Ghost Town (15 page)

But one day my grandfather adopted a different tone. He had no sitter in his studio that day and he seemed in good humor. There was a bottle of red wine on the floor by his easel and a glass of the stuff close to hand. He was putting a few last touches to the portrait of an eminent banker with a high bald head and a mean face. He even hummed as he worked.

—Oh it’s you again, is it? Back you come like a case of the pox, no one will have you, will they? Sit down over there but don’t say a word.

After some minutes I forgot that I was not to say a word.

—Grandpapa?

—What is it, worm?

—What happened to your eye?

At this he stopped working and turned to me.

—My
eye
? he growled.

He fingered his eye patch, watching me closely, and I thought he might take it off so I could see the empty socket beneath, if that was what lay beneath. But he did not. Instead he came close to me and I could smell the wine and the cigar smoke on his breath. All at once I was not sure what sort of game we were playing. I felt a
little afraid. He put his face very close to mine, and the bristles of his beard touched my skin.

—It was your Uncle Julius, he whispered.

His breath made me feel ill. I thought I might be sick.

—Uncle Julius, I whispered.

—He attacked me, he whispered.

—No.

—Yes. I ruined his life, and he ruined mine. The girl belonged to me, you see, and it was too much for him!

I remember his laughter as I ran along the corridor and down the stairs, how it boomed from his studio and swirled about me like a cloud of cigar smoke and only grew fainter when I came panting to a halt in the drawing room, where my mama and my grandmama were having tea.

—What
is
the matter with you now? said my mama.

I could not tell her. It was too dreadful. The secret was revealed. I held it close in my heart for many years and in time I understood that mine was not the only family in which violence and insanity had erupted in generations past, and plagued the lives of those to come. They are all dead now, and what survives of them are the
phantoms, merely—the daguerreotypes, the photographs, the paintings. The portrait of Noah van Horn came down to me, and as I say, I spend too much time in front of it. It all began with him, of course; it was Noah who denied Julius his chance of love, and why? Because of a prejudice acquired as a function of fear. Love must never be denied, never!—as I have cause to know, and better than most. For the story of Julius, so painstakingly assembled by means of the fading memories of those who knew him, and the ghosts now clustered on my walls and sideboards—do they not all clamor the same sad warning? That love denied will make us mad? I think so.

Danny Silver was like a son to me, and as a childless woman who never married I do not say this lightly. He was also my patient. For seven years we had been meeting twice a week to talk through his problems, which were largely sexual in nature, and which originated in a suffocating maternal relationship which created conflicts that ran like fault lines deep in his psyche, becoming visible only when he tried to sustain intimacy with a woman. Dan was eager to enjoy a healthy relationship, but the damage had begun early, and it was structural, so progress was slow. I was not in New York when the terrorist attacks occurred, but Dan was, and the events of that day disturbed him profoundly. It became clear to me that our work would for some time be thrown off track by the repercussions of an assault which he was not
alone in regarding as having been directed at himself, as in a way it was.

He was a large, sad, untidy man, highly intelligent, and his face so creased and fissured that he seemed prematurely aged, as though burdened with the weight of all of human history. I believe this had been true of him even in childhood. He dressed carelessly and had an air of constant distraction, and he did not look healthy; he took no exercise, and ate badly. He was resigned to the prospect of spending several more years in therapy, recognizing that with two wrecked marriages behind him he could not afford to make another mistake. In conversation he was given to frowns, groans, and sighs, and during our sessions together he would watch me closely from darkly bagged eyes that teemed with complicated anxieties. It may have been the very tortuousness of his mind that propelled him into a career in the law, and I believe he was a very good lawyer. Civil rights was his area.

