The Affairs of Others: A Novel (11 page)

Some mornings, back then, not all, it depended, I saw it from where I stood on the subway platform. However many of us there were bent toward the tunnel, watching that same dense, dusty dark. So many mornings spent attending the dark there, praying to it, and just as impatience grew into shifting and sighing and swearing, there’d be an intimation of light on the tunnel wall. The darkness would jump and give way in a flash then return, only to be pierced by a sliver that became a fine line, all made from light and as delicate as anything was delicate. The light grew, in squares and streaks, agitating faster and faster, spreading in the way only light or joy can spread, catching and unpredictable, and unless you were insensate your body woke with it and vibrated with the metal and hot air and noise—such affronting noise!—that was the arriving train. You’d be exhilarated, or I was. All sorts of human traffic—need and boredom and anger—awaited you on that train, but for a moment, ears ringing, you ran in, delirious for motion.

Today, rush hour over, the platform felt a vacuum, very little of the spring day could be felt, save perhaps in the clothing and attitude of a few stragglers, in no hurry at this hour. The train could soon be heard rumbling its way to us before it was visible. I’d forgotten that was sometimes so, here at the Court Street stop, when the system had calmed. Then the train pulled in, making its outsized racket, a hundred strongmen banging on steel, metal brakes turning banshees, piercing the soft parts of you. I leaned into its wind, as close to the tracks as I could. When the doors opened, I hesitated only an instant, catching my breath.

Everything inside reflected, the ads for vodka and podiatric care, all the hard surfaces. The car was perhaps a third full. I sat diagonal to a young woman who dashed blush on her cheeks. It went on micaed and tropical. She held up a mirror, peered at herself with terrible seriousness. Lipstick came next. Another version of pink, of summer, of freshness. She did not seem to care who watched. I did in flashes. A Hassidic man, a seat over from me, with a dark beard, dark eyes, coat and hat, stared steadily. Not once did she give him the satisfaction of a look in reply.

Elsewhere on the car, fingers twitched on gadgets, a few heads were plugged up with white earphones. At one end of the car, a lanky boy drew an electronic game to his nose; its screen lit his eyes and blued his forehead. His long thumbs never stopped; they beat and poked and jabbed, faster and faster, as if the train’s speed and not just the game he played dictated.

So much potential energy expressed in the congress of person and device, designed to claim the entitlements of privacy in public, to avert the eyes and more. One man held up a
Daily News.
No books today. I used to keep track of what was being read: Dean Koontz, Patricia Cornwell, Nelson DeMille, Stephen King. I’d seen Woolf, too, Virginia, and Chekhov and Calvino, but admittedly not as often, and then there were so many books I was not equipped to categorize, many in other languages, alphabets. I worked in book publishing back then, for a small literary house, and I believed with a young person’s conviction that certain books, the right books, were a measure of a person’s ambition to engage with life rather than retreat from it. If I saw a book held up that I admired, I’d look to see if my face or one I’d recognize was there behind it. More often than not, I’d get warning looks. There was never enough distance down here, so we were meant not to be too curious, not to wonder at one another too long.

The man a seat over from me now leaned into the aisle that separated him from the girl. He wanted her to see him. She still refused. She dug a nail around the outline of her lips to ensure her bright lipstick was not bleeding. Still he leaned, and my neck grew hot, itchy. I was a woman who hit back, or was I really? That anxiety. New unknowns and especially so here, on these live machines, where I’d given myself away before.

*   *   *

Five years ago, more, it had begun. Yes, my first long day as a widow. On that day, I had not held up a newspaper or hung over a book. I had death in my mouth, hands, hair, all over my skin. I had let go of all protections. I had looked at the man looking at me, for me. My clothes were thin, I was thin and thinning still, all of me untended to. I had goose bumps from the air-conditioning set for a July day in New York. Yes, the man whose cheeks looked freshly slapped had shifted his seat at least four times until he was next to me and breathing in my ear. He said, “I got fired today.” He had something Eastern European in his accent and in the wide set of his brows and straw-colored hair sticky with gel. When I did not look at him or say anything in reply, but nodded slightly and kept my eyes straight ahead, he went further: “I would like to get with you.” He smelled of Ivory soap and a persistent, vinegary sweat. “I think you would like that, too.” I still did not look at him, only nodded again, glad to be taken from the horrible repetition of my thoughts.

