“I wasn’t ready for you. It couldn’t have happened a day before it did. My life was leading to that point.”
“Was it the Caesar salad for you, sir?” said the waitress, leaning over them.
“My life is over,” he said. “It dies when you board that plane.”
“I want you to tell me everything because I’ll never have the chance to talk to you again.”
“In thirty minutes, sweetheart?”
“Don’t look at your watch. Just don’t look.”
“Nothing in my life was of any consequence before I met you.”
“Would you care for any dessert?”
“One thing we need to agree. I need to know this, Mary, to stop me from going insane. If you go, you go. There’s no coming back. Get in that taxi and it’s over. I can’t take any more. I’m a strong man, but I can’t take any more of this. Is that a deal?”
“It’s a deal. And no writing afterwards. No telephone calls. A complete break.”
“Swear to me, swear to God.”
“Shake my hand on it.”
“Okay. Now tell me everything you need to say.”
Mary’s good humor faltered for a moment. “All I can think to say is that I love you.” She sniffed noisily.
“Okay, okay,” he said, frantic not to let the scene degenerate. “I’ll tell you … I’ll tell you …”
“Just tell me how much you love me. Tell me.”
“I love you with all my heart … I love you so much that my life is worthless without you, that—”
“Then let me stay, my darling. Let me stay.”
“Can I get you folks the check now?”
Mary looked up from the table for the first time and saw that the place was almost empty; their waitress was now eating her own lunch at the bar.
It was dark when they emerged; it had stopped snowing and Grove Street was almost empty. They went one last time across to Frank’s building, and, up in the apartment, he called for a taxi to take her to the airport.
Now that it was coming he wanted it to be over; yet he could not bear to take his eyes away from her face. If he looked hard enough, he thought, he might imprint its image permanently on his retina, so she would not really be gone, but would be a veil or mist through which he would see the rest of his life.
They managed to remain calm, even humorous as the minutes passed. Then there was a silence.
Frank said, “I will think of you every day. All the time. If ever you should think of me and wonder what I’m doing, I’m thinking of you. That’s all I’ll be doing. Nothing else.”
She smiled. “I believe you.”
“How can you smile at me at a time like this?”
“It’s my happy temperament, Frank. I’m famous for it.”
The telephone rang. It was the taxi.
“I’ll come down with you. I’ll carry your suitcase. Have you got your ticket? Passport?”
Mary stood inside the front door of the apartment. “Remember the deal? This is your last chance. Once I’m gone …”
He could not speak, so he leaned down and grabbed the suitcase and walked along the corridor toward the elevator. She smiled at him wanly as they waited.
Downstairs they crossed the marble lobby.
“How ya doin’, Frank?” said Giovanni, the super, coming out of his office.
The cab was waiting by the curb. The driver threw Mary’s bag into the trunk.
“Idlewild Airport,” said Frank. “Have you got money?”
Mary nodded. She looked up into his face, scraping it with her eyes. “Good-bye, Frank.”
He held her once, wordlessly, then released her. She did not look out of the cab window as the vehicle moved off, signaling as it swung out slowly onto Christopher Street. Frank stood, shivering, watching the taillights as the car slowed down in the slush, made a slow, deliberate right onto Waverly Place, and disappeared.
Back in his apartment, Frank felt reasonably calm. He was certain he had come to the right decision, certain that Mary would, in the course of the years, come to think so too. He wished that he had a photograph. Maybe he could break the deal just once to write and ask for one. He wished that he had had a little more time. But what they had done together, the time they had had, surely that was enough; surely, he thought, lighting a cigarette, prowling across the room, that had a density and richness off which he could live forever.
The difficulty lay in passing the future days. Whatever hours remained in his life would be filled by other things, by other people; not by her.
The task began now. There was an evening to dispose of, to bury. He picked up the newspaper and began to flick through it, scanning two pages at once. He turned on the television, which was showing an old ball game, and forced himself to watch it. The third baseman stepped up to the plate. There was one out and two men on base. It was a good-looking game. He might call Bob Levine later, maybe look in at the Five Spot.
He had been watching the game for twenty minutes; he had killed off almost an hour of his life already.
He went through to the kitchen and poured himself a bourbon, threw in some ice, took a deep pull and poured up to the brim again. He did not really know what he was feeling.
The game wore on. He sneaked a look at his watch. It was six-fifteen. Checked in, baggage away. She was almost gone.
He went through to the bathroom and washed the traces of newspaper ink off his hands. He ran his damp fingers through his hair and looked at himself in the mirror above the basin. The face had gazed back from worse places than this: scraps of mirror hanging from a jungle tree, shared toilets in freezing tenements. He smiled stiffly. He felt all right.
He went into the bedroom to find a towel to dry his hands. Among the shambles of the unmade bed, he found one. Beside it, wrapped up in twisted sheets, his hand touched something soft. He pulled it out. It was one of her sweaters.
He held it up, then laid it against his cheek. His hands were shaking. What kind of human being am I? he thought. I had a chance to get outside the limits of my life. She stood on my doorstep; she gave me one last chance. Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.
