She was not the one, not the girl. “I don’t need much,” she always used to say and I hadn’t believed her at first so I tried to give her everything I could, but she kept saying it: “I don’t need much.” I never figured out what that little bit was.
Marco starts the engine. I hadn’t noticed that the rear window extends down over it, revealing the big aluminum V-8. Transparency — a heart on display. Even so, few know what makes it go. Claire had said that she loved me, was still saying it with electric eyes and girlish cheeks—“I love you”—handing out the words like two-bit lemon ices.
8
Like Ahab I do not sleep but unlike him I don’t die — I dream. I dream of Claire with someone else. It makes it easier I suppose, to say goodbye. Money. Plans. Johnny Little Nancyboy left a message for me to go to Greene Street, the corner of Broome. He’d said that there would be better work.
I get up and feed Thomas. He eats. He looks better than yesterday. I wonder who will take care of the fish when I go. I suppose I could leave a note for Marco with care instructions and they could pick him up when they get back. Maybe they won’t come back. Maybe she’ll stay with Edith. It would be better, cheaper. The kids could go to public school. The house is paid for and they would have all that space. They can just open up the door and run outside with a ball by themselves. I don’t think Claire even wants to live in New York any longer, anyway. She hasn’t danced in years and the people she’s met since then, the mothers she’s befriended, the ones she actually liked are all leaving. They can’t afford it, either.
Having grown up poor, I never understood what it cost to be rich: how much a home cost, how much tuition cost, how much it cost to run in certain circles, to maintain a lifestyle. We had cheap rent, and we lived in a small, naive world.
I think I remember coming to New York to become rich — to make a name for myself, with a guitar and notebooks in tow, but it didn’t work. I don’t know why we’d expected it to, and we never made a contingency plan in case it didn’t. I see Claire and myself, twelve years ago, young and stupid — rube-like — making plans to succeed, plans that were really closer to fantasies than anything else.
Most things fail. Most people fail. Most ideas go bad; movements, marriages. I strum the guitar. It’s out of tune, but I keep playing anyway — nothing in particular, just random chords I come to finger. It’s only money. That’s all I really need now for damage control. I put the guitar down and sit up. I get a clean sheet of paper and write a list.
Today:
Go to SoHo
Go to school
Go to Marta — get check
Find some way to make money tonight
Find apartment for them
Not specific but good enough because it’s written down — doable, practical tasks. Things I will do. Things I choose to do. A contract, that sober and of age and consenting, I freely enter. I get up and get dressed. I go downstairs. Marco is standing in the kitchen, dressed and reading the Times. The phone rings. He answers and hands it to me.
“Hey. Morning.”
I take the phone from him.
“Hello.”
No one responds, but I know it’s her. I believe I can hear her breathing and I know her breaths — each one of them — elated, angry, sad. This is how she breathes when she doesn’t know what to say, when in the moment before speaking she realizes how very different we are, how enormous a gap there is between us two and that she hasn’t the power to cross it, that I have given up trying. In this breath there is an assessment, a reassessment of me, of her, of us. There is a hint of shame — that she believed in something between us, first without prudence, then without wisdom. Now there’s only breath as a symbol — an expression of loneliness.
“Hello,” I say again.
“Where were you?” She lets her voice waver on the verge of crying. The kids must still be asleep.
“I worked yesterday.” Marco leaves, allowing me to lie about his message. “I didn’t know you called until late.”
“Of course I called.” More breaths; these are more frustrated, hurt — which means that somewhere in them is a hope. It makes them worse for me to hear than the lonely ones. “You went out?” Which is an accusation of me spending money.
“Marco took me out to dinner. I met him in the city.”
“I had everyone by the phone. Everyone wanted to sing to you. They were so disappointed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Like a fool, I believe her — that it is okay, that she has hope that things will turn out okay. I can’t imagine her remarrying, but I can’t imagine her alone, but like last night I cannot see the face of the man who would replace me, and I wonder if I’ve damaged her too much for her to ever love or trust again.
“Did you find anything for today?” It’s a simple enough question, but it sounds ridiculous coming from her — Claire as the hardscrabble wife of a day laborer.
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing?”
“Something for Johnny — I don’t know.”
“Ick. That guy gets jobs?”
“I guess so.”
“Maybe you can start getting your own jobs?”
“Maybe.”
“You talk to Marta?”
“Today.”
“Great. School?”
“After work.”
“Will anyone be there?”
“I get out at four.”
“Oh, okay. I’m sorry.” She wants to stop asking these sorts of questions, but she can’t help herself. “What about apartments?”
“Tomorrow.”
“We don’t have much time.”
“I know.”
She brightens. “What about Pincus?”
“What about Pincus?”
“I saw his new book. It got great reviews.”
“Did it?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“I keep bugging you. I’m putting it all on you.”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Things’ll work out.”
“Yeah.”
She sighs. “I feel better. I’m sorry.”
“Shh.”
“Are you coming this weekend? The kids miss you. I miss you.”
“I’ll try.” It doesn’t sound genuine to me.
“Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She seems to wait on the line as though she’s expecting me to say more, but she hangs up before I can disappoint.
The stink and dread of the subway when you are going to work isn’t like the stink and dread of the subway when you’re going out to the movies or lunch. It’s not the funk, or the idea that you’ll be trapped underground, it’s the stink of your dreams rotting somewhere along the rails. It’s the dread of knowing that you’re being carted off — complicitly — to the slaughter. Two hundred and fifty dollars a day in New York City will never get me out from under. Next stop — Satan’s lair. It’s seven thirty in the morning and I’m on the F-train, SoHo bound.
I try to account for every dollar I’ve spent in an attempt to figure out how it all came to this. I made money. And for a while, at least, we were operating at a surplus. Claire’s cousin Linus started a dot-com and hired me to write their copy. It was the first time in my life, since being a stock clerk during high school, that I’d brought home a regular check. It made our rent seem trivial, our monthly nut seem like nothing. We saved. I had an office and someone to direct my incoming calls. I didn’t have to do much, either. Linus used to come visit me and ask why I didn’t move his cousin out of that crawlspace we were in. He’d sit on my desk, sipping a coffee. He did the same thing when he presented me with my stock in the company. He did the same, only with a cigar, when his shares made him a millionaire. He also did it when he asked me not to sell. But not when all I had left were penny stocks, a little cash in the bank, and an odd entry on my résumé.