I maintained my silence and kept my eyes from him as best I could throughout the episode. This made him bolder, though he had to work up to it through four station stops. Find the language that fit, the right level of force with me. I nearly laughed when he called me “bitch” the first time; not only was it a word from another world, it had a querying tone, as if he wanted me to approve it. When I would not kiss him at first, he pulled my hair but not hard, not right away. He had led me to the men’s room of a deserted diner. Me, a nursemaid, a bookish woman, and that day, a new widow to someone I’d loved more than I did myself.

To the man half-asleep behind the register, he asked for a key and handed the man a limp bill. It may have only been a dollar. Once he latched the door, he positioned me against the sink, yanked down my drawstring pants, and then his voice went soft and stuttery as he explained that I was nobody now and that he owned me, that this was what I always wanted and needed as a woman, that we would do this as many times and in as many ways as he needed because he was “my boss now.” His phrase. Almost gentle like a young doctor instructing his patient if not for the violent bright of the fluorescent showing the grime everywhere and the sneer that kept steeling his mouth. I moved how and where he asked and when he could not come as he took me from behind he started hitting me on my back, first with an open hand and then a fist. He asked me to say things. I wouldn’t at first. Pleasing him was not the point. He knocked my head against the mirror. Then I did.

He was after predictable things. But the words, as over-circulated as they are, can and do alter wildly with the scenario; they are porous so become filled with the squeaking timbre of the man’s voice, with the hollowness of your own; there’s the banality of the broken soap dispenser as you say
fuck me,
the haze and brown age spots of an ancient mirror over the sink as you say
that feels good,
and the blessed strangeness of it, degradation I’d allowed that day. I was wet, actually for a time, out of gratitude perhaps, that this act was nothing I would mourn as I was mourning suddenly and would yet mourn. That was the point, that day and on others to come. I had bruises, abrasions inside me, on my forehead, backside for weeks after, but, like Hope, I had hardly felt them either.

*   *   *

I missed my stop. I’d been pulled under. I became another vibrating body thrown in on itself, remembering to the rhythm of the train, of other bodies, half there, coming and going, seeing and not seeing. The girl and her makeup were gone. As was her admirer.

At Union Square, I turned around, went back south. It exhausted me, the effort, made me feel too acutely that so much of human life is deciding when to resist and when not to, when you can be carried and when you cannot, cannot afford to be.

Because I was weary as I reached the ferry terminal, where I came to search for Mr. Coughlan, the effects of the place did not dawn on me right away. The high ceilings, glass walls, its white metal bones. Its own environment much like an airport. What I did see as I climbed the escalator to the main concourse was a handful of security guards, chatting in desultory poses, half-bored. The patches on their blue jackets indicated they belonged to a private company. A few held yellow Labs on loose leashes. Affable, smiling dogs, tongues hanging. You had to pass through a line of low-grade metal detectors the size of tombstones to get to the waiting area. No one remarked me as I passed. There were only three shops: a bakery, a newspaper stand, and a deli; and lines of benches were made of a brindled brown and gray granite that sent a chill through me when I sat down.

Another security guard stood in the far corner of the structure, on the side with the Statue of Liberty to his left, behind him. The harbor’s green lady was too far away and too small at this distance to be sure of what she was holding up (though I knew what it was; didn’t we all?), but from that distance it was clear only that she did so without fail, whatever the weather. I raised myself up and walked over to the man. I was too worn to smile convincingly so I didn’t. The water just outside took the sun and threw it in my eyes.

“I’m looking for a friend, a tenant of mine,” I told the man carefully, squinting. “He was a ferryman in his day. I thought maybe he’d visit here, want to ride the ferry. He’s an older man, white-haired, not tall.” The face I addressed myself to was impassive with wide planes; bags tried to hide his eyes and his lips were dry.

“Lady, a lot of people pass through here—”

“Of course, I thought maybe he’d ride back and forth or maybe he’d sit here, for the view.” He looked over his shoulder briefly to check the view, as if to verify we saw the same thing.

“No one’s allowed to stay on the boat anymore. They have to get off if they want to get on again, and we don’t encourage multiple trips.” He had no yellow Lab of his own, this man. He crossed his arms. I guessed he wasn’t far from retirement. His skin was the color of teak yet still managed to be sallow. “They get on here,” he pointed to loading doors 1 and 2, “get off there,” then to a corridor that separated the disembarking from the waiting area. Traffic control.

