Lit Riffs (13 page)

His CD player must have been set on
REPEAT
because
Rubber Soul
was still playing when he opened the door—the reflective strains of John Lennon’s “In My Life.” He fed Gracie and then picked up his phone to make some calls. He had a message. It was Angela. “Hi, sweetie,” she said, her voice warm and clear. “I’m sorry to call so early, but I wanted to see if I could catch you before I went off to my day. It was wonderful seeing you over the weekend, and I can’t wait for Friday. I really miss you. Let’s talk tonight, okay? Love you—bye!” He put down the phone and lay on his couch.

Angela was just completing her first semester of teaching English at Harvard. She was a Byron specialist. In terms of sheer brainpower, she was the smartest woman Marks had ever been involved with—and, amazingly, the least pretentious. What he loved about her conversation was that she assumed the intelligence and interest of anyone she spoke to, and assumed nothing else. She carried her beauty with equal ease, though not without pride. Her considerable vanity amused him because she was so nice a person that she couldn’t allow herself to acknowledge or accept it. She somehow thought that if she kept her vanity a secret from herself, no one else would notice it. But the pleasure she took in compliments was palpable, which made it fun to compliment her.

When they met three years ago, she had just turned thirty and she had no idea who he was. He was surprised that didn’t bother him and wondered if it meant he had achieved some previously unanticipated level of maturity. Later, when she described him to one of her friends after their first date, that girl had enthusiastically given her the rundown: the 1974 debut album,
Waiting for You
, that had drawn comparisons to Dylan; the Grammy; the string of songs that had become part of the singer-songwriter canon: “You Loved Me Then,” “Biding My Time,” “More Wood for the Flame,” and a handful of others.

As with Hannah, he and Angela had had blinding sex on their first night together. But what he most remembered was the long, leisurely bath they took the next morning, because she had the day off and didn’t have to leave for work. In the steam of his large, stone bathroom they had talked for what seemed like hours. Her vulnerability touched him. Uncharacteristically, he spent more time listening than speaking.

“I was diagnosed with cancer when I was twenty,” she told him. “I can’t tell you how frightening it was.” She was from Kansas, and in a flat Midwestern accent that sounded exotic to his East Coast ears, she plainly described the radiation and chemotherapy. He looked at the gorgeous body that had withstood all that, and, strangely, he began to stir. He wondered about the source of his arousal, and then stopped wondering about it. He couldn’t imagine having to be so strong at such a young age.

“After a period of remission,” she continued, as calmly as if she were talking about someone else, but with no detachment, “it came back when I was twenty-four. I was devastated. I had to leave graduate school for a semester and go home to Lawrence for treatment. To top things off, I had been having an affair with a professor in my department who was separated from his wife. While I was away in the hospital, he went back to her. I found out through a friend of mine who had called to cheer me up and share the gossip from back at school. She didn’t know I had been seeing him.”

He sat there soaking, watching as she leaned against the white tiles behind her, her platinum hair wet and sticking to the sides of her face. As she spoke, he had been thinking about the failure of his marriage and the romantic agony of his run-ins with Hannah. He had often wondered how he would ever be able to tell someone about them without feeling pathetic. The depth of Angela’s story made him feel that he could safely tell his own.

Just before her thirtieth birthday, Angela had just passed the five-year mark since her cancer recurrence, and her doctor had given her a clean bill of health. “I’m ready for a new beginning,” she told him excitedly. “I want to be part of that,” he thought, but said nothing.

He had fallen asleep on the couch, and when he woke up, the room felt chilly. He got up, nearly stepping on the dog, who was sleeping on the floor next to him, and went to the woodstove to build a fire. He gathered up the many newspapers that were scattered around the room, and he removed four logs from the pile against the brick wall opposite the windows. He also took the letter that lay on his kitchen counter and placed the logs and the paper in the stove. He got a wooden match from a kitchen cabinet and lit the paper. The flames quickly filled the belly of the stove, and he could already feel the heat coming from vents on the side.

