‘Because it’s kind of creepy,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s unfashionable, I suppose.’
‘No-one writes anymore anyway. Everyone uses computers.’
‘I know.’ He sounded regretful.
‘You must hate signing your name. Giving away everything about yourself.’
‘I manage to avoid it fairly successfully.’
His face was serious and distant once more. He took some money out of his wallet and put it on the table. We left, and on the street he pulled up the collar of his dark overcoat.
‘Let’s do this again,’ I said.
He almost smiled, same as before. ‘You know where I live.’ He walked away.
The subway platform was oddly deserted when I descended to catch my train back downtown. Dark trickles of mud ran down the white tiled walls across the tracks, around posters that warned of ‘rodenticide’ in the area, complete with a drawing of a healthy-looking rat. On cue, a long tail flicked away underneath the tracks. The train arrived.
I recognised Gabriel sitting in a seat near the door when I entered, the graduate student who had opened the door to Trinh’s office that day. He was reading a book with a worn red cloth cover; an old edition of a Greek text. I sat down in the orange plastic seat across from him. The carriage swayed.
‘Gabriel?’ I said. He looked up and blinked and recognised me.
‘Hello. Sorry – I forget your name – Trinh’s friend?’
I told him.
‘I’m sorry about your friend Ingrid,’ he offered.
It was hard to know what the etiquette was around the event. So many people had died that I assumed that anyone I met could have lost a friend or family member. It felt not quite right to count myself among them.
He seemed to understand my thoughts.
‘She’s the only one I knew. Not that I knew her that well – we had one class together, last year, my first year. But she’s the only person.’
‘Where were you?’ It was the first time I’d asked anyone this question.
The book he’d been reading was still open, his hands relaxed around it. They shifted now, but didn’t close the book.
‘Yes, I saw it, a lot of it. I was on my way to the Center for a meeting downtown there. Lawyers.’ His eyes wandered. ‘I walked up out of the subway station at Fulton Street and there at the top of the stairs was a piece of an aeroplane, a huge fuselage, just a few feet away from the subway entrance.’ He rested the book in his lap and moved his hands up and out to describe the outlandish size of the aeroplane fragment. ‘It was surreal.’
I could picture it, the fuselage sitting fatly – singed at the edges, perhaps, burnt? – at the top of the stairs, blocking the entrance to the street like a misplaced object in a Magritte painting. It was hard to read his expression. He didn’t sound disturbed.
‘But no-one was looking at the fuselage, this enormous piece of a plane right there in the street. I could see that everyone was looking up. I looked up, and I saw the building, the tower. It was melting.’
Now he swallowed, and his skin seemed to take on a different sheen. Or perhaps the lights in the subway car became stronger, whiter, to my eyes as I tried to imagine the thing he was describing. A woman muffled in a scarf a couple of seats from me had become very still as he was talking, and she rose abruptly now, not looking at us, and moved to the other end of the car where she stood and held onto the metal pole.
‘The metal on the outside of the building – the supporting struts, whatever they were – it was melting. It was sliding down, the outside of the building was sliding, like liquid.’
Now his hands were lost for a way to signal what he had seen. The carriage lurched a little, an arrhythmic side to side as we turned a corner. The lights were bright, and all the shadows seemed to have disappeared.
His tone grew tired, and he talked a little about growing up in Bogotá. The difference of this from the terror there. The sameness.
We were both quiet for a while before the train came to my station. We said goodbye. Speakers blared. The walls across the platform were almost identical to the ones at the station I’d come from, right down to the dribbles of mud and the rodenticide warnings, only these ones were emblazoned with neon pink tags in spray-paint, unreadable names and messages.
