That afternoon—visiting hours, the end of January—Helen was sitting at my bedside. My left hand was under the covers because seeing it upset her too much: She had always been one to faint at the sight, or even the thought, of blood. But she clutched my right hand and looked into my eyes and waited for my answer.
Part of me wanted to ask why she, why they, hadn’t asked me if I needed help. They surely had to have noticed. But I could not blame them—did not blame them, not really. I did what I did. No one else was responsible.
In a way, it was my own independence—I could see now, after the incident—that had caused the incident. The very compulsion that had driven my achievements for so long had somehow begun to work against me.
It had never been an effort for me to keep up my aggressive vivacity—until suddenly it was, and I didn’t know how to get it back or what to do in its absence. And so I did not do anything, and I did not tell anyone.
The answer that I gave to Helen was:
“I have never cared for those who treat their friends as they would a charity ward.”
“But we’d have wanted to help,” she told me. “You know I would have. You know any of us would.”
“I know,” I said. “I know you would have. And you’re helping now. And I’m grateful. And I’m sorry, Helen. What I did was incredibly rude, and I’m sorry for that.”
She protested, but I knew I was right. My long, fine streak of charm had ended: I had jumped the groove, gracelessly scraping everything in my path. I had become boorish, embarrassing, but worst of all I had become exhausting. I was sure I heard a sigh of relief every time someone trundled me away into a cab or train, or took their leave of me through a hospital door.
I had even worn poor Helen out: Her reassurances gradually waned in the face of my stolid despair. We were sitting in silence when we heard the Morse-code tap of sensible heels down the corridor. The supervising nurse appeared at the door, and visiting hours were over.
I was left alone again to think, and to listen to the traffic outside: a throbbing note appropriate to the irreparable wreck of Cupid’s barque. An almost tidal-sounding score perfect for the choreography of the passage of time, a dull and dogged reminder that I was just like everyone else in suffering the injustice of chronology: I could only walk through it facing forward, going in that one direction.
24
A Secret
Although I have promised Gian that if I am ever confronted by muggers I will not resist, this turns out to have been an untruth.
I do not discover my falsehood immediately after emerging from the party, but rather outside of Penn Station. It takes a few minutes.
Walking north to Thirty-Third Street, leaving Peter and Wendy’s place, I pass numerous idling cabs, yellow and hungry like the golden Pac-Mans in those video games my grandchildren love. Single-minded, the drivers trawl the curbs, aiming to devour little ghosties like me. With just moments to go until midnight, every cabbie is waiting for a fare, all hoping that whoever drunkenly stumbles through their doors after ringing in the New Year will be a short trip: each seeks to pack as much earning as possible into this, the cabbie’s busiest night of the year.
As I walk, I’m weaving a little—hard to say just how much—from the effect of drinking cheap vodka two hours past my usual bedtime. It makes me a target, but I want to be a target. A spectacle. A catalyst. Things used to happen around me.
It hasn’t rained, but the sidewalks are as damp and gray as tombstones.
I arrive at Penn Station, by which I mean not Penn Station but the atrocity they erected in its place in 1968. I have walked by it hundreds of times since then, but the nastiness of the place still claps like a slap across the face. It is so ugly.
The old station, the one that stood when I arrived in 1926, was a Beaux-Arts marvel of pink granite and glass and steel that evoked not just travel by rail, but also travel through time: the splendor of an ancient Roman past, plus the possibility of a future where beauty and civic function are not just valued but understood to be in harmony.
I will not make it all the way there before 1985, but I have decided that I would like to walk by R.H. Macy’s on my way back home. The last stop of the night.
Stay off the street, Peter told me. Stay off the street, Wendy agreed.
I am not going to stay off the street. Not when the street is the only thing that still consistently interests me, aside from maybe my son and my cat. The only place that feels vibrant and lively. Where things collide. Where the future comes from.
Where lights snick on and off in unreachable windows, like the ones above me. Even when the street is not majestic or momentous, it fascinates me. The lights that working people leave on after they go home: pies in a pie case bathed in bulb glow, the desk lamp burning in the funeral home, the hundreds of indistinguishable desks in fluorescent-washed offices, waiting for the next business day to restore their significance.
Footsteps to my left and a deep voice. “Hey, lady,” it says.