‘I have to start preparing for Columbia, the fall term – this has all taken so much time and energy. Gil thought I should defer for a year but I don’t want to.’
He appeared then before us, and took Ingrid’s arm. ‘We’re missing you inside,’ he said in his quiet voice, and kissed her. ‘Hello, Julia. So good to see you here.’ He kissed my cheek. His hand remained on Ingrid’s back, the same proprietary gesture I remembered from seeing them together in New York. ‘I love your beautiful city,’ he said, moving his gaze to take in the whole harbour, the whole city. ‘So much … natural beauty.’ His thoughtful tone suggested disdain for whatever Sydney might have to offer in other, cultural terms. ‘The water is really exquisite.’
We all looked at it, the waves slopping on the pylons below the pier, the winking lights of boats passing over the water, windows on the shore beyond.
Julia loves New York, I’ve told you,’ Ingrid was saying to Grey. ‘You’ll come and visit soon, won’t you?’ she asked.
‘We’d love that,’ Grey added. But his eyes on me were cold, the same dispassionate regard I had met before dinner at Maeve’s apartment after I had seen the look between the two of them.
I realised that I was being farewelled. The city lights glinted, doubled, in the glass walls of the restaurant, the glass doors. Inside, people were beginning to take their seats at the long table, waiting for Grey and Ingrid to take their places. It looked like the beginning of a contemporary rendition of the Last Supper. Voices were raised now with wine and waiting, clothes rumpled, the music sounding louder, with Ingrid waiting to sit in the centre seat.
‘I’ll stay out here a moment longer,’ I said, and let them go inside. The glass doors slid shut behind them with a sharp sense of finality. It felt like a heavily symbolic exit, even while it was happening: he took her inside, away from where I was, and shut the door, separating us. I watched her beautiful back retreating and wondered when I would ever see her in Sydney again.
What happened next had the odd distance of a dream, and it was all I had imagined in my fears about the event. I saw Mark inside talking to Ralph, who looked very drunk. Mark’s hand was on Ralph’s sleeve, but he shook it off. Their words were unclear but I saw Ralph move away and towards Ingrid and Grey as they walked in. He stepped closer and addressed Grey. Grey looked at him with cautious concern, and whatever Ralph was saying made a crack in his expression, and Grey’s hand went up to Ralph’s chest. The violence in the motion, just restrained from turning into a blow, was surprising. Ralph threw his glass of wine at Grey. It mostly missed. It was red wine so it didn’t show on his charcoal suit but it left a spot on the white shirt underneath and the silver tie, the colour of blood on snow.
I’d been transfixed by the sight of the argument, but the splash of wine snapped me into motion, driven by a desperate, hollow fear of what Ralph might do next. My grip faltered and slipped on the recessed handles of the sliding doors and they stuck as I pushed, juddering on their tracks, caked in harbour salt.
Ralph’s arms were around Ingrid, his mouth on hers, and then Grey’s hand was on Ralph’s neck, pulling him away. The word ‘scruff’ made its way into my head. Ingrid’s face was visible for a second, blank and tragic, before Mark dragged Ralph away – the doors opened smoothly for him as soon as he touched them – and outside to the balcony, up close to me where I could suddenly feel and smell their bodies, the smell of sweat and adrenaline. The doors closed and inside was a silent, sealed box where everyone was busily ignoring the scene and taking another drink, applauding the first course as it emerged, right on time, seconds after the bride, the wife, had taken her seat and raised her glass to the groom.
Mark’s breathing sounded very loud, and so did the little waves smacking against the pier. Ralph looked sick and unhappy. Mark leaned over the balcony and for a moment it seemed as though he was going to vomit, but he didn’t. He turned and started talking angrily to Ralph, who stayed quiet and met my eyes defiantly with his glittery, dark stare.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘there has to be a way out of here without going back through there.’
We made our way to the end of the balcony and back around the pier, wooden walls and walkway bleached out and blotchily lit in the fast approaching night. The road was deserted.
