“We were apart, now we’re back, or beginning to be back.”
“Of course,” she said.
This was the second time he’d walked across the park. He knew why he was here but could not have explained it to someone and did not have to explain it to her. It didn’t matter whether they spoke or not. It would be fine, not speaking, breathing the same air, or she speaks, he listens, or day is night.
She said, “I went to St. Paul ’s yesterday. I wanted to be with people, down there in particular. I knew there would be people there. I looked at the flowers and the personal things people left, the homemade memorials. I didn’t look at the photographs of the missing. I couldn’t do that. I sat in the chapel for an hour and people came in and prayed or just walked around, only looking, reading the marble plaques. In memory of, in memory of. Rescue workers came in, three of them, and I tried not to stare, and then two more came in.”
She’d been married for a brief time, ten years earlier, a mistake so fleeting it left few marks. That’s what she said. The man died some months after the marriage ended, in a car crash, and his mother blamed Florence. That was the mark it left.
“I say to myself dying is ordinary.”
“Not when it’s you. Not when it’s someone you know.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t grieve. Just, why don’t we put it in God’s hands?” she said. “Why haven’t we learned this, after all the evidence of all the dead? We’re supposed to believe in God but then why don’t we obey the laws of God’s universe, which teach us how small we are and where we’re all going to end up?”
“Can’t be that simple.”
“Those men who did this thing. They’re anti everything we stand for. But they believe in God,” she said.
“Whose God? Which God? I don’t even know what it means, to believe in God. I never think about it.”
“Never think about it.”
“Does that upset you?”
“It frightens me,” she said. “I’ve always felt the presence of God. I talk to God sometimes. I don’t have to be in church to talk to God. I go to church but not, you know, week in, week out-what’s the word I’m thinking of?”
“Religiously,” he said.
He could make her laugh. She seemed to look into him when she laughed, eyes alive, seeing something he could not guess at. There was an element in Florence that was always close to some emotional distress, a memory of bearing injury or sustaining loss, possibly lifelong, and the laughter was a kind of shedding, a physical deliverance from old woe, dead skin, if only for a moment.
There was music coming from a back room, something classical and familiar but he didn’t know the name of the piece or the composer. He never knew these things. They drank tea and talked. She talked about the tower, going over it again, claustrophobically, the smoke, the fold of bodies, and he understood that they could talk about these things only with each other, in minute and dullest detail, but it would never be dull or too detailed because it was inside them now and because he needed to hear what he’d lost in the tracings of memory. This was their pitch of delirium, the dazed reality they’d shared in the stairwells, the deep shafts of spiraling men and women.
The talk continued, touching on marriage, friendship, the future. He was an amateur at this but spoke willingly enough. Mostly he listened.
“What we carry. This is the story in the end,” she said remotely.
His car hit a wall. His mother blamed Florence because if they’d still been married he wouldn’t have been in that car on that road and since she was the one who’d ended the marriage the blame was hers, the mark was hers.
“He was an older man by seventeen years. It sounds so tragic. An older man. He had an engineering degree but worked in the post office.”
“He drank.”
“Yes.”
“He was drinking the night of the crash.”
“Yes. It was afternoon. Broad daylight. No other cars involved.”
He told her it was time for him to leave.
“Of course. You have to. That’s the way these things happen. Everybody knows that.”
She seemed to be blaming him for this, the fact of leaving, the fact of marrying, the thoughtless gesture of reuniting, and at the same time did not seem to be talking to him at all. She was talking to the room, to herself, he thought, talking back in time to some version of herself, a person who might confirm the grim familiarity of the moment. She wanted her feelings to register, officially, and needed to say the actual words, if not necessarily to him.
But he remained in the chair.
He said, “What is that music?”
“I think I need to make it go away. It’s like movie music in those old movies when the man and woman run through the heather.”
“Tell the truth. You love those movies.”
“I love the music too. But only when it’s playing in the movie.”
She looked at him and got up. She went past the front door and down the hall. She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling.
Light-skinned black woman. One of those odd embodyings of doubtful language and unwavering race but the only words that meant anything to him were the ones she’d spoken and would speak.
She talked to God. Maybe Lianne had these conversations as well. He wasn’t sure. Or long troubled monologues. Or shy thoughts. When she raised the subject or spoke the name he went blank. The matter was too abstract. Here, with a woman he barely knew, the matter seemed unavoidable, and other matters, other questions.
He heard the music change to something that had a buzz and drive, voices in Portuguese rapping, singing, whistling, with guitars and drums behind them, manic saxophones.
First she’d looked at him and then he’d watched her walk past the door and down the hall and now he knew that he was supposed to follow.
She stood by the window, clapping her hands to the music. It was a small bedroom, without a chair, and he sat on the floor and watched her.
“I’ve never been to Brazil,” she said. “A place I think about sometimes.”
“I’m talking to somebody. Very early in the talks. About a job involving Brazilian investors. I may need some Portuguese.”
“We all need some Portuguese. We all need to go to Brazil. This is the disc that was in the player that you carried out of there.”
He said, “Go ahead.”
“What?”
“Dance.”
“What?”
“Dance,” he said. “You want to dance. I want to watch.”
She stepped out of her shoes and began to dance, clapping hands softly to the beat and beginning to move toward him. She reached out a hand and he shook his head, smiling, and pushed back toward the wall. She was not practiced at this. This was not something she’d allow herself to do alone, he thought, or with someone else, or for someone else, not until now. She moved back across the room, seeming to lose herself in the music, eyes closed. She danced in slow motion for a time, no longer clapping, arms up and away from her body, nearly trancelike, and began to whirl in place, ever slower, facing him now, mouth open, eyes coming open.
Sitting there, watching, he began to crawl out of his clothes.
It happened to Rosellen S., an elemental fear out of deepest childhood. She could not remember where she lived. She stood alone on a corner near the elevated tracks, becoming desperate, separated from everything. She looked for a storefront, a street sign that might give her a clue. The world was receding, the simplest recognitions. She began to lose her sense of clarity, of distinctness. She was not lost so much as falling, growing fainter. Nothing
