City of Strangers (12 page)

Even as he finally turns away and, catching a glimpse of the woman just as she leaves the main hall, quickly follows her out, Paul feels an unfamiliar chemical elation from what he saw. The crowds are growing. Tourists chatter like magpies. A glutted escalator carries them to the third floor. His thoughts still blink with a strobing flutter; the image of the girl's finger touching the canvas holds his mind like a startling piece of pornography. He manages not to lose the woman. Briefly she and Paul are in the architecture wing; he pretends to look at a photograph of a Soviet-era housing complex. Half the windows are broken. A French couple behind him seem much more interested by it than he is, and he stands aside to allow them a closer look. When she leaves he waits a beat, then makes his own exit.

In the fourth-floor galleries the pace slows. At certain pieces she hovers: one of Pollock's hypnotic, wiry nests; a baboon howling with terrific pain; a giant abstract canvas, covered in tarry black, with only a few spills of color, a hatching of blood and yolk. Fluorescent lights of different lengths slatted into a bright cathedral: his eyes hurt when he stares at it. Paul preserves a steady distance between himself and the woman, but enjoys, after she has walked away, trying to retrieve, in the air, a residue of her thoughts, a fiber of emotion. He avoids a clean view of her face, observing her only in sidelong glances, slivers of profile, nothing his eye can hold onto. It ensures also that she doesn't see him. He lets her chart the course. Occasionally someone speaks too loudly in one of the galleries and breaks his reverie – it is always a woman, middle-aged, from out of town. Around him footsteps scuff and slap the hardwood floor.

He can admit now that she bears little resemblance to Claire. With every glimpse of her face, even fragments and flashes of it, the knowledge ossifies; he knows she isn't his wife, she isn't even a close match. Yet this awareness doesn't diminish his enthusiasm: he follows more closely, and more carelessly.

Things thicken considerably in the room of Picassos. People press toward him with the peculiar intimacy of the art museum; they bump his shoulder while trying to read a title card or examine a brush stroke. In the jostle of heads, it takes Paul a moment to realize that she's already come and gone. He spots her in the far doorway, the back of her, and pushes through. By the time he reaches the next room, she is nowhere to be found.

Slowly and mindlessly he follows the escalators back down to the main hall. To his surprise she is there, standing once more in front of the Twombly paintings, framed by the enormous white wall. As he halts beside her – they are standing in front of the last piece:
Inverno
– she senses his presence and turns slightly. They smile. Now that he can see her face directly he understands how foolish this has been. He feels faintly ashamed.

She moves her eyes from him to the paintings. 'You seem to really love these,' she says. He must look nonplussed, because she adds: 'Earlier. You were staring at them so intently.'

She has been aware of him, too.

He nods. 'I've always found this one a bit terrifying.'

They look together at the hazy black orb sinking through the dun canvas: it suggests not only the end of a given year, the frozen passages of winter, but the onset of a greater, more grievous finale. In its dying sun it is easy to imagine that Twombly had in mind a much more permanent descent.

'It surprised me,' she says, 'how quickly he turns from something lovely to something so dark and – yes, so terrifying.'

He says, 'I once saw them in London with my wife.'

She gives him a strained smile, and both turn back to the painting. After a suitable interval, she wanders away, pauses at the piece on the opposite side of the room, and then vanishes down the stairs in the direction of the museum's exit.

Paul lowers himself onto a bench. He wasn't following this woman but Claire, a fantasy of proximity, and into the space he has allowed a stranger to occupy for the past hour now seep memories of his wife.

When the end of their marriage perhaps had become inevitable, he and Claire went to Venice. It was a vacation not only from home but from marriage itself: the weight, the accretion of silence, the litany of grievances. Months later they would be divorced. But for a week they were happy: they ate long dinners and had conversations that reminded Paul of their first year; they took walks through the city and spent hours in the museums, holding hands and talking about the art; after staring at an erotic canvas by Modigliani they even snuck into a bathroom to make love. Claire threw pennies into fountains, laughed at herself for trusting in wishes. Their voices climbed the egg-brown walls of empty squares. Venice encased them in the un familiar, made them residents of their own private ambit. Like anonymous lovers they devoured the city and each other; no whim passed unindulged. The versions of themselves who were unhappy in marriage, who were charting a slow path toward its demise – those unfortunate people were back in New York, stewing glumly in their apartment, chewing bitterly on the silence. Meanwhile, in Venice, Paul made a cuckold of himself, taking every chance to touch Claire, to bite down on a mouthful of her flesh and hold it between his teeth.

In the afternoons they would nap after making love. At some point he'd wake, or she would, and they would loll in bed like buoys, touching and parting without pattern or purpose. Minutes would collect with a satisfying sense of time accumulating rather than passing. On one such afternoon, rolling over and looking at him through eyes clotted with sleep, she mumbled: 'Isn't this like a movie? Can't you imagine us in black and white right now?'

