The Book of Jonah (16 page)

“No, I mean it. It'd just be nice if we could, y'know—have a few more hours together.”

“Believe me, if it were up to me…” she muttered. “I don't exactly love spending my weekends in a hotel. Did I tell you what happened with the bedspread? I came back to my room last night and—”

“I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen,” a woman's voice cried out. She stood by the door at the back of the car: dark-skinned, scrawny, hair a kind of tangled explosion from the top of her head, dressed in flip-flops, jeans torn above scabby knees, a T-shirt that dangled loosely at her neck—so filthy it looked like she had been rolled in ash. “I'm sorry,” she bellowed again, and then stopped—mouth open, eyes haggard—as if not knowing or not remembering or simply too strung out to know what to say next. She just stood by the door, wavering slightly on her feet.

“Jesus,” Sylvia muttered. She went on. “I put the bedspread in the closet every day when they put it on the bed, and every night I come back and the housekeeper has put it on again. So this time—”

“Ladies and gentlemen can you help me?” the woman called in a hurried tumble of syllables—as though suddenly remembering her lines.

“So this time I wrote her a note, and I left it on the bed.”

“Can anyone … Can anyone please help me out?”

“And it said, ‘Please do not make up the bed with the bedspread on it.'”

“Ladies and gentlemen!”

Jonah glanced around the car. There was a narrow-faced young man in horned-rimmed glasses and headphones with a soul patch on his chin; a black teenage girl reading from a biology textbook; a dour man whose brown and baggy hooded sweatshirt gave him an oddly monklike appearance; two large Hispanic men in matching orange construction vests, their faces torpid and eyelids drooping. Closest to the woman sat a balding man in a tuxedo shirt and bow tie with a violin case across his lap. Though the woman was directly in front of him, he stared ahead with a sort of willed vacancy.

“And that night she'd put the bedspread back onto the bed—and left the note on top of it.”

“Please, please.” The woman took a step forward. There was no movement for purses, for wallets. The woman dropped to her knees. “Please…” she whimpered—mewled—as if now overcome by a still deeper sorrow, her eyes closed, hands clasped before her chest. “Please help me!” All on the train avoided looking at her, at one another.

Jonah had seen this before: The most dramatic, the most humiliating pleas from panhandlers were almost always ignored. The song, the joke, the tidy request for a dollar or a quarter for something specific like a sandwich: This was what people responded to. The greater shows of desperation seemed to violate somehow the social contract between the beggars and those from whom they begged.

“I mean, can you believe that? Now, I know it's possible she couldn't read it. But I've mentioned it to the concierge and I've called housekeeping about it.”

The woman was still on her knees—head down, eyes closed, lips moving soundlessly. Her body was tilting to one side, threatening to topple over onto the man with the violin. He was pressing himself into the corner at the end of his bank of seats—seemed to be weighing whether he could stand and move away without brushing against her.

“For what it's worth, I am Starwood platinum.”

Jonah took out his wallet; he had only twenties. “Jesus,” Sylvia whispered sharply.

He didn't, as a rule, give to people on the subway. The musical performances annoyed him, he simply didn't credit the requests for shelter money or bite-to-eat money; was sure his spare change would end up going for drugs and or alcohol. What prompted him now was not the woman, not even the reactions to the woman from the others on the train: It was noticing it—it was that he couldn't ignore it.

“Look, do you have any singles?” he asked Sylvia.

“No,” she said—her sunglasses-covered face inclined toward her knees, her purse now clutched between her arms against her chest. The woman was shuffling toward them, supporting herself by grasping the metal bar fastened to the roof of the train. From under her arm a great tuft of black hair was visible, flecked with beads of moisture and dandruff. Jonah could smell her from ten feet away—urine, sweat, and a thick, indistinguishable commingling of other bodily odors. She now dangled above him from the subway bar, her face still distorted in folds of anguish. He could see a strange whitening at the corners of her eyes and mouth, dark purple bruises on her forearms and legs. He took out forty dollars. Her fingertips were as if charred black, her palm was ashy. He tried to hand the money to her so that the bills stayed between their skin, but as she clasped them, her coarse fingertips dragged over his palm, and something in his stomach and his balls clenched reflexively.

