40
The doorman who’d let me slip by was gone and Ray was there as I opened the stairwell door—
Mrs. Riley, no one was ’sposed to let you up there.
Ray still had that immovable mass of black hair and the one blond eyebrow and the one set of blond eyelashes, a thing that turned this broad, dense man into a kind of puppy.
Did the new guy give the letter to you? He was ’sposed to.
Yeah, I got it, I said.
Ray got a set of keys from the desk. The little TV was still on, a weathergirl in front of a map, her arm moving in a slow karate chop.
I should take you to the basement, then. Right? Get your stuff?
Sure, I said, and I tried to smile and seem grateful.
We got into the elevator and when it opened in the basement Ray held an arm in front of the door and looked toward me to signal he was letting me off first, but he looked above my head instead of at my face and I realized Ray probably wouldn’t look at me because he must have thought I was a bad thing, even though he had said Good morning! to me so many times and so sincerely and asked How ya doin’, Elly? and even bothered to listen to and maybe care about how I was doing and often he had carried my groceries when I came stumbling into the lobby and once he even took the elevator with me all the way up to my apartment because I had been sick and didn’t look well and Ray had noticed and done something about it and despite all that history, Ray could now not even look at me, wouldn’t even just gently once look. To Ray I was just a chore now, just a thing that he had to endure; to him I had smacked the humanness from myself.
Ray stacked my boxes and two chairs and little table on a rolling pallet and pushed the pallet to the freight elevator, and in the lobby he unloaded everything from the pallet and stacked it in the vestibule beside a bench I hadn’t ever noticed before, since this lobby wasn’t a place where I had ever waited, just a place I had passed through in that part of the past when I knew where I was going, where I should be, and what I should do. When Ray was done he didn’t say anything, just rolled the pallet away, and left me and my things like he was leaving anyone and anything and he was, because objects are just slow events and people are just slow events and Ray was done with the part of his life that I would be in and from here on out I was a stranger to him and even if I saw him on some sidewalk someday and had an impulse to say Good morning, he would not see me and he would not say anything and he would not look in my eyes because to him there would be nothing there to see.
I sat on the lobby’s bench for a while and had nowhere to go and I wondered if there was a number I could call for a Man with a Van who might double as a therapist or priest or someone who could just tell me what to do with myself, someone who could take me and my furniture and boxes of life stuff to another part of the world or the city and tell me what to do in it, someone who knew a wide, clear place where I could start over. I wondered if there was such a thing as a Life Re-creation Specialist but I was mostly certain that if I was to look in the yellow pages for such a thing I’d only discover that it did not or did not yet exist — it would be up to me to find a new place in the world for my self and life and it seems that everyone else who was living or dead knew that you can only make those kinds of decisions for yourself and no one else can make them for you, and that there was probably something potentially very wrong with the woman who had a hard time just choosing anything to do with her whole entire self.
After some time, something like an hour or hours, Ray came over and told me that I couldn’t just sit in the lobby all day now that I didn’t live here anymore. He generated some kind of pity and asked, Don’t you have anywhere to go? He seemed almost sincerely concerned about where I could possibly ever go and I surprised myself when I said, Yes, I do have somewhere to go, and I said it in a fed-up way, and again it was my voice, not my brain or body telling me how I felt and this was news to myself because being fed up wasn’t what I thought I was. I have plenty of places to go, I said, and I stopped looking at Ray and dug through my backpack and took only the things that were the most necessary (toothbrush, papers from immigration, little wooden camel Jaye had given me, socks, passport, underwear, a shirt) and I put them in a small canvas bag that seemed now preferable to the lug and labor of a backpack. I considered looking through the boxes for something else I might need like shoes that were more functional or clean pants but it wasn’t worth the trouble of having to push past the blue dresses and think of my husband taking things off their hangers and folding them and putting them in these boxes. A happy UPS man walked into the lobby, he and his shorts and his smile and his name sewn on his shirt, and Ray chatted with him, happy to talk to someone who was who he was expected to be, who came and did and went just like that.
While Ray spoke and joked with the UPS man I walked out of the lobby and immediately regretted telling Ray that I had a place to go because, in fact, I did not have a place to go and that was exactly where I was going. I made it to the end of the block before Ray started yelling after me about all the things I’d left in his lobby, so I turned the corner onto Broadway and sprinted toward the train and I don’t know if Ray was running after me or not, because I did not look because I was too busy running as a way of saying, Fuck you, everything, fuck all of the things forever because I am free, so free, but also I knew that I wasn’t free, because running from something isn’t freedom, it’s just a way to flee, and, sure, the day was what a person talking to another person would call beautiful, but I immediately took it for granted, felt the earth owed me this one warm favor.
In the subway station I jumped the turnstile as if that was how I’d always gotten around and I bolted into a waiting car just as the doors closed and we went and no one cared and I looked at all the people around me, staring off, headphones plugging ears, some sleeping or almost sleeping, and no one cared — oh, how no one cared — oh, how I loved how no one cared.