Late Air

by Jaclyn Gilbert

She hadn’t come back for any meets either, not even Heptagonals at Van Cortlandt, like the most accomplished alumni often did. Maybe it wasn’t too late to write her now, but when he checked, her email wasn’t in the network. He could have tried another online search, to see if her info was attached to a link, but he didn’t have the energy. He powered his computer off. Flipped his office light.

  Later in his apartment, around 7:30, he put a slice of bread into the toaster oven and filled a pot with water to boil eggs. He pulled the carton out of the refrigerator, five left of the dozen he’d consume over a matter of weeks; he never ate the eggs in the order of their rows, but kept the patterns symmetrical along the two axes—always rotationally symmetrical—so the center of mass stayed in the middle of the carton.

  When he and Nancy were first married, she used to rearrange the cartons, put the eggs back, one after the other, neat in their rows; she’d assumed he was being scattered, rushed—until he’d explained his reasoning, the laws of centering weight, how to keep everything balanced, but still she’d rearrange them back, as if she hadn’t believed him—as if everything he did was arbitrarily compulsive, ungrounded.

  The toaster oven was ticking—he listened to the timer tick, until the machine finished, dinged. He reached straight in, fingers searing, dropping the toast bare on the counter. He ate on his couch, over his coffee table without a plate, more books than he remembered stacked around him in three short towers.

  Nancy had taken all the bookcases. Had them shipped to her new apartment in West Haven, and Murray would never buy a new one, not even a small one. The only thing he’d kept was their pine headboard from an antique shop on State Street. His only new purchase had been a desk, just something to fill the second bedroom’s emptiness, except for scrapings of the border he’d peeled off and had tried to paint over so long ago, and a half dozen boxes overstuffed with old files, ones Nancy had wanted to convert into a digital archive for him. But he’d refused her help then—just after they’d married. She used to say, Isn’t there one thing I can help you with? He banished that thought. She is gone, he told himself, nibbling his toast.

  He didn’t know how much time had passed before he smelled the burning. In the kitchen, he discovered the water had boiled all the way out of the pot, hot air hissing against metal, this bluish singe at its base, more gas and smoke that Murray coughed on, hands shaking as he dropped the pan in the sink, arms flailing to clear the air.

  He waited for the heat to dissipate before he filled the pan with water, and he shuddered at the continued hissing, the sound of steam. On his way home, he’d picked up a bottle of scotch he’d planned to save for later, for the weekend—a long winter—but he was tugging it out of its paper bag now, crumpling the paper, the receipt. His heart rate had not gone down; it was 102 beats per minute, tachycardia, he thought, drinking straight from the bottle. He drank on the sofa in his living room—minutes, hours he couldn’t be certain of—until eventually the books became less defined, until he couldn’t hear his heart anymore, his breathing was steadier. More emptiness and quiet, surrounding his thoughts, folding him in.

  He slept on the floor, crumbs at the corner of his mouth, which stayed open, breath heavy through the night.

  EIGHTEEN

  Somehow, in just two weeks’ time, Caroline had convinced Nancy to quit her job at Beinecke for the one at the Morgan. Several bottles of wine had been involved, and Caroline had illuminated a blank canvas, and as a moth drawn to a porch lamp in the night, Nancy could not have anticipated the magnitude of that sudden light—how much this prospect trumped everything else, even her more recent successes at Beinecke. There was no denying it: work had long since ceased to offer refuge from the past. The majority of her coworkers scorned her affair, and Nancy remained silent behind the haze of this realization coming into focus, her truth like a small, luminous marble rolling down a long hill, inconsequential under the relentless force of gravity.

  Of course, it had been easy for others to judge her, Nancy thought: every year since Murray’s success with Sarah Lloyd, Murray had managed to bring at least one of his girls to Nationals, making him a kind of local legend. And this had made it easier, she thought, for coworkers to assume she was the broken one, the weaker one. Nancy had felt it in the lunches and happy hours she hadn’t been invited to, the reluctance of her superiors to accept her ideas when they’d once extolled them. She felt in many ways that everyone had been waiting for her to leave.

