How It Ended Part 20

"I'm going back up there in a few days."

"It must be just lovely."

"I told you I wanted a simpler life."

"Simpler life? You're moving to Livingston f.u.c.king Montana with Chip f.u.c.king Ralston. Do you have any idea what a cliche that is? I've got it in my computer. Control MONTANA CLICHe. It's not simple. It's just ... stupid."

She is silent on the other end and, as for me, I can hardly speak. Finally I say, "This is a joke, right?"

"Collin, these things happen. You know? It's n.o.body's fault."

"Chip Ralston?"

"I can understand your being upset."

"It's pathetic."

"Don't make me say things you don't want to hear."

"That f.u.c.king midget," I say, then slam down the phone and regret it immediately. Scooping up an Imari vase, Philomena's prized possession, I hurl it against the wall, where it shatters gratifyingly. We bought the vase on a trip to Kyoto, and I remember wondering what would happen to it, the first durable object we purchased together. Would we look at it ten, twenty years hence and remember? Afterward, we went back to the ryokan ryokan in the hills, where a deep cedar tub was steaming in antic.i.p.ation of our arrival, and blue-and-white striped robes had been laid out on the black-bordered tatami mats. Would I go back to that time, if I could? Would I relive it all to this moment, with foreknowledge? Or would I drown the b.i.t.c.h right there in the tub? in the hills, where a deep cedar tub was steaming in antic.i.p.ation of our arrival, and blue-and-white striped robes had been laid out on the black-bordered tatami mats. Would I go back to that time, if I could? Would I relive it all to this moment, with foreknowledge? Or would I drown the b.i.t.c.h right there in the tub?

Parting Words from the Editor-in-Chief "Please hold for Jillian."

I'd rather not, thanks.

"Whatever you did to alienate Chip Ralston and his people," my editrix says by way of greeting, "I'm afraid it's rather the last straw. At any rate, I don't think your heart was ever in this enterprise. I'm sure you'll find a position more worthy of your, uh, talents elsewhere, yes? Well, I think that covers it."

"What I I did? The son of a b.i.t.c.h is f.u.c.king my girlfriend." did? The son of a b.i.t.c.h is f.u.c.king my girlfriend."

"Well, I think that's very democratic of him. Droit du seigneur Droit du seigneur and all. Quite an honor." She pauses to inhale. "You know, I keep thinking you've been hanging out for long enough-that you and all. Quite an honor." She pauses to inhale. "You know, I keep thinking you've been hanging out for long enough-that you ought ought to be dry behind the ears by now. I kept waiting. Good-bye, Collin." to be dry behind the ears by now. I kept waiting. Good-bye, Collin."

One Week Later, Theater District We are cl.u.s.tered around the side entrance of the Ed Sullivan Theater, on West Fifty-third Street, home of the Late Show with David Letterman Late Show with David Letterman. Two blue police barriers make a corridor from the curb to the stage door. A security man stands nearby while we press up against the barricades, autograph books clutched to our chests, stamping our cold feet. We don't mind the cold. We're fans, real fans, big fans. We are the biggest fans. As in "Hey, Clint, I'm your biggest fan." (Most of us are, anyway, although one is an impostor.) Clarence, for instance, with his huge, fur-hooded Army-surplus parka, his scholarly thick black gla.s.ses, has the unabashed air of a man engaged in an important pursuit: "I just got Brooke Shields, man. She's a real nice lady. Not like that Richard Chamberlain. Richard Chamberlain, he comes through here, he shakes your hand. That sucks, man. What I'm gonna do with a handshake?"

"Can't sell it," says Charlie, an incongruously sane-looking gentleman in a Mets warmup jacket who is probably a plumber in Patchogue, Long Island, when he isn't here outside the Ed Sullivan Theater or in the lobby of NBC headquarters in Rockefeller Center. He and his friend Tony are armed with five-by-eight index cards and the squeaky-wheel, Me-Me-Me manners of born New Yorkers. If they can get three cards signed, they will sell two to a dealer.

