Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (36 page)

She has never done this with a man before, but she takes her own card out and tucks it into his shirt pocket, taps it closed with the palm of her hand. She feels her face tighten again. Too forward. Too flirtatious. Too easy.

It used to bother her terribly, as a teenager, that her mother and grandmother had worked the streets. She thought it might rebound on her someday, that she would find herself too much in love with love. Or that it might be dirty. Or that her friends would find out. Or, worse, that she might ask a boy to pay for it. She was the last of her high school friends to even kiss a boy: a kid in school once called her the Reluctant African Queen. Her first kiss ever was just after science class before social studies. He had a broad face and dark eyes. He held her in the doorway and kept his foot on the frame. Only the constant knocking on the door from a teacher separated them. She walked home with him that day, hand in hand, through the streets of Poughkeepsie. Gloria saw her from the porch of their small house and smiled deeply. She and the boy lasted all the way through college. She had even contemplated marrying him, but he went to Chicago to take a trading job. She went home to Gloria then, wept for a day.

Afterward, Gloria said to her that it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
—So you’ll call me, then? she asks him.
—I’ll call you, yes.
—Really? she asks with arched brow.
—Of course, he replies.
He extends his shoulder playfully. She rocks backward as if in a cartoon, her arms spread wide, flailing. She is not sure why she does it, but for a moment she doesn’t really care—there is an electricity to it, it makes her laugh.
He kisses her again, this time on the lips, quickly, smartly. She almost wishes her co- workers were here, that they could see her, bidding goodbye to an Italian man, a doctor, on Park Avenue, in the dark, in the cold, in the rain, in the wind, in the night. Like there might some secret camera that beams it all back to the offices in Little Rock, everyone looking up from the tax forms to watch her wave good-bye, to see him turn his body in the back of the cab, his arm raised, a shadow on his face, a smile.
She hears the hiss of the taxi tires as the car pulls away. Then she cups her hands out beyond the awning and runs some rainwater through her hair.

The doorman smiles, although it has been years since she’s seen him. A Welshman. He used to sing on Sundays when she, Gloria, and her sister came to visit. She can’t quite recall his name. His mustache has gone gray.

And then she remembers: Melvyn. He reaches for the small bag and for a moment she thinks he’s going to say how much she’s grown. But all he says is, in a grateful way: They put me on the night shift.

She is not quite sure if she should kiss his cheek or not—this evening of kissing—but he solves the dilemma by turning away.
—Melvyn, she says, you haven’t changed a bit.
He pats his stomach, smiles. She is wary of elevators, she would like to take the stairs, but a teenage boy is there with his hat and white gloves on.
—Madame, says the elevator boy.
—You staying long, Miss Jaslyn? asks Melvyn, but already the gate is closing.
She smiles at him from the back of the elevator.
—I’ll call up to Mrs. Soderberg’s, he says through the grille, and let them know you’re here.
The elevator boy stares straight ahead. He takes great care with the Otis. He doesn’t engage her in conversation, his head tilted slightly to the ceiling and his body as if it’s counting out rhythm. She gets the sense that he will be here ten years from now, twenty, thirty. She would like to step up behind him and whisper, Boo! in his ear, but she watches the panel and the small circular white lights as they rise.
He pulls the lever, aligns the elevator and the floor perfectly. He slides his foot out to test his workmanship. A young man of precision.
—Madame, he says. First door on your right.

The door is opened by a tall Jamaican nurse, a man. They are momentarily confused, as if they should know each other somehow. The exchange is rapid- fire. I’m Mrs. Soderberg’s niece. Oh, I see, come in. Not her niece, really, but she calls me her niece. Please come in. I called earlier. Yes, yes, she’s sleeping now. Step inside. How is she? Well . . . he says.

