Look at me: (31 page)

“Africa,” he said. “Asia.”

She glanced at the sky. “It was supposed to snow.”

“Ellen, look at me.”

She did. She held his hand and looked up at him.

“Anywhere you want,” Harris said.

As soon as it was quiet, Charlotte slipped from the house and pedaled madly through the cold. She looked for the moon, whose size she recorded occasionally in her notes. Tonight, a layer of violet clouds hid the sky, and the air trilled with flecks of ice.

His light was on. She pulled into the driveway on the quiet, ill-lit street, skimmed down it quickly and softly and knocked on the back door. He opened it, scanning the yard while she stepped past him into the kitchen. The shades were down.

“How are you?” he asked, his accent always most audible in those first words, when he hadn’t spoken in a while. Charlotte had given up asking where it came from.

“I’m good,” she said.

He poured her a glass of juice and sat across the table from her, sipping his Bud, watching her with his strange dark eyes. “Tell me what you did today,” he said, and Charlotte told him: a trigonometry test (what kinds of problems? he wanted to know, competitive with Mr. Marx, her math teacher). The fight at dinner, a short version because she didn’t want to think about it—she was here to forget it. She told him everything except about seeing Uncle Moose, whom she never mentioned.

She left her chair and came to him, kissing his mouth, relishing the sense of being taller, kissing down.
If he smiles, then he loves me. If he kisses back then he
but this was just habit, tiny corroborations of what she already knew.

He’d given her the amber necklace. Three nights after Christmas, pushed it into her palm while she slept so Charlotte woke to find it there, balled up and warm, a little sticky.

She kissed him, and Michael felt her pulse in his mouth, all that young, fresh blood lifting itself to him, rousing him from his torpor. At times he was hypnotized by the power of this release. Holding Charlotte’s face, he came as near as he ever did, anymore, to feeling the rage he so desperately missed, rage and desire commingled; he imagined snapping her neck, crushing her skull between his palms, and the eroticism of that vision made him catch his breath. She had died a hundred different ways at his hands, but what he did instead was pull off her shirt and her clothes and do it that way, kill her as many times as she could take it.

He carried her upstairs, bouncing her in his arms to demonstrate her lightness. Charlotte heard the whistle of a train, a last vestige of that network that had revolutionized the world, cars loaded with grain or beef packed in ice cut from frozen ponds, butchered parts neatly stacked. Michael set her facedown on his bed, took her hips in his hands and eased himself inside her from behind. Charlotte held very still while he moved, while he did everything, finding all the parts of her until she moaned and thrashed in his hands, and then he turned her onto her back and began again, mercilessly, ready, the veiled tails of fish flinging shadows on the walls. She looked at his face, his dark eyes fixed on her or was it something behind her (she could never tell). He moved with absolute concentration, his breathing measured and slow, and she flailed against him, trying to get away, but he wasn’t done with her yet, he could make it happen again and again until she hardly breathed. He wanted her spent, limp beneath him, and only when she was empty, her heart almost stopped, her head a can of broken thoughts, only then did he release himself with a quiet that astonished Charlotte, his body convulsing for whole minutes, it seemed, but soundlessly, like someone being electrocuted. Afterward he held very still, recovering himself, then withdrew slowly and pulled off the condom, dropped it in a basket he kept by the bed for that purpose, uncoiled his body and lay beside Charlotte as she dangled near sleep. His eyes open. She had never seen him even doze.

When the girl’s modest weight grew heavier beside him, Michael pulled on his jeans and a sweater and went noiselessly downstairs in his bare feet to the living room, where he’d moved the TV after her nocturnal visits had begun. He turned it on. A shopping channel. Smiling blonde in magenta sweater. Michael relaxed slightly, letting himself drift among the images. “You can wear this all by itself or drape the cardigan over it.” Drape.
You can drape the cardigan.…
He murmured the words to himself, memorizing.

Because even now, with no conspiracy to fight, no plan or mission or any idea, really, what to do next, the apparatus of infiltration was still alive in him, operating with an efficiency and an independence Michael was coming to find grotesque. He was a machine of adaptation, listening, memorizing, his mind gnawing like a mass of termites at the heft of all he didn’t know.

