Let the Great World Spin (14 page)

—You’ll make sure they’re welcome?

—Of course, ma’am.

—Four of them.

—Yes, Mrs. Soderberg.

Breathing into the handset. That fuzz of red mustache above his lip.

Should have asked where he was from when he first started working.

Rude not to.

—Anything else, ma’am?

Ruder to ask now.

—Melvyn? The correct elevator.

—Of course, ma’am.

—Thank you.

She leans her head against the cool of the wall. She shouldn’t have said anything at all about a correct or incorrect elevator. A
bushe,
Solomon would have said. Melvyn’ll be down there, paralyzed, and then he’ll put them in the wrong one.
The elevator there to your right, ladies. In you go.

She feels a flush of shame to her cheeks. But she used the word
dining,
didn’t she? He’ll hardly mistake that.
Dining
for breakfast. Oh, my.

The overexamined life, Claire, it’s not worth living.

She allows herself a smile and goes back along the corridor to the liv-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 80

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ing room. Flowers in place. Sun bouncing off the white furniture. The Miró print above the couch. The ashtrays placed at strategic points. Hope they won’t smoke inside. Solomon hates smoking. But they all smoke, even her. It’s the smell that gets to him. The afterburn. Ah, well. Maybe she’ll join them anyway, puff away, that little chimney, that small holo-caust. Terrible word. Never heard it as a child. She was raised Presbyte-rian. A small scandal when she married. Her father’s booming voice.

He’s a what? A yoohoo? From New England?
And poor Solomon, hands clasped behind his back, staring out the window, adjusting his tie, staying quiet, enduring the abuse. But they still took Joshua to Florida, to the shores of Lochloosa Lake, every summer. Walking through the mango groves, all three holding hands, Joshua in the middle, one two three weeeeee.

It was there in the mansion that Joshua learned to play the piano. Five years old. He sat on the wooden stool, slid his fingers up and down the keys. When they got back to the city they arranged lessons in the basement of the Whitney. Recitals in a bow tie. His little blue blazer with gold buttons. Hair parted to the left. He used to love to press the gold pedal with his foot. Said he wanted to drive the piano all the way home. Vroom vroom. They bought him a Steinway for his birthday and at the age of eight he was playing Chopin before dinnertime. Cocktails in hand, they settled on the couch and listened.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

She grabs her hidden cigarettes from under the lid of the piano chair and walks to the rear of the apartment, swings open the heavy back door.

Used to be the maid’s entrance. Long ago, when there was such a thing: maids and entrances. Up the rear stairs. She is the only one in the building who ever uses the roof. Shoves open the fire door. No alarm. The blast of heat from the dark rooftop. The co- op board has been trying for years to put a deck up on the roof but Solomon complained. Doesn’t want footsteps above him. Nor smokers. A stickler for that. Hates the smell.

Solomon. Good, sweet man. Even in his straitjacket.

She stands in the doorway and drags deep, tosses a little cloud of smoke to the sky. The benefit of a top- floor. She refuses to call it a penthouse. Something leering about that. Something glossy and magazine- y.

She has arranged a little row of flowerpots on the black tarmac of the roof, in the shade of the wall. More trouble than they’re worth some-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 81

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times, but she likes to greet them in the mornings. Floribundas and a couple of straggly hybrid teas.

She bends down to the row of pots. A little yellow spot on the leaves.

Struggling through the summer. She taps the ash at her feet. A pleasant breeze from the east. The whiff of the river. The television suggested yesterday a slight chance of rain. No sign. A few clouds, that’s all. How is it they fill, the clouds? Such a small miracle, rain.
It rains on the living and
the dead, Mama, only the dead have better umbrellas.
Perhaps we will drag our chairs up here, all four of us, no, five, and raise our faces to the sun.

In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big head-phones he loved.
Let it be.
Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns.

There’s the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

She pulls again on the cigarette and looks over the wall. A momentary vertigo. The creek of yellow taxis along the street, the crawl of green in the median of the avenue, the saplings just planted.

Nothing much happening on Park. Everyone gone to their summer homes. Solomon, dead against. City boy. Likes his late hours. Even in summertime. His kiss this morning made me feel good. And his cologne smell. Same as Joshua’s. Oh, the day Joshua first shaved! Oh, the day!

Covered himself in foam. So very careful with the razor. Made an avenue through the cheek, but nicked himself on the neck. Tore off a tiny piece of his Daddy’s
Wall Street Journal.
Licked it and pasted it to the wound.

The business page clotting his blood. Walked around with the paper on his neck for an hour. He had to wet it to get it off. She had stood at the bathroom door, smiling. My big tall boy, shaving. Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

No newspapers big enough to paste him back together in Saigon.

She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs—she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soliders. Lucky Strikes.

She spies a black woman on the corner, turning away. Tall and bosom-burdened. Wearing a flowery dress. Perhaps Gloria. But all alone. A housekeeper, probably. You never know. She would love to run down-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 82

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stairs and go to the corner and scoop her up, Gloria, her favorite of them all, gather her in her arms, bring her back, sit her down, make her coffee, talk and laugh and whisper and belong with her, just belong. That’s all she wants. Our little club. Our little interruption. Dearest Gloria. Up there in her high- rise every night and day. How in the world did she live in such a place? The chainlink fences. The whirling litter. The terrible stench. All those young girls outside selling their bodies. Looking like they would fall on their backs and use their spines as mattresses. And the fires in the sky—they should call it Dresden and be finished with it.

