Commuters (24 page)

In the foyer, Vikram leaned close, closer than he needed to, to say his good-byes. Rachel thought she could taste his breath in her own mouth. It wasn’t unpleasant. His hair was rumpled in a way she hadn’t seen before.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, with your mother?” He had to yell, almost, above the sound level. “The house on Greenham? Has that been settled yet?”

“No,” Rachel admitted. She started to say something else, but Vikram cut her off.

“It’s too bad her husband didn’t make his wishes more clear, for the record—oh, hey!” He turned and swept a younger woman into
a one-armed hug, almost lifting her off the ground. Rachel slipped out the door. His words rang in her ears. Had he said
for the record
? Or
on the record
. Or something about recording…

An idea took hold, there in what was once her front walkway, a desperate and silly idea, built on merlot and a misheard phrase. But still—and maybe…

“Do you want to say anything about…anything? Winnie’s not here, Jerry—you won’t upset her, you can speak freely.” Last night, Rachel had scanned dozens of websites, with names like elderlaw.com, or respectmywishes.alz.net. She had quickly realized how in over her head she was, how little she knew—did anyone know?—about Jerry’s plans or intentions, before that slight car accident sent him spiraling down. Did he have a durable power of attorney? Was that now Avery? What about a living will? Was that related to a regular will? It was a huge mess. Of course the person Rachel knew she could ask, whom she should ask, but whom she couldn’t ask—obviously—was Bob. Well, someone had to find this stuff out—for Jerry’s sake, Rachel told herself. And the one thing she had gleaned from the websites was the importance of an “advance directive,” when it came to what they unflinchingly called
approaching dementia
. Rachel couldn’t find many details, but she gathered this was some kind of document (maybe it could be a tape recording?) that set out a person’s wishes about their future care—and possibly the future ownership of their legally contested, family-disputed, five-bedroom beautiful wreck of a house, which came with a half-installed pool right smack in its front yard.

Rachel cleared her throat and tried again. “We can be straight with each other, Jerry. Right? You’ve been a real friend to me, this
year. I’m not just talking about the loans, either, which really—” Her throat caught, and she had to stop. His eyes were pinned to the television, where men in white helmets scattered and regrouped against a green background. “I didn’t know how much I needed that, someone who could just…say what needed to be said, who could cut through all the bullshit. You know? I can’t do that, or when I want to, something stops me.” Rachel took a deep breath. “But I want to return the favor, all right? I hope you don’t take offense. I don’t know what the doctors are telling you, or how much you realize what’s going on. But here’s the deal: I think this might be toward the end for you—not your
life
, I mean—but of really knowing what’s going on around you, being able to say what you mean. If you don’t come back from this, I want you to have had the chance to tell us what you want. We’ll go by whatever you say, all of us, I mean, Annette and my mom and Avery—about your wishes—about the house.”

Nothing; no response.

“You can be frank now, Jerry.”

At this, his eyes slid over to hers. “Frank?” he said, his voice thin and flat.

“Yes?” Rachel moved closer. “Do you want to talk? Do you have anything to say?”

Jerry’s mouth worked for a while, his jaw pumping up and down, before the words came out. “Likes a good joke,” he said finally. “He here? Where is he? Frank. Tell him I’m onto him.”

Rachel felt something curdle and die inside her. She gathered her hair and let it drop; she touched a pen on the table next to her, the spoon, lining them up. He was gone. And so was this temporary alliance, the thing that had kept her going. Still, that was
nothing compared to what her mother had lost, would lose, and the pure ache of the thought washed over Rachel, renewing her, rinsing her clean.

Does she know? Will I have to tell her? That he’s gone.

Jerry was still rambling on about his brother, Frank, over the noise of the television. When he stopped to look at her, for confirmation, Rachel blew her nose, wiped at unshed tears and said, “Definitely; you said it. So, what else? What else about Frank?”

He talked and talked, a sudden fount of energy. Rachel put her hand into her purse to shut off the tape recorder, and then, on second thought, left it on. She wandered away to get his medicine and applesauce; when she came back, he was still telling the same story about Frank—or was it now another one? The football game was forgotten; she switched channels and put her feet up on the bed. He took the pills she handed him; she ate the applesauce. Frank hid the hubcaps from someone’s car—he pretended to be Chinese—he was a whiz with numbers. Frank sounded like kind of a pain, Rachel thought, but Jerry didn’t agree. He told story after story, mixing up the past and the present, as if Frank was just in the next room and would walk in any minute. After a while, he dozed off.

