Gossip (9 page)

“I used to know a lot about securitization. That commands a premium on the Street these days. It won't kill me.”

Famous last words. As a minor act of subversion, I sent him home with Dinah's tin of lemon squares.

D
inah half-regretted refusing to give him a break. I knew this because she kept justifying herself afterward.

“What if
I
want to retire? I'd like to get a dog. If I didn't have to travel all the time, I could get a dog.”

“You want a dog?”

“I'd
love
a dog.”

It was the first I'd heard of it. “What kind?”

“A nice clean grateful mutt. I like mutts. I believe in hybrid vigor.”

Richard and Charlotte had a Portuguese water dog that had cost a fortune.

Things jogged on. Richard closed his business and took a job way downtown, analyzing something or other, at a decent salary, though what he seemed most grateful for was the gold-plated health insurance.

A
wise man told me once that growing up means the death of many talents. Nicky's first job out of college was in a touring company of
Les Misérables
. We thought he was on his way, the next Matthew Broderick, but he quit after three months. He said he was bored with the road, and we suspected some affair gone wrong with someone in the company, but he never explained. He moved back home and started a novel for real. Dinah bought him a fancy computer, but after six months he admitted he wasn't making a great deal more progress than the author of the immortal tale of Michel and Evangeline, and he was really tired of having no spending money. Richard said he was sorry he couldn't help him. He had three daughters to put through school, and Nicky was just going to have to figure it out. His brother, RJ, had now finished business school and taken a job with Alcoa in Pittsburgh. Nicky gave up and took the LSAT, preparing to apply to law school.

While he waited, Dinah got Nicky a job in a literary agency. It was a small office. He read submissions, answered the phones, and gossiped with the bookkeeper, who came in twice a week. At night he sang with a Brooklyn band called Monkeys Have the Bomb. Dinah asked if we could come see them perform, but he said, “Oh no. You'd experience it as punishment.” He got overtired working days as well as nights, he got mononucleosis, he lost both jobs and spent two months recovering in his boyhood bedroom. Even Dinah was beginning to see a downside to having such a big apartment. She began to say that Nicky's career plan was to outlive her, inherit the lease, then rent out rooms.

Finally he got another job with the articles editor at a fashion magazine. He loved it, and they loved him. I don't think Richard was awfully pleased. Where he came from, for a man to work in fashion was sort of like joining the circus, bizarre but not in an interesting way. We pointed out that Nicky wasn't really working in fashion, he was in the Magazine World.

“It isn't exactly
Newsweek,
is it?” was Richard's response.

“God, Richard, when did you get so stuffy?” Dinah asked him.

“Well at least he has health insurance,” Richard said.

“Health insurance, and he's surrounded by chic, beautiful people, and it's fun!”

“Fun,” said Richard. “Is that what work is supposed to be?”

D
inah went to the Vineyard for two months that summer. The cottage she rented was covered in climbing roses. RJ and his family spent a week in July with her, and Nicky went for a week in August and filled the house with friends. I went up for Labor Day weekend to see what all the fuss was about, and I must say, it was heaven. The rooms were small but bright and fragrant from the roses, and from the deck at the back of the house you could hear the ocean. The kitchen was arrayed with fresh mint, basil, parsley, and dill from the farmers' market in water glasses as if they were bunches of flowers. In the evening there was always a kettle of mussels on the stove, or a bouillabaisse or paella.

I
'd been home for a week—I was still suntanned—the morning the world blew up.

Uptown we didn't feel the first plane ram the North Tower, or see the dogs in the park come off the ground or the birds knocked out of the trees as they did in Washington Square. What happened to us was the phones started ringing. Gil called me first, to tell me to turn on the television. RJ in Pittsburgh, dressing for work while his wife got the kids' breakfast, called Dinah.

“Good morning, my treasure,” she had said happily, because no one but one of her sons would call her at that hour. He told
her
to turn on the television. All networks were showing a live shot of the World Trade Center, where there was a plane-shaped hole in the north face of one building as the smoke poured into the sky and people hung out the windows in the floors above the gash, looking skyward and waving.

