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E X C E R P T If Richard Christie had seen her standing on Sixth, if he’d been driving his dusty blue unmarked Taurus, headed for a crime scene on the hazy, humid morning of June 26th, would he have noticed her? Or she, if she’d stopped, turned, looked outward into the rows and rows of cars, looked through dirty or rolled down windows, into faces, have seen him? He thinks, later, he would have. She, well, she wasn’t looking outward, she knows that, hadn’t been for a while. If he had noticed her, he would have felt an automatic nudge of lust. And why? The hair, partly, she had long hair which he liked. Abundant. Very large eyes, a dark gray-green he would call them, and not at all serene; unusual bone structure about the cheeks and mouth; and a thin face with determined curved lines under the eyes. Most people would have described her hair as black but as a policeman, he knew it was actually a dark brown. She had a look of summer, islands. Put her in a sarong, have her sell suntan lotion. That kind of thing. Still. If he’d seen her then, he would have seen sadness in her and understood she was one of what nearly all of us are in his opinion--motherless children. She, she blamed herself for not looking outward. A narcissistic blot, she had it. A constant soul-searching. She didn’t think much about how she looked, although most people would have been surprised to hear that since she dressed and walked with what passed for self-awareness, even self-love. If she’d looked outward toward Christie, she would not have noticed him. Even closer up--if he’d popped on his blinkers, hopped out of the car, if someone had introduced them--she would have dismissed him. A detective, essentially a cop. A thick-headed flat-foot. Light-years away. Maybe even a Republican. Not somebody she could know or want to know. She stood on Sixth with Michael. He held his briefcase stiffly. People walked around them. “I have to go, Marina,” he said. “I’m supposed to be there by 10:15.” “It’s okay.” “I’d drive you, but it would make me late.” “I know.” He offered a new suggestion, dropping each word reluctantly, “You could take me and then pick me up. Then you’d have the car.” There was tightness around his eyes as if he fought a glare. She felt badly for him, wished she could embrace him, but that was the point, she couldn’t, hadn’t been able to get in for a long time now. The tense muscles of his face worked hard as he tried to stay calm. There was a moment, before he turned and strode off, in which she might have undone everything—taken back what she’d just said upstairs in Dr. Caldwell’s office. And she almost did, out of agony for the look on his face. But something stopped her words. The way he tightened his lips, maybe, the reminder of recent cruelties. From that point on, many things were decided. Dr. Caldwell had asked her, “And do you still feel you ought to leave, be on your own?” The homework assignment had been to think this through, or more accurately, feel it through, Marina having lost her ability to act for herself instead of for Michael. “You keep saying what he wants,” Dr. Caldwell had pointed out. This morning Marina caught Dr. Caldwell’s almost imperceptible nod when she said she’d decided a separation might be better for both of them. “I think we’re hurting each other too much.” Him on the love seat, her on the matching sofa, the doctor in the high backed chair, all of them on their sandy-colored islands. Again that nod. Or her imagination. Michael made an exhalation of pretend affront, surprise. Dr. Caldwell turned to Michael. “It’s been going on for a long time,” she reminded him. “Whatever she wants. I don’t care.” He sank back with an arm around the shoulder of the sofa and looked toward his own crossed legs, unable to make eye contact. Dr. Caldwell looked hard at him, but he didn’t look up. “You don’t care?” she asked finally. “No. I’ve had it.” “What?” He looked up. “Failure. I can’t take any more failure.” “Separation--I know I’ve said this--has rules. You have to make them and keep to them. Decide exactly what you want out of it. You told me your wishes, your needs, didn’t you, last week?” Here she turned to Marina. Marina said, “It’s hard to remember. Change. Peace. Peace is what I want.” “You told me last week, ‘Self-knowledge. A chance to figure out what I feel.’” Dr. Caldwell seemed to be reading from the yellow legal pad. The room was a court, of sorts, judge, plaintiff and accused. Marina was exhausted with trying. Dr. Caldwell had looked downward at her tablet and honored the seriousness of this about-to-happen parting with a long silence. For a long time, nobody said anything. “I’m so sad,” Marina said finally. “And yet it still feels the right thing to