A Soft Place to Land (27 page)

If Dara knew that Ruthie was attracted to a man who was antichoice, she would give Ruthie hell. And even if Ruthie were able to “find common ground” with Gabe on such an issue, what would he think if she were to tell him that her deeply entrenched belief in a woman’s right to choose was rooted in her own history? That at eighteen she had chosen. She had chosen not to remain pregnant.

God, he was so good-looking, so funny, so smart. But a Jew who had converted to Catholicism and was pro-life? What kind of deep neuroses did that reveal? Better to look at her watch, exclaim at the time, and quickly, before he could say anything to pull her back, dart away.

As she hurried down Bancroft, she had a feeling of averting disaster, like swerving the car to avoid hitting the child crossing the street.

She managed to avoid him the next week by rushing into class at the last minute and then dashing out as soon as it was over. He called her twice, but she, regretting that she gave him her cell phone number during their marathon conversation at Caffè Strada, did not answer. She could not help but steal glances at him
during class, though, when she was sure he wasn’t looking her way. She could not help still being attracted.

That Tuesday Ruthie awoke to the ringing of her cell phone. She turned, looked at the face of her alarm clock. It was 7:30
A.M.
, too early to answer. She put her pillow over her head, willed the phone to stop ringing. A moment after it did, the landline rang. She remained motionless for a few more seconds and then, figuring someone really needed to reach her—Mimi? Robert?—grabbed the cordless phone, which lay on the floor beside her bed.

“Ruthie honey, it’s Mimi. Are you watching your TV?”

“No. I was sleeping.”

“Turn it on.”

“What channel?”

“Any channel.”

The urgency in Mimi’s voice forced her out of bed. “I have to walk to the other room to do it. What’s happening?”

“Oh, sweetie, it’s terrible. Terrorists have been hijacking commercial airplanes. They flew two of them into the World Trade Center, and both towers—the north and the south—are down.”

“What do you mean, down?”

“I mean gone. I mean collapsed. It’s horrible, Ruthie; there were so many people inside.”

When she reached the living room, she noticed that the coffee table was cluttered with dishes from the night before. She found the remote, punched on the TV. Saw a haunting image. An airplane plowing into one of the towers, followed by a line of thick gray smoke rushing toward the sky. And then a newswoman was talking, saying that they had just watched a recording of the first plane that crashed into the north tower at approximately 8:45
A.M.
Eastern time.

“Holy shit. Is this for real?”

“I’m afraid it is, sweetheart.”

They were playing another clip, this one of the second plane hitting the south tower. Ruthie gaped at the twin lines of billowing gray smoke, the flames shooting out of the side of the
building. Tears popped into her eyes, though she couldn’t really make sense of the images. They did not compute.

“Oh my god. Have you spoken to Julia? Is she okay?” Ruthie asked.

Upon finishing her MFA at Virginia, Julia had moved to New York, to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

“I tried calling, but I can’t get through. I heard everything is down in New York right now, so it probably doesn’t mean anything that I couldn’t reach her on the phone.”

Another image played on the news, this one of the north tower collapsing, starting at the top. It collapsed so quickly. As if it were a vertical sand castle, held together by a frame. As if someone had hit the sand castle on the head with a hammer. The idea that cement and steel were part of that building—it was almost unfathomable.

“Have you sent Julia an e-mail?”

“I have, but I’m guessing that connection is down, too.”

“Look, I’m going to come to your house, spend the day with you and Robert.”

“I would love that, sweetie, but I don’t want you crossing any bridges. Not today. We just don’t know what else might happen. There may be more attacks.”

Ruthie was chilled, though she usually complained that their apartment was stuffy. Dara walked into the living room, her hair, which she had cut short, sticking straight up. She wore only a T-shirt and underwear, her usual sleeping attire. She was holding her cell phone against her ear, and she looked wild-eyed.

“Oh my god,” she said as she looked at the TV screen, which showed New Yorkers on the ground, running away from the collapsing building, shirts, scarves, sweaters over their mouths to keep from inhaling the smoke.

“Dara just woke up,” said Ruthie.

“Why don’t you two keep each other company. I’ll call you later. And I’ll call the minute I hear from Julia. You do the same if you hear from her first, okay?”