“Dad's down there,” said RJ in a panicked voice, like someone shouting orders.

For a moment Dinah went blank. Could that be true?

“No, he's—”

“Yes, Mom, he is. His office is in the World Trade Center. I'm looking at my address book.”

“What floor?”

“Ninety-fourth.”

“Jesus. And what the hell happened? Some asshole in a Cessna, trying to . . .”

“That's Dad's building.”

They were watching, trying to count up the floors to see which ones were burning, when the second plane hit.

So was I; I couldn't stop looking. On the screen, the top slumped sideways off the South Tower, and then the whole building was gone. What can that have sounded like? I don't remember hearing anything from the television, just the image. So many souls streaming into heaven at once . . .

I tried to call Gil back—I realized I was hysterical—but either his line was busy or the lines were down. I was standing in my stocking feet staring at the television when my phone rang the second time. Dinah. She told me about Richard.

For a moment—this is the measure of my shock—I wasn't sure who she meant. RJ? Was RJ in New York for business for some reason? Or did she mean Richard Flanagan, the wine expert she'd dated until she figured out he was a pathological liar?

“RJ says his office is in the North Tower. Ninety-fourth floor. He's not answering his cell phone. Charlotte says he left at the usual time, and he's always in the office by eight-thirty.”

“Where's Nicky?”

“On his way down there.”

“I'll come. Hang up and keep your line free.”

Of course we didn't open the shop that day. Mrs. Oba was stuck underground on a train from Brooklyn. When the train finally inched into the East Broadway station, the passengers were released, but by then the subway system was shut down. Everyone feared another attack, maybe on the transit system. In fact, we went on fearing that for months. Years.

Nicky never got below Canal Street, and downtown below Franklin was evacuated, the gas and electric to the buildings cut off. No one knew where the next explosion might be, and they needed all the power they could get at the crime site. Mrs. Oba, I learned later that night, had walked back over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn and all the way home. It took her seven hours.

Nicky reached Dinah's apartment at about noon. He had been standing at Canal and Hudson before the North Tower fell, and he'd seen with naked eyes what looked to him at first like silver coating peeling from the surface of the flaming building until the guy standing next to him said, “Dude—those are people jumping.”

He wasn't in such great shape when he got to us. He said he could see right through the building where the plane had hit. Those two floors, or more, were gone, the space empty except for flames and supporting columns at the corners of the building. On the floors above the breach, people were still waving at helicopters, still apparently thinking they could be rescued. Thinking someday they'd describe this day to their grandchildren.

He'd tried to get past the cordons, without luck. There were hundreds like him, trying to go toward the site, crying, “My daughter, my husband, my girlfriend . . .” but the police were deaf to it. All the traffic was streaming the other way, thousands of workers and residents walking north in whatever they happened to be wearing when the first tower fell. Some were ghostlike, covered in a sticky chalk layer of gray dust. It didn't do to think about what was in that dust.

It was a beautiful day, I don't know if you remember. Nicky said it was surreal, to walk up Lexington not knowing if his father was alive or dead and find all the shops open, the restaurants full, people going about their business. Dinah, for once in her life, didn't offer anyone food and didn't eat herself. She just stared at the television, where WTC Seven was burning. During station breaks we obsessively told one another exactly what time it was when normality ended for each of us. Who called. What was said. Where we were. WTC Seven burned all day, because it held the mayor's emergency center, complete with a fuel dump for running generators. Rudy Giuliani strode around. We were learning a whole new vocabulary. Jihad. Osama bin Laden. Was it that day that we started watching the film clip of the man we know now as Mohammed Atta clearing security in the Portland airport that morning? Or was that later?

I know the Portland airport. I've been through that security check. If you had a computer with you, you had to boot it up to prove it was a computer, not a bomb. Such innocent times.

Charlotte called sometime in the afternoon; Dinah had the phone before the first ring was finished.

“He's alive,” Charlotte said.

Dinah's eyes cut to Nicky as she slumped against the kitchen counter. Nicky instantly understood. I didn't.

“Where is he?” I heard Dinah say, and I was still thinking hospital . . . morgue . . . until Dinah said in surprise, “
New Jersey
?”