“Hey,” a voice said from the doorway.

Rachel froze, her feet suspended in midair. Her first thought:
Pool guy? In here?
But it was Bob, half smiling, a little out of breath.

“Fuck,” she said. “Why do you always—”

“I don’t mean to. He’s sleeping?” Rachel looked over at Jerry, tucked peacefully on his side, mouth open. She clicked off the TV and went into the hall, tugging Bob with her.

“Very weird,” she said. “That was the most I’ve heard him talk in—”

“I sold the first chapter,” Bob said. Facing her directly with a strange, sheepish smile. “To
The Atlantic
. It’s a magazine. They’re going to run the first chapter of my book in the magazine.”

Rachel just looked at him, the mottled red and white of the skin on his head, that yellow and black rugby shirt he’d been wearing for twenty years, and the way he seemed to be nodding slightly. At her. He was waiting for her to say something.

“Is that—how did you—when?”

“I just got an e-mail. Jesus, I almost deleted it! I saw the address and thought it was some subscription deal. God, can you imagine? I was sitting there, reading this from the editor, him saying how much he loves the piece and they want to put it as the first person feature, not the next issue but the one after that.”

“You know him? The editor, I mean? How did you—”

“My writing teacher has a friend! At the magazine!” Bob seized both her upper arms; his eyes were wide and sparkling behind smudged glasses. “She mentioned once a while ago that she was going to pass it on to this guy, but I totally forgot! Okay, I didn’t really
forget
, but I just assumed nothing would come of it!”

Her mind spun. Was this for real? How could it be, when the writing he was doing was just…therapy?

“—and Nona might even be able to meet me there, if she’s not already in Italy—”

“Wait. Did you say…Nona? That girlfriend of Avery’s?”

“Yeah,” Bob said, enjoying her confusion. “We’ve been e-mailing, and she knows this open-mic reading series I may go to. I thought it might be fun to bring the girls.”

Rachel didn’t know what to say. Nona? And Bob? E-mailing? She couldn’t keep up; everything about this news was topsy-turvy. Something occurred to her.

“Where are the girls?”

“Lila’s at practice, of course, and Melissa’s over at Terry’s. Why?”

“Did you need the car, or something? I mean—you walked here?”

“I walked here,” Bob said slowly, as if she were dense. “To tell you. In person.”

His voice rose, as it always did, but before Rachel could shush him, Bob pulled her down the hallway even farther from Jerry’s room. He was talking the whole time, about print runs and proof deadlines and how this would seal the deal for a book contract—he was sure of it. Rachel could hardly get in a word, although it didn’t seem expected of her anyway. Bob was busy tugging open door after door in the hallway, still talking.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Here,” he said, thrusting her ahead of him into one of the rooms—dark, musty, closed-up. She turned back to him—what is this?—and suddenly, his mouth was on hers, muffling her surprised squawk. They grappled together there in the half-lit doorway, Rachel stumbling backward and Bob trying to kiss them both farther into the room. She clutched at him to avoid falling backward over some boxes, and he slid a hand up her shirt.

“Are you”—the shock of his fingers on her skin made her cough—“kidding?”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he murmured, elbowing the
door shut. “All those years I wasted in the firm, when I should have been
writing
.”

Rachel didn’t want to hear about that, so she kissed him deeper, more thoroughly. Thoughts collided in her head—
sold the chapter? Had she showered this morning? Was
The Atlantic
the one with the cartoons, or was that
—as she helped Bob pull her sweater over her head. They shuffled in the dark over to a bed, no, not a bed, a bare mattress that sent up a
whoof
of dust when they tumbled down onto it.

“This is amazing,” Bob said, his breath hot in her ear. “I never thought I’d be here, like this.”

“I know.”
Were they talking about his book? Or the sex?
Maybe it didn’t matter. She wrapped her leg around his back, amazed at the way it still fit there. This was crazy, she thought, their having sex in this house. Their having sex
period
. She couldn’t remember a time they had fucked—yes, that’s what this was—in any place other than 144 Locust, and God knows she couldn’t remember the last time they had done it there in any case; but this was good, it broke through something inside Rachel—the sudden weight of her husband’s body, this strange, musty room—it was like being someone else, or maybe it was like being herself again, which she hadn’t been for some time. It was a surprise, to know you could still be surprised like this, in your own marriage.

