Stay (5 page)

“Just a bit of hammering?”

“We’d have to fire up the generator and hang a few lights, but, yes, just a bit of hammering.”

We split the night open with noise and light and the stink of diesel and it felt good, it felt human, and although the tarps were heavy and the nails awkward, although Dornan hit the knuckle of my left index finger once and his own thumb twice, I think we both had the most fun either of us had enjoyed for months. It was a single, simple, discrete task, and we did it well.

When the generator had been turned off and the tools stowed in the hogpen, we went into the trailer. In the steady, yellow-white fluorescent light, Dornan’s shoulders were no longer hunched; the lines at the corner of his eyes were not as deep. I felt tired, and peaceful.

“Time for bed,” I said. “Tomorrow I want an early start.” I did not sleep for a while. From the woods to the west, a screech owl hooted. Another answered from the north. Calling to each other in the dark.

I
shook Dornan awake just before six.
“I have a long drive today. I want to be out of here in an hour. Clean the shower after you’ve finished.”

While he blundered about getting showered and dressed, I poured coffee, then unplugged and cleaned his espresso machine. I unloaded the fridge and put the perishables in a cardboard box.

Dornan peered into the box over his coffee. “Eggs. Green peppers. Seems like an odd choice to eat on the road.”

“This is for you to take with you. No point it all going to waste.”

“You expect to be gone a while, then?”

“A few days. I’ll call, when I find her. That’s all you need to know. Now drink your coffee and load your car. I want to leave before seven.”

I wiped down the inside of the fridge and propped the door open, shut down the appliances one by one, turned off the propane and water lines, checked locks, latches, and bolts on the cabin, hogpen, and trailer, put my bag and phone in the truck. The light in the clearing was like cool green tea, and dozens of birds sang. Dornan leaned against his Isuzu, sipping coffee and looking forlorn.

“Got everything?”

He nodded.

“Then I’ll call you in a few days.”

He nodded again, turned and slid into his seat, put his coffee in the cup holder and the key in the ignition, but didn’t shut the door. “Which way are you heading?”

“Go home, Dornan. Go home and take care of your business. Don’t come back here. I’ll call you.”

I stood there for a long time after he bumped his way over the turf and down the track, until the smell of his exhaust had faded into the trees and soil, and I could hear nothing but the birds. The air smelled like rain.

By seven-thirty I was on I-26 heading north and west for Tennessee. If I ignored the weather, ignored the scenery, and just drove, I could hold the clearing in my mind; I could imagine the soft patter of rain on the leaves—a flatter sound, now that the leaves were drier and getting ready to fall—building to a harsh rattling, the gush of rain runneling over the rich forest loam. In my truck, I could pretend I was not heading for a place hard with machine hum and concrete and seething with people who stank of fear and need. Once on I-81 I crossed Tennessee and Virginia at a steady seventy-five miles an hour, tires thrumming rhythmically over the concrete and whining on the asphalt, stopping only to refill the truck’s huge twin tanks. At about one in the afternoon, just before Roanoke, I took a twenty-minute break to eat, drink, and use the bathroom. I didn’t stop again until seven in the evening, not far outside Harrisburg. Both times I chose seedy, ill-lit fast food shacks where the colors would be dim and the noise low—no children screaming and running up and down, no canned music—and I wouldn’t have to smile or talk. In the rest room I didn’t look in the mirror. When I got back into the truck near Harrisburg, the wind was blowing pewter clouds into an already darkening sky.

“It won’t work,” Julia said.

“What won’t?”

“Pretending. The world’s out there. You have to move through it at some point.”

I changed gears unnecessarily and didn’t reply.

“And why do you need a truck in New York?”

She gave me that smug smile she always used when she was being Socratic, and disappeared.

Rain hissed against my windscreen, washing it to silver and mercury. I hadn’t thought further than the fact that I didn’t want to fly. The truck was familiar, a piece of my refuge. I should have rented a car in Asheville.

