Myers, you old crater-head,
Glad you decided to come. Nicaragua is the most beautiful place in the world. So you’re married, old man. I didn’t know. Congratulations, I say! Bring her over, I’d love to meet her. I don’t know what I can answer for you.
I haven’t had much luck in the on-the-hook myself—I’m a divorcé with a leftover shoot, as you might have read in the alumni notes. But I’ll advise as best I can. My mind is an enormous unscrolled newsreel. Bring some aspirin. I have a splitting headache.
Gray
Myers walked the lobby end to end. Two doormen stationed for night duty stared impassively after him. He passed them over and over. Didn’t know he was married… Oh, he had a splitting ache for the guy, all right. He’d make a watermark on the pavement with Gray’s brain. He wondered what the laws here were.
The world teemed out there, unmoored. He plugged letters into the screen, felt less every moment, felt nothing, felt dull. The gift shop closed. Behind the glass sat the T-shirt and postcard set-ups, the beach equipment, scuba stuff, drown book, sand machine. He wandered down another hall. Found the restaurant. Empty, dim. Coat check in its cubby-hole. Tablecloths covering their four edges. The window had a view of the city. The hotel, perched on its rock like a rat, its head bobbing over the whatnot—the waterline of town, the sunk sun. A pattern of antennae on rooftops, pale lines of sky. Inside was orderly, milk-clean, as if implying that the mind could be like that, as if that drastic mess in the brain could be straightened. You could go inside and smooth everything over like a fresh roller of paint over dirty walls, hide the filth underneath, cover it over, shove it down in there, hard.
Sure, I’ll come. Where are you, Gray?
Above him, down hallways, doors shut. Guests performed their weary nightly series of floss, undress, sex. Clocks rocked to a stop for the dark hours. The doormen held their deadpan positions.
Myers believed in nothing and nobody, but somebody had an eye on him, must have, or else he would have paced all night. Somebody corralled him like a little mouse in, yes, a maze, lifting this wall, blocking that entrance, drawing a line down a corridor, an arrow for him to scurry over, a pellet at the foot of the door. And the night finally ended with him sitting down on the bed, at the edge of it, wedged into this country (how’d he get himself into this?), in the one room Gray obviously wasn’t (at least he was in the right country now), eyes closing, leaning back, his thoughts going along the edges, along the windowsill, the shower-stall ledge, along the night table, the edge of light and the space on the other side of the door, through it, over it, to the woman he’d left behind.
Chapter Six
It took a month for Myers to see that she was following someone else.
At first he noticed nothing but her. Her figure on the street filled his mind. He saw no one in front of her. Then he did. Once, twice. The same shuffle, the slouch in the crowd. At last it was plain:
she was following a man.
Long jacket, briefcase in hand, hat. A man. A year or two younger than Myers. A little thinner, an inch shorter. Not so unlike Myers. He hiked along. People collected on the sidewalks. He drew into them and emerged without any special flair. He raised a hand to adjust the forward tilt of his hat in the same way Myers might.
That’s what she was doing. She watched from the corner or she sat on a bar stool a few feet away. She waited for the man to come out of shops. She followed him down stairs to the subway. In rain, she stepped his paintbrush line, slickered by Myers who had berated her into wearing rain gear that morning, knowing she’d be out in a storm following some goddamn man around.
And this:
she did not know him
. Or rather, he did not know her. He never bothered to look her way, nod or smile, never worked his way to her table to say hello, never held open the door if she was behind him. Now and then he pivoted and she swerved into his view. He did not take her in. His eyes went over her, unstirred, buzzless. She did not heap up his heart in any way at all.
The three of them were walking along like a shifty Simon Says. Myers tracking his wife tracking a stranger. The stranger was pulling them along like a string toy.
What the hell did she think she was doing following some guy all over creation? And if Myers was expected to believe there was anything innocent in it—well, did she think he was a complete and utter fool?
At night Myers lay next to her. He dreamed that she was dreaming of the man. He dreamed that he, Myers, was absent and that man was here—and that man was lying here dreaming of his wife.
If anyone thought Myers was going to give away his position now, they had another thing coming.
Best-case scenario: The guy had committed a crime she had witnessed. Another guy had committed a crime and this man was the victim. She needed to tell him something. Someone paid her to follow him, it was a job she made money at and invested in secret. There were other reasons—political, philosophical, messianic. She expected terrible or wonderful events to stem from him. She had gone mad.
Next, this:
he
knew the man
.
Or thought he did. The man was familiarish. He got a quick look in a men’s room. Then a long stare from the side. Where had Myers seen that face?
A procession of images passed behind his eyes.
The name didn’t come at first, just the outline of his head against a collegiate backdrop. Then the shoulders, the form of him, a figure propped up at the bus stop years ago, of him bent over his tray in the dorm café. Myers lay the one over the other, stood them beside the man now receding down the street while Myers found himself stunned into a standstill.
Illumination. Gold came up in the pan.
The name was Gray.
They argued. It was her birthday and he stupidly said he loved her, handed the words over along with a gift, stupid because he didn’t feel like he did that day but he said it, he loved her, and she said, I don’t even know what that is. He said, That’s a nice comment to make to your husband, and she said, fine, she was just saying what was on her mind. If he wanted, she could keep what was on her mind where it was.