  She would leave it all behind, then.

  Caroline helped Nancy land a moderately sized apartment on First Avenue in the East Village, though it was on the sixth floor of a walk-up. In carrying the first of her boxes up a steep, narrow staircase, she’d barely made it to the top. She’d needed to stop and recover her breath several times. That was the day she’d taken the plunge, the fourth of March, just three days after she signed and dated her new lease. If she wanted to survive, she was going to quit smoking for good, and that was the first thing she did. In the kitchen, she used a random takeout bag on the counter to throw out her last pack of cigarettes—though it was only an hour later, when she was lying on her belly over the cold hardwood floors, encircled by all of her boxes, pen quivering as she listed essentials like trash bags, sponges, and Q-tips in a thin spiral-bound notebook, that she fantasized about the pack still within reach and the proximity of the roof, just a shoulder shove away, where she would be free to blow smoke among views of other buildings, all at various slants, the view of the Brooklyn Bridge distant and beautiful; she would be free there to dismiss and scatter her debris.

  Certainly the previous tenants had left theirs in the refrigerator: tuna fish salad gray and puffy with mold, the juices of fruits and vegetables rotted and sticky between plastic crevices, soured milk and cottage cheese stinging her nose. But the worst part had been the jars of baby food, the pureed carrots and apples and peas. Many of them half-eaten, and as she added cleaning supplies, toothbrush holder, and shower rack, she felt the baby’s presence even if there was no scent, no remnants of need.

  The nearest corner grocery store was on Ninth Street. Under its blue awning, an elderly Chinese man cut and arranged flesh flowers. Nancy had burned her finger testing the efficacy of the oven, and when she stepped inside, the wound throbbed. She hastily picked up a few things to get by, a box of instant oatmeal, a carton of eggs. When she was in the aisle for household items, she dropped overpriced sponges and bleach in her basket, and then at checkout, she reached for a box of Neosporin, just in case. But the box seemed too light, and it was: empty. She thought, The city, this giant rip-off with angry, entitled inhabitants stealing and leaving messes behind for others to clean up.

  There were two people before her at checkout, so she distracted herself with a tabloid. Somehow affairs among movie stars soothed her—their marriages never lasted, and the children they adopted, ones with eccentric names they’d deliberated, made her oddly hopeful.

  On her way back to the apartment, bones aching up the stairwell, she reminded herself that she had moved here to embrace her singleness, but she could still fantasize, and when she did, her future was always some vague abstraction of the past. Though reality taught her it would be the opposite: starting over would require patient love and acceptance of herself, as Katherine had often reminded her. Was she capable of that? She’d said, Do you think you can do that? Forgive yourself?

  Nancy didn’t know. Forgiving herself meant looking in the mirror and accepting every body part that had once produced and nurtured a child; it meant choosing kind thoughts over judgmental ones when she made a mistake; it was comforting herself when she began to chase the same loops around fear and doubt; it was not this constant chastising, this berating voice that told her she wasn’t good enough and wouldn’t ever be. The voice of her parents, with her always, even as she tried to free herself.

  Nancy had already bleached the bathroom tiles. Now she was scrubbing the hollow belly of the claw-foot tub. The stains were permanent, and she d
id not know if she could take a bath knowing that a child had splashed in it, rubber toys floating as he or she kicked and laughed. She could see Jean in the tub that last time, Murray there, too, as they’d rinsed under her arms, and she had splashed the water, proud of the sounds, of what she could do.

  The first time someone asked them whether they had any children afterward, Murray had been there too. They’d been out to lunch and had run into the new fencing coach, who’d started after Jean had passed, and Nancy had had to tell him—passed, that terrible word seeming to belong only to those who had lived a full life. Murray had been silent after the fencing coach asked the question, and she’d had to answer it—to say those words alone. In time, she’d learned not to say it out of anger or tears—Katherine had taught her to say it openly, to not deny the fact that her child would always be with her, in everything, and so she sat with it, the feeling of Jean, even in the tightness of Nancy’s breath, as she breathed and scrubbed.

