Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (35 page)

The photo was taken on the same day her mother died—it was one of the reasons she was attracted to it in the first place: the sheer fact that such beauty had occurred at the same time. She had found it, yellowing and torn, in a garage sale in San Francisco four years ago. At the bottom of a box of photographs. The world delivers its surprises. She bought it, got it framed, kept it with her as she went from hotel to hotel.

A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a larger one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later. The intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories. We wait for the explosion but it never occurs. The plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don’t fall apart.

It strikes her as an enduring moment, the man alone against scale, still capable of myth in the face of all other evidence. It has become one of her favorite possessions—her suitcase would feel wrong without it, as if it were missing a latch. When she travels she always tucks the photo in tissue paper along with the other mementoes: a set of pearls, a lock of her sister’s hair.

At the security line in Little Rock she stands behind a tall man in jeans and a battered leather jacket. Handsome in an offhand way. In his late thirties or early forties, maybe—five or six years older than she is. A bounce in his step as he moves up the line. She edges a little closer to him. The tag on his bag reads:
DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS
.

The security guard bristles and examines his passport.
—Are you carrying any liquids, sir?
—Just eight pints.
—Excuse me, sir?
—Eight pints of blood. I don’t think they’ll spill.
He taps his chest and she chuckles. She can tell that he’s Italian: the

words stretched with a lyrical curl. He turns to her and smiles, but the security guard stands back, stares at the man, as if at a painting, and then says: Sir, I need you to step out of line, please.

—Excuse me?
—Step out of line, please. Now.
Two other guards swing across.
—Listen, I’m only joking, says the Italian.
—Sir, follow us, please.
—Just a joke, he says.
He’s pushed in the back, toward an office.
—I’m a doctor, I was just making a joke. Just carrying eight pints of

He flings out his hands to plead, but his arm is twisted high behind his back, and the door is closed behind him with a thump.
The rancor passes down the line to her and the other passengers in the security area. She feels a thread of cold along her neck as the security guard stares her down. She has a bottle of perfume sealed in a little ziploc bag, and she places it carefully in the tray.
—Why are you bringing this in carry- on, miss?
—It’s less than three ounces.
—And the purpose of your travel?
—Personal. To see a friend.
—And what’s your final destination, miss?
—New York.
—Business or pleasure?
—Pleasure, she says, the word catching at the back of her throat.
She answers calmly, practiced, controlled, and when she goes through the metal detector she automatically stretches her arms out to be searched, even though she doesn’t set off the alarm.

The plane is near empty. The Italian finally slouches on, quiet, embarrassed, contrite. He has a hunch to his shoulders as if he can’t quite deal with his height. His light- brown hair in a havoc. A small shadow of graytinged beard on his chin. He catches her eye as he takes the seat behind her. A smile travels between them. She can hear him, behind her, as he takes off his leather jacket and sighs down into his place.

Halfway through the flight she orders a gin and tonic and he extends a twenty- dollar bill across the seat to pay for her drink.
—They used to give things out free, he says.
—You’re used to traveling in style?
She is annoyed at herself—she didn’t mean to be so curt, but sometimes it happens, the words come out at the wrong angle, like she’s on the defensive from the very beginning.
—No, not me, he says. Style and I never got along.
She can tell it’s true, the wide collar on his shirt, an ink spot on the breast pocket. He looks like the sort of man who might give himself his own haircut. Not your normal Italian, but what’s a normal Italian anyway? She has grown tired of the people who tell her that she’s not a normal African- American, as if there were only one great big normal box that everyone had to pop out of, the Swedish, the Poles, the Mexicans, and what did they mean anyway that she wasn’t normal, that she didn’t wear gold hoop earrings, that she moved tightly, dressed tightly, kept everything in line?
—So, she says, what did they tell you in the airport?
—Not to make jokes anymore.
—God bless America.
—The bad- joke police. Did you hear the one...
—No, no!
— . . . about the man who went to the doctor’s office with the carrot up his nose?
Already she is laughing. He gestures to the aisle seat.
—Please, yes.
She is surprised by the immediate comfort she feels, inviting him to sit, even turning toward him, bridging the distance over the middle seat. She is often nervous around men and women her own age, their attention, their desires. A tall, willowy beauty, she has cinnamon skin, white teeth, serious lips, no makeup, but her dark eyes always seem to want to escape her good looks. It adds up to a strange force around her: she strikes people as intelligent and dangerous, an otherland stranger. Sometimes she tries to claw her way through the awkwardness, but falls back down, suffocating. It’s as if she feels it all bubbling up inside, all that wild ancestry, but she can’t get it to boil.
At work she is known as one of the bosses with ice in her veins. If there’s a joke e- mail sent around the offices, she is seldom copied on it: she would love to be, but seldom is, even among her closest colleagues. In the foundation the volunteers talk about her behind her back. When she steps into jeans and a T- shirt to join them in the field there is always something stiff about it, her shoulders in a controlled line, her demeanor mannered.
— . . . and the doctor says, I know exactly what’s wrong with you.
—Yes?
—You’re not eating properly.
—Ba dah boom, she says, bringing her head alarmingly close to his shoulder.

