Fearless (27 page)

The old man’s head bowed. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled and sat down.

Perlman moved toward the gray-headed mother. She continued to leave slowly; she took small despairing steps.

“Anyone else remember that row?” Perlman asked. “What was it? Twenty-one?” He had reached the woman and stopped her progress.

In front and four seats to the left of Carla a young woman turned to her companion and whispered: “Twenty-one C was three rows ahead of me. They were smashed flat.”

Carla’s heart raced. With it pounding so fast, she couldn’t sit and breathe comfortably.

“Does anyone else have any information?” Perlman said.

Carla leaned forward to better eavesdrop on the young woman who knew what had happened to the silver-haired lady’s son. Her neighbor, the man she had spoken to, bumped her shoulder: “Go ahead. Speak up.”

“Stop it!” Carla was on her feet shouting at Perlman. “Let her go!”

The silver-haired mother was frightened by Carla. She slunk away from Perlman, heading for the exit.

“Why?” Perlman asked Carla.

“This isn’t gonna do any good,” Carla said.

Perlman stepped toward Carla, arguing. “What harm can it do? She just wants to know what happened to her son.”

“My son died,” Carla said in a clear voice.

“But you know how he died,” Perlman said. “You were with him.” He turned back to the embarrassed woman leaning against the wall. Her hand searched its surface as if hoping to find a secret exit. “When was the last time you saw your son?” Perlman asked the grieving mother.

“His birthday. About a month before. I don’t remember kissing him goodbye.” She lowered her head and mumbled. “I know I did. Just can’t remember.” She raised her eyes and seemed to notice Carla. “You’re very young,” she said.

Carla knew what that meant. Her aunts said it often enough: You’re young—you can have another. As if Bubble were something on sale that had been thrown out by accident and Carla still had time to rush to the store for another just as good. “I’m not young,” Carla said.

“How old was your son?” the silver-haired woman asked gently.

“He was gonna be two,” Carla said. She felt ashamed. She wanted to cry, of course, but that was nothing new. The shame was. She had to look away from the older grieving mother. She stared at the blue carpet.

“I’m sorry,” the silver-haired woman said. “He wasn’t with you for very long.”

“Jesus Christ!” a man shouted. “This is sadistic! We’re not accomplishing anything.”

“Who says we’re here to accomplish something?” Perlman answered. “We’re here to talk.”

The silver-haired woman talked; Perlman answered; there was shouting between some men. Carla couldn’t follow their conversations anymore. She didn’t know, for a moment, where she was or who these people were. They seemed to be memories or nightmares. She knew the facts: she was in a room of survivors and she was one of them; but that was nothing compared to the shriveling feeling that the faces of these people came from a dream or a television show, that none of it was real. I’m going crazy, she thought, and felt the room spin.

“Manny,” she said in a weak voice, hoping to summon him. He was real and if he appeared, then she was too.

“Hello,” a woman in front of her said. “Remember me?”

It was Lisa the flight attendant. She stood right in front of Carla. The rest of the group was silent. What had happened to their conversations? Why was everyone looking at her and Lisa?

“Sure,” Carla said. She stared at Lisa, registering the changes in her. Without makeup and with her long hair cut as short as a schoolboy’s she looked different. No, not just her face; it was the weight. Lisa had gained a lot, maybe as much as thirty pounds. But she still had her friendly smile, her happy smile of helpfulness.

“I really wanted to see you. I came mostly to see you.” Lisa put her hands together and seemed to pray for an answer.

Carla remembered the streak of her smeared lipstick and her gaunt cheekbone as she bent over Bubble. He had kicked out his chubby legs and slid down. The belt tightened on his neck. “
Hold him in your lap,” Lisa had said. “He’ll be okay
.”

“I think about you and your baby a lot,” Lisa said. She was smiling. Why was she so cruel? Her smile was mean and got bigger as she came even closer, only inches from Carla. “Remember I tried to help you with the seat belt?”

“Help me?” Carla said. The strange faces popped, expanding into Carla’s world. They
were
real, not memories or dreams or television actors. “You told me everything was going to be okay!” She was angry. Her voice filled the room. The friendly survivors shrank away like scolded children. Lisa’s smile was gone. Tears came, pushing Carla’s chin up and clogging her nostrils, but she didn’t lose her voice or her righteousness. “Help me? You think you helped me? You didn’t help me. You told me to hold him. I couldn’t hold him.”

