William added, “And now is the time to do it, because New York is not in terrible shape at the moment, but there will be another surge when it gets cold. So let’s do this now.”
“Really?” I asked.
He just raised his eyebrows at me.
* * *
—
And so by the middle of September, with help from Bob—who found three young men ready and excited about doing the job, they had never been to New York City—my things were moved up to Maine from New York. I gave everything in the kitchen to Marie, who helped me with my cleaning: She FaceTimed me from my apartment. And I gave her most of my clothes as well. I also gave her most of the linens and most of the towels. Her aunt wanted the bed, and they had it moved to her aunt’s place in the Bronx. My building manager—a young woman—was extremely good about all this; usually someone has to be there if you are moving out, and certain insurance things have to be filled out by the movers, but the manager let the guys come in and take the things that were left; she was very nice about it, as I have said. I told Marie I would give her a year’s severance pay; she—or, rather, her husband, the doorman—had come into the apartment every week to water my plant; it was—along with David’s cello—the only thing in the apartment I really cared about.
* * *
—
When I saw the plant, almost eight feet tall, standing so shyly on our porch, I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe I had done this. I put David’s cello in the spare bedroom upstairs, the one with the bookcase in it and the trees pressing up against the windows.
* * *
—
When I thought of the New York apartment, I thought: It is gone, as all things will be gone someday.
iv
From New York had come four large cardboard boxes filled with old writings and photos of mine, and so one day William helped me take those to my studio, and I went through the boxes slowly. It was very strange. There were photos of me in college, with William, and with other friends. I looked so young and happy!
* * *
—
I found a journal entry from back when I had been living with William and the girls—they were about eight and nine at the time—and I had decided to have someone come in and clean the apartment. It was a young man who had arrived; he was very sweaty and anxious-looking, and I recorded in my journal how I felt sorry for him while he vacuumed with sweat dripping off his nose. But then this young man had gone into the bathroom for quite a while, and after he left I went into the bathroom and I realized that he had masturbated in there, and I had a very bad reaction to this.
I had forgotten the incident until I read it there in my young handwriting. Of course I had been frightened by this, because my father would so frequently do the same thing during my childhood. According to the journal entry, William did not care when I told him. I mean he sort of shrugged it off.
I had called the young man and told him we did not need him anymore.
* * *
—
It was a strange thing to go through those papers.
* * *
—
I found this: a birthday card from my mother. As soon as I saw it I remembered: It was the last card she ever sent me, the year before she died. On the front were pretty violet-colored flowers. When I opened it up, the card had printed on it: Happy Birthday. And below it was simply—
M.
v
William and I continued to take car trips. We did not feel safe spending the night anywhere else, but we would drive to various places and then come back home. In late September, William and I drove to a town called Dixon; it was almost two hours away. The town was built along a river, and there was a paper mill that had once employed thousands, but it had mostly closed down many years earlier; only one hundred people still worked there. William was interested in the old mills; he had researched this one and said that the man who had started the mill in the late 1800s was from England and that he had made houses for the millworkers that were quite beautiful; it was called Bradford Place. William had shown me a photograph of the houses online, and they did seem lovely, built on the hills throughout the town, two-family places of brick, with wide porches. On top of the hill was a huge cathedral. The photograph was from the 1950s.
* * *
—
What we found was appalling.
* * *
—
The town was like a ghost town, but when William drove up to where the houses had been built for the millworkers, we saw a few people out in front of them. The houses were in terrible shape; they seemed to spew forth their guts onto their front lawns. Broken bicycles and large black bags of garbage and a broken windowframe, these things were in front of the houses; some of the porches were piled with what looked to be junk.
Some of the houses had huge American flags draped over their front windows or on their porches. The few people who were outside stood and watched us as we drove by.
“Oh God,” William said.
* * *
—
We went back into the center of town, and William got out to go into a gas station store to buy two bottles of water. I stayed in the car, and I saw that there was a policeman in his cruiser right beside me; he wore no mask, and he kept looking at his phone, and every so often he would pick up a big paper cup and drink through the straw in it.
* * *
—
I watched him so carefully.
So carefully I watched him.
I wondered, What is it like to be a policeman, especially now, these days? What is it like to be you?
I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person. And I could not stop feeling a fascination for this man, who seemed to be in his fifties, with a decent face and strong-looking arms. In a way that is not uncommon for me as a writer, I sort of began to feel what it was like to be inside his skin. It sounds very strange, but it is almost as though I could feel my molecules go into him and his come into me.
* * *
—
And then three young guys came out of the gas station store, and they stood in the parking lot opening bags of potato chips and laughing, but they scared me in a way; they all had very pasty skin and their eyes said that they had nothing left in this world to lose. The youngest one was probably thirteen and he looked especially sad; his teeth were skinny and sort of bucked, and you could tell that he was trying to impress the two older ones, and they were not impressed.
* * *
—
William got back into the car and we drove around more; we saw the mill that, according to William, had sent its paper all over the world back in the day, to Europe, even to South Africa. As we drove along the river, I saw down on the embankment—through the trees—a few broken-down old cottages.
As we headed back to Crosby, I said, “I was watching a policeman who was sitting in his cruiser while you were in the store. I’m going to write a story about him.”
William glanced over at me.
“His name is going to be Arms Emory. And he has a brother named Legs in the next town who sells insurance. They’re called Arms and Legs because they used to play football when they were kids, they were the stars. Arms could throw that football like the wind, and Legs could run down the field like a crazy man.”
“Okay,” William said.
* * *
—
Back in my studio I started the story. I loved Arms. He would be a supporter of our current president; this seemed true to me. Then I realized that his brother, Legs, would have fallen off a ladder six years earlier when he was cleaning the gutters, and as a result he got hooked on painkillers.
* * *
—
I called Margaret, who put me in touch with a social worker who counseled drug users, and I spoke with this drug counselor for a long time so that I would understand Legs’s situation. Then Margaret had me call a man who had once been on the police force, and he was enormously helpful as well. He said, “Cops take care of each other.”
* * *
—