He walked over to the window and stared at the river, as still as a pane of glass this morning, reflecting the clouds. “Isn’t it good?” he thought, and as “If I Needed Someone” played, he began, quietly, to sing along.

author inspiration

I first heard “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” in 1965, the year The Beatles’
Rubber Soul
was released. I was fourteen years old. I remember noticing the strange, dreamlike sound of George Harrison’s sitar, and the sense that the song told an actual adult story in a way that most of the pop music I had heard to that point didn’t. Those impressions weren’t conscious; I probably just felt that the song was “different” in some way. As I grew more sophisticated as a listener over the years, I discovered how the song’s narrative was broken by surreal details and information that John Lennon had left out. In later interviews, Lennon would say that the song was his way of writing about having an affair without revealing it to his wife, Cynthia. Those facts—and the song’s reflective tone—inspired me to imagine a songwriter who, unlike Lennon, had lived into his fifties and had occasion to evaluate the impact on his life of a past affair.

hannah tinti

D
own on the street they are all trying to cross at once. It’s a hard, crisp fall day and the people are crowded on the corner, eyeing the light, and when the yellow cab runs the red and angles itself in the crosswalk, they rush forward and split and divide around it like water. These are city people and they all know where they are going, taking fast steps—one, two, three, four—and dodging around things in their way, like newspaper stands and lunch carts grilling rows of chicken legs and tourists with matching purple windbreakers looking up and unshaven men on the steps of the church, crouched beneath statues, blankets over their heads and cardboard signs at their feet—
Help me I need help PLEASE ANYTHING
. There’s a double stroller coming in on the right. There is someone shouting Spanish into a pay phone. There are watches for sale. And bags. And hats. And small plastic frogs swimming in water.

Above all of this, the rope slips. And there he goes. One moment Red has his hand out, steadying as he pulls the squeegee down the side of the twenty-seventh-floor window, grinning as the secretary wearing the green blouse inside picks her nose, and the next he feels the roof braces shift and one side of the scaffolding drops and he is putting his heel down into nothing, into empty air, and the rest of him follows behind, like a string of beads falling off a table.

Red has fallen before, off his own two-story home. Tripped over the edge while reshingling and landed on a small fir tree he had planted three weeks earlier to symbolize the birth of a new baby, a girl, who’d come so early that her ears hadn’t developed yet—there were just small openings with tiny flaps of skin above. She’d immediately been placed in an incubator, and that was where she was when Red fell off the roof—in that tiny plastic bubble, her ears just beginning to bend and fold. The tree collapsed underneath Red’s weight, and he heard those branches snapping more than his leg, which came apart in three places.

Now the floors whiz past him—twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four—and Red is waiting for his safety line to catch. There is a harness across his shoulders and underneath his arms with a large metal ring in the back for a rope to go through, and that rope should be stopping him now. Meanwhile he is remembering how to fall, with his shirt flapping and his stomach sinking and his body turning and his hard hat gone.

On the sidewalk, no one looks up. Not even the tourists. They are busy moving around a truck that has taken a corner too quickly and knocked over the lunch cart that sells kebabs. Raw meat hits the gutter and the owner is holding on to the side of his face, singed by his portable stove.

A man breaks away out of the crowd and enters the lobby of the building. There is something special about him, the way he carries himself, as if he is determined to make good. He nods at the security guards, and they smile back. He turns into the narrow hallway and there is an elevator waiting, already full of people. He steps in right before the door closes. There is a woman standing next to him, wearing a blue overcoat and smelling like lavender. The scent is coming from her hair.

This man is going to quit his job today, a job he has worked at for fifteen years, and soon he will never have to ride this elevator again. Last night he ordered a gin and tonic at a bar, and when he tasted the lime, he suddenly remembered being in love when he was twenty-two, with a girl he’d met working at a fish fry—tall, slender, and knockkneed, her skin so pale it would change color when you touched it. On Mondays the fish fry was closed and he would pack food and a small thermos of gin and tonic and they would go to the beach, stretch out on a blanket in the sun, and take turns reading short stories out loud and swimming in the icy water.