“It’s been so long since—”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe it. I’m—you’re—”

“I know.”

Then there were no words at all, nothing else in Rachel’s head, only the scratching, rhythmic heave of the mattress against the
wood floor, moving
across
the wood floor, bit by bit, sure and steady on its inevitable way—no other sounds until the footsteps on the stairs and a voice out in the hall—
Miz T? Anybody up here?
—as Jerry’s nurse made her way up to his room. But even that was quite a while after the mattress had stopped moving, and Rachel and Bob—asleep for how long?—woke naked together with pounding hearts, and told each other to shut up, not to laugh so loud, lest someone find them like this.

“Okay, I get it,” Avery said, as the cab turned south off Court Street onto yet another quiet, picturesque street lined with old trees. “Poncy Brooklyn. A little tour of poncy Brooklyn, to get you primed for
la dolce vita
.” Jokes helped. Sometimes.

Nona said nothing, just directed the driver along Henry Street to the corner, and then told him to stop. It was almost 10 pm, but there were still plenty of couples strolling the wide, evenly paved sidewalks or sitting on their brownstone steps waving to passersby. Everyone was so
white
out here, Avery thought with disgust, glaring at anyone who dared glance at him unfolding himself out of the cab. Look at all these happy, clueless, white losers. Even this dumb neighborhood name—Cobble Hill—made him want to vomit. Then again, it could just be his mood. Everything that he cared about would be gone in less than three days, and it turned out that was sort of affecting his perspective.

“Well?” Nona posed herself against the chipped green pole of the street sign. Even though the night was springtime warm, she
wore a long, raggedy sweater and black tights, and a pair of high-top basketball sneakers.

“Strong Place,” Avery read, above her. “Yeah, so?”

She dropped her arms. “Forget it.”

“What? It’s a cute name? Is that it?”

“Yeah, that’s it. I wanted you to appreciate the cuteness.” She linked her arm in his, all too easily. Most of his stupid sarcasm these past few days failed to anger her the way it would have before.

“Just one block long,” she said, pointing.

“The whole street?” Avery snorted. “Should’ve been called
Short
Place.”

Nona was checking an address she’d inked on the palm of one hand. “That one,” she said.

The crumbling stairs they were climbing led to the same kind of reddish brownstone building as all the rest. Nothing different about this one—Number 42—that he could see. No restaurant sign. But Nona had dragged him to so many venues by this point that Avery figured this was just another off-the-beaten-track spot, somewhere only those in the know could find. Or that’s what he
would
have assumed, except this block out here in yuppie Brooklyn was eons away from the places they usually went to, in DUMBO or other parts of Williamsburg, or even the Blue Apple’s deserted stretch in north Fort Greene. Nona had insisted, though—she was going to take
him
out to eat, for once, and so tonight was her pick, her treat. Avery had tried to seem psyched about the sweetness of this plan, the way he knew she wanted him to, but it was hard. He wasn’t even hungry.

It took several buzzers, but finally Nona pressed the right one.
A young guy came to the glass-fronted door, wiping his hands on a towel. He let them in and kissed Nona on the cheek, put a hand on Avery’s shoulder and ushered them into the first-floor apartment, pointing out the two kids’ bikes in the hall that they should avoid tripping over. Inside, there were two high-ceilinged rooms separated by painted-over pocket doors, and four tiny tables spread out as far as possible across the uneven wood floors—someone’s apartment minus the bed and couches. Couples were at the tables, two younger and one older.
Huh,
Avery thought. So it was a dinner party, of sorts. He was bummed; small talk with strangers was not high on his list at the moment.

The guy—the host?—led them to the empty table, and apologized for the paperback book that was propping up its one wobbly leg. They sat, he left, and Avery braced himself for weirdness; soon there would be performance art, some kind of yelling and/or nudity, he was sure of it. There was a coffee can full of pencils on the tablecloth and a stack of papers underneath it: proof. Of something.

“What’s this music playing?” Avery asked, suspicious.

Nona listened for a moment. “Schubert,” she said. “Second piano trio. Um…third movement.”

“Are you going to sing?”

“You never know.”