  When she finished, she showered in the clean tub, running soap along her body, cleaning dirt from her nails. She showered with her feet firm along the slippery porcelain she’d get a mat for tomorrow. Then she went to the bedroom and unpacked her robe, and she made her bed. She still had to order a bed frame. Tonight she’d sleep on box springs with a set of fresh sheets and the mint-green quilt she’d taken from her parents’ house, the one that used to hang on a stand in her and Murray’s bedroom.

  It was 2:00 a.m., a Saturday, and she was lying on her bed, looking up at the ceiling like she and Murray had done from time to time. She breathed in dust and heat, absorbed the sputtering sound of pipes. The city noise, the diffuse bleat of taxicabs and the asthmatic wheeze of bus brakes, the rumble of delivery trucks, and the occasional prickle of sirens. She would adjust to this, she thought. She went to her box of fiction, which she’d alphabetized by author, and opened Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. She’d just finished reading Woolf’s diaries, and she hoped they would change how she read the novel this time around. This would be her eleventh, clear by the notes flooding the margins, in different color pens, which she regretted, because now the notes distracted her, and made it impossible to see anything but the images of light and shadow she’d always been so keen to underline—markings that made her look up to see them at play in the room, and then back in the pages.

  At 6:34 a.m., she awoke with the wings of her novel spread over her chest. There were the same city sounds, but she had the frightening feeling that she’d forgotten her passport or social security card. She would not be able to start work in two days without them. But there they were, in the accordion file of important papers, along with her divorce agreement, Jean’s birth and death certificates. Her life, its blueprint, to be tucked away in a file cabinet.

  She did not know if it was her loneliness that made her think of Murray more now so much as the fear—the fear she saw in every patched hole and the emptiness of the cabinets she had yet to fully stock, the missing bookshelves she did not know why she hadn’t brought with her, this fear she’d made a terrible mistake. Had she worked hard enough to understand him? If she’d accepted his silence, his need to put everything into work, would things have turned out differently? She thought of that first walk-through of their apartment, following the broker around, sizing up the large living room, the old kitchen: this hope of leaving the person she’d been behind, even if it came with old appliances and creaking floors.

  She thought of all the furniture she’d left behind with Richard, the bookcases, the kitchen table, the glassware that had been Murray’s mother’s, the stoneware she’d found in Aix-en-Provence when she’d taken the train there one weekend during her fellowship. She’d told herself it was too hard to manage, too expensive to move it all, when the truth was she never wanted to see Richard again, never wanted to have to call him to coordinate pickups, to have to explain her choices; she wanted to keep the past separate and removed, like a lost, forgotten limb. But she should have known you never forgot, that you always felt the ghost of that limb, of what had been—this ghost who told her she should have been braver with Murray, strong enough to have at least mailed him back the glassware that belonged to him, to at least have packed up the French pottery and taken it with her, the coffee cups she’d always loved so much.

  She’d once taken great care to tell Murray all about how she’d met the potter at his tiny studio in the countryside—about the number of trials that went into making a single cup—and Murray had smiled and said, I like the rims, which were uneven, but still she’d thought he would never understand her experience inside that studio, where one man’s whole livelihood depended on the ratio of clay to water, the even speed of his wheel as he spun it, pressing the pedal down, waiting for his art to reach into existence. It was this thought, like another ghost, that would remind her of her pregnancy books: one of them had warned her about stoneware, the potential risk of high-lead content—and for this, Murray had assumed she was being foolish. These cups are fine. She would make herself sick, drive herself crazy. But she’d blamed him for that as well, for not acknowledging her every fear, as if his denial were inextricable from the fact of the child they had lost.

  But the truth was Nancy’s own obsessions had made her blind to the details of Murray’s smile as he drank his coffee, the way he’d reached for her hand in their new apartment, just three months of being married, the way he’d said, I love that this cup makes you happy. She felt tears gathering there, where Murray’s words were, the simple affirmation of them.

