I used to be in insurance, but then one day the company exploded, I thought of saying. Came close to saying, actually. In the end, I managed something a little more sane.
“I don’t want a date, Ms. Robeson,” No more than I wanted to be on a first-name basis with her, and was that a wink of disappointment I saw in her eyes? By God, I thought it was. But at least it convinced her. I was still safe.
She put her hands on her hips and looked at me with mock exasperation. Or maybe not so mock. “Then what do you want?”
“Just someone to talk to. I tried several shrinks, but they’re . . . busy.”
“All of them?”
“It would appear so.”
“If you’re having problems with your sex life or feeling the urge to race around town killing men in turbans, I don’t want to know about it.”
“It’s nothing like that. I’m not going to make you blush, I promise.” Which wasn’t quite the same as saying I promise not to shock you or You won’t think I’m crazy. “Just lunch and a little advice, that’s all I’m asking. What do you say?”
I was surprised—almost flabbergasted—by my own persuasiveness. If I’d planned the conversation in advance, I almost certainly would have blown the whole deal. I suppose she was curious, and I’m sure she heard a degree of sincerity in my voice. She may also have surmised that if I was the sort of man who liked to try his hand picking up women, I would have had a go on that day in August when I’d actually been alone with her in her apartment, the elusive Edward in France or Germany. And I have to wonder how much actual desperation she saw in my face.
In any case, she agreed to have lunch with me at Donald’s Grill down the street on Friday. Donald’s may be the least romantic restaurant in all of Manhattan—good food, fluorescent lights, waiters who make it clear they’d like you to hurry. She did so with the air of a woman paying an overdue debt about which she’s nearly forgotten. This was not exactly flattering, but it was good enough for me. Noon would be fine for her, she said. If I’d meet her in the lobby, we could walk down there together; I told her that would be fine for me, too.
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 familiarly 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 speak a dozen words, but they were life-changers. Life-savers.
The first five (that’s me, sitting on the edge of the bed): Yow, call in sick, y’all! The next seven (that’s me, plodding toward the shower and scratching my left buttock as I go): Yow, spend the day in Central Park! There was no premonition involved. It was clearly Mr. Yow, Git Down, not the voice of God. It was just a version of my very own voice (as they all are), in other words, telling me to play hooky. Do a little suffin fo’ yo’self, Gre’t God! The last time I could recall hearing this version of my voice, the subject had been a karaoke contest at a bar on Amsterdam Avenue: Yow, sing along wit’ Neil Diamond, fool— git up on stage and git ya bad self down!
“I guess I know what you mean,” she said, smiling a little.
“Do you?”
“Well… I once took off my shirt in a Key West bar and won ten dollars dancing to ‘Honky Tonk Women.'” She paused. “Edward doesn’t know, and if you ever tell him, I’ll be forced to stab you in the eye with one of his tie tacks.”
“Yow, you go, girl,” I said, and her smile became a rather wistful grin. It made her look younger. I thought this had a chance of working.
We walked into Donald’s. There was a cardboard turkey on the door, cardboard Pilgrims on the green tile wall above the steam table.
“I listened to Mr. Yow, Git Down and I’m here,” I said. “But some other things are here, too, and he can’t help with them. They’re things I can’t seem to get rid of. Those are what I want to talk to you about.”
“Let me repeat that I’m no shrink,” she said, and with more than a trace of uneasiness. The grin was gone. “I majored in German and minored in European history.”
You and your husband must have a lot to talk about, I thought. What I said out loud was that it didn’t have to be her, necessarily, just someone.
“All right. Just as long as you know.”
A waiter took our drink orders, decaf for her, regular for me. Once he went away she asked me what things I was talking about.