The Singer's Gun (16 page)

Beyond the fact that Caleb couldn’t quite bring himself to touch her anymore, there seemed to be an underlying question of compatibility. He talked about specimens, types of leaves. She found herself grieving for the absolute tragedy of the lost tree in Utah. He talked about cross-sections of bark, the genetic structure of the
Lotus japonicus
, work that was being done on the plant genome project. Elena listened to him and found her mind wandering, wondering if that Utah geology student who felled the four-thousand-nine-hundred-year-old tree felt remorseful, what kind of person could do that, if a person capable of felling a tree to retrieve a broken tool is even capable of understanding the sheer magnitude of his crime; someone must have pointed out to him that the organism he’d killed had been alive three thousand years before Christ, but can a man who thinks so small perceive anything so enormous?

In the morning after Caleb had left for the university Elena stood in the hallway for a while, watching the movement of the goldfish, trying to think ordered thoughts. Phylum Chordata, with us and the otters and the monkeys and the sea squirts; the phylum for all of us in possession of a nerve cord. Class Actinopterygii, the domain of bright fishes. Order Cypriniformes, of carps and minnows; family Cyprinidae, genus
Carassius
, species
auratus
. Fins like orange silk in the water. Memories of childhood cartoons with orange fishes and black cats.

Two days later she stood in the photographer’s apartment on the Upper West Side, blinking in a flood of sunlight with dust motes drifting bright around her. She hadn’t been sleeping well. Her eyes were heavy. She remembered posing here five years ago, but the memory was so distant that it was almost third-person: the five-years-ago girl had insisted that the blinds be closed even though the sunlight in the room was perfect when they were open, the five-years-ago girl had taken off her clothes but lain on her stomach on the sofa and had to be gently persuaded to turn over. Elena shied away from nothing now, but the difference was more frightening than liberating; she could feel the five-years-ago shadow staring at her from the sofa while she stood in the window in full view of the neighbors across the street, naked from the waist down except for her most perilous pair of high-heeled shoes, alarmed by how little the thought of strangers seeing her in the window concerned her.

“That’s beautiful,” Leigh said. He was moving around her, taking picture after picture, the faint digital
beep
of the shutter sounding over and over again. “Now take off your shirt.”

She did this, and stood naked except for the shoes. She turned her face toward the camera, but she was looking at dust motes drifting through the light.

“Close your eyes,” he said, and when she closed her eyes it was harder to balance; she touched the window frame and felt the warmth of sunlight on her hand. “Can you touch yourself a little?”

She found that she could, but that was more or less when the nausea started, and an hour later she threw up in a Starbucks bathroom near the subway.

13.

“You can dispose of my luggage as you see fit,” Sophie had actually said, a half-hour before boarding the ferry to Naples.

How does one dispose of luggage? For the first few weeks Anton kept Sophie’s suitcase in the wardrobe beside the bed, but its presence was oppressive. On a bright clear afternoon in late October he came up from the piazza and was bothered yet again by the way the wardrobe wouldn’t quite close. He lifted the suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it. He was overcome for a moment; sweet, faint, her hair, her skin. She was the kind of preternaturally organized girl who remained packed for entire vacations, extracting a set of clothes every morning and leaving everything else folded neatly, hand-washing the previous day’s clothing in the sink and hanging it up to dry on the hotel balcony overnight, re-folding it the following morning. Everything was clean. There were three pairs of pants, several shirts, a skirt, the blue linen dress she’d worn in Naples. He laid it all out on the bed like evidence. There were t-shirts, a wrinkled blouse, underwear, socks. A bra the color of daffodils, a biography of Jim Morrison; he read the first few pages and then returned his attention to the suitcase. It was empty now but for a wadded-up pair of socks, so he began methodically checking the outside pockets. In the first pocket was an Oxford Italian-English dictionary, two blank postcards from Rome, an article about nuclear ethics torn out of a newspaper, and a packet of sugar with a picture of Capri on the back. In the other pocket were two folded maps (Rome and Naples), a partially consumed bottle of water with condensation clinging to the inside, and an envelope addressed to Sophie c/o the New York Philharmonic.