N
icky called Charlotte right back, but she didn't know any more than that Richard had called and said he'd explain when he saw her. She was weeping. Nicky told her he'd call back later, and he did, three or four times, as we waited. In between, RJ called. He said he was coming to New York.

“How?” said Nicky.

All flights were grounded. Of course we knew by then about the crashes in Washington and Pennsylvania. I think trains were stopped as well. I guess there was still driving that day, and now I no longer remember, day by day, how long it was before any of that got normal again, and my diary doesn't say. Meanwhile, where was Richard?

At about four, the doorman called to say Mr. Wainwright was on his way up. We weren't surprised, but only because we'd lost the power to be surprised. We all stood looking at the door. Richard walked in, wearing a suit in a condition I couldn't interpret. He looked as if he'd been through a washer that stopped before the spin cycle.

Nicky walked to his father and wrapped his arms around him. Richard returned the embrace and began to weep. Dinah and I were both in tears as well. When Nicky let Richard go, Dinah went into his arms, and they held each other as they had not done since the terrible Christmas after Richard left the marriage.

Then it was my turn. I, who had never held Richard like that, clung to him and cried for all those souls who were somewhere now, but where? For the horror of the day, for our fear for him and so many others, for the knowledge of the terrible, terrible news that was coming, of who was lost and for the pain and terror in which they died. And Richard wept because he wasn't one of them and there was no reason on earth he shouldn't have been.

When we finally let him go, but still stood close around him, Dinah touched his suit and said, “This smells like wet dog.”

“I know,” said Richard.

“Are you hungry?”

“Could I have a drink?”

We all agreed that a drink was a good idea. Richard went into Dinah's bedroom to call Charlotte again. When he came back, Dinah had put a towel on the best chair for him to sit on, and handed him a scotch and a Tupperware box of cold curried lamb and a fork. Richard said he had eaten a hot dog on the street somewhere on his way and wasn't hungry, then ate the whole thing without even seeming to know he was doing it.

The scotch steadied us all, although none of us was far from tears for the next few hours as he talked.

He'd gotten to the city late because he'd stopped in Ardsley to vote. He'd come out of the subway and had just bought a coffee from a cart on Fulton Street when he became aware that a plane over the Hudson was flying much too low, the noise much too loud. Then he saw it, so he knew from the start it was no Cessna. People on the street were paralyzed, watching. At that point, after the initial shock, his instinct was to try to get closer. To see if he could help. Or just to see. They could hear the roar of the fire above them, and soon, the people trapped above the crash line hanging out the windows, looking up, looking down. On the street chaos and ash and debris rained everywhere, but at that point, he said, there was still a sense that this couldn't really be happening, or that soon someone would stop it, put the fire out, 'copter in and rescue the people at the top of the building. Sirens screamed everywhere around them, and fire trucks raced toward the site from every direction. Richard said he was still thinking about the work he had to do that day, planning, the way you do, about where he would do it, since he clearly wouldn't be getting into his office. He tried calling Charlotte at home in Westchester to tell her what had happened, but he couldn't get a signal.

Then the second plane hit, and the horror moved inside him to a different level, although he admitted that, as a spectacle, it was so overwhelming that you couldn't react with more than astonishment. You stared. Wanted to move but couldn't look away. Couldn't process emotions, so they went somewhere, and the eyes and that powerful motor, curiosity, ruled. What would happen next? When the top of the South Tower with all its human cargo fell off the building toward the east where they were standing, they started to run, some of them screaming, and when they looked back, the whole tower was gone. He said that later he realized he had felt the earthquake shock of the planes hitting, heard the vast inhuman roar of the building as it died, but at the time he only knew running, in a herd, through stinging stinking smothering pink-gray dust. When the cloud thinned enough for sunlight to penetrate, they were blocks below where they had been, moving toward Battery Park. They stopped to look back, their eyes and noses full of ash and grit, which wiping made worse. Policemen herded them southward. You could tell who had been closest by the thickness of the dust coating them. Many, who kept looking back like Lot's wife and shaking or crying, had come from the North Tower itself, which was then still standing. “I was on the sixteenth floor.”