The Unnamed (21 page)

“I love it,” he said. “And I’m very impulsive.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s wonderful.”

They talked about what his initial offer should be and what she thought they could get the developer to come down to. He wanted it badly and suggested starting at the listing price minus ten percent, but she knew that the developer was having a hard time selling and suggested that he start at minus twenty and go from there. He thanked her for the advice and after going over a few more formalities, they left and she locked up.

In the elevator, he surprised her. “Remember how I said I was impulsive?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, I say we celebrate.”

“Celebrate?”

“A drink, my treat. A deal like this can’t happen every day, can it?”

“Well. Nothing is, you know, final yet.”

She felt dull and sobering, having said that.

“I can promise you this,” he said. “I’m buying that apartment. And at this hour—”

He moved to reveal the watch beneath his cuff. She liked the watch and she liked the graceful way he brought it out into the light.

“—we can just avoid scandal.”

For one fleeting instant, her sobriety was tested as it had not been since the day Tim picked her up from Cedarview. For one fleeting instant, her way of life, necessary for normal healthy functioning, struck her as totally life
less,
drained of spontaneity and energy and pleasure. She wanted nothing more than to have a drink with him. She wanted to get herself lost inside the darkness of a neighborhood bar, become unrecognizable to herself, gorge on the excitement of a stranger and risk everything—the languorous mornings, the illicit lunch dates, the companionable nights—risk it all for the sake of the risk itself. Then, the moment passed.

“I’m not much of a drinker,” she said.

“Oh, don’t make me beg,” he said. “Everyone enjoys a glass of champagne.”

“Especially recovering alcoholics,” she said.

He leaned back in his tracks and winced. “That was stupid of me,” he said. “I would have never suggested.”

“How could you have known?” she said. “Don’t think a thing of it.”

“Dinner, then,” he said.

His look was unwavering. He was so prepossessing that it didn’t seem brazen. It seemed merely part of his charm that he didn’t give a damn about whether she was married or not. She was flattered, mystified, exhilarated. She was also, after a moment, steady.

“I’m having dinner with my husband tonight,” she said, just as the elevator dinged and the doors opened. He smiled and gestured for her to go first.

Walking through the lobby, she felt effervescent. She had shown resolve. They stepped out together onto Greenwich Street just as night was falling. She was surprised by the sudden chill in the air. “It’s plummeted,” she said, as her phone began to ring.

“At least it’s stopped raining,” he said.

“I have to take this,” she said to him. “I’ll just be a second.”

Later she thought back on that moment, and the ironies were not lost on her. That she was with that particular man who had the power, just in passing, to make her feel restive and extravagant, urgent, fanciful, and destructive. That such a man was buying, in essence, shelter, protection from rain and falling temperatures. That Tim calling at that very moment should have driven the final stake between her and temptation.

“Tim, are you there?”

She gestured for David to give her a minute. David opened his umbrella to shake the trapped water from its folds. There was more sound on the other end than that stillborn nothingness of a bad connection, so she persisted. “Tim?”

“It’s back.”

She turned around and looked at David. In that moment she saw more than a temptation. She saw a life.

Hang up!

So I’ve had a change of heart about dinner
.

Say wrong number, say…

But first take me to a bar. Order the champagne
.

Say are you there? I can’t hear you. Are you there, Tim?

Start from the beginning. Teach me everything there is to know about art
.

Turn it off and throw it in the gutter.

Where do you think this piece should go—this wall here, or that one?

Jane? Jane who? You must have the wrong number.

Hurry, David, come to the window! Look at the storm gathering over the river
.

I wouldn’t want to be out in that
.

But it’s beautiful, isn’t it?

“Jane?” he said. “Are you there?”

“Come home,” she said.

A sudden splintering of the wind had scattered the rain like a school of silverfish. Women held their clothes to their bodies as they ran. The freak menace drove people inside, some to where they belonged, the rest to the nearest shelter. The fear was ingrained in them, bone-deep, and their reactions foretold. One or two wretches wandered around in it, indifferent to the lashings, drenched, labeled crazy to give the world its point of reference. His body moved him down the sidewalk. From the storm, the raging city edges, the clanking lanyards, the corridors of wind, the raindrops white as blisters, the windows whipping in their warped sills—from these things he had no awning under which to take cover, no deli, no lobby, no office, no Starbucks, no bedroom.

