City of Strangers (6 page)

His thoughts tilt toward Claire. This is inevitable, he knows, even if she hadn't invited him up last night. He is constantly miserable over her, and so thinks about her constantly, and when he drinks he is miserable over and thinks about her even more. His hasn't been a distinguished reentry into bachelorhood. The sex with his ex-wife yesterday is the only sex he's had since the divorce. For a while he'd found himself in bars again; there were a couple of dates. But he no longer wants the difficult pleasure of surprise, the labor of uncertainty. Once upon a time it was exciting: a new person, new mind, new body. The narcissism of collecting the affections of different women. He has no need for that now. With Claire the work is done, and he is far enough along in life to realize that it
is
work, interrogating another person about her life and narrating your own for her; they are always stories you have told before, and, worse, hers are somehow ones you have already heard. Such is the cost of new romance. Even the disappointment of last night hasn't drained him of the wish to have her again. Paul doesn't believe it is nostalgia. Nostalgia is a fantasy, an ingrown wish. What he feels is a highly practical emotion, a desire to map the shortest possible route to contentment and peace. He isn't delusional, he hasn't any misconceptions about what a return to life with Claire would be like: it wouldn't come out gleaming or bright, like a freshly minted coin. But it would improve on what he has. If that's nostalgia, he thinks, so be it.

He drinks.

They met when she was twenty-four and he was thirty. She was working at a gallery in Chelsea and Paul, still balancing himself within the world, testing himself against it, was gathering his first real plumes of success as a writer. His name appeared frequently in those days, and in more places; editors kept his details to hand. He was dating casually, seeing a couple of women at a time, success like a renewable resource, a currency he could convert from work to sex and back again, its value always multiplying, and when he walked down the street in the middle of the day his blood beat with possibility. He ran regularly, used the gym. He felt young, strong, tight as a fist. He was a little thinner then.

Art was a serious interest long before he met her – even if his was an amateur's taste – and he'd decided to spend that particular afternoon at a few galleries, saving for last a group of new works by Gerhard Richter. This was the summer of 2000. Claire was standing at the desk, dealing with some papers, and Paul happened to catch her at a moment of private amusement. She was reading a document, and a dimple emerged at only one side of her mouth – an incidental gesture, meant for no one, yet it illuminated an intelligence and equanimity, a rich interior. The self she stored away from the world at hand. It didn't hurt that she had a lovely face, her brown hair pulled casually together into a clip, and, under a black skirt, a striking body, the kind that makes a man helplessly clench his teeth. Paul, standing at one of the paintings with his back to her, was working out what he might say, when to his great surprise she approached him.

'Are you looking to buy or just to rent?'

He was accustomed to being the clever one and, charmed, smiled a little more than he meant to.

'Is it that obvious?'

'Is what obvious? That you aren't here to throw around your millions?'

'You never know.'

'All but one or two of these were sold privately before we ever put them up. If you were the kind of man with the money to buy a Richter, your art consultant would have told you that.'

'What's the point of showing them at all? If you are so certain I don't have the cash to lay out for one.'

'Naturally, we have to maintain our considerable public profile.'

She smiled. He was not surprised to see that she had a wonderful smile.

'Then you're saying this one isn't up for sale.'

'I'm afraid not. You didn't have your heart set on it, I hope.'

'Where's it headed?'

'Dubai.'

By the time he left the gallery they'd arranged to have dinner. Over the next few weeks they met with growing urgency, confidence, heat; Paul stopped calling the other women. They secluded themselves. In his own life, at least, he knew of no precedent for the ease with which they discarded the previous versions of themselves in favor of a new, shared idea.

And for a while it remained so. Love fell on them as certainly and powerfully as sleep. He met her parents – they were polite and distant – and gave an account of his own. In the absence of a test, an episode of hardship, love was simple. Sex was regular and exhausting. He wanted to be depleted each night in her arms, to be fully spent, only so that she could replenish him. When they could, they made love in the afternoons. Winter came. In the cold their love condensed, hardened, like a seam of coal. Ice lashed the windowpanes. The wind screamed. They didn't care, they were in bed.

