Authors: Jill Ciment
HALFWAY DOWN THE BLOCK, ALEX BECOMES
aware of sounds he hasn’t heard in years—his own footfalls in slush, singing from the Pentecostal Church, a flock of pigeons taking off, voices of passersby, and distant sirens. He doesn’t entirely trust his hearing aids, but to his old soldier’s battle-alert ears, the sirens sound like a full barrage. “Do you hear them?” he asks Ruth.
“What?”
“Sirens.”
“No more than yesterday.” She takes his arm; the brisk air feels so good on her cheeks and throat; she’s so happy they’re not in Florida. “Doesn’t knowing we’re looking for the three of us make all the difference in the world? Wouldn’t it be something if the junior two-bedroom turns out to be nice? It would almost be an even trade if we take Yellow Rubbers’ offer. We’d even make a little profit if Harold’s Ladies came through. And it’s so close by: we wouldn’t have to change pharmacies.”
The building is a nondescript six-story box near the corner of Avenue C and Second Street. Ruth takes note of the façade—faux brick, graffiti, only two casement windows
per floor, no windowsills, no stoop. The front door is unpainted steel.
She reads the directory next to the intercom. It doesn’t bode well for the co-op’s stability. Names have been crossed out, scratched out, and written over, a pentimento of transient identities. Open House is printed on a paper scrap taped beside 2G.
She hesitates before ringing.
“We’re here already, Ruth. We might as well look.”
She presses the bell, while Alex positions himself against the door to push as soon as the lock-release buzzer sounds.
The intercom crackles unintelligibly. The buzzer is louder than a truck horn. The steel door vibrates as if it were about to explode: Alex shoulders it open.
“We’re inside,” Ruth shouts back at the intercom. The lobby is big, but she’s appalled at the color, Pepto-Bismol pink. The elevator smells of cigarettes. A low, thrumming rock-and-roll bass line greets her when the elevator opens on the second floor, despite it being nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. She squares her shoulders and knocks on 2G.
A tall young man with lanky black hair and a blade-thin face answers the door. By his bare feet, Ruth surmises he’s not the broker.
“Come in and have a look,” he says, and then disappears into one of the bedrooms, where a television is playing.
Ruth steps into the living room, a long narrow space the proportions of a tunnel, the light at the end of which is a single casement window. The furnishings are spare and
missing cushions and legs. Japanese cartoon posters are stapled to the walls. Though Ruth has never been inside a fraternity house, she imagines this is the décor. She peers into the kitchen. It isn’t wide enough to turn around in. She inspects the bathroom—no tub, only a shower. A large tea-color rust stain encircles the drain. She wanders into the first bedroom, empty save for an unmade bed. The barefoot young man didn’t bother to make his bed for the open house? She heads into the second bedroom, astounded to find it crowded—Alex, the barefoot young man biting his nails, two Russian gentlemen in camel-hair coats, a couple with a baby, and the young woman who, only yesterday, asked to lie down on their bed. Ruth recognizes the knee-high boots. All eyes are on the young man’s television, a vast flat screen that fills one entire wall. The basset-eyed newscaster’s face is as large as the moon. He wears the expression of an oracle about to make a prediction. Across his brow is written
Breaking News—Target: New York City
. “Fifteen thousand yellow cabs service New York at any given hour,” he says. “Let’s face it, every cab is now a potential ground zero.”
“What happened?” Ruth asks.
“Pamir’s carjacked a taxi,” Alex tells her.
“Who can tell one rag-head cabbie from another? They’ll never catch him now,” says one of the Russians.
“Maybe he’s heading back to the tunnel to finish the job?” says the other.
Ruth recognizes the “the sky is falling” tactic to scare away the competition. The Russians are what her father— a dreamy, deeply religious egg peddler who refused to make an extra nickel off the World War II black market—
used to call war gonifs. Her mother called her father the village schlemiel.
“Maybe he’s driving out of town and will become someone else’s problem?” says the nail-biting young man.
“Maybe he’s going to Queens. Isn’t his wife in Queens?” says the thoughtless girl in the knee-high boots.
“Don’t they have the cab’s medallion number?” Ruth asks.
“Pamir locked the driver in the trunk. They don’t know which cab it is,” Alex says.
“The mayor’s ordered all taxis back to their garages by ten,” says knee-high boots.