  Maybe people became the best and worst versions of what you projected onto them, she thought—they became the stories you told yourself, so they filled the holes of your own story, the ones you didn’t want to look at. Murray would never share her own experience of joy, or love, or pain—the absence of the child she had felt form slowly week by week in her body, then leave her as slowly over the years, the burning hole of the ghost of the flesh and bones they had buried, but he had been there too; he had suffered.

  When she was thirteen, Nancy’s aunt Lilian on her mother’s side had passed away from breast cancer. Nancy’s mother had been so enraged about the late diagnosis, after Lilian had been complaining of a lump the doctor maintained was just a benign cyst, but then as other symptoms surfaced, and the second set of scans came back six months later, the doctor could see the fingernail speck of cancer had grown into something inoperable, something that had spread into her lymph nodes. The night after Lilian died, Nancy’s mother had wanted her father to hold her. She had wanted him to feel the same pain, but he couldn’t—it was not his sister. Nancy had wept with her mother, partly because her mother had been so hysterical and inconsolable, and partly because her father had failed to weep, failed, it seemed, to love her aunt as much as she and her mother had.

  Nancy’s mother never forgave her father for that, and Nancy had thought her mother was right: it was because her father, like Murray, had seemed incapable of feeling. But now she could see it was just what her mother had seen—her mother saw what she’d needed to through her grief—not that her father had been suffocated by that pressure. As much as she’d tried to be everything her parents weren’t, in marrying Murray, in resolving to raise Jean differently with him, Nancy had never completely escaped the unfulfilled desires and expectations of her own childhood. The ghosts of her parents were with her always, remnants of need that seeped into her fears and desires, whether she’d wanted them to or not. It was too impossible to look at herself honestly, clearly, without needing to point her finger at Murray, for all that he should have provided and protected her from. In blaming him, she had repeated her past. And there was no telling how these same ghosts, the way she saw the world through her own parents, would have influenced her choices, in raising her child, even as she’d sought escape, an opposite future, in Murray and Jean.

  Her loneliness, this singularity of experience that was her own, she thought, in this new expanse of space: a space only she could fill in time.

&
nbsp; She already had the key to her new office. She could round out her bookcases before Monday, prepare her desk. That Saturday, later in the afternoon, she carried her most cherished classics, her whole Everyman’s Library, along with reference texts, journals, and notebooks, in tote bags, just to Third Avenue, where she caught the bus heading uptown. Tomorrow would be the essentials, for which she had her own rare editions: Eliot’s Middlemarch; Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain; the short novels of Marguerite Duras.

  She had met her colleagues already. The director, Martin Swanson, had introduced her as a “New Haven celebrity,” and his assistant, Frida, had asked if she’d tried Pepe’s pizza, and an office intern, Carla, had wanted to know with whom she’d collaborated at Yale. And while she was glad for a certain degree of anonymity, she was slightly annoyed at these cliché references and assumptions. But she was going to have to get over it. After all, she was the new person here and still had to prove her abilities.

  The first week at her new job, Martin wanted her to attend a monthly review meeting to learn about extant projects, and she still had to better orient herself with several shared spreadsheets on the server with tentative exhibition names and dates, as well as the acquisition status of works the library was bidding for. How hadn’t she foreseen the difficulty of this transition? The number of folders she’d have to click through one after another, only to discover that the most important files required an authorization code, and when IT turned out to comprise a third-party entity in India, Nancy was even more frustrated. Eventually she yielded remote access to a consultant—he had not given his name, and his accent was impossible to fully parse—and as she watched, her mouse moved around like a phantom. The opening and closing of more unknown folders only enhanced her sense of estrangement, led her to wonder if it was not too late to go back to Beinecke, since the familiarity of its own quirks seemed suddenly endearing, and she could reverse commute—but then Nancy shuddered at the thought of what it would mean to admit another failure to herself. She wondered how long until she’d have enough savings to start her own business, perhaps somewhere in the heart of the West Village, where there were loads of wealthy people who might like to hire her as their private archivist.