“She’s not here,” said handsome Sean, or Philip, the commune’s champion kyacker. “I didn’t think she was, but you never know with Jade.”
“Oh,” I said, in an amazingly dead voice, as if my throat was lined in brick. “When will she be in? Do you know where I could reach her?”
“She might be at the music barn. I don’t know. She was supposed to go to that thing at Sophie’s farm but I think it was canceled.”
“God.” It was too amazing: music barn, Sophie’s farm, the boy’s voice. I was hovering over Jade’s life like an errant, misled ghost, rattling the shutters in the wrong window. How could I have made this arduous journey and still be without her?
“Do you want to leave a message or something?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, but left it at that.
He waited—I don’t know how long. He had a healthy respect for the unspeakable.
“This is a friend of hers,” I said. I seemed to have wandered back to the beginning of the conversation, like a nervous rat in a maze. I was sprawled on my back, holding the phone with both hands and staring at the texture of the paint on the ceiling. It looked like chicken skin. “You have no idea when she’ll be back?”
“No,” he said softly.
“But this is where she usually stays, isn’t it? At this number?”
“Who is this?”
“Dave. I told you. This is Dave.”
“But who are you?” Well, I knew those long tender sessions that must have taken place at the commune, just as they did at Rockville, those conversations that alternated between anecdote and lament, and it was my foregone conclusion that the name David Axelrod was familiar to that handsome sentinel at heaven’s oak door.
“Oh, I’m an old friend of hers. A friend of the family.” It seemed both risky and unkind to leave a true message. I didn’t want her to come home and find my name thumb-tacked to the communal bulletin board. “I’ll get in touch with her later.”
“I’ll tell her you called, Dave.”
“No, that’s all right.” I wanted to warn him not to, but seizing on a bit of strategy with all the subtlety of an opera tenor plunging a knife into his breast, I said, “It’s no big deal. I’ll catch up with her.”
“OK,” he said.
“Don’t even mention anything,” I said.
“OK, Dave. A friend of the family.”
“No! That’s the whole thing. Don’t even mention it.” I thought for a moment and was seized from behind by what seemed a rather brilliant idea. “Dave’s not even my name,” I said.
“OK. Who is this?”
I very quietly hung up and kept my hands on the phone, just as I did when I was in Chicago and allowing myself just a few calls a day from my list of Butterfields. A wave of futility came over me, followed by an equally powerful wave of humiliation. It wasn’t until I placed the phone on the bedside table and buried my face in the cool, barely yielding pillow that I remembered this hadn’t been one of my ordinary long-shot phonecalls: I’d just been very close to Jade; I still had the phone numbers; I still had an address; and I was loose in the world and unstoppable.
I showered and rang up room service and had them send me French toast (what Hugh called “lost bread”), ham, orange juice, and a pot of coffee. I had a wedge-shaped view from my window and I watched the Saturday shoppers ten floors below streaming past me like the world viewed from a box camera. How beautiful it all seemed…
I read the newspaper as I ate breakfast like a man with a stable life. Despite the agonies of expectation, I felt I sat in the lap of towering luxury. I ate as slowly as I could, read as slowly as I could, and would have liked to have tied sandbags to the hands of time. Since the day of the fire I had wanted no more of time than for it to move swiftly and humbly along, like a nun in the rain, but now my life had texture again.
I noticed in the newspaper that Krapp’s Last Tape was being performed that night in a small theater on the East Side. It was my favorite Beckett play and I remembered that Ann liked it, too. Tickets only cost four dollars and I could actually afford to attend. Impulsively, I called Ann.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But I was wondering if you’d like to see a play tonight?”
“Not really. Hugh called.”
“That’s good,” I said. I don’t know what I meant. I might have been feeling all of us coming together again.
“Hugh’s in town with his new girl,” Ann said. “They went to Chinatown. They’re buying spices and oils. She’s also going to introduce Hugh to a healer, a Chinaman much older than the century, who’s going to divulge certain secrets of herbal teas. She’s so much better for him than I am.”