I took the stairs and thought about the street that would be there another three flights up. The tubular metal rail on the side of the stairway felt very solid under my hand. It shone and reflected all the tiles and colour around it in a thin kaleidoscope. I couldn’t help thinking of all its solidity melting away. The difference between the cool hardness I felt and its potential other state, pouring away in a rush of heat, seemed suddenly both very small and horribly alien. I pulled my hand away and wanted to run up all the rest of the steps to the street, feet clacking against the tiles, but my legs felt heavy and I had to drag myself up, step by step, without the support of the treacherous rail, arms wrapped around my body.
19.
Back at the apartment the hallway was dark but there was a light on in the living room. Jones was sitting there on the couch. There was music playing, minimalist tones with so much silence between them it took a moment to realise it was music.
‘How did you get in here?’ I asked him.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said.
I guessed that Matt had let him in. He wanted to take me out for dinner. But first he asked coyly for another tour of the terrace.
I turned on the strings of lights and we went out through the doors. He walked to the edge of the terrace again and leaned on the ledge. The dusk fell until it was night on one side of the sky and a smudge of sunset on the other. We spent a while with my body pressed up against that same wall where he had kissed me before. The air grew dark around us.
He lifted his face away from mine. ‘I don’t love you,’ he said casually, without stopping what he was doing with his hands, as though he were reminding me of an important detail I might forget, a detour we had to make along the way to our final destination. It was hard to make words, part of my brain detached from language. I swallowed. Anywhere we weren’t touching or clothed – small areas of skin – felt invaded by cold.
His face was back in my neck. ‘I don’t love you too,’ I said, his mouth against the place my voice came from. He threw his head back then and laughed with real delight. I smiled.
‘Now …’ he said.
Desire was thick in my throat, I was lost in it, and I pulled him inside through the doors; he fell heavily onto the bed when I pushed his chest.
‘No,’ he said when I started to undo the buttons at my neck. ‘Leave them on.’
I was all rush and wanting to go faster; he let me for a minute and smiled at me. Then he pinned my wrists above my head against the bed and gave me a cool, hungry look. He found a weak point in the seam of my skirt at the waist where the stitching had started to come undone and tore hard, a practised motion, so that the whole thing came apart in one jagged movement down my hips and thighs. A long, liquid breath went through me and I felt my body relax at last, surrendered.
‘That’s better,’ he said, and touched me just as slow and as fast as he wanted to.
The rest of our clothes came off with varying degrees of force and speed. We struggled and pushed and pulled each other with a kind of desperation that shaded quickly into play; he held me down, and did what I said, and made me laugh and cry out, fight and give up.
We lay exhausted afterwards on the bed in my room with the French doors open. He rolled over and mumbled something that ended with ‘go’. A short moment later he was snoring lightly, lying on his stomach with his face pressed on its side into the pillow.
I shrugged my body up the bed and let my head fall back on the pillow behind me. The room was still in the darkness, and the shapes of things in the air around us seemed to grow more precise. Jones breathed heavily, his unguarded face half-lit by a glow from the street. Ingrid’s box sat on the cha
ir across from the bed, filling the seat with its bulk. Jones hadn’t seemed to notice it. I wanted to hide it, to throw a blanket or a towel across it.
The thought was still with me when I opened my eyes, with no memory of having closed them. The room was filled with the thin light of morning. There was no sign of Jones, the pillow lying flat and silent on the bed next to me. I slapped it with my open hand, feeling the feathers collapse, the pillowcase inflate and sink again. Sounds of early morning on the street outside penetrated the room: grates rolling up on the fronts of shops, trucks idling, traffic stalled and starting. The roar of a motorcycle passed through and faded. I imagined the scene of his departure, and felt uncomfortable, picturing him awake and dressing while I lay sleeping. I remembered watching him fall into sleep the night before.
In the bathroom my naked torso was pale in the mirror, a small red cloud of a bruise forming on the side of one breast. His mouth there – hands, gripping – I swallowed, unsteady. Having slept in front of him provoked far worse feelings of vulnerability than having slept with him. I crossed my arms against the sight and yawned.
