She reaches for the teapot, her hands trembling. The odd sounds in the room, the lack of quiet, the rustle of bagel bags, and the peeling back of muffin wrappers.
She takes her cup and drains it. Dabs her knuckle at the side of her mouth.
Gloria’s flowers on the table, already opening. Janet picking a crumb off her plate. Jacqueline with her knee going up and down, in rhythm. Marcia looking off into space. That’s my boy up there and he’s come to say hello.
Claire stands, not shaky at all, not one bit, not now.
— Come, she says, come. Let’s go see Joshua’s room.
A FEAR OF LOVE
BEING INSIDE THE CAR, when it clipped the back of the van, was like being in a body we didn’t know. The picture we refuse to see of ourselves. That is not me, that must be somebody else.
In any other circumstance we might have ended up at the side of the road, swapping license numbers, maybe haggling over a few dollars, even going immediately to a body shop to get the damage repaired, but it didn’t turn out that way. It was the gentlest tap. A small screech of the tires. We figured afterward that the driver must have had his foot on the brake, or his rear lights weren’t working, or maybe he had been riding the brake all along — in the sunlight we didn’t see the shine. The van was big and lazy. The rear fender was tied with wire and string. I recall seeing it like one of those old horses from my youth, a lumbering, impatient animal grown stubborn to being slapped on the rump. It was the back wheels that went first. The driver tried to correct. His elbow pulled in from the window. The van went sideways right, which is when he tried to correct again, but he pulled too hard and we felt the second jolt, like bumper cars at a fair, except we weren’t in a spin — our car was steady and straight.
Blaine had just lit a joint. It smoldered on the rim of an empty Coke can that sat between us. He had barely smoked any, one or two drags, when the van spun out, brown and horsey: the peace decals on the rear glass, the dented side panels, the windows left slightly ajar. On and on and on it spun.
There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it’s the last we’ll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.
The driver had a handsome face and his hair was peppered toward gray. There were deep, dark bags under his eyes. He was unshaven and he wore a shirt ambitiously undone at the neck, the sort of man who might have been calm at most times, but the wheel was sliding through his hands now and his mouth open wide. He looked down at us from the height of the van as if he might be freezing our faces in memory too. His mouth stretched into a further O and his eyes widened. I wonder now how he saw me, my fringed dress, my curved beads, my hair cut flapper-style, my eyeliner royal blue, my eyes bleary with lack of sleep.
There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max’s Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn’t get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another.
If only we had been so careful with ourselves.
Blaine was thirty-two. I was twenty-eight. We were two years married. Our car, an antique 1927 Pontiac Landau, gold with silver paneling, was almost older than both of us put together. We had installed an eight-track that was hidden under the dashboard. We played twenties jazz. The music filtered out over the East River. There was so much cocaine still pumping through our bodies even at that hour that we felt there was still some promise.
The van spun farther. It was almost front-on. On the passenger side, all I could see was a pair of bare feet propped up on the dashboard. Untangling in slow motion. The bottoms of her feet were so white at the edges and so dark in their hollows that they could only have belonged to a black woman. She untucked at the ankles. The spin was slow enough. I could just see the top of her frame. She was calm. As if ready to accept. Her hair was pulled back tight off her face and bright baubles of jewelry bounced at her neck. If I hadn’t seen her again, moments later, after she was thrown through the windshield, I might have thought she was naked, given the angle I was looking from. Younger than me, a beauty. Her eyes traveled across mine as if asking, What are you doing, you tan blond bitch in your billowy blouse and your fancy Cotton Club car?
She was gone just as quickly. The van went into a wider spin and our car kept on going straight. We passed them. The road opened like a split peach. I recall hearing the first crunch behind us, another car hitting the van, then the clatter of a grille that fell to the ground, and later on, when we went back over it all in our minds, Blaine and I, we reheard the impact of the newspaper truck as it sent them into the guardrail, a big boxy truck with the driver’s door open and the radio blaring. It hit with brute force. There never would have been a way out for them.
Blaine looked over his shoulder and then floored it for an instant until I shouted at him to stop, please stop, please. Nothing more uncluttered than these moments. Our lives in perfect clarity. You must get out. Take responsibility. Walk back to the crash. Give the girl mouth-to-mouth. Hold her bleeding head. Whisper in her ear. Warm the whites of her feet. Run to a phone. Save the crushed man.
Blaine pulled over to the side of the FDR and we stepped out. The caw of gulls from the river, breasting the wind. The dapple of light on the water. The surging currents, their spinning motions. Blaine shaded his eyes in the sunlight. He looked like an ancient explorer. A few cars had stopped in the middle of the road and the newspaper truck had come to a sideways halt, but it wasn’t one of those enormous wrecks that you sometimes hear about in rock songs, all blood and fracture and American highway; rather, it was calm with only small sprinklings of jeweled glass across the lanes, a few bundles of newspapers in a havoc on the ground, distant from the body of the young girl, who was expressing herself in a patch of blooming blood. The engine roared and steam poured out of the van. The driver’s foot must still have been on the pedal. It whined incessantly, at its highest pitch. Some doors were opening in the stalled cars behind and already some other drivers were leaning on their horns, the chorus of New York, impatient to get going again, the fuck-you shrill. We were alone, two hundred yards ahead of the clamor. The road was perfectly dry but with patches of puddled heat. Sunlight through the girdings. Gulls out over the water.
I looked across at Blaine. He wore his worsted jacket and his bow tie. He looked ridiculous and sad, his hair flopping down over his eyes, all of him frozen to the past.
— Tell me that didn’t happen, he said.
The moment he turned to check the front of the car I recall thinking that we’d never survive it, not so much the crash, or even the death of the young girl — she was so obviously dead, in a bloodied heap on the road — or the man who was slapped against the steering wheel, almost certainly ruined, his chest jammed up against the dashboard, but the fact that Blaine went around to check on the damage that was done to our car, the smashed headlight, the crumpled fender, like our years together, something broken, while behind us we could hear the sirens already on their way, and he let out a little groan of despair, and I knew it was for the car, and our unsold canvases, and what would happen to us shortly, and I said to him: Come on, let’s go, quick, get in, Blaine, quick, get a move on.