And Now You Can Go (8 page)

Nicholas has counted the money and is now counting it a second time. "Listen," he says, "why don't you take some of it back. I feel bad." "Really?" I say.

"Yeah," he says. He takes a one-hundred-dollar bill and tears in into pieces, into confetti, and tosses it in my direction.

"Do you know how many hours you just threw away?" "Did you sell some more of yourself ?"

I walk to the door, past a maid vacuuming. The maid wears a black dress and a white apron. She looks up as I leave.

A narrow bench is built into the back of the elevator. I sit down as the car begins its twenty-one floor descent. One floor for every year of my life. I want to believe this has some significance, but I can't think what it could be.

I get off the subway at 116th Street and walk to Schermerhorn Hall to check my mail in the student lounge. White Christmas lights hang from trees on campus in strange constellations. I zip my blue coat all the way up—I bought it in San Francisco and it's too thin for this weather. Somewhere, at some point in the last few days, I've lost my scarf.

Hanging folders, arranged in alphabetical order, function as our mailboxes. Papers are stuffed and mangled into my folder: a notice about final papers; information about a class excursion; an invitation to another Christmas party, now four days past; a paper returned by a professor. I got a good grade. I look at the date. November 30. Not even that long ago, but I have to read the first paragraph to remember what it was about: the architecture of a convent in Venice.

Two professors, one male and one female, have written me letters saying they heard what happened. I don't need to turn in papers for their classes, they write, not until I feel like it. The wording in both their letters is so similar I know they've discussed the matter.

Someone's left a broken candy cane in my folder. I pocket it, knowing I'll probably find it there, in my coat, next year.

On my way out of the building I say hi to a few people I know drinking coffee at a table and move on. After I've left the table, I turn back and see their heads have huddled together in unison, like those of synchronized swimmers. There's no question in my mind they're discussing the incident in the park. There's always someone who hasn't heard, someone who wants more details, someone who wants to blame me.

Was what happened in the park a big deal or not?
Big deal, not a big deal. Big deal, not a big deal
, I say in my head over and over, like a girl plucking off petals from a daisy. I'm saying
not a big deal
when I hear someone call out behind me.

"Hey, Ellis," the voice says.

I turn. It's Tom. He's coming from the pool. He's wearing the hat he wears after swimming, and the pieces of hair that are poking out underneath have frozen together into small icicles.

I don't know what comes over me, but I start to run. My bag thumps against my thigh as I curve around students, sprinting.

"Ellis," he calls again. I turn back and see he's running after me. I take steps as big as I can risk, avoiding ice patches. I make the green light across Broadway and run without turning back to see if he's still on my tail.

When I enter the lobby of my building, I'm coughing. The cold air is still inside my throat, tickling. Danny's on duty. I see he's been drinking again. There's no sign of a bottle, but I

spy an open can of Coke and a coffee thermos. I picture him fun-neling his rum into the thermos, thinking no one will ever know. He's a big child. I can't help liking him.

"I've been looking for you," he says. He looks like he might have been handsome once; now there's a black hair curling out of his nostril. "Louis thinks he's seen your man."

Louis is another doorman, the one who works until three in the afternoon.

"My man?" The running and sweating has made my head itch under my wool hat. I take the hat off.

"The man from the park." "Where?"

"He's been walking around here during the day, right out there on Riverside." "Oh God," I say.

"He didn't want to tell you," Danny says, "because he wasn't sure. He's never seen the guy. But this fellow has red hair and wears a leather jacket."

I think about calling the female police officer who gave me her card. But what would I say? Someone who hasn't seen the guy, who has no idea what he looks like, thinks he recognizes him?

"Don't worry," Danny says, doing his best not to slur. "I'll keep good watch over you."

"Thanks," I say, and look toward the glass door. Tom would have been at the door by now, if he was coming.