Odd thing to have on her mind, he said, considering she had heard him say it for almost two years running, not to mention on their very wedding night.
They were in the bedroom when this happened. Not in the bed but by the closet door. She was half-dressed and dressing further, getting ready to meet her friend Anita for a birthday dinner. He was half-undressed because he was staying home, had stayed home from work (had been missing too much) because he had come down with the flu (who wouldn’t, zigzagging around in the rain like an umbrella?) and was on his way to bed. He knew she’d ditch her friend and follow that man by herself.
She doesn’t know what that is, he mumbled. There are many things that he is that he doesn’t know what are.
You damn well used to know the word before, he said.
What word?
Love. As in, I love you.
I didn’t say I didn’t know the word, she said. I said I didn’t know what you meant when you said it.
Next, this:
she
didn’t know his name. Myers tried to be cute, said Gray’s name aloud, called him a client, inserted him into news stories, but she looked as bored as ever, as sunk into her own cesspit, and it was obvious—she’d never heard of him. Which why should that surprise him? Why else follow someone through sleet and sun, around the ironwork of this city, other than because you don’t know who he is?
For Christ’s sake. Jesus.
So she lied and sneaked with a regularity matched only by the rising sun and anybody within a few feet of her (Myers) was just going to have to live with it, buddy, and he certainly was.
What do you mean what did he mean? He didn’t know what he meant. I love you. He said it like he always does.
Married people say that all the time, he said.
It’s a vulgar phrase, she said. It means nothing. Why not simply say what you mean?
He wasn’t the only vulgar one. Might he remind her that she herself had said it many, many times herself?
The man Gray, whom his wife followed, sat alone in restaurants near other men who looked more or less like him, youngish, early thirties, also alone. No one seemed terrified of him or angry or alarmed. No one seemed to think that guy better get out of there or that he was some sort of sexual deviant. No one changed tables or moved farther down the bar at his approach. He wasn’t peculiar. He was normal-sized, normal-voiced, normal, not eccentric. Myers’s wife was normal-sized and normal-faced as well. And Myers too, normal. You never saw so many normal people sitting around calmly looking and not looking at each other.
They walked up broad streets, then narrow ones, fire escapes hanging overhead, water dripping from windows. And they walked by the opera house and the symphony and other cultural spots, museums of various sizes, some small enough to fit in a storefront window, some that took a block to approach and another to leave behind, a band of yammering tourists stamping outside. Inside—once Gray tramped them through some large art edifice—were the regulation objects, bottles and pictures, shipped in and stood up at intervals, identifying haiku on a tag below each one, telling what each one was in desponding abstraction. They wove through rooms, Myers a room or two behind. He stifled his own breathing, which had a distinguishable jagged lag due to a childhood accident. He thought she might recognize the sound and go back. It felt like they were walking through the maze of their own graves at that point.
If she no longer said it, that implied she was saying she didn’t.
She never said she was saying that. She never said she didn’t love him anymore.
Then what was she saying?
She didn’t know, she just didn’t know, and could they go one day, one
hour
, without an extravagant fight?
That, then her, walking out the door.
After that he didn’t say it anymore and neither did she. Its absence entered and chilled him.
He had a very penetrating stride, this guy. The most varied step Myers had ever seen, as if he suspected there were people trailing him and he wasn’t going to make it easy on anybody. The man continuously changed his pace, sped up, paused, raised an arm to his hat, examined the lines of newspaper machines or looked into a store window, then abruptly broke into an even step. Who knew just what this was about. He’d begin down a long street, then he’d stop, reverse himself as if he’d just remembered some smashed sandwich on his desk and meant to go back and retrieve
it. This set off a whole chain of reactions down the street with her hurrying out of the line of vision and Myers as well. Then just as suddenly the guy would change his mind and go back the other way.
The man left work between 5:25 and 6:10 and to get himself awake he would take a brisk walk. Myers and his wife would follow along. He’d go just about anywhere—by either river, under overpasses, it didn’t matter. He could go on for hours that way.
One night he was walking and he was going on and on, through the turns and sway of the vast park (the one dark blot in the middle of the city, yes, let’s have a stroll there by all means, why not, sure, his wife alone-ish, unprotected), and they went on and on and it got probably to be about eleven at night, and Myers fell asleep. As a matter of fact, before he fell asleep he thought to himself: My God, I’m going to fall asleep, and he did. He just kept going along, dozing, he must have, because the next thing he knew, he crashed into a park map-board and woke up. He didn’t know how long he’d been walking or where he was or how long he’d been asleep, but his wife was gone and Gray was gone. Somehow the man had led her out of there and somehow safely home.
The ground froze. It chipped under their shoes. Gray remained in the Battery area, moving in swift circles until the streets emptied and the place took on an industrial sheen. Dark shapes patched the sky. The street shone like a river. The posters were coming off the walls in paper flakes. Gray walked ahead. Only her shoes made sound—a light squeak now and then, almost nothing. She paused as if listening. Had she heard Myers? She looked like a struck match, light hair blowing, body trembling. She did not turn. No one saw anyone who wasn’t supposed to. Myers held up a finger and blotted her out.
Then they all went on.
Gray himself, when Myers managed a glance, always had the same startled look on his face, as if he’d just received an insult. And he seemed not to know how to stop once set in motion, apart from the pauses and the demented jerks.