Authors: Michael Cunningham
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‘‘Yo
u need to finish your breakfast,’’ she says to him.
‘‘Okay,’’ he says.
They return to the kitchen. Her husband has washed his coffee cup, dried it, put it away. The boy sets about eating with a certain tractorish steadiness that has more to do with obedience than appetite. Laura pours herself a fresh cup of coffee, sits at the table. She lights a cigarette.
. . . the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
She exhales a rich gray plume of smoke. She is so tired. She was up until after two, reading. She touches her belly—is it bad for the new baby, her getting so little sleep? She hasn’t asked the doctor about it; she’s afraid he’ll tell her to stop reading altogether. She promises that tonight she’ll read less. She’ll go to sleep by midnight, at the latest.
She says to Richie, ‘‘Guess what we’re going to do today? We’re going to make a cake for your father’s birthday. Oh, what a big job we have ahead of us.’’
He nods gravely, judiciously. He seems unconvinced about something.
She says, ‘‘We’re going to make him the best cake he’s ever seen. The very best. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?’’
Again, Richie nods. He waits to see what will happen next.
Laura watches him through the meandering vine of cigarette smoke. She will not go upstairs, and return to her book. She will remain. She will do all that’s required, and more.
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Mr
s . Dall ow ay
C
lariss
a carries her armload of flowers out into Spring Street. She imagines Barbara still in the cool dimness on the far side of the door, continuing to live in what Clarissa can’t help thinking of now as the past (it has to do, somehow, with Barbara’s sorrow, and the racks of ribbons on the back wall) while she herself walks into the present, all this: the Chinese boy careening by on a bicycle; the number 281 written in gold on dark glass; the scattering of pigeons with feet the color of pencil erasers (a bird had flown in through the open window of her fourth-grade classroom, violent, dreadful); Spring Street; and here she is with a huge bouquet of flowers. She will stop by Richard’s apartment to see how he’s doing (it’s useless to call, he never answers), but first she goes and stands shyly, expectantly, not too close to the trailer from which the famous head emerged. A small crowd is gathered there, mostly tourists, and
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Clariss
a positions herself beside two young girls, one with hair dyed canary yellow and the other with hair dyed platinum. Clarissa wonders if they intended to so strongly suggest the sun and the moon.
Sun says to Moon, ‘‘It was Meryl Streep, definitely Meryl Streep.’’
Clarissa is excited, despite herself. She was right. There is a surprisingly potent satisfaction in knowing that her vision was shared by another.
‘‘No way,’’ says Moon. ‘‘It was Susan Sarandon.’’
It was not, Clarissa thinks, Susan Sarandon. It may have been Vanessa Redgrave but it was certainly not Susan Sarandon. ‘‘No,’’ says Sun, ‘‘it was Streep. Trust me.’’ ‘‘It was not Meryl Streep.’’ ‘‘It was. It fucking was.’’ Clarissa stands guiltily, holding her flowers, hoping the star
will show herself again, embarrassed by her own interest. She is not given to fawning over celebrities, no more than most people, but can’t help being drawn to the aura of fame—and more than fame, actual immortality—implied by the presence of a movie star in a trailer on the corner of MacDougal and Spring Streets. These two girls standing beside Clarissa, twenty if not younger, defiantly hefty, slouching into each other, laden with brightly colored bags from discount stores; these two girls will grow to middle and then old age, either wither or bloat; the cemeteries in which they’re buried will fall eventually into ruin, the grass grown wild, browsed at night by dogs; and when all that remains of these girls is a few silver fillings lost under
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groun
d the woman in the trailer, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or even Susan Sarandon, will still be known. She will exist in archives, in books; her recorded voice will be stored away among other precious and venerated objects. Clarissa allows herself to continue standing, foolish as any fan, for another few minutes, in hope of seeing the star emerge. Yes, just another few minutes, before the humiliation is simply too much to bear. She remains before the trailer with her flowers. She watches the door. After several minutes have passed (nearly ten, although she hates admitting it) she leaves suddenly, indignantly, as if she’s been stood up, and walks the few blocks uptown to Richard’s apartment.