He went to the kitchen, took a beer from the refrigerator and swallowed half while staring at the kitchen shade, wondering if he was developing a resistance to alcohol or had simply ceased to notice its effects.

Then he heard something faint, tinkling. A barely discernible crackle. It seemed to come from everywhere at once; Michael wondered at first if it was happening inside him.

He pushed open the back door. And there, in the light from the kitchen, he saw thousands of soft white plummeting spots. Snow. He stared, amazed to find that it looked exactly as he’d imagined, like snow in a picture. He stepped outside and a soft cold layer stung his bare feet. He breathed in frozen splotches as he tipped back his head to look up at the trillions of feathery shadows hurtling toward him through the streetlight. He felt them on his face, in his eyelashes. They melted and ran down his neck.

For years he’d made such a common, stupid mistake: assumed the world was full of people like himself—conspirators—failing to consider that his several lives would have been impossible in such a place. He’d credited his light skin and chameleon face, his ease with languages and ability to germinate documents; his instinct for plotting a few coordinates of knowledge onto a vast, alien landscape and waiting for the strands of connection to form and proliferate, until eventually his ignorance would fragment, fall away like an island dissolving into the sea. The difference between not knowing and knowing was so slight. One fact.

But he owed his survival to none of that. Michael saw this now, tilting back his head, letting the snow ache in his eyes. He owed it to faith: other people’s faith, which in most cases was so powerful that the most gigantic assumption—you were the person you claimed to be—was one they accepted at the outset.

Faith. Of all things.

It wasn’t that people weren’t bad. But if they were bad alone, there was no way to stop them efficiently. If the badness worked through them, then they, too, were its victims.

His feet ached, his hair was caked with snow. He opened the door and went back inside.
Screen door. Formica table. Linoleum floor.
Memorizing.

In the living room, he drove his cold feet into the cushions of the couch and turned to a cooking show. A bearded man making crêpes. “Let a small amount of batter spread evenly over the pan, and keep the flame under control.”
Batter. Flame. Control.
Michael memorized the crêpe-maker’s technique.

He must have dozed, because when he heard the girl come downstairs, the TV displayed a family of baboons gnawing leaves. “Homer, like any kid, makes a mess of his meal,” a narrator said.

“What time is it?” she asked, her small, warm hand on his neck.

He tilted back his head to look at her. She was wearing one of his shirts. Michael encouraged this; for a day or two, the shirt would retain the smell of the lotion she wore. It reminded him of the sea. “Four,” he said.

“I better go.”

He followed her upstairs and watched her dress. The fish danced in their bowl. He found himself looking at them often as he went to sleep, just as she had instructed. And he slept well.

“Did you see?” she asked, pointing out the window at the snow.

“I saw.”

In her tennis shoes she bounced down the stairs, Michael behind her. “Whoops,” she said. “My glasses.”

They were on the windowsill, beside the fish. Michael retrieved them and slipped them onto himself. He hadn’t realized how terrible her eyes were, everything running together in a way that made a pain in the center of his head. “Is this what you see, without them?” he asked, emerging from the bedroom.

She stood on the stairs, laughing up at him. “Now you really look like a teacher.”

An idea: clear glasses. He’d used them at other times. But whom was he trying to deceive, and for what reason?

In the kitchen she went straight to the freezer. Waffles, her favorite. He’d bought real maple syrup, but she preferred the fake kind.

“I’m making one for you,” she said, dropping two into the toaster.

“No,” Michael said, and pulled one out. “I had lunch at McDonald’s.” It relieved him, somehow, to say it.

“Lunch,” she said, puzzled. “That was yesterday.”

He smiled. It was true, lunch was yesterday. He raised the shade, watching the snow spin through the light on his neighbor’s house. “You can ride your bike in this?” he asked.

“Of course!”

“You won’t fall?”

“Please.”

She pulled the waffle from the toaster with two fingers, dropped it onto a plate, buttered it and poured syrup on top. He sat beside her at the table, dreading the vacancy she would leave behind. Often he heard a thrumming sound—the whir of emptiness—and felt the possibility of panic moving inside him. But he hadn’t panicked yet. Never in his life.

“One bite,” Charlotte said, and held out a forkful of waffle.

