Miss Misery (20 page)

With the disc burned, I rifled through copies of
Esquire
and
GQ
, searching for a suitably vague and cool-seeming image to gank for a cover. I found one near the back of a year-old issue of
GQ
with Jake Gyllenhaal on the front. It was a two-page ad for expensive watches, but all I was interested in was the background: a moody shot of the old TWA terminal at JFK Airport, aglow with strange hues of green and gold. I snipped it out and stuck it in an empty jewel box. Looking good. All I lacked was a title. I thought for a moment, then without hesitating uncapped a Sharpie and wrote across the disc: “INDEPENDENCE, DAZE.” What girl didn't love puns? I slammed the case shut, threw it in my bag, then went to get changed. I was feeling peppy and I had a party to go to.

When I raced out of my apartment a short time later, Mrs. Armando was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, sweeping up great clouds of nothing in the dim indoor light. The entire first floor smelled like a pine forest, and I did my best to avoid any spots she may have already tended to.

“David!” she said without looking up at me. “What time you get in last night?”

“Last night?” I said, playing dumb and charming at the same time. “I don't know, Mrs. Armando. Late?” I smiled as broadly as I could. I was moving again. I wasn't going to be dragged down by this.

“I don't know where your head is at,” she said in the direction of the floor. She coughed, and I thought I was free, but then: “You gonna watch the explosions tonight?”

I paused. “The explosions?”

“You know, the flag, the lights, all lit up in the sky? Whaddya call it.”

“Fireworks?”

“That's it, that's it. You gonna watch?”

“I'm gonna watch, Mrs. Armando. Are you?”

“Oh…” She fussed with something on the corner of the rug. “You never know, you never know.”

I took that as my cue to push past her and open the door.

When I left the house for the second time that day, the quality of the sky seemed to have improved even more: Where once there had been gauzy puffs of clouds, now there was nothing but a deep, burnished blue. The sun was glaring and hot, focused down to a tight coin perched precariously above the Manhattan skyline. Everything seemed richer, more profound: the loose soil spilling onto the sidewalk in front of the house, the reggaeton blaring from the open windows of a passing Honda, the smile from the unknown bearded neighbor out walking his three-legged Great Dane. I smoothed my T-shirt out, felt the first tickle of sweat in the small of my spine. Even the air smelled decadent, like wood chips and hot dogs; thick not with humidity but with nostalgia for summer days remembered from sleepaway-camp photo books and family-vacation videotapes. Without my iPod to blanket my ears, I focused instead on smaller sounds: a baby crying, children playing catch in the middle of the street, the tinkly chime of a Mister Softee truck blocks away, and everywhere the quiet, calming hum of a thousand air conditioners at full tilt. I put my sunglasses on and stepped off the landing, staring upward for a change at the deep leafy green of the few trees that lined the street—dyed a strange golden yellow by my UV-protection lenses.

As I headed toward the avenue, I felt a spring in my step, a twittering hiccup in my chest. I felt poised for something, a strange miasma of anticipation coating my entire body as if I too were playing catch in traffic—with both the ball and an eighteen-wheeler barreling my way. It was excitement and nerves and fear and all of those things, but it was also something new: It was freedom. It was a holiday in every sense—from work, from responsibilities, from life. I felt like I was bursting out of my own skin, like I was walking quickly downhill after weeks of uphill trudgery. I clenched and unclenched my fists at my sides and imagined, as I often did on this walk, how much easier and more pleasant things would be if I could fly.

I couldn't, of course—I was just impatient—so I kept walking until Fifth Avenue, then hung an aggressive left and headed toward the subway. The sunlight bashed itself into glass storefronts and spilled messily onto the pavement. Everywhere children were running, Super Soakers filled and dripping; pizza slices were folded over and eaten; beer was purchased; cars were double-parked and other cars were honking before slowly and grudgingly double-parking themselves. A trio of do-ragged black guys swept down the sidewalk like a wave, smoking Newports, pushing one another and throwing noisemakers down at their feet as they walked,
pop-pop-pop.
A pigeon flew low over my head; instinctively I ducked and then wondered if it was my old friend. No, I decided—too pale. All that greenery would have had to have improved a bird's health.

I wondered what the sky was like in the Netherlands—dark by then, probably—and if the expats had paid for fireworks of their own or if that was too ostentatious for Americans abroad these days, most of whom were tripping over each other pretending to be Canadian. But I didn't like the room this thought led to in my mind, so I quietly shut that particular door and stopped thinking about it.

Instead I double-timed my steps and nearly sprinted down the hill and up the stairs to the train. My legs felt hot and claustrophobic in my jeans, but I didn't mind. The day was well and truly spectacular.

Up on the platform again, I walked to the end as I always did and stared out over the Gowanus Canal at the shimmery image of the Statue of Liberty, as small as a tourist's statue of it from this distance, standing stock-still and ramrod straight. It was, as always, strange to see see something so famous, so recognizable in the mundanity of public transportation. It was like coming face-to-face with a supermodel in the DMV, almost unbelievable in its reality. But it also made me calm. I turned 180 degrees and stared out over Downtown Brooklyn—the avenues and warehouses, the impossibly phallic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building forever thrusting itself into the sky—and then past it to the curve of Manhattan, as stoic as a mountain range, from the self-important skyscrapers at its southernmost tip all the way to another unreal familiar landmark, the Empire State Building, where Amy had once worked and where I would wait in endless security lines and forever elevator queues just to sneak in a wordless visit during her lunch hour. Hello city, I said silently. I wonder if you've changed this year too.