It was, John remembered, a time when he was happy, and he was not happy now, living alone and reading Kierkegaard and masturbating every night into a sock. Leaning against the bar, he caught a reflection of himself in the mirror above. There was no denying it—he was middle-aged. He lifted his fingers to his mouth as he swallowed the gin, as if he needed to push the alcohol farther down his throat. He remembered licking the girl’s neck on the blanket, how salty it tasted, and he ran his tongue over his own wrist. All he felt was hair.

He would change what he could—he would leave his job. In the morning this made everything seem different. The sky was brighter, the colors people wore passed in a blur, and even when he stepped onto the elevator, he could sense it—a certain snappiness to things, to their possibility.

John can’t help himself—he starts to hum.
Fascinating rhythm, you’ve got me on the go
. The other people in the elevator exchange glances and try to move away from him, but there is no place to go. John does not care—in fact, so determined is he to change his life that he hums louder. Still they are going up and up and John’s ears begin to pop. He taps his foot back and forth, keeping time to the jingle in his throat.

The lavender-smelling woman touches her elbow to the side of John’s coat as she reaches into her bag for a tissue. There is something in her eye and she is looking at the ceiling of the elevator, at the tiny little escape hatch, holding the skin below her lashes so that the pink shows. John watches her. He hums.

When John was twelve years old, he bought a plastic model of an eye for a science project. The model was the size of a bowling ball and came apart into soft pieces, pink and blue and red, with a sliding see-through lid over the iris. John made lists of diseases that blinded, chemicals and birth defects. He learned to read the alphabet in braille. He set books out on the table and drew charts with Magic Markers and came in second place at the science fair, just behind the kinetic energy roller designed by Philly Joe.

Later, John told the girl he fell in love with about it on the beach. He talked about her pupils, her cornea, her sclera and iris, her vitreous body and aqueous humor. She told him that when she was a child and something was caught in her eye, her mother, a nurse, would use her tongue to remove it.

The elevator stops at the fourteenth floor. The doors open and three people step out before the doors close again. The remaining passengers move away from John into the corners, and the lavender woman rearranges herself so that she is no longer touching anyone. She lowers her head, dabbing at her lashes with the tissue in her hand. John wonders if he should offer to lick it out.

Red has been washing windows for five years. Before that he was a housepainter and before that he shingled roofs and before that he was a truck driver and before that he was a mover. He carried pianos on his back. The hammers hit the strings on each step down the stairs, and with the crushing weight of wood on top of him, Red felt it was not an instrument anymore but all of his disappointments in life, groaning. His parents were killed in a car on the highway while Red was at a moving job, and that did it for him—he couldn’t carry anything anymore.

He met his wife at a truck stop. She was driving a refrigerated case full of turkey parts; he was pulling a load of Nabisco. They made love in the parking lot, his cab beneath a row of trees. She held on to the back of the driver’s seat and he braced against the wheel, the smell of cigarettes on his fingertips. Her hair covered her face in the dark. He parted it and pulled it aside and looked at her nose. It was round with a slight turn at the end, and he could see straight up inside.

Before long she was pregnant and Red was climbing roofs. It was good to be working on homes, to be in one place, with a woman who made him sandwiches. He opened his lunch bag each day and reached inside with the expectation of hard-boiled eggs, of tuna fish, of salami and cheese and grapes and cookies and small containers of applesauce. He pressed his back against the chimney, spread these items out on his napkin, and felt loved.

After the baby came they needed money and he began washing skyscrapers. On his first trip over the edge, his knees had wobbled. Don’t look down, he’d been told—it’ll seem like miles. He didn’t, but he could still see the reflection of what was behind him in the glass as he ran his squeegee across, and he could feel the wind shifting the scaffolding beneath his feet, and the metal of the railings seemed cold, no matter how long the sun had been shining on it. Bugs ran into the windows. Occasionally, a bird.