I drove grimly through the rain. Pennsylvania became New Jersey. I took the Newark Airport exit, and the streaming windscreen yellowed to cadmium and sodium as I approached the long-term parking lot, which turned out to be full of cars but empty of people. The rain was steady, and when I looked up as I got out of the truck, falling drops seemed to stretch and streak until they were golden needles. It seemed I had not thought to bring a coat.

The shuttle bus was driven by a woman with drooping eyelids and swollen knuckles. One of the pair of doors wouldn’t open fully; I had to hold my bag in front of me to squeeze through. The driver watched noncommittally. “Which airline?” Jamaican accent.

“American.” It made no difference. The bus jerked into motion.

Inside it was too hot and too bright, the air swollen with rain evaporating from wet passengers, bulky with coats and hats and umbrellas. I couldn’t breathe. I shut my eyes. Grass, trees, pigs rooting by the remains of a fallen tulip tree. Fish finning idly in the dark, deep water near the bank. The bus jerked again, and I heard “Which airline” delivered in exactly the same tone, as though the driver were a machine, except the designers of such a thing would have made it pretty and white and young, with an insanely cheerful smile and large breasts.

The bus stopped again. “United,” the voice announced, and I stood up with a couple who studiously ignored each other, even though their matching rings said they were married. The driver didn’t seem to care that I was getting out at the wrong stop.

The terminal was a madhouse of flashing blue-and-white screens, security personnel in red-piped uniforms waving people through lines, green exit signs, arrows pointing this way and that at eye height and overhead, labels on bathroom doors, logos on storefronts, and flashing Bureau de Change icons, and it roared with voices and trundling luggage wheels, childish screams and the beeps of video games and cellular phones. I walked into the nearest rest room, into a stall, and shut the door. Grass, trees, pigs rooting by the remains of a fallen tulip tree. Grass, trees, pigs. Breathe. The place stank of disinfectant and dirty water. My heart rate slowed.

I changed from my wet traveling clothes into an Eileen Fisher tunic and trousers, swapped my boots for shoes, added earrings, and left the stall. The sinks were slimed with violently green liquid soap, scummy with old lather, and dripping with dirty water. I reached for the paper towel dispenser and stopped. The mirror showed a face with wild eyes and skinned-back lips, the face of a fox gone mad. I closed my eyes and rubbed my cheeks and forehead with the heels of my hands, stretched the muscles wide then pulled them tight, pulled and relaxed, until they let go. I practiced until my expression was bland, then went to find a cab.

I said, “Midtown, the Hilton. Fifty-third and Sixth.”

The cab was hot and reeked of air freshener. My window wouldn’t work. Halfway through the Holland Tunnel my knuckles began to ache; I wanted to punch the glass from the doors and escape.

The city sucked the cab north with terrifying ease, as though we were falling downhill, as if the whole island had tilted north. I closed my eyes against the momentary vertigo. When I opened them again, I kept my gaze focused forwards. Even at ten-thirty, traffic blared, lights flashed, and pedestrians gesticulated as they walked swiftly. Radio City Music Hall was already advertising the annual Christmas Rockettes show; there must have been some special event at MoMA because women in elegant dresses and men in casually expensive clothes streamed onto the wet sidewalk, whose slick black surface sizzled with reflected electric blue and neon pink. A sea of people, all distinct, all with dreams and fears, bank accounts and health problems, family and enemies. Too many, far too many.

The cab pulled into the semicircular driveway in front of the hotel. Big and busy and anonymous. A uniformed doorman opened my door and took my bag, another waved the cab forward to join the line waiting to take some of the perfume- and cologne-drenched passengers queuing behind a red velvet rope. I followed my bag through the lobby to the registration desk. The woman spoke, and my answers must have made sense because I handed her my credit card and she handed me a pen, and then a key card, but it was like watching a silent film. Then I was following the bellman and his gilded bag trolley to the elevators.

The elevators stood near the bar, which was full of burly-voiced conventioneers, several of whom decided at that moment to return to their rooms. When a door tinged and opened, they bulled forward, and although the bellman gestured that he would follow me onto the elevator, I shook my head. The bellman, unlike the usual cheerful kind, merely ducked in assent.

