Face (46 page)

Three hundred ten.

The man kicked out everybody but Mike and the match man. Then he squatted next to me. He wore penny loafers. Shiny. With Chinese
coins in the penny holders. Chinese coins. Anna had a Chinese coin like that. And suddenly I couldn’t remember what number
I’d reached.

I stared at his shoes so I wouldn’t have to look at his face, so like Tommy’s, hear his voice. If I stared hard enough, I
could transform them; when I followed the legs up to his waist, his chest, his face, it would be Tommy, years later. He would
take my hand, swing arms, and walk me safely uptown.

But I couldn’t stare down the words.

“I know who you are. You don’t move. Don’t scream. Understand?”

The crazy act wasn’t fooling anybody. I nodded. They made me squat, shoved me into a garbage bag that was slimy and stank
of the fishmonger’s trash they must have emptied out of it.

Would they bother to threaten me if they were going to kill me? The rest of it—the pain and filth, my revulsion and panic—all
paled beside this single shaft of hope.

They weren’t going to use that blade on me. Not yet.

But I’d already been cut too deeply.

Tear the scab away and a hole remains, deeper than you could ever imagine. Like a swimming hole without a bottom. Like a well
without a top.

I ride the elevator up twelve stories and bang on a door smeared with greens and blues. Water, I think, still pounding until
the sleeping blond man awakes.

The door opens and I throw myself on Jed Moffitt with kisses for his blue eyes, hugs for his thin ribs, fingers swimming through
his long pale hair.

“Maibelle!”

“No. Don’t say anything.”

I push him backward into his darkened hallway. With the door closed, the surging, gurgling colors rise and fall like supernatural
pets. The place is a wonderland of liquid color and light.

I knead him, smooth him. He doesn’t resist. He is tall, golden. I play blind, moving my palms over the lines of his face,
closing my eyes and
making my own dream picture. He wears only a T-shirt and shorts. His skin’s cold as marble, but his hands move quickly, responding
with grabs and tugs. He strips me, then himself, falls on me stroking.

I want him to numb me, let me believe. I want him to turn into Johnny and take me away, back before. To not have to remember
or forget. This stranger to become a friend, a lover, to render me capable of love and forgiveness. To force me to trust him.

But his nails scrape my skin like the tips of forceps shocking with each touch. And instead of numbing the surfaces, welding
them, the jabs just keep sharpening. Now his arms and legs become whips, flicking lightly, then harder, piercing.

Not Johnny.

Jed moans, exhausted and thrilled. I roll away in disgust, feel the sneer before I hear it.

Chinaman’s whore.

At the end of the darkened hallway outside Jed’s apartment a window stands low to the floor. It is crusted with soot. The
frame is blistered and cracked, the lock broken, catch missing. I don’t look past the filthy glass, but I feel the cold air
splashing through a bullet-sized hole with cracks fingering out in a web. Where this air comes from you can either float or
sink.

The sill hits my knees. The panes climb nearly to the ceiling, each sash the size of a steamer trunk. The grinding vibrates
down the hall, and I worry someone might wake. Another shove, though, and it’s open.

No moon tonight. Just blackened rooftops and the pinked blur of streetlights below. Spidery limbs of leafless trees in Sheridan
Square. Twelve stories down. No spinning. No blur. No dizzying outward mental plunge. Just the perfect, unbearable clarity
of this empty patch of air. My heels kick against the granite fall. My hands clasp the sill. Straight down. No fire escape.
No moon tonight. No witness.

I tip forward, back. A human seesaw. Unclasp my hands and reach
into space, grabbing the steam that spurts from my mouth, steam that hangs weightless from invisible threads. No thought.

I touch the child’s golden heart that still, belatedly, hangs at my throat. The only reply is the tug of air. No comforting
voices. No Marge or Johnny. No White Witch or Tai. I’m on my own here. They want no part of this.

The low moan of a pump nearly unseats me. A road crew. Pale helmets like snails crawling up out of manholes. I can’t see bodies
or faces, just the glow of lanterns, black holes in the ground.

An inch forward, and the balance tips. Gravity will handle the rest. They don’t notice me, those men. I am no one to them.
Nothing but soiled shards of bone and bent pieces. A shattered lens on the earth’s smooth, unyielding face.

Just another fallen object.

I
t was nearly dawn when I returned to Eleventh Street. I needed a shower. To rinse and sponge and soap away the filth, the
stench of fish and beer that still clung to me. To scrape my skin free of the memory I’d finally retrieved and now longed
desperately to abandon. In the end I had neither jumped nor fallen nor flown from the window outside Jed Moffitt’s, but even
with my feet flat on the ground the distance below seemed endless.

There was music softly playing inside my darkened apartment and perfume in the air. Wine. Gardenias. Otis Redding.

I leaned into the door, all the breath gone out of me. I wailed something unintelligible and dented the refrigerator with
my fist.

My brother appeared through the darkness, ghosted in a sheet. ’That you, Maibelle?”

“Henry…” It was all I could manage. The night had been too long and too wide, and now, suddenly, I was drowning.

“Hey, Maibee.” He stepped forward and held me. “We all knew it was coming. God, I feel terrible not being there. That’s okay,
go ahead and cry.”

“Knew what?”

He became very still.

“About Dad?”

I was talking into his shoulder, but couldn’t bear to pull back.

