Carry the One (26 page)

“I don’t think there are any of those still on the road. I think you’d have to get a Pacer. I saw one of those still puttering around the other day.”

“You doing okay?” she asked.

“I am. And I’m serious about it this time; I scared the hell out of myself with that last bender. But still, it’s not easy. There are so many minutes in a day. You know. To get through unassisted. Plus the past. Now I have to carry that around all the time. No erasing it with a pill. I want to tell you something, something I want you to know. Just you. That night. I saw her. I saw her coming out of the woods, when she was still a ways up the road. All it would have taken was reaching out and jerking the steering wheel away from Olivia, taking the car off the road, into the ditch. We would have been a little banged up maybe. But the girl would be alive. But I was just so, so stoned. I thought she was so interesting to watch. I wanted to see what would happen to her. Like she was a character in some poignant movie.”

“Jesus,” Alice said.

Carmen was in bed. Rob stretched on the floor, holding above himself a sheet of diagrams given to him by his physical therapist. He had a terrible back. He was probably going to get spinal fusion surgery. He was holding out, hoping technology would outpace the degeneration of his discs and they’d be able to fix them with a laser, or something laparoscopic, replacements made of some unrejectable polymer or something. Carmen tuned in and out on the details.

She was reading the latest issue of
The Nation
. Bush was claiming he was going to be the education president. He was going to leave no child behind. Right. What he appeared to be so far, in these early months of his presidency, was lazy. He liked to spend time at his ranch, whacking brush. Carmen wasn’t sure what about the brush needed whacking. Although she had been clenched since the election, she was starting to think maybe he would just be passive and nondescript. A nothing administration she hoped would be whisked out in four years.

“Hey.” Rob was up and sitting on the edge of the mattress, holding a piece of her hair between thumb and second finger, a professional assessment. “Let me give you a conditioning treatment. It’ll only take ten minutes. Your ends are pretty dry.”

“Okay,” Carmen said. Rob did not follow politics. He voted the way Carmen told him to. She couldn’t talk with him about her latent fears about who was actually running the show while the president whacked brush. She wouldn’t be able to get him revved up about the bad résumés of the new cabinet. The best Rob could bring to the table tonight was a conditioning treatment, and she supposed this was something. She still thought marrying him was a small mistake, but also that someone as fiendish on perfection as she was might need to make a few mistakes. She would say he was a mistake that had turned out surprisingly well.

“We don’t deserve the luxury of our lives,” she told him.

“I know. I know,” he said, sitting her up, wrapping a towel around her shoulders, ripping open a foil packet. The room filled with coconut.

delivery

Alice was in gear, making coffee, mixing paint. Sitting on her high stool, mapping out the day’s work while she had her usual energy breakfast, an Almond Joy. The morning outside was dazzling, pouring in through the windows and skylights.

The phone rang. It was Carmen.

“Are you watching TV?”

“Well … No?”

“You might.”

“What’s up?”

“A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.”

“Accident?”

“Don’t think so. Gotta go. I’m trying to get Gabe to answer his cell. I know Providence is miles from Manhattan, but I want to—you know—hear his voice.”

After another plane blasted into another tower, Alice decided she needed some company. Nick had the biggest TV of anyone she knew, maybe of anybody in the world, so she headed over. People were out on the streets, and for a while it still looked like an ordinary Tuesday.
But then at Belmont, a small crowd was coming off the El and down the steps, as though it were six p.m. instead of ten in the morning. A reverse rush hour. No one wanted to be in the Loop just now. Alice didn’t feel frightened for her safety. If these planes were seeking out skyscrapers, the next one probably wasn’t headed for La Vida Taco or the dollhouse shop just up from where Alice turned left onto Clark. The sensation was more an eerie one, the vibration of huge events. Events of unknown origin with unforeseeable consequences.

She pressed Nick’s buzzer a few times, then gave up and used her key. He was stretched out on the sofa in camouflage-print jockey shorts, not truly present to the morning. Clearly he was using again. The living room smelled of something bad masked with bayberry; melted candle stubs sat in saucers all around. She put on Channel 7 and found out that while she’d been biking over, one of the towers had crumpled to the ground. They were replaying it on all the news stations. She sat down in the guest chair Nick never used, the cleanest piece of furniture in the room.

