by Colum McCann
I propped the empty white handbag against the stoop and walked on without it. She could have it. Take it all, except the photos.
I stuck out my hand and a gypsy cab stopped immediately. I slid into the backseat. He adjusted his rearview mirror.
“Yeah?” he said, drumming away on the steering wheel.
Try measuring certain days on a weighing scale.
“Hey, lady,” he shouted. “Where you going?”
Try measuring them.
“ Seventy- sixth and Park,” I said.
I had no idea why. Certain things we just can’t explain. I could just as easily have gone home: I had enough money tucked away under my mattress to pay for the cab fare ten times over. And the Bronx was closer than Claire’s house, that I knew. But we wove into the traffic. I didn’t ask the driver to turn around. The dread rose in me as the streets clicked by.
The doorman buzzed her and she ran down the stairs, came right out and paid the cab driver. She glanced down at my feet—a little barrier of blood had bubbled up over the edge of my heel, and the pocket of my dress was torn—and something turned in her, some key, her face grew soft. She said my name and discomforted me a moment. Her arm went around me and she took me straight up in the elevator, down the corridor towards her McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 309
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bedroom. The curtains were drawn. A deep scent of cigarettes came from her, mixed with fresh perfume. “Here,” she said as if it was the only place in the world. I sat on the clean unrumpled linen as she ran the bath. The splash of water. “You poor thing,” she called. There was a smell of perfumed salts in the air.
I could see my reflection in the bedroom mirror. My face looked puffed and worn. She was saying something, but her voice got caught up in the noise of the water.
The other side of the bed was dented. So, she had been lying down, maybe crying. I felt like flopping down into her imprint, making it three times the size. The door opened slowly. Claire stood there smiling. “We’ll get you right,” she said. She came to the edge of the bed, took my elbow, led me into the bathroom, sat me on a wooden stool by the bath. She leaned over and tested the warmth of the water with her knuckle. I un-rolled the hose from my legs. Bits of skin came off my feet. I sat at the edge of the bath and swung my legs across. The water stung. The blood slid from my feet. Some vanishing sunset, the red glow dispersing in the water.
Claire laid a white towel out in the middle of the bathroom floor, at my feet. She handed me some sticky bandages, the back paper already peeled off. I couldn’t help the thought that she wanted to dry my feet with her hair.
“I’m okay, Claire,” I told her.
“What did they steal?”
“Only my handbag.”
I felt charged with dread: she might think that all I wanted was the money she had offered me earlier to stay, to get my reward, my slave purse.
“There was no money in it.”
“We’ll call the police anyway.”
“The police?”
“Why not?”
“Claire . . .”
She looked at me blankly and then an understanding traveled across her eyes. People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don’t. There’s no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
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I bent down and put the bandages on the backs of my heels. They weren’t quite wide enough for the cut. I could already feel the sharp sting of having to take them off later.
“You know the worst of it?” I said.
“What?”
“She called me fat.”
“Oh, Gloria. I’m sorry.”
“It’s your fault, Claire.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s your fault.”
“Oh,” she said, a tremble of nerves in her voice.
“I told you I shouldn’t’ve had those extra doughnuts.”
“Oh!”
She threw her head back until her neck was taut, and reached out to touch my hand.
“Gloria,” she said. “Next time it’s bread and water.”
“Maybe a little pastry.”
I leaned down to towel my toes. Her hand drifted to my shoulder, but then she rose and said: “You need slippers.”
She rummaged in the closet for a pair of felt slippers for me and a dressing gown that must’ve belonged to her husband since her own wouldn’t have fit me. I shook my head, and hung the gown on a hook on the door. “No offense,” I said. I could live in my torn dress. She guided me into the living room. None of the plates or cups had been cleared from earlier. A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle. Ice was melting in a bowl. Claire was using the lemons we had cut instead of limes. She held the bottle high in the air and shrugged. Without asking she took out a second glass. “Excuse my fingers,” she said as she dropped ice into the glass.
It had been years since I’d had a drink. It felt cool at the back of my throat. Nothing mattered but that momentary taste.
“God, that’s good.”
“Sometimes it’s a cure,” she said.
Sunlight shone through Claire’s glass. It caught the color of lemon and the glass turned in her hands. She looked like she was weighing the world. She leaned back against the white of the couch and said: “Gloria?”
“ Uh- huh?”
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She looked away, over my head, to a painting in the corner of the room.
“The truth?”
“The truth.”
“I don’t normally drink, you know. It’s just today, with, you know, all that talking. I think I made a bit of a fool of myself.”
“You were fine.”