The envelope been opened. Inside was a typed note on San Francisco Symphony Orchestra letterhead, dated August 15th:

Dear Ms. Berenhardt,
As per our telephone conversation of August 4th, it is with great pleasure that I acknowledge your acceptance of our invitation to join the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for our upcoming season. As discussed, Jacob Neerman from our personnel department will contact you within the next two weeks to work out the
details. We are happy to provide a stipend to offset your expenses in relocating to San Francisco this fall. Jacob will discuss the details when you speak with him.

Sincerely,

Arthur Gonzalez

Administrative Director, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

“San Francisco,” Anton said. The room was silent. He carried the letter out to the balcony, where he read it again and then stood for a while looking out at the sea. After a few minutes of this he went back inside. His cell phone was flashing a low-battery warning on the desk, so he picked up the keys and his wallet and ran down the hotel stairs and around the corner to the piazza, where a tourist was using the pay phone. He stood nearby, impatiently shifting his weight, and realized that the page was still in his hand. He read it over a few times and then lost himself for a few minutes watching a passionate soccer game being played by boys on the beach. They were the children of fishermen, of restaurant workers, of the woman who ran the newsstand, and they played on the beach all day while their parents worked, an emotional society of small tanned boys in swim shorts who formed and broke alliances, went swimming individually and came back together again, organized themselves into soccer teams and then disbanded to pester their parents for ice cream.

“Ich vermiss dich so sehr,” said the tourist, on the phone.

He wanted to call Sophie and ask when exactly she had planned on telling him that she was moving to San Francisco.
As per our telephone conversation of August 4th.
He remembered August 4th. He had stood in front of his bathroom mirror that morning, extracted a piece of glass from his face with a pair of tweezers and held the shining transparent thing up to the light. Sophie had stood in the doorway and asked if he’d been shaving with glass and then hadn’t wanted to talk about it later. Had she really decided to leave him that day? But married him anyway? He’d gone off to work, she’d stayed home and placed a call to San Francisco and then behaved as if nothing was wrong that night? He was incredulous. The whole thing seemed pathetic. He was disgusted with both Sophie and himself. A yellow-and-blue boat was coming into the harbor.

“Ich werde niemals zu dir zurückkommen,” said the tourist. She was silent a moment, listening, and then hung up the phone without saying anything else and walked away toward the water. Anton moved in immediately and made the call, but their home phone number in New York had been disconnected. He called Sophie’s cell phone, but it went to voice mail and he didn’t want to leave a message. Anton hung up and dialed a different number but then remembered that he and Gary weren’t necessarily on speaking terms and hung up before Gary answered. He went to the fishermen’s café and read a newspaper until David appeared. It was a bleached-white day, cloudless, the sky so bright he couldn’t look at it.

“Mind if I join you?” David sat down across the table from him without waiting for an answer. He had green paint under his fingernails. He was carrying his own newspaper. He opened it, folded it carefully to expose the crossword puzzle, and ordered a beer from the waiter before he looked up at Anton again.

“What’s the matter?” David asked.

“Something I read.” The letter was still in Anton’s pocket. He unfolded it and gave it to David. “My wife,” he said. “I didn’t know she was going to leave me.”

David took the letter from him and read it through quickly. “She said nothing about it? No hint?”

“Nothing. I found the letter in her suitcase. I mean, to be fair, I guess I left her first.”

“Why didn’t she take her suitcase?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she wanted me to find it.”

“Are you all right?”

“More startled than anything.”

“I would be.”

“I mean, I was cheating on
her
,” Anton said. “I didn’t think she’d . . .” He trailed off and there was a silence, during which a fisherman climbed into his red-and-white boat and started slowly out of the harbor. “It’s all so pathetic,” he said. “I don’t know why we got married. It just seemed like the right thing to do, but why would either of us . . .” The
putt-putt
of the motor played counter-point to the calls of the soccer boys on the beach.

