Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  Halliday jolted as if I’d stuck him with an electric prod, then he reared up beneath me and flung me across the cab. The back of my head slammed against the window, and I saw stars, except they didn’t look like stars, they looked like radioactive sperm.

  “I’ve lost everything,” he said, his voice hushed. “Everything I had in the world. But what the fuck do you care?”

  My head throbbed and my eyes were full of water. I was afraid he would think it was tears.

  “Stop the cab,” he told the driver.

  “Can’t stop here,” the cabbie said.

  “Stop the fucking cab.”

  We pulled off the FDR and Halliday got out without a word. I didn’t say anything, either. My ears were ringing so loudly, I couldn’t hear the door slam, although the cab shook from the impact.

  As the driver continued to my building, I relaxed into a dreamy numbness, a confusion about what had happened, exactly. But once I was back inside, taking my familiar steps past the sleepy-looking doorman, under the vast chandelier that looked like it had been filched from the nearest Hyatt, toward the bank of elevators, I felt my new paramour welcoming me home with a cold, seeping weight. I opened my flask and finished off the tequila in the elevator.

  My apartment was just as I had left it, except that now the empty bottles and chaos of discarded outfits looked like the hopeful prelude to a ruined evening. I’d forgotten I had no booze. I stood in my living room, mulling this over for two or three seconds, then turned on my heel and headed back down to the lobby. It was 3:45 A.M., so my bar options were going to be limited. I turned down my doorman’s offer of a taxi and tramped back into the freezing night. Three-fifty; I had ten minutes to find a bar. I proceeded calmly to First Avenue, heading for McFadden’s, a tiny Irish pub I’d gone to once or twice before the accident, where the atmosphere of seedy die-hard drinking was offset by young couples swirling Irish coffees and eating lousy pie à la mode, but when I reached the place where McFadden’s should have been, I found the space vacant, garbage piled behind its dusty windows and a “for rent” sign hanging askew. Three-fifty-seven.

  Fine, I thought, no drink. I thought “fine” but I didn’t feel fine—I felt extremely unpleasant, and the unpleasantness wasn’t something I could put a name to; words like “bad,” “sad,” “sick,” seemed mincing beside it. I surveyed my vital signs. Pulse: very fast, possibly around 120. Temperature: low. Hands shaking, heart racing a little … diagnosis? I was flipping out. Okay, I told myself, so it was a bad night, you made one bad call and it cost you a roll in the hay with a former drunk who has a violent streak—this is a tragedy? Go home, take a sleeping pill … tomorrow’s another day, blah blah blah, but this rational part of me was oddly disenfranchised this evening, because the more I chastised myself, the more agitated I became, to the point where I actually screamed—doubled over and bellowed aloud in the empty street—a shriek of pain and helplessness that sounded like an animal’s cry, even to me.

  I began walking toward the East River. I had found that states of mental discomfort could be managed only through physical activity. Don’t think! I can take this, I told myself. I’m strong, look what I’ve been through and survived. I wanted to get to the river, but it was hard to reach; a park blocked it off, and its gates were locked at sundown. But tonight, mercifully, mysteriously, the gate had been left open. I entered the park and crossed the FDR on an overpass. A frigid wind was holding court along the river, full of ice crystals and the smell of gasoline. I passed what I thought were bags of garbage, but they turned out to be people, human beings lying on the pavement and huddled under boxes—how could they survive this cold? Were they already dead? I walked faster, half hoping someone would leap out of nowhere and murder me, toss me into the freezing river—innocent me, cut down in my prime! Ah, tragedy.

  The narrowing spit of concrete I was rushing along had winnowed away, and I’d reached the mouth of a tunnel. The wind crowded my ears, forcing a needle of pain deep inside each. I looked up at my apartment building looming overhead, its staggered balconies making the silhouette of a ziggurat against the pink, chemical sky. I turned and quickly began walking back.

  The doorman looked befuddled at my return—I sensed him wondering if he had dreamed my previous homecoming. But this time I’d arrived with my new companion already on my arm, an evil lover who had crushed me in his embrace and inflicted upon me a venomous kiss, just as I had done to Halliday. In the elevator, I jumped to keep moving, and when the door opened, I bolted into the hallway.

