"Yes."
"Have you spoken with Errol? Yes, of course, yesterday afternoon." Claire looks down at him. "What happened to your hand?"
He covers one with the other, though that one is no better. The bites have become infected, damp. "I was fixing a flat."
"You? That's likely. What was her name?"
Nathan focuses on a kitchen window across the little yard, the back of the next block of brownstones. He used to watch the tenant here, a hugely fat man, leaning into the sauces steaming on the stove.
"By the way, Errol was wrong," Claire says. "You look terrible. Did I say that yet?"
She says it not to him but to the window, at his reflection superimposed on the fat man's building. As though the distance the glass grants them provides a vacuum of time, making him harmless, unthreatening-someone else, out of reach. And she is right, he sees. He looks awfuclass="underline" sallow, his lips bluish, the hollows below his cheek bones, once sculpted, sunk to divots.
"But you look good," he says.
"What do you want, Nathan?"
"I was in the neighborhood."
"At six in the morning?"
"Is that what time it is?"
"You look so tired," she says in a voice near a whisper. Sitting beside him, her hands falling away, into her lap, she is still addressing his reflection: "You look so tired. I was going to fax you, actually. Until this thing with Isabel. I just thought you should know, I took one of your cases."
"Regina Nunez," he says flatly.
"So she's already fired you. Good for her. Maybe she's not as stupid as-"
"I saw her last night."
"Well, don't do that again. She needs help. She doesn't need you. She's about to give birth, Nathan. Or didn't you notice? You've abandoned her. You've missed her court dates."
"Abandoned her?"
"What else would you call it?"
"I'm going to help her," he says.
Laughing, she shakes out her hair. "You and your delusions."
The phone interrupts and Claire, startled, is on her feet before the first ring falls out of the air.
"Why don't you let the machine get it," he says. "That's what they're for."
"That's not what they're for, Nathan," she says, and then before she can stop herself: "You never answered the phone. God forbid you ever did without screening it or making me, running across the room drawing your finger across your throat, whispering, I'm not home, I'm not home, without even knowing who it was." She pauses, blushing. "God forbid you got lassoed into something you couldn't control."
Nathan gazes at her, at the conversation exactly as it was left years ago. Its preservation is a biological condition, he assumes, an instinct to keep us from returning to old used lovers again and again across eternity. Across all the time and the silence Claire has not stopped piling on the complaints and Nathan has not stopped slithering out from under them. "Who is it this early?"
But Claire is having none of it, heading already into the silence that has followed another ring, standing across the room over the phone, waiting. "It's none of your business. You don't live here anymore, remember? Hello-?"
Nathan, his hands together in that same attitude of prayer, remembers.
Her back turned, Claire's hands cup the mouthpiece. She is mumbling, but she does nod her head, once, turning obliquely to the wall, Nathan assumes, to keep him there, in peripheral view.
"Yes," Claire is saying, holding tight to the phone one beat longer than she should. As though afraid of floating off.
"Who was that?"
Again addressing his reflection, his ghost, transparent, half gone. "Nobody. Work."
"Errol."
"No. He's got more important things-"
"Maria is dead," Nathan says. "I thought you should know."
Claire is looking at him, finally, Nathan in the flesh. Her pale eyes, bottomless, little circles of reflected sky, examining, rationing attention in measured doses. "You mean Isabel."
"And Maria."
"Jesus. What, am I next?" She gives a little laugh, then touches her mouth as if to rearrange it. "I'm sorry," she says flatly. "No, I'm really sorry. It's terrible. How, how did it happen?"
Nathan has wrung a paper napkin to shreds. "It's complicated.
"It's awful.
He doesn't even believe she thinks that's true. “So where are you now?" Nathan knows that the question can be read a dozen ways; whichever road they travel will be her decision.
“Sorry, but don't tell me this is all about tbat. This little visit. You're free now, you have what, some time? That you're here because Errol's left for work, because Maria's-"
"I am going away,” he says, startling even himself. "I want-I’d like it if – ” The words roll off his tongue before he knows it, slipping out of him from he doesn't know where. Is it really true? He has no idea. As if he is caught in a continuum of possible emotions, from which he plucks the most fascinating without considering the consequences. First he tells a lie, then the lie tells a lie-
“- if you came with me."
“Don't joke."
“This isn't a joke."
“Of course it's not a joke."
“I mean I'm not joking."
They sit a moment in silence, both of them weighing the multitude of possible replies. Claire lifts the backs of her hands to her eyes.
“I'm not talking about a vacation, Claire."
"You want to run. You always wanted to run. Well, too bad."
“Claire-"
“Just hold on, Nathan. just please, all right? Just don't let's start with that curious tidbit."
" Curious-?
"Because you're a freak!" she sputters, clutching at her hair with one hand, pointing back at the silent phone with the other. As if news of his character had just come through it. "You sit here and it's years and years later. So Maria is dead now. And Isabel, God help her. And now here you are. Always after something new. But you forgot, Nathan, I'm not new anymore. Whatever you liked me for is what you ended up hating me for. You don't like me if I'm strong, you don't like me if I'm weak. You don't like me if I'm funny or if I'm sad. You don't like me if I'm ugly, you don't like me if I'm beautiful. You don't like me if I'm white, you certainly don't like me if I'm Hispanic."
She tilts her head to the side, as if she sees she's hit the mark: "There's something wrong with you, isn't there. You look terrible. Is that what Ruth meant?"
" Ruth? "
But Claire is waving him away. "You haven't changed, Nathan. How can you stand it?"
Mouth open, he can feel his face go numb, her anger like dentist's gas, shutting him down. Outside, traits of snowdust rip away from the roof and pass on the horizontal gusts. Somewhere down there, in the tiny plots of greenery, in some herb garden, wind chimes clang at regular intervals, as at the opening of a Catholic service, announcing-what? He doesn't know. He doesn't know what Catholics actually do. Something, he's sure. Something practical. He'd like to know.
Leaning on one hip, Claire has been watching him. "So what are you going to do?"
He looks confused. "Do?"
"She has a son, remember? Doesn't-" She looks fearful. "Didn't Maria have a son? Don't you two have a child?"
The boy's sweet pastiness rises to his eyes like a flash card, both sides -word and meaning-of a vocabulary of some life not his. "Benny," he remembers.
"Benny. What are you going to do about Benny? Your son."
"He's not mine, really."
"How does that feel, Nathan, to be a father?"
"I'm going to keep him," he says, surprising himself again. Is this why he came here, to hear out this strange-maybe better – version of himself?
She stares and stares. "They won't let you do it, Nathan. Not you."
"Of course not." He glances at his watch, half rising out of his chair. "I should go see him before school. I should tell him."
She frowns. "Tell him?"
"About his mother."
"You mean he doesn't know?"
"How could he know? It happened last night, they weren't going to call bim, after all? The kid's nine, or something."