Jill Ciment Page 3

  She and the bag are put in a cage. To her right, in a separate cell, something moans under a yellow towel, and to her left, something whimpers through the bars. Dorothy has no patience for the suffering of other dogs. She closes her eyes. Whenever she hears human voices, though, she rouses herself. Maybe Alex and Ruth have come for her?

  THE HOSPITAL’S AUTOMATED GLASS DOORS spring open. The night air is now so arctic and still, Ruth half expects the city to sound muted; the noise assaults her like fists. When Alex hears the dull din again, he’s almost relieved: any noise but the muffled despair of the hospital.

  Alex carries the board, Ruth the blanket. There’s no point in looking for a taxi; the whole East Side is still log-jammed. They could walk home faster, if it wasn’t so cold and far, and they weren’t so exhausted and sad.

  “Should we try the subway?” Alex asks.

  “I’m not riding in any tunnels tonight,” Ruth says.

  Near the bus stop, a woman dressed in a fur coat and house slippers comes out her lobby door and peers down Second Avenue. Brake lights recede to infinity. A news helicopter circles overhead. Police part traffic to let a caravan of armored FBI trucks through. “Do you know what’s going on?” she asks Alex and Ruth. “My cable’s out.”

  “We’ve been at the animal hospital for the past couple of hours,” Alex says.

  “Our dog might be paralyzed,” Ruth blurts out, lest Dorothy’s tragedy already be forgotten in the city’s crisis.

  “All we know is the Midtown Tunnel has been closed,” Alex tells her.

  “A tanker truck crashed inside,” Ruth adds. “We don’t know if it was an accident or if the driver swerved on purpose.”

  “Do you think that’s why my cable’s out?”

  Next to the bus stop is a newspaper kiosk, the headlines already old news. Behind a curtain of tabloids hanging from clothespins, the vendor stares at a television no bigger than a toaster. The screen is entirely phosphorescent green, except for a local news channel’s logo, and what Alex and Ruth assume are the tanker’s headlamps glowing in the belly of the tunnel. They watch as the yellow orbs grow bigger, brighter, sharper, and closer.

  “Who’s operating the camera?” Alex asks the vender.

  “The FBI. It’s an unmanned bomb robot with a night-vision camera mounted on top,” he answers, without taking his eyes off the set.

  Ruth and Alex can now see a faint shape behind the headlights, something more suggested than real—a ghostly relic, sunken tonnage, a danger that’s been down in that tunnel for decades rather than hours.

  “They think there’s a bomb?” Alex asks.

  The vendor shrugs. “They’re still looking for the driver.”

  “Is he in the truck?”

  “The tank holds ten thousand gallons of gasoline. Would you stay inside that truck?”

  Stuffy, humid, alive with perfumes and must, the downtown bus is standing-room-only The crowd separates them, Ruth to the rear, Alex up front near the trio of seats set aside for the handicapped and the elderly. He grabs a strap as the bus releases its airbrakes. A middle-aged woman offers him her seat, a gesture he normally finds demeaning, but tonight seems kind beyond words. He rests the cutting board across his lap and closes his eyes, just for a second or two. Once he shuts them, though, he realizes he hasn’t the will to open them. Heat pours up through the floor vents. The bus sways. The weight of the cutting board is like a blanket. All this should put him to sleep, but it’s not exhaustion he feels, it’s relief, primal burning relief, as when you open a blister.

  He’s as terrified as the next man about what might be down in that tunnel, but he can’t deny the exquisite rush of release he feels. He’s been granted a temporary reprieve. He won’t have to suffer house hunters in his studio tomorrow—stepping around piles of drawings, setting their wet gloves on his work bench, a surface he keeps as clean and neat as an operating table; strangers measuring walls thick with sketches—disturbing the fragile alchemy of chaos and sterility he needs for his work. He’s been covering these walls with his imagery for almost half a century, as methodically as a clam secretes its essence to make its shell. When Lily had first peered into his studio during the appraisal, she proclaimed it would make a perfect nursery.

  Ruth suggested he take Polaroids of his studio so that when they move, they’ll be able to set up his new studio— wherever that may be—exactly like the old one.

