Her speech arrived at its terminus: we had lost the ability to speak to each other. The attack on New York had removed any doubt about this. She’d never sensed herself so alone, so comfortless, so far from home, as during these last weeks. “And that’s bad, Hans. That’s bad.”
I could have countered with words of my own.
“You’ve abandoned me, Hans,” she said, sniffing. “I don’t know why, but you’ve left me to fend for myself. And I can’t fend for myself. I just can’t.” She stated that she now questioned everything, including, as she put it, the narrative of our marriage.
I said sharply, “‘Narrative’?”
“The whole story,” she said. The story of her and me, for better and for worse, till death did us part, the story of our union to the exclusion of all others — the story. It just wasn’t right anymore. It had somehow been falsified. When she thought ahead, imagined the years and the years…“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. She was tearful. “I’m so sorry.” She wiped her nose.
I was sitting on the floor, my shoes stupidly pointing at the ceiling. The yelping of emergency vehicles welled up from the street, flooded the room, ebbed one yelp at a time.
I said disastrously, “Is there anything I can say that’ll make you change your mind?”
We sat opposite each other in silence. Then I tossed my coat onto a chair and went to the bathroom. When I picked up my toothbrush it was wet. She had used it with a wife’s unthinking intimacy. A hooting sob rose up from my chest. I began to gulp and pant. A deep, useless shame filled me — shame that I had failed my wife and my son, shame that I lacked the means to fight on, to tell her that I refused to accept that our marriage had suddenly collapsed, that all marriages went through crises, that others had survived their crises and we would do the same, to tell her she could be speaking out of shock or some other temporary condition, to tell her to stay, to tell her that I loved her, to tell her I needed her, that I would cut back on work, that I was a family man, a man with no friends and no pastimes, that my life was nothing but her and our boy. I felt shame — I see this clearly, now — at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible. I felt shame because it was me, not terror, she was fleeing.
And yet that night we reached for each other in the shuttered bedroom. Over the following weeks, our last as a family in New York, we had sex with a frequency that brought back our first year together, in London. This time round, however, we went about it with strangeness and no kissing, handling and licking and sucking and fucking with dispassion the series of cunts, dicks, assholes, and tits that assembled itself out of our successive yet miserably several encounters. Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.
An awful sensibleness descended upon us. In December, we found the will to visit our loft to fetch some belongings. There were stories going around of abandoned downtown apartments overrun by vermin, and when I opened our door I was braced for horrors. But, dust-clouded windows aside, our old home was as we’d left it. We retrieved some clothes and at Rachel’s insistence picked out items of furniture for the hotel apartment, which I was to continue renting. She was concerned for my comfort just as I was concerned for hers. We’d agreed that whatever else happened, we wouldn’t be moving back to Tribeca. The loft would be sold, and the net proceeds, comfortably over a million dollars, would be invested in government bonds, a cautious spread of stocks, and, on a tip from an economist I trusted, gold. We had another two million dollars in a joint savings account — the market was making me nervous — and two hundred thousand in various checking accounts, also in our joint names. It was understood that nobody would take any legal steps for a year. There was a chance, we carefully agreed, that everything would look different after Rachel had spent some time away from New York.
The three of us flew together to England. We stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Bolton at their house in Barnes, in southwest London, arriving on Christmas Eve. We opened gifts on Christmas morning, ate turkey with stuffing and potatoes and Brussels sprouts, drank sherry and red wine and port, made small talk, went to bed, slept, awoke, and then spent an almost unendurable further three days chewing, swallowing, sipping, walking, and exchanging reasonable remarks. Then a black cab pulled up in front of the house. Rachel offered to accompany me to the airport. I shook my head. I went upstairs, where Jake was playing with his new toys. I picked him up and held him in my arms until he began to protest. I flew back to New York. There is no describing the wretchedness I felt, which persisted, in one form or another, throughout my association with Chuck Ramkissoon.
On my own, it was as if I were hospitalized at the Chelsea Hotel. I stayed in bed for almost a week, my existence sustained by a succession of men who arrived at my door with beer and pizzas and sparkling water. When I did begin to leave my room — as I had to, in order to work — I used the service elevator, a metal-clad box in which I was unlikely to meet anyone other than a muttering Panamanian maid or, as happened once, a very famous actress sneaking away from an encounter with a rumored drug dealer on the tenth floor. After a week or two, my routine changed. Most evenings, once I’d showered and put on some casual clothes, I went down to the lobby and fell listlessly into a chair by the nonoperational fireplace. I carried a book but did not read it. Often I was joined by a very kind widow in a baseball cap who conducted an endless and apparently fruitless search of her handbag and murmured to herself, for some reason, about Luxembourg. There was something anesthetizing about the traffic of people in the lobby, and I also took comfort from the men at the front desk, who out of pity invited me behind the counter to watch sports on their television and asked if I wanted to join their football pool. I did join, though I knew nothing about American football. “You did real good yesterday,” Jesus, the bellman, would announce. “I did?” “Sure,” Jesus said, bringing out his chart. “The Broncos won, right? And the Giants. That’s two winners you got right there. OK,” he said, frowning as he concentrated, “now you lost with the Packers. And the Bills. And I guess the 49ers.” He tapped a pencil against the chart as he considered the problem of my picks. “So I’m still not ahead?” “Right now, no,” Jesus admitted. “But the season’s not over yet. You could still turn it around, easy. You hang in there, you get hot next week? Shit, anything could happen.”