Blue security horses lay in the street. He removed his gabardine blazer and let it fall to the ground. A man came out of a doorway, one of a loose association of the ill and unkempt, and picked it up and put it on and returned to the doorway where he sheltered. The man should have followed him as he discarded the rest: his tie next; his white oxford, which he tore the buttons off and let fall some distance from the tie; his watch, which Jane had given him for a recent anniversary, sent clattering into the gutter. Rainwater backed up around the sewer drains with a gray and foamy choleric density.

His undershirt and chinos and tennis shoes were soaked through, his hair was matted and his eyes red and clenching as they struggled to make out the next step in his advance. He was trapped again in the next step, the next step and the next step. He walked across a halted intersection where the lights flashed red in both directions and long lines of cars sounded their horns down the lanes. They honked louder at his impudent passing. He paid no attention. His world had constricted. He cried out. People on the sidewalk turned.

Two pole workers were repairing a downed line at the corner.

“Did you hear that guy?”

“What was he saying?”

“Just screaming to himself.”

“About what?”

“About somebody.”

They stood in his wake and looked at him through the storm. He shed his T-shirt at last and flung the wet lump to the sidewalk, inviting the chill that came with the rain. Who did that? Who walked bare-chested through the cold rain? Maniacs. People at war with themselves. You saw them from time to time, wasted, psychotic, off their meds, poor naked wretches doomed to crime or death or jail or forced sedation. They tear a hole in the city for half a block until they disappear again inside the crowd.

The two workers turned back to the downed line, shaking their heads. He had not noticed them. His world had constricted to exclude everything but himself, and then was riven in two.

“You and me,” he cried, “you son of a bitch!”

He woke up shivering on the wet pavement in the back of a gas station. The rain had died but the wind continued to shake water from the trees and the sky was draped in folds of purple shrouds. The trees behind the station were leftovers, demarcation points convenient to separate the surrounding developments, choked at pavement’s end with crushed beer cans and soggy newspaper. The dumpster was overflowing with uncollected trash. Near one of its wheels lay an old rag. He stood and took up the rag. It folded out into a T-shirt. Though it was soaked through with rainwater, it remained stiff and required a series of shakes before he could put it on, and still it retained its bellows-like wrinkles. It was moldy and smelled of rot and advertised MasterCard, but he needed it to walk the distance up the road, past the auto-parts dealers and the fast-food franchises, so as to look presentable enough to rent a room at one of the motels. He did this, and once inside the room took the shirt off and washed it with the bar soap, scrubbing it with itself inch by inch. When he was through he wrung it out as best he could. He removed the rest of his clothes and wrung them free of the rainwater over the tub. Then he put them back on. They clung to him and that made him cold. He got under the blankets, shivering, thinking what he needed was a good fire. Instead of a fire he had free HBO. He could still smell traces of mold on the shirt. As night fell he stopped chattering and reached for his BlackBerry.

Jane was standing with David on Greenwich Street just south of West 10th. She took her phone out of her purse and looked down at caller ID as David unwrapped his umbrella. He twirled it lightly with his wrist and the rainwater fell off in drops.

“Hello?” she said.

He kept silent.

“Hello? Tim?”

He didn’t want to tell her.

“Tim, are you there?”

Jane put up a finger and smiled at David. She repeated Tim’s name into the phone a third time.

Finally he told her. She was silent.

“Jane?” he said. “Are you there?”

“Come home.”

The next walk took him from the motel to a Home Depot to the McDonald’s to the strip mall with the Family Dollar store. He came to a stop outside a mall, specifically the long wall of glass doors leading into the Sears wing, locked that time of night. A stone ashtray and stone bench matched the plain stone arcade above the doors that extended twenty feet out toward the parking lot to keep the smokers dry and the old people safe from the treacheries of the curb while awaiting rides. He remembered all over again how pleasurable it was, arguably the most pleasurable physical experience of his life, to arrive at the end and, without giving a damn where, to lie down, the blood in his veins still walking, and to yield to the exhaustion. He fell asleep on the stone bench by a refugee tree in a metal grate and by the time mall security came around to run him off he’d gotten the sleep he needed and felt oddly cheery.

