“An interpretation for your dream. The blood sacrifice you were ready to make to save the city, the children on the scrapheap—your son.”
She denied it.
By three that afternoon the tops of buildings were invisible at street level.
She had walked crosstown from the office in a lukewarm drizzle, then taken the subway down to East 14th. All the way, the argument with Bernie had continued inside her, like some battery-powered toy, a novelty doll with a loop of tape that croaks after each smack of the old smacker. “Oh, don’t do that again! Oh, please don’t, I can’t stand it!” Before she’d come out through the turnstile she could smell the grease from Big San Juan’s, a dark ground of onion polk a dotted with plantain. By the time she was up on the street, her mouth was watering. She would have bought a quarter bag but customers had gathered three deep around the counters (baseball season—already?) and she saw Lottie Hanson in the crowd in front of the screen. The plantains weren’t worth the risk of a conversation. Lottie’s blowzy sexiness always affected Alexa elegiacally, like a roomful of cut flowers.
Crossing Third Avenue between 11th and 12th, a sound dopplered at her, swelling in an instant from a hum to a roar. She whirled about, scanning the fog for whatever lunatic truck or …
The sound as suddenly diminished. The street was empty. A block to the north the lights winked green. She got to the curb before the traffic—a bus and two shrill Yamahas—reached the second stripe of the ped crossing. Then, several beats after she’d figured it out, her idiot heart caught up with her panic.
A helicopter certainly, but flying lower than any she’d ever known.
Her knees took so to trembling that she had to lean against a hydrant. Long after the distant whirr had diffused into the general midday din the machineries of her glands kept her in a flutter.
Marylou Levin had taken her mother’s place at the corner with the broom and the can. A homely, slow, earnest girl who’d grow up to be a day-care worker, unless, which would probably be more profitable both for Marylou and for society, she took over her mother’s license as a sweep.
Alexa dropped a penny in the can. The girl looked up from her comic book and said thank you.
“I hoped I’d find your mother here, Marylou.”
“She’s home.”
“I’ve got a declaration she had to fill out. I didn’t get it to her last time and now the office is starting to make a fuss.”
“Well, she’s sleeping.” Marylou turned back to the comic book, a sad story about horses in a Dallas circus, then thought to add: “She relieves me at four.”
It meant either waiting or walking up to the seventeenth floor. If the M-28 wasn’t cleared through Blake’s section by tomorrow Mrs. Levin might lose her apartment (Blake had been known to do worse) and it would be Alexa’s fault.
Usually, except for the stink, she didn’t mind the stairs, but all the walking today had taken it out of her. A weariness as of heavy shopping bags focused in the small of her back. On the ninth floor she stopped in at Mr. Anderson’s to hear the poor tedious old man complain about the various ingratitudes of his adopted daughter. (Though “boarder” described that relationship more accurately.) Cats and kittens climbed over Alexa, rubbed against her, inveigled her.
On eleven her legs gave out again. She sat on the top step and listened to the commingled urgencies of a newscast one flight up and a song one flight down. Her ears filtered Latin words from the Spanish phrases.
Imagine, she thought, actually living here. Would one grow numb eventually? One would have to.
Lottie Hanson hove into sight at the landing below, clutching the rail and panting. Recognizing Alexa and conscious of having to look nice for her, she patted her damp, drizzly wig and smiled.
“Glory, isn’t it”—she caught her breath, waved her hand in front of her face, decoratively—“exciting!”
Alexa asked what.
“The bombing.”
“Bombing?”
“Oh, you haven’t heard. They’re bombing New York. They showed it on teevee, where it landed. These steps!” She collapsed beside Alexa with a great huff. The smell that had seemed so appetizing outside Big San Juan’s had lost its savor. “But they couldn’t show”—she waved her hand and it was still, Alexa had to admit, a lovely and a graceful hand—“the actual airplane itself. Because of the fog, you know.”
“Who’s bombing New York?”
