That night was a good one for me. I went to sleep almost immediately, and there were
no dreams of Sonja D’Amico going down beside the burning building with her hands
on her thighs, like a stewardess looking for water.
As we strolled down 86th Street the following day, I asked Paula where she’d been
when she heard.
“San Francisco,” she said. “Fast asleep in a Wradling Hotel suite with Edward beside
me, undoubtedly snoring as usual. I was coming back here on September twelfth and
Edward was going on to Los Angeles for meetings. The hotel management actually
rang the fire alarm.”
“That must have scared the hell out of you.”
“It did, although my first thought wasn’t fire but earthquake. Then this disembodied
voice came through the speakers, telling us that there was no fire in the hotel, but a
hell of a big one in New York.”
“Jesus.”
“Hearing it like that, in bed in a strange room…hearing it come down from the ceiling
like the voice of God…” She shook her head. Her lips were pressed so tightly together
that her lipstick almost disappeared. “That was very frightening. I suppose I
understand the urge to pass on news like that, and immediately, but I still haven’t
entirely forgiven the management of the Wradling for doing it that way. I don’t think
I’ll be staying there again.”
“Did your husband go on to his meetings?”
“They were canceled. I imagine a lot of meetings were canceled that day. We stayed
in bed with the TV on until the sun came up, trying to get our heads around it. Do you
know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“We talked about who might have been there that we knew. I suppose we weren’t the
only ones doing that, either.”
“Did you come up with anyone?”
“A broker from Shearson Lehman and the assistant manager of the Borders book store
in the mall,” she said. “One of them was all right. One of them…well, you know, one
of them wasn’t. What about you?”
So I didn’t have to sneak up on it, after all. We weren’t even at the restaurant yet and
here it was.
“I would have been there,” I said. “I should have been there. It’s where I worked. In an insurance company on the hundred and tenth floor.”
She stopped dead on the sidewalk, looking up at me, eyes wide. I suppose to the
people who had to veer around us, we must have looked like lovers. “Scott, no!”
“Scott, yes,” I said. And finally told someone about how I woke up on September
Eleventh expecting to do all the things I usually did on weekdays, from the cup of
black coffee while I shaved all the way to the cup of cocoa in front of the midnight
news summary on Channel Thirteen. A day like any other day, that was what I had in mind. I think that is what Americans had come to expect as their right. Well, guess
what? That’s an airplane! Flying into the side of a skyscraper! Ha-ha, asshole, the
joke’s on you, and half the goddam world’s laughing!
I told her about looking out my apartment window and seeing the seven A.M. sky was
perfectly cloudless, the sort of blue so deep you think you can almost see through it to
the stars beyond. Then I told her about the voice. I think everyone has various voices
in their heads and we get used to them. When I was sixteen, one of mine spoke up and
suggested it might be quite a kick to masturbate into a pair of my sister’s underpants.
She has about a thousand pairs and surely won’t miss one, y’all, the voice opined. (I
did not tell Paula Robeson about this particular adolescent adventure.) I’d have to call
that the voice of utter irresponsibility, more familiarily known as Mr. Yow, Git Down.
“Mr. Yow, Git Down?” Paula asked doubtfully.
“In honor of James Brown, the King of Soul.”
“If you say so.”
Mr. Yow, Git Down had had less and less to say to me, especially since I’d pretty
much given up drinking, and on that day he awoke from his doze just long enough to