Falling Man (12 page)

He looked into his plate. How different is a fish from a bird? One flies, the other swims. Maybe this is what he was thinking. He wouldn’t eat a bird, would he, a goldfinch or a blue jay. Why should he eat a fish swimming wild in the ocean, caught with ten thousand other fish in a giant net on Channel 27?

One flies, the other swims.

This is what she felt in him, these stubborn thoughts, biscuit in his fist.

Keith walked through the park and came out on West 90th Street and it was strange, what he was seeing down by the community garden and coming toward him, a woman in the middle of the street, on horseback, wearing a yellow hard hat and carrying a riding crop, bobbing above the traffic, and it took him a long moment to understand that horse and rider had come out of a stable somewhere nearby and were headed toward the bridle path in the park.

It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash.

He used to come home late, looking shiny and a little crazy. This was the period, not long before the separation, when he took the simplest question as a form of hostile interrogation. He seemed to walk in the door waiting for her questions, prepared to stare right through her questions, but she had no interest in saying anything at all. She thought she knew by now. She understood by this time that it wasn’t the drinking, or not that alone, and probably not some sport with a woman. He’d hide it better, she told herself. It was who he was, his native face, without the leveling element, the claims of social code.

Those nights, sometimes, he seemed on the verge of saying something, a sentence fragment, that was all, and it would end everything between them, all discourse, every form of stated arrangement, whatever drifts of love still lingered. He carried that glassy look in his eyes and a moist smile across his mouth, a dare to himself, boyish and horrible. But he did not put into words whatever it was that lay there, something so surely and recklessly cruel that it scared her, spoken or not. The look scared her, the body slant. He walked through the apartment, bent slightly to one side, a twisted guilt in his smile, ready to break up a table and burn it so he could take out his dick and piss on the flames.

They sat in a taxi going downtown and began to clutch each other, kissing and groping. She said, in urgent murmurs,
It’s a movie, it’s a movie.
At traffic lights people crossing the street stopped to watch, two or three, seeming briefly to float above the windows, and sometimes only one. The others just crossed, who didn’t give a damn.

In the Indian restaurant the man at the podium said, We do not seat incomplete tables.

She asked him one night about the friends he’d lost. He spoke about them, Rumsey and Hovanis, and the one who was badly burned, whose name she’d forgotten. She’d met one of them, Rumsey, she thought, briefly, somewhere. He spoke only about their qualities, their personalities, or married or single, or children or not, and this was enough. She didn’t want to hear more.

It was still there, more often than not, music on the stairs.

There was a job offer he’d probably accept, drafting contracts of sale on behalf of Brazilian investors who were engaged in real-estate transactions in New York. He made it sound like a ride on a hang glider, completely wind-assisted.

In the beginning she washed his clothes in a separate load. She had no idea why she did this. It was like he was dead.

She listened to what he said and let him know she was listening, mind and body, because listening is what would save them this time, keep them from falling into distortion and rancor.

The easy names were the ones she forgot. But this one wasn’t easy and it was like the swaggering name of some football player from Alabama and that’s how she remembered it, Demetrius, badly burned in the other tower, the south tower.

When she asked him about the briefcase in the closet, why it was there one day and gone the next, he said he’d actually returned it to the owner because it wasn’t his and he didn’t know why he’d taken it out of the building.

What was ordinary was not more ordinary than usual, or less.

It was the word
actually
that made her think about what he said concerning the briefcase, although in fact there was nothing to think about, even if this was the word he’d used so often, more or less superfluously, those earlier years, when he was lying to her, or baiting her, or even effecting some minor sleight.

This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people’s pores. She used to think she was other people. Other people have truer lives.

It’s a movie,
she kept saying, his hand in her pants, saying it, a moan in the shape of words, and at traffic lights people watched, a few, and the driver watched, lights or not, eyes gliding across the rearview mirror.

But then she might be wrong about what was ordinary. Maybe nothing was. Maybe there was a deep fold in the grain of things, the way things pass through the mind, the way time swings in the mind, which is the only place it meaningfully exists.

He listened to language tapes labeled South American Portuguese and practiced on the kid. He said, I speak only little Portuguese, saying this in English, with a Latin accent, and Justin tried not to smile.

She read newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed. Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to, out of some need she did not try to interpret.

After the first time they made love he was in the bathroom, at first light, and she got up to dress for her morning run but then pressed herself naked to the full-length mirror, face turned, hands raised to roughly head level. She pressed her body to the glass, eyes shut, and stayed for a long moment, nearly collapsed against the cool surface, abandoning herself to it. Then she put on her shorts and top and was lacing her shoes when he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven, and saw the fogged marks of her face, hands, breasts and thighs stamped on the mirror.

He sat alongside the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge. He worked on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling. He used the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand.

The wrist was fine, the wrist was normal. He’d thrown away the splint and stopped using the ice. But he sat alongside the table, two or three times a day now, curling the left hand into a gentle fist, forearm flat on the table, thumb raised in certain setups. He did not need the instruction sheet. It was automatic, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations, hand raised, forearm flat. He counted the seconds, he counted the repetitions.

There were the mysteries of word and glance but also this, that every time they saw each other there was something tentative at first, a little stilted.

“I see them on the street now and then.”

“Stopped me cold for a moment. A horse,” he said.

