“Oh, I really don’t want to think about it.” She put the paper down. “I’m sorry.”
“No.” He took part of the rest of it. “Right.”
She watched him turn the pages. Here were his wrists, the muscles of his forearms, and she felt, with the same shock of those first moments at the airport, the sense of his physical presence as unnerving, even threatening—the solidness of him, the size of him. His very maleness. A part of her marked the reaction as if it were a separate thing, a phenomenon to be studied: why should this about the man she loved, the curve of his wrists and the rippling tendons and musculature of his forearms, make her feel so queasy? He was the gentlest man, the kindest and most considerate person. She liked him, along with being in love with him.
Having realized that she was staring at him, he put the paper down and said, “Want to try again?”
She did not want to, and the fact struck through her. Against the rush of it, she leaned forward a little. “Oh,” she said. “Let’s.”
He rose and took her hand, and they crossed into the bedroom and lay down. She kissed him, moving with him, the worry about everything lodged at the back of her mind like the knowledge of death.
For him, it was exquisite, uncomplicated. He lay on top of her, breathing the faint honey odor of her hair, kissing her neck, murmuring the words of his love.
“Oh, darling,” she said, feeling as though she were performing, as she experienced again the pain of him inside her. Wrapping her arms tightly around him, she moved her hips with him.
“I’m going to come,” he said, breathless.
“Do, baby.” She felt the small spasms and was far away from him, turning in her soul to look at the thing itself, this ludicrous animal act, this grossness, all flesh and need; and those other spasms, the ones she had felt inside her on that Jamaican beach, after the ripping and hurting and the sand blinding her, and the choking—the quivering that let her know the awful thing was ending at last—that was all part of the same brute thing. The same helpless little stutter of being. It appalled her.
He lay back and sighed, looking at the ceiling, and felt the rushing of his blood slowing down. She was quiet. He put his hand on her thigh. “God.”
“So good,” she murmured.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Why?”
“You seemed—well, you—I felt you being a little, I don’t know—” he said.
“What? Tell me.”
“Elsewhere?”
She said nothing. She had an impulse to be sharp with him, tell him to stop thinking of himself so much. But here he was, with his sad eyes, wanting so badly for the two of them to be as they had been before all this. It wasn’t such a selfish thing, wanting love back. She reached over and touched his cheek.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“I—I can’t get those images out of my head. I wish I hadn’t looked at the paper. I’ll do better, I promise.”
“No, no,” he told her. “It was wonderful. Don’t get me wrong. I just want it to be as good for you, you know.”
“But it was. Really. I only want to be close to you now. I need it so much now. I thought you were—you’d been—I couldn’t believe you were all right.”
He kissed her cheek, putting his arm across her middle, deciding not to press it. Something was not right, and he could not persuade himself it was solely the attacks on the cities. How could that affect a thing like their intimacy? He murmured the word “sweetheart,” attempting to clear his mind of everything but this moment’s warmth, all a man had the right to hope for in a world where people killed themselves in order to murder thousands of others. This tenderness was the only thing anyone really possessed in order to defeat that hatred. He believed this, even as he recognized it as being at the level of a homily he might write. A second later, he remembered that he was no longer required to think that way. He gave another sigh and sat up. “I’ve got to find a place for storage before the truck gets here. I never seem to get organized.”
“You’re beautiful,” she said, and looking back at her he saw tears in her eyes.
“Baby, what is it.”
“I’m just happy to be here. Glad, and relieved and scared to believe it.” As she spoke these words, she felt the truth of them slip away in a self-accusatory surge of doubt, the sense of having deceived him. It is not. I did. I did think so. I did think I’d lost him.
He lay down and wanted to begin again, kissing her. It went on for a few moments, but she couldn’t do it, finally. She stiffened and pulled back. “Iris might walk over.”
“Iris won’t do that.”
“No, honey. Please. Later, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and got out of the bed, keeping his back to her because he was aroused. He felt a measure of humiliation and strove to put it down in himself, moving into the bathroom and turning the shower on. I am not a selfish man. He attempted to put that away, too, stepping into the stream.
He heard her come in. “Have to pee,” she said, just loud enough for him to hear.
She saw the shape of him behind the shower curtain and caught herself feeling sorry for him. Back in the bedroom, she opened one of her suitcases and started picking through what she would wear. The shower water stopped.
“I’m already your wife,” she called. “Do you feel that?”
Toweling off, he called back to her. “I do.” And then laughed. “I do,” he repeated. “Do you?”
“I do,” she said.
But he felt walled off from her in some subtle yet lacerating way, and he could not shake the suspicion that this was the beginning of something, that some nameless trouble was near.
5
The truck arrived, with two young men in it who looked like brothers—big, round shouldered, heavy in the belly, and with longish blond hair. The driver introduced himself as Bud and pointed to the other. “That’s Joel. We got hung up in Pennsylvania first. All the traffic going up to see that field where the plane went down. At least I guess that’s what it was.”
