above the city like a bruise. Paul's thoughts turn to his father's will. Naming him the sole beneficiary, it was signed only in the presence of a caretaker whose English is poor, and his brother's lawyer has pressed for a previous draft to be recognized, one that leaves Ben with fully three-quarters of their father's estate, including the payout on the life insurance. That version is decades old. Paul has no idea why his father waited so long to revise it; somehow he must have clung to the dismal hope that he and his firstborn son would be reconciled. Ben was never going to do that, and, although he must have his reasons for contesting the will, Paul doesn't understand. Ben is rich. He hardly needs what amounts to a modest inheritance. Paul has grown tired of fighting him – a fight that until this morning has been conducted solely through lawyers and the postal service. But he has no choice. It's money, and he's desperate. Frank Metzger will be dead by the end of the week.

Paul shouldn't even go out again. He's exhausted. Before getting on the subway he stops at the cafe by the station. It is an ordinary coffeehouse, with thatch-backed chairs and iron-legged tables, and in the heart of the afternoon it fills with young people on laptops and old men reading news papers. By now they're gone, and the cafe is a vacant cube of light on the dark corner. He sees that a man he knows, Pirro, is working tonight. In the wicker baskets behind the glass counter, the day's last muffins and croissants nestle in blond heaps, like litters of sleeping puppies. They have a waxy, inedible sheen. Pirro, a Bosnian, is perhaps a few years younger than Paul, and his face – round, sunken, and fleshy – wears a carpet of stubble. Since moving to the neighborhood Paul has probably spoken to no one as often as Pirro. He sees him sometimes twice a day.

With his big hands Pirro wrestles the cash register and hits Paul with a fusillade of curses as soon as the door opens.

'What's the matter?'

'Oh – Paul. Good evening. It is nothing, just the fucking printer. It prints receipts that are nonsense.'

Still prying at the machine, he says, 'Have you heard what the mayor wants to do? Charging cars to drive in Manhattan. Next they are going to make us pay to breathe the air. You want just a coffee?'

'I don't think it's such a bad idea. It will be good for the environment. It will be easier to get around.'

'Medium? My cousin runs a business. They drive trucks everywhere. Do you know how much this will cost him?'

'Medium's fine. They can use the money to repair roads, make the subways better.'

'Okay, let's see if the subway gets any better.' He seals the lid on the coffee. 'You shouldn't believe everything the mayor says, my friend.'

Paul laughs. As he's pulling out his wallet, Pirro waves a hand. 'Not tonight, my friend. On the house.'

'That's very kind of you.' The coffee is still too hot to drink and smells burnt.

'Now if I can just get this machine to work, we will really have reason to thank God.'

Paul waves as the door shuts after him. On his way to the subway he passes a group of men standing outside the corner bar, smoking cigarettes and, from the sound of it, already drunk. His mind elsewhere, he narrowly avoids walking into a fire hydrant and stumbles slightly, spilling some coffee. 'Careful!' cries one of the men as they all laugh.

The day's final errand brings him once more to Manhattan. He knows the address, an apartment south of Union Square, but hasn't seen the building, and the meeting is an unscheduled one – a half-formed idea, really, which has sat within him all day, and upon which, until now, it has been unclear if he would act. When he leaves the station it is even colder; he walks quickly, the digestive murmur of trains dying away behind him, even as his nerve for the endeavor starts to wane. He makes the turn onto the street he wants, passing the fogged, noisy windows of another bar, and when he finds her name next to the apartment number he feels a miserable, sickening turbulence. For a moment he studies the handwritten name like a piece of evidence.

He presses the bell.

'Hello?'

The hour is too late for a delivery, and her voice comes down the intercom's staticky chute pinched with anxiety. She isn't expecting anyone, then, although the possibility that she might have been occurs to Paul only now that he's at her doorstep.

'What are you doing here?' she asks once he announces himself.

'I have to talk to you.'

'You could have called.'

'It's my father. He's dying.'

She says, 'Hold on,' but the lock doesn't open. He waits. When she appears a few moments later it is apparent that she has already made up her mind about the distance to keep between them, about the expression to wear. She stands a few feet away and says nothing.

'I can't come up?'

They both watch the white curl of his breath expire in the air.

He knew the sight of his wife after so many months would affect him, but he couldn't have anticipated the hot, gluey pressure in his chest, the unceasing flap of blood down through his legs. They have spoken infrequently since the divorce, and this is the first time he has seen her face. He makes an inventory, beginning with the hazel eyes, then the drawn-down cheeks, the parentheses of sleek, dark hair; her thin lips part to expose a slash of perfect white teeth. She's always been beautiful. Everything is where it should be. Yet something, as present as the friction of clothes on skin, has changed.

As if reading his mind, she says, 'You look different.'

'Do I?'

She turns away, a private thought. He read once that when a person momentarily glances away before speaking, the direction of the glance distinguishes a recollection of fact from the invention of a lie, but Paul can't remember which is indicated by a turn to the left and which by a turn to the right; he gives up and instead lets his eyes trace the long asymptote of Claire's neck to where it vanishes beneath the line of her coat.

'This is why I didn't want to see you,' she says. 'Your face doesn't quite look right. I didn't want to know that I've started to forget what you look like.'

She's exaggerating, he knows, she too is addled, but her words nevertheless flood Paul with dreary imagination. Could she have walked by him without noticing? On a half-crowded street at noon, her mind divided between her starting point and her destination, preoccupied with other thoughts – of course she could have. What will survive of them? The day will come when they are strangers again, but less even than that: they will be strangers without the usual privileges of meeting for the first time – of a chance encounter, of newfound attraction. Of unexpectedly falling in love.

They go around the corner to a diner. Painfully bright fluorescent lamps glaze the faces of the few, solitary men who roost in the farther booths, huddled silently over plates of food they seem never to touch. Paul and Claire order coffees; she calls back the waitress and asks for a bowl of fruit.

'When did you last see him?'

'This afternoon. He's been unconscious for a week. He's got those tubes in his nose and machines are doing all the work. It's getting difficult to think of him as a person.'

'Paul. I'm so sorry.'

'There isn't a lot to be sorry about, you know that. Anyway, you never liked him.'

'Only because you told me not to. Before I'd even met him you put it in my head that this was a man people didn't like. Someone people hated. What else was I going to think? I was so young then.'

The waitress returns, sets down the chattering porcelain.

'You were twenty-six when we got married, Claire.'