“What about Dad?”

“Isn’t that why you’re upset? It’s all over?”

I began to breathe. And choked. It was the closest thing to a laugh I could produce. Not that laughter would have been any
more appropriate.

“No, that’s not it. Henry, no. Don’t let go. I can’t tell you what’s happened. But I’m so tired. Please, just let me lie down
next to you for a while. Maybe then I could sleep.”

“Hey, Maibee.” He kissed my forehead, but his mouth was hard and nervous. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on.”

He pulled back, and I was suddenly aware of the darkness turning. A bird trilled outside. Through the pale tissue of light
I saw the muted squares that I knew were Marge’s photographs against the far wall, the slumbering form of her couch, the blackened
entrance to her darkroom. I felt the White Witch and her children warning me not to stay.

“Henri?”

Only then did I realize we weren’t alone. Coralie huddled in the bedroom doorway, in my brother’s shirt.

“It’s all right. My sister.”

I grabbed his hand as he made a start back to her. “Both of you, then. Please, Henry. Let me sleep with you—or get out!”

“Yes, all right.” She took my other hand and led me forward. There were no more questions, no need for answers. They opened
a safety zone and I crawled in just as I had when I was young enough to find comfort in my parents’ bed.

But unlike those childhood nights, I did not dream of gliding through air or dodging bullets in lower Manhattan. I did not
go into free fall, either.

I awoke with a queer sense of peace, like the solitude you feel staring out over hundreds of miles of uninhabited land. A
kind of peace that, in a blink, can switch to terror.

Henry and Coralie lay still sleeping, their backs to me, their faces away from each other. More secrets they possessed. When
I left the bed, they rolled naturally, fluidly together. Children yelled in the playground, and a soft, rhythmic thump of
tambourines fell from the floor above. The narrow bedroom was tinted orange by sunlight working through the window sheet.
Coralie’s hair fanned across the pillow, drawing Henry closer. I felt an intense spasm of love for them both for receiving
me, and for letting me go unnoticed.

Everything in the living room was as I remembered it. The White Witch and her children. Marge Gramercy’s children. My equipment.
Yet it all looked foreign, the edges too sharp, shadows too dark. It was like a word I’d written thousands, millions of times
turned suddenly unrecognizable.

A ceramic mug sat amid a shelf full of gadgets. Blue-green mold covered the surface of its contents. Mold takes weeks to grow
like that. Months. It must once have been coffee, but I couldn’t remember holding it, putting it down, abandoning it. It seemed
important that I remember when I last noticed it, but I couldn’t. One of millions of instants that make no difference, except
that without them the thread falls apart.

I took the cup and rinsed it, watched the mold separate, the tap water push it through the holes of the drain until all trace
of spoilage was gone. I paid attention as I scrubbed the bright red glaze and set the mug down on the lip of the sink. If
I paid attention, I would remember. I would know that something happened to me. I would be able to explain.

When I turned around, I noticed the Leica where I dropped it that night weeks ago, before learning my father was dying. Before
I understood what I’d been chasing all these years. It sat on the windowsill facing out. If I tipped it straight down, it
would frame the old lady’s garden. But what would be the point of that now?

I put the camera to my eye and rotated slowly, reducing the room to a continuous stream of rectangular frames. My mother used
to encourage me to do this as an exercise when I was new to photography. “Find odd corners,” she’d say, “shapes you haven’t
noticed before.”

There was so much I never noticed. The chip in the mantelpiece.
The hairline crack running the length of the wall. Dustballs behind the backdrop paper. A web clouding the top of the curtain
rod. The camera framed dirt and breakage; if I planned to stay, I would lay down my eyepiece and get to work scrubbing, dusting,
sweeping. I would revel in the motions of my arms, the fresh smell of soap, and the sparkle of water on wood. I did not plan
to stay, though. I wanted to be gone before Henry and Coralie woke up.

The viewfinder caught on a pile of mail that I could not have noticed before because it had arrived during my absence. I set
aside the camera and pulled from the top of the stack a large manila envelope bearing Tai’s careful block lettering, postmarked
a week ago. It was overstuffed, as if booby-trapped.

He was not there, I told myself. Whatever happened between him and Henry, he had no part in my attack. He was no more guilty
than I was.

Nevertheless, he was linked in my mind. An unwitting accomplice and now a reminder. I dreaded this package almost as much
as I dreaded seeing him again.

Fortunately the rest of the pile was tamer. An overdue check from Noble for the work I finished before Dad got sick. Some
junk mail. And a message from Stein & Stein, the rental agency for my building. Harriet had finally delivered. Violation of
the lease’s single-occupancy clause. One month’s notice of termination. I placed the letter in the refrigerator where Henry
would see it when he poured his wake-up orange juice. The heavy white metal door shut without a sound.

I turned back to pocket the check and for the first time sighted my portfolio. Could I really have left it out all this time?
I remembered neither putting it away nor seeing it since that night Tai was here. The size of it, the blackness of its leather,
seemed equally unfamiliar. I stepped closer, but the object remained alien, challenging. The binder was unnaturally heavy.
The zipper stuck. In the other room bodies turned and sighed. I froze, but there was no further movement.

Slowly, slowly, I pulled the metal tab around the corners and peeled back the covers. Not ringed pages but loose glassine
envelopes. Not my photographs. Not my portfolio.