Dive From Clausen's Pier

by Ann Packer

  Then I knew. I dried off and dressed in clean jeans and a sweatshirt, then made a pot of coffee. By the time I sat down at my sewing table it was almost ten, but that didn’t faze me. I’d marked the robe’s hemline the day before, and now I cut away all but a perfect three inches, then used my machine to put in a line of basting half an inch from the edge. The iron was heating and I turned the seam allowance under and pressed it, then carefully pinned the hem up using my ballpoint pins, pulling on the basting thread wherever I needed to adjust the fullness. I had four yards to sew, but I didn’t feel daunted; I took the robe to a chair near a bright light, threaded a needle, and got started. When my neck felt sore I took breaks, lay on the floor for a while or did some stretches, but I was always back at it within a few minutes. I had to rethread my needle several times, and as luck would have it I ran out again just a couple inches shy of the end, but I didn’t feel the irritation I usually felt when that happened; I just cut off another foot of thread, poked it through the eye of the needle, knotted the end, and finished my work.

  My body ached. I undressed and slipped on the gown, then the robe. In my bedroom mirror I did look glamorous, as Jamie had said, but only from the neck down, because my face was all wrong: too serious, too plain, too young. I knew I could pluck my eyebrows, put on foundation and blush and lipstick, do something to make my eyes look deep-set and mysterious, but I’d still look like what I was—not a child, maybe, but not a woman either. A girl of twenty-three.

  It was nearly one in the morning now, and as I took off the robe and then the gown it occurred to me that there might be some danger ahead, that I might end up being a girl all my life, like Mrs. Fletcher. I thought of what Dave King had said, his suggestion that seeing myself as a child had been self-protective, and I made a wish for courage.

  I got dressed and went back out to the living room, where I put everything away—the iron and ironing board, the scraps of fabric, the pattern pieces that I’d never gotten around to returning to their envelope. I unplugged the sewing machine, used a little brush to clean out the bobbin housing, wrapped the cord up and tucked it into its container, and put the cover on. I set the machine by the door, then I went into my bedroom and got out the enormous old suitcase my mother had lent me when I moved from the dorms to my apartment. Working quickly, I filled it with clothes, and when I had finished my dresser and closet were nearly empty. Last in were the gown and robe, folded carefully and wrapped in tissue paper. I found a smaller hold-all for my toiletries and a few other odds and ends, and I carried both bags down to my car. I went back up for a last look around, emptied half a gallon of milk into the sink, took out the garbage, and returned for my sewing machine. And then I locked up.

  How much do we owe the people we love? How much do we owe them? When I was in high school something people said in praise of their friends was “He’d put his hand in the fire for me.” I think Mike may have even said it about Rooster once, and it’s just possible Rooster would have: put his hand in the fire for Mike, given up his hand. What I had discovered was that I couldn’t give up my life for Mike—that’s how I saw it at the time, that’s the choice I thought I had to make. And because I couldn’t give up everything, I also thought I couldn’t give up anything.

  There’s a kind of tired you can get that has its own energy. I was exhausted when I started the car, my eyes stinging and my back and neck aching, but once I was driving I discovered that I was actually in no real danger of falling asleep.

  I took I–90 down past Chicago and saw the sun rise just as I was passing Lake Michigan. It was a clear day, and soon the states were going by as if they were towns built close together by the side of the highway. I thought occasionally of stopping, but I was in the rhythm of it, I was running on French fries and terrible coffee, and I kept going. Finally, somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, I got off the interstate and found a motel and slept.

  By mid-morning I was back on the road. At one gas station I bought a map, and at another I found a Manhattan phone book and located the address of Biggs, Lepper, Rush, Creighton and Fenelon, the helpful nickname perfectly clear in my mind. Then, just as the morning clouds were thinning and the sky was turning blue, I steered my way onto the George Washington Bridge, and there was New York, stretching down the river as far as I could see.