This neighborhood was once the center of something new and wild; something disreputable; a part of the city where the sound of guitars drifted all night out of bars and coffeehouses; where the stores that sold books and clothing smelled the way she imagined Arab bazaars must smell: incense and rich, dung-y dust, some sort of wood (cedar? camphor?), something fruitily, fertilely rotting; and where it had seemed possible, quite possible, that if you passed through the wrong door or down the wrong alley you would meet a fate: not just the familiar threat of robbery and physical harm but something more perverse and transforming, more permanent. Here, right here, on this corner, she had stood with Richard when Richard was nineteen— when Richard was a firm-featured, hard-eyed, not-quitebeautiful dark-haired boy with an impossibly long and graceful, very pale neck—here they had stood and argued... about what? A kiss? Had Richard kissed her, or had she, Clarissa, only believed Richard was about to kiss her, and evaded it? Here on this corner (in front of what had been a head shop and is now a delicatessen) they had kissed or not kissed, they had certainly argued, and here or somewhere soon after, they had canceled their little experiment, for Clarissa wanted her freedom and Richard wanted, well, too much, didn’t he always? He wanted too much. She’d told him that what happened over the summer had been exactly that, something that happened over a summer. Why should he want her, a wry and diffident girl, no breasts to speak of (how could she be expected to trust his desire?), when he knew as well as she the bent of his deepest longings and when he had Louis, worshipful Louis, heavy-limbed, far from stupid, a boy Michelangelo would have been pleased to draw? Wasn’t it, really, just another poetic conceit, Richard’s idea of her? They had not had a large or spectacular fight, just a squabble on a corner—there had been no question, even then, of deep damage to the friendship—and yet as she looks back it seems definitive; it seems like the moment at which one possible future ended and a new one began. That day, after the argument (or possibly before it), Clarissa had bought a packet of incense and a gray alpaca jacket, secondhand, with rose-shaped buttons carved out of bone. Richard had eventually gone off to Europe with Louis. What, Clarissa wonders now, ever became of the alpaca jacket? It seems that she had it for years and years, and then suddenly didn’t have it anymore.
She turns down Bleecker, goes up Thompson. The neighborhood today is an imitation of itself, a watered-down carnival
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r tourists, and Clarissa, at fifty-two, knows that behind these doors and down these alleys lies nothing more or less than people living their lives. Grotesquely, some of the same bars and coffeehouses are still here, done up now to resemble themselves for the benefit of Germans and Japanese. The stores all sell essentially the same things: souvenir T-shirts, cheap silver jewelry, cheap leather jackets.
At Richard’s building she lets herself in through the vestibule door and thinks, as she always does, of the word ‘‘squalid.’’ It is almost funny, the way the entrance to Richard’s building so perfectly demonstrates the concept of squalor. It is so obviously, dreadfully squalid that it still surprises her slightly, even after all these years. It surprises her in almost the way a rare and remarkable object, a work of art, can continue to surprise; simply because it remains, throughout time, so purely and utterly itself. Here again, surprisingly, are the faded yellow-beige walls, more or less the color of an arrowroot biscuit; here is the fluorescent panel on the ceiling emitting its sputtering, watery glare. It is worse—much worse—that the cramped little lobby was cheaply and half heartedly renovated a decade ago. The lobby is far more discouraging with its soiled white brick-patterned linoleum and its artificial ficus tree than it could possibly have been in its original decrepitude. Only the ancient marble wainscoting—a palomino-colored marble, veined in blue and gray with a deep yellow, smoky overlay, like a very fine old cheese, now hideously echoed by the yellowish walls—indicates that this was once a building of some consequence; that hopes were nurtured here; that upon entering the lobby people were ex
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pecte
d to feel as if they were moving in an orderly fashion into a future that held something worth having.
