Mysteries of Motion (27 page)

“Say something,” he said. “Anything.”

After a minute, he said, “I’ll wait.”

How smart he is. Don’t cry over it. Her eyes stung.

Ask him then. The question that welled up in her wherever she was in the world, from a distance she was only beginning to define.

“How do I get to you? How we ever—going to get to you?”

People like me. To people like you.

Would he think it the basic cry between man and woman, or black and fair? Or rich or poor? If she herself knew who was asking, who was replying—would that be the answer?

She could have sworn she heard him smiling, before he said from confident lip,
“We
—get to
you.”

That was the answer. That she knows only the question. That he has only his reply.

“Yes—I have your card,” she said. “Your calling card.” The phone was an extension on its own wall switch. Gently, she pulled out its plug.

Now she was ready. Her overnight bag could still be swung over a shoulder, though in addition to her month’s supply of interchangeables, it now held the boots and woollies she’d need if she went north. She’d always wanted to visit Calgary and the Rockies above it, ever since riding up in a Montreal elevator with a young woman carrying a thick hide suitcase out of another era, with a sticker from there—a rawboned white girl tall as herself, with ankles like hocks, long feet shod in new white kid, red hands and a face brilliant with quiet—a young moose who’d parted the foothill forest in order to check in at the Ritz.

She herself kept certain places like that stored always in the back of her mind. To go to, as now. In emergency.

Montreal itself might just now be as hot as New York. The manuscript was in the central pocket of the bag over her left shoulder, the typewriter case in her right hand, carried under her mottled cape of all purpose. She knew she looked internationally handsome, seductively capable, a spender though probably not rich. Trained by Vivie to love clothes both for vanity’s sake and for their artistry, in her long mirror she saw a woman who had learned on her own to value them for their guises, which could both influence her thought and externalize it, all the while hiding her good mind. Men used clothing in much more muted and less conscious ways, which at times she envied. A man’s dress, much closer to uniform, gave him the same solidity of intent and maneuverability which his lack of protracted reproductive process did. Their vanities, like their energies, could be applied straight to the main chance. When she wanted a man, it was in part for this. She didn’t see herself as ever wanting a particular man’s child. The poem was her child, born to her in the washroom at Miss Lacey’s, at the time when it became plain to her that her body interposed between her and all revolution, because men noted it.

And now, ready to wheel and go, she suddenly let go of everything, typewriter banging to the floor, the cape puddling after it. The shoulder bag unyoked itself and slid. Kneeling at the open refrigerator door, she might have been searching its contents like a scholar, or adoring them. She saw nothing, blindly. Squatting on her haunches, she wolfed abstractedly at random, paté, mushrooms, bread, the door hanging wide. Now and again she rested her head on her long thighs, inching her head to the knees. Her shoulders heaved, but only in digestion. When she’d finished the solid food, she closed the door in reflex, her face still a blank. Opened it again. Only mustard left, soda, champagne. Shutting it again noiselessly she stood up. Head bent, eyes inward, she reassembled herself, leaving without a backward look.

Outside, she walked rapidly in flat rubber-soled sandals. On the road, she never wore high heels. The city at this hour, with its stars waning, its buildings coming forward out of night into the stone of themselves, its milk-and-porridge needs beginning mildly to clink, was her precinct. In her cub reporter days she’d often left town at weird times or worked an excited, self-imposed midnight-to-dawn shift because she loved the office then, a catacombs for one person, neatened by cleaning women and lunar light. On a view.

Inside the office and her own cubicle, flinging her gear on the tweed couch, she sat down at her desk to watch it. How kind big buildings could be when deserted, how permissive. This architectural kindness was rarely spoken of. Structures of many sorts had it, as if from an instinct beyond their builders. Seated here she felt nurtured by an amah’s arm from behind, urging on her the orange-blue over a bridge, the wet fishgleam on a junkyard’s immortals. She had mappings here, all pointing outward. When she sat here in the early hours, she was always about to set out.

She’d walked the few blocks here piloting steady on that. Each time, crossing the broad convergence of streets in front of the Gulf & Western, mounting the small apron of steps and past the guard’s trusty joke—“Only two of us holding up the world this morning!”—she was walking toward this.