And the
well
is drawn out, a pause, not an affirmative—Claire is not well at all; she is at the bottom of a dark well.
Jaslyn hears the sound of other voices: a radio, perhaps?
The apartment seems as if it has been sunk in aspic. It used to terrify her and her sister as children, on those occasions when they came into the city with Gloria, the dark hallway, the artwork, the smell of old wood. She and her sister held hands as they walked down the corridor. The worst thing was the portrait of the dead man on the wall. The painting had been done in such a way that his eyes seemed to follow them. Claire would talk about him all the time, that Solomon had loved this and Solomon loved that. She had sold some of the other paintings—even her Miró, to help pay the expenses—but the Solomon portrait remained.
The nurse takes her bag and settles it in the corner against the hat stand.
—Please, he says, and he motions her toward the living room.
She is stunned to see six people, most of them her own age, around the table and on the sofa. They are casually dressed but sipping cocktails. Her heart thumps against the wall of her chest. They too freeze at the sight of her. Well, well. The true nieces, nephews, cousins, perhaps? Song of Solomon. He is dead fourteen years but she can see him in their faces. One, almost certainly, is Claire’s niece, with a streak of gray in her hair.
They stare at her. The air like ice around her. She wishes that she had taken Pino upstairs alongside her, so he could help take control, calmly, smoothly, or at least draw attention. She can still feel the kiss on her lips. She touches them with her fingers, as if she can hold the memory of it there.
—Hi, I’m Jaslyn, she says with a wave.
An idiotic wave. Presidential, almost.
—Hi, says a tall brunette.
She feels as if she has been nailed to the floor, but one of the nephews strides across the room. He has something of the petulant college boy about him, chubby face, a white shirt, a blue blazer, a red handkerchief in the breast pocket.
—Tom, he says. Lovely to meet you, Jaslyn, finally.
He says her name like something he wants to flick off his shoe, and the word
finally
stretches into rebuke. So he knows about her. He has heard. He probably thinks she’s here to dig. So be it. Gold digger. The truth is, she couldn’t care less about the will; if she got anything she would probably give it away.
—A drink?
—I’m fine, thanks.
—We figured that Auntie would’ve wanted us to enjoy ourselves even in the worst of times. He lowers his voice: We’re making Manhattans.
—How is she?
—She’s sleeping.
—It’s late—I’m terribly sorry.
—We have soda too, if you want.
—Is she . . . ?
She cannot finish the sentence. The words hang in the air between her and Tom.
—She’s not well, he says.
That word again. A hollow echo all the way down to the ground. No splash. A constant free fall. Well well.
She dislikes them for drinking, but then she knows she should join them, that she should not be apart. Bring Pino back, let him slide some charm among them, let him take her off into the evening upon his arm, nestled up against his leather jacket.
—Maybe I’ll take a drink, she says.
—And so, says Tom, what exactly brings you here?
—Excuse me?
—I mean, what exactly do you do now? Weren’t you working for the Democrats or something?
She hears a slight giggle from across the room. They are facing her, all of them, watching, as if she has, at last, made it to the stage. —

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse. They arrange their lives in front of her, a few sheets of paper, a pay stub, a welfare check, all they have left. She adds up the figures. She knows the tax credits, the loopholes, the exits and entrances, the phone calls that must be made. She tries to nullify mortgage payments on a house that has floated down to the sea. She gets around insurance demands on cars that are at the bottom of the bayou. She tries to stop bills for very small white coffins.

She has seen others from the Little Rock foundation cleave people open immediately, but she has never been able to get to them so quickly. At first they are stilted with her, but she has learned how to listen all the same. After a half hour or so she gets to them.

It’s as if they’re talking to themselves, as if she is a mirror in front of them, giving them another history of themselves.
She is attracted to their darkness, but she likes the moment when they turn again and find some meaning that sideswipes them:
I really loved her. I loosened his shirt before he drifted through the floodgates. My husband put the stove on a layaway plan.
And before they know it, their taxes are done, the insurance claim is laid out, the mortgage companies have been noted, the paper is slid across the table for them to sign. Sometimes it takes them an age just to sign, since they have something else to say—they are off and chatting about the cars they bought, the loves they loved. They have a deep need just to talk, just to tell a story, however small or reckless.
Listening to these people is like listening to trees—sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.

There was an old woman about nine months ago—she sat in a Little Rock hotel room, her dress spread out. Jaslyn was trying to figure out payments that the woman wasn’t getting from her pension fund.

—My boy was the mailman, the woman said. Right there in the Ninth. He was a good boy. Twenty- two years old. Used to work late if he had to. And he worked, I ain’t lying. People loved getting his letters. They waited for him. They liked him coming knocking on the door. You lis tenin’? —Yes, ma’am.
—And then the storm blowed in. And he didn’t come back. I was

waiting. I had his dinner ready. I was living on the third floor then. Waiting. Except nothing happened. So I waited and waited. I went out after two days looking for him, went downstairs. All those helicopters were flying over, ignoring us. I waded out into the street, I was up to my neck, near drowning. I couldn’t find no sign, nothing, ’til I was down there by the check- cashing store and I found the sack of mail floating and I pulled it in. And I thought, Holy.

