There’s this theory I have about your September series.
By all means.
You reminded me when you touched on the buildings. Instead of the towers, you chose to depict the victims—the actual physical people, the man on the plane, the woman in the office, the falling man—
Yes.
No one was willing to show those images. It was a kind of censorship.
Censorship is a strong word.
Where were those images then? Where else?
I don’t think I can address all that. Clearly, what I was trying to do, I failed.
You got people talking.
Not in the way I intended. That’s something artists say a lot, don’t they—good or bad, as long as it gets people talking? I don’t understand that. People are always talking. They’re desperate for talk. They’ll talk about anything. Most of what they say is stupid.
And if they hadn’t taken the series away when they did?
Who knows?
If they’d let the pieces stay on view, you might have had a different reaction.
It’s certainly flattering to think so. But I think that probably they were right, in taking them away. People didn’t like them, didn’t want to like them.
For what it’s worth, I thought they were exquisite.
You saw them?
Only in pictures. I was in Ohio for college at the time. They’re in a private collection now?
That’s right.
Well, I wish I had seen them. Actually I wish I’d been in New York then, to see all that.
You mean on nine-eleven?
Is that awful to say?
It’s natural. It was one of those rare important times, fully realized. A day that announced itself as history. That’s exciting. I wish I was there, and I was.
You say you were downtown by the time of the attacks, but you live uptown. How early do you usually begin work?
I stay at the studio overnight some nights.
And your family?
They’re very patient.
Is that of your wife?
That, no. That’s a picture for something I’m working on now.
Do you still work off live models?
Sometimes.
Strangers or people you know?
Doesn’t really matter. To me. Though it might matter to them.
I used to model a little, when I first moved to New York.
—
From the Super 8, he could walk to the minimart, where he bought an off-brand Big Gulp, and back to the bar, where he bought two more whiskeys, neat, and a vodka cranberry for the girl who sat down next to him and who would tell him his ChapStick tasted like piña colada. But that was Later.
In Jamestown, with the overhead off and the front door propped open, it was a dark summer morning indoors. The kids were still in bed. Deb looked into the fridge and decided her iced tea had cooled enough. She’d used the mushroom pitcher Jack had found once at a flea market in town. The ceramic bowl of it was carved with cremini, painted seventies beige and orange and brown. Two clumsy green leaves made up the spout.
She packed two glasses with ice and clutched them stinging cold against her dress and bare arms. Gary was at the great wood table, aiming a screwdriver at parts of a fishing reel and probably straining his eyes. “Whatcha got there?” she asked.
“Oh, I was thinking we might like to go fishing, one of these days. Maybe a birthday trip.”
She sat, peeled the glasses from her skin. “You were always good about that, birthdays.”
“Yours is easy to remember,” he said, though not why.
She thought of the first birthday she’d had with Jack, when he was married and she wasn’t. Her twenty-sixth. How could she have been sad about anything then? Crazy, stupid, tortured girl: She wanted to shake herself. Nothing is so bad, twenty-six. It had seemed bad, when Jack was two weeks with his wife in Cape Cod at some beach she’d never been to, and she was drunk from endless Bloody Marys at the endless birthday brunch her friends had arranged for her. She had chosen brunch over a proper party because Jack’s plane landed that night around eight and he’d promised to make it over.
And had she even thanked them for birthday brunch, her friends? She’d become indifferent to them; they’d become boring to her: Their opinions were not his. She’d liked him immediately, and so much. What do they call it? Enchanted. A victory just to be with him, moments when he wasn’t with anyone else. Why had that meant so much then? The five of them had split the bill without her, even though everyone was a dancer and poor, and Izzy had arranged to be out that night. “But call if you need me,” she’d said, clearly worried that Jack would not come. Deb couldn’t remember thanking them. She wanted to call them all now.
“God, Gar, how’d we get to be so old?”
“Flattering, thank you.”
“It’s just being back around all this stuff. This incredible, ugly pitcher.” Its ugliness had made them laugh the first few times they’d used it. At one point she’d tried making it into a vase, but Jack said it ruined the flowers. “How many summers ago were we all cooking dinner together here? Cutting the ends off snap peas or something.”
“Long time.”
“Being in this house—We’re even in our same seats.”
Gary shrugged. “It’s where I sit.”
“And this is where I sit, and that’s him, where he would,” nodding at the empty end chair between them.
Deb turned twenty-six in her rattling apartment over the subway with all the lights off thinking, Come. Please come. Where are you. Where are you. Whereareyou. Jack made it, just made it, the way he just did a lot of things. It was eleven-something when he rang up from the street. He hadn’t showered since Chatham and brought the beach in with him. Later, after he left in the small early hours—their affair gave her so much new time, blue morning time she used to sleep through—Deb stayed very awake in bed and stared up at the ceiling, dragging the soles of her feet up and down the mattress, feeling the grit of him everywhere. Now she was forty-one, nearly forty-two, and a little thrilled to be away from New York, and from Jack.
She was pressing the nails of her left hand into the dark wood, engraving small arcs in its waxy surface. “Someone should have dropped this pitcher a decade ago.”
