City of Strangers (3 page)

She tears a grape from its stem. 'I hate it when you use my name like it's a slur.'

They take sips of coffee as the silence stretches out. A second couple comes in and occupies a nearby table. Paul tries to listen to their conversation but can hear only the scribble of voices.

'I didn't mean it that way,' he says finally. 'It's hard, seeing you after so long.'

'You're the one who came.' She's eating around the strawberries, which means she's saving them for last.

'Are you saying we're never supposed to see each other?' When she makes no response, he adds: 'We were married, Claire.'

She continues to drink her coffee and looks out the window. 'I'm just saying I don't know how long it would have been. I don't know what I'm supposed to think about you.'

'Then you do think about me.'

'As you say, we were married.'

Paul holds his breath. Looking through the window, he tries to find what might have caught her attention. He speaks next without turning, addressing her reflection.

'Are you seeing someone?'

'Is that what you came here to ask me?'

'No.'

'Then please, don't.'

He notices that she doesn't ask the same of him, then realizes that by the tone of his question, by his insistence on asking it, he's already given her the answer. From her purse she takes a pack of cigarettes – this is new; she wasn't a smoker – and places it on the table.

'Are you still working on that book?' Claire spins the pack once. 'Forget it,' she says when he doesn't respond.

Two teenagers appear in the window. They saunter with a purposeless boredom, crisscrossing the street and hooting to each other in carelessly loud voices when they land on opposite sides. Draped in dark clothing, they gutter and flinch like smoke from a candle. Before they vanish around a corner, one coils his leg and, with a snap of muscle, kicks over a metal newspaper box. It crashes to the sidewalk and the noise flies into the windowpane. A single flag of newsprint shoots up like something sucked out of a fire. The boys don't look back. Paul turns to Claire, but she's slow to relinquish the scene, even though her face exhibits only a faint interest in what just happened. When at last she returns his stare, her eyes flash and she jostles her eyebrows at him.

'Look,' she says, 'if you're going to sit there staring at me like that, I don't see the point.' Something, perhaps an awareness of how cold those words are, catches her, and her eyes fill. 'This is a familiar silence.'

It draws out, the silence, as she regains control of her face.

Paul says, 'What about you? How are you?'

'I'm fine.'

'The job?'

'It's good. It's really good.'

A little current of tenderness washes through him. She means it, she is happy. Within a month of the divorce, she was hired onto the staff of one of the city's most famous art museums, after years of working in galleries. Were a man the source of this happiness, or even some other private, newfound joy, the warmth within him would be a bruise, a hemorrhage. But it is her work, and he knows how much it matters to her, he was present for its arc across those four, almost five, years – it's his life, too. 'I'm glad,' he says.

'Thanks. Thank you.' She smiles briefly, takes a sip of her coffee, and plunges her fork into the bowl of fruit. A grape. Carelessly she pierces it with her front teeth, and the plump red bead, as fat as an acorn, bursts in half, spraying juice across her chin; she unfolds a napkin. Then she looks at him and asks: 'Is everything arranged?'

Paul isn't thinking about his father; his brain reluctantly adjusts. 'I'm meeting with the funeral director tomorrow.'

He'd come here under the notion that he would ask Claire to accompany him to the funeral. Seeing her now, talking like this, he no longer wants to make the request, not only because he is sure the answer would be no, but because he doesn't want to let his father intrude and choke the fragile affection that has – he's not sure how – fluttered up between them.

'I am sorry, you know. He is your father.'

'I know.'

Acting on an impulse, he reaches out to snatch away a last glint of grape juice from Claire's cheek, then dries it against the sleeve of his jacket, and only afterward is he surprised that she didn't raise a hand to stop him. They talk a while longer, not really about anything; the couple behind them leaves. Then, with uncharacteristic suddenness, Claire stands and takes a cigarette from the pack with a thoughtless economy that tells him it's more than an occasional habit.

'I want to smoke this. Will you get the check?'