Suddenly the throng goes taut and silent, a lovestruck jellyfish, as a shiny black stretch fins up to the curb and stops, its cargo invisible behind the smoked gla.s.s.

The stately, plump driver marches around and opens the door.

"Chip!" screams one of the photographers. "Over here!"

"Hey, Chip!"

"I'm your biggest fan, Chip."

"How about an autograph, Chip?"

"Look over here! Smile!"

Chip hesitates, framed in the open door of the limo, before he launches himself toward the stage door, hunched over, his head retracted into the sh.e.l.l of his jacket, moving quickly, but not quickly enough to dodge me as I slide under the police barrier and cut him off.

"Hi, Chip, I'm Collin McNab." Savoring for a nanosecond the infusion of fear in his much admired and, indeed, very striking, hazel eyes, I then nail him with a hard right jab, aimed at the bridge of the nose, that actually connects with his temple as he tries to duck away. Solid contact, nonetheless. Solid enough to hurt the s.h.i.t out of my hand.

"I'm your biggest f.u.c.kin' fan, Chip," I say as he wobbles and then sinks to his knees just as a security guard tackles me and smashes my face against the grainy concrete.

Good news, Clarence and Charlie: I see stars!

The Lemon Light By the time my name is called, Brooke is waiting for me by the front desk at the Eighteenth Precinct. So is a reporter from the Post Post. A sallow man, ancient by newspaper standards-easily forty-he pushes back the bill of his cap, which bears the logo New York-It Ain't Over New York-It Ain't Over, and flips open his steno pad.

"Why'd you do it?" he asks as I finish signing at the desk.

"I didn't like his acting choices."

"Is it true you've been stalking Chip Ralston for months?"

Brooke takes my arm as we bolt for the door. Outside, we are ambushed by three photographers.

"Collin, look here."

"Is that your girlfriend?"

"How about the two of you kissing for a picture?"

They follow us down the street, yipping and snapping. So this is what it's like, I think.

Finally we are alone and anonymous again on the sidewalk. The next day the Post Post will run a photo of me and Brooke, who is identified, half correctly, as my girlfriend. will run a photo of me and Brooke, who is identified, half correctly, as my girlfriend.

"So," Brooke says. "What do you want to do? Go to Rockefeller Center and watch the skaters?" For some reason I find this hilarious. "Then maybe check out the windows at Saks." She's laughing now.

"Catch the Christmas show at Radio City," I suggest.

"I don't know if they let felons in to see the Rockettes." Brooke's demeanor turns earnest. "Maybe if we act like we just got off the bus and it's our first day ever in the city, and we've come from really far away to see the lights on Fifth Avenue and the tree ..." She shrugs, takes my hand and begins to lead me east on Fiftieth.

And, walking through the slanting secondhand light toward Rockefeller Center and Fifth Avenue, I remember that the city used to seem to me like a giant advent calendar with a thousand doors. Prowling the streets at night, you felt that every luminous tower was a glittering enigma that might secretly bear your name. I remember the joy, not so very long ago, of waking up newly arrived in the city, believing that everything I wanted in the world was waiting outside the door of my apartment, right down the street. Just around the next corner, or the one after.

1995.

I Love You, Honey The first time it happened, Liam blamed the terrorists. He a.s.sumed that his wife, like all the other sentient residents of the city, was traumatized by the events of that September day. Deciding that this was no world into which to bring another child was a perfectly rational response, though he knew many people who'd had the exact opposite response. This, too, was understandable: affirming life in the face of so much death. He could name several children who were born nine months later, and he a.s.sumed there were hundreds, maybe thousands, more around the city-in fact, he'd read something to that effect. But Lora's was the opposite response. He didn't really begin to suspect until much later that her motives might have been more complex, less cosmic and more personal, than he had imagined.