The woman’s fingers clamped down, gripping Jasyln’s hand. —I was sure he’d come floating around the next corner, alive. I looked and looked. But I never did see my boy. I wish I woulda drowned right there and then. I found out two weeks later that he was caught up high in a treetop just rotting in the heat. In his mailman uniform. Imagine that, caught in the tree.
The woman got to her feet, and went across the hotel room, went to a cheap dresser, yanked a drawer open.
—I still got his mail here, see? You can take it if you want it.
Jaslyn held the sack in her hands. None of the envelopes had been touched.
—Take it, please, the woman said. I can’t stand it no more.

She took the sack of letters out to the lake near Natural Steps at the outskirts of Little Rock. The last light of day, she walked on the bank, her shoes sinking in the loam. Birds rose by pairs, bursting upward and wheeling overhead with the sun red on their cupped underwings. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the mail. She sat down on the grass and sorted them out, magazines, flyers, personal letters to be returned with a note:
This got lost some time ago. I hope it’s okay to send it on again now.

She stands by the window, the dark down. A chatter in the room. She is reminded of white birds, flapping. The cocktail glass she holds feels fragile. If she holds it too tight, she thinks, it might shatter.

She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria’s dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Missouri. The smile on Gloria’s face. Her sister, Janice, in the front seat, driving. Playing games with the rearview mirror. Both of them pushing Gloria in a wheelchair along the banks of the river.
Up a lazy river where the robin’s song wakes a brand- new morning as we roll along.
It was a celebration, that day. They had dug their feet down into happiness and weren’t prepared to let go. They threw sticks into an eddy and watched them circle. Put a blanket down, ate Wonder Bread sandwiches. Later in the afternoon, her sister began crying, like a change in the weather, for no reason except the popping of a wine cork. Jaslyn handed her a wadded tissue. Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Gloria left with a smile on her face. They closed her eyes with the glare of the sun still on them, rolled the wheelchair up the hill, stayed a little while looking out over the land until the insects of evening gathered.

They buried her two days later in a plot near the back of her old house. She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried. A quiet ceremony, just the girls and a preacher. They put Gloria in the ground with one of her father’s old hand- painted signs and a sewing tin she’d kept from her own mother. If there was any good way to go, it was a good way to go.

Yes, she thinks, she would like to stay and be with Claire also, spend a few moments, find some silence, let the moments crawl. She has even brought her pajamas, her toothbrush, her comb. But it is clear to her now that she is not welcome.

She had forgotten that there might be others too, that a life is lived in many ways—so many unopened envelopes.
—May I see her?
—I don’t think she should be disturbed.
—I’ll just pop my head around the door.
—It’s a little late. She’s sleeping. Would you like another drink ...?
His voice rises high on the question, unfinished, as if searching for her name. But he knows her name. Idiot. A crass, lumbering fool. He wants to own the grief and throw a party for it.
—Jaslyn, she says and smiles thinly.
—Another drink, Jaslyn?
—Thank you, no, she says, I have a room at the Regis.
—The Regis, awesome.
It’s the fanciest hotel she can think of, the most expensive place. She has no idea even where it is, just somewhere nearby, but the name changes Tom’s face—he smiles and shows his very white teeth.
She wraps a napkin around the bottom of her drink, places it down on the glass coffee table.
—Well, I should say good night. It’s been a pleasure.
—Please, I’ll show you down.
—It’s okay, really.
—No, no, I insist.
He touches her elbow and she cringes. She resists the urge to ask him if he has ever been president of a frat house.
—Really, she says at the elevator, I can let myself out.
He leans forward to kiss her cheek. She allows him her shoulder and she gives a slight nudge against his chin.
— Good- bye, she says with a singsong finality.
Downstairs, Melvyn hails her a cab and soon she is alone again, as if none of the evening has happened at all. She checks in her pocket for the card from Pino. Turns it over in her fingers. It’s as if she can feel the phone already ringing itself out in his pocket.