Nathan looks at the man. "It's hard to say," he says.
"Parent?"
"No."
"She's not your wife."
"Not my wife, no. My girlfriend."
The man raises his palm. "None of my business, I apologize.”
"We live together," Nathan explains.
The Man nods. "That's okay. I'm sorry I asked. Didn't mean to be nosy. She'll be fine, I'm sure."
"I don't think she will."
The man blows on his coffee.
There is a distant chirp, another, insistent. "Your phone?"
Nathan asks.
"Me? I don't have one of them things."
Nathan warily eyes his jacket then picks through the pocket.
"Yeah, it's me. Where am I? It doesn't matter-" He toes at the floor. He blinks, blinks again. Feeling the man peering at him from across the table, he turns aside and faces the wall. He lifts a finger to one eye and then the other.
"When did it happen?" Looking at his watch, dropping it, wrist and hand, against his thigh. He looks to the door of the cafeteria through the little square window to the hall outside, through the hall to the elevator and up the shaft to the sixth floor, where in room 614 there is no sound and no breath and the machines have stopped and Maria's mouth has frozen shapeless. "I see. I understand. No, she would have never wanted that. All those tubes and wires, they made her feel like a marionette… They need me to ID the body tomorrow?… Yes, I'll come in. No, he's at the apartment. Don't go over there. I'm going. I'm going home. I'll tell him myself."
When Nathan refolds the phone the man across from him is nodding over and over. "Well, you were right here," he says. "You were right with her."
Nathan is looking at the sugar dispenser in his hand. He blows on it and shakes his head, the distorted image of his face in the dispenser's metal top misting away and returning.
"Can I get you something? I'll get you some water," the man says. He quickly stands and walks off.
Nathan exhales and lifts his jacket off the seat next to him, feels for the envelope of cash in the pocket and fans what must be ten or fifteen thousand and tugs it out and slides the bills between two napkins and leaves it next to the man's coffee. He sips at his cup then sets it down and looks up at the little window leading to the street. There is a small pool of spilled coffee on the plastic tabletop at his elbow and a fly, fellow traveler through this hermetic monastery, is crouched at the edge, wading in. Nathan turns in his seat and sees the man standing next to the woman at the register, both of them staring at him. He gets up and goes out.
Santos stands in the doorway, his hair dark with damp, as though dripping with blood. He has rehearsed on his tongue lines that will be warm and appropriate but it strikes him that there aren't any words to say. Claire reaches up and leads him down to the bed by hand. Santos puts his arm around her shoulders, leaning his wet head against her hair like a child, and for a moment it is as if a cloud of timeless tenderness closes around them, guarding, watching. Even here in this bedroom where nothing has changed since Nathan left it. Wallpaper of eagles and bells. Clothed, shod, Santos sinks into the bed where days after Nathan moved out, he and Claire first made love with teenage shamelessness.
Claire sits up. "I tried to wait, but I was so tired."
"I'm sorry."
"She was beautiful, Errol. I loved her."
But he presses a finger to her lips and paws her hair. Smell of soap and mint. Once he envisioned for them a month of Christmas days blue with permanent twilight, rooftops crusted with moonlit snow, tire chains clinking as cocktail glasses would, the living room windows up and down a safe and neighborly street beacons of warmth and privacy. This hope that has kept them together.
She whispers: "I needed you to call. Where have you been?"
"Claire, it was terrible."
"I'm so sorry."
The long sweeps of hair and squared bangs frame her face. Her pale eyes. Her grim endurance practiced in making irrelevancies of the things they've spent their lives waiting for.
They sit close, hands clasped, and he tells her about the beach, giving all the details-not Krivit, not Nathan, only Isabel. She nods, as if agreeing quickly, and he talks on like a furloughed prisoner whose clock is running down, steadily losing time.
When he is done talking she drags her fingertips across his face, sending him back into the pillows, toward sleep. He drifts through rooms of dreams-barren, unpeopled-he can't see in the light. He smells the rooms smoldering. It feels hours later-probably it is only minutes-when her lips bring him up, the strange cold compresses on his shoulders, on the nape of his neck, unwanted, but he doesn't stop her. She blows lightly on his eyes, as if to open them, and when he does the streetlight has partitioned her, revealing the facts of her, stern, lurid, one who calls bluffs. He obeys wordlessly as she feels for his underwear and slips it off. For months she had seemed completely beyond arousal. Now, tonight, tonight especially, she moves him across the bed like a nurse, with a firmness that excludes options.
Words are pointless. How to explain any of this, where there was purpose but no reason? Her eyes open and glassed, the straight line of her mouth blue. Santos reaches to touch her face. His lips part to speak, but she puts a finger over them. Her rhythm is slow and exact, calm, her eyes turned inward, mute eyes that seem to be looking at him from the bottom of a pool. As though this lovemaking is more an ambition than it is desire, to right a wrong or at least smooth a way. Claire's thighs tighten and her stomach heaves and she gulps air and she shudders, then she caves into a cloud of their mingled breath. He clutches to her as to a life preserver. Maybe saving him, no matter the consequences, is her ambition. Burying his face in her red hair enormous and everywhere.
Hours later his eyes startle open. He turns his head to his reflection in the window and takes Claire's hand-she is asleep-and places it, like a living mask, over his face. But from beyond the bars her fingers make, Isabel returns his stare. Her eyes are flecked with grains of sand, and they are making demands.
2 A.M.
In an overheated lobby filled with weak and twitchy light, Nathan shoulders open another door and steps into a little apartment where there is no sign of movement, plant life, air. Through the curtains, up in the clouds, lightning, continuous, splits the sky in fiery convulsions, illuminating like signal flares the surrounding apartment towers. A blank grid of wide boulevards named for plants and trees. From behind the walls at the development's edge, trees rise coated in glass, like the hands of drowned giants.
He stands in the opening between living room and kitchen, breathing heavily. Clothes are strewn across the carpet, the door to a highboy unhinged, a shattered bowl, its chocolate-covered candies scattered like birdseed. Against the far wall, the long shelf of opera records that belonged to his grandfather, Joe the plumber, has been rifled through, the old vacuum-tube phonograph below it, long ago burned out, torn from its perch and made off with.
The spotted legs of an old woman surface out of a corner shadow. In a leather easy chair, a gift from Nathan years before, she leans forward, closing her robe at her throat. Her tangled cloud of hair crinkles electrically.
"It's me, Rose," Nathan said.
She reaches, loose and frail, and the hand that clenches at him trembles like a bird.
"What are you doing up?" he asks.
"It's late."
"Surprised I'm here?"
"I didn't say that."
Nathan looks around. "What happened?"
"They were here to fix the pipes."
Nathan looks back at the kitchen table. Her pocketbook has been upended, lipstick, billfold, candies, pennies, three prescription vials spread over the table. A low, continuous murmur of Yiddish pours out the radio.