They return to Claire's building in silence. The area's usual noise is muted by the cold – a flinty, iron cold – that drives everybody indoors; each faceless building adds its silence to their own. At this moment, as at many others during their relationship, Paul gropes clumsily through his thoughts, looking for a phrase, a plea that will make his wife respond in some way – by a word, a gesture, a touch. Of the two, he walks more slowly. He is only partly conscious of making an effort to extend their time together. He has nothing to say; he isn't sure what he's allowed to say. He looks around: the black within black of a cat in an unlit window; paper at the top of an open trash can stirring like surf; the cement tattooed with cigarettes and lottery tickets. When they arrive he asks when he will see her again.

'I don't know,' she says. 'I haven't been your wife for a year.'

'Ten months,' he corrects her.

Wanting to say more, he stops himself, stung by how the rules have changed. There was a time when this tension would have matured into a real fight, the entire drama of shouting, doors slammed into silent halls – and then in the taut, trembling aftermath would come the tenderness of reconciliation, the mild kisses blossoming into full, gasping sex. The intensity of their arguments came from a powerful and mutual want: Paul wanted Claire to be different, just by a little, and she wanted the same of him. They had a good reason for wanting this – they did not want to be apart. Once, at the end of a fight, or perhaps at its beginning, she called theirs a relationship of ninety percent – ninety percent was good, it worked, and only the last ten percent didn't fit. He understood what she meant, but quibbled petulantly with the math; couldn't it be ninety-five or even ninety-eight percent? In this way, like all couples, they had arguments about their arguments. Tonight it's hard to imagine Claire raising her voice at all. Her only setting seems to be an exhausted tolerance.

Her eyes sink through him. 'Paul, Paul, Paul,' she says.

He isn't dressed to stand in the cold, and his ears sting, hot and numb at once. But he doesn't move. He doesn't want to lose what little he can say he has: this moment now, the memory of the last hour: her words and his, the flickering of her face, the uncontrived delicacy of her hands and the way they use the air. Two months ago she sent him an email.
I wanted you to know
, it said. She's Claire Brennan again; Claire Metzger has ceased to exist. The explanation was much longer, of course – it bulged with apology, guilt, pity, self-pity, and accusation – and, after he had read through it a second time, more calmly, he then calmly deleted it. He now recalls only its single noteworthy detail. It has been a point of minor obsession, in fact. One by one, the people with whom he shares a name are vanishing.

She is standing in the open door, and her face wears a curious, half-hearted expression. Some words shuffle up to his lips, since it seems to be his responsibility to speak, to release her back to this new life, but before he can do so he hears the words he might have wished for if he had thought there was any hope of hearing them: 'I guess you may as well come up.'

There's a problem with the trains. Paul's usual line isn't running properly between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and, like all city-dwellers, he takes it personally. Tonight the disruption is all the more excruciating because, in the limbo of a station where arrivals and departures are as rare as comets, there is nothing to guard him from his thoughts. Shortly after eleven, Claire asked him to leave. She didn't say why, but then again she didn't explain what inner swerve led her to ask him up in the first place. In the embarrassing aftermath he dressed hastily, aware that his nakedness had suddenly become a stain, a trespass; all told, he couldn't have been in her apartment for more than an hour. Only her bedroom, really, and the lights were out; he didn't even use the bathroom. Paul doesn't feel like a man who got what he wanted, even though, before she upended him with the invitation, he would have said there was nothing in the world he'd rather have.

Midnight has come and gone. He emerges from his stop trailing a group of three people, two men and a woman, whose conversation concerns a bar they want to find. It's a Sunday night, thinks Paul. But their enthusiasm appears unconditional. They are young, and perhaps, like him, have unconventional jobs, no place they belong in the morning. He feels empty, absent, dry, and, as they go in the opposite direction and their chatter shrinks to a papery crackle behind him, he walks toward home, mildly appalled by the idea of other people, of the claims company would make on him. He doesn't want to think. He wants only the privacy of sleep.

One block from the turn onto his street he hears the growl and bark of a new mix of voices, loud ones. Ribbons of laughter snap at the air. It is exceedingly rare to find people on his street at this hour, and he's still too far away to tell how many they are, but the speech has a shrill, excited quality; from a distance joy can sound like terror.