Lisa’s smile wasn’t coming back anytime soon. Perlman had moved to Lisa’s side. The big clown had her by the shoulders, trying to back her away from Carla.

“No—don’t say that—” Lisa begged Carla.

“Yes!” Carla shot at her, refusing to stop. “You said everything was going to be okay. It wasn’t okay! My baby died!”

“Okay, okay,” Perlman said. Lisa hid in his chest, sobbing. She wouldn’t smile ever again. “That’s enough,” the doctor said sternly. “You’ve said it. That’s enough.”

He was full of shit, too. He wanted Carla to talk, but only if she was a pretty blonde who was happy that the people she loved had died, who was going to cry a little and say nice forgiving things.

“Fuck you,” Carla said. “Don’t tell me when I’ve said enough. I’ll never say enough! She told me it was okay! And it wasn’t!”

Perlman let go of Lisa and moved at Carla. His spotted and beefy arms reached for her.

“Don’t touch me!” Carla shouted. Perlman was so startled by her ferocity he came to a halt.

“If you don’t have anything to say but to blame people then I want you to go.” Perlman was firm. He was a bastard, Carla realized. He pretended to be gentle and easygoing, but really you had to play by his rules or he would get rough.

“I’ll be happy to get out of here,” Carla told him. She walked out, passing the silver-haired mother. Now she was the one who hung her head, ashamed. “Take my advice,” Carla said to her. “Go home. He can’t help you. He’s a witch doctor.”

In the corridor outside the conference room she could hear the slow traffic grumbling toward the tunnel. Her heart pounded with rage. But she felt good. She felt better than she had for a long time, maybe the best she’d felt since it happened. As she walked to the front of the lobby, her legs—even the damaged one—had spring and energy. She was eager to find Manny and go.

She saw her husband’s back leaning against the half partition of a public phone. He was always on the phone since the crash, either talking to Brillstein or telling his friends about the lawsuit.

She hurried to him, dancing across the blue carpet. The prospect of being alone with her husband was thrilling. She imagined them returning to New York in the car with the whole day ahead of them. They could go to a movie. She hadn’t been to a movie since the crash. Was the Rockefeller rink open? She had taught Manny how to ice-skate—a passion of hers—and she imagined skimming on the big-city ice with her husband, just having fun for no reason at all.

She was stopped by a strange ugly sound. She looked around to find its source. It frightened her when she realized the noise came from the phone booth.

“Manny,” she called faintly. She hung back, afraid to touch him.

He had on a tan windbreaker. Huddled forward in the booth, his head was bowed. He hadn’t heard Carla. His muscular shoulders flexed and stretched the material to the limit. It quaked from his sobs.

“Oh baby,” he moaned into the receiver. “I can’t take it anymore. You can’t leave me. I can’t handle this by myself. I need your help, baby.” The words were yawned out of his weeping.

He’s crying, Carla comprehended, amazed. He had never cried in front of Carla, not for his dead mother, not for his dead son.

“Don’t leave me, baby,” he blubbered.

The lobby was cold. Chilled air leaked in from the glass doors. Her throat closed. She knew in her bones that he was talking to another woman, crying for her. Crying for a woman! All those whispered phone calls; Manny acting so strong, rushing around doing things for the lawsuit, concerned only about the money, all of it, bullshit and lies—he was chasing after another woman.

“I can’t do that to her,” he spoke abruptly, supposedly in answer to something the bitch on the other end of the line had said. His voice had cleared.

Think of what kind of person she must be. To sleep with the husband of a woman who had just lost her baby. But that’s exactly what makes the world so disgusting: they tell you they feel sorry for you, that they care about you, but everybody is only out for themselves, relieved that it didn’t happen to them, that you’re the one with the bad luck.

Carla walked right up behind her husband and grabbed his straight shiny black hair, his bastard mulatto hair. She pulled as hard as she could. He yelped like a dog.

Manny twisted out of her grip, cursing. His hand was up, ready to punch his attacker. At the sight of Carla he looked terrified.

“You fucking bastard,” Carla said. “You’re going to burn in hell.”