Up in my room, I get out the rug tape someone once suggested I use when having a party, and tape down the fake Oriental in my bedroom. I get up on the bed and jump down onto the rug. I turn on my CD player and insert a Guns N' Roses CD someone gave me as, I think, a joke. I put "Paradise City" on repeat and dance. The first time it plays I dance the way I dance now. The next time it comes on I dance the way I did in college. Then late high school. Then early high school. I get down on the rug, on my back, and spin around and around. The rug tape keeps the Oriental in place perfectly.

. . .

I have to get away. I'm going back to San Francisco for Christmas, but not for three more days, and it's six hundred dollars to change my ticket. I call the 800 number and ask an

owner-representative, "How can it be six hundred dollars to change my ticket when it only cost three seventy-nine to begin with?"

She can't explain.

"Are there discounts for deaths in the family?" I ask.

"Yes," she says, her cheerful voice now lowered an octave with compassion.

"What about near-deaths?" I ask, still hopeful. And then I feel bad. There are worse things than this, much worse.

"Excuse me?" she asks. I imagine this owner-representative crying over the death of a sibling, a lover. I picture her ordering a bouquet of flowers to send to someone grieving. "Anything but carnations," she might say to the FTD florist.

"Never mind," I say.

I take the train to Philadelphia for the day. I want to go to the Museum of Art to research one of my overdue papers. It's on Degas's and Bonnard's nude women emerging from baths. I need to see the paintings.

From the train station in Philadelphia I take a taxi. I pass signs that say "Walk! Philadelphia" everywhere I go.
Exclamation points
, I think,
are so misused
!

The museum is huge but I don't need a map. I find the nude women quickly; I gravitate toward them. I stand in front of them, close up and then at a distance, and then close up again. Really close-up. I want to feel the water, and their skin. But everywhere there are guards and signs that say "Do Not Touch." There's a small picture of a statue with a shiny nose and an explanation of how salts and oils in my fingers could destroy great works of art.
Destroy! Philadelphia
, I think.

I walk and walk, wanting to touch, but not being able to.

Sarah claims she was taken to museums too early in life. Now, whenever she goes, she gets what she calls "museum feet." I try to convince myself the museum is why my feet hurt now, still.

In the room of Dadaist art, I try to make sense of Duchamp's
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
. Too many museum-goers are also staring at the painting, which is on two panes of glass that together are the size of a department store window. On the upper pane, the bride is hanging from a rope, or perhaps she's been crucified. The bachelors crowd together below.

"What do you think she did wrong?" a woman in a beret asks her husband.

"How can a bride have nine bachelors and no husband?" a teenage boy asks his mom. He stares at the plaque bearing the title, as if to be sure.

I don't want to hear anybody's answer. I move into a small side room that's devoid of people—and of art. Maybe the room's for storage. Or an upcoming exhibit. There's nothing on the walls in front of me, or to my right. But then I notice the large wooden gate at the left end of the room. The gate is framed by a brick archway.

I walk toward the gate's doors, which look like those of a barn. I try to open them, but they won't budge. I peer through a crack and see a woman's body, naked, prostrate, abandoned on a hillside. In her left hand she holds a gas lamp, still glowing.

From where I'm standing, I can't see the woman's face. I have to see it.
Who did this to her? Was she on a picnic
? I tug hard on the weathered doors. They won't open. I can only see the woman through one little crack in the wood, but I can't get near, can't see, can't touch.

I bang on the gate with my right hand, and then twice with both fists. I stop myself. I turn around, put my back up against the wooden doors, and stare at the blank wall on the other side of the small room.

II

Stolen Jesus

Christmas vacation, finally.

I go back to San Francisco, to my family. I arrive home full of hope and expectation, an open parachute inside my chest. But after one day I'm restless. I have no plans for the three weeks before classes begin.

"Why don't you go out with your friends?" my mother says. "I don't want to," I say. "I have no friends," I lie.

She sighs.

I feel like a useless present she's been given and doesn't know what to do with.

"Anna, let her be," my father says. He's Polish and says her name so it sounds like the last two syllables in "banana." She gave up on correcting him shortly after they were engaged.