“There was construction, too,” the one named Joel said. “And then the storms near Knoxville.”
They worked together putting the most important of Natasha’s things into the space in the house that wasn’t to be painted or worked on, and then what she would immediately need—the rest of her clothes and a few books—in Faulk’s apartment. Mr. Baines sat on his porch with a plate of spaghetti and watched. Iris worked with Natasha going through the books to choose the ones Natasha wanted to keep within reach—volumes of poems, an anthology of Russian short stories, several novels. There were overlaps between her books and Faulk’s, and all of those she wanted to leave in storage, even after the house was ready.
“I’m going over tonight and start on it,” Faulk said. “I want to get some wood and more paint. Build some bookcases.”
He followed the men in the truck to a storage place on Summer Avenue, across from the wide parking lot of a closed-down motel, the Washington, the end of its sign broken down so that what you saw as you approached was THE WASHINGT. There was a lot of traffic, and the young woman behind the desk at the storage place seemed worried about it.
She was talking on the phone as she worked, taking Faulk’s credit card and handing him a form to fill out. “I don’t know what it is,” she said into the phone. “But I’m not going home that way. You see something and right away you think—you know. Is this another attack?”
Faulk filled out the form and signed it, and signed the credit card slip, and the woman handed him a key with a number on it. “Wait a minute,” she said into the phone and then in an apologetic tone directed him around to the back of the building. He mouthed the words Thank you, and went back out to the truck. Joel and Bud were standing there smoking and talking about someone they knew who had been in New York.
“I was in New York,” Faulk told them.
“Really?” Bud, the heavie
r of the two, said without interest.
Faulk helped them unload the truck. It wasn’t much. Among several boxes of knickknacks and keepsakes, he came upon a large square metal camera case full of photographs and papers. Seeing the corner of a photograph, he unlatched and opened the case. The photograph was of Natasha, smiling, standing in a living room with a Christmas tree behind her. The tree had no decorations on it yet; boxes of glossy bulbs were open at her feet. She looked to be about fourteen or fifteen. Her hair was cut very short, and she wore a scotch-plaid skirt and white loose-fitting blouse. He smiled, looking through the other photos. He did not allow himself more than a minute. He looked through pictures of her with friends, other women, Senator Norland and cousin Greta, school friends, several from her time in Provence. Many of them were dated. A more recent one showed her standing bundled in a black coat outside a restaurant on some snowy city street. He looked at the back of it and saw that it was dated January 2000, and Chicago was written under the date. Below the name of the city, in other hand writing, were the words: Love of my life. On Our State Street.
He put it back in its place. He put everything back and closed the box, taking another brief moment to look at her face in the one photograph. State Street. She appeared very happy and, he decided, she also looked full of love. It was in the eyes and around the sensuous mouth with its small, shy smile. January 2000. He thought of the April day of this year that he had met her and then counted to there from the date of the Chicago picture. Thirteen months. And when exactly had it ended?
“Memories?” Joel startled him, standing at the entrance of the cubicle with part of the frame of her bed.
“Yeah,” Faulk said, straightening quickly. “Memories.”
They followed him back to his apartment, and he paid them. Joel said, “So. Did you see the whole thing?”
“Excuse me?” Faulk looked at him.
“The towers.”
“Oh—I didn’t even know it was happening until I turned the TV on. I watched it on TV.”
“Man, that is weird.”
“My brother lives in Brooklyn,” Bud said, “ ’cross the river. You know. He saw it from his living room window. He saw the whole thing. Couldn’t believe his own eyes. Said, you know, it was like looking at movie special effects.”
“I’ve heard other people talk about that,” Faulk said. “You can’t get your mind around the fact that people are dying right in front of your eyes.”
“I can get my mind around it,” said Joel. “All the way around it. And I’d like to kill me some Islamers.”
Bud said, “My brother wants to come home, you know. Can’t stand living up there now.”
“Well, thanks, sir.” They shook hands. It was odd, how close he felt to them in that moment.
“You guys be careful,” he told them.
They climbed into the truck, waved at him, and drove away.
In the apartment, he found a note.
Gone to the store with Iris
Love you.
He sat in the chair by the window that overlooked the shady lawn. Less than two years ago she was in love with someone else, happy, smiling into a camera, standing on State Street in Chicago. Our State Street. He knew there had been unhappiness in the months before he met her, and he knew that it had something to do with the end of a love affair. He did know this. She had even spoken about it in an oblique way. But why had she kept the photograph with the handwriting, not her handwriting, on the back of it?
Just now, feeling this way, he did not want to be in her company. He looked at the note and had an uneasy moment’s vision that in Jamaica she had run into whoever it was that had taken the picture in Chicago. It felt true, as if he already had proof. He could not unthink it.
