Song of Susannah (8 page)

Over her left shoulder the apparition wore a cloth-lined pouch that looked as if it had been woven of reeds. There appeared to be plates or dishes inside it. In her right hand she clutched a faded red bag with a drawstring top. Something with square sides at the bottom, swinging back and forth. Trudy couldn’t make out everything written on the side of the bag, but she thought part of it was
MIDTOWN LANES
.

Then the woman grabbed Trudy by the arm. “What you got in that bag?” she asked. “You got shoes?”

This caused Trudy to look at the black woman’s feet, and she saw another amazing thing when she did: the African-American woman’s feet were
white.
As white as her own.

Trudy had heard of people being rendered speechless; now it had happened to her. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth and wouldn’t come down. Still, there was nothing wrong with her eyes. They saw everything. The white feet. More droplets on the black woman’s face, almost certainly dried blood. The smell of sweat, as if materializing on Second Avenue like this had only come as the result of tremendous exertion.

“If you got shoes, lady, you best give em to me. I don’t want to kill you but I got to get to folks that’ll help me with my chap and I can’t do that barefoot.”

No one on this little piece of Second Avenue. People—a few, anyway—sitting on the steps of 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza, and a couple were looking right at Trudy and the black woman (the
mostly
black woman), but not with any alarm or even interest, what the hell was
wrong
with them, were they blind?

Well, it’s not them she’s grabbing, for one thing. And it’s not them she’s threatening to kill, for anoth—

The canvas Borders bag with her office shoes inside it (sensible half-heels, cordovan-colored) was snatched from her shoulder. The black woman peered inside it, then looked up at Trudy again. “What size’re these?”

Trudy’s tongue finally came unstuck from the roof of her mouth, but that was no help; it promptly fell dead at the bottom.

“Ne’mine, Susannah says you look like about a seven. These’ll d—”

The apparition’s face suddenly seemed to shimmer. She lifted one hand—it rose in a loose loop with an equally loose fist anchoring the end, as if the woman didn’t have very good control of it—and thumped herself on the forehead, right between the eyes. And suddenly her face was different. Trudy had Comedy Central as part of her basic cable deal, and she’d seen stand-up comics who specialized in mimicry change their faces that same way.

When the black woman spoke again, her voice had changed, too. Now it was that of an educated woman. And (Trudy would have sworn it) a frightened one.

“Help me,” she said. “My name is Susannah Dean and I . . . I . . . oh dear . . . oh
Christ
—”

This time it was pain that twisted the woman’s
face, and she clutched at her belly. She looked down. When she looked back up again, the first one had reappeared, the one who had talked of killing for a pair of shoes. She took a step back on her bare feet, still holding the bag with Trudy’s nice Ferragamo low-heels and her
New York Times
inside it.

“Oh Christ,” she said. “Oh don’t that hurt!
Mama!
You got to make it stop. It can’t come yet, not right out here on the street, you got to make it stop awhile.”

Trudy tried to raise her voice and yell for a cop. Nothing came out but a small, whispering sigh.

The apparition pointed at her. “You want to get out of here now,” she said. “And if you rouse any constabulary or raise any posse, I’ll find you and cut your breasts off.” She took one of the plates from the reed pouch. Trudy observed that the plate’s curved edge was metal, and as keen as a butcher’s knife, and suddenly found herself in a struggle to keep from wetting her pants.

Find you and cut your breasts off,
and an edge like the one she was looking at would probably do the job. Zip-zoop, instant mastectomy, O dear Lord.

“Good day to you, madam,” Trudy heard her mouth saying. She sounded like someone trying to talk to the dentist before the Novocain has worn off. “Enjoy those shoes, wear them in good health.”

Not that the apparition looked particularly healthy. Not even with her legs on and her fancy white feet.

Trudy walked. She walked down Second Avenue. She tried to tell herself (with no success at all) that she had
not
seen a woman appear out of thin air in front of 2 Hammarskjöld, the building the folks who worked there jokingly called the Black Tower. She tried to tell herself (also with no success at all) that this was what she got for eating roast beef and fried potatoes. She should have stuck to her usual waffle-and-egg, you went to Dennis’s for
waffles,
not for roast beef and potatoes, and if you didn’t believe that, look what had just happened to her. Seeing African-American apparitions, and—

And her bag! Her canvas Borders bag! She must have dropped it!