  PART TWO

  A THOUSAND MILES

  CHAPTER 15

  Simon lived on the edge of Chelsea in a decrepit old brownstone with taped-over windows and a sheet of graffitied plywood covering the front door. The house was owned by a partner at his law firm: the partner had inherited it from an uncle and was renting it to Simon—for the unheard-of sum of five hundred dollars a month—while he tried to decide whether to unload it or sink a bundle into it and live there himself. A block east everything was leafy and well-kept, neat iron fencelets around the bases of ginkgo trees, but this block was borderline, home not just to some other dubious townhouses, but also to a gas station, an auto body shop, and a double-wide empty lot surrounded by chain-link fence. Simon and some Yale friends occupied the four bedrooms, but he found me an empty alcove on the third floor, and together we dragged a spare futon up the steep, creaking stairs.

  He kept apologizing about the place, but I liked it—it was so shabby and easygoing. Water stains mapped the ceilings, bits of baseboard pulled away from the walls. The walls themselves looked so battered they might have been attacked, scarred with marks and dents and actual holes that blew plaster dust onto the floors. In the bathrooms, leaky faucets wobbled in their sockets, while ancient bathtubs rested on clawed feet, makeshift shower curtains hanging precariously from rigged-up lengths of pipe. “Like showering in a raincoat,” Simon said, and it was true.

  There was a dark, cavernous living room, but the kitchen was the true center of the house, the place where everyone hung out. Low-ceilinged and poorly lit, it was full of old appliances: a broken washing machine, a broken dishwasher, a rickety electric range with a broken fan, an enormous dinosaur of a microwave, a free-standing lift-top freezer that served as a countertop, and a round-shouldered refrigerator that gave off an erratic, worrisome hum. On an old metal desk that had been shoved against the wall there was a big whiteboard that Simon told me was the most important piece of furniture in the house: the place where messages were recorded.

  At least a couple stereos were usually playing, and it was a little like living in a dorm again: people coming and going at all hours, the sound of a door closing waking me just as I’d fallen asleep. Simon’s friends were perfectly nice, but they were all so ambitious I felt like a misfit. Simon was a proofreader but wanted to be an illustrator, one friend was a waiter but wanted to be an actor, another worked at a magazine but wanted to be a playwright. Simon referred to what they were doing now as their meanwhile jobs, as if once they’d held them for a while they’d step past them into their lives.

  My ambition was to have an ambition, until I found Kilroy. Then I did: to stay in New York.

  I’d left his note in Madison, but I’d brought our conversation: I’d brought our conversation, and the intent way he’d looked at me across Viktor and Ania’s table, and the name of the bar where he hung out, the place with the pool table that had a gouge he could almost always make work for him. McClanahan’s. A few days after my arrival, I sat at the kitchen table with the Manhattan white pages and looked up the address.

  It was on Avenue of the Americas—Sixth Avenue—which, according to my map, narrowed it down to about sixty blocks. Nonetheless, I headed off to look, still such a newcomer that the traffic unnerved me, the groaning buses, the scream of an ambulance, the flash and honk of a dozen taxis. The density of people on the streets amazed me—the density and the variety: I’d always thought Madison was pretty multicultural, but it was clear now how white it really was. I saw faces from olive to deep brown, heard accents I didn’t recognize, languages I couldn’t begin to identify. I passed restaurants, pharmacies, laundromats, stationers, florists, liquor stores, coffee
shops, and then suddenly there it was, McClanahan’s, a corner bar next to a dry cleaner’s. What did it mean that I’d done this, tracked this place down? I hurried by, telling myself a story I half believed, that I was just exploring the city and could as easily have been somewhere else.

  I was back the next day. There were neon beer signs in the windows—Miller and Pabst, good Midwestern beers—but here the windows were covered by iron bars. I went around the block slowly, wondering what I’d do when I got back. The stretch from Seventh to Sixth seemed endless, a dark, narrow passageway of tall gray buildings. Finally I reached McClanahan’s again, and someone opened the door just as I arrived, revealing a long, narrow room that was smoke-filled and dimly lit and nearly empty.