She spoke again. 'I love the sound of bodies in bed. In films now there's never enough silence. They never let a moment breathe. I love older movies. They used to listen. Skin against sheets – I love that sound. I want our movie to have that. No talking, no soundtrack.'

Then: 'Hotel bedsheets are always so crisp – they're perfect for that.'

He pinched the fabric and worked it between his fingers. She rolled away again so that he couldn't see her face. Without warning a feeling of inexpressible sadness filled his heart; he felt the room close around them, a hotel room in a foreign city, with its unfamiliar habits of light, its narcotic air of freedom. A temporary place.

Paul, whose eyes have been shut now for a long time, opens them only with reluctance, finding it difficult to observe others' faces, their smiles, even children's looks of boredom. His father is dead. It's been hours since he considered that new fact. He checks his watch – he doesn't have anywhere to be, but he ought to go. Why did he come here? Why did he pretend that being here, in rooms full of art that he has seen with his wife, in the building where she works, wouldn't have exactly this effect on him? The muscles in his legs flex as if to stand, yet he can't. Memory, as painful as it can be, is addicting.

In their third year, after the fighting had exhausted them, silence pushed into the marriage. Both left it unaddressed, seeming to think it would pass if they gave it time, and grateful, certainly, for a return to calm. Paul spent more hours in his office, a small room at the end of the hall; every week another friend of Claire's from college turned up, requiring a long evening out, at the end of which she would come home half drunk, chatty and brightly oblivious to Paul. Sex was infrequent. Eventually the silence came to seem like a piece of furniture that had been around too long to get rid of. At the very end the pressure that had built within the walls of the apartment abated. Both knew what was coming; both had adapted to the inevitability of divorce. It actually became easier. They were gentler with one another. They learned that divorce, like marriage, has a rhythm. They grew comfortable with the silence, used to the oppressive, dewy emotion that clung to everything in the apartment, to the upholstery, the dinner plates, the drapes – if it can be said that you get used to it, to that kind of sadness.

Paul has only a light headache, but swallows three aspirin, then decides it would be better to have four. In the hours that follow he molders in the apartment, tired but not asleep. The light changes first to a sultry gray and then finally to black. After it has been dark for a long time he stumbles from the sofa, lurching into the room. It responds with a mirthless chatter of creaks and groans; an empty room is always louder than a fully furnished one. His apartment is a study in absences: no bed, no dining table, no place to sit other than the sofa. The end of his marriage swept away many of his possessions, and along with them the urge to acquire new ones.

So few people even know he's here. The mailman, who sees his name along the bottoms of magazine covers; Ben, who was forced by circumstance to visit. Credit card companies, the gas and electric conglomerates, who remember him in their databases. It occurs to Paul that he hasn't even bothered to write his name on the list of tenants by the front door. Rashly, he rattles around the room in search of a pen, finally finding a cheap ballpoint on the windowsill; then, pulling on his jacket, he jogs downstairs, intending at least to affix his name to his place of residence. Outside the cold bangs into him; with frozen, ungloved fingers, he pries up the plastic cover that shields the tenant list. Against his apartment number he sees the name of the previous occupant. He uncaps the pen and tries to cross it out. Nothing happens – the pen is dry. He works it against the card until the nib scrapes through entirely, mutilating the paper and leaving a sordid gash. Paul lets the pen fall to the cement, where it gives a tepid double tap. He starts to reach for his keys, then stops: the thought is dismal, going back upstairs, returning to an apartment where no one even knows he lives.

Instead he walks toward the cafe, though he can't remember if it's even open at this hour. Once, he has the feeling that someone is behind him, but when he turns there's no one there; even so, he's relieved to find the lights still on at the cafe. A few more steps and he can even see Pirro, slanted over a mop he pushes from one end of the window to the other, then back again.

'You're just in time,' Pirro says when Paul walks in. 'I am about to close.'

Without asking for Paul's order, he goes behind the counter and makes a coffee, the largest size.

'All right if I sit here for a little?' asks Paul, taking the paper cup.

'Sure, sure. It will take me thirty, forty minutes to clean up anyway. And you are a friend. You are always welcome.'

Paul tastes the coffee, recoiling when a little dark wave leaps clumsily over the lip of the cup and scalds him.

'Do you mind the radio?'

Pirro is already working the dial. From the static emerges a crisp British accent. 'I hate American music,' he says. 'I put on the news. Just to have something to listen to.'

The report is an assortment of the usual. Taking tender sips of the coffee, Paul concentrates on it briefly, then lets his mind slip; Pirro isn't paying attention at all. He puts his weight behind the mop's stem, urging it forward, peeling away a strip of glistening checkered floor. He's halfway done when something in the newscast catches his interest. 'What a bitch. I can't believe they did not hang her.'

