“I’m sorry,” Clarissa whispered. “I’m sorry—”
“They said there’s a bomb under the George Washington Bridge!” Kim shouted. “I can’t get the ferry to New Jersey, it’s closed. Is there a heliport in Manhattan? I’ll pay anything to get to a heliport. Can you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” said Clarissa, “I don’t know where one is—”
There was a pause. “I’m leaving town,” said Kim. “I can’t stay here. And I want a refund. I want it all back.”
ONE DAY BEFORE THEY LEFT VIRGINIA TO RETURN TO NEW YORK, Clarissa received an emaiclass="underline" IN REGARDS TO REFUND:
I have not heard from you in regards to the status of my refund. Perhaps you are too busy to think of me now. All the hotels are giving refunds. Also free rooms in the future, suite upgrades. My pet peeves are injustice and dishonesty. I know when I am being treated fairly. You did not tell me certain facts about the apartment, which was, I am sorry to say, filthy. Black goo all over the refrigerator. I had to wear plastic gloves to keep my hands clean.
Darla and I planned our vacation for a long time. We are best friends. We were going to buy the same clothes, go to the newest restaurants. People would admire us and say who are those glamour girls. Her hair is red and more beautiful, but I will admit I have nicer legs, we wanted to start a commotion.
I expect to receive payment of U.S. $3,000 within a week.
WHEN THEY GOT OUT OF THEIR CAB AT CANAL STREET, THE BORDER between civilian New York and the war zone, they unloaded their luggage by the rows of blue police barricades. “Let’s see your ID,” said the state trooper, standing trim and noble in his brown uniform, surrounded by pans of homemade cookies. “Do you live here, or do you have reservations?”
They looked at him.
“The restaurants gave us lists of people who have reservations,” he said, pulling out a piece of paper. They offered their driver’s licenses, and the officer agreed: this was where they lived.
He offered to give them a ride to their building. The car floated by the gray, scrolled buildings, the streets deserted, simply a stage set, built quickly, then abandoned. The sky had become a pale, sickly orange and gray. There were too many police cars posted at corners; sirens pierced the warm air. There were American flags everywhere, as though everyone was desperate to have the same thought. People hurried down the streets, carrying groceries, pushing strollers; some were wearing surgical masks.
Kim had left in great haste, sheets piled in the living room, a pale lipstick in the bathroom sink. Clarissa picked up the lipstick and touched the tip; the color was a frosted pink. Sammy ran ahead of them. She thought that they should make some grand entrance, that they should say something profound to each other, but she merely listened to the sound of their presence ring through the apartment.
THERE WAS THE SMELL, UNLIKE ANYTHING SHE HAD SMELLED before. Burning concrete and computers and office carpets and jets and steel girders and people. There was nothing natural about the smell; it tasted bitter and metal in her mouth and blew through their neighborhood at variable times; the mornings began sweet and deceptive, yet the afternoons became heavy with it. She began to get a sore throat, and her tongue became numb. The girls at the American Lung Association table gave her a white paper mask and told her that there was nothing to worry about, but to keep her windows closed and stay inside. She walked against the small stream of people wearing paper masks. The streets were dark and shiny, the sanitation trucks spraying down the street to keep the dust from lifting into the air. A man walked by in a suit and a gas mask. Did he know something that they did not? Where did he get the gas mask?
She went out to the market the first morning after they returned. She pushed Sammy in his stroller downtown, heading straight toward the empty sky. In the market, she picked out cereal, detergent, apples to the pop soundtrack in the supermarket, the cheerful music that usually made her feel as though she were part of some drama greater than herself. Now it floated around her, impossible, but the supermarket did not shut it off.
When she ran into neighbors, anyone — Modesto, the maintenance man in the building, the counter man at the bodega, mothers from the playground — she moved toward them, the fact of their existence, her fingers like talons. It did not matter that she did not know their names. How are you, they asked each other, and it seemed like they were saying I love you.
“How are you?” Modesto asked.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“How is your apartment?”
“I’m glad to see you.”
The meetings were hushed and tender, and then, with further discussion, she found that the neighbors had become deformed by a part of their personalities. The mothers who had been angry now were enormous, stiff-shouldered with anger; the mothers who were fearful were feathery, barely rooted to the ground. “Why do they close the park for asbestos,” said one angrily, “when before it was just full of piss and shit?”
She stood with Josh, that first week, looking out their closed window at the lines of dump trucks taking the rubble to the barge. They sat, sweaty, greasy, in their living room, listening to the crash of the crumbled buildings as they fell into the steel barge. The swerve of the cranes sounded like huge, screaming cats, and when the heavy debris crashed into the barge, the sound was so loud they could feel it in their jaws.
They drifted quickly from their damp new gratitude for their lives to the fact that they had to live them. One week after their return, they sat beside the pile of bills that had accumulated. They sat before the pile as though before a dozen accusations: then Josh got up and went to the closet and brought out suits that she had not seen since he was in his twenties. She was startled when she saw him, the same slim figure, but now with gray hair. Suddenly, she realized that she had stopped looking closely at herself in the mirror. She dragged out some of the dresses she had worn fifteen years ago: stretchy Lycra dresses that clung to her skin. Now she looked like a sausage exploding from its casing. She had been hostage to the absurd notion that by acting young, she would not age. The part-time jobs, the haphazard routine, had kept them mired in a state of hope, which now made it difficult to get off the odd welfare state that was the adjunct, freelance, part-time job.
“We were fools,” he said.
Clarissa looked at herself in the mirror. She tried to hold her stomach in.
“We have to get real jobs. We should have had them fifteen years ago.”
“What about your art?” she asked. “We can cut back. We can eat beans more.” He stared at her. “We can get another gallery, you’re doing great work—”
She hated the tinny, rotting optimism in her voice. It had pushed them forward blindly, roughly, toward an imagined place where they would be seen for who they really were. She had wanted to walk through museums to see her work displayed on the walls. That sort of presence would, she had thought, cure her sorrow for her own death. But of course, it did not.
“We were idiots,” he said.
They looked out the window at the smoke rising. His eyelashes were dark and beautiful. She remembered how when she married him, she hoped that their children would have those eyelashes, hoped that this loveliness would be protection against loneliness or cruelty. All of her previous thoughts seemed the musings of a fool. She rubbed her face, which was damp with sweat. Her mind seemed to have stopped. There was a short pause outside; the crane operators stopped for a moment of silence whenever they found part of a body. She looked out and saw one of the workers holding his hat. She opened a window. The bitter, metallic smell entered the apartment.