Four small plastic bottles of gin rattle on his airplane tray. He is, she thinks, already too complicated. He is from Genoa and divorced, with two children. He has worked in Africa, Russia, and Haiti, and spent two years in New Orleans working as a doctor in the Ninth Ward. He has just moved to Little Rock, he says, where he runs a small mobile clinic for veterans home from the wars.
—Pino, he says, extending his hand.
—Jaslyn.
—And you? he asks.
—Me?
A charm in his eyes.
—What about you?
What can she tell him? That she comes from a long line of hookers,

that her grandmother died in a prison cell, that she and her sister were adopted, grew up in Poughkeepsie, their mother Gloria went around the house singing bad opera? That she got sent to Yale, while her sister chose to join the army? That she was in the theater department and that she failed to make it? That she changed her name from Jazzlyn to Jaslyn? That it wasn’t from shame, not from shame at all? That Gloria said there was no such thing as shame, that life was about a refusal to be shamed?

—Well, I’m sort of an accountant, she says.
—A sort of accountant?
—Well, I’m at a small foundation. We help with tax preparation. It’s

not what I thought I’d do, I mean, when I was younger, but I like it. It’s good. We go around the trailer parks and hotels and all. After Rita and Katrina and all. We help people fill out their tax forms and take care of things. ’Cause often they don’t even have their driver’s licenses anymore.

She eyes him suspiciously, but wonders if perhaps he means it. He could—it’s possible, she thinks—why not, even in these times.
The more he talks the more she notices that his accent has a couple of continents in it, like it has landed in each place and picked up a few sounds in each. He tells her the story of how, as a child in Genoa, he used to go to the soccer games and help bandage the wounded who were involved in stadium fights.
—Serious injuries, he says. Especially when Sampdoria played Lazio.
—Sorry?
—You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?
—No, she laughs.
He cracks the small seal on another bottle of gin, pours half in her glass, half in his own. She feels herself loosening further around him.
—Well, she says, I once worked at McDonald’s.
—You’re kidding.
—Kind of. I tried to be an actor. Same thing, really. Learn your lines— you want fries with that? Hit your mark—you want fries with that?
—Film?
—Theater.
She reaches across for her glass, lifts it, drinks. It is the first time in years that she’s opened herself to a stranger. It’s as if she has bitten into the skin of an apricot.
—Cheers.
—Salute, he says in Italian.
The plane banks out over the city. Storm clouds and a driving rain against the windows. The lights of New York like shadows of light, under the clouds, ghostly, rain- dampened, dim.
—So? he says, gesturing out the window, the darkness webbed over Kennedy.
—Excuse me?
—New York. You staying long?
—Oh, I’m going to see an old friend, she says.
—I see. How old?
—Very old.

When she was young and not so shy, she used to love going out on the street in Poughkeepsie, outside their small house, where she would run along with one foot on the pavement and the other on the road. It took some gymnastics: she had to extend one leg and keep the other slightly bent, running at close to full pace.