He makes the turn and sees them, stationed away from the ungainly glare of the streetlamp and – inevitably, he thinks – in front of his own building. Two stand, hurling back violent swallows from bottles sheathed in paper bags, and a third man, helpless from the load of alcohol in his body, is already on his knees, his arms chasing wildly around his head. Annoyed in advance at whatever idiocies they will heckle him with as he passes, Paul quickens his pace and sets his face in an uninviting scowl. He straightens his back, as if his posture alone can articulate his unwillingness to engage even in brief, good-hearted banter with these drunks.

He sees the two upright men splash liquor onto their friend. Christ, that's too much. Can they even feel how cold it is? Something is said – to Paul's ears it sounds like
Drink soma
, whatever that means – and again they all laugh. Though he is more than a block from his door, he digs around for his keys, wanting to get indoors as easily as he can. Not until he's close enough to see their faces does Paul realize that he has misread the scene. The man on his knees isn't laughing; he's silent, his face alert with fear, and he isn't a man at all, just a boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. He's maybe Middle Eastern or South Asian. He could be one of the kids Paul saw earlier playing soccer in the street. When again one of the men speaks, following another dousing from the bottle, the words are clear: 'Drink, Osama.'

Paul hesitates only briefly, then starts to walk directly toward them. Without a clue as to how such an episode materialized on his block, he understands that he has to intercede, and imagines that as soon as they realize they aren't alone the two louts will clear out.

He is too late. Before reaching them he watches in horror as the boy is forced to the ground from behind; there's no mistaking the fleshy clap of face and pavement. No one moves to help him up. Then, with two long strides, one of them administers a punishing kick to the ribs. At the sight Paul's hands strangle the fabric inside the pockets of his coat. Nerves scream. They want him to do the sensible thing, the selfish thing – to run away. A vague principle holds cowardice in check. The fear of shame prevails. Men don't run.

Paul has never been in a fight. Something shivers inside him, an alien energy that takes control of his actions, and, without being fully conscious of doing so, he searches himself for a weapon. There are the keys, whose touch and innocent chime seem too ordinary, too domestic. But he has nothing else. His fingers, looking for a sensible way to hold them, play with the keys. He chooses one and closes his hand around it; it nestles between the middle and ring fingers, a good fit. The firmness of the metal calms him somewhat: the key's teeth feel convincing. A startling image surfaces unbidden: throwing a punch and tearing a hole in someone's cheek. Nothing like this has ever occurred to him, yet it is solid and familiar, as if it has always been there, this immediate and unexpected resourcefulness, an idea locked in the genes.

He stops. Ten feet separate him from them. He's been seen.

No one speaks. The men, who are white with hair cut close to the scalp and dress identically in black leather jackets, stand a bit awkwardly, like actors onstage who have forgotten their lines. Yet nothing about them indicates a trace of concern or panic – he isn't a policeman, he hasn't any visible claim to authority. Tattoos of intricate, spidery black grip the base of each man's throat, crawling upward, almost to the hinge of the jawbone. The boy, twisted and limp and tangled around himself like wet cloth, is still in too much pain to rise. Spots of blood pepper the concrete; the violence didn't begin with Paul's arrival. The boy's nose is a mess. Both men wear the surly, dull expressions of the uneducated, and both are considerably younger than Paul – twenty-two, twenty-three. He reminds himself that he is calm.

Sensing that someone has to break the silence, he says, 'I think he's had enough.' Meanwhile he sizes them up. Is it only sport to them, a flare-up of spontaneous drunken aggression, or has Paul stumbled onto something much darker, a premeditated assault, a sick idea of American justice? The boy's race can't be an accident.

'Who the fuck are you?'

This response comes from the shorter of the two, who, though he stands farther from Paul, projects the greater menace. His eyes drift from alcohol, perhaps also from the drugged aftermath of violence, yet they communicate a sharpness, a stability and assurance that suggest he won't be knocked aside just because he's drunk, just because he lacks Paul's advantages in age, education, and status.