The guy came back to the table—Wendell, his name was—and engaged Nona in a long discussion about a mutual friend. Avery dismissed him as boring (blue button-down, hair parted on the side, big doofy smile) and gazed instead at the older couple at the table next to them. They were forties, or fifty maybe. All dressed up, both kind of fat, and not talking much. Avery wondered why
they were already eating. Were he and Nona late to the party? There was a meaty sauce clinging nicely to the man’s pappardelle noodles. Avery felt a flicker of interest in sorting out its components—
not beef, maybe veal?
—which then died out.

“Just water,” Nona said, flicking her eyes to Avery, when Wendell was going on about Bordeaux and merlot.

After he left, Avery said, “You never finished
Choke
, did you?” It came out more accusatory than he’d planned, but then again, so what?

“I’m not done,” Nona said. “I don’t read as fast as you do.”

“You hated the other Palahniuk novel too.”

Nona took a pencil from the coffee cup and started to write, fast, on one of the slips of paper. He tried to read upside down, but she covered it with her hand, like he was cheating on an exam.

“Take a look, why don’t you,” Wendell said. “But you’re the last seating, so no rush.” He dropped the edge of a chalkboard onto their tabletop and held it so they could see. Avery stared at it blankly:
Fiddlehead and goat cheese salad, $9. Pappardelle with veal ragout, $17. Grilled grain-fed spring lamb,
MP.

“MP?” Nona asked.

“Market price,” Wendell said. “Let me see what we have left, and I’ll let you know.” He stood the chalkboard against the wall and hurried away.

Okay, so now Avery got it. A pretend restaurant. A performed “dinner party” as “restaurant” as critique of foodie capitalism…something along those lines. He’d done this type of thing before with Nona. Audience-participation art. (One had involved a playground at midnight, with adults dressed in overalls and Underoos, swinging and sliding, digging in sand, dead serious. The animal
crackers and juice, though, had been a nice touch.) Well, he would play along, if that’s what she wanted.

“What are you going to order?” Avery said, leaning back in his chair, grinning.

Nona was studying the menu. “This place is kind of pricier than I thought. Maybe the pasta?”

“Right.
Pricier.
” He snorted. “Did you bring your Monopoly money?”

She ignored this, though, digging around in her shapeless purse.

Wendell came back. “Sorry. No more lamb. But I can seriously recommend the pappardelle. And we’ve got just enough for two. Nobody has a veal problem, do they?”

“No veal problem here,” Nona said, smiling up at him. “That sounds perfect.”

Avery shrugged—why not? “And a goat cheese salad, to start? We’ll share it.” Wendell nodded, obviously pleased. Why wasn’t he writing this all down on a fake order pad, though? And he shouldn’t be wearing that excited, nervous smile. People doing these pieces were usually real serious, so you got that it was
art
.

“Did you read this much as a boy?” Nona was looking straight at him, without guile or agenda. She wasn’t trying to change the subject. She wanted to
know
him. But what did it matter, now? “I always pictured you as a hell-raiser, not some studious little bookworm.”

“You can’t be both?”

“Can you? Were you?”

Avery toyed with his fork and knife (mismatched silver patterns). He pictured that scared, angry boy he’d been, with messy blond hair and chewed, bloody cuticles, trapped in his room, lis
tening to his mother shout at someone on the phone down the hall. That boy could flip his desk over, again. Or he could get lost in Middle-earth, somewhere between Rivendell and Gondor. What’ll it be?

“The first two days I was in rehab,” he said, picking his way through the phrasing. How hateful to have to say it out loud, how dull and meaningless. “On the third floor, where you go when you’re coming off the shit, when they still think you might go mental on an aide. They take away all your stuff, and you have to wear these matching pajamas—they look like doctors’ scrubs.”

The salad arrived, already divided on two plates by Wendell, who put them down gently and then departed.

Nona didn’t touch hers. “Go on.”

“Well, long story short, it’s basically lockdown. The guards call it that, to each other. They’re not supposed to say it to you, though. But it doesn’t take a genius.”

“I would have been terrified. Anyone would.”

“I couldn’t tell if it was the junk, leaking out of my system, after fucking it up for so long. Or the idea of it, that I couldn’t leave. That all the furniture was bolted down, the windows…yeah. I was so scared. I was scared of being that scared—I had to fight my panic all the time, count squares on the floor, that kind of thing.” He let out a deep breath. This wasn’t what he’d meant to talk about—he wanted to answer her, about reading. “You going to try that?”

“Finish telling me first.”

Avery took a bite of greens—peppery, warm, expertly dressed. Huh. Not bad, for pretend salad.