Oh, Mary. He looked at his watch. It was twenty past six. He had forty minutes. He ran from the apartment, grabbing his coat in the hall; he sprinted down the corridor to the elevator and jabbed the call button repeatedly with his finger.
Down on Christopher Street he looked frantically back and forth, then ran up to Sixth Avenue. A yellow light was coming toward him. He leaped into the road and waved his arm. The driver swerved over, the front end of the car bucking as the braking tires fought to grip the road beneath the slush.
“Idlewild. Here’s twenty bucks. Twenty more if you make it in less than thirty minutes. Go on!”
The driver, an elderly white man with a greasy-necked plaid jacket, said, “Okay, pal. Don’t push me.”
He swung the cab in a leisurely circle to the right, up West Ninth Street.
“Which way you wanna go?”
“I don’t know. You’re the fucking driver. The fastest way.”
“You sure don’t wanna miss that plane, do ya?”
The cab crawled across town, gripped by the red lights of Manhattan at every intersection, like an honored visitor to whom the island was fastidiously reluctant to say farewell. The cars tailed back beneath the East River: people from Queens coming in for Saturday night, Frank thought, but why so many going out? In the line for tolls, they funneled into the slowest one, the booth manned by some kid on his first experience of handling currency, the drivers placidly searching pockets, rear seats, trunks and trailers for the right change.
Frank was struggling hard to hold himself in check.
“I have to make that goddamn plane,” he said. “I just have to.”
“You told me, pal. I’m doing my best. I didn’t ask all these cars to park their asses in front of me.”
They were on the Van Wyck Expressway at last, the road the city had cut through Queens to speed th
e traffic to the waiting planes.
“What the fuck is going on?” said Frank.
“Beats me, bud. It’s not like there’s a game on.”
“Change lanes. Get on the inside. Push through. Know any shortcuts?”
“Relax, will ya?”
“Where are you from? Aren’t you from Queens?”
“No, I’m from the Bronx.”
“Aren’t you supposed to know the fucking city?”
“Listen, bud, you go on like this and I’m gonna put you down, twenty bucks or no twenty bucks.”
“Forty. Move it.”
The gantries overhead showed white directions on their placid green rectangles: suburbs you would never want to visit, rows of nothing in the flight path, magnets for the idling traffic.
“I never seen it like this before,” said the driver. “Friday evening, yes. Friday, it’s bad. People goin’ to Long Island. But Saturday. Beats me. It’s ten to seven. We ain’t gonna make it. Face it, feller, we ain’t gonna make it.”
Frank looked down at his watch in the darkness of the car’s interior; the luminous minute hand was sweeping to the upright. The cab was moving at five miles an hour, then stopping; then jerking forward for a few yards, then stopping again. They were not even getting signs to Idlewild; the directions were all still for Kew Gardens.
Frank no longer looked from the window of the taxi; he gazed only at the face of his watch, and when the minute hand touched twelve he lowered his head into his arms and held it for a long time, silently, rocking himself in the darkness.
At fifteen minutes past, he said, “How far are we away?”
“At this rate, I guess another twenty minutes.”
“All right. Pull over. Go up this ramp. Stop the car as soon as you can.”
The driver swung through from the outside lane, where he had been stuck, cut across two lanes of resentful traffic, off the expressway and up onto a raised road that looped back over a bridge.
“Keep going,” said Frank. “Take that small turn there. Down to the right.”
They were on a narrow road that was leading toward a group of houses.
“Pull over right here.”
The cab stopped and Frank opened the door. He stood up and looked down at the solid lights of the Van Wyck beneath them; then he walked a few paces toward the row of frame houses, pinched, shivering and indifferent in the winter night.
By the road was a ditch and he knelt down, lifting a handful of leaves made damp by the snow. He let them fall from his hands, then picked up more and rubbed them into the back of his neck. He looked up at the lightless sky and then walked back, uncertainly, to the car.
As he stood beside it, he felt a cry coming up from inside him, not a sob but something like a shout of strangled, raging grief, and as it came out of his lungs, he bellowed and howled, trying to free himself of what was welling up inside him, and he began to hammer at the roof of the taxi with his fists, again and again, so the soft metal bent beneath the impact.
The driver came around. “What the hell you doin’ to my car? Are you some kind of crazy?” He pushed Frank in the chest. “Get out of here, will ya?”
The driver climbed back into the cab, turned around and drove off toward the ramp that would take him back to the expressway. Frank felt his knees give way beneath him and he buried his face in the damp leaves to muffle the noise of his howls.
Chapter 21
Mary was too shocked by the speed of events to feel much as the taxi made its way through the streets of the Lower East Side. Each light seemed to yield its green obediently as they approached, so it was not until the East River that the car seemed to slow down at all. She turned her head around to see the last of that monstrous skyline which always reminded her of Dresden, with only the strongest buildings left standing. They moved rapidly onward to the tunnel at First and 41st … At last! She had found her new prime number, her escape from the grid.
There seemed to be hardly any traffic at all on the way to Idlewild.