“Hey,” David said, “I think Gennaro wants you.” Anton followed the direction of his gaze. The owner of the hotel was coming around the corner into the piazza. The white FedEx envelope in his hand shone almost painfully in the sunlight.

Anton felt as if the envelope were floating toward him, a glaring white rectangle that he found hard to look at dead-on. The wait was agonizing, so he stood up from the table and went to meet it.

“Good afternoon,” Gennaro said. “This envelope arrived for you. I signed for it, thought I’d give it to you in person.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.” It was addressed to an Ali Merino, care of Anton Waker. He recognized Aria’s handwriting. She’d used Gary’s father’s store for the return address. “It’s for a friend of mine,” he said. “He forgot some papers.”

“Ah,” said Gennaro. “A beautiful day, yes?”

“It is.” Anton raised the envelope to shield his eyes against the sun and tried to smile.

“Well,” Gennaro said awkwardly, “goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” He watched Gennaro recede for a moment before he returned to the table where David was sitting.

“Your package?” David asked.

“After all these weeks.”

“You going to open it?”

“No,” Anton said. Strange to have it before him after all this time, shining innocuously in the sunlight.

14.

On the third Thursday of October in the city of New York, Elena stood on the corner of 81st Street and Columbus watching the slow progress of a moving truck parked halfway up the block. It had arrived an hour earlier and three men were carrying furniture and boxes between the front door and the truck. Five minutes earlier she had seen Sophie come out and speak to them. Sophie had left soon afterward, walking away down West 81st Street in the opposite direction. Elena counted to ten before she ventured up the hill. It was October 20th, but the forecast called for 85 degrees Fahrenheit, here in one of the last countries on earth that still used the Fahrenheit system. Her shirt was wet on her back. She made her way up the sidewalk in the deadening heat, and one of the movers winked as she approached.

“Hey,” she said, “you know where Sophie is?”

“She went out,” the man said. “Running an errand of some sort.”

“Oh, okay. I’m Ellie, I’m here about the cat. She told you I’d be coming?”

“No.”

“That’s strange. I’m Ellie—” She realized that she was repeating herself, but too late—“and I’m taking care of the cat for a couple days. He’s upstairs?”

“Who’s upstairs?”

“The cat?”

“Yeah, yeah, locked in the bedroom. Go on up.”

She ascended the stairs quickly. Inside the apartment a mover was taking apart a table in the middle of the room. He looked up and grunted when she said hello. It seemed to be possible to walk into apartments that people were moving out of without anyone saying much. Her heart was beating very quickly, and there was a disjointedness about the scene—she was crossing the room with the cat-carrying box, although she couldn’t remember reaching up into the closet to retrieve it, she was opening the door to the bedroom and closing herself in.

The bedroom was empty. The closet doors wide open, the bed and dresser gone, pale rectangles on the wall where pictures had hung. Jim was lying on the carpet by the window, absorbing sunlight. He raised his head and watched her with his one bright eye. She set the box down in the middle of the floor and opened the cage door, but it turned out that the cat wasn’t interested in being inserted into it. He began twisting away from her almost immediately when she grasped him, and he braced his legs on the edges of the opening. By the time she had forced him in headfirst and slammed the cage door shut her arms were stinging with scratches. Jim yowled once. When she looked in through the door he was crouched low, glaring with his single eye.

“I’m sorry,” Elena whispered, to everyone. She lifted the box (the cat was surprisingly heavy), and opened the bedroom door just as Sophie opened the door to the apartment. Two movers were indoors now, disassembling the bookcases.

“Elena,” Sophie said, “what are you doing with the cat?”

“I’m sorry,” Elena said, again.

There was a soft thud. “Jesus, that was my thumb,” one of the movers said.

“What are you doing with the cat?” Sophie asked again. She didn’t move away from the doorway or look away from Elena’s eyes.

“Anton asked me to send him to Italy.”

