“Where’s he going?” Mike said.
I was leaning against the wall, and when he looked at me I shrugged a little. “You were kind of ignoring him—I think maybe he’s a little hurt.”
“I was not. What—he was talking about Coach Henry or someone, the new hockey coach. I heard him.”
“Henderson,” I said. “You heard, but maybe you weren’t quite listening.”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, excuse me. Who’s visiting who?”
“Whom.” Mrs. Mayer was sitting very straight, her arms crossed over her chest. “Who’s visiting
whom
.”
“Gimme a break.”
“Son.” Mrs. Mayer frowned, uncrossing her arms and then recrossing them. She lifted a hand and touched her hair. “We’re all trying awfully hard, but lately it seems no one can do anything right by you. I think you owe your brother an apology. I’m going to go get him, and then I think we’ll go home.” She stood up.
“You don’t have to go.” He glanced at me. “I’m sorry.”
“I’ll get your brother.”
She left the room, and I went over to the bed and took his hand.
“I’m
sorry,” I said. “I started it.”
“No, I am.” He was flushed and teary, ready to cry. “I’m an asshole.”
“You’re not.” I drew the curtain between his bed and Jeff’s, then sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand again. “You’re not at all,” I said quietly. “John just misses you. I think he’d probably like some time alone with you, but that never seems to happen.”
“Mom,” he said.
“Yeah, but me, too.”
“You’re different.” He looked me in the eye, and then quickly looked away. “I don’t know, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I’m just so bored! Isn’t that crazy? As if that were anything like my biggest problem. But I’m so fucking bored sometimes I just want to scream.”
“They don’t call them patients for nothing.”
He smiled. “You know what I was thinking about the other day? Remember that party Jamie had for us, for our five years? At Fabrizio’s?”
“We were supposed to meet her for dinner there, and we couldn’t figure out why she wanted to go to Fabrizio’s.”
“Then everyone was in that little room.” He closed his eyes and sighed.
“What made you think of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, what?”
His eyes met mine. “Well, I always thought we should go there after the next five. I mean not with everyone—just us. But I guess we won’t now, will we?” He looked at me evenly.
I hesitated. This was the edge, the opening I’d been looking for, but I couldn’t bear to use it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”
“It’s OK,” he said. “You don’t have to feel bad.”
“We can’t have this conversation right now. Your mother and John’ll be back any minute.”
He licked his lips. “We’ve had it, haven’t we?”
“No. Please.”
He gave me a look of piercing quietude. “It’s a relief to me, actually,” he said. “I was really tired of wondering.”
“Mike—”
He moved his arm, pulled it closer to his body, and I stopped talking. He lifted the arm onto his lap, his hand dragging behind.
“Let’s not,” he said. “OK? Let’s just not.”
At home, I filled my tub with hot water and took a long bath. It was September now, the first really cool night of the coming fall, and I lay soaking for a long time, waiting to be filled by tears and terrible regret or by relief—whatever it would be. I lay and lay, and waited and waited, but all I could think—all I could feel—was that I was tired. If an era of my life had ended, its passing was remarkable only for the quiet it left behind, the whisper of myself asking myself what there was now.
Then I knew. I dried off and dressed in clean jeans and a sweatshirt, then made a pot of coffee. By the time I sat down at my sewing table it was almost ten, but that didn’t faze me. I’d marked the robe’s hemline the day before, and now I cut away all but a perfect three inches, then used my machine to put in a line of basting half an inch from the edge. The iron was heating and I turned the seam allowance under and pressed it, then carefully pinned the hem up using my ballpoint pins, pulling on the basting thread wherever I needed to adjust the fullness. I had four yards to sew, but I didn’t feel daunted; I took the robe to a chair near a bright light, threaded a needle, and got started. When my neck felt sore I took breaks, lay on the floor for a while or did some stretches, but I was always back at it within a few minutes. I had to rethread my needle several times, and as luck would have it I ran out again just a couple inches shy of the end, but I didn’t feel the irritation I usually felt when that happened; I just cut off another foot of thread, poked it through the eye of the needle, knotted the end, and finished my work.