Spring. A thaw. Flowers budded, released their fists. Then an accident – Claire was late. For two days they talked it over. Marriage was mentioned and forgotten. Careers. Timing. And children, Claire said, made her wary. When she was a child she had felt like an interloper in her own parents' marriage; she wanted to be a better mother than that. I'm so young, she said. Paul may have replied, I'm not. He let it go, waited for her outside the doctor's.

That could have been it. With friends they were the same, but, alone together in a room, it was there, the little ghost. It isn't the most important thing in the world, she told him. We can move on. She wasn't being honest, but the lie helped. Slowly the oxygen returned to their relationship. The following summer was dreamy, uneventful, and, even if some of the burning of those early months had been lost, it was replaced by a new security and comfort. They were always generous, gracious, deferential. The leaves became dry, the air smelled like copper.

Six months after the planes hit the towers, they were married. Recalling the day, Paul drinks; he bites off a mouthful of beer as if it must be torn apart from the rest. More of her friends than his came to the wedding – she was younger and hadn't yet shed the relationships of college. By then his career as a writer was beginning to idle; he wasn't sure how it happened, what derailed him. He is even less certain now. The child they didn't have was never discussed, nor were the children they might one day have. It was assumed, or Paul assumed, that eventually, when the time felt right and the circumstances of their lives were suited to it, a luxury of forethought unknown for almost the entire span of human history, they would decide to conceive.

The fights started in the second year. Small things, at first. At some point Paul said what he was really thinking. So did she. Timing. Careers – hers by then describing a much more auspicious ascent. And she was still wary of children. He told her that he always imagined it as a son; at this she cried. He now remembers those arguments with bitter clarity, when in fact they were the exception. For the most part he and Claire were happy. They talked, fucked, traveled. It was what he wanted from a woman and from life. Even when they argued it was good, the reconciliation, the sturdiness and certainty of it, the knowledge that they always had safe terrain to return to. Children could wait.

With one swallow Paul halves the beer in his glass. There's a television above the bar and, sick of his thoughts, he asks to have it turned on. The screen jitters to life and the bartender looks at Paul, who nods. It's CNN. In silence a camera sweeps across a large crowd: yet another demonstration. He can feel the beer between his throat and his stomach. Dozens of faces fill the screen. A flag in the background – Syria's, Iran's, whatever – beats the air.

Paul calls back the bartender and orders another. When it arrives, he takes a greedy, immediate swallow. He's a little drunk. He barricades himself against further thoughts of Claire and looks again at the television. The camera pans toward the epicenter of the protest, and without the newscaster's voice there is no telling what may come next. It wouldn't surprise him if when the camera finally comes to a stop its gaze has settled on a dead body. He drinks.

Flames fill the screen, crisp and orange at the edges and at the center a deep, nightmarish black. It isn't yet apparent what's burning. Then the camera retreats and Paul can see the white cross and red field of the Danish flag. The camera leisurely absorbs the sight as the fire eats away the fabric's resistance. Nobody's dead. The image vanishes and into its place pops the anchorwoman's head. Eerie in her silence, strangely captive, she moves her mouth like a doll without its ventriloquist. Her well-trained face betrays no emotion.

Paul doesn't feel well. He takes another drink of his beer and immediately regrets it, as his body seems to be in mild revolt – nausea, headache, and feverishness set upon him at once. His ribs ache. For a moment the awful gurge of vomit seems to be rising within him, but he swallows dryly, pays for his drinks, and steps into the street. Once there he stands quite still and fixes his mind penitently on the simple acts of breathing and staring, as he contains and then patiently works down the sense of discomfort. The effort is made greater by the difference of sunlight – harsh, white, Martian – on slightly drunk eyes. The people who pass have their heads down, their bodies sheathed. Litter on the concrete swirls in the wind. He can walk: he begins to move. He refuses to admit that it might have been a mistake not to seek medical attention immediately after the attack last night – it was easier just to tough it out. Nothing was broken; bruises heal. Going to the hospital seemed unnecessary, to say nothing of the cost for an uninsured man. Nor does he intend to file a police report, which wouldn't do much good: he'd be able to offer only a cursory description, and the intended victim, anyway, was the boy; Paul was a byproduct. Better just to forget it.