Ruthie said okay, told her aunt she loved her. When she hung up, Dara was still talking on the phone. There went the plane into the first tower again. Apparently they were playing the image on a loop.

Julia was there, in that city under attack. Ruthie went back to her bedroom to get her cell phone, where she had saved Julia’s number. So infrequently did she call her sister, Ruthie did not have it memorized. She scrolled through her contacts until
JULIA
came up. She hit the call button.

The line was busy, but it didn’t sound like a normal busy signal. The beep was longer, haunting.

Ruthie knew that Julia lived in Brooklyn—Williamsburg—but didn’t know what she did during the day besides write. What if she rented a writing office in downtown Manhattan? And wasn’t there a restaurant on top of the World Trade Center? What if Julia had gone there for breakfast that morning? What if an editor from Penguin had taken her there? No. That made no sense. She couldn’t become panicky, illogical. Why would a literary editor meet a writer at a pricey restaurant for tourists and Wall Street people? Julia was probably okay. Probably. But it wasn’t as if Ruthie believed her family was immune to disaster. Taking her cell phone with her, she returned to the living room with Dara, who now sat, Indian-style, in front of the TV.

“Classes are canceled, I’m sure,” Dara said, not taking her eyes off the screen. “And if they’re not, it doesn’t matter. We’re not going.”

The news showed the clip of the north tower collapsing again. Dara turned to look at her.

“Holy shit, Ruthie. This can’t be undone.”

They watched TV for seven hours straight. Seeing the same images again and again. The two separate planes going into the towers. The firemen in their black protective gear with the yellow stripes. The profile of a woman watching the towers in horror, tears in the corner of her eye. The people clutching shirts and
bandanas against their faces. People running after each tower collapsed. Mayor Giuliani at a press conference.

Ruthie phoned her sister every half hour but never got through. She told herself not to panic, that all of the lines in New York were down.

There was nothing to eat in the house besides Cheerios, old milk, and a six-pack of beer, which she and Dara finished quickly. Ruthie had been planning on grocery shopping that day, but now the thought of going to the Berkeley Bowl exhausted her. It was 2:30 and they were starving.

“I want more beer,” said Dara. “Don’t you?”

They decided to go to Ulysses, an Irish pub nearby that had two TVs for watching sports. Normally sports bars were not the type of place Dara and Ruthie frequented, but they felt as if it was wrong to turn away from the TV. They felt that by watching the horrific images they were somehow showing their support for the people of New York, for the country. Ruthie had an urge to call Gabe, to see if he wanted to meet them at the pub, but she decided against it. Her earlier impulse to nip their budding relationship was correct. Were she to see Gabe on this day of vast destruction, she would lose all self-control.

Dara called Yael, asked if she wanted to meet them at the bar. Yael said she would. She was also living in Berkeley, working on her Ph.D. in comparative literature. Yael now spoke Hebrew fluently, along with German and some Yiddish. She was dating a much older man, a writer in his forties, who lived in a beautiful glass and wood house in the Berkeley hills. Ruthie and Dara had gone to dinner there once. It was strange to see Yael, whom Ruthie would always think of as a riot grrrl, at home in such a refined atmosphere. It was as if she had jumped over years and years of striving and landed in comfortable middle age.

People were smoking inside Ulysses even though smoking was not allowed. The bartender did not seem to be bothered by it. Both of the TVs were turned to CNN. Ruthie and Dara sat at the bar
and watched, waiting for Yael. The same images as before rotated before their eyes, only now there were more images of firefighters, astonishing in their bravery. Ruthie and Dara drank Guinness stout, which normally Ruthie did not like but on this day found comforting. They ate sliders and fries, which Ulysses called chips. They glared at the man sitting next to them, the man who said, “I hate to say this, but America had this coming.”

He was as noxious as the group of boys who came in a few minutes later, drunk, chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” As if they were watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Yael arrived an hour after they did, looking expensive in her thin cashmere shell, her black pants made of cotton and linen. Ruthie assumed Yael’s man friend was now buying her clothes. She and Dara put their arms around each other and hugged for a solid minute, and as always, Ruthie felt envious of them. Felt that they had the kind of relationship she and Julia would have had, should have had, if not for the accident.