‘Where are the fucking taxis?’ Mark asked, scanning the street and zipping his fly. Again.
‘What were you doing, Ralph?’ I asked, furious, unable to help myself. My head hurt with the hangover already beginning.
He brushed a piece of ash away from his suit with one elegant hand. Apart from the tiny mark it left he was spotless, his face a ruined mask that broke into a grim smile. ‘Don’t start crying now,’ he said flatly and began walking away.
I moved to follow him but Mark stopped me. He was strong, and held my struggling arms. Ralph kept going. His hands were in his pockets, his jacket creased up at the elbows the way it did when he bent his arms like that. I felt it all, the loss and anger, bile in the throat. Mark groaned and looked green, and a taxi cruised by, smooth and silent, and stopped to take us in.
On the ride home, the taxi seats squeaking and smelling of plastic, I thought about Ingrid’s face when she had caught my eye across the room. The colour of the shadows under her eyes, little hollows beneath the thin skin, more iris showing. It had looked like a small second of fear. This was an emotion Ingrid never showed or seemed to feel. It was hard to imagine what fear would look like on her – would it be like that, the trace of a bruise under the eyes?
I thought about that expression from time to time over the next few years. It became so that whenever I summoned Ingrid’s face, that look wasn’t the first thing I saw – that was always the sunlit profile, the sculpted, gentle face of a Venus, smiling, hand pulling back the stray strands of hair – but it was always the next. The shadow of the first thing. I told myself it was jet lag and strain and later seemed to confirm that it was dread and fear and regret, and railed against the idea. It was only a second. I was imagining whatever it meant.
‘What did Ralph say to him?’ I asked Mark.
He shifted in his seat, reluctant. ‘He was really drunk. He called him an arsehole.’
This sounded pretty unsophisticated, for Ralph, but I believed it.
‘He said that he was an evil fucking bastard. That was it.’ Mark was gathering steam.
‘And something about someone being a bitch – Maeve, I think And –’
‘Stop,’ I told him. ‘Stop.’ I knew every word of it suddenly, the whole speech, the whole thing, and couldn’t stand to imagine the sound of it in Ralph’s voice.
The streets passed by, quiet, patches of brightness and dark. The lights of the clock showed on the dash. We had been at the party for just over an hour. The taxi stopped at a red light. ‘Let me out,’ I said, gripping the door handle. The locks clicked.
‘What?’ Mark asked. ‘We’re blocks away from your place.’ ‘Go home,’ I said, and got out of the car.
11.
When the planes struck the towers that morning, it was late at night in Sydney. I spent the whole night in bed, re-reading Middlemarch for class the following week, eating shortbread straight from the packet. At that moment I was probably reading about the Lydgates arguing about whether to sell the furniture to cover their debts. When I woke up the next morning the book was squashed open next to me on the bed. I went out to the kitchen to make tea, and as I walked down the hall I could hear the radio. I wasn’t paying attention to what the voices were saying, a news program. I could also, unusually, hear the sound of the television from the living room at the other end of the passageway.
Jenny was standing at the kitchen counter with her arms folded, looking down at the floor. I thought she might have been waiting for the kettle to boil, but could see that the stove wasn’t on. She was listening. She must have heard me then, and lifted her head to face me.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked when I saw her stricken expression.
�
��It’s New York,’ she said.
‘What?’ I frowned and rubbed my eyes. I started listening to the radio. As I started understanding what they were saying – … second tower collapsed … blood donations … missing and thousands presumed dead … – I heard the phone start to ring. It went on ringing. I turned up the radio. My aunt went to answer the phone. I could hear the shriek of the kettle boiling, and then it stopped, an illusion. I blinked and picked it up and filled it with water from the tap.
My aunt held the phone in her hand. ‘It’s Ralph,’ she said.
I took the receiver from her and put it to my ear. As I did, I remembered Ingrid. I hadn’t thought of her until that moment, was thinking only of the planes and the buildings and the fifty thousand body bags the announcer said that Giuliani was ordering in.