She flipped up and down through the channels. “Oh my God, two people just jumped. Together.”

“What movie is this?” he said, establishing conversational traction.

“Get a grip.”

In between the news networks, stations with taped programming gave the appearance of being clueless, or insensitive. On the Food Network, a celebrity Alice didn’t recognize was cooking something Cajun. On another channel contestants were jumping up and down and squealing and trying to win a low-end convertible.

“Man,” Nick, now focused, said when the second tower deflated in a thick cloud of ash. “Somebody’s really pissed off at us. We just took delivery on a big message.”

“We’re so used to special effects. I have to keep checking myself, resetting my mind to this is real. There were people in there. How many?
Who could survive that? No one will survive, will they? Not the people in the planes either. Not the rescue workers.”

“Olivia might have been inside. She was in New York.”

“That was a few years back. We don’t know where she is anymore.”

“She could have been in there.”

“She could have been flying the plane,” Alice said. “She is not a knowable part of this story, or any story.”

“Right,” Nick said, and nodded as if Alice had said something immensely wise.

Carmen came by a while later, having closed the shelter early. “My ladies—not unreasonably, I guess—have decided they’d rather be outside today than in a building. Gabe was in his studio when I got him; he’s okay. Rob’s in Venice, so he’s probably better than okay. He’s okay and eating really good spaghetti. Nobody’s mad at Italy.” She took off her jacket, got a Coke from the refrigerator and squeezed into the big armchair with Alice. Neither wanted to try the sofa. The sofa was a hazmat area. “I’m glad you guys are here. I don’t want to be alone just now.”

“Mom called,” Alice told her. “She heard they’ve cleared the airspace above the whole country. They pulled down every last plane. Have they ever done that before?”

“What’s up with the one that crashed in the field?”

“Peter Jennings said it might be an unrelated crash,” Alice said.

Carmen stared at her. “Right. And why are we having to rely on the bad guesses of news anchors? Where’s our government? Where’s our, like, president?”

“They had a scratchy little clip of him earlier. He was flying around for a while; now he’s in an undisclosed location. Because he’s so valuable. Because when he comes out, he’s going to know just what to do.”

“He’ll be wearing a little president jacket. The guy loves those jackets,” Nick said.

“They don’t think this is a Timothy McVeigh thing, home-grown?” Carmen said.

“No. They think it’s the same people who bombed the Trade Center before. The guys who put explosives in the parking garage. They think today they were finishing the job. Terrorists with a strong work ethic.”

Carmen thought awhile. “This administration, their response will be military. These are old hawks in charge. They’re not going to be interested in low-profile police work, in ferreting out who’s responsible, going cell by cell. They’ll want to find a country to bomb.”

Nick stretched to pick up the phone receiver on his coffee table. “Would you guys mind if I asked Andalusia over to watch with us?”

“Don’t even touch that,” Alice said. “We are not keeping vigil through our country’s darkest hour with a ridiculously pseudonymed hooker.”

Jean called, then came by. She’d been at her studio, trying to call Sylvie Artaud, her Parisian chanteuse, who was in New York playing a small supper club. “You can’t even get through. I think the lines are jammed with everyone calling their friends in Manhattan to make sure they’re all right.”

“I wonder what Tom’s going to do with this?” Carmen said. “What song he’s going to write. Maybe about the towers falling? How it was so galling?”

“Now America’s bawling?” Alice contributed. Jean was done with Tom. It was now safe to say stuff like this.

“Actually,” Jean said, “he did call. Anything big, he still feels he needs to tell me. The weird thing is, I don’t think he’s terribly interested in a tragedy so big everyone else is in on it. He’s a tragedy snob. He doesn’t want to stand next to some NASCAR guy, both of them waving little flags. That’s what he said.”

“Wow,” Alice said. “Well there you go.”

