Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  CHAPTER THIRTY - FIVE

  DEL USUALLY TRANSFERRED to the N train at Times Square after work. That was the train that took her back home. But she continued on the 9, trying to picture Raj in his most familiar position, lying in bed with a pillow shoved over his face. It would now be her duty to bring him back to life, to force him into a pair of shoes and walk him to a restaurant, ordering food that could be shared. There she would press him lightly on what had happened in Florida to shut him off so entirely that he hadn’t even responded to her calls. That was as far as the reverie went. Or as far as Del allowed it to go, because the thought came to her that perhaps she had misconstrued their brief reunion, holding each other on his bare mattress, for something more. The side effect of her recent estrangement from Joseph was this: she missed Raj, the curly black hair and the clench of his teeth before his guard faded and someone more fragile and awkward appeared, a man who had been alone too long to remember the value of someone else’s hands. With Madi gone, who else would lead him back into the world?

  Twenty-Eighth Street whizzed by and now Twenty-Third Street. Del bolted out of the car and bound up the stairs to Seventh Avenue. Here again was the long walk west toward Raj’s highway studio. She had already made this pilgrimage two times in as many months, and how different her pace had been on both occasions—the first time reticent and the second crazed with grief. She wondered how many more times she would walk in the opposite direction of home before the date of the INS interview on December 1. “How do you spend your evenings, Mrs. Guiteau?” she imagined the agent asking her. At that appointment, she would have Joseph beside her, nodding through the sanctity of a marriage being factchecked by professional love readers, and the thought stopped her in her tracks, right on Twenty-Third Street, as tourists with their wheeling suitcases funneled around her into the grungy cavern of the Chelsea Hotel. She should turn around and head back to him. She had left Joseph with a fever in bed, too sick to respond when she checked on him that morning before work. But she envisioned other bodies in the apartment where she had last seen them: William on the couch, sleeping on his stomach with his torn, checkered boxers barely covering his hairy ass, the contents of his bags spilled out on the rug, and her bottle of scotch open on the coffee table. She couldn’t return to the apartment, not when it was still daylight with too many hours left to consume with the physically sick and the psychologically deranged. But most importantly, the compulsion to check her phone and smile through the mystery of no news from Raj was too disabling to make it through another night.

  She kept heading west, faster now as she broke into a light jog, then running across Eighth Avenue against a DON’T WALK light, dodging an uptown bus that whistled with its brakes. Her lungs were burning from a lifetime addiction to nicotine, but the pump of her heart revitalized her. She zigzagged, she bolted, she galloped the bike lane, hurrying like she was late for her own court verdict. She was already at Tenth Avenue, already rounding the corner on a Citibank that was once an art gallery that was once a pizzeria that was once a savings and loan, and soon his street was in her sight. There was the car wash with its prismatic suds pouring into the sewer and, on the other side, the glass prism of a photo agency with its invisible furniture and alien-thin inhabitants. She ran straight toward Twenty-Fourth Street, crisscrossing between cars, clipping bumpers, flashing her palm to halt oncoming traffic. Her breathing had become loud and shallow, but she didn’t slow down, flying across the sidewalk as she culled the last of her strength, bit down on the hot afternoon wind, and sprinted past the frosted glass of art galleries as empty as white vaults. She saw the rusted green dumpster, his dumpster, the one that had always guarded his front door and reeked of vomit, and finally, crossing the littered pizza boxes of a finishing line, let herself go slack.

  She grabbed the dumpster handle for support and bent over, collecting all of the air she could, which blew out faster than she could swallow. She tried to wipe the sweat from her forehead, suddenly alert to how she must look. She searched for a car window to gauge her reflection. But even before Del could run her fingers under her eyes to mop up the smeared eyeliner, the metal door of Raj’s building opened and there he was: Raj in laced loafers, peering past her into the street for a cab. He was not rolling around in dirty sheets cursing the sunlight. He was wearing a crisp, gray shirt buttoned at the wrists, its tails tucked into the waist of a pair of belted khakis. His hair was long and parted down with gel.