Claire came to visit in a chauffeured town car. Once she sat and watched the trick for a long time, with delight, and said that Jaslyn was running an extended entrechat, half on, half off, half on, half off, half on.

Later, Claire sat with Gloria on wooden chairs in the back garden, by the plastic pool, near the red fence. They looked so different, Claire in her neat skirt, Gloria in her flowered dress, as if they too were running on different levels of pavement, but in the same body, the two of them combined.

At the luggage carousel, Pino waits beside her. He has no suitcase to pick up. She rubs her hands together, nervously. Why, still, this small feeling of tightness at her core? Not even her own two gin and tonics have done their work. But he too is edgy, she notices, as he moves from foot to foot and adjusts his shoulder bag. She likes his nervousness—it brings him down to earth, makes him solid. He has already suggested that he can share a taxi with her into Manhattan, if she’d like. He is on his way to the Village, wants to hear some jazz.

She wants to tell him that he doesn’t look like a jazz man, that there’s something folk- rock about him, that he might fit well into a Bob Dylan song, or he might be found with the liner notes for Springsteen in his pocket, but jazz doesn’t fit. Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them. If only she could turn to Pino and say that she’ll come with him tonight, to a jazz club, sit at a table with a tasseled lamp, feel the saxophone trill through her, stand and move to the tiny dance floor and align her long body against his, maybe even allow him to rub his lips along her neck.

She watches the line of suitcases tumble from the conveyor belt onto the carousel below: none of them hers. A group of kids on the far side jump on and off the carousel, to the amusement of their parents. She waves across and mugs a face at the youngest, who is perched atop a giant red suitcase.

—Your children, she says as she turns to Pino. Do you have photographs?
A silly, awkward question. She has spoken without thinking, leaned too close to him, asked too much. But he pulls out a cell phone and scrolls through the pictures, shows her a young teenage girl, dark, serious, attractive. He starts to scroll again for a picture of his boy, when a security guard comes right up beside him.
—No cell phone use in the terminal, sir.
—Excuse me?
—No cell phones, no cameras.
—Not your day, she says, smiling, as she leans down to pick up her small traveling bag.
—Maybe, maybe not, he says.
Across the way, a high yelp. The kids riding suitcases on the moving carousel have fallen afoul of the security guard too. She and Pino turn to each other. She feels much younger all of a sudden: the thrill of flirtation, her whole body shot through with lightness.

As they step from the terminal he says that they’ll take the Queensboro Bridge, if that’s okay with her. He will drop her off first and then go downtown.

So he knows the city, she thinks. He’s been here before. This place belongs to him too. Another surprise. She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours.

Sabine Pass and Johnson’s Bayou, Beauregard and Vermilion, Acadia and New Iberia, Merryville and DeRidder, Thibodaux and Port Bolivar, Napoleonville and Slaughter, Point Cadet and Casino Row, Moss Point and Pass Christian, Escambia and Walton, Diamondhead and Jones Mill, Americus, America.

Names in her mind, flooding.
—

Rain outside the terminal. He stands under a small ledge, pulls a packet of cigarettes from his inside pocket. He tamps the pack with the heel of his hand, shifts a cigarette upward, offers it. She shakes her head no. She used to smoke, not anymore, an old habit from her days at Yale; almost everyone in the theater smoked.

The taxi slides through the rain. The last of the storm has blown over the city, a final exhausted bow, an endfall. He hands her a card before the taxi pulls in by the awning on Park Avenue. He scribbles his name and the number of his cell on the back.

He picks her small bag out of the back of the cab, leans across and kisses her on each cheek. She notices with a smile that he has one foot on, one foot off the curb.

He fumbles in his pocket. She looks away and she hears a sudden click. He has taken her photograph with his cell phone. She is not quite sure how to respond. Erase it, file it, make it his screen saver? She thinks of herself, there, pixelated, alongside his children, carried around in his pocket, to his jazz club, to his clinic, to his home.