Sophie stared at her, silent.

“He said he misses him,” Elena said.

Sophie still didn’t speak.

“I’m sorry. I’m just really—I’m sorry,” Elena said.

The movers, disassembling the bookcase, worked on in awkward silence. Elena felt that she was becoming transparent under Sophie’s gaze. Her knees were weak. She wanted to fall. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, and to her utter mortification she realized that she was beginning to weep. She stood frozen in the bedroom doorway with sunlight pouring through her, a shadow, a ghost, gripping the cat box as tightly as possible and wishing to be anywhere, anywhere else, her shoulder aching from the cat’s weight and tears on her face, her breath catching, and still Sophie only watched her.

The movers had entirely dismantled the bookshelves now—they lay in a stack of flat boards gleaming dark in the sunlight—and they were wrapping the boards in a packing quilt and bundling the packing quilt with tape. The sounds they made were distant, like actions occurring in another room. Elena began walking forward across the room, trying to come to some internal understanding of what she would do if Sophie didn’t step aside from the doorway. But Sophie did step aside, almost at the last moment, and she said nothing as Elena passed by. Elena kept walking, away down the stairs with Sophie looking down from above, until she was out on the street with the cat. She hailed a taxi, asked for Kennedy Airport and closed her eyes in the backseat.

“You okay?” the driver asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “fine—” and realized that there were still tears streaming down her face, unabated. Her hands were shaking.

“Where you traveling today?”

“Italy,” she said.

“Italy,” said the driver. “Without luggage?”

“Without luggage.”

“Who flies without luggage? I didn’t take you for a terrorist.” His tone was jokey; he was trying to make her laugh. She smiled wanly and didn’t answer him.

“Wait,” she said after a moment, “can we make a stop? I forgot my passport.”

“Of course. Wherever you want.” In East Williamsburg she carried the cat into the apartment and the cab idled out front while she threw a few things into a small suitcase: some clothes, a manila envelope containing old postcards, a piece of paper hidden in a blue sock at the back of her sock drawer, both the Canadian and American passports, a few things from the bathroom. Halfway to the door she remembered the cat, and went to the kitchen for a can of tuna and a can opener. A phone message in Caleb’s handwriting was attached to the fridge:
ALEXANDRA BRODEN CALLED PLS CALL BACK
. She stood for a moment holding the piece of paper, went to the kitchen phone and dialed the number.

“Please don’t ever call me at home again,” Elena said when Broden picked up.

“I tried your work first. You didn’t tell me you’d left and I need to ask you a question.” There was an urgency in Broden’s voice that Elena hadn’t heard before. “Did Anton ever say anything to you about shipping?”

“Shipping?”

“Shipping containers, or boats, or ports, or travel over oceans, or the import-export business. Anything of that nature. Any mention at all.”

“No,” Elena said, after a moment. “He never did.”

“When did you last speak with him?”

“Just before he left.”

“He was supposed to be back weeks ago,” Broden said.

“I know.”

“Well,” Broden said, “we can discuss this tomorrow.”

“I have to see you tomorrow?”

“Yes, at four o’clock. We scheduled this three weeks ago.”

“I’ll be there,” Elena said.

She paused for a moment by the goldfish tank and then locked the apartment door behind her and ran back down the stairs with the cat and the suitcase. The interior of the cab was too warm.

“One more stop before the airport,” she said. She was opening the window. “Can you take me up to Columbia University?”

“Pretty big detour. What time’s your flight?”

“I don’t have a flight.”

He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “You said you were flying to Italy.”

“I am.”

“Okay,” the driver said.

“Are you from Italy?” she asked after a few miles of silence. They had crossed to the Manhattan side of the bridge and they were racing north up the island, streets passing fast. Flashes of mannequins in store windows, people walking on the sidewalks, whole lives played out between avenues, a bright faux-summer day. All the trees she saw were still green.

“Italy? No.”

“Your accent, I thought it sounded . . .”