“The radicals, I suppose. It’s some kind of protest. Against something.” Lottie Hanson watched her breasts lift and fall. The importance of the news she bore made her feel pleased with herself. She waited for the next question all aglow.
But Alexa had begun calculating with no more input than she had already. The notion had seemed, from Lottie’s first words, inevitable. The city cried out to be bombed. The amazing thing was that no one had ever thought to do it before.
When she did at last ask Lottie a question, it came from an unexpected direction. “Are you afraid?”
“No, not a bit. It’s funny, because usually, you know, I’m just a bundle of nerves. Are you afraid?”
“No. Just the opposite. I feel…” She had to stop and think what it was that she did feel.
Children came storming down the stairs. With a gentle “God-damn,” Lottie squeezed up against the crusty wall. Alexa pressed up to the railing. the children ran down through the canyon they’d formed.
Lottie screamed at the last of them, “Amparo!”
The girl turned round at the landing and smiled. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Miller.”
“Goddamn it, Amparo, don’t you know they’re bombing the city?”
“We’re all going down to the street to watch.”
Dazzling, Alexa thought. She’d always had a thing for pierced ears on children, had even been tempted to do Tank’s for him when he was four, but G. had interposed.
“You get your ass back upstairs and stay there till they shoot that flicking airplane down!”
“The teevee said it doesn’t make any difference where you are.”
Lottie had gone all red. “I don’t care about that. I say—”
But Amparo had already run off.
“One of these days I’m going to kill her.”
Alexa laughed indulgently.
“I am, just wait and see.”
“Not on stage, I hope.”
“What?”
“Ne pueros coram,” she explained, “populo Medea trucidet. Don’t let Medea kill her boys before the audience. It’s Horace.” She got up and bent round to see if she’d soiled her dress.
Lottie remained on the step, inert. An everyday depression began to blunt the exhilaration of the catastrophe, like fog spoiling an April day, today’s fog, today’s April day.
Smells filmed every surface like cheap skin cream. Alexa had to get out of the stairwell, but Lottie had somehow caught hold of her and she wriggled in the meshes of an indefinite guilt.
“I think I’ll go up to the battlement now,” she said, “to watch the siege.”
“Well, don’t wait for me.”
“But later there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Right. Later.”
When she was one landing up Lottie called after her—“Mrs. Miller?”
“Yes?”
“The first bomb got the museum.”
“Oh. Which museum?”
“The Met.”
“Really.”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
Like a theater just before the movie starts, reduced by the darkness to a bare geometry, the fog had erased all details and distances. Uncertain sounds sifted through the grayness—engines, music, women’s voices. She felt through her whole body the imminence of the collapse, and because now she could feel it, it was no longer debilitating. She ran along the gravel. The roof stretched on and on in front of her without perspective. At the ledge she swerved to the right. She ran on.
&nbs
p; She heard, far off, the stolen plane. It neither approached her nor receded, as though it were executing an immense circle, searching for her.
She stood still and lifted her arms, inviting it to her, offering herself to these barbarians, fingers splayed, eyes pressed tightly closed. Commanding. She saw, beneath her but unforeshortened, the bound ox. She saw its heaving belly and desperate eyes. She felt, in her hand, the sharp obsidian.
She told herself that this was what she had to do. Not for her own sake, of course. Never for her own sake—for theirs.
Its blood drenched the gravel. It gushed and splattered. The hem of the palla was stained. She knelt in the blood and dipped her hands into the opened belly to raise the dripping entrails high above her head, tubes and wires in a slime of thick black oil. She wound herself in the soft coils and danced like some god-drenched girl at the festivals, laughing and pulling the torches from their sockets, smashing sacred articles, jeering at the generals.
No one approached her. No one asked what she had read in the haruspices. She climbed up into the jungle gym and stood peering into the featureless air, her legs braced against the thin pipes, raptured and strong with a dawning faith.
The airplane approached, audibly.