When the next elevator came, he again waited for me to get in first, and pushed the button for the twenty-second floor with a powerful finger. His nails were ragged and chewed, but there were no tattoos on his hands. Curious. His body language—his excessive, almost cringing politeness, his careful button pressing, lack of swagger—was something I associated with time spent in prison, where assertiveness is beaten out of you in a matter of weeks and replaced by a nervous need to please. But there were no jailhouse tattoos.

He knew I was watching him. He didn’t know what it meant. It made him anxious. “Good flight, I hope. Well, my name’s Bob, and I’ll be happy to help you with anything you might need during your stay. I’ll just get these bags, this bag, to your room and get you settled. The ice machine is just a few doors down from your room—which faces north, so you should have a view of Central—”

He shut up abruptly. I wondered if my lips were skinning back again. I smiled and forced the bland expression back into place, but he still tried unobtrusively to put the trolley between us. Bad haircut, cheap watch, new shoes, nervous eyes. He hadn’t been doing this long, and it was probably his first steady paying job for a while. What kind of family waited for him when he got home after his shift? Probably divorced, maybe with two kids he was allowed to see every other weekend. The hotel might not even know he had been in trouble with the law. The lack of tattoos meant he’d done his time somewhere soft, and not for too long, so whatever he’d done was probably crime against property rather than person; forged checks, boosting truckloads of cigarettes, something like that. I could do or say almost anything in this elevator and he wouldn’t retaliate: he needed this job, and it would be his word against a guest’s. I tracked the way the muscles in his shoulders moved as he kept his balance in the elevator: not easy, not supple.

The door opened, I stepped off first, he followed cautiously. My room was halfway down a long corridor. I opened it myself, lifted the bag from the trolley, and gave him a ten because it occurred to me that even timid guests probably sensed they could undertip him, and because I felt soiled, having imagined the things I could do to him if I wanted. I knew he had sensed my understanding of his vulnerability, might have bad dreams tonight in his fifth-floor walkup with the bath in the middle of the kitchen. “Thank you,” I said, and shut the door. I opened it again when he was gone, put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, then locked and chained it.

It took less than a minute to unpack: I had forgotten almost everything. No toiletries, no underwear, not even a comb. Just the clothes I had worn for most of the drive, the clothes I stood up in, three pairs of socks, two books, my phone, and a can of half-frozen concentrated orange juice. How strange.

It was an anonymous room, done in the artificial pinks and grays popular for public spaces five years ago, with two beds. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a hotel room with two beds. The furniture was all fake-mahogany-veneered particleboard, and the window would only open three inches, barely enough to let in the greasy, hydrocarbon air. Room service was open until midnight: another ten minutes. The desk phone felt large and unnatural in my hand. I told the woman who answered that I wanted tomato soup, chicken teriyaki, a bottle of Samuel Adams, and three bottles of Evian. I had to repeat myself because even up on the twenty-second floor and even at night the ululation of sirens and honking of angry drivers on Sixth drowned me out. That done, I stripped off the Eileen Fisher and hung it up.

The only space big enough to lie on the carpet was in front of the dresser. I sat and stretched my tendons one by one. I wondered when Bob got off shift, whether or not he had friends to go for a drink with, or whether he crept home to a microwaved dinner and reruns and infomercials on TV. I stood, began the slow swelling inhalation of an aikido warm-up. Maybe he had a cat who would curl up on his stomach and knead his chest, digging its claws through the cheap cotton and into his skin, reminding him that love hurts. I moved in the blending exercise, soften, step, exhale, turn, slide. There wasn’t room for a kata, or a tai chi form.

There was a mirror above the dresser. I touched my reflection with a fingertip. My reflection felt nothing. That’s what I wanted from the world, to feel nothing. To feel nothing and not be involved, for everything to stay comfortably outside myself and not get in. How did people survive all this knowledge of suffering in the world? How did they carry it around, day after day, and not go mad? And what would I wear tomorrow?

The food came. I didn’t let the man push the table into the room, refused to look at him; I didn’t want to know what he looked like or how he felt or anything about him. I didn’t care, I didn’t want to care. It wasn’t until I shut the door again that I realized I’d answered it in my underwear.