Wherever “John Mulenberg, One Gulf & Western Plaza” had his office here, his view wouldn’t be quite hers. Perhaps his was at the very top—not counting the restaurant. This seemed likely. They might still pass each other unaware for years—or meet soon, one dusk or morning. She ruled no one out of her life, not even Lievering. But that was the range of possibility she liked best.

Over Jersey two helicopters were homing for the city port like mechanical bees. She had a license to fly dating from a period just after graduation when she’d been acquiring every physically useful talent she could, from snorkeling to marine navigation, since these too were ways of conquering the world. Or in order to demonstrate—to the gods, perhaps—her lost faith in language alone? Never. Or not yet. If that ever happened, didn’t she know what she’d have to do? Hunt him up—Lievering. To apologize—“Now there are two of us.”

What did she mean by language? Faith, hope and principle? Or only that the act of enunciating was the mediatrix to all grace? All she knew for sure was that once she’d found it, the act of announcing had been her way out of the wilderness of early being. So that when in days before she’d have sobbed or raged, now instead a rod rose in her, ramming those valves shut. Cry on the page, the rod said.

Years went by before she knew that this, too, was worship—and, like all worship, could be dangerous. In any act of words there’s praise, she thought. And I don’t yet fully know what I praise.

That man Mulenberg had thought her a terrorist. She smiled to herself, meanwhile overlooking the angled warps of the same view he at best might have eight or so more stories of. A singer, he’d sensed the timbre her life sounded, when like a bell it was struck: that she was organized around something. True to the times, he’d assigned this to the political—and hadn’t been altogether wrong. There were people who were linked to the political world merely by what they themselves were circumstantially. Many an émigré thought himself a revolutionary for that reason alone. And it appeared that all revolutionaries thought of themselves as émigrés emotionally, when really both might be merely among those who were displaced in life by having had a world view thrust upon them. Like greatness, she thought. So that though they talked of themselves as part of the “new world,” they didn’t yet know what that world was.

Over beyond Columbus Circle, in that welter of lower rooftops whose tarred surfaces were catching the first sun gleams, her own house lay, a molecule helping inch life along. Or actually far smaller, in the atomic scale. From a period spent at an institute in La Jolla, writing up a pair of physicists who felt themselves to be turning into biologists (quite as naïvely, it turned out, as pilots might dream of being trapeze artists), she’d learned certain rudiments from the one who’d fallen in love with her—and although she tended to mistrust secondhand knowledge picked up sexually, she did know that in the realms of matter, a molecule was now very large. Would her house, however infinitesimal, soon be made to puff up higher than its neighbors, sending up a heap of tumbling clothes and small criminalities? She couldn’t stay to see. But I’m glad I ate that stuff in the fridge. Got the jump on whoever. Maybe even Ollie’s crowd, ignorant of Ollie’s effort and, like many of the gangs, now reportedly masking their ordinary crimes and vendettas by aping the style of the political ones, would indeed come for the house.

Ollie had wanted the rocker. She’d have settled for the bed—Vivie’s old couch bed, bought in the Maritimes on her marriage holiday with Hervé Oliphant. Vivie, during her last weeks in it, had worn a white cap belonging to her own grandmother. By every atavism she could pry from the past, she’d meant to control her own death. On the appointed day, not revealed to Veronica beforehand—“But I keep hinting to God, baby, and I think He’s clinching it”—she would, as she said, “take up my bed and walk.”

The sofa bed here was comfortable on a daily basis but it was essentially an office sofa and never really slept on, unless the secretary to all the staff writers, a lean man, pork-white with former priesthood, used it for bouts with the pickup boys Rhoda alleged but no one ever saw him with. “Truth is,” Tom had said, “I’ve stocked the office with idealists, lapsed or practicing. And in exact ratio to their kin outside, no one of them agrees with any other.”

Which am I?—she’d thought, but wouldn’t ask. “Neither,” Tom said, as if she had. “Or both.” So was he, then. That was their link.