  “Del?” he said with a startled exclamation, blown back a few inches on his heels. “What are you doing here?”

  She pitched herself up, wiping the residue of the dumpster handle on her thigh.

  “Raj,” she breathed. “I was coming. To see you.”

  “Were you running to see me?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I was running. But . . . ” She took a step back as his hand shot forward to steady her.

  In a flash, her humiliation turned to resentment, and she stiffened up, hands on hips, her head tilted in the conviction that the most accurate way to read someone was sidelong.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I live here.”

  “I mean outside,” she charged. Raj’s cheeks went flush, and that was all she needed, the biological evidence of guilt, blood vessels more honest than any clumsy rejoinder, because now he knew that she knew and vice versa. He hadn’t called, not because he was too doubled-over in grief but because he was actively avoiding her. A sane Raj had gotten those text messages late in the night. She wasn’t sure at what moment her pulse passed over from exertion to pain, but her heart had taken on a thicker beat, worms eating at the aorta, timed perfectly to tinge her words. “So you’re back. And looking well.”

  “I got in a few days ago,” he managed. “I’ve had to deal with some family obligations. I wanted to get that all done before I called you.”

  “I thought you got in yesterday.”

  “No,” he said uncertainly. “The day before.”

  “I see.” Imagining him still in Ft. Lauderdale when he had, in fact, been eight avenues away felt like a betrayal to the bond they had formed in his studio only a week ago. She shook her head at her own stupidity, shook it because what was becoming clear to her was already clear to him—he hadn’t wanted to see her. “Well, I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I was worried. That’s why I ran. I know we were both pretty bad off before you went down for the funeral.”

  “It’s been rough, you know,” he mumbled weakly. “I’m as fine as can be expected.”

  “That’s good.”

  He smiled nervously. They both concentrated on a sign hanging across the street. A commercial jet flew overhead on its descent into JFK.

  “I waited . . . ” she said but didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

  “I do want to see you,” he replied quietly, those glacial blue eyes fixed on her face in either honesty or pity. “Maybe this week if you have some time. Or next. I know I told you I’d call when I landed—”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s a bad time for you. I can’t expect you to think of me as soon as you touch down. Are you off somewhere now?” She asked this pleadingly, one last gesture, one final attempt at reparation, because the thought of walking east against the sunset on this soulless excuse for a conversation seemed worse than grabbing him by the waist and begging for him to go upstairs, undress, and climb into the recesses of his bed to wait for her knock. They could have that again, it would be so easy, a mere cheat on the last two minutes.

  “I’m actually off to meet a woman,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not what it sounds like. It’s complicated. I don’t know her really.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ll let you go. Give me a call when you find some free time.”

  “I will, Del. I mean it. I’d like that. It really meant so much . . . ” She spun around and lifted her hand in a half-hearted wave and started moving down the block before she could complete the gesture. She wal
ked down Twenty-Fourth Street, marching straight ahead, measuring her inhales and exhales, as the dirty wind stung her eyes. She wouldn’t cry. She’d keep the water frozen behind her eyes until she was far away from his building and then, like slamming an ice-cube tray against the knee, let all of it break loose in one snap.

  Del got all the way to the corner before she let herself look back. The block was deserted. Raj had gone in another direction. She lit a cigarette, blew the tobacco into her lungs, and, two minutes later, snuffed it out, all of which was more than enough time for Raj to come to reclaim her, reaching his hands out, apologizing for bad nerves, saying all of the things that she assumed he had wanted to say to her and, of course, so stupid of her, never had, not even when they had been together as a couple the first time. So it’s like that, she said to herself, the same as it always was, and crossed Tenth Avenue with her purse slumped against her stomach. Was there any deeper humiliation than running across Manhattan for someone who was on his way to meet another woman?