'Who?'

'Oh, you know, that woman. The one with a country for a name. England.'

On the radio is a discussion about the modern use of images, how the shocking becomes banal. The host has just mentioned Abu Ghraib: the horrid, hooded man, his arms outstretched as if hanging on the cross, wires dripping from his hands like threads of blood. How rapidly, says the host, it became canonical, like the
Mona Lisa
, ready for mass production on T-shirts and wall posters. She goes on to cite other enduring images of arrested death: the Spanish partisan, shot in battle, flailing back; the bullet passing through the head of a Vietnamese man; someone dropping from the World Trade Center like a blurry branch.

'Women just aren't supposed to be like that,' Pirro adds.

Paul nods, not knowing what else to say: no, women are not supposed to be like that. Nor, he thinks, are men, although perhaps he is wrong about that, and cruelty – bodily cruelty – is written into every masculine life. He takes his coffee to the window and stares blankly at the street. A few cars make quarter- and half-circuits through the roundabout. On the other side is the cinema, whose marquee holds a brilliant white vigil, but from here Paul can't make out the titles of the films it advertises. His eyes change focus. In the center of the roundabout is a pedestrian island. A person is standing there, at its near edge. There are bushes and benches on which vagrants sleep, but this is not a vagrant. At first the figure seems to be a trick of vision, the result of zooming between distances too quickly. Eyes are especially unreliable at night, and it's difficult to see through the yolky puddles of light on the windowpane, through the ghost of his own reflection. He concentrates. He is certain there was someone there, even if now he's gone.

'Listen,' says Pirro, oblivious to Paul's unease, 'I always have a beer while I clean up. No one minds. You want one?'

When Paul finally turns from the window, he sees Pirro, the mop leaning into his ribs like a rifle stock, already flexing the caps off two brown bottles. He doesn't notice as Paul replies, 'Yes. Yes, why not.'

After going through the day's mail his first act is to fill a tumbler with ice and a generous amount of Scotch. He waits for the drink to settle, listening to the liquor sizzle and crack as it finds pockets of air in the ice and they burst. Ben hasn't bothered to turn on the light in the study. He wants to have his drink in darkness. This is a celebration, a private one. As the clear strong flavor rises into the back of his nose, he holds the first sip on his tongue, suppressing the urge to swallow it immediately. Ben has always enjoyed little games of willpower, in which he competes only against himself; the Scotch runs down his throat. He replaces the glass on the desk, using the card his brother left as a coaster.

His wife walks up behind him. 'Do you want company?'

Yesterday, almost the whole of which he spent in the apartment, the monotony broken only by the trip to the hospital to pick up Paul, drove him crazy. This morning he had to get out, and he went early, before his wife was awake, in search of sunshine, oxygen, activity, distraction; he went without his mobile phone. For the whole day he walked all over the city, gulping it down like a tourist. Streets he'd never seen. Men performing drum music in a square. High, thin clicks chattering above a deep, violent pulse. Sounds born in a far-flung part of the world – there was a primal, tribal, even a sexual energy to it, a brutal, warlike dissonance. It rang in his blood. He imagined it as music used to rouse men for a slaughter. He had difficulty pulling himself away; he watched for half an hour, wrapped in his coat, then ate at a small cafe. No one looked at him. Beth's presence should calm him, ease him back to a feeling of normalcy, but his agitation isn't so easily solved. She's been worried about him, she knows the weight of everything that has piled up. His brother. His father. Work – the absence of it, the rest of the world continuing to operate without his hands on the levers. His wife's concern is understandable.

The silence hangs too long. 'So,' his wife says, 'what have you been doing all day?'

'Nothing. I took a walk.'

'I didn't even realize you were gone until Paul came by. I assumed you were just in your study.' When he says nothing, she adds, 'We said we would have lunch.'

'I had a sandwich at this little place.'

At the cafe he read the papers cover to cover, both the
Times
and the
Journal
, and watched the people at other tables. Young men, a few women, typing on laptop computers. Ears plugged with small, uncomfortable-looking headphones. They smiled periodically, laughed to themselves. He left, wondering what to do. Yesterday Beth had suggested that he read a book. She meant a novel; he hates fiction. It put the idea in his head nonetheless, and he walked to the bookstore on Eighty-sixth Street, intending to purchase a new biography of Eisenhower he'd read about, but it was out of stock. He walked around a while longer, sat by the lake in Central Park, and then finally came home, where he slipped in quietly and found the card on his desk.

'Beth. Please. I just need a moment to myself.' She leaves without another word. The floorboards groan under her feet, the usual murmurs, the brooding of a building with history.