Her friend LuAnne had called to say something had happened, and she'd started surfing channels with the remote in one hand and the phone in the other, seeing the same image on all the stations. She called Liam at work and his a.s.sistant said he had a meeting scheduled out of the office. Lora then tried his cell, but the call went directly to voice mail. She kept punching the redial b.u.t.ton every few minutes. After the second plane hit, she called the office again to ask where, exactly, the meeting was, frantic with worry, trying to remember if Liam had ever mentioned any business in the World Trade Center, but now she got the a.s.sistant's recorded message. In fact, Liam's office was in TriBeCa, only seven or eight blocks from the towers, and after the first one collapsed, she could imagine any number of scenarios that might have put him in harm's way. After the second tower fell, she was convinced he was dead. And then he called, his greeting incongruously blithe.

"Hey, babe, it's me."

"Liam. Oh my G.o.d. Where are are you?" you?"

"At the office. Just out of a meeting. What's up?"

"Thank G.o.d," she said.

"What's wrong?"

"I thought you were dead."

"Why would I be dead?"

"Jesus, G.o.d, Liam, haven't you heard? heard? Turn on the TV. Look out the window, for G.o.d's sake." Turn on the TV. Look out the window, for G.o.d's sake."

Liam arrived at their apartment on Waverly Place ten minutes later-less time than it would have taken him to walk from TriBeCa, but he didn't realize until later that the subway service was knocked out and that cabs had vanished from the downtown streets-so everyone later agreed-within minutes of the second plane hitting. In fact, he'd been a few blocks away at his girlfriend's apartment on St. Mark's Place. They met there every Tuesday morning, between nine and eleven, turning off the phones, doing it exactly twice, and there had been no reason to suppose that the world would be turned upside down on this particular Tuesday. After talking to Lora, he turned on the TV, shushing Sasha as she stepped out of the bathroom, trying to figure out what the h.e.l.l was happening to his city. His horror was compounded with guilt as he realized how implausible was his claim of being at the office.

"My G.o.d, I can't believe this," Sasha said, throwing her arms around him as she slumped beside him on the couch. He squirmed free and stood up. He knew it was unfair, irrational even, but somehow he blamed her for what had happened and felt an overwhelming desire to be with his wife. Walking back across the Village, looking up warily at a looming apartment tower on Broadway, he struck on the perfect alibi.

Until she actually saw and touched him, Lora couldn't quite overcome her earlier conviction that he'd perished in the disaster, and he seemed just as emotional as he hugged her in the foyer, nearly crushing her ribs in his emphatic embrace. When he finally let go, she saw the tears in his eyes.

"I thought I'd never see you again."

"I was in a screening," he said. "I had no idea."

"I thought I was going to raise our baby alone."

The days that followed were the most vivid of his life. In retrospect, though, they sometimes seemed reduced to a set of experiences that came to sound almost cliched by virtue of their resemblance to those of their friends, repeated endlessly over numerous c.o.c.ktails: the mind-numbing hours in front of the television; the sense of disbelief; the missing friends and acquaintances; the nightmares; the acrid electrical-fire smell in the air; the spontaneous weeping, the excessive drinking. And yet they both agreed-as did everyone else-that they'd never been so conscious of the lives of others, of their own turbulent stream of consciousness, of their own mortality. And they discovered that life was never quite so precious as it was in the proximity of death. From that first night they f.u.c.ked as if their survival depended on it, and with a pa.s.sion neither had felt in years.

Liam was mortified at his own infidelity and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the resolve to honor his marriage vows forever more. He'd felt the same resolve three weeks earlier when he learned Lora was pregnant, but somehow he hadn't managed to break it off with Sasha. He kept meaning to, but it seemed like something he had to do in person rather than over the phone or in an e-mail, and then she would greet him at her apartment door, wearing that aquamarine kimono, the mere sight of which aroused him even before she kissed him.