do.” Even the way Michael bristled, the little bit he moved, as soon as she showed the soft underbelly of her sadness, spoke of the violence in him. Marina’s breath caught and if she needed a warning not to go soft now, this was it. He had not struck her except for that once. But the books, papers, dishes, he had thrown, broken. He had been on the verge of striking her a million times. The threat of it was almost worse, given her family history, than if he’d hit her. Dr. Caldwell by now knew all about Marina’s family history--a violent father who’d struck her mother repeatedly, her sister as well, and Marina sometimes too, or began to, but somehow left off, mysteriously collapsed into himself. As a child of ten, Marina had yelled at her father, “Don’t you ever hit my mother again!” And her father had stopped moving forward--chaos all around them, the table turned over, the pie makings on the floor. Her mother whimpering in a corner. After that he waited till Marina was at school to go crazy. He was clearly afraid of her, a child. Twice she called the police about him. Dr. Caldwell puzzled over these stories, saying she thought there was something unusual, forceful in Marina even when there didn’t seem to be. And the blame, a few years later, on Marina for his illness and death. Can you kill someone with a look, with accusations? Her mother and sister seemed to imply she had. She was afraid to look at Michael, today, upstairs. Did not want to hurt him. Did not want to hurt herself, either. Could not understand how this was her drama, to be enacted over and over, being faced with violence and seeking to stop it. Why? Are people born into certain patterns? She’d said, riding down the elevator, “I’ll take the bus home. I don’t mind.” He did not say, “Is it real, then? Are you leaving?” She did not say, “I meant it, I’m leaving.” The discussion part was over, and now only the action to be done. She watched him walk up the street until he was out of sight and felt grief that she had once loved him and didn’t any more. People who turned to look at her probably sensed her making a decision, saw her almost run after him, but in the end, not. And in that pause, she was shifting roles. Right there on Sixth Avenue, beneath Dr. Caldwell’s office. Deciding to go it alone. Small steps forward, acting on her own interests for once, even if afraid. “You are too accommodating,” Dr. Caldwell said once. “People take advantage.” “She’s too fucking saintly,” Michael said. “Not a great turn-on!” “No,” Dr. Caldwell said seriously. “No, it’s not.” After Marina watched Michael hurry up the street, head bent, she turned the other way and went toward Liberty Avenue. A tiny plan was forming. She and Michael were scheduled to see Dr. Caldwell next week to work out finances and rules: How would they separate? Would they see each other, call each other in that time? How often? Who would pay for what? The fact was, they had hardly enough money for one household, definitely not enough for two. Michael had loans to pay off, they had a high mortgage, their bank account was a mess. One of their cars had broken down and they’d given it up--just told the guys at the station to sell it. They were down to one car, but Marina was going to need a car, on her own, with her own place to live. . . . They’d lived beyond their means, like so many in their generation, that too, with their Cuisinarts and all-wool carpets and two cars. The dull facts emerged six months back, along with everything else, bigger things than money, when they first went to Dr. Caldwell, pretending to themselves they needed to figure out what to do differently, but really in the beginning stages of unwinding from each other. I'm beside myself, Marina thought, feeling the truth of that expression. She was someone else walking along beside her body. Why, she couldn’t even remember where the bus stop was! Finally remembered. After she did her one tiny bit of investigation, she would walk up past that newspaper box and take the bus home. She headed toward the Clark Building. All she wanted was truth and yet she kept up appearances, walking as if she could think, and people smiled back at her, one jaunty man, one old woman, as if this was some other time in her life when she was a woman of fashion, feeling good. Was this her way of not offending anyone with the dark wells of sadness in her? Had she become an actress--Dr. Caldwell thought so--because she had a need to turn rage and grief into something acceptable? Make something good out of it. Not bother anybody. And so she wore a pink and orange flowered sheath dress, classic cut, short. A small black shoulder bag, an old thing, of black leather, very un-summery, and black strapped sandals with small stacked heels. Her starburst earrings picked