“The TV room was too depressing, they had it on all the time,
the plastic couches, the volume up full bore. So I found where they had some paperbacks on a shelf. Six or seven, all crap. Except there was this copy of
Rebecca
, you know that novel? Kind of a romance-thriller thing. I think they made a movie—”

“You have that novel! I’ve seen it on your shelf. So that’s where you got it, rehab?”

“Oh,” Avery said, rattled, deeply embarrassed. “No, I bought that copy. Later.” He had to have one around, all the time, since then.

But even as Nona waited, an expectant smile on her face, he lost the thread. Energy rushed out of him, and with it any urge to tell this story. The silence grew; Avery dropped his eyes to his unfinished plate, which was soon replaced with a dish of pasta.

Why? Why should he tell this to her, when she was as good as gone, when all of it was over? His few attempts at protesting—they could make it work, long-distance, and he would visit—had been met with such hesitancy that Avery had instantly backed off, his pride hurt. Look, if he was going to spill his soul and guts and then she would leave anyway and nothing would be different, wasn’t it better to just shut the hell up? They would “keep in touch,” she might have e-mail (she might not), and there was a chance she could come back once over the summer—fine, but he wasn’t dumb enough to think that meant anything. The time for telling each other heartwarming stories about each other’s pasts was over. What good could it do now?

On the third floor that day, standing next to him at the pathetic bookshelf, there had been a woman named Gris. Fellow inmate, total stranger, a heavy Mexican woman who argued and pleaded for him to give her
Rebecca
, said she was sick to death
of her romance magazines and needed to put her eyes on something other than those godforsaken soap operas. Or herself, in the bathroom mirror. Who should get it first, this stupid paperback? Should they tear it in half? Let the guards mediate? (
Hell
no, both agreed). So they had ended up together, he and sweaty Gris, for several hours, pressed side to side and leg to leg in their matching scrubs, the book held between them; he was faster, so he read ahead, on the right side—she slowly turned pages on the left, sucking her teeth with interest and occasionally interrupting Avery with a question about the plot or a word’s definition. Both of them had to hold their heads tilted uncomfortably to one side; both had to endure snickers from the aides and catcalls from the other junkies. Didn’t matter. Avery couldn’t speak for Gris, but he found there—in stupid, doomed Manderley, in the effort of turning one page at a time, in Gris’s solid flesh—the first glimmerings of calm, an easing of his panic, since they had stuck him in that place twenty hours before. He had been using fast and ugly for weeks by then; it had been a long time since he’d read anything.

He shook his head at Nona’s gesture—
and then?

He could smell Gris right now. She had been unwashed; she reeked of exhaustion and body odor and the metallic tinge of meth. Strangely, that hadn’t bothered him—the opposite, actually; her physical presence had grounded him. But he wasn’t going to tell Nona about that, not now, not ever. Or that he’d never seen Gris after that, after he’d finished
Rebecca
and ceded the book to her. She had taken it into both hands without even looking at him—she wasn’t yet at the halfway mark—and then early the next day they moved him down to the second floor. He had improved.

“Don’t put cheese on that,” he instructed Nona, aiming in his tone for good humor, for
it doesn’t matter
. “Not every pasta sauce needs Parmesan, but everyone always dumps it on it, anyway. And keep that in mind in Italy. Seriously. They’d laugh at the way Americans put cheese on everything.”

“You don’t have to do this. Make jokes about it, be cheerful.”

“No, I’m just saying.” Avery took another bite of pappardelle; somewhere along the line, he had joined in the pretense, or he had forgotten the need to—this dinner was
good
, fake restaurant or not. And he was feeling better, from withholding that story. Not because it was a
fuck-you
gesture (although, tell the truth, it sort of was), but because a tiny spark had kindled in him: he would need to build up his reserves, to survive Nona’s leaving. He would keep things to himself again. He always had, before her, and now he saw why.

“Another thing,” he said, mouth full, back in the comfort of lecturing her about food. “It’s not going to be like this—” He gestured with his fork at their big plates. “They do pasta as a first course, not the main. Definitely order it, but you have to save room. The meat course comes next. Are you listening? This is important!”

Nona was watching him carefully. “Meat course,” she said.

“I will not be held responsible if you go to live in food heaven and miss out on the whole experience. All right? Don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

“I won’t.” She was eating now too, very slowly. After a while, at Wendell’s suggestion, they shared a mocha pot de crème.