It was a time of lofty resolutions, of vows and renunciations. He felt incredibly lucky to have escaped this recent peccadillo unscathed, with his marriage intact, although he sometimes wondered if Lora didn't harbor suspicions, and he felt the occasional twinge of guilt about Sasha, who had no one to comfort her in this moment of collective trauma.

For her part, Lora was too relieved to have her husband back to inquire too deeply into his precise itinerary that day. She told herself that the clock had been reset on the morning of September 11 and that whatever happened before didn't really matter. But she couldn't help noticing that Liam seemed almost allergic to his cell phone, jumping whenever it rang over the next few days. He also seemed uncomfortable whenever the subject of people's whereabouts that morning arose, as it did constantly in the days and weeks that followed.

They were inseparable those first few days, staying in or near the apartment, clinging to each other in the aftermath, until Sat.u.r.day morning, when Liam said he was going to the gym.

"Maybe I'll go with you," Lora said.

He shrugged. "If you'd like."

"No, you go ahead," she said.

She waited exactly sixty seconds and then followed him out the door and down the two flights of stairs to the double doors leading to the street, the second of which was just wafting shut. It was one of those days when the wind had shifted uptown, carrying the burned-plastic smell of smoke from Ground Zero. Her fellow pedestrians seemed skittish, the brusque, purposeful tunnel vision of the natives having been replaced by a new caution that made everyone seem like tourists. Lora didn't really have a plan, but the gym was only a few blocks away, and if she lost him on the street, she could just turn up, and if she found him there, she'd say she'd changed her mind. She watched him walking west and followed, catching sight of him at the end of the block as he turned left on Sixth-the opposite direction from the gym. She ran up Waverly and saw Liam at the next corner, waiting for the light.

He crossed the avenue, turned right and went up the steps of St. Joseph's Church, disappearing inside through the big double oak doors. She could hardly believe it. She approached stealthily and stood watching for a few minutes on the sidewalk across the street. She felt almost giddy with relief when she realized this was his secret destination. But her relief was almost immediately replaced by a sense of irritation at how cowardly it was to have lied about where he was going.

Liam had been raised as a Catholic on Long Island, and they were married in the church where he'd received his First Communion. Their wedding day was the last time she agreed to accompany him to church. The daughter of a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother, Lora had enjoyed a thoroughly secular childhood. A staunch agnostic, she used to tease him about his residual Catholicism, which she saw as a tribal habit, like his fondness for corned beef and cabbage, rather than an active belief system. She supposed it made sense that he would seek out the faith of his childhood now, in this moment of extremis. Part of her envied him this reserve source of consolation, and part of her thought he was weak for surrendering, when the going got tough, to the superst.i.tions of his ancestors. What the h.e.l.l was he doing in there anyway? It was probably a reflex, like the desire for comfort food and retro music that had swept across the city. She waited for another five minutes and then returned to the apartment, where she flipped restlessly from one news channel to another, watching the towers fall over and over again as she waited for Liam to come home.

Liam knelt with his head in his hands, finding the familiar darkness of the confessional, redolent of furniture polish and stale perspiration, unexpectedly comforting. When he heard the wood panel slide open, he looked up to see the silhouette of the priest behind the screen.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been, well, more than a year since my last confession."

"How much longer, would you say?"

"It's been ... I think it's about four years."

"Go ahead, my son."

"I'm not sure where to begin."

When he returned home, Liam seemed like a different man from the twitchy neurotic who'd left the apartment a half hour before. For the rest of the day he exhibited a maddening serenity. Lora wanted to challenge him, to crash his spiritual buzz, if that's what it was, but it seemed peevish to chide him for being in a good mood, and she couldn't think of how to engage him in an intellectual debate without acknowledging that she'd followed him. She took another Xanax, her third of the day.

"I'm thinking about going to Ma.s.s tomorrow," he said, while they waited for the check at their local bistro. "I don't know, somehow, with everything that's happened, I think it would be, you know, comforting. Of course you're welcome to join me."