Coming back into the bedroom after a shower I noticed the remains of my skirt on the end of the bed, halfway to the floor. The sight of it sent a hot, heady rush through me. I eased it off with one toe and pushed it under the bed. Part of me distantly regretted its loss – it had been old, made in the 1940s, with a high waist and a faded silk label stitched onto the inside, embroidered with a little flower. I had bought it years before at a market stall one Saturday. The tearing feeling crossed my body again, a pleasant shiver that passed out of me with a sigh.
Wrapped in a towel, I made myself a mug of strong coffee. It cleared my head, chased the taste of the night before from my mouth. I sat on the bed and placed the box in front of me, opened the lid and started reading again.
It was afternoon when I came to the end, having skimmed through most and read carefully through some of the contents. A plate lay on the bed covered with toast crumbs. I finished looking through an article copied from a journal, a piece about the storage of lead curse tablets, the kind of conditions they required, the fragility of the material. An important cache of tablets had been destroyed, years ago, just by storing them in a drawer made of the wrong stuff. The air had been made too acidic by the wood, and gradually the tablets decayed. They had been in bad shape to begin with. By then the writing on them had been transcribed, but now it would be impossible to check any possible errors of transcription.
Even looking so briefly into Ingrid’s field, it was clear that the whole discipline of recovery was a complex tragedy of loss, a salvage operation whose finds, however stunning they might be, were random, piecemeal, tiny – small bits of a larger, unrecoverable picture. What survived. What died. What made it. What didn’t. Who lived. Who died unknown. Who left behind two lines quoted by someone quoted by someone. A game of whispers. A graffitist who attacked their lover in writing on the walls of a street in a dead city could be preserved and quoted endlessly, while poets renowned in their time left nothing behind in their own hand.
I turned the pages and added them to the pile of paper next to the box, its emptied contents. The last piece of paper lay alone at the bottom of the box. I looked at it for a while before picking it up.
It wasn’t a piece about the curse tablets or ancient Roman writing. It was a page of a letter from a medical insurance company, a statement of account. It was dated from August 2001, and it mentioned an emergency room visit and orthopaedic services. The reverse side of the page was blank; it seemed to be a photocopy of the original. I looked at the page again but could see no pen marks, no notes. I put it back in the box then thought again and took it out. I put the rest of the papers back in, and laid the medical account on top. The room was growing dark. A sudden breeze came up and swept across the terrace, making the birdcage tinkle and lifting the edges of the pages on top of the pile. The French doors slammed shut. I replaced the lid.
When I woke up the box was on the floor beside the bed, although I couldn’t remember putting it down there, and the plate and coffee mugs were gone. Matt. The clock showed 8 pm. I felt hungry and thought about the last piece of toast before I had fallen asleep. I got up and turned on all the lamps, and the lights out on the terrace.
In the kitchen Matt was drying dishes and looking more tanned than usual. I suspected that he used a tanning salon. We talked about ordering dinner.
‘Matt,’ I asked, ‘an orthopaedic surgeon works on bones, right?’
He smiled archly. ‘I saw one once about a broken nose. Don’t ask.’
I stared at him, and at the table.
‘OK, it’s a long story,’ he started, enthusiastic. ‘It also involves a fractured hand and a contusion or two. Let’s wait for the food. In the meantime you can tell me all about the racket coming from your room last night.’
His nose was handsome, a slight bump evident now that I knew about the break.
‘Over dinner?’ I said.
After we ate he helped me choose an outfit, a dark shirt with a gauzy sheen and a pair of black jeans. I found myself inspecting the integrity of the material with a new kind of interest, testing the solid feel of the denim in my fingers as I pulled up the zip. He also found a pair of boots in one of the hallway closets.
‘I’ve been waiting for someone to make use of these,’ he said. They looked like tall motorcycle boots, harness and buckle around the foot, heels worn down on one side. ‘They’ve been here for at least a year.’