He shook his head. He had covered the overhead bulb with a big round globe that filled the kitchen with feathery light.

If he eats the waffle
.

“Come on,” she said, raising the fork to his mouth. He smelled the butter, the syrup. “Open up.”

Chapter Twelve

Irene Maitlock paused
before her computer, thinking she heard Mark on the stairs. She listened, trying to parse her husband’s mood from the meter of his tread, the trochees and spondees he made while climbing the four tiers of steps to their apartment.

Jangling keys, the complaining door. Irene heard her husband wrestling his coat into the overstuffed closet, breathing hard from the climb. “Hi, baby,” she called.

“Hello.” Wiping rain from his big shoes. Irene swiveled around at her desk, which faced one of the two windows in the living room/dining room/kitchen/office of their tiny one-bedroom apartment, and looked at her husband, whose expression of defeat was palpable even through the gauze of her nearsightedness. “How did it go?”

“Okay.” He crossed the room and hugged her in her chair, holding her head to his stomach. Irene felt him sway a little; he’d been drinking, probably from nervousness.

“Not so good?” she said.

“No, it was good. It was fine.” The party had taken place at the East Seventy-eighth Street duplex of Gadi Austenhaus, a composer who for many years had been Mark’s mentor and champion. Irene had stopped just short of begging Mark to let her come along—he was so shy in groups, and there had been a time when her presence had relaxed him. But now, Mark said, having her with him at such events made them harder. It was her own fault, Irene knew, for as this lean middle period befell her husband, this era when commissions were routed around him, past him—right through him, it almost seemed—on their way to other, younger composers; as a whiff of anxious isolation began to infect this man who had written his first sonata at the age of six, she found herself scrutinizing her husband’s behavior more closely in the presence of his colleagues.

Physically, he had altered: in three short years, Mark’s uplifted sweep of glossy black hair had vacated his head, leaving behind a saddle of baldness. And this sudden evacuation of hair revealed more than just the pallor and slight knobbiness of her husband’s skull (knobs Irene kissed at night and covered with her hands to protect them)—it revealed how critical that layer of raffish black hair had been to the emphatic figure Mark had formerly cut. Now his vast height—six-four—had been reduced to another component of his baldness, the lengthy wand at the end of which his denuded pate was brandished at the world. And he’d developed an unfortunate corollary habit of shoving his hands backward over his nearly bald head with such force that people naturally must assume that this violent pawing
itself
had induced the hair loss. And so, when Mark’s hands rose inadvertently to his skull while he chatted over plastic cups of wine after someone’s recital, Irene would spear him with a fierce warning glance that made him feel as if his last ally in the world—his wife—had turned on him.

“Who was there?” she asked.

“Everyone. Everyone was there.” He crossed the room to the half-kitchen and poured himself a glass of vodka from the freezer. “Saw John Melior.”

“And?”

“He didn’t bring it up.”

“Did you?”

“There was no opening, really. He didn’t give me one.”

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s off.”

“No,” he said, and lowered himself onto the piano stool. Lately, to make money, he’d been giving lessons in the apartment on nights when Irene was at Charlotte’s. “But it doesn’t seem good.”

Incongruously, he smiled. So exceptional had Mark been for so much of his life, so unaccustomed to being ignored and disregarded, that the normal responses—anger, bitterness—seemed never to have developed in him, and he reacted to each new slight and disappointment with an almost childlike bafflement. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand and there was no way for Irene to explain what she barely understood herself: that fashion was ruthless, reputations variable, that the slightest intimation of failure could drive people away. Lately she had begun forcing herself to see these things coldly, dispassionately, because one of them had to; otherwise they would be trampled underfoot by everyone else.

“If it does come through with Melior,” he said, “you could quit that bitch.”

“She’s not so bad,” Irene said, over his grunted objection. “And think about the money. If it comes through.” She added, mostly to herself, “No one will know I had anything to do with it.”

