Falling Man (2 page)

She sat thinking about this. Her mind drifted in and out of this, the early times, eight years ago, of the eventual extended grimness called their marriage. The day’s mail was in her lap. There were matters to attend to and there were events that crowded out such matters but she was looking past the lamp into the wall, where they seemed to be projected, the man and woman, bodies incomplete but bright and real.

It was the postcard that snapped her back, on top of the cluster of bills and other mail. She glanced at the message, a standard scrawled greeting, sent by a friend staying in Rome, then looked again at the face of the card. It was a reproduction of the cover of Shelley’s poem in twelve cantos, first edition, called
Revolt of Islam.
Even in postcard format, it was clear that the cover was beautifully designed, with a large illustrated
R
that included creatural flourishes, a ram’s head and what may have been a fanciful fish with a tusk and a trunk.
Revolt of Islam.
The card was from the Keats-Shelley House in Piazza di Spagna and she’d understood in the first taut seconds that the card had been sent a week or two earlier. It was a matter of simple coincidence, or not so simple, that a card might arrive at this particular time bearing the title of that specific book.

This was all, a lost moment on the Friday of that lifelong week, three days after the planes.

She said to her mother, “It was not possible, up from the dead, there he was in the doorway. It’s so lucky Justin was here with you. Because it would have been awful for him to see his father like that. Like gray soot head to toe, I don’t know, like smoke, standing there, with blood on his face and clothes.”

“We did a puzzle, an animal puzzle, horses in a field.”

Her mother’s apartment was not far from Fifth Avenue, with art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces on tables and bookshelves. Today the living room was in a state of happy disarray. Justin’s toys and games were scattered across the floor, subverting the timeless quality of the room, and this was nice, Lianne thought, because it was otherwise hard not to whisper in such a setting.

“I didn’t know what to do. I mean with the phones out. Finally we walked to the hospital. Walked, step by step, like walking a child.”

“Why was he there in the first place, in your apartment?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t he go straight to a hospital? Down there, downtown. Why didn’t he go to a friend’s place?”

Friend meant girlfriend, an unavoidable thrust, she had to do it, couldn’t help it.

“I don’t know.”

“You haven’t discussed this. Where is he now?”

“He’s all right. Done with doctors for a while.”

“What have you discussed?”

“No major problems, physical.”

“What have you discussed?” she said.

Her mother, Nina Bartos, had taught at universities in California and New York, retiring two years earlier, the So-and-So Professor of Such-and-Such, as Keith said once. She was pale and thin, her mother, following knee-replacement surgery. She was finally and resolutely old. This is what she wanted, it seemed, to be old and tired, to embrace old age, take up old age, surround herself with it. There were the canes, there were the medications, there were the afternoon naps, the dietary restrictions, the doctors’ appointments.

“There’s nothing to discuss right now. He needs to stay away from things, including discussions.”

“Reticent.”

“You know Keith.”

“I’ve always admired that about him. He gives the impression there’s something deeper than hiking and skiing, or playing cards. But what?”

“Rock climbing. Don’t forget.”

“And you went with him. I did forget.”

Her mother stirred in the chair, feet propped on the matching stool, late morning, still in her robe, dying for a cigarette.

“I like his reticence, or whatever it is,” she said. “But be careful.”

“He’s reticent around you, or was, the few times there was actual communication.”

“Be careful. He was in grave danger, I know. He had friends in there. I know that too,” her mother said. “But if you let your sympathy and goodwill affect your judgment.”

There were the conversations with friends and former colleagues about knee replacements, hip replacements, about the atrocities of short-term memory and long-term health insurance. All of this was so alien to Lianne’s sense of her mother that she thought there might be an element of performance. Nina was trying to accommodate the true encroachments of age by making drama of them, giving herself a certain degree of ironic distance.

“And Justin. Having a father around the house again.”

“The kid is fine. Who knows how the kid is? He’s fine, he’s back in school,” she said. “They reopened.”

“But you worry. I know this. You like to nourish your fear.”

“What’s next? Don’t you ask yourself? Not only next month. Years to come.”

“Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to be afraid. Too late now.”

Lianne stood by the window.

“But when the towers fell.”

“I know.”

“When this happened.”

“I know.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“So did I,” Nina said. “So many watching.”

“Thinking he’s dead, she’s dead.”

“I know.”

“Watching those buildings fall.”

“First one, then the other. I know,” her mother said.

She had several canes to choose from and sometimes, on the off-hours and the rainy days, she walked up the street to the Metropolitan Museum and looked at pictures. She looked at three or four pictures in an hour and a half of looking. She looked at what was unfailing. She liked the big rooms, the old masters, what was unfailing in its grip on the eye and mind, on memory and identity. Then she came home and read. She read and slept.

“Of course the child is a blessing but otherwise, you know better than I, marrying the man was a huge mistake, and you willed it, you went looking for it. You wanted to live a certain way, never mind the consequences. You wanted a certain thing and you thought Keith.”

“What did I want?”

“You thought Keith would get you there.”

“What did I want?”

“To feel dangerously alive. This was a quality you associated with your father. But that wasn’t the case. Your father was at heart a careful man. And your son is a beautiful and sensitive child,” she said. “But otherwise.”