‘Ralph?’
There was silence for a moment. Then, ‘I’ve tried calling Grey. I can’t get through. The phone won’t even ring. It’s just dead.’
‘She’ll be OK, won’t she?’ I was trying to listen to the radio and get my thoughts straight. I needed tea. My aunt started making it, spooning leaves into the pot. ‘It’s just downtown, right? Ingrid’s never that far downtown. What would she be doing there?’ I started thinking it through. ‘Why would she be at the Trade Center at – what – nine in the morning?’
‘I know –’
‘She lives uptown. That’s far away. They’re on the Upper West Side.’
‘I know, Julia –’
‘That’s, like, a hundred blocks away. It’s more than that, it’s more than a hundred blocks.’
‘I know, Julia, I know. I just want to know that she’s OK.’
I started to think, then, of the other people I knew in the city. Were any of them still even living there? I didn’t know.
‘I just woke up, just half an hour ago, and just turned on the radio …’ His voice was thick with panic.
‘Call me, OK, when you’ve heard from Grey. When you get through to him,’ I said.
I thought about offering to go over there. It was what I would have done six months earlier. But it wasn’t like that anymore. The kettle started its screaming noise, for real this time. Jenny turned it off. Ralph and I said goodbye.
‘I’m making tea,’ Jenny said, as if to reassure me.
‘Thanks.’
It was 9 am, just about the same time it had been there when the plane struck the first tower. Jenny poured the tea. We took it through to the living room and sat there for an hour watching the television, seeing the planes strike over and over again from different angles, the buildings crumbling slowly into a cloud of dust and smoke. I saw the dark plume rise and curve through the sky to fall down on Brooklyn across the water and waited for the phone to ring again. It didn’t.
I called Ralph and the line was busy. I switched on my computer, impatient while it whirred and hummed into life, and sent an email to Ingrid – the folder showed that it had been six months since our last exchange. Are you OK? Call me. Send. The modem burbled away and onscreen the cursor blinked, a steady little machine pulse.
After two more hours and more attempts at calling Ralph, I went to my room and dug out my address book. Ingrid’s name was there, and her number in New York. I called it. It rang out after what felt like endless minutes while my insides grew tight imagining the sound of Grey’s voice on the other end.
My aunt looked at me. She was wearing her white straw hat and was heading out into the garden. The television was off but the radio was still going. ‘I don’t want to watch it anymore,’ she said. I agreed. She rolled up the sleeves of her linen shirt. ‘I’m sure he’ll call again, won’t he, if there’s any news,’ she said. ‘If there’s anything wrong. You’ll find out.’
I nodded. I wanted to tell her to change shirts, not to wear that one outside to garden. It was one I liked, a soft pearl grey that once had been white but had gone through the wash with other colours too many times. But it seemed I didn’t have much of a voice left. I went back to Middlemarch and the troubles of the Lydgates. The computer stayed silent, screen blank and asleep.
It was late afternoon and the chunk of sunlight in my room had travelled across the bed and onto the floor when the phone rang again. I put the book down quickly – my hand was stiff with holding it – and rose to answer the call. It wasn’t Ralph on the other end, but Mark.
‘Hi, Julia. I just heard, I just turned on the radio.’
How strange it was that we were all getting our first news of the event this way, I thought, like something out of World War II.
‘How did you only hear about it just now?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been reading all day, working on this chapter at home.’ He sounded defensive. ‘Why didn’t you call me? Christ.’
‘I didn’t think about it. Sorry.’
He sighed. ‘No, sorry, I’m sorry. Look, is your friend OK? Ingrid – she’s in New York, right?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s OK, I can’t get in touch – she’s uptown though. I’m sure she’ll be alright.’ ‘Right, right. OK. So. What are you doing?’
‘Reading.’ I brushed some crumbs off my lap.
‘Are you coming over?’
‘Well, alright.’
‘I’m going ahead with dinner.’