  On the third day I planted myself out front. People looked at me as they strode by, or didn’t: already I understood how the rules of the sidewalk differed from the rules in Madison or even Chicago. Here you could do anything you wanted—growl, rant, scream—and no one would give you more than a passing glance.

  The door to McClanahan’s was massive, ornamented with tarnished brass studs. I stood there waiting for something to take over, the urge to leave or the urge to go in. Five minutes went by, perhaps ten; I didn’t keep track. I stared at the door until, virtually conjured, Kilroy himself came out.

  He looked older than I remembered, wearing jeans and a leather jacket, his face narrow and closed. His hair was shaggy, and he sported a two- or three-day growth of beard. He glanced at me and turned the corner, then stopped and turned back. “I know you,” he said, and I smiled a little, feeling foolish and pleased and scared.

  He pointed at me. “Madison, Wisconsin. Dinner at that Polish couple’s house. How’s it going?”

  “Fine, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, Carrie.”

  I couldn’t believe he remembered my name after—what?—three months, but he just gave me a sly smile and went on. “No, don’t tell me, I’m going for broke here. Carrie … Bell. There, I got it. Do you remember my name?”

  I told him what it was, and he smiled again, this time a sweet, open-mouthed smile that revealed his front teeth, the way one overlapped the edge of the other. He said, “You’re a long way from home, Carrie Bell. What brings you to wretched New York?”

  “Why is it wretched?”

  “Oh, you know—it’s wretched, it’s wonderful, it’s disgusting, it’s divine. All at the same time, usually, which is why I love it so.” He gave me an ironic look, as if to suggest that in fact he didn’t love it so—or that if he did it was for nothing so simple, nothing he’d be so glib about. He gestured at me with his chin. “But you haven’t answered my question. Carrie Bell the Evasive. What’s a nice Midwestern girl like you doing in big bad Manhattan?”

  “What makes you so sure I’m nice?”

  “You’ve got it written all over you. It’s right there on your face next to sweet and good.”

  I thought of what I’d done, run out in the middle of the night on people who counted on me, and I felt shaky suddenly, ready to cry. I hadn’t called anyone in Madison, had no idea what was going through my mother’s head, Jamie’s. Mike’s.

  “Oops,” he said. “I sense a story. Can I buy you a beer? Or do you want to pretend this never happened, we never ran into each other?”

  I looked at the door to McClanahan’s. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and I wondered how long he’d been in there. There were three or four tiny blond hairs growing out of his cheek, up near his left eye, and I longed to reach up and stroke them. “Sure,” I said to him. “I’ll have a beer.”

  That first day we talked for four hours, or rather I talked: I told him all about the summer, the jerky slip-slide of my feelings, the weeks and weeks of it. And how since leaving I’d been on a speedway, careening from guilt to remorse to relief to exhilaration, with New York standing right outside it all: massive, impassive, just there and there. I even told him about the last night with Mike, his We’ve had it, haven’t we?, and the way I waved to him from the door as I was leaving, a finger waggle, a light, entirely untruthful wiggle of the fingers of my right hand, as if either of us had any idea what we expected next, let alone what would actually happen.

  “You flew the coop,” Kilroy said. “You had to.”

  We were sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park by then, the night black and heavy around us, a pair of pigeons bobbing at our feet. We’d stayed at McClanahan’s until it had gotten so crowded we couldn’t hear each other, then we’d eaten pizza slices standing at the counter of a place open to the din of 8th Street.

  “I think it was brave of you,” he went on. “It must’ve been a very hard thing to do.” He turned so he was facing me, one knee up on the bench. “Harder than staying.”

  “Staying felt impossible.”

  “Yeah, but staying was static. You acted. I admire it.”

  I was surprised, and for the first time since we’d begun talking I felt self-conscious: in the bar, with voices rushing past us, it had been easier. The park was bright with activity—a gang of kids on skateboards, a knot of teenagers around a tiny ember, a tall man swooping by on Rollerblades—but it was all far away, modulated, no competition for the sudden strangeness that overcame me.

