Doubles (15 page)

“This is a fine line,” the American Pakistani said. “A fine line.”

Paige turned to the deaf Pakistani and drew a fine line in the air.

I wasn’t exactly clear what had just been resolved. Paige disappeared
behind closed doors. The handful of people watching trickled out while speaking various languages into their cell phones. Suits and leather attaché cases floated among the seats. I felt like a teenager waiting for my parents to pick me up. After several minutes, Paige opened the door behind me and said, “I’m so glad you waited.”

“That was
amazing
.”

“Really?”

“I could never do that. I mean, of course I couldn’t. But.”

“Asad always gets upset.”

“You guys were just talking about a movie? At the UN? Is that what this place is for?”

“I just translate,” she said. “I can barely remember what we were just debating.”

We rode back across the island in a rush, traffic suddenly gone. It seemed we were outside her apartment within minutes.

“Would you care to come in for a cup of coffee?” she said.

I stuck my bottom lip out like Katie and shrugged.

Glittering light blue tiles lined almost every visible surface in her kitchen. Every fixture looked like it cost more than my monthly mortgage payment. There wasn’t even a magazine lying on a table, not an apple out of place.

“It’s New York,” she said as we entered, as if in apology.

She started a gleaming blue enamel Italian coffeemaker on her spotless counter and said, “Mind if I make a call?”

She took the phone into the bathroom and left me to admire her kitchen. I stood at her sink and looked out the window at water towers tilting at different angles across the low buildings. Inside, every fixture sparkled. Outside, rust and decay emerged from standing water on flat rooftops. The blue tile around Paige’s sink reflected dim images of me, distorted and dark on the lacquer. I missed my home. The Gatorade left a taste in my mouth like I had been licking aluminum.
Mugs and wineglasses filled the cabinets above her sink. They were all so clean I was scared to use one. I stuck my head under the faucet and drank.

“Can I offer you anything?” Paige said from behind me. I hadn’t heard her return.

“I’m a barbarian,” I said, wiping my face with my sleeve. The coffeemaker sputtered and hissed as it finished its immaculate process.

“So you were coming from Katie’s when I saw you earlier?”

“No.”

She tilted her head and looked at me through her eyebrows.

She stepped across the kitchen and just leaned against me. There was nothing to do but put my arms around her. My calloused fingers caught on the shimmery fabric of her jacket. She held on longer than I expected, and when I met her gaze, her face closed in on mine. I was disgusted by the knowledge that I had tried and failed to kiss the last woman who came in this close a contact with me, only an hour or two before. This time it worked. Paige’s lips were full and soft, like miniature wet pillows. Nothing like Anne’s.

“We can’t do this,” I said.

“Shhh,” she said and kissed me again.

Her flesh was yielding and expansive. Again it reminded me of touching Anne in her final months of pregnancy. I saw all of it.

On her knees on the living room rug Paige rubbed herself, pushing back against me. Sunlight through the open windows lit dust rising around us. We were silent and careful. I let my forehead drop onto her back, then turned my cheek to her skin. Soft moans, too weak to let themselves be heard outside of that flesh, were suddenly audible as I kept my ear to her warm, shifting body. I closed my eyes and thought about how I would remember this. When I opened them, the blue metal door to the apartment was opening. I stopped moving in terror, but Paige continued pushing slowly against me. Katie stepped
through the open door. She was still wearing her Christmas colors, the green dress and red flats, and she didn’t see us, closing the door behind her like she was entering an empty room. Paige just continued to rub and rock. Then Katie turned. Her eyes met mine. Paige finally stopped moving, and we knelt there, frozen. Katie gasped, one small intake, then turned to the door, opened it, and was gone.