‘Dinner?’ I had forgotten. Mark was having people over that night. ‘I’ll be right there.’
I tried Ralph and Grey again two or three more times before I left. No answer. The car started – it took a few tries – and I drove away. The streets seemed quieter than usual. Mark was only a couple of blocks from Ralph’s old Kings Cross flat, and I thought about driving by but didn’t.
Mark and I went to the shops together and bought mountains of food – long baguettes that stuck out of their paper bags like spears, damp parcels of fish and prawns, handfuls of pale green leeks and lettuces, bags of lemons and boxes of eggs. It felt necessary to be feeding people on some kind of larger-than-usual scale.
When we walked in the door of his flat Mark went right to the little television and turned it on. I stopped just inside the threshold and looked straight down the hallway at it. On screen the towers were falling again, again and again. I put down the bags carefully and stood still. Low sounds came out of the television, voices. I went to the phone and dialled Ralph. He still wasn’t answering. Mark came and took the phone out of my hands.
He hated tears. He kissed me. The little towers on the screen crumbled and fell, burned and smoked and dissolved into dust. He switched the TV off.
I chopped and peeled and washed things in the kitchen while Mark cooked. He was good at it. The guests arrived early and more kept coming, neighbours from upstairs with bottles of wine, friends of the friends he had invited who wanted to come to be with somebody and wanted something to eat. There were ten people in his small kitchen-dining room by seven and we were all getting drunk fast. Plates piled up in the sink, on the tables.
I called Jenny just before we sat down to eat.
‘Any news from Ralph?’ I asked her.
‘No, darling, sorry. I’ll tell him to call you right away if he calls here.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Oh, I’m fine. I’m sad about it – I’m afraid of what’s going to happen next. The war that’s about to start.’ She sounded tired. ‘Don’t worry about me. Take care.’
‘Bye.’
Mark was at his best in this environment, an expansive and generous host, opening wine, refilling glasses, humouring everyone. He refilled my glass and kissed me sloppily. I looked at him. If there was ever a time to say ‘I love you’ this would be it. An affirmation in the face of whatever it was over there behind the now-silent and dark television screen, all that way across the world, the smoking hole in the ground and pile of rubble.
‘Why don’t you move in here?’ he asked.
I didn’t even have a key. Well, I did, but not that he knew about.
‘Wow.’
Just think about it,’ h
e said, and squeezed my waist, and went back to being host, raising his eyebrows at a joke someone had just told, pouring wine into their glass.
We were all still stunned. The sense of crisis had the predictable effect of bringing us together, and more people from the building drifted in over the course of the night, and the crowd grew. It was an oddly distant sense of crisis though; already, there, across the world, it was morning again. It made New York and the whole United States seem at once closer and further away. The other side of the world, the other side of the day. Every now and again someone else would get up and go to the phone or open their mobile to call someone over there or a friend here to see what news there was. One of the upstairs neighbours was waiting for news of a friend of her brother’s who was working in one of the financial companies that was in the towers. She went over to Mark’s computer in the corner to check her email every half an hour. Her partner grew crankier over the course of the evening and got into a long argument with one of the original dinner party guests, a philosophy student like Mark, about what really happened in the Sudan and the Gulf War.
I don’t know if my sense of the artificiality of that camaraderie was something I felt then, at the time, or whether I’ve back projected it, so that the whole scene of the evening seems like an elaborately designed film sequence with every character carefully choreographed in their movements. Someone lit the candles that sat on top of the bookshelves along the walls and along the windowsills. They didn’t seem to burn down even as the night wore on. The light shone so that everyone’s face was illumined softly. It wasn’t so much artificial, I suppose, as driven by a sense of self-consciousness and vague panic on everyone’s part. Here we all were, seeking out company and comfort, afraid to be alone in our individual places. One of Mark’s other friends tried to follow me into the bathroom after dessert.
‘Come on, Julia,’ he said, his hand reaching under my shirt. ‘You’ve got to affirm life at a time like this, right?’
The Legacy Page 15