  A block later, Del found a bar with a neon shamrock blinking palely in the window. She entered and ordered a double scotch, while wiping her face with a cocktail napkin. The bar was filled with older, bloated men keeping eye contact with their liquor, who could no longer remember any reason for running across town. They had already made their peace with the limits of their hearts. Del took the scotch down in a single gulp and ordered another round.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - SIX

  CECILE DOZOL LIVED in the fourth-floor loft of an old granary building on the Bowery just above Houston Street. BOUWERIE GRANERE read the faded words painted on the dilapidated brick, and a wooden pulley wheel floated in the top window, a testament to an old world that pushed the rental prices up for authentic loft living.

  Raj had suggested meeting at a coffee shop in the East Village, but the woman on the phone who had just introduced herself in a sedate British accent moaned in disapproval. “Too many people staring. Why don’t you come up to my apartment?”

  “Are you sure that’s safe?” he had asked, surprised by the intimacy put forward to a complete stranger.

  “For you or for me?” she had replied, her accent slipping like the Eurostar train under the English Channel into a lazy French indolence. “Yee, just come. It’s quieter here, and we can talk.” He rang her buzzer and climbed four flights of stairs with railings overgrown in locked bicycles. When he got to her floor, pressing his hand along the splintered banister, the only door on the landing creaked open. A young woman stood in the frame wearing a tight yellow dress made out of surgical bandages. Brown-blonde hair was tied loosely back in the day’s fashion, artfully unruly so strands fizzed and snarled like a nest of branches. In comparison to her head, her arms and waist were so thin it looked as if her body had withered into a vine to produce this tremendous, ripe face. Cecile was not the kind of innocent bystander that Raj had expected to discuss the death of his sister with. Although she pointed a toothbrush at him threateningly, she offered the kind of demure, chin-lowered glare that she must instinctively bestow upon every member of the opposite sex to indicate that to know Cecile Dozol was to want to sleep with her immediately. She was barefoot, and her legs were sharp and skinny and oiled like African sculptures, only coming into contact with each other at the knees. Raj smiled the irritable smile of a man who did want to sleep with Cecile Dozol but understood he didn’t have a chance with her. She returned the favor, her grin surprisingly lopsided and sincere, bearing crooked yellow teeth. She looked like the daughter of someone famous, a more equine, street-smart version of the insurmountable beauty her mother must have been, and Raj mentally scanned through the tear sheets of his twenties when he occasionally shot fashion editorials for magazines.

  “I’m sorry to be dressed like this. It is disrespectful,” she said, more French than English, though the words sounded wealthy no matter where they hailed from. “I must go to a party in an hour, and they make me wear this.” Cecile beckoned him in with a wave of her toothbrush, and soon Raj was standing in a darkened loft with a high, tin ceiling and linen pillows arranged in groupings on the floor like circular crop patterns in Iowa cornfields. The place smelled of marijuana and dried flowers. Mapplethorpe black-and-whites were framed but left leaning against the wall under awaiting brass hooks; owning them was a commitment to taste, hanging them was too much of a commitment to residency. A laptop computer sat on a bookcase with its screensaver cascading smoky rainbows. An acoustic guitar lay on a wooden card table by the kitchenette, the table’s legs bound with silver gaffer tape. She kicked a black garment bag that must have once held the dress she wore and extended her arm toward a chair with its cane weaving broken out on the back. Raj was so overtaken with the exotic richness of the world he had suddenly stumbled into he felt embarrassment at the reason for his visit.

  “Hervé Léger,” Cecile said in the easy rhythm of a native tongue, sucking her stomach in and hiking the top of the dress up over her breasts.

  “What does that mean?”

  “The designer,” she replied. “It’s so gruesomely tight. But if you agree to go to these store openings, they demand pictures. Usually, if I want to keep the clothes, I don’t mind. But something like this? You stay out too late, you look like a prostitute. Tch-tch-tch.” She spoke without moving her lips like she was used to having a cigarette rammed in the corner of her mouth, and soon she was on the hunt through a basket of needles and thread for a pack of Parliaments.