“Pamir still has forty-eight minutes to go,” says the first Russian. “And who knows if he’s acting alone? A lot could still happen.”
“He can make himself a few dollars on fares and tips before he blows himself up,” says the other.
“Or
gives
himself up,” says the nail-biting young man.
Lily was right, Ruth thinks, the television news shouldn’t be on during an open house.
A satellite image of Manhattan shimmers on the screen. The grid of streets is golden-yellow, the buildings infrared squares. The basset-eyed newscaster turns to his newest guest, “Professor and Author of
The Universal Theory of Traffic.”
“How do you get fifteen thousand cabs off the streets by ten o’clock?”
The professor’s beard is so thick and wild he appears to be peeking over a hedge. “You don’t,” he says, turning around to face the satellite image: the back of his head looks exactly like the front, but without eyes. “Traffic behaves like liquid. Think of the infrared squares as
islands, and the yellow grid as tributaries. Imagine each taxicab is a drop of water suddenly moving against the tide. Rip currents might occur, backing up traffic for hours, gigantic waves could flood intersections.”
The basset-eyed newscaster, who’s been listening with the solemnity of a bright, if cloying student, faces his audience again, the tableau of house hunters crowded around the screen. “New York is beautiful from outer space, folks, but today, that golden grid isn’t made up of yellow brick roads.”
“Maybe it’s not such a wise idea to go apartment hunting today,” Alex says as they exit the pink lobby.
“Maybe it’s the wisest time of all to go hunting. Did you see the poor seller’s face when everyone but the Russians left? He looked ready to give away his apartment. I hope we didn’t look like that yesterday.”
As soon as they reach the corner, and can see in all four directions, Alex checks if the color cadmium yellow dark has disappeared from the otherwise gray cityscape, but Yellow Cabs are still plentiful. He watches a woman come out of the Lower East Side Bake Shoppe and hail one, so enjoying the muffin she is eating that she doesn’t bother to check if Pamir is her driver or not. Alex wants what that woman’s eating, a muffin so tasty you forget reason.
“Let’s sit down somewhere warm, Ruth, enjoy a muffin and a cup of coffee, and wait until ten. It’s almost a quarter to. Once the cabs are off the streets, we’re bound to know more.”
As they step into the bakery, the same acuity he had
with hearing earlier, he now has with smell. He can distinguish cinnamon, sugar, coffee, burned caraway seeds, toasted wheat and earthy bran.
“A bran muffin and a coffee,” he says to the woman behind the counter.
“You sure you want a bran muffin
and
a coffee?” Ruth asks. “You don’t want an English muffin instead?”
“The world may end today, I want a bran muffin.”
“A tea and an English muffin for me, please,” she says.
They eat at a table by the window. Alex yanks down his muffin’s waxed-paper skirt while Ruth sugars her tea. “I hope we can still get to the hospital today,” she says, adding another spoonful. “Do you think Dorothy somehow knows we’re coming?”
“She knows.” He takes a big bite, stunned at how good it tastes. It’s as saturated with flavors as the air is with scents. He chews with concentration and pleasure, and as he does, he remembers relishing a pumpernickel loaf between skirmishes on the German border, how fear had made everything taste so good.
“Oh my,” Ruth says.
He looks up from his muffin and follows her surprised gaze out the window. There isn’t a Yellow Cab in sight. It’s as if he’s seeing a dear old friend he’d known only in a blond toupee, suddenly bald. He turns to the man at the next table, hunched over a laptop. “Can you get the news on that?”
Without so much as glancing up to see what might be going on outside, the man reads his screen. “Police just found Pamir’s taxi abandoned under the FDR near the Queensboro Bridge.”
“How do they know its Pamir’s?” Alex asks.
“The cabbie was still in the trunk.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
“Pamir?” Ruth asks.
“Long gone.”
Ruth would like nothing more than to go home and climb under the covers until it’s safe to visit Dorothy, but she’s also anxious to see the other apartment before anything else happens. She suspects that her anxiety isn’t only because Pamir’s still out there. On the contrary, had he been caught, there would be no rush to look at the built-in bookcases and window seat on their way to the hospital; they could no longer afford them. As ashamed as she is to admit it, she’s a little relieved he’s still out there.
She rises from her chair. “Let’s go look at the other apartment.”