The woman stared at the money in her hand for a moment like she saw in it only another object of grief—and then she closed her hand around the bills and shoved her fist into the pocket of her jeans. She looked very agitated, very frightened now, and, hand still balled in a fist in her pants, she took awkward and clumsy steps to the end of the car, and pulled open the door, was gone.

“And now she's doing the exact same thing in there,” Sylvia muttered without looking at him. They rode in silence to their stop.

Sylvia didn't speak again until they had surfaced
,
a few blocks from Jonah's building. When she did, she said, “You are such an asshole, you realize that?” He felt too worn out to disagree. He waited for her to elaborate, which she did. “You realize that woman was an addict, right? Those people are dangerous. Did you ever think about that? Do you know what addicts will do for a fix?”

She was saying “addict” the way commentators on CNN said “satanist,” he thought. “Nothing was going to happen,” he muttered.

“Of course, you're so worldly about these things,” Sylvia shot back. “Sorry if it offends your liberal sensibilities, but you can't just go around throwing twenties at every homeless person you see.” She shook her head. “This all goes back to the warped values of your Roxwood upbringing.”

With this she had succeeded in irritating him—which
,
he guessed, was her intention. “Right, I should have told her to write her congressman about lowering the capital gains tax.”

“Make fun of me all you want, but those of us who understand how the economy actually works—”

“Jesus Christ, Sylvia.”

“It's not like forty dollars will change anything for her. In fact, it will probably only make things worse. You probably gave her enough to OD on.” These words were shot out with a rapid, staccato wrath, as if she were trying to pelt him with stones.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Jonah shouted, a day's worth of hangover and seemingly unbroken and unbreakable frustration now finding shape in anger. He understood that this anger involved Sylvia only tangentially—but none of its other sources were around to be yelled at. “Okay, I gave money to a crack addict because I'm some naïve tree-hugging socialist. What the fuck does it matter to you?”

“Because you did it just to insult me!” There was another tone entering her voice—something more tremulous and wounded. He knew that when he yelled it brought back all the bad old memories of her shitty father. But he felt justified in ignoring this. She'd wanted to fight—so here they were.

“That's right, Sylvia, no one gives money to a homeless person without thinking about how it will affect you.”

“You're so hung up on class issues and the way I was raised!”

“Giving that woman money has nothing to do with your fucking house in Nantucket!”

“Then why did you say it would be bourgie for us to use a decorator?”

“Because it would be bourgie to use a decorator!” He couldn't believe the argument, by its own ineluctable gravity, had reached such an absurd point—but of course, neither was he willing to let any of it go. Evidently, neither was she.

“Forgive me for wanting more in my apartment than a couch and a giant television!” she shouted. “Forgive me for wanting to live in a place that actually feels like a home!”

“The ABC Carpet showroom is not a fucking home!”

“So to prove to me what a, a, a man of the people you are, you put me in danger and probably—”

“I just wanted to give that fucking crack addict some fucking money! And if you're too much of a spoiled, conservative snob to accept that…” The bottom of her face was bent in a sorrowful frown; he felt entitled to ignore this, too. “You've never given a shit about anyone but yourself,” he finished.

“Fuck you, Jonah.” Tears were sliding from behind the lenses of her sunglasses. Of course they were, he thought. Hadn't she wanted that, too? Maybe they both had wanted it, all of it: Maybe this was all they had to offer each other.

When they got back to his apartment, she went directly to the small table adjacent to the kitchenette—the one they'd gotten so they could eat breakfasts together. She took out her laptop and began silently to adjust some mammoth flowchart. After an hour or so, he started to feel regretful, guilty—but any attempts he made to talk to her, to touch her, were ignored or shaken off. He stoically filled out the apartment paperwork: the salaries, the employers' addresses, the names and numbers of references.