“Ugly things don’t break,” Gary said over his gear.
She would always know Gary, regardless of how long they’d been apart. She knew how he took iced tea. With sugar, sunk mostly to the bottom. Gary was a little bit of a place to come back to.
Jack’s head was like a blister of brown liquor simmering under the mile of sun between the Super 8 and his car. He made it, each step a superhuman achievement, past the cardboard box of a campus chapel and the forsaken tennis courts around which the grass would not even grow for heatstroke, to the parking lot, to his ridiculous red convertible, long abandoned by the shade of tree in whose custody he’d left it. And then the car, when he got there, it wouldn’t start.
He sat with the door open, one leg swung out and the other growing slick against the leather interior—shorts were a mixed blessing—and pumped the gas and tried again. He could have taken it as a sign, right, if he were watching his life from somewhere far away, like a character in a book or movie. The sign would have been to go home. Go home, go home. None of this is for you. Only in movies do we heed the warnings of inanimate objects with due reverence. In life Jack ran the heater on high until it started blowing cool air, took the cap off the gas tank, and made his own shade, his back to the sun and his silhouette cast across what parts of the engine seemed important.
He’d woken up alone in his hotel room, on the scratchy-moss carpet, between the enormous, funereal beds. He was on his stomach, with a crick in his neck and some drool pooled around the corner of his mouth that made him want to move never. There had been, what, many drinks. He’d gotten sloppy with that girl. Kissed her in the bar and again outside after her friends had gone home. Made out, like a teenager.
He remembered no name, only that she was studying audiology. Whether it was a joke or not, she did seem to have a thing for ears, whispering into his like to drive him crazy, which it might have if his senses had not been so dull and if all of it were not so thin and so obvious. He was relieved when she didn’t want to go into the Super 8, and it was easy to turn down the invitation to her on-campus double because, while he was lonely, or horny, he was not completely stupid (despite all outward appearances). Plus, also, he had certain practical misgivings (specifically that he was drunk to the point where it might not work).
It took cycling the ignition ten more minutes before the car would start, but finally it did. Jack drove to the airport without any idea about flights and without calling Deb, without calling Jolie. It was a pleasure not calling, building a dam between himself and the voices reminding him of all he’d done, and hadn’t.
He was glad to be getting rid of the red convertible, which, like the Super 8, had become a failed irony. Funny for the Queen of England to stay at the Super 8, or for the Very Famous Architect. Not for you. In the shower he’d found an old washcloth, dried stiff, that betrayed the history of the place, the sad naked men and women who’d preceded him. If the washcloth was from the last person, or the one before that, or how far back did it go.
Jack knew he was behaving irrationally—that he wasn’t behaving, period—which was why everything he did now, all he was permitted, seemed suddenly too easy. The Super 8 people, Jolie, the ear girl—nobody knew. The woman elevated up behind the counter at the car rental did not know, or care. Her job was to say yes. We do have an economy model available for one-way travel, yes. To Houston, no problem. We have a branch located at Bush Intercontinental, very convenient if you plan on flying out. Yes, sir, it’s a sedan. Four-door. Sorry? Black, I believe. Yes.
Jack was going home.
That afternoon it was back, the big gray one with the yellow eyes that Kay had started calling Wolf. The cat had a way of making its body thin on the sides and squeezing past their bedroom door even as Simon closed it, running always to the same place on Kay’s closet floor, the pile of her clothes a kind of bed or nest.
“It’s going to give you lice or fleas or whatever,” Simon said in the warpy full-length mirror. He was trying out his fifth shirt of the day, fifth of the last four minutes.
“He doesn’t have lice,” Kay said from the floor, where Wolf was kneading a red sweatshirt with his eyes closed.
“Just keep it out of my stuff.”
“He isn’t interested in your stuff.”
“Yeah, okay,” stamping on his shoes.
—
At first it looked like a pile of trash, the pots, buckets, and vases heaped on the fringe of pale grass outside the house that had to be hers. Not without some reluctance, either, did Simon decide it was hers, only it had to be, because of the yellow swings she’d mentioned, and because the number on the house to the left was too low and the number on the right too high.
There was a yard sale in front of it.
Or not a sale, because the cardboard sign, flat on its back and weighted with rocks, when he stood over it, read FREE! TAKE ALL! Most of the clay pots still had soil in them, and the glass vases looked not very well washed.
Simon rang the white plastic doorbell, which was slapped crooked by the door, and if it worked, if it did anything, the sound was not one he could hear. He stood on the porch that creaked under several rugs, and it was strange to have rugs outside, though he guessed welcome mats were like the same thing, and these might have been welcome mats, all overlapping each other, welcome welcome welcome. He thought about this so he would not worry about what was taking so long, if she’d forgotten the invitation, if he wasn’t really meant to come.
At last he heard a high shriek and a “Coming!” then a thumping down stairs.
The door opened to a green-beaded curtain and, behind it, Teagan, in a simple white T-shirt and the same shorts as before. Her eyes were rimmed purple, thick Cleopatra lines that curved out a little at the ends, like fish tails. She held out a bottle through the strings of twisted plastic. Beer, for him.