“So are you going to see Hugh tonight?”
“No. They’re going back to New Jersey. Where I’m sure they belong.” Ann laughed; she sounded edgy and she was poking around trying to locate the exact dimensions of her sadness, jabbing at her feelings as if with a stick.
“And you don’t want to see Krapp’s Last Tape?”
“I don’t think so.”
“My treat?”
“I said no.”
We were silent for a moment.
“So should I still give you a call around six?” I said.
“Only if you want to,” answered Ann.
Suddenly restless, I left the hotel and headed for the streets.
I wandered uptown on Fifth Avenue starting at 34th, gazing into the generous-looking windows of electronics shops that featured pocket cameras, battery-operated tape recorders, and short-wave radios. While somewhere near, across the street, or perhaps next door, Hugh and Ingrid were smiling uncertainly at a small circular window with eight-inch glass behind which stood a miniature red wagon that held a pair of diamond and emerald earrings. It was their mild misfortune to have the tastes and appetites of the rich and to suffer the wanting of things they couldn’t even remotely afford—whereas I walked the same street and noted that the carved Mexican chess set could be mine if I wanted it, likewise the Austrian binoculars, and likewise the Japanese setting for eight, with soup bowls and a covered dish, painted my favorite shades of blue and yellow, and marked down from thirty-five dollars to nine.
I could explain this so much better if I’d lived in some other time, if the story of my love was a true ballad, if I could shake my fist at the sky and believe not that I was gesturing at layers of ozone and oxygen, at chunks of mineral and pockets of gas, but at heaven, at a real heaven, alive with intelligence, churning out time and circumstance.
I was walking up Fifth Avenue to pass an hour or two before it was time to call Ann. Hugh was with his new lover remembering the things he’d been taught to want when he was young. Who knows how many people were out there with us? A million seems a fair guess. New York is the place in America where you’re most likely to meet someone you know; it’s our capital of surprise encounters. If you stay there long enough you might see everyone you ever knew.
I’m thinking of a skeleton bent expectantly over a radar screen and Hugh and I are blips of light heading into each other’s path with the blind imperiousness of comets.
We are blind to the future. We can barely hold on to our strange versions of the past. We see only a little of what is directly before us. We know almost nothing. The only way we can stand it is not to care. I care and I can’t stand it.
I should just breathe in and out and be brave. But not knowing what is going to happen next and living with the hope that whatever it is it won’t be too difficult to understand is like driving at top speed with the windshield completely painted over with a picture of where you used to live.
I had been looking in the window of the Doubleday Bookstore. I was thinking of going in to buy Ann a book. It had once been a common thing for me to bring her things to read, trading her a copy of Jews Without Money for The Good Soldier or The Subterraneans for Strait Is the Gate. We were so entertained by our differences. And I was thinking that a part of that pleasure might be recaptured if I brou
ght her a book. But nothing on display in the window seemed right for Ann and I couldn’t think of anything I’d read recently that I wanted to give her. I turned around and I saw that across the street and a little to the north was Tiffany’s. Jade and I once saw the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We’d skipped school and watched it at the Clark Theater in downtown Chicago, and when Audrey Hepburn went searching for her cat in the rain Jade and I sat sobbing in that empty theater, squandering our emotions with the abandon of drunken pirates reeling through port with a sack full of gold.
I thought that I would go and take a close look at Tiffany’s. If I saw Jade soon, it would be something I could tell her about. I walked to the corner and waited with about fifty other people for the light to change. I was folded into the crowd and feeling poorly dressed. In Chicago, a city of blondes, I always felt dashingly Semitic, but here in New York, surrounded by men in dark suits and inkwell eyes, by women with huge spreading mantles of electrified black hair, in that mass of silk ties and jewelry, I was overwhelmed by the classiness of Manhattan and had the hick’s reflexive comeback: Are these people for real? It was in the middle of the day and I could have been standing in the lobby of the Opera House. As subtly as I could, I glanced from face to serious face, at the large noses that were displayed like genetic trophies, at the furry eyebrows and four o’clock shadows, at a powder blue beret, a shaved head, a teenager with a red velvet yarmulke.