They numbed themselves with replay, the loop of horror: the Twin Towers, the plane that hit the Pentagon, also the one that went down
in the field in Pennsylvania. They heard about the cell phone calls from people on the planes, how the terrorists slit the flight attendant’s throat.

“That would definitely get your attention. You couldn’t have many illusions after that,” Nick said.

“Plus the people on the later planes were hearing on the cell phones from their wives and husbands about what had happened with the first ones. How chilling must that have been?” Alice thought about this for a minute. “Today is kind of off-the-meter from anything we’ve had to consider before today.”

On the screen, Peter Jennings asked a reporter where the president was. “He has disappeared down the rabbit hole, Peter.”

“They’re saying churches all over the country are filling up. People are just wandering in.” Jean was relaying this to Alice, who’d been out getting sandwiches.

“Well, that’s what this is with us, isn’t it?” Alice said, opening the sandwich papers to see what was whose. “Today, in here? Our church? Our small religion?”

By mid-afternoon, Carmen was sifting the text for the subtext. “We’re through the information-gathering part. The information is now in. Now they’re shaping this for our consumption, imposing a story line. The brave passengers taking the last plane down in the field. The firemen rushing in heedlessly, answering their call to duty. And pretty soon, they’ll get the president ready for his close-up to congratulate us for being Americans. This huge unprecedented, unmanageable mess, all the complexity behind it—they’re already starting to manage it. They’re making a theater piece out of pure horror so we can watch the unwatchable then get back to the mall.”

enough monkeys

Funny thing. Just when she was truly over Maude, when she even seemed to have gotten past the need to cook up exhausting Maudelike obsessions for new women, Alice ran into her during intermission at Steppenwolf.

Alice was here with her mother, who wanted to see this play. All her friends loved it. Everyone present was happy to be pampered by the lavish air conditioning of the theater. The temperature outside had been stuck in the nineties for the past few days. Loretta, at the moment, waited in a long line of women snaking into the ladies room. Meanwhile Alice was eating the world’s most expensive Snickers, drifting on a wave of peanut and the human tide of intermission, people-watching in a basically uninterested way, and then a woman with her back to Alice, turned around and was, rather stunningly, Maude.

Alice had known she was back living in Chicago. Through Gabe she always knew at least Maude’s longitude and latitude. And lately she had felt the slight thickening of the atmosphere that came with Maude-proximity. She was nonetheless sandbagged in this particular moment, and had to apply herself to seeming regular. She improvised a little narration: “Some years later, they run into each other at the theater.”

“Had to happen.” Maude smiled, as though she had had weeks to prepare.

Suddenly the air went wavy with possibility. Alice thought she might throw up. She clung to the conversational line. “Exactly. Of the billions of times we weren’t in the same place at the same time, there almost had to be one time. One time when we are.”

“Put enough monkeys on typewriters and you’ll get the Bible. Or I suppose in your case it would be give enough monkeys paintbrushes and you’ll eventually come up with the
Mona Lisa
.” Maude said all this smoothly, like this was an ordinary little chat, like Alice was the third ex-lover she had run into on her way to the concession counter.

“I’m too nerved up to go on here,” Alice confessed.

“Let’s talk about the play.”

Alice thought. “Okay. Didn’t you know when you sat down that nothing good could possibly happen on that set?”

“Totally. The farmhouse with the rocking chairs on the porch. The hitching post.”

“The pump,” Alice said.

“And as if there really was a second story behind the fake front. A real room with a lamp in the window.”

And here they were, slipping into the sort of effortlessly syncopated conversation about nothing that they always used to have. Alice crumpled a little as she thought of all she had missed, the uncountable moments that could have been just like this, but never happened. While she was sinking, Maude turned toward someone in the distance. Alice couldn’t see who it was.

“Got to go,” she said, pressing a fingertip hard on the exact center of Alice’s breastbone.

As she watched Maude get folded into the crowd, Alice felt an implosion in her chest. This pain then gave way to a ludicrous joy at still being able to feel this much about anything. She thought all that was behind her. She also thought this was a good thing.