My body ached. I undressed and slipped on the gown, then the robe. In my bedroom mirror I did look glamorous, as Jamie had said, but only from the neck down, because my face was all wrong: too serious, too plain, too young. I knew I could pluck my eyebrows, put on foundation and blush and lipstick, do something to make my eyes look deep-set and
mysterious, but I’d still look like what I was—not a child, maybe, but not a woman either. A girl of twenty-three.
It was nearly one in the morning now, and as I took off the robe and then the gown it occurred to me that there might be some danger ahead, that I might end up being a girl all my life, like Mrs. Fletcher. I thought of what Dave King had said, his suggestion that seeing myself as a child had been self-protective, and I made a wish for courage.
I got dressed and went back out to the living room, where I put everything away—the iron and ironing board, the scraps of fabric, the pattern pieces that I’d never gotten around to returning to their envelope. I unplugged the sewing machine, used a little brush to clean out the bobbin housing, wrapped the cord up and tucked it into its container, and put the cover on. I set the machine by the door, then I went into my bedroom and got out the enormous old suitcase my mother had lent me when I moved from the dorms to my apartment. Working quickly, I filled it with clothes, and when I had finished my dresser and closet were nearly empty. Last in were the gown and robe, folded carefully and wrapped in tissue paper. I found a smaller hold-all for my toiletries and a few other odds and ends, and I carried both bags down to my car. I went back up for a last look around, emptied half a gallon of milk into the sink, took out the garbage, and returned for my sewing machine. And then I locked up.
How much do we owe the people we love? How much do we owe them? When I was in high school something people said in praise of their friends was “He’d put his hand in the fire for me.” I think Mike may have even said it about Rooster once, and it’s just possible Rooster would have: put his hand in the fire for Mike, given up his hand. What I had discovered was that I couldn’t give up my life for Mike—that’s how I saw it at the time, that’s the choice I thought I had to make. And because I couldn’t give up everything, I also thought I couldn’t give up anything.
There’s a kind of tired you can get that has its own energy. I was exhausted when I started the car, my eyes stinging and my back and neck aching, but once I was driving I discovered that I was actually in no real danger of falling asleep.
I took I–90 down past Chicago and saw the sun rise just as I was passing Lake Michigan. It was a clear day, and soon the states were going by as if they were towns built close together by the side of the highway. I thought occasionally of stopping, but I was in the rhythm of it, I was running on French fries and terrible coffee, and I kept going. Finally, somewhere
in eastern Pennsylvania, I got off the interstate and found a motel and slept.
By mid-morning I was back on the road. At one gas station I bought a map, and at another I found a Manhattan phone book and located the address of Biggs, Lepper, Rush, Creighton and Fenelon, the helpful nickname perfectly clear in my mind. Then, just as the morning clouds were thinning and the sky was turning blue, I steered my way onto the George Washington Bridge, and there was New York, stretching down the river as far as I could see.
PART TWO
A T
HOUSAND
M
ILES
C
HAPTER
15
Simon lived on the edge of Chelsea in a decrepit old brownstone with taped-over windows and a sheet of graffitied plywood covering the front door. The house was owned by a partner at his law firm: the partner had inherited it from an uncle and was renting it to Simon—for the unheard-of sum of five hundred dollars a month—while he tried to decide whether to unload it or sink a bundle into it and live there himself. A block east everything was leafy and well-kept, neat iron fencelets around the bases of ginkgo trees, but this block was borderline, home not just to some other dubious townhouses, but also to a gas station, an auto body shop, and a double-wide empty lot surrounded by chain-link fence. Simon and some Yale friends occupied the four bedrooms, but he found me an empty alcove on the third floor, and together we dragged a spare futon up the steep, creaking stairs.
He kept apologizing about the place, but I liked it—it was so shabby and easygoing. Water stains mapped the ceilings, bits of baseboard pulled away from the walls. The walls themselves looked so battered they might have been attacked, scarred with marks and dents and actual holes that blew plaster dust onto the floors. In the bathrooms, leaky faucets wobbled in their sockets, while ancient bathtubs rested on clawed feet, makeshift shower curtains hanging precariously from rigged-up lengths of pipe. “Like showering in a raincoat,” Simon said, and it was true.
