“What’s she laughing at?” Katie said.
“I’d just stepped into the hallway,” I said. I hadn’t been wearing anything but sunglasses. It was one of my oldest gags. I didn’t tell her about that, though. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to look.
Anne held the hem of her shirt to her chest, baring the expanding flesh of her belly. For weeks her hip bones continued to jut out further than her stomach. Then she filled with the rounding life.
After number 187, a small sign made out of vinyl lettering read:
ON APRIL 25, 2006, ANNE SMITH AND HER HUSBAND WERE INVOLVED IN AN AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT NEAR THEIR HOME IN NORTH CAROLINA. THE IMPACT LEFT ANNE IN A COMA. FOR THE NEXT 236 DAYS, HER HUSBAND CONTINUED TO PHOTOGRAPH HER. IT IS HIS HANDWRITING YOU SEE ON THE BOTTOM OF PHOTOS 192-542.
Above the vinyl lettering was a Polaroid of me, one of the series Anne had taken of me leaning over my front leg, bouncing a tennis ball. Counting. On the bottom was written SLOW COUNTING, INDIA-NAPOLIS, RCA, 3.7.04. MY HUSBAND = BIG WEIRDO! I LOVE HIM.
Then Anne lay in bed, her face swollen into a dried apricot crusted with blood. Over the space of a few yards of wall, the swelling disappeared and was replaced by withering, shrinking, the slow recession of her lips. Then for dozens of photos, nothing changed except for the light. Finally, at the end of the line, there was one photo that stood out like an exclamation point. It was labeled THE FIRST DAY AWAKE, and in it Anne looked directly at the camera, her spooky eyes swollen from crying. It was shocking, even there, to see her come back to life.
“Excuse me,” a young woman said, laying her hand on my arm.
I turned. The hand belonged to one of the Asian women who had passed me on the sidewalk. She pointed to the photo of me. I nodded.
She said. “This.” She held out her small round hand. “Is so beautiful.”
“OK.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I whispered, “She’s a terrible person.”
The woman stepped away in shock. I turned back to the photos, my face on fire. When I next moved she was gone.
At the end of the room I found more vinyl wall text. It read ON FRIDAY, JUNE 12, AT 3PM, SMITH WILL GIVE A GALLERY TALK AND SIGN COPIES OF
ANNESMITH
, THE 230-PAGE FULL-COLOR CATALOGUE.
Behind the information desk sat a young man with a shaved head who wore a khaki suit two sizes too small. He looked at me as I approached like I was going to ask him for spare change.
“So that’s my wife,” I said. “And I was wondering if I could leave a note for her that you could give to her tomorrow?”
“Who?”
“Anne Smith.”
“You’d have to email the gallery.”
“She’s my wife.”
“Anne Smith?”
“Yes,” I said. I walked to the photo of me on the wall and pointed at it.
“Don’t touch the artwork.”
“That’s me. I
took
these.”
The suit walked around the front of the desk, and a group of young men with rattails stopped to watch. He leaned closer to the photo, then looked at me.
“Weird,” he said. “But you’re really going to have to email the gallery.”
“Just. Here.” I walked to the desk, picked up a postcard with a photo of Anne sleeping on the front, lifted a pen from beside the computer keyboard, and I wrote COME TO KATIE’S TOMORROW FOR CHARADES. 7PM. slow. “Here.” I handed him the postcard. “See? It’s perfectly normal. Just put it right there, beside your keyboard. When she comes in give it to her.”
“I can’t promise anything unless you email the gallery.”
“Hunter,” Katie said. The man in the suit looked at her like she owned him. “Give her the note.”
At the sight of Katie, he vigorously nodded yes, of course he would give her the note.
We waited outside for a cab.
“Thanks for pulling rank,” I said.
“What’d it say?”
“To come to your place for charades.”
“We’re doing that again?”
“Can’t stop now.”
I held my hand high above our heads, and a cab finally slowed on its path down Ninth. We would be taking separate cars in different directions, so this was it for a while. As it came to a stop I said, “I want to apologize about Paige.”