People have never commented on the four years my father was gone—not to us, anyway. One day we came back home from the grocery store and found him on the couch watching
Wheel of Fortune;
in all the time he'd been gone, my mother never changed the locks.

My feet are still sore. Something's wrong with them. My mother has poured hot water and dishwashing soap in the orange plastic basin she usually uses to hand-wash her bras. "Soak up," she says. Then she goes back to the kitchen to finish washing the dishes. She insists on doing them by hand.

My father and I have the same freckle on our lower lips. It's right on the cusp of lip and skin. A few people have said it looks like it fastens mouth and chin together—a button. We resemble each other so much, my father and I, sometimes I can't look at him.

My father closes his eyes before he starts a sentence. He opens them and says, "I have something to show you." From a drawer under the TV he pulls out a picture of himself when he was younger. It's a school picture he's just come across, from when he was eight and lived in a small town outside Szczecin.

"Who were your friends?" I ask.

He points out the people in his class whose names he remembers.

"Something sad ended up happening to this one here," he says. His finger rests on the stomach of a boy sitting cross-legged in shorts and long socks. "His father was a fisherman. He had a fishing boat and every weekend we'd go out on it with him."

My father pauses. He closes his eyes.

"One weekend I was supposed to go, but my parents wanted me to stay around the house because someone was sick—I can't remember who. Anyway, that weekend I was supposed to go, the whole boat capsized and everyone drowned.

"He died," he says, his finger still on the stomach of the boy. "If I had gone that day, I would be dead."

"So would I."

"No, you just wouldn't have been born." "That's the same thing."

My father ignores my comment; he's somewhere else. "The most bizarre thing was, he had left a birthday present for me, a sixteenth-birthday present. His mother found it in his room after he died."

I ask what it was.

My father taps my shins, signaling I should take my feet out of the basin so he can fill it with more hot water.

"Cufflinks," he says. "I still have them somewhere upstairs."

He lifts the plastic basin with both hands. Holding it steady, he carries it to the kitchen. I wonder if all my belongings—the skirt I sewed and spray-painted in high school, my Softball bat from sixth grade, the concert ticket stubs I saved—would have more weight, be more valued, if I'd been killed in the park. I know that if my father died tomorrow I'd keep the basin. I'd tell the story of his last night, how he sat with me while I soothed my feet. I try to appreciate my father, his stories, his love, all of it. I swallow it in like I'm holding my breath before diving under water.

I've given the police in New York, and the doormen, my number at home, so when the phone rings, I put down my book. I hear my mother running to answer the phone and I wait to hear her call my name. She doesn't and I relax. I go back to reading about the history of worlds fairs:

"The first world's fair was held in England in 1851 at the Crystal Palace, so called because of its stunning iron and glass structure. It was designed by a greenhouse builder …"

Five minutes later, my mom comes into the living room.

"Don't sit on the couch!" she says. Furniture is the one item my parents spend money on— but they won't use it. When they watch TV they sit on the floor.

I roll my eyes.

"It's Jason on the phone for you." "What?"

"Jason."

"You've been talking to him this whole time?"

"Yes," she says, and gestures that I should pick up the extension. I hear breathing on the phone. "Mama," I say. "I got it."

She hangs up.

"So how are you?" he asks. "Good," I say. "Great," I lie.

"Good, glad to hear it." He does sound glad to hear that I'm good, and I like him all over again.

Jason was two years ahead of me in high school. We ran into each other a few summers ago at a blood drive at my mother's hospital. When he asked me out, I felt redeemed: in high school I'd never had a boyfriend. He was studying ornithology at S.F. State, and often pointed out to me which birds mated for life. But we never had sex. There were never any condoms and when he'd tell me, "I'll pull out," I'd say, "No dice." I was saying "no dice" a lot then.

He asks if I want to get together on Thursday. I say sure.

"My car's in the shop—I'm getting it detailed," he explains. "So I'll pick you up on the scooter."