Red’s daughter’s ears never did grow in. She had a hearing aid to make up for a twisted canal, and there was no outer cartilage, just those tiny flaps—the beginnings of ears, a ridge of semicircles—that her mother helped to hide with her hair.

At the breakfast table that morning his daughter had told him that she loved someone. Me, I hope, Red said. And she said yes, but she meant a different kind of love. She meant movie love. There was a boy in her first-grade class who wore glasses and she was making him a valentine. She had already picked out the paper and was working on cutting a triangle for the front, because he liked triangles.

It made Red think of the fir tree. Too much damage had been done when he crushed it, and so while his daughter was still in the incubator and maybe going to die, he’d torn the plant out by the roots. It hurt him to do it, because he felt it might have saved him. When he fed it into the wood chipper, the machine choked. He pulled the pieces out, his hands sticky with sap, and he’d thought, I love this so much. I love this more than anything.

John steps out of the elevator with the lavender-smelling woman. They are standing on the same floor. He asks her, does she need any help? Can he do something for her? The speck—he can almost see it—seems to be caught in the corner of her eye. She is nearly crying, but says no and reaches out for the wall, then begins to guide herself, sliding her hand toward the door to the ladies’ room.

John’s assistant has her hair piled on top of her head like an ice cream cone. He says hello to her and wiggles his eyebrows in a way that means
coffee
. She can tell that something is different. He notices that she notices and he feels glad. He wants to shout, I am different today! But instead he grips the handle of his office door and turns it. This office is a corner office, with windows from ceiling to floor, and as he puts down his briefcase on his desk, he sees Red go flying past in one vertical movement.

The man is more of a blur, really, a flash of something large that makes John jump and then think—
Did I see that?
—and rush over to the window and press his forehead against it, looking down at the body twisting and turning. A piece of rope is trailing behind, attached to the man’s back like the tail of a kite. John bangs his hands against the glass, thinking for a moment that he will be able to grab hold of it.

There is nothing he can do, so he watches. John’s legs ache as if he has been running. He sees the body flail along the side of the building and his stomach drops—the same queasy sensation of an elevator slipping before it catches itself—the suspension for a moment in the air it leaves behind. John leans into the frame of the window and realizes he is biting his lip. There is blood; he can taste it with his tongue.

His secretary comes in behind him and places a cup of coffee on his desk. Here you are, she says, and John decides, right as he hears the sound of the cup and saucer clink together on the table, that he going to wait outside the ladies’ room until the lavender woman comes out. He is going to ask her to lunch and ride the elevator down with her, and if he is lucky—very, very lucky—she will marry him and his life will change and he will never have to come back to this.

The owner of the kebab stand is sitting on a milk crate and pressing a package of frozen meat to his face. He is looking up at a police officer and giving a description of the truck that destroyed his lunch cart when he sees Red’s hard hat and pauses, thinking it is a falling bird—just as one of the purple-windbreaker tourists lifts the lens of her camera and focuses on a gargoyle and presses the shutter and captures it.

The hard hat is white. On the side, it has the letters CABM stamped in blue by the company Red works for, Chambers American Building & Maintenance. The hard hat is given to each man his first day on the job. It lands a full fifteen seconds before Red does, in a fountain in front of the building.

There is a woman on her way to an interview. She has three children at home and a husband who has disappeared, and now, suddenly, here is a shimmering explosion of water over her pink silk suit that leaves dark stains across her shoulders, blurs the ink on the copies of her résumé, and flattens her hair.

There is a boy delivering a plain cheese pizza. This pizza is on its way to a good-bye party for a receptionist who has worked at her company for forty years, but now the thin cardboard box is drenched, and the pizza boy turns his head in surprise as lucky pennies wash onto the pavement.