THE SUNRISE SLID
through refinery towers outside the train window. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but kept thinking about what had happened. After Katie had found us, I’d gone back to Manny’s. Multiple voices sounded from his closed bedroom, interspersed with flashes of light from under the door. I felt drunk on sin, too near the vicinity of these indulgences. I took my bag and walked to the Victory on Forty-second Street, where I watched
Pirates of the Caribbean II
twice in a row. It made almost no sense the first time I saw it, but by the second, I had begun to see the flaws with even more clarity. Keira Knightly was in it, though, and she was beautiful, and so she made me think of Anne, and of Katie, and of Paige, and of the mess that I had made of everything. The movie ended, and I took a cab to Penn Station, where I bought a one-way ticket on the Carolinian to Durham. It didn’t depart until 4:00 AM, so I strapped my duffel bag to my leg and slept intermittently in Grand Central Station, waking in sudden panic of the strange weight attached to myself.

The train was filled with business commuters, all beyond awake, cell phones and the smell of their coffee making the prospect of sleep for me less and less likely. At a stop in New Jersey, a young Mexican woman sat beside me, stuffing a seemingly endless amount of plastic bags full of clothing and food under the seat in front of her. She was emaciated, her teeth were a mess, and her nose bent to the left, but she was young and wearing a dress and
was sitting beside me. That’s all it took. Again I thought of Anne, Katie, and Paige.

From one of her plastic bags, the woman withdrew a dark oblong fruit that I couldn’t identify, which she then began to expertly disassemble with her fingers. She noticed me looking and held part of the fruit towards me. I must have looked more depraved than she did. I took the fruit, but the mechanics of peeling the waxy thing were beyond me.

A man in a blue vest and pillbox hat walked into the car from behind us and began asking loudly for tickets. I guess it was because of Homeland Security, but after every few tickets he demanded identification. I’d ridden Amtrak a lot, and they never checked ID before. Customarily I wouldn’t have cared, but today I had purchased my ticket on Combover’s Visa. It was his name on the ticket.

“
Buena
?” the woman said.

“Oh. Yeah,” I said and began to try to dig my finger into the peel. Juice ran down my forearm as my index finger slid into the pulp. I could feel the Mexican woman’s gaze on me as I struggled with the thing.

“Tickets,” the man said, close behind us.

I tried to peel the rest of the skin off, starting from the hole, and juice poured into my lap. The engineer appeared beside me.

“Tickets.”

I wiped my hands on my pants. I handed him my damp ticket as the woman began to rustle through one of her plastic bags. The engineer glanced at my ticket, then just held it while he waited for the woman. When she finally pulled a folded ticket from a bag, the man said, “ID,” and it was clear he would have asked no matter what she handed him. “ID,” he said louder. “Identification. You got a driver’s license?” He looked down at my ticket, then up at me. “Mr. Como, she got an ID?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think she speaks English. She’s very nice.”

“OK. ID, please. You too.”

I gave him my driver’s license.

“Mr. Smith, this isn’t your ticket.”

“That’s my boss,” I said. “I’m on a business trip, and he bought the ticket for me.”

“You can’t use someone else’s ticket, Mr. Smith.”

“OK. Then what do I do?”

“Come on,” the man said to the woman. “
Vamos
. Both of you.”

In the amount of time it took my neighbor to retrieve all of her plastic bags this guy could have ID’d every stockbroker in the car, but of course they would have all checked out. He had what he was looking for. As we rustled down the aisle, we were interesting enough to make a dozen sets of stockbroking eyeballs leave their BlackBerrys to stare.

Pill Box walked us to the last seating car, where we sat down again, and the woman went through her whole plastic bag routine a second time. She was looking from side to side like a cow in a pen.

“Look,” I said to her. “This will be OK.”

“
Gracias
,” she said, beaming with thanks. “
Gracias
.”

I nodded to her, knowingly. But I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know why I was promising this woman something I couldn’t possibly deliver. I held my cell phone up to Pill Box as he passed and said, “Just call my boss. Let’s just call him. He’ll confirm this.”

The man surprised me when he shrugged and said, “OK.”

I dialed Combover, and he answered like a wheezing mouse.

“It’s about time,” he said.

“I need some help.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

“I need you to tell this guy I’m on a business trip.”