Mark soon retreated to the bedroom—to read, he said, but more likely he would be flattened by sleep and have trouble rising in the morning. The thrum of fear he’d brought with him into their tiny home surrounded Irene now; she looked anxiously at the familiar artifacts of her married life, the musical instruments she and Mark had bought in India hanging on the wall, two sitars, a mridangam drum, a sarod, a shruti box, the kanjira tambourine, the zither Mark could play so beautifully; all of them he could play, he lifted them from the wall and played them. But not lately. Irene taunted herself with these thoughts; they galvanized her with an energy she’d never felt in her life, some combustive agitation of love and anger and fuck you and not so fast, buddy! She wasn’t Mark, exhausted by fear—she would win. Win for both of them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. She would sail their little boat. And when Mark stopped being afraid, his luck would turn, because that was how luck worked, and then the world would favor him again, because that was the world. He didn’t have to see it. She would see for both of them.

Before Mark’s return, she’d been longing for bed herself. Now, thus electrified, she stared at her screen. Ten days ago she had delivered Charlotte’s background to Ordinary People, but there had been no response. She’d had trouble concentrating since then, kept sliding into academic jargon whenever she tried to compose.

I
, she typed. Then consulted her notebook, letting the memory of Charlotte’s voice soak her mind until, with a ventriloquism that still amazed Irene, words tumbled from her in a voice that wasn’t her own or Charlotte’s but a hybrid, an unholy creature that was Irene’s creation, too, fed by the cheap detective novels she still gulped down when she had time. She could hardly type fast enough.

The next time I saw Z, I got near enough to reach for the spot where I’d seen the wire inside his shirt. There was nothing this time. Just the spokes of his ribs and a hard stomach. It was the kind of hardness that can mean a few things. Devoted gym attendance. Subsistence living
.

He put his hand over mine and held it to his chest
.

“Charlotte?” came the faint drowning call from the cistern of a speakerphone. “Thomas Keene.”

“Thomas!” I said—yelled, actually, into my cell phone over the chumming of the Circle Line, which was passing close to me. Tourists lined its deck, waving merrily. I waved back. It was late April, and I was sitting in one of my new haunts: a bench facing the East River on a spit of land across the FDR from my apartment building; the same spit of land, in fact, where I had dashed in a panic last winter, shortly before leaping off my balcony.

Having switched to a regular phone, Thomas said, “So. I spent last night reading your background.”

My stomach pitched. I knew Irene had turned something in—I’d signed an accompanying letter she had written in my name. “And?”

“The material was incredibly thorough, very professional.”

“Good!” I said.

“Very … realistic.”

“Good.”

“There is one thing. It’s—it’s not a problem, exactly,” he said. “It’s just, I have trouble believing you wrote this, Charlotte.”

I was prepared for that. “You mean it doesn’t sound like me.”

“No, it does sound like you. A lot like you—too much like you in a way,” Thomas said. “Too much like you for you to have written it.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“See, I have no problem with you using a writer. Frankly, I’m delighted—you’ve saved me the job of finding someone to clean it all up at the end. But I want to get Cyrano out from behind the curtain and bring him to the table. I’d like to work with him.”

“So you liked the”—what had he called it?—“material?”

“Oh, my God, it’s fantastic! A thousand percent better than I expected.”

There it was: the insult I’d sensed lodged in the middle of all this like an infected tooth.

“It’s a her,” I said. “The writer. But she won’t want to meet you.”

“Why not?”

“She’s a journalist,” I said, with pride. “For an extremely well-known paper that you probably read—”

“I get it, I get it,” Thomas said. “Tell her not to worry.”

“I’m not sure you—”

“She doesn’t want to compromise her name. But see, I don’t want to compromise yours, so we’re fine. She’s off the record, guaranteed.”

By the time we hung up, I had promised to bring Irene to Thomas’s office within the week, a promise I knew she would deplore, having told me repeatedly that she wished to remain, as she put it, a ghost.

I had come to the river that afternoon from my other new haunt: Gristede’s, where I had a job bagging groceries. This unlikely turn of events had transpired for two reasons: First, I was desperate for money. Second, I was itching for something to do, being not merely jobless and friendless, but unable to afford or justify the myriad self-grooming activities that once had comprised a sizable portion of my schedule. Of course, my professional aims had initially been much higher: TV anchor, fashion editor, executive assistant. But I’d discovered the existence of traits that, in my old life, I had regarded as dull, invisible and pointless. These traits had a name, I now learned: “skills.” And I didn’t have any.