up and reflected the colors of the dress. A costume for an Italian comedy. And this on a day her life was falling apart. A director told her once that she was like the Marina in Shakespeare’s Pericles; she confused people; empathy and beauty together, he said, is a curse. Because people don’t know what to do, aren’t sure they like it. You seem to be flaunting something—goodness — he told her. And it makes them feel kind of shabby with their grubby inner lives. She understood. Kindness in an unkind world seemed disingenuous. Was disingenuous. Even laughable. Well, she had changes to make. She was going to be of the world from now on, responsive to it, harsher, grabbing. She crossed the street toward the Clark Building. There was a jewelry shop on the second floor where for years Michael had bought her gold and silver, sapphires and emeralds, adornments for the ears, neck, wrists, fingers. At first, the weight and beauty of the jewelry against her skin seemed a measure of her worth. Now these things felt like blackmail. And. How could she keep jewelry when she needed money so badly for an apartment, for food? In the shop, she would be stepping over the line. On-stage to off. She had told only her best friend Lizzie that she and Michael were in trouble, not her mother or sister or any one else. When she asked about selling the jewels back. . . .Well, it would be obvious. Even Lizzie didn’t know how bad things really were. Michael could be charming. People were not going to want to believe the level of his fury at himself, at life, at luck, the way he’d routinely taken it out on her. Her mother and sister would remember Michael teasing, joking with them and they would think that was the whole of him for he managed to be charming even when things were very bad between them. Ha. Who was the actor in the family? The building’s lobby was cool and dark, with patterned marble floors and walls. She didn’t look around, didn’t pay attention to anybody or anything, except the cool green walls with their deco brassy outlining bands. She wished she could rest her head against the smooth marble. A sob began to well up in her and she imagined death was a nice thing, cool, and preferable to living. After all, maybe the trouble was her fault. Too fucking saintly. Why did she not strike out for herself. Nobody liked weakness. “You’re too nice,” the receptionist at the casting agency said soberly, a hint of instruction in her tone. Who wanted nice? Suddenly Marina felt light-headed and unsteady. She leaned against the wall. “Better eat something,” she heard someone say. She looked up to see the very old man who ran the concessions counter. He had been there every time she ever came in. He looked as if his whole life he had sold candy bars and sodas from that spot. His counter was full of dusty goods. She wanted one of the chocolate bars, but didn’t trust them--where was it she’d bought a Clark bar and opened it to find a tiny worm poking its head up at her? Irrationally, she felt the Granola bar, more newly invented, might be fresher; so she took a chance on it. While she was paying for the candy bar, she heard the elevator open behind her. “Finally. I thought maybe it was broken.” She watched the man take her change without counting it. “No. Just taking its own time. Don’t be in a hurry in this building.” “I’m not. It’s okay.” He looked closely at her. “What’s the matter? Your boyfriend giving you a hard time?” She shook her head. The elevator doors closed and the thing went upward without her. Unwrapping the candy bar, she watched a woman who’d evidently just come out of the elevator, leaning over a baby stroller. The woman was twenty-five, maybe less, and she was pretty in a wholesome way, all her features in line, nothing particularly outstanding. She wore a light blue, flower-patterned, sun-dress and she looked happy. The young mother looked up at Marina and back down to her baby who waved arms and legs in a wobbly but energetic semaphore. The woman tucked a diaper into a plastic bag, looked around for a waste bin, thought better of it, and tucked the wrapped bag back in the star-spangled one. Boy, Marina registered, because he wore little blue overalls and a tee shirt underneath which was a sea of small sailboats. Marina always looked at babies, always had even when she was too young to be so desperate and full of longing as she was now. And that was one of the large strands in the undoing of her marriage, their failure to make a child. In her heart she felt an actual physical pain of longing. Studying the baby, she was enchanted. He was ordinary enough, she supposed, but she loved the roundness of his blue eyes, the particular way his lips puckered as if he were working hard on a decision--whether to let his mother coo him into