Queens Noir (11 page)

"More importantly, love, did the Mets win?"

She slapped my hand playfully. "You're bad." She walked
to the other end of the bar where a couple was signaling for
a refill.

Yes, tonight I think I am.

ead. Just keep reading. She had to try to lose herself
in the story. Let it block out the shaking and shuttering. She gripped the book with sweating hands. She
rubbed her knee. There was no way in this cramped space to
ease the throbbing.

The man in the seat next to her was sleeping. He had
changed places with a Hasid who had refused to sit next to a
woman. When this new guy first sat down, he had scared her.
He looked like an Arab. His pockmarked skin gave him a sinister appearance, and she had tried not to think of him in such a
prejudiced way. He had a nice smile. But hijackers could smile.

"Are you going home or do you live in the UK?" She had
worked up her courage to question him while she waited behind him in line for the loo. She kept saying "loo" now, after a
week with the people in the London office.

"Home," he had said. That smile again. It did look kind
of threatening. "I'm from the Bronx, and I can't wait to get
back."

The accent was unmistakable. Bronx, for sure. He was
probably Puerto Rican. "Me too. Riverdale." She tried to
smile back at him. The last word came out sounding apologetic. People from the real Bronx hated Riverdale; she was
sure of that. It shamed her to have suspected him. He seemed
so benign now. He could be a victim, not a terrorist.

The plane touched down with a jolt that woke him.

She wiped her palms on the rough fabric of the seat. Rivulets of rain ran over the window glass.

"Welcome to JFK," an intimate and humorous voice began
over the loudspeaker. "If I hadn't just spent nearly eight hours
cavorting with all of you on this plane, I would think we were still
in London, given this gloomy weather."

Friday. The traffic would be awful. And she had her car in
long-term parking. The Triboro Bridge would be backed up.
And the rain would make it worse.

She got her black rolly down from the overhead bin and
waited in the aisle to get off the plane.

"Thank you for flying Virgin Atlantic," they said by way of
goodbye.

The walk to Passport Control went on forever. The specter of having to drive over the bridge haunted her. Suppose
she got stuck in traffic in the middle of the bridge with her
heart beating out of control. She would have to get off. She
would have to. This started back in October of 2001, returning from Washington on a Sunday night-at dusk on a misty
evening, driving along, sipping the latte she had picked up
at the rest stop. The bottoms of her feet had gotten sweaty
when suddenly there was the Delaware Memorial Bridgethe double span sticking up above some light fog. It would
have looked pretty, if it hadn't frozen her heart. She couldn't
drive up there.

She had moved behind a blue Volkswagen Passat in the
middle lane and hung onto the steering wheel for dear life.
She had stayed behind that car and couldn't look left or right
until they got through the toll on the other side. Heart still
pounding, she had pulled over at the first opportunity. It was
almost an hour before she could get back on the road.

A few months later, she had gotten lost trying to get back
to Manhattan from Newark without driving on the Pulaski
Skyway. Worse and worse. Two weeks ago, she had driven
down through New Jersey and gone through the Lincoln Tunnel and back up to the Bronx, just to avoid the George Washington Bridge. So ashamed, she hadn't even told her sister.
But when she finally mentioned it to Roger, who was hardly a
close friend, he immediately asked, "Did this start after 9/11?"
The idea had shocked her.

"Go to line twenty-seven." The short, sharp-faced AfricanAmerican woman at Passport Control jabbed a finger in the
direction of a booth.

The officer's face was round and kind, but he looked at
her with hard, searching eyes. She handed him her passport.
He scanned it and watched the screen, then handed it back
with a perfunctory, "Welcome home."

The baggage was slow. The rain, she guessed. The Hasidic
guy stood near her, waiting. The rainy weather made her knee
worse. She tried to keep her weight off it.

On 9/11 she had been down in Soho, getting physical
therapy. She hadn't gone to the office that morning. A lot
of people weren't at work for odd reasons. They were late.
They called in sick. She had heard a lot of stories like this.
A woman who went to pick up her new eyeglasses and never
got up there. A guy from Jersey whose little girl had cried
and said, "Daddy, don't go." The father had stopped so long
comforting his kid, he missed his train. The kid had saved
her father.

Her knee had saved her. By rights she should have been
on the ninety-seventh floor.

After her therapy appointment, while icing her knee, she
felt the gym go quiet. They were all staring at the burning skyscraper on the TV, asking each other, "Which building?"
"What kind of plane?"

Her office would be flooded with light. On such a sunny
day, the intensity of the light always made her giddy. Working
up there made you feel important, even if all you did was put
numbers into spreadsheets all day. Gerry and Margaret, sitting
at their desks, would be silhouetted against the windows on a
day like this. Like ghosts. Only black. Only they couldn't be
sitting. Not with this going on in the other tower.

She stood, gazing at the burning building, completely silent, feeling guilty that she was thinking about how much it
would hurt her knee to be walking down all those stairs with
them. The second plane hit. "Terrorists," was all she said. She
went and put on her clothes.

She had a portable radio in her gym bag. Only one station
was broadcasting. One tense male voice.