  I flicked on the lights, and my apartment ambushed me. I can sell the apartment, I thought. I can sell the sectional couch. I could sell the expensive necklaces and bracelets and earrings I’d been given over the years by rich, insolent playboys. I could sell my kitchen appliances. My towels, my makeup. My purses. My clothing! My Halstons and Chanels, my Gallianoses and Isaac Mizrahis. I could sell my stereo, my TV, though neither was state-of-the-art anymore. My furniture, the antiques I’d bought in Europe. I could sell my Japanese woodblock print of a snowy rural landscape.

  And if I sold all of that, would I have enough?

  Enough for what?

  I slid open the door to my balcony and stood just outside it in the scouring wind. No, I thought, I don’t want to sell those things. I was too drunk to sell anything.

  It’s over, I thought. It’s finished. There’s nothing left.

  Tragedy!

  The mirrored room was gone, I would never reach it—perhaps it didn’t exist.

  I turned my face straight into the wind. Jump. The thought floated through my mind like a streamer. I looked out at the soft pink darkness.

  Jump.

  I closed my eyes. The thought of leaping from my balcony into the snow-swollen night filled me with a lust even more potent than what I’d felt with Halliday—oh, the delicious thrill of giving myself to a single, violent act … I gritted my teeth, I swallowed it back … and felt something give in my knees.

  My eyes still shut, I reached for the iron railing, curled my fingers around it and climbed over. Now I was balancing the narrow heels of my high-heeled shoes on maybe two inches of concrete still left to stand on. I gripped the railing behind me. The wind pummeled me, as if I were strapped to the prow of an icebreaking ship. Twenty-five stories of dazzling emptiness sucked at me from below. My head was spinning. Don’t open your eyes. Chin down. Let them see you.

  I let go of the railing and jumped.

  It felt like an instant later that I hit concrete. I lay there, amazed to find myself conscious. Or was I dead? Certainly I was, had to be—how could I survive a fall of twenty-five stories? And yet I was conscious, or at least able to think. I lay in a heap, testing my crumpled limbs with tiny, fragile movements. When I opened my eyes, I saw double, as I had after the accident. I seemed to be looking at a pane of glass. Light spilled from behind it and there was noise, faint, intermittent noise … voices. A voice. I lay on the pavement, my eyes open, and listened, trying to understand, Deberr … sister … chillrrn … because the voice was familiar, it was the voice of a friend, an acquaintance or possibly a lover. No … no. It was the basso voice of Robert Stack, the iron-haired narrator of Unsolved Mysteries.

  I was on someone else’s balcony.

  But how could that be? Still prone, I twisted my neck to look up, and sure enough, yes, now I understood; because of the staggering pattern that ensured sunlight and privacy to each and every balcony owner, this balcony, while directly below my own, jutted out three feet beyond it.

  I began to laugh. It hurt, but I couldn’t stop. I’m alive, I thought.

  I staggered to my feet and tried to peer through the white curtain covering the window, but I couldn’t see much of anything. I tapped lightly on the glass door, but the TV was on, Deborah had taken no luggage and no extra clothing the night she disappeared, and most likely, since it was—I checked my watch—4:45 A.M., whoever was inside was fast asleep.

  Gently, I slid open the glass door and step
ped inside the room. The layout of the apartment was the same as mine, but this occupant had apparently decided to make the more spacious living room into a bedroom, for there was the bed, to my left, with a lumpy shape beneath the covers that seemed—I glimpsed from the corner of my eye as I crept across the room—seemed to be moving, and moving in a way that was familiar. I stopped and turned. She said she had a date, that’s all she said, and when she didn’t come back we started lookingA man’s silvery head protruded from beneath a blanket, and beneath his head was a second head that emitted mews of pleasure as the man moved up and down. “Oh, God,” said the second head, in a woman’s voice. “Oh, God.”

  Oh, God.

