“Of course it’s personal. Anybody would take it personally. Under these circumstances. There are circumstances. You acknowledge this, don’t you?”
“There are no circumstances. It’s music,” she said. “It gives me peace.”
“But why now?”
“The music has nothing to do with now or then or any other time. And nobody ever said loud.”
“It’s fucking loud.”
“You must be ultrasensitive, which I would never think from hearing the language you use.”
“The whole city is ultrasensitive right now. Where have you been hiding?”
Every time she saw the dog out in the street, half a block away, with Elena carrying a plastic baggie to harvest his shit, she thought Marko with a k.
“It’s music. I like it, I play it. You think it’s so loud, walk faster on your way out the door.”
Lianne put her hand in the woman’s face.
“It gives you peace,” she said.
She twisted her open hand in Elena’s face, under the left eye, and pushed her back into the entranceway.
“It gives you peace,” she said.
Marko backed into the apartment, barking. Lianne mashed the hand into the eye and the woman took a swing at her, a blind right that caught the edge of the door. Lianne knew she was going crazy even as she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her and hearing the dog bark over the sound of a solo lute from Turkey or Egypt or Kurdistan.
Rumsey sat in a cubicle not far from the north facade, a hockey stick propped in a corner. He and Keith played in pickup games at Chelsea Piers at two in the morning. In warmer months they wandered the streets and plazas at lunchtime, in the rippling shadows of the towers, looking at women, talking about women, telling stories, taking comfort.
Keith separated, living nearby for convenience, eating for convenience, checking the running time of rented movies before he took them out of the store. Rumsey single, in an affair with a married woman, recently arrived from Malaysia, who sold T-shirts and postcards on Canal Street.
Rumsey had compulsions. He admitted this to his friend. He admitted everything, concealed nothing. He counted parked cars in the street, windows in a building a block away. He counted the steps he took, here to there. He memorized things that crossed his consciousness, streams of information, more or less unwillingly. He could recite the personal data of a couple of dozen friends and acquaintances, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays. Months after the file of a random client crossed his desk, he could tell you the man’s mother’s maiden name.
This was not cute stuff. There was an open pathos in the man. At the hockey rink, in poker games, they shared a recognition, he and Keith, an intuitive sense of the other’s methodology as teammate or opponent. He was ordinary in many ways, Rumsey, a broad and squarish body, an even temperament, but he took his ordinariness to the deep end at times. He was forty-one, in a suit and tie, walking through promenades, in waves of beating heat, looking for women in open-toed sandals.
All right. He was compelled to count things including the digits that constitute the foreparts of a woman’s foot. He admitted this. Keith did not laugh. He tried to see it as routine human business, unfathomable, something people do, all of us, in one form or another, in the off moments of living the lives others think we are living. He did not laugh, then he did. But he understood that the fixation was not directed toward sexual ends. It was the counting that mattered, even if the outcome was established in advance. Toes on one foot, toes on the other. Always totaling ten.
Keith tall, five or six inches taller than his friend. He saw male pattern baldness develop in Rumsey, seemingly week by week, on their noontime walks, or Rumsey slumped in his cubicle, or holding a sandwich with both hands, head lowered to eat. He carried bottled water everywhere. He memorized the numbers on license plates even as he drove.
Keith seeing a woman with two kids, goddamn. She lived in Far fucking Rockaway.
Women on benches or steps, reading or doing crosswords, sunning themselves, heads thrown back, or scooping yogurt with blue spoons, sandaled women, some of them, toes exposed.
Rumsey eyes down, following the puck across the ice, body crashing the boards, free of aberrant need for a couple of happy shattering hours.
Keith running in place, on a treadmill at the gym, voices in his head, mostly his own, even when he wore a headset, listening to books on tape, science or history.
The counting always led to ten. This was not a discouragement or impediment. Ten is the beauty of it. Ten is probably why I do it. To get that sameness, Rumsey said. Something holds, something stays in place.
Rumsey’s girlfriend wanted him to invest in the business she ran with three relatives including her husband. They wanted to add stock, add running shoes and personal electronics.
The toes meant nothing if they were not defined by sandals. Barefoot women on the beach were not about their feet.
He compiled bonus miles on his credit cards and flew to cities chosen strictly for their distance from New York, just to use the miles. It satisfied some principle of emotional credit.
There were men in open-toed sandals, here and there, in the streets and parks, but Rumsey did not count their toes. So maybe it wasn’t just the counting that mattered. One had to factor in the women. He admitted this. He admitted everything.
The persistence of the man’s needs had a kind of crippled appeal. It opened Keith to dimmer things, at odder angles, to something crouched and uncorrectable in people but also capable of stirring a warm feeling in him, a rare tinge of affinity.
Baldness in Rumsey, as it progressed, was a gentle melancholy, the pensive regret of a failed boy.
They fought once, briefly, on the ice, teammates, by mistake, in a mass brawl, and Keith thought it was funny but Rumsey was angry, a little shrill with accusation, claiming that Keith threw a few additional punches after he realized who it was he was hitting, which wasn’t true, Keith said, but thought it might be, because once the thing starts, what recourse is there?
They walked toward the towers now, amid the sweep and crisscross of masses of people.
All right. But what if the digits don’t always total ten? You’re riding the subway, say, and you’re sitting eyes down, Keith said, and you’re absentmindedly scanning the aisle, and you see a pair of sandals, and you count and count again, and there are nine digits, or eleven.
Rumsey took this question with him up to his cubicle in the sky, where he went back to work on less arresting matters, on money and property, contracts and titles.
One day later he said, I would ask her to marry me.
And later still, Because I would understand that I was cured, like Lourdes, and could stop counting now.
Keith watched her across the table.
“When did it happen?”
“About an hour ago.”
“That dog,” he said.
“I know. It was a crazy thing to do.”
“What happens now? You’ll see her in the hall.”
“I don’t apologize. That’s what happens.”
He sat and nodded, watching her.
“Hate to say it but when I came up the stairs just now.”
“You don’t have to say it.”
“The music was playing,” he said.
“I guess that means she wins.”
“No louder, no softer.”
“She wins.”
He said, “Maybe she’s dead. Lying there.”
“Dead or alive, she wins.”
“That dog.”