Left alone, he takes another delicate swallow of the Scotch. His lips shrink with the pleasurable sting of ice. He hasn't been to work in two days, but the work lives within him, the numbers, hunches, pressures, the anxiety like a vapor in his chest. Energy futures have been especially volatile. Flux is worrying. Markets prefer constancy. There's another hostage situation in Nigeria's oil fields. Politics are obstructing development in Russia. He runs his thumb along the edge of the desk, trying to hush his mind. The desk is a good, solid piece, one hundred percent walnut; he bought it years ago, a gift for himself, a piece of furniture that fitted his idea of who he was and would become.

There's also Paul to think of. It's not worth being angry at him for leaving the card, even if the trace of fraternal provocation is unmistakable. He wanted to accuse Ben one last time of the crime of rejecting their father, maybe make a last effort to persuade him to relent on the matter of the will; in consenting to retrieve his brother from the hospital, perhaps Ben had made too large a gesture, one open to misinterpretation. He still isn't sure why, when she asked yesterday where he was going, he felt the need to lie to his wife about the errand.

His brother doesn't know the full story. Paul only knows that he, Ben Wald, turned his back on their father. Paul wasn't even born then. He doesn't understand that Ben did, once, love his father, as all boys do. That he was confused by his parents' divorce – in an era when that was far less common – and even more so by the silence with which his mother plastered over it: she allowed him to see Frank but never spoke of him, and always got tight when his name came up. Paul doesn't know how those years twisted up Ben, how they gnarled his insides, how they slowly made him hard. Ben knew his mother had been hurt by Frank but didn't know why or how. He learned from her a method of living: when you leave, you leave; you don't speak of the thing you left. And yet he did not hate his father – certainly he didn't want to. He wanted only what any boy wants: affection, instruction, praise. Frank tried, Ben knows; he did. Like so many divorced fathers he attempted to fatten their lean hours together with meaning and trust. When Ben visited him Frank was attentive, if guarded; were Ben to let himself recall them, the small moments would add up: being handed the razor and then shaving his father's face for him, even after nicking him on the chin; eating bland meals of chicken and rice as Frank studied him for signs of enjoyment; suffering Frank's inquiries, delivered with pretended casualness, about his mother. But there was a cavity, and when Ben learned the truth – of who his father was – it didn't even come as a surprise. Of course, he thought. Of course there's something more. The reluctant submission to his father's restrained affection turned to disgust under the pressure of those greedy, self-pitying eyes. From Frank, who had given him so little, he was now determined to take nothing at all. He used the fact of his father's past and took shape around it, like an oyster with its pearl. He used it to make himself and then, at seventeen, he acted. The choice defines him. Ben is the Ben only who did this, who broke free. Frank was a poor father because he had already failed inexorably as a human being. And that is what Paul doesn't understand. Paul, who has endured none of it, who wouldn't have had the strength, and who doesn't know what it means to destroy a part of yourself. Ben sawed and chiseled until the idea became truth: there existed no one whom he could call Father, or Dad, or any of the names people use. He effaced the concept from his emotional lexicon. It formed again only when Jake was born. How could Paul understand that? Who isn't even a father. How could Paul understand that each time his son addresses him – 'Dad' – there rises up in Ben an extra, shivering throb of pleasure and pride, almost painful in its strength, one which must exceed that of even the most devoted and loving parents?

He stands. His blood shakes a little. The Scotch wasted no time working its way under his skin; drinking has become a rare event, especially with his heart. His mouth feels dry, and he squeezes his tongue against the roof. Arguing with Paul in his head will get him nowhere. Ice, still melting and restless, knocks around the glass. Steadying himself against the door frame, he pauses, then makes his way to the living room.

She doesn't see him yet: sitting on the sofa, she dips her head over a book, her neck curved like a swan's, and a few strands of hair fall toward the page. Girlishly, she has tucked one leg under herself, halfway into a lotus position. Beth has a trick of folding into herself that he loves. Nothing in the world but the sight of his wife can make him feel this sense of calm, comfort, completion.

'I bet you think I should go to the funeral,' he says.

She looks up and smiles, surprised, her eyes animated by a glitter of concern. 'Your brother seemed on edge. As though something were wrong. Something else, I mean.'

'It's probably nothing.'

He thinks of the kid outside his brother's apartment. Ben is a man who appreciates risk, the value of partial information, and he knows when he doesn't have enough. But it seems implausible that Paul got mixed up in such grim business – for one thing, his account of the dust-up in the street certainly contained a grain of exaggeration – and yet the one Ben saw did have a hardness in his eyes, an uncommon determination. Still, it's hard to believe that he plans to come around again. Characters like him have short attention spans; he'll find someone else to bother.

'Maybe you could talk to him.'

'Which do you want me to do? Talk to Paul? Or go to my father's funeral?'