  How can he explain to her that it isn’t just the room, it’s also the routine, the uniformity of the airshaft light, the predictability of the clanging radiator. The wretched monotony is needed for wild exuberance, the safety of going crazy in a padded cell. His latest creations are illuminated manuscripts he’s been working on for the past year. As monks once illustrated the Bible with gold leaf and devotion, he is illuminating the seven-hundred-and-fifty-page file that the FBI had kept on Ruth and him during the heyday of the cold war. Initial showings of the manuscript pages have garnered him just enough attention from the art world to offer promise, though at his age, he isn’t exactly sure what promise means anymore.

  He’d prefer putting off their move—a disruption, in all likelihood, that might cost him months—until he is at least halfway finished with his tome, the point of no return, but how can he ask Ruth to wait? He is only on page fifty-one of seven hundred and fifty. And now, as long as the danger remains in the tunnel, the question is moot. Who shops for a nursery during a red alert?

  They disembark at St. Mark’s Place. Mr. Rahim is rolling down his metal shutter for the night. He sees them before they see him, the old husband gripping the empty cutting board and his old wife clutching the shabby blanket. They look, to Mr. Rahim, like refugees. “How’s Miss Dottie?” he asks.

  “She might need surgery,” Ruth says.

  “Any news about the truck?” Alex asks.

  “The robot’s found nothing so far, but the FBI is saying the bomb may be inside the tank. It’s an Exxon truck. No one knows where the driver is. Police aren’t even sure the driver was behind the wheel when it crashed. He may have been hijacked. A police sketch of a man witnesses saw fleeing the truck is all over the TV. My wife phones to say she thinks it’s our super. When did our super, who can’t fix the boiler, learn to drive a tanker truck?”

  Mr. Rahim glances over at the wife. Her bottle-thick glasses are dusted with hoarfrost. Even so, he can see her eyes are red-rimmed. “Is the surgery dangerous?” he asks her.

  “At Dorothy’s age, everything is risky.”

  The five flights of stairs are a drawback, but not a deal breaker, according to Lily. “The East Village is a young person’s neighborhood these days, edgy and energetic. The stairs can even be an asset; they keep the monthly charges low.”

  Ruth looks up at the ascending steps. It’s like climbing to the top of a bell tower. She could barely summon the strength to walk home from the bus stop, but he’s already started up, taking two treads at a time. The walls echo and amplify; she hears him breathing hard, sighing, his footfalls increasingly leaden. But he doesn’t slow down. What does his stupid test prove? Does he think he can outrun death? Does he think if he doesn’t waste time, time won’t waste him?

  Alex is already in the apartment when she finally catches up. She reaches for the light switch. Dorothy’s rubber mailman, her squeaky hot dog, her tennis ball lay scattered on the floor, her leash and winter sweater hang on a hook. In the kitchen, her untouched bowl waits between their chairs, her mess lays pooled on the tiles.

  Ruth sheds her coat, picks up a roll of paper towels and cleanser, gets on her knees, and wipes up the mess with an intensity and vigor that rivals Alex’s sprint up the steps. She clears the table, throws the leftover chicken into the garbage, rinses the plates, and stacks them in the dishwasher.

  “Ruth,” Alex says, “we can clean up tomorrow.”

  “When? The open house starts at nine.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s going house hunting tomorrow.”

  “You don’t know
that.”

  “Would you buy an apartment this weekend?”

  She wipes the table and counters, gets out the broom and sweeps. She can’t stop herself anymore than he could. Does she think if her floor is swept, the young and the energetic won’t notice the new water stain on the ceiling, the missing knob on the twenty-year-old stove? Does she think she can fool death with cleanser and paper towels? Out of the corner of her eye she sees Alex is trying to help. He retrieves the cutting board from the hall, runs hot water over it, soaps, rinses, wipes, and then sets it atop the counter. Casting him a look of disbelief, she removes the cutting board and leans it against the garbage pail to be thrown out with the chicken.

  The phone rings. Something’s happened to Dorothy! Ruth grabs the receiver and crushes it to her ear.

  “Sorry to call so late, but I wanted to alert you that I’m bringing a couple by at eight-thirty”

  From the other side of the kitchen, Alex mouths, Is it the hospital? She shakes her head no. “What about the tunnel?” she asks Lily.