“Why haven’t you been calling me back?”

“I’ve been emailing you. But listen, I need you to help me out.”

“With what?”

“Tell this guy it’s OK that your name’s on my ticket.”

“What ticket?”

“Amtrak.”

“Why’s my name on your ticket?”

“I bought it with your credit card.”

“I never said you could buy tickets.”

“How was I going to get home?”

“You said you had a ride.”

“Only up here.”

Pill Box reached for the phone. I let him take it. Before he could even pace to the end of the car and back, he closed it and shook his head, the plastic rim of his hat pointing from eastern refinery to western refinery.

This was no organized reception, no intricate capture. It was simply a catch and release. At the DC exit, they removed us from the train.

The station in DC was grand. Three-story marble arches vaulted over the low-budget travelers confined to the rails and the businessmen who passed by the throngs of nobodies, the mystery fruit-eating Mexican women and destitute retired doubles tennis players.

The Mexican woman walked away, and I waved, expecting her to turn around and remember that she needed my help, but she didn’t. It was like she had expected this very sequence of events to happen from the moment she’d boarded the train. From one side of a slotted Plexiglas window I said, “I need to buy a ticket with this Visa, but my name needs to be on it.”

The attendant swiped the card. She swiped again.

“You have another card?” she said.

I called Combover again. He answered immediately.

“I know what you’ve been doing,” he said. He sounded tired and resigned.

“What do you mean?”

“Vecsey wrote about you.”

“Where?”

“
Tennis
.”

“The new issue isn’t even out yet.”

“Online. You can’t spend our money on whatever it is you’re up to, Slow. I want to help you. I do. But I don’t have any money, man. I can’t believe you’ve put me in this position.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“You’re going to have to buy your own ticket home.”

“Look who wrote the article. Vecsey! Who did I say I was with?”

“I’m sorry.”

Anybody else would have just bought their tickets with their own money. But ATP health insurance was dependent upon how much you bought into it. Which meant for me, it was crap. My measly pittance from Combover had left me with less money than I had had when I was eighteen years old. After the last round of medical bills had been paid, I probably had $200 in my bank account. Maybe less.

I searched my phone for Adam Lawler’s phone number. He was one of those classmates from Durham Academy who had been in my life since nap time in kindergarten. Even our dreams had shared the same vicinity for years. Now apart, we stayed in touch like we were never far away. He lived in DC, was in training for the CIA. At least that’s what we all thought. He said it was high-security State Department work, but ever since he started, friend after friend had been called by government security agents, who met them in Starbucks, living rooms, empty conference rooms asking details about Adam’s past. No one had called me, but if they had I could have told them that he was a perfect candidate for the job, that since he was a young boy he had read weapons manuals, had painted his face black and hid in the bushes beside the golf course, and obsessed over Tom Clancy
novels and spy movies. He endeavored to reinforce stereotype. He had attended West Point. He had red hair cut into a tight flattop. He loved Guinness. In fact, he loved everything that had alcohol in it. He answered his phone before the first ring had finished sounding.

“Adam Lawler!” he said.

“I need evacuation.”

“Slow?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I just got kicked off the Amtrak.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s awesome.”

He picked me up in a golden Ford Explorer with a disassembled Ping-Pong table in the back.

“You look terrible,” he said as I placed my bag on top of the Ping-Pong table. I explained what had happened with the ticket. I left out the phone call to Combover.

“I’m starving,” I said.

“You want a cigarette?”

“I mean for food.”

“You like empanadas?”

“I guess.”

“When I was in Rio last summer, all we ate was empanadas.”

“Rio?”

“It was a language study.”

He drove tight on the bumper of a taxi, leaving a yard of air between us.

“So there’s this empanada place in my neighborhood,” Adam said as the taxi came to a stop. We cut into a Texaco and drove through the lot at full speed, compressing and releasing the Ford’s shocks in an instant as we crossed the curb. The service bell rang behind us as we rumbled into the road. Adam didn’t ask about my trip.