In truth she loved this room, Lianne did, in its most composed form, without the games and scattered toys. Her mother had been living here for a few years only and Lianne tended to see it as a visitor might, a space that was serenely self-possessed, and so what if it’s a little intimidating. What she loved most were the two still lifes on the north wall, by Giorgio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied and written about. These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name, or in the irregular edges of vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings.
Natura morta.
The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous, even, but these were matters she hadn’t talked about with her mother. Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment.

“You liked asking questions as a child. Insistently digging. But you were curious about the wrong things.”

“They were my things, not yours.”

“Keith wanted a woman who’d regret what she did with him. This is his style, to get a woman to do something she’ll be sorry for. And the thing you did wasn’t just a night or a weekend. He was built for weekends. The thing you did.”

“This isn’t the time.”

“You actually married the man.”

“And then I threw him out. I had strong objections, building up over time. What you object to is very different. He’s not a scholar, not an artist. Doesn’t paint, doesn’t write poetry. If he did, you’d overlook everything else. He’d be the raging artist. He’d be allowed to behave unspeakably. Tell me something.”

“You have more to lose this time. Self-respect. Think about that.”

“Tell me this. What kind of painter is allowed to behave more unspeakably, figurative or abstract?”

She heard the buzzer and walked over to the intercom to listen to the doorman’s announcement. She knew what it was in advance. This would be Martin on the way up, her mother’s lover.

3

He signed a document, then another. There were people on gurneys and there were others, a few, in wheelchairs, and he had trouble writing his name and more trouble fastening the hospital gown behind him. Lianne was there to help. Then she wasn’t anymore and an orderly put him in a wheelchair and pushed him down a corridor and into a series of examining rooms, with urgent cases rolling by.

Doctors in scrubs and paper masks checked his airway and took blood-pressure readings. They were interested in potentially fatal reactions to injury, hemorrhage, dehydration. They looked for diminished blood flow to tissues. They studied the contusions on his body and peered into his eyes and ears. Someone gave him an EKG. Through the open door he saw IV racks go floating past. They tested his hand grip and took X rays. They told him things he could not absorb about a ligament or cartilage, a tear or sprain.

Someone took the glass out of his face. The man talked throughout, using an instrument he called a pickup to extract small fragments of glass that were not deeply embedded. He said that most of the worst cases were in hospitals downtown or at the trauma center on a pier. He said that survivors were not appearing in the numbers expected. He was propelled by events and could not stop talking. Doctors and volunteers were standing idle, he said, because the people they were waiting for were mostly back there, in the ruins. He said he would use a clamp for deeper fragments.

“Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don’t want to hear this.”

“I don’t know.”

“In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.”

He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keith’s face.

“This is something I don’t think you have,” he said.

Justin’s two best friends were a sister and brother who lived in a high-rise ten blocks away. Lianne had trouble remembering their names at first and called them the Siblings and soon the name stuck. Justin said this was their real name anyway and she thought what a funny kid when he wants to be.

She saw Isabel on the street, mother of the Siblings, and they stood at the corner talking.

“That’s what kids do, absolutely, but I have to admit I’m beginning to wonder.”

“They sort of conspire.”

“Yes, and sort of talk in code, and they spend a lot of time at the window in Katie’s room, with the door closed.”

“You know they’re at the window.”

“Because I can hear them talking when I walk by and I know that’s where they’re standing. They’re at the window talking in this sort of code. Maybe Justin tells you things.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Because it’s getting a little strange, frankly, all the time they spend, first, sort of huddled together, and then, I don’t know, like endlessly whispering things in this semi-gibberish, which is what kids do, absolutely, but still.”

Lianne wasn’t sure what this was all about. It was about three kids being kids together.

“Justin’s getting interested in the weather. I think they’re doing clouds in school,” she said, realizing how hollow this sounded.

“They’re not whispering about clouds.”

“Okay.”

“It has something to do with this man.”

“What man?”

“This name. You’ve heard it.”

“This name,” Lianne said.

“Isn’t this the name they sort of mumble back and forth? My kids totally don’t want to discuss the matter. Katie enforces the thing. She basically inspires fear in her brother. I thought maybe you would know something.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Like Justin says nothing about any of this?”

“No. What man?”

“What man? Exactly,” Isabel said.

He was tall, with cropped hair, and she thought he looked like army, like career military, still in shape and beginning to look seasoned, not in combat but in the pale rigors of this life, in separation perhaps, in living alone, being a father from a distance.

He was in bed now and watched her, a few feet away, begin to button her shirt. They slept in the same bed because she could not tell him to use the sofa and because she liked having him here next to her. He didn’t seem to sleep. He lay on his back and talked but mostly listened and this was all right. She didn’t need to know a man’s feelings about everything, not anymore and not this man. She liked the spaces he made. She liked dressing in front of him. She knew the time was coming when he’d press her to the wall before she finished dressing. He’d get out of bed and look at her and she’d stop what she was doing and wait for him to come and press her to the wall.

He lay on a long narrow table within the closed unit. There was a pillow under his knees and a pair of track lights overhead and he tried to listen to the music. Inside the powerful noise of the scanner he fixed his attention on the instruments, separating one set from another, strings, woodwinds, brass. The noise was a violent staccato knocking, a metallic clamor that made him feel he was deep inside the core of a science-fiction city about to come undone.