Another gulp.
“Know what he did? He took me into the men’s room, pulled out a couple of notes I’d written to her. Guess they found ’em in her apartment. I was pissed at first. You know, embarrassed he’d read them. They were private between me and her. But then he tore out the page in her address book with my name on it. Showed it to me. Then he ripped all of it into confetti and flushed the pieces down the john. And he said to me, ‘There. That’s done. Forget about her.’ ”
He coughed. Drank again.
“I offered to talk to him, to tell him about her. He didn’t want to know. He wrote down that I called her. He asked if I could have called her again, later, and I said sure. I said Lord knows what I did later. So he wrote down that I called Ruth again that night, that the second time there was no reply. And that was it. He didn’t want to hear any more about her, and the next week I got a call telling me I was being transferred to Traffic. He told me if I opened my mouth about her again I wouldn’t even have a job in Traffic anymore.
“He just didn’t want to know. But I wanted to tell someone. I needed to tell someone what she was like. What she was really like. And he didn’t want to know.”
It was midnight in Queens and Ruth could not sleep despite the bourbon she had drunk. Frank had been back for two weeks and she couldn’t bear the sound of his steady breathing. His occasional snores. The snores of Bill Lombardo through the wall. Gina’s bed creaking above them as she turned in her sleep.
She felt the tension in her eyelids as she tried to keep her eyes closed. She couldn’t bear the fact of these people. Couldn’t bear that they should be able to sleep. Couldn’t bear the weight of their peaceful dreaming.
Teeth clenched, she slid out of bed. Pulled on her thick coat and boots. Felt her way down the hallway. Held her breath. Held her mind on the idea of escape.
Then she opened the front door and the silvery light was bright around her. The frost and ice high and clear.
And she was outside in the November night and she breathed in the cold, clear air, and she breathed out slow like fog, welcoming the stillness.
She stood on the snow-covered grass in front of the building and the quiet seeped through her clothes, seeped through her skin until she was drunk with it. She wanted to run and leap and dance against the whiteness until she was silver-bright with cold and with silence.
She turned and spun, arms outstretched to the space, arms resting on the rich, clear currents of air. And when she was dizzy she let herself fall and lay calm and still in a thick blanket of snow. She felt her breath coming fast and her blood singing in her veins.
Then she opened her eyes and looked up at the rows of bricks, the rows of windows like empty eyes. The dozens of judgments shut in behind those walls.
For months, trapped in the apartment by the crowds and the reporters and the weight of all those stares, she had looked down from those windows and imagined there would be a time she’d be able to sit out here again like anyone else. Alone and unnoticed. She had wanted it so much she’d almost been able to feel the scrubby yellow grass scratching her arms and legs.
She had thought about long golden evenings out here with Frank or Gina, lazy conversations on battered lawn chairs, a bottle of beer apiece. Afternoons kneeling on faded blankets with Frankie and Cindy as they made an island or a city from a mound of dirt. And now, although she lay alone and in silence, she still felt like she was being watched. She lay flat, wrapped in warm damp wool, her hair sweating beneath Frank’s old hunting cap, spread out beneath the night instead of the sun, beneath diamond-spattered blackness instead of hot blue skies.
She spread her legs and arms wide, and the snow fell gently on her flushed skin. She opened her mouth and let the soft snowflakes come, and she tasted each one as it melted in a cold kiss.
She held her breath and felt her stomach tighten, breathed out and watched the swaddled curve of her breasts fall. She looked up and saw the flat silvery gleam of each window, and felt their gaze on her. Knew that everything was noticed here and that nothing was missed.
But she closed her eyes and ignored them as the night continued around and within her and she lay in the shape of an angel and swallowed the thin black air. And she thought that if anyone were to ask what she was doing out here, she would tell them: I am breathing.
Pete took a job at a bookstore in Greenwich Village. The pay was lousy but it would just about keep him afloat for a while.
At the interview, he told them he could only work part-time. When they asked why, he said he had family responsibilities. A sick relative. Maybe he only got the job because they felt sorry for him. He didn’t care.