Perhaps she could hire Gloria. Bring her in. Odd jobs around the house. The bits and pieces. They could sit at the kitchen table together and while away the days, make a secret gin and tonic or two, and let the hours just drift, her and Gloria, at ease, at joy, yes, Gloria, in excelsis deo.

Down on the street, the woman turns the corner and away.

Claire stamps out the cigarette and totters back toward the roof door.

A little dizzy. The world shifted sideways for an instant. Down the stairs, head spinning. Joshua never smoked. Maybe on his way to heaven he asked for one. Here’s my thumb and here’s my leg and here’s my throat and here’s my heart and here’s one lung and, hey, let’s bring them all together for a final Lucky Strike.

Back inside, through the maid’s entrance, she hears the clock in the living room striking time.

To the kitchen.

Woozy, now. Take a breath.

Who needs a master’s degree to boil water?

She steps unsurely along the corridor and back to the kitchen. Marble countertop, gold- handled cabinets, lots of white machinery. The others had made a rule early on in their coffee mornings: the visitors are the ones to bring the bagels, muffins, cheese Danish, fruit, cookies, crullers.

The host makes the tea and coffee. A nice balance that way. She had thought about ordering a whole tray of goodies from William Green-berg’s up on Madison, rainbow cookies and pecan rings and challahs and croissants, but that would be oneupmanship, womanship, whatever.

She turns the flame under the water high. A little universe of bubble and burn. Good French roast. Instant satisfaction. Tell that to the Viet Cong.

A row of tea bags on the counter. Five saucers. Five cups. Five spoons.

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Perhaps the cow- shaped creamer for a touch of humor. No, too much.

Too whimsical. But can I not laugh in front of them? Didn’t Dr. Tonnemann tell me to laugh?

Go ahead, please, laugh.

Laugh, Claire. Let it out.

A good doctor. He would not let her take pills. Try each day just to laugh a little bit, it’s a good medicine, he said. Pills were a second option.

I should have taken them. No. Better off to try laughing. Die laughing.

Yes, move wild laughter in the throat of death. A good doctor, yes.

Could even quote Shakespeare. Move wild laughter indeed.

Joshua had written her a letter once about water buffalo. He was amazed by them. Their beauty. He saw a squadron once tossing grenades by a river. All merrily laughing. Throat of death indeed. When the water buffalo were finished, he said, the soldiers shot the brightly colored birds out of the trees. Imagine if they had to count that too.
You can count the
dead, but you can’t count the cost. We’ve got no math for heaven, Mama. Everything else can be measured.
She had turned that letter over and over in her mind. A logic in every living thing. The patterns you get in flowers.

In people. In water buffalo. In the air. He hated the war but got asked to go while out in California at PARC. Got asked politely, of all things. The president wanted to know how many dead there were. Lyndon B.

couldn’t figure it out. Every day the advisers came to him with their facts and figures and laid them down on his desk. Army dead. Navy dead. Ma-rine dead. Civilian dead. Diplomatic dead. MASH dead. Delta dead.

Seabee dead. National Guard dead. But the numbers didn’t compute.

Someone was messing up somewhere. All the reporters and TV channels were breathing down LBJ’s neck and he needed the proper information.

He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn’t count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn’t figure out how many crosses to go into the ground. A crack computer unit. The Geek Squad.

Quick initiation. Serve your nation. Get your hair cut.
My country, ’tis of
thee, we’ve got technology.
Only the best and brighest came. From Stanford.

MIT. University of Utah. U.C. Davis. His friends from PARC. The ones who were developing the dream of the ARPANET. Kitted up and sent off.

White men, all. There were other systems also—how much sugar was used, how much oil, how many bullets, how many cigarettes, how many cans of corned beef, but Joshua’s beat was the dead.

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Serve your country, Josh. If you can write a program that plays chess you surely can tell us how many are falling to the gooks. Give me all your ones and zeros, heroes. Show us how to count the fragged.

They could hardly find uniforms small enough at the shoulders or long enough at the legs for him. He stepped onto the plane, trouser legs at half- mast. I should have known then. Should have just called him back. But on he went. The plane took off and went small against the sky.

A barracks was already built out in Tan Son Nhut. At the air force base. A small brass band was there to meet them, he said. Cinder block and desks of pressure- treated wood. A room full of PDP- 10’s and Honeywells.

They walked inside and the place hummed for them. A candy store, he said.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re- create. Theorem, anti- theorem, corollary, anti- corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers.

Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

But he stood, buzz- haired and red- cheeked, in front of her, and she said nothing.

Say something to him. That shine to his cheeks. Say something. Tell him. Tell him. But she just smiled. Solomon pressed a Star of David into his hands and turned away and said:
Be brave.
She kissed his forehead good- bye. She noticed the way the back of his uniform creased and un-creased in perfect symmetry, and she knew, she just knew, the moment she saw him go, that she was seeing him go forever.
Hello, Central, give
me heaven, I think my Joshua is there.

Can’t indulge this heartsickness. No. Spoon the coffee out and line the tea bags up. Imagine endurance. There’s a logic to that. Imagine and hang on.

How is it being dead, son, and would I like it?

Oh. The buzzer. Oh. Oh. Spoon clang to the floor. Oh. Stepping quickly along the corridor. Return and pick up the spoon. Everything neat now, neat, yes. Give me back his living body, Mr. Nixon, and we will not quarrel. Take this corpse, all fifty- two years of it, swap it; I won’t regret it, I won’t complain. Just give him back to us all sewn up and handsome.

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Control yourself, Claire.

I shall not fall apart.