Manny must have agreed with her. He let go of the phone and fell to his knees. He pleaded silently with Carla, begging with his black eyes. Only for a moment, though, before, scared by what he saw in Carla, he shut them to whisper, “Oh Jesus.”

She wanted to kick him in the face. She was going to but she couldn’t breathe and her legs buckled. She tried to call out to Manny to help her. Instead she fainted onto the Sheraton’s blue carpet.

16

Max closed the business Thanksgiving week. Gladys continued to believe he would change his mind up through the last day. She didn’t seem to be convinced even then.

“Max, I won’t look for a job until the summer. But if
you
need me, just call.”

Max found Warren a job at Turner Construction, where Max had worked when he was fresh out of graduate school. Young Betty was going West with her boyfriend and didn’t plan on looking for work until the spring. Scott stuck to his plan to use his unemployment insurance and his savings to fund another go at painting. Warren’s new situation meant he was secure (as was Gladys, who didn’t need to work; she needed to be out of the house to escape from her retired husband) and yet Warren was the most upset and nervous.

“I’ll probably get fired in six months,” he mumbled whenever someone congratulated him or encouraged him to be cheerful.

The funniest part of the shutdown was the reaction of clients, old and new.

“Why?” prospective clients asked. They sounded appalled and nervous.

“I’ve decided to retire early.”

“How old are you?” one astonished woman asked. When Max said forty-two, she said, “Well! Lucky you.”

Another man who wanted Max to design a house for him—“Just like the house you built for my brother-in-law, only better”—was more persistent. “How the hell can you afford to retire at forty-two?”

“I was in a plane crash,” Max answered.

“They pay you for that?” the man asked.

“Yep,” Max said. “Big dollars.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No,” Max said and smiled at the thought. He didn’t want to bother to explain the insurance money was for the death of his partner.

“They pay you even if you don’t get hurt? Gee, I would think it would be kind of exhilarating. Living through something that horrific without a scratch. Maybe even a positive experience.”

“It was,” Max said, “and one of the things that makes it so positive is that they’re paying me.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s so nice for you,” the man said, anger joining his surprise. “But frankly this is the kind of cockamamie arrangement that’s destroying this country.”

Old clients were hurt or concerned. “Are you okay?” one asked and then added, with a nervous laugh, “Guess you’ll be glad to be rid of your pain-in-the-ass customers.”

“Yes,” Max agreed, calm and unimpressed by their reactions. He moved through conversations and day-to-day errands as if he were a passenger on an express train watching small towns go by; they blocked his vision for a moment, only to be quickly forgotten by his steady, armored progress.

He took a final walk through the empty offices on Thanksgiving morning to make sure everything had been taken. Shutting the door behind him, he decided to leave it unlocked since there was nothing to steal. He had a moment of fear, the bitter taste of cowardice rising from a hollow stomach, and then bursting through it came happiness: he was walking away from the scene of so much compromise and frustration.

Thanksgiving dinner was held, as usual and as required, at his mother-in-law’s. Required because her self-satisfaction and family fame came as a cook. Flora shared Debby’s height, excellent posture, and slow, graceful movements; but decades of dinner parties for her husband’s academic colleagues and family celebrations had thickened her body and given her face the warm, well-fed appearance of mothers in children’s book illustrations. And she played the role as well, treating her forty-year-old daughter as if she were six and maintaining a quiet but ominous presence about her grandson’s health, like that of a Secret Service agent guarding the President.

Shortly after two in the afternoon Max, Debby and Jonah walked to his in-laws’ apartment on 103rd and Riverside. It was a dangerous neighborhood when Max and Debby first married. Harry and Flora bore the danger because their ten-room apartment with a high unblocked view of the river and a working fireplace was cheap and kept cheap by rent-control laws. Besides, his father-in-law Harry could walk to work at Columbia University—even though he was mugged once a year. He once went to the hospital to be stitched but otherwise was not badly hurt.

The indiscriminate renovations and conversions of the 1980s had changed the area. It was now an expensive dangerous neighborhood. Since their building had gone co-op, they paid a large monthly mortgage and an ever rising monthly maintenance. Of course on paper, at the height of the real estate boom, they could have claimed to be millionaires. Boom or bust, however, Harry continued to be mugged yearly.