Yael ordered a Black and Tan, asked Dara if the pub had a pool table.

“In the back,” said Dara. “But I think people are playing.”

“I’ll check it out,” said Yael. “Put our names on a wait list if I need to. I don’t think I can just sit and watch TV anymore.”

As Yael walked toward the back of the bar, Ruthie hoped the wait list for the pool table would be long. She hated pool. She was terrible at it, no matter how many times Dara tried to coach her. She thought of it as geometry with balls, and she had never thought of math as fun. She was startled from her thoughts by the ring of her cell phone. Julia! Please be Julia, calling to say she was fine. But no, when Ruthie glanced at the screen she saw it was a 510 area code. She answered.

“Hey. I just wanted to call and check in.”

It was Gabe. Gabe Schwartz. That low, warm voice.

“Hey. It’s good to hear from you. Are you okay? Is Schwartzy?”

“We’re all accounted for. How about you?”

She told him she was waiting to hear from Julia in New York.
That she had been trying her sister’s number all day and couldn’t get through.

“God, I hope you hear from her soon. What are you doing while you wait?”

“Drinking Guinness at a pub with my roommate and her sister. Watching CNN. Trying not to go crazy with worry.”

“Have you ever heard of Taizé?”

He pronounced it like “tie-zay.”

“Uh-uh.”

“It’s this meditation service. The one I go to is held at an Episcopalian church, but the service is ecumenical. What happens is this amazing singer leads the congregation in fifty minutes of simple prayer put to music. Basically you just sing the same prayer over and over, but it’s in Latin, so it feels deeper. And then there’s ten minutes for silent meditation.”

“I thought you were Catholic.”

“I am. But my church doesn’t hold Taizé services, so I sleep around a little.”

“Just don’t get pregnant,” said Ruthie, a bitter edge to her voice.

“Funny. Look, I’ve been watching TV all day and it’s just—it’s just too much. I keep watching because it feels weird not to. But I’m already starting to feel desensitized. I really need to go somewhere and be quiet. Anyway, I wanted to know if you might like to come with me. The service starts at six thirty.”

Ruthie looked at the cold fries on the plate in front of her, at the bartender who appeared exhausted, at the smoke that surrounded her, at the bright TVs with their unrelenting images, at Yael motioning from the back room, presumably because the pool table was available.

She said yes to Gabe. She would meet him at the church.

She lied to Dara and Yael about where she was going. Told them she was going to drive up into the hills, just for the view, the fresh air, the perspective. Asked Yael if she would mind taking Dara home.

“You’re sure you don’t want us to go with you?” Dara asked. “You’re just going to drive around by yourself?”

“You know how I am,” said Ruthie.

The church was on Cedar, just a few blocks away from Chez Panisse, which amused Ruthie, because she thought of Chez Panisse as her house of worship. Much as she liked to analyze books for her literature courses, she liked thinking about food even more, and she would study the menus posted weekly at Chez Panisse as if they were poems to savor, meditating on each word. She was so jealous of Robert, who had been invited to the restaurant’s thirtieth-anniversary celebration, held just a few weeks before. She had listened hungrily as he described his favorite parts of the meal: the Provençal fish soup, the spit-roasted lamb with chanterelles, the homemade mulberry ice cream. She could taste what he was describing, the char on the meat, the intensity of the berry tempered with sugar and cream. She loved food so much that she was considering enrolling in culinary school after graduation, so that she might become a chef.

Gabe was waiting on the sidewalk in front of the church, a weathered gray wood building with an arched doorway and stained-glass windows. He was wearing the same Levi’s he wore that first day of class and a green T-shirt with the words
BARTON FINK
printed across it. His face brightened as she approached. His eyes focused solely on her.

“Hey,” he said, hugging her. She could feel his muscles through his T-shirt. “I’m glad you came. I’ve been thinking about you.”

“I’m kind of a wreck. I guess everyone is. I still haven’t been able to get ahold of my sister. I keep trying her cell phone. At first I got a busy signal, now just nothing. And I’ve been so out of touch—I don’t even know what she typically does in a day. I don’t know where she was supposed to be this morning. I don’t even know if she changed her number. What if she changed her number? But if she did, why hasn’t she called me?”