Lightheaded, he descends at the nearest subway entrance and boards the L train bound for Manhattan; he disembarks at Union Square. The station's noise and its hot, oppressive air are immediate, as is the pollution of garbage: greasy paper and darkening fruit skins and milk-lined disposable cups that scamper along the tracks and fill the fortresslike black trash cans. Paul catches the sharp, vinegary smell of urine. Departing and arriving trains keen and howl in their separate chambers. Drums beat the air. He ascends toward the street. Why is he so tired? He didn't have that much to drink. Policemen at one of the gates inspect bags. They are laughing, the officers, with a man whose belongings they have just searched. Up in the world again, Paul walks carelessly away, quickly, he thinks, although his footsteps seem also to be dribbling along the sidewalk; Claire used to say that he walks too fast. Even as he's moving, he feels sleep relax his brain, and when he reaches the address he wants, he sits heavily on the steps. In the warmth of his exhaustion the cold loses its strength, and his eyes, as heavy as garage doors, close.

At intervals he opens them, only partway, the world flicking in and out, and once a man, or a man's legs – Paul's eyes are aimed downward – are standing in front of him, as if waiting to have a conversation. Paul is too tired for that. He shuts his eyes again. The man is still there when he opens them, but the next time he is gone. Perhaps Paul imagined it, or dreamt it. He finally wakes to the sound of a voice. Standing above him are two people. One is Claire, the other a man he doesn't recognize. The one who was standing there a moment ago? Paul has no idea how long he's been here; his mouth, eyes, and brain are all webbed from sleep. He wishes he could have a glass of water, then registers the man's uniform: a police officer, his features screwed into a mixture of curiosity and disgust.

'You know him, ma'am?'

Claire nods, and, when the officer lingers, makes a gesture to indicate that he can go: Paul doesn't pose a threat. Even then, the policeman doesn't leave, but stands at a certain distance, his small face constricted, trying to fit Paul into one of the known categories of lawbreaker.

'Were you mugged?' asks Claire.

'No,' Paul says, only then realizing that she's looking at the injury on his neck. 'It's nothing. I'm sorry. I don't know why I came here. I just felt so – tired.'

'You were tired? No one gets tired and falls asleep outdoors in the middle of winter. Tell me what happened.'

'Nothing happened. I'm sorry, it was stupid to have come here.' She doesn't contradict him. He makes an effort to rise to his feet, but stumbles. Claire steps forward. 'I'm fine,' he says.

'You aren't fine. What happened to your neck?'

'Nothing,' he says. 'I fell on some ice.'

'You've been drinking.'

She smells it on his breath. She also knows that for months immediately following the divorce he drank heavily. He often called late at night, his blood up, and come morning would forget what he'd said. She always refused to tell him, and eventually stopped answering the phone altogether. The policeman begins to walk away. Once he's out of hearing range Paul almost tells her everything: the boy, the thugs attacking him, his luck with the shard of glass. Wouldn't that impress her? He hasn't thought of it in terms of bravery until now, but certainly that's what it was. He put himself in harm's way to protect a stranger – his heart turns rubbery just from the memory. But something holds him back. Claire is hardly in the right frame of mind to hear it. The urge to speak dwindles, and the story begins to seem far off, irrelevant.

'If you're here to talk about last night—'

'I'm not. I'll go. I was just feeling out of sorts. It was – there was this meeting today, with an editor. He wants me to write a book about my father.'

'Ah.'

'I told him to forget about it.'

'Did he offer you money?'

'Basically. Yes, a lot of it.'

'Paul. You didn't consider it?'

'Don't make it sound like a choice I'll regret.'

Her face abruptly closes. 'Write the book or don't,' she says. 'It's your life, not mine.'

He looks away. At the end of the street stands a man in a wool cap, not moving, who seems to be staring right at him. Paul returns the look until the man walks out of view, which he does with unnatural deliberateness. Maybe he moved his head in response to someone's call; it is impossible to say from this distance.