“I’m from a place you’ve never heard of,” he said, and he winked at her in the rearview mirror.

“So am I,” said Elena. She thought for a second about obscure countries and then said, “Kyrgyzstan?”

“Tajikistan,” the cab driver said. He looked at her in the rearview mirror, startled. “But I’ve been to Kyrgyzstan many times. Many times.”

“What’s it like there?”

“Kyrgyzstan? I don’t know. Different from here.”

“Everywhere’s different from here.” The gates of Columbia were on their right. “You’ll wait for me?”

“I’ll wait,” the driver said.

She took her suitcase and the cat with her anyway and made her way through the gates and over the sunlit expanse of the grounds, through a doorway and down several flights of stairs to the underground laboratory where Caleb was working. He looked up from his computer when Elena said his name. On the screen before him line upon line of gibberish ran down the screen. He hit a key and the letters and numbers stopped moving and flickered silently in place.

“Ellie? What’s going on?”

Elena set down her suitcase and Jim, who meowed furiously and then sank into a prowling orange fury that moved him back and forth across the carrier.

“Whose cat is that?”

“It’s Anton’s,” she said. “Caleb, listen—”

“Anton your old boss?”

“Yes. Caleb—”

“Why would you have your boss’s cat? Your
ex
-boss’s cat.” He spoke without malice.

“Caleb.”

“Are you leaving me?”

Elena found all at once that she had nothing to say. She had planned a speech on the way down the corridor but all the words were fading out in the cool air of the room. She looked down at the floor and nodded.

“You’re leaving me,” Caleb said. He smiled briefly, ran his hands through his hair and looked at her. “Where are you going?”

“Italy,” she said.

“Italy,” he repeated. “With no money, and Anton’s cat.”

“I have a little cash. And I still have a credit card.”

“Italy,” he said again, very quietly, and laughed.

“Caleb, I’m sorry, I just . . .”

He raised his hand to stop the sentence, and smiled, and shook his head. She smiled back at him, and for an instant there was peace. Then Jim meowed again, more urgently, and she remembered the time and the cab idling out front with the meter running. She picked up the cat’s carrying box and the suitcase.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry too, I just couldn’t . . .”

“It’s all right.”

“A lot of it was just the pills, you know. The side effects.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to go so far away,” he said.

“I can’t stay in the United States anymore.”

“It’s a big place, Ellie.”

“It’s not that. I’m not trying to get away from you. The thing is, look, I don’t have time to get into it, there’s a flight I want to catch, but the thing is, I’m not an American. My American passport’s a fake. I shouldn’t have lied to you. Caleb, listen, I have to go.”

“What? What do you mean your passport’s a—”

“Goodbye, Caleb.”

“Ellie, wait,” he said, but he didn’t make a move to follow her when she turned away. In the cab to the airport she turned to look out the back window at the last possible minute, just in time to see the Manhattan skyline disappear.

At JFK she bought a one-way ticket to Rome and gave the cat over to a red-suited airline representative who promised not to lose him. She used her Canadian passport, half-expecting to be arrested on the spot, and was mildly surprised when she met no resistance. Her suitcase was small, so she carried it with her through security and was grateful that she had something to hold on to as she paced the grayish corridors of the terminal. There was a considerable amount of time to kill before the next flight to Italy.

Elena ate a grease-and-salt meal at a bar beyond the security gates, ordered a glass of cheap wine that she didn’t touch, and sat for a while in the airport restaurant thinking about calling home to talk to her family; calling Caleb and apologizing, saying she’d made a terrible mistake, asking him to come get her; calling Anton to tell him that the cat was arriving in Rome tomorrow morning; calling Anton to tell him that in twenty-four hours she would be on Ischia; calling Broden to announce that she would give her Anton Waker if only she could stay forever in New York. Not all of these options canceled each other out, and contemplating all the possible configurations was exhausting.

She spent some time standing at a wall of glass, watching airplanes rise and descend in the gathering twilight. There was still something breathtaking about the ascent.