“I couldn't eat a thing, honey," she says.
Ashamed, Nathan leaves the phone, walks on.
He takes from his jacket an envelope. He takes out a half dozen sheets of paper and holds them up to the window. Maria Rosa, Last Will and Testament.
His grandmother cocks her head, her eyes blankly attentive.
"What do you have there?"
"Just something I want you to sign for me."
At her side he kneels and sets her fingers around the fountain pen and leads it to the line at the bottom below a signature already there, his. The pen droops, and he sets it upright again and kneads her fingers back into place. Her other hand he takes and straightens, pressing her fingertips to the space she is to fill, guiding her to guide herself.
"What is this?" she asks.
"You're my witness."
"To what?"
Nathan opens his mouth to answer, then shuts it.
"Is it a will?" she asks.
He smooths the papers on his grandmother's knee. "For my corporation.”
"Your corporation."
"Yes.”
"I can't see it," she says.
"You don't need to see it. Here it is."
"But I don't know what it says."
"It says just what you'd expect."
A pulse of sight surfacing one last time through her dead pupils holds him where he kneels, as though to assess and decide. For months after she insisted she could no longer see she gave directions from the backseat of cars and never failed to distinguish the denominations of her money. But now her eyes, drifting, are off by a degree, as though she is searching for something in the next room, for something, an answer, written on the ceiling, to make itself known.
He bears down on her hand, guiding it toward the page.
Meekly: "Who is in your corporation?"
“Me.”
"Just you?"
"Just me."
"Can you have a corporation with just one person?”
"Yes, you can."
"Why would you want that?"
Nathan breathes. "To protect me. They can get to the corporation but they can't get to me."
She reaches out for him and misses. "Who wants to get to you?”
"I wouldn't bother you with it."
They sit for a time in silence. In her presence, an ease of routine gestures and automatic rhythms. The dark and dry heat of this old apartment like a dreamroad in which everything that has gone wrong has not yet begun and everything that will be right is yet to come. The window, he knows, faces east, and beyond the landfill and the harbor lie open water and the horizon. They sit a long time facing that direction. The night, lightning-struck, cracks like glass and is mended back again.
"It will be light soon," Nathan says. He looks nervously at his watch. "Just a few hours."
After she signs she does not pull away, and Nathan does not let her go. Her hand is cool and slack, and they sit holding each other, waiting. He watches the window, she the cei'ling, as if they are bracing for the thunder.
Sometime later she pats his knee. "You're a good boy," she says. "It's a good day when you visit. It's going to be a good day."
MONDAY
6 A.M.
He falls in sleep into the windless pocket of a rowboat, squinting one eye then the other, seesawing the pale gray light across the bridge of his nose. It is midday, or seems to be. The sun, what he can see of it, is a high dim peephole into a suspended furnace. The surf slides away against the rocks, pinching white geysers into the air. Strewn about in the seawrack the green faces and the splayed legs of women dragging their toes in the foam, their robes pooling beneath them. Their breasts afloat on the rocks. Ropes of hair fanned as if to dry. A cloud of frenzied gulls darkens the sky. The birds shuttle back and forth from their midair float to the bodies below, gangs of them carrying out coordinated sorties on one and then the other. Amongst them, on no particular rock, a sandwiched pair scuffles, the woman beneath gulping, the man on top arching rhythmically, doughy buttocks and head bucking. The man turns his head toward the sea. It is Nathan himself. Nathan watches himself smile menacingly, turn away, concentrate downward. jammed in the last of the boulders lining the beach the first of three rows of crosses faces the ocean, the crosspieces like the arms of irritable fathers hoisting their dozing sons, picking at their sagging elbows to keep their eyes on the show. The wind is stiff and wet and when it drops he can hear the cries from the back row of crosses where the blood-oiled wood glistens in the sun. The heads tick-tock like metronomes. Pinned wrists and ankles pry at the iron tacks. He sees himself stand from the rock. The woman below is not moving. He knows that face, he knows her name, and he can see himself clearly, can see himself clearly-
What time is it when he senses someone or something nearby? Nathan opens his eyes to the cloth ceiling of the car, fingering a birthmark on his own neck. His blazer is laid over his chest like a blanket, the steering wheel crowding him, the dashboard clock blinks its odd hour in incandescent green, while outside nothing at all is clear. The growing dawn-if that's what this is-is violent and webby. It is still sleeting, or sleeting again.
He wipes away his stale breath from the glass and looks up to the high parlor windows of 11 Cheever Place. Its sweeps of white curtain, the soft glow of the lamppost. The flower boxes are empty, which he thinks strange until he reminds himself again what month this is. Here and there the stoop lights have been kept on, beacons of happiness, ways home. Furry tinsel rims the windows; plastic reindeer graze the little yard of blue-stone slate a few doors down. A young father in an undershirt leans out a doorway, bending for the morning paper in the snow as though offering the invisible authority of the day his freshly washed head. Nothing seems to have changed. The same beaten trash cans, a few more cracks in the sidewalk. The same neighborhood on the wrong side of the edge of respectability.
Claire must be up. She'll have court, she'll prepare notes at the table letting out on the little garden, pour herself a second cup of coffee then let it grow cold and leave it for the office-
"Honey," she will say. "Look at me-there's nothing keeping us here anymore."
Nathan is sweating, his whole frame trembling.
"What are you afraid of?"
"Everything.
"Let's go. Let's go today."
He puts his arm around her for support, dropping his damp head on her shoulder like a child. A shield of tenderness and guardianship has fallen around them. "Why not," he says. "Let's get away now while we can."
– piercing the wild sky, the roiling clouds, toward the perfect golden yolk of sun, the crisp mountains stretching end to end along the horizon-
"Do you mean it?"
"I mean it. I mean this. But, Claire-I've fallen, somehow. I won't be the same."
Sweetly, a hurried whisper: "Never mind."
"I can’t do what I used to do."
"Yes.”
"But, Claire-"
"I don't expect you to. I know it will be hard."
"But we could be happy, couldn't we?"
"Yes," Claire says. "We could be happy."
– and far across the ocean, the little bungalow, the unseen roar of surf beating the sand, the strong clean onshore wind-all of it waiting-
It is six in the morning. The thunderclaps above, and the thunderclaps just beneath the surface of his skull. And yes, that is Errol Santos's Chevrolet parked out front.
Nathan tries to send back his confusion like a bad meal but he can't. Blinking, he stretches his legs, slowly focusing on the readout display of his beeper, fourteen messages: New York Times… Doctor E … Errol Santos … New York Post … Errol Santos… Errol Santos … it goes on, but he doesn't, he can't, he aims the beeper at Baron, who is sitting upright in the passenger seat beside him. "What do you think? Staying silent, I see. Of course, you're right, as always." Clipping the beeper safely to his belt, Nathan presses thumb and forefinger, his messages flying off to wherever they fly, to message heaven, the graveyard of electronically snubbed pleas and particles of undesired need. His memory now clear, he slips in a CD, Ben Webster and "Soulville," slow and heavy as a dirge, recasting the gray day as a blue idea. Now he knows where this day is going, how it ends. And it will end, it must.