And then I happened to let my glance drift to the other side of the street where a knot of pedestrians just like the one I stood in was waiting for the light to change. And there was Hugh, standing at the edge of the curb and staring directly at me. Next to him was a tall woman with reddish braids wearing a sleeveless shirt and a denim skirt. She was holding a shopping bag and looking straight up into the sky. I followed her gaze and saw a small plane expelling gauzy smoke and sky-writing a message: and H, an O, a V…
There were so many responses available to me.
The light governing north-south traffic was still green. I cut through the crowd and crossed 57th Street, heading toward the fragrant green blur of Central Park. Though I knew, essentially, it wasn’t so, I told myself that Hugh hadn’t seen me and that I’d be doing us both a favor if I got out of his way. I moved with my head down and I moved quickly. I was almost running.
Hugh bolted after me, cutting diagonally across Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, coming at me like an arrow. Ingrid shouted out to him, as she would tell us later: “Hugh! What are you doing?”
And here comes the taxi cab, gunning ahead to make it through the yellow light, because cab drivers are always in an acute hurry. That’s how they make a living.
I glanced back once to see if Hugh was following me. He was, of course, and I tried to make myself stop but I couldn’t. My legs were committed to cowardice. I told myself not to look back again, just to keep going straight and fast. The sidewalk was crowded; it was like a Christmas crowd.
Everything was noisy and dense but the sound of those brakes couldn’t have been more penetrating if I’d heard them in a concert hall. I stopped in my tracks and turned around and saw Hugh just the moment after the taxi struck him.
He was in the air, sailing backwards in a northwesterly direction. It looked like a stunt. The taxi cab was going up an inch, back an inch, starting and stopping and bobbing up and down as if in seizure. No one was saying anything and Hugh was in the air.
Then he was on his back, but still moving, shooting along as if he were on a sled. His arms were spread at his side and his tan jacket was riding up and bunching at the shoulders. He was turning over, in a broken, graceless motion—now, for the first moment, it looked serious and out of control. He turned on his right shoulder but his head didn’t move and his legs were going in two different directions. It looked like he might break into pieces. And now another car was slamming on its brakes and another and another. For the first moments after the cab hit Hugh, his body had been skidding in its own lane, between the east-west traffic on 57th Street, but now that was no longer the case.
It probably didn’t matter. The taxi that hit him was going fast and it hit him direct. Hugh was probably already dead, or on his way toward death. But a green florist’s van hit him a second time. It wasn’t even a hit. The little truck rolled over Hugh and ruined the top part of his lifeless body.
Did the sky turn red? Did the sun even hesitate in its stiff rounds? The world, even along the dense strip of Manhattan, seemed utterly calm. People turned slowly, quietly; faces wore that perplexed, slightly absent expression you see in the lobby after an avant garde play. This is it? You tell me what it means. It was as if we needed a second look to confirm what had happened. And then the image of that man being tossed like a sack of meal by that cab completed its frantic loop through our senses and we did see it again. The long moments of waiting were over, the synaptic reprieve canceled, and now the first screams, the first shouts, the first hands clapped over unwilling eyes—we were suddenly a terror-struck herd staggering toward the street, stepping on each other’s heels, elbowing each other, afraid to look too carefully at any stranger, and each of us hoping that someone would know what to do.
But no one knew what to do. No one ever does. We were just moving toward the point of impact. Then I saw Hugh get up, but that didn’t happen. Someone in front of me dropped a pretzel, one of those big brain-sized New York pretzels, and I stepped on it accidentally. Someone else dropped a newspaper. People were dropping things.