There was a dark, cavernous living room, but the kitchen was the true
center of the house, the place where everyone hung out. Low-ceilinged and poorly lit, it was full of old appliances: a broken washing machine, a broken dishwasher, a rickety electric range with a broken fan, an enormous dinosaur of a microwave, a free-standing lift-top freezer that served as a countertop, and a round-shouldered refrigerator that gave off an erratic, worrisome hum. On an old metal desk that had been shoved against the wall there was a big whiteboard that Simon told me was the most important piece of furniture in the house: the place where messages were recorded.
At least a couple stereos were usually playing, and it was a little like living in a dorm again: people coming and going at all hours, the sound of a door closing waking me just as I’d fallen asleep. Simon’s friends were perfectly nice, but they were all so ambitious I felt like a misfit. Simon was a proofreader but wanted to be an illustrator, one friend was a waiter but wanted to be an actor, another worked at a magazine but wanted to be a playwright. Simon referred to what they were doing now as their meanwhile jobs, as if once they’d held them for a while they’d step past them into their lives.
My ambition was to
have
an ambition, until I found Kilroy. Then I did: to stay in New York.
I’d left his note in Madison, but I’d brought our conversation: I’d brought our conversation, and the intent way he’d looked at me across Viktor and Ania’s table, and the name of the bar where he hung out, the place with the pool table that had a gouge he could almost always make work for him. McClanahan’s. A few days after my arrival, I sat at the kitchen table with the Manhattan white pages and looked up the address.
It was on Avenue of the Americas—Sixth Avenue—which, according to my map, narrowed it down to about sixty blocks. Nonetheless, I headed off to look, still such a newcomer that the traffic unnerved me, the groaning buses, the scream of an ambulance, the flash and honk of a dozen taxis. The density of people on the streets amazed me—the density and the
variety:
I’d always thought Madison was pretty multicultural, but it was clear now how white it really was. I saw faces from olive to deep brown, heard accents I didn’t recognize, languages I couldn’t begin to identify. I passed restaurants, pharmacies, laundromats, stationers, florists, liquor stores, coffee shops, and then suddenly there it was, McClanahan’s, a corner bar next to a dry cleaner’s. What did it mean that I’d done this, tracked this place down? I hurried by, telling myself a story I half believed, that I was just exploring the city and could as easily have been somewhere else.
I was back the next day. There were neon beer signs in the windows—Miller and Pabst, good Midwestern beers—but here the windows were covered by iron bars. I went around the block slowly, wondering what I’d do when I got back. The stretch from Seventh to Sixth seemed endless, a dark, narrow passageway of tall gray buildings. Finally I reached McClanahan’s again, and someone opened the door just as I arrived, revealing a long, narrow room that was smoke-filled and dimly lit and nearly empty.
On the third day I planted myself out front. People looked at me as they strode by, or didn’t: already I understood how the rules of the sidewalk differed from the rules in Madison or even Chicago. Here you could do anything you wanted—growl, rant, scream—and no one would give you more than a passing glance.
The door to McClanahan’s was massive, ornamented with tarnished brass studs. I stood there waiting for something to take over, the urge to leave or the urge to go in. Five minutes went by, perhaps ten; I didn’t keep track. I stared at the door until, virtually conjured, Kilroy himself came out.
He looked older than I remembered, wearing jeans and a leather jacket, his face narrow and closed. His hair was shaggy, and he sported a two- or three-day growth of beard. He glanced at me and turned the corner, then stopped and turned back. “I know you,” he said, and I smiled a little, feeling foolish and pleased and scared.
He pointed at me. “Madison, Wisconsin. Dinner at that Polish couple’s house. How’s it going?”
“Fine, how are you?”
“I’m fine, Carrie.”
I couldn’t believe he remembered my name after—what?—three months, but he just gave me a sly smile and went on. “No, don’t tell me, I’m going for broke here. Carrie … Bell. There, I got it. Do you remember my name?”