She wanted it to see her. She wanted the boys inside to know that she knew, that she agreed.
It appeared quite suddenly, and near, like Minerva sprung full-grown from the brow of Jupiter. It was shaped like a cross.
“Come then,” she said with conscious dignity. “Lay waste.”
But the plane—a Rolls Rapide—passed overhead and returned to the haze from which it had materialized.
She climbed down from the gym with a sense of loss: she had offered herself to History and History had refused. With a sense, equally, of what a fool she’d been.
She felt in her pockets for a pack of hankies but she’d run out at the office. She had her cry anyhow.
Since the Army had begun celebrating its victory the city no longer seemed a sanctuary. Therefore early the next morning Merriam and Arcadius started back home on foot. During the darkest moments of the siege, with the generosity of despair, Arcadius had given the cook and the Theban girl their freedom, so that they were returning to the villa completely unattended.
Merriam was dreadfully hungover. The road was a slough, and when they came to the cut-off, Arcadius insisted on taking the even muddier path that went through Alexa’s fields. But for all that, she felt happy as an apricot. the sun was shining and the fields steamed like some great kitchen full of soup kettles and sauceboats, as though the very earth was sending up its prayer of thanksgiving.
“Lord,” she would murmur, “Lord.” She felt like a new woman.
“Have you noticed,” Arcadius pointed out, after they’d gone some distance, “that there is nowhere any sign of them?”
“Of the barbarians? Yes, I’ve been crossing my fingers.”
“It’s a miracle.”
“Oh yes, it’s God’s work, beyond a doubt.”
“Do you think she knew?”
“Who?” she asked, in not an encouraging tone. Talk always dissipated her good feelings.
“Alexa. Perhaps she’s been sent a sign. Perhaps, after all, she danced in thanksgiving and not… the opposite.”
Merriam pressed her lips together and made no reply. It was a blasphemous proposition. God did not give signs to the servants of the abominations he loathed and comminated! And yet…
“In retrospect,” Arcadius insisted, “there’s really no other explanation.” (And yet, she had seemed altogether jubilant. Perhaps—she had heard this suggested by a priest in Alexandria—there are evil spirits whom God permits, to a limited degree and imperfectly, to see the shape of future things.)
She said, “I thought it was an obscene display.”
Arcadius didn’t contradict her.
Later, after they had circled round the base of the larger hill, the path sloped upward and grew dryer. The trees fell away on their left and permitted a view eastward across Alexa’s melon fields. Hundreds of bodies were scattered over the trampled scenery. Merriam hid her eyes but it was not so easy to escape the scent of decay, which mingled, almost pleasantly, with the odor of smashed, fermenting melons.
“Oh dear,” said Arcadius, realizing that their path would lead them straight through the midst of the carnage.
“Well, we’ll have to do it—that’s all,” Merriam said, lifting her chin with a show of defiance. She took his hand and they walked through the field of defeated barbarians as quickly as they could.
Later, Lottie came up looking for her. “I was wondering if you were all right.”
“Thank you. I just needed a breath of air.”
“The plane crashed, you know.”
“No, I hadn’t heard any more than you told me.”
“Yes—it crashed into a MODICUM project at the end of Christopher Street. One-seventy-six.”
“Oh, that’s awful.”
“But the building was just going up. No one was killed but a couple of electricians.”
“That’s a miracle.”
“I thought you might like to come down and watch the teevee with us. Mom is making Koffee.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“Good.” Lottie held open the door. The stairwell had achieved evening a couple hours in advance of the day.
On the way downstairs Alexa mentioned that she thought she could arrange for Amparo to get a scholarship at the Lowen School.
“Would that be good?” Lottie asked, and then, embarrassed by her question, “I mean—I’ve never heard of it till just now.”
“Yes, I think it’s pretty good. My son Tancred will be going there next year.”
Lottie seemed unpersuaded.