  “I closed on a Tribeca loft the day after Nine Eleven. We might not get the hordes we want, but we’ll get the serious ones, and that will work in our favor.”

  Ruth hangs up. “Lily’s bringing a couple by at eight-thirty. The open house is on.”

  Alex hunts for the remote to turn on the news, while Ruth searches for her glasses. She must have taken them off to wash the dishes, but they’re not next to the sink. Without her glasses, Ruth feels naked, more than just undressed, soulless. She’s been wearing glasses since she was nine years old. Before glasses her childhood, a ten-block area around King’s Highway in Brooklyn, had been but light and shadow. When she slipped on her first pair, thick as table-glass, and looked out the optician’s window, she saw that the foaming horse harnessed to a rag wagon, the beggar picking up cigarette butts, the beat cop, the newspaper boy fanning himself with headlines, the men waiting in line for soup, the blur of humanity at the nadir of the Depression, was actually made up of individual faces, each face, including the horse’s, expressing such blatant defeat or rage or worry or hunger or bewilderment that Ruth felt as if she had caught them at their most private moments. Ruth believes that initial shock of clarity awoke in her the first stirring of compassion, that, in many ways, her glasses tell her story.

  Her first frames were thick-rimmed and brown, the least expensive in the shop, chosen by her mother. Even seeing clearly in those years struck her mother, a Russian immigrant with four other children to feed, as an extravagance.

  Her next pair, tiny round wire rims, Ruth chose herself. At sixteen, short, with her mother’s ample breasts and her father’s wild hair, she hoped the frames’ austerity lent her the seriousness with which she yearned to be taken. All the nearsighted Jewish girls in the young socialist club wore round wire frames.

  She was wearing black horn-rims when she first met Alex. He was one of the square-shouldered, chain-smoking, intense, wry veterans crowding City College after the war. He wore paint-splattered army pants and smoked French cigarettes in class. He wasn’t afraid to show disdain when he didn’t agree with professors or reverence when he did. Taking a chair beside him one afternoon as the lights dimmed for an art history slide lecture, Ruth spent the hour studying him; his eyes, caverns of intensity under stiff black brows. He looked as if he was staring into a sun rather than at an example of somber Dutch realism. She invited him to a Henry Wallace for President rally that evening—she was recording secretary of the Progressive Party campus chapter. He was standing by the classroom door, the last to leave. When Ruth was nervous, she imploded behind her glasses. He gently slid them off, studied her naked eyes with the same intensity she’d witnessed all afternoon, and then slid them back on again. It was the sexiest thing that had ever happened to her. A week later, almost to the day, she was lying nude in his bed, her glasses on the floor.

  She and Alex chose her next frames—red, cat-eye, urban, the height of beatnik fashion. She was wearing them her first day of teaching, the week they purchased the apartment for five grand (sixty dollars and seventy-eight cents a month on the GI Bill). Most of their friends—painters, fellow travelers, the sculptress and her war-damaged husband, the musician couple who chain-smoked reefer—were moving to the suburbs and having children, diaper pins clamped between lips where jays once slanted. Sitting with them in their spanking-new treeless box houses, in toy-strewn living rooms that smelled of sour milk and talc, holding squirming infants in her arms, Ruth acted disappointed that she hadn’t yet gotten pregnant, but truthfully, all she felt was relief.

  Now, near blind as she hunts for her glasses (thick, round, brown, a piece of translucent tape reinforcing the left temple), the repercussion of their decision (if that’s what it was) to remain childless and free is inescapable. She and Alex have no one but each other—two specks of dust soon to be scattered to the universe. She gropes behind the microwave and finally feels her thick-rimmed frames. How did her glasses get there?

  Alex presses the red button in the upper-left-hand corner of the remote control, careful not to graze any other button lest he accidentally deprogram the cable box as he did last month. It took him and Ruth the better part of a weekend to reprogram it.

  He inserts his hearing aids and sits on the sofa across from the TV. Ruth slips on her glasses and sits beside him.

  A gyrating cube with the network’s logo spins toward them. A ticker tape of stock quotes, sport’s scores, and headlines scroll across the bottom of the screen. The newscaster’s face fills the rest. His eyes resemble a basset hound’s. “Here’s how our viewer’s responded to tonight’s polling question. If you were in New York City, would you stop using the tunnels and bridges for the next few days? Forty-eight percent of you say yes, forty-two percent say no, and ten percent are undecided.”

