She stopped watching TV when she got her first job. Or maybe she got the job in order to stop watching it. No matter how frequently and closely she watched, she was never sure what really went on, who had supposedly died only to return with amnesia, who was cheating on whom with whose husbands and wives, who was kidnapped on the day of the wedding by the priest who turned out to be a spy. She thought these dramas required specific minds that could keep up with all the details. Yet what made her finally turn the TV off had nothing to do with its mind-numbing spell, but the gunshot. At least one or two characters were killed on TV each day. Almost always in daytime soaps, the victims came back alive, and the actual shooting scene was skipped over. But there were the odd ones that would show the entire gruesome sequence in detail—the index finger on the trigger, the horrified victim shuddering, the squinting of the killer’s vengeful eyes, the slow falling of the body as the final ray of blood spurts out. The first time she saw a scene like that, Suzy was fixated. She could not stop thinking about it and wanted to record it to watch again and again. But the second time it happened, she felt sick and lay still on the futon and did not move for hours. And the third time, she shut it off and moved the TV set to the farthest corner of the apartment. She never went near it again.
“You’re waiting for a whistle to blow; it’d take you less than five minutes to grab your stuff and run,” said Jen when she stopped by a few months ago, which she rarely did. “Deadline,” she claimed. “Drop by the office, we’ll go to the Royalton for lunch on the company’s account.” But Suzy knew that Jen did not want to meet at home. When lounging at each other’s apartments, they naturally fell into the familiar ways of former roommates. One would get up to pour coffee before the other even asked for a refill, or bring the ashtray before the other took out a cigarette. Yet somehow, sitting on the futon with the coffee brewing, they could not help remembering the way Suzy had quit and left an irreparable hole in their college days. Jen was right, though. The apartment resembles a temporary shelter. There is no sweetness here, no flowery sheets, no matching duvet cover, no framed childhood photos. In fact, Suzy cannot say if she is attached to anything anymore. A jade ring that once belonged to her mother? An album filled with her childhood photos? A videotape of her seventh-birthday party? No such memorabilia in her apartment. Sure, Grace might have retrieved a few items from the Queens house where their parents had lived in their final years—their family having moved frequently through their growing up—but how important were such things if she had rarely missed them all these years? In college, Suzy envied Jen, who went home every few months to her parents’ Connecticut mansion, where her childhood bedroom was intact with her Barbie and her tattered Cure poster and a bulletin board filled with the snapshots from her high-school excursion to St. Petersburg. The shrine of such a lovely American past, to Suzy, suggested an emblem, a reference to what Jen would become, what Jen could only become—a successful editor, the one-bedroom apartment on Central Park West, a summer share in the Hamptons, a boyfriend of her own age in his final year of residency at Johns Hopkins. They were all the right, correct things in life, which a smart, ambitious young woman such as Jen, upon finishing an Ivy League education, was expected to find in such a scintillatingly possible ground as New York City.
But those things were not what differentiated Jen from Suzy. Two girls of the same age, the same education, the same earnest propensity for Brontë’s Villette, and yet their makeups were different from the start. It was neither because Suzy spent her early years moving constantly from Flushing to the Bronx to the inner parts of Queens, as new immigrants often did, nor because Suzy’s inner-city public-school education suffered next to Jen’s suburban private-school history, a deficit that Suzy was bright enough to overcome. But there was something else, something markedly different, something more fundamental, ingrained, almost inborn. Jen seemed to float about their mutual college life with the brightest sunlight, whereas Suzy, no matter how she tried to hide it, was stuck somewhere cold and brooding. And Damian was the first one to notice, and was not afraid to tell her about it.
On their first date, sitting on the bench in Riverside Park—although “date” might be a misnomer, since they had just slept together for the first time that day—Damian gazed at her awhile and said, “Stop looking at me for an answer; you’re not going to be happier.” Suzy knew that he was telling the truth and kept silent, because she still did not know what she wanted, and could still feel the pain between her legs, and felt no regrets. She looked away instead at the afternoon calm of the Hudson River, across which New Jersey loomed with not much promise, and remembered that she had missed language lab that afternoon. Damian was forty-nine then, a married scholar whose picture she had seen framed at Professor Tamiko’s office. Suzy had just turned twenty, a comparative-literature major, a virgin, which strangely did not matter at all. Neither discussed it. Suzy’s virginity was the last thing on their minds. From the first meeting, there was no doubt that they would make love. What bothered them was the darkness they sensed in each other, which pulled them together, which let them know almost instantly that their union was not a good thing, was doomed, was bound to hurt people and leave scars that might not go away no matter how much time passed, how they reorganized their lives so that one might forget that the other had ever happened at all.
The phone is persistent, and Suzy is not sure what makes her finally answer it. Perhaps she hopes it is Damian after all, perhaps she imagines that he has gotten softer with years and will break down just once. She tightens the towel grip and walks over to the end of the room and picks up the receiver before its fourth ring. She does not say hello. She waits for a voice, a signal. But instead, a pause, a drawn-out silence. She will not speak. She will not give up easily. Then, finally, comes the click—she knew it—a smooth, intentional hang-up. Must’ve been a wrong number, surely a prank call. And yet, for a quick second, she cannot help looking to make sure that the blinds on both windows are drawn.
5.
NO MATTER WHAT TIME OF DAY, it seems, the north wing of Penn Station is packed. Eight a.m., and a horde of men and women in suits and briefcases pour out of Long Island Rail Road trains and rush into the subway to reach their cubicles on Wall Street or the Avenue of the Americas by nine o’clock sharp. The commute costs them the better part of the day, the better mood of their lives. But a small sacrifice for a two-story house with a basketball hoop in the backyard and a cozy public school whose PTA meets for a monthly picnic in the town park. It’s worth one and a half hours each way, three hours combined. Who would want to raise kids in the city, who could afford it? So they recline in their seats with The Wall Street Journal, the Long Island Weekly, or the Times. The clever ones make the best of the lull by balancing their checkbooks, or reading over contracts or invoices, whatever they do all day at work and still take home extra of because there never is enough time, because time is what such commutes are all about. And amidst crowds who reappear from the LIRR each morning like ants out of mounds, Suzy stands waiting for her 8:25 to Montauk, glad to be going in the opposite direction.