On her way out, she glanced over at the knot of people
gathered in front of the big TV near the treadmills and Stair,
Masters. Radio to her ear, she left without looking at the
screen.

Out on Broadway, the air was acrid with smoke and stung
her throat. People streamed up the sidewalks. Ambulances and
firetrucks careened south toward the towers. An EMT vehicle with the words Valley Stream Rescue Squad on its side went
screaming by. How the hell could they have gotten here so fast?

A crowd gathered around her. "What are they saying?"
A short guy in a snug gray suit pointed to the radio. She held
it out to him. The battery was weak and the street so noisy
that he had to put his finger in his opposite ear to hear it.
Two big African-American women with tears streaming down
their faces stopped and asked for news. She just shrugged and
gestured to the guy holding her radio.

One of them was sobbing uncontrollably. "They are jumping out of the top floors."

They couldn't be. No one would do that. Gerry wouldn't
do that. Harry Ardini wouldn't do that. She looked at the
other woman, who just nodded and pulled her friend away,
up Broadway.

She pictured the wide expanse of her office. The fichus
tree next to her chair burning. The light from it shining in the
frame on her desk. Her sister's picture smiling through the
bright red reflected flames.

The guy handed the radio back to her. She put it to her
ear and started walking north with the herd.

The voice on the radio was suddenly hysterical. "We're
losing it! We're losing it! OMIGOD!"

She turned and looked down Broadway. Her building was
collapsing. Boom! Boom! Boom! Like one of those structures
in a demolition movie. A huge cloud of thick gray dust rushed
toward them up the street. She turned again and ran. Past
the church with the pealing bells. The sexton had thought to
do that. As if he were in some medieval village that had the
plague.

She had walked all the way to Riverdale that day. Over
the Henry Hudson Bridge. Her knee never recovered, had not
stopped hurting since. She never returned to physical therapy.
Just the thought of physical therapy brought back that picture in the papers the next day. The guy falling though the
air. Head down. The familiar building behind him. She had
looked and looked at that picture. Sometimes she was sure it
was Harry. Other days, it didn't look like his hair.

The buzzer on the luggage carousel sounded and the
metal belt started to move. Bags moved down the slope onto
the belt in front of her. The Hasidic guy peered at a huge black one, frowned, and then let it pass. It came around again.
Blood dripped from a small opening where the zippers met at
the top. Bright and shining, it pooled onto the metal of the
conveyor. She breathed in to scream as it went by. She held
her breath. People would call her a hysteric. Seeing blood all
the time, knowing that if she had jumped that day her body
would have liquefied. That's what they said. That a body hitting the ground from such a height just liquefies. The bottoms
of her feet were sweating. Just like driving over a bridge.

Her bag came tumbling down the slope. She saw the
green ribbons on the zipper. Not red. Not blood. She grabbed
her bag, turned in her card at Customs, and dragged it to the
nearest restroom. She couldn't drive over the bridge. She just
couldn't.

In the handicapped stall, she sat on the toilet and laid the
big bag down. Inside was her toiletries kit, with all that stuff
you can't carry with you on a plane anymore.

She unzipped it and pulled out a pink disposable razor.
She wedged it under the toilet paper dispenser and pressed
hard. It bent but would not break. She put her foot against it
too and finally it popped with a loud metallic crack.

"Are you okay in there?" a voice from another stall
called.

"Fine," she said.

She retrieved the razor blade from the floor and held it
carefully between her thumb and forefinger. This is better, she
thought. She could stop the pictures in her head of Harry liquefying on the sidewalk. She could finally do what she was supposed to have done. She cut along the blue veins on her wrists.
She held out her arms and let the blood drip on the green ribbons, running them red, like the blood in baggage claim.

love my job. How many people can say that?

I could be working security in a department store over in
Manhattan, where they make you follow old ladies with
large purses and mothers with baby strollers. Or in an office
tower doing Homeland Security detail, looking at photo IDs
all day and pretending I care whether you belong in a building
full of uninteresting lawyers and accountants, most of whom
come to work hoping I'd find a reason to stop them from going in. Or guarding a bank where you're so bored that you
consider robbing it yourself or kicking one of those lousy machines that charge two dollars to do what a bank is supposed
to do for free.

My friends tell me I got it pretty good because I work security at Silvercup Studios where they shoot television shows,
movies, and commercials. Not to mention the fact that it's
not far from my walkup in Long Island City. My neighbors
treat me like I'm a celebrity. Which is pretty funny since my
mother worked at Silvercup in the '50s baking bread and nobody ever treated her like she was somebody, except me and
my father.

Yeah, okay, I see lots of good-looking men and pretty girls,
famous singers and movie stars. No big deal. They're just like
you and me. Especially without the makeup and the fancy
clothes. They all come in with uncombed hair, comfortable shoes, and sunglasses. Some of them got egos to match the
size of the cars they drive up in. They arrive with their assistants and their entourages carrying everything from little
dogs to adopted babies. Some of them pride themselves as just
folks and come in on the subway. The one thing they all got in
common is that I make them sign in. It's my job. They might
be celebrities, but I treat them all the same.