  “There’s nothing new,” Ruth says. “They don’t know anything. They’re filling time.”

  “How do you know? It says LIVE. You’re the one who told me if it says LIVE, something’s going on.”

  “They’re onto LIVE. They know all about LIVE. Nowadays, all LIVE means is that the newscaster isn’t dead.”

  The phone rings again. They both look down at the extension on the coffee table. Alex picks it up. All he hears, though, is a dial tone, yet it won’t stop ringing. “It’s dead.”

  “It’s the cell phone!” Ruth says, foraging through her purse. She presses the ringing instrument to her ear. By her expression—eyes closed, mouth a wide slot of darkness, forehead painfully taut, as if someone is pulling her hair— Alex doesn’t need to ask who it is.

  She covers the mouthpiece. “Dorothy can’t feel pain any longer. They don’t think the steroids are going to work. She needs the surgery. They have to perform a test first to see where to operate. The dye can cause seizures. The test could kill her. She’ll have it around seven; if she’s operable she’ll go right to surgery. They need to speak to you. We put it on your credit card.” She hands him the cell phone.

  Even under the best of circumstances—the satellite is overhead, the TV is mute—he can barely make out what anyone says to him on the cell phone. A woman’s voice crackles three hundred or three thousand, he can’t tell. He turns to Ruth, but she’s risen off the sofa, her back to him. Her glasses remain on the armrest, the lenses catching the kitchen’s fluorescent glow, concentrating it into two tiny suns.

  “We’ll authorize the test,” Alex tells the woman, “but please have Dr. Rush call us on our land line with the test results. We want to talk to him before the surgery.” He closes the phone, puts it back in her purse.

  “He talked about a wheelchair of some sort,” Ruth says. “He said the dogs adjust better than their owners.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “No.”

  She sits down again, pulls a tissue from her purse, wipes her eyes, and then crushes the sodden wad in her fist, as if she were trying to compress it into a diamond. In a voice as calm as he can manage, he says, “She�
�s one tough old dame, Ruth. She might surprise us.”

  He takes her hand, and they sit side by side in the television’s volatile, liquid light. The newscaster is now interviewing a robotics expert who explains, in a droning monotone, how an aqua-bomb robot can enter a ten-thousand-gallon gasoline tank and maneuver through highly flammable liquid without destabilizing the environment. “She’s called a Robo-eel. She uses the undulating motions of an eel to keep friction to a minimum.”

  Ruth is right, there’s nothing new.

  Without even knowing that he’s doing it, Alex nods off, catches himself, and sits upright. He doesn’t want to leave Ruth alone right now, but sleep tugs him under again. Only when something loud—a laugh, a gunshot— shatters the oblivion, and alerts him to the world he’s abandoned, does he resurface and open his eyes. In those brief clicks of consciousness, he sees Ruth—now wearing her glasses, pushing the channel button on the remote control as it were a morphine pump. Sometimes he sees the television screen—dancing M&M’s, the ravaged face of a middle-aged rock star, a bloody dagger, BBQ sauce being painted on ribs, an SUV climbing a staircase, a map of Bonanza burning, a cat dancing the cha-cha, the basset-eyed newscaster, green shapes rolling over a weather map, a comely woman eating worms, their empty co-op lobby, commemorative president portrait plates, a man’s face going through a window, a planet exploding. And sometimes, just as sleep gets hold of him again, just as he sinks back into tranquil nothingness, he sees Dorothy in the examining room, crouched on the linoleum floor, waiting for him to call her.

  RUTH PAUSES AT THE NEWS STATION ON HER third go around. In the time it’s taken Alex to fall asleep, a graphic for tonight’s top story has already been designed— a long shot of the tunnel as seen by the night-vision bomb robot, and a bold red-and-black sans-serif typeface emblazoned diagonally across it, Danger in the Tunnel. She switches back to the BBQ sauce being painted on ribs, to the gold-edged dinner plate bearing Ronald Reagan’s face, to their lobby as seen by the security camera near the vestibule door—a skinny boy of twenty, their upstairs neighbor who always forgets to take off his wooden clogs, strides through the lobby on his way out.