“Oh Jesus,” I heard someone say, “don’t look. Please, sweetheart. Don’t look.”
I was half on the curb, half in the street. All traffic was stopped. Five blocks down, cars were blowing their horns. There were dozens and dozens of people in front of me. No one was screaming “I’m a doctor!” No one was asking us to make a path. It was all right just to be standing around like a total idiot.
I felt for a moment as if I might lose consciousness and I could imagine in that instant what it would be like to be beneath the feet of the crowd. I thought of a high heel in my throat’s hollow.
It was not even Hugh anymore. Hugh had passed out of that ruined body and…he was standing next to me. No, but the man standing to my side, leaning into and not feeling me, wearing one of those straw hats you expect to see only at racetracks and a yachtsman’s blazer, had a bit of Hugh in him, it seemed to me. An earnestness in the sea green eyes, an impassiveness that allowed you to project your most heroic fantasies. Maybe Hugh’s spirit was everywhere around us, floating through the air like debris after an explosion, and we were all absorbing parts of it. But that’s what you always want to think when someone dies.
I moved closer. No one put up much resistance. Those who were closer than I to Hugh’s body had no will to defend their position.
From the other side of the street, Ingrid Ochester was making her way. “He’s mine,” she said, in a voice far behind her grief—the tone was declarative, slightly embarrassed. She seemed to be apologizing for her connection to the disturbance, like a babysitter whose ward has toppled a department store display. “He’s mine,” she said over and over. She was waving her large hands in front of her, slapping abstractly at anyone who didn’t make way for her. She looked like someone in a garden who is being attacked by a swarm of black flies. As she staggered over the curb and was almost upon Hugh’s body, Ingrid’s knees gave way and, making no effort to stop her fall, she landed on her palms and knees. She was planted five or ten feet from Hugh, though by now the pool of blood beneath him had spread out and she was on its rim, staring down into it as if to see her reflection. I was standing on Hugh’s other side, ten or so feet from his body. Three other strangers had also made it through the crowd and we existed now within that dazed sphere of onlookers, as if caught in some ritual dance, surrounded by faces.
“Don’t touch him,” a voice said to Ingrid. But when I turned to look at the cop who’d made it through the crowd and was now taking control, I saw nothing but pedestrians, and when I turne
d back to Ingrid she was kneeling in Hugh’s blood, stroking his hair back from his eyes. Her loosely braided red hair dangled in front of her and her denim skirt was red and wet with Hugh’s blood and now her hands were red too and her face when she touched it. She was saying something—to Hugh, to me, to everyone—but I don’t know what. I was watching Hugh run after me. I was Hugh. The cab hit me in the chest and I fell forward onto the hood, but the cab kept coming and the velocity threw me backward. I went flying and when I hit the street I kept moving. The bones in my chest were broken, and when my head hit the street a piece of it fell away, like a chunk of an old jack-o’-lantern. But the worst part was the skidding backward, the tearing of my skin: it was the most familiar pain, the stupidest and the most ordinary. It was like rolling in hot shattered glass, though I don’t actually know what that would be, and I knew this, this pain that filled the last instants of my life like a fierce hideous chord at the end of a symphony.
The driver of the florist’s van that had run over Hugh got out of his truck. He was a huge fellow, a muscle man, in a white undershirt and tapered black pants and an Elvis Presley hair cut. He pressed a handkerchief onto his forehead, blotting at the little pinpoints of blood that seeped through the scrape he’d suffered when his large head knocked into the windshield. He was stopped a full hundred feet beyond Hugh; it had taken that long to stop after running him over. The driver walked in an odd mincing gait, as if he were wearing his little brother’s shoes. He was looking at Hugh and shaking his head: it seemed so inconceivable to him that he’d suddenly been thrust at the center of a man’s death.
“Look what happened!” Ingrid was saying to the driver.
Endless Love Page 23