She gets into the elevator, a tiny chamber of intensified, bleached brightness, paneled in wood-grain metal, and pushes the button for the fifth floor. The elevator door sighs and rattles shut. Nothing happens. Of course. It works only intermittently; in fact, it is something of a relief to abandon it and climb the stairs instead. Clarissa presses the button marked with a chipped white ‘‘O’’ and, after a nervous hesitation, the door rattles open again. She is always afraid of getting trapped between floors in this elevator—she can all too easily imagine the long, long wait; the cries for help to tenants who might or might not speak English and who might or might not care to intervene; the strange numbing deathlike fear of standing there, alone, for a considerable time, in the brilliant, stale-smelling emptiness, either looking or not looking at her distorted reflection in the dim circular mirror fastened to the upper right-hand corner. It is better, really, to find the elevator frankly inoperable, and to walk up five flights. It is better to be free.
She mounts the stairs, feeling both weary and bridal—virginal—with her armload of flowers. The treads of the stairs, chipped, worn down at their centers, are made of a peculiar, milky-black, rubberish substance. At each of the four landings a window offers a different view of laundry hanging from lines: flowered sheets, baby clothes, sweatpants; lurid in their inexpensive newness; not at all the sort of old-fashioned laundry— dark socks and elaborate women’s underwear, faded housedresses, luminous white shirts—that would make the air shaft
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l like something ordinary but marvelous, preserved from another time. Squalid, she thinks again. Simply, squalid.
Richard’s hallway, painted the same arrowroot-biscuit color, is still tiled as it must have been at the turn of the century (the linoleum gives out, mysteriously, on the second story); its floor, bordered in a mosaic of geometric, pale-yellow flowers, bears a single cigarette butt stained with red lipstick. Clarissa knocks at Richard’s door, pauses, knocks again.
‘‘Who is it?’’
‘‘Just me.’’
‘‘Who?’’
‘‘Clarissa.’’
‘‘Oh, Mrs. D. Oh, come in.’’
Isn’t it time, she thinks, to dispense with the old nickname? If he’s having a good enough day, she’ll bring it up: Richard, don’t you think it’s time to just call me Clarissa?
She opens the door with her key. She can hear Richard speaking in the other room, in a low, amused voice, as if he is imparting scandalous secrets. She can’t tell what he is saying— she makes out the word ‘‘hurl,’’ which is followed by Richard’s low, rumbling laugh, a slightly pained sound, as if laughter were something sharp that had caught in his throat.
Well, Clarissa thinks, it’s another day of this, then—not a day, certainly, to bring up the subject of names.
How can she help resenting Evan and all the others who got the new drugs in time; all the fortunate (‘‘fortunate’’ being, of course, a relative term) men and women whose minds had not yet been eaten into lace by the virus. How can she help feeling
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angr
y on behalf of Richard, whose muscles and organs have been revived by the new discoveries but whose mind seems to have passed beyond any sort of repair other than the conferring of good days among the bad.
His apartment is, as always, dim and close, overheated, full of the sage and juniper incense Richard burns to cover the smells of illness. It is unutterably cluttered, inhabited here and there by a wan circle of pulverized non-dark emanating from the brown-shaded lamps in which Richard will tolerate no bulb more powerful than fifteen watts. The apartment has, more than anything, an underwater aspect. Clarissa walks through it as she would negotiate the hold of a sunken ship. It would not be entirely surprising if a small school of silver fish darted by in the half-light. These rooms do not seem, in any serious way, to be part of the building in which they happen to occur, and when Clarissa enters and closes behind her the big, creaky door with the four locks (two of them broken) she feels, always, as if she has passed through a dimensional warp—through the looking glass, as it were; as if the lobby, stairwell, and hallway exist in another realm altogether; another time.
‘‘Good morning,’’ she calls.
‘‘Is it still morning?’’
‘‘Yes. It is.’’
Richard is in the second room. The apartment contains only two rooms: the kitchen (into which one enters) and the large other room, where Richard’s life (what remains of it) is conducted. Clarissa passes through the kitchen, with its ancient stove and large white bathtub (dimly luminous as marble in the
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room’
s eternal dusk), its faint odor of gas and old cooking, its piled-up cardboard cartons full of . . . who knows what?, its gilt-framed oval mirror that gives back (always a bit of a shock, no matter how thoroughly expected) her pale reflection. Over the years, she has gotten used to ignoring the mirror.