Mrs. Hanson stood outside the door of the apartment gesturing frantically. “Hurry up, hurry up! They’ve found the boy’s mother, and they’re going to interview her.”
“We can talk about it more later,” Alexa said.
Inside, on the teevee, the boy’s mother was explaining to the camera, to the millions of viewers, what she couldn’t understand.
Emancipation:
A Romance of the Times to Come
1
Summer mornings the balcony would fill up with bona-fide sunshine and Boz would spread open the recliner and lie there languid as something tropical in their own little basin of private air and ultraviolet fifteen floors above entrance level. Just watching, half-awake, the vague geometries of jet trails that formed and disappeared, formed and disappeared in the pale cerulean haze. Sometimes you could hear the dinky preschoolers on the roof piping their nursery rhymes in thin, drugged voices.
A Boeing buzzing from the west brings the boy that I love best. But a Boeing from the east…
Just nonsense, but it taught directions, like north and south. Boz, who had no patience with Science, always confused north and south. One was uptown, one was downtown—why not just call them that? Of the two, uptown was preferable. Who wants to be MOD, after all? Though it was no disgrace: his own mother, for instance. Human dignity is more than a zipcode number, or so they say.
Tabbycat, who was just as fond of sunshine and out-of-doors as Boz, would stalk along the prestressed ledge as far as the rubber plant and then back to the geraniums, very sinister, just back and forth all morning long, and every so often Boz would reach up to stroke the soft sexy down of her throat and sometimes when he did that he would think of Milly. Boz liked the mornings best of all.
But in the afternoons the balcony fell into the shadow of the next building and though it remained almost as warm it didn’t do anything for his tan, so in the afternoon Boz had to find something else to do.
Once he had studied cooking on television but it had nearly doubled the grocery bills, and Milly didn’t seem to care whether Boz or Betty Crocker made her omelette fine herbes, and he had to admit himself that really there wasn’t that much difference. Still, the spice shelf and the two copper-bott
om pans he had given himself for Christmas made an unusual decorator contribution. The nice names spices have—rosemary, thyme, ginger, cinnamon—like fairies in a ballet, all gauze wings and toeshoes. He could see her now, his own little niecelette Amparo Martinez as Oregano Queen of the Willies. And he’d be Basil, a doomed lover. So much for the spice shelf.
Of course he could always read a book, he liked books. His favorite author was Norman Mailer and then Gene Stratton Porter. He’d read everything they’d ever written. But lately when he’d read for more than a few minutes he would develop really epic headaches and then be a complete tyrant to Milly when she came home from work. What she called work.
At four o’clock art movies on Channel 5. Sometimes he used the electromassage and sometimes just his hands to jerk off with. He’d read in the Sunday facs that if all the semen from the Metropolitan Area viewers of Channel 5 were put all together in one single place it would fill a medium-sized swimming pool. Fantastic? Then imagine swimming in it!
Afterwards he would lie spread out on the sofa that looked like a giant Baggie, his own little contribution to the municipal swimming pool drooling down the clear plastic and he would think glumly: There’s something wrong. Something is missing.
There was no romance in their marriage anymore, that’s what was wrong. It had been leaking out slowly, like air from a punctured Baggie chair, and one of these days she would mean it when she started talking about a divorce, or he would kill her with his own bare hands or with the electromassage, when she was ribbing him in bed, or something dreadful would happen, he knew it.
Something really dreadful.
At dusk, in bed, her breasts hung above him, swaying. Just the smell of her is enough, sometimes, to drive him up the walls. He brought his thighs up against the sweaty backside of her legs. Knees pressed against buttocks. One breast, then the other, brushed his forehead; he arched his neck to kiss one breast, then the other.
“Mm,” she said. “Continue.”
Obediently Boz slid his arms between her legs and pulled her forward. As he wriggled down on the damp sheets his own legs went over the edge of the mattress, and his toes touched her Antron slip, a puddle of coolness on the desert-beige rug.
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