The circuit from the old Customs House to Wall Street, and then down to South Street Seaport, was a distance of less than a mile. The Customs House faced Bowling Green, which had been used in the seventeenth century for the executions of paupers and slaves. In a tarred space in the park, along an avenue bordered by sturdy, heavy-headed elms, Chinese women danced in formation. There were eight of them, all in casual clothes. One was young, maybe in her thirties. All the others had gray hair, and there was one who was especially old and wise-looking. Their calisthenics was accompanied by vaguely martial pop music blasted from a radio. The young dancer led the group. Her movements were exaggerated. Each time she swept her arms, the too-long sleeves of her baggy pink jacket tousled calligraphically. The others followed easily, through points, swoops, quarter turns in one direction, half turns in the other. She was graceful and beautiful. But when the music stopped and the dancers paused, she did not look beautiful. The beauty had all been in her movement.
Their pause let me hear the other sound present, that of an instrument being played at the opposite end of the park. I wanted to get closer to it, and so I walked under the arbor of elms, passing by rows of concrete chess tables, which were oases of order and invitations to a twinned solitude. But no one sat at them or played chess. Around the tables, where they sank into earth, moss grew, spreading up the concrete and into the ground so that it seemed as if the chessboards had grown roots. I walked under the trees, past the creak of children’s swings and, as I moved closer to the end of the arbor, I could make out the sound of an erhu. The line was breathy and nimble, the precise nimbleness of an old-fashioned thing. How clear its sound in the park, how unlike the whine the same instrument made when it was played by a subway busker competing with the screech of subway trains.
When I reached the other side of the park, I saw that there were actually two erhu players, not one. They were playing in unison, seated together on a stone ledge, and standing, facing them, was a young woman singing. A small group near the musicians, three women and a man, all past middle age, talked and stretched. One of the women carried a child in her arms and played with it, and as she walked around slowly she pointed her feet to the grass ahead of her, first one, then the other. Her deliberate movements were like a delayed shadow of the dancers’. I sat in the grass for a long while listening to the erhu players and the singer. It was cold. The singer sang softly, matching the bowed strings note for note. The players nodded to each other at the accents. I thought of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch’s pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir’s opera The Consolations of Scholarship, which were the things I could best connect to this Chinese music. The song, the clear day, and the elms: it could have been any day from the last fifteen hundred years.
The Times had said, in the obituary I read that day, that V. wrote of atrocity without flinching. They might have said, without flinching visibly, for it had all affected her far more deeply than anyone’s ability to guess. I could hardly imagine the kind of raw pain her family — her husband, her parents — would be experiencing. I returned to the knoll in the park, where I had come in. The dancers had started again. Many of them, I now noticed, wore red or pink. I could not remember if red was lucky in Chinese culture. The thin sound of the erhu still slithered in among the drums of the dancers’ tape player, and it seemed to summon to my mind’s eye the long-ago spirits that V. had been so concerned to honor in her work. Turning away from the dancers, and taking in the expanse of the bay once more, I sat on a green wooden bench. A curious junco, black on its upper half and white on the lower, hopped up to my feet. It was tiny, and soon darted away. There was another man on the bench, dressed in a linen suit, with carefully polished shoes, and a straw hat: summer clothes on a winter’s day. His shirt was yellow and his tie dark brown — my train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the laughter of the Chinese women behind us. His mustache was white and neatly trimmed. The man read El Diario, seriously and slowly. We sat there, the two of us, and I looked over the green park. We did not acknowledge each other’s presence, though I had a sudden urge to tell him all about V.’s life, the depth of her work, her tragic death. We simply sat, and the day rolled down the knoll before us and drifted upward across the grass, and across the water, with its busy crisscrossing ferries, and southward, toward the Statue of Liberty.
When I got home, still not remembering the number for my ATM card, I refused to check the bank documents. I assured myself the number would return in its own time. Then I forgot all about the incident. The next day, Citibank called to tell me they had noticed a dozen failed attempts to withdraw money from my account. I was jovial with the clerk, and assured her that it was my encroaching senility that was responsible, not a thief; my card was fine, they needn’t worry. But when I got off the phone I sat on my bed in the silence of my apartment. I had forgotten about the incident, but then it had become fresh again, and this time more heavily, and this time without witnesses or an official record. The strange feeling was harder to dispel, the memory of standing alone, standing in Wall Street, my memory gone, a pathetic old-young man padding about in the grip of some nervousness, while all around me the smart set made deals, talked on cellphones, and adjusted their cuff links. I recalled having seen a police officer from whose holster an automatic shone, and how I’d been taken with an odd sort of envy of that weapon, of its total lack of ambiguity, of its promise of danger. I imagined I had forgotten not just that number but all numbers, as well as all names, and why I was even there on Wall Street in the first place. I got up from the bed and checked the oven.
Later that day, it snowed, the first snowfall I had witnessed in the season. A furious sense of imbalance came over me as I watched the flakes tumble down and disappear on contact with the ground. Almost a full week afterward, when the cold front had retreated once again into the shadows of our unwintry winter, I still hadn’t remembered the four-digit code. I finally looked it up among my documents, and recaptured what had been hovering, for no good reason, just out of reach.
FOURTEEN
We’ve had a rough time of it, Dr. Saito said, welcoming me in. I’ve been sleeping here in the living room, on this pallet. We’ve had an infestation of bedbugs. Red coats they used to be called in this part of the country, do you know that name? We thought the exterminators had cleared it up, but it came back worse eight days later, and I’ve had to make an unpleasant choice between this room, with its noisy vents, and being eaten up by the little creatures. He gestured toward the slats above the window. They bite. Like this, one, two, three; breakfast, lunch, and dinner, along your arm; but I’m afraid I haven’t much blood to spare anymore. Then he folded his hands and said he expected the exterminators to return in a few days.