good humor or to let out his other complaints now that his diaper had been changed. And so unprivately. She guessed what the baby’s remaining frustrations might be. The heat. The discomfort with new places--dark interiors with marble floors and nobody talking and elevators taking forever and then thunking into place. Poor sweetie, she thought. You don’t much like it here, in the dark, in the unfamiliar. He made a sound. He seemed to hear her unvoiced sympathy. He seemed to like her smile. All this time, the mother was going through the baby’s star-spangled diaper bag, as if inventorying its contents. Marina broke off a small corner of the candy bar and ate it, putting the rest in her purse. The baby watched her chewing, which made her laugh. ‘You’ve cheered me up, you clever fellow,’ she thought. The baby laughed as if she’d said it out loud. “Hello, little one. Hello.” The baby’s legs and arms stopped moving and he looked at her with something that might be amazement. Her eyes? Something about her voice that mesmerized him? Or did he simply get the message that she liked him? Actually, it wasn’t unusual. Babies often reacted this way to her. His mother stopped and looked up, smiled and looked down again. The elevator sunk into position once more and its doors opened. It was empty this time. Marina waved good-bye to the little boy and he seemed to follow her with his eyes. She hummed an ongoing prayer for a child much like him. The elevator moved silently and mysteriously up one floor. Hardly a whisper of machinery working, even when it opened its doors. In Joy’s Antique Jewelry Shop, the owners greeted Marina by name and said, “Oh, have we got something to show you!” And before she knew it, before she could stop them, they had carefully taken out and displayed on a cloth an emerald ring. “Oh, that’s beautiful,” she said, “but I can’t. I couldn’t.” The owlish young woman named Joy who kept ebullience in check and the tall, sober, Greek-looking man who was her husband, nodded sadly that the ring should be so beautiful that Marina would be tempted by it. “I don’t know if it’s possible, or how you work, but I’ve been thinking I might sell a few things back. If you ever do that.” They looked at her, surprised. “I have too much,” she said quickly. “I’m not wearing things.” The couple seemed to shrug at the same time. The husband was taking the ring box out of the case and putting the emerald back into it. “Not impossible,” he said, summoning a light tone. “This is one of the most beautiful rings we’ve ever had. We thought of you.” “I could remind you of what I have or just bring the things in.” “Wait and bring them in,” Joy said. Marina was struck by the thought that maybe Joy and her husband couldn’t afford to buy her rings and bracelets back from her. Theirs was a small specialty shop. What if it threw them off for a month, two months? But what was she to do? She needed money. And what did people do with jewelry that stood for meanings that no longer existed? She had only two hundred dollars in an account. Hadn’t had an acting job in a year. Needed work. Needed an apartment, a car, furniture, phone service--all of that cost more money than she usually made typing briefs, teaching acting, selling clothing--her piecemeal income. “Let us know when you’re coming in. We’ll look up your slips.” “We keep good records,” Joy said, shifting position and looking downward for no good reason at all. Yes, they understood. It made tears come to her eyes and she had to wave a farewell without actually looking back, but they understood that too, she could tell, from the tone of the good-byes. When she left Joy’s she walked past the other shops which sold new jewelry. The new glitter didn’t appeal to her at all, never had, not compared to a ring or a necklace with history. The rings she wore carried a hundred years of feelings. The company of other women who made decisions, felt love, got angry, struggled to put a life together. Marina took the elevator back down to the lobby, thinking briefly of the child in the stroller, sorry to see he and his mother were gone. She started across town toward the bus stop. As she walked, she remembered something Michael had said that morning, something so sad she wanted to put it aside. “I tried to give her things I thought she wanted,” he told Dr. Caldwell. “I knew I could never be enough for her. I thought she was above me.” Maybe this was a clue to her worst faults. Hers or his. She couldn’t tell any more. She stopped and looked in Lerner’s window, but only because she couldn’t move any more. Shorts, tank tops, a defeated-looking woman moving a mannequin that had been arranged to suggest a confident strut, ridiculous when being dragged at a angle with only the heels on the floor, the arms and knees