When I was dressed and lipsticked he looked at my face critically. ‘Great shirt. Great boots. Now let me fix your eyebrows.’
I allowed him to spend five minutes pulling my eyebrows into shape with little tweezers. It hurt less than I had imagined it would. This position of compliance, standing with my face to the bathroom light, felt strangely relaxing. My eyes watered.
‘OK,’ he said finally.
My eyebrows had been almost straight lines; now they had the suggestion of an elegant arch. I raised one for him.
‘You’re beautiful. Go.’
I thought I would get there before Trinh – wasn’t even sure if she would come, but was counting on the fact that she drank there most nights. But Trinh was already standing at the bar, talking to the bartender, when I entered the Lilac. She was wearing a leather jacket zipped up to the neck, and a short skirt. Her cheeks were flushed as though she’d just stepped in out of the cold. She smiled when she saw me, and said something to the bartender, and he nodded and started mixing a drink.
‘Hi,’ Trinh said, as though she’d been expecting me, and touched her hand lightly to my waist. ‘Ben’s mixing some mean martinis tonight.’
Ben smiled and put two glasses on the bar, filled them from a shaker.
With the first few mouthfuls of my drink I glowed with a sudden sense of belonging: to walk into a bar and find a friend there. This was what it meant to be at home in a city. Wasn’t it? I remembered Thursday afternoons in that last spring on campus, when I would walk upstairs to the bar and count on finding Ingrid and Ralph there, huddled on the battered red leather sofa. They would be drinking gin and beer and playing board games on the coffee table littered with ashtrays and cigarettes.
Then I remembered what I had come here to talk to Trinh about. The glow faded.
We sat together at the same booth of black vinyl. Trinh unzipped her jacket. My drink was very strong. I told her that I had looked through Ingrid’s box.
Trinh raised her eyebrows. ‘Did you find anything interesting? I don’t think there was much in there very personal.’
‘There wasn’t. But I know a lot about magic in the ancient world now. More than I used to, which isn’t saying much.’
Trinh smiled. ‘Ingrid’s work was very promising. She was a good student.’
‘There was something else in there.’
Trinh’s eyebrows stayed where they were.
‘It was a medical bill. Not a bill – an account. It was from
the emergency room.’
The table was lit by a small votive candle in a cloudy glass holder. Trinh passed her hand over it, back and forth once, absently. ‘There were all kinds of papers in her drawer and on the shelf. To tell you the truth I didn’t look through them very closely.’
I waited.
‘The account must have been from when she broke her hand at the end of 2000 – no, the year before last,’ she said.
‘She broke her hand?’
‘Yes. She fell down those stairs in the flat. You’ve seen them. Broke her fall badly, broke … some bones, I don’t remember how many, those little bones in the hand. She was so cross about it – she wore a bandage for a couple of weeks and couldn’t type, had to type with one hand.’
I pictured Ingrid, bandaged, and thought of Fleur’s doll statuettes with their missing hands. Something didn’t fit.
‘The bill is from 2001,’ I said. ‘Not 2000.’
Trinh frowned gently. ‘I might be remembering it wrong. I thought it was the year before. Maybe they were sending the account later.’ Her eyes strayed across the room.
‘The visit is from August.’
‘God, I hardly saw her all that summer. She must have been in and out of the office. I don’t know what that might have been about. It’s been a while since I saw her. It was a while – is that right? I hadn’t seen her for a while. Anyway.’
Her eyes came back to me and her expression was concerned. She leaned forward. ‘I’m sorry, Julia. I wasn’t thinking. How awful for you to come across things like that, so personal, something from her life. I didn’t think, when I gave you the box, about how upsetting that would be.’ She looked down. ‘I just wanted to get it out of the room. I thought you might like to see some of her work.’
I looked at my own hand holding my glass, other hand in my lap. ‘It was good to see her work. Thanks.’
‘Why don’t I come and get that stuff back from you? Take it out of your hands?’
The Legacy Page 25