He walked to the fork in the road and went left and that road gradually curved around and followed the stucco wall of a private country club and then went up past the cemetery and a few miles later down a hill to a reservoir sitting beyond a bank of trees, which gave way to a public golf course, and then to a switching station humming menacingly behind a chain-link cage, and he continued onward to a town square, through the parking lot, and he walked the edges of gas stations hung with red and white flag bunting along another endless avenue until five miles later a writhing parabola of highway appeared and his body stopped under an overpass festooned with graffiti, where he lay down a few feet from the traffic rushing overhead and fell asleep.

He squatted at the top of the concrete ramp after waking. He could descend and go left or right or he could remain squatting. There were things he should probably do, like secure some kind of food before being forced to walk again. Usually he called Jane and she picked him up. He was either going to get picked up by Jane or from this point forward have a lot of time on his hands. He wasn’t good with excess time. He stopped breathing and had to remind himself to start up again. The traffic went by him overhead and one of the things he thought of doing was climbing up and throwing himself in front of the passing cars. But that was letting the son of a bitch off too easy. He decided to call Jane.

His BlackBerry was dead. He was going to have to stop squatting and make his way down the loose rock and broken glass scattered across the ramp to the shoulder of the highway and go back the way he came, where he would search out a pay phone.

A few miles down he found a convenience store. He went inside and microwaved some burritos. He ate outside, standing next to the ice machine. When he finished he walked over to the pay phone and pulled out some pocket change. She picked up on the first ring.

“Well, I’ve fed the son of a bitch,” he said.

“Tim?” she said. “Where are you? For God’s sake, it’s been almost twenty-four hours.”

The relief in her voice gave way to panic. He let her go on for a while longer. “I’ve fed the son of a bitch and now we’re standing outside the mini-mart where I bought the burritos.”

“What mini-mart?”

He didn’t reply.

“Tim, come home, you need to come home, tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.”

“We’re feeling better,” he said. “I think maybe… maybe we’ll go over to that sporting goods store while there’s still time.”

“What sporting goods store?”

“Jane?”

“Yes?”

“Jane, you don’t have to worry about us. We’re going to be just fine.”

“Are you with someone?”

“We’re going to be just fine,” he said. “We’re going to go over to that sporting goods store and stock up on a few things.”

“Tell me where you are so I can pick you up.”

“That’s the operator, and I don’t have any more change.”

“Tim!”

“Don’t worry about us,” he said.

He supposed that decided it: he wasn’t going to be picked up. He walked over to the sporting goods store. Their winter offering was on display. They had fleece and spandex, neoprene and knit, polyester and cotton. He needed a different shirt. The one advertising MasterCard was dry now and the stench of rotted milk enveloped him. But to choose a size and a color and to do all that human business inside the fitting room was so exhausting. He needed boots and a coat as well, but that was also a pain in the ass. You had to hunt down a salesperson, give him your size, and wait for him to return from the back, where everything was kept, and then try on one of the boots—maybe both, depending on how the first one fit—and all the rest of it. What a pain in the ass. He didn’t want to make the effort. He refused to. He left the store and stood outside the automatic doors, just off to the side, where he remained standing a long time.

She did not say, she told Becka later, “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.” As far back as Becka could remember, that’s how it was done. He called and told her where, what town, what gas station, what intersection, and then she and Becka got in the car and drove. Becka remembered the long drives. She remembered watching her mom get out of the car, walk up to him, and bend down and shake him gently. Her mom would tuck her hair behind an ear as she squatted beside him, waiting for him to come to. She remembered the car rides home, some tense and silent, others full of anguish and adult talk going nowhere. By the time she was old enough to better understand, she didn’t ride along as much. They would just suddenly return to the house together, or the phone would ring and wake her up and her mom would leave in the middle of the night. Her idea of family was bound up in those car rides and midnight runs, in her mom’s attempts to keep everyone together, everyone safe, and in the memory of her mom squatting patiently beside her dad as he slowly rose to a sitting position.