  On toes so pronged that my feet barely seemed in contact with the rug, I resumed my stealthy and now rather desperate attempt to flee the premises undetected. But my balance was off, my knee hurt, my toes were too pointed—hell, something went wrong and I tripped over the TV cord and lost my balance and crashed to the floor, knocking over a large copper lamp in the process and shattering both bulb and globe, which sent chunks of thick crusty glass into my hair.

  An appalled scream, followed by commotion, all of it unfolding in sudden, ghastly silence—I’d unplugged the TV—and darkness, since the lamp was broken.

  “Over there! There!” the woman shrieked in quite a different voice than the one she’d used a moment ago. I couldn’t bear to lift my head. A second light went on. When finally I looked up, I found a heavyset man in a terrycloth bathrobe standing over me, wielding a blue aluminum baseball bat.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, which, under the circumstances, sounded stunningly inadequate.

  Clearly, I was not what the man had been expecting to see. He lowered the bat an inch or two. “What are you doing in our apartment?” he said.

  I forced myself to stand. An older woman with lovely chestnut-colored hair was sitting up in bed, clutching sheets to her chest. “Mark, don’t let him stand up!” she shrieked.

  “It’s not a him,” he said. “It’s a her.”

  “I’m your upstairs neighbor,” I said. “From twenty-five. I fell off my balcony onto yours by mistake.”

  This explanation silenced them both for a moment. “What do you mean, fell off your balcony?” the man asked.

  “I was doing … exercises,” I said. “And I fell.”

  “What did he say?” the woman said.

  “It’s a she, Miriam,” the man yelled back. “Says she was doing exercises and fell off her balcony.”

  “Exercises, my foot,” the woman huffed. “Mark, get me my robe, honey.”

  “You relax, baby,” Mark said. “It’s under control.”

  “I’m drunk,” I announced, in hopes of caulking up any remaining gaps in my story. The man eyed me, uncertain. “I’m blotto,” I said. “Tipsy. Wasted. I had too much to drink and I fell off the balcony, okay?”

  “I understand,” he said, then shouted over his shoulder, “She was drunk.”

  “… craziest thing I ever …”

  Mark walked me to the door. I liked him, this man who loved his wife and desired her still, even with the two of them getting on in years. I was sorry I’d interrupted them.

  “You know, we’ve got a nice gym right here in the building,” he said. “On fourteen.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You didn’t hurt yourself, did you, dear?”

  “No,” I said. “I feel fine.”

  “Three aspirin,” he said, winking. “Lots of water. Tomorrow, sleep in a little if you can.”

  “I will.”

  The door closed, and I was back in the hallway. But it was a different hallway. It was a different building. Why? I wondered as I padded over the soft carpeting to the elevator. Why? And then I knew: Despair had vanished. It had been too bulky, I supposed, grinning at myself in the elevator mirror, too gigantic and unwieldy to break its fall on that extra three feet of balcony. It had fallen the twenty-five stories and died.

  I went back upstairs, but of course my door was locked. I returned to the lobby yet again, where I gamely explained my plight to the stupefied doorman, leaving out the part about falling off my balcony. He produced the spare key, and I went upstairs and let myself back inside.

  Chapter Nine

  After breakfast, Charlotte stepped from the back door into the shimmer of her exhaustion. White sky, weird trees, her bike where she’d left it that morning, at three-forty-five, after coming back from Michael West’s. Her sixth time. She recorded each visit on the pages of her calendar using a code she was still inventing: when exactly she left the house and when she returned; facts about the weather, recorded it all in entries like: N1T2″0412*//**KL1704 (November first; Thursday; raining; left at 12:04; returned at 4:17; with details of the visit sandwiched in between), so that later, when she was gripped by a fear that it might not be real—that it was nothing, had not even happened—she could look at her notes and be calmed.

  She rode shakily through the raw, scraped-feeling morning, pulling the weight of her new life, its rich complications. November. Empty trees, dry old lawns, the cemetery. And underneath it all a quiver of excitement, invisible as electricity.