“I’ll wait and see. Thank you.”

He said nothing in reply, only looked me up and down, not with derision, but because suspicion was part of the job, of the urban days we shared now. It was also a punctuation mark: He returned to surveilling the great hall, had other things, people, to watch.

Back in my stone seat, all I saw was outside, how the breeze ran over the water’s surface, stirring the sunlight there, turning it into waves. New Jersey’s shore across the way, to the west, was hazy with green growth and made to seem paltry, a scattered strip under the dominance of sky.

The security man stalked off to join his coworkers; I heard a shot of laughter. Maybe they were tickled by the woman who thought they would recognize one old man in thousands of travelers, or by the notion that all old ferrymen collected here. Or maybe not, maybe I did not matter much. It was far-fetched that I’d find him—I knew that as well as they did—but I liked all the sky offered here. So would Mr. Coughlan. Of that I was certain, and it consoled me. It was not always easy to know expanse, real expanse in New York City, unless you were determined or rich. Most of us here traded in confines—of a train, an office, an apartment under or over a stack of them, of streets lined with tall structures that divvy up and often block the light. But here expanse, along with the day’s generosity or lack of it, depending on the weather and season, was given on all sides of the high glass box. Trees from Battery Park at the right edge of the view shook their moving parts in the air.

I closed my eyes, memorizing it all, imagining room inside me for all of it, leaves shaking, clouds splitting, blue as vast backdrop to this and me and more, and feeling something loosen ever so slightly. It was worth the visit, to see what I could see. I considered riding to the other side, but I’d last ridden the ferry with my husband, from the old terminal. How he’d liked to stand in the front of the boat on the lower deck and whoop and laugh at the motion. He was, at times, vengeful in his pursuit of joy, of new air. It exhilarated me, his boldness; it made me bold. I hollered too, at the air, the screaming birds, at ghosts, as he’d like to describe them to me—of the British, who’d seized Staten Island at the start of the Revolutionary War, the same forces who soon occupied Manhattan and made its occupants suffer at every opportunity and those occupants who endured it rather than see their city burn. Ah, but those Staten Islanders (
right there!
), they wanted to secede from New York City as recently as 1989; they were still part of a place apart, their own island.

We did not have to get off then to come back, so we did not—we were allowed to be children at sea, so we were—but now passengers were required to get off. If Mr. Coughlan was on the incoming ferry, he would have to pass by me if he meant to keep crossing the harbor.

Around me a press of bodies would eventually form. A woman yanked her small son to his feet to walk until, exasperated by his refusal, she lifted him off the ground by his arm. A girl yelled at what I took to be her boyfriend, “Why you gotta say those things to me?”

“Can’t I be me? Be who I
really
am?” he replied.

Then they were gone, the smells of sweat and food and perfume, the conflicts, pleasure bolting to hit the high ceiling, the leisurely postures, shreds of conversations, of sex, and we few were left alone again. I was glad each time and also sad, inexplicably, for a moment, not to get up and go with the rest. Perhaps from some strange or ancient part of me missing the comforts of the pack.

I tried to sort through the exiting passengers, filing through the corridor now. If he was among them, yes, as unlikely as that was, I knew I would spot him, even if I did not stand and press my face to the glass. He had a very particular carriage; he still had power in his arms and shoulders and they pumped with greater strength than the rest of him moving him along. He’d be wearing a cap, his ancient weather-resistant parka.

I had the sense that someone was looking at me; I turned to see the security guard from the corner approaching. Maybe he planned to ask me to move on. No loitering, or not for long, since 9/11. He had a slight catch in his gait, a vulnerability in the knee, or perhaps the hip. A short-waisted man, his legs were long and thin; he operated them as if he was made to think about the bones inside them too keenly. I ducked my head. Whatever it was about sitting here and letting the fullness of the space work on me made me quick to emotion. For a second, I thought I might cry if he asked me to leave. “Ma’am,” he said in greeting, though he was older than me by at least twenty years. He eased himself onto the bench a few spots down from me. He leaned in, a confiding posture, his face more mobile than before, better circulated. Something in him had shifted as he watched me waiting for one old man or maybe it was the laughter he’d shared with his coworkers. How funny that is, under the right mix of circumstances, how we move in and out of our default attitudes, how we open and close.