Knowing better. All the time expecting the woman to come after her, shrieking like a headhunter from the deepest, darkest jungles of Papua. There was a ningly-tumb place on her back (she meant
a tingly-numb place,
but ningly-tumb was how it actually felt, kind of loose and cool and distant) where she knew the crazy woman’s plate would bite into her, drinking her blood and then eating one of her kidneys before coming to rest, still quivering, in the live chalk of her spine. She would hear it coming, somehow she knew that, it would make a whistling sound like a child’s top before it chunked into her and warm blood went splashing down over her buttocks and the backs of her legs—

She couldn’t help it. Her bladder let go, her urine gushed, and the front of her slacks, part of a
très
expensive Norma Kamali suit, went distressingly dark. She was almost at the corner of Second and
Forty-fifth by then. Trudy—never again to be the hard-headed woman she’d once fancied herself—was finally able to stop and turn around. She no longer felt quite so ningly-tumb. Only warm at the crotch.

And the woman, the mad apparition, was gone.

Trudy kept some softball-practice clothes—tee-shirts and two old pairs of jeans—inside her office storage cabinet. When she got back to Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel, she made changing her first priority. Her second was a call to the police. The cop who took her report turned out to be Officer Paul Antassi.

“My name is Trudy Damascus,” she said, “and I was just mugged on Second Avenue.”

Officer Antassi was extremely sympathetic on the phone, and Trudy found herself imagining an Italian George Clooney. Not a big stretch, considering Antassi’s name and Clooney’s dark hair and eyes. Antassi didn’t look a bit like Clooney in person, but hey, who expected miracles and movie stars, it was a real world they were living in. Although . . . considering what had happened to her on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth at 1:19
P.M.
, EDT . . .

Officer Antassi arrived at about three-thirty, and she found herself telling him exactly what had happened to her,
everything,
even the part about feeling ningly-tumb instead of tingly-numb and her weird certainty that the woman was getting ready to throw that dish at her—

“Dish had a sharpened edge, you say?” Antassi asked, jotting on his pad, and when she said yes, he nodded sympathetically. Something about that nod had struck her as familiar, but right then she’d been too involved in telling her tale to chase down the association. Later, though, she wondered how she could possibly have been so dumb. It was every sympathetic nod she’d ever seen in one of those lady-gone-crazy films, from
Girl, Interrupted
with Winona Ryder all the way back to
The Snake Pit,
with Olivia de Havilland.

But right then she’d been too involved. Too busy telling the nice Officer Antassi about how the apparition’s jeans had been dragging on the sidewalk from the knees down. And when she was done, she for the first time heard the one about how the black woman had probably come out from behind a bus shelter. Also the one—this’ll killya—about how the black woman had probably just stepped out of some little store, there were billions of them in that neighborhood. As for Trudy, she premiered her bit about how there
were
no bus shelters on that corner, not on the downtown side of Forty-sixth, not on the uptown side, either. Also the one about how all the shops were gone on the downtown side since 2 Hammarskjöld went up, that would prove to be one of her most popular routines, would probably get her onstage at Radio Goddam City someday.

She was asked for the first time what she’d had for lunch just before seeing this woman, and realized for the first time that she’d had a twentieth-century version of what Ebenezer Scrooge had eaten shortly before seeing his old (and long-dead)
business partner: potatoes and roast beef. Not to mention
several
blots of mustard.

She forgot all about asking Officer Antassi if he’d like to go out to dinner with her.

In fact, she threw him out of her office.

Mitch Guttenberg poked his head in shortly thereafter. “Do they think they’ll be able to get your bag back, Tru—”

“Get lost,” Trudy said without looking up. “Right now.”

Guttenberg assessed her pallid cheeks and set jaw. Then he retired without saying another word.