“I haven’t finished my muffin,” Alex says.
“You can finish it on the way.”
On the corner of Second Avenue and Second Street, Ruth realizes that the apartment shares the block with the old cemetery, a half-acre sanctuary of trees, marble headstones, stone walls, a wrought-iron gate, and a plaque that reads:
Marble Cemetery
1830
—
A Place of Internment for Gentlemen
. Living on the same street as the cemetery is even better than living near the park. These gentlemen don’t ride skateboards and play boom boxes. She quickens her stride. The building is on the south side, catching all the sun. It’s still a half dozen doors away, but she can
already see it overlooks the sanctuary. She tamps down her excitement. They haven’t even been inside. The façade is nothing to speak of—standard turn-of-the-century brick—but the exterior has been recently painted, a tasteful sand color with black trim. The front door is rosewood. The directory is framed under glass: all the names are neatly typed. She presses the intercom bell beside the realtor’s card. “We’re here for the open house,” she shouts into the speaker.
“Take the elevator to the top floor and turn right,” the intercom answers back with crystal clarity.
The lobby is simple but attractive; black and white tiles, wainscoting, white walls, and a small French Provincial bench. She rings for the elevator. When the door opens, a fox terrier trots out, followed by a preoccupied man talking on a cell phone.
“Dogs must be allowed!” Ruth says to Alex.
The elevator is slow, but steady. The sixth-floor walls are the same cream white as the lobby. The corridor is so quiet Ruth can hear blood banging in her ears. She knocks on the apartment door. The realtor, a tall young woman in a black bubble haircut, invites them inside. Ruth’s sure she smells something delicious baking until she realizes it’s only boiled cinnamon. Alex wanders into the bedrooms to see if one would make a good studio, while she starts in the living room, curious to see the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and the built-in window seat. The room is already crowded with milling overcoats and gleaming, overheated faces and wet shoes, and one familiar pair of knee-high boots. No one seems alarmed by the latest news; they seem far more interested in the crown molding. But then again,
the television is off. She sits down on the window seat’s Chinese-red cushion. The view is just what she hoped it would be: sanctuary and sky.
The kitchen is tinier than she’d like, but there’s a square of morning sun on the floor for Dorothy to sunbathe in. She tests the stove: all four burners work.
The first bedroom is about the same size as the one they have now, more than enough room for a queen-size bed, two night tables, and a computer desk. From the window, she can see the branches of a majestic oak, bare and black. In summer, the whole view will be verdant. She’s tempted to lie down on the bed to see the view from there, but, of course, she doesn’t dare. Besides, the girl, sans her knee-high boots, is already lying there.
The second bedroom catches Ruth off-guard; it’s such an irregular shape, a trapezoid with one long wall and three short ones. She’s no judge of distance, but the farthest wall appears to be over twenty feet away, or perhaps it’s just a spatial illusion. Alex is staring across the length of the room to that white wall just waiting for a blank canvas. He takes a giant stride backward, and then another and another. The studio he has now is only fifteen feet long. She knows what those extra five feet would mean for him.
A line has already formed to talk to the realtor. While they wait their turn, Alex feels the same roiling want for the vista of wall that Ruth feels for the verdant view, but in his case, he suspects that the churning might also be from the bran muffin with the coffee chaser. “I may have to use the bathroom,” he whispers to Ruth.
“Now? We’re next in line. You can’t wait?”
“I’m sorry.”
“How can I help you?” says the realtor.
“How firm is the price?” Ruth asks.
“I’ll be right back,” Alex promises, and hurries down the hall looking for a bathroom. Despite the million-one price tag, the apartment only seems to have one, and two young Asian women taking pictures of the tub with their cell phones occupy it.
“Please, I need to use the bathroom,” Alex says. He locks himself inside and opens the window as wide as it will go. The cold is shocking. He releases his belt and sits down on the commode.
Someone knocks.
“I’ll be right out!” he shouts.
Someone taps.
“Just a minute!”
Someone hammers.
“Hold your horses!”
To ignore the knocks, he turns off his hearing aids and concentrates on the floor. The tile work is handsome, a diamond pattern. Four black squares framed in eight blue-green ones. How would he mix the color? Cerulean with viridian? With a vista like that, he could paint larger. If the FBI memos evoked illuminated manuscripts, why not billboards?