Let the Great World Spin (19 page)

And he took off his hat. One of those hairstyles, short, parted down the middle. A little shock of white along his scalp. He sat right there.

She nods over at Gloria and wishes she hadn’t said that, but there’s no taking it back.

Gloria wipes at the seat as if trying to get the stain of the man off. A little sliver of doughnut icing remains.

—Everything was so pure I thought I was standing in a painting.

—Yes, yes.

—He kept playing with his hat on his knee.

—Mine did too.

—Shh.

—And then he just said, Your son is passed, ma’am. And I was thinking, Passed? Passed where? What do you mean, Sergeant, he’s passed?

He didn’t tell me of any exam.

—Mercy.

—I was smiling at him. I couldn’t make my face do anything else.

—Well, I just flat- out wept, says Janet.

—Shh, says Jacqueline.

—I felt like there was rushing steam going up inside me, right up my spine. I could feel it hissing in my brain.

—Exactly.

—And then I just said, Yes. That’s all I said. Smiling still. The steam hissing and burning. I said, Yes, Sergeant. And thank you.

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—Mercy.

—He finished his tea.

All of them looking at their cups.

—And I brought him to the door. And that was it.

—Yes.

—And Solomon took him down in the elevator. And I’ve never told anyone that story. Afterward my face hurt, I smiled so much. Isn’t that terrible?

—No, no.

—Of course not.

—It feels like I’ve waited my whole life to tell that story.

—Oh, Claire.

—I just can’t believe that I smiled.

She knows that she has not told certain things about it, that the intercom had buzzed, that the doorman had stuttered, that the wait was a stunned one, that the sound of his knocking was like that against a coffin lid, that he took off his hat and said ma’am and then sir, and that they had said, Come in, come in, that the sergeant had never seen the like of the apartment before—it was obvious just from the way he looked at the furniture that he was nervous but thrilled too.

In another time he might have found it all glamorous, Park Avenue, fancy art, candles, rituals. She had watched him as he caught a mirror glance of himself, but he turned away from his own reflection and she might have even liked him then, the way he coughed into the hollow of his rounded hand, the gentleness of it. He held his hand at his mouth and he was like a magician about to pull out a sad scarf. He looked around, as if about to leave, as if there might be all sorts of exits, but she sat him down again. She went to the kitchen and brought a slice of fruitcake for him to eat. To ease the tension. He ate it with a little flick of guilt in his eyes. The little crumbs on the floor. She could hardly bring herself to vacuum them up afterward.

Solomon wanted to know what had happened. The sergeant said that he wasn’t at liberty, but Solomon pressed and said,
None of us are at liberty, are we, really? I mean, when you think about it, Sergeant, none of us are
free.
And the hat went bouncing on the military knee again.
Tell me,
said Solomon, and there was a tremble in his voice then.
Tell me or get out of
my home.

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The sergeant coughed into a closed fist. A liar’s gesture. They were still collecting the details, the sergeant said, but Joshua had been at a café. Sitting inside. They had been warned, all the personnel, about the cafés. He was with a group of officers. They had been to a club the night before.

Must have been just blowing off steam. She couldn’t imagine that, but she didn’t say anything—her Joshua at a club? It was impossible, but she let it slide, yes, that was the word,
slide.
It was early morning, the sergeant said, Saigon time. Bright blue skies. Four grenades rolled in at their feet. He died a hero, the sergeant said. Solomon was the one who coughed at that.

You don’t die a fucking hero, man.
She had never heard Solomon curse like that before, not to a stranger. The sergeant arranged his hat on his knee.

Like his leg might be the thing now that needed to tell the story. Glancing up at the prints above the couch. Miró, Miró, on the wall, who’s the dead-est of them all?

He pulled his breath in. His throat looked corrugated.
I’m very sorry
for your loss,
he said again.

When he had gone, when the night was silent, they had stood there in the room, Solomon and Claire, looking at each other, and he had said they would not crack, which they hadn’t, which she wouldn’t, no, they wouldn’t blame each other, they wouldn’t grow bitter, they’d get through it, survive, they would not allow it to become a rift between them.

—And all the time I was just smiling, see.

—You poor thing.

—That’s awful.

—But it’s understandable, Claire, it really is.

—Do you think so?

—It’s okay. Really.

—I just smiled so much, she says.

—I smiled too, Claire.

—You did?

—That’s what you do, you keep back the tears, gospel.

And then she knows now what it is about the walking man. It strikes her deep and hard and shivery. It has nothing to do with angels or devils.

Nothing to do with art, or the reformed, or the intersection of a man with a vector, man beyond nature. None of that.

He was up there out of a sort of loneliness. What his mind was, what his body was: a sort of loneliness. With no thought at all for death.

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Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet wound, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by Kalashnikov, death by RPG, death by best friend, death by syphilis, death by sorrow, death by hypothermia, death by quicksand, death by tracer, death by thrombosis, death by water torture, death by trip wire, death by pool cue, death by Russian roulette, death by punji trap, death by opiate, death by machete, death by motorbike, death by firing squad, death by gangrene, death by foot-sore, death by palsy, death by memory loss, death by claymore, death by scorpion, death by crack- up, death by Agent Orange, death by rent boy, death by harpoon, death by nightstick, death by immolation, death by crocodile, death by electrocution, death by mercury, death by strangula-tion, death by bowie knife, death by mescaline, death by mushroom, death by lysergic acid, death by jeep smash, death by grenade trap, death by boredom, death by heartache, death by sniper, death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game, death by numbers, death by bureaucracy, death by carelessness, death by delay, death by avoidance, death by appeasement, death by mathematics, death by carbon copy, death by eraser, death by filing error, death by penstroke, death by suppression, death by authority, death by isolation, death by incarceration, death by fratricide, death by suicide, death by genocide, death by Kennedy, death by LBJ, death by Nixon, death by Kissinger, death by Uncle Sam, death by Charlie, death by signature, death by silence, death by natural causes.