I knew powerful people, of course, any of whom I could ask for help. But after one disastrous attempt—lunch with a financier whose jet had ferried me to ski slopes and islands over the years, who flinched when I identified myself at the restaurant bar and glanced distrustfully at my face throughout lunch; who left me standing on the curb as he was driven away in his car, then ignored my calls to obtain the leads he’d promised—after that, I couldn’t bring myself to try again. The calls from my old life had winnowed away, like calls to a prior tenant whose forwarding number has finally made the rounds. All that remained were Grace, Irene and Anthony Halliday, who called a couple of times each week, usually at night, for conversations whose main ingredient was silence. Yet I looked forward to his calls. Afterward, I felt a kind of peace.

I accepted the bagging job for minimum wage because I was tired of looking and because Gristede’s, where I had shopped for years, was just around the corner. Since Sam, the waxen-mustachioed deli man, and Arlene, the cat-eyed manager, didn’t recognize me as the woman they had sold groceries to for many years, there was no shame in it. I even took a certain pleasure in being an expert grocery packer, making a careful pyramid of each bag in which the most fragile items—eggs, raspberries, chanterelles—floated weightlessly at the top. And Irene approved of the job. Its jarring contrast to my prior line of work would help, she said, to make me sympathetic.

Two nights each week, she crossed my threshold, bringing with her smells of the city, the newspaper where she worked; she sat on my sectional couch with a notebook in her lap, and asked me questions. I had intended to lie as much as possible, but I was thwarted by an unforeseen impediment: I lacked the imagination to invent another person’s life. My own was all I could think of. So I told the truth, first awkwardly and in a kind of agony, then ploddingly, and finally, to my own surprise, with a feeling that edged, at times, toward pleasure. I began looking forward to her visits—she was my only visitor. I tried questioning Irene about herself, in part just to change the subject, also out of real curiosity about the life of a
New York Post
reporter. But Irene was tight-lipped; she disliked talking about herself as much as I did, and she wasn’t being paid to.

Shortly after I hung up with Thomas, Pluto, one of a handful of homeless people who lived in tents and garbage bags near the mouth of the tunnel, appeared at my bench carrying a sack of laundry, which he washed in a First Avenue high-rise during the shifts of a particular doorman who believed he lived there. He sat down gloomily and opened a paper bag containing eight beers from an obscure micro brewery. He offered me one, but I declined. The beers were expensive, and Pluto needed them.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Man accosted me in the laundry room,” he said. “Says, I’ve got my sneaking suspicions you don’t actually live here. I say back, Sir, I do my best to abide with dignity amidst more countervailing circumstances than you can shake a stick at. Should a man be punished for this? He says, Count of ten, I’m calling security. Had to pull out my whites before they were fully dry.”

“Jerk,” I said.

“That and more, baby,” he said, gulping his beer so the Adam’s apple rolled like a die in his throat. “That and more.”

Pluto was a dark-skinned black man in his forties, I guessed, whose taut, striving physique seemed the very personification of human effort. I had never known a homeless person—the notion would have seemed ludicrous before the accident—yet I was impressed by Pluto’s resourcefulness. Each morning at dawn, he used a handmade rope harness to lower himself from the rail of the concrete embankment into the East River, where he bathed vigorously in its icy waters and shaved before a mirror shard he’d epoxied to the embankment wall. He dressed impeccably, pressing his clothes with bricks heated over fire; read several newspapers each day, rented computer time at Kinko’s when he could afford it, and on garbage days combed the Upper East Side wearing yellow gloves and a face mask, searching out products by Kiehls and Polo (his favorites), along with vitamins and antibiotics whose “best used by” dates had passed. He begged outside certain buildings, Citicorp being his favorite, and carried handmade business cards—rectangles of white paper with his E-mail address printed on them—should anyone wish to expand the relationship of donor to beggar into that of employer to employee. Yet such mammoth effort did it require for Pluto to maintain his clean, sweet-smelling, healthy and well-informed demeanor that no time remained in the day for him to put it to any real use; he longed to improve his life, but could only remain in a perpetual state of readiness. The beers, which he drank at night, ate up most of his cash.