upward, helpless. Finally, she made herself move. She headed up the street. For a while she stood at the crowded bus stop, just thinking. At last, the 16A came along and she hopped on, dropped a dollar and a quarter into the box, and started for a seat. In the front of the bus, the scattered passengers were staking out territory with packages, or their arms and legs spread out to discourage anyone from taking the seats next to them. Their angry, sleepy faces told their own stories of unhappiness. Love and money in short supply, no doubt, just like in her life. Plays, comedies, turned on the moment of getting both, like a miracle. Marina headed for the back of the bus as it pulled out jerkily, throwing her off balance. After several quick balancing steps, she caught onto a pole, swung in a circle, and plopped too hard into an empty row. Well, she was no Syd Charisse. Clumsy. In the row in front of her was a man and a baby. If she hadn’t looked. If she had sat in the front of the bus, so many things might have been different. She looked, as she always had (on planes, in doctor’s waiting rooms, anywhere), toward the sound of a child. In the man’s lap, was a boy in a blue overalls and a tee shirt which was a sea of sailboats. “Oh, hello!” she said. “There you are again!” For a moment there was stillness. It seemed the man would turn to her, but he moved his shoulder forward to shield the baby. Marina’s gut reacted long before her mind did. Her stomach dropped. A moment’s vertigo seized her—space became fuzzy, the surfaces of things lost their hardness. She floated briefly, then suddenly she felt the surfaces again—window pane, cold aluminum frame, wall of the bus. Cold air from the bus’s air-conditioning hit her body. She was sweating, shivering. Some other child, she told herself. The man is simply being protective. She looked again. And the baby looked at her, studied her, making his little thoughtful faces. No, this was the same child, so almost certainly a father or uncle, wouldn’t it be, taking the. . . ? She rode for a while working out a theory that all was innocent. Perhaps a relative had taken over for the afternoon. Yet her stomach continued to register alarm. Why had the man turned away? When she stretched forward to look at the floor around his seat, she saw there was no stroller, no diaper bag, no bottle in sight. This kind of thing was on television all the time--a father in an estranged marriage snatching a child back, running to another city. The man shifted again, but she still could not see him. “Hello, little one,” she said. “Hello!” Her voice was too high and light, betraying her. “What’s his name?” After a pause the man said, “Brian.” “Hello, Brian,” Marina whispered, leaning forward. “Hello, Brian.” With a few sharp jabs of breath to get him going, the baby began to cry. The man muttered angrily and began a crude rocking motion. “How old is he?” “Two months.” Marina eased herself back in her seat. The man did not know what he was talking about. The baby was three or four-months old. Four. Alert and thoughtful. The child who strained in front of her, trying to look back at her, was surely more than two months old. The bus driver turned a corner badly, and began to lurch back and forth, cursing, as he tried to avoid hitting parked cars. Everyone watched. “Bet he’s sweating,” someone laughed up front. All this time, Marina, being jostled, looked at the child when the driver brought them into view of each other; always the child looked back. When the bus began to make steady progress again, she made a decision. She got up and sat down in the space next to the man. She had to see more than the undistinguished brown-gray hair, conventionally cut, and the side of the man’s cheek. The man wore dark summer pants and a simple tan sport shirt. He had a large hawkish nose and a receding chin. He looked awkward, a little slow. His eyes, which bulged slightly, were blue, not bright blue like the child’s, but a faded, tired color. A spectacles case poked up out of his shirt pocket. Black socks and hard shoes made him look old-fashioned, like a recent immigrant. He did not quite fit in. He was about fifty, possibly a little more, roughly a generation older than she was. He was not overweight, but not toned either. His body looked defeated. No, the woman in the Clark Building would not have been married to him. . . . They didn’t match at all. The grandfather possibly. The father’s father come to snatch the grandchild home to the right side of the family? But he had not thought to bring anything with him, water, milk, juice, diapers. Perhaps on the other end of a brief trip was a grandma who knew what to do. Perhaps. She began to memorize. Gray pants, possibly of light wool, a tan shirt with a linen-cotton look. No