“I wasn’t silly?”
“You were fine, Claire.”
“I hate making a fool of myself.”
“You didn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“The truth’s not foolish,” she said.
She was swiveling her glass and watching the gin swirl in circles, a cyclone she wanted to drown herself in.
“I mean, about Joshua. Not the other stuff. I mean, I felt very silly when I said I’d pay you to stay. I just wanted someone to hang around.
With, you know, with me. Selfish, really, and I feel awful.”
“It happens.”
“I didn’t mean it.” She looked away. “And then when you left, I called your name. I wanted to run after you.”
“I needed to walk, Claire. That’s all.”
“The others were laughing at me.”
“I’m sure they weren’t.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.”
“Of course we will.”
She let out a long sigh and threw back the drink, poured herself another, but mostly tonic this time, not gin.
“Why did you come back, Gloria?”
“To get paid, of course.”
“Excuse me?”
“A joke, Claire, joke.”
I could feel the gin working under my tongue.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m a little slow this afternoon.”
“I’ve no idea, really,” I said.
“I’m glad you did.”
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“Nothing better to do.”
“You’re funny.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Oh!” she said. “Your choir. I forgot.”
“My what?”
“Your choir. You said you had
choir.”
“I don’t have choir, Claire. Never did. Never will. Sorry. No such thing.”
She seemed to chew on the thought for a moment and then broke out in a grin.
“You’ll stay awhile, though? Rest your feet. Stay for dinner. My husband should be home around six or so. You’ll stay?”
“Oh, I don’t think I should.”
“Twenty dollars an hour?” she said with a grin.
“You’ve got me,” I laughed.
We sat in happy quiet and she ran her fingers over the rim of her glass, but then she perked up and said suddenly: “Tell me about your boys again.”
Her question rankled. I didn’t want to think about my boys anymore.
In a strange way, all I wanted was to be surrounded by another, to be a part of somebody else’s room. I took a piece of lemon and slid it between my teeth and gums. The acid jarred me. I guess I wanted another sort of question altogether.
“Can I ask you something, Claire?”
“Of course.”
“Could we put on some music?”
“What?”
“I mean, I suppose I’m just still in a little bit of shock.”
“What sort of music?”
“Whatever you have. It makes me feel, I don’t know, it calms me down. I like having an orchestra around. Do you have opera?”
“Afraid not. You like opera?”
“All my savings. I go to the Met every chance I get. Way up in the gods.
Slip off my shoes and away I go.”
She rose and went to the record player. I couldn’t see the sleeve of the McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 313
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record she took out. She cleaned the vinyl with a soft yellow cloth and then she lifted the needle. She did everything small as if it was extraordinary and necessary. The music filled the room. A deep, hard piano: the hammers rippling across the strings.
“He’s Russian,” she said. “He can stretch his fingers to thirteen keys.”
—
i wa s h a p p y e nou gh the day my second husband found himself a younger version of the train he was riding towards oblivion. His hat had always been a helping too large on his head anyway. He upped and left me with three boys and a view of the Deegan. I didn’t mind. My last thought of him was that nobody ought to be as lonely as him, walking away. But it didn’t break my heart to close the door on him, or even to suck up the pride of a monthly check.
The Bronx was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. My boys wore brown hunting caps with earflaps. Later they threw the caps away and grew up into Afros. They hid pencils in their hair. We had our good days. I recall one summer afternoon when all four of us went to Foodland and raced up and down the frozen- food aisles with our shopping cart, keeping ourselves cool.
It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.
I asked Clarence one day why he was going and he said one or two things about liberty, but mostly he was doing it because he was bored.
Brandon and Jason said about the same thing too when their draft cards were dropped in our mailbox. It was the only mail that didn’t get stolen in the houses. The mailman carried around huge bags of gloom. There was heroin all over the projects in those years and I thought maybe my boys were right, they were getting themselves free. I’d seen far too many children slouched down in the corners with needles in their arms, little spoons sticking out of their shirt pockets.
I as much as opened the windows and told them to be on their merry way. They flew off. Not one of them came back.
Every time a branch of mine got to being a decent size, that wind just came along and broke it.
I sat in my chair in my living room, watching afternoon soap operas.
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I guess I ate. I suppose that’s what I did. I ate whatever I could. Alone.
Surrounded by packets of Velveeta and saltines, trying hard not to remember, switching channels and crackers and cheeses so the memories didn’t get me. I watched my ankles swell. Every woman with her own curse, and I suppose mine was not much worse than a whole lot of them.
Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accu-mulated in a sound. I took to listening on the radio every Sunday and spent whatever extra grief money the government gave me on tickets to the Metropolitan. I felt like I had a room full of voices. The music pouring out over the Bronx. I sometimes turned the stereo so loud the neighbors complained. I bought earphones. Huge ones that covered half my head. I wouldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. But there was a medicine in it.
That afternoon, too, I sat in Claire’s living room and let the music float over me: it wasn’t opera, it was piano, but it was a new pleasure—it thrilled me.
We went through three or four records. In the late afternoon or early evening, I wasn’t quite sure, but I opened my eyes and she was putting a light blanket on my knees. She sat back against the white of the couch, the glass held at her lips.
“You know what I’d like to do?” said Claire.
“What’s that?”
“I’d love to have a cigarette, right here, right now, in this room.”
She fumbled around on the table for a package.
“My husband hates it when I smoke indoors.”
She fished out a single cigarette. It was turned the wrong way around in her mouth and for a moment I thought she was going to light it that way, but she laughed and flipped it. The matches were wet and they dissolved at the touch.
I sat up and picked another book of matches off the table. She touched my hand.
“I think I’m a little tipsy,” she said, but her voice was elegant.
I had the horrific feeling then—right then—that she might lean across and try to kiss me, or make some strange approach, like you read about in magazines. We lose ourselves sometimes. I felt hollow inside McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 315
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and there seemed to be a cool wind moving along my body like a breeze down a street, but it was nothing of the sort—all she did was sit back and blow the smoke to the ceiling and allow the music to wash over us.
A short while later she set the table for three and heated up a chicken pot pie. The phone rang a few times but she didn’t answer. “I guess he’s going to be late,” she said.
On the fifth ring she picked it up. I could hear his voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying. She held the mouthpiece close and I could hear her whispering the words Dear and Solly and I love you, but the conversation was quick and sharp, as if she were the only one talking, and I got the strangest feeling that the response at his end of the line was silence.
“He’s in his favorite restaurant,” she told me, “celebrating with the D.A.”
It didn’t make much difference—it’s hardly like I wanted him to step down off the wall and get all friendly with me, but Claire had a far- off look in her eyes, like she wanted to be asked about him, and so I did. She launched into a long story about a promenade, a walk she was taking, a man who came towards her in long white flannel trousers, how he was the friend of some famous poet, how they used to go to Mystic every weekend, to a little restaurant there where he sampled their martinis; she went on and on and on, her eyes towards the front door, waiting for him to come home.
What drifted across my mind was how unusual it must have been, if anyone could have watched us from the outside, sitting with the light dimming outside, letting simple talk drift over us.
—
i c a n’ t r e c a l l what it was led me to the sma
ll ad that was in the back of The Village Voice. It was not a paper I had any particular fondness for, but it was there one day, like sometimes happens, Marcia’s ad, by the strangest chance, her, of all people. I sat down to compose a letter that maybe I wrote fifty or sixty times over, at the small counter in my kitchen.
I explained everything about my boys, over and over again, the Lord knows how many times, saying how I was a colored woman, how I was living in a bad place but I kept it real nice and clean, how I had three boys McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 316
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and how I’d been through two husbands, how I’d really wanted to get back to Missouri but I never had the chance or the courage, how I’d be fine and happy to meet up with other people like me, how I’d be privileged. Each time I tore the letter up. It just didn’t seem right. In the end all I wrote was: Hello, my name is Gloria and I’d like to meet up too.
—
i t m us t h av e b e e n ten in the evening when her husband stumbled through the door. From the corridor he actually called: “Honey, I’m home.”
In the living room, he stopped and stared, as if he were in the wrong place. He slapped his pockets like he might find a different set of keys there.
“Is something wrong?” he said to Claire.
He looked as if he could have aged some and then stepped right out of the portrait on the wall. His tie was a little askew but his shirt was buttoned up to the neck. The bald dome shone. He carried a leather briefcase with a silver snap. Claire introduced me. He pulled himself together and walked across to shake my hand. A faint scent of wine rolled from him. “Pleasure to meet you,” he said, in the sort of way that meant he had no idea whatsoever why it might be a pleasure, but he had to say it anyway; he was bound to it by pure politeness. His hand was chubby and warm. He placed his briefcase at the foot of the table and frowned at the ashtray.
“Girls’ night out?” he said.
Claire kissed him high, on the cheek, near his eyelid, and loosened his tie for him.
“I had some friends over.”
He held the empty gin bottle to the light.
“Come sit with us,” she said.
“I’m going to run and have a shower, hon.”
“Come join us, come on.”