"I think it's sweet," she said, pinching his cheek, "and totally understandable that you can find comfort in your old rituals, but I might feel a little hypocritical suddenly going to church just because I'm feeling emotionally needy. But that's just me. You do what you need to, honey."

That night, for the first time since Tuesday, they failed to have s.e.x. Lora wasn't really in the mood, and was almost looking forward to letting him know she wasn't. But within moments of turning off the television set, she heard him snoring from the other pillow. Lora lay awake in the dark, feeling abandoned, thinking about the chaos outside, and the life growing within her. Though she wished she had some kind of faith, after what had happened she was hard-pressed to imagine a moral order in the universe.

The churches were packed that Sunday. Liam arrived fifteen minutes early for the ten o'clock Ma.s.s and even so he had to stand in the back. He felt the force of Lora's implicit admonishment, along with a kind of sociological embarra.s.sment. Ever since he'd made his way to Stanford, he'd done all he could to distance himself from his heritage and to regard religion as an academic subject. Seeing himself now through the eyes of his friends, he felt ashamed, as if he were standing naked in a room of fully clothed adults, but at the same time he felt the exhilaration of surrender, as if he were a naked infant lying in the sun, absolved of the responsibilities of higher consciousness. For the first time since Tuesday, he felt at home and at peace in his city. He was unexpectedly moved when it came time to exchange the peace of the Lord-a folksy ritual inspired by the Second Vatican Council-which had always seemed artificial to him, the congregants stiffly shaking hands and wishing one another the peace of the Lord, but that day, he found himself clasping the hands of neighbors with special vigor and warmth, looking into their glistening eyes as he uttered, "The peace of the Lord be with you," the voices of his neighbors swelling and filling the church around him. And when the priest intoned, "Lift up your hearts," he seemed to feel his own heart swell and rise as he responded, "We have lifted them up to the Lord." And when, finally, he took the host on his tongue, letting it dissolve on the roof of his mouth, he imagined his inner being infused with light, like a cave suddenly illuminated by a torch.

After Ma.s.s he didn't feel he could return directly to the apartment. It would be like smoking a cigarette after running a marathon. He knew he couldn't face Lora in this state, any more than he'd been able to face Jenny, his last girlfriend, the teetotaler, after doing a few lines of c.o.ke. Instead, he tested this new lightness of spirit as he walked down to Ca.n.a.l Street, to the edge of the blue police barricades sealing off the zone of destruction from the rest of the city, and stood with his fellow citizens watching the plume of smoke that rose like a white pillar into the blue sky and tilted off to the east before diffusing into the c.u.mulus over Brooklyn. From this distance it was an incongruously beautiful sight.

That night, they walked over to Norman's loft in Chelsea, where everyone was telling their stories. "I'm walking down Greenwich Street and suddenly this plane is practically on top of me," their host said, pa.s.sing a joint to Jason, "this huge jet flying just above the tops of the buildings."

Jason took a hit. "Do you guys remember Carlos, the guy who used to cook for our parties?"

"The cute one with the scar above his eye?"

Jason nodded. "Missing. He was a line chef at Windows on the World."

"Jesus."

"Speaking of Jesus," Lora said, "Liam has rediscovered his faith."

"What's this?"

"He went to Ma.s.s this week." Lora walked over and ruffled his hair as if he were a child who'd just done something cute. "Didn't you, my love? I think it's sweet."

"That's great," Jason said.

"Yeah, really," Norman said. "I wish I had one to rediscover."

"Confession," Jason said. "That's what I've always envied about Catholicism. The idea that you can go into a little booth and cleanse your soul."

"I don't think I could go and tell some stranger my sins."

"Oh come on. We Jews have that, too. It's called psychoa.n.a.lysis."

"But it doesn't help. I've talked to my shrink twice this week. What can he tell me? That I have every right to feel bad? That I have survivor's guilt? That I should refill my Paxil?"