Emerald City Part 16

We make our way to Union Square. Lo and behold, there is Irish, holding court with a couple of winos and a girl named Pamela, who I've heard is a prost.i.tute. Irish looks different tonight-he's got big, swashbuckling sleeves that flap like sails in the wind. He's grand. As we walk toward him, blinking in the liquidy light, an amazement at his greatness overwhelms us. He is a great man, Irish. We're lucky to know him.

Irish scoops Angel into his arms. "My beloved," he says. "I've been waiting all night for you." And he kisses her full on the lips-a deep, long kiss that Angel seems at first to resist. Then she relaxes, like always. I feel a small, sharp pain, like a splinter of gla.s.s in my heart. But I'm not surprised. It was always going to happen, I think. We were always waiting.

Angel and Irish draw apart and look at each other. Liz hovers near them. Pamela gets up and walks away, into the shadows. I sit on the bench with the winos and stare up at the St. Francis Hotel.

"You're high," Irish says to Angel. "So very high."

"What about you? Your pupils are gone," she says.

Irish laughs. He laughs and laughs, opening up his mouth like the world could fit in it. Irish might live on the streets, but his teeth are white. "I'll see you in Heaven," he says.

On the St. Francis Hotel the gla.s.s elevators float. Two reach the top, and two more rise slowly to join them. They hang there, all four, and I hold my breath as the fifth approaches and will the others not to move until it gets there. I keep perfectly still, pushing the last one up with my eyes until it reaches the top, and there they are, in a perfect line, all five.

I turn to show Angel and Liz, but they're gone. I see them walking away with Irish, Angel in the middle, Liz clutching at her arm like the night could pull them apart. It's Liz who looks back at me. Our eyes meet, and I feel like she's talking out loud, I understand so perfectly. If I move fast, now, I can keep her from winning. But the thought makes me tired. I don't move. Liz turns away. I think I see a bouncing in her steps, but I stay where I am.

They turn to ghosts in the darkness and vanish. My teeth start to chatter. It's over. Angel is gone, I think, and I start to cry. She just walked away.

Then I hear a rushing noise. It's a sound like time pa.s.sing, years racing past, so all of a sudden I'm much older, a grown-up woman looking back to when she was a girl in Union Square. And I realize that even if Angel never thinks of me again, at some point I'll get up and take the bus home.

The winos have drifted off. By my Mickey Mouse watch it's 5 A.M. I notice someone crossing the square-it's Silas, the dirty bandage still around his head. I yell out to him.

He comes over slowly, like it hurts to walk. He sits down next to me. For a long time we just sit, not talking. Finally I ask, "Was it really over a woman?"

Silas shakes his head. "Just a fight," he says. "Just another stupid fight."

I straighten my legs so that my sneakers meet in front of me. They're smudged but still white. "I'm hungry," I say.

"Me, too," Silas says. "But everything's closed." Then he says, "I'm leaving town."

"To where?"

"South Carolina. My brother's store. Called him up today."

"How come?"

"Had enough," he says. "Just finally had enough."

I know there's something I should say, but I don't know what. "Is he nice," I ask, "your brother?"

Silas grins. I see the young part of him then, the kind of mischief boys have. "He's the meanest b.a.s.t.a.r.d I know."

"What about Irish?" I ask. "Won't you miss Irish and those guys?

"Irish is a dead man."

I stare at Silas.

"Believe it," he says. "In twenty years no one will remember him."

Twenty years. In twenty years I'd be thirty-four years old, my stepmother's age. It would be 1994. And suddenly I think, Silas is right-Irish is dead. And Angel, too, and maybe even Liz. Right now is their perfect, only time. It will sweep them away. But Silas was always outside it.

I put my hand in my pocket and find the thimble. I pull it out. "You gave me this," I tell him.

Silas looks at the thimble like he's never seen it. Then he says, "That's real silver."

Maybe he wants it back to sell, for his trip to South Carolina. I leave the thimble in my hand so that if Silas wants it he can just take it. But he doesn't. We both look at the thimble. "Thanks," I say.

We lean back on the bench. My high is wearing off. I have a feeling in my chest like feathers, like a bird waking up and brushing against my ribs. The elevators rise and fall, like signals.

"Always watching," Silas says, looking at me. "Those big eyes, always moving."

I nod, ashamed. "But I never do anything," I say. And all of a sudden I know, I know why Angel left me.

Silas frowns. "Sure you do. You watch," he says, "which is what'll save you."

I shrug. But the longer we sit, the more I realize he's right-what I do is watch. I'm like Silas, I think. In twenty years I'll still be alive.

On one side the sky is getting light, like a lid is being lifted up. I watch it, trying to see the day coming, but I can't. All of a sudden the sky is just bright.

"I wonder what people will look like in 1994," I say.

Silas considers. "Twenty years? Probably look like us again."

"Like you and me?" I'm disappointed.

"Oh yeah," Silas says with a wry grin. "Wishing they'd been here the first time."

I look at the blue bandanna tied around his wrist, his torn-up jeans and army jacket with a Grateful Dead skull on one pocket. When I'm thirty-four, tonight will be a million years ago, I think-the St. Francis Hotel and the rainy palm tree sounds, Silas with the bandage on his head-and this makes me see how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.

"I'll remember Irish," I say loudly. "I'll remember everyone. In twenty years."

Silas looks at me curiously. Then he touches my face, tracing my left cheekbone almost to my ear. His finger is warm and rough, and I have the thought that to Silas my skin must feel soft. He studies the paint on the tip of his finger, and smiles. He shows me. "Silver," he says.

JENNIFER EGAN.

Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, The Invisible Circus, The Keep, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and the story collection Emerald City. Her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Books by Jennifer Egan.

A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The Keep.

Look at Me.

Emerald City and Other Stories.

The Invisible Circus.

BOOKS BY JENNIFER EGAN.

EMERALD CITY.

These eleven masterful stories-the first collection from acclaimed author Jennifer Egan-deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan's characters-models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls-are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations. Elegant and poignant, the stories in Emerald City are seamless evocations of self-discovery.

Fiction/978-0-307-38753-0.

THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS.

In Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest that yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation. This spellbinding novel introduced Egan's remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters and the nuances of emotion.

Fiction/978-0-307-38752-3.

THE KEEP.

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

Fiction/978-1-4000-7974-2.

LOOK AT ME.

At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty t.i.tanium screws to rea.s.semble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch film, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte's narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with image. There's a deceptively plain teenage girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of ident.i.ty and imposture.

Fiction/978-0-385-72135-6.

ANCHOR BOOKS.

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