Ghost Town (17 page)

Dan and I met again four days later, on October 3. It had not been easy for any of us. There had been no more terror attacks, but New York’s suffering was now compounded with the fear of biological assault. It seemed our water supply was susceptible to deliberate contamination, in fact there were rumors that it had already been poisoned, with the result that many people in the city, myself included, were drinking only bottled water now. The Bush people claimed they were working to strengthen our “biodefenses,” and smallpox vaccine was being stockpiled,
some forty million doses of it. Who would be the lucky forty million, one wondered. We were not reassured to learn that our doctors were not trained to recognize the symptoms of smallpox, botulism, or bubonic plague, although they were getting better at identifying anthrax, as we now had at least two confirmed cases in Florida, one fatal. So to the various psychic afflictions that had come in the wake of the attacks, by which I mean feelings of dread and anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks, sleep disturbances—catastrophe sex and delusions of love—were now added paranoia and terror. And we were at war. There were troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

We talked about all this. Dan mentioned the feeling of raw incredulity that would often take him by surprise, these strange days of late September and early October—can this be reality? reality in America?—as though, he said, glimpsing suddenly through the window of a spacecraft a world utterly alien, utterly different from the world he had come from; but then found his thoughts returning, unable to concentrate on what his city and his country had become, to the equally bewildering state of his own heart: the fact that he was falling in
love with a woman he didn’t begin to understand.

—No, I said, that’s what you need me for.

In the flush and flood of his newfound happiness he gave me one of his rare grins, his face splitting open in a ramshackle fashion such that half of it was squeezed and creased by the side of his mouth that went upwards, the other half pulled taut by the side that went down. It was comical and endearing, and I thought: he is, at this moment, a child. At this moment he has regained the childish aspect of his nature. As though he had never been scarred and calloused and hardened, not at the deeper levels. But I knew that this flood of shallow feeling was only masking his damage, and that what he was experiencing was just the brief elation of a false liberation from phobic structures very securely embedded by his mother.

But I said nothing of this. I asked him to tell me what happened next. After he’d driven her away with his indifference.

He called her hotel several times, he said. He always left a message but she never returned his calls. When he finally went to the hotel, to wait for her there, all night if necessary, he was told
she had gone home. He told the receptionist he was her attorney and produced his card. He said he had to reach her urgently, so she gave out the address.

—You were prepared to sit there all night? I said.

—Yes.

—What if she’d been working?

—I didn’t care. I had to see her.

This I had never known in Dan before. He had never tried to find his way
back
to a woman, once he’d felt the impulse to flee. The next day he left his office at six and walked west across Tribeca to Duane Square. The dull roar of heavy machinery clanked and rattled from Ground Zero. A truck rolled by with buckled sections of steel girder lashed to it. He found her building and pushed the buzzer. It took what seemed a very long time for her to respond.

—Who is it?

—It’s me. Dan.

—I’m coming down.

There was a loud click and he pushed open the heavy industrial door. A bleak hallway with walls painted gray, a rack of mailboxes. To his left the rusty metal gate of a freight elevator.
Dan could hear it slowly descending, the oddly terrible sounds of shivering metal and screaming cables. Then she was hauling open the heavy gate and he stepped in. The operating lever was made of brass and seemed to have come straight out of a Hudson River tugboat. As they clanked back up to the top of the building the woman stood stony-faced in the big dusty cage and Dan said nothing, thinking: at least I am in. Her T-shirt and jeans were smeared with ash. Her hair was tied up in a red scarf, and the sweat was streaming down her face. A smudged face mask hung round her neck on a thin elastic band. She was filthy, and—because of it, he said—more desirable to him than ever. After a silent eternity the elevator shuddered to a halt and she hauled the gate open and went through into the loft.

All the furniture had been pushed up to one end so that she could scrub the floor and walls. At the other end, beyond the area cleared of furniture, a door stood open, and he saw an easel with a tall narrow canvas clamped to it. It too had a thick layer of ash. The windows over the street were open but the air in the loft was heavy with a fine-grained dust. White motes drifted through slanting beams of light in the warm evening sunshine. The smell from Ground
Zero was foul, and Dan wondered what exactly he was inhaling. She stood by the door and stared at him, and he stared back, and there was, he said, a profound wordless connection; and then she was in his arms. He knew it was going to be all right. When finally they broke apart she set her hands on his shoulders and regarded him with fond amusement.

—Do you want a drink?

He asked her what she was having and she said gin and tonic. He asked for the same. He watched her at the counter as she sliced a lemon. The snick of the knife on the cutting board. Then all at once, as though she had heard her name being called, she lifted her head and put down the knife and stared at the window. Dan said that for some reason he thought of a body of water, a sudden gust of wind, clouds passing across the sun—she was always somehow elemental to him. She turned to him then. Her face was pale. She bit her knuckle. Her eyes filled with tears.

—I’m so frightened.

He held her gaze.

—Will you help me?

—I’ll try.

He paused. Dan had a habit, when he gathered his thoughts, of making a steeple of his fingers and resting his forehead on it. I had begun to think this woman he claimed he loved was borderline schizoid, certainly there had been enough psychotic breaks to justify that tentative diagnosis. What she said to him now left me in no doubt at all.

—You remember the morning the towers came down, you remember thinking, this is not real but I’m seeing it?

—Yeah.

—That’s what’s happening to me all the time now. He’s not real, but I’m seeing him.

He is not real but I am seeing him: what a wealth of pathology lay buried in those nine words!