On the street below, two young women came by, one pushing a stroller with a sleeping baby in it, the other walking a small dog. He had seen them before. They lived nearby. They ambled along, laughing and talking, and the one with the stroller stopped to adjust the shade screen on it. The other tossed her pretty brown hair and looked at the sky. It struck him that people made some kind of peace with their country’s troubles and somehow never lost the ability to laugh and chatter or to enjoy good weather and the smell of flowers, the smiles of friendly company on a walk in the city. Why, then, could Natasha not go on a little, as these two were, coming down a dappled street talking, appreciating the late-summer light, the softly swaying shade and the breezes?
6
She sat with Iris on the stone patio of a small coffee shop off Poplar Avenue. They were in the shade of the building, but it was hot, and Iris kept fanning herself with the menu card.
“There’s something else going on, isn’t there,” Iris said in a flat tone.
“Stress is going on,” Natasha told her. “Okay? I’ve been through hell. I thought my fiancé was dead or hurt, and I couldn’t get through.”
“But he wasn’t.” Iris’s face took on a ruminative look, as though she were dealing with some pain or cramp behind her eyes, a thought that hurt. It was an expression Natasha knew well. And just now she felt a sort of wondering disorientation, realizing the fact. “And, sweetie,” Iris went on, “this feels like more than having a scare about Michael.”
Natasha was silent. The server was a slight, dark brown young man wearing thick glasses. He brought the tea Iris had ordered.
Iris said, “Thanks, Philip.”
“You know him?”
“I’ve been coming here.”
Natasha smiled, shaking her head. “The things I don’t know about you.”
“Well.”
A moment later, Iris said, “Could it be that you’re having second thoughts?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“That’s not silly. It’s a legitimate question. It happens all the time. I had them before I married your grandfather.”
“I’m not having second thoughts.”
“Okay.”
They sipped the tea and watched the cars go by on the street.
“You really had second thoughts?”
Iris nodded. “They were the silly nervous thoughts of a girl. And given what happened I guess I should’ve had them. But remember, I was only twenty-four years old. And he was fifty-eight.”
“Everybody was married by then when you were a girl, right?”
“Yes, they were. Silly girls rushing into everything.”
“Do you have any regrets?”
“A little late for that, don’t you think?” Iris’s smile was tolerant, but it went away quickly. “Did something happen with Constance?”
“Constance got very drunk that first night after it happened.” Natasha saw a mental image of her friend, drink in hand, settling into the chilly water of the beach, and Mr. Skinner complaining about how cold it was. She found herself shaking a little, deep in the bone, and she sat forward slightly, both hands cradling the cup of warm tea.
“What just went through you.” For a second time, her grandmother’s question had the flat inflection of a statement.
“Nothing.”
“You just had a chill.”
“I did not—will you stop?”
“All right. So Constance got drunk that first night. Did she do something to you, or say something that upset you? Was it that she got drunk? I thought you said you got drunk, too.”
“No. Everyone—it seemed like everyone got drunk. I’m just saying—”
“Well, I need some sense of what’s still going through you.”
“Nothing’s going through me. I’m putting my life together. I left a job I had for six years and I’ve moved home and this awful disaster has happened and the whole country’s reeling. What do you want me to do? I mean how do you want me to behave?”
“There’s no need to get upset.”
“Well, Michael said something this morning, too. I can’t seem to process all this the way I need to without everybody questioning me.”
“I wasn’t questioning you,” Iris said. “I wa
nt you to be all right. I was a little worried.”
“Can we go soon?”
“You haven’t touched your tea.”
They drank without looking at each other. Natasha was thinking about how little she actually knew of this woman who had raised her—a person of unvarying consistency in the way she went through her days. Everything precise and orderly as the notes in a Mozart concerto. Now and then she would have friends over from her work in the mayor’s office, women and men who knew her in her professional life and treated her with a deference. Sometimes, after Natasha was old enough to be on her own, Iris would go out with them to concerts or to one official occasion or another. Iris’s job was to organize such things, to be a kind of public relations maven for the city. But because there was always reluctance on the part of people from downtown or Midtown to go “all the way out” to Collierville, Iris and Natasha were alone together a lot. In the evenings they talked, grandmother and little girl, and then grandmother and young woman. Iris read to her from books, and they watched television; sometimes they went to movies. They were like girlfriends and, as Natasha had once started to say to Faulk, this was probably one reason she had been comfortable forming the friendship with Constance. Yet through all that time together in the house, they had never really talked about Iris herself, Iris’s life in the world before she was Natasha’s grandmother. Natasha knew that at the birthday party of a friend, she met a middle-aged man, William Mara, a colonel in the army, getting ready to retire. Pearl Harbor was a year away. They dated for two years while he was stationed in Anacostia, Virginia, and Iris went there and lived in a small apartment in D.C., near Catholic University.
There were romantic stories of him coming in the middle of the night to the street outside her apartment, standing down there whistling tunes from Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman for her. But on those occasions he was drunk, and the stories stopped there. She and William were married in 1942; he went away to the war in January 1943. She had Natasha’s mother, Laura, while he was in the Pacific.
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