“My mom’s asleep,” she said, nodding in at the living room as they passed it, but he didn’t know if she meant they should be quiet. He couldn’t see anyone there, only the back of the couch, and for a moment the reflection, in the black, glassy face of an ancient Sony Trinitron TV, of what could have been a body or could have been only a mass of sheets and throw pillows. Of the house he was ready to say things like, No, it looks great, in case she said something like, Sorry for the mess, which she never said.
They came out onto the back porch, which turned out to be the same porch as the front, wrapped around. “He made it,” said a pair of legs high in a hammock. Pale and freckled legs, the girl attached near to upside down. An Us Weekly splayed open on her stomach, she held a cigarette in the air so that the ash, if it fell, might hit her face.
That “he” made Simon uncomfortable, as though they’d been talking about him recently. And there was another he that bothered him, but this one an actual person, sitting on the floor with his back against the railing.
“You know Laura, and that’s Manny. This is Simon.”
Manny tipped his beer. The whispery brown hair, the divot in one eyebrow, and Simon knew this was the cashier who’d bagged their groceries that first day, when his mother had called him “squirt.” Please may he not remember. Simon pressed the neck of his own beer against his chest and twisted the cap, hoping it was the twisting kind, and when it fell off a light mist rose up from the rim and the cold left a dark moon on his shirt.
Teagan kicked off her shoes, soft yellow Keds, and climbed up into the hammock with Laura and Laura’s legs. “So! Simon.” She blew invisible strands of hair from her face. “Tell us something.”
“Something,” Simon answered. No one laughed, or even smiled. “Like what? I mean, I’m from New York. My parents have a house here? Um.”
“What do you do for fun?” Laura asked, idly turning the leaves of her magazine.
“Regular stuff, I guess. Hang out with friends, play videogames.”
“Gamer, huh?” Manny said. “Right on.”
“Quit being a dick,” said Teagan, though Simon hadn’t realized he was. “Simon likes to read, too, don’t you? Unlike some people.”
“Well, my school.” Simon swallowed. “I’m still in high school, and our school is like—”
“Wait,” Laura said, looking suddenly, troublingly interested. “Say again?”
“Just, we have like a lot of electives at our school, so—”
“You know we’re in high school, right?” Laura pitched herself forward, anchoring her chin onto Teagan’s shoulder. She’d lit another cigarette.
Simon could feel all parts of him tighten. “I know. Me too.”
“But,” Laura went on, “the way you said you were in high school, like we weren’t.”
Simon tried staring only at the piece of ash that had settled in a curl of her hair. “Yeah. Yeah, no.”
“We’ll be seniors in the fall,” Teagan said, “but Manny graduated.”
“Oh?” he asked, turning to the boy on the floor. “What are you doing now?” Like this was a person he wanted to know better. The nick in his eyebrow he’d probably had from birth, but here, minus apron, plus cigarette, plus girls, it seemed more like something he’d won in a fight.
Manny was no more interested in Simon than Simon was in him, or in anything—the world, it seemed like—except whoever or whatever was on the other end of the old flip phone he never shut or let out of his hand, pressing buttons that clicked. “Uh.” He looked up and then back to his phone. “I’ve got a band.”
“You used to have a band,” Teagan said. “He works at McQuades.”
At that, Manny snapped his phone shut. “Okay, it’s my time.” He grabbed the last beer from the tub of ice on the floor, mostly melted, and stood letting it drip as he and Teagan seemed to say somethin
g to each other without speaking. He might have been waiting for her to walk him out.
She didn’t. “Fine. Later.”
They listened to him leave, and for a while there were still four of them, the girls and Simon and the sound of Manny walking out.
“It’s cool you guys have jobs,” Simon said. “I want a job, but, I don’t know, you need experience it seems like. Like, how do you get the first job if they always want you to have experience? It’s a total catch twenty-two.” Catch-22 was a thing he always realized too late that he might not be using correctly but never remembered to look up later.
Teagan picked a cuticle. Laura stayed with her chin on Teagan’s shoulder and began to blow smoke out her nose. Simon finished his beer and it didn’t make him feel anything. Maybe he should have been going. He’d only just gotten there, but he’d delivered himself, or some version of self, and they were not interested.
Then Laura said, “Actually, Teegs, I gotta go too.” She hoisted herself out of the hammock and into the same sneakers Teagan had had on before. She dropped her cigarette into the tub and Us onto the floor, where the cover flapped off at the staple. “I gotta be at that thing really early.”
“Boo,” Teagan said, but the way she said it and the way she threw herself lengthwise along the hammock made Simon wonder if it was at all possible that she could want to be alone with him.
Laura walked out along the wraparound porch, the same way that Manny had gone before. Now Simon’s only questions were (1) was this on purpose? and (2) or should he leave?
Teagan dug her bare feet deeper into the hammock’s open netting, toes curled around its strings. “So.” She looked at him. “Are you going to ditch me too?”
“I don’t have any things in the morning.”
“Ha.” She spun herself around, tried scooting out from the middle of the hammock, which she could not do well. It was the lowest point and where gravity wanted to keep her.
Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel Page 16