  Charlotte recorded the things she and Michael had done together using letters (but avoiding X’s), stars and slashes to denote the various acts, so she could remember what exactly had happened between them, and in what order. There had come a moment that first night (twenty-four days ago) when he had bent back her legs so her knees were by her ears, so she was bent in half, almost, clinging feebly to this stranger who had pushed himself inside her, when Charlotte had thought, “You’re in trouble,” the words distinct as if someone had whispered them into her ear. Fate, destiny—they dropped away, leaving only her fear: Who was this man? How had she gotten here?

  Afterward she had ridden home slowly through a light mist (it was in her notes), feeling hurt inside, broken maybe, thinking, I’ll never go back there, no one will ever know about it. But after two or three days her craving for him made her almost sick—to flee the tiny envelope of her life into the strange other world where he lived, to feel his hands on her. All of it.

  “I have a boyfriend,” she told herself, throwing back her head to look at the bare vectors of trees. “I’m dating someone. He loves me and I love him.” That it be love was essential, beyond negotiation. Nothing less was enough to force their nocturnal encounters into a shape she could recognize. She tested his love in little ways; if he kisses me now, he loves me. If he smells my hair, he loves me. She rubbed the lotion from Florida onto her face and arms and stomach before going to see him, because he’d said he loved the smell—the first night, before they kissed. “I love it,” he’d said, and then kissed her, his tongue strong and alive behind the stillness of his face. He had used the word “love,” it was in her notes.

  She nearly burst through a red light onto State Street, and the force of braking sent her halfway over her handlebars. The cold singed her nostrils. She was almost at school. She had to stop herself from riding into trees, into traffic, thinking of him. At dinner she sat stupefied until Ricky waved his arm in front of her eyes like a crossing guard. She drifted from her classes like a genie leaving a bottle, floated over the nothing houses until she found the one that signaled to her as she lay in her bed, a series of pulses sensible only to her fish, whose agitated motions registered the disturbance. And Charlotte would rise from her bed like a sleepwalker, pull on her clothes and carry her shoes in one hand down the back stairs to the kitchen door, not afraid of getting caught because by then she had left behind her life for a different one.

  Last night, he had lifted her onto the kitchen counter and done it there, standing up! And so it had to be love, Charlotte decided, locking her bike to the long crowded rack outside of East. It had to be, for him to want her that much.

  Melanie Trier’s locker was open next to Charlotte’s, a curiosity cabinet of miniature stuffed bears and other cute mammals brandishing tiny flags emblazoned with th
e school’s insignia. Melanie’s boyfriend, Tor, played football for East and had given her thousands of tiny gold bracelets that formed a chattering soundtrack to Melanie’s existence, laughing on her wrists each time she breathed.

  “Hey, Mel,” Charlotte said.

  “Heyryoucoming to the game?”

  “I have a … an appointment.” She was meeting Uncle Moose.

  “Boo!” So fresh, genuine, this disappointment, as if Charlotte were a regular cheering presence at football games. She basked in Melanie’s indiscriminate friendship, the amiable sense that there was no world but the one in which Melanie lived, so Charlotte must live there, too. “Positive thoughts,” Melanie urged her, pensive now. “We need this win.” She was on Pom Squad, flinging paper puffs and her own slender legs while Tor shouldered his way along the field.

  “Positive thoughts,” Charlotte promised. Then she paused, beset by an urge to mention Michael West, to say his name aloud. She wanted him to exist the way Tor existed. But no one could know. It was illegal, for one thing.

  He had scars, one on his stomach that looked like the slash of a knife or some crude operation, smaller ones in his shoulder. He claimed not to know where they’d come from—one of countless things he couldn’t remember. Lying close to his face, Charlotte found a faint pink line bisecting his right cheek. “That’s from the cut you had by the river,” she said, but he just laughed, not confirming or denying it. The river had become a joke between them.

  His own curiosity was boundless: What kinds of tropical fish did Charlotte sell at work? What did her family eat for dinner? Which flowers grew behind her house? Ricky, his years of treatment—why was it longer for boys? What was the family support group like? And above all her father—how many products had Demographics in America tested? How were the focus groups arranged? Was it domestic or international? Gradually, when Charlotte’s answers grew spare and tense, Michael said, “You don’t like to speak about your father.” And she told him, without thinking, “He hates me.”