labels that she could see. No rings on the man’s fingers. Moles? Yes, a large one on the right eyebrow and a small on the left chin. The moles are good, she thought. Remember the moles. His voice? If she had to describe it? She could remember no telling vocal characteristics. She thought, what am I doing, my life is falling apart, why court someone else’s trouble? The boy she thought of as Brian began to cry, at first almost tentatively, but then with increasing conviction until he was yowling. Good, she thought, hoping for allies, but the people in the front of the bus only focused more intently on whatever they carried--books, papers, shopping bags. One man going through a handful of change. Did they notice? Did they hear? “Okay, okay,” the man rocked the child crudely. “He’s miserable about something,” Marina ventured. “Do you have a bottle somewhere? I’ll get it out for you.” “It’s okay. We’re. . . almost home.” Almost home. General Robinson Avenue, Reedsdale Avenue. She looked out at the busway lane, the derelict housing off the road to the right, and wondered what ‘almost home’ meant. The man shifted the infant in his arms, but not enough to stop the crying. She almost asked the man where he lived when he moved the child awkwardly to burping position. Now she could no longer see the man’s face. Was this the intention? The change of position had made the crying change tenor. Now it was aggrieved, puzzled, no longer outraged. The baby’s face was only inches away from Marina’s. “Hi. Hi, Sweetie.” Such dumb surprised faces people made for babies. . . . Anything, somersaults, to keep a baby from crying. “Hi,” she said in a soothing whisper. “Not so bad, huh? Whatever it was that was bothering you. Not so bad.” And he seemed to consider her truth. She rode in silence for a while. Brian’s wide eyes were brimming and his bottom lip trembled. She made faces and held silent encouraging conversations with him. A rude jolt to her knee was the first sign the man was fighting back. He shifted in his seat and spread his legs wide so she would have no room. She felt his elbow hard against her upper arm. The claiming of space was framed like the seemingly accidental ones on airplanes, but was much rougher. Wires of anger went through her. She felt her face flush. The rage she felt--something stored up from childhood?--filled her with dread. She withstood the pushing for several minutes, but finally couldn’t bear it any longer and got up and went back again to the row behind him. “. . . got the message,” the man muttered bitterly. The baby’s eyes found her again. She’d seen the man. She could describe him. That was the main thing. She could see where he got off the bus, and then she could file a report. Was that enough? If she went to the front of the bus, to the man counting change, the woman reading a paperback, to tell them she knew something terrible was happening--. She imagined dazed faces, heads shaking. And perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps the man could explain everything. Very probably she was wrong. Missing some fact. She told herself to let it all go. This affair was not her business. Leaning back in the seat, she closed her eyes and ordered herself to think of something else. Images of Michael came to her. His face loomed up like a swimmer run out of air and pushing toward the surface, measuring endurance against time. She felt a pang of remorse for her part in hurting him. But they had hurt each other. How awful the downward slide is, when things get worse and worse, day by day, for three years. The bus came to an abrupt stop. She opened her eyes. She leaned forward after all, and tried again. “I met Brian earlier today. Not too long ago.” “Beg pardon?” “In the Clark Building. With his mother. He was in the Aprica, I think it’s called, or a stroller that looked like an Aprica.” “Wrong kid.” “No, it was Brian all right.” “I’m telling you you got it wrong. I don’t know who you are.” Again her heart pounded. The man way up in the front had put his change away and was now gathering his things to exit the bus. Another man slept. The woman who read turned a page, yawned grotesquely. Get off the bus, call the police, she told herself. But if she did, she would lose track of the man. And what would persuade a police officer? “Don’t babies all look alike at that age?” he might counter. “No hair, chubby cheeks. And isn’t it possible these clothes you describe are sold in big lots? Same outfit on a thousand kids on any one day?” She looked at the tiny blue tennis shoes on the baby. Had she see them before? Minutes later she was off the bus on a street she didn’t know at all in a very run-down part of town, still miles from her own bus stop. |
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