He came to see me soon after my return to the city. We sat in my apartment on Riverside Drive one warm evening in late September. The sun was setting over the Jersey shore and the Hudson was a lovely silvery gray in the last of the
light. So tranquil was the view from the window in my consulting room, with its wide western exposure, high above the river, one could almost forget the horror at the other end of the island. Dan sat down heavily, and with his elbows on his knees, and his head pushed forward, said he was a worried man. He feared for our civil liberties, he said. He feared that Congress was going to push through a bill letting federal agents lock up anyone they didn’t like the look of. He said these new powers would be exercised with no judicial oversight, and the people the feds locked up would have no access to legal representation.

He rubbed his cropped skull as he voiced these troublesome thoughts, and then sat staring at the floor and shaking his head. I waited for what was really on his mind. Finally he looked up, and quietly told me that in the immediate wake of the attacks he had gotten into a situation with a woman.

—Go on, I said.

He met her the Saturday after the attacks. About forty, he said. On the small side. Black hair, good body—very intense woman, he said—little cleft chin that juts out—he jutted out his own chin, smiling slightly, absurd gesture
in this big, blue-jowled man—sensitive, smart … Not a woman to inspire affection, he’d thought on first meeting her, too, oh—cool—for that, although at the time that had had no bearing on their relationship. He had found her through an escort agency which advertised in the back pages of
New York
magazine—

Here he paused. I was aware Dan used prostitutes, nothing new there. In fact I encouraged it.

—Go on, I said.

He was not strong, he told me, nobody who lived in the city and had been there that morning was strong. He was finding it difficult to work. It brought back everything he had suffered after his mother’s death: the same disabling grief, the same leaching of joy and purpose from projects which had previously given meaning to his life. The same sudden debilitating waves of anger and wretchedness and despair. Dan lived in one of those big apartment buildings on the north side of West Twenty-Third, and it was there that he’d grown up. His mother had died in that apartment. Both his marriages had failed in that apartment. His bedroom had a balcony with a wrought iron rail and a view of downtown.
He’d heard it on NPR that morning, that a plane had gone into the World Trade Center. He’d turned on the TV and listened to the first reports, standing on his balcony high over Twenty-Third Street and watching the north tower burn.

Then he’d seen the other plane go in and with a lurch of stupefied incredulity realized that
New York was under attack
. He called his office and talked to his partner. Later he saw the south tower fall, and heard a roar like distant thunder as clouds of dense smoke billowed up from the tip of the island. For a moment, no more than that, the tower left a ghostly image of itself in the empty air. Dan remembered trying to resist the numbness he felt creeping over him by thinking of people who lived downtown, or worked there—people in his office, colleagues, friends … Later he watched a man he knew slightly, a man who worked for the city, come limping along the block, covered from head to foot in gray ash, and go into the apartment building on the opposite side of the street. He could see him in the lobby of the building opening his mailbox.

After a while he turned off the TV and made his way over to Union Square. There were many
who shared this impulse, he said, and they milled about together, disparate New Yorkers finding what primitive comfort they could in the face of the destruction unleashed upon their city. Establishing transient bonds with strangers so as to escape the horror of solitude in the face of so much death.

Which was why, a few days later, he had called the escort service.

The woman gave him a brief firm handshake and sat down. They quickly arranged the money side of it, then she went into the bedroom and got undressed. Apparently what followed was clinical rather than passionate, which did not surprise me. She was very businesslike, said Dan, very efficient. Good cold sex. When it was over, he said, they stayed in bed, talking, and it seems that what Dan called a “rapport” sprang up between them.

—What kind of “rapport”?

She relaxed. She was interested in him. Wanted to know what he did. Had he grown up in New York? That sort of thing. She made him laugh. Dan never laughed, a sardonic bark was the closest Dan ever got to laughter, and I assumed that was what he meant. I must have said something to that effect.

—It wasn’t like that, he said.

—Like what?

He was frowning. He stared at the floor, sitting forward in the chair, trying to be clear about what he meant and what he felt. He had caught the tone of my voice, my dismissive response to this “rapport” he’d achieved with a woman he’d hired for an hour.