As the afternoon light ebbed toward dusk, she abruptly closed her computer, stood. He was seated on the couch—for some reason he stood, too. “I changed my flight,” she announced matter-of-factly. “I'm going to the airport now.”

“Come on, Sylvia, don't do that…” She didn't answer—her eyes as sheerly unemotional as the lenses of the sunglasses she'd worn. “I'm sorry,” he told her. She began to gather her power cord and other things into her bag. “Don't say goodbye like this.” She let out a sharp, sarcastic scoff. He knew, he ought to let her go. But in some way it was easier to say, “I need your signature. For the credit check and shit.”

She stopped, her face still down toward the open mouth of her bag. “It surprises me you want to live with a spoiled conservative snob.”

“But you're my favorite conservative snob.” She showed no trace of amusement, and the joke had been halfhearted at best. “I got angry—I didn't sleep, I … I didn't give that woman money to insult you.”

She shook her head—either at him, or herself. She looked at him assessingly for a moment—then took the papers and signed them. “You gave that woman forty dollars, and you made me feel like shit. I hope you understand what that means.”

He was sure he didn't, but he said, “I get it, I'm sorry.”

She let out a slow, irritated sigh—the sigh of a claim to infinite patience. “If this is going to work … Do you want this to work, Jonah?”

He knew there was a truthful answer to this question in some far-off corner of his mind—but it appeared so distant, he felt so tired, that retrieving it seemed impossible. “Of course,” he said.

“Then it will,” she said with determination—determination that he realized was as necessary a condition of their relationship as any quality each found attractive in the other. “We can decide to make it work.”

As she looked at him, her face softened—if slightly, if only for the sake of appearing to soften. She gave his hand a token squeeze; he leaned forward to kiss her, but she drew away. The hand squeeze was going to be the extent of it. She picked up her oversize bag and slung it over her shoulder and went out the door. His relief as it closed was inestimable, as was the strangeness of how much he immediately missed her.

Within five minutes he had the shades down, had dug the noise-canceling headphones he used on long-haul flights out of a drawer, had kicked off his shoes and lain down in bed. The blackness flooded and churned behind his eyes—but he didn't sleep. He felt too adrift in the space of his own head to sleep.

They were, empirically, so compatible: They were about as attractive as each other, they made about the same amount of money, they were both white New Englanders from divorced homes, they shared (well, had shared) a basic disinterest in organized religion, they were the same age, had the same build. They made each other laugh, they liked a lot of the same movies; he wasn't intimidated by her success or ambition, she gave him blow jobs in restaurants. In sum, they made a lot of sense. One could even say there was no rational reason why they should not be together. And this, Jonah finally understood, was the only reason they were together at all—the only reason they'd progressed beyond a first date, the only reason they might progress any further.

They liked each other—they loved each other. They could probably convince themselves to spend the rest of their lives together. But there was some form of trust or belief or blind affection they simply had no capacity to feel for each other. Ultimately—they had no faith in each other.

His wallet and phone formed an awkward bulge in his pocket. He pulled them out and, as he did, he found a card stuck to the wallet. He saw Guru Phil—whose serenity was ensured because it was based merely on existence. Which was all well and good, Jonah thought, except for the times when existence sucked—when it was contradictory and answerless—when you were assaulted by— He crumpled up the card and tossed it to the floor. It settled among the massive dust clusters and half-consumed bottles of water that lived like the relics of some lost civilization beneath his bed. He didn't so much fall into sleep as he was swallowed up by it.

5.
THE SHIP WAS IN DANGER OF BREAKING UP

Jonah awoke feeling greatly refreshed, greatly relieved that his sleep had been dreamless. He looked at his phone, laying on the bed beside him: It was ten in the morning. He felt better still as he scrolled through his emails, considered the day ahead of him—a Sunday ensconced in his office, reading through the boxes of BBEC files. He had his job to do: his rationally defined, entirely predictable, emotionally characterless, utterly secular job.