A stupid, endless menu of death.

But death by tightrope?

Death by performance?

That’s what it amounted to. So flagrant with his body. Making it cheap. The puppetry of it all. His little Charlie Chaplin walk, coming in like a hack on her morning. How dare he do that with his own body?

Throwing his life in everyone’s face? Making her own son’s so cheap?

Yes, he has intruded on her coffee morning like a hack on her code. With his hijinks above the city. Coffee and cookies and a man out there walking in the sky, munching away what should have been.

—You know what? she says, leaning into the circle of ladies.

—What?

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She pauses a moment, wondering what she should say. A tremble running deep through her body.

—I like you all so much.

She is looking at Gloria when she says it, but she means it to them all, she genuinely means it. A little catch in her throat. She scans the row of faces. Gentleness and courtesy. All of them smiling at her. Come, ladies.

Come. Let us while away our morning now. Let it slide. Let us forget walking men. Let us leave them high in the air. Let us sip our coffee and be thankful. Simple as that. Let’s pull back the curtains and allow light through. Let this be the first of many more. No one else will intrude. We have our boys. They are brought together. Even here. On Park Avenue.

We hurt, and have one another for the healing.

She reaches for the teapot, her hands trembling. The odd sounds in the room, the lack of quiet, the rustle of bagel bags, and the peeling back of muffin wrappers.

She takes her cup and drains it. Dabs her knuckle at the side of her mouth.

Gloria’s flowers on the table, already opening. Janet picking a crumb off her plate. Jacqueline with her knee going up and down, in rhythm.

Marcia looking off into space. That’s my boy up there and he’s come to say hello.

Claire stands, not shaky at all, not one bit, not now.

—Come, she says, come. Let’s go see Joshua’s room.

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A F E A R O F L O V E

Being inside the car, when it clipped the back of the van, was like being in a body we didn’t know. The picture we refuse to see of ourselves. That is not me, that must be somebody else.

In any other circumstance we might have ended up at the side of the road, swapping license numbers, maybe haggling over a few dollars, even going immediately to a body shop to get the damage repaired, but it didn’t turn out that way. It was the gentlest tap. A small screech of the tires. We figured afterward that the driver must have had his foot on the brake, or his rear lights weren’t working, or maybe he had been riding the brake all along—in the sunlight we didn’t see the shine. The van was big and lazy. The rear fender was tied with wire and string. I recall seeing it like one of those old horses from my youth, a lumbering, impatient animal grown stubborn to being slapped on the rump. It was the back wheels that went first. The driver tried to correct. His elbow pulled in from the window. The van went sideways right, which is when he tried to correct again, but he pulled too hard and we felt the second jolt, like bumper cars at a fair, except we weren’t in a spin—our car was steady and straight.

Blaine had just lit a joint. It smoldered on the rim of an empty Coke can that sat between us. He had barely smoked any, one or two drags, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 116

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when the van spun out, brown and horsey: the peace decals on the rear glass, the dented side panels, the windows left slightly ajar. On and on and on it spun.

There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror.

Perhaps we figure it’s the last we’ll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over.

We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.

The driver had a handsome face and his hair was peppered toward gray. There were deep, dark bags under his eyes. He was unshaven and he wore a shirt ambitiously undone at the neck, the sort of man who might have been calm at most times, but the wheel was sliding through his hands now and his mouth open wide. He looked down at us from the height of the van as if he might be freezing our faces in memory too. His mouth stretched into a further
O
and his eyes widened. I wonder now how he saw me, my fringed dress, my curved beads, my hair cut flapper-style, my eyeliner royal blue, my eyes bleary with lack of sleep.

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max’s Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn’t get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another.

If only we had been so careful with ourselves.

Blaine was thirty- two. I was twenty- eight. We were two years married.

Our car, an antique 1927 Pontiac Landau, gold with silver paneling, was almost older than both of us put together. We had installed an eight- track that was hidden under the dashboard. We played twenties jazz. The music filtered out over the East River. There was so much cocaine still pumping through our bodies even at that hour that we felt there was still some promise.

The van spun farther. It was almost front- on. On the passenger side, all I could see was a pair of bare feet propped up on the dashboard. Un-tangling in slow motion. The bottoms of her feet were so white at the edges and so dark in their hollows that they could only have belonged to a black woman. She untucked at the ankles. The spin was slow enough. I could just see the top of her frame. She was calm. As if ready to accept.

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bounced at her neck. If I hadn’t seen her again, moments later, after she was thrown through the windshield, I might have thought she was naked, given the angle I was looking from. Younger than me, a beauty. Her eyes traveled across mine as if asking, What are you doing, you tan blond bitch in your billowy blouse and your fancy Cotton Club car?

She was gone just as quickly. The van went into a wider spin and our car kept on going straight. We passed them. The road opened like a split peach. I recall hearing the first crunch behind us, another car hitting the van, then the clatter of a grille that fell to the ground, and later on, when we went back over it all in our minds, Blaine and I, we reheard the impact of the newspaper truck as it sent them into the guardrail, a big boxy truck with the driver’s door open and the radio blaring. It hit with brute force.