—We connected.

—Go on.

But then it seems the mood changed. They were talking about the attacks—what else did anyone talk about?—and it became clear that she had been through something far worse than him. She was badly scared, he said. She wanted him to help her, or at least listen to her and not just write her off as a crazy person. She was an artist. She did escort work to cover the rent on her loft. She lived in a building seven blocks from the Trade Center, and from her rooftop she had watched the first plane go in. She’d heard it coming down the west side. It was very loud until just before it hit. Then everything went quiet, and she thought they’d turned off the engines. She said it went into the building as if it were going through tissue paper. The building
swallowed
it, she said. And through it all,
through the impact, and the silence, and the shock, and the smoke, her only thought was of the guy who’d left her bed an hour earlier to go to work on the 104th floor.

Dan fell silent here. He wanted me to grasp the significance of what he’d just told me. I hardly needed his portentous silence to engage with the woman’s experience; there were many such stories at the time and I’d heard worse.

She called the guy on his cellphone—his name was Jay, she said—and he answered on the first ring. She was close to hysteria, but his voice was calm. She could hear chaos in the background, screams, and the smashing of glass, and he told her that it was getting pretty hot and smoky in there. He asked her what had happened to them and she told him, a plane had hit the building. He knew this already, it seems he just wanted it confirmed. They had to shout to make themselves heard, but even as he grasped the enormity of his predicament he remained steady and calm, in fact
he
was comforting
her
. He told her he loved her. He told her to be happy. Then he said he had to call his father to say goodbye, and the line went dead.

From her rooftop she could see men and women clustered in open windows and out
on the ledges of the high floors of the tower. She could see people falling. She said she stood there on her roof with her cellphone in her hand and stared at the burning tower, trying to make out which of those distant falling figures was her lover.

All this she told Dan in flat neutral tones, sitting forward in the bed and staring out of the window such that she gave him her profile, and he lay on his side watching her: two strangers, he remembered thinking, each seeking succor in an hour of fearful desolation, and it counted for nothing that the pretext of their meeting was commercial sex.

Still staring out of the window she began to speak again. She told Dan that later that day the cops had evacuated her from her building and she had gone to a hotel uptown. The day after, she was on the east side subway. She was thinking of her last conversation with the guy, with Jay, as the train pulled out of Grand Central. The people who’d just got off were pushing toward the turnstile, but one figure stood unmoving at the edge of the platform.

He slowly turned his head and stared at her.

She said all this in a low, quiet voice, her arms
wrapped tightly round her knees but with no other obvious signs of distress. She hammered at the window and ran back down the subway car—

Dan asked her if she was sure it was him.

She looked straight at him then, and her eyes, he said, seemed for a second or two to flare up as though they were about to burst into flame. Then they died once more into guardedness and opacity. Oh, she was sure. She had seen him quite clearly in that brief instant before the train went into the tunnel. She said she would never forget the expression on his face. What was the expression on his face? Grief. Grief and pain. Grief and pain and sorrow and loss and anger. A terrible quiet sad anger, and it was directed not at the men who had murdered him, but at her.

Poor Danny. Again in deep waters. A brief rueful grin as he rubbed his skull and I gazed at him, thinking, this poor damaged man who loses himself in the problems of others so as to forget his own, and now what has he done? What has he gotten himself into now?

—Go on, I said.

She told him she spent several days in Grand Central after that, looking for him, and it was
not difficult for me to imagine this distressed creature moving among the crowds of commuters, peering intently into the faces of hurrying men, accosting total strangers, showing them a photograph. In the immediate wake of the attacks there were many in the city who refused to give up hope, and continued to search for their lost loved ones despite overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were gone. Dan knew this, and he asked her what she thought the guy—Jay—would have said to her, if she’d found him in Grand Central. She’d leaned toward him, he said, a hand spread on the pillow and the bed-sheet slipping from her breasts—and it broke his heart, he said, her reply.