She took up her bag again, slinging it on the worn harness made for her by a leather shop, once she’d caught on that there were parts of the civilized earth—Orly in August, Grand Central Station forever—where she must be her own baggageman, and left the building, signing out for the guard, who this time said, “Early bird leaving early, huh?”—a man whose sedentary profession obliged him to have the last say.

Outside, she could have waited for a cab to pass, but chose instead to cross the Circle and walk along the southern rim of the park. There was always a line of cabs waiting in front of the Athletic Club. Sometimes they took you on, often they wouldn’t, citing their “regulars.” Once, late for a plane, she’d doubted the existence of such a customer at such an off hour and received the driver’s haughty reply, “He prefers to remain anonymous.” It was a need for independence that took the drivers suddenly. They all had it; those who could afford to indulged it. She understood it well.

The park, running along beside her, smelled of its city-peculiar summer—those low green melodies which were never quite snuffed. Approaching the cabs, she saw from across Fifty-ninth Street that they were all Checkers, empty, or maybe the drivers asleep. Some people were afraid to take cabs at these hours, but to her cabbies had always been the city’s nurses, its twenty-four-hours-a-day attendants through whose changing licenses one could clock the city’s migrants—the world’s. Since the Vietnam war, a lot of Thais. Ever since the Papa Doc era, a lot of Haitians. Recently some Turks, whose significance she didn’t yet know. And now and then one of the earlier progenitors in his privately owned medallion cab, a Brooklyn Jew or Queens Italian family man who’d put his sons through college by means of this equipage bearing you, waxy as a mausoleum and tartly clean. People brought their own murders with them, most of the time.

She peered in the window of the last cab on the line. Empty. In the next one, the driver was asleep. Now that the street was deserted she could see what an ugly strip of false Paris this sector of it was, gaining breadth only far toward Fifth. Here no late lovers stood entwined. Above the A.C.’s marquee, its oblong windows, so nineteen-twentyish narrow for the view they commanded, squinted like the small eyes one sometimes saw in the handsomest Irishmen, some of whom had founded the place. Was that man now sleeping in a room up there, or had he phoned her from his suite in the building she’d just left? Where would the two of them have eaten? Now that he was safely by-passed, she could allow a certain interest. All things could be of interest to those who were resolved that people were not permanent.

Should she tap on the glass? The cab driver was slumped over his wheel, poor man, which kept on turning maybe even in his rest. But it was his profession to drive her to hers. Battista, Juan, his license said. Maybe from that Puerto Rican barrio, two blocks from her own block, whose whole motto was a shrug. Sure, why not wake him to a good airport fare. She was about to rap when the blast came. Like nothing she had ever heard before. Sucking the air in. At once she remembered the beauty-supply store, stocked with inflammables, at the bottom of her house.

He opened an eye. Saw her over the half-rolled-down window. Eye to eye. “That wasn’t no backfire,” he said, as if to a regular. He got slowly out of the cab. “Wonder where.” Looking up, they saw nothing. The great buildings, plane on plane, hid all perspective. Vibration lapped their ankles. Two more cabbies joined them, staring up. “Listen—” her cabbie said. They heard it, a slow brown web they couldn’t see, settling. Rubbling the smacked light.

“Terrorists,” he said. “Wonder where.”

The silence yawed her sideways. “Maybe—Fifty-fifth Street.”

He caught her elbow. “My wife’s afraid to go to the bank, the department store. Where you going?”

“Kennedy.”

“Right. Let’s get outa here.”

They were at the Queensboro Bridge before they heard sirens. Once out on the structure, she leaned out to stare back. The river wrinkled under the impossibly looped guy wires and spidery fenestrations which the years had flung over it. Faded red-brick warehouses with postscripts from the soaps and comforts and inventions of a century ago were riding cozily alongside the cab, to blot out, on the far shore, the high-pointed spires and glass forests of now.

“See anything?” the driver asked. “Them bomb clouds, they last forever.”

She shook her head. He was a good driver; he didn’t look behind. Her life surface was pocked with encounters like this, the small businessmen of the traveler’s experience, often more memorable in a penny-hard way than the persons one shared ideas with, or loins. “Vignette people—” Tom, to whom she’d confessed this, had said. “Everybody’s more comfortable with those. Nobody really wants the big story.”