“Did you clean them up?”
“No, of course not. Lazy little twits that we were! My dad poked his finger on a piece before I told him what happened. I remember he gave me the strangest look when I explained it to him.”
“I think you were guarding your virginity, Mom! It all sounds very Freudian.”
“You know, I thought the same thing!” she said and laughed. “I’ve always thought exactly that. The masculine surge and the feminine repulse! I don’t think I’ve ever told this story to anyone. How odd that it came to mind.”
“Why tonight?”
She shrugged, obviously amused with the recollection.
“Why not tonight, I guess? I imagine I’ve been thinking about Jack, too. I didn’t know him, of course, but he might have been a little like the girls and me smashing the pumpkins before anyone even approached them. Sometimes it’s easier to ruin a thing than to guard it. Does that make any sense?”
“It does, Mom, but we don’t have to figure out Jack’s motives. I’m trying to let all of that go under the bridge, so to speak. Bygones be bygones. That’s what I want now.”
She nodded. She poked the remote control and nudged the stove a tiny bit higher. Then she picked up the crossword puzzle clipboard and propped it on her lap.
“Not loving this tea,” she said.
“Me, neither.”
“My joints don’t feel any better, either.”
“Isn’t that always the way?” I asked.
42
What you do is work. That becomes the answer for everything. You dress in the early dawn, showered, powdered, hair cut to a smart set, the clothes in your closet mirroring back an image of a gal on the go. That’s absurd, you know, but that’s what you think of when you address your wardrobe. What you want, mostly, is a good-looking outfit, not dowdy, that can transform, when necessary, into something chic and hip and provocative. Why not? you ask yourself when you bend to the mirror in your apartment—an apartment that is either tropically warm or refrigerator cold—and apply makeup, why not have your times in New York City? Why not enjoy what it is to be young, free, single, in one of the great cities of the world? Jack was wrong about that. New York City is not a prison the prisoners built for themselves. No, no, it is something rich and fun and festive, something occasionally desperate and frightening, an edge of some sort of world, and you like knowing you belong, had conquered a small corner of it, had it licked.
Sort of.
Not too much makeup, by the way. Never too much. Just enough to give yourself a glow, an outline, a definition. The bathroom is still foggy, but when you step back, you can see your cloudy form. A gal on the go. You turn this way, back, the other way, back, check the line of your skirt, the tuck of your blouse, the height of your heel. It works, it usually works, and you are aware of being young, very young, and of being in demand for your youth, because what did your division boss quote? He said the most powerful people on earth are rich old men and pretty young women. Maybe he was right—who knows?—but right now you simply assess that you are competently dressed, correctly dressed, and on the way down in the apartment elevator, you go through your purse and say the modern rosary of Cs: cell, comb, credit card, condom.
Then it’s New York City. You step out, and it’s cold, cold as hell, the wind pushing through the buildings, everyone moving quickly, trying to get indoors, to get to work, no lollygagging. You’d like to take a cab just for the luxury of it, and you have the funds for it—not a bad salary, not at all a bad salary, it turns out—but at this hour of the morning, the traffic, especially the crosstown traffic, would be torture. So you hustle to the nearest subway entrance, go down into the cave, a mythological creature Constance would be able to identify, then you slide your monthly pass through the turnstile, knock the three-armed fanny patter with your thigh and hip, check your phone as you find a place to stand on the platform. The subway station smells like panting, you’ve always thought, like the lair of some awful creature whose breath, year after year, painted the walls until no other smell could find a purchase. As you think it—you think it every day—you look at your phone and check a dozen things. Stock market. Basic headlines. Messages, texts, e-mails.
You do not look for anything from Jack. You gave that up long ago.
You didn’t give it up, but you pretend that you did. You tell yourself that you did. And that amounts to almost, kind of, the same thing.
Then the train comes in, and you step on, turn sideways, find a pole to hold on to as the train begins to move forward. It’s okay. It’s early enough that it’s okay. And the reception on your cell disappears, and you sling into the darkness of the between-stations world, and you think of Vulcan, for Constance, and of all the creatures below the earth, the dirt animals, and that strikes you as strange, not a healthy thought, and when you finally reach your stop you are glad to get out, glad to move quickly toward the light, a square of daylight, and the cold brilliance of winter in New York City.
Then you are career girl, a girl on the go, because you like what you are wearing, like how it feels, and you can tell some men you pass are appreciative, and you stop at a coffee truck and order a medium, skim, two artificial sweeteners, then decide to splurge on a fruit salad kind of thing that comes in a plastic container. You carry everything toward your building, the coffee’s warmth entirely welcome, and you push through the revolving door to find Bill, the security officer, standing behind the check-in desk, his eyes passing to the cameras that show him every corner of the workplace.
“Hey, Bill. How’s it going?”
“Fine, Ms. Mulgrew.”
“Glad to hear it. Am I the first one in?”
“Just about, I think.”
You ride the elevator up—again something mythological about this up-and-down life, this above the ground and below the ground—and for a blinding second you think of the mighty Esche, the European ash, covered now, probably, in snow. You think of Pan’s statue watching the Jardin du Luxembourg, and then the elevator arrives at your floor, twenty-third floor, and you feel yourself tighten and come more alive, work, work, work, sacred work. It’s okay, you like work, and you move to your desk, hang up your coat, put your coffee down, toss your bag into your bottom drawer, look around. One of the supervisors’ office lights is on—Burky’s, you figure—but you are not game for him, not so early, not yet, so you sit down, boot up your computer, plug in your phone to the spare power cord you keep on your desk, and that’s that. Open for business.
You take a minute to wiggle the top free on your fruit, put on last night’s economic report from The Wall Street Journal, eat the taste of sunlight and sweetness, and behind you, and around you, lights begin coming on, a little foot traffic noise arrives, and the day has begun, and Jack is still missing, and your heart, your treacherous heart, refuses to let him go.