  Kilroy grinned. “You can’t believe you’re talking to me like this when you don’t really know me.”

  “I don’t really know you?” I said with a laugh. “I don’t know you at all.”

  He lifted one shoulder. “What’s knowing someone? You may not know where I grew up or what I do from nine to five every day, but you know what it’s like to be with me for several hours. Doesn’t that tell you more than information would?”

  “I guess,” I said, but I was thinking, Where did you grow up? What do you do from nine to five each day—drink?

  He looked at me and laughed. “Go ahead.”

  “OK, easy one first,” I said. “Is Kilroy your first or last name?”

  “It’s neither.”

  “It’s your middle name?”

  “My name is Paul Eliot Fraser. There’s no Kilroy in there at all, it’s just what I’m called.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not in there at all.”

  Score one, Kilroy, I thought. “All right, where did you grow up?”

  Smirking, he lifted a finger to his lips. “I didn’t. Don’t tell.”

  “Paul Eliot Fraser the Evasive,” I said, and he gave me a big smile that lasted and lasted—a smile that anointed me.

  “New York,” he said. “Born and bred. And the thing I do from nine to five is I work for a temp agency. I get hired out to businesses who need a week or two of word processing done because someone’s on vacation, or I go answer the phones while someone’s sick. I’m the rambling man of office work, I never stay anywhere very long—I put that Dictaphone behind me and saddle up for the subway ride to the copier on the horizon.”

  I smiled, but I was surprised: I’d figured he was a struggling something or other, like Simon and his friends. Maybe he was a struggling something or other and just wasn’t saying.

  “Happy now?” he said. “Feel you know me a whole lot better?”

  I lifted one shoulder. “Do your parents still live in the city?”

  “If you could call it that.”

  “What—they live in one of the other boroughs or something?”

  “Living,” he said.

  Something in his expression warned me not to ask more. He took his keys from his pocket and began fiddling with them, pulling them around the key ring one by one. Uncomfortable, I looked away, at the teenagers behind us. They seemed so veiled: their faces by their hair, their bodies by their dark, shapeless clothes. A bit of light glinted off a nylon jacket, but otherwise they were barely more than silhouettes.

  I turned back and found Kilroy studying me. “Are you an alcoholic?” I asked, no idea where I’d gotten the nerve.

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “You were at tha
t bar in the middle of the afternoon.”

  “I’m just a guy who likes bars,” he said. “And McClanahan’s is about as good as it gets these days, though the yuppie hordes are making inroads.” He smiled. “Next time we’ll have your first lesson.”

  “My first lesson?”

  “Your first pool lesson—I’m sure I remember that you’ve never shot pool.”

  “You have quite a memory.”

  “I’ve heard that said before.”

  By whom, I wondered, but he was getting to his feet, so I stood, too, and all at once everyone stood with me—Mike, Jamie, Rooster, even my mother, everyone I’d been talking about. Why did I have such a crowd along when Kilroy was so obviously by himself?

  “Shall we?” he said.

  We’d entered the park through an opening on the side, but we went out past the arch, at once massive and curiously ghostly against the night sky. It was my first time on lower Fifth Avenue, and I walked with my head tilted back, the skyline jagged with roofs and lit windows. Far ahead, the Empire State Building was limned with white lights.

  “Do you like to walk?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “That’s good. New York is a walker’s city, that’s the only way to get to know it.”

  We turned onto 14th Street and went past gated storefronts and tiny bodegas crowded with men. Cold fluorescent light spilled onto the sidewalk. In Madison there would have been a stillness to the night, but here even the garbage in the gutter seemed active, jittering in the wind, ready to dart away. A police car with its red and blue lights swirling shrieked past us and turned at the far corner.

  “I love sirens,” Kilroy said. “The sound of them, especially at night.”

  I looked at him.

  “I do. My bedroom’s an especially good listening point for sirens—it’s got my only window onto Seventh Avenue. You’ll see.”