  “If this isn’t a good time,” he said, “I can come back tomorrow.”

  “No, you stay. I’m sorry. You want to talk about your poor sister, and I’m dressed for a party. You see, I forget that I promised. They make me go to these things. They say it is good for my career. Please forgive me.” She ran over to clench his hands. Seeing that he wasn’t offended, that, in fact, he was thankful for the five minutes she agreed to spend talking about the accident to a total stranger, she exposed her mangled teeth again. Her gums were purple, and no doubt in some other planet ruled on the precepts of dentistry she would have been considered one of the ugliest members of her tribe. In this world, she was one of the most attractive.

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you look familiar.” Raj couldn’t shake the sense that he was somehow supposed to know her by sight.

  She sat across the table from him on an even more precarious chair. She struck a match and then puffed smoke, much of it escaping around the cigarette.

  “Do I?” she replied more in defiance than in doubt. “I came to New York a year ago to get away from that kind of question. I came here to belong to nobody, to work on my music. But New York is not far enough away. There’s never getting away from your parents, is there? Not mine anyway. You know who they are and probably see their faces in me. That’s why I look familiar to you.” Cecile’s self-absorption was rather charming in its humility at being bested by the generation before her own. “My mother is Laura Allen.” No explanation needed, her mother was the British model, muse, and silent actress in speaking ’70s movies, who, when her face turned thirty, moved to Paris to marry the city’s notorious French musician. “Sebastian Dozol. That’s my father. So now we know who I am. Now we know the reason for this dress and why the guitar lies on the table and no one ever asks me to play it. Who wants to hear a song by the daughter of so and so? It’s too bad because I’m quite good.” She sighed cigarette fumes. “Now who are you?”

  “Raj Singh,” he said, appreciating the lack of glamour that followed his name in echoes around the loft. What a prison to have the ghosts of your parents pursuing you around the globe, to have them always a step ahead of you, breezing into rooms just before you entered, the holy cynosures to which you are only the insufficient ambassador. Suddenly, he felt less inadequate in his cheap dress shoes and unironed shirt. How freeing to be Raj Singh of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where even Ft. Lauderdale would collectively ask who? “I take pictures but not the kind that you’re used to.”

  “You see,” she squ
ealed in laughter. “Isn’t it nice to have to explain? I don’t mean to complain. I think maybe it will be okay for my son. By the time he’s older, people won’t remember who his grandparents were.”

  “You have a kid?” Raj asked in genuine surprise. He figured that Cecile couldn’t be more than twenty-five.

  “Yes, he’s four.” Cecile reached for the guitar, and immediately Raj worried he would have to sit through a tender ballad devoted to the child. Instead she pulled out a photograph that was woven in the strings. “Seb,” she said, holding up a shot of a blank-faced boy with long, girlish hair and breadcrumbs dotting his mouth. “He’s with his father in Paris. We are no longer together. Mon destin est des mauvais hommes.”

  “If you wanted to break him from the family, you shouldn’t have named him after your father.”

  “Very smart,” Cecile replied, shaking her fist with her fingers hooked to let the cigarette do the exclamatory pointing. “But even a rebellious girl at eighteen knows to watch out for her son’s future.” She paused, digging her fingernail into a skull that was carved into the grain of the table. “I do love my family,” she avowed, as if Raj had been the one to suggest otherwise.

  “Cecile, I wanted to ask you about the picture you took. The one that you turned in to the police.”

  “I know.” She returned her son to the guitar strings and leaned back in her seat. “I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.”

  “You saw what happened.”

  “I was going to talk to my agent that afternoon,” she said, shutting her eyes briefly to reveal two painted black lids. “His office is down there. I had just done some shopping. I was looking at magazines in one of those outdoor stalls. I had posed for a spread in a fashion magazine, the kind where they ask you to take off your clothes and then they don’t tell you if you will find yourself completely naked two months later in every bookstore.”