“Man on a horse. Woman on a horse. Not something I would think of doing myself,” Florence said. “Give me all your money. Wouldn’t matter. I’m not getting on a horse.”

There was a shyness for a time and then something that eased the mood, a look or a wisecrack or the way she begins to hum, in a parody of social desperation, eyes darting about the room. But the faint discomfort of those early moments, the sense of ill-matched people was not completely dispelled.

“Sometimes six or seven horses single file, going up the street. The riders looking straight ahead,” she said, “like the natives might take offense.”

“I’ll tell you what surprises me.”

“Is it my eyes? Is it my lips?”

“It’s your cat,” he said.

“I don’t have a cat.”

“That’s what surprises me.”

“You think I’m a cat person.”

“I see you with a cat, definitely. There ought to be a cat slipping along the walls.”

He was in the armchair this time and she’d placed a kitchen chair alongside and sat facing him, a hand on his forearm.

“Tell me you’re not taking the job.”

“Have to do it.”

“What happens to our time together?”

“We’ll work it out.”

“I want to blame you for this. But my turn is coming. Looks like the whole company is moving across the river. Permanently. We’ll have a nice view of lower Manhattan. What’s left of it.”

“And you’ll find a place to live somewhere nearby.”

She looked at him.

“Can you mean that? I don’t believe you said that. Do you think I’d put that much space between us?”

“Bridge or tunnel doesn’t matter. It’s hell on earth, that commute.”

“I don’t care. Do you think I care? They’ll resume train service. If they don’t, I’ll drive.”

“Okay.”

“It’s only Jersey.”

“Okay,” he said.

He thought she might cry. He thought this kind of conversation was for other people. People have these conversations all the time, he thought, in rooms like this one, sitting, looking.

Then she said, “You saved my life. Don’t you know that?”

He sat back, looking at her.

“I saved your briefcase.”

And waited for her to laugh.

“I can’t explain it but no, you saved my life. After what happened, so many gone, friends gone, people I worked with, I was nearly gone, nearly dead, in another way. I couldn’t see people, talk to people, go from here to there without forcing myself up off the chair. Then you walked in the door. I kept calling the number of a friend, missing, she’s one of the photographs on the walls and windows everywhere, Davia, officially missing, I can barely say her name, in the middle of the night, dial the number, let it ring. I was afraid, in the daytime, other people would be there to pick up the phone, somebody who knew something I didn’t want to hear. Then you walked in the door. You ask yourself why you took the briefcase out of the building. That’s why. So you could bring it here. So we could get to know each other. That’s why you took it and that’s why you brought it here, to keep me alive.”

He didn’t believe this but he believed her. She felt it and meant it.

“You ask yourself what the story is that goes with the briefcase. I’m the story,” she said.

7

The two dark objects, the white bottle, the huddled boxes. Lianne turned away from the painting and saw the room itself as a still life, briefly. Then the human figures appear, Mother and Lover, with Nina still in the armchair, thinking remotely of something, and Martin hunched on the sofa now, facing her.

Finally her mother said, “Architecture, yes, maybe, but coming out of another time entirely, another century. Office towers, no. These shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or shapes of things.”

Lianne knew, in a pinprick of light, what her mother was going to say.

She said, “It’s all about mortality, isn’t it?”

“Being human,” Lianne said.

“Being human, being mortal. I think these pictures are what I’ll look at when I’ve stopped looking at everything else. I’ll look at bottles and jars. I’ll sit here looking.”

“You’ll need to move the chair a little closer.”

“I’ll push the chair up to the wall. I’ll call the maintenance man and have him push the chair for me. I’ll be too frail to do it myself. I’ll look and I’ll muse. Or I’ll just look. After a while I won’t need the paintings to look at. The paintings will be excess. I’ll look at the wall.”

Lianne crossed to the sofa, where she gave Martin a light poke in the arm.

“What about your walls? What’s on your walls?”

“My walls are bare. Home and office. I keep bare walls,” he said.

“Not completely,” Nina said.

“All right, not completely.”

She was looking at him.

“You tell us to forget God.”

The argument had been here all this time, in the air and on the skin, but the shift in tone was abrupt.

“You tell us this is history.”

Nina looked at him, she stared hard at Martin, her voice marked by accusation.

“But we can’t forget God. They invoke God constantly. This is their oldest source, their oldest word. Yes, there’s something else but it’s not history or economics. It’s what men feel. It’s the thing that happens among men, the blood that happens when an idea begins to travel, whatever’s behind it, whatever blind force or blunt force or violent need. How convenient it is to find a system of belief that justifies these feelings and these killings.”

“But the system doesn’t justify this. Islam renounces this,” he said.

“If you call it God, then it’s God. God is whatever God allows.”

“Don’t you realize how bizarre that is? Don’t you see what you’re denying? You’re denying all human grievance against others, every force of history that places people in conflict.”

“We’re talking about these people, here and now. It’s a misplaced grievance. It’s a viral infection. A virus reproduces itself outside history.”

He sat hunched and peering, leaning toward her now.

“First they kill you, then you try to understand them. Maybe, eventually, you’ll learn their names. But they have to kill you first.”

It went on for a time and Lianne listened, disturbed by the fervor in their voices. Martin sat wrapped in argument, one hand gripping the other, and he spoke about lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money, empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West, and she wondered how he did the work he did, made the living he made, moving art, taking profit. Then there were the bare walls. She wondered about that.