A woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”
Don’t ask me that, he thought. For Christ’s sake, above all, do not ask me that. “Grace?” he asked. “Is that you, Grace?”
“There ain’t no Grace here, mister,” the voice said.
He knocked on the door adjacent to it. He waited while he heard footsteps approaching the door, and then the door opened, and an old woman in a nightgown peered into the hallway. He mumbled his apologies and knocked on the next door, and the next, and both doors opened almost simultaneously, and two strange faces looked out at him, and he turned away apologetically and gripped the banister and ran up to the fourth floor. He knocked on all the doors in rapid succession, running from one to the other without waiting for a response, and then standing in the middle of the hallway while the doors opened everywhere around him. Let me in, he thought, let me back in, and he looked at the strange faces in the hallway, and then seized the banister and climbed the steps two at a time to the fifth floor. If I reach the roof without finding her, he thought, I will jump off into the street. A door opened on a little boy in a bathrobe, another on a tall man in his undershirt, a third on a woman with cold cream on her face. He knocked on the last door in the hallway and leaned against the jamb. When the door opened, he did not look up at first. And then he raised his eyes, and she was standing there.
She was wearing flannel pajamas and her hair was loose around her face, and there were tear stains on her cheeks, and her age showed in the lines around her eyes and her mouth, in the sag of her breasts and the slight protrusion of her belly beneath the pajama bottoms. But his vision was blurred, and he saw two Graces standing side by side in the open doorway, and one of them had long blond hair and bright youthful eyes, and he smiled at her and said, “Grace, I almost lost you. Oh God, I almost lost you.”
“You did,” she answered.
“Wh—”
“The party’s over,” she said, and slammed the door in his face.
18
A cool wind was blowing in off the East River.
He came down into the street, and deliberately headed into the wind, walking toward the river. His head was throbbing and the long, deserted street ahead of him was double-exposed, the street-lamps swirling into shifting patterns of light, stretches of darkness, and then blurred light again, the wind cool on his cheeks and on his mouth. He needed time to think. He could not think with his head pounding like this. The river wind would cool his face, and the headache would recede, and he would go back to the apartment and talk to her gently through the wooden door, until she turned the bolt, and eased open the door, and let him back into her life. He did not for a moment believe it was all over. They had argued violently a hundred times before, she had slammed a thousand doors in his face, but it could not be over, it could never be over.
It was cold by the river.
The breeze he had sought was a harsh sharp wind that whistled angrily over the water, slapping waves against the shore pilings. He pulled up the collar of his jacket, and thrust his hands into his pockets, and began walking uptown. In the distance, he could see the lights of the Triboro Bridge, hung mistily against the sky. Through his blurred vision, everything had taken on a quality of softness, the bridge lights nuzzling a curiously fuzzy sky, the clouds blending into blackness, Randall’s Island and North Brother losing the perspective of distance, a dredge out on the water pounding in time with the beating pulse at his temple, but silhouetted curiously against nearer blurred lights, Hell Gate hanging on the horizon, shrouded. He walked close to the iron railing bordering the river, shivering from the cold, watching the lights in the distance. There was no fog, but he felt as though he were walking through layers upon layers of mist, each foot coming down gently and easily upon a soft bank of cloud into which he sank knee-deep without effort.
He was alone by the river.
The noises of the city were distant and impersonal. Because his feet sank into deep layers of mist, he did not even hear his own footfalls. Because the pounding at his temple coincided with the steady beat of the dredge, he heard neither, and walked steadily and easily, wafted gently on a mild current of air that carried him without conscious direction to a half-understood goal.
He was going to his grandfather’s tailorshop.
He looked up at the street sign across the East River Drive and saw that he had come as far uptown as 101st Street. He did not quicken his pace. He continued drifting easily and dreamily, the sound of the dredge behind him now, passing Benjamin Franklin High School, and then 116th Street, and knowing the tailorshop was on First Avenue just off 117th Street, but continuing on past 117th and then going as far as 120th Street. He crossed the Drive and walked past Pleasant Avenue and saw P.S. 80 ahead in the middle of the block, and crossed to the side of the street where the school sat hunched in darkness.
He stopped on the sidewalk.
He looked up at the school, and tried to remember himself as a boy there — what had they called him then, what was his name? He could remember Miss Taxton, and the time she took him and another boy in 2A to her house in Larchmont for lunch on a Saturday afternoon; they had bounced a golf ball on the large flagstone terrace behind her house; he had thought it was the biggest house in the world. He could remember Mrs. Flynn, who was tall and string-bean-thin and with whom he had got into a heated argument at the Boys’ Club on 111th Street where the school used to take them to swim every Friday afternoon. He could remember Mrs. Davidstein and the project on Mexico for which he had drawn a picture of a peasant in white sitting against a pale yellow wall taking a noonday siesta, and he could remember learning the words in Spanish to “Cielito Lindo.” Mrs. Harnig had been his favorite, a very tall woman very much like his mother, who would say “Oh hell” whenever anything went wrong, and who took his side in the argument with Mrs. Flynn that day at the Boys’ Club. He could remember all of this, but he could not remember his name. He could remember who he had been — but he could not remember who he was.
He walked past the school and up to First Avenue. He crossed the street and stopped on the corner, looking up toward Second Avenue where the elevated structure used to be. He could barely recognize the street. He turned left on First Avenue (the pasticceria was still there on the corner) and began walking downtown, following the route he used to take from the school each afternoon (the coal station across the street was gone), crossing 119th Street and continuing on down First Avenue until he was almost to 117th Street, and then stopping for the tailorshop. He did not expect to find it there still, but he at least hoped the façade of the shop would be the same, that whether the inside now housed a delicatessen or a butchershop, the outside would still be the same. There would still be the wide front plate-glass window with the hanging light bulb, and the door with the handle he used to reach up to grab.