Trudy left work at four-forty-five, which was early for her. She walked back to the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, and although that ningly-tumb feeling began to work its way up her legs and into the pit of her stomach again as she approached Hammarskjöld Plaza, she never hesitated. She stood on the corner, ignoring both white
WALK
and red
DON’T WALK.
She turned in a tight little circle, almost like a ballet dancer, also ignoring her fellow Second Avenue-ites and being ignored in turn.

“Right here,” she said. “It happened right here. I know it did. She asked me what size I was, and before I could answer—I
would
have answered, I would have told her what color my underwear was if she asked, I was in shock—before I could answer, she said . . .”

Ne’mine, Susannah says you look like about a seven. These’ll do.

Well, no, she hadn’t quite finished that last part, but Trudy was sure that was what the woman had meant to say. Only then her face had changed. Like a comic getting ready to imitate Bill Clinton or Michael Jackson or maybe even George Clooney. And she’d asked for help. Asked for help and said her name was . . . what?

“Susannah Dean,” Trudy said. “That was the name. I never told Officer Antassi.”

Well, yeah, but fuck Officer Antassi. Officer Antassi with his bus shelters and little stores, just
fuck
him.

That woman—Susannah Dean, Whoopi Goldberg, Coretta Scott King, whoever she was—thought she was pregnant. Thought she was in
labor.
I’m almost sure of it. Did she look pregnant to you, Trudes?

“No,” she said.

On the uptown side of Forty-sixth, white
WALK
once again became red
DON’T WALK
. Trudy realized she was calming down. Something about just standing here, with 2 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza on her right, was calming. Like a cool hand on a hot brow, or a soothing word that assured you that there was nothing, absolutely
nothing
to feel ningly-tumb about.

She could hear a humming, she realized. A sweet humming sound.

“That’s not humming,” she said as red
DON’T WALK
cycled back to white
WALK
one more time (she remembered a date in college once telling her the worst karmic disaster he could imagine would be coming back as a traffic light). “That’s not humming, that’s
singing.
”

And then, right beside her—startling her but not frightening her—a man’s voice spoke. “That’s right,” he said. Trudy turned and saw a gentleman who looked to be in his early forties. “I come by here all the time, just to hear it. And I’ll tell you something, since we’re just ships passing in the night, so to speak—when I was a young man, I had the world’s most terrible case of acne. I think coming here cleared it up, somehow.”

“You think standing on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth cleared up your acne,” she said.

His smile, only a small one but very sweet, faltered a tiny bit. “I know it sounds crazy—”

“I saw a woman appear out of nowhere right here,” Trudy said. “Three and a half hours ago, I saw this. When she showed up, she had no legs from the knees down. Then she grew the rest of em. So who’s crazy, my friend?”

He was looking at her, wide-eyed, just some anonymous time-server in a suit with his tie pulled down at the end of the work-day. And yes, she could see the pits and shadows of old acne on his cheeks and forehead. “This is true?”

She held up her right hand. “If I’m lyin, I’m dyin. Bitch stole my shoes.” She hesitated. “No, she wasn’t a bitch. I don’t believe she was a bitch. She was scared and she was barefooted and she thought she was in labor. I just wish I’d had time to give her my sneakers instead of my good goddam shoes.”

The man was giving her a cautious look, and Trudy Damascus suddenly felt tired. She had an idea this was a look she was going to get used to.
The sign said
WALK
again, and the man who’d spoken to her started across, swinging his briefcase.

“Mister!”

He didn’t stop walking, but did look back over his shoulder.

“What used to be here, back when you used to stop by for acne treatments?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It was just a vacant lot behind a fence. I thought it would stop—that nice sound—when they built on the site, but it never did.”

He gained the far curb. Walked off up Second Avenue. Trudy stood where she was, lost in thought.
I thought it would stop, but it never did.

“Now why would that be?” she asked, and turned to look more directly at 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza. The Black Tower. The humming was stronger now that she was concentrating on it. And sweeter. Not just one voice but many of them. Like a choir. Then it was gone. Disappeared as suddenly as the black woman had done the opposite.