“Where is everyone?” she said. She was hoping for an accident, some terrible pileup of cars, of slewed and jackknifed trailer trucks across the highway, that would make it impossible to complete the journey.
“Beats me,” said the driver, a young man in a leather jacket. “Enjoying the ride? It’s a new car. I only had it three weeks. Where ya headed?”
“London. England.”
“Which airline?”
“BOAC.”
“Okay, you’re right by the main entrance in the arrival building there.” Mary looked up at the modest frame houses on the embankment above the expressway and she envied the people who lived there for the tranquillity of their lives. She was frightened by the thought of how long it was going to take her to digest what was happening to her.
The green and white signs above the road began to flash their terminal messages: La Guardia, then International Airport. Her throat was dry. She could barely believe the speed with which they were completing the journey. The driver was delighted when his headlights picked out the upright rectangle of the new arrivals building; the site itself was full of half-finished work, notably the TWA terminal, a white birdlike structure through whose skeletal wings tall girders rose into the night. There were hardly any cars on the slip roads or at the front of the building; it was more like an airfield than an international airport.
Mary was on the curb, and the driver hauled out her suitcase while she fumbled for the right money to pay him. She hoped he would suddenly stop and say something like, “It’s all right, lady. It’s a practical joke. I have to take you back now.”
He said nothing after he had thanked her, but climbed back into the yellow car and switched on his light. Mary went through the plate-glass doors to the check-in. Her hand was shaking a little, perhaps from exertion, as she hauled her bag onto the scale. The woman behind the desk politely checked the ticket, and again Mary hoped she would tell her it was the wrong day or the wrong place, but she merely smiled and wished her a pleasant flight as she handed back the passport.
She went, as instructed, to the escalator at the end of the hall and up to the first floor. There was an atmosphere of calm and opulence: all the women wore hats; the men were dressed in suits and ties. The polished floor was barely used, and the ashtrays in their upturned metal cones were empty. It was still only six o’clock and her flight was not due to leave for another hour. She didn’t know what to do to make the time pass, so she went along to the BOAC lounge. Inside there was a feeling of studied luxury, as though they wished to put the facts of flying as far away as possible. There was a smell of leather from the seats; the woodwork was in teak and the end wall was covered in blue and magenta leather squares. She sat at a vacant table—all the tables seemed to be vacant—and ordered a vodka and tonic, something she never normally drank.
She tried to think of Louisa and Richard, but she could not concentrate. They were young and what they felt could not touch her at this moment. It was a disease of being the age she was that had made her feel that her deepest experiences of love—for her mother, for Frank, for her children, for Charlie—were in some way presentiments of dying. She could not tolerate the experience of loving as desperately as she did; she would rather they were all dead, so she would have nothing left to suffer. She knew it was not rational: Louisa and Richard never gave a thought to their mortality; even her mother as she neared the end had been curiously indifferent to it.
She smoked a cigarette and ordered another drink. She gazed at the decor. She had the time to take in every detail.
She could not think clearly about the events of the last year; the memory of them rushed at her from different angles, impossible to hold, though one thing did strike her in the confusion. Her private decision to take a room in New York had been influenced by her impetuous need to escape from Duncan Trench’s importunings; Charlie’s first suspicions of her behavior had been suggested to him by agents of the FBI; while her own moment of emotional clarity in
Moscow had been precipitated by the haunting presence of the state’s unseen watchers. What strange days, she thought. And then poor Billy Foy, used up and thrown away …
She drained the drink down to the ice. The alcohol was doing something to weaken her resolve. She was finding it very difficult to keep herself calm in this formal, well-behaved environment.
She began to believe that she had made a mistake. She should have stayed with Frank. She had had one chance, and out of some confused motive—pride and fear as much as anything—she had let it slip. At half past six there came an announcement over the p.a. system.
Her flight had been delayed for an hour.
It was this news that fractured her resolve. She knew she could not wait that long. She stood up and went out into the hallway to look for a telephone. There was a booth halfway down, next to a newsstand. Somehow she was going to have to make those coins work for once, those nickels, dimes and pennies.
She knew Frank’s number by heart, but she pulled out the book of matches—the original one on which he had first written it. She did not want to make a mistake at this stage; she didn’t want to beg a stranger to come out to the airport for her.
Her hands were shaking so hard she couldn’t fit a dime in the slot. She clamped the receiver between her shoulder and her ear and used both hands to steady the coin. She drove it home with her thumb and dialed.
As she listened to the connection being made, Mary sensed two or three people waiting in line behind her. She heard the telephone ringing in Frank’s apartment.
She had not cried once—at least, not that she could recall—since this chain of terrible events had begun. Now she felt something filling up inside her, a great reservoir on which the lid was beginning to lift.
No one answered the telephone. Hearing the impatient clucking of the people behind her, she slowly redialed, showering coins on the polished floor. A man in a felt hat picked them up and put them back into her hand with a gracious smile; his act of kindness almost broke her self-control.
There was no doubt that this time she had dialed correctly. There was still no answer, but she did not dare to hang up in case Frank was running down the corridor from the elevator, dashing into the room and lunging for the phone, grabbing it the very moment it stopped ringing.