“David? Is that you?”

I turned, and it wasn't the city made flesh, responding to my sun-drenched whimsy. It was Agnes, a former colleague of Amy's from another summer job, this one at Amnesty International. Agnes was only five years our senior but decades apart from us in demeanor. She was prim and tidy, even today wearing gray slacks and a polo shirt just red enough to highlight the lack of blood in her neck and just loose enough to accommodate the baby that was growing in her belly. She had mousy hair that mushroomed in all directions and an accent that, to my ears at least, caromed dangerously between Swedish and French.

“Hello, Agnes. Long time no see.”

“Yes, I knew that it was you!” She clasped my left hand clumsily and then made some attempt to lean into me, brushing my cheeks in a sloppy recreation of a European greeting.

I smiled dumbly, taking in the sight of her. “Yes,” I said. “Here I am.”

“You are looking a little tired, no?”

“Maybe,” I said in halfhearted cheerfulness. “Maybe.” I ran a hand through my hair, let the backs of my fingers brush my face. Once again I had forgotten to shave.

“Paul and I were just speaking of you,” she said referring to her husband, a professional percussionist at Broadway shows. “We were thinking that we wish Amy were here for when the baby comes. She always said she'd help with the babysitting. And what a delight it would be with you both in the neighborhood!”

I smiled but it came out like a grimace. “Oh, I'm sure she would have loved that.”

Agnes took my left hand again in her own clammy paw. “Oh, you poor dear. She really left you all alone, didn't she?”

I took my hand back as gently as I could. “It's not so bad. I'm managing.”

Agnes clucked, and the tendons in her neck seemed to make a desperate lunge for freedom. “
Managing
! We shouldn't have to
manage
!”

“No,” I said, feeling torn in two. “We shouldn't.”

We stood there then, feeling the sun beat down on our heads, with not a single thing more to say to each other. Why hadn't I noticed her first? Then I would have been able to do the sensible thing: pretend I hadn't seen her and walk farther away until awkward pauses like this one—in fact, entire awkward conversations like this one—would have been an impossibility.

When the weight of the silence became overwhelming, we both made efforts to repel it.

“Have you—?” Agnes said.

“What is—?” I said.

“Go ahead,” Agnes said, bored and blushing.

“No, no,” I said, rubbing my palms against my jeans. “You.”

“Have you been following Amy's case in the papers? They've been doing an awfully good job of reporting it.”

“Amy's case,” I repeated, with no inflection.

“Yes—Radzic's trial? Did you see that he's insisting on representing himself and has been calling everyone—
everyone
—in as a witness? Yesterday he called Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, and the Pope, but when none of them miraculously appeared, he settled for his prison guard and his anesthesiologist.”

I shook my head. All of a sudden I wanted to grab this poor mousy pregnant woman and shake her and bury my face in her shoulder and cry and beg her to tell me everything she knew about the person I should have given up everything for. Instead all I said was, “Crazy.”

“Yes,” she said, believing it. “Very crazy.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was only an incoming text, but I took it out and regarded it like it was the phone call I'd been waiting for half my life. I glanced up at Agnes with a look of extreme concern on my face. “I'm sorry to be rude,” I said. “I'm afraid I have to take this call.”

“It is no problem,” Agnes said, waving me away as she would a mosquito. “When Amy returns we will all have to get dinner again. This time at a place with high chairs!” She rubbed her swollen belly as if a genie would pop out and grant us each three wishes.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Absolutely. Take care.” And I headed off down the platform, still clutching my phone like it was a grenade with its pin removed. When I was well out of earshot, I actually opened the phone, held it to my ear and mimed speaking to someone for a moment, but I needn't have bothered. Agnes was headed off to the other end of the platform, no doubt as grateful for the interruption as I would have been had it been genuine. Feeling disgusted with myself, I slid the phone from my ear and looked at the screen. It read:

I felt fury rise in my throat, and I slammed the phone shut. Up and down, up and down. I rubbed at my forehead, felt the sweat that had begun to appear there, as if massaging my skull could make my brain divulge the mysteries of its massive mood swings.

The papers have been doing a good job of reporting it. I hadn't looked at the papers; I hadn't even known what Amy was doing over there. I hadn't picked up the phone, and I certainly hadn't bothered to ask. There was no mystery to that realization, only shame. A shame that burned even brighter when I felt the almost imperceptible weight in my shoulder bag: the mix CD I had made for someone else.

I felt—no. Finish the thought:

A mix CD made for a twenty-two-year-old you barely know that you are racing to see. While another version of you laughs and preens and snorts and flirts and scores. Really, I thought to myself, it's enough to give someone some sort of breakdown. The idle G train stalled in the middle of the station rumbled to life then, and I looked down the tunnel to see the faint light of an approaching F. Time to go; time to keep moving.

My phone buzzed in my hand: