Absent Friends

LAURA'S STORY

Chapter 4

image

How to Find the Floor

October 31, 2001

The night before—the night of the day Harry died—Laura had submerged herself in a blanket on the couch in her own apartment and waited for the hours to pass. Headlights brightened the room, fell away, rose again, a seashore rhythm. Car engines purred, a motorcycle roared by. From the staircase came a sudden laugh, as pleased and tipsy people passed Laura's front door.

To all of these Laura attended, lying curled and sleepless. She would have to relearn them now. In the nearly three years that she and Harry had been together, these had become unfamiliar, the sounds, sights, and cadences of the cramped and sunless downtown studio that in any case had never been her home.

Harry had been here only twice: once, on a Sunday morning in early spring, out of a cheerful, demanding curiosity. A quick glance had shown him everything the room had to offer; he'd laughed and taken her in his arms. They'd perched with paper coffee cups on the roof and admired the view over Lower Manhattan. Harry had pointed out this building and that, one neighborhood and another. Laura had been two years in New York by then and would have bridled at a geography lesson from anyone else. But Harry, as always, took the measure perfectly of what she knew and offered detail or context, footnotes or background. And Laura, as always when she listened to Harry—and this was especially true when his subject was his first love, New York—felt a thrill that was part anticipation, part relief, part a sense of herself as privileged beyond hope. It was—and she had laughed when she'd realized this, and never told Harry—the same thrill she'd felt when, as a little girl, she had begun to learn to read.

Though even through her joy, Laura, listening to Harry's measured drawl, heard an urgency behind it, as though he saw the tide slowly rising and had much to tell her before the island where they stood was engulfed and they had to strike out for shore.

That morning they'd climbed back down the fire escape and in through Laura's window. They made laughing, teasing love on a jumble of blankets on the floor, Harry refusing to have any part of anything so tacky as Laura's fold-out couch.

Lying together afterwards, Laura asked Harry, “Can you swim?”

“I can barely float. Why do you ask?”

Laura, who had spent three summers as a lifeguard at a lakeside beach, held him more closely and answered, “I'm not sure.”

The second time Harry had been to Laura's apartment was three days after the attacks. With the smoke still rising, they had climbed to the roof to stare out over Lower Manhattan again.



Leaving Leo's office now, Laura threw her bag over her shoulder, strode through the newsroom as though hurrying to an assignment. Heads turned toward her; she met no one's eyes, and they turned away again. Across the room, Georgie pivoted his chair to follow her progress but did not rise. She stood at the elevator with her back to them all.

In the normal course of things Laura had preferred to walk uptown to Harry's apartment, varying her route according to her mood. Some days she went for speed, beating traffic lights and leaping to curbs, so that she was perspiring, her heart pounding, when she arrived. Other times she meandered, ambling behind a couple or a group she'd choose for their intriguing conversation. Later she and Harry would play a game, assuming that overheard conversation to have been a critical turning point in the speakers' lives, inventing characters and circumstances of whom that could be true.

In the beginning Laura's stories were always reasonable and logical, Harry's fanciful and ridiculous. Later Laura had resolved to out-absurd Harry and had achieved, they both agreed, some significant successes. In the first weeks after September 11 they had not had the heart for the game and had stopped it. Then one day three weeks ago, as the pasta water was boiling, Harry had asked whether anyone had had anything momentous to say on Laura's walk home. From then they had begun the game again. Laura, in what seemed to her like an earlier century but was, she realized with a lurch of her heart, just the past week, had stored up two story lines for future use, to make Harry laugh.

She was grateful for the elevator's sluggishness until she realized she was, and her gratitude flashed into anger. When she finally reached the lobby, she charged straight toward the subway.

Many people feared the subway these days, since the anthrax letters and the smallpox threats and the knowledge (no truer than before, but now everyone's eyes had been opened) that any briefcase could be a bomb and any rider, a bomber. Some people had stopped taking the subway. Some wouldn't ride the bus, go to the movies, or shop at Lord & Taylor. Laura did all these things, though now on the subway or in a store her eyes roved her surroundings, she swung her head toward sudden sounds, her skin prickled the same way it did when she walked alone down a dark street at night.

No, fear of the subway was not a problem for Laura. But the subway would take her uptown quickly, and Laura understood enough about herself to know that that was the reason why, today, on her way to Harry's apartment, she was tempted to walk.



Harry's building: rough tan brick patterned with bricks of a darker brown. Sunlight flashed off the windows, cast watery squares on the building across the street as Laura approached from the west. She'd walked around the block to come up from Riverside Drive, a way she seldom used. The ploy was not effective, though. As the building came into view, even from this unfamiliar angle, her heart faltered and her feet slowed and stumbled.

The lobby: calm walls of a clear, pale blue, quiet lighting from discreet sconces, lustrous terrazzo floor. Two chairs by the elevator and a table for your mail. A painting of sailboats; a gilt-framed mirror. Music, as always, just audible from the doorman's radio. Different doormen, different music. As Laura walked in, it was opera.

The doorman himself: Hector, a Puerto Rican twenty years with the building. He hurried to the door for Laura and told her in accented English that he was very sorry. He said it again in Spanish, as though his grief wasn't complete until put that way.

The elevator: dark wood paneling, gouged and chipped with age but carefully polished. Creaky noises and slight shakes as it went about its business. Like me, Harry always said.

Harry's door: black like all the others. His name in the bronze square. Today's papers piled on the mat.

The dryness of her mouth and the chill on her skin as she turned the knob surprised Laura. Reporter-Laura pushed her forward. Reporter-Laura was not afraid of ghosts. She stumbled through the door, her heart choppy. A breeze from the open window rustled papers on Harry's desk; she jumped, then stood still and looked dumbly around. Reporter-Laura waited, her impatience growing, as the real Laura, her heart breaking, stared at the chairs, tables, rugs, and books. All these things were Harry's. He'd lived among them for so long, and now they stood patiently waiting, and they didn't know he wasn't coming back.

She could feel Reporter-Laura's amused contempt at the idea that she was feeling bad for the furniture. She didn't care. But what blurred her vision was the thought, too swift, too natural for her heart's guards to embargo and turn back, that she'd have to ask Harry if he'd ever felt this way, too.

Laura sat in the armchair and cried. A few times in the last year, she had cried with Harry there, for reasons she couldn't remember now. Except September 11, the obvious reason, which took no remembering, permitted no forgetting. She did remember Harry's silence, and the stroke of his hand on her hair. The indifferent empty blankness of the room now was so utterly unlike Harry's enveloping, companionable quiet that she could not use the same name for it.

Shakily she rose. She went into the white-tiled kitchen with the ancient fixtures Harry had refused to replace. Water hissed into the sink from bronze piping with ornate handles. She splashed it on her face, ran it up her arms, rubbed it on the back of her neck. She stared at it running away, racing to disappear.

Why had she come here, where everything was so hard?

She wasn't sure of the answer, but Reporter-Laura was.

Work.

Work was what she'd come for. Harry's desk, his computer, his file drawers—she had a lot to do. She turned off the tap. The silence that flooded the room was so thick and swampy, she had to force her way through it.

As she turned to walk back into the living room, though, she stopped, she and her heart, for a moment. On the kitchen table stood a pitcher holding roses Harry had brought her early in the week. Their buds had been tightly furled when he'd pulled them with a flourish—ta da!—from behind his back; now they'd shattered, dropping crimson petals on the tabletop, on the floor. Laura gathered the fallen petals and the sad stems, and threw them out.

She had not told Leo about the roses. She had not known how. The truth was so simple, she was afraid it would sound simpleminded, would confirm Leo's suspicion that Laura Stone was on a baseless, emotional crusade: not a reporter chasing a headline but a forlorn lover chasing a vanishing ghost.

But Harry had brought her roses.

With a clear, fathomless certainty, Laura was sure of this: Harry would not have left her without saying goodbye.