“You did me a favor.”
The driver—a man with a turban and a very large beard—bent down in the seat to see what the holdup was.
“Manny is completely insane. I know. But I love him.”
“What’s wrong with us?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“All of us. Why do we all do this stupid shit?”
The cab honked.
“Go on,” I said.
The cabbie rolled the window down and yelled, “You getting in?”
But Katie didn’t move. She just waved the cab away with her hand and said, “I want to show you something.”
I followed her west on Twenty-third, past the same galleries, the Big Gulps and the mice and Anne. We crossed Tenth, occupied with odd car dealerships and apartment buildings, and emerged on the west side north of Chelsea Piers. Still I followed, silent. Katie walked a path that ran down to the river past a large area of excavated earth behind a chain-link fence, rocks hewn up from the ground and piled in mounds that rose above us, the holes from which they emerged kept far from view, deep and hidden. It was a city riverwalk under construction, almost deserted. A metal pier, probably unused for sixty years, a hundred maybe, more even, stretched into the Hudson, its skeleton warped and collapsed into a series of arthritic architectural fingers crossed and reaching out of the water. And through that tangle of moldering metal shone the setting sun, orange and oblong and all ours, of all things in this city. The path led along an area of rocks made into a short bank. The area adjacent to the pier was strangely free of debris. The bank was long and shallow, and the Hudson washed simple and clean around the base of a giant black corroded steel girder, swirling into a tiny eddy past the metal, under the shadow of the pier. Katie stepped off the path and approached the metal, and I stood on the path and watched. She stopped just short of the water. The breeze off the river was colder than it had been only blocks away, and she held her arms around her small torso. Her green blouse whipped around her slender waist, flashing tan flesh beneath. I thought of Anne on the pontoon, when she had held herself against the cold that first afternoon we’d met. I waited for a sign, a movement, but nothing came. Silent and careful, I approached and stopped beside Katie.
She said, “I come here all the time.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, nervous I’d admitted some aesthetic blunder.
She nodded. “I always want to get in.”
“Then get in.”
“That’s the Hudson.”
“So what?”
She looked at me like she’d never seen me before. It thrilled me that I had surprised her.
“Get in,” I said again.
“Really?”
“I don’t know. Why not?”
“Because I might drown like the last time we got near water.”
“You didn’t drown, though. Remember? I saved you.”
She stepped out of her shoes and flinched when she stepped into the water, but kept going until it lapped up her ankles, then deeper, slowly letting it rise, until she was waist-deep. Then she turned and said what I guess I knew she was going to say. “Come on.”
Only blocks away, Hunter in his miniature suit had my postcard, cabs flew by restaurants, construction carried on. Here there was sunset, water, and Katie. It was a year ago that I had joined her in underwear in water, a year to the day probably, when I had jumped into the pool in the dark and Katie had told me about Anne. I unzipped my pants so that they turned into shorts, took off my sweatshirt and hat, and stepped into the Hudson. Katie let herself fall back into the water, and I did the same. The water was surprisingly clean. My eyes rose to the pinking sky. We let the river wash us into the shadow of the crumbling pier, where the ground opened up, a sudden deep ravine that swept our feet out from under us. Panic rushed through me for an instant, but we did not wash downstream. We floated softly and easily into the eddy and found ourselves caught in an urban whirlpool, the sky changing pastels
through the metal crosses and curves above. We circled each other, not touching, not speaking, just orbiting the same center, carried on that same steady current, letting it carry us to the same spot again and again and again.
25
ONE OF MANNY’S
cowboy boots stood in the middle of Katie’s living room as if it had been crossing the room on its own and just stopped there to look for something. The sports section was spread open on the coffee table, dangling off the edge and on to the carpet. I heard Kaz and Manny laughing from the small balcony above. When I closed the door behind me they stopped. I walked upstairs, under the African masks, past the fireplace that still burned and still gave off no heat. Kaz looked at me like I had just told him to use inside voices. Manny held up his fist black-pride-style. On the coffee table lay pencils, torn paper, a bowl, a cowboy hat, a beer bottle, and some Gatorade. A stopwatch hung around Manny’s neck.