—Dan, I said—and this was something I had been reluctant to press him on before, but now I felt I must—Dan, don’t you think I ought to see her?

But he cut me off at once. It was out of the question. He had already suggested it to her, and she had said no. He was adamant. I had been afraid of this.

—Then let me take a look at her at least. In a café or wherever. Some public place.

—Why?

—I need to see her face, Dan. We talk about her, I form impressions from what you tell me about her, but it’s hard to know what I’m dealing with.

—I’m dealing with her, he said, and I could see how uneasy he was with the idea of secret surveillance; this was a man, after all, who had made a career out of civil rights abuses. But deeper even than that, I realized, there was something else: there was the fact that he was afraid of her.

—She won’t find out, I said.

—She might.

—And then?

But this was not to be contemplated. A shake of the head. Nothing more to be said. Very well, I would say nothing either. So, a stalemate. But we had known each other a long time. Now I did apply pressure.

—Daniel, I said, employing a certain tone of voice with which he was familiar. A short pause ensued.

—All right! Oh Christ. There’s a place on West Broadway, near the subway.

He told me the name of the restaurant. He said he met her there for coffee in the morning if he could get away from the office.

And so the next day I found myself once again within a few blocks of Ground Zero. The sky was clear, the air temperate, a lovely day—any other October. But again I smelled the foul acrid reek from the ruins, which now seemed to me less harmful to the lungs than it was to the soul, for it carried with it emanations of the evil which had created it in the first place. There were firemen in the streets of Tribeca and also in the restaurant, a trendy place with a zinc bar and a dining room in back, and a few tables up front under a mirrored wall where the specials were written up in what looked like lipstick. The firemen sat eating large breakfasts: workers from the site ate for free in all the downtown restaurants; there’d been a piece about it in the
Times
. They would have been out of place—any other October. I sat down and ordered a coffee. A few minutes later the firemen left. It was 10.40 and still no sign of them. I decided to wait until 11.

At five of they came in. She was smaller than I had imagined her, though otherwise she fitted Dan’s description. But he had never mentioned what I should have thought a rather significant characteristic of the woman: she was Chinese. Or Asian, anyway. Not beautiful, but certainly
feline, the small heart-shaped face under a slick helmet of black hair, as if she’d just stepped out of the shower. She carried herself with a certain arrogance, and there was cruelty there too, something hard and dark; she was like a black stone, a little chunk of polished jet. She wore a black T-shirt under a denim jacket, and a short black skirt. She was slender, assured, flawless of feature and complexion, and as the waiter emerged from behind the bar with menus she flounced past him without even a flicker of acknowledgment. I realized I did not know her name.

He followed her into the restaurant displaying great discomfort. He glanced at me and he seemed, in the company of that petite slinking creature, more bear than man. His hair was uncombed. His black leather jacket looked shapeless, almost sack-like over his humped shoulders, his rolling gait. I thought absurdly of a man unsteady on the deck of a ship in heavy seas. She glanced at herself in the mirror, and by means of the mirror on the opposite wall I saw her properly for the first time, and knew what she was. They went into the back, and I could still see her in the mirror. Dan was fingering the menu and talking to her, and she sat beside him
on the banquette picking delicately among the contents of a small leather purse. Only once did I see her lift her face to his, and caught a gleam of animation in those black-cat eyes.

It was when they were leaving that I got what I’d come for. She paused at my table.

—So now you know what the crazy woman looks like, she said, or sneered, rather.

I was cool. A small bewildered shrug.

—I’m sorry?

I tipped my spectacles down my nose as I gazed up into her vicious little face. I saw how very angry she was, close to hysteria.

—Why can’t you just leave me alone!

Then she turned to the hapless Daniel.

—You stupid fuck, she cried.

She swept on out of the restaurant, him scurrying after her without a single glance of reproach. No manifestation of anger at all.

That came later. By god he was furious. How could I have done it? More to the point, how could he have let me do it? It was a total fiasco. A debacle. She was far too smart not to have known she was being scrutinized by a stranger, and having seen it to then realize that Dan was implicated—what an idiot he was! But I was not
interested in his histrionics. What was the up-shot, I wanted to know. The upshot? Ha! Fierce, baleful glance from eyes hot with rage. The upshot. The upshot was, he’d spent practically the rest of the day attempting to make her listen to him.

—Listen to what, exactly?

He became all at once defensive. He said something inaudible.

—Daniel?

—To my apologies! he cried. My abject fucking groveling apologies! You didn’t come out of it so well either.

This last he muttered darkly, as though it was at least some consolation to him that in his general debasement he had blackened my character in her eyes. I told him that didn’t matter.

—It may not matter to you.

—Dan, you didn’t tell me she was Chinese. What’s her name?

—You realize you’ve never asked me her name until now? She’s called Kim Lee. And she’s as American as you or me though I shouldn’t have thought that needed saying!

And I suddenly saw the extent to which he was in thrall to the woman, to this
Kim Lee
. He had crossed the line that separates pathological
obsession from healthy sexual love, and her displeasure had cast him into a state of terror—terror of loss, of abandonment, of solitude—and I could only imagine the things he must have said and done to mollify her. Did he not see how deftly he was being manipulated? She had refused to allow him into her building. She would not pick up the phone when he’d called her from the street. He had hung about in Duane Square when he should have been at work, miserable, angry, jealous—ironic, this, given that she was already haunted by one lover who gazed up at her window from the sidewalk.