“Let’s wang chung,” Manny said.
“We gotta wait,” I said.
“Katie! Get me a beer?” he called over the balcony.
“I’m serious.”
He started dividing the paper into groups.
“
Wait
.”
“What for?”
“Anne.”
Kaz looked up.
“She in town?”
I nodded.
“What for?”
“Thing at the gallery,” Manny said.
“I left her a note.”
“A note?”
“What gallery?” Kaz said.
“A note?”
“We have to do it the same,” I said.
“She didn’t always play,” Kaz said. “We’re
doing
it the same.”
“I’m not talking about charades.”
The only thing that moved in the room was the silent, cold fire.
Kaz looked at his filthy fingernails.
I said it again. “We have to do it the same.”
“I don’t get it,” Manny said.
“You’re gonna have to do it again.”
Kaz wouldn’t look up.
“What’s he have to do?” Manny said.
“He knows.”
“He doesn’t look like it.”
For a second I worried that Manny was right, that Kaz didn’t know what I meant. But then he finally looked up at me through those dark, thin eyebrows, and it was clear that he knew he had to do it too.
“What’s he have to do? What?” Manny said.
“He’s got to sleep with Anne.”
The room fell silent.
I had not seen Anne since she had gotten out of her hospital bed, had not seen her walk since she had drifted mad across the moss more than a year ago and gotten into the Dart. I settled into a hard-backed wooden chair and waited for her to arrive. When she did, it was in a pale green vintage dress and yellow high heels and without most of her hair. It had been cut into a short red bowl cut, straight and severe and boyish. She looked from me to Manny to Kaz, the men of her life, and Manny said, “OK. It’s a movie . . . One syllable . . .
Ghost
.”
“My back hurts,” she said and sat on the floor. She leaned against an empty plush seat like she’d been here dozens of times.
We looked around the room, each waiting for the other. Kaz’s eyes darted from Anne to Manny to me and back. Together we had pushed each other to tears, driven ourselves to carve names into our shoulders and thrill each other by promising monkey-style. Together we had pursued our dreams until they were our currency, until we traded on what we thought was their limitless value. But there was a limit, and we had reached it, had lived that saturation point for years. There was no real striving anymore, just this repetition of success with diminishing returns. One year off, though, just one cycle, made me want it all again more than ever. Here were the people I lived my life with. Here were the people who had seen me fail and conquer over decades. They made me feel old, like those shoppers in Forest Hills. Old and strong and confident and glad that their youth was gone. These were the loves of my life.
“We gonna wang chung?” Manny said.
Anne pursed her lips a little and ran a hand through her bowl cut. I saw the bottom of a tattoo peek out from her sleeve. It hadn’t been there before.
“I know you need me here to complete whatever spell you’re casting,” she said.
We listened to the silence, full and swelling.
“OK then,” Manny finally said. “This is a little game I like to call charades.”
Manny, me, and Katie. Kaz and Anne. The teams were always the same. With Manny’s input, our scraps filled with the names of Westerns. Kaz and Anne were settled into the love seat. Nervous and awkward, they silently wrote clues onto strips of paper and dropped them into a yellow plastic mixing bowl.
“I don’t think they know what
Hondo
is,” Katie whispered.
“Yeah they do,” Manny said.
“
A Fist Full of Dollars
?”
“Everybody knows that.”
He wrote the names of more and more Westerns onto the scraps and tossed them into one of his cowboy hats. He was the only confident one in the room. Before he was done, I wrote one clue of my own. It said
Big
. It was the first movie Anne and I had ever seen together. In the years since, no movie was good enough for Anne. Watching with her, she either sighed at bad scenes or simply fell asleep.
Big
, though—which we had rented and watched on my thirteen-inch television in my old apartment with the lights out during a summer thunderstorm, the screen doors to the porch open, water spraying in on us from time to time—she had loved. I dropped the word into the bowl, and as soon as it was handed to Kaz, I said, “Wait. I want to change one.”
“Too late,” Anne said and took the bowl greedily.